“I mean.” Emma’s jaw worked. She was looking at a spot on the floor between them. “You would have driven up the boreen the way you always did. And I would have been next door. In my garden or in Bridget’s kitchen or wherever. And you would have seen my car and known I was home.” She swallowed. The sound was audible in the quiet kitchen. “Would you have wanted to pick up where we left off?”
The question caught Natalie off guard. Her breath hitched, and heat spread through her chest. She gripped the table edge, the worn wood rough against her palms, steadying herself against what Emma was asking.
Where they’d left off.
The archway rushed back to her in vivid, merciless detail. Emma’s mouth on hers, soft at first and then urgent, the warmth of it spreading through Natalie’s chest like whiskey. The way Emma had kissed her back without hesitation, without surprise, as if she’d been waiting for it.
Natalie remembered the sound Emma had made against her lips—small and breathless. The way Emma had looked at her afterward, unguarded, as if Natalie had given her something she’d hoped for but never asked for.
Natalie stared at Emma across the kitchen, the question hanging in the air between them like something you could touch. She opened her mouth, then closed it again. Her throat felt dry.
Would you have wanted to pick up where we left off?
The honest answer was blazing through her chest, too bright and too desperate to voice. Yes. God, yes. She’d thought about nothing else for weeks leading up to that summer.
The truth was that she’d wanted those two months in Emma’s orbit more than she’d wanted anything in years. Mornings here in this kitchen, with her grandmother and Emma and the conversations that always flowed so easily. Afternoon walks through the woods. Drives out to Connemara to explore a new beach. Evenings at O’Shea’s where Emma’s knee would rest close enough to hers that she could feel the warmth without quite touching, and maybe this time she wouldn’t pull away.
The truth was that she’d imagined picking up exactly where they’d left off, and also somewhere entirely new. She’d imagined what it would feel like to stop pretending that the kiss had been an accident, a moment of impulse she regretted. She’d imagined what it would feel like to want someone and not immediately start planning her exit.
But then Emma’s house had been dark.
The memory closed around her chest like a fist.
“Natalie?”
She realized she hadn’t answered. That she was gripping the table edge. That her breathing had gone shallow and her eyes were burning, and Emma was watching her from three feet away with an expression that was half fear and half something so open it hurt to look at directly.
To answer honestly meant saying what she’d wanted. Not what she’d done. Not what had been sensible or safe or self-preserving. What she had actually, physically, desperately wanted when she drove into Kilvolan that July with her pulse hammering and her stomach swooping low with nerves.
She had never said it out loud. Not to her therapist. Not to the empty rooms of her LA house at three in the morning. Not even inside her own head.
She’d been in love with Emma for years.
13
Emma watched the silence stretch between them. Natalie’s face had gone pale, her knuckles white where she gripped the table edge. The kitchen clock ticked on.
The answer was in that silence. In the way Natalie’s mouth opened and closed without sound. In the careful blankness that settled over her features.
Of course. Of course Natalie wouldn’t have wanted to pick up where they’d left off. Even if she had been here that summer, it wouldn’t have changed anything. Natalie would have been polite. Friendly. And Emma would have understood that the kiss in the archway had been exactly what she’d spent five years trying to convince herself it wasn’t: a mistake.
Her chest ached. She pushed off the counter hard enough to make Natalie look up.
“You know what,” Emma said, keeping her voice level. “I shouldn’t have asked you that.”
She headed for the back door. She couldn’t stay in this kitchen with Natalie’s silence anymore. She’d asked the question expecting a simple yes, maybe even that soft smile she remembered from before things got complicated.
Instead she’d gotten this careful blankness, this polite nothing that was somehow worse than any rejection could have been.
“I’m going to go.”
Emma pulled the door open, cool night air rushing in to fill the space between them. She didn’t wait for Natalie to respond. Couldn’t stand to hear whatever careful, diplomatic thing Natalie might say to fill the awkwardness Emma had created.
Her feet found their own way down the drive, out to their narrow road, and through her own gate. She unlocked her door and turned on a few lights, heading straight for her own kitchen. She poured herself a tumbler of whiskey, the amber liquid catching the overhead light as she carried it outside.
The fire pit was already set up, kindling stacked beneath larger pieces of turf. Emma struck a match and held it to the dry kindling and newspaper, watching the flames catch and spread.
She should have been thinking about sleep. It was nearly midnight. But sleep felt impossible now, her skin buzzing with embarrassment and the particular sting of having hoped for something she should have known better than to want.
