Jer pushes himself off the wall, turns around and . . . sure enough, there is Aidan bleedin’ Gallagher, standing not four feet away, arms crossed, looking like he wants to crush Jer beneath the heel of his boot.
Or is it me he wants to crush? I can’t tell.
Jer looks over at me. “Is this your fella, then?”
I snort, but it comes out as a messy, wet raspberry. “Aidan bleedin’ Gallagher is not my fella. He might could have been my fella, but he doesn’t like women in that way.”
Might could have? Did I really just say that? Lawd, I must be drunk. I thought I had the might could haves beaten out of me in broadcasting school by Mr. Rhunda, a tyrant of diction.
Aidan looks at me with murder in his eyes and I suddenly realize the unintended implication in my statement. A bubble of laughter floats up my throat, tickling my tongue, until I can’t contain it anymore.
“T . . . that sounded like I was s . . . saying you are”—I scrunch up my face trying to think of the word—“a p . . . ponce! Trust me, Jer, Aidan is not a ponce. He likes women. He just doesn’t like me.”
Jer looks from Aidan to me and back again.
“Feck off,” Aidan growls.
Jer doesn’t even stop to collect his Guinness from the ledge. He just mumbles something to Aidan and walks away.
“What is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me?” Aidan stalks closer until I can feel the heat of his body, smell the smoky scent of peat fire clinging to his clothes. “You’re the one making a holy show of yourself over some feckin’ eejit fiddle player from Cork. Jaysus, Cork!”
“I am not making a holy show of myself... whatever that is,” I say, pushing myself off the wall and swaying as a wave of dizziness washes over me.
Aidan picks me up and tosses me over his shoulder like a bag of potatoes. People in the bar hoot and holler. The floor spins around and around until I think I might be sick. No! I will not be sick. I am clutching onto a tiny scrap of dignity and I will not let it go by losing my fish and chips all over the Red Horse. I close my eyes and take several deeps breaths. When I open my eyes again, I am standing beside a shiny black Range Rover. The rain has stopped and a fat, silver moon hangs low in the sky—so low I feel like I could just reach out and grab it. Aidan keeps one hand clamped around my arm as he opens the passenger door.
“Get in,” he says.
I climb inside. Aidan reaches around me and secures the seatbelt around my lap. I close my eyes, and rest my forehead against the cool window. I am vaguely aware of Aidan opening the driver’s side door, the sound of the engine starting, my head bumping against the glass as we hit a pothole.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Home.”
“What?” I open my eyes and sit up. “You can’t take me home. I don’t want Mrs. McGregor to see me like this. Please. Can’t we go somewhere else? Please?”
I try to focus on his face, but the Range Rover is swaying like we’ve driven onto one of those carnival Tilt-A-Whirls. We tilt to the left, then the right. Centrifugal force moves me away from Aidan, spins me around and around, moves me closer, then away again. I close my eyes and let my head fall back against the headrest.
“Fine.”
He turns into an Esso and pulls into a parking spot.
“Stay here,” he says, opening the door and climbing out. “I will be right back.”
He raises his hand and pushes the button on a small black remote. The doors lock with a startling click.
I close my eyes again and am drifting off to sleep when the locks click again and he climbs back into the driver’s seat.
“Here,” he says, handing me a steaming Styrofoam cup. “Drink this.”
I take the cup from him and lift it to my mouth. Wispy tendrils of coffee-scented steam tickle my nose. I take several sips of coffee and then slide the cup into the cup holder between our seats. Aidan hands me a sack. Inside, I find a bottle of water, a pack of peppermint-flavored gum, and a small package of Buplex—Ireland’s equivalent to Advil.
My throat suddenly feels lumpy and tight, like I swallowed the wrong way, and hot tears fill my eyes. I sniffle. Aidan looks over at me.
“What’s the matter?”
“Y . . . you bought me gum!” I cry. “That’s the sweetest, most considerate thing anyone has d . . . done for me in a long time.”
“Jaysus!” He pushes the ignition button and the engine roars to life. “How many pints did ya have, then?”
