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“‘Elope from our slabs’—I think that’s how Plath put it.” Áine took her sup, swallowing briskly to speak more. “Makes me wonder if you should have immigrated to France. That I should have followed you there instead, if you think in such a morbid way.”
Fionn smiled wholeheartedly, both because he understood and because she knew he would. Not two minutes had she arrived and he already felt greater in worth. Felt special.
“It’s like I told you the night at the B&B, it was German I studied in school,” he said. In hindsight, he couldn’t recall actually saying that aloud at all. “Anyway, I’d be lost in France if I were to be there and the only one I brought with me who could speak the language was the dead wife I’d just married.”
“Even still, you picked here of all places. A place with a worse law than necro marriage; it’s illegal to be drunk in a pub here,” she whispered.
He smiled terribly lopsided for how cheeky his next words were. “Well in that case, I’ll marry you in the morning when the hangover is ripe. But at least we’ll only befeelingon the precipice of death.”
Áine smiled too, not teethy and formal, but in the genuine form. In the way made her cheeks puff out like no time had passed. Then she took the reins of their most favourited pastime, and tumbled into a debating topic she’d just had with the man next to her on the layover flight to Dubai. “What do you think about the need for apathy in regard to the thriving of a community?”
Fionn sipped on his pint, licking the creamy head from above his stubbled lip before giving her his off-the-bat response. And she watched on, all the while basking in their declared affinity. Her on the left and him on the right, how it had been when they were younger. How they hoped it would be in their shared grave.
It was this that made him realise, for all their joking he really did hope that would be the case, and so the resulting thought shouldn’t have been as surprising as it was;
Christ, I would. I would marry her.
In unison they peered at one another, her blue eyes flecked with green meeting his golden brown, certainly sharing the thought as always.
“Fionn.”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too, Áine.”
It was then that something formed beyond the knowledge of either one of them. Beyond the distant, convoluted observation of any one person who brushed past their shared moments;
In the end, Áine and Fionn were just two humans who had elapsed into great balance for the company of one another. Two positive souls on the cusp of great things who had finally, fortheir unexpected rekindling in a Dublin B&B on an autumn wet night, managed to reach a point of independence that could only be described as the wondrous phenomenon known as flourishing.
