Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
I just looked up at him, unable to move.
It couldn’t have been easy to find me—there were so many bars and clubs on this block, all packed with people.
Maybe something had drawn him to this one.
Maybe it was fate, whatever fate had dropped me in front of his shop in the first place. I’d never believed in fate.
“Come on, Jess,” he said. “You owe me one, remember? I’m calling it in.”
I didn’t quite know how to move to this song, which built to a rhythmic beat but then came back down again.
In the end, I looped my arms around Eamonn’s neck, letting him draw me closer as he kept his hand at my waist, his other hand at his side almost like he, too, didn’t quite know what to do with them as he danced.
He was still in his T-shirt, the fabric thin and soft under my fingers as they rested at the nape of his neck. I wanted to move them up, to brush the buzzed line of his hair, but I wasn’t bold enough.
“You didn’t leave your sweater, I hope?” It had looked like a really nice sweater.
I could feel his smile next to my forehead. “It’s at the door,” he said. “Your jacket, too. They’ll be there when we need them.”
He said it with such inevitability, like of course we’d be leaving together, like this interlude didn’t have to set us back at all.
From over his shoulder, the women from the bathroom were giving me thumbs-up gestures, Ashley mouthing an overexaggerated hot.
I huffed a laugh, my breath landing somewhere in the hollow of his throat, which was so close to my mouth I could’ve kissed him there.
“What?” he asked. His voice was a low rasp next to my ear, and I realized he’d brought his other hand up to my lower back, where I felt it tighten.
I shook my head. The music throbbed through my body like a heartbeat, and I wanted to kiss him so badly. But I wasn’t brave enough, and so in the end I settled for pulling him a little closer, until the jumping pulse of his throat was against my open mouth, and it was almost almost the same.
I could feel him swallow, and then he pressed his own mouth against my hair. His chest expanded as he took a deep, steadying breath.
“I said I’d get you to the embassy,” he said. “And I’m still going to do that.”
He’d backed off in a way that was subtle but still punched me in the gut.
He’d shifted his hands from where they’d started to drift over my hips to a more respectful location at my waist, like we were two kids at a chaperoned dance.
Suddenly I felt like if I tried to pull him in for a kiss it would be the most awkward, desperate thing I could possibly do.
I must’ve imagined only a few moments before, when I’d been sure he was smelling my hair.
“In the meantime,” he said, “what else do you want to see in Ireland? Where do you want to go?”
I wrinkled my nose, thinking about it. In another life, if I’d had the chance to plan a trip like a normal person, there would be any number of cool attractions and amazing sites I’d want to visit.
Those iconic cliffs, or megalithic monuments, or other cities like Galway or Cork.
The idea of seeing any of those places sounded incredible, but I also found it hard to click into picturing myself as a regular tourist.
“It’s bad luck,” I said. “Starting a journey on a Sunday.”
He looked around, like he was searching for a clock somewhere in the club, before he reached to grab his phone out of his pocket.
The action shifted him a little under my arms, and my hand did brush the edge of his hair then.
I could pretend it had just been his own motion that had done it, and I used the excuse to splay my fingers in the fuzz before dropping my hand back to his neck.
There was the finest sheen of sweat there, like dancing had heated him up.
“We’ve got time,” he said, glancing down at his phone screen. “Let’s keep the night going.”
We walked quickly down the cobblestoned streets with an urgency like we were two fugitives on the run, laughing like we were two teenagers out past curfew.
“Nothing is going to be open,” I said.
“That depends,” he said. “And we can always see how far we get. So what about it, what do you want to do?”
It didn’t matter, so I said the first thing that occurred to me without overanalyzing it. “Yeats’ grave?”
We came to a street with more traffic, and Eamonn reached down to grab my hand as we half ran across.
He dropped it the minute we made it to the other side, and I wondered if he’d thought about it before taking my hand, or if it had been an automatic gesture.
I couldn’t decide which one I liked the idea of more.
“A poet’s grave,” he said once we were headed down a side street, like he wanted to make sure he’d heard me. “That’s the one?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know, I’ve always wanted to see it. Is it far?”
“It’s on the other side of the bloody country,” Eamonn said, then grinned at me. “But it’s a small country. We could head that way, see how far we get before we’re too tired, then pull off the road somewhere to sleep.”
“I don’t want to sleep,” I said. I hadn’t known I’d felt like that until I said it, any more than I’d known I was going to suggest we visit a writer’s grave in the middle of the night.
