Chapter 4 An Experiment in Causing an All-Consuming Black Hole of Uncomfortable Doom
My eyes dragged farther and farther up his body, taking him all in.
This man was huge. Head and shoulders taller than I was, and built like he’d never seen a sofa.
Legs like tree trunks, the slightest glimpse of chest hair at his unbuttoned collar, a trim, manly beard, thick, wavy brown hair.
A scowl pulled across his brows. When my eyes met his for just one second, he stilled.
The stage lights above him shone down and gilded him in soft golden rays, and I thought perhaps the heavens had opened and—finally recognizing all my good cat deeds—delivered this man unto me.
He looked like Henry Cavill had had a love child with Hugh Jackman, and that child was a forty-year-old solid wall of rugged anger.
The only thing that stopped his perfect face from being too sickeningly perfect was a break in his nose that was long healed, flattening out in the middle of a straight, sharp stretch.
Unfortunately for me, this imperfection was my undoing.
My eyes were drawn to it, then traveled to his mouth and back to his stormy eyes.
My heart stopped for a few seconds and then raced to catch up.
“I think she likes what she sees, Tadhg!” came a voice. Whose was it? Where was I? My lips parted slightly, to say something, maybe, or scenting the air like a tracking dog, I wasn’t sure.
Whoops and wolf whistles came from the audience. And then his face, which one might have reasonably assumed could not have looked grumpier, tightened further still. Without saying a word to me, he thundered offstage and left me there, mouth agape, trying to remember how to breathe.
“Go on, Maya. You’d better go catch your man before he gets away!
” Annie said, and everyone in the whole world laughed.
My eyes found Jackie, and he made a little shooing motion with his hands.
Hurry, he seemed to say, like I was meant to chase this ethereal being before it disappeared back to whatever magical realm it had come from.
My legs made the decision before I did, and my brain caught up as I was nearing the bar.
“I’ll settle up, Calvin,” he was saying to the bartender in that deep, gravelly Irish accent that had pissed me off over the microphone.
With some inexplicable confidence I did not feel, I found myself standing next to him at the bar.
The audience followed, crowding around us and pushing us closer together.
Our arms were pressed together for lack of room, but he didn’t deign to even cast a glance my way.
A full minute passed, maybe two or sixty, who knew?
I waited for him to say something. Anything. I mean, I definitely wasn’t going to be the first one to talk. What could I possibly say? Hi. I’m Maya. I’d like to climb you like a tree now, so brace yourself.
Before I knew it, I was talking. Thankfully, my brain did a quick, uncharacteristic edit and left the tree part out.
“Um. Hi. I’m Maya.”
He said nothing. He didn’t even turn his head, just stared straight ahead like he was trying to pretend that none of this was happening.
“Oh, come on, Tiger! Don’t keep your girl waiting.”
“Why don’t you give her a smooch?” someone called.
“Yeah! Kiss her!”
“Show the girl what she’s won, Tadhg!”
Everyone was laughing. Some people clapped him on the back, and even I got a few shoulder pats. Several people offered to buy us drinks. It seemed like good-natured ribbing to me, but his jaw tightened like he was trying to grind down gravel with his teeth.
“Right.” He kept his eyes firmly on the barman. “Do you want to go to the tavern, or shall I give you the gift certificate and we can forget this whole thing?”
I had to assume he was talking to me and not asking Calvin the barman on a date. “Oh. Um. I’d . . . Well. I don’t know. It kinda sounds like fun. And maybe . . . we should? Everyone will know if we don’t, right?”
Seconds ticked by in no hurry at all.
“Fine.”
Wow.
“Um. Okay. So, um. How do we, um?” Oh my God, you idiot, stop saying “um”! “Um. So uh. How do we? You know. Do we just walk? Or do we need a ride?”
“Yeah, Tadhg! The lady wants to know if you’re going to give her a ride!”
Mass hysteria broke out.
Suddenly, Jackie was there by my side, glass in hand, beaming from ear to ear. “There you go, Maya! A few hours in Ireland, and you already have a date with a gorgeous hunk. There’s magic in the air!”
My furious new date whirled on Jackie, his eyes narrowed to knife slits, slicing the air down to Jackie’s good-natured smile nearly two full feet below. “Keep out of it, old man.”
