His taillights shrank to two red pinpricks at the end of my street, then the road bent and they were gone. I stood in my driveway holding my keys tight enough that later, inside, I'd find the teeth of them stamped into my palm like braille. A message my body had been sending all night that I hadn't bothered to read.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Did it again. There was something sticky there, a synthetic cherry smell that wasn't mine. Rhys wore lip balm, a detail I did not need to learn tonight and will now never unlearn. I kept swiping at it like I could undo the last forty five seconds through friction alone.
The porch light was on because I'd left it on. Somewhere a few houses down someone's sprinkler was going, that rhythmic tsk tsk tsk of water hitting concrete, and I stood there listening to it, holding my keys, tasting fake cherry and whiskey and my own bad judgement.
Let me back up.
The text came three weeks ago. I was at the Tesco self checkout buying hummus and a birthday card for my mum when my phone buzzed with an unknown number. *Hey, is this still Roisin? It's Rhys. Rhys Kelleher. From school.* As if there were a queue of Rhyses I'd need to sort through. As if I could forget.
I knew what I should have done. I knew it the way you know not to touch the hob when the ring's glowing red. You know it and you know it and then sometimes you touch it anyway, because some stupid part of your brain wants confirmation that yes, it is in fact still hot. Well done. You've learned nothing.
I typed back *Hey! Yeah it's me. How are you?* with an exclamation mark I didn't feel and a question I didn't want the answer to. Or I did want it. That's the problem. I cared enough to reply in under a minute, standing there with my hummus and my mum's card while the machine told me there was an unexpected item in the bagging area, which. Yeah. Story of my life.
We texted for a few days. He was back in town, working for some logistics company that I gathered, from context, he thought was more interesting than it was. He remembered me from sixth form, he said. Remembered my laugh. I'm a sucker for that, someone telling me they remember something specific about me. I'm a sucker for smiles, which is another way of saying I'm a sucker.
When he asked if I wanted to grab a drink, I said yes. I said yes because I believe people can change. I told myself that. I am generous and I am open and I believe in second chances and personal growth and all that. But the truth, the actual truth that I'm only admitting now on my front step with cherry lip balm still ghosting across my mouth, is that I was lonely on a Thursday night and he has brown hair that falls in this soft way across his forehead and when he smiled in his profile picture something in my chest did a thing it had no right to do.
People change. That's what I told my friend Nessa. Nessa met him once at a house party when we were seventeen and has referred to him ever since as "that prick." Nessa who said, "Don't. I'm serious. Don't," and I said it's just a drink, and she said, "It's never just a drink with you," and she was right, and I went anyway.
The bar was his pick. Some place on the high street I'd never been to, dim enough that everyone looked better than they probably deserved. There was music playing, an indie track I almost recognised, the kind of song that sounds like every other song in its genre, all reverb and someone's breathy voice saying something about arms or light or letting go. I'll hear it in every Sainsbury's for the rest of my life and flinch.
He was already there, in a booth near the back with one arm stretched along the top of the seat like he owned the place. He stood when he saw me and smiled and the smile was exactly as I remembered it. Wide, slightly crooked, the kind that makes you feel like you've been selected for something. He hugged me and I caught his cologne, something sharp and deliberate, and then we sat down and he said, "I got you a whiskey."
The glass was already on my side of the table. He'd ordered it before I arrived. He slid it towards me across the lacquered wood and it made this sound, a wet hiss of glass on varnish that I keep replaying. Like something being decided. For me. Without me.
"Oh," I said. "Thanks."
I don't like whiskey. I wanted a gin and tonic. But correcting him felt like it would cost more than just swallowing the drink, so I wrapped my hands around the glass and smiled and said thank you and took a sip, and it burned the way whiskey does when you don't want it, which is to say more.
I'm telling you this part and I can see myself from the outside. That's the thing about telling it after. You get this horrible bird's eye view of yourself being polite, being accommodating, being the version of you that makes things easy for everyone except you. In the moment I thought I was being gracious. I don't have a clean word yet for what it actually was.
He talked about himself. The logistics company, the flat in the new builds by the canal, the car, which was a Golf GTI, which came up twice. There was a lads' holiday to Ibiza last summer and something that happened at a club that was apparently hilarious but relied on context I didn't have and didn't get offered. I laughed in the right places. I nodded. I asked follow up questions, because I am pathologically incapable of letting a conversation die, even one I'm not really part of.
At one point I tried to tell him about my job. I work for a small publishing house, mostly admin but sometimes I get to read submissions, which is the part I actually love. I got about two sentences in before he said "mad" in the way people say it when they're not listening, then pivoted to a podcast he'd started and abandoned.
I took another sip of whiskey.
Here's the thing, though. The thing that makes all of this worse, or more complicated, or whatever word fits. About halfway through the evening he told me about his sister. Camila. She'd just graduated from uni, first in the family. And when he talked about her his face changed. The performance dropped away and he was just a bloke who was proud of his kid sister, saying how she'd walked across the stage and their mum had cried and he'd filmed the whole thing and his hand was shaking in the footage. He laughed at himself for that. A real laugh, not the one he'd been using all night.
