Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
The sky was gray and overcast when we pulled into a parking lot with a bunch of other cars, and I knew we weren’t at Eamonn’s shop even though we’d been driving long enough that I assumed we must be close. I gave him a quizzical look as he unbuckled his seat belt.
“Two days on an island and you haven’t even seen the sea,” he said. “I thought we’d stop for a bit. Sound okay?”
We got out to walk along the promenade, waiting for a break in the wall where we could enter the beach. I could tell Eamonn had something in particular on his mind, so I wasn’t surprised when he finally asked me a question.
“When do you fly out?”
He must’ve been feeling a similar weight to what I had, the sense that something was coming to an end. Maybe it was just that typical Sunday-evening vibe as one week closed and another one started, but we’d both been quiet on the three-hour drive back to the other coast.
“Well, I’ll need to work out the passport thing,” I said.
“I can still drive you in,” he said. “If you want.”
It felt like a roundabout way to ask if I would spend the night at his place. Or maybe that was just the question I wanted to answer. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“No,” he said. “Definitely not.”
There was a low fog that hid the line of water from view until we finally stepped out onto the rocky beach and headed toward it.
The rocks crunched beneath my feet, and I could feel them poking through the thin soles of my flats, so I had to step carefully to make sure I didn’t hurt myself.
Eamonn took his hand out of his pocket to hover briefly at my elbow, like he was going to steady me, before he put his hands back in his pockets again.
Now that he was wearing his work pants and the matching jacket, it really did make him look like a mechanic, all suited up and ready to go.
I wanted to ask him more about the man who’d given him the apprenticeship before he went to prison and then still felt kindly enough toward him to write a character reference, get him a job when he got out.
I wanted to know how the man who’d taught him to be mechanically inclined in the first place, the one who’d probably shown him how to fix a faulty boiler and troubleshoot other problems around a house, could just up and leave one day and start another family without looking back.
“Do you come out here often?” I asked instead.
“Not as much as I should,” he said. “I forget how pretty the water is, every single time, and then when I see it again it hits me all at once. It’s overwhelming.”
I glanced at him, expecting to see him staring out at the sea like I had been, but he was looking at me.
We’d inched nearer to the sandy shore, the waterline dangerously close to the edge of our shoes.
Eamonn would be fine with those big old boots of his, but if my flats got wet they’d be miserable to walk in.
I kicked them off, leaving them on the dry part of the sand.
“I’m going in,” I said.
“It’ll be cold.”
“I know,” I said. “I can handle it.”
Turned out, I could just barely handle it, because the water was freezing.
I gave a shocked yelp the minute it washed over my bare feet, turning back to look at Eamonn with what I was sure was a holy fuck expression because that was all my face could do.
He laughed, giving a head shake that I could read clear as day. Told you so.
“You should come in,” I called.
“I’m grand, thanks.”
That accent, the way he dropped the h from the word.
I still loved it, but it was shocking how quickly I felt like I’d gotten used to it, how much less I thought of him as intriguing, hot Irish guy and more as simply Eamonn.
He was watching me in the water, an indulgent smile playing around his mouth, and I thought, I could love this man.
That was as close as I allowed myself to get to that type of thought.
I was still very conscious of the fact that this might not even be real, although it felt impossible that it wasn’t, with the sting of frigid water swirling around my ankles, the wind blowing my hair across my face.
I’d known Eamonn for a little over a day, maybe I didn’t know him at all.
I knew what I felt but I also knew that you couldn’t always trust your feelings.
“All right,” he said, “you proved your point. You’re more badass than me. Can you get out of there now, before you catch your death?”
My teeth had started chattering. I stepped out of the water, making my way carefully back up the rocky shore to Eamonn, trying to avoid any sharp bits poking up out of the ground. I eyed my shoes, but my feet were still wet so I didn’t exactly want to slide them back in there.
“I really didn’t think this through,” I said, laughing. “Worth it, though. Now I can always say that I stood in the Irish Sea.”
Eamonn shrugged out of his jacket. “Hold on to me,” he said gruffly, and before I knew what he was going to do, he’d bent down to dry off my feet with the soft fleece lining of the jacket.
