He don't hang around with the gang no more. He don't do the wild things that he did before.
You told him to quit. He quit. This is what you wanted. So why does it feel like something’s missing.
Word Count: 2.9k
Masterlist
@dailydoseofaustinbutler
Waking up next to Benny never gets old.
It used to be rare — a handful of nights a week if you were lucky, and half the time you’d reach for him in the morning and the bed would be empty and the front door open and he’d be gone, out before sunrise. But now. Every morning. Every single morning he’s here, on his stomach with his face smashed into the pillow and one arm hanging off the bed, dead to the world. You could set the house on fire and he wouldn’t flinch.
You trace a line down his spine and he makes a sound that isn’t a word and pulls you closer without opening his eyes. You press your mouth to his shoulder blade and he rolls over and pulls you on top of him and grins up at you with his eyes half-shut and his hair everywhere.
“Stop starin’ at me.”
“I’m not staring.”
“You’re breathin’ on my face.”
“That’s called being close to you. Most people like it.”
“Most people haven’t seen you at 7 a.m.”
You kiss him and he kisses you back and his hands are warm and his mouth is warm and the light is coming through the curtain. This is what every fight was about. Every 3 a.m. door slam, every morning you woke up alone with his side of the bed still cold. You wanted him here. He’s here.
It’s been a few weeks since he quit the club. You’d had the fight — the same one as always, the one where you said I can’t do this anymore and he looked at you and didn’t argue. He never argues. He just goes quiet and still and looks at you with those eyes and it’s worse than arguing because arguing you could win. But this time he said okay. Just like that. And you’d won. You’d finally won.
He’s home and he’s yours and he’s got all this energy with nowhere to put it, so he puts it into the house. You come home one afternoon and he’s in the yard with his shirt off, hacking at the overgrown patch along the fence that’s been driving you crazy all summer. He’s got the shears in one hand and a cigarette in his mouth and sweat running down his back and you stand at the kitchen window and watch him for longer than you’d ever admit to anyone. The tattoos moving on his skin as he works. His shoulders. The way he shoves his hair back with his forearm because his hands are full. He catches you watching through the glass and raises an eyebrow and you look away too fast and he grins and you can see it even from inside.
“Looks good,” you say when you go out, meaning the yard, mostly.
“Uh huh,” he says, and he knows you don’t mean the yard.
He fixes the porch step. The one that’s been loose since you moved in. You’ve been asking him to fix it for months — you’ve been telling him, actually, because asking didn’t work — and he always said he’d get to it and never got to it because he was never here long enough to get to anything. Now he’s sitting on the porch with a hammer and nails and a piece of wood he got from somewhere and he’s doing it. Just doing it. No complaining, no putting it off, just his hands and the hammer and that focus he has, the one where the rest of the world goes away.
“You’re actually fixing it,” you say from the doorway.
“You asked me to fix it.”
“I asked you six months ago.”
“So I’m fixin’ it.”
“Should I make a list of everything else? Because I’ve got a list, Benny.”
“Don’t push it.”
You sit on the top step and hand him nails when he needs them and the afternoon is warm and easy and he finishes and stands on the step and bounces on it a couple of times to test it and it holds and he looks at you.
“Solid,” he says.
“My hero.”
“Don’t start.”
But he’s almost smiling and the step is fixed and the yard is trimmed and there’s sawdust on his jeans and he looks good. He looks really good. And you think: see? This works. He just needed something to do with his hands.
Except he runs out of things.
The yard’s done. The step’s done. He tightens a couple of hinges, fixes the drip under the bathroom sink, rehangs a picture that’s been crooked for a year. It doesn’t take him long to work through everything that actually needs doing, and then the house is done. Everything works. Nothing creaks or drips or sticks. And Benny is standing in the kitchen with nothing in his hands and nowhere to go.
