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)
Gee, no fucking pressure!
“You need to stop, Alasdair,” I tell him, the words grinding out. “I know what you’ve done in the past, but that’s behind you now. That’s behind us. If you’re going to be with me, you need to behave. You can’t be with me, live in this house, be in my body, and go out there and take women when you feel like it.”
“I only ate her,” he protests, “just as you eat your breakfast right now.”
I erupt. “Oh, this breakfast?” I pick up my oatmeal and fling the bowl at his head. Of course, he has lightning-fast reflexes and ducks before the bowl goes soaring across the kitchen, crashing against the wall and splintering into porcelain chunks and soggy oat splatters.
He stares at me, wide-eyed, perhaps the most surprised I’ve ever seen him.
“Get out,” I shout, absolutely seething.
His brows raise even further.
“Get out, Alasdair! Out of my house. I can’t…I can’t look at you. Go!”
I expect…I don’t know what I expect. An argument, perhaps. Him telling me again all the reasons I knew what he was when I let him in—which would be true—which is the worst of it, because I did. Something akin to, if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you don’t deserve me at my best.
But he doesn’t do any of that. He stands up from the table and he looks at me with the confusion not gone but set aside, folded away, because I’ve told him no, and honoring my no is the one law he keeps.
For now, anyway.
He goes to the back door and pauses there, one hand on the frame, his back half to me. For a second, I think he’s going to say something, and some treacherous part of me wants him to, wants him to give me a reason to make him stay. But he doesn’t. He opens the door and the cold whips in, ruffling my hair, and then he’s gone, and I’m alone inside.
The cottage is mine again.
It’s the first thing I notice in the silence after, that it’s mine again—the way it was mine before any of this, before the castle across the bay, before the box and the key and the paintings, before I knew there was more to this world than what I was told. Just me and Effie’s life all crammed together into one cottage. And I wanted this. This is what I came here for. The two weeks of a monster at my table, in my bed, and at my back, and some part of me has been quietly screaming for exactly this, the cottage emptied of him, the air gone so utterly ordinary.
Yet I hate it instantly.
The quiet isn’t peace, no, it’s a held breath. I stand in the middle of the kitchen with the broken dish on the floor, and the size of the emptiness is enormous—far bigger than the cottage itself. I understand, with a sick lurch in my stomach, that his presence had been filling something I’d stopped noticing was a hole.
I go to the window at the door, expecting to see him disappear into the water, but the bay is already empty. No pale shape on the rocks. No man, no horse, no sea creature, or drowned wives.
I should call Maddie, but once again, I know I won’t. It makes me feel better, slightly, to know that I could call her and maybe she’d fly over here and make it all better. Maybe convince me to leave. But I don’t want to put her in any danger and, besides, I’m old enough now to pull up my big girl panties—I’m a recent divorcée for crying out loud, that’s some real adult shit—and figure this stuff out on my own, without anyone coming here to save me.
I just hate it, that’s all.
I sigh, my heart feeling like it’s breaking, and I hate that, too. I’m alone for the first time in a long time, and it’s so much worse than I thought it would be.
Chapter
Twenty-Six
Ispend the day not coping in the specific way I’ve gotten good at not coping with things: coffee that keeps going cold, that fucking wolfsbane, and bog myrtle I still haven’t finished, the curtain over the sink open, then closed, and then open again because I can’t decide whether I want to be able to see the bay or not. I’ve kept catching myself listening for him. Setting two mugs out, then putting one back. The aloneness hasn’t softened; it’s calcified into something I carry around the rooms with me.
So when I hear an engine working down the rutted track through the woods, my first feeling, god help me, is hope. Some pathetic part of me leaps up thinking, he’s come back, before the rational part reminds me that though I’ve seen his Land Rover, I’ve never actually seen him drive it here. And, if he were to return, I think he’d come from the water.