Despite the miserable weather, the pub was full. Men were shoulder to shoulder at the bar, hands coming out of the line of tweed and wool and Donegal caps, filled with pints of stout and bitter and porter as well as the occasional peat-gold flash of whiskey. One of the farmers, a man whose tractor he’d helped fix last week, put a glass of whiskey on the table in front of him and said, “Throw that back, man, it will take the chill from ye.”
He’d already bought himself a pint of Harp and one for Claudia as well. He took a swallow of the whiskey, not wanting to offend the man and hoping to take the edge off his nerves. He wasn’t used to this many people all at once. It was a little overwhelming.
He looked about him, mesmerized by all the activity. The village seemed to be in a mood for fun this night. There was music and dance and women coming out of their coats and rain slickers and boots and shawls and kerchiefs like a tree full of butterflies suddenly released from their respective chrysalises. The music had already begun and he could feel the thump of the bodhran right to his marrow, and it set up an itch in his hands. He thought perhaps he had played it, back in that other life.
Someone coughed lightly and he looked up. He recognized the girl from the local men’s shop. She’d helped him pick out the pants he was wearing. She was pretty, with one of those round, rosy faces that would look weathered and ruddy in some years’ time. She swayed a little in time to the music, hands clasped in front of her, as shy and uncertain as a deer in her green dress. He felt a bit of melancholy at the sight of her; her face was lit up like a candle glowed within and he supposed he would have to dance with her. It wasn’t an unpleasant prospect entirely, so he wondered why it filled his chest with a weight of sand to contemplate it.
“Would ye like to dance then?” he asked, and she nodded, wordless but the glow in her face amped up another few notches, causing him no little worry. He had nothing to give this girl other than a twirl around the dance floor. He wasn’t entirely certain he could dance though, truth be told.
Once on the floor, the steps came naturally though, and he moved with ease guiding her around the small space of the dance floor. She was uncertain on her feet and a bit slow to know which direction his hand was guiding her. He firmed his hand up on the small of her back, so she wouldn’t trod on his toes and he felt the response in her body immediately. He left the hand as it was, to spare his toes, if not her feelings. He noticed that Claudia was watching them, and the look on her face was one of disapproval, though of what he wasn’t certain, just that seeing him dancing with this girl didn’t seem to please her.
There was a tarnished mirror above the hearth, an old one in a heavy gilt frame. He could see the various couples turning and whirling in the glass, the music tempo a wee bit melancholy, giving him that ache he sometimes got in his chest at the sound of a fiddle or the pipes. It was a timeless scene, for it might have been a decade or two ago, or even a hundred years before—dance and drink and courtship, and shy men and women with yearning in their hearts for more than this wee village or even the wider world could possibly give them. He was wise enough to know that all of human experience existed as much in this small village as it did in larger towns, and yet a person could be suffocated by the weight of that as well and blame it on the wee village and its invisible confines.
It was warm in the pub, the fug of damp wool and drink sitting thick in his lungs. He felt lightheaded, and noticed that the girl in his arms was as flushed as a ripe apple about to fall from the tree. He shouldn’t have downed the whiskey, he knew better, but the temptation to take away his nerves had been too great. When the music ended he escorted the girl back to her friends, who were all giggling and flushed and giving her rather pointed looks.
He enjoyed the dancing, and found the steps came naturally to him, and he partnered one woman after another, some of the young girl’s friends and then some of the older women of the village, who were married and happily so but didn’t mind being taken about the dance floor by a young man. When finally he begged off for his knee was giving its familiar ache as it did when it felt it had moved him about enough for one day, he found Claudia waiting at the table for him. Once he’d sat for a bit and finished off his pint, she’d looked at him and said, “Dance with me,” and then took his hand and led him out onto the floor before he could protest.
