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)
I turn my head slowly toward the corner.
The wardrobe’s there. Ornately-carved, dark, vaguely person-shaped in the dim, the thing my eye has snagged on all these nights and corrected before I freaked myself out. Just the wardrobe, my brain offers, trying to be helpful though it’s tired. Not a person. It’s never a person.
Then my eye keeps going, to the window.
It’s open. Open wide, actually, the curtain pulled inward on the cold, breathing in the darkness outside.
I never opened it.
I closed it before bed, I know I closed it because it was cold out and also I salted the sill heavy hours ago with my own hands.
But now…that salt is broken.
The clean white line I laid is scattered back across the sill in a smear, like a hand went through it. The cold’s coming straight off the loch, through my open window, and I’m working out how the fuck and what the fuck, when the shadow of the wardrobe shifts out of the corner of my eye.
It fucking moves.
Just slightly.
But the wardrobe can’t shift.
The wardrobe’s stood in that corner, not moving for decades, I’m sure. It isn’t the wardrobe that moved, but the dark beside it, the dark in front of it, the vaguely person-shaped dark I’ve dismissed as just a wardrobe…except tonight, when I stare at the shape, it doesn’t resolve into carved oak.
It resolves the other way.
Into my worst fears.
Into a man.
Internally, it’s like all systems stop—my lungs catch, my muscles freeze—while externally I also go still, the stillness that lives below thought, a rabbit hiding in the grass, prey operating on instinct only. I can only lie in my own bed and look at the corner of my own bedroom where a fucking man is standing in shadow.
The intruder doesn’t move for a bit either.
He’s letting me see him.
Then his face shifts, and his eyes catch the very dim light that comes through the curtains, from the outside security light that’s posted by the front door.
For one beat his eyes are black. Not shadowed, but black. Wet, and depthless, and lightless, the way the loch goes at midnight where the bottom’s never been mapped, two points of nothing at the height a man’s eyes would be, fixed on me.
Then gone. Back to faint hint of glacial blue.
I don’t make a sound. I would if I could, but my throat’s shut in terror.
Then he takes a step toward me, and I gasp, and the floorboard under his foot doesn’t creak the way it should. I’m starting to wonder if he’s really here at all.
He answers me with another silent step, and the shape resolves into Alasdair fully as he comes out of the shadow.
But now I know he’s also the…thing I just saw in the corner.
He takes another step, stopping at the foot of the bed, wet and naked.
I haven’t moved. Haven’t told him to leave, haven’t sat up, haven’t reached for the lamp. I’ve lain here with the quilt to my chin and watched him cross the room toward me and done nothing to stop him. Has this been some kind of test, one that I’m about to spectacularly fail?
He lays his hand on the footboard. No weight on the mattress yet, just his fingers around the wood, and he looks at me down the length of the bed.
He doesn’t speak. He just waits.
The waiting is the worst of it, because the waiting is where I could still send him away. He’s approached me slowly, like the way a cat comes after a mouse, but also giving me enough time to do the things I need to do. In the last minute, I could’ve screamed or sat up or said no, but I didn’t, and this last stillness is him showing me he knows I won’t say or do any of that.
He knows me well, and I hate it.
And in this moment, for not stopping him, I hate myself.
He puts a knee on the mattress and the bed dips, and at last I make a sound, not a word, just a small involuntary noise from the back of my throat, because now I know this is real.
He puts the other knee down and moves over me on his hands and knees, slow, so slow, prowling. His face comes out of the dark above mine, eyes very close and blue and looking at me like he’s about to take something from me, rather than give.
He stops with his hands either side of my head, his weight not yet on me, his face six inches from mine, and he draws the quilt down. Slowly, his hand at the hem, the heavy weight of it coming off my chin and my collarbone, down past my chest, past my hips, to my knees, where he folds it back and leaves it, because he isn’t uncovering all of me yet.