The oil lamp flickers, and I watch the shadows shift across Declan's face like something alive. He stands over me, and I'm still on the butcher's block where he laid me down last week, my skirt bunched around my hips, my cardigan abandoned somewhere on the wool blanket. The sawdust on his palms catches the light—gold against the grain of his skin.
"Siobhan." My name is all he says, and it's enough. It's a question and an answer and a warning all at once.
I don't move. Don't look away. I want him to see that I know what I'm doing. That the girl who lay beneath his mouth last week, who cried out his name while he drank from her like she was the only water in a city of fire—that girl is still here, still burning.
"Declan." I reach for him, my fingers finding the collar of his shirt, pulling him closer until his knees press against the edge of the block. "I haven't stopped thinking about you."
"Nor me you." His voice is low, rough, the Belfast in it thickening the way it does when he's stripped bare of pretense. "Every night. Every hour."
"Then stop thinking." I tug at his shirt, pulling the hem from his trousers. "Show me."
His hands find my hips, thumbs pressing into the bone, and he pulls me to the edge of the butcher's block. The wood is cold against the back of my thighs, rough and scarred—a table that's seen a hundred carcasses, a thousand cuts, and now this. Now us. The smell of blood and salt still clings to the grain, and I think about all the prayers my mother taught me, all the rosary beads wrapped around my wrist, and whether God looks away from what we're about to do or whether He's watching, judging, waiting.
Declan's hands slide up my sides, pushing my blouse higher, and the air hits my ribs like a shock. He pauses, his palms flat against my stomach, and I feel the calluses—every ridge, every groove, every story his hands have lived before they found me.
"Tell me to stop." His voice breaks on the last word. "Tell me—"
"No." I catch his wrist, hold him there. "I'm not telling you to stop. I'm not telling you anything except keep going. Keep touching me. Keep—"
He kisses me. Hard. The kind of kiss that steals breath and replaces it with hunger, with need, with everything we've been holding back since the moment we met in the rain outside the library. His hands are in my hair, pins scattering across the block, and I feel my hair fall loose around my shoulders like a surrender.
"Siobhan." He says it against my mouth, against my throat, against the hollow where my pulse jumps beneath my skin. "Siobhan, I need—"
"I know." I'm already reaching for his belt, fumbling with the buckle, and my hands are shaking but I don't care. "I need it too."
He pulls back just far enough to look at me. His gray eyes are almost black in this light, pupils blown wide, and there's something raw in his face that makes my chest ache. "This isn't—" He stops, swallows. "This changes everything."
"I know."
"There's no going back."
"I know."
His jaw tightens. He holds my gaze for three heartbeats, four, and then his hands are at my hips again, pulling me closer, and I feel him—hard and ready through the rough wool of his trousers. The heat of him, the weight of what we're about to do, crashes through me like a wave.
He lifts me onto the block properly, the wood cold and unforgiving against my bare thighs, and I wrap my legs around his waist. I can feel him through the layers between us, and it's not enough. It's nowhere near enough.
"Declan." I'm breathless, desperate, and I don't care. "Please."
His hands find the hem of my blouse, and he pulls it over my head. The air is cold on my skin, but his eyes are hot, hungry, tracing the line of my collarbone, the curve of my breasts still covered by the thin cotton of my chemise. He touches me like I'm something holy—fingertips light against my sternum, trailing down between my breasts, stopping at my stomach.
"You're beautiful." His voice is barely a whisper. "I've never—" He stops, shakes his head. "I've never seen anything like you."
I pull him down to me, my fingers in his auburn hair, and I kiss him until I can't breathe. Until the world outside—the soldiers on the corner, the walls between our neighborhoods, the brother who threatened me with a gun—all of it blurs into static. There's only Declan. His mouth on mine. His hands on my skin. The sound of our breathing, ragged and urgent, filling the small room like a prayer.
He lays me back on the block, the wood pressing into my spine, and I feel every ridge, every scar. He works the buttons of his shirt one-handed, and I watch his chest emerge from the fabric—pale skin, the dusting of auburn hair, the muscles that tighten as he moves. He's built for work, for strength, for building things that last, and for a moment I think about what he builds. What he makes. What he leaves behind.
And then I stop thinking.
His weight settles over me, careful, testing, and I feel him against my thigh, through the last thin layer of fabric between us. I reach down, my fingers finding the waistband of his trousers, and I push them lower. He helps me, kicking them off, and then there's nothing between us but heat and skin and the smell of sawdust and lavender.
I feel him—the weight of him, the warmth of him, pressing against me through the damp fabric of my underwear. I'm wet, have been wet since I walked through the door and saw him standing in the lamplight, and the thought makes me blush even now, even here, with his mouth on my throat and his hand between my legs.
He hooks his fingers into the waistband of my underwear and pulls them down my thighs, slow, deliberate, like he's unwrapping something precious. The air hits me, cold and sharp, and I shiver.
"Siobhan." His voice is broken, reverent, and I feel his fingers find me, slide through the wetness, circle where I need him most. "Look at me."
I open my eyes. I didn't realize I'd closed them.
