Chapter Nineteen
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Maureen and I run through the rain and I feel like a naughty kid, gleeful in my bad behavior.
Now I get why the other me is always stealing this dog.
First of all, when you’re sad or lonely, it’s nice to have a wonderful, happy little creature who’s never in a bad mood to sit there with you and…
well, I guess, love you.
Second of all, it’s an obvious ploy for Cillian’s attention.
It was so easy.
Seeing that Cillian was busy at the bar, I walked up the stairs to his flat and checked under his mat for a spare key.
Lo and behold, there was one there, either due to magic memories translating through dimensions or simply because he is predictably trusting.
I used it and went in and took Maureen back.
I left behind a note.
Hope it’s okay!
xoxo, M
I mean if he really cared, he’d probably move the key.
I think, deep down, he likes it.
At the very least, Maureen gets extra love and playtime while he’s working.
She splashes through the puddles and I do too, not even minding how wet either of us are getting.
I take off my hood and let the rain drench my hair, the cool water running down my cheeks, and I feel deeply present.
Things aren’t perfect right now.
In fact, a lot is really weird and confusing.
But I feel more like myself than I have in a long time.
I think back to my birthday party, when Barry Keoghan had stood in Grayson’s yard and done this very same thing.
It feels like two lifetimes ago.
Maybe more.
Once fully drenched and back at the cottage, I fumble for the key and then go inside, letting Maureen race in ahead of me.
As soon as she’s in, she shakes the rain everywhere, which only makes me laugh.
I go to the bathroom for a towel and come back to Maureen, saying, “Come here, pup, good girl.”
She obeys happily, letting me scrub the moisture out of her fur.
I feel almost drunk on well-being.
I want to stay here, doing laundry and hand-drying the dishes, picking up coffee and cream from that tiny supermarket.
Stopping off at the pub, rehearsing for shows in that old theater.
Healing my friendship with Aimee and nurturing the one with Kiera.
And, you know, banging and then hopefully marrying the shit out of Cillian.
Maureen buries her damp head into my chest and it knocks me over.
I smile, tell her she’s a good dog for the millionth time, and then stand up, tossing the wet towel into the washing machine before going over to the record player and picking out an album.
I choose one of my favorites, one that I always listen to with my mom: A-ha’s East of the Sun, West of the Moon .
I open a bottle of Gamay, pouring a few ounces into a glass I’ve decided is one of my favorites, having a sudden wave of certainty that I pilfered it and its matching partner from a hotel where Cillian and I once stayed.
Was it the place in Dingle, maybe?
As usual, it isn’t quite a memory.
The first song on the album is the ever-melodramatic, blindingly Norwegian, delightfully overwrought cover of “Crying in the Rain.” I blast it loud and get into the steaming hot shower.
I take my time, indulging in the water and not bothering to worry about the next thing I need to do.
Halfway through the shower, I traipse out, cold and naked, to gingerly flip the record.
It’s an everything shower.
I shave my legs and underarms in that slow, careful way rarely afforded to women in a hurry.
I let a goopy hair mask sit on my hair.
I sing along to the music at the top of my lungs—something I weirdly have not done in years, since I’m never really alone.
When I finally get out, my skin is warm and plump.
I wrap my hair in a towel and look at my reflection.
I feel a real sense of fondness for the girl in the mirror.
She didn’t deserve to be changed.
She didn’t deserve to be whittled into something more palatable for social media.
She’s a good person who deserves carbs and sugar and whatever else makes her happy.
I retrieve a bar of chocolate from the kitchen and take a big piece, tossing a sweet potato dog treat to Maureen, then relighting the cabinet candle from last night.
I build a fire in the living room hearth, and then decide to go crazy and build one in the bedroom fireplace too.
It’s a particularly chilly night, especially in this old house.
The fires warm the place up so much that by midnight, I’m comfortable in a big, hideous, gloriously soft T-shirt that says Avalon School of the Arts on it, no bra, and my ratty old sweatpants, my hair brushed back into a ponytail.
