Chapter Eighteen NowNever #2
He knew exactly who she meant.
Evelyn Cross.
The safe name. The one sponsors loved. The one people expected. The one he’d been hiding behind. The one the internet had already written for him, as if the world could crowdsource his heart.
Byrne looked at the reporter.
Then he looked past her.
And the world slowed.
It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a physical sensation, like someone had dropped the volume in his skull and turned up the clarity.
The rain seemed to hang in the air in visible strings.
The roar of the Aviva became distant, muffled, as if it was underwater.
Even the reporter’s breath fogged in front of her face in a slow, delicate bloom.
A camera followed his gaze across the rain-soaked pitch to Kaine — mud-streaked, soaked through, laughing softly at something that wasn’t funny.
Alive. Real. Shoulders still heaving with exertion, cheeks flushed, that bright, stubborn shine in his eyes that had carried them through eighty minutes of hell.
Kaine glanced up.
Their eyes met.
And in that suspended second Byrne saw it all at once: every time he’d swallowed a truth, every time he’d let Kaine disappear, every time he’d taken the easy line because it made the headlines quieter and his life manageable.
He saw the ice bath, the question, the way Kaine had walked away without slamming a door because he’d been too tired to beg.
He saw the future, too — not rings and certainty, not some tidy fairytale — but a series of mornings and matches and choices, and one of them was about to happen now. Right now. On this pitch. In front of the entire Aviva. In front of cameras broadcasting to the whole world.
If he answered the question the way they wanted, he would lose him forever.
Byrne looked back at the reporter.
Looked straight into the camera.
He saw the red tally light.
Saw his own reflection warped in the wet lens.
And something in him — something old, something finally exhausted — snapped clean into decision.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said.
The words landed hard and clear.
The stadium went quiet.
Not silent — but hushed, breath caught, the crowd sensing something breaking open. A collective intake like the entire country had leaned forward at once.
Byrne reached up, unclipped the microphone from his collar, and let it fall into the mud.
It hit with a wet, ugly sound that somehow felt perfect. Honest. Final.
Then he walked.
Not hurried. Not uncertain.
He marched.
Straight past the reporters. Straight through the rain. Cameras scrambled to follow, boots slipping as they tried to keep up. A producer shouted something; someone cursed as they nearly went down. The camera kept him centered anyway, because this — whatever this was — had become the story.
The crowd stayed eerily quiet, a hundred thousand people holding their breath.
Kaine’s smile faded as Byrne closed the distance.
“Byrne—”
Lucas cupped his face with both hands, thumbs warm and steady against mud-smeared cheeks.
“I’m so sorry,” Lucas said, voice breaking. “I’ve been a moron. I was scared. I thought I could fix it later.”
Eli stared at him, rain dripping from his lashes.
“I’m choosing to fix it now,” Lucas said. “I’m choosing you.”
He swallowed.
“I love you.”
Eli’s breath hitched.
The stadium was utterly still.
Then Lucas leaned in and kissed him.
Not frantic.
Not desperate.
Certain.
For half a heartbeat, Eli froze — disbelief written through him — and then he melted, fingers fisting in the front of Lucas’s jersey like he was afraid this might vanish if he let go.
The crowd exploded.
Cheers tore through the stands, roars of approval rolling like thunder. Whistles. Stamping feet. Happy, joyous noise crashing over them in waves. A sound that didn’t just approve — it claimed the moment and made it communal, made it real in the way nothing whispered ever could.
Teammates whooped and clapped. Someone yelled something incoherent and ecstatic. Cameras flashed wildly.
Lucas barely noticed.
He pulled back just enough to rest his forehead against Eli’s.
“I meant it,” he said, softly. “All of it.”
Eli laughed — broken, breathless — and shook his head.
“You’re an idiot,” he said.
“Yeah,” Lucas said. “But I’m yours.”
Eli kissed him again, fierce and unafraid, right there in the rain, right there in the center of the pitch, right there with the whole world watching and no apology left in either of them.
Somewhere in Dublin, Maeve Donnelly stood barefoot in Lucas Byrne’s apartment, wrapped in Lucas Byrne’s jumper, drinking Lucas Byrne’s very good whiskey straight from the bottle like she’d paid for it herself.
Which, frankly, she felt entitled to after his bullshit.
She’d kicked her shoes off hours ago, feet tucked up on the kitchen chair, the match on far too loud, the windows rattling faintly every time the crowd roared. She’d been pacing for most of the second half, muttering at the screen, flinching at every hit like it was landing on her own ribs.
