38. The Morning After
38
THE MORNING AFTER
I load myself down with chains and try to wriggle free.
— AUSTIN CLARKE, LETTER TO ROBERT FROST
T he fog had lifted, but the sky was still chilly and gray the next morning as we waited for our final flight to the Aran Islands.
Jonathan hadn’t said more than was absolutely necessary for the last several hours. We had checked out of The Carson in solemn silence while the sky was still dark, taken another chartered plane to Galway City, and sat in the cab to Connemara airstrip as if we were each completely alone.
I might have chalked his behavior up to alcohol-induced amnesia if he hadn’t been avoiding my touch as well. Even his broad shoulders kept a safe two inches from mine. For most of the flight from Dublin, he had kept one hand pressed firmly between his brows with his eyes shut, occasionally muttering under his breath. Spells, I supposed. Perhaps to ward off a headache, though they didn’t seem to be doing much good.
It didn’t help that he looked better than any man with a raging hangover had any right to, even with the shadows under his eyes and his skin a bit dewier than normal. A quick glance in the mirror told me I strongly resembled a stereotypical banshee with hollowed eyes, sallow skin, and my hair a messy thicket around my face.
So I waited—though for what, I wasn’t sure. An apology, maybe? Or at least recognition that something had, in fact,happened last night. That it wasn’t just my lips that tingled from too many soft, but demanding kisses to count. Or that the purple mark on my neck was actually a remnant of the way he had sucked the delicate skin between his teeth.
I wasn’t an idiot. In the light of day, I could admit that he was right—starting any kind of romantic relationship was a bad idea. No matter how good it might have felt in the moment, I had other things to worry about than jumping into bed with a dashing, shape-shifting, OCD sorcerer. Things like assuming my birthright. Avenging my grandmother. Assuring myself that there was some kind of justice in the world.
Yes, things like that had to take precedence over a schoolgirl crush.
But hadn’t he felt even a little of what I had?
Hadn’t it meant anything to him at all?
I slumped on a rickety white bench, doing my best to ignore the train of minor thoughts that leached from the wood, remnants of previous passengers’ worries about their pending flights. Jonathan stood next to me with his forehead pressed against the white brick, like a pained convict waiting for the final shots from a firing squad. He seemed to be in more pain than me—no surprise, given the amount he drank last night.
There was some justice in the world, I supposed.
“Please accept my apology for my behavior last night.” The words crumpled into each other as he said them, half-hearted and morose.
I looked up. He was well out of reach and spoke low as if to avoid eavesdroppers, though there were no other passengers waiting at the edge of the tarmac. The rest of the employees of the airfield were happily indoors, but as if he knew I’d be more comfortable in the slight drizzle, Jonathan hadn’t even asked before guiding me outside to wait for our plane.
I ground my teeth, trying yet again to push the memory of last night away. It didn’t work. Instead, those kisses burned,tenacious embers that wouldn’t quite turn to ash.
“You don’t need to say that,” I gritted out
Jonathan turned. “I do. And I am sorry.”
“Yes, you’re always the perfect gentleman, aren’t you?”
“I wasn’t at all last night, and for that, I sincerely apologize.”
I turned. “Apologize for what, exactly? For marking up my neck like an annotated textbook? For making me come loud enough that all of Dublin could hear me? Or for liking it just as much as I did and then shutting me down again ?”
I was being unfair, considering I had already decided not to pursue anything more with him. But bitterness lacks reason.
With every accusation, Jonathan flinched. “For all of it. You’ve no idea. Cass, I—” He stopped as his voice cracked, betraying the first sign of real emotion, his eyes seemed endless, a soft, grass green that begged to be rolled in.
I softened, unable to help myself.
Because that was something he always managed. A sorcerer, of all folk, was able to crack my defenses like the thinnest piece of glass.
What I’d thought were brick walls were barely even windows to him.
He took a seat beside me, though he was still careful to keep at least a foot between us.
“I don’t understand,” I admitted, though I didn’t clarify whether it was his behavior or his ability to break me that was so confusing. Both, if I was being honest.
Jonathan didn’t answer. But he didn’t look away either.
We stared at each other for a long moment as the magnetic pull that always seemed to exist between us grew stronger. Jonathan bit his lip, and the muscle in his jaw ticked again. His eyes drifted down to my mouth, and then he looked away.
“We’ll forget about it,” I said with a sigh. And then, before he could stop me, I reached out to pat his hand where it lay over his knee.
