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Saoirse

 

 

 

Diarmuid cleared his throat. “Come on, selkie. Let’s get you into some dry clothes.”

And just like that, we agreed without speaking not to talk about my mother and her apathetic attitude towards me for the rest of the evening.

I followed him into the bathroom.

“You can have a hot shower here. Be back in a sec.” He left and returned with a pile of clothes. “You can wear these.”

I unfolded the shirt on top—a black faded Led Zeppelin shirt that I would swim in.

“I hope it’s okay,” he said. “It’s the smallest one I have.”

It was still huge.

“It’s great,” I replied, a small thrill going through me at the thought of wearing his shirt.

I unfolded the other item. It was a pair of gym shorts with a tie in the front. I eyed the slim size, then glanced at Diarmuid. There was no way that these were his.

“They’re Ava’s,” he said. He could always seem to read my mind. “She won’t mind if you wear them.”

I frowned. “Who’s Ava? Your housemate?”

Diarmuid blinked. “My…girlfriend.”

Girlfriend.

The word hit me like a blow to the chest. “You…have a girlfriend?”

“Yeah,” he said casually as if he didn’t just rip my heart into two pieces.

My chest felt heavy and sore, swollen like my thumb did when I’d accidentally caught in between the door and the doorframe. “You never told me you had a girlfriend. You’ve never talked about her.”

He rubbed his beard. “I must have.”

I shook my head adamantly. “I would have remembered if you did. You haven’t. Not one peep about her in the whole time we’ve known each other.”

“Oh. Well…I can tell you about her once you’ve showered and dressed.”

I didn’t want to hear about her. I didn’t want her to exist.

A girlfriend…

Diarmuid left, closing the door behind him, leaving me standing alone and shivering in the middle of the bathroom.

I undressed and stepped under the hot water, my head whirring. Diarmuid had a girlfriend.

A girlfriend.

He wasn’t allowed to have a girlfriend.

He was supposed to be mine.

And I, his.

After my shower, I stood naked in front of the mirror, wiping the steam off the glass with my hand. I stared at my body. It had been changing this last year. My breasts were budding, my hips widening and my thighs developing shape. But I was still stuck somewhere between a girl and a woman.

Did Diarmuid’s girlfriend, this Ava, have big breasts? Did she have hips and hair between her legs?

Does she do for him all the things that my ma does for those men she brings home? Is that why he’s with her?

Is that what I have to do for him to make him like me?

My gaze fell upon the two toothbrushes in the holder, one blue one, the other was red. A stab went through me.

That was her toothbrush.

Suddenly all the evidence became like glaring beacons. The pink, sugary-smelling body wash in the shower, the two razors, the tropical shampoo and conditioner, the second towel hanging off the rack and a pale blue lace bra hanging behind the door.

Until now, I could have almost imagined that she didn’t exist.

But she was here. Even if she wasn’t here. She lived with him. She got to live here with him instead of me. I had to live with a mother who didn’t care if I didn’t come home. My belly churned, the back of my throat going bitter, tasting the foulness of my jealousy.

I grabbed her bra off the back of the door and held it up against my chest. There was so much space between the material and my tender flesh. She had big boobs. Much bigger than mine. Is that why Diarmuid liked her?

A thought went through my mind almost causing me to drop the bra. What if he more than liked her…what if he loved her? What if he was going to marry her?

There was only one way to find out.

I tossed the bra back on the hook, trying not to throw up, and turned my attention to the clothes Diarmuid had left me. I pulled on the shirt. I finished dressing and stepped out of the bathroom.

Diarmuid wasn’t in the living room. I wandered back into the corridor. Where was he?

I walked past the bathroom to the only other door at the end of this short corridor, partly open. I froze at what I saw inside. Diarmuid was naked from the waist up, unfolding a plain white shirt.

He was the most glorious man I’d ever seen. Thick torso, powerful arms, beautiful intricate ink tattooed across his back and shoulders. I wanted to run my hand across his skin, across the ridges of his abs. A buzzing grew in my lower belly. I was getting drunk off the sight of him.

