“Warm enough?” he asked, then gestured toward my shoes. “How are those holding up?”
I’d built up a nice cocoon of body heat inside Eamonn’s oversized jacket. My hands and face still got a little cold, but nothing I couldn’t handle. And it was true that my shoes weren’t exactly what I would’ve chosen to take a walking tour of the city in, but they were okay. This time yesterday, I’d been standing in these very same shoes in the break room, making myself my afternoon coffee with the Keurig and thinking ahead to the date I had that night.
“They’re grand,” I said, trying to use the lingo.
Eamonn grinned at me. “Not likegrand pianoorgrand staircase.Let it roll off a little more, don’t think about it too much.”
“They’re grand,” I repeated, probably worse than before, because now I was definitely overthinking it.
But he just laughed. “Grand,” he said. “Yeah.”
Eventually we came upon a giant stone church, just the kind of structure I might’ve envisioned if I thought about visiting Dublin. Eamonn gestured up at it, leaning back to take it all in.
“This is Saint Patrick’s,” he said. “It’s our national cathedral, built in the…twelfth century? Don’t quote me on that.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, tilting my head back to look at where the tallest spire touched the sky. Built out of stone of various sizes and shades of gray, it looked solid and serious, especially against the backdrop of clouds that had gotten darker than I remembered them being back in the park. Intricate carving framed the arched windows, and there were two tiny stone heads next to a clock that showed the time as almost three.
While I was looking up I felt a raindrop land on my cheek, then another. When I glanced back at Eamonn, his eyes were hooded, watching that drop as it trailed its way down my jaw. When his gaze lifted to mine, his lashes were already spiked with rain, his eyes bluer than ever.
It wasn’t hard to imagine him kissing me. I could practically feel it—his fingers touching those same places his gaze had on my cheek, my jaw, the warmth of his mouth as he pressed it against mine. We could kiss for hours and if I glanced back up at that clock the hands wouldn’t have moved at all.
But then the rain started coming down in earnest, and Eamonn touched my back, so lightly it was more a phantom brush of his fingers I could barely feel through the jacket.
“Let’s go inside,” he said. “That’s a dirty-looking sky.”
I’d said I didn’t want him to pay for anything that required admission, but with the weather being what it was, I didn’t argue too hard. It seemed like the second we made it through the doors, the rain started coming down more steadily, and I was grateful we’d missed the worst of it. Still, my hair had gotten damp enough to stick to the sides of my neck, causing me to shiver as we entered the church.
“Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?” Eamonn said, his voice low enough to make me shiver again.
“It really does.”
The scope of everything was what did it. The scale, the dimensions, thedetail. I could see where this felt like a holy building because you just couldn’t believe that human hands were capable of making something like this.
“Eleven ninety-one,” I said, reading from a placard near the entrance. “You were spot-on.”
“Look at me, knowing my Irish history,” Eamonn said. “Let’s see what else I know, although it probably won’t be much. I know it was a big deal, there being two cathedrals in the city—the other one is Christ Church, which isn’t far. There are a lot of important people buried or entombed here—Jonathan Swift and Stella, his longtime friend and possible secret wife.”
Eamonn waggled his eyebrows at me, and I was almost sorry that whatever romantic spell we’d been under for that moment outside had already broken. But I liked this side of him, too, that came out when he started talking about something he found interesting or funny, so different from the monosyllables he’d given me when we first met.
“Secret wife?”
“The subject of much speculation. They both claimed to be single until the day they died. But there are poems and letters spanning decades that reveal how much they cared for each other, and it was because he refused to break things off with Stella—real name Esther—that he ended his other longstanding relationship with Vanessa—real name also Esther. Proper love-triangle stuff. Either way, Swift and Stella are buried together here.”
“Well, that’s…sweet.”
There was a bust of Swift set into an alcove in the wall, every fold of his clothes and line in his face expertly sculpted. Eamonn and I both stood staring at it, our hands clasped behind our backs.
“I think it is sweet,” he said at last. “He wrote her a poem every single year on her birthday. The last one was in 1727, when she was very sick and he knew she would die. The ending lines will put a lump in your throat just to hear ’em.”
“What are they?”
He looked at me, and the romantic spell from outside wasn’t all the way broken. I still felt it, whenever he turned his attention on me, whenever I realized just how close we were standing, even if it was just so we could keep our voices down in this sacred space.
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t do it justice,” he said. “And you really should read the whole poem all the way through to get the full effect. But I’m sure there’s loads of facts on the audio guides—we can do that, if you want.”
But I didn’t really want to. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe anytour would be interesting—I knew it would. But I didn’t feel like engaging with this space in that way, not right now.
So I just shook my head, walking slowly toward the altar, my hands still clasped behind my back. It was hard to know where to look—there was so much to take in. Even the tile under our feet was eye-catching, laid in intricate patterns of triangles and Celtic crosses and other filigree. There were tall, arched windows of stained glass all down the sides of the church, in every shadowed alcove a scene of such vivid, stunning detail that I wanted to stop and figure out what story was being told in that panel. There were various placards and displays, too, describing the way the church had evolved or its role in political conflicts, but I didn’t pause too long to read them. Right now, the cathedral felt so big to me—its impossibly high ceiling, the way the light poured in through some of those stained-glass windows and bleached them almost white from a distance. There was something reverent in the way light moved through the space, and I didn’t want to be looking down to read a placard.