He doesn’t wear his boots in the house anymore. You used to scream at him about those boots — the mud, the oil, the black marks all over the kitchen floor. He’d walk through every room like the house was just more road. You’d be on your hands and knees scrubbing boot prints off the tile and he’d walk right across the wet floor in them and you’d fantasise about murder. So the clean floor should feel like a victory. And it does. It’s just that without them his walk is different — that rolling, easy thing in his hips is gone, the way he used to move through a room like he was arriving even when he was just crossing the kitchen. Now he pads around in his socks and barely makes a sound. And his hair — you catch yourself staring at him while you’re watching TV and he catches you catching yourself.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
It’s not that it looks bad. It’s that it doesn’t look like anything. It used to have this tousled thing. Not styled, Benny never styled anything in his life, but it had life in it. Wind and speed and not giving a damn, and it all added up to this look that wasn’t a look, it was just him. Now he showers and it dries flat and he doesn’t touch it. Doesn’t push it back, doesn’t run his hand through it, doesn’t do any of the nothing he used to do that somehow made it right. It just sits there like it belongs to someone else.
You file these things away. You don’t think about them too hard. He’s here. That’s what matters.
But now that the house is fixed and the yard is done, Benny has nothing to do except be in the way. You’re trying to cook and he’s in front of the refrigerator. Door open, cold pouring out, staring at the shelves. You’re behind him with a pot of water and he is directly, geometrically, precisely between you and the stove.
“Benny.”
Nothing.
“Benny. Move.”
He takes out a beer, looks at it, puts it back. Takes out the orange juice. Puts that back too. Closes the fridge and opens it again.
“If you don’t move I’m going to pour this on your head.”
He shifts about four inches. You squeeze past him with the pot held high and your hip against the counter and he doesn’t even register it.
“We’re outta eggs.”
“They’re behind the milk.”
He moves the milk. Finds the eggs. Doesn’t take any out. Closes the door.
“I’m goin’ outside,” he says.
He goes outside. Sits on the step — the one he fixed, the one that doesn’t creak anymore — and lights a cigarette.
He picks a fight with you about the fan. The fan. The old green metal box fan in the window, rattling away on high, and Benny is standing there staring at it like it’s a personal enemy.
“You’ve got it blowing the wrong way.”
“It’s a fan, Benny. It blows air.”
“You’re supposed to point it out the window. Sucks the hot air out. You’ve got it pulling the street air in.”
“It’s fine the way it is.”
“It’s not fine. You’re tryin’ to cool the place with hot air. That’s not how it works.”
Benny, who once threw a chair through a window at a bar, who once rode home in a thunderstorm because somebody looked at you wrong at a gas station, is getting loud about which direction a box fan should face. His jaw does the thing — that clench that used to mean somebody was about to get hit. It used to mean the fuse was lit and you had about half a second before everything went sideways because Benny didn’t have a slow burn. He had a match and gasoline and nothing in between. Now the jaw clenches and unclenches and nothing happens. Like striking a match in the rain.
“Forget it,” he says, and walks into the bedroom.
You come home one afternoon and he’s taken the kitchen cabinet doors off. All of them. They’re leaning against the wall in a stack and he’s standing on a chair with a screwdriver. It looks like a bomb went off.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“This one was stickin’.”
“One was sticking. So you took them all off?”
“Figured while I was at it.”
“Benny, I was gone for forty-five minutes.”
He doesn’t look at you. He’s focused on the hinge with that same intensity that used to be reserved for his bike, for the road, for the split second before a fight when everything in him narrowed to a point. The cabinets were fine. He’s inventing problems because he’s run out of real ones.
“Can you put them back on.”
“When I’m done.”
“When will you be done?”
“When they’re fixed.”
You leave him to it. Two hours later the cabinet doors are back on. Every one of them swings perfectly. He opens and closes them all to show you. You say thank you. He sits on the couch and stares at the TV and you stand in the kitchen with your perfect cabinets and the something-wrong feeling is getting harder to ignore.
He kisses you goodnight — this soft, quick thing, his mouth on yours for half a second. Done. A stamp. A receipt. Transaction complete. You lie in bed afterwards thinking about the first time he kissed you. Parking lot of the Stoplight. He didn’t ask, didn’t hesitate, just walked you backward into the side of someone’s truck with his hand in your hair and his mouth on yours and the absolute certainty that you were in over your head and didn’t care. He kissed you like a dare. He doesn’t kiss you like anything anymore. He kisses you like someone honouring a deal.
