Just Like You Said It Would Be Page 15

  “It’s my fault.” Darragh took another step away from me. “I shouldn’t have asked you to come play pool. Trying to stick to being friends is messing with our heads.” He watched my eyes like he was hoping I’d hatch a master plan that would save us. “Marieve won’t be sick forever. I know it’s a lot to ask, but can you wait a bit longer?”

  Wait until when? He didn’t know the answer to that any more than I did and suddenly I felt queasy. I could demand he tell Ursula about us right now. Ask him to stop hanging out with her and allowing himself to be one of the people she was leaning on. He might do it, but then neither of us would feel good about it.

  The trouble was, I didn’t feel good now either.

  “I don’t think I can,” I said, my reply pounding in my ears. “You’re right about this messing with my head. It’s too complicated. It feels like we’re in the wrong.”

  Not long ago I’d have been fine without him. If I’d never believed we could be friends, if we’d never argued in the rain, never once kissed, I still would be. But I didn’t know how to roll my point of view back to the time before those things had happened. They call them crushes for a reason, if nothing comes of them and you insist on holding on to them anyway, they begin to do damage.

  I watched Darragh’s face drop, the silence between us starting to hurt my ears. “People can have attractions and not act on them,” I continued. “We don’t have to pretend to be friends—we could actually be friends instead.” I liked him far too much to want to stay away. Being only friends had to be possible. I was beginning to believe it was as good as things were going to get with us.

  “We’ve tried that. Look where it’s gotten us.” Darragh rubbed his eyes.

  “If we genuinely like each other enough, it should be possible. Otherwise this thing’s only physical.” That felt like an inarguable emotional truth to me.

  “It’s not as cut and dry as that. If it was, we wouldn’t be having these problems.” Darragh stared into the unending stream of Temple Bar foot traffic that jostled by us, forcing us to constantly adjust our position on the cobblestones.

  “We’re having these problems because now we’re playing a waiting game with no end in sight,” I said. “Maybe that’s what needs to stop. Then you can be there for Ursula without feeling like you’re letting either of us down and I can stop waiting for something that might never happen.” Darragh opened his mouth to protest but I didn’t let him. “Be my friend for real,” I insisted. “Without any waiting for something else. And I don’t mean that in the two of us making small talk when we happen to see each other with Zoey way either. Real friends, but only friends.” It burned me to have to ask him for that, but I needed it more than I needed the pride it would’ve taken to hold the request back. “We’d have a big part of what we want, everything except the physical part.”

  “That’s what you really want?” Darragh asked incredulously, as though it was one of the most revolutionary ideas he’d ever heard. “To chuck out the possibility of anything else between us? Listen, Marieve will be out of the woods soon and then Ursula won’t be in such a state and—”

  “But we don’t know when,” I cut in. “And with me leaving at the end of summer anyway this is what makes the most sense. I want to know you. And I don’t want to wait.” The honesty burned my lips. It was an enormous thing to say. Let me know you. Show me who you are.

  “I want to know you too,” Darragh said and his voice had an ache to it that I wanted to be the cure for. “But we don’t know that we can’t still have everything. There’s still plenty of summer left.”

  Six and a half weeks before I’d fly home. But I didn’t want to spend them counting on something that might never be, the clock continually spinning down. My cheeks smarted from refusing to let my face sag in exhaustion like it wanted to. I felt like a ping pong ball from all the back and forth between us. I couldn’t ask Darragh to be my friend a second time. It was up to him now.

  “Walk with me,” Darragh said. “It’s too hard to talk in this crowd.”

  Silently we wound through Dublin streets together, my ears burning and my emotions churning. Darragh led us to the spot on the Trinity College grounds where everyone ignores the ‘please keep off the lawns’ sign. It was dotted with summer students and Book of Kells tourists, but at least it was quieter than Temple Bar.

