Page 115 of Bonetide

Into my worst fears.

Into a man.

Internally, it’s like all systems stop—my lungs catch, my muscles freeze—while externally I also go still, the stillness that lives below thought, a rabbit hiding in the grass, prey operating on instinct only. I can only lie in my own bed and look at the corner of my own bedroom where a fucking man is standing in shadow.

The intruder doesn’t move for a bit either.

He’s letting me see him.

Then his face shifts, and his eyes catch the very dim light that comes through the curtains, from the outside security light that’s posted by the front door.

For one beat his eyes are black. Not shadowed, but black. Wet, and depthless, and lightless, the way the loch goes at midnight where the bottom’s never been mapped, two points of nothing at the height a man’s eyes would be, fixed on me.

Then gone. Back to faint hint of glacial blue.

I don’t make a sound. I would if I could, but my throat’s shut in terror.

Then he takes a step toward me, and I gasp, and the floorboard under his foot doesn’t creak the way it should. I’m starting to wonder if he’s really here at all.

He answers me with another silent step, and the shape resolves into Alasdair fully as he comes out of the shadow.

But now I know he’s also the…thing I just saw in the corner.

He takes another step, stopping at the foot of the bed, wet and naked.

I haven’t moved. Haven’t told him to leave, haven’t sat up, haven’t reached for the lamp. I’ve lain here with the quilt to my chin and watched him cross the room toward me and done nothing to stop him. Has this been some kind of test, one that I’m about to spectacularly fail?

He lays his hand on the footboard. No weight on the mattress yet, just his fingers around the wood, and he looks at me down the length of the bed.

He doesn’t speak. He just waits.

The waiting is the worst of it, because the waiting is where I could still send him away. He’s approached me slowly, like the way a cat comes after a mouse, but also giving me enough time to do the things I need to do. In the last minute, I could’ve screamed or sat up or said no, but I didn’t, and this last stillness is him showing me he knows I won’t say or do any of that.

He knows me well, and I hate it.

And in this moment, for not stopping him, I hate myself.

He puts a knee on the mattress and the bed dips, and at last I make a sound, not a word, just a small involuntary noise from the back of my throat, because now I know this is real.

He puts the other knee down and moves over me on his hands and knees, slow, so slow, prowling. His face comes out of the dark above mine, eyes very close and blue and looking at me like he’s about to take something from me, rather than give.

He stops with his hands either side of my head, his weight not yet on me, his face six inches from mine, and he draws the quilt down. Slowly, his hand at the hem, the heavy weight of it coming off my chin and my collarbone, down past my chest, past my hips, to my knees, where he folds it back and leaves it, because he isn’t uncovering all of me yet.

His palm comes to the side of my throat. He doesn’t squeeze, doesn’t hold, just lays his hand where the pulse runs, the way he has before, except now his hand is cold.

I exhale, the noise shockingly loud in the room.

He makes a noise back, a small intake of breath, the smallest acknowledgment, like he needed to know I was fully here and present. Then his mouth is at my throat where his hand was. Not biting, just his open mouth against my pulse, breathing me in, taking the scent of me into him slow, his nose at the side of my neck and his lips under my jaw, his breath warm. He stays there a long time, just…smelling me.

I don’t move.

When he speaks at last it’s so quiet I almost miss it. “Foxglove.”

I make a sound. Then find my voice. “The salt.”

I salted the window; you shouldn’t have been able to get through.

“I know,” he says against my throat. “I know what you did, foxglove. The salt would not have stopped me. You knew that when you laid it.” A pause, his mouth moving on my skin. “You laid it for yourself.”