Dr. Byrne’s voice moved to the kitchen. I heard a clatter, two cups knocking together, and then the sound of James’s weight on the kitchen counter.
Who was I kidding?
Why on earth would Dr. Byrne come to my house in the middle of the night to criticise my bookshelves? He had probably already forgotten that I lived there, too. I still thought I was the centre of this story, the main character, just because it had started that way.
I begged myself to fall asleep before any real noise started. James had brought a couple of people back to the house in the last few weeks, but always after a night out. I was a sleepy drunk. I was out for the count before anyone even made it upstairs, and they were usually gone by the morning.
I heard them talk again, their words indistinct but their meaning very clear. Dr. Byrne had a nuzzling kind of voice on, a coaxing, flirty timbre I hadn’t ever heard him use. Bee-loud, like Yeats said. I could tell that James was trying to keep his head straight. He didn’t want to bring Dr. Byrne upstairs, not while I was still awake.
I went under the covers with James’s laptop, the headphones stuck so far into my ears that they were tickling my brain. It was only eleven o’clock. James and I didn’t usually go to sleep until at least 1 a.m., even on the nights we stayed in.
Since Jonathan, I had not slept with anyone. I know. Aren’t you disappointed? There was kissing; there were bodies pressed up against the various walls of Cork city night clubs; there were hands in my knickers. There were boys—cute ones, nice ones—who had walked me home after the club kicked out, their jackets draped around my shoulders, their hands laced through mine. But whenever they would imply that they had walked me home for sex, had understood that I wanted to have sex also, I acted all disgraced.
“You think I’m that easy, huh?” I said to them, feigning shock that a twenty-one-year-old boy standing without a jacket in February at two in the morning might have an ulterior motive. I would send them packing, triumphant, then I would go inside and feel depressed, stupid and horny.
I don’t know who I was trying to impress. I did not want a boyfriend; I did want romance. I wanted passion; I did not want to be someone who was known as easy. I was desperate to be touched; I was terrified of being ruined.
All I can say in my defence is that I was developing at a kind of crossroads of female messaging. I think about it a lot now. Puberty in the 2000s was Paris Hilton’s sex tape and Britney Spears’s crotch shots and Amy Winehouse drunk on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and if any of that happened now we would have found a way to celebrate it, but then it was disgusting. We thought a lot about the abortions we weren’t allowed to have and the locked-up girls of the Magdalene laundries. We swore to each other, at my girls’ school, that we had never masturbated and we accused each other of doing it on the sly. On top of that: everyone knew each other. Cork was beautiful and anarchic, but you could fit it all on the head of a pin.
Maybe that’s why the Fred Byrne fantasy had been so appealing to me, as a rebound option. Something that had to be kept a secret and that guaranteed touch, stimulus, novelty.
There was a DVD still in the disc drive. More Ab Fab. I put on a jumper over my pyjamas and watched it until I fell asleep. Feeling like Edie, longing to be Patsy.
The next morning, I woke up to a breakfast roll wrapped in clingfilm. It landed on my head, the French baguette clunking off my temple. James was in the doorway.
“There you go,” he said brightly. “Thanks for being a sounder last night.”
“Is he gone?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “I walked him to the station.”
“The train station?”
The station was at least a mile away, and back then we never walked anywhere further than college or the bookshop. I sat up, and pulled at the curtains next to my bed. The sky was still morning blue, the trees dark.
“What time is it?”
“Just gone seven thirty.”
“Seven?”
Dr. Byrne was going to Dublin that morning, to some kind of conference relevant to his book. He had told Deenie that he was taking the last train the night before, and used the opportunity to hit up James instead.
“Are you coming in?” he said.
I thought about it. “Have you changed the sheets?”
“Good point. Give me ten.”
I padded downstairs barefoot, feeling like Santa Claus had been. I was awake too early, I had been brought a snack in bed, and someone familiar yet simultaneously mysterious had visited my house while I slept. James had cleaned up the living room, and a new bottle of orange Tropicana and some chocolate buttons were on the side.
I took a long, confused wee. Food was James’s love language, and this much of it indicated that he was feeling at least a little guilty. I didn’t know whether he should. It was too early in the morning to have my thoughts straight about it.
But on the whole, I was curiously unbothered. Not because I was this divinely liberal, unselfish twenty-year-old. I was quite self-obsessed, but I was also used to being passed over. I had learned not to take it personally. I had been almost six foot tall since the age of fourteen. Living with my partially closeted gay friend while he romanced my adored professor was new to me; having a friend fuck my crush was not.
James threw the old sheets down the stairs and the smell of Dr. Byrne fell in waves around me. James never smelled of anything but deodorant and clean cotton; Dr. Byrne had a denser mix of male odour. There was something in it that pinched at the base of your nostril, like nutmeg or cinnamon.
He peered down at me from the top of the stairs. He was already getting back into his sweatpants.
“I know,” he said, watching me sniff the air. “Old Spice. So typical.”
We got into bed.
“What was it like?” I asked.
“Hot,” he said, biting into his breakfast roll. “Did you hear anything?”
“No. Not really.”
He swallowed hard, and a chunk of hash brown stuck in his throat. He swigged some Diet Coke and coughed. “That was my first time,” he said at last. “My first time it not being a first time.”
“You mean it was your first time riding someone for a second time?”
“Yes.”
This was crazy to me. I was a boyfriend girl. Casual sex was still a thing for famous people and girls I was jealous of.
“What did you talk about?”
He raised his eyebrow.
“Come on, you must have said something to each other. He was here hours.”
James looked dreamy and coy. “He said he wasn’t able to stop thinking about me. Since the launch.”
A spike of jealousy. I smoothed it down. “What else?”
“He got his first blow job in Canada from a boy at the farm next door.”
“Wow. Okay.”
“And then he lived in America for a bit and sometimes went to gay clubs.”
“Why won’t he just be gay, then?”
James shot me a look.
“Okay, sorry.”
“He likes women too, though, he said that a lot. I asked him about his wife.”
“Deenie.”
“Yeah.” He bit into his roll again, ketchup smearing on his chin. “He really loves her. She has no idea.”
I felt defensive of poor Deenie. “He can’t love her that much if he’s keeping secrets from her. If he’s cheating on her.”