Maureen jumps up suddenly and runs to the door, tail wagging, nose at the base of the doorjamb.
I have a feeling I know why.
I go over and open the door, hanging on to Maureen’s collar.
I didn’t mind being wet earlier, during my coming-of-age movie moment of reconnecting with nature, but we’re both clean and dry now and I’d actually like to stay that way.
I see Cillian running through the dark rain, and something deep inside me shudders.
He’s in a white T-shirt and jeans.
No jacket.
Eat your heart out, Mr.
Darcy.
The light catches him as he gets closer.
He gives a cheeky grin, and my heart soars.
“What dog?” I call out innocently.
He gets to the front step.
“Mind if I come in?” he asks.
I move aside, and his body touches mine as he goes by.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to get you wet.”
I strain to keep from making a sex joke, and say only, confusingly, “Oh, it’s nothing. I mean, don’t worry about it.”
My grip on her collar slips and Maureen starts to run out, but is stopped by Cillian’s quick, sharp whistle.
Whoa, why is that so hot?
He’s like Captain von Trapp without the late-wife baggage and war trauma.
I find a dry towel from under the bathroom sink, and then ask, “So why didn’t you wear a jacket or something?”
“I was in a hurry.”
As I hand it to him, I look up into his eyes and see something there I haven’t seen before.
My blood runs icy.
In a good way.
“I feel like a right clown,” he says.
“Why’s that?”
He breaks my gaze and walks into the kitchen, where he tosses the towel into the washer like I did, and then opens the fridge.
“Y’mind?”
He holds up the open bottle of Gamay.
I gesture that he should go ahead.
He gets out the glass that matches mine.
“Did I take these glasses from a hotel by any chance?” I hold mine up.
“So you are starting to remember then?”
“No,” I say, thrilled that I’d been spookily right.
“I have flashes sometimes. Vague sort of memories that aren’t really memories. It’s kind of like being a little psychic except all I get is senses of things like that.”
“Bit like déjà vu?”
My mouth falls open.
“Exactly!”
He pours his wine and then leans against the counter.
The candlelight sends him into even more flattering light than usual.
“So why do you feel like a clown?”
“Ah, yeah. Because I know you’re not the same girl. You said as much. But you are. And somehow, it’s doing my head in.”
He smiles and blushes a little.
“Can I say something completely inappropriate?” I ask, the words coming out without my full consent.
“Now that we’re being honest with each other.”
He nods.
“You look”—I glance at his body and then back to his face—“really fucking hot tonight.”
That muscle in his jaw flicks and he says, “So do you.”
I know I’m in sloppy pajamas, but for once in my life I don’t do the self-deprecating, painfully female thing where I say, No, no I look awful .
I get it.
I get that he sees me , not the clothes.
“This is so bizarre,” he says.
“I don’t think there’s a rule book for what you’re supposed to do in these situations.”
“Situations where your ex-girlfriend is convinced she’s traveling from another dimension and therefore she doesn’t know you?”
“That’d be it.”
“Do I seem the same?” I ask, busying myself with a sip of wine.
He nods.
“Mostly. Bit more relaxed, actually. You haven’t broken up with me this week, so that’s different. Though I guess, we’re not together.”
He doesn’t say it in a mean way.
“Why do you put up with it? With… me?”
He takes a nip of the wine and then says, “The sex. It’s really good.”
This shocks me and my eyebrows shoot up my forehead as I say, “Cillian!”
“I’m only coddin’ you. Not about the sex. That really is very good.” His gaze is steady on me.
“Very good.”
I smile, my heartbeat quickening.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he says, matter-of-fact.
I’ve inched a little closer.
He leans on one arm, clasping the edge of the counter.
“But that’s not why I put up with it,” he says.
“I do that because I love you, Meg.”
The words make me weak.
In my real life, when a man tells me he loves me—off-screen—I’m sent into a strange tizzy.