Desire-tinged remorse slipped through his surprise at my touch. I pulled my hand back, as much to guard my thoughts as to protect anything he didn’t want me to See.
Jonathan tucked his hand under his arm like a wounded paw. The sun was high now, a thin light through the fog that cast the trees surrounding the airstrip in myriad shades of green. I counted the leaves of a nearby rowan, willing myself to put aside the bone-deep urge to tuck comfortably into the crook of Jonathan’s shoulder and ignore the ache of rejection in my heart.
As we hurtled over the cliffs of Galway Bay, twin wells of nausea and excitement rose in my stomach with the movements of the plane.
My surfboard and wetsuits were shoved in the space behind my seat and hung overhead, forcing me to hunch over. Crammed into his own seat and thrust forward, Jonathan smiled grimly at me.
“Not quite a private jet, is it?” I shouted over the roar of the engines.
Jonathan bared his teeth as the plane shook again.
I looked out my window and watched the cliffs of Moher recede into the distance, the waves crashing at their feet reduced to a fine line of whitewash. Even from this distance, the rims were cast vibrant green.
Part of me wished we had more time to explore some of the other parts before journeying out to the islands that were, by most accounts, quite barren. I would have liked to meander more of the streets in Ulysses or walk the moors that inspired Yeats’s “Wanderings of Oisin.”
The plane took a sudden dive, and my stomach lurched as three small islands came into view. Tiny guardians of the coast, they were lonely, treeless outposts against the open sea. But barren, they were not.
As the plane dropped further to our destination, the knit of stone grids crisscrossing most of the island came into high relief against brilliant green swatches of grass and plants.
“Limestone!” yelled Jonathan. “The Irish soil was too rocky to grow much, so the farmers used to dig up the rocks and stack them without mortar so they could move them easily when property changed between families. On the islands, the walls protect the topsoil from blowing away.”
I nodded. I had read about Ireland’s famous limestone fences. But it was another thing to view the mosaic of green in person.
A solid pressure warmed my shoulder, along with remorse and shame pulsing through Jonathan’s hand, paired with the desire to protect me. He cared about me a great deal, for my own sake, along with his allegiance to my grandmother. Though he couldn’t deny the physical attraction between us, it was more important to him that I trust him, as Gran had wanted before, as he wanted now.
Friends? he asked.
His eyes began to blaze, and I felt him struggle against his headache to activate his Sight. For the last few minutes of the flight, we watched the green and gray checkerboard beneath us burst into a kaleidoscopic blend of color. Though I knew it must be wishful thinking, it seemed to me that a shade of turquoise green the color of the ocean swirled just a bit brighter beneath the rest of the hues, winking as if it had been waiting so long for me to arrive.
We were met at the airport by an elderly man named Jock with truly mountainous shoulders, whose snow-white hair stuck out in tufts under his ancient driver’s cap. He was the director of the island’s cultural center, which offered tours and Irish classes, and also doubled as the island’s entire car service, driving those who needed it around in an ancient red station wagon. Jock had greeted Jonathan with a bone-crunching hug as we walked off the airstrip, clapping him merrily on the top of his head as if he were a mischievous boy home on school holiday and not a stalwart scientist who walked with a straight spine and spit-polished his shoes every night.
“Been too long, Jonny,” Jock said as he lifted my board with one hand and carried my oversized suitcase with more ease than should come to a man his age. Powerful forearms rippled under the faded plaid of his rolled sleeves as he walked us to his car. “And who’s this? Brought one home to meet Rob and Caitlin, have you?”
Jonathan glanced at me. “Something like that.”
He didn’t need to touch me to let me know that it was better to let folks make what assumptions they wanted. They definitely shouldn’t know my family was from here.
“Sure and they’ll be glad to see you,” Jock said. “This yours, a chara ?”
I opened my mouth to reply but was quickly cut off by Jonathan.
“It’s hers,” he confirmed, causing Jock to examine me more closely as we strapped the board to the top of the car.
“There’s been a surfer or two out here in the spring,” Jock replied. “Though they’re usually men and not such a wee thing as yourself.”
I stifled a laugh. At five foot nine, I could hardly be called small. Years of surfing and swimming had given me strong shoulders and arms, though they were nothing compared to Jock’s bullish deltoids.
“Just be careful of the merrows,” he continued with a sly grin, his joke clear. “They’ll drag you down to be their wives, and you’ll never be heard from again, will she, Jon?”
Goddess, would I never be free of that threat, even from plain folk?
“Never again,” Jonathan echoed solemnly as he slid into the front passenger seat, eyes darkened noticeably.
