Page 28 of Bonetide

Does he…want me to look?

As if in answer, he starts to stroke.

Slow. The kind of stroke a man does when he has all the time in the world. His chin is up, eyes closed. His mouth—and this is the part I am going to lose sleep over—is slightly open.

I should put the binoculars down.

Instead, my hand goes to the waistband of my leggings, and the world whittles down to just a few things. There’s just my hand, and the angle of his shoulders, and the shape of his mouth, and the way his hand is moving on himself in a rhythm I am already breathing to.

I push my fingers between my legs and I am embarrassingly wet.

A small rough noise comes out of my mouth.

The binoculars knock against the pane, and the world wobbles, and his hand is still moving, and his head is still up, and the gold has bled out of the light around him. He is standing in a colder, bluer dusk that makes his body look carved from stone, coldness suiting him more than warmth.

I find the rhythm I know.

It takes me less than a minute. I’ve barely touched myself lately. My body has been holding over a year of slow, ungrieved want, and I feel it’s finally waking up, dust flying off the shelves.

I come with one hand in my leggings, and the other holding the binoculars to my face, my hands shaking, my vision blurred. The orgasm moves through me in a vicious wave that starts in my hips and goes up through my stomach and out into my hands, and I let out a garbled cry.

I manage to keep the binoculars at my eyes through it all, and I’m still looking when his head moves.

He lifts his face the rest of the way up and now he’s looking directly at me. Across the dimming water, through a kitchen window I told myself he couldn’t possibly see through, and past the binoculars I told myself he couldn’t possibly know I was holding.

He is looking at me.

And he is smiling.

It is a slow, startlingly sinister smile, the kind that arrives on a face that has known the whole time and is only now letting itself be seen. There’s nothing apologetic in it. Nothing of the man who said he was sorry to scare me. He’s not sorry now, he is anything but. And somehow has just heard a woman come, hidden in her own cottage across the bay.

He does not stop stroking.

He holds my eyes.

And then he comes, mouth parted, lips wet, neck corded, with the dusk bluing around him, and his hand on himself, and his eyes on mine.

I drop the binoculars.

They hit the floor hard with a thunk and I cry out. I’m shaking and wild and I don’t know what to do with myself.

I quickly close the curtain, then wash my hands at the sink, the cold water running over my fingers, piling on the soap and scrubbing them clean, like I can wash away what just happened.

I pick up the binoculars, relieved to see they aren’t damaged, then check all the doors are locked and I hurry to bed, as if going to bed early like a good girl is going to change the fact that I’ve been a very bad girl indeed.

I lie on my back in the room with the wardrobe that looks like a man when it’s the middle of the night, and I think of him on the rocks. I think of him smiling at me through the dusk. I think, in the slow ambient terror that is going to be my new bedfellow for the rest of this year, he saw me. He wanted me to see, and knew I wanted to see.

He now knows that about me, and how I wish that was something I could quickly undo.

I roll onto my side under Effie’s quilt and face the wardrobe. The horseshoe over the bedroom door is the color of dried blood in the low light. The salt at the sill is a thin pale ridge. The wards Effie left me are in place. The doors are locked.

He will not come in.

He cannot come in.

I won’t let him.

I say this to myself like a prayer. I close my eyes, and, somewhere deep inside, that terrible feeling that one day soon I’ll do the very thing I’m not supposed to do blooms.