“title”:”We Slept Together Once and Never Spoke Again”,”excerpt”:”Two Dublin strangers share one tender night and years of silence before a chance encounter gives them the courage to name what happened.”,”content”:”
The first time Mara saw Cian Kavanagh, he was standing outside Whelan’s in the rain with his collar turned up and a paper cup of coffee going cold in his hand. It was a Thursday in November, the kind of Dublin night that made every streetlight look like it had been rubbed with butter. People were queuing for a gig, laughing under umbrellas, and Camden Street shone black and gold beneath the buses.
Mara was not meant to be there. She had come into town to collect a coat she’d left in the bookshop on Dawson Street, and then, because going home to her flat in Phibsborough felt like walking into a room where someone had just stopped speaking, she kept going. Her mother had died three weeks earlier. Since the funeral, Mara had become a woman who walked without destinations.
She was waiting to cross at the lights when Cian said, “You’re Aoife’s friend, aren’t you?”
Mara turned. He had a careful face, handsome in a tired way, with rain caught in his eyelashes. It took her a second to place him. Aoife was Mara’s old housemate, now living in Berlin, always posting photographs of bicycles and lakes.
“Mara,” he said, remembering before she could answer. “I’m Cian. I used to play five-a-side with her brother. We met at that barbecue in Portobello. You argued with a man about whether seagulls had souls.”
“They do,” Mara said.
“I thought so too. I just didn’t want to get involved.”
She laughed, and the sound surprised her so much she looked down at her shoes. She had laughed at the funeral too, when her aunt dropped a vol-au-vent into her handbag, and had hated herself for it afterward. But this laugh was lighter, a small bird escaping.
“Are you going in?” Cian asked, nodding toward Whelan’s.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a very Dublin answer.”
“Are you?”
“I was. My friend has abandoned me for a woman he met in the queue. I’m trying to decide whether that’s romantic or rude.”
“Both, probably.”
The rain thickened. Someone opened the pub door and music rushed out, warm and messy. Mara should have gone home. She should have made toast, taken off her damp jeans, sat on the edge of the bed and scrolled through messages she had no intention of answering. Instead she said, “Do you want a drink?”
They went first to a crowded bar where the windows fogged and a group in the corner sang along to a song they only half knew. Cian bought Guinness; Mara bought crisps. They talked about nothing important at first: bad landlords, the Luas, the strange comfort of Dublin rain, the best chipper after midnight. He worked as an architect’s assistant near Grand Canal Dock and lived with two teachers in Ranelagh. She worked in a bookshop and had once wanted to be a poet, which she admitted only because he promised not to look impressed.
“Nobody should look impressed by failed ambitions,” she said.
“They’re not failed if you’re still alive,” he said.
It was too neat a line, but he seemed embarrassed after saying it, and that saved him.
At some point they moved to Grogan’s because Cian claimed it was impossible to understand a person properly until you had seen how they handled a toasted special. Mara told him her mother had died. She hadn’t planned to. The words simply appeared between them beside the pint glasses and the waxy paper plate.
Cian did not say the usual things immediately. He did not tilt his head into pity. He looked at her, then at the table, and said, “My father died when I was twenty. For about a year I kept buying him birthday cards. I’d see one and think, he’d like that. Then I’d remember. Then I’d buy it anyway.”
Mara felt something in her loosen. Not heal, not even soften. Just loosen, like a knot becoming aware of fingers.
“I keep ringing her,” she said. “Not on purpose. I’ll be walking past St Stephen’s Green and think, Mam would want to know the swans are acting like gangsters again. Then I have the phone in my hand.”
“Do you leave messages?”
“Once.”
“What did you say?”
She looked at him sharply, but his face held no curiosity for curiosity’s sake. Only permission.
“I said I was sorry I didn’t take the good plates. She wanted me to have them. I said they were ugly.”
“Were they?”
“Hideous.”
“Then she knew.”
Mara smiled into her pint. Outside, South William Street glittered with umbrellas, taxis, girls in silver shoes stepping around puddles. Inside, the city pressed close and kind.
They stayed until closing, then walked because neither wanted to be the first to suggest leaving. They went through Temple Bar, where the tourists were bright with beer and hope, and across the Ha’penny Bridge. The Liffey below was dark and restless. Cian told her about a building he loved on Pearse Street because its bricks looked stubborn. Mara told him about a customer who came into the shop every Tuesday to ask for books he had no intention of buying, just so someone would say good morning.
At the corner near Tara Street, Cian’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it and put it away too quickly.
“Girlfriend?” Mara asked, half joking, half already injured.
“No.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “My sister. She worries.”
“About what?”
“Me, mostly. I had a rough patch last year.”
He did not explain, and she did not ask. They had both given enough blood for one night.
Near Pearse Station, the last Dart had gone, and the buses seemed mythical. Mara said she lived northside. Cian said his place was closer. There was a pause then, the kind that can become many different futures depending on who breathes first.
“You don’t have to,” he said.
“I know.”
“I mean, I’m not assuming.”
“Cian.”
“Yeah?”
“Stop being decent for one second.”
He smiled, but there was sadness in it. “I’m not sure I know how.&rdquo