He’s not sleeping. You know because you’re not either. You lie there and listen to him breathe and it’s all wrong — too even, too controlled. He’s awake and staring at the ceiling and performing sleep for your benefit. Sometimes at 2 or 3 a.m. he gets up and you hear the back door. You give it ten minutes and then you go out and he’s sitting on the step in his boxers, smoking, looking at the road. Not at anything on the street. At the asphalt itself.
“Come back to bed.”
He does. He always does.
You’re in the cereal aisle at the grocery store and it hits you. You’re thinking about the night you met him — the bar, him at the pool table, jacket and boots and that jaw, watching the room like it owed him something. He caught you looking and didn’t smile — just held your gaze until your stomach dropped and your friend grabbed your arm and said don’t and you were already walking over. That guy. You fell in love with that guy. And then you spent two years trying to put the fire out. And it worked. That’s the worst part.
He smiles at you across the kitchen table that evening and you see it. It starts in the right place. It’s heading the right direction. But it doesn’t get there. It stalls halfway, this effortful thing, like an engine turning over in the cold. He used to smile like breathing — easy, fast, real. Now there’s a half-second delay where the work shows and it hits you right there with the dinner going cold — this is what you did. You asked him to be something he’s not and he did it because he loves you and it’s killing him.
“Benny.”
“Yeah?”
“I uh —“
“What is it?”
“Jesus.” You shake your head. “I never thought I’d say this, but — I think you should start riding again.”
The smile — the wrong one — drops off his face.
“I’m serious. You’ve fixed everything in this house. The yard, the porch, the sink, the cabinets — Benny, you’re running out of things to take apart.”
“But you told me to quit. This is what you wanted.”
“I know I did. And I was wrong.”
That sits between you for a second.
“You were wrong,” he says. Not mean. Careful. Like he’s checking.
“Yeah. I was wrong. I was worried about you and I was tired of fighting, and I love that you did this for me Benny, but it was wrong. This isn’t you, it’s like something’s died. And it’s my fault.”
He looks at the table. Looks at the front door. Looks at you.
“You sure?”
“No,” you say. Because you’re not. You’re terrified. You’re terrified of the 3 a.m. door and the cold sheets and the bruises and the sirens and the phone call you’ve rehearsed in your head a thousand times, the one that starts with ma’am. You’re scared of all of it.
“But I’d rather be scared than watch you disappear.”
He gets up. Grabs the boots from the front door — the dirty old black ones that haven’t moved in weeks — and sits on the step to pull them on. You lean in the doorway and watch him lace them and his hands are quick and sure and something in his shoulders is already different. Straighter. More like him.
“I’ll see you later,” you say.
He looks at you over his shoulder. Nods once. Finishes lacing up and walks down the street and the walk is already different — that rolling thing coming back into his body like it was just waiting — and you watch him until he rounds the corner.
You grab a beer. You sit on the front step — the one he fixed, the one that holds solid.
He’s not coming home tonight. You know that. He’ll get the bike and he’ll ride and he’ll find the guys at the bar and fall right back into it like the last two months didn’t happen. He’ll be out all night and tomorrow night too, probably, and he’ll come home when he comes home, if he comes home, because that’s the other thing — Benny has always told you he might just go. Maybe I should just go. He’s said it standing in the doorway with the keys in his hand. He’s said it flat on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling, like he’s reminding himself it’s an option. He’s said it enough times that you’ve stopped being able to tell whether it’s a threat or a promise or just the truth.
Maybe tonight’s the night he means it. Maybe he rides out and keeps riding. Maybe you’ll sit on this step tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, waiting for a sound that doesn’t come.
And you know what? You’d rather that. You’d rather the worry and the cold sheets and the not-knowing than one more day of the version of Benny who smiles at you like it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done.
You go to bed. You leave the window open.
