Unfixable

Chapter Sixteen

When Shane pulls up outside the Claymore Inn, he’s in a different car than the night he picked up Faith and I at O’Kelly’s. This one is candy-apple red, sleek, and low to the ground. A sports car. It’s also a convertible, but I suspect the retractable roof doesn’t get a lot of use in this rainy country. When he steps out of the driver’s side and rounds the car to open my door, I feel a wicked little hum kick up in my belly. In faded jeans and a bomber jacket, hair finger-mussed, he might as well be wearing a sign that says, I’m bad. But in a way that will make you feel really good. It does nothing to calm the category-five hormone storm taking place inside me when his gaze slides over my body like he’s planning on making a meal out of me at the earliest opportunity.
Feeling a little bit like I’m heading to my own funeral, I sink into the plush leather passenger seat, unable to keep myself from watching him through the windshield as he returns to the driver’s side. A moment later, we’re both enclosed in the car, the purr of the engine vibrating beneath us. It’s just after ten o’clock and the street is illuminated by streetlamps. Since the day’s warmth has lingered into the night, people stroll down Baggot Street, looking positively elated to be free of their jackets and umbrellas.
“Where have you been hiding this car?”
His hand slides over the steering wheel like a caress. “In a garage down the road. The attendant lets me store it there in exchange for a free pint now and again.” He throws the clutch into first gear and eases away from the curb. “Although I think he uses it to pick up girls by telling them he’s the owner.”
“And that works?”
He glances at my tightly crossed legs. “Worked on you.”
I should be annoyed or embarrassed by that arrogant statement. Or both. Instead, his confidence is ridiculously attractive to me. It’s drawing me closer, making me want him even more. Tonight alone, I’ve seen him surprised, regretful, grateful, and humorous. Now…now he is working his swagger. And shit, I like it way too much. The way he drives the car, capable hands working the gearshift like he’d been born inside of it, is sexy as all get-out. His thigh muscles shift each time he applies the break, the seat hugging his body like it had been customized for his muscular frame.
With a deep breath, I finally accept where this night is headed and admit I’m going there willingly. I’m done pretending I have the willpower to stay away from Shane. It’s a pointless waste of time, and I’ve never been a procrastinator. I just have to hope like hell when it comes time for me to get on the plane back to Chicago, I’ve got my damn head on straight. That after I satisfy this hunger inside me, I’m able to walk away and see this for what it is. A diversion. A passing attraction that might very well eviscerate my last relationship from my head, but one that can’t become a relationship in itself. As corny and old-fashioned as it sounds, we’re two ships passing in the night. Which makes my desire to know more about him rather inconvenient. What I should do is ask him to pull over so I can drag him into the backseat. But there it is again, that niggling curiosity that is far from satisfied, rearing its nosy little head.
“I overheard what Faith told you tonight,” Shane says, before I have a chance to ask.
“I thought as much,” I murmur, shifting my attention out the window.
“I also heard what you said back to her.” He waits until I’m looking at him. “Thank you for that.”
“Okay.” Uncomfortable with the gratitude softballs being lobbed in my direction tonight, I change the subject, wishing I was well-adjusted enough to simply say you’re welcome. “So, did you have this car before you left Ireland to race?”
Shane slants a look at me, as if to determine my motivation for asking. Finally, he shakes his head. “I bought it at an auction with the money from my first win. I’d come home for Faith’s birthday.” He pushes the car into fifth gear. “It was an impulsive buy, but I thought…”
When he doesn’t continue, I prompt him, sensing he’s going to open up. “What did you think?” If he overheard what Faith told me, he already knows his rocky relationship with his father won’t be news to me.
“I thought if he could just see I’d been successful, that the time I’d spent away from the inn had paid off in some small way, it would change everything, but he wouldn’t even let me in the door.” He clears his throat. “I don’t drive it very often anymore.”
“You should,” I blurt, hating the defeat in his voice. “You should be proud of it even if he couldn’t manage it. Maybe buying the car was impulsive, but he should have seen it for what it was. Not a boast. An explanation…an apology. He should have known you better.”
Even though Shane isn’t looking at me, I can tell by his posture I’ve surprised him. I’ve kind of surprised myself at the close attention I’ve been paying without realizing it. When he doesn’t say anything for a long time, however, I’m starting to wonder if I was wrong. Or worse, I’ve overstepped my bounds.
