Chapter Two
Cillian
We anchor just off the reef in Isle Arun’s sheltered bay.
The resort is the central point of a little town pressed right up against the beach.
The island is big enough to have all the amenities a tour group could want, and low-key enough to have them all available.
There’s a mountain in the island’s centre, covered in so much lush green it feels like Ireland, except rather than rowan and ash and oak you have wild fig and almond trees.
Everyone’s on deck in trunks and bikinis, picking snorkels and fins from a large tub.
As groups go, this one’s proving easier to wrangle than the others I’ve helped Seán take out.
Initially, I thought they were all being nice and respectful because Seán is their friend, but watching them, I realise the true reason my job of keeping an eye on everything is going so smoothly: someone’s already doing it.
“I forgot my hairband. Do you have a spare?” Willow asks Mary.
“Here.” Jules pulls a hairband from…I miss where. His blond hair is trimmed on the sides and long on top, but nowhere near long enough to need one for himself. A mesh UV shirt hugs his lean frame, and there are streaks of white where he liberally applied sun cream to his face.
Mathieu is hemming and hawing between fins, Darren ineffectually trying to help him find a pair that fits.
“What size are you?” Jules swoops in.
“Forty-one in France, but these are marked with… I don’t think these are even UK sizes?”
Jules presses his foot side by side with Mathieu’s, whose attention lingers where their calves touch. Jules digs through the box. “These should work.” He walks off, Mathieu staring after him. Darren stuffs his feet into flippers, his jaw tight.
I rub my mouth.
“What’s funny?” Seán asks as he comes up from below deck.
He sips from a zero-zero beer, his eyes alert as he scans the group.
I told him since I’m here, resolutely sober, he’s welcome to have an actual beer if he wants.
He took out his phone and played a safety video about guides drinking on the job.
He made me watch the entire thing too, the bastard.
I didn’t get to finish my episode of Home and Away.
He leans against the railing beside me.
“Darren’s date seems more interested in his ex-boyfriend.”
Seán’s brows rise. Across the deck, Mathieu is still gazing after Jules, despite Darren trying to draw him into conversation.
“Serves him right, bringing a date.”
I grunt in agreement. Truthfully, I know everyone in the group decently well bar Darren and Jules, but after that stunt Darren pulled earlier, I’ve formed an opinion.
“Though,” Seán continues, “Jules did specifically request you for ‘eye candy’. I don’t think he’s too hung up about their breakup.”
“Did he actually say that? He barely said a word to me the last time I met up with your friends, never mind check me out.” Unless I missed it, but Jules doesn’t strike me as subtle.
Waxed and bleached. What does that look like?
My gaze slides over his blue trunks. His thighs are lean, with either hair too pale to stand out against his skin, or none at all.
“Looking for a rebound, maybe?” Seán casts me a long look. I tear my gaze from Jules’s shorts and wave it off.
“I’m in a relationship.”
“You got dumped last month.”
“Ah.” That’s right. Kara had thrown several things at me when kicking me out of our Dublin flat. It’s becoming a worrying pattern. I fall into a relationship, things go well, and then, predictable as the rising sun, I fuck up in bed. “Either way, I’ve just ended a relationship with a woman.”
Luckily, all Seán wants in exchange for his couch is that I work for his business.
I grew up joining Seán for most of his outdoor extracurriculars, taking instructor exams as we went.
The adventure centre where I work in Wicklow gets annoyed when I take off for the odd week, but given that they trained Seán since he was a kid, it softens them up that I’m leaving to help him with his business.
“Fair.”
Jules slips his feet into fins, rights his goggles and confidently dives into the water, leading the way.
“How much of this trip was planned by you and how much was planned by Jules?”
“Aside from the nightclub, it’s all me. He’s not a control freak. Or maybe he is, but he’s learned how to delegate.” Seán pushes off the railing. “You good with me drinking later? I don’t mind—”
I wave him away. “Drink away.”
◆◆◆
The nightclub is nestled into the back of the resort, tucked into the tree cover and far from the open-air beach bars out the front and the rooms above.
We’re stuffed into a small, squat room. Hanging yellow bulbs illuminate tables crowded with paint tubs and brushes. Colourful streaks across the walls and floor indicate it’s been used as an art room several times before us. I’m leaning against a clean stretch of one of the tables, sipping a Coke.
Seán has stepped out to speak with the resort manager.
