Riley
Ifiddle with my fork, pushing my Caesar salad around the plate, setting off another frustrated sigh from Kate.
“So, you’re not going to talk to me, then?”
“I have nothing to say,” I tell her, setting the plate and fork down on the table.
“You didn’t eat your lunch,” she points out and I start to regret agreeing to have something with her before going home.
“I’m worried about you, Riley.”
“No need, everything’s alright.”
“Ray says that you were upset after the game.”
“Ray should mind his own business.”
“If there’s something wrong, you can talk to me about it. We’re friends, you know.”
I give her a strained smile.
“Sometimes I don’t feel like I know you at all. You’re so reserved. I don’t know anything about your life before you joined the theatre.”
“There’s nothing to talk about, Kate. My life is very boring, believe me.”
“So this guy who plays for Leinster just came out of nowhere?”
Kate’s phone goes off on the table, giving me a moment of peace.
“We’re not done here,” she threatens me before picking up.
I shouldn’t have asked Ray to come with me.
Watching the game upset me. What I felt while I was there upset me. He upsets me and that can only be a bad thing.
What I feel when I’m next to him, when I think about him, when the memory of what we shared together comes back to hurt me…it’s all too much, dangerous.
Wrong.
Outside of my grasp.
I look out the window of Madigan’s on O’Connell Street, sighing sadly when I see right in that moment a pair of familiar-looking shoulders pass me by on the street outside.
I jump to my feet.
“Everything okay, Riley?” Kate asks, placing a hand over her phone.
I continue to watch the man walk away, getting lost in the crowd; he has his arm around a woman. He holds her closely, almost protecting her as if to say, ‘she’s mine, don’t touch’ and I’m lucky my heart doesn’t flop out of my ribcage and splatter all over the lurid, sticky floor.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
I sit back down and look at her, disorientated.
“Nothing, I thought it was…” I shake my head and try to sit still but I can’t avoid acknowledging what’s going through my mind right now. That I was this close from running up behind him and slapping him across the face.
It’s unreasonable, it makes no sense: I know that. I shouldn’t care who he goes out with or what he does. It shouldn’t matter to me if he has a girlfriend and didn’t tell me, that he deliberately tried to keep me in the dark about it when I showed up at his house. A house he probably shares with her! Or if he came to my house, if we ate together, he touched me and now he’s touching someone else. Or if he beat that guy up just because he was dancing with me, as if he cared that I was next to some other man.
It shouldn’t matter to me.
