Page 93 of Dark Ink

“Try what?”

“Try to find what I want to say.”

Our goodbyes before had been rushed. Outside the dean’s office, at the edge of the cemetery, on the corner of his sweat-soaked bed. I could endure one more. I owed him at least that, a proper goodbye.

Still I hesitated. How many times had I let myself fall back into Stewart’s manipulation just because of a few kindly spoken words? How long had the road been to finally finding worth in myself? How hard had it been just tearing my eyes away from Rian? Again the confusion swept over me, that unsettled feeling in my stomach: was this all a beginning? Or an end?

“Eithne,” Rian said and my name on his tongue sounded like bodies beneath silk sheets in the night. It was a flutter, a gasp, a moan of the mattress. In my name from his mouth, I heard all of our time together condensed: pain and pleasure, misery and pure bliss. I longed for him. With just my name alone, I longed for him.

I’d been Rian’s drug. But maybe he’d been mine, too.

“I’ve been unwell for a long time,” he continued. “And that’s hard to admit. It’s hard enough to admit to myself about those last few weeks we spent together. It’s even harder to admit how long it’s been since I’ve been well, long before I ever met you.”

Rian swallowed heavily and shifted from foot to foot. Sunlight caught half his face. He turned toward it instead of away from it, taking a moment to close his eyes and breathe in deeply the sweet aroma of the blooming trees. With a sigh, he turned back to me.

“It probably doesn’t mean much. And I’m not by any stretch asking for your forgiveness,” he said, “but I just want you to know that I always thought what I was giving you was love. That’s what I did call it. My possessiveness, my obsession. My demanding more and more of you. My insistence, my pushing. My overwhelming need to have you experience pleasure. I—I loved you, Eithne. I was driven by this thing I called love.”

I was going to give in to him. I knew I was. Rian was going to ask me to take him back and I was going to open my arms to him. I wasn’t strong enough. Not yet. I hadn’t had enough time. Panic filled my chest. It warred with what pooled in my stomach: longing. Missing. Aching for the thing I’d been stripped of and so terribly, terribly wanted back.

“I’m still not…better yet,” Rian said, again glancing away. “But I’ve come to see, at least, that what I was calling ‘love’ was never love. Not for my friends. Not for myself. Not, most of all, for you. I don’t mean for this to sound cruel, please believe me, I don’t, and, really, it’s maybe been the most painful part of all this healing so far, but Eithne, I never truly loved you. I never—”

Rian’s voice broke. He looked down at his hands. I felt a strange sensation. Something like chains breaking. A snapping. A freeing. A flying. I watched the wind carry away the blossoms.

“But I want to,” Rian said. “I want to love you. I want to ask nothing of you, demand nothing of you, take nothing from you. I just want to give. I want to—to be there with you. Beside you. Just be there. Just be with you. I…”

Again Rian’s words trailed off. He laughed a little awkwardly and cleared his throat.

“Really this is just a long-winded way of asking if you want to, someday, get coffee together,” he said at last.

I saw the apprehension in his eyes as he looked down at me. He squinted against the sun.

I blinked stupidly. “You want to—”

“Coffee,” Rian said hastily. He nodded and then added, “Or tea.”

I frowned slightly. This wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. Stewart read through his lines perfectly, so why had Rian suddenly gone off script? In the silence of my confusion, Rian began again.

“I’m not saying we erase the past. I mean, fuck, I wish we could. God, I stay awake at night praying and crying and screaming to be able to just—but we can’t. And we shouldn’t. I hurt you. And that can’t just—what I mean is, I don’t want to pretend that we’re strangers. That we’ve never met. That there isn’t this mess of shite between us. That we don’t need attending to just like my addiction does. I just…I just mean that we go get coffee and we drink it and we talk, or maybe we don’t talk, maybe we don’t talk at all at first. I just walk you home and I give you my jacket when it gets cold and—”

“A beginning and an end,” I interrupted.

“What?”

I looked around me. At the empty stage. The deserted chairs. The balloons quivering in the wind. At the trees losing their delicate blossoms, gaining their hearty leaves. At the stone buildings of Dublin Art School.

At Rian.

“It’s both,” I said, smiling.

“Both?”

“If it were just a beginning, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I wouldn’t have discovered the strength you showed me, the strength to find my own worth, to take my own pleasure, to believe I’m deserving of that. If it were just a beginning, I wouldn’t be so fucking confused about what I’m doing in life because I’d be headed for some corporate job.”

I laughed and Rian smiled.

“And if it were just an end,” I said, “we wouldn’t have hope. We wouldn’t have another chance. We wouldn’t have…we wouldn’t have coffee.”

Rian bit at his lip. “What kind of life would that be? One without…coffee.”

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