“Three.”
“Three? Is that all?” He laughs. “Ya know how to bake, but ya sure don’t know how to hold your Guinness.”
“I like the way you say three.”
He frowns at me.
“T’ree.” I hold up three fingers. “I had t’ree feckin’ pints of Guinness.”
“Jaysus.”
He backs the Range Rover out of the parking spot and we are off, speeding down a dark, winding road. I sip my coffee whenever we hit a straightaway. When the cup is empty, I twist the lid off the water and swallow the Buplex. I feel myself sobering with each mile and with sobriety comes a deep, mortifying humiliation. I open a piece of peppermint gum and pop it into my mouth—eager to erase the evidence of my shame.
Aidan turns down onto a dirt track and we bump along for several miles. Finally, he stops driving and kills the engine.
I look out the front window, at scrubby bushes that seem to be glowing in the quicksilver light of the moon, at a lone tree, its bare white branches stretching up to the black sky, like a skeleton reaching for the heavens, and I have the strange feeling I have been here before.
“Where are we?”
“Somewhere special.” He looks softer in the moonlight, the sharp edges of his face blunted. “I come here when I want to be alone.”
But you’re not alone. You’re with me.
He gets out of the SUV. I hear the lift gate open, feel a rush of cool air, see him through my side mirror, rifling around in the trunk. He opens my door and holds his hand out. A thick blanket is rolled up and tucked under his arm and his trusty rucksack is flung around his shoulder.
I put my hand in his and let him help me out of the vehicle. An adrenaline-like burst of excitement quickens my pulse. I am alone with Aidan. It is the middle of the night and we are alone, in the middle of nowhere. I should be frightened remembering the homicidal look on his face when he saw me flirting with Jer. I should be frightened over my own nonsensical reactions to this man.
I like him.
I hate him.
I lust him.
I hate him.
I love him.
I love him . . .
My hand feels cold and so very, very small in his, like I am a lost child he found wandering around in the dark. Aidan has always made me feel that safe and protected, even when we were both children. He is only a year older than me, but he exudes such strength, such confidence that it’s easy to forget we are contemporaries.
Maybe that’s why I’ve always loved him.
Hush up, girl. What’s wrong with you? Stop saying you love Aidan Gallagher. You don’t love him. You don’t know him.
Hand in hand, we start climbing up hill while I wage a heated debate in my head.
I can’t love Aidan.
Why can’t I love him?
Because I love Grayson.
Do I? Really?
Okay, maybe I was just comfortable with Grayson. Maybe Grayson is like that worn-out, tattered robe of Momma’s hidden in a box under my bed back home in Charleston. I have kept that robe all these years even though it doesn’t fit and has more holes than a block of Swiss cheese. I kept it because it felt wrong not to keep it.
Grayson was my security blanket, a tattered, worn-out relationship I held onto because I was too afraid to let it go. Is that what I am doing now? Clinging onto this remnant of my past because I am too afraid to be alone? Too afraid to feel the discomfort and loneliness that comes with the unfamiliar? Maybe I should pump the brakes on my speeding, out-
of-control, soap-box-derby wreck of emotions until I am certain they’re not heading me down a road to nowhere.
That’s it then. I will listen to my logical side, that eloquent, persuasive side that knows, just knows, falling in love with Aidan Gallagher would be the same as disaster courting folly.
We reach the top of the hill and stop walking. The moon is so bright it reminds me of the lightning bugs I used to catch and keep in an old mason jar. I would fall asleep watching those bugs glowing in the dark, their light reflected through the glass creating a soft blue halo on my bedside table. I always put a slice of apple and wet grass in the jar because Daddy said it would keep the air moist and help them live longer in captivity. Even so, I cried when I eventually let them go.
I guess I’ve always struggled with letting things go.
I shift my gaze away from the moon to the lake shimmering and rippling like molten silver in the valley below.
The lake.
I look at Aidan.
“This is your special place?”
He nods.
“This is our lake.”
This is the lake where Aidan kissed me that last summer beneath a moon as big and beautiful as the moon hanging over our heads right now.
