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“I meant now.”
Áine slid her hand from his to cradle it. “Right,” she managed. “I don’t want you to go. I’m just saying you can if you want.”
“Please, can you tell me what’s wrong? Can you please just talk to me?” he asked quite woundedly, scrunching his eyes to the point of closing.
“Nothing is wrong. Tonight was . . . it was amazing. All of it. All of this night. It was better than any story you’d find in that little library, and trust me I’d know. I’ve read them all. But I just know it has to end.”
Fionn paused, running fingers over his lips to further it a moment longer. “What about the second part of the question?”
Nowhewas being brave and asking things he shouldn’t. He even stood taller now.
She considered pretending not to understand, which was silly when her brain power was never immune to insinuation, and that he’d know it too. All the same, Áine played the card for lack of other options, “What question?”
The redness returned to his ears, but as always, he said whatever it was anyway. “Do you want me to go to Australia?”
“Of course I bloody do!” she enthused too fast. “You deserve a new life.”
“Okay then let me ask you another question.”
Her palm crashed into his unwavering chest, already knowing what it was. “No. Please—”
“Would you come with me?”
As Áine digested his words, she reaffirmed that she’d never have asked the same of him. She’d never ask him to stay.
Sliding her hand off his chest, she went in search of some kitchen towel. Or at least her body did. Her mind felt heavy and delayed, echoing her movements. No sooner did the anger resurface. It heated her cheeks and made her pull rotten faces no amount of meditative thinking or smoking could placate. Grabbing a tissue with lemon prints from its holder, she folded and bent it around the fingers already hardly bleeding.
“Áine?”
Having all but a few seconds to conclude the root of the anger, it became quite simple in the way all things were simple once you understood them. And in this case, it was simply that she assumed he had the same respect for her.
“Tell me this.” She approached him with eyes no longer doey but rearing with vindication. “You say we’re so attuned to each other that we share thoughts. You say it like it makes us something special. But if I did go with you? What then? Because I think it wouldn’t be long before we were incapable of stimulating each other. What reason would there be to even open our bloody mouths if all our thoughts were one and the same? We’ll just cancel each other into a state of non-existence,” she spoke so loud he retracted into the worktop. “Succumbing to you is too easy, which you must know! You make it so easy to forget the bad things I literally forgot you. Oh my god”—she grabbed the worktops ledge with all her fingers—“I regressed you. You are the scar on my chin in living form!”
“Christ, Áine, give it a rest! I know what I did wasn’t right. Fucking hell, I know. But is that really what you think?” heshouted back, passionately in the way of it drawing a crease between his brows.
God, why did he have to be so beautiful?
Before she could answer his question he beat her to it, passion and offence revving in him, drawing veins out of places she hadn’t thought possible. “You think I would ever do to you what your mother did? Or that this”—his hands ferried back and forth between them—“me and you, it all boils to the loose ideology that opposites attract? We’ll run out of words to say because we’re like-fucking-minded?” He laughed at its absurdity.
Áine thought none of this. The proof was right in front of her. Here they were still talking, debating, disagreeing,thrivingin each other’s presence like no one had ever offered her before.
Her fingers raked through her roots. “Fuck. No. I don’t think that at all. I don’t know what to think. I can’t just pick up my life for someone I used to—” She spared a moment to look at him.
Love. Someone she used to love.
Still, the expectation that she’d be the one to drop everything; to incur the loss of her dream to one day finish her degree. It wasn’t right. It felt like she was tossing a coin into the patriarchal metre in some reaching way.
Vulnerability glassed Fionn’s eyes so thick she feared they might shatter, and she’d be left to fall to her knees to gather more broken shards.
“Look, I’ll head off,” he managed, seemingly empty of all his anger now. “Make it easier on us once and for all. I’m sorry. I know this might be all in my head. That I’m probably making wild presumptions, but just know if I hadn’t met you at all I’d be some shittier version of myself, stuck in the void of external opinions.”
“You remembered that?” Looking back, she found herself to be short-sighted and bleak. Since then, she’d delved further intothis concept of being controlled by the judgement of others. Realised people weren’t composed of one self but multiples; subselves. A collection, taking turns like some mild form of dissociative identity disorder that’s maybe not so dissociative. But who was the subself in control now, in thissituation? Loving Áine? Resilient Áine? Vulnerable Áine?
No!
Áine stood with too many scenarios running over her lips to allow her to gather one. Or maybe therightone. But Fionn had said all he needed to say, and clearly Áine was incapable of saying any more.
Dipping a hand into his back pocket he took out his tatty leather wallet and pulled from it a small piece of paper; weathered and folded over so many times the creases were embedded into it like a passed down identity of dendrochronology.
