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He should not have agreed to this.
Ambrose had asked, though, and Paddy is supposed to do things with other people as part of his unconvincing play at being a normal sort of chap. There is also the fact that most of Ambrose’s friends overlap with his own acquaintances, with people he is supposed to like, so it would have been odd to say no. It is not as though he is going to a party full of strangers. That thought, however, is not nearly enough to comfort him.
Paddy had necked a bottle of wine before he came over, not because wine was something he particularly enjoyed but because it had been given to him at the company Christmas party, and if he’s going to spend time at yet another Christmas party, he needs to be drunk for it as expediently and inexpensively as possible. This, he is quickly realizing as he stands at the front door of Ambrose’s building, swaying and feeling hot and slightly ill from a combination of the wine and the anxiety, was a mistake. He is just about to turn round and beat a hasty retreat to the comforting arms of a pub and his copy of Yeats when the door opens to reveal a red-cheeked Ambrose propping up the doorway.
“Aah!” he says, smile breaking across his handsome face, “you actually came! I was worried you’d no-show again.”
He has a paper crown on his head and a glassy look in his eyes that betrays him as being even more plastered than Paddy is. A tinsel garland is slung round his neck like a scarf.
It’s always slightly awkward, now, seeing Ambrose, or at least Paddy feels as though it is. Ambrose of course, is none the wiser about the kind of man Paddy is beneath the suits and legal-speak and the dazzle-camouflage of the poetry, does not know of the indiscretion of two summers ago that even still haunts Paddy’s waking and his sleeping and tingles in his fingertips, his lips. He wonders sometimes what Ambrose would do if he knew, if he’d kill him for it himself or get it done legally through an official complaint. The wondering, the guilt, the knowledge of his own unforgivable sin, has made socializing with Ambrose specifically even more fraught than Paddy usually finds it.
“Come in! Come in!” Ambrose orders, boisterous and gregarious as he only gets while drinking, waving Paddy into the entryway and up the stairs “Everyone’s here!’
Ambrose lives on the second floor in a modestly styled, sparsely furnished bachelor pad, and it does, rather, seem as though everyone is piled into it, pressed in like sardines. The air is hot and smoky despite the windows being open, the wireless is blaring something with a bit of swing in it, and the overlapping chatter of what sounds like hundreds of voices is mixing with the wine and the anxiety into the beginnings of a headache at the base of Paddy’s brain. They wade through the throng, dodging stray elbows and lit cigarettes. A halfhearted effort had been made to decorate the place for the holiday; pine boughs arranged haphazardly on the windowsills, paper chains strung awkwardly across the bare walls. The tinsel, it seems, had been in short supply and had been used more for sartorial purposes following Ambrose’s lead. The real purpose of this gathering, however, is to drink, and the frankly impressive amount of alcohol is arrayed on the kitchen table like the spoils of war.
“Here”, Ambrose says, handing Paddy a glass of whiskey, “get this down ye. We’re near out of the good stuff, it’ll be potin for the rest of the night, I’m afraid. Matthew brought up five cases of the shite his uncle makes”
Paddy, who is never going to turn down a drink of any variety when it’s offered him, downs the whiskey in one. It settles him, slightly, takes some of the edge off.
Ambrose pours him another.
The crowd is a mix of Ambrose’s friends from university, old rugby teammates, and a few other apprentice solicitors whom he and Paddy had met at various industry events or after work drinks at the pub. Nobody that Paddy knows particularly, but people who all think they know Paddy. He drinks through several brain-dead deconstructions of the most recent rugby season, a recap of a recent case some poor sod had worked on, and a long-winded monologue about the various assets possessed by someone’s sweetheart. He’s solidly drunk by this point, the room swaying, and if he hears another mention of tits he thinks he might very well either start swinging or hurl. He is fizzing inside himself, skin too tight around his bones. He respects Ambrose too much to start a fight in his flat, however, and so he makes a tactical retreat to the spare room where Ambrose has stored all the visitors’ coats.
