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“To fuck with it,” Paddy says, seeing as no fucker else has opened their mouth. “Are we to talk about this or what?”
The pub at least is lively with talk. There is chatter and laughter and a woman in the corner with a soft voice and a dancing fiddle, there is the clink of glasses and the rattle of cash, there is the back-and-forth at the bar and argument and debate and negotiations on intimate and financial matters.
Their own table is caught counting down in the moment between lightning and thunder. Electric.
“The three of us like crows on a wire,” Paddy says. “Waiting for the war.”
Ambrose takes a long draft of stout and wipes his mouth after. There is no need for accusations or pointing fingers. Paddy knows where the fault lines stand. Witness: there is Eoin on the other side of his brother, his pint untouched, yet to meet Paddy’s eyes. Oh, his boy, all the long lines and angles of him, fierce as a peregrine, with his head of curls and his broad shoulders and his slim waist and his loving heart and all the warm speech of him. Not a glimpse of a smile tonight. Silent.
“Don’t quote Charmides,” Ambrose warns.
His honeyed words. His ravenous fang. Paddy swallows such epithets in another man’s voice, where he is speechless.
“If you’d but kept your mouth shut in the first place, Blair Mayne,” Ambrose says, Ambrose who has devilled with Paddy on moor and rugby pitch and debating chamber alike, his good friend roaring down the years. “If you’d have kept your fucking mouth shut we wouldn’t be here.”
Ambrose’s hand circles between the three of them. Crows on a wire, all in black. Paddy wears his fine suit, his only suit, which has served him well for college formals and court functions and funerals alike, bought to last: four years down the line it is tight on his shoulders and cramped about the thighs, but the serge is eternal. Ambrose wears his own court dress, daringly pin striped. Eoin’s old overcoat is primly buttoned, and the tweed scarf his ma bought him last Christmas wraps from collarbones to jawline, not an inch of neck showing.
It makes no difference. Paddy can smell the heat scent rising on him like the smell of his own bed, and so can everyone else in the bar. He can hardly look at the boy. The flush along his cheekbones, the sweat on his forehead, the wicked sloe droop of his eyelids. The sad flat line of his mouth.
He can barely look away. “Am I to stand by while he twists on the hook?” Paddy says.
“Tell him to fuck off with his fucking wee date charts,” Eoin says.
Ambrose looks between them. “You heard him,” he tells Paddy.
Paddy sticks his chin out. “Am I to watch him pained?” The lad on Paddy’s sofa, hot water bottle clutched to his belly, bloodied match shirt under his nose. Smell of him. Smell of him like a knee to the balls. What was Paddy to do, stand over his suffering like a nun wringing her hands?
Eoin’s own chin goes up, waiting for the punchline. Paddy taught him better.
“Ah, fuck’s sake!” says Ambrose, turning. “He says, it pained him to watch you suffer.” He cuts his eyes back to Paddy, with the faintest lift of an eyebrow.
The lad hadn’t mentioned, then. Paddy jerks his chin. He means, nigh on three years. He means, yon lad was curled up on my sofa when he should have been in his dormitory bed, lights out. He means, there was Paddy trotting back and forth like Florence Nightingale herself in blue and white striped pyjamas, blankets on, blankets off, kettle on, hot lemon tea for the throat, ice to the back of the neck, fuck it Eoin this can’t go on, let me call the doctor, aye?
Paddy called the doctor.
“Tell him that was no call to speak to others,” Eoin says, bitter.
His mouth thins of itself but Paddy makes no excuse. The doctor said, this cannot go on. The doctor said, if he does not allow himself his heat, the fever may take him. The doctor said, the longer he fights this, the worse it will be.
The doctor said, are you a relation, Mr Mayne?
No. No, he is not.
Eoin pushes the pint glass away from him and tugs at his scarf. Heat scent eddies across the table. At the bar, four men and a woman look round and only two of them remember themselves and look away before Paddy stares the remainder down with the show of tooth and snarl he learned from a boy better armed and just as reckless as himself.
“Tell him I can organise my own fucking heat,” Eoin says.
Ambrose says, “He says he can organise his own fucking heat, but here I fucking am at his side, Mayne, in my good suit and sober as a judge. Where you should be.”
To which Paddy has nothing to say, because Ambrose is not wrong. If anyone, it should have been Paddy in Ambrose’s place. Not Eoin’s own brother. The last time there was a McGonigal so blessed there’d been a High King on the Irish throne, a Leinster princeling had stood for the girl, and the heat price had been paid in Spanish gold. Paddy at least – Paddy is no prince but he has done his research, has a short list of places he thought safe, has a shorter list of men and women he thought might have caught Eoin’s eye. He’d have brought Brian Boru himself to the table if Eoin had asked.
