Page 76 of Bonetide

“Aye, my foxglove. All right.”

“That’s it? You’re not going to try to convince me to take it more seriously?”

“No, Iris. I think you’ve heard me as plainly as I can say it. I won’t say it again.”

“Okay, but now you sound a little sad.”

“Aye. That happens.”

He kisses my forehead one more time and holds me against him for a beat. His arms are warm through the wool of his sweater and he continues to smell divine.

He pulls back and holds me by my shoulders, peering at me. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Oh, will you, now?” I muse.

“I will. You’ll come here for dinner.”

I raise a brow at his bossiness. “Well, luckily for you, I would love to.”

“Might be best that you drive here, supposed to storm tomorrow and the next few days, aye?”

“Aye, aye captain,” I joke, but he does not get the idiom.

So, I awkwardly turn around and head down his drive. I look back twice. Both times he is standing in the gateway, hands in his pockets, watching me go.

The third time I look back, however, he’s gone.

I walk home with the morning breeze on my face.

The road is long, but my legs have become used to this route now, and the air is doing me good. By the time the cottage comes into view, I’m spent in the best way my body can let me be spent. I am, for a stretch of single-track road in the Highlands of Scotland, the happiest woman alive.

I am also, somewhere under the glow, sitting with what he said before we parted.

The version of me you fall asleep next to won’t be the version you wake up to.

The category I put it in at the time was the I’m not the relationship type category. The I’m going to disappoint you category. The I’m going to be distant category. He was warning me he’d pull back, the way some men do, and I suppose it was kind of him to give me a warning. That shows a bit of self-awareness, doesn’t it?

I get to the cottage and step inside. It smells stale and familiar and like nothing has happened in it for twelve hours, which is true. It’s the first time I’ve been gone for more than half a day.

I make coffee, because finally, coffee. I drink the first cup standing at the kitchen window, watching the bay and the clouds coming up over the mountains. Then I refill the cup and sit at the table.

I take out my phone for the first time since I left this place. I had it with me at the castle in case there was an emergency, but I didn’t feel the pull to look at it even once.

Now I can see there is one text from Maddie, sent late last night her time.

Hey love. Checking in. Tell me you’re alive in the morning.

I look at it for a long time.

I should call her. I promised her I would. I should pick up the phone right now and dial her, regardless of the hour, to tell her about last night, where I just had breakfast, and tell her about the man who said things will change, and that there are such things as fuckboys who live in castles.

But, of course, I can’t.

I can’t give her any of it because if I give her any of it, I have to give her all of it, and the all of it is a story she can’t hear without me getting an earful. I promised her I wouldn’t have sex with my neighbor, and while I guess that’s kind of true if you want to be really, really technical about it, she’ll be mad. Even though she also said she knew I’d do it anyway, she’ll be mad.

I type back: I’m alive. Glowing, actually. Tell you more soon. Love you.

I set the phone down.