His warm hand encircled my ankle, lifting my foot slightly to rub the cloth over my heel, making sure everything was completely dry before he slid that shoe back over my foot.
Then he started in on my other foot and I had to clutch his shoulders, trying not to lose my balance.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I don’t want you to be cold.”
Maybe it was because of my own fanciful thoughts only a moment before, but those words suddenly felt very close to I could love you, too.
They felt like I will always be gentle with you, which had been rattling around my head ever since he’d said it.
But I had to get a grip on myself, because this was almost a scarier way to lose touch with reality than it had been to wake up in Ireland in the first place.
Almost.
“You never met outerwear you couldn’t just use like a rag, huh?” I said, trying to turn the moment back into something light.
Eamonn huffed a laugh. “Yeah,” he said. “Hazard of the trade, I suppose. Bad habit. I figure that’s what the washing machine is for.”
He pressed his thumb along my arch, not even bothering to use the jacket, before bringing my other shoe closer so I could slide my foot into it.
I thanked him as he stood back up, but it was hard to make direct eye contact, like we’d just been doing something way more salacious on a public beach than him drying off my feet.
My toes were still tingling but not from the cold.
We kept walking along the water’s edge. Ahead of us was a couple with a big, bounding dog who kept running into the water, splashing before heading back up toward them, then making the loop again. When we passed them, Eamonn turned briefly as if to check on the dog one more time before moving on.
“Can I ask you,” I said, “there’s a receipt for some kind of flea shampoo in your jacket pocket—I wasn’t trying to snoop, I swear, it was just in there. But I thought you said you didn’t have a dog, so…”
I didn’t actually know how to phrase the question.
It might come out sounding like I thought he had fleas.
It might come out like I cared way too much about a potential girlfriend’s dog even after he’d said he didn’t really date, and when I had no business getting jealous about something like that anyway.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “I think about getting a dog sometimes,” he said. “That’s all.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“Oh, you know,” he said. “The usual. They’re a lot of commitment. A lot of work. I don’t know if my life could handle a dog right now.”
Eamonn didn’t strike me as someone who was afraid of work, and from what I knew about his life, it actually seemed ideally suited to a dog.
He lived by himself, he stayed home a lot, he owned his own business where, as far as I knew, he could let the dog hang around all day if he wanted.
I didn’t know anything about the safety or health regulations around garages, but that seemed feasible.
Someone who went out of his way to buy flea treatments for a pet he didn’t even have also struck me as someone who really, really wanted a dog.
I was trying to think of a way to phrase all of this without overstepping when he pulled on the sleeve of my sweater—well, his sweater, that I was still wearing. “See that guy over there?”
I looked in the direction he was indicating, and there was an older man sitting in front of an easel.
Whatever he’d been working on, he seemed satisfied that it was done and was in the middle of handing it over to a woman and a young boy.
The woman crouched down to show it to the boy, pointing at a few things in the picture before reaching into her purse for a wad of bills, which she handed to the man.
“Is he some kind of street artist?” I asked. “Like he paints pictures of scenes for tourists, that kind of thing?”
“I assume so,” Eamonn said. “Come on.”
The man was flipping through a pad, flying through various stops and starts of different paintings, pages covered in test smears of paint colors and a few rough sketches. When he reached a blank page he stopped, setting the pad back on his easel, glancing up when he saw us approaching.
“Excuse me,” Eamonn said. “I was wondering if—”
“As Gaeilge, le do thoil,” the man said, and Eamonn glanced at me.
“Ah, my Irish isn’t that good,” Eamonn said. “Hang on, let me—an féidir liom do, uh, péinteanna a úsáid?”
The man’s already wrinkled brow furrowed even more. “Mo phéinteanna?”
“Yeah,” Eamonn said. “If that’s the right word. Ach cúpla nóiméad. I’d pay you, of course. D’íocfainn airgead leat.”
This whole exchange was fascinating to me. “What are you saying?”
“Trying,” Eamonn said. “I don’t know if I’m making any sense. My sister would laugh her head off if she could hear me now.”
I remembered he’d said Kathleen taught Irish, which I’d already assumed was the language he was speaking. Since I didn’t know a word of it, it all sounded good to me.