It was a vicious growl. Before I could think, I butted in. “Hey! Come on. He didn’t do anything to you.”
He scoffed. “He’s done plenty.”
Then, before I knew what was happening, the growling beast of a man grabbed my hand in his giant bear claw, pushed through the crowd, and dragged me out of there behind him.
Holy shit on a stick! What is happening?
My hand skin was touching his hand skin.
I did not love unnecessary touching. It was not my thing. But this was all happening so quickly that I didn’t have time to overthink it. I could have pulled away. But I didn’t. His hand was warm and so large, wrapped around mine.
And there were calluses involved.
Big, burly, rough, work-outside, man calluses.
The thought of it melted through my veins like lava.
Good God, what have I done?
We plowed down the road in complete silence. Which, as it turned out, I was grateful for, because it gave me time to think and review my protocol for going on a date with Adonis.
A protocol? Are you kidding me? There is no protocol for this! AHHHH!
I should have turned him down at the bar and spared my dignity. This was going to be the absolute most awkward date of my entire life. Worse even than Episode Twenty-Seven, “Pottery Class with Hard-On Harry!”
It was bad enough when it was just a regular date. Normally, all it took was the mere whiff of a date to turn me into a complete weirdo. But this was a date with the most beautiful man alive. What was I doing? We shouldn’t be going on a date! I should be building a shrine out of his hair!
Not to mention that this guy did not seem like he wanted to go on a date with me. How on earth was I going to get through this without collapsing the entire pub into an imploding black hole of awkward embarrassment?
Finally, a whole two blocks and a million lifetimes later, he let go of my hand. But even this was done with what felt like the ghost of an annoyed shove. Like he’d only just realized that we were angrily marching hand in hand through the streets of Lisdoonvarna during matchmaking season.
We turned the corner, walked down the hill another few minutes, and just like that, with not nearly enough time for me to get a hold of myself, we were outside the Roadside Tavern, and he was shoving the door open while my eyes drifted to his incredible ass without permission.
I followed him in dumbly and tried to keep from drooling down my front.
The pub was low-lit and low-ceilinged, and there was a beam so low that my oversize date had to duck to make it through.
As if we’d just walked into a Hallmark movie, there was a little group of musicians playing the lovely traditional Irish music that I had been expecting earlier.
It smelled of food, delicious food, and my stomach, even squirming with nerves, rumbled in response.
I had no idea what time it was here, or what time it was in San Francisco, but I realized that I was starving.
By the time I caught up with angry-brick-wall-bear-man, whose name I did not remember, he was sitting in a little nook set into the wall, somewhat out of sight of half the room. Probably embarrassed to be seen with me. Too late for that, buddy. The whole village just saw us hand-hugging!
He didn’t invite me to sit in the chair across from him but, rather, pinned me with an expectant glare that made me panic. Could I even remember how to sit down in a chair?
I could definitely figure out how to sit on that grumpy face of his. No! Oh my God! Stop it!
I did, in fact, manage to sit without knocking the table over.
He didn’t say anything to congratulate me for it.
He didn’t say anything at all. His eyes were glued in the direction of the musicians, but because of the little wall of the nook, I knew he couldn’t actually see them.
He was just choosing to look anywhere but at me.
They’d given us a hundred euros—too much to drink without a hospital visit—which meant a meal and, if my calculations were correct, an hour, or maybe even ninety minutes, of mandatory date time.
Ninety minutes of floundering through a painfully stuttery conversation. Ninety minutes of knocking things off the table as I made wild, irregular gesticulations. Ninety minutes of saying all the wrong things. Ninety minutes of trying very hard not to look at his crotch.
What were we going to talk about? Awkward silences were my kryptonite. This silence stretched out so long that I felt like my body was on a medieval torture rack, each passing second a click of the wheel pulling my vertebrae apart, until I could stand it no longer.
“So. Um. Hi. Again.”
His eyes flicked to mine for a brief second, but he didn’t smile. Were they green? Brown? Devil red?
“I’m Maya.”
“Yeah. I remember.”
For a moment, I thought that salty little chestnut would be the only thing he would say, and we’d spend the rest of the date in excruciating, diarrhea-inducing silence.
But then he sighed—it was a big, long-suffering, fed-up gust—before he straightened the angle of his body and looked at me finally. “I’m Tadhg.”
“Tige?” It sounded like the word “tiger” without the R.
