Page 151 of Bonetide

I don’t know. That’s the truth I walk around the kitchen with all afternoon. I don’t know, and until yesterday I couldn’t have known, and there’s no test for it except the one coming for me whenever that door opens.

If it ever opens.

It opens at dusk.

Not the window. Not the bay-side darkness, not the tilt in the air, none of the old announcements. A knock—a knock, knuckles on wood, polite as the neighbor he used to be—and I cross the kitchen like lightening, pulling back the bolt and opening the door.

Alasdair stands on my step.

He’s wet, as usual, his dark hair plastered to his skull, but he’s wearing dry clothes, probably found somewhere in the castle, and he’s shivering.

That’s the first thing I notice. Before his face, before anything. Alasdair MacCoinnich is shivering. His shoulders are hunched against the cold, his jaw is tight with it, a tremor running through him that he can’t suppress because the cold is new to him now.

“I’d have come sooner.” His voice is hoarse, and there’s something underneath it I’ve never heard there before, and it takes me a second to name it because I’ve never had to—it’s effort. He’s slightly out of breath. From the walk over, from whatever adjustments becoming mortal he has had to make. “It took—the water held me a long while. And then I had to learn to swim again.”

“You had to what?”

“I’ve never had to before, not since after the loch took me,” he says. “It always carried me. It doesn’t carry me now. I went under at the castle shore and it was just…water. Cold water that wanted to kill me, same as it’d kill anyone.”

His eyes come up to mine, and they’re his, the glacial pale blue, but something’s different in them too and I can’t place it yet. “I nearly drowned, foxglove. Me. I had to remember arms and legs like a bairn. I crawled out at the point and I lay on the stones and my heart was going like a hammer and I—” He stops. His throat works. “I could feel it. My own heart. It’s beat all this while—you’ve laid your head on it; you know it better than I do—but it was never mine to notice. The loch kept it the way it kept everything, quiet and far off, like the tide. Something done for me, somewhere below. And now it’s mine, and it’s going like a fist, and it won’t stop, and it’s so loud, Iris. How do you all live with the noise of it?”

At that, I burst into tears, the stress of two whole days comes up and out of me at once, ugly and hiccupping. He doesn’t reach for me, I think he still doesn’t trust his hands, which hang at his sides with the fingers curled, so I must do the reaching. I grab two fists of damp wool and pull him over the threshold he hasn’t needed permission to cross in weeks, and I shut the door behind him against the cold that can hurt him now.

“You’re freezing,” I manage. “You’re actually freezing, you’re going to get hypothermia, you can get hypothermia now, oh my god, get by the fire⁠—”

“Iris.”

“I mean it, this is a real problem now, this is a medical⁠—”

“Iris.” And his hand comes up, slowly, watched by both of us, the hand that did what it did against that wall, and it stops short of my face, hovering, asking. I lean my cheek into it the last inch myself.

It’s warm.

Not warm like a normal man’s hand, not yet, since he’s still half-frozen, but under the chill of the skin there’s heat moving, blood moving, a temperature where there was always the loch’s cold, and at his wrist, against my jaw, I can feel a pulse. Small and fast and human, tapping away at me.

We stand there a long moment, his hand on my face, his pulse against my jaw.

“You’re warm,” I whisper.

“Aye.” His voice cracks down the middle of it. “It’s everywhere. I’m fucking freezing but I’m inside I’m actually warm. The warmth, the heart, the breath…I can’t stop any of it, it just goes and goes, it’s like living inside a bell that won’t stop ringing. Christ.” He laughs—shaky, winded, human—and then his face dissolves into anguish.

“I didn’t know if you’d open the door. I stood out there the whole walk telling myself you’d not open it. You’d seen what I—” He stops himself. Starts again, carefully. “The thing that used to make it easy is gone. You’ll have felt that. Whatever was in the air between us all this time, whatever it did to your wanting, it went down with the horse. So, I stood on your step and I knocked like a man, because that’s all I am now…and I don’t need to tell you, but a man can be left standing on a step.”

So he feels it too. The absence. The terrifying quiet where the pull used to be.

“I almost didn’t recognize my own kitchen today,” I say, swallowing thickly. “Everything’s so still. I kept looking at the bay and feeling nothing and thinking…what if it was all the glamour and only the glamour? What if I never, what if you never…” I can’t finish either. We’re both standing in the same fear from opposite sides.

“Aye. What if?”

The world seems to close in on us now, in the utter normalcy of the cottage with the logs settling in the wood stove and the fridge humming on.

Yet neither of us moves, because the next thing that happens between us will be the first thing that ever happened between us unassisted. That means no pull, no glamour, no bargain, no leash. Just two people, two humans, deciding how they feel about each other, deciding what to do next with their very mortal lives.

Two humans deciding to get to know each other, for real this time.

It’s the most frightening doorway I’ve ever stood in. Every other time, the water did the deciding, or the thing in him did, or the broken, yearning thing in me did. There’s nothing to blame it on now. If I go to him, it’s because I want to, and if he reaches for me, it’s because he wants to.

I look at him, really look, the way the illustrator in me has always looked, except even that feels different now, almost uncurated…it feels all mine.