Page 65 of Devilish Ink

I saw a vulnerability in his gaze that hadn’t been there before. I could hear the words behind his words: Don’t takeyouaway from me.

He didn’t know it, but this frightened me infinitely more than any threatening growl.

There was a bond between us. A piece of each of us that we’d given the other. He was afraid to lose me.

I’d suspected he’d make it difficult for me to go.

But now, I realised he would never let me leave.

Even if staying would get me killed.

LIAM

For the next few months, Ry and I lived in our own world made for two. Every spare second outside of work I spent by her side, under her tattoo gun, in her kitchen, feet touching under the dining table, in her bed, inher.

Slowly I saw the hesitation leave her eyes. She talked about leaving Dublin less. About leaving me. Stopped trying to talk about us as if we were just a fling.

I learned her full name: Ryleigh Elizabeth Carroll and I learned how to write it out in Gaelic script.

I memorised her movements across Europe after she’d exiled herself and learned how to cook her favourite foods: osso buco, a slow-cooked veal in a white wine tomato sauce, a dish she’d grown to love when she’d stayed in Milan; paella (she pronounced it as pah-ye-yah) Valenciana, a fragrant saffron rice dish cooked traditionally with chicken and rabbit that reminded her of her time in Spain; and boeuf bourguignon, a beef stew simmered in a rich red wine sauce that she tasted in Paris.

I memorised the lyrics to all her favourite songs so I could sing them to her, badly, when she was having trouble sleeping.

And when she’d twitch in her sleep sometimes, a mumblednoescaping her lips, I’d tuck her close, and whatever nightmare was stealing over her fled at my fierce touch.

She took me to all her favourite places in Dublin, every piece making this city more and more my home.

She showed me Marsh’s Library, the oldest public library in Ireland. Tourists all went to the famous Trinity library, she said with a giggle in her voice, but they always missed this one, a quiet eighteenth century brick building in the shadows of St Patrick’s Cathedral, hidden by a lush garden.

I walked with her hand in mine through the rows of three-hundred-year-old ornate oak bookcases, vintage seating and weathered book spines, fingering the bullet holes in the shelves still left over from the Easter Rising.

I softly threatened to lock her away in one of the vintage reading cages where they used to lock up patrons while they perused books so they couldn’t steal them. She laughed and skipped out of my grasp, the smile she cast me as she glanced back over her shoulder taking my breath away.

She pointed to a spot next to a window in the central reading room they call “Swift’s Corner”, where the author Jonathan Swift used to sit and look out onto the cathedral.

I asked her who Jonathan Swift was and she slapped my arm, called me a heathen then told me he’d written Gulliver’s Travels.

She squealed when I pulled her into my lap in that spot for a long kiss as a response.

She took me to The Library Bar, her favourite secret bar tucked upstairs in a hotel on Exchequer Street that looked like a Victorian mansion’s living room with plush velvet armchairs, deep green walls lined with towering wood bookcases and lit with ornate chandeliers. We sat curled up together in front of one of their roaring fireplaces and sipped hot coffee laced with Jameson whiskey.

We walked arm in arm along the willow-shaded footpath of the Grand Canal fringed with reeds, passing in single file overthe wooden lock near Baggot Street, and throwing bread at the swans.

We stopped at her favourite tea shop called Wall & Keogh, the smell of sweet floral teas thick in the air as we made our way to the small shaded garden seating out the back and debated over steaming cups of Irish Mist, green tea brightened with Galway fruits, whether Dublin or Kerry were the better GAA team and whether Mayo would ever win another Sam Maguire cup.

That night after work, I drove to Dublin Ink and parked several blocks away as usual.

Dublin Ink had become like a second home to me.

It was where I’d come to know the woman I love. Where she’d left her mark on me forever.

Where I went when I closed my eyes and thought of her: the cold of the leather, the warmth of her fingertips. The grey of her eyes, the pink of the neon glow.

The abandoned street outside, the drapes cocooning us like there was only her and me and no one else.

The wind whipped especially cold that evening as I walked closer to the warm square of light spilling out from the Dublin Ink window into the damp street. Even with my collar turned up against it, icy tendrils managed to slither around my throat.

I paused at the door as voices filtered out to me.

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