“Give me my bag back now! And stop talking to me like I’m a child!”
“Oh, I’m not. I’m talking to you like you’re a clinically deranged madwoman. Look at yourself, Andie. This is exactly what I was talking about when I said you were attention seeking.”
“Don’t change the subject! This is about you, not about me looking for attention!”
“It’s about to become about you. You’ve just stolen a bag from a shop to beat me with, the entire lobby is staring at us, and it looks like the girl behind the counter is calling security on you.”
I looked up to see the shop assistant engaging in a frantic conversation on the phone while glaring in my direction.
“Is it any wonder I’m ignoring you?” Colm went on. “Not only do you wriggle your way into my private life, but then you turn the whole thing around so that it’s all about you. You don’t want to support me, Andie. You want to make my personal history into something you can solve. You want to fix me, and then it’s all about you again – look what you did, aren’t you so great, etc. And then, when I don’t play ball with your plan, you have a hissy fit and make a show of both of us. So I think it’s best to continue with this ignoring thing, don’t you?”
I had no idea what to say. I suddenly felt very small.
“Colm, I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . .”
He held his hand up. “No. Just leave it for now.” He dropped my handbag at my feet.
“Okay. But I am sorry. Just know that.”
He nodded. He looked like he wanted to say something else, but couldn’t get the words out. It suddenly seemed hugely important to me to find out what was on his mind, but my attention was diverted by the sound of a “Hey!” from an approaching security guard. Normally, I would have been worried, but it suddenly didn’t matter that I might be plastered all over the news for shoplifting. There were more important things to worry about.
“I’ll stay and tell them you didn’t mean to take that,” said Colm.
“No. You go. I can handle this.”
He nodded. His face thawed. “For the record, if you need to use that on him to escape, it bloody well hurts.”
I laughed in a nervous, high-pitched fashion as the security guard descended upon me, and Colm walked away to leave me to talk my way out of things.
I heard a knock at my door a few hours after I’d somehow manoeuvred my way out of the shop situation – Colm’s knock. I got up and went to answer the door, bracing myself for the inevitable onslaught.
I opened the door to the sight of Colm’s legs, his hair, his forehead and eyes, and a gigantic bouquet of flowers covering his entire torso. A box of chocolates was squashed between his left arm and his chest. A plastic bag containing a bottle of wine dangled from his right wrist, which looked like it was about to snap between the weight of the bottle and his attempt to hold up the bouquet of flowers.
I was shocked into silence. I pulled down the top of the bouquet to make sure that it was actually Colm standing behind the flowers – although the torn brown corduroy trousers had pretty much given the game away, but it was still hard to believe that he would do something like this.
“You’re very quiet.” A muffled voice came from behind the flowers.
“I’m just wondering how the hell you managed to knock carrying all that stuff?”
“Thanks. That was exactly the reaction I was hoping for.”
“You should come in.”
“I should.” He shuffled in. “These are for you. You might have guessed that.” He held out the bouquet of flowers, then fished out the chocolates and stuck them under my arm.
“I actually wasn’t sure. It was quite possible you got lost on your way to Lindy’s with these. I really wasn’t expecting this . . .”
“Because I’m such a tosser, I suppose?” he asked as he freed himself from the bottle of wine.
“I just didn’t think you were the type of guy to give flowers.”
“I’ve never done it before in my life, so I suppose that means I’m not.”
“So why now?” I threw the question out there as nonchalantly as I could, but my heart started pounding. It was a loaded question, and we both knew it.
The answer came in a format I didn’t expect. Colm came over to me and took the flowers out of my arms, then cupped his hands around my face and stared into my eyes for what felt like forever. My initial reaction was shock, but within seconds, what shocked me was how right it felt.
He swept his hands down my cheeks, onto my neck and into my hair, staring at me in wonder. I stared back, drinking in this new, barrier-free person before me. I was almost afraid to breathe in case the interruption would startle him and send him away. And right then, I felt that I would die if he left my side. I slowly moved my arms up his chest, then rested them around his shoulders as I stroked the back of his neck. He closed his eyes, then rested his forehead against mine. We stood like that for an immeasurable amount of time, but when we finally looked up at each other, everything changed. Within seconds, he was kissing me with an intensity that made me melt into him. We tore at each other’s clothes, stumbling backwards towards the bed. Once we got there, all I could think was that it was absolute madness that we hadn’t done this before . . .
“What are you thinking?” Colm asked me as he snuggled his bare body against mine some time later.
I smiled, and kissed his neck. “Isn’t that what the woman usually asks?”
“I know, I know. I’m just hoping you haven’t already started to regret what we’ve just done.”
“Of course I don’t! Why would you think that I would?”
“I just can’t believe my luck that you’re actually interested in me,” Colm whispered. “I’ve fancied you since the first time I set eyes on you in the Éire TV canteen, when you worked on that Glitter show.”