“Come on,” he says, grabbing my hand. “I’ll row ya to the middle of the lake and by the time we step on dry land again, ya will be sober as a nun.”
I’m already sober as a nun.
I follow Aidan along the spongy shore until we arrive at a flat-bottomed rowboat beached amid willowy grass. Aidan tosses the blanket and his rucksack onto one of the wooden seats and pushes the boat over the grass. When the stern of the boat slides into the water, Aidan stops pushing. He walks over to me, sweeps me up in his arms, and carries me to the rowboat.
I feel seventeen again. Seventeen and, deep sigh, in love, love, love with a beautiful Irish boy, with eyes as blue as the sea, and a smile that makes my heart skip several silly beats.
I won’t pay my silly beat-skipping heart no mind, because I am not, not falling in love with Aidan Gallagher. It’s only the pints of Guinness, the romantic moonlight, the way I get all dizzy headed when he wraps his arms around me.
Chapter Twenty-three
I sent Manderley a postcard from Ireland once. It was a scene of a cloud-ringed mountain reflected in a glassine lake. I bought the postcard at a roadside gas station somewhere in Connemara, during one of my outings with Aunt Patricia. Manderley kept the postcard, probably hidden away in the Georgian-era tea box with the cracked lid she used to store her treasures. She sent the postcard back to me during my first semester in college, when I was having a difficult time adjusting to life in a place as strange as Austin. She attached the postcard to a piece of expensive stationery, upon which she had jotted a poem by William Butler Yeats in her beautiful, loopy script. I’ve never been one for poetry, too many confusing, highfalutin’ words, but that one resonated because it talked about a person in search of peace. A peace that dropped like the veil of morning and glimmered like the moon at midnight—or some such thing.
Three lines stuck in my memory and I recall them now, sitting in a rowboat on a lake in Donegal.
“I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore,” I say, reciting the lines aloud. “While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
We are in the middle of the lake now. Aidan stops rowing and secures the oars. He is sitting on the center bench, across from me, facing me.
“‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’,” he says.
“You read poetry?”
I don’t mean to sound so surprised, so supercilious, but Aidan Gallagher spends his free time training to be a Mixed Martial Arts fighter. I never imagined someone so rough around the edges would like something as soft and refined as poetry.
“I don’t read poetry,” he says. “I read an article about Yeats in a magazine when I was waiting to be deployed to Afghanistan. ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ was printed at the end of the article. I liked it, so I ripped it out and stuck it in my caubeen.”
“Caubeen?”
“Cap.”
“You carried a Yeats poem in your hat band when you went to war?”
“It stayed in my cap until . . .”
Aidan looks away, fixing his blank, dead-eyed gaze somewhere in the distance. I hear Catriona’s voice in my head.
Our Aidan is haunted by ghosts he can’t exorcise.
Silence descends over our little boat, like the veil of morning descending on the shore, as Yeats would have said. I want to ask Aidan what he thinks about when he drifts away from me, when his eyes get that sad, haunted look in them, but I am afraid. Afraid my poking and prodding will be like picking a scab. So, I sit real still like and listen to the gentle, soothing sound of the water lapping against the side of the boat. I sit still and silent until I can’t take sitting still and silent, until I feel my heart will twist itself into a knot if I don’t say something to bring him back to me, to sooth the invisible wounds paining him.
“I don’t like poetry.” My voice sounds too loud against the hush of night. “All of those obscure words and incomplete thoughts and misplaced punctuation marks. Shakespeare is the worst. Lawd! I hated having to read his poems in Lit Class. To me, they were gobbledygook.”
Slowly, surely, my pointless prattle leads him out of the hazy labyrinthine he has become lost in, out of the mist of his memories, and back to me. He smiles and I know I have his full attention again.
I tell him about my decision to attend college in Texas, about how I knew, just knew, I would die if I kept on living the life my daddy expected, the life of a well-bred Southern girl.