His gaze holds mine, and I see something shift behind his gray eyes—a decision made. He positions himself at my entrance, and the weight of what we're about to do crashes through me. This isn't just touching anymore. This is crossing a line we can't uncross, and we both know it.
"I love you." I say it because I need him to know, need him to hear it before the world finds a way to rip us apart. "I love you, Declan Morrow."
His face cracks open—something wounded, something grateful—and then he pushes inside me.
Slow. Deliberate. I feel every inch of him stretching me, filling me, and my breath catches in my throat. The sawdust on his palms grips my waist, rough and real, and I think: this is what it costs to love someone in a city that would kill us for it.
There's pain—a sharp, burning stretch that makes me gasp—and I see the concern flash across his face before I can stop it.
"Are you—"
"Don't stop." I dig my nails into his shoulders, pulling him closer, deeper. "Don't you dare stop."
He moves inside me, slow at first, letting me adjust, and the pain begins to blur into something else. Something fuller. Something that makes me arch my back and press my heels into the small of his back, pulling him deeper.
I hold his gaze because if I close my eyes, I'll see the street outside. The soldiers. The walls between us. The bullet that could find him tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that. I'll see his brother's face, twisted with rage, and the gun he pressed against my collarbone. I'll see the priest who told me I was damned, the mother who would disown me if she knew, the city that would tear us apart and call it justice.
So I keep my eyes open. I watch Declan's face as he moves inside me—the way his breath catches, the way his jaw tightens, the way his eyes never leave mine.
"Siobhan." He says my name like it's the only word that matters. "Siobhan, I—"
I feel the change in his rhythm, the way his control starts to slip, and I wrap my legs tighter around him, pulling him deeper. "Come for me," I whisper. "I want to feel you."
He groans, low and broken, and I feel him pulse inside me—hot, deep, a release that trembles through his whole body. He stays there, buried in me, his forehead pressed against mine, and I feel the weight of him, the warmth of him, the reality of what we've done.
I don't know if it changes everything or nothing. I don't know if the world outside will still be there when we walk out the door, or if it will have rearranged itself into something we don't recognize.
But here, now, with Declan's breath warm against my neck and his body still inside mine, I don't care.
"I love you." He says it against my skin, muffled, like a confession. "I should have said it first. Last week. The first time I saw you. I should have—"
"You said it when it mattered." I run my fingers through his hair, pushing the dark auburn strands back from his forehead. "You said it when I needed to hear it."
He lifts his head, and his eyes are wet. Not crying—not quite—but the kind of wet that comes from somewhere deeper than tears. "This isn't—this isn't just a thing. This isn't just—"
"I know." I cup his face in my hands, feel the stubble rough against my palms. "I know."
He kisses me again, slow and soft, nothing like the desperate hunger of before. This is different. This is a promise.
When he pulls out, I feel the loss of him like an absence—a cold space where warmth used to be. He reaches for his shirt, cleans me gently, and I let him. There's something intimate about it, the care he takes, the way his fingers linger on my skin.
We dress in silence, but it's not an awkward silence. It's the silence of two people who don't need words to say what matters. He finds my pins scattered across the block and hands them to me one by one, and I pin my hair up again, hiding the evidence of what we've done.
When I'm dressed, he pulls me into his arms and holds me. Just holds me. And I press my face into his chest and breathe him in—sawdust and sweat and something that smells like home.
"Next week?" I ask, and my voice is small, smaller than I meant it to be.
"Next week." He presses a kiss to the top of my head. "And the week after. And the week after that."
I want to believe him. I want to believe there will be week after week, that the world outside will let us keep this, keep each other.
But I'm a Catholic girl from the Falls, and he's a Protestant boy from the Shankill, and our love is a war waiting to happen.
I pull away, just far enough to look at him. "What if they find out?"
He doesn't answer. He doesn't have to. We both know what happens to people like us in a city like this.
He touches my face, his thumb tracing the line of my cheekbone. "Then we'll run."
"Run where?"
"Anywhere. England. Scotland. France. I don't care as long as you're there."
I laugh, but it comes out broken. "You'd leave for me?"
"I'd die for you." He says it so simply, like it's the truest thing he knows. "I'd kill for you. I'd cross every line in this bloody city for you."
I think about all the lines he's already crossed. The butcher's block. The moments between us that can't be taken back. The love that feels like a revolution and a suicide note all at once.
I kiss him one last time—soft, sure, a seal on everything we've said and everything we haven't.
And then I open the door, and I walk out into the Belfast night, leaving the warm lamplight and the smell of sawdust behind me.
The streets are quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that comes before something breaks. I pull my cardigan tighter around my shoulders and walk faster, counting my steps like a prayer, thinking about Declan's hands on my hips and the way he said my name when he came inside me.
I pass a mural of a masked man holding a rifle, and I look away.
I pass a church I used to attend, and I cross myself out of habit.
And I think about next week. About whether we'll make it that far. About whether love is enough in a city built on hate.