You don’t sleep. You lie there and listen and every car that passes isn’t the right sound.
It’s almost four when you hear it.
Blocks away. That low rumble. Your body knows it before the rest of you catches on.
Closer.
The engine cuts. The front door opens.
He doesn’t take his boots off.
You hear them on the floor — heavy, real, tracking in dirt and road and God knows what — and you laugh into the pillow because there is mud on your clean kitchen floor and it is the best thing you have ever heard.
He comes into the bedroom windblown and grinning — the real grin, the full one, effortless — grease on his forearms, his hair wrecked from the wind, alive and tousled and exactly right. His whole body is loose and easy, like someone opened every window in a room that’s been shut for months.
He kicks the boots off onto the carpet. Thud. Thud. Dirt and all. Drops his jacket. Gets undressed and gets in beside you, warm from the ride, smelling like engine oil and summer night air, and puts his hand on your face and kisses you.
Not the goodnight kiss. His hand in your hair, his mouth hard and warm and sure — the dare, the whole dare, the one from the parking lot, the one that says try and stop me.
“Where’d you go?” you say against his mouth.
“Bar. Then rode out. Then back.”
“You smell terrible.”
“You love it.”
His arm goes around you, warm and heavy and loose, and he’s real and solid and him. The happy ending was never him quitting. It was always this — the 4 a.m. door and the warm hands and the mud on the floor and the kiss that isn’t careful. The going and the coming back. The coming back was always the point.
There’s going to be boot prints all over the floor in the morning.
She should have looked away. Any decent person would have looked away. She didn’t, and the universe made her pay for it.
Word Count: 3.8k
Author’s Note:
FYI: Hank’s naked swimming and the cigarettes in his ears are not my invention — they’re straight from Charlie Huston’s Six Bad Things. I couldn’t make that up if I tried.
Masterlist
@dailydoseofaustinbutler
I want to be clear about something: the sea urchin was not my fault.
I mean, technically I stepped on it. And technically I wasn’t looking where I was going. And technically the reason I wasn’t looking where I was going was because I was watching a naked man walk out of the ocean. But the point is, the sea urchin didn’t have to be there. It chose to be there. It made a decision. And I think that’s important context for everything that came after.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
⸻
We’d been in Tulum a few days. Carly already had sunburn and Roisín had adopted two lads from Galway on night one that were now a permanent feature, like furniture you didn’t order that showed up anyway.
One morning the three of us went for a walk along the coast. Past the busy stretch with the bars and the loungers and the men selling bracelets, into the quieter part where the bungalows sit back from the beach in the scrub and the sand goes white and the only sound is the water. It was gorgeous. The kind of quiet that makes your shoulders drop.
I noticed, as we walked past one of the bungalows, a man sitting on the porch. Shirtless, very still, with something on either side of his head — something small and glowing, thin lines of smoke rising past his temples. At that distance I couldn’t make it out. I was walking, not staring, and Carly was talking about one of the Galway lads and whether he had a girlfriend and what Roisín thought his friend’s deal was, and the bungalow went past and I forgot about it. Mostly. The beach I remembered — how quiet it was, how still. I thought: I should come back here before we go home.
A couple of days later, early evening, the sun starting to drop. Carly and Roisín were getting ready for another night out and I wasn’t feeling it. I’d had a good time. I had. I’d done the margaritas, done the dancing, done the staying out until four and waking up at noon and eating tacos in sunglasses feeling like I’d been reassembled wrong. But constant noise and constant people and constant fun was starting to make me feel like a phone that’s been left on vibrate too long. I just needed an hour where nobody asked me if I wanted a shot.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the bar.”
I walked south along the shore with my sandals in one hand and the sand warm under my feet and the sky doing that thing it does here where it turns six colours at once, and I walked until the noise faded and the coast opened up into that quiet stretch and I felt my shoulders drop again and I thought: there. That’s better.
I’d been walking for a while when I saw him.
