Page 35 of Dark Ink

“Listen, it’s not like before,” I told him. “It’s not going to be like before.”

Conor’s eyes went to the joint.

“I’m in control,” I reassured him. “I know what it’s like not to be. To lose yourself. And I’m not going there again. I know what that cliff face looks like.”

“Yeah, well, so does everybody who’s already falling from it,” Conor replied. “When it’s already too late.”

I reached for the door and Conor did not stop me.

“I’ll never go back there,” I told him, hesitating in the doorway. “It’s hell. Nobody seeks out hell.”

The night breeze was icy. It signalled the end of autumn. It meant a shift was occurring. A change coming.

But my change had already come. Swept in early on the wind. My Raglan Road girl. She’d found her way inside of me and I would never be the same. I had as little control over it, over her as the trees had of losing their leaves, the grass of withering beneath the frost, the air of turning cold, brittle, cruel. I could tell myself she wouldn’t destroy me, but wouldn’t it be foolish? A rose never expects to last the winter. Why should I?

“It’s not empty, you know?”

I glanced back over my shoulder, collar turned up against the increasing wind. Conor had his head out the door of Dublin Ink. I stared back at him, joint between my lips, hands stuffed into my pockets.

“Hell,” Conor called out, his voice unattainable in the silence of the night. “Maybe nobody seeks it out, but that doesn’t mean people don’t end up there anyway.”

I stared at him without speaking.

“You’ll tell us if you need help, won’t you?”

I felt bad for Conor for a minute. For Aurnia. For Mason. They wanted to help. But I knew they couldn’t.

“Of course.”

Eithne

All it took was one phone call.

I could have ignored it. If the bus had arrived twenty seconds earlier, I could have been so preoccupied with squeezing myself through the crowded rows of seats that I could have missed it entirely. It would have gone to voicemail. I would have checked it only once I left Dublin Ink. I would have still had Rian’s ink-stained fingers on my art, his ink-stained fingers on me.

But I didn’t ignore it.

“This is Eithne,” I said over the frazzled noise of evening traffic, students tramping the sidewalks toward the nearest bar, and my own breathless excitement as I rose onto tiptoes to see if my bus had at last rounded the busy intersection.

“Ms Brady?”

“Yes, that’s me. Who is this?”

I fumbled with my portfolio, wedged it under one arm so that I could plug one ear to hear better.

“This is your very pissed off landlord, Ms Brady.”

My stomach dropped. I’d gotten calls like this one before. More times than I could count. But I’d never been so devastated to get one of those calls.

The bus I had intended to get on pulled up with a cough of smoke. The door screeched open and people piled in. The doors closed and I remained there on the sidewalk.

I sank onto the gum-speckled bench and watched the bus I was supposed to be on disappear around the corner. I could almost see myself on that bus, the me that just wasn’t to be: lower lip held anxiously between my teeth, a grin I couldn’t quite contain curling the corners of my mouth, my eyes bouncing from building to building, eager to spy the first glimpse of Dublin Ink.

“Ms Brady?”

The image of me on that bus disappeared.

“Early this afternoon we received several complaints about noise coming from your apartment. When we tried to reach you with no luck, I entered the apartment to find a man who was out of his mind, and not on the lease, I might add, destroying the place in some kind of wild frenzy.”

---