Chapter 1
Kickoff: A rugby term used to identify the start of a game.
Translation: Is it too much to want to kickoff people’s faces?
Everly
“Oh my God!” I growl as I glance at the tagged post notification that just popped up on my Instagram.
“Are you talking to me?” my roommate, Cliona, asks from her twin bed across our dorm room as she slides off her white headphones.
I blink rapidly at my phone screen. “That guy I went to the Trinity Ball with last week just one-starred me on Instagram.”
“The bloke you said had food stuck in his teeth the whole night, even after you tried to politely tell him?”
“Yes, that guy!”
“What do you mean he rated you? You can’t rate people on Instagram.” Cliona frowns, her Irish accent getting thicker with
her confusion.
“No, but you can make a scathing public post about them,” I argue, flashing my screen to her. “The asshat even included a
photo of me.” I zoom in on the shot he snapped when I wasn’t looking. In it, I’m wearing a lush white gown for the ball, something
Cliona and I spent hours shopping for. My blonde hair curtains my face as I stare down at my phone, clearly deep in thought.
“I need to take a closer look.” The bag of ice on Cliona’s leg crinkles as she slides it off her knee and gets up to hobble
across the room toward where I’m sprawled out on my matching twin bed. Cliona’s back is hunched like an old lady as she struggles
to find her balance. She calls this the “rugby walk” and says it’s part of the fun of the collegiate sport she willingly participates
in, but nothing about walking like an eighty-year-old looks fun to me.
The scent of Icy Hot permeates my nose as she grabs my phone and squints at it. “One-Star Review for the Campus Matchmaker. Would not recommend, not even to my worst enemy. Bit dramatic of a start if you ask me.”
“Keep reading,” I growl and cover my face.
“Can someone explain how the blonde American lass that swans around Trinity campus and calls herself a matchmaking mastermind
manages to be an absolute car crash on a date for herself? I know it’s not decent to go reviewing people online like they’re
takeaway curry, but since this one fancies herself as some sort of love guru, I reckon the student body deserves a heads-up:
She’s a disaster. Full stop.”
“What a fucking arsehole!” Cliona growls, her brown eyes lit with rage. “I’ll kill the fecker myself. Where’s he live?”
“Just keep reading,” I groan, rolling over and hugging a pillow over my head.
“I met Everly Fletcher at one of those speed dating events she runs at Mulligans. She wasn’t participating in the event, but
she’s not bad to look at, so I decided to shoot my shot with her instead of the D-list girls she had there. She agreed to
go to the Trinity Ball with me. Bit of craic, right? Well, while we’re at the festival, she barely looked up from her phone
the whole time. I swear I had to beg her to dance with me. That’s not a date, that’s making me feel like a distraction.”
“Everly!” Cliona chastises, likely looking at the photo as evidence.
“I had a crisis going on,” I exclaim defensively. “Mulligans Pub was trying to cancel my final matchmaking event, and I had already ordered those cute little graduation hats for everyone to wear that were seasonal and . . . just keep frickin’ reading.”
“Fine, fine. But I’m starting to see this guy’s point.”
I scowl at my roommate as she continues. “Then out of nowhere, she starts telling me this story about eating her flatmate’s laxatives because she thought they were
chocolates. Three days of her shitting herself before she told me she ended up in the campus A&E getting an IV and cream for
her raw arse. Thought she was winding me up. She wasn’t. I tried not to judge, but surely the Saints wept for me.”
Cliona’s lips part in horror. “Fletcher, why the bleedin’ hell did you tell him about shitting your trousers?”
“It was a funny story,” I defend, my head jerking back. “You and I died laughing about it! I was trying to be relatable. That’s
one of my dating rules, you know.”
Her face twists. “Would you ever in your lifetime tell one of your matchmaking clients to share a story about shitting their
face off on a first date?”
I swallow the lump in my throat. “No.”
“So why did you tell the food-in-teeth guy?”
“It just . . . came up. Context matters.”
“Contextual shit?”
I curl my shoulders in as I press my back to the brick wall. “Okay, upon reflection, I can see how that was maybe an off-color
story.”
“Off-color? It was a shit color!”
“I’m sorry! I was just trying to make conversation.”
“About pooing so much you needed to go to hospital? Fletch, this is bad. This is why you never get any second dates. I’ve
just never seen it spelled out so specifically before.”
