Chapter 6 #2
‘Standards.’ She repeated the word, not entirely sure if she liked it or not, but then coming from Marcus Johnson, she knew, it meant something.
‘I suppose, I have,’ she said and yes, she knew, there were plenty here who only came because they couldn’t get into a straight business degree. ‘But so have you…’
‘Ah, but the difference is, I’m driven by lack as much as by ambition.’
‘Hah!’ she thought he was joking.
‘I’m serious. I don’t have a hotel in my back pocket to fall back on.’
‘Hold on, neither do I… I’m just as…’
‘I didn’t mean it as an insult.’ He held up his hand to stop her arguing with him. ‘I just meant that I’m going to have to make my way in the world and I intend to make a good job of it. I don’t want to end up like my parents.’
‘Would that be such a bad thing?’
‘No, in some ways, maybe not. They are good people, but we haven’t a bean, that’s the reality.
I left school at sixteen for a part-time job and I managed to make something of it, but the lives they’ve settled for, well, I want more.
I’ve always wanted the sort of security my parents never had the guts to go out and get for themselves.
’ As he spoke, she could hear the thinnest slice of bitterness cut through his voice.
He told her about his family, their twenty-acre, mostly bogland farm in the midlands and the fact that after his leaving cert, he could not wait to get away.
He spoke plainly, but there was a vulnerability about him that he’d hidden so well before this.
Blythe felt her heart soften towards him just a bit.
She noticed his eyes, brown with tiny flecks of gold that flashed when the light caught them – and how they creased when he smiled at her.
He was, she decided that day, the fittest of all the boys in their year.
His lithe body was a result of a lifetime of hard work, working on the bog and fencing for weeks on end seemed to produce a certain sort of physique.
Marcus had a body like an Adonis, it probably helped that he did very little in the way of high living.
He was good looking, too. Very good looking, in fact, now that she really studied him.
And she found herself looking at him, increasingly, catching his eye and then her insides buzzed with a desire for him that caught her by surprise.
Soon, she no longer saw him as a competitor, was she falling in love with him?
Maybe, she liked the fact that he was ambitious; the idea that here was someone who fully intended to make something out of nothing.
That day, sitting there, she absolutely believed that he would be the most successful of their class.
This was a million miles away from wanting to go to the village dance with Shane McPherson. It had all been so childish. In hindsight, it had been as much about getting what Fiona wanted – because it was like that between them; their friendship was a constant competition to see who’d win.
Shane was just a challenge – the one boy every girl wanted to go out with, because of his good looks.
It didn’t hurt either that he could string a sentence together which didn’t involve you feeling like he was guessing your bra size at the same time.
Now for the first time, she’d fallen hook, line and sinker for someone.
Marcus Johnson was in a completely different league to any other boy she’d known.
He had, she suspected, hidden depths and that was damned sexy, maybe more so, when her whole life had been spent on Pin Hill Island where everyone knew your business and there was no room to keep a secret for much longer than it took the tide to turn.
Blythe realised this, as she watched Marcus walking along the path towards the college, early, their first class was not due to take place for at least an hour.
They were in their last semester, and it was only now she was beginning to see how gorgeous he was; how come it had taken so long?
She’d been so busy competing against him that she hadn’t properly noticed him.
‘I need Rae here,’ she thought to herself one day.
‘I need Rae to fall in front of Marcus Johnson and make him walk her home, so he is ambushed into asking me out.’ She laughed then, thinking of her sister’s antics on her behalf.
She hadn’t told Rae about Marcus, mainly because there was nothing to tell.
It was new ground for her. The only fella Blythe had ever really fancied on the island was Kip Carney.
That was years ago, when she was a kid and everyone looked up to Kip.
He was a celebrity on Pin Hill – but of course, he was way older than Blythe or any of the other girls who had his official rugby photo pinned to their bedroom wall. Kip Carney was in a whole other league.
The problem was, Marcus never went to any of the college social events.
Blythe had always believed he thought himself above them.
Now, she wondered if maybe he couldn’t afford to socialise, not on a regular basis at any rate.
There was only one way to get him on his own and that was by asking him for help on her end of year project.
‘Hey Marcus,’ she said a lot more breezily than she felt.
‘Blythe, hey,’ he said. He was putting his bag in his locker, organising his books for the day ahead. She peeked inside, couldn’t help it. Oh my God, was it alphabetised?
‘I wondered if I could ask you a favour…’ she took a deep breath to regain her composure.
‘Sure, you can ask,’ he laughed at this, but when he pinned her with those brown eyes for just a fleeting second, she thought she’d melt.
‘The end of year project? I’m doing it on the Hope Square Hotel – you know, I told you about…
’ They were meant to be doing a complete overhaul, making something more of something already existing.
Most of the other students were doing their project on a nearby hotel, who’d offered the college access to its workings.
‘I’m struggling with it, maybe I’m too close to it, would you take a look…
’ She put her head to one side coquettishly.
‘I don’t know, I’m quite busy with my own, I’m…
’ he broke off, closing his locker and turning to look at her.
