Chapter Eight #5
He squints, like he doesn’t understand the question, then answers. “Neither.” His eyes settle back on the sea, sunlight sparking off the waves. “My father would say it was the Viking in our blood that granted me the light hair.”
I smile, wondering if it’s the Viking blood that gave him his striking blue eyes and the tall, hardy posture of someone who has conquered lands and slayed kings. Who is unafraid of death, of anything the sea might toss his way.
He is quiet as I slide the blade easily, cleanly across his jaw, slicing away the hairs.
Only his breath stirs the air between us.
The thick curls of his beard fall through my fingers to the porch.
The unease I felt when I started melts away, and there is an effortlessness in the motion of my hands against his face.
A comfort in it. It almost feels devotional—each stroke a ritual as I delicately curve around his mouth, his temple, every breath from his lungs into mine.
The evening air we share. And the more his face is revealed, the shape of his jaw, the slope of his chin, my heart starts to beat heavy against my ribs in a strange, nocturnal way.
Almost unbearable.
At last, I wipe the blade clean with the cloth, then lightly run my fingers across his temple, brushing away the last of the soap.
He looks up at me, blue and blue and blue, every feature of his face exposed, his jaw clenched down. And I suck in a breath. His skin is golden, eyelashes suspended over ocean-deep eyes, a tiny scar across his chin—healed jagged. Without stitches.
He looks younger than he did with the beard. Years scraped away. Revealing the youth in his skin. He’s in his mid-thirties, but the overgrown beard had made him seem rougher, older, and weathered. But now I see who he is beneath. The structure of his face, the symmetry.
He rubs a hand along his chin, feeling the smoothness of his skin. And I realize… all at once. He is not different, as I had first thought.
I am different.
When I stepped onto the island all those years ago, I was just a girl. But now, standing beside him as the sun melts into the Atlantic, we are the same age. And he is striking in a way I could never have seen or noticed before. He is… impossible. Improbable.
He is a man I hardly know. Who is nothing like James.
And yet, the feeling inside me is like mercury: silvery, slippery, untrustworthy. And most of all, dangerous. Foolish.
A symptom of exhaustion, most likely. Of stress. Of feeling all alone. Lost at sea, with no way of getting home.
But then, delicately, he takes the blade from my hand. “Thank ye,” he says, and I swear I hear it in his voice: the same uncertainty, the same near breaking, the same thinking of things neither of us will say aloud. He smiles, and his face is sunlight. A small dimple pulling at his left cheek.
He is beautiful.
But he stands up before the moment strains us both. Breaks us.
He strides down the porch steps, walking out to the cliff edge, to the precipice of the sea—a man who looks like a ghost, a god, a thing etched into old books.
I turn inside, leaving the bowl of soapy water, the cloth dripping onto the porch boards, and I retreat to the bedroom upstairs, hiding from my own thoughts.
I braid my hair in a long plait down my back.
I press my head into the pillow, I twist the diamond ring around my finger.
I try to think of home, of the café, James bringing me espresso and a bowl of sun-dried tomato pasta, some new recipe to try—a dish he’s thinking of adding to the summer menu.
But my thoughts won’t behave.
I still feel the weight of the blade in my hand, the tiny hairs flitting down to the porch. We were so close. Only inches apart. With his eyes on me, he could have lifted his hand. He could have touched the soft place at my wrist.
I would have dropped the knife, let it clatter to the porch. The air would have left my lungs. Or maybe I would have leaned closer, just a little, just enough to feel my heart race.
I’m a stupid woman. My thoughts tangle up so easily, like I’m seventeen again.
Maybe I would have even let his fingers stray along my arm. Would I have stopped him? Walked back inside?
Or maybe I’d let it last a little longer. I’d want to know—I’d want to feel what it was like, the roughness of his hands. Or the tenderness.
Would he touch me delicately, like when he tends to the garden, each flower as precious as glass?
But in truth, I’ve already imagined it, well before tonight—treacherous thoughts I don’t want to admit to myself—when we’re both asleep in our separate rooms. I’ve thought about tiptoeing down the steps, the wood creaking beneath my feet, and easing myself beneath his blanket, edging myself close to him on the couch.
The warmth and comfort of another human.
So I wouldn’t feel so alone, so lost. Maybe he’d think it was a dream.
His hands sliding over my chilled flesh, breathing against my throat, whispering words in a language I don’t understand.
Maybe he’s thought about it too. And neither of us know how to stop.
