Chapter 44: Do we know each other?

Cian and Eoin walked side by side through many years after that. Cian spent five years studying in Edinburgh, then travelled alone across five continents, and when he finally came back he took Eoin with him, the two of them moving from country to country, trying food they couldn’t name and getting lost in places neither of them knew.

On a slow afternoon on a small island somewhere warm, Cian lay in a rocking chair and told Eoin the truth about where he’d actually come from.

He was wearing board shorts and a pair of sunglasses with flowers on the arms, a straw from a fizzy drink hanging out of his mouth. Eoin was sitting beside him, rubbing sunscreen into his shoulders.

"Mm," Eoin said, and kept rubbing.

Weeks in the sun had brought Cian up a shade darker, though he was still absurdly good looking. The muscle under Eoin’s hands was loose and warm.

Cian rolled over and caught his wrist, squinting at him. "You’re very calm about this. You don’t think I’ve gone off the rails again, do you?"

Eoin let out a small breath. "It does sound strange. But I’ve known for a long time that you and he weren’t the same person."

A person’s face could change, and their habits could change. But the core of who someone was didn’t change, not really. Underneath Cian’s lazy, careless surface was someone genuinely gentle. Eoin had never been able to make himself believe that this was a man who had once hurt people freely, who had once put his own entertainment above someone else’s suffering.

"Have you," Cian said. His eyebrow went up. "For a long time. How long exactly?"

Eoin paused, and then looked away.

The strange thing about being somewhere sunny for weeks on end was what it did to different people. Cian had gone a warm gold all over. Eoin had stayed pale as ever, which meant there was nowhere for the colour to hide when it came up.

Cian’s eyebrow climbed higher.

Eoin was not, by nature, easy to fluster. He’d grown a fairly thick skin over the years, particularly when it came to Cian’s habit of saying things just to get a reaction. But there were still moments, fewer now, when something landed and his face gave him away entirely.

Cian folded his arms. "Tell me. Exactly when."

Eoin said, "Are you sure you want to know?"

"Obviously."

"I’m just saying, you might not enjoy what you hear."

"How could I not? Wait."

He’d noticed where Eoin’s gaze had dropped. He looked down at himself.

"No," he said. "Seriously?"

"Mm."

The sunscreen was sliding down his chest from all the movement. Eoin pushed him flat again and kept going. "You know the reputation. Young Mr. Fitzgerald. People talked about him the way they talk about someone very experienced. But the reality was more like..."

Eoin shook his head and left it there.

Cian stared at him. "Like what?"

"I said you’d get annoyed."

Cian’s jaw tightened. "Finish the sentence."

Eoin said, very calmly, "Like someone on a first date who doesn’t quite know where to put themselves."

There was a long silence.

Cian’s expression went through several phases.

Eoin added, after a moment, "Though it wasn’t bad."

Coming from Eoin, that required some translation. Once, running a fever of thirty nine degrees, he’d insisted he was perfectly fine and tried to go into the lab. Cian had made him stay in bed for a full day, which had taken considerable effort. If Eoin said something wasn’t bad, it meant it had barely cleared the bar.

Watching Cian’s face do something complicated, Eoin relented slightly. "You improved fast."

Cian said, with great dignity, "Mr. Brennan, are you trying to make me feel better right now? Should I be thanking you?"

The afternoon drifted into evening, the conversation finding its way from serious to something looser and stranger. After dark they lay on the net bed of the overwater bungalow and looked up at the stars, and the day’s questions got asked properly at last.

Cian, half asleep and worn out, pulled Eoin close and pressed a kiss to his forehead.

– – –

The next day, close to noon, Cian woke up slowly and reached out to the other side of the bed without opening his eyes.

It was empty.

He lay still for a second, then opened his eyes and looked around.

This wasn’t their bungalow.

A balcony. A suite. Heavy dark furniture. Large windows stretching from floor to ceiling with a round bathtub beside them.

This was a hotel room in Dublin.

Cian sat up. He checked his phone. The date it showed him was nine years ago, two full years before the story had even started, two years before Eoin had any idea who he was.

He swore quietly, got out of bed, and scrolled through his contacts until he found Darragh. "I need you to find someone for me."

Darragh’s family had some connection to Trinity, which made tracking down a student there a straightforward enough job. The call came back quickly.

"The fella you’re after," Darragh said, "he’s picked up a shift from Student Services. Handing out flyers on Grafton Street."