He doesn’t bother with the lights, the dimness comforting, and with the door closed the noise of the party is muffled enough that he can almost pretend he isn’t here, that he’s somewhere else.
He shouldn’t have come.
From far away, Paddy hears the front door open as another guest arrives, followed by a great uproar of sound as the new arrival is greeted and feted in proper McGonigal fashion.
He flops backwards onto the bed, onto the pile of coats on it. He presses the heels of his palms to his eyes and tries to breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth. The room is spinning.
It is not easy for him, socializing like this, and the reminder of his failings makes something deep inside him ache. It is not grief, per se, more of a deep hole of emptiness at the core of him that he can ignore most of the time until he is confronted by the presence of other people and finds himself faced once again with the reality of his own alienation.
He has always been odd, separated from the world by an impermeable barrier, like looking in at living through glass. He knows why, of course, had long ago come to if not acceptance than at least understanding of the particular lack inside himself. The last time, the only time, he has ever felt connected to the world around him was that summer he’d spent with the McGonigals, with… well, he will not think of that. There is no point.
Paddy startles as the door opens, the sudden shaft of light blinding as it falls across where he’s lying on the bed.
Generally, the polite thing to do when you discover someone at a house party lying down in the guest room in the dark is to apologize, turn round, and leave the poor fucker to his misery.
The lad in the doorway does no such thing. He steps into the room and closes the door behind him. The room is dark again, and in the dimness, the silhouette of him is halfway familiar. Paddy can’t quite breathe.
“You’re lying on some coats," the boy says, total non-sequitur. His voice is soft and lyrical, halfway familiar even as it smooths down the ragged edges of Paddy’s shrivelled soul.
“It’s sometimes nice to feel what it’s like to lie in someone else's coat” Paddy says “Wear another skin”
It’s a shockingly odd thing to say, and he hopes it's enough to have the lad cast him a strange look before leaving him alone.
“Is it?” he asks instead, seeming genuinely curious, stepping across the room and lying down on the pile of coats next to Paddy. They’re close enough that he can feel the warmth of the body beside him, hear the sound of his breathing.
Paddy wonders if the lad can hear the way his heart is thundering, if they’re close enough for that too.
“I suppose,” the lad says at last and Paddy can hear the smile in his voice even though he steadfastly does not turn his head to look, “I can see the appeal.”
“Oh?”
“Sort of like being a rabbit in a den,” he says, “hiding from the fox”
As though to illustrate the point, something shatters in the living room followed by a round of raucous shouting as the culprit is found and teased mercilessly for his butterfingers.
“Do you make a regular habit of going to parties just to sulk in the spare room alone with the outerwear?”
“I remind you that you are currently sulking alongside me,” Paddy replies rather than answer the question. The true answer is that he doesn’t make a habit of going to parties at all, though if he did, he reckons he'd be more practised and might not need to hide in the spare room “So it hardly qualifies as a solitary activity now.”
“Oh aye,” and there’s that smile again, so much warmth in his voice it’s almost physical “But this is scientific curiosity to test the validity of your methods. I also have an excuse to be tired, I’ve been travelling all day”
“And how do you know I haven’t?” Paddy asks just to be contrary, just to steal another moment of this marvellous creature’s attention and bask for just a second longer in the warmth of his voice.
The boy scoffs, “Your accent is all Belfast”
That is true enough.
“And where have you blown in from, then, o well-travelled stranger?”
“Dublin”
Paddy snorts, “Hardly the moon, then”
A playful elbow nudges against his bicep, and Paddy has to fight to stop the jolt the touch elicits from him, the stumble of his breathing as the air catches in his throat. He can not, now that he is thinking of it, remember the last time he was touched casually and without intent to harm. Most people know he is a wild animal, liable to bite at the slightest provocation, and steer clear. Even Ambrose for all his genial friendship and willingness to take Paddy as he is, knows better than to touch him off the rugby pitch. The last person to have touched him just to touch him had been… well.
