Bonetide

Chapter 23

Chapter

Twenty-Three

When I wake up, he’s still in my bed.

He’s pressed against my back with his chest against my spine and his arm heavy across my waist, his breath silent, but steady. The loch-sweet smell of him is gone, replaced by that familiar mix of peat smoke, amber, and a hint of clean sea.

The cottage around us is grey-lit and quiet, a wren calling from the brush outside, the wood stove ticking in the kitchen.

The clock on the bedside table reads ten past seven.

The bay through the gap in the curtains is the dull pewter it goes when the sun hasn’t decided whether to come up properly and perhaps never will.

I don’t move. I lie there with his arm across me and his breath at the back of my neck and I try to calmly assess the situation except there’s no guidebook for this, no So You Woke Up Next to a Monster, Now What?

I glance down at my body and notice what the night left behind—there’s the bite at my shoulder where he broke skin, I feel the throb at my hip where the bruise is spreading. And those thin red lines down my side where his nails caught? They’re real. They’re going to be real all the live long day.

I should be horrified.

And frankly I am horrified, even though it’s buried somewhere deep, which is easy to do this morning when my brain is still half-asleep.

But the more pressing thing right now is that I really need to pee. Some things in life can’t be helped, no matter the circumstances.

I shift. Just a little, to let him know I’m moving.

“You’re awake,” he mumbles, low at my ear.

His voice in the morning is the voice he uses with me in the dark, that low, careful Scots thing, the rich brogue the cadence, the sound of it travels down the back of my neck and into my chest where it makes my heart bloom against my will.

“Were you awake the whole night?” I inquire.

“Aye, foxglove.”

“You should sleep.”

“I don’t, really.”

Of course he doesn’t, really. Part of me wants to ask him if maybe he ever tried sleeping like a dolphin, with one half of the brain working, and the other turned off, but I don’t because I need to pee.

“I have to get up.”

He lifts the weight of his arm off my waist, and I sit up, the quilt sliding off my bare shoulders into my lap. The cold of the cottage hits my skin all at once and I whimper profusely which is the most normal thing about this morning so far.

I look at him.

His hair is dry. Properly dry for the first time in a while, the black silky weight of it loose around his chin, the slight wave to it where it dried against the pillow. The early light from the window is on his face and his eyes are the bright pale blue they’re supposed to be.

He looks like a man. A ridiculously handsome man who happens to be naked in my bed, but just a man.

But he isn’t just a man, I remind myself. Still, how can I believe that when my eyes are telling me otherwise?

I drag my eyes off him before I do something embarrassing. Like climb back into bed.

“I’m gonna pee,” I say, with all the grace of someone trying to get the conversation back on track and the conversation is revolving around bodily fluids.

“Aye, foxglove. You go do that.”

“And then I’m gonna have coffee, and then I’m gonna ask you some questions.”

“Aye.”

“A lot of questions.”

A tinge of sadness comes over his eyes. “I know.”

After I do my business, I come out of the bathroom in Effie’s robe cinched tight, with my hair in a knot, my face washed, teeth brushed, and the marks on my throat hidden under the collar.

He’s in the kitchen at the back window, wearing dark trousers and a black shirt that he must have taken off when he came in last night, his back to me, the kettle going on the stove, the French press out on the counter, as well as a tin of tea for himself.

He turns when I come in and doesn’t say anything, just looks at me and once again I’m struck by how normal he looks—how normal and borderline domestic this all feels. How can he be what he is? In the light of day, how can such a thing exist? How can there be monsters?

There can’t be, I decide. At least not right at this moment, and not in my kitchen.

He makes me coffee the way I like, and pulls out the chair for me.

I slouch down in it, and he sits across with his tea, dunking in the bag with his slender fingers.

The first sip of the coffee is scalding hot, the second is bittersweet and good, and the third one makes me feel like a person again, enough that I’m straightening up in my chair like a pool toy that’s slowly being inflated.

“You’re not having any.” I observe.

“I have my tea. Coffee is an acquired taste, isn’t that what they say?”

I’m not sure who “they” are, but I nod anyway.

“Ask me the questions,” he says quietly.

I take another sip and set the mug down. I’ve got about six hundred questions, and they’re all jockeying for the front of the line. Most of them are terrible, so I pick the boring one, because it’s the easiest to handle.

