Page 111 of Bonetide

“It’s the castle guy,” she says definitively, my lies collapsing.

I sigh in defeat. “It’s complicated.”

“What does complicated mean?”

I take a breath.

“It means I’m in over my head, and I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”

“Iris, that’s the kind of sentence that gets a friend on a plane.”

“Please don’t get on a plane,” I beg, “I forbid it.”

“Then talk to me.”

I am rounding the bend where the single-track curves around the headland and the bay opens up, the long silver throat of it stretching toward the open sea, and I think for a beat about telling her. About telling her the whole thing. The whole fucking crazy-ass truth.

Maddie, the man across the bay is not a man, he’s a creature out of folklore, Horsey McHorseCock, because yes he shapeshifts into a horse and his cock is equally as large, and yes I’m sleeping with him, and last night I salted my back step against him and the salt held, and today I drove forty-five minutes to a village library to read about him in a book, and I don’t know what I’m going to do because one part of me wants to keep sleeping with him because he’s immortal and a monster and therefore infinitely more fascinating than anyone on earth, and the other part of me thinks I need to run far, far away and I don’t know which part of me is going to win.

I think about her face hearing that overwrought sentence.

I think about her reaching for her laptop and pulling up flights.

So I don’t say it.

Instead, I say, “He’s older than me. Like…significantly older.”

“How significantly?”

“Significantly,” I reply firmly. “He’s also…he’s—he’s not normal, Maddie. He’s strange. He’s strange in ways I can’t explain.”

“Strange how?” Her voice has gone quiet, rife with suspicion.

“Strange like…he watches me too much but not so much in the stalkerish way, more in the he’s fascinated by me way. He also says things that don’t quite make sense, and treats me like I’m made of gold, and I don’t know whether he’s the best man I’ve ever been with, or the most dangerous one.”

“That’s it, I’m getting on a plane.”

“You can’t!” I interject. “You can’t, it’s expensive, and you have your daughter, and Andrew, well, he can’t take care of her, Andrew has that thing.”

“What thing?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure he has a thing, he always has a thing.”

She goes silent for a beat and I can almost hear her pulling up the calendar in her brain. “You’re right, he has that conference in Delaware.”

“Yes!” I exclaim. “Delaware!”

“If you’re seriously in trouble though…”

“But I’m not seriously in trouble.”

Shit, the lies are coming easier now, almost as if I believe them.

“You just listed a bunch of red flags.”

“I know, Maddie.”

“Get out. If not out of the situationship, then out of that cottage. It’s doing you no good.”