Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
Six days after I left my fourth boyfriend, I spent twenty hours with this guy—a stranger, really—in his cramped bedroom in Glasnevin.
This fourth boyfriend and I had been together for a period of close to three years. When we met, he was eighteen and I was eighteen-and-a-half and we both lived in New York. Now we were twenty-one, and lived in Dublin, though only for a little while longer. Outside of these numbers and locations, nothing else had really changed except the length of his hair, which began as short curls stacked atop his head, then gradually reached down near his shoulders, and ended back as short curls, even shorter this time, the Sunday night I told him I didn’t want to be eighteen anymore, I wanted to be an adult woman.
Less than a week later I was underneath this Glasnevin man, with my fourth boyfriend being truly and legitimately the furthest thing from my mind.
He had asked me out, Mr. Glasnevin, two days after the breakup. This was by no means an accident. He, a fellow student in one of my literature courses, had asked the same question once before, and I’d found myself devastated when saying no. I think this was because I’d once overheard him talking about, His music. The possessive pronoun on that one really had me going crazy.
So anyway, in class again, the last class of the year in fact, I made sure to tell my sort-of-friend, the boy who sat every day in the unassigned assigned seat next to me, rather loudly that my fourth boyfriend and I had broken up, but that I felt totally ok about it—better than ok, healed, ready, grown. My planning genius succeeded in its purpose. After the lecture finished, my intended target sidled up to my desk very pouty and deep and interesting, with eyes that screamed, I couldn’t help but overhear.
We met at a bar that night. He ordered soda. I was nervous and spoke too much. I think I mentioned my childhood best friend from back in Alabama three times. He had not known I was from Alabama. He had thought I was from New York—born there and grown there and perhaps never having left the boroughs, not even once, before boarding the flight to Ireland. The news that I existed pre New York seemed to disappoint him.
He had never asked for my number, so I had not given it, and he searched the next day for my academic email on a club roster form. I received the message in my inbox late that afternoon, almost night.
FROM: ********@tcd.ie
SUBJECT LINE: Our Next Date (Maybe?)
Three days later, we met at the coffee shop in the Botanic Gardens, his idea. He ordered hot chocolate, and stared at me as his slim, callused fingers popped pink marshmallows into his thin mouth. He asked me what I wrote about—I hadn’t remembered mentioning that I was a writer, I’m actually sure now I never did—so I told him, I dunno, loads of things, I guess. He said he’d love to read something some time, but in a way that made it clear he truly wouldn’t. I told him I’d like that, but in a way that made it clear I actually would like that, and was sorry he never would.
His eyes were both somehow stoic and joking, I remember that still. He looked at me with completely unchanging emotion, and yet sometimes cocked his head the smallest bit to the side, as if to say, Don’t you get it, I don’t take myself seriously, either.
He grabbed my hand as we walked by the garden’s pond. His hand was small and cold and soft, and I felt that the skin was actually only toughened on the tips of three of his fingers, and not all of them. I hadn’t thought of it as a particularly chilly day, but around us, frost clung to dead leaves and thin blades of grass. I imagined the crunch I could make by jumping onto this frost, but kept my feet planted on the path beside his.
We walked past two squirrels standing together at the base of an oak tree, and he said very suddenly, as if for no reason at all though perhaps I’ve just forgotten it, that he did not like his father. I said, Ok. He continued that he did not like his father because he was both selfish and angry, but more than that perhaps, because he just bored the fuck out of him these days. Then he said his father’s name out loud, and I made the connection that I’d heard his father on the radio before. I told him this, thinking it very interesting and serendipitous, but he kept staring forward at the path ahead of him with eyes that told me it was neither interesting nor serendipitous, and I shouldn’t have mentioned I had heard his father ever at all.
I asked him if he didn’t drink because of his father. He laughed at that and asked why that would be. I dunno, I responded, Maybe I’m just saying that because my dad’s an alcoholic. Well, he really looked at me then. Right in the eyes. It made me uncomfortable and I turned away, but then he asked if I’d like a cup of tea at his place, and I said, Yes. His home was coincidentally, definitely not purposefully, very near the gardens indeed.
He warned me on the walk up the house’s small front path, circumscribed by neat garden plots, that he lived with his parents, and they may be home. I said that was fine. I sort of liked it, all things considered; it made me feel fifteen.
Inside, his home was beautiful. The surfaces were very clean and stacked with glossy catalogs, with blue walls confined by white accents and photographs of the family encased in glass shadow boxes. The kitchen, where he led me, was framed with windows on three sides and a large whiteboard calendar next to the door from which we’d entered. On the board’s surface were written little notes about different family members’ activities, when and where they needed to be picked up, when to pay bills or grab dry cleaning. The letters were written in a very neat, feminine hand.
He had me sit at the breakfast nook in the corner of the kitchen as he fixed the tea. The windows made me feel very cold. I traced my finger along some of the cookbooks stacked on the plastic tablecloth in front of me. There were sticky notes attached to some pages, with the occasional star drawn in bright red pen on the scraps of paper to highlight which tapas recipe looked the best or which roast seemed most perfect for a family of three.
The kettle heated quickly. I remember thinking, All kettles here seem to heat with twice the speed of the ones back home. He opened a cabinet near the fridge, and slid a drawer filled with boxes of crackers and chocolate and biscuits all the way out before finding the tea he wanted. When he poured the hot water over the tea bags, already waiting at the bottom of the mugs, he stayed facing away from me. I was busy though, picturing my own family’s kitchen in my mind. Setting it against the kitchen here before me, creating a dual image, two kitchens stacked on top of each other in the same space. Resting atop the whiteboard, my mother’s large, wooden spoon she’d nailed to the wall after my grandma died. In the breakfast nook where I now sat, my old dog’s bed rested with his half-ripped toys spilling out over the marked cookbooks. The drawer of dry goods, still pulled out into empty space, now filled with Tabasco and cornbread mix and my little sister’s Lucky Charms.