I had this paranoia that if I allowed myself to go to sleep, if I let myself fall fully into a dream state, there was no telling what might happen next.
I didn’t know if I’d wake up and be back in my old life, which would be a relief in many ways, should be what I wanted. I should be begging to sleep.
But there was also the chance that I wouldn’t wake up at all.
Or that I’d wake up and be in a completely different place, a dream within a dream, a nesting doll I’d never emerge from.
And I didn’t want this night to be over yet, didn’t want to have to say goodbye to Eamonn now that he’d found me again.
“Well,” he said. “It’s about three hours, so I’ll try to make it in one go, but if I need to stop, then I will. How about that?”
“Sounds good.” He was the one driving through the night. It wasn’t really my place to dictate how he did it.
We kept walking, and I was grateful to have his jacket back.
I was also gratified by how many streets and landmarks I felt like I recognized already, how I remembered being on Drury Street earlier that day or passed a corner shop that had been all lit up and bustling but now the windows were dark.
I hadn’t traveled very much in my life, relatively speaking, but I liked the point when someplace new started feeling a little familiar.
There was a puddle in the dip of the street when we stepped off one sidewalk, and Eamonn cleared it in one easy stride, reaching back to touch my elbow as I did the same. “Watch yourself.”
I wondered what a date looked like to Eamonn.
If this was the kind of thing he would’ve done with the girl he’d said didn’t see her forever with him—dinner, maybe even the dancing after.
I wondered about the best date he’d ever had, if there was any part of him that would be tempted to say this, tonight, even though it wasn’t a date, even though we hadn’t chosen it or planned it so much as let it unfold.
“So it really is all a coincidence, then?” Eamonn said seemingly out of nowhere, although maybe his thoughts were running in the same direction as mine. “You being here, after that date with Niall?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re not actually dating?”
I wanted to snort, but held it in. “No.”
He gestured across the street to where he’d parked, and it made me happy just to see that weird little red car again.
I stood on the right side, waiting for him to get in and open the doors, but instead he reached around me, close enough that his hand brushed my skirt, as he put the key in the lock.
“You planning to drive?” he asked, a smile in his voice, and I realized my error and walked around the front to the other side of the car. He’d already gotten in and reached over to open my door from the inside.
“It’s not my fault everything’s flipped here,” I said, buckling my seat belt.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Everything is just as it should be. Here, pick the music if you want.”
He grabbed a shoebox of old cassette tapes from the back seat and set it on my lap.
I took the tape that was already sticking out from the deck in the dashboard, giving it a glance.
It looked homemade, incomprehensible initials printed across the top of it in black Sharpie.
I held it up, my eyebrows raised in question.
“Uh, not that one,” he said, picking it from my fingers and tossing it in the back. “That’s a bargain bin compilation I found, it’s a little rough. There’s other stuff in there.”
It was an eclectic selection of music. Bands I’d heard of, like Depeche Mode and The Clash and The Smiths, but then a lot that I hadn’t, which seemed to be more punk or metal if all the black design and jagged lettering was anything to go on.
I held up a cassette featuring Cher on the front of it, her eyes closed, her hair big and her hand tucked inside her leather jacket. “Cher’s self-titled?”
He took it from me, removing the tape from its case and sliding it into the tape deck. “I can’t have Heart of Stone,” he said. “No music after 1987 in the car, that’s the rule.”
It was a bit of a mistake, I realized after he’d turned the volume up where we could hear the music but still comfortably talk over it.
This album was all about big emotions, and Cher wasted no time in getting right into it.
Eamonn had only barely pulled onto a main street, drumming his fingers lightly against the steering wheel, and I already felt like my heart was in my throat.
He glanced over at me. “This drive would be prettier during the day,” he said. “When you could see the scenery better.”
There was something endearing about the way he always wanted things to be prettier for me, whether the flowers in the park or the scenery outside the car window.
It was like he was both protective of his home country, wanting it to be its most impressive, and also like he wanted to impress me.
I thought back to the women at the club, who’d all been thrilled I was leaving with someone.
I hadn’t wanted them to think he was a stranger, but I also didn’t know how to explain that we’d just met, so in the end they seemed to think he was my Irish boyfriend and I let them.
Now there were lights strewn across the buildings we passed by, a stretch of clear road in front of us, and Cher singing about finding someone to take away the loneliness. It was hard to imagine this drive could be improved upon.
“I love night driving when I don’t have to drive,” I said. “And I can see well enough.”