Chapter Twenty One And It Goes On #2
He’d never been particularly sentimental about airports. He’d spent his adult life in them—lounges, gates, early-morning queues, the tired sameness of duty-free perfume and coffee that tasted vaguely of cardboard.
But airports were where you learned the cost of loving people who moved.
Eli returned, eyes a little red, face steady.
The plane pushed back slowly, engines deepening, lights blinking. It began its careful turn, inch by inch, toward the runway.
Lucas followed its path until it vanished from view, swallowed by distance and dark.
He stood there with the sadness and didn’t fight it.
Months ago, that sight would have broken him. It would have felt like a punishment. A consequence. Something he deserved for not being brave enough.
Now it just felt like rhythm.
People leaving. People returning. Love stretching across oceans and refusing to snap.
“They’ll land in two days,” Eli said. “Texted already. Mum says she forgot to tell you she loves you.”
Lucas’s throat tightened. “Tell her I love her too.”
Eli paused—just for a beat. Then nodded, a soft smile pulling at his mouth. “Yeah. She’ll like that.”
They began to walk away from the gate together, footsteps syncing without effort.
Lucas glanced back once more, as if making sure the silver fern had truly gone.
Eli bumped his shoulder lightly. “You hungry?”
“Always.”
“Thought so. There’s a place still open near the river.”
Lucas smiled, small and real. “Lead the way.”
They moved through the terminal, past closed shops and sleepy cleaners, past couples dozing against their luggage, past the glow of vending machines that promised snacks in neon desperation.
Lucas let the ordinary details settle him. Let the world feel real again.
It had been months since the kiss.
The phrase still made his mouth twitch when he heard it—the kiss seen round the world, as the tabloids had breathlessly named it. The clip had been replayed endlessly, slowed down, zoomed in, dissected by strangers with opinions and hot takes and far too much time.
For a while, it had felt like living inside an echo.
There had been the immediate aftermath—Aoife’s tight-eyed competence, Maeve’s profanity-laced triumph, the way the training facility had looked at him with a mixture of awe and “you absolute lunatic,” the way the crowd outside the gates had held flags and signs and made him cry in a taxi like a man who didn’t know how to accept kindness.
There had been the press conference too… short, controlled, as Aoife had demanded. Lucas had kept his answers boring on purpose. He’d refused to turn his private life into a spectacle, even when every question tried to drag it there.
He’d said only what he could live with forever:
“Yes, I’m in love.”
“Yes, it’s real.”
“No, I won’t apologize.”
And then he’d gone home—to Eli’s flat, because “home” had changed shape without anyone writing it down.
They’d lost a handful of sponsors. Predictable ones. Brands that had already felt hollow. Lucas had signed the termination paperwork with a strange calm, as if he’d known, somewhere deep down, that those doors were never meant to stay open.
He’d expected that to hurt more than it did.
But then the offers had poured in.
New partnerships. Better ones. Campaigns that didn’t flinch.
Invitations to appear, to speak, to exist as himself without qualifiers.
Not because he wanted to be a symbol—God, he didn’t—but because people kept telling him, quietly and earnestly, that it mattered to see someone survive what they were still afraid to name.
There had been letters, too.
Not the creepy ones, though those existed—there were always creeps. Lucas had learned to live with creeps the way celebrities did, by trusting Aoife and locking his doors.
No, the ones that stayed with him were simple.
A teenager from Donegal: I watched you and didn’t feel sick with fear for the first time.
A man in his forties from Limerick: I didn’t come out till last year. I was so tired. I’m happy you’re free now.
A woman who wrote she’d never cared about rugby until she saw two men kiss in the rain and then she cried in her kitchen like she’d been watching her favorite daytime show.
Lucas had read those late at night with Eli’s hand on his back, both of them quiet.
He didn’t think about Declan much anymore—in the days after the cup match Declan had used the words “We can fix this” and Lucas had promptly fired him without expression.
Declan’s little narratives had crumbled on impact with real life.
The tabloids had tried to twist it into scandal, but scandal required secrecy, and Lucas had taken that weapon and snapped it in half on live television.
And then there had been his father. His father was different. His father lived in Lucas’s chest like a stone.
The message that had come.
We will pray for you and the country to find the way back to God.
No “I love you.”
No “Are you safe?”