His cheeks are hot with blush, and he is grateful for the darkness of the room, which hides it.
“What is it you do in Dublin?” he asks when he finds the breath to. The boy has not pulled away, and the warm pressure of his touch against Paddy’s arm lingers like a burn, like sunglow.
The boy sighs “Uni” and then, seemingly apropos of nothing but with a weight to it that Paddy can not parse “I’m eighteen, now. Since yesterday”
“Happy birthday”, Paddy says because it is expected.
The lad sighs, shifts slightly closer, rolling so he can prop himself up on one elbow. Like this, he’s looming slightly over Paddy. In the dim filter of streetlight through the window, the high points of his face are gilded. He is handsome. He is familiar. He is something wandered out of Paddy’s dreams.
“Have they taught you anything good, then, at university in Dublin?” Paddy's voice is scratchy, half-strangled inside his throat.
“Maybe,” he says and leans down to press his lips to Paddy’s.
He smells of snow and spice and latently of cigarettes, a pang of something so familiar that Paddy finds himself melting into it. He is drunk and he is dreaming and he grips tightly to his dear phantom’s shoulders as they move together, mouths against mouths.
“Blair”, the lad gasps, and Paddy jolts as though electrocuted, the moment shattering like glass on tile.
“What the fuck?” he shouts.
“I’m sorry,” Eoin says, scrambling away, “Fuck”
The door opens with a slam and the sudden bright flare of light into their dark sanctuary. Paddy flails about for an unforgivable second, gets tangled in the coats he’s lying on, before he finally finds his feet and goes tearing after Eoin. The noise of the party hits him like a brick wall, and he runs nearly headlong into Ambrose who is coming up the hallway toward them, a glass of potin in his hand, his paper crown torn and listing over one ear.
“Ahh, Blair, there you are! You’ve even found the prodigal,” Ambrose says to Paddy, reaching up to throw an arm around Eoin’s shoulders, catching him mid-stride and turning him back around to face Paddy fully “Blair you remember Eoin, my wee brother?”
Paddy almost laughs at the absurdity. He knows a great deal about the McGonigals, knows and has spent a great deal of time with Ambrose’s overabundance of siblings, particularly with his youngest brother. Of course, he knows Eoin, has in fact been spending the past year and a half trying to forget Eoin, trying to lose him in the bottom of bottles and the hands of other men. He had never once considered, outside of his most lecherous fantasies, that Eoin might be the type to kiss another man, unprompted, in the darkened spare bedroom at a house party.
“Aye, I remember,” he chokes out at last, mouth open, fish-like, in shock and alarm, heart pounding like a war drum in his chest.
Last time he had seen Eoin he had been back from school for the summer, sixteen, awkward and gangly as a colt, all knees and elbows and ears that stuck straight out from his head (and those narrow hips and wide eyes and that smiling mouth that Paddy noticed at once and then made himself stop noticing). He’d gotten very good at ignoring Eoin McGonigal that summer despite the lad’s best attempts to weasel himself into Paddy’s space at all times; picnics, fishing trips, outings to the cinema and the bookshop and the pub and Eoin always there at Paddy’s elbow and Paddy having to staunchly look away away away until finally his control had failed him and the world ended.
Eoin had gone back to school, Paddy had gone to Africa with the Lions, and that idyllic summer with the McGonigal crew was a thing of the past. Even after reconnecting with Ambrose upon his return he had been able to keep Eoin McGonigal and the memory of him buried deep, never to be looked at lest he reveal too much of himself to himself.
But he is here, now, and Paddy can not fucking breathe…
“What did you do to the poor fucker?” Ambrose asks, turning to his brother, suspicious in that sibling’s way that always assumes the worst.
