AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“God bless. God bless,” the man called after Fionn who made toward the single-lit building down the road. His socks were already cold and damp.
The rain thickened then as if through God’s will, and while Fionn smiled upwards and found the irony first, it was the guilt, despite his gesture, that persisted. Injustices annoyed him. His inability to invoke real change annoyed him. But that’s all it did; annoyed him.
He wished it struck fervour or fury, but those silent convictions came deep into the night when he was too tired to do anything about it. Then when morning came, his pent-up motivation was all but lost, and old shoes really were all he had to give.
He reached the B&B not long after; Roche’s Bed & Breakfast in block form, holding onto the orange bricks by a hair. His eyebrows rose and his soggy heels tilted back on closer inspection because he noticed the wordsWhore Housesprayed beneath and poorly painted over. A sign like this might have enticed the good man to walk away and the bad one to enter, gleefully rubbing his hands together.
Fionn was neither.
He considered himself—and most others—to be something in between, something circumstantially motivated by. Having said that, in this circumstance, hewasthe good man. Not that he had the means to engage in monetary-fuelled sexploits, but it was something he’d no interest in regardless.
Still, he stepped inside the building through a heavy wooden door where the foyer’s dust danced into his nose—a cursed big one. His uncle, Joe, liked to loudly point it out at family functions, despite his being no better.
Why?
Fionn thought it was an insecurity transference, which he wasn’t sure was even a real thing. But if it was, it was Freudian. A man Fionn agreed with in few circumstances. Least of which for how much Fionn himself was a culprit of picking apart his brain was Freud’s wrongful view that the Irish were “imperviousto psychoanalysis.” Fionn’s pure-bred Irish brain was a feeding ground for traumatic self-analysis. A frontline contributor to the insomnia, he supposed.
The old stench persisted to rise from the brown kaleidoscope carpet, long faded, but he hoped the poor upkeep meant a single bedroom would be cheap.
Not twenty feet ahead was the reception desk. He walked towards it, hair shaking like a wet dog. It gave him an odd primal sensation he’d come to enjoy in the months of growing it out. He had also enjoyed how much it threatened the masculinity of at least half of men, whereby he found the most satisfying way to shut them up was to remind them, for their sins, that the Westernised image of who they worshipped had even longer hair than him.
Ding.
Fionn called out for assistance twice until a young woman, all curls, appeared by the adjacent door. Her head was faced down as she paced around him with such berth, he was tempted to smell his armpits.
The bus journey was quite stuffy.
“Sorry about that,” she said when opposite him behind her desk. “I was just sorting stuff for the morning. The name?” She flipped open a book with a broken spine that cracked into a worse state.
Fionn pressed his lips, hard, worried not booking ahead meant he might have to take that bench after all. But then he worried about nothing, because after she looked up, above him first to something, she then lookedtohim. And everything else like thinking and breathing became irrelevant.
It was her eyes that did it, doe-resembling and deep blue with flecks of green. They triggered something in Fionn, shooting memories into his head at a speed so fierce he staggered back from the desk. They—the eyes—managed to hold his gazeanother moment before drifting off. He was grateful for that; them not lingering to watch the heat begin to crawl up his neck.
Followed was a deep, unexpected yearning. It surfaced with a gasp like it had held its breath for too long. It wanted him to say her name aloud just to hear it on his lips again.
Áine Meaher.
Áine Meaher.
Áine Meaher.
It wanted to pour out of him like a sinner’s outstanding confession. But that thing always clamping Fionn down prevailed. He could never quite put his finger on what that ‘thing’ was. He considered it being anxiety or shyness. A lack of worth maybe. That no matter the conversation, the person listening wouldn’t care. In the months gone, he’d all but vanquished this ‘thing’ but Áine . . . he remembered her to be something else. Something of an exception. Every worddidmatter to her. She was too clever not to notice or subsequently mention the validity of things.
“When I’m with you, I am my whole self,” he had once told her. And he wasn’t sure if anything had ever frightened him as much as that moment.
“The name?” She smiled wider, not for him. It was more robotic. Unless that’s what had become of her.
God, he hoped not.
His broad shoulders clinched a little inwards. He thought she might remember him. Might at least tell him he was an arsehole for how things went between them, so he could tell her she was right. But she didn’t and so to do anything other than be a man lost for words, he dragged his fingers through his dark hair only to have it fall back into place. Fionn had symbolically let it grow so that when the time came, he could shed himself of his past.
That day was tomorrow.
Remembering this made absolute butter of his gut. Sometimes he found he couldn’t tell the difference between anxiety and excitement when they both twisted his stomach in the same cruel way. He likened it to being on a rollercoaster; terrified the whole time you’re on it but swearing you had a great time once your feet hit the safety of ground.
He was also starting to wonder if he just had stomach issues in general.
“You’re Fionn O’ Rourke.” She said it with absolute certainty. Said it like it pleased her. The way she bit her rosy bottom lip when the F of Fionn flicked off it. The way her mouth pursed and her eyes hazed when she said, O’ Rourke. It intoxicated him. So much so, he had to force himself not to lick his drying lips and accidentally swallow the temptation.
