Natalie blinked and felt tears threaten behind her eyes. The wine made everything closer to the surface, made her chest tight with possibility and loss tangled together until she couldn’t separate them.
It was hard to think about the future without Gran. Every plan felt hollow, missing the steady presence that had anchored her summers.
She set her glass down on the stone beside her chair.
“I keep forgetting she’s gone,” she said quietly. “I keep thinking I should check on her before it gets too late. Make sure she’s taken her tablets.”
Emma’s voice was soft when she answered. “That’ll happen for a while.”
Her eyes found Emma’s. “I’m really glad you’re here.”
The fire cracked between them.
“I’m glad you’re here too.”
11
The first sip was always the best. Emma tilted the glass and let the Guinness settle against her tongue, that mineral bitterness smoothed by the cream of the head, cold enough to feel clean and dark enough to feel earned. Beside her, Natalie lifted her own pint and drank with the quiet concentration of someone who had learned to appreciate this particular ritual over many summers.
The bar was warm against Emma’s forearms. Years of elbows and spilled porter had worn O’Shea’s counter to a sticky-smooth finish that Trish’s polishing couldn’t erase.
Two pints in, the pub held its midweek quiet. No tourists. No weekend energy. Just regulars. Séamus had his fiddle out in the corner, starting up a jig with Pádraig and his accordion.
Emma set her glass down and listened.
A week since the funeral. The days had fallen into a pattern she hadn’t planned. She’d collected the BMW, driven it back to Kilvolan with the windows down.
She’d spent most evenings with Natalie. It had just happened. Not by arrangement, but by proximity and shared loss. Neither of them wanted to be alone. The first night Emmahad cooked at Bridget’s. Natalie had opened wine and they’d sat in the kitchen until eleven. The second night Natalie had texted.
Chicken in the oven. Come over.
The third night Emma had lit the firepit in her back garden. Natalie had appeared at the wall with a bottle of Malbec and two glasses. They’d talked until the fire burned to ash.
It felt natural. That was the problem. It felt like resuming a conversation they’d been having for years, picking up mid-sentence, filling in the gaps with silence that didn’t need filling. Emma had missed their summers together with an ache she’d spent five years in Australia learning to manage, and now the management was failing because the thing she’d been managing was sitting beside her drinking Guinness.
More than once over the past week she’d had to pull herself back. A moment at the kitchen sink where their hands had brushed. A morning when Natalie had opened the front door still half-asleep, hair loose and tangled, wearing a hoodie that hung past her hands, and Emma had forgotten why she’d knocked. An evening by the fire when Natalie’s gaze lingered on Emma.
There was nothing between them. She had to keep remembering that. Friendship. Proximity. Shared grief. The accumulated weight of ten summers boiled down to something that looked, from the outside, like two women who’d known each other a long time and were comfortable in each other’s company.
Except Natalie had kissed her in the woods five years ago and Emma had kissed her back and it was never mentioned again.
That was what Emma kept coming back to. She’d stood in that archway in the rain and told Natalie that she was crazy about her. The kiss… Emma couldn’t think about that kisswithout a rush of heat running through her, electricity rippling over her skin.
But Natalie had left for Los Angeles the next morning, and it was all just a memory.
Last week, by the fire, Natalie had asked the question.Who’s the lucky woman you can’t seem to forget?
The answer had risen in her throat so fast it was almost violent—You.Just that. Just the one word, the one truth she’d carried for five years like a secret pressed between her ribs. She’d tasted it on her tongue, felt the shape of it against the roof of her mouth, and then swallowed it back down because the alternative was letting it out into the air between them, where it would hang like the smoke from the fire, impossible to unsee.Ask me another day,she’d said instead, her voice steady even as her pulse hammered in her wrists. Because it was the night after they’d buried Bridget, and it wasn’t the right time, and if Emma was being completely honest with herself, she was afraid of how Natalie would react.
But the thing about open loops was that they didn’t stay open forever. They frayed at the edges. They unraveled when you weren’t looking. And this one—this quiet, persistent ache—was the reason she’d never been able to give Maria what she deserved.
She was going to have to say it, eventually. Because she needed to close the loop, one way or another. Needed to know, once and for all, if that kiss in the archway had been a crazy moment in time, or if it was in anyway real for Natalie.
Now, Emma’s arm rested on the bar beside Natalie’s. Close enough that the fine hair on her forearm caught against Natalie’s skin when either of them shifted. Close enough that every accidental brush sent a small bright signal up through her elbow, her shoulder, the back of her neck. She kept her eyes on the session and her breathing even and her body exactly where itwas, because moving away would be an admission and moving closer would be something else entirely, and the narrow margin between those two options was the only territory she could safely occupy.
Natalie lifted her pint. The movement brought their arms together for a full second, the length of Natalie’s forearm warm against hers, and then Natalie set the glass down and the contact broke and Emma took a drink of her own Guinness to give her mouth something to do besides say something stupid.
The question surfaced again. What was the truth. Emma had spent five years building and abandoning theories. Natalie was bi. Natalie was gay. Whatever she was, it was something she kept hidden. And the kiss in the archway—the way Natalie’s mouth had opened, the sound she’d made, the way her hands had held Emma, like she was afraid Emma might pull away. That wasn’t confusion. That wasn’t curiosity. That was a woman who knew what she wanted and took it.