My mother is waiting in the kitchen when I get home, a cup of tea gone cold in her hands, her eyes sharp with questions she doesn't ask. I kiss her cheek, say goodnight, and climb the stairs to my room.
I close the door, press my back against it, and breathe.
In the dark, I touch my stomach, still warm from him, and I wonder if a child has taken root in me—Catholic and Protestant, a living truce we'll have to bury or hide.
Or maybe not. Maybe it's just him, just us, just two bodies finding each other in a city that wants us apart.
I curl up on my bed, still wearing his smell, and I let myself believe, for one long moment, that we'll make it.
The oil lamp in the butcher's back room still burns. I know he's still there, sitting alone, his hands trembling the way they did the first time I left him.
And I know, with a certainty that feels like prophecy, that the world will find a way to punish us for this.
But not tonight.
Tonight, I am full of him, and the silence is a kind of grace.
The knock comes sharp. Three raps, quick and deliberate—my mother's knock, the one that means business, the one that won't be ignored.
I'm still in my cardigan, still wearing his smell, and the panic hits me like cold water. I sit up too fast, my heart slamming against my ribs, and I look around the room for something—anything—that might give me away.
"Siobhan." Her voice through the wood. Not loud. Flat. The kind of flat that means she's been thinking too long about what to say. "Open the door."
I cross the room on feet that don't feel like my own. The floorboards creak beneath me, the same creak they've made since I was a child, and I think about how many times I've stood in this spot, heart pounding, waiting for her to see through me.
I open the door.
She's still in her apron, flour dusted across the front like she's been baking to fill the hours I was gone. Her hair is pulled back tight, the way she always wears it, and her eyes—the same green as mine, but older, sharper—move over me like she's reading a page she already knows the ending of.
"It's late," she says.
"I know."
"Tea's cold."
"I saw."
She doesn't step inside. She stands in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, and for a long moment she doesn't speak. I can hear the clock ticking in the hallway downstairs, the same clock that's been ticking since before I was born, marking time in a house that's been waiting for something to break.
"Father McGrath called," she says.
The name lands like a stone in my stomach. I keep my face still, keep my hands steady, but I can feel the heat creeping up my neck, the blood rising to betray me.
"He asked after you," she continues. "Said he hasn't seen you at Mass in three weeks."
"I've been busy."
"Busy." She repeats the word like she's testing it, turning it over in her mouth, finding it hollow. "Busy doing what, exactly?"
I think about the butcher's block. The sawdust in his hair. The way he said my name when he came inside me, like a prayer and a confession all at once.
"Grading papers," I say. "The children are behind on their sums. I've been staying late to help them catch up."
It's a good lie. Clean. Specific. The kind of lie I've been practicing for weeks now, layering details like bricks, building a wall between my mother and the truth.
She looks at me. Just looks. And I see something flicker in her eyes—not belief, not accusation, but something in between. A knowing she doesn't want to name.
"Come downstairs," she says. "I'll make fresh tea."
She turns and walks away before I can answer, her slippers soft against the hallway floor, and I stand in the doorway of my room, still wearing his smell, and I wonder how much longer I can keep building walls before they all come down.
I follow her.
The kitchen is warm, the stove still glowing, and she moves through it with the practiced ease of a woman who's spent thirty years in this room. She fills the kettle, sets it on the burner, and I watch the steam begin to rise, curling toward the ceiling like smoke from a censer.
I sit at the table. The same table where I've eaten every meal of my life. The same chair, the same chipped edge, the same crack in the wood that I've traced with my finger a thousand times.
She doesn't sit. She stands at the counter, her back to me, and I wait.
"Your father used to come home late," she says, and her voice is different now—quieter, softer, like she's talking to herself more than to me. "He'd tell me he was working, that the foreman needed him, that there was overtime to be had. And I believed him. Because I wanted to believe him."
She turns, just enough to look at me over her shoulder. "Do you know what I found in his pocket?"
I shake my head.
"A lipstick. Not mine." She turns back to the kettle. "I never told him I found it. I never asked. Because once you ask, you can't un-ask, and I wasn't ready to know the answer."
The kettle whistles. She pours the water slow, deliberate, watching the steam rise like she's reading tea leaves in the air between us.
"I'm not your father," I say.
"No." She brings the tea to the table, sets a cup in front of me. "You're not. You're something else entirely."
She sits across from me, wraps her hands around her cup, and I see them—the knuckles, red and raw from scrubbing, the wedding ring she still wears even though he's been gone ten years, the tremor in her fingers that wasn't there before.
"I don't know where you go," she says. "I don't know who you see. But I know you're lying to me, and I know it's dangerous, because if it wasn't dangerous, you wouldn't need to lie."
I open my mouth to speak, but she holds up a hand, and I stop.
"I don't want to know," she says. "I don't want to know his name, or his face, or what side of the wall he lives on. Because if I know, I have to do something about it. And I'm not ready to lose you."
Her voice breaks on the last word, just barely, a crack in the armor she's been wearing all night, and I feel something twist in my chest—guilt, love, fear, all tangled together like the rosary beads I used to wrap around my fingers as a child.
