Chapter Twenty-Four #3
“Full throttle,” I said. “That’s what I need, nothing holding me back.”
“Ah, an adrenaline seeker,” Eamonn said, his eyes smiling at me. “Why didn’t you say so. We could find something for you. Cliff diving or mountain biking. I’d take you to get your first tattoo.”
“Oh, I already have a tattoo,” I said.
He glanced at me, seeming genuinely surprised. “Really?”
“What,” I said, “you don’t think I’m the type?”
“I didn’t say that,” he said, his gaze raking down me.
He’d given me that kind of once-over before, but this time it felt different.
It was like he knew he could take his time, like now that we agreed we didn’t regret what had happened in the car, he didn’t have to pretend he wasn’t paying attention.
“I just hadn’t seen one. But I suppose technically you wouldn’t have seen my tattoo, either. Though you did touch it.”
I raised my eyebrows, thinking about that, the way my hands had been greedy underneath his shirt. “Chest? Back?”
He pressed a finger to a spot on his upper arm, hidden beneath his T-shirt sleeve. Now that he mentioned it, I thought I’d felt something there, jagged like a scar, but there had been a lot going on. “What about yours?”
I thought of the small, stupid thing I’d gotten my first year of college, where I’d ended up having the tattoo artist put it. “You got pretty warm,” I said. “You may have touched it. You’re not allowed to ask what it’s of, though, because, trust me, it would be embarrassing for both of us.”
“That’s not fair,” he said. “Now I have to know. What if I guessed it?”
“No,” I said, laughing a little. “Seriously, please. Embarrassing for both of us.”
“Well, I’m not as withholding as you,” he said. “You can peek at mine, if you want. It’s just my mother’s initials.”
I glanced at him, making sure he meant it before I pushed the sleeve of his T-shirt almost all the way up to his corded shoulder. Sure enough, there it was—MJG, carved crudely into his bicep, the letters a little raised. I traced my fingers over them lightly.
“MJG?” I realized I didn’t even know Eamonn’s last name.
“Maura Jean Gallagher,” he said.
“That’s pretty.”
“Yeah.”
I let his sleeve drop back down, smoothing the edge, which had gotten flipped up when I’d moved it. Suddenly, something Eamonn had said earlier sparked another memory. “Wait,” I said. “You grew up around here.”
“So your tattoo,” he said. “Is it lewd? A pinup girl?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, but trust that to be a man’s first idea. Where exactly did you grow up?”
“About ten minutes north of here,” he said. “How did you know that?”
He obviously knew I must’ve gotten my information from his brother, but I could tell he was more expressing surprise that his brother would’ve dropped that detail, given what we’d discussed about him seeming to want as much distance from Ireland as possible.
“Niall mentioned class trips to Carrowmore,” I said.
“So when you named that one, it made something click. Can we visit there? The house where you lived?”
I held my breath. The fact that Eamonn hadn’t been the one to volunteer this information—that we’d driven three hours out to this part of the country, and he’d not once mentioned that he had any connection to it—told me that he wouldn’t be too keen on this idea.
“Nobody lives there anymore,” he said. “Or someone does, but not us. The house was sold after my mother died.”
I could admit that a part of me had been hoping one of his sisters might still be there, Kathleen maybe, with her family. I wondered if he still had any family living nearby, but I didn’t want to push it.
“This is what I want to do,” I said. “Since I would be absolutely hopeless at mountain biking.”
“I can’t interest you in a second tattoo?” he said. “Maybe another Cranberries lyric, to match the first one?”
“Why would I ever be embarrassed by a Cranberries lyric tattoo,” I said. “Why would you?”
“I wouldn’t,” he said. “But you have to admit, if we drove all the way out here because of a Cranberries song and then you also had a lyric tattoo…?”
“That’s just called cohesion,” I said. “That’s called bringing your whole self to something.”
I knew he was trying to distract me away from the conversation about his childhood home, and I was going to let him do it, because if he really didn’t want to visit there then I didn’t want to be the person who made him.
I’d been trying to think of something else to fill the time, to make me forget about the dream or any of its implications, but in a way this conversation was only making me think about it more.
It reminded me of that date with Niall, the last time I’d actually been positive I was still in a stable reality, instead of whatever this was now.
Eamonn sighed, reaching into the pocket of my jacket to retrieve the car key. He seemed to do it thoughtlessly, automatically, but it suddenly struck me as the most romantic thing anyone could do. I wanted him to take keys out of my pockets every day. “All right,” he said. “This time, I’ll drive.”