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Áine backed away to give space to the floor before her, but as Fionn’s feet hit the ground, his fervid hands had already met her soft cheeks so forcefully she staggered back further against the press of his lips meeting hers in a unified gasp.
His uncontainable strength curled around her frame as he slid a hand over her shoulder to pull her closer.
Nothing could mollify this pleasure.
She breathed into his mouth as their lips parted save to catch her moan before pressing them to his again. Her confident touch matched his own, which he’d tailored to near perfection for such an exchange. Because for all the kindness Fionn noted inhimself, it was no match for his vigour when touching someone in heated desire. No match for what his hands would do to her and for her if she let him.
He’d comply with her any demand or request for the rest of the night.
All she needed was to ask, and he would be hers.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dublin 2016
Áine
20 minutes earlier
Just like that, Áine’s final glance at Fionn perished as he ascended the stairs toward his room. Her greatest fear had begun to lay its foundations on the growing cavern in her chest. The final stepping stone to ruination had transpired—grossly. Vulnerability had gotten the better of her. But not how she had imagined.
For the initial and almost torturous fear that succumbing to vulnerability would be her end, the opposite had happened. Her rally against vulnerability when all Fionn wanted was to kiss her, had burned a moment she might have marked as beautiful otherwise.
“For fuck’s sake,” she groaned, backing onto the reception’s office chair. Its legs had become creaky to the point of shrieking on her arrival.
Even the fucking chair doesn’t like me.
It also reclined much further than designed, saved only by hitting the wall behind. She huffed upwards despite her grievance aimed beneath. Nothing was going her way. She had to finally admit to herself not everything was the fault of hermother, or past Fionn, or Paddy when this time, it was her decision to ruin things.
Moodily deflecting from the overdue recognition, Áine sighed and crossed her pumps to lounge them on the lower ledge of the desk, just above where a little safe resided, which could be cracked not by an intuitive ear but by a literal hammer for how cheap it was. She could attest to this because she found the receipt that totalled the delivery and safe itself to one-hundred and sixty euros. That evening, when her first foot touched the stairs to bed, Áine had been tempted to tell Paddy he might get away with cheaping out on food, maintenance, and wages, but this was going to have him robbed.
The reason she didn’t tell him this wasn’t because it threatened her job, but rather she hoped the motherfucker did get robbed.
Áine’s thoughts moved on from the comfort of seeing Paddy in the line of misfortune. She rubbed her heavy eyes with the backs of her fingers, knuckles grinding against the edges of her sockets as she mused what shedid know; that the reason she rejected Fionn was clear. What wasn’t clear, however, was why it had hurt her just as much as she knew it hurt him, when she hadn’t given him a second thought in years.
Why did it hurt him at all?
The last time she’d seen him before tonight, it was so heart-breaking it seemed she’d forced herself to forget it. She understood that right at the moment he kissed her. The act had evoked the hidden memory from the mist, and with it, all her confusion about how she could forget someone like him had presented itself to her in gift form, wrapped with translucent paper.
It was her doing.Herchoice to forget.
Áine’s subconscious, teenage resilience was a force so powerful it could suppress trauma. Her brain had done it at leastonce before, and both concurrently told her enough to know ignorance wasn’t really bliss for the forgotten years. Instead, it was a brutish torment; to know something bad had happened while taunting you with the scale of how bad itmighthave been. And if there was anything that got under her skin, it was not having a definite answer.
She dropped her feet with a unified thud to lackadaisically stand with no direction in her standard prestigious work ethic, because the sinking truth struck hard. Painfully so.
Oh, I’m never going to see him again. Ever.
Áine found her breath chaffed and fingers clutching the desk’s edge with such sudden, internal fear that their joints had become jagged and directionless. She stayed that way for some time, calcified into a motley trance.
C’mon you silly girl. Give yourself a wobble.
She scrunched her nose, dragging her top lip with it.A resolve for this feeling threatening to malfunction her insides would be to figure out what sheactuallywanted.
Any friend of Áine’s would say her habit of thinking about what she wanted in a radical long-term sense was an ‘untypical’ trait for a 24-year-old, and she supposed she agreed. They might think that was also contradictory, considering how many spontaneous one-night stands she had. However, those nights were clear-cut for her future wants; her future was simply one without whoever the lucky person was that night. Áine never felt guilty for considering her lovers ‘lucky’ either because if she’d executed any part of Aristotle’s philosophy of virtue, it was her ability to rest herself upon the pedestal of modesty. And people would debate with her that someone who really was modest wouldn’t say as much or fuck as much. Áine knew modesty was just a way to view the world through the lens of fairness, rather than an adopted word to further gender disparity.
She chewed the inside of her cheek for how fast it happened, how everything came full-circle back to Fionn. What she really wanted, was Fionn.
Her head shrunk into her neck. She felt stuck inside the loop with no escape. It was so clear now what made her so sad; letting him back in for even a few hours had changed the future, because it was one without him. Unlike her one-night stands, this one night of wonder would make his absence noticeable. It would affect her.