  As we sat next down to each other on the grass, Darragh grabbed the tip of my running shoe. “Our timing’s been shite,” he said, his blue eyes drilling into mine. “But there’s nothing wrong about us together. This isn’t only physical; you have to know that. But my feelings for you are a lot more than what you’d call friendly. Aside from Zoey I haven’t had many close friends who were girls. There was one—Aisling—when I was fifteen, who started out that way…”

  “Then you hooked up?” I ventured.

  Darragh scratched at his sleeve, not really looking at me. “Neither of us had slept with anyone before. We were like best mates back then, and we wanted to know what it would be like. But it only happened a few times before we fell out.” I’d never had a guy talk to me about his first time in anything except a bragging or joking way but Darragh was just being real about it. “How about you?” He pointed his eyes back at me.

  “I haven’t really had close guy friends. Just friends’ boyfriends or guys my friends and I hang out with in a group. And I haven’t slept with any of them. I haven’t slept with anybody.” I’d never said it straight out like that to a guy before either, but I wanted things to be different with Darragh. I wanted to feel like I could say anything.

  Darragh blinked quickly and stretched his legs out in front of him. “I didn’t know that about you.”

  “Surprised?”

  He took a moment to ponder my question. “Not now that you’ve said it, no.”

  “Well, now that you know for definite you can see that being friends might not be so different than if we were seeing each other,” I said. “No sex either way.”

  “If we were together there are a lot of things we could do that wouldn’t technically qualify as sex, but that wouldn’t be platonic either.” Darragh’s eyes were shining and his voice was warm. “I’d follow your lead. I’m open to suggestions.”

  “I’m sure you are.” This wasn’t the smartest conversation to have while we were trying to be just friends. I was greedy for Darragh on multiple levels. I wanted to know everything about him there was to know; at the same time I wanted to crawl on top of him like a blanket, our bodies pressed so tightly together that it would take a crowbar to pry them apart. “But we’re not there,” I added pointedly, the reminder directed at myself as much as at him.

  “Okay.” His cheeks hollowed out as he exhaled. “But if we’re going to try to be the sort of friends you say you want to be you should know what you said weeks back about me always being on game is dead wrong. Sometimes things are complicated without it being anyone’s fault.” Darragh drove his fingers through his hair, pushing it back from his face and venturing another look at me. “After Aisling I had a bit of a mad time with a few different girls at parties and things. But that was years ago. It stopped when things got serious with my ex-girlfriend, Lily. We were together for nearly a year before breaking up. Since then there’s only been Sophie and Ursula.”

  “You were in love with her,” I said. “Lily.” There was a wrinkle in his voice when he’d said her name that marked her as special.

  It wasn’t a question, but Darragh replied, “As close as I have been.” His lips formed a rigid line. “What about you? There must have been someone at home, even if you didn’t sleep together.”

  “A guy named Matias.” The three guys I’d kissed before him didn’t count; they were only moments, not relationships. “For a couple of months this winter. But it wasn’t…” My incomplete thought hovered in the air over our heads. I’d already run out of words; there wasn’t much worth saying about Matias.

  Darragh’s eyes were silently asking me to continue and I ad
ded, “He wasn’t a bad person or anything like that. It was just that it didn’t really mean anything.”

  I stretched my legs out in front of me, next to Darragh’s, balancing my weight on my elbows.

  “No impact,” he commented.

  “Right.”

  Darragh reached out and touched my hip, his hand lingering there. “If we were together I wouldn’t want you to say that about me. I’d want to have an impact.” Our eyes locked. His were intensely restless, the rest of his face taut and flushed, and I knew we were picturing a variation of the same thing, something that shouldn’t happen on the Trinity grounds, surrounded by students and tourists.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” I said breathlessly. “We’re not kissing again.”

  “I know.” Darragh’s voice was low and husky. “I’m trying not to think about it.”

  For several seconds we were both quiet, my mind fighting itself to purge the pictures in my head. I didn’t have a pen and this was no time for notes, but my thoughts reached out to my sister. Rana, this is crazy. What am I doing?