He turned, and his kitchen became his again, with mine receding across the Atlantic. He walked across the room to me quickly, even though it felt as if nothing had changed. He grabbed my forearms, and pulled me up then against the counter to my left, where he kissed me with his full body pressed against mine. The granite cut into my lower back, and he continued to bend me so deeply that I was nervous my spine would snap in half. This pain was all I thought of as he kissed me, even though he kissed quite well. I said nothing.
Then he led me from the kitchen silently, leaving the two steaming cups of tea forgotten by the sink. As we climbed the carpeted stairs to his room, I imagined his mother pouring the cold tea down the drain hours later then placing the empty mugs into the dishwasher with steady hands.
We fucked three times that night. After the first two, he said I should leave but when I got up he pulled me back down into his chest and brought his blue comforter up over my head so I couldn’t make out anything at all. That is until my eyes adjusted and I saw his face, so near mine, and unblinking.
He kept touching me and repeating the same phrases over and over, none of which were my name, until he eventually fell asleep. I looked over at the clock, its number half-obscured by one of his navy socks carelessly thrown there by either him or I earlier in the evening. It was past one, though to what minute remained a mystery, so I went to sleep as well.
At two, I woke to him sneaking downstairs to get us cups of water. I drank my cup in huge gulps, then held the frosty glass to my temple. With the light switched on, his room felt very small, the entirety of the floor obscured by his and my clothes strewn about and one whole corner taken up by two glossy guitars, one with strings and one without. So I laid back down and looked at the empty ceiling, cut into a half rhombus shape by his left wall. A wall I learned was shared with his father when he came home one hour later and knocked about the drawers on the wall’s other side, directly next to my head. His mother had gone to sleep in a separate room hours earlier. The boy I was with didn’t have to tell me to be quiet while his father was awake next door. I knew to be.
For the rest of the night, we kept kissing and staring at each other and staring at the ceiling and staring at the wall. Sometimes he grabbed my breasts and sometimes he didn’t. Once, with his head buried in my hair, he sang to me softly, barely audible, in the darkness of that room. He had a truly lovely voice. I told him this.
He asked if I was happy or sad to return to New York so soon. I said that I did not know. He told me he dreamed of moving to New York. I told him that I had always wanted to live in Dublin. We barely touched as we said this, only the length of our forearms connected at the center of the bed.
We woke the next day at noon before he murmured, Alright it’s time. I said nothing, just immediately stood and began to gather the clothes I’d lost one by one the night before. He grabbed my hand then, while still laying on the bed, that’s how damn small that room was, and asked me why I said nothing, just always did exactly what he told me to do. I said I did not know. He asked me if I would let him do whatever he wanted to do with me. I said probably I would.
He pulled me back onto him then, and we fucked again, with him on top repeating constantly in my ear that he could do whatever he wanted to me, and me agreeing each time with a simple, Yes. And yet that felt like a very true conversation. So much so I considered asking him to get off so I could write it down quickly. I wrote it on his ceiling in my mind instead, adding another letter each time he pulled backwards before thrusting his body back over mine again, constantly looking at me, never not looking dead into my face.
After that, it truly was time to leave. I began to dress and so did he. He put on this tiny pair of GAA shorts, white with red stripes up the sides, then hesitated for only a second before pulling on the shirt that I had worn the day before. My shirt, only sometimes attractive on me, fit him quite well. He looked at himself in the mirror for a long while. I said nothing, just continued to stand there with my jeans on and my breasts out. He then went back to the opposite end of his room, and reached into his chest of drawers very knowingly. He took out a red jersey which he pulled over my head himself, with my hands raised like a small child. He explained it was for the team in his home village back in Leitrim, where he had grown up. Then he turned me so my body faced the mirror which hung loosely on the back of his door.
We stood side by side then, staring into that mirror. Him in my college shirt, me in his jersey. He was only a few inches taller than me, but his chest was twice as wide across, which I had not noticed before. His hair was dark and short and matted. He did not smile at his or my reflection, and I did not either. We both had blue eyes.
When we had our shoes on, I asked him how I should go about sneaking out of his house without his parents seeing me. He looked at me very funny then. I can see his face now, his eyes wide and his hand resting on the golden doorknob of his bedroom.
“We’re both adults.”
So we walked down the stairs without making our bodies smaller, and out the front door without stopping to silence the click of its close behind us. Halfway down the garden walk, I turned and found his form stalled on the stoop, his body perfectly framed by the entrance to his father’s house. He looked at me standing in his garden, then he continued on.
He walked me to the bus then, and waited, leaning slightly against the stop’s dirty glass, until it came. He looked awkward and pained, saying nothing at first, then asking if he could have my number. I looked into his face. I did not hesitate, and wrote a string of random numbers onto the receipt for my coffee from the day before. I handed it to him so our fingers did not touch. Then he hugged me halfway, and I got on the bus.
I climbed to the second level, and sat in the back as I always did. When I turned to look out the window, he was walking home already, walking away from me, the dark fabric of my shirt eating up the afternoon light which shone onto his back. Behind him, a piece of paper floated into the middle of the road, my handwriting staining its white creased surface. I turned to face the empty seats.
Beyond the front window, Glasnevin’s squat, brick buildings rose before me like rows of baby teeth. I watched them alone.
Reese Alexander is a junior studying English and creative writing at Barnard College. Her stories have been published in Quarto, Echoes, Flash Fiction Magazine, Five on the Fifth, Literally Stories, and Trinity College Dublin's The Attic. She may be reached via email at era2146@barnard.edu.