She moved well, and followed his lead smoothly. He looked down at her, suddenly aware that he was holding a desirable woman. One who was lovely and intelligent and kind and with whom he talked over the dinner table each night. The scent of her hair tickled at his nose and he was all too aware of the soft press of her breasts against him. He swallowed and tried to think of other things—how much feed was needed to see the sheep through the winter, whether he ought to turn over the north field one more time and if he’d remembered to feed McCool his dinner this evening. None of it worked and he worried that Claudia was going to notice his senses had been stirred by her proximity.
She looked up and gave him a small smile, a knowing one that clearly communicated that she was aware of his body’s response to her and was pleased by it. He smiled back at her, though he was vaguely uneasy. Yet at the same time he was sorely tempted. Claudia was fond of him, and he of her, but she wasn’t going to fall in love with him because she was still in love with her husband. He considered the possibility that it might work for the two of them. She moved slightly closer to him, an imperceptible distance to anyone observing them, but he felt it along every inch of him. He understood just what it meant. His body wanted the solace of a woman’s touch, a woman’s warmth, and if he was entirely honest, so did his soul.
He took a breath and closed his eyes for a second, the heat of the woman in his arms overwhelming. When he opened his eyes again there was a strange aura around his vision and he blinked trying to clear the fog. His sight narrowed suddenly down to something strange, like he viewed a painting in the distance and the woman in his arms was suddenly no more than a figure from another time and no more substantial than the autumn leaves which stuck fast to the pub windows.
He turned, confused, the music sounding distant now, the fiddle playing an air that danced in and out of his hearing, like notes upon the wind. The people were like those glimpsed in a glass ball, the sort that would hang over a dance floor—tiny and distorted and moving slowly, as if the music were a stately pavane rather than the lively air it was. The old gilt mirror appeared to be moving, the surface rippling softly like melted silver poured slowly across an uneven surface.
A space cleared in the middle of it, smoothed by his brain’s unreliable neurons, and a face appeared bit by bit—a jawline of such delicacy and skin the color of roses and opals and ivory. The face was alight with laughter, looking up into his own, so fiercely beautiful and so terribly familiar that he lost his breath. In some small part of his mind he understood that he had stopped, that he was somehow still in the pub, with dancers two-stepping around him, but the woman in the mirror seemed more real to his eyes just now, and he wanted to walk across the floor and reach through the mirror and whatever else divided them and touch her, let her draw him across the barrier that stood between them. She turned suddenly and glanced from the mirror, her expression as grave as that of a woman in a 19th century painting, all tints of cream and ivory, and eyes that took the breath from a man’s soul. He saw her as through smoke or fog, glimpsed clear and then half disappearing like she was a mirage, something a man who hungered might see just to keep him going that last mile.
The vision kaleidoscoped down and she was distant, a figure so small he could hardly see her against the horizon the mirror set. Then there he was back in the pub, the low light too bright and the music too loud and everyone staring at him as he stood stock-still in the center of the low-beamed room. He had dropped his hands from Claudia and she stood looking at him, flushed scarlet with embarrassment. The familiar sharp pain sliced through his head, and he feared he would be sick in front of all of them.
“I’m sorry, I was
just taken oddly there for a moment. Ye’ll excuse me.” He left the floor and Claudia and went out into the night through the pub’s back entrance. He was sorry to embarrass Claudia, though with luck the brown-haired farmer who had been glaring daggers at him much of the night would take the opportunity to rush to her rescue and thus install himself into her good graces.
He ran to the edge of the small wood that sat behind the pub, he felt half sick to his stomach and didn’t want to vomit within sight of anyone who might look out the foggy pub windows.
It took a few moments to get the nausea under control and then he sat on an old wooden wire spool that was out behind the pub. He took a few breaths and watched them drift off into the cold October night. He wished the memory hadn’t left as soon as it had come, but it was always so with his patchy brain—a sliver, a side view, a glimpse in a funhouse mirror and then nothing.