It feels as though a truth serum pulses through me and I physically can’t bring myself to lie and tell him I love him too.
Even when it’s a real relationship, and I should love the guy by then.
This is the exact opposite experience.
I shouldn’t love him.
I don’t even know him.
And yet I feel more compelled to say the words and mean them than I ever have in my life.
“I think I love you too,” I say, using the apologetic I think not to white lie, for once, but to soften the intensity of what I’m really feeling.
He nods.
“It would be nice if you could talk to the other version of yourself. The one I know. Maybe put in a good word.”
A smirk plays at his lips.
“I could kill her,” I say, laughing.
“She’s screwed up a really good life.”
“Nah. Figuring it out. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I always try to hold you too close. The old saying about the bird.”
“Or Lenny and the puppy.”
His eyebrows go up and he says, “Oy, I’m not that bad.”
I laugh, and then there’s a long, heavy silence between us, filled by the Sarah Vaughan record I put on right before he arrived.
I change the subject.
“So is the sex really that good?”
He stares at me, looking amused, and bites his bottom lip.
“No one has better sex than us.”
“No?”
“Mm. No.”
“I bet it’s only fine,” I say, flirting and trying now to cover up how strangely, how intensely I want to find out.
“Ya know, I mean most sex is fine .”
He hesitates, then pushes off the counter and comes toward me.
I straighten up, wetting my lips nervously and covertly.
He sets his glass beside mine and then puts his hand down on the wood so that his skin barely touches mine.
His scent is intoxicating.
I’ve lost all my cool.
I am putty.
“The key to good sex is listening to each other,” he says.
“You told me what you like. I know you like to be kissed here.” He touches the spot behind my ear and I inhale sharply at his warmth.
“I know you like to be held here.” He puts one of his strong hands around my waist, pulling me barely toward him.
“I know you like to be bitten here.” He leans down and gently slaps the inside of my thigh.
I’m going to die.
“Seems like you listen really well,” I say.
“You leave me no choice.” He leans forward then, his lips close to my ear, where he whispers, “You never shut the fuck up.”
I push him away by the chest, smiling and saying, “Okay, all right, very nice.”
He laughs.
“I’m kidding. I love to hear you talk, Meg. Even when you’re saying batshit crazy things like you tend to.”
My aching desire for him mingles now with a warm fondness.
There’s an ease between us that runs more deeply than I can reach.
I can feel the importance of us.
We’re Cillian and Meg, Meg and Cillian.
Iconic in our own private way.
I step toward him, waiting for a long moment before I reach up and put a hand on his cheek.
He leans into it, shutting his eyes, then wrapping his fingers around my wrist.
I run my own through his hair and step even closer.
He kisses the thin skin on the inside of my palm and I inhale deeply.
I don’t know which of us initiates, and it hardly matters.
His lips are on mine, my lips are on his, and I feel like I might explode.
He kisses me with hungry urgency, one hand flat on my back, one on my jaw.
He’s the best, best, best kisser I’ve ever encountered.
And for a bit at an award show, I once kissed Glen Powell.
I love every piece of him that touches me.
His slightly rough face where he hasn’t shaved in a day or two, the taste of French wine on his tongue, the intensity of his desire and how I can feel it matched inside me like a magnet.
In that moment, I release the doubt I have about whether or not I do or should love him.
I let go of the idea that no one can love someone after only knowing them a few days.
If this whole experience has taught me anything, it’s that there are gorgeous mysteries winding between us and the people we care for.
Why should I wonder if I love him when it’s my very certainty that causes me to ask the question in the first place?
I pull back and say it.
“I love you, Cillian.”
No apologies, no soft language, no insulation, nothing to break the fall.
I know he already told me he loves me, but that’s not the part that scares me.
It’s the part where I love someone too.
“I love you, Meggie.”
He looks into my eyes and I realize this is the first time I’ve been in a moment like this.
I’m so unprotected that my nerves start to hum.
It’s gentleness in his eyes that tells me not to worry.
