Page 152 of Bonetide

I note the wet wool clinging to shoulders that are tense not still, at the hollow of his throat where a pulse is visibly going, at the water that soaks his hair black, and down a face that is tired—actually tired—with faint shadows under the eyes like a man who fought a loch and lost and yet lived. In a way he’s less beautiful than he was, as strange as that is to say. Whatever burnish the glamour put on him, that shimmery sheen of otherworldliness, has gone down with it, and what’s left is just a very fine-looking, handsome man in his apparent late thirties/early forties with a strong facial structure, a great body and good hair, shivering in my cottage, mortal as any day of the week.

And the wanting comes anyway.

It comes up slow, from somewhere real, no hook. It comes up the way warmth comes back into cold hands, painful and undeniable but mine, and I could cry with relief, because there’s my answer, there’s the damned test result. With every supernatural thumb off the scale, standing in plain lamplight looking at an earthly, dripping, breakable man, I want him. Not the lord of anything. Him.

And nothing and no one else.

I go to him, as I always will.

“You’ll catch your death,” I say, and start pulling the damp jumper up his body, and he raises his arms to let me, obedient, watching my face the whole time like it’s the only thing keeping his heart going at its terrible new speed, “and I’ve put far too much effort into keeping you alive this week to lose you to a chill.”

The jumper hits the floor with a slap. His skin is cold and underneath it, the warmth is rising as I run my hands everywhere. “I need you to know something before…if we…” He swallows. “I don’t know how to do this. As this. I’ve taken women to bed for centuries with the water in my veins doing half the work, and I don’t…” he trails off, licks his lips. “What if I don’t do it right? My hands are going to shake. My heart’s going like a bloody rabbit’s. I’m cold and I’m clumsy in this body and I’m frightened of my own grip, and you’ll be getting no creature tonight, just⁠—”

“Just a man,” I fill in, unable to keep from grinning. “Just you.”

“Aye.” Barely a sound. “Just me. And I don’t know if just me is⁠—”

I kiss him before he can finish that sentence, because that sentence doesn’t deserve finishing.

And it’s different. God, it’s different. His mouth is careful where it was always certain, and it tastes of rain and nothing else, no cold metal, no deep-water mineral, none of the loch’s signature under his tongue, just a man, just warmth and salt and him. He lets out a whimper against my lips, helpless, completely without management, and his arms come around me and they tremble. Not with restraint. With feeling, with cold, with a body that’s brand new at being only a worldly body.

I take him to bed. I lead him by the hand through my own cottage like it’s the first time, and in every way that counts, it is.

We undress each other slowly because slow is all his shaking hands can do, and I find the changes as I go, the skin warming under my palms by the minute as the radiator and the blankets and I do our work. His heartbeat everywhere, in his chest, his throat, his wrists, the inside of his thigh, the whole length of him ticking with it like the struck bell he called it. And the breath that catches when I touch him. It catches. Audibly. Several hundred years of composure and his breath stutters because my mouth found his collarbone.

“Sorry,” he mutters, mortified, and I laugh into his skin.

“Don’t you dare apologize. I’ve been making embarrassing noises for two months. Welcome to the body.”

“The body,” he says in a faint, gruff voice, as my hand moves down him, “has opinions—” and then the rest of it goes out of him in a rush, because the body does have opinions, loud ones, and he’s never had to hear them before. Now I can tell that every sensation is arriving at him raw and unbuffered, no creature’s vast indifference to dilute it. I watch it happen. I watch him feel things, my hands, my mouth, the heat of me, as if he’s hearing music for the first time. He’s overwhelmed—almost in pain with it—his eyes squeezing shut and flying open like he can’t decide whether looking makes it more bearable or less.

“Stay with me,” I whisper, and his blue eyes find mine and stay.

When he finally moves over me, slow and carefully, his weight on his forearms, he pauses at the threshold of me the way he paused at the foot of my bed the night of the window.

“Ask me in,” he says, his voice rough and raw. “Not because anything in me needs it now. Because I’m asking to be asked.”

“Come in,” I plead. “Alasdair, come home.”

And he does. He pushes inside me slowly, shaking, breathing my name. The heat is there, slower and deeper and stranger than it’s ever been, a heat with no hook in it, climbed instead of fallen into. His eyes are locked with mine. Present. Inhabited. Nobody else surfacing behind them, no endless void for elder gods. For the first time since August, I am making love with one single person, and he is here for every second of it.

“It’s you,” I gasp, somewhere near the edge, and I don’t even know what I mean by it except everything. “It’s just you, it’s actually you⁠—”

“Aye.” His forehead drops to mine, his breath ragged, his heart slamming against my chest like it wants into mine. “It’s me. God help you, foxglove, it’s only ever me from here, it’s—” his words drop away, replaced by a primal groan as he pushes into the hilt, sweat falling from his brow and dripping on me from the exertion.

I come undone with my arms around a shaking mortal man, and for once it doesn’t feel like a tidal wave or a rip current pulling me under, instead it’s a pushing up into the sky, it’s surfacing, it’s air after submersion, and he follows me over that edge with strained muscles and a ragged grunt, his face buried in my neck.

Then he collapses. He lies on me heavy and spent and breathing hard, utterly wrecked, and I hold the weight of him and stare at the ceiling and feel his heartbeat slowly, slowly come down, and I realize that’s the difference—he finishes like he just came home from a battle.

“Well,” he says eventually, muffled, into my neck. “That was—” He lifts his head. His hair is a ruin. His eyes are heavily lidded in a way I’ve never seen, and it takes me a moment to understand what I’m looking at.

He’s sleepy.

“You’re tired,” I remark in awe.

“I’m—” He stops, assessing, a man taking inventory of a new country. “Aye. That’s what this is, then. It’s like sinking. Pleasant sinking.” He frowns, fighting it, lashes already losing. “I don’t want to. I’ve things to say to you. I’ve two days of things⁠—”

“I’m sure you’ll remember.”