“Jesus Christ, Luke, will you breathe,” she’d snapped at one point, pointing an accusatory finger at the television. “You’re going to give yourself a heart attack and I do not have time to explain that to your mother.”
The final whistle had barely finished echoing.
And then—
The reporter.
The question.
Maeve froze.
The whiskey bottle hovered halfway to her mouth as the words landed.
Do you want to dedicate this win to anyone special?
“Oh no,” Maeve said aloud, dread curling sharp in her chest. “Don’t you dare, you cowardly bollocks.” The finger came up to point at the tv again. “Don’t do it you cunt!”
She leaned closer to the screen, heart pounding.
Luke looked past the reporter.
Maeve followed his gaze as the camera did.
She saw Eli.
And then Luke looked straight back at the camera.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
Maeve screamed.
A full, feral, unladylike sound tore out of her as she slapped the kitchen counter hard enough to rattle the cutlery drawer.
“Oh my God,” she whooped, already laughing, already crying. “ABOUT TIME, YA FUCKING EEJIT!”
She didn’t even register the mic hitting the mud. She was too busy watching him walk — straight past the reporters, straight across the pitch like a man possessed.
“Yes! … Yes!” she crowed, pointing at the screen. “Go on. GO ON.” She hadn’t even been this animated during the match.
Her eyes burned as Luke stopped in front of Eli. As he cupped his face. As his mouth moved, words swallowed by the roar in Maeve’s ears but not by her heart.
“Oh, Luke,” she breathed, the laugh breaking into something wetter, softer. “You stupid bastard. I love you.”
When Luke kissed him, Maeve made a strangled noise somewhere between a sob and a bark of laughter and dropped heavily into the nearest chair.
“Jesus,” she said hoarsely, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, will you look at him.”
The crowd erupted.
Maeve laughed harder, shaking her head, tears streaking down her cheeks as she took a long pull straight from the bottle.
“Would you look at that,” she sniffed. “The whole country is clapping because you finally got your head out of your arse.”
She raised the bottle toward the television in a mock toast, voice thick but steady.
“Finally,” she said, pride shining through every rough edge of the word. “I was starting to think I’d have to lock em in a room together.”
She took another drink, wiped her mouth, and smiled — wide, fierce, and impossibly fond.
“God help anyone who tries to hurt you now,” Maeve murmured, eyes never leaving the screen. “They’ll have to go through all of Ireland first.”
She leaned back in her chair, jumper swallowing her whole, whiskey warm in her chest, and laughed softly to herself.
“About time,” she said again, quieter now. “About bloody time.”
On the other side of the world, in Auckland, it was just after dawn.
Grey light crept through thin curtains — but there were far too many people in the Kaine family home for anyone to notice the sunrise properly.
The house had spilled past its own walls hours ago.
The front door had been propped open since before kickoff.
Shoes were piled in chaotic heaps by the entry like an offering.
Someone’s chilly bin sat by the back step with a handwritten label on masking tape that simply read: DON’T TOUCH (AUNTIE’S).
They were hosting a watch-party. Not the quiet, polite kind where everyone pretended rugby was background noise.
The huge kind.
The kind where neighbors you hadn’t seen in years arrived with foil trays of food and kissed you on both cheeks like no time had passed.
The kind where cousins dragged extra plastic chairs in from the garage, where kids fell asleep in a tangle of blankets on the floor and were carefully stepped over like sacred obstacles.
The kind where the kettle never stopped boiling, where someone shouted “WHO WANTS TEA?” every ten minutes and no one ever said no.
Where the lounge was packed shoulder to shoulder and the hallway was packed too and someone had set up a second screen in the dining room because there were simply too many bodies to fit.
The television blared from the front of the lounge, volume unapologetically high, rugby roaring through the speakers like weather.
A second TV — slightly smaller, slightly crooked — played in the dining room, where aunts leaned on the table with plates in hand, eyes locked to the screen.
Someone’s phone had been propped up on a stack of coasters with a livestream running as backup “just in case,” because no one trusted anything important to the mercy of a single connection.
The air smelled like toast and fried bread and strong tea, like someone’s perfume, like damp jackets hung too close together, like warm bodies and anticipation.
There was laughter threaded through everything, the low constant hum of community: small talk, teasing, “Shush!” calls when the ref brought the whistle to his mouth, and the occasional roar that made a baby in the back room stir and then settle again.