I’d seen men with their shirts off; the men that Ma brought home. But none of them looked like this.

Maybe I gasped. Or maybe I let out a groan at the sight.

He looked up and his eyes locked onto mine. For a second he looked shocked, embarrassed, even. He pulled down the shirt over his beautiful body and tugged down the hem.

“Hey, I just ordered pizza to be—” He cut off as his eyes lowered to my body.

My undies were dry enough to put on again but I hadn’t put my bra back on.

“What?” I looked down at myself. His shirt swam on me but I didn’t think it looked so bad.

Diarmuid grinned as he walked towards me. “You look cute in my shirt.”

I wrinkled my nose. Cute? I wanted to look beautiful. Or sexy. But not cute.

He ruffled my hair as he passed and I grimaced.

“Just you and me tonight, selkie,” he called over his shoulder as I followed him to the living room. “Pizza will be here soon. I ordered your favourite.”

Pepperoni and jalapenos. Extra cheese. He always remembered. Did he remember Ava’s favourite pizza?

“So…” I said as I walked into the living room, arms folded. Ava. Ask him straight out if he loves her.

“So…” Diarmuid plopped onto the corner of the L-shaped couch.

“What do your tattoos mean?” I was such a coward.

He raised an eyebrow. Even he didn’t believe that was what I was planning to ask.

“Well…” he began slowly, turning one colourful arm. It looked like a jungle crammed with animals and leaves and flowers and stars. “I’ve been collecting tattoos since I was sixteen. Each one has a meaning.”

I perked up, watching him as he spoke, mesmerised by every single piece of information about him, as if each piece was another panel in a quilt I was building. Once I wove together all the pieces, he would be mine.

I came closer, drawn in by the thickness of his bicep, by the power shifting underneath his skin-like silk. Drawn in by just…him.

I reached out my hand, then drew it back

“You can touch them if you want,” he said.

I traced my fingers on a cluster of beautiful pink roses. They looked so real that I almost thought I could lean in closer and smell them.

“These roses are for my ma.”

“You don’t talk much about her,” I said.

His lip twitched. “She died when I was younger.”

A feeling lodged into my throat. I hated my ma sometimes but she was still my ma. She was one of the only people I had in this world. I don’t know what I would do or where I would go if she died.

“How much younger?” I asked him, my voice small enough that he could just pretend not to have heard it if he wanted to.

“When I was five.”

My heart ached for a five-year-old Diarmuid who had just lost his ma. It hurt when I lost my da but he didn’t die. I knew he would come back one day. “Do you remember much about her?”

He shook his head. “Just that she had the most beautiful singing voice, and she smelled like powder and roses.”

Hence, the roses. I smiled. I thought she sounded beautiful.

“So you lived with your da?”

Diarmuid’s jaw clenched as he shook his head, just once. “My ma had me when she was young. Only seventeen. We lived with my grandma, so when my ma died I just stayed with my granny until she passed away nine years later.”

He would have been fourteen. My age now.

“After that I went into foster care. Bounced around a few homes because no one could control me. I was angry at the world for taking everyone away from me. So angry.” He flexed his hands in and out of fists, and I could see the pools of anger still there, soaking around him like a bog, appearing to be solid until you tested the ground. “The world isn’t fair, selkie. You and I know it the most.”

I don’t know why I did it, but I reached out with my hand and slipped it into his. He flinched. For a second I thought that he might pull away from me. Instead his fingers closed around mine, causing my heart to warm.

“I could have ended up a criminal instead of a cop,” he said quietly. “But I didn’t.”

So could you, his unsaid words were clear in my mind.

“Why didn’t you?” I asked.

Diarmuid let out a long breath. “For a while it looked like I was headed in that direction. Until I was arrested and was assigned my very own JLO. He mentored me, gave me direction, taught me how to channel my aggression into fighting in a ring instead of on the street.”

“That’s why you’re a JLO now,” I realised.

He smiled. “I guess so.”

“Why did we get so unlucky?” I asked, not really expecting an answer.