"Mammy—"
"Don't." She shakes her head, and I see the tears she won't let fall. "Don't tell me. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. But promise me one thing."
I wait.
"Be careful." She reaches across the table, takes my hand, and her grip is stronger than I expected. "The world out there doesn't care about love. It cares about flags and names and which street you were born on. And it will tear you apart if you let it."
I squeeze her hand back. "I know."
"Do you?" Her eyes search mine, and I can see the fear in them, the fear she's been carrying since the day I was born, the fear that comes with raising a daughter in a city that eats its children. "Do you really know what you're risking?"
I think about Declan's hands on my hips. The way he said I'd die for you like it was the simplest thing in the world. The bullet that's already been fired, waiting to find us.
"I know," I say, and my voice is steady in a way I didn't expect. "And I'm willing to risk it."
She lets go of my hand. Picks up her tea. Takes a sip, slow and deliberate, and I can see the calculation happening behind her eyes—the weighing of love against fear, the decision to trust or to fight.
"Finish your tea," she says finally. "You have school in the morning."
I drink. The tea is hot, too hot, but I drink it anyway, letting it burn my throat, letting the pain remind me that I'm still here, still breathing, still choosing him with every lie I tell.
When I'm finished, I stand, take my cup to the sink, and rinse it. The water is cold against my fingers, and I think about the way Declan cleaned me with his shirt, the tenderness in his hands, the gentleness of a man who could kill but chose to love instead.
"Goodnight, Mammy."
"Goodnight, love."
I climb the stairs, and I can feel her eyes on my back, watching me go, carrying the weight of everything she knows and everything she's chosen not to ask.
In my room, I close the door and press my back against it. The darkness wraps around me like a blanket, and I let myself breathe for the first time since I heard her knock.
I touch my stomach. Still warm. Still holding the memory of him. And I think about next week, about whether we'll make it that far, about whether love is enough when the world is waiting to prove it isn't.
I curl up on my bed, still wearing his smell, and I let myself believe, just for this one night, that we will.
The silence settles around me like a held breath, and somewhere across the city, I know he's still awake, still sitting alone in the lamplight, his hands trembling the way they do when he thinks of me.
And I hold onto that thought like a prayer, like a promise, like the only truth I have left.
We have next week. We have next week. We have next week.
I whisper it into the dark until I believe it.
The kettle's whistle fades, and I'm left with the echo of her voice in my head — not the words she said, but the ones she didn't. The ones that hang in the air between us like smoke after a candle's been blown out.
I lie awake in my bed, the sheets twisted around my legs, and I can still feel him. Not just the ache between my thighs, but the weight of his hands on my hips, the way he looked at me like I was the only thing in the world worth seeing. The way he said my name — Siobhan — like it was a prayer and a confession all at once.
The ceiling above me is cracked, a spiderweb of plaster and time, and I trace it with my eyes the way I traced the lines of his face in the lamplight. The way his jaw tightened when he pushed inside me. The way his breath caught when I said his name back.
I press my palm flat against my stomach, and I swear I can still feel the warmth of him, the pulse of him, the way he filled me so completely that for a moment, I forgot there was a world outside that room.
But the world doesn't forget you.
It waits.
I close my eyes, and I'm back in the butcher's back room, the smell of blood and salt in my nose, his hands rough against my skin, his voice low and desperate against my ear. I love you. I've loved you since the rain.
And I think about what my mother said — the world out there doesn't care about love — and I wonder if she's right. If love is just something we tell ourselves to make the fear bearable. If we're just two people holding each other in the dark, pretending the light won't find us.
I turn onto my side, pull the pillow against my chest, and breathe in the faint smell of him that's still clinging to my skin. Sawdust and sweat and something underneath — something that smells like home, even though home is the last place I should be looking for him.
Outside, a car passes. The headlights sweep across my ceiling, and for a second, I'm sure it's them — the soldiers, the police, his brother, someone who's come to take me away from this lie I've been living. But the lights keep moving, and the street goes dark again, and I'm still here, still breathing, still choosing him.
I whisper his name into the dark. Declan.
And I wait for the silence to answer.
---
Three days pass. Three days of school, of chalk dust on my fingers, of children's voices filling the classroom with questions I can't answer. Three days of walking home with my head down, of crossing the street when I see a group of men in work clothes, of pretending I don't notice the way the world is holding its breath.
On the fourth day, I find a note tucked under my pillow.
It's written on a scrap of brown paper, the kind they use to wrap meat at the butcher's. The handwriting is rough, uneven, like he was holding the pencil with trembling hands.
Thursday. Same place. Same time. I need to see you.
No signature. No endearment. Just those words, and the weight of everything they don't say.
I read it three times, then fold it into a tiny square and hide it in the lining of my coat. I don't know how he got it here. I don't want to know. Some questions are safer unanswered.
---
Thursday comes slow, like it's dragging its feet through the mud. I teach my classes, I smile at my students, I eat my lunch in the staff room with the other teachers, and all the while, I'm counting the hours, the minutes, the seconds until I can see him again.
