Page 84 of Bonetide

He looks at me like I’ve humored him.

“It has been a very long time,” he eventually says.

“How long?” I ask, because I’m nosy.

“Long enough that you don’t need to worry about anything I might give you. Long enough that the asking embarrasses me, foxglove.”

That was not the answer I expected, and yet it’s the answer I should have expected. He’s a man who lives alone in a castle on a tidal loch in a part of the Scottish Highlands that does not have a town for fifteen miles or a city for hours, a man that doesn’t seem to interact with anyone but me. Of course it’s been a long time. Then again, small towns can surprise you.

“Okay.” I surrender.

“Okay.”

“Are we…good?”

“Aye, foxglove.”

He kisses me.

The kiss is different from the kisses he has given me before. It is the kiss of a man who has stopped negotiating with himself; who no longer wishes to be held back. His mouth opens against mine and his tongue is in my mouth, full and wet and wanting, and his hands are on my face and then on my throat and then at my shoulders, and I’m being pushed gently back toward the bed without my feet quite finding the floor between his steps.

The backs of my knees hit the edge of the mattress.

He pulls back.

He looks at me for a beat, as if to read my reaction.

Then he undresses me.

He does this slowly, even slower than he did yesterday. He undresses me like he’s unwrapping a present he’s been waiting all year for. The cardigan first, slid off my shoulders and laid across the chair beside us. Then his fingers at the hem of the cream waffle-knit, lifting it, pulling it up and over my head, the cotton catching briefly on the half-up of my hair before he frees it. My hair falls back around my shoulders.

He looks down.

I am bare from the waist up, my boobs free.

The realization that I didn’t wear a bra moves across his face the way a slow tide moves across a flat beach.

“Christ, Iris,” he says, inhaling sharply.

His hands come up. He cups my breasts in both hands, slow, like he’s weighing them. His thumbs find my nipples already hard from the air of the room and from him. He drags the pad of each thumb across them and I make an involuntary sound.

He bends and puts his mouth on my left breast.

His mouth is hot as he takes my nipple between his lips and sucks once, gently, then with more pressure, then he uses his tongue and his teeth in a small careful combination that goes through me like a wire pulled tight.

Holy fuck.

I clutch his hair.

He moves to the other breast and does the same. Even slower now, spending a long time. By the time he straightens, his mouth is slightly red, my breasts are wet from his mouth and aching, my nipples are hard as pebbles, and I’m barely standing.

He unzips the skirt at my hip.

It falls.

He looks down.

Nothing under it either.