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He was silent, sitting there. I lay down and pulled the blankets over my shoulder and still he sat there. “Please, Ronan,” I said, my voice breaking all over the place. Leave so I can have some dignity. He stood and I bit my lip against a sob, missing him already.
He braced his hands on the bed. “I can’t be what you want, Poppy.”
“All I want is for you to leave—”
“Stop,” he said quietly. “We both know you want…more. You want a regular life with a regular man. And I’m not that man. I can’t give that to you.”
I didn’t want that. I didn’t want it at all. I wanted him and I wanted our life, the kind we could make. In my silence he must have found the agreement he wanted, he stood and opened the door, letting in a slice of light.
“Ronan?”
“Yeah?”
“What if I’m pregnant?”
I heard him stop breathing. I could practically hear his heart stop. The nightmare was gone and so was the adrenaline and I was back to being exhausted. His silence stretched and stretched and I knew he didn’t have an answer, either.
I told myself to stay awake, but my eyelids were too heavy.
If he answered, I didn’t hear it.
* * *
Ronan
“What’s the craic, then?” Niamh asked, making us tea in her shabby little kitchen. She had the good shortbread she ordered in special. It was noon and I’d left Poppy sleeping in my bed like it was the dead of night. If I had my way, she’d sleep through every reckoning that was coming our way, but I knew I would not be that lucky. The only thing I could do was act fast. What if I’m pregnant?
“Dead on,” I said, putting her off, pretending things were fine. “You?”
“Try that garbage with someone else, Ronan. You look shite,” Niamh said, putting the teacup on the table in front of me. I added sugar and milk to my tea and grunted in answer. So much fucking worse than you know, Niamh. She sat down opposite me at her kitchen table and laughed.
“That bad, like?” Niamh owned the building and lived in the most modest unit on the second floor. Smaller than mine, without the big bedroom and en suite off the back. But neither one of us had changed our apartments since we moved in. It was my good fortune that the man who lived on the top floor had moved in within the last ten years and had excellent taste. The previous resident of Niamh’s was in the early ’70s and loved the avocado green craze. Fridge. Stove. A microwave the size of a small car. The table was Formica and sticky as fuck from a million pots of spilled tea. A million more bottles of spilled whiskey. Niamh had given me stitches on this table and set a broken finger. She’d taken a bullet out of McGill’s ass before he went to jail. I had no idea why she didn’t change it and at the same time I was glad she didn’t. Some things were unchanging. Resolute. She was whipcord thin and her silver hair was cut short. Not fashionably short. Like she did it herself with some clippers and a broken mirror.
“Why is there a girl in your apartment?”
“Raj has a big mouth.” I drank the tea too fast because I needed caffeine and sugar more than I cared about a burnt tongue.
“It’s not just Raj. Word is you’re married, but there’s no way you’re that stupid.” I sighed. “You’re that stupid.”
“We didn’t have much choice.”
Niamh crossed one leg over the other. She wore jeans and a faded yellow shirt, with buttons and a rounded collar that looked too soft on her. There were thick wool socks on her feet because she caught chilblains in an English prison and her feet bothered her every day of her life. Of all the women in my life, she’s the one I understood the best. I understood her restraint and her self-denial. The way she only used what she needed and kept what she needed to the bare minimum. Niamh made sense to me.
Caroline, when she came into my life, was the total opposite. The wealth and the glamour. The cars and suits and women…it had been a feast for a man who’d been starving his whole damn life. I took it as my due, as payment for years of trouble. Clearly, it had made me weak. I should have done it the Niamh way and kept myself sharp.
“You know,” Niamh said. Her mug had a chip in it. A mug that would have been tossed and replaced by Caroline. By Poppy. But this woman kept using it, just avoiding the chip so she didn’t hurt her lip. Because the only thing that mattered was restraint and common sense. “I’ve used that excuse once or twice in my life,” she said. “It’s not an excuse.”