He walked back to the farm unable to face the crowd of villagers again. Claudia had her wee car and would be fine on her own. He on the other hand might never be able to show his face in public again. He climbed the stairs in the byre to his room and lit the lantern, took off his good clothes and then lay down on the bed. The lantern cast a soft glow around the space. He could smell the hay, slightly dusty; the feed with its warm graininess, and the sheep, the scent of wool and lanolin, and he found all of it comforting. He was tired, the pain and nausea having left as he’d walked the two miles between the pub and the farm. The byre was warm, and it lulled him like a tincture of valerian so that sleep took him swiftly and softly.
He was dreaming, as though sleep had dropped him so deep into a well that he’d fallen through like a character in a child’s storybook, arriving in another world so fantastical as not to be possible. But there was little fantastical about this world other than how warm he was, and that the woman of whom he always dreamed was, at long last, speaking to him. Speaking to him about, of all things, a bill for hay.
“Do you really think we need this much hay?” she asked, a wee line across the top of her nose as she looked over the piece of paper she held in her hand. “We only have the one sheep, after all.” The paper unfurled suddenly, spiralling out from her hand and down across the polished pine floor until it touched his feet. He bent down to pick it up and the scent of strawberries and green growing things and something that smelled a bit like the wind off the ocean on a fine day filled his senses. He breathed it deep, and felt his body relax in the way it did after satisfying a long held back appetite. Hunger—both that of body and soul, satiated for a moment.
And then she looked up and laughed, her eyes the green of a spring in full flush, like the hills of his land. He laughed with her and suddenly she had tumbled him to a surface of some sort, grass or a bed, he didn’t know, only that it was soft and she was warm, so warm and her hands were on him and he wanted her so badly he thought he might die if he didn’t take her then and there. Then suddenly they were talking again, but she was still touching him and he couldn’t really hear what she was saying entirely.
It seemed to him that he asked her a question, something to do with Claudia and the girl he had danced with in the pub, and she laughed and reached up and kissed him on the corner of his mouth.
“Casey Riordan, for heaven’s sake, man, you know well enough the effect you have on women.”
“I don’t know what ye mean,” he said, but he did know, he knew himself suddenly like his wholeness had flooded back at the touch of this woman. It was as if he could see it all, his history, who he had been, who he was, who he might be in the depths of those green, green eyes. He felt joy well up, as he grabbed at memory the way a child might plunge its hands into a bin of candy, with greed and wonder.
He ran his hands down her back, realizing with delight that she was naked. One hand touched the line of his jaw, thumb rasping sweetly over his stubble, the other hand drifting with intent down his chest and then over the plane of his belly, touching his cock so that it sprang eager to her hand, a delirious sort of joy fizzing through his blood. He was almost blind with desire and the need to simply join with her and feel her heat around him.
“Casey, please,” she said in a voice of both surrender and demand all at once, “touch me, touch me now.”
He wanted to say to her, “Tell me yer name, woman, tell me where to find ye. Tell me why it is ye haunt me in sleep an’ in the waking hours, but ye never tell me who it is ye are.”
It was the voice that brought him up through the well, reluctantly, like a swimmer who wanted the drowning and dreaded the rescue. The voice was all wrong, it wasn’t that soft, grave, slightly throaty voice that tickled right there at the base of the brain, where his memory was locked up awaiting the key which would turn the tumblers and set his life in motion once again. That voice had set the tumblers, rusty as they were, to moving, like a clear golden oil poured between the iron pieces, washing away the detritus that kept him stuck fast, locked inside his own head. This present voice was different, it scratched at his consciousness, pulled his sleep off as though it were merely an autumn cobweb, and submerged the memories back down into that cold black water.
He was not in a bed with a green-eyed woman whose voice warmed him both in body and soul. He was in a byre, with a lantern lit low, and the smell of sheep and dusty timothy thick in his nose and Claudia was sitting on the side of his bed. He felt both angry and bereft, for what the waking had cost him.