“Nothing,” Eoin says, petulant, but there’s a tension to him now, something frightened and flighty in his gaze when he seeks out Paddy as though for reassurance.
Paddy feels ill suddenly and profoundly, gorge rising, sweat at the back of his neck. It’s not the wine, this time.
“I need to go”
He leaves his coat tangled on the bed with everyone else’s, unwilling to brave Eoin’s presence for the length of time it would take to retrieve it, and so the cold December air hits him like a slap to the face, punishment for his indiscretion. After the close-loud warmth of the party, the night feels endless and open and very, very cold. He is shockingly, immediately, sober as a stone.
The door slams open behind him, the sound of running feet.
“Wait!” Eoin shouts, and Paddy has to measure himself to keep from breaking out into an all-out sprint to get away from him.
“Blair!” he calls and then “please!” with a voice that breaks.
They’re making a scene, people stopping to look at them, and Paddy has to get them out of the public eye as quickly as he can lest they draw unwanted attention.
With a snarl, he wheels round so he can grab Eoin by the collar of his coat and pull him into a narrow alleyway between two buildings. He is taller than Paddy now, by nearly a head and a half, but Paddy is familiar with the procedure for scrapping with men larger than himself and Eoin isn’t exactly fighting him.
“What the fuck are you playing at, lad?” Paddy snarls, hands in Eoin’s lapel,s shoving him back and back and back until he comes up short against the bricks of the alleyway, shaking him roughly, “You fixing to get me fuckin’ arrested, is it?”
Eoin at least has the decency to look distraught.
“I’m sorry. It was a joke, the whole not-knowing-you thing, I thought you were playing along, I thought… that summer. Everything we shared… I thought…”
He does not finish what he had thought, hands flexing around Paddy’s where they’re still twisted up in his collar, though he makes no move to pry Paddy’s hands off of him. His skin is very warm.
“Please don’t tell Rose,” Eoin begs, desperate, eyes big and wide and frightened, tears gathering on his bottom lashes, “If you tell him he’ll tell da. Please, please don’t tell them. I promise you won’t have to see me again just…”
Paddy’s brain grinds to a halt.
“What?”
“I promise I’ll stay away from you. I’ll never come back to Belfast again, just…”
“What in god’s name are you talking about?” Paddy growls, shaking him again, and Eoin finally stops his verbal flailing and goes terribly quiet, terribly still.
“That summer”, Eoin says, whisper quiet, sending a zing up Paddy’s spine “you were so… we were so… and then I kissed you that night after the pub, and you told me off, said that I was too young. I thought maybe now I'm not too young and it might be alright. But you really just don’t want me, do you? and now I’ve gone and ruined all of it…”
For a long moment there is just the sound of them breathing, in synch; a distant rumble of a passing motorcar. Eoin is shaking in Paddy’s hold, his eyes wide and glassy with unshed tears. Paddy feels like the worst person on the face of the earth.
“I took advantage of you” Paddy says, confused to the point of delirium. They had both been drunk, and Eoin had looked like one of Michelangelo’s saints haloed by cigarette smoke and summer haze in the spray of streetlight. He’d looked at Paddy - they had been the same height then - and said something extraordinarily clever, and Paddy had no choice but to lean in and kiss the words out of his mouth. It had been the stupidest thing he’d ever done, a taste of a drug he knew he’d be chasing for the rest of his life, trying to recreate the same high. He’d sulked back to his mother’s house in the wee hours and steadfastly ignored every letter and telephone call until he’d gone off to Africa, and once there, tried to drown it all out with violence and alcohol and rugby. He hadn’t written. Every time he tried to explain himself, it felt worse, more disgusting, what he had done. There’s a stain on him that corrupts everything he touches.
“I.. forced you…”
Eoin looks at him like he's gone mad.
“I kissed you.”
Paddy’s whole world tilts on its axis.
“What?”