At four o'clock, I tell my mother I'm staying late to grade papers. She looks at me the same way she's been looking at me all week — like she's trying to see through me, to find the truth I've been hiding. But she doesn't ask. She just nods, and I feel the weight of her silence as she turns away.
I wait until the street is empty, then I walk the opposite direction from school. I take the long way, through alleys and side streets, past the peace wall with its graffiti and razor wire, past the soldiers standing guard with their rifles slung across their chests. I keep my head down, my hands in my pockets, and I pretend I'm just another girl going home.
But my heart is pounding so loud I'm sure they can hear it.
The butcher's shop is closed when I arrive, the metal grate pulled down over the window. But the side door is unlocked, just like it always is, and I slip through it like a ghost.
The back room is dark. The lamp isn't lit. For a moment, I think he's not here, that I've come too early or too late, that the note was a mistake or a trap or something I imagined.
Then I hear him breathe.
"Siobhan."
Her mother's voice again — this time not in question.
"You're late."
The words hit me before I'm through the door, before I can hang my coat on the hook by the kitchen, before I can rearrange my face into something that doesn't look like I've been touched. I freeze with my back to her, one hand still on the doorframe, and I count to three before I turn around.
"I told you. Papers."
"You told me a lot of things."
She's sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of tea gone cold in front of her. The clock above the stove says half past eight — later than I thought, later than I meant it to be. The light in the kitchen is yellow and thin, casting her face in shadows that make her look older than she is.
"Sit down, Siobhan."
I don't sit. I stand in the doorway, my coat still buttoned, my hands in my pockets because I don't trust them not to shake. "What is this?"
"This is your mother asking you a question." She takes a sip of the cold tea, doesn't flinch at the taste. "Where were you?"
"I told you. I was grading—"
"Don't."
The word is quiet, but it cuts. She sets the cup down, and her hands are steady in a way mine aren't. "Don't lie to me in this house. Don't make me ask the priest to pray for a daughter who's already gone."
I feel something crack in my chest. A hairline fracture, thin as a spiderweb, spreading from the center of my ribs outward. "Mammy—"
"I saw you."
The words fall between us like stones.
"I saw you, Siobhan. Coming out of the butcher's. Three days ago. I was on my way to Mrs. Finnegan's, and I saw you slip out that side door, and I saw you fix your hair, and I saw you wipe your mouth."
I can't breathe. The kitchen is too small, too close, the walls pressing in on me from all sides. I can hear the clock ticking, the water dripping in the sink, the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears.
"Who is he?"
"I don't—"
"Don't you dare say you don't know what I'm talking about." Her voice rises, cracks, and for a moment I hear the mother who used to sing me to sleep, the mother who held me when the bombs fell too close and the windows rattled in their frames. "I have sat in this house, night after night, watching you slip out like a ghost, watching you come back with that look on your face — that look I remember, that look I wore myself, before I knew better. And I have prayed. I have prayed to every saint in heaven that you would tell me the truth before I had to drag it out of you."
She stands up. The chair scrapes against the linoleum, and the sound is like a rifle shot in the quiet.
"Who is he?"
I open my mouth, and nothing comes out. My throat is closed, my tongue heavy, the lie I've been carrying for weeks sitting on my chest like a stone.
"Is he Catholic?"
The question is a knife, and she's holding it by the blade.
I don't answer. I can't. The silence is the only truth I have left.
"Oh, God." She sinks back into the chair, her hand pressed to her mouth, her eyes wide and wet. "Oh, God, Siobhan. Tell me he's Catholic. Tell me he's one of us."
"Mammy—"
"Tell me."
I grip the doorframe behind me, the wood biting into my palms. The words are there, waiting, but I can't say them. I can't say his name in this house, can't let it touch these walls that have held my mother's prayers for twenty-six years.
"He's Protestant."
The words come out flat, broken, like glass I've been holding too long.
My mother's face goes white. Not pale — white, like the sheets we draped over the furniture when my grandmother died, like the communion dress I wore when I was seven, like the surrender flag that flew over the city when I was too young to understand what it meant.
"No."
"Mammy—"
"No." She shakes her head, slow and deliberate, like she can unhear it by refusing to accept it. "No. You're not. You're not seeing a Protestant boy. You're not sneaking through the streets to lie down with someone who would as soon see us dead as look at us."
"He's not like that."
"They're all like that."
"You don't know him."
"I don't need to know him." Her voice is sharp now, cutting through the kitchen like a blade. "I know what they are. I know what they've done. I know what they'll do to a girl like you, Siobhan, when they're done with her."
"He loves me."
She laughs. It's a hollow sound, ugly in a way I've never heard from her before. "Love. You think love matters? You think love means anything to the men who shot your uncle in the street? To the men who firebombed our church when you were three years old?"
"He's not those men."
"He's one of them." She stands again, her chair scraping back, and she's across the kitchen before I can move, her hands gripping my shoulders, her face inches from mine. "He's one of them, Siobhan. He may not carry a gun, he may not wear a hood, but he's one of them. And if you keep seeing him, they will find out. And when they do, they won't care that he loves you. They won't care that you're a good girl, a teacher, a daughter. They will see a Catholic girl who spread her legs for the enemy, and they will make an example of you."