“Yeah.”
“Oh. That’s cool!” I nodded. It’s cool? You’re an idiot! “Is that like . . . a nickname? Short for . . . I dunno, Celtic tiger? Or . . .” I shrugged and shook my head. “Tiger in the sack?” Ooh, my sweet holy crap!
His jaw tightened further. I worried about the state of his molars. This . . . was going to be a star-spangled shit show.
“No.”
The word, once it fought its way out from between his clenched teeth, was very final.
And yet I persisted.
“Is it like . . . short for some really long, crazy Irish name with a bunch of D’s and H’s and B’s in it?” Why couldn’t I stop?
“No.”
“What is it short for, then?” Stop fixating! Change the subject!
He took a minute and closed his eyes. Like he was trying very hard not to turn green, tip the table, and smash through the wall like the Incredible Hulk.
“It’s Tadhg. That’s my name. That’s all of it.”
“Really? Tige? That’s all of it? Weird! I’ve never heard that before.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have, would you? It’s another language.”
Shit. I was doing it. He was actually getting angrier.
“Ha ha! Yeah. I guess mostly.”
Mostly what? I’d actually said the words “ha ha,” but not sarcastically. And then I giggled a little for good measure. Just in case I wasn’t weird enough.
He looked away as if I were too painful to watch. I grabbed the rolled cutlery off the table and started ripping the napkin into confetti, just for something to do with my hands.
“So . . . you’re Irish?” I asked him, because maybe I wasn’t sure that he was Irish? Or because his accent hadn’t given the mystery away? Or maybe I’d just died on the flight over and this was hell. Just this date. Over and over again for all eternity.
With that, I saw the moment when his spirit broke. “I’m gonna need a drink. Can I get you something?”
“Oh, thank God. Yes, please! Um. What do you recommend?”
“Well.” He was already standing, as if he hadn’t expected to have to wait for an answer. My eyes darted to his crotch. “This place is a brewery, and a good one. I like the Burren Blond.”
“What’s that taste like?”
His weight shifted. He was getting fed up again. But he took a second and answered evenly. “Well, it’s a lager, with a hoppy—”
“Nope! Don’t like hops. Hate ’em, actually! Tastes like liquefied potpourri. Huuc!” I mimed vomiting, because that seemed like the best choice for ultimate sex appeal. “Am I right?”
He ran a hand over his face. I looked at his crotch again.
He sighed. “Right. I’ll just ask the staff to pick something. I’m sure it hardly matters.”
He left before I could say anything else stupid. I hunched my back and ripped more paper.
Wow. He couldn’t stand me. I’d barely said anything yet. I hadn’t even mentioned the megacolon. This has gotta be a new record.
Then my hands stilled mid-rip.
Wait. One. Minute. I knew what this was!
So maybe I wasn’t good at picking up on social cues, but I was good at research, and I had researched what I could about Irish culture, dating, and social interactions before I’d left.
Irish people were famously rude to people they liked—like their closest friends—or when they were flirting. Flirting!
The one TikTok guy, Garron Noone, said that “if an Irish person respects you, they’ll greet you with devastating insults that make you wish you were dead before you were even alive.”
That’s probably why Tiger was so rude to Jackie too!
I had watched a whole stand-up comedy routine by the hilarious Aisling Bea about two Irish people flirting where the guy said that the woman had tumbleweeds rolling around in her womb, and she said that the guy’s penis was so small that instead of a condom, he had to empty out half of a vitamin E capsule and put that on his penis and could still get his pinkie around the circumference . . . and then they moved in together!
Aisling—an Irish woman—had said that there was no way to tell the difference between Irish flirting and verbal abuse!
Okay! Okay! Okay!
I sat up a little straighter and recalibrated. Protocol for Irish Banter:
Objective: Banter it up!
1. If banter is detected, attempt to match vibe.
2. Energy allotted to this task shall be directly and positively correlated to interest levels.
3. Extreme interest can be exhibited most clearly by escalating banter levels, or “one-upping” the participant in question (see fig. 2).
I could totally do this. This was easy! I was going to be great at this!
Snark was my usual modus operandi. Maybe Ireland was the only country in the world where I could be good at dating!
Tige, or whatever the hell his name was, wouldn’t know what hit him!
I was going to flirt him like he’d never been flirted before!