Page 81 of 56 Days
Even though she should destroy the ones she already has, because that’s what’s going to happen to them anyway, eventually, and why torture herself until then by pretending that there can be another way?
You can’t erase the past. You can lock it in a box, yeah, but you can’t make it goaway.
The box is here now, sitting on the grass between them.
But Oliver doesn’t know it exists and she’s stubbornly pretending she doesn’t see it.
“Do you ever think about what we’d be doing if all this wasn’t happening?” he asks. “If there wasn’t a pandemic?”
“No.”
This is true. This set of circumstances has proved so dangerously perfect in so many ways, she doesn’t like thinking about what might have happened otherwise.
What might have had to happen.
“Really?”
“Nope.” She shakes her head. “Why, do you?”
“All the time. In fact...” He takes out his phone, taps the screen a few times, and then holds it out to her. “I do more than that.”
She can’t see through the glare of the sun on the screen, so she takes the phone from him and cups her hand around it until there’s enough shadow to make out what it is. He’s opened his Notes app to a list, it looks like.
“What’s this?”
“Places I’m going to take you,” he says. “After. Things we’re going to do.” He pauses. “Things I want to do with you.”
She only manages to read the first few items on the list before the words begin to blur.
Stella Cinema
Killiney Hill
Chapter One (chef’s table)
National Gallery
Long Room
Sunrise @ Sandycove (swim?)
She doesn’t even know what to say, much less feel.
She’s stunned that he would admit to this, that he would show her such a thing. She’s touched that he made this list. She finds it amusing that so many of the things on there are the same things that appear in tourists’ schedules, that it’s a list designed for two people new to Dublin, keen to explore the city but lacking any real knowledge of where to go. She’s scared that she wants to do all this too, with him, that she can already picture them walking hand in hand around the streets, like they did earlier today but with normality having returned and there being nothing left to fear.
Apart from the thing that will never go away.
Ciara feels a sudden flare of heat on her cheeks. His face is inches from her own; there’s nowhere to hide a reaction. She works to keep her expression neutral as she feels wave after wave of feeling rush up and crash over her, pulling her under and lifting her to the surface, leaving her dizzy and disoriented, her throat dry.
“And it’s not on the list,” he says, “but there’s a hotel in Killarney where you wake up and you’re just looking out at the lakes, and the mountains beyond, and you can’t see anything except green and blue. When we can go places again, I thought we might go there. Just to not see city for a while.”
It was never supposed to go this far.
But now that it has, she doesn’t want to turn back.
And really, what did she think was going to happen? Isn’t there a part of her that wanted this all along, despite the cost of it? Hasn’t she been lying to herself just as much as she’s been lying tohim?
“I want to do those things, too,” she says. “With you.”
