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)
“Sit down, love. I’ll make you coffee.”
I sit at the kitchen table, carefully. He makes me coffee.
The afternoon light through the back window has shifted while we did what we did, the bay outside the dull blue it goes before dusk. I sit at the table with my legs uncertain under me and my body still feeling him, and I watch the monster I live with make me a perfect cup of coffee, just the way I like it.
He sets it down in front of me, kisses the top of my head, goes back to the sitting room, and picks up his book.
A few nights later, he comes to bed, which is to say he doesn’t sleep in it so much as occupy it, keeping me company. He lies with his arm over my waist, his chest at my spine, his breath moving slow and silent against the back of my neck. The cold of him has stopped being a thing I flinch from and started being a thing I burrow toward, especially since I naturally run hot. The fire’s banked, and the radiator’s on, and I’m as cozy as can be, considering the circumstances. I fall asleep quickly in his presence, despite the fact that when I was married, there was no way in hell I could fall asleep with Ryan touching me.
I wake at 3:17, the alarm clock glowing red.
And I am alone in bed.
This isn’t new. He does this on most nights, somewhere in the small hours, the weight of him lifts off me and I surface just enough to know he’s gone and then sink again. In the morning he’s back—at the window, at the stove, the wet at his collar, the coffee going—like he never left. The first time it happened, I laid rigid till dawn, wondering, worrying. By now I’ve half-trained myself to read it the way you read a partner getting up to use the bathroom. He’ll go, but he’ll come back. Nothing to pay attention to.
He goes to the loch, I figure. He’s a thing made of cold, dark water, and he can’t be out of it forever any more than I could hold my breath all night. So he goes back to it in the dead hours because he can’t sleep anyway, then returns to me before the light. That’s the story I tell myself; and most mornings the story makes total sense.
Tonight, I don’t move as usual. I keep my breathing long and even. I’ve gotten good at performing sleep, and through my lashes I watch the room in the near darkness.
He’s at the foot of the bed, dressing. He’s already got the trousers on, and he’s pulling the dark sweater down over his head, and he does all of it quietly, not a single rustle of fabric or creak of the floorboard.
And it’s odd, not the lack of noise, because he’s always so quiet, but that he’s getting dressed. That’s why I figured he goes to the loch every night, because he leaves totally naked. Why put on clothes if you’re just going for a swim?
But tonight he’s putting on clothes. Perhaps he’s heading to the castle. He goes there sometimes to bring back some books and supplies.
He pauses at the window, the one I’ve stopped salting because we both know what the salt is and isn’t, and he stands there looking out at the bay with his back to me.
Where do you go? I think, but I don’t say.
I think about saying it, though. About sitting up and asking him why he’s up at three a.m. with his clothes on, like a normal person would. But there are doors in him I can open and doors I can’t, and I’m learning that the difference between the two is the difference between the man and the monster and lying here performing sleep, I can’t always tell which side of that door a given night is on. Most nights it’s the loch. Most nights he’s just going home to the water for a while, to kill time.
But I can’t tell, from here, whether tonight is most nights.
I can’t tell if he’s killing time or…killing in general.
And I’ve decided, in some place deep inside of me, that not knowing is the price of keeping him. That if I asked, and he told me, because he hates to lie to me (so he says), I’d have to do something about the answer.
So I don’t ask. I just pretend to sleep.
He turns from the window and comes back to the bed. He leans down over me, and I keep my eyes shut and my breath slow. I feel the cold of him near my face, and his mouth touches my temple; the same kiss he’s given me a hundred times. He inhales once at my hair. Then he straightens.