Belinda McKeon - Tender

“Restraining order?” Emmet said, coming up to her at the mailbox. He was grinning as widely as ever, but the blush was back again; she watched its progress across the smooth skin of his face.

“Very funny,” she said, stuffing the envelope into her pocket. “Well, enjoy production night. I have dinner waiting for me.”

He gave her a disbelieving look. “What, has your mother moved in with you or something?”

“No,” she said, laughing. “Just my friend. James.”

“Oh, James, is it?” Emmet said archly. “That’s the ginger I saw you hugging outside the arts block this morning? I was heartbroken, Reilly. I thought the time we spent together on Saturday night meant something. You came back to my place —”

“With about a hundred other people.”

“And then this morning, I’m coming out of my Politics tutorial—”

“You were not coming out of a Politics tutorial at half eleven in the morning.”

“…to see you — I resent that statement, by the way — to see you with your arms around another man. I’m heartbroken, Reilly. Devastated.”

This was Doyle’s usual routine, this layering of sarcasm onto mockery onto brazen cheek, onto what, deep down, might even be a trace of genuine honesty, until it was impossible to tell which was which and what was what. It was a code, deep irony by means of the presence of sincerity, in which he and a few of the other TN guys frequently spoke, and Catherine could not get her head around it. Talking to them, she tried to imitate it, but her efforts always seemed to come out just sounding bitchy.

“Fuck off, Doyle,” she said now, and exactly that thing happened, but Emmet seemed not to notice.

“You brought your friend to my party the other night, right? I was talking to him for a while.”

“Yeah. He’d just arrived from Berlin.”

“Very strong culchie accent for a German.”

“Hilarious,” she said, as she gathered her things from the desk: her notes, her jacket, her bag. “Right. I’m off home,” she said, making for the door.

Emmet followed her. “Does your friend go to college here?” he said, as they reached the hallway. “I don’t think I’ve seen him before Saturday.”

“No, he’s not a student,” Catherine said. She turned slightly, and Emmet stopped abruptly, so that he was standing very close to her. He stepped back. Catherine stepped in the other direction. There was silence between them for a long moment; Catherine did not know what to do with it.

“Don’t you have a newspaper to put to bed?” she said eventually, her tone sharp.

For a second, Emmet looked as though he did not understand the question, but then he rolled his eyes at her, and the grin was back. “Put to bed?” he said mockingly. “Where’d you learn that, the Longford Leader ?”

“Good night, Emmet,” she said, waving without looking back at him, as she took the first flight.

He leaned down over the banister. “Good night, Poetess,” he called.

Sometime after nine the next morning, Catherine tiptoed into the sitting room to wake James up in the same way she had woken him the morning before: by bouncing on his couch cushions until he groaned. But this time, instead of jumping on him, she stood and watched him for a long moment as he slept. He was on his side, with his arms raised over his face, his head pushed forward into the crooks of his elbows; it was a position she remembered from Carrigfinn during the summer, from when she had crept into his room to wake him. Now the air was thick with the smell of his sleep, the stale, slightly sickly smell of a night of dreaming breath.

James gasped and dropped his arms to his chest, and his eyes shot open, wide; they were staring right at Catherine, staring through her. She was startled by his expression, which seemed almost terrified, and she took a step back, but in the next instant James was blinking sleepily, stretching, and he looked like himself again.

“Morning,” she said brightly, reaching down to stipple her fingertips on his bare shoulder.

“No, no,” he said, burying his head in his pillow. “It’s not morning, Catherine. Go away. It’s still the middle of the night.”

“It’s getting-up time,” she said, crossing to the window and opening the shutters. “God, this room is always so stuffy the morning after we have people round.”

He raised himself to his elbows and frowned at her. “Oh, so I’m a ‘person round,’ am I?”

“What are you going to get up to today?” she said, coming back to the couch.

“You tell me,” he shrugged. “Another day of staring at the older men you have a Daddy fetish about, presumably. God, you’ve no taste at all, Reilly, do you know that?”

She pushed his head into the pillow until he bawled in protest, and then she released him, laughing. He twisted around and grabbed her, his hands tickling her waist, inching towards her belly button; she squealed and tried to wriggle away from him, but he had her. He pulled her down, and pressed his face into the back of her neck, growling, squeezing her so tight that she could hardly breathe. She pushed back against him, but he had stopped tickling her now; he had stopped moving altogether, and now his body against hers was solid and still. He sighed.

“So what are we doing today, Brain?”

It was one of their routines, a quote from a cartoon they both found hilarious, and Catherine responded without missing a beat. “The same thing we do every day, Pinky. Try to take over the world! ”

“Oh, Reilly,” he said, nuzzling her, “we’re awful eejits, do you know that?”

“I know,” she said, happily.

“So, what are we doing today?”

“Well, I have a load of lectures. And I have to meet up with Dr. Parker to ask him about my Plath essay.”

“Daddy, Daddy…”

“Shut up, ” she said, kicking back at him. He snorted.

“All right,” he said, and on her neck she felt the scrape of his stubble. “Will I come in with you, then? Or what do you want to do?”

“Oh,” she said, surprised. “You want to come in to college with me again?”

“Oh,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “Was that not the plan? I thought—”

“No, no,” she said, feeling embarrassed herself now; she was actually blushing, and so glad that she had her back to him so that he could not see her, “Of course you can come in to college with me. I just thought…”

“Oh, well, I won’t if you don’t want me to,” he said, and she could feel the pillow jolting as he shook his head. “No, no. Of course. You have your lectures. Sure if I wanted to go to lectures, I’d have gone to college myself.”

“It’s just,” she said, and she turned around now to face him. His morning breath hit her; she reeled for a second but managed not to let her reaction show. “It’s just, yeah, I thought you’d have your own stuff to do. You said you wanted to find a darkroom this week, and look for a job, maybe, and—”

“Yeah,” he said, quietly.

“I mean, we can meet up later.”

“I’ll walk in with you anyway,” he said, “and then we can make our arrangements for later. Does that sound OK?”

“OK,” she said, but uncertainly, and she knew he heard the uncertainty in her tone, and she saw him react to it — a sort of wincing, a sort of tightening and thinning of his mouth, a darkening of his eyes — so, to try and change the mood, she shook him, and bounced on him, and tickled him until he begged her to stop.

“Now, up, ” she said then, getting to her feet and heading towards the kitchen. “It’s a new day. New dawn.”

“Fuck the dawn,” she heard James mutter from behind her, as he snuggled back into his makeshift bed.