Page 55 of Bonetide

He stops a few feet away, a careful distance.

I stop with him.

I’m breathing hard from the walk, but he’s not. In fact, as far as I can tell, he’s not breathing at all. He’s gone still as he often does, but this is not a calm, idle stillness. This is a man holding himself back; his hands at his sides, fists clenched. The clenching is the only thing about him that’s moving, the slow pulse of his knuckles whitening and easing, whitening and easing, like he’s timing something.

My heart does several summersaults as it waits.

“Iris Galloway,” he says in a low, rough rasp that makes the hair stand at the back of my neck.

“Hi,” I mumble dumbly, suddenly feeling very awkward and put on the spot.

“You came.”

“I did.”

He doesn’t say anything for a beat. He’s looking at me like he wants to be sure he has me right, like I’m actually here.

He clears his throat.

“I asked you something the last time you were here. Whether you’d come back knowing what you want with me.”

“I remember.”

“Do you know now?”

It’s the whole question. It’s what I’ve thought about for every step over the last four miles. And there is some part of me that knows the honest answer is I don’t really know, Alasdair, I’ve never known anything in my life, and the part of me that knows that should win.

Except the part of me that is here today is not the part of me that knows things. The part of me that is here today is dumb and reckless and impulsive, and wants what it wants, and is tired of trying to be perfect and do everything right and still failing at it anyway.

“I want you,” I declare. It comes out easily, my voice surprisingly steady.

And there it is. The truth, for better or for worse. And even though I feel incredibly vulnerable admitting this in front of him, I square my shoulders and stay firm.

He closes his eyes.

Only for a second. His head tips back slightly, his throat moves. When he opens his eyes again, the blue in them has gone so vivid that I find myself trying to figure out what color I would use to paint them. Forget-me-not blue. Manganese blue. The blue at the bottom of a flame.

Or maybe the color doesn’t even exist in this world.

Alasdair blue.

“Aye,” he replies, very quietly. “All right then.”

Then he steps forward and he kisses me.

The kiss is slow at first. One hand to my jaw, the other to my waist. He comes down to my mouth without rushing, as if he had promised himself to take it one second at a time. The press of his lips against mine is flush and full and soft, a gentleness that gradually changes, becoming something harder and hungrier, and by the time his tongue sweeps across mine, I’m making a pathetic whimper against his mouth, my knees officially growing weak.

He swallows the sound, and the kiss deepens.

His hand at my jaw slides into my hair. His hand at my waist slides around to the small of my back. He turns us as he kisses me, slow at first, and then faster, and the next thing I know, my back is against the pale white trunk of a birch on the side of the road, and his body is against mine, and his kiss has become an animal of its own.

“Christ,” he swears into my mouth. “Christ, Iris.”

“Don’t stop,” I plead, suddenly struck by some unreasonable fear that he might think this is a bad idea, because I suppose someone has to.

“I’m not going to stop.”

He kisses me harder as if to reassure me. His hand comes up to my throat, just a little pressure there, just a wee hand necklace right out of the gate. Then his thumb under is my jaw, and he’s tilting my face the way he wants it for the kiss, and I’m letting him.