15. Lorcan
Lorcan
All through dinner, Maeve keeps catching my eye across the table and then looking away fast with a pink blush spreading over her cheeks. Every time it happens, my cock tries to punch its way out of my zipper.
If I’m not mistaken—and I don’t mean to brag, but I’m rarely mistaken when it comes to women—she’s ready to consummate our marriage.
The kids go down easy. Oisin conks out. Jamie's lock clicks. Cara's door closes. And I'm standing in our bedroom doorway watching Maeve pull the pins from her hair, watching it tumble loose around her shoulders.
In seconds I'm crossing the room—
A sharp cry comes through the baby monitor.
Not the stairwell-echo shriek. Not a tantrum howl. This one is different, and it has Maeve racing through the door and down the hall in seconds.
I'm two steps behind her.
Oisin is sitting up in his bed, cheeks flushed cherry-red, hair plastered to his forehead, crying a raspy, hiccuping cry of a kid who feels miserable and doesn't have the words for it.
"Hey, hey, baby, I'm here." Maeve's already got him, hand pressed to his forehead, and I watch her whole face change. "He's burning up with fever.”
Her voice is high-pitched and frantic. "I need a thermometer, children's Tylenol, a cool cloth—god, I don't have any of that stuff here.”
“I’m on it." I'm already moving.
I fire up my Porsche and floor it to the nearest all-night drug store.
The pimply-faced kid working the register helps me find what I need, and I toss him an extra twenty for the quick service.
I'm back in under fifteen minutes with the thermometer and Tylenol, then I race around gathering a cloth and a cup of water.
One hundred and two point four.
"Okay." Maeve exhales through her nose. "Okay. That's high but it's not emergency room-high. It's probably some daycare crud that’s going around." She measures the medicine with a steady hand. "Come on, baby, drink this for me."
Oisin turns his face away and wails.
"I know. I know it's yucky. Please, sweetheart.”
"What if it comes in a special cup?” I ask.
They both look at me.
"Hold on." I take the medicine cup, disappear into the bathroom off our bedroom, and come back with the little dose of Tylenol poured into the cap of my mouthwash bottle—which happens to be shaped like a tiny castle turret, realizing for the first time that whoever designs mouthwash bottles is a genius.
"This is Knight Elixir. Very rare. Only brave boys get it because if they drink it all down, they become knights.”
Oisin peers up at me. Eyes glassy, cheeks blazing, but suspicious.
"I not a knight."
"Not yet. Because you haven't drunk the elixir.” I crouch to his level. “Drink it down, and it’ll be official. You’ll be able to fight dragons.”
He looks at me quizzically.
I shrug. “I don't make the rules, buddy."
There's a long thought process happening behind his eyes. Then his small hand reaches out, takes the turret, and downs the whole dose.
"There it is." I bow to him. "Sir Oisin the dragon slayer.”
"That was shameless," Maeve murmurs.
“But effective," I whisper back, and, over the head of a sick three-year-old, my wife’s eyes meet mine, and our gazes hold.
Then Oisin throws up on my shirt.
It's an impressive amount for such a small person. Maeve gasps and lunges for the damp cloth, apologizing like she personally aimed him at me. I hold the kid out in front of me and hear myself saying, "Good man, better out than in," while pasta from two hours ago sticks to my chest.
"Lorcan, I'm so sorry—give me the shirt, I'll—"
"Maeve." I sit Oisin down and take Maeve by the shoulders. She's already spinning frantically. "It's a shirt. I own others. Breathe."
"He's sick and it's our third night and you probably had other plans—" She stops and presses her lips together.
"Hey." I wait until she looks at me. "There's nowhere else I'd rather be."
That’s not entirely true. I’d rather be fucking my wife all night long, but not while we’re worried about a sick kid.
I strip off the ruined shirt and prepare for a long night.
We fall into a rhythm without discussing it.
She monitors temperature and medicine timing.
I replace cool cloths with fresh ones, and change the bedding.
A little after midnight, the fever spikes to one-oh-three, and Oisin gets weepy and thrashy, kicking off blankets and then sobbing because he's cold, and Maeve walks him in circles while I call the O'Rourke family doctor—who answers on the second ring at midnight, because he's paid to—and confirms what she already knew.
Fluids. Fever reducer. Watch him. Call back if it hits one-oh-four.
"You have a doctor on call," Maeve says when I hang up. "At midnight."
"Perk of the family."
She stares at me over Oisin's damp curls. He won't settle for her. I can see her exhaustion, but his fevered little body is too miserable to be consoled even by MaeMae.
"Give him here," I say.
"He won’t…I don’t think he’ll go to—"
"Let's find out."
She hands him over, and forty pounds of furnace-hot, whimpering boy lands against my chest. I settle into the big armchair by the window, and I do the only thing I know how to do at nearly one in the morning with a sick child. I sing.
Soft and low, the song Ma sang to me through my childhood illnesses—Toora loora loora. My hand moves in slow circles on his small back.
Oisin stills. Not asleep, just listening. His breath hitches, hiccups, then slows. One small hand closes into a fist and rests against me.
So I keep going. Through that one, then Molly Malone. Then, when I run out of lullabies, I sing a soft, embarrassing rendition of Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall—because he doesn't care about the words. He cares about the rumble of my chest and big arms that hold him steadily.
Somewhere around verse forty, I look up.
Maeve is sitting on the edge of the bed, a cool cloth hanging forgotten from her hand, watching us. And her face—
I've seen my wife furious. Suspicious. Exhausted. I've seen her writhe in pleasure.
I have never seen her look like this. Open. Unguarded.
"He doesn't do that," she whispers. "He doesn't—with anyone but me. Ever."
“Maybe he knows,” I say quietly, over the small head tucked under my chin. “That I’d take a bullet for him.”
Her breath catches. “You would?"
"Maeve." I lock eyes with her across the dimly lit room, holding this warm little boy. “For any of you. Without a moment’s hesitation.”
She doesn't answer. She just crosses the room, sits on the chair's arm beside us, rests her head against my shoulder, and lays her hand over Oisin's small back.
The fever breaks at 4 a.m.
I know because Maeve's checked every thirty minutes all night—and when the thermometer beeps ninety-nine point one, she sags against me in relief. She’s asleep within minutes.
Two of them now, sleeping on me in the gray almost-morning, and my arm is dead and my back is ruined and there is vomit in my hair somewhere, I'm nearly sure of it.
I look down at my wife’s face, soft in sleep, and at the little boy breathing easy against my chest, and I think about the two kids asleep down the hall who also came as part of the package deal.
How hard can one small wife be?
Hardest thing I've ever done.
And the best thing I've ever done.