Page 60 of Bonetide

Thirteen

The first thing I do when I get home is pour myself a glass of wine, which I drink in the bathroom while I freshen up and do my business that needed doing.

Then I go upstairs, change into leggings and a sweatshirt because my body suddenly wants to be warm and hidden, come back down, refill the glass, and sit at the kitchen table. I make myself a bowl of soup and crackers which I barely eat, but I do drink the fuck out of that wine.

The bay is going gold outside the back window. The afternoon light has turned that low slanting Highland color that makes everything in this country look like a painting, especially as it lights the top of the castle. Surely, Alasdair and Sinclair have run into each other by now, but I don’t know whether Sinclair has cuffs out and a charge sheet open, or whether the two of them are sitting in those leather chairs in the firelit library with their whiskies, talking around the things they mean to talk about.

I don’t know anything, anymore, really. Today was proof of that.

I take another sip of the wine.

My phone is on the table. I pick it up. I open the message thread with Maddie.

She’d kill me. She’d kill me twice. Once for what I did against a tree on a road in the middle of the afternoon with the man she told me to stay away from—and who is probably the man my aunt told me to stay away from, too— and once more for what I’m planning to do about it. She’d probably try to convince me to talk to Sinclair again and tell him all that I know, which is that I know nothing. Worst case scenario she might even tell me to give up on the cottage and come back to Chicago.

But I can’t have that conversation. Not tonight. Not yet.

I put the phone face-down and push it away with my fingertips.

The trouble with Maddie being right is that, well…she’s right. Officially, as of today, I have gotten involved with a man a detective is investigating, whose attention I unwittingly called to the situation to begin with. I have lied for him by way of not informing on him, by way of sitting here and drinking wine and not saying a word. I’ve allowed my body to be put in a kind of debt I’m not, in my saner moments, capable of carrying.

A man who might be a killer. A man who, in some other reading of the evidence, is something even less likely than a killer, and yet somehow more dangerous. A man who no doubt is hiding things. A man who walked toward a police inspector without flinching while the taste of me was still in his mouth.

As of today, I’m involved with him in a way I wasn’t before. Yes, only his fingers have been inside of me, but it’s the beginning of the end anyway, the start of what I knew to be inevitable.

Because I want him inside me.

I want him inside me badly enough that the wanting is making it hard to sit still in this chair, even after I have come for him in the forest this afternoon. The wanting is its own thing now. It has its own gravity, its own direction. It is sitting in my chest like a small additional heart, beating just and only for that.

I keep waiting for the panic. I keep waiting for the part of me that should be sensibly losing her mind about all of this—the disappearances, the lies, Sinclair’s investigation, the names on the list, my dead great-aunt’s letter that says don’t let him in in a hand that has clearly seen things—to wake up and start kicking and screaming. But that part of me isn’t screaming. It’s sitting in the kitchen with me drinking the wine, watching the bay go gold.

It’s keeping me company.

And that is what’s scaring me. Not him.

Me.

I drink the rest of the glass.

I sit at the table for a long time until the gold darkens and the sun starts to go down, the kind of sunset where you think it’s going to be a good one judging by the high fluffy clouds in the sky, creating the perfect canvas to catch the colors.

Then sunset arrives in full and the sky goes from gold to bruised, that strange burgundy and orange, the kind of evening light that makes you want to break out the alizarin crimson and goldenrod and make a shoddy attempt of capturing it.

But there is no painting tonight.

I step outside to find the breeze enough to keep the midges at bay and strangely warm for this time of evening. I gaze at the surface of the loch, that metallic sheen rippling slightly in the wind, and then I see him.

He’s halfway across the bay, his head surfacing, dark and featureless and backlit enough that his black hair shines dark rose gold.

I’m down the slope and onto the rocks in less than a minute. He is closer than I thought, he has crossed most of the bay already, the white of his shoulders breaking the copper of the water with a slow easy stroke. Fuck, he’s fast.

He sees me come. He stops swimming for a second. and lifts his head out of the water. Even at this distance I can see the smile he gives.

He swims the rest of the way toward me with a slow easy stroke. He is maybe fifteen feet out from the rocks when his head comes up out of the water properly and he plants his feet on the bottom, the loch chest-deep on him, his hair slicked back, the wet of his face catching the gold-burgundy light. He starts wading in.

“Stay in the water,” I tell him. It comes out of my mouth before I have worked out what I’m going to say.

He stops and blinks once. “Pardon?”