Page 18 of Fierce Highland Longing

His hand came up.

Four inches, at the most. It stopped, and started again, and there was a hitch in it a quarter of the way across, and I understood he’d thought about this before today.

Two inches from my face.

The ground hit the bottom of my boots.

I felt it before I heard it: the world buckled upward, a concussion through the stone shelf running blunt and total up through the soles of my boots, through both shinbones and my knees, jarring my spine, so the vertebrae stacked momentarily out of order. The whole shoulder of the headland jumped under me, and my arms shot wider, steadying against nothing, my balance not only taken but methodically removed, like the first shunt of turbulence on the transatlantic red-eye, when you have just enough warning to remember how little holds you up in the air. The sound landed a heartbeat behind the impact—a single, uncut, impossible break of stone somewhere below, so sharp and so deep that my chest went hollow with the echo of it.

I gasped, and Tavish caught my arm, balancing me, matching the exact pressure I used to steady myself, so that for a second neither of us moved or spoke or breathed. Then, as if we had agreed to it beforehand, we both leaned forward into the wind, peering down the drop toward the sea.

Below us, at the base of the cliff, where the swell had been methodically breaking every nine seconds, the usual white water was gone, erased by a solid, gleaming wedge of foam that had shot up the entire cliff face. It had left a band of fresh, dripping black on the granite, thirty feet higher than the last line of salt.

“I thought—” I started, but Tavish had already let go of my arm and gone to the edge, boots grinding against the lichen, scanning the shore below.

He said nothing. His eyes were wide and black and fixed on the place where the sea had just struck, and I saw that he was breathing with his mouth open, breathless not from exertion but from something like recognition, or dread.3

A few seconds later the normal waves returned, the measured eight-count, the pull and break and pull. The wind restarted, catching my damp hair and plastering it against my cheek. The moment, whatever had happened, was over, except that the air between us was changed—emptied out, or maybe filled up, but different. I realized the camera was not around my neck, and I had the sudden urge to document the exact place and time.

But Tavish was still looking down the cliff, not blinking, not moving. I found myself leaning towards him, drawn by the gravity of his stilled attention.

“What was that?” I said, low.

He seemed to be checking the math on a difficult equation, or refusing to say a thing already known. “Not the weather,” he said finally, and when he turned to me his face was a mask of confusion, or maybe shame.

We stood that way, shoulder to shoulder, for a count of four more swells. Then Tavish straightened, squinted at the clouds to the east, and said, “It’s nothing. Some trick of the ledge, maybe.” But he didn’t believe it. I could see that much.

“Has it happened before?” I asked.

He hesitated, shoulders lifted, then dropped them and said, “Once. Not for a long while.”

I expected him to say more, but he turned and started back along the path, not looking at the water, not at me.

After a brief hesitation, I followed Tavish back along the path, neither of us speaking. The sheep still didn’t move, but I thoughtthey looked more alert, pulled into themselves against the wind, as if they, too, had registered the anomaly.

At the bottom of the steps, Tavish waited for me. The gold in the light had faded, and there was nearly enough darkness to pretend nothing at all had occurred.

We both turned.

“That’s the tide.” His voice had a crack across the middle of it. “That’s—the shelf. It comes off the shelf like that.”

“Right.”

“It does that.”

“Okay.”

He got ordinary again inside about ten seconds, which was worse than the crack.

We went down the sixty-one steps with the light gone gray and the eleven words still in my mouth.

The wrong moment. That’s what I built on the way down, and I built it well, because I’ve had practice. You don’t say a thing like that to a man on a cliff in a wind he can’t hear you in. You say it at a table with the fire on and a glass in his hand and nothing behind him but a wall.

Tomorrow.

I called it timing.

Isla was up. The bar was dark. I got my boots off on the stairs, so I wouldn’t wake her and went up in my socks past the fourth step and the ninth.