Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
“And then?”
“And then I came up.”
“As what you are now?”
“Aye.”
“And the man you were?”
“Was already drowned by then.”
“Were you drowned…by something?”
“Yes, I think so,” he says with a thoughtful look. “Helped along. But I don’t know what it was. Something like I am now, I suppose. Whoever—or whatever—it was, I never saw them again. But I know I didn’t become this alone.”
I don’t know what to do with my face, so I look down at my coffee instead. “So you are the undead, then. Like a vampire.”
He offers me a soft smile. “No. Not like a vampire. I am not dead, Iris. I am very much alive, as you can see. It’s just that I was brought back as something else, started a second life, that’s all.”
I snort. “Oh, that’s all.”
He shrugs. I suppose he has had a lot of time—centuries?—to become used to these facts and I’ve had, like, a minute.
“Was there anyone for you then? When you were a man?” I ask. “Did you have a family? A wife?”
He’s quiet for a long beat. “There was a lass, aye. I’d been meaning to ask her father if I could court her properly. I’d been saving for the bride-gift. I’d not yet had the conversation.”
“What was her name?”
He presses his lips together and shakes his head. “I don’t remember.”
I look at him.
“That’s the truth of it, foxglove. I couldn’t tell you her name if you held a blade to me. I remember the feeling of wanting her. But the name went a long time ago, and the face after it. That’s what the years do. They take the small things first.” A pause. “I used to think forgetting her would feel like a betrayal. But it didn’t feel like anything, and that was the worst of it. So, you see, my grief isn’t for her. It’s older and stranger than that; grief for the forgetting itself, for being a thing that outlasts everyone it loved and knew until even the loss wears smooth.”
His words sink into me, the tenderness in the tone, that longing. That watching time as it ticks past, never to take you along.
“Did you ever go back? After, I mean. As what you are.”
“To her village?”
“Yes.”
“Once. She was old by then. I stood at the edge of the woods and watched her in her garden, and then I went away again. She never knew what I had become.”
“You let her have her life.”
“Aye. Of course.”
“Even though you…I suppose maybe you had…appetites.”
“Aye, lass. I had appetites, various ones. But I was so much more of the man back then, the MacCoinnich, that there wasn’t too much of a struggle to be…good.”
I have to set the coffee down because my hands are shaking a little. The matter-of-fact way he’s saying things is unnerving to say the least, and even though it still all sounds so preposterous on the surface, the words hanging in the air and defying the known universe, I can feel their truth. And that scares me.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. New question.”
“Keep them coming.”
“How many other women have you been with since her? Like, in the centuries since.”
He looks at me a long beat. “You’re asking me my number?”
Okay, I’m aware that this question is rather selfish and not really needed but still…I’m insecure and petty and I want to know.
I nod. “I am asking you your number.”
A flicker at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, the closest thing to one I’ve seen this morning. “Are you sure?”
“I want to know.”
“I’m not going to give you a count.”
“Roughly. Give me a rough number.”
“Roughly is worse than a count.” He looks at me, then at the bay through the window, then back. “There’ve been times across the centuries I was with no one for fifty, sixty years. Times I was with one woman for a chunk of her life before she left me. Times I took what I needed, and didn’t keep the names. I’m not going to give you a number, foxglove. The number’s not the thing. The thing is that none of them were you.”
“Oh my god,” I respond, laughing, “that’s such a Hallmark answer.”
“I don’t know who this Hallmark is, but it’s the truth.”
I bite back the smile and shake my head. “Okay, how about…how long had it been since you, um, before we, got together?”
“You mean fucked?” he asks and word sounds so wrong and good and dirty coming from him right now that I can’t help but blush.
“Yeah. That.”
“Ohh,” he says, looking off. “Probably a hundred years?”
My mouth drops open. “Are you serious?”
“Aye. Remember I told you that it was long enough that the asking embarrasses me?”
I do remember that. I thought it was charming hyperbole, though I can clearly see the asking does embarrass him. Which is charming in itself.