And I wouldn’t, if this life were mine.
Our lips collide again, messily but in a hot way.
He takes off my big T-shirt.
I pull off his damp one, revealing an absolutely sarcastically good body that couldn’t be better if I had specifically had it made for me.
He lifts me up and takes me into the bedroom, lays me down slowly, his body over mine.
“You’re sure?” he asks.
“Cillian, my flight is in two days. I have no intention of getting on it. But I’m afraid of what might happen. I’m afraid I’ll never see you again.” My eyes fill with tears and I blink them away.
“If I wind up back in my old life and don’t know what it’s like to do this with you, then I’m going to lose my mind. Even more than I already have.”
“Meg. We will never lose each other.”
He says it with such conviction that I actually, somehow, find myself believing him.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t want him anyway.
I’m not that sure he’s right.
He pulls off my sweatpants, kissing me from my neck to my chest, to my stomach, all the way down to my shaking thighs.
When he finally moves my thong aside and touches me, I shudder at the substantial weight of satisfaction and relief.
I feel my heartbeat all over my body as he moves with expert grace and, clearly, a well-memorized choreography.
It’s not slow and sensual, it’s frenzied and urgent.
The kind of thing I’ve thought was eye-roll-worthy in so many movies and shows.
When is sex really like that?
Now, it’s like that now .
He seems to know how hard to grab on to my arm, my tits, my ribs, my ass, my thighs, never too hard, never too soft.
He uses just enough teeth on my hip bones and nipples and ears.
I’m primal, my open mouth on his cheekbone and in his hair as he puts his fingers inside me and uses his thumb on my clit.
I am obsessed with his body, desperate for the muscles beneath the skin, curious and hungry to run my tongue and fingers and everything else over the peaks and valleys.
The bend of his collarbone, the soft part behind his ear, the marble of his strong legs.
I am engulfed in the smell of salt and wood and rainwater and fry oil in his hair, a combination that makes me nostalgic for something I can’t place.
It’s so good it makes me dizzy.
I should not be surprised that he has a great dick.
And maybe I’m not.
I mean really, look at him.
I never thought I cared about that kind of thing, for real, until that moment.
And maybe it isn’t the size so much as how truly perfect it is.
The Platonic ideal.
His anatomy plugs so perfectly into mine, so satisfyingly correct.
Every part of him manages to touch every part of me.
I feel like we are discovering or inventing sex for the first time.
It’s suddenly so clear that yes , the motion of thrusting in and out is so that— ohhhh , right yes, it’s for both of us.
When he throbs in me or puts my breast in his mouth, I feel myself heaving and thinking, Yes, they should write about this, there should be a whole genre about this .
I always felt like I was doing something wrong in the past when my mind would wander, and now I know I wasn’t.
My mind wasn’t wandering far enough.
While I lay in some Echo Park bedroom letting an okay-looking Loyola alum who met Jerry Seinfeld once go down on me, I was thinking about the meter outside.
When Grayson and I had sex, I thought about whether or not the hot tub heater was turned on and if my Kindle was charged so I could go out and read after.
But now, my mind has found what it couldn’t in meditation; I am thinking in colors and feelings and music and abstract imagery.
I’m not awake or asleep.
I’m experiencing something new.
And while my mind is in space, my body is fully present.
Every nerve, every urge.
I am following my desire like stage direction in a script.
I want to, so I move on top of him.
I bend over him, my hair falling in a curtain around our faces.
It’s.
Fucking.
Hot.
It’s not awkward when it’s over.
We lie upside down on the bed, limbs entangled, the heat of the fire warming us from behind.
I stare up at the print above the bed for a long while, both of us catching our breath.
“Have I told you about that? Why I have it?” I gesture at it.
He shakes his head.
“No, actually. You haven’t.”
“I had it on my bedroom wall when I was a teenager. Along with a million ads from magazines and printouts of celebrities. I used to stare at it for hours when I was a moody teenager, listening to Fiona Apple or Mazzy Star or Death Cab or eventually Lana Del Rey. I used to call it sad girling .”
