Electricity

“Love looks not with the eyes,

but with the mind,

And therefore is

winged Cupid painted blind.”

William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream



They walked the circumference of Dursey the second week in August, just Meg and Niall and Adam, with a basket lunch for three. The ruined signal tower at the top of the island was Napoleonic, square and roofless with staring windows that stood sentinel over the miles and miles and miles of ocean broken only by an occasional ship scooting in or out of Bantry Bay. Below the ruin, the markers that had spelled out EIRE in World War II to deter bomber pilots from hitting neutral Ireland looked like little more than the foundations of broken buildings.

“So many different people fighting over such a small spot of ground,” Meg said, standing with her hand in Niall’s.

“True, but it’s a grand spot of ground, don’t you think?” He smiled down at her, and sometimes the sight of that smile that shone from the depths of his soul made her heart expand all over again.

Meg was certain it had expanded over the months, stretched to make room for Niall and Adam and all of Ireland. An enormous amount of room, and maybe the heart’s capacity to stretch was limitless.

A gull screeched overhead and Adam came back around the corner of the tower and stopped beside them. “Did you ask her yet?” he said to Niall. “What did she say?”

“Go away, eejit,” Niall said.

Adam grinned. “That’s not what she said.”

“It’s what I said. Now leg it, mate.”

Adam’s grin widened even more, and he ambled off slowly, very slowly, back toward the tower.

Meg studied Niall’s face, the now familiar planes and shadows, the white lines of smiles and sunlight etched around the corners of his eyes. “What was it that you were supposed to ask me?”

“Will you come with us?” He ran the back of his thumb across the blade of her cheekbone and made her shiver.

Her laugh was nervous and hopeful, and she took in a deeper breath. “I am with you.”

“I mean to Dublin when this last session ends. We’ve been ignoring the subject all these weeks, and if you go to New York for good, I’ll visit you—Adam and I will visit you—but will you consider staying here? Stay and take a chance.”

Meg hadn’t believed in fairy tales before coming to Ireland, but she had come to believe in the sidhe . She’d come to love the lichen-flecked standing stones that had stood in the same place for some five to six thousand years and sometimes felt, in moonlight, as though they could pick themselves up and move. She’d discovered the magic of holy wells with Bronze Age cup marks, of ancient ruins, and Viking warrior ship burials complete with swords and cauldrons and intricate game pieces that museums were already fighting over, and of a history so brutal that it had left its marks of faith and fury on every inch of embattled ground. More than anything, she had fallen in love with the man who stood beside her. He wasn’t perfect, but he worked harder to be good than anyone she had ever met, and that alone was worth a gamble.

She’d been thinking a lot about the nature of love—which was such a nebulous word with so many various meanings. But she had decided that the definition was much less complicated than people made it out to be. Love wasn’t about any particular kind of electricity, any specific feeling. It was, quite simply, what happened when you opened the inner vault of your heart and threw it wide to let another person enter, when you laid bare every dark and cobwebbed corner of your soul. When you wanted to be a better person for someone, even when they didn’t ask you to change—when they didn’t ask you for anything except a little faith.

She’d had electricity with men before. Her brief marriage had started with a firestorm of that, which had quickly burned out. She’d met men who could make her ache with need, men who could make her smile, men who made her think and made her laugh. But all that rarely came wrapped up in a single package, and wasn’t that what love really meant? The package deal.

Turning back to Niall, Meg looked up into eyes that shimmered as blue and deep as the wild Atlantic, and she asked him, “Why do you want me to stay?”

“Because I can’t imagine a time when you weren’t with me, and I can’t bear to think of a future without you in it,” he said, without hesitation, and he brought her hand up against his chest and pressed her palm against the thin fabric of his T-shirt. “Because wherever you decide to live, wherever you go, you will always be alive right here.”

Beneath her fingers, his heartbeat was strong and steady, and she fisted her free hand in his shirt and pulled him down to her, felt his pulse quicken even before their lips met. Kissing Niall was like scraping all the light from the sky and the ocean and the brightness of the yellow furze bushes and cramming it inside her until it made her feel like a beacon, so filled with light that it threatened to burst out through her skin.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ll come to Dublin with you. Dublin and anywhere else you want to go.”