He was coming out of the sea. Tall and tanned the kind of brown that comes from more than a couple of weeks. Blonde hair pushed back, water running off him. All of him. Because he was naked. Not oh, I think he might be naked. Naked. The full uncut director’s edition. Walking out of the Caribbean Sea like your man from a Bond film if the Bond film had lost its entire costume budget.
He hadn’t seen me. He was maybe thirty feet away, wading through the shallows, and I was walking along the waterline, and I should have looked away. Any decent person would have looked away. I’d like to tell you I looked away.
I didn’t look away. I kept walking and I kept looking and because I was looking at him and not at the ground, I put my bare foot directly onto a sea urchin.
The noise I made is not something I’m prepared to describe. I went down on the wet sand and grabbed my foot and there were black spines sticking out of the sole — five, six of them — and the pain was unbelievable, searing, the kind that makes your vision go white, and I was sitting there with tears pouring down my face thinking this is what I get, this is divine punishment for being a pervert when I heard splashing.
I looked up. He was running toward me through the shallows. Still naked. Arms pumping. Everything pumping.
He crouched in front of me and his face was all concern — “Are you okay? What happened?” — and his hands were reaching for my foot and I was in enough pain that the naked thing was maybe third or fourth on my list of concerns but it was still on the list, and I think my face did something because he stopped and looked down at himself and there was a moment — a single, terrible moment — where we made eye contact and he was naked and I was crying and neither of us knew what to do about any of it.
He stood up. “Don’t — hold on. Don’t go anywhere.”
“I have spines in my foot. I’m not going anywhere.”
He went to a spot up the beach where a sarong was laid out on the sand, and I watched him wrap it around his waist with the urgency of a man defusing a bomb. He fumbled the knot. Tried again. Got it on the third attempt, too tight, sitting at an odd angle on his hips, and came back and crouched in front of me again and the tips of his ears were red.
“Sea urchin,” he said, taking my foot. His voice was slightly off — a fraction too loud, like he was compensating for something. He turned my foot, looking at the spines. “Don’t try to pull them out. They snap off and then you’ve got bigger problems.”
He sat back on his heels. “I’ve got tweezers at the house. Vinegar. I can get them out.” He nodded toward the bungalow up the beach. “Can you hop?”
So. To summarise: I had been staring at a naked stranger on a public beach. God had punished me with a sea urchin. And now the naked stranger, who was no longer naked but was wearing a badly-tied sarong and couldn’t quite hear properly, was going to take me to his house and pull spines out of my foot. This was my evening.
He got me up — my arm over his shoulders, which were damp and solid and smelled like salt — and we hobbled up the beach. It was not elegant. At one point the sarong slipped and he grabbed it with his free hand and I was trying so hard not to look anywhere below his collarbones that I was essentially staring at the sky, which made the hopping worse.
“I’m Hank,” he said, halfway up the beach, like it had just occurred to him that we hadn’t done this part.
“Caoimhe.”
He slowed down. “Sorry — what was that?”
“Caoimhe.”
He frowned. Tilted his head, the way he’d been doing. “Is that — am I hearing that right? Kee-va?”
“Caoimhe. Yeah.”
“Okay,” he said, in the voice of a man who was absolutely not sure but had decided to move on.
His porch. Two chairs. He lowered me into the canvas one and a cat appeared from inside — a big brown tabby, longhaired, absurdly fluffy for the tropics. It sat and stared at me with an expression that wasn’t quite hello and wasn’t quite explain yourself but was somewhere in between.
“Careful with him,” Hank said, heading inside. “He’s a biter.”
“Grand,” I said.
He leaned back through the doorway, tilting his head slightly toward me. “Is that — does that mean okay?”
“It means okay.”
“Right. Grand.” I heard him opening drawers, running water. He came back with a basin, vinegar, tweezers, a towel, and crouched in front of me. The whole thing had the feeling of a man who’d done this before — not the pulling-spines-from-a-stranger’s-foot part, but the sea urchin part, the vinegar and the tweezers and the routine of it.
“Vinegar dissolves the tips,” he said, pouring it in. “Soak it first. It’ll sting.”
