“Yeah,” James said, with a breath of a laugh, and it almost startled her, to be brought back to him again, back to here. She had been drifting. But her hands were on him, her lips were on him, and when she moved her left hand, she felt his ribcage under her fingers, and more than that, she felt him go entirely still.
“I can count your ribs,” she said, and she counted them: two, four, eight of them. He laughed again, the same hesitant wheeze, and this time, when she put her lips to his neck, she let her tongue touch on his skin as well, and he gasped. He said her name. It was a question, she knew; maybe, she knew in some part of herself, it was a warning.
“Catherine,” he said, and she let her hand go lower.
“Catherine,” James said again, but now his hands were moving too, and he was not asking her anything anymore.
And just the touch of him made her come.
And she knew why it was working for him. She knew why it was that he was able to do this. He did not stay hard the whole time, and she knew why this was, but it did not take him long to recover, and she did not mind — it did not occur to her to mind — that he did so looking not at her, but elsewhere: at the ceiling, at the wall, it did not matter. Nothing mattered. She knew what this was. It was touch; he was desperate for it. With Nate — she pushed him instantly back out of her mind — it had been more than he could deal with, more than he could bear, but with Catherine, it was different. With Catherine, it was a deal.
And everything was such a relief; that was what struck her. Everything, as they kissed, as they touched, as they fucked. Everything was a relief, and everything was like the end of something, the end of a problem or a misunderstanding that had gone on, now, for far too long. And she did not think, lying there afterwards, that she would long for this with James again. She did not think it would be necessary. She thought, the fever had been broken now; the madness had been purged. And she thought that later that morning, or early in the afternoon, she would wake and she would be able to get on with her life now, now that this business was out of the way. She would catch her train home, and tomorrow night she would go to her grandfather’s party, and she would come back to Dublin on Monday, or on Tuesday, and everything would be fresh, and everything would be clear. She lay there — laughing about it, really, the way that James, in the moments after they had finished, had been laughing about it too. Because what fun. What a lark. What devilment they had proven themselves capable of; what new knowledge they had of one another now.
And then Catherine woke up early in the afternoon, and nothing had gone away after all.
12
Her mother, smiling from the car. It was almost dark, but it was possible to make that much out: her mother’s smile. Her mother leaning over the wheel a little, as though she needed to come closer to the windscreen to get a proper look at Catherine. And, Catherine could see now, in the space between the front seats, Anna, the blond mop, the happy wave, and now she was scrambling, as she always did when they met Catherine at the train station, to get out of the car. She tumbled through the door, and she was out, and she was coming, running, and—oooof—Catherine picked her up and told her how heavy she was.
“I have six Easter eggs,” Anna said solemnly, and Catherine said that this could not possibly be true.
“Eight, because I’m sharing two.”
“Eight. That’s unbelievable.”
“And you have two for you just on your own.”
“Hello, pet,” their mother said, coming around from her door to open the boot of the car; she leaned in to give Catherine a kiss.
It could not be shown. Under no circumstances could it, or anything close to it, anything that was even a shadow of it, be shown. So the thing to do was to talk yourself, to ask questions, rather than to be asked them.
“All set for Granddad’s party?”
“He doesn’t want a bloody bit of it,” said Anna from the backseat, and both women erupted into laughter at the child’s pitch-perfect imitation of what she had so clearly been hearing all week at home.
“Stop that, you,” their mother said, as firmly as she could, and Anna gave a self-satisfied snort.
“So is there much left to do?” Catherine said, as Anna sank back in her seat, singing to herself.
“Oh, you’ll be kept busy, don’t you worry,” her mother said drily. “Monica and Fidelma are up to high-doh with the preparations.”
“You’d think it was a wedding,” came another echo of her mother from the back.
“Anna!” their mother warned, before turning to Catherine. “So what is it you’ve been so busy with?”
She slowed the car, now, for Mulligans’ cattle; the large herd was walked to the farmyard twice daily for milking from a field further on down the hill, sixty or seventy Friesians filling the road to the verges, weaving lazily through the stalled cars, nosing windscreens, swatting tails against wing mirrors.
“They’re late out this evening,” Catherine said.
“Good Friday,” her mother said. “They were probably at late Mass.”
“The cows?” Anna said, delighted with herself.
“You settle down, now,” Catherine said over her shoulder. She wanted to get off the subject of Good Friday as smoothly as possible; she was cursing herself, now, for having walked right into it. “Just this essay for English,” she said, seeing from her mother’s slow blink that she had clean forgotten her question of a few moments earlier. “It’s a big one, so I want to do a good job.”
Her mother nodded. “Where did you go to Mass today, in case you’re asked?”
“At Mass?”
“If you’re asked. I presume you didn’t go.”
“I didn’t get…” Catherine said, trailing off.
“Well. Pick a church,” her mother said briskly, and eased the car back onto the open road.
The yellow square of light on the hill as they drove towards the house. Inside, a figure moved past the window: Ellen. Catherine would have recognized the shape of her, the movement of her, even if she had been looking at a stranger’s house from a stranger’s car in a country she did not know. She was heading for their bedroom, where they would meet to talk, as they always did the moment Catherine arrived home; they would confer on the events of the weeks since last they had seen one another.
“Ellen’s very worried about this bloody Leaving Cert,” their mother said now, clearly seeing the same thing. “Give her some reassurance, would you?”
“But it’s ages away yet.”
“That’s what I keep saying to her. She can’t go on like this for the next two months.”
“She’s got exam stress,” Anna clarified. “She needs to take a break and do an activity.”
“Where did you hear that?” Catherine said, laughing; it did not sound like their mother.
“The radio,” Anna shrugged, clicking herself free of her seatbelt.
“So who was at the party?” Ellen said, sprawled across her bed. “Was Robert Emmet there?”
She had heard, on a previous visit of Catherine’s, of James’s nickname for Emmet, and had approved of it.
“No,” Catherine said. “Nobody from college was there.”
“What were you doing there, then?”
“James.”
“Oh,” Ellen nodded. “Cool.”
Ellen was the only one in Catherine’s family who knew that James had returned to Ireland; Catherine had told her in a phone call that first Sunday, warning her to check, first, that there was no way their mother, much less their father, might be within earshot. James was still an unmentionable subject with her parents; James would always be that way, Catherine suspected. He had gone to Germany, far away and unable to influence their daughter, and that was all that mattered to them. That weekend the previous summer, when Catherine had stepped over the line so astonishingly, simply, now, had not happened; the shouting had not happened, and the arguing had not happened, and the aftermath, the weeks of creeping around under a cloud of anger and trouble, simply had not happened. With Ellen it was different, obviously; Ellen liked the sound of James, laughing at the things Catherine told her about him, at the lines of his that Catherine quoted to her, as though they were lines from films. But none of what had been happening over the last couple of weeks could be told to Ellen; she and Ellen had always told each other about the boys they liked, and the boys they had been with, but this was different. This was, Catherine felt, somehow shameful; that was what this was. This was not something that Catherine could stand for her sister to know. Which made it a first, yes — but some things needed, surely, to be that way. They were getting older. They were moving on, on their separate streams.