I feel him chuckle.
“Yeah, that sounds about right.”
For the first time, I’m telling him something about myself that he doesn’t already know.
“Does it?”
“Well, you’re not a very sad person. Restless, yes, but unhappy, no. When you do get sad, it’s always a little funny like that. Sad girling. It’s funny. Melodramatic. Anyway, you were saying.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I identified so much with the girl in the painting. Obviously, I was in high school so I was overly emotional about everything and I could relate to her as she stands on the outside of the presumed fun. She’s alone, trapped in her own internal landscape.”
“Mm.”
“I thought I’d grow out of it, especially if I was the one on the screen—not in the audience, not in the hall. But instead, I’ve only come to get it more and more. I still kind of feel like her. Especially being here. I feel like I’m on the outside of my own life. I mean, I am . Outside of both, I guess.”
He squeezes me a little closer.
“I think she’s an usher.”
“What?”
He points at the girl in the print.
“She’s in a uniform. I think she’s bored at work. I don’t know that she’s upset as much as she’s just… waiting.”
I sit up and squint at her.
“Huh.”
A log cracks behind us and he turns to check on it.
It’s fine, so he pulls me closer and relaxes again.
“You’re not on the outside of your life looking in. Everyone isn’t off having some perfect moment and you’re left out of it. You’re alive right now. Whether your real life is back in California, or it’s here, or if it’s on Pluto, it doesn’t matter. You’re here right now. I wish you didn’t feel like things were such high stakes. You can be happy, you know. Look, let’s say you’re right, that girl there is on the outside, yeah? Everyone’s inside enjoying the film, and she’s in the hall.” He shrugs against me.
“She could walk in. And maybe the happiness is closer than she thinks.”
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“But maybe it is, also. It’s the indecision that’ll kill ya.”
I look up at him and he looks down at me.
I love being this close to him.
I love the firmness of him.
“So do you think that… the Meg who lives here. Do you think she should go try to become an actress then?”
“I think she should do what she wants. I only hope she lets me be a part of it.”
I think about the proposal.
I had asked myself how it was possible that the other version of me didn’t know how good this life is.
But now I see it, or at least I’m starting to.
She went from life with her parents in a small town in Florida, to college in a small village, and nothing more.
There was no great tragedy that taught her, for better or worse, about the unpredictability of life.
She is restless with the unlived life rattling around inside, never having given it a shot.
When I showed up for my Brilliance audition, I was in a terrible mood.
I’d been dumped by some guy who thought he was the next Quentin Tarantino, I’d found a rat eating a cockroach in the laundry room of my shitty apartment building, and I’d bartended for a particularly bad crowd until two a.
m.
before making my nine a.
m.
audition.
I was mad at myself for not running the lines enough, for not coming up with something creative to go in the room with.
I showed up raw, real, and unprepared.
And what do you know?
That worked better than the overthought approach I’d been trying for years.
It’s not Which life is right?
It’s that I need all of it.
I needed to try to be big in LA; I could never have appreciated a smaller life without it.
But it doesn’t mean that that life is right forever either.
And that’s okay.
I can lead a hundred lives in my lifetime.
I remember what Kiera was saying about celebrities, and how they often pour their whole souls into success, only to wind up hiding.
I thought it sounded tragic.
Maybe it isn’t.
I’m not supposed to be in LA with Grayson and Lisa Michele buzzing around me.
I have to change my life.
Maybe the universe will be kind enough to forget me here, in this other life, but maybe it won’t.
The glitch could end in an instant.
Life, as I know too well, can do the same.
My mind whirs, but instead of being confused and conflicted and overwhelmed, like midnight epiphanies sometimes can make me, I know the pieces are drifting into place, settling in.
I fall asleep on Cillian’s chest, wrapped in a deep feeling of contentedness that I’ve never had in my life.
In any life.