He has already said some truths to Eoin’s family priest which he perhaps should not have done.
“If I wanted to fuck a rugby team, I’d have fucking done it,” Eoin tells Ambrose.
“He says he can make his own choices,” says Ambrose.
“Aye, but he did not, that is the rub,” says Paddy.
Eoin whips round, snarling, “Tell him he’s no fucking pimp and I’m no fucking whore,” he says.
“Hey! No call for – I will no!” says Ambrose, whom Paddy knows well told his baby brother grand tales of Ireland’s queens, of warrior tooth and blood red claw.
“To fuck with you both,” says Eoin, chin up again. “I made my choice. I made my choice five years ago, if you’d thought to ask.”
“Eoin, lad-”
“You never thought to ask me!” Eoin shouts.
Which he did not. Paddy, called to account, makes himself stand his ground and not walk away and not drop his eyes. He’ll own his own errors.
If Eoin might look at him once more.
“You did not ask me,” Eoin says, looking at Paddy, looking at Paddy straight on with his dark eyes and no laughter in them, looking and looking and hoping for looking back, too, with his wide dark eyes and the wildness at the edges of them.
Paddy is missing something here. He can feel the missing of it, the ghost of a crow, hanging on the wire between McGonigal judge and McGonigal jury.
“Aye, I should have done so,” Paddy says. If Eoin wishes to speak face to face he must too; if Eoin wants to look he may do so as long as he wishes, Paddy will hold still for him. Paddy will get down on his knees and beg and if it will return the boy’s smile, Paddy will bare his own throat and wait on every fang, no different from the last six empty weeks and his heart ripped out.
“To fuck with it, Blair Mayne,” says Eoin. “D’you think I wanted your lists and your notes and your goose feather bed? It’s the man himself in it I am after.”
Oh, he is alight now. Fire in his eyes. Smell of him. Smell of him like a hook in the balls, the fishing line ran straight up to Paddy’s tender trembling innards.
“No one but you,” Eoin says. “Or no one.”
“Lad,” Paddy says, the weakest of protests. There is no such singularity for Eoin. Nothing Paddy has read – and oh, he has read – suggests any queen so sequestered. His boy is destined to be adored as he should be, as he deserves to be, the beloved of many, happy, offered such tribute as he deserves. Garlanded in gold, laughing.
“Tell him,” says Eoin, who is not laughing.
And there is too Ambrose, leaning over. Must they be so tall, these McGonigals? No smile to Ambrose either. “Blair.” He holds out the envelope in his hand, a stiff white envelope with Paddy’s own full name inscribed upon it in Eoin’s hand. An invitation, such as Paddy had expected only ever to hand out, not receive.
“What?” Paddy says.
“I do not know who the fuck else you expected him to ask,” Ambrose says.
“What,” Paddy says, looking at Eoin.
“Take the fucking envelope,” Ambrose says.
“You don’t want to?” Eoin cuts himself off, chin up, mouth flattened, all the colour fading out of his face.
Christ, is there no misstep Paddy cannot take? He takes the envelope, presses it to his heart, never mind Ambrose watching. “Never I ween did lover hold such tryst,” Paddy says, as if Wilde can lend his own courage to such words as Paddy cannot find. He tries. “I would – if you would trust yourself to these unsteady hands I – is there no better choice you can make? Lad, you know well enough I shall be all snap and snarl at your heels.” Eoin’s face, still uncertain. “If you-” He does at least have the proper response if not the words. “Here,” Paddy says, reaching into his pocket and closing his fingers around the tangled chain and the pendant he’d brought, in fear lest this had been the last time – “Yours,” he says. Are there not words for this? Some ceremony? He shoves the tangle of chain and pendant towards Eoin so the boy must take it, the gold chain pooled in his long fingers.
“For your heat,” he says, awkward. “For your heat gift, if you would have it so.”
Eoin frowns, untangling. Then his hands still. His eyes are down, but the blooming flush in his cheeks is everything Paddy had hoped it might be. There’s a tremor in his fingers, so the electric lights send glitter dancing over the gold of the chain, and there is fire in the heart of the ruby. Red, for his dark eyes, and his curls, and the living flame of him.
His dark eyes are wide, when he looks up. His mouth shapes Paddy’s name.
“Fucking hell, Eoin, put that away,” Ambrose hisses. He closes his hand around Eoin’s. “Not here. Not in public. Mother of God, Blair, where did you get such a thing?”
“You like it?” Paddy asks, anxious.
“You robbed a bank,” Ambrose mutters.
Eoin’s smiling, his eyes curled at the corners and his lovely mouth up-turned, just the very tips of his teeth on show. He’s got one hand clenched on his pendant, but he reaches out across the table with the other and lays his fingertips against Paddy’s.