She found herself batting her eyelashes, even though, she was never that sort of girl.
Marcus was having a strange effect on her, it was unnerving.
Obviously, she liked him a lot more than she realised.
‘What if I bought us both dinner, or I could make it, at my flat – you could come over one evening, have a read through and there’d be a free dinner and dessert too…’ she laughed, but inwardly loathed the ring of desperation in her voice.
‘Uh, okay, that sounds like a fair deal.’ He flashed her one of those killer smiles again and she wanted to turn herself inside out for him, right there, standing at the lockers in the main corridor.
*
A little part of Blythe felt slightly guilty.
She knew, her grandfather would have a conniption if he realised that she was sharing the contents of his end of year accounts with some stranger to score a date with him. But it was all she could think of doing to get Marcus to notice her.
They’d agreed that he’d pop across the following Thursday evening, and Blythe had scrubbed and cleaned the flat until it almost shone.
She reckoned anyone who kept their ring binders in alphabetical order would definitely knock points off her for a dusty lampshade, never mind the ten-year build-up of grease under the cooker hood.
She’d made spaghetti Bolognese with crispy bread and splashed out on a few bottles of semi-decent plonk.
It was a simple, studenty meal. She didn’t want to look as if she was trying to impress him, although she had made ice cream for afters.
Well, she couldn’t bear to walk past the freshest of strawberries she’d spotted in Moore Street on the way home from college that day.
‘Sorry, I’m late,’ he said, looking at his watch and smelling the garlicky, basil infused air appreciatively as he made his way into her empty sitting room. She’d bribed her flatmates to stay away for a few uninterrupted hours.
‘By about two minutes!’ Blythe laughed. It was another thing she admired about him, he was always on time for class.
He never forgot things either, not like some of the other boys who spent more time borrowing pages or pencils and most of them looked as if they’d never seen a hairbrush.
Marcus on the other hand was always turned out like a man who was going places.
He reminded her of one of those guys you see on billboards advertising designer reading glasses; smart, but there’s no covering over the smouldering sexiness beneath, unlike the other boys who dressed like extras from a Nirvana video.
They pored over the project for about three-quarters of an hour.
He asked all the right questions, too many of them probably.
Blythe felt a crease of guilt at the amount of information she gave glibly away about the annual takings and the breakdown of where they were making the largest profits and what wasn’t working.
Her grandfather would faint, if he realised.
But she rationalised, there was no harm in it, Marcus was not the competition, it was all in the name of love.
‘You’ve done a terrific job, top marks!’ Marcus said when he came to the final page. ‘After all that, I’d love to go and see the place…’ He laughed as they tucked into dinner.
‘Anytime, you’d be very welcome,’ she said then, buoyed up on the way the evening was going. The way he was looking at her now, it felt different to how he had seen her before, as if he was finally noticing her.
They quickly made their way through the first bottle of wine. It turned out wooing and chatting about their future dreams was thirsty work. She brought out the homemade ice cream just as it felt as if he might be about to leave.
‘Oh my God, Blythe, this is delicious,’ he said as he finished the first spoonful.
His eyes travelled from the ice cream to her face, to the project and back to her eyes, again.
When he looked at her, it felt as if he wasn’t just seeing her, he was properly seeing her, maybe even undressing her, and she shivered with eager desire.
‘Ah, it’s nothing. Sure, I’ve been making desserts since I was a kid,’ she said, but she had only really perfected this recipe since she arrived in Dublin. She took down the second bottle of wine and poured them both generous glasses.
‘I never realised you were so…’ he said, and he left the words hanging there for her to fill in, which was probably both wise and dangerous.
‘I think we’re both…’ She leaned towards him, forgetting what she was going to say.
The wine finally taking hold of her and then, somehow, he was kissing her.
Short, innocent kisses at first, then something longer, deeper, probing, promising, and her whole body felt as if it was being coaxed into a net of taut expectation.
The more they kissed, and his hands moved across her back, then to her face, then down and towards her breasts, she thought she’d explode with longing for him.
Their breathing, heavy, their kisses more urgent – he shifted his weight next to her and she could feel the longing in him, which made her crave him even more.
Ding dong.
Oh, God. No.
Her flatmates had arrived back.
‘Saved by the bell.’ He laughed, pulling away from her and straightening himself up, while she tried to regain some sort of composure as she heard Diana and Chloe make their way into the flat.
The moment was broken. But still, she was filled up with this urgent need for more of him.
‘I should be off,’ he said then, strangely embarrassed as if they’d been caught out by her parents, rather than her flatmates.
‘Don’t leave on our account.’ Diana laughed.
‘No. No. Early morning. I’ll…’ he looked at Blythe for a moment and she felt as if the whole world was waiting on his next words.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?’ he said then and she nodded at him, because she wasn’t sure she could formulate any words properly just yet, she was still so caught up in what had just happened.
‘Tomorrow,’ she said softly as she heard the front door close behind him and then she looked at her flatmates and they all burst out laughing together.