It lasted maybe thirty seconds. Then he picked his phone up to show me the video, got distracted by a notification, and the moment closed like a door.
But I saw it. That's what makes men like him dangerous, I think. Not that they're entirely terrible. Entirely terrible would be easier. You could point at it and say there, that's the problem, and walk away. It's the pockets. The small warm pockets inside all the cold where you catch a glimpse of someone worth knowing and think maybe, maybe if I wait it out, that person will stay.
He won't. I knew it then, sitting in that booth with my whiskey I didn't want, watching his face go soft for his sister and then hard again for his phone. I knew it and I stayed.
A woman walked past our booth on the way to the loo. Dark hair, red dress, tall. His eyes followed her for a full three seconds, which doesn't sound like much until you're the one sitting opposite, counting. He didn't even try to make it subtle. And the strange thing is I wasn't angry. I was tired. Oh, I thought. Yes. This part. Different bar, different man, same look, same feeling in my chest like a drawer being slowly emptied.
I said something about needing to get going soon. He said "yeah, no, for sure" and didn't ask for the bill for another twenty minutes.
In the car park he put his hand on the small of my back as we walked and I let him. Another thing I'm cataloguing after the fact. The letting.
His Golf was clean inside in a way that felt intentional, like he'd hoovered it before picking me up, which I suppose could be flattering if you wanted it to be. The seats were cold vinyl. When I sat down the backs of my bare thighs stuck to the material and I remember thinking I want to get out, a clear clean sentence in my head, not panicked, just certain. My body knew before my brain filed the paperwork.
He drove me home. We made small talk. I asked about his mum and he said she was good and I said "that's good" and then we sat in the spectacular emptiness of two people who have absolutely nothing to say to each other.
He pulled into my driveway and left the engine running.
"This was fun," he said.
"Yeah. Thanks for the drink."
Then he leaned across the console. No preamble, no question, no reading of the room or of my face or of anything at all. His hand went to the back of my neck like he was picking up a cat and his mouth was on mine, all pressure and intention, a hard purposeful kiss that had nothing in it for me. No tenderness, no curiosity. A mouth arriving at another mouth like a box being ticked.
I went rigid. My whole body locked. And there was a split second, a tiny horrible gap, where I didn't pull away. My first instinct was to accommodate him. To be polite about the man putting his tongue in my mouth without asking. Then I got my hand on his chest and pushed.
"I should go inside," I said.
He leaned back and smiled. That smile. "Yeah, cool. I'll text you."
I said okay. I got out and the vinyl peeled away from my thighs with a small sucking sound and the cold air hit my legs and I walked to my front door and didn't look back, but I heard him reverse out, heard the engine note change as he pulled away, and then it was just me and the sprinkler and the porch light.
I stood there for I don't know how long. Long enough that the balm dried tacky on my mouth. I wiped it. I wiped it again. Then I unlocked my phone.
His Snapchat story was already up. Timestamp eleven minutes ago, which meant he'd posted it more or less at the end of my street. Rhys in someone's kitchen, grinning, a drink in his hand that wasn't whiskey. Someone's arm around his shoulder, half out of frame. A single fire emoji as caption. The party looked like it had been going a while, which meant he'd had somewhere to be all along. I was the warm up act.
I locked my phone and sat down on the front step. The concrete was cold through my skirt and I didn't care.
I thought about texting him something sharp, something that would let him know I'd seen it, something that would hand him even a fraction of the smallness I felt sitting on that step. But then I'd be giving him another minute. Another moment of me, even an angry one, and he'd already taken enough of them and done nothing useful with a single one.
So I didn't text him. I just sat there.
The thing that gets me, the thing I keep circling, is that I walked into this knowing. Not suspecting. Knowing. Nessa told me. My own gut told me in the Tesco, right there between the hummus and the unexpected item. I knew and I went anyway, and now I'm on my front step at half ten on a Thursday with synthetic cherry on my lips and a hollow feeling in my chest, asking myself the same question I always ask, which is why do I keep welcoming the wrong men into my life, and the answer is always the same inadequate shape. Because they smile. Because I'm lonely. Because I'm a hopeless romantic, which sounds charming in a book and feels mostly just hopeless in practice.
But.
There's a bloke called Sam who once spent forty minutes helping me move a bookshelf and didn't make it weird. Jacob at the publishing house asks how my weekend was and then actually waits for the answer. Bradley from uni has texted me on my birthday two years running with nothing behind it, just "happy birthday Roisin, hope it's a good one." None of them are romantic prospects. They're evidence. Proof that decency exists in the species, that someone out there knows how to sit across a table and ask a question and listen to the answer and not look at the woman walking past.
I'm still looking. For the right kiss, for the right person, for whatever it is I keep reaching for and closing my hand around empty air. I haven't found it and tonight cost me something. I can feel the cost, a little less trust, a little more edge around the word yes. But I'm not done looking. I don't know how to be done.
The sprinkler down the street cut off. The silence after it was loud, the way silence gets when you've been inside noise for a while. I pulled my cardigan tighter, unlocked the door, and went inside. My keys had left four small dents in my palm, one for each tooth. I ran my thumb across them like reading