Page 94 of Dark Ink

I grinned. “A shite one really.”

He nodded.

I breathed in deeply. “And really if it’s both, it’s neither.”

“Neither a beginning, nor an end?” Rian said.

I looked back at him. He had petals in his hair. I smiled.

“Just a moment,” I said. “Just a moment in life.”

“Like when I see a girl from across the street,” Rian said.

“Like when I say ‘coffee sounds nice’,” I replied.

I extended my hand. Rian’s hand was warm in mine. We held on for a moment and then we let go.

An end.

A beginning.

Rian

My hands shook as I did my tie.

One of the few moments of kindness I could remember of my father was his rough, callused hands looping the cheap black fabric of a child’s tie through, wiggling the knot gently toward my throat, patting the length against my chest as he lowered his eyes.

The last time I wore a tie, it was for my mother’s funeral. A memory so distant it felt like a dream.

Now it was for my first coffee date with Eithne, but I felt that same twisting in the stomach. Something had died. Something had passed on. Something would, in time, be forgotten.

I was, in a way, saying goodbye to the man I had been as I straightened the knot in the small bathroom mirror. My father was gone and it was my own gentleness I had to rely on. My own tender hands. My own palm pressed against my beating chest. I would be a better man than he was after the dead was laid into the soft earth. I would not turn to cruelty, to anger, to violence. I was happy to put to rest who I had been. I was happy to let the past fade in the sun of the future.

Still, my hands shook.

On my way out of the apartment I passed Ryleigh’s room. She was a force of nature, but she was also a slob. It was a welcomed distraction to nudge back into her bedroom a Limerick Art School sweatshirt, a couple of charcoal pencils, and a notebook haphazardly opened to a drawing of a vaguely familiar man’s profile. If I’d paused to look more closely, if I wasn’t more consumed with my anxiety of meeting Eithne, I might have recognised the man. It might have softened the blow that was to come in a mere few fateful seconds.

Instead I closed Ryleigh’s door and continued on. She’d been a godsend covering for me at Dublin Ink. Even still she worked most of my shifts as I recovered. I wasn’t going to repay her by nosing into her business. Besides, I had my own to mind.

There was nothing left to do as I stood at the entryway. My jacket was thrown over my hand. Keys in hand. Wallet tucked into my back pocket. I brushed my fingertips one last time across my tie. Eithne would joke that I looked more like her professor than ever: knit tie, old tweed blazer with leather pads on the elbows, Oxfords. I’d never quite look like a professor with my dark ink peeking out over my collar and across the backs of my hands. But I wanted her to see that I was trying. That I would spend my whole life trying if necessary. Working endlessly to be a better man. For her.

A loud knock came at the door.

I frowned. Had Ry left her keys behind? I opened it, only to freeze in the doorway at my brother standing there.

“Rian,” Liam said, “hey, I’m—”

“What the fuck do you want, Liam?” I said, hands gripping the doorframe, holding myself back from lunging at my older brother. I grasped for everything my therapist had taught me. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember all the tools we’d practised for those gruelling months. Liam had visited every week for the whole time I’d been in rehab but I’d refused to see him. It was a shock to see him again. And it pissed me off that it wasn’t on my terms.

“You look great. Well, I mean better than—”

“Fuck off. I don’t need your platitudes.”

My chest heaved as I sucked in air, trying to calm myself down. Failing miserably: nothing was ever going to change. My past hounded me at every turn. I could never escape. Not my home. Not my family. Not myself.

He moved towards me as if I’d just step aside and let him in. “I thought I could come in—”

The fucking nerve. I blocked his path. “No.”

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