Ronan
I found her in my study at one in the morning, and I should have left her there.
That was the thought I had in the doorway.
Leave her be. She'd had the worst day a person could have that didn't end with them in the ground, the kind grave turned to a question, the loved uncle turned into the hand that opened the doors, all her grief revealed as a thing she'd worn for a man who didn't deserve it.
She didn't need me. She needed quiet and the dark and to be left alone to put herself back together the way she'd done it since she was fifteen.
But she stood at my window with her back to the door and the moon doing what it did off the water, and she said, without turning around, "I know you're there. You breathe like a big man trying to be quiet. You're all rubbish at it."
So I didn't leave.
I came in and shut the door. She still didn't turn. She had her arms wrapped around herself, the dressed one careful against her stomach, and she stared out at the black water like it owed her something.
"He used to take me down to the harbor," she said.
"Eamon. When my father worked and my mother had her headaches.
He'd buy me chips and let me throw them at the gulls and tell me which of the men on the docks were lying about their catch and how he could tell.
" A breath. "I learned to read people from a man who was lying to my whole family the entire time.
That's the part I can't get the shape of.
He was good at it because he meant it. The kindness was real.
That's how he got close enough to do it. "
"Sienna."
She went still.
I hadn't planned to say it. It came out of me the way the truth does when you've held it long enough, on its own schedule, deciding for itself that now was the time.
I'd been careful the whole time. Claire when others were in the room.
Nothing at all when it was just us, because I didn't trust what my own mouth would do with her real name.
It had sat in me like a swallowed coal the whole time, the name I grieved at an empty grave, and it finally got loose at one in the morning in a dark room because I was tired and so was she, the day having burned all the careful out of both of us.
She turned around then.
"Say it again," she said.
"Sienna."
"You've never said it. Not once, this whole time." Her voice went strange. "Fifteen years. I'm Claire. I've been Claire so long that Sienna feels like a girl I read about once. And you say it like..." She stopped. "Like you know her."
"I was meant to," I said.
And because I'd started, because the coal was out, I gave her the rest of it.
"Our fathers made an arrangement. You and me.
I was nineteen, you were small, it was the kind of thing families like ours did, stitching two houses together with a promise neither child got a vote in.
I didn't think much of it at the time. You were a name in my father's mouth, a Madigan girl down the coast I'd marry one day when you were grown.
An arrangement set aside for a future I assumed would take care of itself.
" I made myself hold her eyes while I said it, because she deserved to be looked at while I told her.
"We met once. You were seven. There was a christening, two families in a cold church, and you spent the whole time trying to feed communion wafers to a dog somebody had tied up outside.
Your mother kept hauling you back in by your collar, and you kept marching straight back out.
I remember thinking, God help the man who's promised that one. "
Something cracked in her face. Not breaking. The opposite. Something letting go.
"I don't remember," she whispered.
"You were seven. You had no reason to." I came a step closer.
"And then the cliffs burned, and they told me the Madigan girl was dead, and I stood at a grave with no one in it and buried the idea of you.
Not the woman. I never had the woman. I buried the promise.
The future I'd assumed would take care of itself.
I decided that day that wanting things was for men who got to keep them, and I wasn't going to be one, and I was very, very good at it for a long time.
" My voice had gone rough at the bottom and I let it.
"And then Tiernan rang me from a bar in Chicago and said your name, your real one, and every bit of that careful work came undone in about four seconds, because it turned out I hadn't buried you at all.
I'd just been waiting. I didn't even know I was doing it.
All those years, waiting for a woman I'd told myself was a closed grave. "
She crossed the room.
I'll be honest about it, even to myself.
I didn't reach for her first. She came to me.
She put her good hand flat on my chest, over the place where the thing I'd buried refused to stay buried, and she looked up at me with the Madigan green that started all of this, and she said, "Then stop waiting. "
I kissed her.
Every one of those years went into it, and I tried to keep them out and failed.
She made a sound against my mouth, low, and her good hand fisted in my shirt and pulled.
I went. I'd have gone anywhere she pulled.
I got my hands on either side of her face and kissed her the way you kiss the thing you'd stopped letting yourself believe in.
She tasted like the whiskey she'd had downstairs, and under it like something I'd never tasted and somehow already knew.
"Ronan." My name in her mouth nearly took my legs.
"I have you," I said against her lips. "Whatever you need tonight. I have you."
"I don't want to think," she said. "For one hour I don't want to think about any of it. Make me not think."
That, I could do.
There was a fire still going low in the grate.