  And then, because I couldn’t seem to keep my thoughts to myself around Darragh, I was opening my mouth and saying, “Do you remember what you said about me being an only child? It’s not exactly true. I had a sister. She died.”

  Darragh’s face fell. “I had no idea. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I never really knew her so I didn’t lose her in quite the same way my parents did.” I sat up straight on the grass, Rana’s mantelpiece picture from home flashing behind my eyes. My parents had two photo albums overflowing with photographs of her, but it was the mantelpiece image I’d laid eyes on the most. In it Rana’s sitting at the bottom of a staircase with a plush monkey in her lap and a crooked purple bow fixed into her hair. She’s grinning at the monkey instead of the camera, looking positively enchanted by the fuzzy object whose face she’s peering into.

  “She was two and I was only a baby. Just four months old. I can’t remember her but”—Jocelyn was the only person aside from my parents who I’d shared the rest of what I was about to say with—“when I was four or so I started dreaming about her. One morning my dad came into my room and I was looking for her, like she was hiding, because in my dream minutes earlier we’d been playing together. Hearing about the dreams freaked my parents out. They thought I was subconsciously traumatized, I guess. Or that there was something else wrong with me. They took me to see a child psychologist and after a while it was just easier to let my mom and dad think the dreams had stopped, so they wouldn’t worry.”

  The heat had gone from Darragh’s eyes, replaced with something less easy to decipher. “But they didn’t stop?” he guessed. “You still dream about her?”

  “Sometimes. Not for a long time and then the dreams started again a few weeks ago.” Because I’d needed her. And I’d missed her too. I didn’t realize how much until she’d come back. My parents’ anxiety from all those years ago had weighed on me. Made my dreams and notes feel wrong. Once my family had put Mom’s breast cancer scare behind us I’d weaned myself off writing Rana. For months afterwards I’d composed messages to her in my head but resisted putting words on paper. In the end I stopped altogether, thinking that’s what my parents would want if they knew. Eventually my dreams of Rana became rarer too.

  But neither the dreams nor the notes felt wrong to me anymore. I was old enough to have my own ideas. “She ages over the years, as strange as that might sound. She’s not a little girl. She doesn’t say anything and nothing much happens in the dreams. She’s just there with me.”

  Darragh’s lips parted in slow motion. “What’s her name?”

  “Rana.”

  “What happened to her?” His voice was gentle and hesitant, as though he wasn’t sure he should be asking.

  “She had meningitis. That morning she was fine, by evening my parents had taken her to the E.R. The doctors tried to stabilize her, but she didn’t make it through the night.”

  “Jesus,” Darragh said, shaking his head sadly. “I’m so sorry. That must’ve broken your parents’ hearts.”

  “I’m glad I don’t remember that part.” Not when it was fresh. Sometimes I wondered how different we all might’ve been if my sister had lived. Would my mom and dad have been the same overprotective, prone to perfectionism people with Rana still in our lives? And would I have been the child my parents never needed to worry about for so long? Had my sister’s absence somehow made me feel that was who I should be?

  I watched Darragh take a breath. “When I was thirteen my best friend Conor died,” he began. His family was on vacation in the Canary Islands and he was killed in a head-on collision. I used to dream about him too. Sometimes I dreamt”—Darragh gazed over at the gaggle of noisy young students teasing each other by the Book of Kells entrance—“that he wasn’t really dead, that it was a mix-up. When he spoke to me in the dreams he sounded the same as he always did.”

  “I’m not religious,” Darragh continued. “The things most people say about God don’t make a lot of sense to me. And they could’ve just been dreams. But they never felt that way.”

  We locked eyes again, the connection between us tightening in my throat. I did know this was beyond physical; Darragh was right about that.

  “There’s something else, I think. Something beyond what we can see.” I couldn’t name it or describe it, but the dreams were real on some level that couldn’t be measured. I absolutely believed that, no matter what anyone else would’ve said if I’d told them about Rana. “I’m really sorry about your friend.”

