Chapter 11 #2
‘Okay, okay,’ his mother said, throwing her arms in the air. She glanced at her co-conspirator. ‘You can’t say we didn’t try.’
Connie shrugged. ‘More cake for us, I guess.’
‘What the hell excuse are we going to give Maeve, though?’
‘Oh, I’m sure the two of you will magic something up,’ Fin remarked derisively. ‘That seems to be your forte all of a sudden.’
Ignoring his sarcasm, his mother turned to Connie. ‘We could say they were making grandbabies. They say the best way to lie is to keep things as close to the truth as possible.’
Fin gaped at them. They really were drinking their own Kool Aid. There was nothing close about this. No baby making was happening. They knew no baby making was happening.
He glanced at Sweeney, who rolled her eyes at him in a way that said these two are officially off the leash, and a laugh tickled the back of his throat.
The situation was getting more and more unhinged but, instead of letting the laugh out, his brain decided to think about baby making with Sweeney.
Thankfully his mother rescued him from his idiot brain. ‘Okay, well … toodles, I suppose.’ She stared at them both with disappointed resignation. ‘Come for dinner tomorrow. We’ll do a Sunday roast.’
Feeling petulant because WTF was he doing thinking about baby making with Sweeney, Fin opened his mouth to tell his mother—in the nicest way possible—that he would rather starve than sit over a meal and pretend they weren’t all living in the twilight zone. But Sweeney spoke first.
‘We’ll be there.’
And that laugh he’d been suppressing finally slipped out. Sweeney may have been unimpressed over the mothers making hay while the sun shone in this particular predicament and would probably also have been prepared to starve over it—if the food on offer had been anything else.
But she’d always been a sucker for his mother’s Yorkshire puddings and rich, Guinness-y gravy, and Rhonda Murphy damn well knew it.
*
With great trepidation, Fin finally accepted his long-ignored invite to the Murphy family WhatsApp chat. Surely his mother was exaggerating?
Nope …
He scrolled quickly through the reams and reams of messages that contained a mishmash of different topics but mostly, this last week, there’d been only one. And it was hot!
Feeney.
Feeney watch, to be exact. All speculating on where the hell they were and why the hell they were being so damn secretive.
There were multiple pics of them posted from the night of the party as well as at the footy club, with every single nuance of their body language parsed.
There was one grainy photo taken from a distance of two people sitting on the jetty at the lake one evening, which his second cousin Erica insisted was the first non-party, non-footy sighting.
Sighting? Like they were royalty. Or the first damn pheasants of the season.
The debate over that one raged for several days, with members of his family either supporting or disputing the identity of the mystery couple.
It couldn’t be them, Catherine messaged, because there was a slight gap between them that no newly engaged couple would ever countenance.
Andrew, another cousin, agreed because the guy on the jetty had straighter hair than Fin.
But his wife pointed out that was definitely a Murphy nose.
Which caused an interesting flurry of conversation about the origins of the nose.
Donny reignited the dispute by also agreeing it wasn’t the reclusive couple because of the timestamp on the photo, which meant it had to have been taken after footy practice, and no way could anyone get from the footy field to the lake in under half an hour even if they were speeding, which they wouldn’t have been since it had been raining that night, which made the windy road to the lake extra hazardous.
Even taking into account the excellent condition and tread depth of the tyres on Fin’s brand new hire car.
Mai had agreed, because for sure no man who loved his woman the way Fin loved Sweeney would ever risk killing her in a car crash just so they could canoodle away from the eyes of the town.
Jesus.
Fin shook his head. Had the entire family drunk the Kool Aid? He was surprised there hadn’t been mentions of alien abductions and crop circles.
‘Check this out.’
He passed his phone to Sweeney, who looked at it as though it was a poisoned chalice. ‘Oh god, what?’
‘Just thought you might like to see the level of Feeney fever that seems to be making every Murphy in Ballyshannon and surrounds lose their minds.’
Fin watched as Sweeney started to scroll. She frowned and glanced at him. ‘There’s a Feeney watch?’
He shrugged. ‘Apparently.’
Her eyes darted back and forth across the screen, getting larger and larger, until she got to the lake sighting. ‘Is this for real? Maybe we’re all stuck in a ridiculous fever dream?’
‘It’s feeling more like an LSD trip now, to be honest.’
She quirked an eyebrow as she peered at him over the top of the screen. ‘And you would know this how?’
Fin threw her his most affronted look, which was hard when he was trying not to smile. ‘I’ve been to music festivals.’
‘Oh, really?’ She laughed. ‘You’ve dropped acid?’
Feeling more and more actually affronted, Fin said, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’
She laughed again, as though it was the most hysterical thing she’d ever heard, but stopped abruptly as Fin frowned. ‘Oh.’ She blinked. ‘I don’t know. You’re so … you were always so …’
‘So what?’
