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)
There is time for all of it.
There is so much time now that she is here.
Because no matter what happens, she won’t leave this place.
The wind shifts, bringing salt and bone and something that is not yet rot. She lifts her face into it, breathing deep. Becoming one with this land. Becoming…open.
But I won’t go to her tonight.
Tonight I only want her to feel me from afar. To carry the feeling inside with her when she goes inside and locks the door behind her. To lie awake in her aunt’s bed wondering if she dreamed me.
But she will not have dreamed me.
For I have come for her.
Chapter
One
There’s a naked man watching me.
At first, I didn’t know what the hell I was looking at. The way the light slants as it passes over Beinn Bhàn—at least I think that’s the name of the mountain to my left; they all sound the same so far—has been playing tricks on my eyes since the evening I first got here just four days ago.
I thought maybe it was a piece of driftwood beached on the shore at an awkward angle, but then it moved ever so slightly. What I thought was the end was indeed someone’s head, and what I thought was a sturdy branch was, well…I’m staring at a penis.
Now that I see it, there’s no mistaking what it is. My first thought is that this man is incredibly well-endowed if I can see his dick from across the loch, even if this particular bay is 200 meters at its widest. My second thought is, uh, what the fuck? Is he skinny dipping, or what’s going on here?
I expect the naked man to enter the water but he doesn’t. Instead, he eventually stops staring at me—as if I’m the problem for interrupting his naked time—and turns walking around a rocky outcrop until he disappears. The last thing I see is his white ass, which, even though he’s too far away to make out any details, I can tell he does squats.
Maybe he lives in the castle, I think to myself. There’s what looks to be a crumbling castle of sorts across the water, I can see just the tip of it from behind the small hill and tops of the stunted pine. I can see even more if I walk to where the bay opens up to Loch Torridon. It looks like something out of a Gothic romance novel.
Then again, so does my entire situation.
I sit down on the back step with my coffee, which has gone lukewarm in the time it took me to identify a stranger’s penis from across a body of water this is what my life is now, and I stare at the place where he was. The shore is empty, just dark gentle waves lapping against the pebble and stone. It was like he was never there.
I tell myself I imagined him. Wouldn’t be the first time my overactive imagination reared its crazy head.
But I didn’t imagine him, because I already drew him.
The sketchbook is open in my lap. I started this morning trying to get the line of the heather blooming right on the slope across the loch. I’m a freelance botanical illustrator I know, I know, I’m just rolling in the dough, which is partly why a year in a stone cottage on the west coast of Scotland—with the chance of it becoming mine—sounded less like a sentence, and more like a rope thrown to a drowning woman. Somewhere between the heather and the third cup of coffee, I’d put my pencil down and looked up, and there he was in all his horse-cock glory.
I look at the page now. Okay, so I have not drawn the man. I’m not that quick. But I’ve drawn the area of where he was, the rocks and the line of the shore and a long pale absence in the middle of it where my eye kept going.
I close the sketchbook.
I’m thirty years old, and four days into the rest of my life.
And the welcome wagon, apparently, is a man with no clothes on.
The cottage is small and stone, and sits about thirty meters back from the high-tide line. My great-aunt Effie lived here for sixty years and, before her, so did three Galloway women I know almost nothing about. I know almost nothing about Effie either. I met her exactly once, when I was twelve, on one of the trips my dad made to the coast of his childhood and brought me along on. My mother never came on those trips, something about how Scotland was too cold (we lived in Colorado, so I have no idea why that was her specific excuse, but she is a woman full of excuses, to be sure).
Anyway, I remember a small woman with thick grey hair and watchful eyes and an herb garden that smelled like something magical. I remember her looking at me for a long time at the kitchen table and asking me questions that didn’t sound like questions a great-aunt should be asking a twelve-year-old. I remember liking her a lot. There weren’t that many people I liked—especially when they fell into the “old people” and “family” categories that younger me felt drawn to—but I had liked Aunt Effie.