“I’ve been doing some traveling in general,” I lied, because it sounded better than anything approximating the truth. “If you haven’t traveled, you haven’t lived, that’s what I always say.”
Eamonn got that little line between his eyebrows again. “Why were you at my garage?”
Right. That did look weird now that I’d revealed my slight connection to his family. To be honest, I’d love an answer to that question myself. It felt like it allmeantsomething, like it couldn’t be pure dumb coincidence that I’d had that date with Niall, talked about his family, and then ended up here. It did feel like dream logic, where random things appear just because you happen to have been thinking about them that day. Like when you watch a movie and suddenly the actor is in your dream, or you scroll through a high school friend’s socialmedia and later find yourself back in math class, trying to solve a problem at the board as everyone stares at you.
“I got mugged,” I said, deciding to stick as close to the truth as possible. At least, the truth as I knew it. “I was a little disoriented. I was trying to find my way around.”
This time, when his gaze skimmed down my body, I felt it everywhere. I knew he was just taking me in, assessing me for any visible damage, but I wasn’t used to being thatlookedat. When his blue eyes came back to my face, there was something in them, a spark that reminded me of that first word I’d thought when I’d seen them—electric. And then he blinked, and it was gone.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
That was the million-dollar question. “I think so,” I said. “I just don’t have my purse or…my passport or anything.”
To quibble over a minor detail, technically I’d never had my passport, but that seemed like a lot to introduce to this conversation.
Eamonn hesitated. “Have you talked to the guards?”
“The what?”
“The police,” he said impatiently. This man clearly wanted nothing to do with my shit, much less having to explain Irish terminology to me. “Have you talked to the police?”
“No,” I said. “I figured there was no point.”
He gave me a look that was impossible to read. My first instinct was that it was more exasperation with me—a foolish American who’d somehow gotten herself in this predicament, and then wasn’t even willing to do the most basic thing aboutit. But there was something else to the look, too. I could see the tension go out of his shoulders.
“I didn’t get a good look at the guy,” I said. “I wouldn’t be able to give them anything useful.”And the mugging happened in another country, in possibly another dimension, but let’s not get into that.
We’d been talking long enough for another bus to pass by, but it barely paused at the stop before continuing on in traffic. Eamonn and I both watched it go.
“You need to get to the embassy,” he said, and I could practically read his thoughts.And that bus was your way to do it.
“I know,” I said, because even if that hadn’t occurred to me before, it did make sense. If I was an American stuck in a foreign country without any identification or travel papers to get home, surely the embassy was the exact place I would go for help. I just didn’t know how it was going to complicate things that there would be no record of me having come over here in the first place. But when had I already started to think of all this as real, with problems to be solved, instead of just that amorphous dream state where nothing mattered?
Eamonn leaned back against the wall again, and maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed like he’d shifted a bit closer this time. I went back to eating my half of the sandwich, and we stayed like that for a few minutes, both looking out toward the street. He was tapping out a beat on his thigh, softly enough to make no sound but with a rhythm that told me he heard the song in his head. He did that for a few minutes, long enough for me to finish my sandwich, long enough that maybe he’d clocked that I’d noticed and felt self-conscious, because heclenched his hand into a fist and stopped. He dug around the brown paper bag between us, coming up with a reddish-yellow apple, which he held out toward me. “Here.”
“I’m all right,” I said. I should let the man eat his own apple at least.
“I don’t even like ’em,” he said, keeping the apple outstretched. “Take it.”
Why get one at all, if he didn’t like them? But I supposed it could’ve been one of those things where they throw it in with the sandwich whether you asked for it or not.
I took the apple from his hand and bit into it, laughing a little and wiping the juice from my chin as it started running down. Eamonn was watching me, and I did feel bad that I was eating most of his lunch. He looked suddenly ravenous.
“You have—” He reached toward me, and for a moment I didn’t know what he was going to say or do.You have juice all over your mouth? His thumb on the indentation of my lower lip, pressing into the sticky sweetness there. Which would be a wild thing for him to do. A wild thing for me towanthim to do.
But instead he reached up and plucked something out of my hair, so lightly I barely felt his touch, opening his palm to show some crushed petals before the wind picked them up and blew them away. They were the same bits of flowers from the dumpster in the parking lot, the ones I’d made a wish on back in Florida.
It felt like something glitched, like there was a ripple in the space-time continuum. Eamonn was looking at his open palm, and then his eyes were back on mine, and it was almost like he’d felt it, too.
“Sorry, that’s been—” he started to say, his voice low, but I cut in.
“It’s okay,” I said, not wanting to make whatever weird thing had just happened any weirder. Even seeing those familiar petals again was making me shake a little. I wasn’t sure what it allmeant.
He cleared his throat, crumpling the empty paper bag in his fist. “I can take you,” he said.
“You can take me?”
“Into town,” he clarified. “To the embassy. I’ll drive you.”