  “Thanks.” Darragh cleared his throat. “What you said before—that if we genuinely like each other enough it should be possible to be friends—I want to try. But I need you to do something for me as well.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t write the rest off yet. Don’t box us in.”

  I jutted my chin out. “That’s just like being back at square one, with the waiting and—”

  “It’s not,” Darragh protested. “We’re friends. Just friends. But don’t cut off the possibilities.”

  I didn’t say yes or no; I stared at him on the Trinity lawn, feeling famished for what we were denying each other—the same possibility that he wanted to keep alive. Did he think this was easy for me? I’d wanted more at least as much as he did; he was the one with his foot still stuck in his friends-with-benefits past with Ursula. Didn’t he see what I was suggesting was our last chance for something real?

  “If you’re serious, do me a favour,” I declared. “No more if we were together talk. It’s not fair.”

  “You’re right.” Darragh bowed his head apologetically. “I won’t say that again, I promise.”

  “Thank you. I’m glad we talked about it, and everything else.”

  “Me too,” he said solemnly.

  “I should get going. I have to be home for dinner any minute now.” My fingers brushed grass and earth from my capris as I got to my feet.

  Darragh slipped his cell out of his back pocket to check the time. “What happened to seven o’clock?”

  “They’ll be expecting me for dinner, since I didn’t call to say I wouldn’t be home for it. I don’t want to piss them off when I only have a few days of curfew left.”

  “I can give you a lift so you won’t be late,” Darragh offered.

  At first it was every bit as overwhelming sitting on the back of Darragh’s scooter as it had been weeks ago. But my brain won out, lowering my body’s sensations to a steady buzz. Outside Aunt Kate and Uncle Frank’s house Darragh climbed off his bike along with me. “I’ll see you soon,” he said as I tugged off his spare helmet and handed it to him.

  I didn’t ask him when. I didn’t touch him at all; even somewhere it should’ve been safe.

  “See you soon,” I said back, turning to head up the driveway. If we were only friends I might not look over my shoulder to watch him go, and so I didn’t do that either. Not until he was far enough away that he couldn’t ha
ve seen me do it.

  Chapter 12

  Why are you so ready to think the worst?

  That evening I went for a walk with Aunt Kate and Zoey after dinner. My cousin had the night off work and for once wasn’t spending it with Rory or the band. Although it was after my seven o’clock curfew, like my aunt had said before, spending time with family was different. I checked my laptop twice before we left and then sent Jocelyn an email saying I was stepping out but wouldn’t be gone more than ninety minutes.

  It was a clear night and the three of us strolled up to the Omni shopping centre where we had coffees and dessert tarts in a place called Costa. Darragh and Joss kept popping in and out of my head as I listened to Zoey complain about three nightmarish customers she’d had to wait on at the restaurant the day before, and then my aunt tell stories about when she and my dad were teenagers. There were only a few years between them, but my dad was relentlessly protective and wouldn’t let any of his friends date her. “But he didn’t think the same rules applied to him,” she said. “I found out he’d secretly gone out with my friend Grainne three times.”

  I braced at her use of the word secretly. I still hadn’t told my parents about the night I’d snuck off to Enda Corrigan’s and was hoping the omission wouldn’t catch up with me.

  “Did you give him hell?” I asked.

  “I did,” she confirmed. “We had a big bust up about it and I left a stack of his records out in the rain overnight. My mother had to hang the album covers out on the line for him the next day.” Aunt Kate smiled at the memory. “She loved to baby him.”

  Zoey arched her eyebrows, probably disapproving of someone’s record collection being abused in that way, but I laughed lightly at the thought of my dad as a protective teenager who was still babied by his mother. When we stepped into the house later she dug her into her purse, exclaiming. “I nearly forgot! This is for you.” She dropped a nondescript cell phone into my hand. “I bought myself a proper new one a couple of days ago so you might as well take it. It’s a bit rubbish—I picked it up cheap when my last mobile was stolen at a club—but you’ll be able to talk and text. There’s an hour or so of pre-paid minutes left on it. I have the charger upstairs. I’ll get that for you too.”