“Look, I’m sorry. It wasn’t my place to say anything.” I pull my messenger bag higher against my chest. “I skipped Tact 101 in high school.”
A small smile playing around the edges of his mouth, he shakes his head. “How do you manage to see the best in everyone, Willa, but only the worst in yourself?” His statement lingers between us, as if I could pluck it out of the air. When I realize my mouth is hanging open, I snap it shut. That’s not true. Is it? “What you said about my father, this car…you’re right, I think. I’ve just never thought of what happened in those terms.”
“I’m an outsider looking in, that’s all. It’s easier to see a situation clearly without messy emotions, like guilt, in the way.”
“I don’t know. A moment ago, you seemed pretty outraged on my behalf.” I stare resolutely out the window and Shane sighs. “You wouldn’t be, if you knew the whole story.”
“Do you want to tell it to me?” I ask softly.
Our eyes meet across the console. “I don’t know.”
Ignoring the stab of hurt, I nod. “Okay. I get that.”
“No, you don’t.” He turns onto the highway, slipping into the fast lane with expert ease. “I liked the way you looked at me when you defended me. Maybe a little too much. When you realize I’m not worth your outrage, I run the risk of never seeing that again.”
The pain remains, but it’s transferred to him now. “It can’t be that bad,” I whisper.
We drive in silence for a few minutes. I sit very still in the passenger side, afraid if I move, it will sway his decision to confide in me. I want to know what put that note of sadness in his voice and I think I’ll be crushed if he decides against telling me. When I got off the plane in Dublin, I didn’t want to get close enough to anyone to feel this emotionally invested. I came here to repair myself and my broken heart, not this family. Just this one final thing, I tell myself. Just to put the curiosity to rest.
Shane’s voice startles me, cutting through the darkness. “I was in Malaysia in March, getting ready for the second race of the Championship. Hadn’t spoken to my father in months. But he called me. Just as I was suiting up for the qualifying round. I didn’t even look at the caller ID, just answered, assuming it would be anyone but him.” Shane isn’t completely there with me in the car anymore, his voice sounding far-off. “He’d hadn’t even let me past the front door of the inn last time I was in Dublin, so when he asked me to come home immediately, I didn’t understand. I asked if Kitty and Faith were all right. He said yes, but I needed to come home and see to my legacy. It had to be that same day.”
As he gets further into the story, a bad feeling settles on my shoulders, tingling in the back of my neck. Before I can analyze my actions or tell myself it’s a bad idea, I settle my hand over his on the clutch. He looks at our touching hands a beat before continuing.
“When I think back to the phone call, I don’t know how I missed it. He kept calling me by my name, which he never used to. Shane, it’s important that you listen. Shane, your mother and sister need you. No mention of him. None.” He steers the car off the highway and takes a turn, beginning the ascent of a semi-steep hill. “The next day, I placed in the top three. Not my first time, but it was a difficult track. I had a voicemail from Faith…”
He has to stop. The moment feels so fragile that any misplaced word or movement will shatter it like glass. I don’t want to hear the rest. I’ll die if I don’t.
“I went out celebrating. Didn’t even listen to the voicemail until the next day.” His voice has turned bitter, full of self-hatred. “He died during the race. He was trying to tell me to come home. Must have known what was coming. It was so obvious, I just didn’t want to f*cking hear it.”
My chest rises and falls rapidly, every breath I manage to draw into my lungs more painful than the last. I try to imagine the guilt that goes along with what he’s telling me and I can’t even fathom it. I feel that I can at least partially relate, because as awful as my nonrelationship is with my mother, if something similar had happened with Valerie…if she died after begging me to come home, I would still be swamped with self-loathing. I can only imagine the magnitude of Shane’s. It’s visible now, in every line of his body, the white-knuckled grip he has on the clutch.
“So? Am I still the type of person you would defend?” Finally, he looks at me and I want to wither under the haunted expression he hits me with. “Or are you wishing you’d never gotten into this car with me?”
