Page 19 of Bonetide

I suck in my breath, pins and needles igniting my nerves and cascading down my back in shivers.

Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look, I tell myself.

But I have to.

I quickly whirl around in the bathtub, water splashing, expecting to see someone standing at the window. But I don’t. There are only patches of rich blue sky coming in through the clouds, that dusky color it gets as it heads toward evening.

I make a mental note to close the curtains next time. Sure, one wouldn’t expect to need privacy out here in the middle of nowhere, but then again, I’ve had more than a few visitors already.

Once I catch my breath, I decide bath time is over. The water isn’t as cold as I thought, but it’s tepid at the very least, and no longer enjoyable. I get out carefully so I don’t end up in a naked heap on the floor, quickly close the curtains, and then hop in the shower to wash my hair and scrub off the bathwater.

By the time I’ve slipped into my comfy clothes—a bralette, a burgundy sweater and sweatpants—and dried my hair, I feel a lot better, and the creepiness of bathtime seems like a distant memory.

Now would be a good time to figure out how to relax.

Effie didn’t have a television set in the house—though the solicitor told me the hookup for cable was there, or I could do what everyone else does and just use the internet to stream things—but my mind is too scattered to attempt to read that airport paperback. I sit down in the armchair in the sitting room for a moment and flip through a stack of aging magazines, mainly Town & Country from the ‘90s, before picking up my phone and going online. I scroll idly through my social media accounts, all neglected since the divorce. I married Ryan young, but we started dating in high school, so a lot of my friends came through that relationship. When our marriage ended and Ryan was proven to be a cheating rat bastard, it turned out those friends were fair-weather and sided with the rat bastard. Call me petty but I blocked them all, one by one.

Of course, I’ve never been quick to make friends in general—something about being both neurodivergent and having a chronic illness makes people put you in either the “no-fun” or “too much” zones—so I haven’t really filled my well in the time since. Even as I scroll through my feeds, there’s a lot of accounts, but few people I actually know well. There’s Maddie, of course, and my brother, I guess. There’s Trisha, whose couch I stayed on for a month before her boyfriend started hitting on me and I left. I probably should have told Trisha, but she knew I wasn’t a fan of his to begin with—and with good reason! And Kayleigh from college who would have let me stay in her basement suite with her and her wonderful wife Callie (yes, their names get confusing) except the landlord wouldn’t let that happen, and he was looking for any excuse to evict them.

I keep scrolling until I see my mother on Rosemary Beach with my stepfather Frank, smiling at the camera like nothing is ever amiss, as if her daughter hasn’t been in Scotland for a week now with nary a call or a text or email to check in on her.

I close the app and decide that I need to do something.

Back in the kitchen, I eye the gauzy light that glows against the drawn curtains. Seems a shame to hide from golden hour.

I open them, expecting to see Alasdair across the bay, but there’s no one. A light breeze has picked up, shaking the herb garden and roses and causing ripples across the loch that looks like it’s been layered with metallic amber paint. Above, the clouds clear fast and the sun heads down toward the horizon behind the castle tower.

I let the light fill the kitchen, then sit at the table and look through the flowers I sorted earlier, picking out which ones to use for my sketches and which ones to use for my flower pressings. Back in the States, I’d use the pressings for resin art and bookmarks and the kind of artsy things I can supplement my income with on Etsy, but I haven’t figured out if I’ll continue my shop here. But the good thing about flower pressings is that they don’t go bad.

I’ve taken out a strand of thistle, the mauve petals bruised from this morning, ready to start sketching it, wilting and all, when I grasp it wrong, and one of the spikes drives into my thumb.

“You fucker,” I swear. You’d think I would be used to getting pricked and poked by flowers, but I’m not, and I swear they’re always out to get me. Sure, this morning I said flowers don’t care if you haven’t slept, but maybe they care a little about being cut, and this is their last form of revenge.

I also said I don’t anthropomorphize vegetation, but here we are.

I head to the sink to wash the blood off my thumb when I get that feeling again. My skin on my spine tickles, the hairs on my arm raising even under my sweater.

I’m being watched again.

You’re being paranoid, I tell myself.

I quickly rinse off my thumb, the blood splashing brightly in the sink, then whirl around.

There’s a motherfucking face at the window.

I open my mouth to scream but the sound catches and kind of gurgles. It’s enough that the face moves back and morphs from what looked like some evil sort of leering to one that’s sincerely apologetic.

And incredibly, ridiculously handsome.

“I’m so sorry,” he says through the window. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Okay, so how about not appearing at people’s windows then?” I cry out, my heart still in my throat.

“I tried knocking but there was no answer.”

“So you decided to snoop around the back?”

“I was going to swim back home and…” he trails off and shrugs. Gives me a sheepish look that borders on a smile.