Page 121 of Bonetide

“You let her have her life.”

“Aye. Of course.”

“Even though you…I suppose maybe you had…appetites.”

“Aye, lass. I had appetites, various ones. But I was so much more of the man back then, the MacCoinnich, that there wasn’t too much of a struggle to be…good.”

I have to set the coffee down because my hands are shaking a little. The matter-of-fact way he’s saying things is unnerving to say the least, and even though it still all sounds so preposterous on the surface, the words hanging in the air and defying the known universe, I can feel their truth. And that scares me.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay. New question.”

“Keep them coming.”

“How many other women have you been with since her? Like, in the centuries since.”

He looks at me a long beat. “You’re asking me my number?”

Okay, I’m aware that this question is rather selfish and not really needed but still…I’m insecure and petty and I want to know.

I nod. “I am asking you your number.”

A flicker at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, the closest thing to one I’ve seen this morning. “Are you sure?”

“I want to know.”

“I’m not going to give you a count.”

“Roughly. Give me a rough number.”

“Roughly is worse than a count.” He looks at me, then at the bay through the window, then back. “There’ve been times across the centuries I was with no one for fifty, sixty years. Times I was with one woman for a chunk of her life before she left me. Times I took what I needed, and didn’t keep the names. I’m not going to give you a number, foxglove. The number’s not the thing. The thing is that none of them were you.”

“Oh my god,” I respond, laughing, “that’s such a Hallmark answer.”

“I don’t know who this Hallmark is, but it’s the truth.”

I bite back the smile and shake my head. “Okay, how about…how long had it been since you, um, before we, got together?”

“You mean fucked?” he asks and word sounds so wrong and good and dirty coming from him right now that I can’t help but blush.

“Yeah. That.”

“Ohh,” he says, looking off. “Probably a hundred years?”

My mouth drops open. “Are you serious?”

“Aye. Remember I told you that it was long enough that the asking embarrasses me?”

I do remember that. I thought it was charming hyperbole, though I can clearly see the asking does embarrass him. Which is charming in itself.

“So we both were revirginized, essentially.”

His dark brows knit together. “Did you not say it had been a year for you?”

“Over a year,” I correct.

“Aye,” he agrees, deadpan. “Alright, I can see how that is the same.”

It’s the closest thing to sarcasm I think I’ve ever heard him say.