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Date Posted: 15:11:38 04/16/12 Mon
Author: celtgirl
Subject: Piece inside>>>
In reply to: celtgirl 's message, "" on 15:00:23 04/16/12 Mon

copyright 2012 Cindy Brandner


He was home, and yet not home at the same time.

Even the streets felt strange beneath his feet, as if his gait were off by a beat and he expected to stumble any second. He felt unrecognizable, as though the boy he had been had disappeared entirely in prison and a young man, hardened beyond his years, had returned. His skin buzzed and he knew it for nerves. He had not seen his brother for five years. What if they were strangers to one another, what if he couldn’t find a way across the divide that he had created with his actions five years earlier?

He saw faces that he knew. He received a few sharp looks, and one or two gruff nods. The rain was drizzling soft on his head, and he stopped for a second and looked up allowing the rain to fall into his mouth, gather in the hollows beneath his eyes and run down into his ears. Irish rain—it felt bloody grand.

The city looked smaller to him, the streets narrower than he had remembered, the houses more cramped cheek by jowl. But still and all, it was home and he felt as though he were taking the first deep breath in five years. Two blocks and then one, and there he was in the quiet laneway. He paused at the wee iron gate, fighting the urge to turn around and run away, to remain in the shelter of anonymity. He took a deep breath, opened the gate and stepped through.

He didn’t knock on the door, he knew his brother would not want him to, but rather walked in calling out as he entered.

“Lucy, I’m home!”

He put his head around the corner, feeling ridiculously nervous, for he could sense that his brother was home and felt scared at the changes he might find to the memory of the boy he had held tight to these last years.

It wasn’t his brother that his gaze lit upon first though, but a girl. He swore softly under his breath, fearing he had opened the wrong door and thinking that, perhaps, there had never been a more right door in his life. That she was partially naked took a second to register, but when it did he felt shocked enough not to be able to turn his head away.

She flushed bright as a summer peony, and shot him a look of green murder. He turned his eyes away, wondering what the hell his brother was up to with a half-naked girl in the kitchen.

He cocked a dark brow at his brother, who stood in the kitchen, looking back at him with a somewhat sheepish grin on his face.

“Lucy,” he said, “you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”
***


Twenty minutes later, they were all seated with a hot teapot in the middle of the table. Casey was still focused on catching his breath, both literally and figuratively speaking. Pat was talking away to beat the dozen, covering up his nerves, no doubt at being caught out with a naked girl in the kitchen.

His brother looked just that much more like their Daddy now that he was grown toward manhood. He had always been a fine-looking boy, but he had turned into a handsome man. The lassies would be paying attention and Casey wondered-with a not entirely happy curiosity-what Pat’s relationship to this girl was.

The girl in question was sitting at the table, fully dressed—more’s the pity there, he thought—and looking about as comfortable as a woman sitting bare-arsed in a nettle patch.

He could not remember ever having felt quite as stupid as he did right this moment. Generally he had a glib tongue with the girls, but right now he couldn’t think of one intelligible word, much less a sentence replete with charm.

Christ, the skin on her was like a hothouse flower, delicate and flawless. His mind would bloody flash back to the glimpse of breast he had gotten as she had clutched the drapery to her. He had seen his fair share of breasts in this life, but not one like that and he knew it wasn’t just five years of deprivation informing that opinion. And those eyes, he could hardly look into them, without a feeling of vertigo. She had mermaid eyes, the sort a man could drown in, and not mind the drowning in the least, despite said man’s dislike of largish bodies of water. Her hair fell down her back in a spill of blue-black curls. It was tousled right now, as though she had just risen from bed. That led to another entirely impure thought on his part and he took a deep breath, attempting to steel himself and be polite. He was certain he must appear entirely depraved. He was certain he was entirely depraved.

She looked highly discomfited right now, a flush blazing up from her collar. He noticed that her shirt was on inside out, which led back to a mental flash of that breast. Christ, he needed to think of something else—nuns, latrine duty, the Mother of Christ—it wasn’t working and he was certain by the blush on her that she could read his mind. His mouth was dry, and he could feel a fine sweat breaking out under his collar.

He realized suddenly that he was talking to her, and he must be making some sort of sense because she was answering, though he had no clue what it was she was answering to. She was American, though he couldn’t place the accent beyond that. God help him to not blurt something stupid out, something to the effect of, ‘I’ll die a miserable and unfulfilled soul, if I don’t find myself between yer thighs at some point.’

He was equal parts relieved and devastated when she said she had to leave. Relieved because he could not possibly sit behind the shield of the table for much longer, devastated because he had no clue if he would ever see her again. He felt sandbagged, as though he had been ambushed by forces beyond anything in his previous experience. He felt a wee bit angry truth be told. No contact with women for five years, and then this woman, sitting in his brother’s kitchen—well, it hardly seemed fair, a man ought to stand at least a wee bit of a chance. It was a bit like having the rug yanked out from under your feet when you didn’t know you’d been standing on the rug to start with. He felt ridiculously proprietary too, he didn’t even like the way his brother was talking to her, bidding her farewell at the door, laughing with her.

Christ on a piece of toast, but such a woman was not meant for the likes of him, and that pissed him off considerably too. He had lost his mind in about two seconds flat. He sighed, his Daddy, wherever he was, must be having himself a good laugh at his expense just now. He had warned him long ago that it would happen this way, after he had boldly stated he didn’t believe there was just one woman out there for him.

“Oh, yes there is boy, I know ye can’t see it, but I’m yer daddy, an’ there’s certain things I know to be true, an’ one of them is that yer meant to love a woman deeply someday. Ye won’t know it yerself until ye see her, but I guarantee that ye will know it then, before even a word is spoken between the two of ye.”

She was just a girl, just flesh and blood. Of course that was half the problem and his own flesh recognized that all too clearly.

It was ridiculous. He wasn’t some virgin schoolboy to tumble head over heels like this. The woman likely wouldn’t spare him another thought. She certainly wouldn’t react well to a proposal to run off to some secluded spot with him, and have his babies. He groaned inwardly, for he could hear his father in his head, clear as day, and it sounded as if the man were laughing.

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