The words hit me like blows, each one landing in a different place — my chest, my stomach, my throat. I can taste blood, or maybe it's just the memory of his mouth on mine, the salt and the heat and the way he said my name.
"I don't care."
"You will."
"I don't care if they kill me."
"Then you're a fool." She releases my shoulders, steps back, and I see the tears she's been holding back finally spill over, tracking down her cheeks in silver lines. "You're a fool, Siobhan. Just like I was."
I don't understand. The words don't make sense — they land and ricochet, leaving dents I can't trace. "What?"
She turns away. Walks to the sink. Stares out the window at the dark street beyond, at the houses huddled together like women sharing secrets, at the peace wall in the distance, a scar across the city.
"Before your father." She says it to the window, not to me. "There was someone else. A boy from the other side. His name was Thomas, and he had the bluest eyes I'd ever seen, and he used to meet me behind the bakery where no one could see us."
I can't move. Can't speak. The kitchen has become a different room, a different time, and I'm watching my mother become a stranger in front of me.
"I loved him." Her voice cracks, just a little, and she presses her palm flat against the counter like she's holding herself up. "I loved him the way you love this boy — like it was the only thing in the world that mattered. And I thought that was enough. I thought love was enough to protect us."
She pauses. The clock ticks. The water drips.
"They found us on a Tuesday. Three men in a car. They dragged him out of the alley, and they beat him in the street while I watched from behind a bin, too scared to scream. They broke his hands, Siobhan. They broke his hands so he couldn't touch me again. And then they told him — told me — that if they ever saw us together again, they'd kill us both."
The tears are running down my face now, and I don't know when they started. "Mammy—"
"I never saw him again." She turns, finally, and her face is wet, her eyes red, and she looks like a ghost of herself. "I don't know if he's alive or dead. I don't know if he married someone else, if he left the country, if they found him in a ditch somewhere. I just know that I loved him, and it wasn't enough. It was never enough."
I cross the kitchen without thinking, my arms reaching for her, but she holds up a hand and I stop.
"I'm not telling you this to hurt you." Her voice is softer now, tired, worn thin. "I'm telling you this so you understand. I'm telling you this so you know what you're walking into. This city doesn't care about love. It never has. And if you keep walking down this road, Siobhan, you will lose. You will lose everything — your job, your family, your home, your life. And he will lose you. And none of it will have mattered."
"It matters to me."
"It won't matter when you're dead."
The words hang between us, final and brutal.
I don't know what to say. I don't know what to do. I'm standing in my mother's kitchen, and she's just told me a story I never knew, a story that changes everything and nothing, a story that proves her right and makes me want to prove her wrong all at once.
"I have to go."
"Siobhan—"
"I have to go." I'm already moving, already at the door, my hand on the handle. "I have to see him."
"If you walk out that door—"
"I know." I turn, and I look at her — my mother, who loved a boy with blue eyes, who watched him get broken in the street, who married a good Catholic man and learned to stop hoping. "I know what you're going to say. But I have to do this. I have to see this through."
She doesn't stop me. She doesn't follow. She stands at the kitchen sink, one hand on the counter, the other pressed to her mouth, and she watches me go.
The cold hits me as soon as I step outside, the street empty and dark, the stars hidden behind a blanket of cloud. I start walking, fast, my heels clicking against the pavement, my breath fogging in front of me. I don't know where I'm going — I don't know if he'll be there, if the butcher's shop is open, if the door will be unlocked. I just know I can't go back inside that house, can't sit across from my mother and pretend I didn't hear what I heard.
The streets are quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that comes before something breaks.
I cross the peace wall through a gap I know, a section where the wire has been cut and the soldiers don't bother to watch. The other side feels different — the same city, the same sky, but the air is thinner, colder, like the oxygen has been replaced with something sharp and metallic.
The butcher's shop is dark when I reach it. The metal grate is pulled down, the windows black, and for a moment I think I've made a mistake, that he won't be here, that I've walked through the dark for nothing.
Then I see the crack of light beneath the side door.
I push it open. The smell hits me first — blood and salt and sawdust, the familiar scent of this room that has become my sanctuary and my sin. The lamp is lit, low and flickering, casting shadows across the scarred wooden table.
And he's there.
He's sitting on the edge of the butcher's block, his head in his hands, his shoulders hunched like he's carrying the weight of the world. He looks up when I come in, and his face is drawn, pale, his gray eyes rimmed with red.
I cross the room without deciding to. My feet carry me across the sawdust floor, past the hooks and the cleavers, past the scarred wooden table where he laid me down last week, and I don't stop until I'm standing between his knees, close enough to feel the heat coming off his body.
He doesn't move. Doesn't speak. His hands hang loose between his thighs, and his gray eyes are fixed on mine, waiting, like he's afraid I'll disappear if he blinks.
I reach out. My fingers find his jaw, the stubble rough against my palm, and I turn his face toward the lamplight. There are shadows under his eyes I didn't notice before, deep and bruised, and a tension in his jaw that doesn't ease when I touch him.