The wagon crept over the crooked, patched concrete that only just seemed to cover the few two-way roads running across the tiny island. Jock spent most of the trip pointing out notable sights and delivering odd bits of trivia.
“First on your right’ll be Cnoc Raithni ; that’s Hill of the Ferns.” He pointed to a small hill surrounded by limestone fencing. A large stone stood up from its center, gloom emanating from it.
“A gravesite,” Jonathan added.
“You’ve got it. From when the Fir Bolg roamed the island. Pushed out by the Tuatha Dé Danann , they were given the islands until they disappeared. Big dark giants, and some say the hill is still haunted by their ghosts, looking for the remains of their bodies, buried in the urns.”
“Where did they go? The urns, I mean,” I asked. I’d studied these myths extensively in school, of course, but I hadn’t had the chance to learn local permutations.
“Oh, the urns were taken away to Dublin,” Jock said bitterly. “To the bleedin’ museum.”
I blinked. “They were real?”
Jonathan turned with a knowing expression. I didn’t have to touch him to know what he was thinking: Did you expect anything different?
“A museum across the water’s no place for sacred remains,” Jock went on. “Better off they stayed as they were, let the poor souls rest in peace.”
I mumbled in agreement, entranced as the hill receded behind us. I hadn’t been aware that urn-burial practices existed so far outside of mainland Europe. An urnfield in the same place where Gran—the keeper of a suspected pithos —was born was quite a coincidence.
“Did you know about this?” I asked Jonathan.
He nodded, then shook his head gently, as if to let me know that he had already investigated the possibility that Gran’s Secret was guarded by the thousands of visitors each day at the National Gallery. Of course, I thought. It couldn’t possibly be as easy as that. But still, urn burials usually weren’t isolated, and where there was one, there might be many more.
“That there’s Caislean Ui Bhrain —Castle O’Brien, it is,” Jock interrupted my thoughts. “Built by the descendants of Brian Bóramha, one of the High Kings of Ireland. Used it to guard the O’Brien lands against pirates.”
The solid square of crumbling stone bricks wasn’t a huge castle by any means. I had seen much grander examples in my previous travels in Europe—great medieval fortresses with winding towers and decorative turrets that lorded over the French vineyards and Bavarian countryside. But on this rolling, wind-torn island, which, according to Jock, didn’t quite rise to sixty meters over sea level, the craggy remains seemed indomitable. Beyond the limestone fences, boxy white houses scattered around the ruins, as if the old castle was still the lord to which the tiny hamlets tithed.
Jonathan showed little interest. Clearly, he had been to the island many times.
His hand slipped around his seat, palm open. An invitation. I took it, and another wave of guilt and remorse vibrated through. Lightly, I smacked his wrist.
Stop the shame game , I thought to him. We were drinking. It’s over now.
Jock continued to jabber merrily with news of the island, though neither Jonathan nor I were paying attention.
I suppose.
So why do you still feel so bad?
While Jonathan thought, I watched the tiny village fade away as we drove toward the southwestern edge of the island. Although the Connolly house was only a short distance from the airstrip, the poor shape of the roads made it impossible to travel more than a few kilometers per hour.
This was where Gran had grown up. This oddly empty, green island. No wonder she was so taciturn—she had learned to enjoy solitude from birth.
I don’t want you to think I’m toying with you, I suppose .
I cocked my head. So don’t toy with me. Just be honest and tell me what you want. Or don’t want to.
Confusion rippled from his mind along with a heavy sigh.
Perhaps you don’t know what you want? I questioned. You just need to be honest about that as well.
Another sigh. It’s not that, Cass. I know very well what I want. The problem is that I can’t have it .
And what is it that you want?
The tires crunched over the gravel as my question traveled through both our minds. Jonathan pulled his hand away, then turned over the back of his seat to face me.
“I want you,” he said softly, so low that Jock couldn’t hear him. “I’m trying desperately not to, but I can’t seem to help it.”
Joy beat like a butterfly’s wings in my heart at the frank admission, but there was nothing of it on his face. We watched each other as the car pulled down a tiny gravel drive.
“But it still can’t happen?” I wondered just as quietly.
Jonathan didn’t need to reply. I could See the answer—along with a strong will to keep a number of emotions and thoughts reined in—in the elegant, frustrated lines on his face.
“Then that’s that,” I said.
The car stopped, and he turned back to the front. But before he got out, his green gaze caught mine through the rearview mirror. Frustration and longing flickered there—which I was sure he could see in my face as well.