Page 81 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

She stared mulishly at him, her mouth a thin line, her green eyes bright with anger.

“I thought as much. You’re going. You’re leaving and you’re never looking back and fuck me and my feelings. Fuck this,” he said, gesturing between them.

Like a bolt of lightning bursting forth from a swollen, dark cloud, Jory’s voice was sharp and fierce. “Youleft!”

He stood, moving with as much speed as he could, coming to stand before her in less time than it took for her brain to decide to breathe.

“Aye, Jory,” he said quietly, clutching at restraint. “Aye. I did leave you. And I’ve paid for it every day since.”

“Well, you seem like you’re doing just fine to me,” she said, and Callum stepped back as if she’d struck him.

In many ways, yes, he was fine. He had thriving businesses. He had… friends, though that was a new addition. He was fine. But in other, bigger ways, he hadn’t been fine since he’d found her in the moonlight on that beach. He’d felt… dead inside. And wasn’t that such an irony.

He felt as if the collar of his T-shirt was cutting off his air now. The anger and the panic were rising, and he couldn’t stand another second of the shirt around his throat. He reached behind his neck and yanked the T-shirt off.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jory shrieked.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. He didn’t have words. They were being overpowered by all of his feelings. It was like trying to shout into a hurricane.

Callum balled up the T-shirt and tossed it into the hamper in the corner. His back was to her now, his hair gripped in his fists as he closed his eyes against the torrent of those goddamn feelings. He’d done well enough for the last nine hundred years nearly numb to them. Numb was easy. It wasn’t pleasant and it got monotonous, but numb didn’t hurt either.

He remembered feeling this way as a human, feeling overcome by feelings. He remembered taking deep, heaving breaths. He remembered the pounding of his heart in his ears and the feeling of adrenaline coursing through his veins. Howaliveit made a person feel to be angry.

But now there was no pounding heart. There was no sawing breath. There was no adrenaline spiking through his veins like acid. There was… nothing. No heartbeat. No inhalations.

If anything, it made the feelings worse. Being able to take breaths, feeling the drumbeat of a heart, those things were the percussion, the baseline to underpin the emotion. Without them, there was just raw, unadulteratedfeeling, a chaotic dissonance that just crashed against him again and again like an angry, rising sea.

Callum rubbed the center of his chest, as if he could will his heart to start beating again. Behind him, he heard Jory. HefeltJory. He would feel her anywhere, his body as in tune to hers as it was to its own needs and cravings.

Jory’s heart was pounding. He could hear the frenzied beat, fast like a rabbit’s, echoing in her chest, sending blood rushing through her body. She was as upset as he was, her body doing what his couldn’t. He wheeled around. Her eyes were wide, her cheeks full of color, her chest rising and falling with the pace of her breath.

“Jory,” he said quietly. “Areyouokay?”

“I—” She stopped abruptly, her eyes widened even more. He took a step closer. “It’s not really fair to have this conversation with your shirt off.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You know why,” she whispered.

“I dinnae ken what ye mean at all,” he said, feeling more like a hunter than he’d felt in hundreds of years.

She narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms over her chest. “You know exactly why it’s hard for me to have this conversation with your shirt off. You used to take your shirt off… before. To stop an argument because you knew I…” She trailed off.

He’d forgotten, actually. But the memories came flooding back. Of a fight that wasn’t going anywhere because Jory—Marjory—had needed to fight but hadn’t known about what. Sometimes she got like that, itching to argue, because she was frustrated or feeling too many things that she didn’t know what to do with. When Callum’s brain got too full, he’d go chop something or cut something or hunt something. But Jory wasn’t like that. She was… what did Penny call it? A verbal processor.

The argument would spiral like a whirlpool that kept growing and growing, dragging in old grievances long settled and petty annoyances never spoken aloud into a fight that wasn’t really about any of them but more about a need to blow off steam, to vent all the feelings.

“You just liked to fight.”

“I did not.”

“You did, Jory. You’d pick a fight about nothing because ye liked it.”

“That never happened.”

“It did,” he said, taking another prowling step closer.

Jory sucked in a fast breath.