Page 29 of Bonetide

Chapter

Seven

Iwake up to a quiet body.

It’s a small miracle. My hips don’t hurt. My jaw isn’t clenched. The deep ache that lives between my shoulder blades has, for the first time in I don’t know how long, taken the morning off.

I lie on my back and listen to a gull arguing with something outside and that’s when it hits me.

Oh. I see.

So the secret to a decent night’s sleep was, apparently, ruining myself thoroughly in front of a kitchen window at dusk. Of all the things to learn about my body in my thirties.

A wry small thought arrives in my head: Ryan never did this for me. I push it away. Ryan and the orgasm gap between us was never worth a conversation, at least not when he had a say in it. He had over a decade to figure my body out and used a couple of minutes, but I refuse to think about my ex-husband or my failed marriage and lackluster sex life for more than a minute today.

Today I have a heater to buy.

The boat shed’s going to be cold by October, that much I know. Hell, it’s probably cold already since summer in the Highlands has, so far, been more of a suggestion than anything. I’d been putting off the trip to Fort William like I put everything off that I need to do. I told myself I needed some time to get my bearings and figure out what I needed to buy, what’s missing from the cottage, etc., before taking the two-hour journey to the nearest big town.

But now it’s no longer something I need to do, but want to do. I want to be somewhere else. Somewhere away from here. Somewhere with parking lots. Somewhere with people who don’t know my name and don’t whisper it through the fucking door.

I get ready with purpose, put on jeans—instead of pants with an elastic waistband—a cozy cardigan, and my boots, then I get in the car.

The drive south is the kind of drive that reminds me why I wanted to move out here in the first place.

The cloud burns off in the first hour. The road slips out of the fern-laden coast and into a country of long pale lochs and bare, scoured mountains, where the rock comes through the heather like bones through skin. I crack the windows. The wind smells of grass and water and woodsmoke from a place I can’t see. I drive past flocks of baa-ing sheep, past a single white house at the head of a glen with no road to it, past a stand of birches the color of cotton candy in the new sun.

By the time I cross into Lochaber, the sky has gone wide and properly blue. I’ve got my cardigan pushed to the elbows. The radio finds a station out of Inverness playing something tinny and cheerful, and I sing along badly to whatever I can catch the chorus of. The mountains here are bigger and emptier, the kind of country where the road feels apologetic for being there at all, like humans bravely dared to mark it. I haven’t thought about Alasdair at all. It’s its own small victory.

Fort William is bigger than I expected—which shows just how isolated I’ve been—and the carpark for the big supermarket at the edge of town is the closest thing to a sensory assault I’ve had in a week. I get a propane heater, the kind hunters use in unheated cabins, along with a spare bottle for it.

Then I tackle groceries, going down my half-finished list. Frozen pizza. Two bags of crisps in flavors I can’t quite trust like shrimp and curry chicken but sound like a good experiment. A box of cereal with a hare on it but looks like it has tiny marshmallows, so that’s a win. Microwave rice. A bag of small clementines I’ll eat enthusiastically for a few days and then forget about until they go fuzzy in the bowl. Pre-cut cheese. Pre-cut anything, really. A jar of pesto, because pesto plus pasta—and chunks of halloumi—is a meal I can put together quickly, providing I set a million timers for the pasta so I don’t let it turn into a mushy mess.

The pretty girl at the till with wild blue hair and a septum ring scans my haul, notes that I’m a tourist by my accent, and, given my grocery haul, gives me a small kind smile that says I am not going to ask about your life. I take it because I swear I’m this close to oversharing what happened last night with a total stranger. God, I really need to talk to someone. I’d give Maddie another call but I feel I need to make her proud before I do and telling her that I got off while secretly watching my naked neighbor masturbate is not a thing I’m proud of.

The drive back is the same drive in reverse, but a different country entirely. The clouds are gone. The lochs have switched from slate to a hard, glittering blue. The mountains across them are clearly mountains now and not the suggestions they were this morning. I pass a man on a bicycle in shorts, which in Scotland is the equivalent of seeing someone in a swimsuit. Somewhere south of Lochcarron I have to pull onto the roadside to shrug my cardigan off because the car has gone genuinely warm.

I drive the last half-hour in my T-shirt with the windows down, the wild wind in my face, and the sun making everything kind.

I pull up to the cottage with the sweater on the passenger seat and my arms bare. The bay is a sheet of beaten silver. The rowan at the front step is rustling in a small warm wind. The cottage looks almost like a postcard of a cottage rather than the cottage itself, and, for the first time since I got here, I can’t help but think how lucky I am to be here at all. It’s amazing what summer weather can do to one’s soul.

I bring the heater in first, planning to haul it to the shed later. Then the groceries, in three trips—I wanted to do one trip like you wouldn’t believe, but my body simply won’t let me do that anymore. The kitchen smells like warm bread by the time I’m done because I’ve left the door open and the sun has reached the woodsmoke in the curtains and let it loose. The cheese and milk go in the fridge. The cereal and crisps go on the shelf. The clementines go in the bowl, because that’s where clementines go to die.

I put the kettle on to make myself a cozy cup of tea with loads of oat milk and sugar, my afternoon treat. Then I remember the laundry.

I left my clothes and some sheets on the line yesterday before the binoculars happened and forgot about them in the catastrophe of myself. The line is strung between the cottage and a rough wooden post that points beyond the herb garden. The sheets have been getting sun and breeze for twenty-four hours straight. They will be the cleanest sheets in the Highlands.

I take the wicker basket from the mudroom and walk out into the back garden, humming a song that was on the radio earlier. The mint has the sun full on it and the smell of it is everywhere. I duck under the line. The first sheet comes off the pegs easily. I fold it against my chest, warm and stiff, and breathe in the scent of the detergent, like a I’m in a commercial. Once again, I’m delighting in romanticizing my new life, even if I’m not even close to being a domestic goddess. I just play one on TV.

I reach for the second sheet, and, as I do so, glance at the ground.

At the strange shadow beneath the sheet.

I lower my hands and crouch down to look at the hem.

There are a pair of legs underneath it. Black trousers. Dark boots.

I stand up slowly. My mouth goes bone dry. I’ve got one hand on the corner of the sheet and the other on the line-pole, and a part of me thinks, Iris, what you are about to do is the most stupid thing a woman in a horror movie ever does. Then I do it anyway, because it’s sunny, because the bay is bright, because I’d rather know than not.