Paddy gasps.
“You did rob a bank,” Ambrose mutters. “Jesus, is that fucking thing insured? I bet it’s not insured.”
“I like it,” Eoin says. He looks down, his long eyelashes charcoal feathered.
Paddy curls his own fingers about Eoin’s. Is he allowed? He’s not sure. He’s doing it anyway.
Eoin looks up. “I like you more,” he says.
Paddy’s heart in his throat, pitter patter. Paddy’s knees cut out from under him. All Paddy’s words fled, poof, nothing left to him but the rising swell of the tide licking from toes to fingertips. Where does all this feeling come from? The floodgates are open. The rain comes.
“Fuck’s sake,” Ambrose says. “Blair, open the envelope. Eoin, sit back. Don’t touch him, he hasn’t said yes yet. Button that thing in your pocket, for the love of God!”
Eoin does not let go.
“Yes,” says Paddy. He is long fast on the hook, nothing left but wriggle.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” says Ambrose. “Call yourself a lawyer?”
Paddy sighs. He can’t let go of Eoin’s hand. He rips one-handed into the corner of the envelope, tears it open, and shakes out the sheet of paper inside.
“Yes,” he tells Eoin.
Then he looks down. “Oh, fuck me,” he says, involuntary. Eoin tries to take his hand back; Paddy should let him go and does not. “Have you seen this?” he says. “You have seen this. Was it your idea? Tell me one of yous had more sense about you?”
There is only one name on the invitation, and that Paddy’s.
“You don’t want?”
“Oh, I want,” Paddy says, holding onto Eoin. “Oh, I fucking do.” Oh, he fucking does. It’s not just his heart stirring, it’s his balls too. Christ, but had not even one of his fundamental organs better sense than to welcome such a thing, and Eoin with his heat near on him, dizzying and very shortly to be in need. Did Ambrose sign up to this mad idea? “Lad, there’s not one thing you could ask me to which I’d say nay. Nevertheless it is your time upon you, and I one man alone.”
Eoin looks back at him, heavy-eyed, glint of tooth. “I know,” he says. He has one hand at his throat again, long fingers tugging at the scarf. “Are you not up to the task, then?”
Sucked in bottom lip, teeth in it, eyebrows, flash of pale skin and fierce rush of scent – ah, fuck, Paddy is up for it, Paddy is snapping open-mouthed at the bait on the hook, Eoin might ply the line as he choses, Paddy must follow.
But there is no call for any such baiting. Does Eoin think him so averse?
He has left the lad waiting. Any minute now – there is Eoin’s chin up again, expecting denial, and Ambrose has kicked Paddy under the table, impactful.
“Lad,” he says. “Love,” Paddy says, so that Eoin is looking back at him with his dark eyes and his flying eyebrows and all the fine angled bones of him and his brave heart, his beloved boy. “I swear, we will travel this road together, you and I and no other, as you wish. But I would be the man at your side, Eoin McGonigal, not the man on your back. I’ll take your wee invitation,” Paddy says, “And if you are willing I’ll take everything else. I’ll take you naked in my bed with the heat on you, and I’ll take you naked in my bed without. I’ll take your muddy socks and your wee snores and your prayer beads and your lost combs, and your smiles and your temper. I’ll put up with him alongside, and your sisters and your ma and da, too. Are you sure, lad? Because I’d have none other, not til death do us part.”
Eoin’s face. Did he think this was just boy’s games? Paddy would take every inch of him.
Eoin’s face, with the growing smile on it curling up fierce as a lit touch paper.
“And every word said his own, a miracle,” Ambrose mutters, and then to Eoin, “I told you so.”
“Ah, fuck off,” Paddy mutters.
“No, really, Blair,” Ambrose begins.
But Eoin, smiling, has caught himself up from the table and is coming hard and quick for Paddy Mayne, so that he is at least on his feet when Eoin takes him by the shoulders and looks him in the eye and tells him, yes. Yes, always. Yes, I am your queen, Blair Mayne, do not forget it; yes, Eoin says, and kisses him in public, kisses him until Paddy forgets everyone else in the bar and very nearly his own name, too, but not Eoin. His boy, his own, his beloved; if Eoin must take Paddy alone and all his snarl and snap, then, Paddy swears, he will never have cause to regret.
"Never," Eoin swears; he says so in the bar in Belfast, and he says so on the beaches at Lochranza, laughing, and he says so before Litani and at Jalo and in Sicily and in Italy. He says so back in Scotland, and in his ma's house on a cold night when he has cause to regret they ever met: he says so in France, and he says so on a quiet beach in Norway when their war is done. And by then, Paddy has come to believe such words might be true.