It did. Like putting a paper cut in lemon juice, but across my entire foot. I gripped the arm of the chair and made a face and he waited, watching, until I nodded.
He picked up the tweezers. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”
He wasn’t quick. He was precise, which isn’t the same thing. He’d grip a spine close to the base, pause, then pull — smooth, steady, one motion. Each time there was a beat of bright sharp pain and each time I flinched and each time he said “sorry” — too loud, guessing at his own volume. The first two were bad. By the third I’d figured out that watching his hands was better than thinking about the pain — the steadiness of them, the patience, the way his face went completely focused like nothing else existed except the point of the tweezers.
“You do this a lot?” I asked.
“To myself. Once. It wasn’t fun.” He pulled the fourth. “You’re handling it better than I did.”
“What did you do?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“That bad?”
“There was swearing. There may have been tears. Nobody was there so it’s unconfirmed.” He glanced up, just for a second, and his mouth did something that was almost a smile and I felt it land somewhere below my ribs. “What are you doing in Tulum?”
“Holiday. With my friends.”
“Where are they?”
“Getting ready to go out.”
“And you’re here.”
“I’m here.”
“On a quiet beach. Getting sea urchin spines pulled out by a stranger.” He pulled the fifth. “Solid evening.”
I laughed. It hurt my foot and I didn’t care. “It wasn’t the plan.”
“What was the plan?”
“Walk. Quiet. Not step on anything.”
“Two out of three.” He sat back. “That’s six. I think that’s all of them but there’ll be fragments — little bits of spine that break off under the skin. They’ll work themselves out. Soak it again.”
I put my foot back in the basin. The cat had jumped onto the wicker chair and was curled up watching us with one eye half-closed.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Bud.”
“He’s gorgeous.”
“He knows it. Don’t tell him, it’ll go to his head.” He stood up, rolled his shoulders, and tilted his head — pressing behind his ear, the same small frustrated movement he’d been doing all evening.
“Are your ears okay?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Narrow canals. The water gets in and it doesn’t come out. I have to clear them every few days and I haven’t done it since —” He stopped, looking uncomfortable. “I have to do a thing. And you’re going to have questions and I’d prefer if you didn’t ask them.”
He went inside and came back with a pack of Benson & Hedges and two towels.
I sat up.
Because I knew. I knew before he sat down, before he draped the towels over his shoulders, before he shook two cigarettes from the pack. I’d seen this — a few days ago, from the beach, the man on the porch with something glowing in his ears, the thin lines of smoke. I hadn’t been able to work it out from that distance. Now I was about to see it up close.
He lit the first cigarette. Put it in his left ear. Lit the second. Right ear.
He sat back and looked at the ocean.
Two lit cigarettes sticking out of his head. Smoke curling up past his temples. Ash starting to form on the towels on his shoulders. He sat very still, jaw set, the posture of a man who knew exactly how he looked and had decided, a long time ago, to get on with it anyway.
“Right,” I said.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not.”
“You want to.”
“I want to so badly.”
“A doctor down here told me to do this. He charged me a thousand pesos for the information, but it works. The heat creates a vacuum and pulls the water out into the filter. It’s science. I’m telling you this so you know I’m not insane.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Ash drifted down onto his left shoulder. Bud was asleep in the wicker chair with one paw hanging off the edge. The sky had gone dark and the stars were coming out and I was sitting on a stranger’s porch with my foot in a basin of vinegar and he had two lit cigarettes in his ears and somewhere behind me Carly and Roisín were doing shots and probably wondering where I was and this was, without competition, the most surreal evening of my life.
I started laughing.
I tried not to. I bit my cheek and pressed my lips together and held it for about four seconds and then it came out — a laugh that started in my stomach and I couldn’t stop it, the kind of laugh that feeds itself, the more I tried to hold it the worse it got.
Hank sat there with cigarettes in his ears and waited.
“Are you done?” he said, when I’d calmed down.
“I think so.”
“Sure?”
“No.”
“Take your time.”