“There’s more,” I murmur, pulling my legs in to sit crisscross on my bed. It’s times like these I realize that perhaps I hung
out with my uncles a bit too much in my youth.
“Christ, I don’t know if I can take much more.” She sighs heavily and continues. “The real deal-breaker was that she would not stop banging on about her family back in the States and the gorgeous mountains
and how her uncles all live up there and she’s going there after graduation. Made them sound like they’d walked straight out
of a Pixar film. Has she not made it outside of Dublin? Ireland is no snore. Either way, I didn’t buy it. Nobody likes their
family that much. So now she’s not only stomach-churning and rude as sin, she’s also creepy close to her family. Bottom line?
Taking dating advice from the American, Everly Fletcher, is like letting your mam teach you how to wank. Just wrong on so
many levels. If you’re in a relationship thanks to her, best get out now while you can. Girl’s got no clue what she’s at.”
Cliona finishes reading, and the silence in our tiny little dorm room is deafening.
I deserve a quiet moment of shameful reflection. I took what’s supposed to be a beautiful, elegant Trinity College in Dublin
experience and fumbled it so hard.
“Oh, Fletcher . . . I’m sorry,” Cliona says, handing me my phone back and noticing the tears welling in my eyes. “You want
me to get my rugby teammates together and go turn his face into a rugby ball? Knock him around until he has no teeth left
to get food stuck in?”
I offer a watery smile at my wonderfully savage roommate. “Don’t bother. I’m only here for another month, and then I can go
back to Colorado and be a social failure there while the whole of Ireland can forget I ever existed.”
I press my head to the wall and wallow over the fact that I didn’t succeed at taking any of my uncle Luke’s advice. In fact,
I lied my ass off every time I updated him on my goings-on here.
I said I was going on amazing dates . . . Lie.
I said I was going to loads of parties . . . Lie.
I said I was making tons of friends . . . Lie.
I said I wasn’t matchmaking anymore . . . Lie!
I’m a fraud. A phony. A loser who lived in Ireland for four years and only managed to find one close friend in the nth hour
because she was forced by the university to have a roommate.
Sure, I connected with a few people over the years. Had coffee, studied, and did some sightseeing with a few willing participants,
but forming tight friendships with people my own age has always been hard. I always felt like I was on the outside looking
in, no matter which country, it seems.
Cliona’s face drops at my destitute look. She points to her chest. “This Irish girl is never gonna be forgettin’ ya.”
She ends the sentence in that musical, playful accent that people from northern Dublin have where you’re not sure if they’re
teasing you or threatening you. It’s a lot of flat vowels and dropped endings on certain words. It’s a voice that’s become
familiar and comforting to me.
A lump forms in my throat over that realization. To think I nearly left Trinity and never truly knew Cliona Reilly is a horror
I can’t fathom.
She says it was Irish luck that brought us together.
My money is on my grandfather from up above sending me a Hail Mary. He was a bit of a mastermind meddler, just like me, and
I think he knew I needed a friend.
And apparently, he thought Trinity College women’s rugby legend Cliona Reilly was just the ticket.
She is a beast in so many ways. Not to mention a giant flirt who’s shredded with more muscle than my arms have ever dreamed
of.
Normally, the rugby players all live in reserved athletic housing off campus, but Cliona had a conflict with one of her teammates last year and had to move out.
I was irritated when the university randomly matched us together in a double suite because I’d had a single all my other years going to school here .
. . but it turned out to be the best irritation that ever happened to me.
We live together in the Rubrics, which is a stunning redbrick building right in the historic part of Trinity campus. It’s
an old stately Georgian structure from the 1700s with tall windows and a weathered edge to everything that makes you wonder
if it’s haunted about nine times a day.
Real talk, it’s like living in a storybook.
This building is usually reserved for postgraduate students, scholars, or students with specific needs. My specific need was
my controlling father back in Colorado making an obnoxious donation to the campus to secure me a room here so he didn’t have
to worry about me walking to class from off-campus housing in a foreign country.
The first day I met Cliona, she asked me to rub out a knot in her shoulder with my elbow. I thought she was a weird jock with
boundary issues, who was possibly into girls. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. She is just a no-boundary bruiser who is
hard not to love.
With a sigh, I grab my Irish roommate by the wrist and yank her down onto my bed. “Don’t worry, I’ll save all my best bowel
movement stories for you from now on. I’ll even text you photos of them once I’m back home in Colorado so you can really remember
all my essence.”