I kept one most nights. The study held the cold worse than the rest of the house, and at one in the morning the embers were the only light in the room besides the moon off the water.
I took her to it. Not to the desk. I'd spent too many years at that desk being the head of a family I thought was the only thing I'd ever be allowed to have, and I wanted her nowhere near it tonight.
I brought her to the old rug in front of the hearth instead, the soft worn one my mother used to sit us on as boys when the storms took the power out, the one warm place in a hard room.
I lowered her down onto it, careful of the stitched arm, until she was lying back with the firelight moving over her and her dark hair spread against the wool.
"You keep looking at me like that," she said, "and I really will stop thinking."
"That's the idea."
That got a laugh out of her, low and surprised, the first real one I'd heard from her since she came. I decided then and there I'd earn that sound for the rest of my life if she let me.
I kissed her again, slowly, then less slow, working my way down her throat while my hand found the hem of her shirt and slid under it to the warm skin of her stomach.
She arched into the touch like she'd been starved of an ordinary hand for years, which I supposed she had.
I got the shirt up and off, careful over the bandage.
Kissed the top of one breast and felt her breath stutter.
Went lower. Her ribs, the soft of her stomach, the jut of her hip, and she was breathing hard by the time I reached the waist of her jeans.
"Tell me yes," I said.
"Yes." Barely a word at all. "Ronan. Yes."
I drew her jeans down and off, and what she wore under them, and I knelt back on my heels and took her in, laid out on my mother's rug in the firelight, flushed and wanting and so completely alive after a day that had spent itself trying to take the life out of her. For a breath all I could do was look.
"What," she said, gone self-conscious for the first time, an arm starting to fold across herself.
"Don't." I caught her wrist. Gentle. Moved it back down. "All those years I had a grave with your name on it. Let me look at the alternative a minute."
Whatever she meant to say, she let it go. She let me look.
Then I lowered my head and stopped letting either of us think.
I took my time. I'd had a long drought of no time and I wasn't going to rush the hour I'd been handed.
I learned her slowly, with my mouth, the way I learned everything that ever mattered, by paying attention, reading the catch of her breath and the tightening of her thighs until I found the thing that undid her.
When I found it I stayed, and stayed, until she had one hand fisted in my hair and the other reaching blind across the floor for something to hold.
I gave it to her. The good hand. I laced my fingers through hers and held on against the wool, because this was not only my mouth on her.
This was a man who'd buried the idea that wanting was even allowed, being let, for one night, to give.
To the one person he'd been certain he would never get to give anything to at all.
"Ronan." My name, broken clean in half. "Ronan, I'm going to."
"I know," I said against her. "I've got you. Let go."
She came with my name in her mouth, her spine lifting off the rug and her hand crushing mine. I held her through all of it, gentling as the waves slowed, until she sank back into the wool loose and gasping with her free arm thrown over her eyes.
I was well past wanting her. I won't pretend otherwise. All those years had pressed it down into something with weight, and she was right there in the firelight, undone and willing, and it would have cost me nothing. A button. A breath. She'd have pulled me in and been glad of it.
I sat back on the rug. I drew her underwear and her jeans back up her legs, gently, and I did not take what I wanted.
She moved her arm and looked at me. Hazy, then less hazy as it landed.
"You didn't," she said.
"No."
"I wanted you to." Not hurt. Just knocked clean off her feet by it.
"I know." I stretched out beside her on the rug, up on an elbow, and brushed the damp hair off her forehead.
I kissed her softly so she could taste herself on me, and felt the shiver go through her.
"And you'll have me. All of me. But not tonight.
Not on the worst day of your life, with the man you found out was a ghost this afternoon still sitting behind your eyes, when you came in here to get an hour away from your own head.
" I held her gaze. "The first time I have you, you're going to be clear.
Clear enough to know exactly what it is and exactly who I am, and you're going to choose it with the whole of your mind, not because grief made you want to disappear for an hour.
" I traced a thumb along her jaw. "You deserve to be a decision, Sienna. Not an escape from one."
She looked at me for a long while in the firelight, and her eyes got wet. I didn't think Eamon was in the room with us anymore.
"You're a very irritating man," she said, thick.
"So I'm told."
She rolled into me. Put her head on my chest, over the exact place where the buried thing refused to stay buried, and I got an arm around her, and we lay there on my mother's rug with the fire sinking low and the sea moving black past the glass, and for the first time in longer than I could name, the waiting didn't feel like a sentence I served out.
It felt like a thing I chose. Gladly.