Page 118 of Bonetide

The words hit deep and hard and I’m already wrestling with them.

He was always the monster.

I just took him off the leash.

I took him off the leash, the one that the previous Galloways had held taut for who knows how many centuries.

But while I grapple with the truth, he pulls me in slowly, his arm coming around, his hand at the back of my neck under my hair, folding me into the hard chill of his body, then draws the quilt up over us both. The smell of the bay is in my hair where his mouth rests. Outside, the loch is silent in a way it hasn’t been before.

The bay is silent because there’s nothing in it tonight.

The thing that lives in it is in my bed.

“You’re a monster,” I whisper.

I don’t mean to say it again. It just comes out, the thought slipping loose, said into the dark against the cold of his collarbone, to remind myself of what he truly is.

He hears me. Of course he hears me.

“Yessss,” he hisses against my hair.

It goes through me. It isn’t a word, so much as the shape of one made by something whose mouth wasn’t built for the language.

His hand at the back of my neck shifts, fingers sliding up into my hair, his breath at my temple. “How does it feel,” he begins, “to just get fucked by one?”

I don’t answer right away. I don’t have the words for it; the words I have aren’t the right ones. I feel the slow undoing of every line I’ve drawn for myself since the first time I crossed his threshold, and what I feel isn’t regret, horror, or love. Not yet. It’s something stranger than all three.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never felt so alive.

His hand tightens in my hair, just slightly. Enough that I know he’s waiting.

“Good,” I eventually reply. Because that’s all there is to say. Because it’s the truth.

He goes very still against me. Then his arm tightens around my waist, slow and possessive, and he kisses the top of my head once, soft, the same kiss he’s always given me.

At the same time, it isn’t, and I lie there with my answer in the air between us, but I don’t take it back.

Good.

It feels good to fuck a monster.

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.