"You came back," he says. His voice is raw, scraped clean of something.
"I said I would."
"You were gone longer than a week."
"I know." I trace the line of his cheekbone, the hollow beneath it. "I'm sorry."
He catches my wrist. His fingers wrap around it, not hard, just holding, his thumb finding my pulse like he's checking I'm real. "I thought something happened. I thought"—he stops, his throat working—"I thought he found you. My brother. Or someone else. I thought you were dead in a ditch somewhere and I wouldn't even know."
"I'm not dead."
"I know." He lets out a breath that shudders through his whole body. "I know. I can see you. But I spent six days imagining it, and knowing it wasn't true didn't stop the pictures."
I don't know what to say to that. There's nothing to say. So I do what I came here to do: I lean down and press my forehead to his, my nose brushing his, my breath mixing with his in the space between.
He doesn't pull away. His hand slides from my wrist to my hip, fingers curling into the wool of my cardigan, and he holds me there like I'm the only solid thing in a world that keeps trying to fall apart.
"My mother knows," I whisper.
His eyes open. They're close enough that I can see the flecks of darker gray in the irises, the ring of blue at the edge. "Knows what?"
"That I'm seeing someone. She saw me leaving. Last week. She followed me—or she guessed, I don't know. But she knows."
His hand tightens on my hip. "What did she say?"
"She told me a story." I pull back just enough to look at him properly, my hands sliding from his jaw to his shoulders, feeling the weight of him. "She loved a Protestant boy once. Before my father. His name was Thomas, and she loved him the way I love you, and they found them. Three men. They beat him in the street and broke his hands so he couldn't touch her again."
Declan's face goes still. Not blank—still. Like he's holding something back by force of will. "Is he alive?"
"She doesn't know. She never saw him again."
He doesn't speak for a long moment. The lamp hisses. Somewhere in the distance, a car engine turns over, and we both flinch at the sound before it fades.
"She told you that to stop you coming here."
"Yes."
"And you came anyway."
"Yes."
His hands move up my sides, slow, tracing the curve of my ribs through the cardigan, like he's memorizing the shape of me. "Why?"
The question lands soft, but it's not soft. It's the hardest question he's ever asked me, because the answer isn't simple. The answer is about the rosary beads I still carry in my pocket, about the priest who told me that loving a Protestant was a sin closer to death than any other, about the look on my mother's face when she told me she'd loved a boy who got his hands broken for it.
The answer is that I don't know if I'm brave or stupid. I don't know if I'm choosing love or courting death. I don't know if I'm proving my mother wrong or proving her right.
"Because I can't stay away," I say. "Because I tried. Because every morning I wake up and tell myself this is the day I stop, and every night I fall asleep thinking about you, and I don't know how to unlove you, Declan. I don't know if I even want to."
His breath catches. I feel it against my throat, his hands stilling on my ribs.
"I'm not worth dying for," he says.
"That's not your choice to make."
"Siobhan—"
"You don't get to decide what I risk." I cup his face again, forcing him to look at me, forcing him to see that I mean it. "I know what I'm walking into. I know what this city does to people like us. But I also know that I have never felt more alive than when I'm with you, and I have never felt more like myself, and I am not going to let fear take that away from me."
His eyes are bright in the lamplight, wet at the edges, but he doesn't cry. He's a Protestant boy from the Shankill who was raised not to show weakness, and the tears stay where they belong, trapped behind walls he's been building his whole life.
But his hands speak for him. They slide under my cardigan, finding the bare skin of my waist, warm and rough and trembling. He pulls me closer until I'm pressed against him, my thighs brushing his, my chest against his chest, my heart hammering against his.
"I love you," he says. "I love you, and I'm terrified, and I don't know how to protect you from a city that wants us dead."
"Then don't protect me." I lower myself onto his lap, straddling him, my knees on either side of his hips, my skirt bunching around my thighs. "Love me. That's all I need."
His hands find my thighs, the bare skin above my stockings, and he makes a sound low in his throat, something between a groan and a prayer. "Is that all?"
"That's everything."
I kiss him. It's not gentle—it's hungry, desperate, the kind of kiss that says I crossed a peace wall for you, the kind of kiss that says I know my mother's story and I'm choosing you anyway. He meets me with the same desperation, his teeth catching my lower lip, his hands gripping my thighs hard enough to bruise.
The butcher's block is cold against my bare thighs where my skirt has ridden up. The wood is scarred and stained, the surface rough from years of use, and I feel every nick and groove pressing into my skin as I shift against him.
He's hard. I feel him through his trousers, through the thin cotton of my underwear, a pressure that makes my breath catch and my hips roll forward without permission.
He breaks the kiss, breathing hard. "Siobhan."
"Don't." I know what he's going to say. I know he's going to ask if I'm sure, if I want this, if I've thought about what it means. "Don't ask me if I'm sure. I've never been more sure of anything in my life."
He searches my face. His gray eyes are dark, his pupils blown wide, and I see the war happening behind them—the part of him that wants to be good, that wants to protect me, fighting against the part of him that wants me so badly it's destroying him.