“I had wanted to kiss you all that summer. Even longer. Forever”
That isn’t right. Paddy is the corrupting influence, the one who had to, that whole summer, turn his head away every time Eoin would come up to him, to steadfastly lock his jaws around his heart and bite until he tasted blood to keep it in check. Paddy is the one who had kissed an unwilling boy and damned him to every kind of hell known to both Protestants and Catholics because he is no better, ultimately, than a beast, hungering as he does for forbidden flesh, forbidden affection, the sight of a forbidden smile.
“I kissed you,” Eoin says, softly, “and you kissed me back, and I thought…”
There is a tear lingering at the corner of his left eye, not quite fallen yet but just there, an expectancy of grief, and Paddy reaches up and brushes it away with the pad of his thumb. Eoin shudders.
“You didn’t mean it,” Paddy says, because he has to, has to give Eoin an out “You were drunk. You were young.”
Eoin sticks out his chin, petulant, stubborn, even as his lower lip trembles slightly.
“I did mean it”, he says, “and I’m neither now”
And he isn’t, is he?
It hasn’t even been too long since they’d seen each other last, the handsbreadth of a year and a half, but somehow in that time Eoin had become a man. For the first time Paddy lets himself simply look at him.
Back then in those golden days of summer, there had been something profound in the potentiality of Eoin’s beauty, but now Paddy experiences the fruition of it like a blow to the head. He is taller now, grown into himself with his hair long and curly as his mammy had never allowed him to keep it at home. It suits him, slightly roguish, tactile, and Paddy wants to know if it is as soft as it looks. Gone is the babyfat that used to cusion his jawline revealing the marble-carved angle of it that blends into strong throat into broad shoulders into muscular arms and fine-boned musician’s hands. Some things are the same, still: the nervy twitch of his fingers, that worrying mouth, those deep-dark eyes.
“I’d like to kiss you again” Eoin says “Properly this time”
“You don’t know what you’re asking for” and they’re close now, closer than they have any right to be, breath warm and shared between them.
“I do know” Eoin says, resolute “I’ve known for a long time”
This kiss is miles better than the last, intentional, warm and familiar, the two of them sliding into place as though they’d always been meant to fit together like this. Lips against cold-chapped lips and then the revelation of Eoin’s tongue when he opens his mouth to gasp. It’s hardly practised, hardly skilful but it is right somehow and Paddy loses himself to it, to the closeness of Eoin to him. His curls, Paddy learns when he is finally able to disentangle their bodies enough to run a hand through them and grip, are even softer than they look. For a moment there is no emptiness in him, for a moment he is completed.
From far away, Saint Anne's chimes the hour, and Paddy startles back into himself, shivers with the cold, and remembers abruptly that they’re barely hidden, in public, and across the street from Eoin’s brother’s flat, which anyone could exit at any time and see them.
Eoin laughs, soft and fond, hand still cupping Paddy’s cheek.
“Cold are you?” Eoin asks, smiling that smile that could launch a thousand ships. Helen, Paddy decides, can eat her heart out.
“I appear to have abandoned my coat somewhere,” Paddy says, leaning in to kiss him again just because he can and it’s just the ticket to warm him up.
“Luckily” Eoin says against his mouth, “I know a place where we can find at least several coats, currently without owners.”
“Cheeky fuck” Paddy says, no heat in it, "and once I’ve been suitably protected against the elements, I think it is time for me to depart the absolute shtiteshow this gathering has become”
Eoin’s smile begins to fade - which is not allowed to happen - and so he barrels onward, gaze fixed firmly to the brick behind Eoin’s shoulder.
“I’ve good whiskey back at mine, not any of this bathtub swill your brother is passing off as booze. Could come by for a nightcap if you like?”
Eoin laughs, a sound that rivals the cathedral bells for religious inspiration - clear and bright in the cold December darkness.
“Yes” Eoin says, leaning down to kiss him again, to press that smile to him as though to stamp his happiness there “Yes, I would like that very much”