AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I don’t know. I said a bunch of stuff. Like, just comforting stuff. Why?”
He shakes his head a little. His eyelashes are so dark and thick. A soaked fringe. He scrubs his left hand down his face, wiping away excess moisture.
“No, you said something else. Like, muh hree. Or something.” He makes an irritated sound. “I’m butchering it. There was another part, too. Ah kooshla. Ah kooshla muh hree.”
He’s right – he is butchering it. But my breath catches anyway, because it’s close enough for me to hear the real words through the mispronunciations.
“A chuisle mo chroí. Is that what you mean?”
He doesn’t hesitate.
“Yes.”
I swallow, my fingers tightening against his shower-slippery shoulders. I stare at his soaked chest, trying to get my bearings, but it’s hard, because I haven’t heard that phrase spoken aloud for more than ten years. Not since before my mom died.
But apparently I said it to Elio today. And I didn’t even realize I’d done it.
“What does it mean?” he prods me when I don’t speak. His left hand drifts to my chin, holding it firmly and lifting my face to his.
“Mo chroí means my heart,” I whisper, unable to speak at full volume for some reason. “A chuisle mo chroí is kind of like darling, I guess, but more meaningful. It translates to ‘the pulse of my heart.’”
Some unnamed emotion lurches across his face.
“I like when you speak to me in Irish,” he says gruffly.
“I don’t actually speak Irish,” I admit. “I just know a few phrases here and there. My mom used to say that one to me a lot. When I was sick or afraid.”
I still can’t believe I said that phrase to Elio. It’s a deeply personal term of endearment for me, associated with childhood and innocence and a soul-binding sort of love. I never in a thousand years would have expected myself to be calling this man a chuisle mo chroí. But somehow, without even being consciously aware of it, I’d reached down into myself, into my past, into my deepest stores of memory and hallowed feeling and I’d pulled it out. For him.
I’ve never said that to anyone else before.
“You’re supposed to be sitting down,” I stammer, trying to distract myself from the strange mix of emotions rising up inside me like a wave. Nostalgia and longing and grief and something stronger than any of those others, something that tightens all around me when Elio’s dark gaze pushes forward into mine.
“Only because you asked me to,” he finally says. Pain snags along the muscles of his face, twisting them as he slowly lowers himself onto the tiles. I sink down to my knees between his hard thighs, now completely under the spray of the shower and getting more soaked every second. I wish I’d had the forethought to tie back my hair, but it’s too late now, so I toss the heavy clumps of it behind my shoulders.
“What else did your mamma do? When you were sick? Or afraid?” he asks.
I glance at him, surprised by the question mid hair-toss. There’s a disconcerting, ravenous sort of greed in his eyes. But there’s nothing sexual in that gaze, or in the question. It’s a hunger I recognize, though. A hunger I’ve felt myself, a bone-deep emptiness that aches when I see young girls with their mothers, or when I’m sick now and no one gives a damn.
He lost his mother too. I know he has his uncle, his brother, Valentina, and all the other people in his life. But has anyone ever cared for him the way his mother would have, had she lived?
“She would make me tea,” I tell him. And then I feel disoriented all over again, like the tiles are shifting under my knees, because someone has cared for me that way recently. Someone did make me tea when I was afraid, when I was hurting.
And I’m staring right at him.
“What else?” Elio asks.
“She would sing to me.”
His chest rises and falls a little quicker than before.
“Would you sing to me?” he asks.
“God, no,” I say with a startled laugh. “Unlike my mom, I don’t have a beautiful voice.”
“Yes you do.”
“No, I really don’t,” I tell him with a shake of my head. “You’ve never heard me sing.”
