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Diarmuid
The one good thing about moving back to Limerick from Dublin was getting to see Brian every Sunday for lunch.
I pushed back from the table and patted my belly. “Jesus, B, you really know how to spoil me.”
Brian O’Connell had been a JLO, Juvenile Liaison Officer, since the program began in 2001. He’d been a cop even longer.
And he had changed my life for the better.
I would have ended up in jail or dead if not for this man.
Brian snorted, his eyes roaming over the roast chicken carcass and scraps of leftover roast veg on the table. “Still amazes me, boy, how much ye can put away.”
I may have been a twenty-eight-year-old man, but he still called me “boy”.
“Your fault for making a roast as tasty as that.”
His eyes roamed over my muscular figure with a spot of envy in them. “Where the hell do you put it all, is what I want to know.”
I shrugged. “I work it off. I don’t sit around watching reruns of Father Ted all day.”
He pointed a fork at me, a piece of potato on the end of it. “Careful, boy. You might be older now but I can still give ye a whopping if need be.”
I laughed, snatching the potato off the end and popping it into my mouth.
Damn that was good. Soft and buttery. The only other person who’d ever cooked anything as nice as this for me was…
Saoirse Quinn.
My mind threw up an image of her young face. God, I still regretted the way I’d left things with her. I’d never told her where I’d moved to. I thought it best after…what had happened. It was all my fault.
I thought about her often. Too often, if I was honest with myself. As sad as it may seem, she’d been my best friend at one point. I missed her. I missed that I had been the one she came to. I missed the way she used to look at me as if I hung the sun.
I often thought about contacting her again. Then all I’d have to do was to remember what’d happened the last day I saw her and it would squash that urge. She was better off hearing nothing from me. She probably hated me. If she even thought of me.
Regret was a dancer. Day and night, I sighed for her, she spun and twisted for me.
My phone buzzed on the table. Ava’s name flashed up on the phone. I gritted my teeth, leaned over to put it on silent, then turned the phone over.
By the look on Brian’s face I knew he had seen who had been calling.
He narrowed his eyes at me, glancing to the traitorous phone. “Apparently Ethan kicked her out of his place.”
It always amazed me how fast news travelled around here.
“So I’d heard,” I said.
“I wondered how long it’d take her to start calling you again.”
“I’m not getting back with her.”
Not after what she did, hopping into the arms of an old mutual school friend only days after we separated. Ava and I had history. But I’d gotten over the habit of letting her back in. Finally.
I wanted more. I wanted to be…someone’s sun. The rising of their day and the centre of their thoughts. I wanted to shine into their life as they moved through mine.
Saoirse and the way she used to look at me flashed into my head. I flicked that away before I could dwell on it or why I had thought of her in this moment.
“I should bloody hope not.” Brian threw down his napkin and crossed his beefy arms. He was always thickset, but after he retired from the force he’d put on a few more pounds. It was all this excellent food he cooked. His secret wifey skills, as he liked to joke, even though he was the perennial bachelor. “I never liked her.”
Him and everyone else.
“I know,” I said, tensing, feeling a lecture coming on.
“You didn’t need to marry her, you know? It’s not the bloody fifties anymore.”
“Brian,” I said as a warning.
A warning that he didn’t heed. “You stayed too long with her, even after she—”
“Brian!”
“Alright. Alright.” He raised his hands. “I’ll let it go. For now…”
I let out a breath. “Thank you.”
The phone began to ring again. Dear God.
“Don’t say anything more,” I warned. I stabbed my phone, turning it off this time, praying that Ava would get the hint.
Brian raised his hands, but the look he gave me was a weary warning. That girl is trouble.