I inhale slowly, ordering myself to think clearly. Maybe I wanted to avoid this position, but my curiosity has landed me here and now I get the sense that I’m needed. That my response is important. More than that, it’s important to me that it leaves no room for doubt. “Yes, I’m defending you, Shane. I’m saying your father didn’t make it clear enough. He was too stubborn to come right out and tell you what the hell he wanted to say. He didn’t say, ‘Shane, I love you, I’m sorry, I’m dying and want you to come home.’ Instead, he left you with a lifetime of guilt. That’s shitty. And you’re making it shittier by imagining hints he probably never dropped.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re the one that’s still alive.” I realize I’m practically shouting and lower my voice. “Someone has to shoulder the guilt you both felt. It didn’t die with him.”
He stares at me hard for long, torturous seconds where I worry my honesty went too far. Then he leans back in his seat, staring out the front windshield. “I have to go back to racing. I have to win or it was all for nothing. I will have alienated him, my family, for nothing. Can you understand that?”
Better than I thought. “Yes,” I say, even though the word feels like it’s being scraped from my throat with a spoon. It’s a complicated and difficult goal, but that’s Shane. Complicated and difficult. People like us, he’d said to me the night we kissed in the office. We must be cut from the same cloth, because this quest he’s on is something I fully grasp. Maybe even something I would do in the same position.
“Selling the inn will ensure Faith and Kitty don’t have to work anymore. That we can afford care for Kitty. I can help them far more that way than staying behind, slowly turning into my father.”
He pushes open his door before I have a chance to respond. I feel anchored to my seat by what he said, but when he pulls open my door, I force myself to climb out of the car. Shane takes my hand without asking for permission and leads me up a path. It’s dark, and I have no idea what remote location he’s brought me to, but I can smell moss and saltwater. I open my mouth a little, and I can even taste it on the drifting wind. Trees line either side of the path and I sense we’re getting closer to the water the more the wind picks up, rustling the leaves. It’s dark, but the moon is enough to see where we’re walking. Shane’s hand tightens around mine when we come upon uneven earth. I trust him, I realize. In this moment, after the way he opened himself up to me…I trust him.
I can feel the tension in his grip, left over from our conversation. Part of me wants to bring it up again, talk it to death. Talk until he stops feeling pain over something he couldn’t prevent, until no more words exist on the subject. It’s so unlike me. I’m the type to ignore a pebble in my boot until it gives me a blister. I’ve made ignoring problems an art form. Maybe it’s his own reluctance to talk about it that’s giving me the urge to create balance. Balance him.
“Where are w—” The words die in my throat when we reach the end of the path and I see Dublin Bay spread out below us. Boats bob on its calm surface, land surrounding it, lit up houses nestled into the hillside along the shore. Somehow the sky doesn’t seem as dark from here, more of a purplish-gray, reflecting the water below. We’re on top of a hill, which didn’t seem so large when climbing it in the car, but from where I’m standing, it feels like we’ve scaled Everest. In the distance, I can see Howth Harbor, where I’d spent the day. This afternoon suddenly feels like a thousand years ago. So much has happened since I dangled my legs over the side of the dock.
It’s so beautiful up here, I can’t stand it. I couldn’t capture this perfect feeling of isolation with my camera if I tried.
Mist. When I read about it in books, I always thought it was a myth. Something to set a tone or create a mood. But it’s real, and it’s curling around our ankles like a cat begging to be petted. It’s not eerie, it’s comforting. It’s like a balm, enclosing us and taking away the ugliness we both carry around on our shoulders.
“Killiney Hill,” Shane says softly, answering my unspoken question. His voice sends goose bumps coasting down my neck. I rock back on my heels and come up against his chest, closing my eyes when he folds his arms around my middle. After the difficult emotions dredged up on the car ride, it feels like a relief to be held. To focus on something else. The way it feels to touch each other.
This is how I can soothe him. Soothe myself in the process. I can’t deny this overwhelming sense that we need one another tonight, right now on this hill. The beauty around me, the hurt evident in Shane’s body, is crowding out every reservation and leaving only now. Now, right now, I can’t stop myself from turning in his arms and sliding my hands up his chest. His eyes are closed, but when I slip a hand up his neck and into his hair, his lips part on a breath. I want to taste that sound on my tongue, so I do. Slowly, I kiss away the tension in his body, replacing it with awareness. Of me. Of what’s about to happen.
Shane seems to lose some invisible battle, pulling me up against him and slanting his mouth over mine with a groan.
“Tonight, Willa.”
I nod. “Tonight.”