“All of my friends went to Clemson because that’s what their parents expected them to do,” I say. “Every good Southern girl knows she will leave home to attend a good old Southern college, where she will meet a boy from a good old Southern family. She’ll get married, have babies, and the cycle will repeat itself. It felt like the important milestones of my life had been decided for me, picked and stacked up like bales of cotton.” My throat tightens remembering the fear, the desperation I felt back then. “I knew if I didn’t do something bold, all of those bales wouldn’t amount to much and I would die an old, unhappy, unremarkable woman, one of thousands of old women who travel from cradle to Clemson to grave without pausing to wonder if there’s a world beyond the Mason-Dixon line.”
I don’t bother telling him about my relapse, about how I moved back to Charleston after college and slipped right back into my old life of vying for my daddy’s attention and Grayson’s fidelity.
“Anyway,” I say, picking up the dropped thread of conversation. “I thought I was too exotic a bloom for Charleston, that I would grow and thrive somewhere outside of South Carolina.”
“Did you?”
I crinkle my nose and he laughs.
“The transplant turned out to be more difficult than I imagined it would be,” I say, shivering. “I was lonely and confused and depressed. My sister, Manderley, found an old postcard I sent her from Ireland. She mailed the postcard to me along with the Yeats poem. I think it was her way of reminding me that I could visit the places and people I loved just by remembering them, by tapping into my heart’s core.”
I cross my arms over my chest, as a shield against the cold and my suddenly vulnerable, exposed heart. Aidan grabs the blanket off the spare bench and stands. The boat sways with his movement, but Aidan remains sure-footed, steady. He squats down in front of me and wraps the blanket around my shoulders.
“I was in love with ya, Tara Maxwell,” he says, still holding the ends of the blanket. “Did ya know it?”
I shake my head because I am too afraid to speak, too afraid words will break this wonderful, magical spell and I will find myself back in Charleston, standing at my kitchen counter eating day-old Cain’s chicken, and wondering why, why Grayson Calhoun chose Maribelle Cravath over me, and why, why nothing ever came of my summer rom
ance with Aidan Gallagher.
He pulls the ends of the blanket, bringing me closer, closer, until I am on my knees, kissing him, touching him, pleading with him to satisfy ten years of longing.
“Jaysus, Tara,” he says, groaning against my lips. “I want ya so bad it hurts.”
I slide my cold hands under his shirt, follow the thin trail of hair from his belly button up his flat abdomen to his muscular chest. He pulls back.
“If ya don’t stop touching me,” he says, grabbing my wrists. “I’ll take ya right here in this boat.”
“I can’t think of a better place for you to take me for the first time”—I kiss him softly—“can you?”
He reaches around me, grabs his rucksack, pulls an army blanket out of the main compartment, and spreads it on the bottom of the boat.
And then he takes me . . .
. . . beneath a midnight moon, in a boat, on a lake, in Donegal.
* * *
After, we lie under the heavy woolen blanket, our limbs tangled together like the roots of the old magnolia that grew back behind Black Ash.
The roots of a magnolia need to be strong, strong enough to keep an eighty-foot tree standing through centuries of torrential rains and hurricane winds. Lying in Aidan’s arms, I feel magnolia-root strong, like nothing, not the rains or winds of life, could knock me over.
I doze off and wake a few hours later, when the rising sun is a pink stain against the watercolor gray of dawn. My muscles ache from the cold, but I don’t want to move. Aidan is still sleeping, his chest rising and falling with a slow, easy rhythm I find comforting. I ease onto my side and look up at him, at the whiskers covering his chin, reddish in the light of dawn, and flush as I remember the way they felt brushing against my bare breasts.
“Good morning, love.”
My breath catches in my throat. “How long have you been awake?”
“All night.”
“Why didn’t you sleep?”
“A sentry doesn’t sleep when he’s guarding a princess.”
He kisses my forehead and I hear Taylor Swift’s Love Story playing in my head. He is Romeo, throwing pebbles at my window, and I’m Juliet, running barefoot through the castle to meet him in the garden. A kiss and a sweet word and I’m a lovesick teen again, daydreaming about a white dress and happily-ever-after.
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