“No way! I had no idea!”
“I used to spot you walking around the building, always in a hurry and looking super-confident, and glammed up to the nines, but I figured you never noticed me.”
“But when we first met, you were so aloof and distant that I actually thought you hated me! I could never figure out what you thought about me!”
“I wanted to dislike you,” Colm said. “I thought you represented everything I don’t like. You seemed to be from a world that’s a million light years away from mine. I looked at you and saw a leggy, skinny model –”
“Former model,” I said. “And I’m not skinny.”
“Ah, go away outta that! But let me finish. On paper, you had the potential to be a superficial celebrity wannabe and a drama queen. Sorry,” he said when my face fell. “I just thought – and don’t kill me for this – that you’d put on all that crying business during the interview when we first met, just so that you’d get publicity for the show. But once I got to know you, I knew then that you were genuinely upset during that interview.”
“Damn right I bloody well was!” I said, feeling genuinely upset again.
“I know, I know.” He stroked my hair softly. “I know what I’m saying sounds horrible, but I want to be honest with you about why I was so detached at times.”
“Go on, so.” I tried to put my indignation to one side.
“Anyway, this was all well and good until I started to develop feelings for you. Proper, strong feelings, not just fancying you. When we first met, I used to actively try not to be too friendly with you, because I had the impression that you thought everyone fancied you. Whenever I made a snide comment at you, it was because I was trying to pull you down a peg or two.”
“So is that what that ‘footballers are more your style’ comment was about on the plane on the way over?”
“Yeah.” He had the good grace to look sheepish.
“Well, you sure wasted no time in getting the knife in . . .”
“I know. It was nasty of me. But then I got to know you despite myself, with all the work we had to do together, and I realised that you’re not like that at all. I
knew I was falling for you before I got sick, but as soon as you gave up that George Clooney meeting to help me, I was goosed. I couldn’t fool myself any longer – I had to admit to myself that I was crazy about you. Problem was, you seemed to be hopelessly in love with Leon. Even so, I had to spend as much time as possible with you after that – I couldn’t help myself. Then, when Martin sent me that email complaining about Valerie, I had a cunning plan – you’d been so nosy about what was going on there . . .” He stopped and laughed when I thumped his arm.
“You meant to say ‘interested’, didn’t you?”
“No, you were nosy, let’s face it. But anyway. I thought it would be a good way to get to spend some extra time with you.”
“I knew there was something behind all of that! At the start, you had no interest at all, and then suddenly it was a different story!”
“Andie, I was never in the slightest bit interested in what is or isn’t going on between Isolde and Martin. It was just an excuse to have something to talk to you about. Things had been so frosty between us, then I saw an opening, and – I exploited it, being perfectly honest.”
“No wonder you won all of those awards. You’re quite ruthless in getting what you want when it comes down to it, aren’t you?”
“Ruthless, no. Ambitious, yes – in most things. I really believed I had no chance at all with you, but that didn’t stop me wanting to spend time with you. Actually, it wasn’t even a matter of want – it was need. I needed to spend every spare second with you, because when I wasn’t with you, I was thinking about you and driving myself crazy.”
“I couldn’t work out what you were thinking. I was actually afraid you might take Lindy up on her advances at one stage – you did meet her for a drink.”
He laughed. “I only met her for that drink to have the opportunity to make it clear to her that I wasn’t interested. I wanted to handle the whole thing as tactfully as possible before it got to a situation where she’d try to kiss me when we were out or something. I didn’t want to embarrass her by rejecting her in front of lots of people or anything like that.”
“That was nice of you. How did you do it, by the way? And how did she react?”
“I asked her for some advice. I told her I was in love with a girl from home, and didn’t know whether I should make a move on her or not. I asked her what she thought I should do.”
“No!”
“Yep. She got the message from that alright. Of course, she knew it was you straight away.”
“So what was her advice? Or had she stomped out in a hissy fit by this stage?”
“Her advice was that I should forget this girl and look further afield.”
“Crumbs. She really doesn’t give up easily, does she?”
“No, but she eventually got sick of listening to me going on about how much I liked this girl. Once I mentioned that I thought this girl was my soul mate, I could see she’d given me up as a bad job. It was like a switch flicked in her head, and she wasn’t prepared to waste any more of her time after that. She got up and left approximately three seconds later.”
I barely registered anything Colm said after the words ‘soul mate’.
“When I told you that I was meeting her,” he continued, “I was trying to suss out if you were in any way jealous at the thought of it. You didn’t seem to be, which was very disappointing!”
I zoned back in and found my voice. “I should’ve been an actress. There would have been more money in it than journalism.”
He laughed. “But despite all that Lindy business, we seemed to be growing closer, and I started to wonder if maybe, just maybe, I had a chance after all. I could feel something happening between us, something amazing. For the first time in my life, I felt like someone ‘got’ me.”
