Page 150 of Bonetide

I asked and he stood. A creature older than the village let me cut the eternity out of him, and for what…for me? I’ve known him for just shy of two months. We’ve never even said the word love. He might have said so earlier in the keep, but he didn’t really tell me, it was just a fact to him, an aside.

Love. I think it and flinch, because what if this isn’t that? What if this is glamour, or loneliness, or two broken beings mistaking their fitting for fate? What if in ten years he wakes up in an aging body next to an aching woman and understands what he traded, and hates me for asking? What if I deserve none of it? Not the binding, not the man, not the line of cunning blood that lit up in me tonight like it had been waiting?

I don’t have answers.

But the hide stays warm against my chest the whole way home, warm as a heart—his heart—the deathless piece of him keeping me company through the cold, and the cottage finally comes up out of the white.

I go inside, and I bolt the door out of habit, and I put the piece of him in that box Effie left me, buried under the floorboards of her secret storage room.

Then I go downstairs and look out at the darkness of the bay.

“Come back to me,” I say to the fog. “Come back a little older.”

Chapter

Thirty-Two

He doesn’t come back that night.

I don’t sleep so much as float near the top of it, surfacing at every sound the cottage makes, and the cottage makes a lot of them: the wind finding the eaves, the stove settling, the rowan scratching the wall like a request to come inside. Each time, I’m up on one elbow with my heart going before I’m even awake, and each time it’s nothing. Each time I lie back down, and put my hand over the place on the quilt where the warmth of the hide would be if I hadn’t buried it under the floorboards with Effie’s things, where it belongs, where I already miss it in some strange (and a little fucked up) way.

And he doesn’t come back the next morning, either.

I do all the motions of an ordinary day: shower, get dressed, have breakfast, attempt to read a book, attempt to sketch and paint, but more often than not I stand at the back window watching the fog burn slowly off the bay, and the water that emerges from under it is just water. Flat, grey-blue, ordinary. No pale shape on the rocks of the far spit. No dark head in the shallows. I don’t want to see a damn thing, but I’m afraid if I don’t watch it, like a watched pot that never boils, then that’s when the loch will come alive with monsters again.

By afternoon I’ve invented several catastrophes, each with full supporting detail.

The binding didn’t work and he’s still down there, horse forever, and I leashed him to a woman he can never come back to.

The binding worked too well and the man drowned with the horse, because the man was never separable, because Mhairi missed something, because the books were wrong and I said the wrong word.

The wives took him.

The loch kept him.

He surfaced somewhere down the coast with no memory and is wandering the A896 in wet trousers, about to be picked up by MacRae.

He’s fine, and he’s not coming, because now that the pull is cut, he’s under no obligation to want me, and what I felt go under with the horse was the only thing that ever brought him to my door.

It’s that last one that gets me. That’s the fear I keep, the one I feed with my anxiety-ridden obsessive spiral.

Because here’s what I haven’t let myself look at until now, pacing my kitchen on a flaring body with a monster’s heart upstairs: the pull is gone.

I mean, it’s hard to argue with because I did feel it go. Somewhere on the walk home, or in the night, or maybe the moment the loch closed over the horse, but the hook behind my sternum that’s been set since August, the tide-tug toward the bay, the thing that turned my feet toward the water and my eyes toward the castle a hundred times a day is now…gone.

I stand at the window and look at the far spit and feel nothing, no lean, no undertow, just a majestic view of a loch in the Highlands. It’s the quietest my body has been in two months and it’s terrifying, because I no longer know which of my feelings were mine.

Was any of it mine?

The wanting at the rocks, before I knew?

The walking into the water?

The way his voice went under my ribs and squeezed its way into my heart?

Glamour is a word for a thing that makes you feel what serves it. I’ve been inside a glamour the way you’re inside the weather, and now the weather’s passed, and I’m standing in the wreckage of my own life trying to piece it all together.

Maybe I loved him. Maybe I only weathered him.