Chapter 6 #2
The foxgloves get pressed. The thistle gets tossed.
The trunk takes me two hours because I keep being distracted by Effie’s old field sketches—there’s a single page of seaweed studies that is so good that I swear my allegiance to the sea if I can, one day, draw like that—and by mid-afternoon, I have unearthed three notebooks I have not yet opened, a tin of pen nibs from the 1970s, a pretty packet of pressed violets between waxed paper, and, at the very bottom, a heavy thing wrapped in oilcloth that turns out to be a pair of—huzzah! —binoculars.
They are the kind of binoculars a serious person owns.
Brass and leather, worn to the same warm honey as the kitchen cabinets, the leather strap salt-stiff but not cracked.
The rubber eyecups have the faint paler indentations of someone’s regular use.
Two patches where Effie held them to her, decade after decade.
I set them on the kitchen table and look at them, wondering about what she would be watching from the windows.
Or who she would be watching.
I decide not to answer that, pick the binoculars up, and take them outside.
I awkwardly bring them to my eyes and the world telescopes.
The lenses are good enough that I can see a single curlew picking its way along the far shore as cleanly as if it were on my step.
I track along the shoreline, taking in the seaweed on the red-and-brown rocks, then the lichen above that, and the heather above that.
And then I am looking at the castle.
The first glimpses of the curtain wall, the dusky rust color of the rock beneath it.
A slit window in the stone, dark. Another window, narrow and tall, also dark.
A higher opening with no glass in it at all, framing only sky.
Just how crumbling is this castle? If he lives there, there must be parts of it that have been refurbished.
I sweep the parapet. The arched doorway with no door in it. The grass coming through where flagstones used to be.
I don’t see a soul, except a few wood pigeons taking flight.
Should I feel a little guilty about spying on my neighbor? Yeah. Maybe. But hell, it’s not like he hasn’t been doing something similar to me.
I lower the binoculars and get on with my afternoon.
I do my laundry in the cramped closet where the washing machine shares space with a coatrack.
I make a terribly dry tuna sandwich along with half a can of tomato soup, jotting down more things to get from the store that are ADHD zero-executive function friendly, even if unhealthy—kids’ cereal, minute rice, biscuits? Suddenly I can’t recall what food is.
Continuing my adventures into wholesome domesticity, I put my washing out on the laundry line, the sun breaking through the clouds enough that I think they might actually dry.
I work on a sketch of the bog asphodel I cut from the verge a few days ago, sitting in its jam jar on the windowsill.
As I draw, the afternoon moves on, light sliding slow across the kitchen floor and into amber as the sun goes down behind the spit.
The midges come up off the bracken in clouds. The wind drops.
At nearly eight, at about the same time he came by last night, I pick up the binoculars again.
I lift them to my face. The world telescopes.
The world brings him to me.
And there he is.
He’s on the rocks of his spit where the water meets the stone, and he’s fucking naked. The same way he was naked days ago in the morning when I thought I was looking at a piece of driftwood I pat myself on the back for not making a joke about his wood.
He’s facing the shore across the loch proper, body tilted slightly away from me. The light is painting gold across the long line of him, picking out the shoulders and the chest and the long flat stomach and the dark hair at the center of him. He’s standing very still in the way I’ve come to notice.
“Are you even real?” I whisper to myself.
I lower the binoculars an inch.
I tell myself I’m going to put them down and walk away from the window and stop being a Peeping Tom.
Instead, I lift the binoculars again. I mean, I am a botanical illustrator after all. I look at things and observe them for a living. Looking is not a crime.
And so, I look.
I can see, now, what I could not see across two hundred meters of open water with my own eyes.
How sculpted his muscles are, his body lean but strong, but the kind of strong that comes from lifting things naturally, not spending hours at the gym.
I find myself studying the scar on his ribs, low on the left side, a clean white line about as long as my thumb.
The scattering of chest hair, the dark line of hair from his navel to his cock. The cock, which is…damn.
Fully hard.
He is standing on the shore at dusk, naked and hard as the rocks around him.
I make a sound that borders on pathetic.
The binoculars shake. I steady them with both hands. The world wobbles and comes back into him, and I’m still looking, because at no point in the last few days has any part of this cottage felt like a place where I was supposed to be doing anything reasonable.