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)
And while I remember the feel of his eyes, I can’t, for the life of me, remember his face.
Chapter
Two
Iwake up sore.
The good news is that I expected to wake up sore. Yesterday was the kind of day that pays interest, and my body has been keeping accounts on me for the last three years, if not more. The bad news is that I did not expect to wake up sore and halfway across the bed with all my limbs in different time zones, because the dream I was having involved a man I haven’t met treading water and looking up at me, and apparently that was enough to spread me out like I was waiting to get railed by a ghost.
Christ, I think I need to get laid. It’s been way too long. Not only had I not slept with anyone since the divorce, we’d stopped having sex at least a year before I found out Ryan was cheating on me. You’d think that would have been a sign…
I make my mind stop thinking about Ryan—it’s taken time to perfect this—and lie there for a minute. The light coming through the bedroom window is the soft yellow-gold of a Scottish morning that is going to be lovely until the next storm rolls in off the Atlantic, which the weather app on my phone tells me is sometime around dinner time. Outside, gulls are arguing somewhere over the bay, their cries loud and piercing. The cottage has gone the kind of quiet that has its own texture, all peat smoke and old stone, with the low constant shush of water against the rocks not far below.
I sit up the way you sit up when you have fibromyalgia and you’ve slept wrong. Slowly, respectfully—just in case you anger the pain gods—and with a brief internal renegotiation of what the day is going to ask of me. My hips are stiff. My hands are stiff. My jaw, for some reason, is also stiff (was I giving blow jobs in my dreams?). I manage to do some stretches my physical therapist taught me when I was twenty-seven and brand-new to the diagnosis, and I think, as I do every morning, that I should be more grateful to him and curse him a little less. Still, the curses come.
The pill organizer is on the kitchen shelf where I left it. Duloxetine. Low-dose amitriptyline left over from last week’s bad nights. The vitamin D my doctor made me promise to take when I told her I was moving to a country that has, in her words, three weeks of summer if you’re lucky (jokes on her, I have seen the sun at least twice since I’ve been here). The pills go down with a glass of water from the kitchen tap, which tastes faintly of iron and stone, and I cinch the heating pad around my shoulders, feeling like a pack mule when I do so.
The kettle goes on. The wood-burning stove is cold, the embers from last night gone to ash, and I carefully crouch and clear it and lay new kindling and strike a long match. This ritual of lighting it, combined with the comforting smell of the smoke, finds the place behind my sternum that has been holding tight for four days and loosens it, just a little. I open the back door for a moment to let the air in. The bay is silver and very calm, the heather on the slope across the loch is purple as a bruise in the early light, and a small swarm of midges find me almost immediately, so I shut the door again.
I contemplate locking the door for a moment but in the light of day, it seems silly. It’s just a perfectly ordinary morning on the rocky south shore of a sea-loch in Wester Ross, and the only reason it feels like anything else is that I’m still half-thinking about a man I’ll probably never see again.
Who I drew last night.
Whose face I can’t remember; whose gaze I can still feel.
I push that out of my head, put a slice of bread in the toaster, and drink my coffee standing up at the window, watching the water, mesmerized by the way the light glints on it. I wrack my brain for what that phenomenon is called. By the time the toaster pops, making me jump out of my skin, I’ve decided on the very scientific term, “sun-sparkles.”
The slow mornings here are by far more enjoyable than the mornings I had at Andrew and Maddie’s place where I always felt like I was in the way, because, I mean I was. Here, I can take my time and luxuriate for as long as I want.
Which is part of the problem because it’s day five now, and I’ve been pretending that this has been a vacation when really it’s the start of the rest of my life, which means I need to get to work, which means I need to create an area in the cottage for me to work, which means I’ve got some sorting to do as my life starts to amalgamate with Effie’s.