No “I’m proud.”
Just prayer as a weapon, disguised as kindness.
Lucas had stared at that screen until the letters blurred.
He’d broken in Eli’s arms so hard Eli had gone silent—no jokes, no lightness, just steady breathing and hands that held him the way you held something fragile you refused to drop.
They’d talked later. Slowly. Carefully. Lucas had admitted things he’d never let himself say before: that he’d been afraid of losing his parents because they’d built their love like a contract. That he’d always suspected he was one misstep away from voiding it.
Eli hadn’t tried to fix that. He’d only said, softly, “I’m sorry. That’s shit.”
Then he’d called his mum.
Not to complain. Not to ask permission.
Just to hear her voice.
And Mereana had said, without hesitation, “Take care of Lucas. Feed him. That boy needs feeding.”
Two weeks later, the Kaines arrived in Dublin for the first time.
They’d made Eli’s flat too small by sheer force of personality.
Aunties in the kitchen. Hemi quietly helping replace the refrigerator door that had taken the brunt of emotions.
Kiri taking Lucas’s phone out of his hand and changing his social media privacy settings while scolding him for having “the digital survival skills of a 90-year-old.”
Mereana had hugged Lucas like he belonged there.
When Lucas had tried to apologize for the chaos, for the inconvenience, for being a “situation,” Mereana had taken his face in her hands and said, very firmly, “You are not a problem to manage.”
Lucas had cried anyway. Quietly. Like someone learning a new language.
Maeve had come over that same night and taken one look at the living room full of Kaine relatives and said, delighted, “Oh my God. It’s a whole army.”
Kiri had sized Maeve up, grinned, and said, “You’re the friend, eh? The loud one.”
Maeve had beamed. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
They’d bonded instantly, terrifyingly. Within ten minutes they were in Eli’s kitchen drinking Lucas’s whiskey and discussing, with alarming seriousness, whether they could “accidentally” run Declan over with a rental car and claim it was the rain.
Lucas had stood in the doorway watching them like a man witnessing a natural disaster form.
Eli had leaned in and murmured, “We were worried about the wrong people taking over the world.”
Maeve had stayed a week after that visit, not because Lucas needed babysitting—though he probably did—but because she was Maeve and she loved him like it was a duty.
When she finally left, she’d kissed Lucas’s cheek and said, “You don’t get to waste this.”
Lucas had nodded, throat tight.
He’d been trying not to.
And now, tonight—standing at the airport while Eli’s family flew home—Lucas felt the shape of it.
What he’d lost.
What he’d gained.
It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t fair. He didn’t get a neat narrative where his parents came around in the end, and everyone clapped. Some people didn’t come around. Some people chose their fear and called it faith.
Lucas couldn’t control that.
But he could control what he chose next.
He could choose to be loved, even if it came from places he hadn’t expected.
Eli glanced over as they reached the exit doors. “You went quiet.”
Lucas exhaled. “Just… thinking.”
“That’s dangerous territory for you,” Eli said automatically, and then softened. “What’s going on in that head?”
Lucas paused, letting the cold night air hit his face as the doors slid open. Dublin smelled like damp stone and traffic and river, like a city that had survived too much to be impressed by drama.
“I’m sad,” Lucas admitted. “About them leaving.”
Eli nodded. “Me too.”
“And I’m…” Lucas hesitated, the words sticking. “I’m grateful. And it makes me feel guilty that I’m grateful.”
Eli stopped walking.
Lucas stopped too, automatically.
Eli turned toward him fully, hands sliding into Lucas’s coat pockets and finding his fingers again, like they belonged there.
“Hey,” Eli said. “You don’t have to earn being loved.”
Lucas swallowed. His eyes burned.
“I know,” he said hoarsely. “It’s just—when you grow up with love as a condition, you start thinking warmth always comes with a price tag.”
Eli’s gaze didn’t waver. “My mum loves you because you love me. My dad respects you because you chose me in public. Kiri loves you because you’re an endless source of stress and she finds that entertaining.”
Lucas let out a choked laugh.
Eli’s mouth curved. “And I love you because you’re you. Not because you’re captain. Not because you did some dramatic thing once. Because you’re the man who still holds the door for old ladies and then panics if someone thanks him.”
“That’s not—” Lucas started.
“That’s exactly you,” Eli said.