“You and me,” he said, “are the lucky ones.”

Lucky? I snorted. “How d’ya figure that?”

“Some people are born into family. We get to choose ours. We make our own, forged out of our hearts and weaved together by our souls. And that is stronger than blood.”

“So, you and me…” I said, “we’re soul family?”

He smiled. “Yeah. We are.”

Feeling brave, I crawled onto his lap. He let me sit there.

I pushed up the sleeve of his shirt, thrilled with the feeling of pushing cloth across skin, and traced my fingers down his arm to another tattoo, loving the feeling of smooth, warm skin under my finger.

He told me the story of each tattoo on his arms, some of them his “kids” as he liked to call them, all the people he’d come across in his life who’d made an impact, no matter how small.

“I have more on my back,” he said.

I hoped he might take his shirt off again and I’d get to touch him there, but he didn’t.

“You don’t have one on your chest, though.” I remembered thinking that space looked empty when I saw him without his shirt on.

“You noticed, huh?”

I blushed. Perhaps I shouldn’t have revealed that I’d been looking so closely.

“I haven’t found anything I care about enough to place it there.” He placed a hand on his heart. “Over my heart. It’s a special place, you know? I can’t put any old tattoo there.”

“You don’t want to put a tattoo there for your girlfriend?” I probed.

He let out a laugh. “Who, Ava? No.”

I nibbled on my bottom lip. God, I wanted to know about her. At the same time, I didn’t want to know.

“Why not?” I asked, as casually as I could. “She’s your girlfriend, right?”

“Yeah, and she might get a tattoo…I guess.”

“But not over your heart.”

He shrugged.

My hope floated. If he wouldn’t put Ava on his heart there was still room for someone else…for me.

“And what about a tattoo for me?” I dared to ask.

His eyes flicked to me, his gaze catching me in its intensity. His lip tweaked up in a half-smile. “You want a tattoo?”

I shrugged, holding back a smile. “Maybe. If I did, where would I go?”

I held my breath. The air between us feeling like it went taut. He opened his mouth to say something.

The doorbell rang. I cursed who I guessed must be the pizza delivery guy. Diarmuid gave me an apologetic look, saved from answering, and shifted me off his lap so he could go and answer the door.

Diarmuid paid the pizza guy and came back into the living room holding the box, the smell of baked dough and melted cheese making my mouth water.

“What movie do you want to watch?” he asked.

Our eyes met. We both cracked into a grin and spoke at the same time.

“Batman!”

We ate the pizza in his living room and Diarmuid stuck on The Dark Knight, a Batman reinvention directed by Christopher Nolan. I’d not watched it but Diarmuid had promised that it was the best Batman movie he’d ever seen.

As the closing credits rolled up, I let out a sigh. “Batman is the best superhero.”

“Absolutely,” Diarmuid agreed. He glanced at me. “Why do you like him best?”

Because he reminds me of you.

I let out a shrug. “Batman doesn’t have superpowers, he’s just an ordinary man who sees all the wrong in the world and makes it his business to make things better. He doesn’t just sit back like most people and let it happen.”

Diarmuid cracked a smile. “Yeah, that’s why I like him too. He’s braver than any other superhero because he doesn’t have super strength or a superpower to fall back on.”

I nodded. “It would be easy to be brave if you had Superman’s powers.”

He nodded. “Batman’s a real hero.”

“Like you,” I said quietly.

The smile on his face could have kept me warm for the rest of the Irish winter.

Soon the pizza box was empty before us and we laid back among the cushions. The movie was good. I found myself getting lost in it, almost forgetting all about Ava and the fact that she was Diarmuid’s girlfriend.

I shuffled closer to Diarmuid, testing the boundaries. When he glanced down at me with a smile, I took that as a good sign and leaned my head on his arm. After a beat he pulled his arm out and wound it around my shoulder, tugging me into his side. A warmth glowed through me. It felt so good.

It felt right.

I decided then I didn’t care if he had a girlfriend. Diarmuid belonged to me. And I belonged to him.

You have my skin.

And you have mine.