“Oh my god,” I said, really looking at him for the first time since I’d hidden my face, then immediately glancing back away, because that meant I could see him looking at me, too. There had been something too soft and almost grave about his expression, something too close to the way he’d looked when staring up at the ceiling in the church. “I’m so sorry.”
I felt the sudden emptiness as his fingers left my body, sliding a stripe of wetness along my inner thigh.
“What are you sorry for?”
For the fact that I just came all over him. For the fact that I could feel that he was still hard beneath me, that I’d never even gotten to touch him before having this post-sex panic attack. For the fact that it had been my post-dream panic attack that had led to all of this in the first place, and maybe I’d forcedsomething to happen that otherwise wouldn’t have, or at least not right now, in his car, parked somewhere along the side of the road in the middle of the night.
But I couldn’t imagine saying any of that out loud, so instead I started the shameful process of putting myself back together, pulling my bra down and shifting my dress to cover myself again. Getting off his lap was ten times more awkward than getting onto his lap had been, between the steering wheel that dug into my back when I tried to move and the fact that Eamonn apparently wasn’t as invested in helping me off as he’d been in getting me on.
Finally, he lifted me by the waist to help throw myself back into the passenger seat in a tangle of limbs, my hair falling over my face. My hips were unused to all these contortions, on top of a day filled with walking, and I knew they’d be sore for a while. I also ached deep in my core. I could still feel the way his fingers had felt inside me, the way I’d clenched around them as I came.
“Sorry,” I said again.
I was pretty sure my elbow had connected with his chest at one point as I was pushing myself off him. He was rubbing the area above his heart, like it hurt there, and I hoped he’d count my apology for that, too. Eventually, he reached down to turn the key in the ignition, and it was only when he switched the heat back on that I realized I’d started to shiver.
“I’m going to get some air,” he said, and then he was out of the car before I could say anything, shutting the door behind him.
I leaned my head back against the seat, trying not to cry.Trying not to cryagain, since I could still feel the tracks from my first round of tears cold and drying on my cheeks. How had I managed to fuck this up so badly? One minute we’d been together, and it had felt so good.God knows I have, he’d said about how he’d been thinking about it all day, being with me, and in that moment I’d believed it. All the tension I’d been feeling, this strange, almost primal connection. It hadn’t just been in my own head.
But then it had felt so overwhelming, being with him. Having him touch me like that, make me come apart like that. I hadn’t known what to do with it.
I’d also been using him to distract myself from thinking about that dream, or whatever I’d woken up from, which I knew wasn’t right. It had seemed like…was I in a coma? Back in my real life, if that’s what the vision was of? So what did that mean about where I was now, what did that mean about any of it?
When I looked at myself in the rearview mirror, I almost didn’t recognize the woman I saw. My hair was a mess, tangled and flipped to one side.I’m obsessed with your hair. My eyes were swollen from crying, and my lower lip looked puffy and almost bruised.Your fuckingmouth, you don’t even know.If this were a dream, surely I would’ve chosen something exactly like this, a hot guy who would get me off and say nice things about me. So then why did I feel so guilty and bad?
I flipped open the glove compartment, hoping to find a package of tissues or something I could use to clean up my face. There weren’t any tissues, but there was a neat stack of paperwork inside what looked like a gallon Ziploc bag, what Icould see even at a glance looked like records of car parts purchased, services performed. When I looked out the window, Eamonn was standing in the grass, his hands in his pockets, staring out at where the earliest morning light was starting to leak into the sky.
I took a deep breath, and opened my door.
Twenty-Four
The first thing I noticedwas the sign that pointed toUaigh Yeats,Yeats’ Grave, a church, a trail. We weren’t off the side of the road, technically—we were in a parking lot, although thankfully there were no other cars parked in it at the moment.
“I didn’t realize we were here,” I said as I walked up to Eamonn. I didn’t know how to play this—if I should apologize again or if that would only make it worse, if I should pretend that everything was normal. In the end, I figured some simple logistical statement was as good a starting point as any.
“You fell asleep on the drive,” he said. “And then I got here and was tired, so…”
So not only had I no doubt freaked him out with my wildness upon waking, but I’d disturbed his sleep, too. He did look tired, with shadows under his eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I didn’t know if he was referring back to the way I’d woken up, or everything that had happened after. Either way, there was only one answer I could really give. “Of course,” I said. “I’m fine. You?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Fine.”
He was already looking away, the words coming almost absently, and I knew neither of us wasfine. For my part, I was embarrassed and unsteady and still, perhaps most confusing of all, a little turned on. I couldn’t tell what Eamonn was, if he was angry with me or frustrated or disgusted or something else.
“That’s Benbulbin over there,” he said, still looking at the flat-topped mountain in the distance. The sun was more fully in the sky now, and it might’ve been an optical illusion but the steep-sided cliffs didn’t look too far, actually, close enough to walk to. “Yeats wrote about it in his poetry a lot. He was a big believer in fairies, as you probably know, and it’s supposed to be one place where fairies are visible. It’s thought to be a ‘thin place’—a place where the veil between worlds is extra thin, and you can pass from one to the other.”
“Fairies?” I said faintly. Maybe that explained my dream, the fact that I’d felt like I was momentarily back with Mari in my real life even as I was still here with Eamonn. A thinning of the veil between worlds.
He gave me a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I thought you’d like that.”
Black birds circled overhead, making an insane amount of sound. It really did feel like the perfect circumstances for visiting a poet’s grave—the birds, the early-morning fog over themountain, the scraggly trees, the fact that we were the only two people in that parking lot, maybe the world. It was cold, and I’d grabbed his jacket again before leaving the car, but I wished I’d been thoughtful enough to grab his sweater, too. He didn’t seem particularly bothered by it, standing in his shirtsleeves.
“The church doesn’t open until later,” Eamonn said, nodding toward the graveyard. “But we can see the grave now, if you want.”
“Sure.”
