Page 90 of Bonetide

He cleans me with the same care he showed yesterday, slower this time, more reverent, sliding the warm wet cloth between my legs and over my hips and down the insides of my thighs. He cleans himself too, then sets the cloth aside.

He gets back into the bed beside me, and pulls the heavy quilt up over both of us.

He tucks me against his chest.

“Iris?” he whispers.

“Mmm?”

“Sleep.”

“Mm.”

He kisses my forehead.

I fall asleep against him.

I wake in the dark with the urge to pee.

The fire has gone down to embers. The candles on the mantel have burned out. The rain is hammering against the leaded glass, the sound of it filling the room in uneven lashings thanks to the wind. I have no idea what time it is. Somewhere in the small hours, probably, the deep middle of the night when the body knows the dawn is still a long way off.

The creepy hour, I sometimes think.

I turn my head on the pillow to look at Alasdair.

He is not asleep.

He’s sitting up against the headboard; his back against the dark wood. The quilt is pooled at his waist, his chest bare.

He’s watching me.

I blink.

His eyes…

For a beat, in the low light from the dying fire, his eyes are wrong.

They’re so terribly wrong.

They’re all black. No blue, no iris. Just black and it fills the whole of his eye, edge to edge, like a void.

I make a small sound. Not even a word.

He blinks.

His eyes are his eyes again.

The blue is rimmed with dark; the pupil is where the pupil should be, the whites are white.

He’s the man I fell asleep against hours ago.

He smiles. A small, careful smile.

“Hush, foxglove. Sleep. I’ll be here.”

I automatically close my eyes.

I tell myself I imagined it. I tell myself it was the dying fire on his face and my eyes still adjusting from the dark and the wine still in me from dinner. I tell myself a lot of things these days.