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Mary Eileen hesitated before asking Sean to come inside for a drink. She feared to spoil a perfect evening.
It wasn’t their first date. It was more like the third or fourth.
“We’ve become such a couple and had spent so much time together that it is tough to tell when we're on ‘a date,’” Mary Eileen said during the after-gun range gathering inside the Coffee Shoppe, “or when we are just together.”
Mary Eileen and Sean were the talk of St. Isidore. She and he knew that. They saw people whispering behind their hands at Charlie’s Crab, the city’s premier seafood restaurant.
Charlie's was an ideal place for a foodie like Mary Eileen. Charlie's served only the freshest fish. The wait staff was college-educated, the chefs were European-trained. When Mary Eileen was inside Charlie's, she forgot about being in St. Isidore.
“Is Charlie still around?” Sean asked.
“Oh, no,” Mary Eileen said with a sly smile. “He was doing some deep-sea fishing off the Keys a few years ago when a storm blew in, and his cruiser capsized.”
“Wow.”
“Yes, wow!” Mary Eileen said. “So after all those years of selling seafood, suddenly, he was seafood.”
“Funny.”
“At least that’s our best guess. Charlie and the boat disappeared.”
The rest of the night was spent sharing their memories of Ireland, England, and their wonder at "how American these Americans are."
Sean was the perfect dinner companion. But he was more. He was quickly becoming Mary Eileen's lover, and she his.
Close to midnight, Sean waited for her in bed as she returned to the bedroom with their drinks.
“So, this Charlie guy,” Sean said, “He just vanished.”
“Yes, he just disappeared,” Mary Eileen said, slightly surprised at Sean’s choice of conversation topics, sitting as closely together as they were in her bed, propped up against some pillows, naked, shoulders and thighs touching.
“Did they just give up looking?”
“I guess. But why are you so interested in Charlie?”
“Oh, it’s not Charlie per se, it is just that it’s amazing how many people go missing. We never see them again.”
Mary Eileen shifted a couple of inches away from Sean. He might not have said anything immediately after her joke about Charlie becoming seafood, but now he had, and Sean seemed to be venturing awfully close to an area Mary Eileen would just as soon avoid.
Her green eyes flashed, her chin set in a defiant posture. Mary Eileen suddenly regretted asking this man into her bed. She had already made two terrible mistakes. She didn’t want to make a third.
“But wait,” he said. “I forget to show you this book I found the last time I was in Dublin.”
Sean reached into his well-worn, brown leather messenger bag that had traveled the world with him, and pulled out a large, thick book. Mary Eileen had been wondering why he’d carried it into the bedroom.
As suddenly as it had come into her mind, any indecision Mary Eileen might have had about inviting Sean to her bed quickly vanished. She’d wrapped her arms and one leg around him two-seconds after they’d walked into her apartment. They had made love wildly, spontaneously and passionately.
The afterglow, which had dimmed momentarily, had returned. It was even nicer than the passion.
“It’s a book of Irish love poems,” Sean explained. “All of them were translated from the original Gaelic. This volume went out of print in 1968, so it’s relatively rare.”
And he’s sharing it with me; Mary Eileen thought as she moved back toward him so that they were bare shoulder to bare shoulder and naked thigh to thigh.
“Read one to me,” she asked with a whisper.
The way to get on with a girl
Is to drift like a man in the mist,
Happy enough to be caught,
Happy enough to be dismissed.
Glad to be out of her way,
Glad to rejoin her in bed,
Equally grieved or gay
To learn that she’s living or dead.
“Ha! Now that’s funny,” Mary Eileen said as she reached across Sean, rubbing her breasts over his chest to reach the drink she’d left on the wooden nightstand. She stayed in that position as he read:
To think
I must be alone:
To love
We must be together.
I think I love you
When I’m alone
More than I think of you
When we’re together.
I cannot think
Without loving
Or love
Without thinking.
Alone I love
To think of us together:
Together I think
I’d love to be alone.
Their lips met. Sean and Mary Eileen were alone, naked together, and she knew they were in love. She might have had two bad romances, but this one was just right.
Mary Eileen awoke with a shudder the next morning. She’d had a violent dream, filled with devils and demons; certainly not the soft, romantic dream Mary Eileen thought she had a right to expect.
The dream was so shattering to her mood; Mary Eileen was afraid to glance to her right to see if Sean was sleeping beside her. Finally, she got the courage to open one eye.
He was gone. Mary Eileen's heart froze.
“Hey, good morning,” Sean said as he came into the bedroom. He carried two cups of coffee and was balancing a plate of fruit and bagels.
“I was wondering when you’d get up,” he said.
“I didn’t have to wonder about you getting up,” Mary Eileen said with a smile as she reached over and softly touched him. “You could have carried a bagel on this thing.”
Sean laughed and set the plate between them, put the coffees on the nightstand and settled back into the bed with Mary Eileen.
They played with the butter, cream cheese and bagels like teenagers who had just discovered how much fun one could have while naked with a member of the opposite sex.
Once, when he got up to use the bathroom, Mary Eileen had taken a quick peek at his phone. Funny, there was a text message to Sean that was just “?” He had answered “Close.”
After she’d asked, he’d quickly explained that a publisher wanted him to write a book about his experiences in Ireland, “It would be literary fiction, the story of one man and the IRA,” Sean said. “They want to know when I will get started, when I will be ready. I am close to a decision.”
An author in her bed, and an Irish author at that. Mary Eileen was thrilled.
She certainly didn’t feel like a woman in her thirties who’d lived through two terrible love affairs that had ended tragically.
No, Mary Eileen felt like she had begun a renaissance, a new life, with someone who was not only incredibly attractive and a beautiful lover; but a person who could quickly become her best —and only — friend.