“How old are you?”

He looks at me a beat. “Older than this cottage.”

“That’s not an answer,” I retort, even though it kind of is because this cottage is at least a hundred years old—that alone should stun me.

“It’s the answer I have, love,” he replies, offering a sympathetic smile.

“I don’t know what year I was born—there’s much about those days that I can’t remember.

I know it was before the Galloways came to this loch, and I didn’t speak English, but another language.

I know I was a man with a life and dreams and then…

I wasn’t. And that it was a long time ago. ”

I let that sit and have another sip of my coffee. “How did it happen? The…you know. I mean, what happened?”

His face strains, like he’s reaching for a memory worn so thin that he has to be careful not to tear it. “A storm. I was out on the loch in a boat I shouldn’t have been on, in weather I shouldn’t have been on it in. The boat went over and I went under, and…I was under a long time.”

“And then?”

“And then I came up.”

“As what you are now?”

“Aye.”

“And the man you were?”

“Was already drowned by then.”

“Were you drowned…by something?”

“Yes, I think so,” he says with a thoughtful look. “Helped along. But I don’t know what it was. Something like I am now, I suppose. Whoever—or whatever—it was, I never saw them again. But I know I didn’t become this alone.”

I don’t know what to do with my face, so I look down at my coffee instead. “So you are the undead, then. Like a vampire.”

He offers me a soft smile. “No. Not like a vampire. I am not dead, Iris. I am very much alive, as you can see. It’s just that I was brought back as something else, started a second life, that’s all.”

I snort. “Oh, that’s all.”

He shrugs. I suppose he has had a lot of time—centuries?—to become used to these facts and I’ve had, like, a minute.

“Was there anyone for you then? When you were a man?” I ask. “Did you have a family? A wife?”

He’s quiet for a long beat. “There was a lass, aye. I’d been meaning to ask her father if I could court her properly. I’d been saving for the bride-gift. I’d not yet had the conversation.”

“What was her name?”

He presses his lips together and shakes his head. “I don’t remember.”

I look at him.

“That’s the truth of it, foxglove. I couldn’t tell you her name if you held a blade to me.

I remember the feeling of wanting her. But the name went a long time ago, and the face after it.

That’s what the years do. They take the small things first.” A pause.

“I used to think forgetting her would feel like a betrayal. But it didn’t feel like anything, and that was the worst of it.

So, you see, my grief isn’t for her. It’s older and stranger than that; grief for the forgetting itself, for being a thing that outlasts everyone it loved and knew until even the loss wears smooth. ”

His words sink into me, the tenderness in the tone, that longing. That watching time as it ticks past, never to take you along.

“Did you ever go back? After, I mean. As what you are.”

“To her village?”

“Yes.”

“Once. She was old by then. I stood at the edge of the woods and watched her in her garden, and then I went away again. She never knew what I had become.”

“You let her have her life.”

“Aye. Of course.”

“Even though you…I suppose maybe you had…appetites.”

“Aye, lass. I had appetites, various ones. But I was so much more of the man back then, the MacCoinnich, that there wasn’t too much of a struggle to be…good.”

I have to set the coffee down because my hands are shaking a little.

The matter-of-fact way he’s saying things is unnerving to say the least, and even though it still all sounds so preposterous on the surface, the words hanging in the air and defying the known universe, I can feel their truth. And that scares me.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay. New question.”

“Keep them coming.”

“How many other women have you been with since her? Like, in the centuries since.”

He looks at me a long beat. “You’re asking me my number?”

Okay, I’m aware that this question is rather selfish and not really needed but still…I’m insecure and petty and I want to know.

I nod. “I am asking you your number.”

A flicker at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, the closest thing to one I’ve seen this morning. “Are you sure?”

“I want to know.”

“I’m not going to give you a count.”

“Roughly. Give me a rough number.”

“Roughly is worse than a count.” He looks at me, then at the bay through the window, then back.

“There’ve been times across the centuries I was with no one for fifty, sixty years.

Times I was with one woman for a chunk of her life before she left me.

Times I took what I needed, and didn’t keep the names.

I’m not going to give you a number, foxglove.

The number’s not the thing. The thing is that none of them were you. ”

“Oh my god,” I respond, laughing, “that’s such a Hallmark answer.”

“I don’t know who this Hallmark is, but it’s the truth.”