Page 58 of Logan

“It looks like heaven.”

Logan stared at me in shock. He tried to hide it, but I could tell I’d startled him.

I gave him a wide smile, instinctively tilting my head in a way that I knew showed off the angle of my jaw and the length of my neck in the best way.

“My therapist and I have been working on it. I still can’t say…” The word angeltangled on my tongue, and I shook my head. “That word, but I’ve managed to conquer related terms. Pretty soon, it won’t bother me at all.”

“Good.” Logan nodded. Something on the plane’s controls changed, and he flipped a few switches before adjusting the position of the steering wheel—a U shaped thing that wasapparently called the Yoke—so we were flying at a subtly different angle. “Although, it wouldn’t matter even if you’re never able to say that word again. The term doesn’t really fit you anyway.”

I watched him on the controls but couldn’t understand what he was doing any more than I could understand what he was saying.

I wasn’t an angel?

What did that mean?

I knew what I looked like. I was the stereotypical angel that appeared at the top of every Christmas tree and on every Hallmark greeting card. Even once I’d exchanged the round, cherubic cheeks of my youth for the sharper angles of adulthood, I could still have easily stared in a nativity play just by putting on a white robe.

Or did Logan mean it in a figurative sense?

Angels were considered to be pure beings, and I didn’t fit that description anymore.

As if sensing the direction my thoughts had taken, Logan was quick to explain himself.

“I don’t mean it in a bad way. I mean… here. Look.”

He let go of the plane’s yoke to fish his phone out of his pocket. I panicked at first, thinking we were about to crash, but Logan assured me that planes weren’t the same as cars that needed constant steering. So long as we weren’t altering our course, the autopilot could do most of the work.

He searched for something on his phone for a moment before handing it to me.

“This is what you reminded me of the first time we met.”

It was a statue of an angel sitting in a particularly provocative pose, one hand on top of his head like he’d just pushed his shoulder length hair out of his face, and the cloth draped over his lap barely covering his otherwise naked form.

I glared at Logan. “Is this supposed to be some sort of joke?”

His cheeks flushed and he hurriedly scrolled down the page on his phone, nearly knocking it out of my hand in the process.

“No, I don’t mean it like that. Ugh, I’m not explaining this well. Here. Read what it is.”

Still trying to decide if I should be angry with him or not, I returned my gaze to the screen to read the description that the museum website had written below the picture.

It was called theGenie du Maal, and apparently it was a statue of Lucifer.

I scrolled back up to the image. What I had initially assumed to be typical angel wings were bare of all feathers. Instead, they had a membrane of skin and claws like a bat.

This was no angel. It was a demon.

Scrolling back down, I read the rest of the statue’s description, and laughed out loud over the scandalous story of how it had come to be.

Handing him back his phone, I smirked at him. “So, when I showed up at your door, you thought I was the devil?”

Instead of putting his phone away, Logan tossed it into a cup holder near the yoke.

“You’re certainly as tempting as the devil.” He must not have meant to say that out loud, because he looked startled by the sound of his own words. He dropped his face into his hands, and groaned. “I’m sorry. That was inappropriate. I didn’t mean?—”

“Please don’t,” I interrupted him. One curious eye peeked at me from behind his hands, but Logan didn’t raise his head. I couldn’t look directly at him either. “Please don’t say you didn’t mean it. I…”

Should I say it?

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