Chapter 7 #2
He looks up briefly at the sky, squinting at it, and I take a moment to study his jawline and the fullness of his mouth. “It’s a fine afternoon for it, isn’t it?”
He says it like someone who’s prepared to stand in a back garden and discuss the weather for as long as I want him to.
I look past him at the bay. The water is a hard blue under the sun, making it look like an ordinary loch and not whatever else it is at dusk, a place of dark thoughts and drowned wives.
I should send him home. The polite version, the one with a smile and a well, okay, thanks for stopping in. He’d take it. He’d go. He’s already shown me he can be told; I don’t even have to be rude about it.
Instead, I shift the sheet against my chest and hear myself say, “I just got back from Fort William. I bought a heater for the shed.” I say this as if he knows what I’m talking about, as if he cares.
“The shed?”
“Yes. The boatshed.” I nod at it though his eyes stay fixed on mine. “I’m setting it up as a studio. For my art.”
“Sounds like a good idea as any.”
Another long beat, the tension between us not dissipating, and yet I am somewhat determined to make it go away, make him finally seem normal.
“Want to help me drag a bench around?” I ask, before I can think about it.
A small, easy smile. “Aye. I can drag a bench.”
“Good.”
I drop the rest of the laundry in the basket without folding it, leave the basket in the mudroom, and walk down the slope to the shed.
He follows a careful step or two behind, which is somehow both respectful, as if he’s giving me space, and unnerving because he’s become just this powerful, strange, overwhelming presence at my back.
I have to fight the urge to keep turning around and make sure he’s not about to pounce on me or something.
As if you’d mind, I chide myself. Probably need a good pouncing.
I ignore my brain and stop in front of the shed. The wrought-iron latch sticks, and the door needs a shoulder to open. I have to back up and let him try when I can’t shift it. He puts his shoulder to the wood. The door creaks open like the cottage when I first arrived.
Don’t let him in, Effie had written. But she didn’t mean the shed, and maybe she didn’t even mean him.
“You’ll need to put some oil on those hinges,” he suggests, stepping aside to let me enter first.
Inside, the air is cool with the iron-rich smell of seaweed.
There are two windows, small and high, one north-facing toward the loch, the other facing west to the bay.
The light through it is the soft even light I’d been hoping for.
There’s a workbench, a low stone shelf along the back wall, a stack of empty wooden fish-crates Effie must have collected over the years, a long-handled push-broom in the corner, two coils of rope on a peg, and a flat slab of slate the size of a small table propped against the wall.
“You’ll want the bench under that window,” he says, pointing to the west one that faces the bay—and the castle. “The light will hold there till almost six in summer. Less in winter.”
He’s right. I originally thought I’d have it under the north window to get that even light, but perhaps at this latitude you have to be a little greedy.
“And the slate.” He goes to the slab. “Set it on the crates, it’ll do as a second surface. You can press flowers under it without the weight of a real press.”
I watch him for a beat. He’s gone to the slate and lifts it as if it weighs nothing at all and continues to look around, already calculating the rest of my space.
“You seem to know what’s best for me,” I comment. My way of pointing out that he’s in my shed and future art studio commanding it like he owns the place.
“I do,” he declares, his nostrils flaring slightly. I should be annoyed at his confidence and pushiness but somehow, I’m not. It’s like I knew he would say that.
Then, as if remembering he has manners in one of his pockets, he nods at the workbench. “Would you like me to move that?”
I tell him I do, because even though he’s bossy, that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
I drag the workbench over to the west window with his help. The bench is heavy oak, worn to a shine in places, and when we set it down under the window, his hand is closer to mine than it has been since he arrived.
“Do you want the heater in the corner or under the bench?” he asks, voice lower now that he’s closer to me.
“Under, but to the side. Less risk of knocking it over and starting a fire.”
“Sensible.”
“Sometimes I am,” I joke wryly, managing to stop myself from going down a self-deprecating spiral as I’m prone to do.
He sets it up while I open the wooden supply box I brought down from the kitchen, with my pencils and pens and the small jar of brushes I’ve been hauling around from place to place. He comes over once the heater’s settled.
“This your kit?”
“In all its glory.”
He picks up one of the brushes. An old sable, bristles thin and pointed, the wood worn smooth where my thumb sits.
He turns it in his fingers. He has the kind of hands that move carefully—long fingers, broad palms, knuckles that look like he’s broken them and they’ve healed.
They’re good fucking hands. Skilled hands.
He holds the brush out to me.
I reach for it.
Our fingers meet at the wooden handle.
His skin is cool. Not cold. Just cool, the way the stone walls of an old church are cool in summer.
Refreshing. A respite. And the brush is between us for a second, his fingers and mine on the handle, and the shock that goes up my arm has nothing to do with static, and everything to do with the line of his knuckle resting beside my thumb.
My breath hitches and I pull my hand back. The brush stays with him. He stares at me curiously.
“Sorry,” I say, too quickly, and now I’m fumbling, blood up in my face, and I reach again and the brush goes back to me. “Sorry, I…”
“Iris.”
He says my name quietly. I stop talking, as if I’ve been conditioned to.
He’s not smiling. He’s just looking at me, those glacial blues searching my face as if he’s expecting to find something.
“Go on,” he urges. “Show me what else you’ve got.”
I take the reprieve for what it is, my heart galloping a million miles a minute.
I narrate too much, as per usual. I tell him about the inks, the watercolors, the small Japanese pen with the nib that makes the line I use for venation.
He listens intently the entire time, as if everything I’m saying is fascinating to him.
When I’ve run out of things in the box, like a glorified show and tell, he picks up one of the foxgloves I’ve been pressing and holds it gently between two fingers.
“What’s the Latin?”
“Digitalis purpurea,” I answer without skipping a beat.
“And what does it do?”
Is he testing me on something I’m extremely knowledgeable in?
How did he know that was my kink?