I am a stupid woman.
I’ve already gone sea-mad.
I watch him from the garden, where I’m snipping off thyme and rosemary leaves, placing them in a basket.
He’s at the shore, gathering driftwood from the rocks that we’ll use for a fire. Other things blow in from the sea too, trash mostly, unrecognizable pieces of plastic and Styrofoam, bleached by the sun.
But he moves steadily, practiced, the sun on his bare back. It’s warm today, not a hint of wind. I watch him and I can see the heartbreak he carries. The grief. It’s a heaviness that digs in; it has teeth, it’ll tear a person apart over time.
But he carries on, because he’s had to.
Because he’s strong. Because time doesn’t just let him be. It toys with him out here, makes a mess of things.
He lifts his head, hair turning even more golden in the sun. His eyes survey the ocean. There’s a coolness about the way he stands, shoulders bent but sturdy. I want to call out to him. I want to see his eyes sway back to me. But I don’t.
And after a moment, he continues up the shoreline, his arms weighted with driftwood.
I watch.
I don’t pull my eyes away even when I tell myself I should.
In the bedside drawer, I find a few loose pieces of paper—torn from a notebook, perhaps—and the short stub of a pencil rolling around at the back.
In Seattle, I kept a notebook on the bedside table.
Not a journal, exactly. One of my former therapists suggested I write everything down, record the details of my life, my memories, that it would help me sort through the mess.
But I found it trivial, tiresome at the end of a long day.
So I started writing out short lines, poems, I suppose. They felt easier, less direct.
It became a habit. Something that soothed me each evening.
Now, I sit in bed, the candlelight on the bedside table flickering across the paper while my eyes trail over the pencil marks.
I’ve forgotten who I am
right from wrong.
I know what it sounds like
this pity.
I know I have everything to lose.
Maybe I already have.
“Bad storm blowing in,” he tells me on day sixty-four.
We close the windows and most of the shutters, leaving the ones in the kitchen so we can keep watch on the barn, the sheep, and the chickens tucked into their henhouse for the night.
I light candles and ladle salted carrot soup into two bowls with thick slices of bread.
It’ll be cold tonight, windy, hard to sleep.
We eat at the kitchen table, beeswax candles flickering from nubs melted on the windowsills, and once the bowls are back in the sink, he opens a lower cupboard and places a bottle of dark liquid on the table, along with two squat glasses that we’ve never used before.
“Might as well have a dram, since I doubt we’ll sleep.”
The bottle is nearly full, unlabeled, and he pulls the cork, filling the two glasses before sliding one toward me—that same shivering light in his eyes that I’ve grown to love.
His smile lives there, in his eyes more than his mouth.
He has become known to me. Familiar. Like a tide I didn’t notice rising until I was knee-deep in it.
I’ve tried not to name it. I’ve told myself that these days, here with him, are about survival.
That anything I feel is just proximity, circumstance.
But the truth of it is sitting here between us.
Unspoken. Built by the hours and the silence.
The wind roars against the house and he lifts his glass, tipping it to mine. “Slàinte Mhath,” he says.
I oblige, tapping the edge of my glass to his. “To getting off this island.”
His mouth tucks flat, eyes to his glass. “Aye.”
We both drink, but he swigs back nearly half his glass, while I sip gingerly. I recognize the taste, some form of whiskey, hard and bitter, and it tumbles into my stomach with a thud.
I bite down on a cough.
Clay smiles, nodding. “Neil Hagdorn,” he says. “My old neighbor made the stuff. Kept us warm through some bloody cold winters.”
“It’s—” I touch my throat. “Not what I’m used to.
” I’m a glass-of-red-wine-in-the-bath kind of girl.
A cocktail at the café with James on a Friday night.
Whiskey straight, without even an ice cube, is like a punch to the gut.
Yet, I take another drink, a larger sip, because I need it.
I need something to deaden all the doubt making a racket inside me.
When I lower my hand from my throat, he nods at me. “Ye’re wearin’ it.”
I’m not sure what he means, but when I follow his eyes, I realize he’s looking at the necklace, where Nana’s tiny scallop hangs beside the cowrie shell he gave me. I smile. “Of course. It’s lovely.”
Most days I keep it tucked inside my sweater, pressed to my skin. Two shells. One that represents the past, a home I’m trying to get back to. While the other has meaning I’m unsure of.
He pulls his eyes away, back to the whiskey.