Page 65 of Bonetide

Iwake up better rested than I have any right to be.

The bath was hot, the wine finished, and I slept the kind of sleep you sleep when your body has been used hard until it totally gives up. My hair is still a bit damp on the pillow when I open my eyes. The sky outside the bedroom window is the soft pearl color above the velvet brown treeless mountains, the bay below it silver and smooth.

I stretch slowly, expecting the usual pains, but for whatever reason they’re operating at half capacity. Maybe there’s something about swimming in the loch, that cold bracing mineral water, that is good for the joints and muscles too. Like cold plunge therapy. Maybe that’s what makes Alasdair the way he is.

Alasdair. The memories of yesterday flood my mind and body over and over again, until I’m both reliving it and watching it like a voyeur might.

He told me to come in the afternoon.

That gives me a morning to figure out who I am between now and then.

I turn over in my bed, staring at the walls around me. The blank spaces where Effie had hung up art and took them down are just begging for something new to be put there, yet I can no longer be bothered. It’s funny how a week ago I was itching to make this cottage as mine as possible, and now, somehow, it already feels like it is mine, like we’ve kind of melded with each other, and we’re good the way we are. Still, if I saw a bric-a-brac shop in Torridon Village that looked like it could have some nice secondhand paintings, I could pick some up. Of course, I could paint my own, but I rarely hang my art. The one in the kitchen is already pushing it.

I wrap the robe around me, slip on my slippers, and put the kettle on. I make instant porridge because I don’t have the patience for the real kind today, and eat it standing at the kitchen window looking at the bay as I always do. Maybe one day, I’ll switch it up, stand at the front door, and stare at the gorse and heather and the thicket, and the tall, rounded peak of Beinn Damh as it looms over the cottage, but today is not that day.

I feel…fine. Good, even. Maybe great? If I want to be dramatic about it, I feel like I’d been lacking in several vital nutrients for years, and I finally got an IV infusion of them. And it wasn’t even his dick. Even his fucking fingers were enough to get the color back in my face, coupled with a bracing swim, of course.

I also feel, somewhere underneath the warmth, the small drop in my stomach that comes every time I think about how his eyes looked in the water, the feeling that we weren’t alone.

The bay this morning is empty. Bright, silver, ordinary. Nothing in it that I can see. That woman in the water last night was just a gull, I decided over and over again as I fell asleep last night. Nothing more.

Still, I think I’m learning not to trust the water.

I shouldn’t trust anyone.

Alasdair told me to come see him in the afternoon, which is good, because I have things I want to do first. I should be working—my deadline is coming up, and I’m so close to being done—but there’s pressure that comes with doing “official” work, and I just want a chance to get my bearings and work on something just for me. Better for practicing anyway.

After I have several more cups of coffee and get dressed, I head to the herb garden and breathe in deep, the bees buzzing in the late blooms of rosemary, the lavender already spent but still fragrant. I drag over a bucket to sit on and bring my sketchbook out to try and capture the sage.

It’s a tough herb to capture and my first drawing sucks. The leaves are not quite the right shape and the texture is off, the small downy hairs on the underside not catching the line the way they need to. It’s easy for the plant to look like it has Goofy and Pluto ears. So I do another sketch, which comes out better.

I sit on the overturned bucket in the even morning light and work for an hour and a half on the sage, getting two passable studies. The work does what I was hoping it would; taking me out of my body and mind, and putting me back into my hands. Hyperfocus takes over and whittles the rest of the world—the rest of my problems—away until there is only one thing: my pencil moving across the page, and the plant in front of me.

By the time I look up, the morning has stretched into a mild noon. The bay has gone from silver to the kind of grey-blue that has a bit of green in it. The light has softened and my back hurts, which means I have been hunched too long.

I stand up and groan, stretch a little, groan some more, then take the sketches inside. I look at the clock on the kitchen wall. It says quarter past one.

He told me to come in the afternoon.

Afternoon is now, I think.

I look down at my morning outfit—CU Boulder hoodie, grass-stained sweatpants—and decide to get changed.

Decisions, decisions.

It’s not like I have a lot of choices since all I have is what fit in my suitcase; the rest is still supposed to show up in a box one day. The skirt would work again, of course, but the chaffing from the walk wasn’t fun. I decide on those lime green harem pants—voted the ugliest pants in the world by most guys—but on top I wear a lace black bra, a thin-strapped black camisole, and a fuzzy black cardigan over that, so at least I have a little cleavage going on.

I mean, if I have any say in it, all these clothes will be coming off the moment I step foot in that castle.

I eschew my boots and the wellies because my back will kill me if I attempt another long walk in anything other than my sneakers, then I lock the cottage. I pocket the key and my phone, heading out to his access road for the third time in five days. The walk is shorter than it has ever been because my legs have learned this route now, and the bracken on the edges has started thinking of me as a regular.

I don’t see the white horse this time, and that is its a relief of its own.

I come down through the trees, through the gateway, and across the courtyard. The castle in daylight without rain looks less like a fairy tale and more like a real place, a home where someone lives, where logs need bringing in, where a man eats and reads and sleeps and does whatever the hell else he does.

I go to the door and knock.

He opens it before my knuckles have left the wood, and I’m suddenly face-to-face with him.