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The front door rattled through possession of wind. Leaving the card, he heeded its beckon with long-striding steps despite holding no belief for such things being signs or gifts from the dead. To be fair, if anything were a sign tonight it was surely the coincidence of meeting Áine, and even that created no worthy result of change in the way spiritual people insinuated ‘signs’ were meant to.
Taking a final look at the old Padauk clock, he lowered the handle, the wind giving his weary frame the support it needed to open the door all the way.
“It was lovely,” Áine called loud but soft.
Fionn found himself suspended in unsureness; wanting to see her, but fearing whatever she had to say would prolong the suffering. But if he knew anything by now it was that he’d little choice in the matter when it came to Áine.
He turned to her, unable to mask the pain stiffening his jaw.
She hovered by the reception on the guest side, her eyes red and upset. The poem hung loose and delicate in her hand.
Fionn’s intention not to upset her, his fingers twitched; their calling sign to reach out and touch her. He resisted, flexing them by his side as he remembered the barrier of touch breached was oneshehad resown.
“Say again?” he asked.
She shrugged—hopelessly. “It’s beautiful—the poem for your mam. It is the saddest and most beautiful thing I’ve ever read. I wished I was dead when reading it just to have something so lovely written about me. I thought that when I was younger too. Wished I was dead so people might love me in the way even the worst of us become canonised in death.”
Ignoring all her compliments he might have prayed for on his knees in another life, the truth he couldn’t say the last night he’d seen her took precedence: “I wasn’t telling you to come with me earlier because I think my future or me as a person is greater than yours. I think I just needed you to know that I have to go for myself. I don’t think I could survive living here. If I do, the suicidal contagion men suffer here will find me too,” he said. “I think I asked because if I didn’t, I’d regret it. Maybe that makes me selfish to put it on you because I’ve put so much on you before, but now I’ve had this night with you I just didn’t want to be without you again.”
“I know.” She sniffled a smile he felt was more to give him comfort than her.
“But that’s not to say I didn’t consider all the possibilities of not going. Because from the second I realised it was you working behind the desk there—a stranger in a lot of ways—I knew there was a risk I might have stayed.” The urge to confess all brewed in him even more, causing him to clench the roots of his hair. “Áine, you have this power over me. And it’s so fuckingterrifying. It’s always been that way too. I’m drowning in it. And I love it even though I don’t think I deserve it because I let you down so bad before. But I accept it now, that this will be enough. And maybe one day you’ll call or write me and tell me you still care for me, but I promise you, what you’ve so kindly given me tonight, itisenough.” His tears toppled over, barely caught by the clasp of his hand.
Mulling something over by virtue of chewing her lips, she asked him, “Stay.”
The wind rattled the door against his back, calling on him to follow his plan. He cleared his throat, “Now or in Ireland?”
“Now,” she said. “Stay until you can’t stay any longer. That’ll bemyenough. It’ll have to be. Stay and let me tell you all the lovely things about you, so you can take something good with you. So you know you’ll be missed by someone here. That you don’t need to be dead for everyone to love you.”
Though Fionn found sadness in this by habit of his old, self-depreciative thinking, he smiled through his tears to fake the cocky attitude of his false exterior. “Oh and, what kind of lovely things would they be?” He laughed through a sharp inhale.
She clenched her lips before coming all the way to him as she spoke. “Like there was a time where I’d wanted to husk out my heart of everything, the small, good part included so you alone could fill it. Pump life into it! Because I think I love you! I think you’re the only person I’ve ever properly loved in my life in this way without expectation, but because it wasmychoice to do so.”
She reached him then, so close that if he were to dip his head his lips might meet hers. “Áine, I don’t know how I forgot, but I have loved you, all of you, for a very long time too.”
Patrick Kavanagh’s golden words came to sing in his mind;
‘on an autumn day I met her first and knew. That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue.’
“Christ,” he bemused. How obvious it had been all along. How different it all could have gone. “The fact I’ve wasted the last six years of my life not acknowledging my love for you makes me sick. That I didn’t chase you down that road to try harder. And look, maybe if it had gone that way back in school it wouldn’t have worked out for all my demons. I stand by the fact I wasn’t good enough for you. But I would have spent every day trying. I’d have spent all the currency of my love, the only thing I ever had any worth in, and given it all to you.”
Áine clutched her chest with jagged fingers, her brow creasing into her eyes. “You loved me too?”
He placed his hand over hers. The honesty was coming again. “Of course I did!” He near laughed at that—the blatancy of it now he’d exposed himself. The madness of them missing the most obvious part of their connection. “I loved the bones of you, Áine. Completely. From your core, right out to all the outer places I often imagined kissing you. You see here’s the thing about me and you, and feel free to disagree if you want, but I actually think we are neither the same nor opposite. I think what makes us feel so right together ties into something we touched on already this night. We’re balanced. We’re a unique equation our younger brains simply didn’t have the cognitive maturity to solve. But tonight, God, tonight every single thing about us felt balanced.”
After a moment of blissful silence and gratitude, like earlier, the impasse had returned with the very same question he’d asked of her already.
Unsure when it had happened, he found his thumb to be caressing her hand locked in his.
“So,” he said.
“So?”
“What now?”
Áine seemed to bask in the question, eyes closed but unable to stop two more tears from sneaking out. Then she looked at him resolutely.
It was so obvious now. As obvious as it was the moment they recognised each other. Because like so many times before, he knew what the unspoken answer was.