Mary is turning Willow into a piece of art, while their boyfriends are going to be walking beacons of light the second they step beneath the UV lights.
They’re slapping paint all over each other caveman-style.
Mathieu is painting Darren’s face, looking only half-interested in the job.
“Are you good with your hands?” Jules asks me. His cheeks are flushed. His eyes are glazed, mostly pupil bar a thin ring of blue.
I hesitate. I didn’t expect to be propositioned so early in the night, and I don’t have a gentle-turndown script ready.
I’m attracted to assertive, outgoing women.
I’ve dated straight-A students, team captains, college society chairpersons, and business-savvy sharks.
You’re a similar type, except that you’ve got a cock.
“Cillian?”
“Decent. Good. Yeah.”
“Great, I assumed you would be.”
I stare. Have I just agreed to a hand job? I can figure it out. I have a cock. It’s not like there’ll be anything surprising in Jules’s trousers. Except that he’s waxed and bleached. That’s different.
“I’m not Yasop, and I’m keeping my trousers on.” Jules sets a tray of paint jars onto the table next to me. My eyes dart up from Jules’s crotch and across the room, to where Yasop is wearing nothing but boxers and UV paint.
Jules hands me a paintbrush, too busy opening paint jars to notice me realise my stupid misunderstanding. Idiot.
“What design do you have in mind?” I ask, cheeks warm.
Jules studies my tattoos. On my arms is a collection of interlocking knots and spirals, like you find on ancient tombstones and metal objects. Jules’s attention locks on to the triskele triple spiral on the back of my left forearm. It’s faded compared to the others, not as pure a black.
“Can you paint this?”
“I can try.”
Jules wobbles as he sits on the table, then offers me his arm.
“Did you design them?” he asks.
“Nah. I showed a tattoo artist the old Celtic designs I liked, the patterns you find at Newgrange or on old crosses and metal objects like lunulas and gorgets.” I dip the brush into paint.
The jars are all equally bright and gaudy.
“That one is actually warped now. I was a teenager when I got it. As I filled out and muscled up, the design stretched.”
Jules makes a strange noise when the brush touches his upper arm. I stop. His cheek is indented, pinched by teeth.
“Tickles, sorry. Keep going.” Jules swings his legs, making himself a moving canvas. To counteract the squirming, I wrap my fingers around his upper arm and hold him still. I find lean, sinewy muscle.
“Which tattoo came first?”
“The one you pointed to.”
Jules leans in and studies it once more. “Where did this come from? Monument or metalwork?”
“I saw it in person on a boundary marker near where I grew up. It was carved into a standing slab of solid rock as tall as I was, over and over, so that every inch was art.” I shrug. “I liked it.”
Jules’s gaze slides across my arms, dominated by swirling patterns. “Like you.”
Our eyes meet. “I never really thought of it like that. Huh.” I suppose I have ended up modelled after that marker, unintentionally. “Think you can hold still for me now?”
Jules nods.
I continue painting.
“What age were you? And what age are you?”
“I was fifteen, and I’m twenty-three.” At fifteen, I’d finally realised that my money was just going to keep being taken.
Sick of it, I took my paycheck and went straight to the tattoo parlour in the next town over and spent every cent.
And I kept doing it until an older girl I met there invited me to live with her as her pet boyfriend.
I’m pretty sure every bad habit I have now developed around that time.
At least when Seán’s parents tracked me down and invited me to live with them, they instilled some good ones too.
“When I was fifteen, I fell off a horse and broke my collarbone. Friends signed my cast. I guess that’s not really the same.”
“It’s pretty close.”
Jules’s lips quirk up. He tips his head back and meets my eyes. He’s very good at eye contact. “I’m twenty-two. I should be twenty-one, but I’m twenty-two.”
As a rule, I dislike it when people get drunk.
Angry drunk, happy drunk, mopey drunk, conquer-the-world drunk, it doesn’t matter.
You can’t communicate. There’s a gap. Someone can promise you the world and forget come morning.
More fool you if you believed them. I compartmentalise, so strangers don’t bother me, but I can’t help the prickle of discomfort I feel when people I’m close to are drunk.
Jules is a stranger, yet discomfort prickles under my skin.
“Why should you be twenty-one?”
“I started college a year late. I should have graduated last year.”
“Got it. You’re the type to have a life plan.” I’m not surprised. “What’s next for you?”
“Event planning. I should get offers for four of the places I applied to. Maybe five. I didn’t gel with the last interviewer.”