“Ciarán.”
I nodded and took a drink from my Smithwick’s, trying not to stare at him too intensely. He was ridiculously handsome, much better looking than the type I normally ended up with, and of course it was he who had made the decision to approach me, which meant that he was interested. We said nothing for a while. I racked my brain for some sensible conversation starter but my mind was a blank and I was relieved when he took the lead.
“I’ve never been here before,” he said, looking around, and the familiar way in which he nodded at the barman made me know that this wasn’t true. “I heard it was a bit of craic.”
“Me neither,” I said. “I was just passing by and stopped in for a drink. I didn’t even know there was a bar here.”
“Do you mind if I ask what you do?” he asked.
“I work in Dublin Zoo,” I told him, which was my standard reply to this question. “In the reptile house.”
“I’m frightened of spiders,” said Ciarán.
“Actually, spiders are arachnids,” I said, as if I knew what I was talking about. “Reptiles are lizards and iguanas and so on.”
“Oh right,” he said. I glanced behind him to where an old man, his belly hanging over the belt of his trousers, was sitting at the bar looking longingly in our direction. I could tell from his expression that he wished he could join us, that he had some natural place in our company, but we were forty years younger than him, so of course he didn’t and he stayed where he was, perhaps contemplating the random unkindness of the universe.
“I’ll probably not stay long,” said Ciarán eventually.
“Nor me,” I said. “I have work in the morning.”
“Do you live nearby?”
I hesitated, having never brought anyone home to Chatham Street. But this was different. He was just too good to let go of. And then there was the Julian-lookalike thing. I knew I wanted more than some illicit fumble in an alleyway that stank of piss and chips and the previous night’s washed-away vomit. I wanted to know what it would be like to hold him, to really hold him, and to be held by him, to be really held.
“Not too far,” I said slowly. “Near Grafton Street. But it’s a bit difficult there. What about you?”
“Not possible, I’m afraid,” he said. It occurred to me how quickly we understood each other, how little discussion it took to make it clear that we wanted to go to bed with each other. For all they said, I was sure that the heterosexual lads would have loved it if women had behaved like us.
“Well, maybe we could take a walk,” I said, willing to settle for the usual if that was all that was on offer. “It’s not a bad night out.”
He considered this only briefly before shaking his head. “Sorry,” he said, placing a hand on my knee beneath the table, which set off sparks of electricity around my body. “I’m not really the outdoors type, to be honest. Sure never mind. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, am I right? Another time, perhaps.”
He stood up and I knew that I was on the verge of losing him and made a quick decision. “We could try mine,” I said. “But we’d have to be quiet.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, looking hopeful.
“We’d have to be very quiet,” I repeated. “I have a flatmate and the landlady and her son live downstairs. I don’t know what would happen if they found us.”
“I can be quiet,” he said. “Or I can try to be anyway,” he added with a smile, which made me laugh, despite my unease.
We left the bar and made our way back toward St. Stephen’s Green. There were any number of good reasons not to allow him to cross the threshold but none was strong enough to fight the fact that every atom in my body longed for his and soon enough we were standing outside the bright-red door where there was nothing left to do but slide the key into the lock. In my anxiety, I struggled to insert it correctly.
“Just wait here a minute,” I whispered, leaning so close to him that our lips were almost touching. “Let me see whether the coast is clear.”
The lights were out in the hallway and the door to Albert’s room was closed, which meant that he was probably asleep. I turned back and waved Ciarán inside and we made our way upstairs. When I opened my own door, I pushed him inside, locked it behind us and within a minute we were on the bed, tearing at each other’s clothes like a pair of teenagers and all notions of being quiet went out of my head as we did what we had come here to do, what we had been born to do.
It was an entirely new experience to me. Usually the temptation was to get it over with as quickly as possible and run away but for once I wanted to take things slowly. I had never had sex in a bed before and the sensation of the sheets against my bare skin was incredibly arousing. I had never run my hands along a man’s leg, never felt the ripple of the hairs beneath my palm, never known what it was like for my bare feet to touch his or to turn him over and run my tongue along his spinal cord as his back arched in pleasure. In the dull light that trickled through the curtains from the streetlamp outside we felt the sincerity of what we were doing and soon I forgot about Julian altogether and thought only of Ciarán.
As night turned toward morning, I felt something that I had never felt during sex before. Something more than lust or the frantic urgency for an orgasm. I felt warmth and friendship and happiness, and all this for a stranger, all this for a man whose real name I probably didn’t even know.
Finally, he turned to me and smiled, shaking his head with that familiar expression of regret. “I better go,” he said.
“You could stay,” I suggested, surprised to hear such words emerge from my mouth. “You could leave when my flatmate is having his bath in the morning. No one would know.”
“I can’t,” he said, climbing out of bed, and I watched as he reached for his clothes, which were scattered among my own on the floor. “My wife will be expecting me back soon. She thinks I’m on a night shift.”
My heart sank inside my chest and I realized that I had felt the gold band on his left hand against my back as he had held me and thought nothing of it. He was married. Of course he was. And, as he buttoned his shirt and searched for his shoes, I saw that the revelation meant nothing to him.
“Have you lived here long?” he asked as he dressed, for silence was worse than anything.
“A while,” I said.
“It’s nice enough,” he said, before stopping and looking around the walls. “Is it just me or does this crack look like the journey the River Shannon takes through the Midlands?”
“That’s what I’ve always thought,” I said. “I’ve asked the landlady to fix it but she says that it will cost too much and it’s been there forever, so no harm.”
I lay back down, pulling the sheets up to my neck to cover my nakedness, and wanted him to stop talking and just leave.
“Listen, we could do this again sometime if you like?” he suggested as he made his way toward the door.