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Much like being able to read her guests, she was perceptive to potential lovers; knew what they wanted and didn’t want. Pinpointed their passions to make them seem like her own, just to feed off their high of feeling seen. But if she were being honestwith herself, the intention was to feel desired for a couple of paradisiacal hours, without ever having to be vulnerable.
A German couple once begged her to have sex at their Airbnb. This was one of those rare occasions where her fancywastickled.
Heading home in the taxi soon after, a stretch of blurring lights following her as if she were famed, Áine decided it would be entertaining to have a world scratch map to mark all her lovers. And for her odd state of being, etching off a new country would bring about an equal pleasure to the sex itself.
With Fionn still standing before her now, who wasn’t so easy to physically read, those flirtatious credentials absorbed into her insecurities to the point where her skin felt like it was receding.
He had known her for who she was at her most vulnerable point in life, and she didn’t like that. She hadn’t been equipped to mask the feeling as much when younger, which often consumed her and deterred her from eating. But when he’d said her name—Áine Meaher. Said it with his lips rubbing together when pronouncing Meaher, like he was savouring the sound of it coming out. It was enough for her to realise she was worth remembering, and that revived her.
“I’m glad to hear I’m not so easily forgotten.” Her Kilkenny accent was already thicker; mouth opening wider to make the vowels louder. She liked it when her accent did that, in an admitted childish way.
“You’re not the forgettable kind, Áine.”
Embracing the playful tone he’d used to say her name, she propped her elbows on the desk to rest her chin. A wink followed to tip the balance of power. “Oh, I know I’m not. It’s hard to forget the smartest person in the room for the inferiority it sears onto company.” She didn’t actually believe this. Not enough to usually say it aloud anyway.
“Woah there.” To shield the burn of her playful attack, he erected his hands which had grown to the size of shovels. In fact, all of him had grown quite pleasingly.
Noticing this made Áine’s lips feel swollen. Made them plusher, resting against each other. She separated them to laugh at his poor acting. It made the knobbly bits of her elbows roll against the wood. “Woah what? Am I wrong?”
She wasn’t.
“You’re forgetting that guy in Mensa who substituted our English class for a term. The lad who wouldn’t let us open the windows in case the breeze blew his feckin’ toupee off again! You were only the second smartest person in the room those few weeks.”
Áine clamped the skin below her lip not to tell him she’d been a member of Mensa for two years, which was probably not classed as getting her money’s worth for the mandatory membership fee when she seldom told people. In hindsight, passing did not fill her with any sense of accomplishment. Still, she’d celebrated in bed with an on-brand Pot Noodle and a ‘fifty bag’ of weed.
Fionn’s shovels thudded onto the desk as he leaned in closer than any other guest had done before him—any sober guest. And yet, she wouldn’t have minded him being closer again. “Of course, I’d remember you even if you weren’t the smartest in the room.” He said this with too many connotations. “It’s been six years since we left school, not sixty.”
“Well, my dear, those little wrinkles trailing across your forehead might insinuate the latter number.” She traced her daring finger across a shallow wrinkle to counter his brazen stretch over the desk.
He rubbed the lines after her like they might disappear with enough force, and she wondered if he hadn’t noticed the slight ageing creeping up on him. She found that herself since leavingschool; things creeping up on her. Parents suddenly looking old. Friends havingplannedbabies. Her waistline had also naturally thickened, but she quite liked that. Sometimes she’d stand in front of the long mirror by her bed, moving backwards and forwards until her hips perfectly touched the mirror’s edges. Even that made her feel more satisfaction than the Mensa accreditation.
“I can’t say the same for you,” Fionn said.
She inched back from him with an unknown offence and an inhale which caught the scent of warm, woody notes. It made her feel insulated and warm.
“Can’t say what?”
“That ageing hasn’t been anything but kind to you. Those cheeks are as round as the day I met you. Like a cabbage patch kid, so ya’ were.”
Áine marked he should have saidnoticedinstead ofmetbecause they were two very different things on two very different occasions. She grinned anyway, knowing it would puff them out more for the ease he brought to her.
Had it always been this way?
Something through the veil of memories lost told her no.
“Well”—she reclaimed the inch lost to him physically in their playful debate—“I don’t know where the years are going, but I do know it’s nice to see you.”
Despite how stiff it sounded, how reinforced it made her jaw feel to say it, Áine meant it.
Did you get to do the Bachelors in creative writing and literature? she suddenly wanted to ask.
He had said as much in the back of English class—her first love. She sometimes felt guilty about this because it was the forced language, so she made sure her Irish grades were on par. Made sure her tongue’s default was Gaeilge.
Pressing her finger to her mole by habit, she reminisced over that place between them in a way she never considered at the time; on few occasions had he cared to talk outside the classroom. His cool reputation was worth more than friendship with an odd-looking, nonconformist.
An unexpected sourness drenched Áine, hardening her lips flat. Deflating them of the heat. “The room for the night, will it be a single or double?”
I want to know if you have a girlfriend even though it’s irrelevant and none of my fucking business, and I’m also feeling resentful towards you, she might as well have said.