He sat up, realizing the blanket had fallen off the bed at some point and that the underwear he wore were not doing much to hide the fact that he was as hard as an iron pipe with the memory of the dream woman’s touch still lingering on him.
“Claudia—what’s wrong?” he asked, leaning over and clutching up the blanket in an attempt at modesty.
“I came to check on you. You left so abruptly, I was worried you were sick.”
“I’m sorry, I had one of my headaches,” he said.
“I thought as much,” she said and then reached forward and pulled the blanket from his hands.
“I could help you with that,” she said softly and then touched him. He suddenly felt fourteen, awkward and certain he was going to go off like a rocket and embarrass himself. He knew he should protest, he knew it wasn’t right even though he did desire her, and for more than just physical reasons. Touching him as she was, she could have little doubt about his ability or readiness. He wanted to have sex for the pure release of it and for the sake of a few precious moments of oblivion, of allowing his heart and mind to take a back seat to his body.
“No man has touched me since my husband died,” she said and it was no more than a plain statement of fact.
He put his hand down and gently removed hers from his body. He ached with need.
“Aye, an’ I know that seems reason enough,” he said gently. “In the end, though, what do we have to give one another other than a few moments of warmth? Then tomorrow, if not sooner, we’ll feel empty an’ just the wee bit sadder.”
“Maybe we wouldn’t. Do ye have any notion of what it is to long for touch, to simply want someone to show ye some tenderness?” she said, anger and pain mixed in her voice.
He wanted to tell her just how well he knew, just how well acquainted he was with the taste of loneliness and that simple human need to touch and be touched; it was the very manna of life itself. A man or woman could die inside for want of it.
“Casey, if ye’re goin’ to leave—and I think we both know ye are—then it’s best that ye do it now before it’s too late.”
He nodded. The fewer words he said the better, at this point. He felt like he would only make things worse by trying to give her any comfort.
“Did your wife die?” she asked. “You never speak of her, but you still wear a ring.”
He took a breath and thought about explaining, but then decided it might be wisest to allow her to believe him a grieving widower.
“Aye,” he said. It would have been closer to the truth to say he had died, he thought, weary.
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“I’d like to keep McCool,” she said, looking away from him. “He’s grand company an’ he’s settled in here, it would be a shame to subject him to a rootless life.”
“Aye, I’ll go an’ I’ll leave ye the cat,” he said bleakly. She watched him as he dressed, shrugging into an old sweater, pulling on the pants he had discarded only a few hours ago. He knew the effects of her hand and her soft skin showed clearly in the lantern’s glow. Well, he was only a man, and a lonely one at that. Perhaps it would give her some comfort to know she had stirred him.
He packed his things, which only took five minutes.
“Thank ye, Claudia, for takin’ me in. I didn’t mean for…” he let the words die away, because he didn’t know what to say without making the situation far more awkward than it already was. She nodded, her head still turned from him, but he thought he saw a glimmer of a tear on her cheek. She was right, it was best if he went now. He leaned down and put one hand to her chin, tilting her face up toward his own. And then he kissed her.
The night outside was cold and filled with mist, and he couldn’t see more than a foot or two in front of his nose. He shivered, his clothes and boots feeling damp at once. He was tired but he gave his head a shake and shoved his hands deep into his pockets and started down the road.
Before he had thought of want and desire, and what those things were to a human. He only understood one want anymore—just one. He wanted to go home.
There was a light on upstairs above the pub and Casey heaved a sigh of relief. Finn answered his knock within a couple of minutes and giving him a shrewd look as he stepped in over the threshold, said, “I waited up, I did think ye might need a place to stay after tonight.”
“Ye did, did ye?” Casey said, with no small sarcasm.
“Aye, a blind man could have seen the looks Claudia was throwin’ at those young girls you were dancin’ with. Ye can’t play with the female hearts, lad, an’ not get caught in the crossfire that results.”
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 73