Page 8 of Bonetide

You know who you want it to be, I think but quickly bat that thought away.

I put my hand flat on the wood. The grain of the door is rough under my palm, the old paint thick and slightly tacky in the cool of the evening. I can feel a faint draft seeping through where the wood has shrunk away from the frame and wish to god there was a damn peephole.

“Who is it?” I ask, my voice rising unnaturally high at the end.

“You don’t know me,” a man says. His voice is low, almost baritone, with a smoothness to it, a touch of Highland cadence underneath. “I came to apologize.”

Apologize? I scan my foggy brain trying to remember if anyone had slighted me since I got here, and other than an errant shaggy cow I encountered leaving the property on my second day, I can’t think of anything.

“I’m sorry, who are you?”

I hear a huff of amusement. “I startled you on the road, I think. Earlier.”

Oh.

Oh.

“You were the man in the loch.”

“I was.”

“Swimming.”

“Aye. It’s what people do in lochs.”

But do they?

“Naked? Is this is a Highlander tradition?” Though I wince as I say the words because I feel one shouldn’t say the word “naked” with a stranger, especially one standing outside your door at sundown.

A pause. “No. Not usually,” he admits.

“Did you swim here now?”

Oh god, is he naked out there?

“I drove.”

“And you live…where, the other side of the bay?”

“Aye.”

“Do you live in that castle?”

“I do.”

“That’s a long way around for somebody who could just swim it.”

“I’ve done enough swimming lately.”

“Right,” I say slowly. “And you drove over to apologize for that?”

“I drove over to introduce myself and apologize at the same time.”

“Alright. So…what’s your name?”

You know, introduce yourself…

“Alasdair.”