international driver’s license, I still find myself behind the wheel.
Maybe it’s the setting that unchains me from any type of reasonable logic. Maybe it’s Mal himself. All I know is I’m eighteen, newly orphaned by a dad I didn’t know, and I feel like I’m suspended in the air, like a marionette. Between sky and earth. Nothing to lose, nothing to gain.
We roll into a small village, tucked between green hills a stone’s throw from Dublin, with a white wooden sign announcing our arrival in Tolka, Co Wicklow. There’s a river to our right, an old stone-arch bridge over it, and old houses with bright red doors edging the town’s entrance. It’s more like a main street with a few houses scattered around it, like spots of hair on an otherwise bald head. We drive down Main Street, passing a bright blue house, a church, a row of inns, pubs, and a little cinema Mal tells me offers actual individual seats, and the people operating it still use traditional reels.
The road winds, snaking up and down, and my heart feels strangely full when I park the car, as instructed by Mal, a few buildings down from a pub called The Boar’s Head.
When we exit the car, I stop and take my camera out. The pub is painted stark white, with green windows decorated by flowerpots with marigolds and cornflowers spilling out of them. The Irish flag hangs on a pole by the door.
It looks like something out of folklore, a tale my late father would have told me in another life.
“What’s keeping you, Rory?” Mal turns around mid-stride into the pub and catches me crouching down on one knee, squinting and aiming the camera at him.
“Make love to the camera, gorgeous,” I say in a creepy, old-man voice, expecting him to tell me to quit it.
Instead, Mal breaks into a huge grin, covers an imaginary blowing-in-the-air dress, and sends a kiss to the camera, a la Marilyn Monroe. Only his dripping masculinity makes it look one hundred percent hilarious and zero percent feminine.
Click. Click. Click.
I stand up and walk over to him. He offers me his arm. I take it, too tired to resist.
“Is this where you live?” I motion around us. “In this village?”
“Just under that hill.” He runs his fingers through my hair to pull it out of my face, and my spine tingles in unexpected delight. He smiles, because he notices. “With all the arsehole sheep I told you about earlier. You’ll meet them in a bit.”
“I have a flight to catch tomorrow.” I clear my traitorous throat, which keeps clogging with all sorts of emotion.
“So?”
“I can’t stay long.”
He stares at me with a mixture of confusion and mirth. I think this is possibly the first time he’s been rejected. Then he does the unbelievable and reaches to run his thumb over my birthmark, staring at it, mesmerized.
“How’d it happen?” he asks, his voice so soft, it sounds like it’s fading.
I feel so warm I can practically sense the sun beating down on my skin, even though it’s cold and gray out.
“It didn’t. I was born with it.”
“You were, huh?” His thumb drags from my temple to my lips. Was he expecting some crazy story about a car crash or a freak accident?
I pull away.
“Anyway, I can’t stay. I have a hotel booked in Dublin.”
“I’ll drive you back to check out.” He snaps out of his weird trance. “You’ll be staying with me tonight.”
“I’m not going to sleep with you. Over my dead body, remember?”
He cups my cheeks in his hands. They’re rough and confident, an artist’s hands, and my heart thunders with newly found pity for my mom. Now I get why she slept with my dad. Not all Casanovas are slimy. Mal isn’t.
“Don’t let your feelings get in the way of facts.”
“Meaning?” I frown.
“Just because you don’t like the fact that you’re going to sleep with me doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.” He brushes his thumb over my lips. “And just because we’ve only met doesn’t mean we’re strangers. Do we feel like strangers?” he asks, jerking me to his body.
No. No, we don’t. He feels like he’s never left my side. Like I carried a tiny part of him with me from the moment I was born, and now that he’s here, we can fit the part I kept with the rest of him, like finishing a puzzle.
I gulp, but say nothing.
“Exactly. Now, you’re cocking up our perfect meet-cute. Geena Davis is