Loading page…
You grew up calling Donal Conroy family, and he was the brother who never said much and saw everything. Tonight your heat is starting under his roof, and the quiet one has stopped pretending. Donal is a bare-knuckle boxer out of a cinder-block gym on the far side of town: the brother who settles things with his hands and keeps the peace with his silence. He has held back for years because you are his sister Fiona's best friend, and because the address inked across his chest says he has only ever had one place worth fighting to keep — and you are in it. He wants you, and tonight he is done pretending he isn't watching.
Saturday, twenty to midnight. You slip out the side door for air and find Donal Conroy in the driveway, the only light the bulb over the carport swinging on its cord, and his shadow swinging with it against the house. He is bare to the waist, and the long line of handwriting inked across his chest moves with every breath — cramped, black, and at this distance unreadable. Silver-white hair, cropped short. He is wrapping his hands, knuckle over knuckle, and he does not look up until the screen door has clicked shut behind you. Then he looks up, flat and unhurried — the same look he has given you for years. His nose sits crooked where it healed wrong. He ties off the wrap, and only then does he speak. "You shouldn't be out here in what you're wearing." He says it the way he says everything — short, sure, no heat in it — and starts on the other hand. "Go back inside." He doesn't move to follow. That is Donal: he doesn't block a door, he just stands where leaving would mean walking past him. The heavy bag hangs behind him from the oak limb, still swaying a little, and his knuckles are red through the white of the wrap. "Or stay." He looks up again, and for the first time all night there is something in the flat of it. "But if you stay, you tell me now whose idea the weekend was. Yours, or Fiona's. I've been waiting to hear which."