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)
“You take care now,” she says, handing the books back.
“Thank you.”
“Drive safe on the road home.”
“I will.”
“Mind the road. The verges are deep this time of year.”
But I know she’s not talking about the verges.
I’m not too far from the turn-off to the cottage when Maddie calls, her name coming up on the display screen. I stare at it for two rings before I answer, because two rings are what I need to brace for impact.
“Hey, Maddie,” I say, trying to sound bright and cheery even though I know she’ll call my bluff.
“Iris.”
The single word has a whole speech in it.
“I’m sorry.” I immediately apologize.
“You went radio silent.”
“I know, I know. I’ve been a bad friend. Bad sister. I’m sorry. I’m okay though. Really. I was going to call you today.”
“You were going to call me today?” she repeats flatly.
“Well, I said I was going to in my text, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t call me. This is me calling you.”
“I got…distracted.”
“Hmmm, well I almost booked a flight.”
“Please don’t book a flight. I’m fine. Truly, I am.”
I am lying through my fucking teeth and she knows it, but I have to do what I can to make her think otherwise.
There’s a long pause on the line before I hear her exhale. I can picture her with her hand over her face the way she does and I know she’s mad at me. But she’s also worried, so the proportions are about even.
“Iris…”
“Yeah.”
“Are you actually okay though?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not just saying it?”
I have to get some form of the truth out. “I’m sleeping with someone,” I blurt.
She inhales sharply.
“Girl…”
“I know.”
“You said you wouldn’t.”
“I said I wouldn’t sleep with the neighbor. I slept with someone else.”
Liar, liar, liar.
“Mmm. Right. Who?”
“Just…some guy.”
“Does some guy have a name?”
“Yeah.”
“And what is his name?”
Horsey McHorseCock.
“Eachann MacCoinnich,” I say somewhat triumphantly. Not a lie!
“Is he the castle guy?”
I swerve around a rabbit that attempted to cross the road and nearly go into the verges myself. “Sorry, I almost hit a rabbit.”
“It’s the castle guy,” she says definitively, my lies collapsing.
I sigh in defeat. “It’s complicated.”
“What does complicated mean?”
I take a breath.
“It means I’m in over my head, and I don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”
“Iris, that’s the kind of sentence that gets a friend on a plane.”
“Please don’t get on a plane,” I beg, “I forbid it.”
“Then talk to me.”
I am rounding the bend where the single-track curves around the headland and the bay opens up, the long silver throat of it stretching toward the open sea, and I think for a beat about telling her. About telling her the whole thing. The whole fucking crazy-ass truth.
Maddie, the man across the bay is not a man, he’s a creature out of folklore, Horsey McHorseCock, because yes he shapeshifts into a horse and his cock is equally as large, and yes I’m sleeping with him, and last night I salted my back step against him and the salt held, and today I drove forty-five minutes to a village library to read about him in a book, and I don’t know what I’m going to do because one part of me wants to keep sleeping with him because he’s immortal and a monster and therefore infinitely more fascinating than anyone on earth, and the other part of me thinks I need to run far, far away and I don’t know which part of me is going to win.
I think about her face hearing that overwrought sentence.
I think about her reaching for her laptop and pulling up flights.
So I don’t say it.
Instead, I say, “He’s older than me. Like…significantly older.”
“How significantly?”
“Significantly,” I reply firmly. “He’s also…he’s—he’s not normal, Maddie. He’s strange. He’s strange in ways I can’t explain.”
“Strange how?” Her voice has gone quiet, rife with suspicion.
“Strange like…he watches me too much but not so much in the stalkerish way, more in the he’s fascinated by me way. He also says things that don’t quite make sense, and treats me like I’m made of gold, and I don’t know whether he’s the best man I’ve ever been with, or the most dangerous one.”
“That’s it, I’m getting on a plane.”
“You can’t!” I interject. “You can’t, it’s expensive, and you have your daughter, and Andrew, well, he can’t take care of her, Andrew has that thing.”
“What thing?”
“I don’t know, I’m sure he has a thing, he always has a thing.”
She goes silent for a beat and I can almost hear her pulling up the calendar in her brain. “You’re right, he has that conference in Delaware.”
“Yes!” I exclaim. “Delaware!”
“If you’re seriously in trouble though…”
“But I’m not seriously in trouble.”
Shit, the lies are coming easier now, almost as if I believe them.
“You just listed a bunch of red flags.”
“I know, Maddie.”
“Get out. If not out of the situationship, then out of that cottage. It’s doing you no good.”