I pressed my hands over my face. Breathed. Got it together. Mostly.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be. I mean, nobody’s actually watched me do this before. But I always figured if anyone did, this is how it would go.”
Something about the way he said it — matter-of-factly, no weight on it — made me stop laughing. Not because it wasn’t funny. Because underneath the funny there was something else. The towels on the shoulders. The ashtray already there. The routine of it. However long he’d been doing this, he’d been doing it alone.
“Tell me something,” he said. “While these burn.”
“Like what?”
“Where are you from?”
“Dunfanaghy. But I live in London now.”
He turned his head just enough to squint at me. The cigarettes wobbled. “I’m going to need you to say that again.”
“Dunfanaghy. It’s in Donegal.”
“Is Donegal a place or are you just making sounds?”
“It’s in Ireland.”
“Okay. Ireland I can work with. Ireland I’ve heard of. Dun-fuh —”
“Dunfanaghy.”
“Dun-fuh-NAG-ee?”
“Not even close.”
“Dun-FANN-a-hee?”
I bit my lip. “Worse.”
“I’ll get there.” He said it like he meant it. “Tell me about it.”
So I talked and he listened with cigarettes in his ears and the dark coming in around us and Bud asleep in his chair. I told him about the harbour and Killahoey Beach and the light in winter and how everyone knows everyone and that my mam still tells people I’m only in London for now as though seven years is temporary. I told him about my flatmates and working at the gallery and how sometimes on the Tube I’d get a wave of missing home so sharp it felt physical, like someone had squeezed my ribs.
He was quiet for a moment after that. Not the comfortable quiet from before — something different. Something still. “Yeah,” he said, eventually. Soft. “I get that.”
I told him about Carly and Roisín, how they’d been my best friends since school and how I loved them and how days of nonstop socialising had made me feel like I’d been put through a mangle. He leaned toward me sometimes when my voice dropped, catching the words, and when he caught them he’d nod or his mouth would move and I liked being listened to like that. Like hearing me was something he was choosing to work at.
He didn’t tell me much. He’d been here a few years. He brought Bud with him. He swam every morning and every evening. The spaces around what he said were deliberate, and I understood that whatever had brought him to this porch was his business and not mine. He’d pulled six sea urchin spines out of my foot. That was enough to know about a person for one night.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Bud stood up, stepped across from the wicker chair, and climbed onto my lap.
I went still. He was heavy — heavier than he looked — and warm, and he turned once and lay down and started purring so loudly it was almost aggressive, like he was making a point.
Hank was staring at his cat like it had just spoken.
“He doesn’t do that,” he said.
“He’s doing it.”
“He bites everyone except me. He’s never sat on another person. Not once.”
Bud purred harder. I put my hand on his back and he pushed into it.
“What did you do to my cat?” Hank said.
“Nothing.”
“You must have done something.”
“I’m sitting in your chair with my foot in a basin. I haven’t done anything.”
He looked at me — properly looked, not a glance, not quick — and I looked at him, and he had cigarettes in his ears and I had his cat on my lap and this was the strangest thing that had ever happened to me and I could feel something in the space between us, something that wasn’t the comedy of it, something underneath, warm and quiet and entirely separate from the absurdity, like a second conversation happening below the first one.
The cigarettes burned down and he pinched them out — slowly, carefully — and dropped them in the ashtray. He rolled his jaw. Tilted his head.
“Say something,” he said.
“Something.”
“Oh. She’s hilarious.” He pulled the towels off, took another cigarette from the pack and held it out toward me.
“I don’t smoke,” I said.
“I didn’t either.” He tapped the side of his head. “Then Sanchez happened.”
He lit one for himself and leaned back against the doorframe and he was a different man without the towels and the ear cigarettes — just a man on a porch, smoking, at ease, and the shift was so stark it caught me off guard. Bud was still on my lap. The waves were still coming in. Hank blew smoke at the stars and I watched the line of his jaw and the way his hand rested on his knee and I thought: fuck.
Because that’s what it was. That was the thought. Not poetic, not complicated. Just: fuck. Okay. This is a thing now.
