Allegiance: A Dublin Novella (14 page)

“Well, she did say you ought to be more careful with your shirts.”

Adam looked up from beneath his brow. “Wasn’t me who was uncareful, as I recall.”

“Aye, well.” William scratched his nose. “Right, I’ll not keep you then. I’ve got my errands to run and such, I just stopped off to pass that along for Mary.”

Adam nodded. “Right.” And then, “Will you be working this evening?”

“Aye. It’s my night off, but I haven’t much else to do these days.”

“Sure I know that feeling.”

“Haven’t seen you down pub in a bit.”

“No. Been busy and all.”

“Aye. Well, I’ll be off then.”

“See ya.”

“Aye, see ya.”

William’s footsteps fell too heavily on the floorboards as he listened for the sound of the closing door. Halfway to the steps he heard Adam’s voice instead.

“I’m sorry, William.”

He had stepped out into the hall, holding the package to his chest. His hair curled in damp corkscrews on his neck.

“I’d no right to embarrass you like that. I don’t know why I carried on so. If you’d been a lass I’d have expected a smack in the face.”

The brown paper in his arms had splotched with drops of water; one bare toe dug between the braids of the rug. William leaned against the banister and sighed.

“No, Adam, I’m sorry. I was rude to you. I don’t know what’s got into me to
—” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have forgotten myself like that.” He shrugged off the look on Adam’s face and gave him a smile. “No bother, right? It’s already forgotten. No harm done. And hey, now you can say you’ve got a Scottish notch on your belt, yeah?.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

William’s smile stiffened. He heard the edge peel back from his voice. “What was it, then?”

Adam’s eyes dropped; he did not reply, and William snorted. “I’ve got to go, alright? I’ll see you around.” He was four steps down the stairs before Adam called out after him.

“Fuck’s sake, William, will you stop running from me?”

William’s hand tightened on the banister until his knuckles turned white. But Adam’s voice was neither taunting nor callous – it was clear and plain, as plain as the expression on his face when William turned to look at him. Plain, and pleading.

“Come inside?”

“I can’t do this,” William said. “I can’t.”

Adam’s eyes were matte gray in the gloomy hall. “Yes you can.”

William became aware that this was the moment of his choice – that regardless of what happened in the next few breaths, the results of this moment would never and could never be undone. He knew this with perfect clarity, just as he knew that the choice had been made long ago, and with as much certainty as the sound of his feet crossing the hall and the creak of the door closing behind them.

The room was about the same size as William’s, but considerably less furnished. A frameless bed sprawled in the corner, sheets unkempt but clean; a large silver crucifix hung above the basin and pitcher on the dresser. The kitchen was smudged with old stove smoke but looked otherwise mostly unused; two empty beer bottles and a sandwich crust littered the counter by the icebox. On the table lay Adam’s shotgun and a pistol – above them, tacked to the faded wallpaper, was an enormous flag of Ireland. William took a step back.

“Fuck, Adam, I can’t be here
—”

The rest of his protest was cut off by Adam’s kiss.

William had always been proud of his control. For nine years of other people’s lives he had never wavered, never once losing his precious, crucial detachment. There had been dodgy times, maddening times, certainly frightening times, but he had never entirely succumbed to any moment. Never had he let anything he was inside of overwhelm him – not like Adam overwhelmed him, surrounding every part of him and soaking deeper into him than any sweat or tears or blood had ever done. Nine years of danger, only to be beaten now – bested by Adam’s hands on his face, the smell of his skin and the taste of his mouth. Adam poured over him like a wave over rocks, and like a drowning man William clung to his last breath of air and groped for a tether. He braced his hands on Adam’s shoulders to push himself away.

Instead, Adam tugged at his coat and scarf. “Let me, William. Just let me…”

Everything was complicated; Adam was simple. Nine years of duplicity and details, so much to remember and think about – Adam was an instinct, the simplest of realities, effortless and undeniable. Nine years dissipated to background noise, a jarring chord stuck in his head that finally stopped repeating at the moment of his capitulation.

Cool air hit his skin as Adam’s fingers undid the last button on his shirt and spread the fabric apart. William shrugged out of the shirt and let it fall behind him. He knew what Adam’s widening eyes could see: the full, jagged welt of the scar on his neck, now flushed to crimson; the splash of angry tissue along his right shoulder, reaching nearly to his bicep; the faded brown slash against his ribcage, half-hidden by his left elbow. Adam took in each mark, one at a time. He traced one finger down the nerveless skin on William’s shoulder; his palm curved around the scar until William could feel the heat seeping through the ruined skin, and then Adam’s arms slid around his neck and William could feel all of him everywhere.

William kissed him greedily, refusing to let go as they shed the rest of their clothes. Adam wriggled out of his braces and pulled back just long enough to peel his vest over his head and undo his trousers; a rush of worn fabric and he stood naked in the hazy light from the window. He was achingly beautiful, clean lines and soft shadows – the unlined skin of a boy over the dense muscles of a man. He leaned into William and kissed his mouth, his jaw, his throat; on the scar he paused, his breath clinging to the numb skin. And then his lips took its place – a single, soft kiss. William let out a breath he didn’t remember holding.

“I’ve been wanting to do that since the first time I saw you,” Adam said.

“You don’t have to feel sorry for me.”

