I kissed him, and he kissed me back. The light kept coming through the Georgian window as the city went about its morning outside.
What followed was slow and unhurried and entirely right—the two of us tangled in the white linen of a Dublin hotel bed with the rooftops beyond the glass and all the joy of being alive and being together in a place that had been, for a long time, a dream I'd circled in a travel guide with a pen.
He rolled me beneath him first, his mouth hot and demanding as he kissed down my throat, teeth grazing the sensitive spot that always made me arch into him.
I laughed when he nipped my collarbone, playful even as his hands slid down to grip my hips, pulling me flush against his growing hardness. We took our time exploring each other, fingers teasing.
His cock was thick and heavy against my thigh, already slick at the tip. I wrapped my fingers around him, stroking slowly while he groaned into my mouth.
The energy between us built quickly, turning playful and hungry.
I pushed him onto his back and straddled his hips, sinking down onto him inch by inch, gasping at the stretch as he filled me completely.
He grinned up at me, eyes dark with lust, and thrust up hard, making me bounce with a sharp cry of pleasure. I rode him like that for a while, grinding my clit against him with every roll of my hips, my breasts swaying as I braced my hands on his chest. The morning light gilded his skin, highlighting every flex of muscle.
Not content to stay in one place, he flipped us again, this time pulling my legs over his shoulders so he could drive deeper, the angle hitting that perfect spot inside me that made stars burst behind my eyelids. I clutched at the sheets, moaning his nameas he fucked me with energetic strokes, our bodies slapping together rhythmically.
We laughed between gasps when we nearly tumbled off the edge of the bed, shifting into a spooning position where he entered me from behind, one hand cupping my breast and the other rubbing tight circles over my clit. The city hummed on outside, oblivious to the way I came hard around him, clenching and pulsing as waves of pleasure crashed through me.
Still not sated, I pulled him toward the window, pressing my palms to the cool glass as he took me standing, my breasts flattened against it while he thrust into me from behind with powerful, playful snaps of his hips. One hand fisted in my hair, the other slipped between my legs to tease me again, building me toward another peak. He was relentless yet tender, whispering filthy praises against my ear about how wet and tight I felt, how perfectly I took him. When he finally spilled inside me with a guttural groan, my own orgasm followed, leaving us both trembling.
Afterward, I lay in the bed against his chest. I looked at the ceiling and thought about how strange and complete the world was.
We had come here by an impossible road. Every step of it—the church, the alley, the pier, the studio, the airport, all of it—had been required to arrive at this particular morning in this particular light. I had given up trying to decide whether that was fate or something more ordinary and had arrived at the conclusion that the distinction didn't matter. What mattered was that we were here. That I was here.
I was here by the grace of a man who had covered me with his body at the Charleston Airport. I would not forget that for as long as I lived, and that was the right thing to carry. Not as guilt, but as knowledge. The most important knowledge there was:that love sometimes expressed itself as the last possible act, and that some debts could not be repaid but only honored.
We were going to honor it today.
The Donovans had always been Irish the way Irish-Americans were Irish—in the blood and the name and the stubbornness my grandmother had called a virtue and my mother had called a trial. But I had never stood in it before. Never walked streets where the names on the shops were the names from the stories, never heard the cadence of it in an ordinary conversation, never felt the thread of it running from wherever I stood all the way back through generations I'd never met.
Brock walked beside me through the city with his hand in mine and said little, because he understood—he always understood—that this required a particular quality of quiet. He let me absorb it.
The color of the buildings, the width of the streets, the way the River Liffey moved beneath its bridges, the fierce green of things growing in window boxes. The accents that caught my ear at every corner with the warmth of something half-recognized.
We stopped for coffee in a place that had been there, according to the hand-lettered sign above the door, since 1887. I sat in it and felt the years of it around me. I thought about my father's family putting down roots in Charleston because staying put was its own kind of victory.
"You doing okay?" Brock asked, over his cup.
"More than okay," I said. "I feel like I recognize it. I've never been here and I recognize it."
He nodded, the slow nod of a man who understood that about places.
"Valentine's like that," he said. "Even when I hate it. It's mine."
The pub in Killarney had been there since 1724.
I had found it from Daniel's description—the name he'd written down three times so he wouldn't lose it. I had called ahead, and we had driven out of Dublin into the countryside that opened up green and vast and almost impossibly beautiful, the light breaking through the clouds in long, gold columns over the mountains. I had sat in the passenger seat and watched Ireland reveal itself mile by mile and felt something in me go very quiet and very full at the same time.
We arrived in Killarney in the late afternoon when the light was best.
The pub was stone, low-ceilinged, dark inside and warm, with a fire going even in summer because the Irish knew what fires were for. It smelled like turf smoke and wood and the lived-in warmth of a place where people had been gathering for three hundred years to be human together.
I had written something. I had started it on the plane and finished it in the Dublin hotel room, sitting at the desk by the Georgian window while the city was dark. I had not shown it to anyone.
We found a table near the fire. A man came to take our order, unhurried, with the ease of a place that had never been in a rush and had no plans to start. We ordered two pints. We sat.
I took out the small card I had written on.