Handing out flyers.

Cian remembered, months after they’d finally said what they meant to each other, Eoin mentioning once that he’d spent a summer doing this. Ten hours a day, fifteen euro an hour, wearing a foam mascot costume on one of the busiest streets in Dublin in the middle of July, nearly passing out from the heat.

He looked out the window. The sky outside was white and blazing, the kind of summer day that made the city shimmer.

Cian was already pulling on his clothes. "What are you doing?" Darragh was saying. "I can hear you moving. Is that a car? Cian, who are you looking for?"

"My wife," Cian said, and hung up.

The car parked outside the hotel wasn’t his usual Bentley. It was a champagne gold convertible he’d apparently owned at twenty two, loud and flashy and not remotely subtle. He didn’t have time to care. He got in, pulled out into traffic, and came to a stop at the top of Grafton Street.

At the far end of the pedestrian stretch, Eoin was clinging to a railing.

He was in the suit, a large foam bear costume, and he was not well. The heat had got into him completely. Sweat had soaked through everything underneath. He was dizzy and trembling slightly, staring out through the mesh of the mascot head at the passing crowds, his arm moving slowly when it moved at all. People were walking past him before he could extend the flyers.

He thought, dimly: I have to finish. If I stop now they won’t pay me.

Fifteen euro for ten hours. That was most of a week’s food.

He looked down at the stack in his hand. The top ones were damp and sticking together. He’d been at it all morning and the pile had barely shifted.

Someone was approaching. Tall, features blurred at this distance, but with a way of moving that didn’t look like a person in a hurry to get past him.

Eoin held out a flyer. "Excuse me, there’s a new shop..."

His voice had gone hoarse and strange. He pressed on. "If you’re interested, we’re just opening..."

The entire remaining stack of flyers was taken from his hand.

He opened his mouth to object, and then someone took him by the shoulders and sat him down firmly on a nearby bench.

"Sir," Eoin managed. "I’m working."

Cian took the mascot head off.

It came free with a soft pull, and fresh air rushed in immediately. Eoin took several quick breaths. His face was flushed scarlet, his eyes bright and damp at the corners. He sat very straight, holding on to the last of his composure. "Sir, please could you give me back the..."

"You have heatstroke," Cian said. "You can’t stay out here. It could get serious."

He found the zip down the back of the costume and pulled it. "Come out of that."

Without waiting for permission, Cian found the little foam tail at the back, got a grip on the suit, and pulled the whole thing off in one go.

The person inside was soaked through. His shirt was plastered flat against him, wrinkled and wet, his pale skin visible through the fabric.

Cian got him upright, holding the costume in one hand and Eoin with the other. "You need a hospital. Come on."

Eoin had been working out regularly for a while. Eoin was dizzy and barely tracking. Between the two, manoeuvring him towards the car was not a significant challenge.

He didn’t explain anything. Eoin went along with it because his throat was too dry to argue, thinking distantly: Is this a kidnapping?

Then he saw the car.

The convertible sitting at the kerb was the kind of thing you noticed. He didn’t recognise the badge, but from the lines of it, the colour, the way it sat on the road, he could make a fairly confident estimate of what it cost. The kind of person who owned a car like that had no practical reason to abduct him. His family’s total worth wouldn’t have covered a service appointment.

Eoin couldn’t quite manage getting in on his own, so Cian lifted him into the passenger seat, clicked his seatbelt in, and put an open water bottle in his hand.

Then he started the engine, which was loud, and said, "There’s a hospital ten minutes from here. You need a drip."

The leather seat was soft and cool under him. Eoin thought, somewhere underneath the dizziness, that if he had the kind of money it took to own a car like this, he could get his Nana into the best consultants in the country. Private room. Real treatment.

Cian practically carried him through the hospital entrance. He didn’t seem bothered by the state of Eoin, drenched in sweat and barely upright. He handled everything, registration and triage and the pharmacy, and didn’t sit down until the drip needle was in and taped securely.

Eoin looked at him, baffled. He had never met this person before. There was something about the way Cian sat beside him, easy and unhurried, as if this were exactly where he was supposed to be, that made no sense at all.

"Do we know each other?" Eoin asked.

Cian glanced up from the medication information sheet. "It’s complicated. Let’s say we don’t, at the moment."

Eoin processed this. It wasn’t really an answer. He was too tired to push it, and somewhere in the middle of the drip he fell asleep.