Page 121 of Try Line Hearts
She looked up at the screen one more time, smiling wide and soft and knowing — and around her, the watch-party surged back into motion: hugs, laughter, someone yelling for more cups, someone else already arguing about whether this would make the papers in New Zealand or if it would melt the internet entirely.
“About bloody time,” Kiri said fondly.
Outside, Auckland stirred awake — unaware that halfway across the world, under rain and stadium lights, something important had just been claimed.
And inside the Kaine home, with the whole community crammed in and cheering like it was their own victory too, love settled in loudly, shamelessly, solid as bone.
Across Ireland, the moment didn’t explode.
It settled.
In pubs, in sitting rooms, in kitchens where kettles had just been switched on, people froze with drinks halfway to their mouths. The noise from the stadium bled through television speakers, but the rooms themselves went oddly still, like everyone had inhaled at the same time and forgotten to exhale.
In a crowded pub off Camden Street, the cheer from the final whistle hadn’t even finished echoing when the camera cut back to the pitch. The barman leaned forward instinctively, polishing cloth dangling uselessly from his hand.
“What’s he doing?” someone asked.
Lucas Byrne walked straight past the reporters.
A few heads tilted. A couple of lads laughed uncertainly, assuming it was some bit of theatre, some captain’s flourish before the interviews wrapped up.
Then he kept walking.
“Oh,” someone said, very quietly.
When Lucas stopped in front of the winger—when he lifted Eli Kaine’s face in his hands…
The room shifted.
Not shouting. Not cheering. A low, collective murmur ran through the pub, chairs scraping as people stood without really deciding to.
“Is that—”
“Jesus.”
“No way.”
When they kissed, it was unmistakable.
There was a beat—just one—of silence.
Then the sound came back, different this time. Not a roar. A scatter of reactions layered over each other: laughter, sharp whistles, someone swearing in surprise, someone else clapping before they quite knew why.
“Fair play to him,” an older man said from the bar, nodding once like the decision had already been weighed and measured.
A woman near the window wiped at her eyes, laughing under her breath. “I wasn’t expecting that today,” she said to no one in particular.
Someone else scoffed, uncomfortable. “Christ, he picked his moment.”
“Yeah,” came the reply, immediate and calm. “He did.”
In a semi-detached house in Galway, a family who’d been watching in companionable silence stared at the screen as the camera lingered too long, then cut wide to the crowd.
The teenage daughter gasped, hands flying to her mouth.
“Mam.”
Her mother didn’t answer straight away. She watched Lucas rest his forehead against Eli’s, watched the way the noise in the stadium didn’t turn on them.