"Tell me to stop," he says. His voice is hoarse, broken. "Tell me to stop, and I will. I swear to God, I will. But if you don't—"
"I don't."
His hands find the hem of my cardigan, and he pushes it up, over my head, letting it fall somewhere behind me. The air is cold on my bare arms, my skin prickling, but his hands are warm when they find my waist, sliding up under my blouse.
I help him with the buttons. My fingers are clumsy, shaking, and I feel his hands cover mine, stilling them, before he undoes each button himself, slow and deliberate, his eyes never leaving mine.
The blouse falls open. His breath catches as he looks at me, at the white cotton of my bra, at the freckles scattered across my collarbone, at the rosary beads I still wear around my wrist, a small betrayal I haven't been able to let go of.
He traces the beads with one finger. "Does this mean something?"
"It means I was raised Catholic." I swallow. "It doesn't mean I think you're a sin."
He doesn't answer. He just leans forward and presses his lips to the hollow of my throat, right where my pulse is fluttering, and I feel the heat of his mouth, the scrape of his stubble, the soft sound he makes against my skin.
I arch into him. My fingers find his hair, the dark auburn curls at the nape of his neck, and I hold him there while his mouth moves down, kissing my collarbone, my sternum, the curve of my breast above the cotton.
He reaches behind me and unclasps my bra in a single motion. I don't know how he learned to do that—I don't ask. The bra falls away, and his hands are on me, warm and rough, his thumbs tracing circles that make my breath catch and my hips press forward.
His mouth follows his hands, and I feel the wet heat of his tongue, the gentle scrape of his teeth, and I let my head fall back, let my eyes close, let myself feel what it's like to be wanted by Declan Morrow, a Protestant boy who reads Yeats in the dark and has sawdust in his hair.
Time stops meaning anything. There's only the weight of him, the heat of him, the way his hands move over my body like he's memorizing every inch. I feel him undo his belt, feel the buckle clink, feel the shift of fabric as he frees himself.
I look down. He's beautiful in the lamplight—his shoulders broad, his chest bare, his arms corded with muscle from years of working with wood. And below, he's hard, ready, the sight of him making my mouth go dry and my thighs clench.
"Are you sure?" he asks again. He can't help it. It's who he is.
I answer by reaching down and guiding him to where I'm wet and waiting, the head of him pressing against me through the damp cotton of my underwear.
We both stop breathing.
"I love you," I say. "Make me yours."
He pushes my underwear aside, and I feel him—just the tip, just the beginning—and the heat of it, the stretch of it, makes me gasp and grip his shoulders.
"Tell me if it hurts," he says.
"It already hurts. In the best way."
He pushes deeper, and I feel myself opening for him, my body yielding to the pressure, my hips tilting to meet him. The wood of the butcher's block is cold beneath me, the air is cold around us, but inside I'm burning, burning, and when he fills me completely, I feel tears prick at the corners of my eyes.
"Siobhan." He says my name like a prayer, like a question I don't have words for. "Siobhan, look at me."
I open my eyes. He's there, above me, his gray eyes dark and endless, his face tight with pleasure and pain and something I can't name, something that looks like hope and terror all at once.
"I see you," he says. "I see all of you. And I'm not going to let this city take you from me."
He moves. Slow at first, a rhythm that builds from nowhere, each thrust deeper than the last, each one pushing me closer to the edge of something I can't see. I wrap my legs around him, pull him deeper, and I feel him shudder, hear him groan, feel the way his control fractures against my skin.
"Declan." I say his name because I can't say anything else. "Declan, Declan—"
His hand finds mine on the wood, and he interlocks our fingers, and he moves faster, harder, the rhythm breaking into something urgent and desperate and beautiful. I feel myself climbing toward a peak I can't see, can't name, and I hold onto him, hold onto his hand, hold onto this moment that the world would tear apart if it could.
I break. The pleasure crests and shatters through me, and I cry out, not caring who hears, not caring about anything except the way he fills me, completes me, makes me whole in a way I didn't know I was broken.
He follows a moment later, his body tensing, his breath catching, his voice low and rough as he says my name like a benediction, like a goodbye, like a promise.
When it's over, we don't move. We lie tangled together on the butcher's block, the wood hard beneath us, the air cold around us, his weight a warm anchor pressing me down. The lamp flickers, casting our shadows across the wall, one shape where there should be two.
"We can't stay here," he says eventually. His voice is tired, heavy. "The shop opens in the morning. Someone will come."
"I know." I don't move. "Five more minutes."
He presses a kiss to my hair, and I feel his arms tighten around me. "Five more minutes."
I close my eyes and let myself pretend that five more minutes is enough. That this—the heat of his body, the sawdust smell of him, the way his thumb traces absent circles on my shoulder—can last forever.
But outside, the city is waking up. Outside, there are soldiers and priests and brothers with guns. Outside, there's a peace wall we have to cross and a mother who's waiting and a war that doesn't care who we love.
Five more minutes.
Then we have to go back to the world.