‘So square.’ She looked at him as though she wasn’t sure why she was having to even articulate it. ‘C’mon, Fin, you know you were.’
Fin supposed that was true and it would be churlish to pretend otherwise. But … he wasn’t the same gangly, giant-headed dork from way back when. It was suddenly exceptionally annoying to realise that Sweeney still saw him as that kid.
Not the man he’d become.
He had no problems seeing her as the woman she’d become, after all.
‘I’m thirty-two years old, Sweeney. I’ve smoked weed, I’ve adopted the Irish fondness for the c word and sometimes I drive my car too fast. I often have too many Guinness at the local with the TGIF crowd from my work, and one of those nights about two weeks before I made this trek home, I took a woman I’d only met a few hours prior out into the alley and went down on her.
She screamed so loudly when she came I thought someone was going to think I was murdering her and call the guards. ’
Okay, that might have been a little TMI and he’d never been one to brag about his sexual conquests, but this conversation was pushing buttons he didn’t even know existed. For fuck’s sake, he was a fully grown man.
Couldn’t she see that?
By the look of her, she could now, her indulgent smile slowly fading. Good. He may have been square boy back then, but these days he was the King of Cunnilingus, and she could take that to the goddamn bank.
She didn’t say anything for several beats, just stared at him as though something had broken in her brain. And then, as if she didn’t quite know how to process the information, she switched tack. ‘Wait.’ She shot him a faux frowny look. ‘You cheated on me?’
It was Fin’s turn to blink, momentarily confused by the jump in topic. ‘What?’
‘Two weeks before you came here? How dare you, Finley Murphy. We’d been engaged for a month by then. You wait until I tell your mother about this.’
It took a beat for him to catch on, then he laughed loud and long, his hand sliding to his belly, grateful for her choice of humour to alleviate a situation that had become bizarrely intense. It had certainly cured the weird itch in his blood that had made him want to peel his skin off.
‘Now you’re drinking the Kool Aid,’ he said when he was finally able to speak again.
They grinned at each other for long moments before Sweeney stirred. ‘Well, anyway.’ She handed him back the phone. ‘Once I get reassigned, the whole Feeney watch will die a natural death.’
And that couldn’t come soon enough. Except, of course, it’d probably be a long time until he saw Sweeney again, and suddenly that wasn’t okay.
This last week may well go down as one of the more bizarre of his life, but connecting with his old friend had been an unexpected benefit and he didn’t want it to be so long between drinks again.
‘Let’s make a pact,’ he said as he placed his phone on the coffee table.
She eyed him warily, which was fair enough considering they were already unwitting partners in this fake fiancé bullshit.
‘What kind of pact?’
‘Let’s not leave it four years between seeing each other again after all this. I’ve missed you,’ he said. ‘A lot.’
‘Yeah.’ Sweeney smiled. ‘I’ve missed you, too.’
And that was all the encouragement Fin needed. It suddenly felt like an imperative to make a regular catch-up date. ‘Let’s agree to meet up once a year—ish—going forward.’
‘Fin.’ She shook her head. ‘Next time we turn up in Ballyshannon together, our mothers will probably have just told some huge fib about us being pregnant despite us having broken off the engagement, and I’ll have to waddle around rubbing my stomach while you get to take expectant father advice from Donny. ’
Fin shuddered at the latter, even as the former slid invisible fingers under his skin. ‘Not here,’ he quickly amended. ‘It can be wherever you might be at the time. As long as I had a couple of months’ notice I could probably swing it. How much in advance do you know your jobs?’
She leaned in, which Fin took as an encouraging sign.
‘Things are usually booked six months or so in advance. There obviously can be last-minute changes to allow for unforeseen staff issues, internal unrest in a particular country, inclement weather events and, you know—’ She waggled her eyebrows.
‘Pandemics and volcanic eruptions. But mostly I do know where I’m going to be months ahead of time. ’
‘Good, okay. Once things are back to—’
He’d been going to say normal. But he doubted things would ever be normal again after this.
There was going to have to be a new normal after being fake engaged to Sweeney and kissing her under the mistletoe and thinking about her waddling around rubbing her belly with his baby snugged safely inside.
‘Once we’re back into our routines, let’s see if we can find a few days in the next twelve months to meet up.’
‘Okay, let’s do it,’ she enthused, which set off a low flutter of excitement in Fin’s chest cavity. ‘I stay in some seriously nice places, too. Always put up in the best suites. Plenty of room for two. We can make a weekend of it?’
‘I like the sound of that.’ The thought of seeing her again after all this? He liked it very much.
‘Oh, actually, I think I have a job in August in Donegal. We could meet there?’
Fleetingly, Fin wondered how many times she’d been to Ireland while he’d been living there, but dismissed it. Neither of them had kept in very good contact, and if she had been in Ireland it would have been to work, not catch up or socialise.
He nodded with a smile. ‘I’ve not made it that far north yet. Sounds like a plan.’
One he was already stupidly excited about.