“Your foot,” he said. “You should go to the pharmacy in town tomorrow. Blue sign. Get antiseptic.”
“Okay.”
He took a drag of his cigarette. “Where are you staying?”
“Boca Paila road.”
He looked at the dark beach. “That’s a walk. On that foot. In the dark.”
I looked down. My sandals. My sandals were on the beach somewhere, dropped in the sand when I went down.
“My shoes,” I said. “I dropped them when I —”
“You’re not going to find them now. Hold on.”
He went inside and came back in a T-shirt and shorts — proper clothes, finally, which was both a relief and, if I’m being honest, a slight downgrade — and holding a pair of flip-flops. He held them out. “Fair warning: these are going to look ridiculous on you.”
They did. I stood up — Bud slid off my lap with a noise of absolute contempt — and the flip-flops were enormous. I looked like a child who’d raided my da’s wardrobe.
“I’m not going to say anything,” Hank said.
“You’re already saying it with your face.”
He walked me back along the beach. I was limping in his ridiculous flip-flops and the moon was out and we walked slowly and I was aware of him beside me the way you’re aware of someone you’ve just seen naked, which is to say: acutely.
We were quiet for a while. The waves came in and went back and the sand was silver under the moon and I could see the outline of him beside me — the height, the jaw, the pale ends of his hair — and I was thinking about the beach and the sarong and the whole ridiculous sequence and before I could stop myself I said:
“I didn’t realise this was a clothes optional beach, by the way.”
He made a sound — half-laugh, half-groan. “It’s not.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“I swim here every day. Twice a day. For three years. There’s hardly ever anyone on this stretch.” He glanced sideways at me.
“I wasn’t complaining. Until the sea urchin.”
He smiled. I could see it even in the dark — the way it changed the shape of his face, the way it made him look younger and less careful. He didn’t smile like someone who did it often. He smiled like someone who’d forgotten he could and was surprised to find the muscles still worked.
We walked. The flip-flops slapped on the wet sand. Somewhere down the coast the bass from a bar was carrying on the air and it felt very far away, like it belonged to a different evening, one where I was doing shots with Carly and Roisín and not walking along a dark beach with a man I’d met because I’d been staring at him naked and a sea urchin had intervened.
“Caoimhe,” he said, out of nowhere. Testing it.
“Yeah?”
“No — I’m just —” He paused. “How do you spell that?”
“C-A-O-I-M-H-E.”
He stopped walking. “Sorry. Say that again.”
“C-A-O-I-M-H-E.”
“And that’s Caoimhe.”
“That’s Caoimhe.”
He started walking again, shaking his head slowly. “Between that and Dunfanaghy, I’m starting to think the Irish language is just a prank.”
“It’s very logical once you know the rules.”
“What are the rules?”
“I don’t actually know. I just know the words.”
He laughed — short, warm, real — and I felt it in my chest, a quick bright thing, and I thought: I want to make him do that again. I want to keep making him do that.
The lights of the Boca Paila road came through the trees. Music, voices. We stopped where the dark beach met the edge of the noise.
“That’s me,” I said.
“That’s you.” Hands in his pockets.
I took off the flip-flops. Held them out.
“Keep them,” he said.
“Then I’ll have to bring them back.”
It sat there. Simple and obvious and meaning exactly what it meant.
“I swim every evening,” he said. “Same beach. Sunset.”
“Okay.”
We stood there. The music from the bar. The waves behind us. His face half-lit, half-dark.
“Night, Caoimhe,” he said, and he said it right — softly, carefully, like he’d been practising it the whole walk.
“Night, Hank.”
He turned and walked back down the dark beach and I watched him go and I was smiling and my foot hurt and I was holding his flip-flops and I was going to go back. I was going to go back to that beach. I knew it and he knew it and the sea urchin probably knew it, wherever it was down there in the dark, the little bastard.
I went inside. Carly was at the bar. She took one look at me and said, “Where the fuck have you been?”
I sat down. I couldn’t stop smiling.
“Right,” I said. “So. You know how I said I was going for a walk?”
