Page 342 of Well Played

“Okay.”

Once seated and buckled into his car, Liam started the engine and headed out of the parking lot, making their way out of Newry to one of their favorite restaurants, Fitzpatrick’s. Glancing over at Maeve, he noticed she seemed more relaxed now than at their first meeting at the GAA, where they both felt like survivors of an unexpected ambush. Fixing his eyes back on the road, he took the conversation plunge.

“Can I ask you a question that has always irritated me?”

“Sure, I guess?”

He counted to five before speaking, working to form his thoughts and words into a reasonable question that wouldn’t make Maeve become defensive.

“Why didn’t you ever return my phone calls, texts, or emails?”

Her silence following this question made him realize maybe he shouldn’t be so blunt. But Liam had nothing to lose. Either he might have the slimmest chance of winning her back, or he would end up with a permanent red penalty card stapled to his chest.

“Well, I guess that’s a logical question, but let me answer you with a question–can you explain what I saw?”

His blood turned into fridged ice water, freezing the air in his lungs, stopping his breathing. Those missing puzzle piecesof understanding that had caused her to cut him off and vanish from his life six years ago finally fell into place, completing the full picture. She had seen the elaborate prank instigated by one of her so-called friends, a very calculated ruse she had been planning to break them up; and it had worked.

“Do you still chat with or see Nula Flannery?”

“No, not since graduation. Besides, she turned out to be a bit of a cow, a very spoiled rich cow. Why would you bring her up?”

“Because that said cow set us up.”

“What are you on about? Are you telling me that what I saw that night and what I overheard your friends discussing as I ran out of the house in such embarrassment, was Nula Flannery setting us up?”

Gripping the steering wheel tighter while tapping his thumb against it in a steady staccato rhythm, Liam kept staring straight ahead at the road. The green landscape continued to roll by in its own silent mocking.

“Were you aware that Nula was starting trouble behind your back to break us up? At the time, neither one of us suspected it. She made sure she had planted plenty of false gossip to create doubts about our relationship. I will also add, I believed none of the gossip, since it was our relationship, and who would have known us better than ourselves what the truth was? Hell, things had been going so well between us for the last four years. Prior to that party, we had just gotten engaged.”

“Ugh!” Maeve covered her face with both hands, hoping to hold back the anger she felt rising from deep in her mid-section. Slowly running her hands down her face, they stopped at her mouth, covering it to not spit out the words she knew were hanging on her lips.

“My friends did not start what you saw, Maeve. They were recruited as stooges, very intoxicated stooges, I will add, who thought they were just having a bit of a lark with Nula’s pranksuggestion. She’d even made sure that Eileen, who was always following her around like a hungry puppy, cornered me alone in that back room. I was pretty wrecked myself and didn’t know what was going on until I felt her tongue attempting to extract my tonsils.”

“Stop the car!” Maeve shouted. “Please stop the car … now!”

“What the feck!”

Tapping the brakes and shifting gears, Liam pulled off to the side of the road, stopping the car at the edge of a field across from Carlingford Lough and a spectacular view of Warrenpoint and the Mourne Mountains. Maeve already had been releasing her seatbelt before the car came to a complete stop, grabbing the passenger door’s handle to open it and jump out. Liam followed her around the car as she stood silently, looking at the ground with her hands on her hips.

“Maeve, I am so sorry. I couldn’t think of any easier way to tell you the truth. I didn’t remember the next morning, only that I had a splitting headache, and you were nowhere to be found. I kept calling you and calling you, which frightened me into thinking something bad had happened.”

“Well, something bad happened,” Maeve interjected with bitterness. “My friends, my parents … they didn’t know what to do. I was so destroyed. All I could think of was to get as far away from you as possible; so, I changed my departure date to move to the US. It was the only option I had for keeping my sanity and forget my humiliation.”

“Jezus! I love you, Maeve. That night, I planned to tell you that one of the US Football Clubs offered me an assistant coaching job and that I would join you. I …”

“Shut your gob for a second. Repeat what you just said.”

“What? That I was planning to tell you that night that I had been offered an assistant coaching job at one of the US Football Clubs and I was coming with you?”

‘No, right before that …”

Staring at Maeve, Liam’s brain rewound his short-term memory soundtrack, trying to remember the exact thing he had said, which was at this moment very important for him to clarify. Maybe it was his lost look of confusion that prompted Maeve to tell him the answer she was looking for.

“I love you Maeve?”

The silence surrounding them, involving this significant Freudian slip he’d just uttered, was not part of Liam’s original talking points. It was way too early to show his emotions, realizing that he had just missed the proverbial winning goal in his strategy to win her back. Damn it, what a bloody mistake on his part.

“Yes, I do Maeve. I never stopped.”

---