I straightened up, holding my hand out to pull her to her feet. I wanted to gather her into my arms, run my fingers through her shining hair, kiss her berry lips. I reached towards her, then snatched my hands back, shocked at my own rudeness.
“I’m sorry! My apologies, miss.” I felt my face burning, probably an unpleasant brick red compared to the delicate apricot flush that spread across her cheeks.
She laughed and swung easily to her feet, put her arms around my neck and leaned against me. She smelled of late, golden sunshine and bonfire smoke, and when I put my hand on her arm her skin was as soft as the furred inside of a beech husk. She kissed me, and she was every shining autumn colour I’d ever seen and every ripe fruit I’d ever tasted.
I ran away every evening to meet her, skimping on homework and scrambling recklessly through the forest. My feet dragged deep scars in years of decomposing bark and leaves as I took the shortest routes down steep banks to reach her. The sun set earlier each day, and after a few weeks the failing light made her hair seem plainer and her lips less red.
But each day we fell into each other’s arms, kissing and laughing as the leaves turned brown and dry around us.
One evening, around the time I was regretfully thinking that I must head home, she shivered a little against me.
“I won’t be here tomorrow.”
“Won’t be here? Why not? Where will you be?”
“It’s time for me to move on.”
I was sixteen, and in love for the first time, and I couldn’t bear to think of losing her. I cried, I begged, I even shouted at her in a rage, but she simply held me, told me she loved me, and that she had to go.
I tried to persuade her to come back to the house with me, to meet my parents. “My mother will be delighted!”
“Will she?” she asked.
“Of course,” I began. But then I looked at her beautiful hair, tangled and threaded with dry leaves. At her arms, bare and scratched and marked with loam where we’d rolled on the forest floor. Her skirts were torn and muddy and she wore no shoes.