“That’s exactly how I feel when I’m with you,” I whispered.
“I thought it was real. But then, I found out that you knew about my past, and I felt that you’d just spent all that time being nice to me because you felt sorry for me. And that feeling I had of you ‘getting’ me – I wondered if it just seemed that way because you knew what you knew all along.”
“That was never it,” I said. “I only found out recently. Besides, there was always so much more to it – to us.”
“I realised that once I had time to think,” Colm said. “But when I found out that you knew, it nearly killed me. I kept thinking it would have been better never to have known how it felt to be this crazy about someone and to think you had a future with them, rather than find out and then have it torn away from you.”
“So what changed?”
He shrugged. “I copped myself on, that’s what. I realised I was being an irrational idiot. But hey, I have the excuse of having years of inexperience with women to fall back on. But that’s a conversation for later. The bottom line was that if I was going to lose you, it wasn’t going to be at my own hand. If you didn’t want to be with me, that was your choice. But I’ve spent my life running away from happiness, and you were one thing that I couldn’t run from.”
“Please don’t ever run away again.”
“Oh, I’m going nowhere.” He paused. “But, Andie, we need to talk about Leon . . .”
I nodded. I’d expected this. In fact, it was crazy that we hadn’t spoken about Leon before now. At this stage, it wasn’t so much an elephant in the room as an entire safari.
“How do you feel about him now?”
“He doesn’t feel real to me any more. It feels like this entire experience of looking for him was predicated on a dream that I never really wanted to come true.”
“If he showed up right now, what would you do?”
“I’d tell him I’m sorry for wasting his time, because I’m in love with someone else.”
Colm’s eyes widened. I nodded. He didn’t need to return the compliment. I already knew he was in love with me too.
And it felt better than anything I’d ever felt before in my life.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Over the next few days, I found out all sorts of interesting things about Colm that helped me to understand him better.
After his parents were killed when he was twelve, he went to live with an aunt and uncle-in-law that he’d never got on with. His aunt was a detached and aloof woman, and his uncle-in-law resented his presence from day one. Colm knew they’d only taken him in out of a sense of duty, and fear of what the neighbours would say if they didn’t. They had two girls in their late teens who were the lights of their lives, and they really weren’t interested in having a boy too – in fact, Colm always felt that his uncle resented having another male presence in the house.
He’d never had a girlfriend since the accident. A lifetime of pushing people away from him had done nothing for his love life.
“I’d been seeing a girl called Sharon from home for two years when the accident happened,” he explained to me over a room-service meal at four o’clock in the morning. We weren’t getting much sleep these days, and had needed to refuel. “She was best friends with a granddaughter of the man I killed. She hadn’t been in the car with me at the time of the accident – I’d been driving alone that night – but she knew it wasn’t my fault, that I couldn’t do anything to avoid the old man when he stepped out. That didn’t stop the whole thing falling apart, though.”
“Was she influenced by her best friend to give you a hard time? I mean, I presume her friend was mad at you, despite you not being able to stop the accident from happening . . .”
“Her friend was livid, as was her friend’s entire family. They were a big family, and quite influential in the village in that they owned half of it – one of the pubs, a grocery store, some of the property on the main street, that kind of thing. They blackened my name to everyone who set foot inside the shop or the pub, even though they knew from the witness statement and the guards that I couldn’t have done anything at all to stop what happened from happening.”
“That was lousy of them.”
&n
bsp; “Yeah. A part of me understood it, though – they were angry, and who else would they take it out on, only the person who’d killed the one they loved? That didn’t stop me feeling bitter about it all, though.”
“I can imagine. And what did your girlfriend have to say about that?”
“My girlfriend always said to me that she was on my side, but I could tell she was doing it out of duty. She always looked mortified to be spotted walking down the street with me. She broke it off with me about two months after I killed the old man, and it destroyed me.”
“You didn’t see it coming at all?” I tried to phrase the question as gently as I could.
“I did, of course. The logical part of my brain knew a long time before it happened that it was over between us. I just fought those voices down so hard that when it did happen, I couldn’t bear it. And I also knew that my relationship with my girlfriend wasn’t the only thing that was over. My entire old way of life was gone forever.”
“That must have been hard for you to come to terms with.”
“It was. So I did the whole mature-guy thing and just went completely into myself. If nobody could get close to me, nobody could hurt me. So, as you’ve quite rightly pointed out, I push people away. I’ve been doing it for years, and I had no intention of stopping – even though I’m sick to death of doing it. I’ve known for years that it’s time for me to get back to the real world. But then, when I actually felt ready to be with someone again, I just didn’t know how to get back in the game. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it got to the stage where I felt like a freak. Imagine explaining to a girl that first of all you’ve killed someone, and then that you’ve never gone out with anyone else since. I’d sound like the biggest loser on the planet.”
“Do you think I think you’re a loser?”
[2014] Looking for Leon Page 26