Page 15 of Fierce Highland Longing

I realized my mistake after I'd said it.

She said nothing. She leaned over the side, peering at black water with nothing in it, and she waited, and about forty seconds later three heads came up past the mooring buoy and the other three after them.

She twisted on the bench, eyeing me.

I felt the weight of her gaze, heavier than the engine’s pull, and braced for the question I was sure would come next. There was always a question. What are you, really? How did you know? Why does the sea obey you? But she held the silence the way you hold a breath underwater—testing to see which of us would break first.

I kept my hand on the tiller and my mouth shut.

Isla left the bottle and two glasses on the counter. She stopped at the foot of the stairs with the cloth over her shoulder.

“There’s peat in the basket. Don’t let it go out on you, pet.”

She gave the pair of us a look on her way up but didn’t say anything else.

The fire was built high. I sat in the chair by the window, well off the hearthstone, the way I usually sit. Twelve feet over my head and one room along, my own hide lay folded in a drawer under a jumper. I could have walked to it in the dark.

I got the two stones out of my pocket and worked the flat one with my thumb.

“Can I tell you something stupid?”

“Aye.”

“I was getting married in eleven weeks.” She had her glass on her knee. “We’d been together for six years. Daniel. He’s a good man—I want to be fair, he never did anything. That’s the whole problem. Nobody did anything.”

She turned the glass round.

“We had a house picked out. He’d got the schools in a spreadsheet. Schools, and we didn’t have children, and we hadn’t talked about having them.”

I let that go past.

“And I kept saying yes to it, because saying yes was easy, and every yes was one more foot of water. The venue. The band. His mother’s list. I said yes to a chair. There was a photograph of a chair, and I said yes to it and went and sat in the car.”

Her hands had been going the whole time she talked. They stopped there.

“It’s a slow drowning, choosing safe. You don’t notice. You’re fine, you’re fine, you’re fine, and one day you’re standing in a kitchen in Portland and you can’t get a breath.”

I worked the flat stone. A better man would have said something warm into that gap. I’ve heard other men do it.

I know the kitchen she means. Mine has been a hundred miles of coast road with the water two hundred feet down it. You keep walking, and you tell yourself the walking is a life, and the day you understand it isn’t, you’ve already given it nineteen years.

She was the one who’d nearly drowned, and she was telling me about it, and I sat there taking the sympathy off her like a bowl held out in both hands.

“So I left. Eleven weeks out. Told him in the car.”

“That’s not stupid.”

“It’s not brave either. I didn’t tell him for three days. I let him book the flowers.” She drank. “I’ve an email sitting on my laptop about a permanent job. Nine days they gave me. I’m on five.”

“And?”

“And I haven’t opened it since Tuesday.” She looked at the fire. “That’s the same thing again, isn’t it? That’s the exact same thing.”

“No.” I turned my glass. “It’s the other thing. It’s late.”

She looked at the glass on her knee. Her thumb moved once across the rim.

“Yeah. It’s late.”