Page 153 of Bonetide

A yawn takes him by force, cracks his jaw, astonishes him. He looks at me with such offense at his own body that I laugh out loud. “How do you people get anything done?”

“We mostly don’t,” I admit, biting back a smile.

He gathers me in, and his arms around me are warm now, warm all the way through. His chest rises and falls under my cheek. His heart taps at my ear, slowing, slowing. The most uncanny man I have ever known is falling ordinarily asleep underneath me, breathing like anyone, and outside the window the bay lies dark and silent and separate for once—just scenery, just water, no part of it in this bed, and no part of this bed in it.

“Iris,” he murmurs, nearly gone into dreamland now.

“Mmmm?”

“The wanting.” His words are slow, sleep-heavy, deliberate, like he’s spending his last waking coins on them. “When the horse went down, I felt everything go with it, the pull, the lure, all the old…machinery. And I lay on those stones with my new heart going and I thought, now I’ll find out. Now I’ll find out what’s left when the myth is gone. Was it the creature wanting her or was it me?” He exhales, long but steady. “And then I stood up and the first thing I knew, the very first thing, before the cold, before the fear, was you. Plain as hunger. No machinery to it at all.” His arm tightens around me, drowsy, certain. “It was always going to be you, Iris. The monster…just got there first.”

He’s asleep before I can reply.

I lie awake a long time listening to him breathe and I look at the dark window where the bay used to pull at me, and I feel nothing from the water, and everything from the man.

I don’t know yet if this is love. I’m done pretending I know things before I know them.

But it’s mine. Whatever it is, every ounce of it is mine, freely chosen, and for the first time since I crossed an ocean with my life in two suitcases, that feels like enough to build on.

The man in my bed breathes in. The man in my bed breathes out.

I close my eyes and join him in sleep.

Chapter

Thirty-Three

Iwake up before he does.

On the first morning of his mortal life, Alasdair MacCoinnich sleeps in, and I lie on one elbow in the grey early light and watch him do it like it’s the eighth wonder of the world, because in my little world it is. He sleeps like he fully embraced the act of it—flat on his back with one arm flung up over the pillow, his mouth slightly open, his chest rising and falling in long, slow swells, and every so often he makes a small sound, half a snore, and I have to press my hand to my mouth so I don’t laugh and wake him up before he’s ready.

Not long ago I shared a bed with a creature that lay in the dark with its eyes closed, performing rest, its chest barely moving. And now there’s a man in my bed snoring slightly, dead to the world in the way only the living can be, and I could watch it for a year.

And I do. I’m starting to feel a little Edward Cullen-y in watching him when his eyes slowly flutter open at just past eight. He blinks confusion contorting his brow, the moment he doesn’t know where or possibly what he is, and then he finds me watching and it washes over all at once.

“I slept,” he mumbles, his voice graveled with it, astonished.

“You snored,” I point out with something like glee.

“I never.”

“Little ones. Wee baby snores.”

He stares at the ceiling, that look of astonishment still present. “I dreamed,” he whispers. “I’d forgotten what dreams were. I was in a boat. Someone was singing somewhere over the water and I couldn’t find the shore, but I wasn’t afraid.” He turns his head on the pillow to look at me. “Is that a normal one?”

“That sounds pretty nice, actually. Mine are usually about having to use the toilet except all the bathroom stalls are dirty and the doors are too low and they don’t lock. Or I’m back in high school or college and I forgot to attend one class all year and it’s the day of the exam and I’m about to fail. I’d rather have your dream.”

“Aye. Yours sounds like a curse.”

“It’s called having an unregulated nervous system, you’ll see.”

And then his stomach growls, audibly, a long, whining complaint, loud enough that we both look down at it, and his expression is so deeply affronted that I lose the battle and laugh until I’m crying. That’s how the first morning starts, with the former terror of the western Highlands being betrayed by his own digestion.

So I make eggs and toast and leftover stew, and he eats like a teenage boy, reminding me of the way my lanky brother used to demolish the kitchen when growing up. He eats my toast too, only after I offer it, of course.

“It’s demanding,” Alasdair says, shaking his head. “This bloody body. It just goes on wanting things. Heat, food, sleep…you—” he catches himself, and there it is, faint color along his cheekbones. He can blush now, how delightful. “It’s a wonder any of you get anything done.”

“You keep saying that, and I keep telling you. We don’t. Welcome to the human experience, where you’ll be a slave to a never-ending to-do list.”