Chapter Nine #3
Her cheeks warmed. He was staring at her, not at his wound.
She could feel the quiet intensity of his regard and didn’t dare meet his gaze.
She pressed gently along each adhesive strip, smoothing the edges with her fingertips, fussing more than was necessary before she stepped back to inspect the result.
She saw three tiny, flimsy strips of plastic against a wound made by a sword. It looked impossibly small and inadequate, and she prayed it would be enough.
Finally she stepped back. “That’s the best I can do.” And how ridiculous she was, that she felt more the need to cry now than she had earlier, for how inept and useless she was!
Bram lowered his chin to examine her handiwork, a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes. “They are... wee bandages.”
She gathered the discarded wrappers, hastily stuffing them and the remaining supplies back into the small red pouch, before shoving that into her bag.
When she stood and turned she found he was still watching her—and she turned around again abruptly, not wanting him to see her tears. She marched to the stream and splashed cold water over her face, hoping it might do something for the burning behind her eyes. She refused to submit to tears again.
Bram came to the water beside her—his shirt thankfully returned to his person—and crouched to rinse his hands and scoop water into his mouth, which he gargled and spat away.
Rising, Anna blinked several times when something dark drifted into the corner of her vision. She rubbed cautiously beneath one eye, but whatever it was remained there, an irritating black blur that seemed to move whenever she blinked.
“What the heck...?”
“Lass,” said Bram cautiously at her side.
Something in Bram's voice made her turn toward him. He’d gone strangely still, his gaze fixed upon her face with an expression of such grave concern that Anna’s stomach dropped.
“What? Is it a spider?”
His brows drew together as he shook his head. “Lass... there is something amiss with yer eye—it’s coming away.”
For one horrifying second, Anna simply stared at him.
Then she remembered. “Oh, sweet Jesus!” She lifted her fingers to her left eye and felt immediately what had happened. The outer edge of the false eyelashes had come loose and was hanging crookedly from her eyelid.
Mortification swept through her.
Of course. Of course this would happen now. She’d forgotten all about them, but apparently the adhesive had finally surrendered. She turned her back on Bram at once and bent her head, trying to catch the loosened strip between her fingertips without the benefit of a mirror.
Anna caught sight of Bram coming around her left side, and she promptly turned the other way.
He followed—she could practically feel his bewildered stare upon the back of her head.
“Don’t. Stop. It’s fine.” She finally managed to strip the dangling set of lashes from one eye, and turned to confront Bram, since he seemed determined to see for himself what was going on.
His paused, his expression arrested, looking from one eye to the other, comparing the two.
“They’re false,” she finally muttered, wishing the earth beneath her feet would open. When his brows dipped low, she explained hastily, “The false eyelashes. They’re not mine. I just... put them on.”
This only confused him more. “Nae yours? Then... to whom do they belong?”
The question—and the idea behind it—caught her so off guard, she burst out laughing.
She tried to stop, truly did, but one look at Bram’s solemn, perplexed face only made it worse.
A second laugh escaped, and then another, until Anna covered her mouth with one hand, shoulders shaking.
After everything that had happened that morning—the terror, the blood, the impossible realization that she was seven hundred years from home—apparently this was what finally broke through the knot of emotion lodged inside her.
“They don’t belong to anyone,” she managed at last, wiping beneath one eye with the heel of her hand. “They’re manufactured. Made to enhance the lashes you have,” she clarified, though his expression told her this didn’t help in the slightest.
His gaze shifted to the remaining lashes still firmly attached to her other eye, then back to the bedraggled strip clenched between her fingers.
Then Bram said, with profound bewilderment, “Ye put them there willingly?”
“Women wear them where I come from,” she said dismissively. “It’s not unusual.”
With no hope now of preserving even a shred of dignity, Anna found the end of the second set and peeled the lashes away.
Bram actually took a step back.
Anna closed her eyes. Kill me now, please. Someone. Anyone?
When she opened them again, he was staring at the little black crescent between her fingers with an expression she might have expected had she just removed a portion of her own flesh.
She stuffed it into her palm. “It’s just eyelashes.”
His blue eyes searched her face again, and she would have sworn he was checking whether any other part of her face might come off. This, she ignored.
“Please never speak of this again.”
Bram continued staring at her, still bewildered. “I wouldnae ken what words to use.”