Chapter 13 Saoirse
Saoirse
I don't want it to be true. I don't want any of what I overheard tonight to be true. I want there to be some other explanation. But Declan’s miles away. His head, his heart—neither are with me anymore.
Still, I try to pull him back to me.
I turn toward him in the dark and press my mouth to the hinge of his jaw as I slide my palm down the ridged terrain of his abdomen and lower—a deliberate offering, an attempt to call him back into his body, and into me.
He responds.
His hands find my hips, my waist, the hem of my shirt.
He pulls it over my head, cups my breasts, runs his thumbs across my nipples until they peak and my breath fractures.
His mouth follows—from my throat, down to the tender spot between my neck and shoulder, and on to the curve of my breast. His mechanics are flawless.
That's the word my mind selects, and I wish it hadn't.
Flawless. Not urgent, not desperate, not the raw, starving collision of the kitchen counter or the shaking tenderness of our first time.
Flawless the way a machine is flawless—executing without error, producing the correct output, delivering exactly the right pressure on my clit and the right angle inside me to tip me over the edge.
I come with his name on my lips, my walls clenching around him, nails scoring his shoulders.
When I open my eyes, his gaze is fixed on a point past my shoulder. A thousand-yard stare. His body is buried inside mine while his mind runs calculations I'm not cleared for.
He finishes shortly after—a controlled, quiet climax muffled against my neck. Even the sound of it is wrong. Rationed. He pulls out and rolls onto his back. His hand rests on my hip—a perfunctory gesture.
I lie beside him. Naked, still damp, the thrill of my orgasm fading fast. I have never felt more alone.
Not on the street. Not on the thin, hard mattress of a shelter.
Not in the back seat of an unlocked car at three in the morning.
Those were the loneliness of absence—no one there, no one coming.
This is the loneliness of presence. Six inches of mattress between his hip and mine, and he is already gone.
I put my hand on his sternum, over his heart. I'm here—are you?
He covers my hand without a glance my way. Pats it once. Absentminded. The way you acknowledge a dog nudging your knee while you're reading.
I pull my hand back.
My body knows this feeling before my mind finds the language.
The feeling of someone going through the motions of keeping you while already making arrangements to let you go.
I've lived it fourteen times. Different kitchens, different bedrooms, different adults who tucked me in and made the call in the morning.
I know this language.
Temporary placement. For your own safety. Until we find something more permanent.
Every time, it meant the same thing. Someone decided I was too much trouble, too much risk, too needy—and then found a reasonable, responsible, grown-up way to explain why I had to go like the garbage on trash day.
I know when my time is up now. No one needs to tell me. It’s fine.
I wait until Declan's breathing evens out, then deepens. The specific rhythm of a man who's gone under fast and hard.
I slip out of bed.
The guest room closet still has my duffel in the back corner. The clothes Declan paid for hang in neat rows on the rod, and I stand looking at them for a moment—the blouses, the jackets, the shoes.
I leave them.
I pull on old jeans, a shirt, and my worn jacket. The duffel is still packed with my clothes, my toothbrush, and my utility knife. The only thing I’ve added since I arrived is food—granola bars, trail mix, the protein drinks I've been stashing.
I zip the bag and hoist the strap over my shoulder.
Hope is on the bed, watching me with her yellow eyes. She knows something's going on. She doesn't move, doesn't make a sound. Just watches.
"Don't," I tell her.
She blinks.
I look away first.
The window opens without a sound. Declan keeps the hinges oiled.
He keeps everything in this house maintained and precise, and the irony of that—him making my escape route noiseless—lands somewhere I don't have the bandwidth to examine right now.
I push the window up and step through onto the fire escape landing.
He has guards, I know that. Corcoran on the corner, the rotation Declan mentioned when he told me to stop walking at night. I know cameras are covering the doors, but they don't cover the fire escape on the east side of the building because there's no sight line from any of the posted positions.
Survival isn't something I had to learn. It's baked into me at a cellular level. I knew how to leave before I knew how to stay.
I descend, stepping gingerly with the metal ringing faintly under my weight. I step off the last rung onto the alley pavement, absorb the drop with bent knees, and straighten.
Then I walk.
East, then south. I have to get out of O'Rourke territory, which means crossing the city. I don't run. Running draws attention. I walk like someone who knows where she's going, head down, hands in my pockets.
The city does its city thing around me. Distant sirens. A group of rowdy revelers spilling out of a bar on the next block, loud and loose-limbed. A man and woman walking their dog. The sounds of a place that doesn't know or care that I'm moving through it.
I've walked like this hundreds of times before. Through dozens of neighborhoods at all hours—just another body in motion, too much of a nobody to be interesting.
I won't think about the bed I just left. I won't think about the man whose hand covered mine in the car and didn't move for the whole drive home. But I will never forget what he said in the dining room, and the particular quality of his voice when he said it—flat, final, certain. It's time. Saoirse’s gotta go…I just can’t stand it anymore. It’s time. I’ve gotta get her out of here.
Two hours out, my calves burn. I stop in the doorway of a shuttered dry cleaner and roll my shoulder to redistribute the duffel's weight.
The buzzing starts before I register what it is.
Again, more buzzing. It’s coming from the side pocket of the duffel. A muffled vibration against the nylon, rhythmic and insistent. I don't have a phone. I've never had a phone. The only phone I've ever held was—
My hand finds it before I finish the thought.
The burner. The one Declan handed me that first night in the laundromat. I'd shoved it in the side pocket and never took it out. I forgot it was there. Or I didn't forget. Maybe I left it on purpose.
Six missed calls, all recent.
As I stare down at it, the screen glows in my palm, lighting up.
One text. Three words. I stare at it, baffled.
Please come home.