“I never have. This scar made you who you are. I’m grateful to it.” He had shaved that morning; his cheek was smooth against William’s jaw. “It’s as beautiful as the rest of you.”

The narrow bed creaked beneath their weight. William moved on top by instinct, but Adam dodged him and he was left to roll to his back. Adam was on him in an instant, grinning down with his hair falling in his eyes and a finger on William’s lips.

“Let me, Glasgow.”

William tensed as Adam moved down his chest and settled between his spread knees. He rose to his elbows, but Adam pushed his thighs apart, thumbs drawing slow circles and mouth hot on William’s belly as he whispered.

“Open for me.”

William’s knees spread wider before he could stop them. Adam’s nose nudged through ginger hair; his tongue flicked across the crease of one thigh and William gasped.

“Christ
— just—”

He felt himself coming undone beneath the strokes of Adam’s thumbs on his bollocks, Adam’s tongue on his foreskin, Adam’s mouth around him. The knot between his shoulder blades unraveled and his elbows would no longer hold him; his right knee slipped free of Adam’s grasp and he wound the leg over Adam’s shoulder, his heel rubbing against Adam’s spine with every roll of his hips. His blood had turned to fire and his muscles to water; he canceled himself out and dissolved to a shivering, boneless ghost beneath the relentless rhythm. Adam’s thumbs stroked endless circles, pressing harder with each stroke until William spit out a choked oath, hips jerking while Adam held him down and refused to let go until every shudder was spent and William’s leg fell sprawling across the mattress.

As the white pulses ebbed from his vision he dimly saw Adam crawling up his belly, grinning as he wiped his mouth with the back of one hand before he fit himself, lithe and sinuous, against William’s trembling body. Wet lips skimmed up his jaw line, warm breath against his ear just before a soft, satisfied voice.

“There now.”

“I have to tell you something,” William said. He fought to calm his racing heart, to slow his gasping breaths. “Adam, I— there is something you must know. I need to tell you…”

“Sh.” Adam moved against him, pressing into his hip. “Later.”

William clung to his last thread of lucidity, the only thing keeping him from flying apart and pinning Adam to his back until the moans drowned out the screaming alarms in his head. Adam’s hand slid across his chest and his hips moved again, hard and insistent against William’s belly. William shuddered.

“Adam, please, listen, I can’t
…stop it, I can’t think—”

“That’s your problem, Glasgow,” Adam said. “You think too much.” His tongue drew a fiery line up the scar on William’s neck.

William moved before either of them realized it, twisting lightning-fast until Adam was on his back, both wrists straining in William’s grip, the thin bed creaking under the violent movement. He could taste himself in Adam’s mouth, smell Adam on his own skin, the lines between them blurred forever. Adam moaned and opened beneath him, all pretenses gone, yielding at last.

William stopped thinking.

18.

April 13, 1922

It rained all afternoon. What little light filtered through the window was cold and gray, murky with the changing patterns of water running down the glass. William listened to the dripping eaves, as rhythmic and constant as Adam’s slow breathing beside him. No fire burned in the stove, and the bedside lamp did little to ease the chill outside the tangle of blankets; William lay with one arm beneath his head and stared at the ceiling, watching the morphing shapes of light move across the whitewash, until his eyelids finally closed.

“Do you have any Gaelic?”

William started awake but managed not to flinch. Adam had not moved; he lay sprawled on his belly in the rumpled sheets, eyes closed and breathing even. His question was so odd that William answered it.

“No, I don’t.”

Adam’s voice was muffled by the pillow beneath his cheek. “They don’t teach Irish in school – not in Dublin, anyway. They go on about doing it but there’s none of us can speak it. I wondered what it was like in Scotland.”

“No one’s spoken Gaelic in Glasgow for two hundred years. That’s only up north now, I think.”

Adam’s eyes opened; he pushed himself up onto one elbow and rubbed his tousled hair. His brows scrunched together in sleepy curiosity, his shoulders striped with crinkled sheet-marks.

“Have you nothing of your culture, then?”

William’s head turned. “Of course we do,” he snapped, and it was only after the words came out that he heard how sharp they were. Adam merely watched him, as he always did.

Of course he had his own culture. What a stupid thing to ask. William thought of street fairs and football matches, fiddle music and toffee apples and chasing his sister through the park. Scrabbling to look over the top of his uncle’s bar, begging to be picked up so he could wrap one chubby hand around the tap and pretend to help. He thought of shillings in his pocket and flags on the awnings and the hoarse sound of his father shouting in the street.

He didn’t need Gaelic to be Scottish
– he had his own language sure enough. He almost smiled, thinking of the Cambridge lasses leaning over his shoulder, handing him slips of poetry to read aloud while they blushed; and later, of damp whispers along quivering throats that shuddered beneath his words. And then he thought of rapped knuckles and shorn consonants, shrill correction and endless rote until they all got it proper, and the clipped disdain of Lord Christopher’s sneer
.
And yet you managed to retain that accent, I see.

“We have our way,” he said.

Adam poked a finger into the hair on William’s chest and began tracing idle patterns. “My brother taught me some – Irish, I mean. He learned it at university. He used to show me words sometimes.” He twirled an auburn curl around his fingertip. “Didn’t anyone show you any Gaelic when you were small?”