Ruairí wraps himself around me, one arm under my head, the other cradling the soft curve of my stomach, and for a while the world outside is just scaffolding and ghosts.
I listen to his heartbeat, slow and metered.
His chest rises and falls with the kind of discipline I used to mistake for calm.
The sheets smell of old soap and the gun oil he never manages to scrub from his hands.
Somewhere in the estate, the pipes groan and rattle.
Somewhere in the city, men with my name in their mouths try to decide whether I am dead or just waiting to be.
He traces a line down my shoulder, fingertip following the edge of an old bruise.
"Does it still hurt?" he asks, voice rough.
"Not that one," I say.
He huffs a laugh into my hair.
"You're supposed to rest."
I almost tell him about the dream—the one where one of the babies is born with a crow's beak and a hunger for blood—but he's tense tonight, and I don't want to tip him off the edge.
Instead, I say, "Tell me something I don't know."
He's quiet so long, I start to think he's fallen asleep.
Then, "When I was nine, Fiachra pushed me off the roof of our house."
This is new.
"You're shitting me."
He shakes his head, chin scraping my crown.
"We'd built this ramp out of plywood. He said we could fly if we jumped hard enough. I made it to the next roof, but I landed on my wrist. Broke it in two places."
I laugh, picturing it.
"And your mother?"
"She said, ‘If you're going to be an idiot, at least land on your head next time. Save us the hospital bill.'"
His voice is fond, a little raw. "We never went to hospitals after that, just learned how to fix each other."
I reach back, run my palm over his forearm, the one with the faint seam of a scar where bone must have poked through.
"Explains a lot."
"Does it?"
He shifts behind me, props himself up on one elbow.
The room is still dark, but his silhouette is solid, the old bruiser pose he adopts when he's trying to seem bigger than the rest of the world.
"I always figured you thought I came out of a factory. Ready-made arsehole."
I laugh, and it echoes in the hollow between us.
