Updated Mar 23, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 15: I want this
The stables in the evening had a particular quality — the low golden light that came through the gaps in the upper boards, the comfortable sounds of horses settled for the night, the smell of hay and leather and the warmth of large animals at rest. She had spent a great deal of time in stables over the course of her life, which was how she had come to be in the wrong place at the wrong time back in March, and she had never regretted the habit.
She found him with his horse. Not grooming — he did that himself most mornings — but simply there, his hand on the animal’s neck, the particular quality of a man who has come to be somewhere quiet and is being quiet in it. She had learned that this was what he did sometimes, when the weight of being responsible for everything was more than usually heavy: he came to the stables and stood with his horse and gave himself a few minutes without having to manage anything.
She stopped in the doorway.
He turned. He had heard her — he always heard her, which she had observed and not said anything about, because the implications of a man who is always precisely calibrated to your presence were more than she had been ready to receive for most of the summer.
“Callum,” she said.
Not MacKinnon. His name. She watched him register it.
“Aye,” he said.
“I need to tell you something.”
He straightened. His face arranged itself into the careful expression, the one that was braced. She had come to hate that expression — the self-protective quality of it, the way it said *I’m expecting something that will cost me and I’m preparing accordingly.* She had contributed to his reasons for that expression and she intended to spend a great deal of effort contributing to the reasons against it.
She crossed the stable.
She stopped when she was close enough that she had to tilt her head back slightly to look at him, and she looked at him directly the way she had always looked at things she needed to see clearly: without flinching, without the peripheral management of things that were easier not to look at straight.
“I didn’t come here willingly,” she said. “I know that. You know that. I’m not going to pretend otherwise because I think pretending is dishonest and I respect us both too much for it.”
He was very still.
“But I’m here. And I’ve been here for five months. And in those five months I’ve learned your language and your clan’s customs and the name of everyone in the village and the way the weather changes when it’s coming from the north versus the east. I’ve learned which of your clanspeople need directness and which need time. I’ve learned—” she paused, because what she wanted to say next was the thing, the actual thing, and she was going to say it and it was going to be frightening and she was going to do it anyway. “I’ve learned you.”
He looked at her.
“You sleep on the floor of your own chamber,” she said. “Not because I demanded it — I didn’t, I offered you the alternative and you declined it. Because you decided that what I needed was more important than what you could have claimed. You told me about Elspeth and Seumas when you didn’t have to. You let me tend your wound and you said thank you for it in the way of someone who doesn’t say thank you easily.” She took a breath. “You are not what I expected. You are not even close to what I expected. And I—”
She stopped.
She had rehearsed further than this. The rehearsal had gotten this far and then run out, because there was no rehearsal for the moment itself, for the actual facing of a man in a stable in the evening light with five months of accumulated truth between you.
She kissed him.
She reached up and put her hand against his jaw — the scar, warm under her palm, the roughness of it familiar — and she kissed him. Not the brief managed thing of the wedding ceremony. Her, this time. Her choice, her timing, her arms going around his neck and her body deciding before her mind could catch up with it that this was what she meant.
He made a sound against her mouth — rough, low, the sound of something long held suddenly released — and then he kissed her back.
He kissed her the way she had suspected he did everything: completely, without reservation, with every available resource committed to the task. His hands were at her face and her waist and she was pulled in against him and the stable smelled of hay and horses and the evening was making gold patterns through the boards and she thought, in the part of her mind still capable of thought: *oh. Oh, this is what that was.*
When they drew back — and it took a while — they were both breathing differently.
“I dinnae want ye to feel obligated,” he said. His voice was rougher than usual. “Because of the marriage, because of the situation—”
“I’m not,” she said. Firmly. “I chose this. I’m choosing you.” She kept her hands at his jaw and made him look at her. “You understand the difference?”
He looked at her. The grey eyes, very close, with the particular open quality she had seen in the firelight when she’d said the word *husband* and when she’d given him Seumas’s name.
“I’m trying to,” he said.
“Let me be very clear.” She held his eyes. “I want this. I want you. That has nothing to do with obligation or circumstance or the kidnapping or the forced marriage or any other thing that happened to us. It has to do with you — the person I’ve spent five months learning — and what I’ve found.” She paused. “Do you understand?”
He looked at her for a long time.
“Aye,” he said. Rough. Certain. “Aye.”
He kissed her again. This one was different — slower, with the quality of someone who is not rushing because they know now that they have time, that this is not going to be taken away, that the moment is not a single moment but the beginning of all of them. She kissed him back with the same understanding, which was the most honest thing she’d ever done with her body, and the stable was warm and the light was gold and the horses were entirely unimpressed by any of it.
When they finally drew apart she was smiling, which she felt before she knew it — surprised by it, the way she had been surprised all summer by her own responses to things.
“I should have—” he started.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t tell me you should have said something sooner or that you didn’t deserve to feel this. Just—” she looked at him. “Just be here. With me.”
He looked at her with the full, open expression — no guard, no professional distance, nothing managed. Just him.
“Aye,” he said. “Here.”
“Good.” She tucked herself against his chest. His arms came around her. She could feel his heartbeat, fast still, settling. “Good.”
They stood in the stable in the evening light until the horses grew restless for attention, and then they walked back to the keep together in the August dusk, and his hand was in hers, and the glen was quiet and enormous around them, and she thought: *I am home.*
She thought it without ceremony, without the weight of what it had taken to arrive here, without anything but the plain and complete knowledge of it.
Home.
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