“No one had any orgasms last night.”

“Whatever. You know what I mean. You’re all gaga over Michaél and I didn’t want to spoil the mood. It wasn’t a big deal, anyway. He’s just not a fan of the cliffs, and tonight he’s going to tell me why.”

“How come? I mean, if this thing between you isn’t a thing, why bother?”

I pause the applying of mascara to shrug. “I have no idea. But I’m not going to fight it. He’s hot, he’s into me, and I’m leaving in a few days. What could possibly go wrong?”

Erin rolls her eyes. “I’m the wrong person to ask.” She leaves me alone in the bathroom.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I yell out after her, but I get no response.

“Whatever,” I mumble to myself. I need to wrestle this hair into something resembling a ‘do before Donal gets so tired of waiting he leaves me behind again.

Ten minutes later and I’m there. Erin has laid out the perfect outfit for me on my bed. I force her to sit up in her bed and hug me.

“I’m totally sick to my stomach right now,” she says.

I let her lie back down. “Me too. I’m hoping some hair of the dog will help me get through it.”

“Beware the hair of the Guinness dog, that’s all I’m saying.” She rolls over onto her side, turning her back to me.

I rest my hand on her hip. “You going to be okay alone tonight?”

“Me? Alone?” Her eyes are closed and her voice is fading. “I have Mrs. O’Grady and her pet cemetery cat to keep me company. What more … could a girl…” She snores the rest of her thought out.

I’m dressed, perfumed, and ready to go less than five minutes later. Donal stands and comes to the bottom of the stairs as I reach the foyer below.

“Ye look very pretty.” He holds out his hand for mine, making me feel like some sort of princess as I descend the last step.

“Thank you. You do too.”

He leads me from the foyer to the front door.

“Goodnight, Mrs. O’Grady. See you before eleven!”

“Goodnight, deary! Have a nice time!”

Donal is driving a truck that looks like it’s been zapped by a shrink-ray. There’s room for the two of us in the front and maybe a couple cases of beer in the back. I hold my laughter in, knowing that to laugh at a man’s truck in any country is to call his masculinity into question.

He opens the door for me and shuts me in once I’m settled, and we drive to the bar in silence. I want to fill the awkward space with words, but nothing will come to mind; nothing that doesn’t sound trite or full of emptiness, anyway. Why do I feel like I need to confess the secrets I hold in my soul when I’m next to him? It makes no sense, so my default reaction is to do nothing at all.

The meal is delicious. Fish and chips that according to Donal are the very best available outside of England. We both sit back with a pint of beer when it’s all over and smile at one another.

“Care for a dessert?” he asks. “I’d be happy to share.”

“Share? Please. I don’t share sugar.”

“Not even with me? I let ye ride Big Dick, after all.”

My face goes red with his flirting. I thought I could handle anything from any guy, but Donal has superpowers or something because he’s making me feel like a virgin all over again. Thank goodness I have learned as an attorney to hide my emotions well.

“Okay, maybe with you,” I concede, “on account of your Big Dick and everything.”

He laughs so loud, everyone around us looks over. Several of them smile along with us, and it almost makes me sad. They probably think we’re a couple and that we’re in love. I almost wish they were right.

Donal calms himself down and then goes all serious on me. “So, as I said before, I brought ye out here with the intention of apologizin’ and explainin’ myself.”

I shake my head. “You don’t have to. I’m fine with not knowing the details.” I’m worried his story will make me like him more than I already do. It’s better if I can imagine he’s a jerk sometimes for no reason. It’ll make it easier to leave.

“But I want to. Ye see …” He looks off into the distance, and I can see he’s not really here with me anymore. He’s in the past somewhere. “For many years, I looked after a girl.”

“Looked after? What’s that mean?”

His eyes are back on me now. “To be fair, I didn’t just look after her. We were an item for some of that time. But it was more out of my desire than hers. She always had an eye for another fella.”

I snort very inelegantly. “She must have had bad eyesight if she preferred some other guy to you.”

He smiles, a lonely kind of expression. “Thanks for that. In any case, when we weren’t together that way, she still needed a lot of looking after. She had a bit of a problem with depression.”

“Oh. That’s a bummer.” I’m starting to get an uneasy feeling as his face goes dark.

“She was in love with this other lad, as I said, but he was married and he didn’t really treat her very well. She tried to hold on but it was too much for her.”

“What was? The relationship?”

“Not just that. Life, maybe. She went to the Cliffs of Moher and …” He shrugs and looks down into his beer mug. “It was the last I saw of her. The last any of us saw of her.”

My hear lurches. “Oh, that’s terrible.”

“Aye. It was. It still is.”

I put my hand on his and lean in trying to catch his eye. “I’m so sorry, Donal. Really, I am. You must have been so sad.”

“I was and I still am. I will never believe that there was nothing I could do. I just … I didn’t know what to say to her, what to do to make her happy.”

When he finally looks up at me I can see he’s suffering, but he doesn’t cry.

I’m desperate to bring the light back into his eyes. “There’s nothing you can do for depressed people except encourage them to get help. You’re not responsible for the decisions they make.”

“Easy to say, easy enough to hear, but not easy at all to believe in yer heart of hearts when someone ye love has … done what she did.”

I understand. I stand up and grab my coat off my chair. “Come on, Donal. Let’s go take a walk.”

“A walk?”

I nod. “I want to go back to the cliffs with you. Just you and me. We don’t have to talk or do anything. I just want to be there with you.”

He stares at me for the longest time, and then he finally gets up. He doesn’t say a word, he just guides me out of the pub and into his car, and he drives us to the Cliffs of Moher.

I open the door before he has time to change his mind. “Come on, let’s go. I’d like to get there before it’s totally dark.” The sun is setting and we don’t have much daylight left.

He joins me and takes my hand. We stop about twenty feet from the edge nearest us.

“What was her name?” I ask.

“Ciara. She was twenty-two. She died on Valentine’s Day, five years ago.”

“So young,” I whisper, my heart aching for her. I cannot imagine what she must have suffered to make her want to jump from this place to the dark and jagged rocks below. Life is just beginning for a twenty-two year old. I was just there myself, and I know this for a fact.

“I will never forget her,” he says. “Sometimes I go for days or even weeks without thinking of her, and then I’ll see a photograph or hear a song and it all comes back. The moods, the sadness, the desperation.”

“What about the guy? The one she was in love with.”

“I have to convince myself not to kill him with my bare hands at least once a month. We did have one altercation that didn’t end well for him, but I’ll not be sorry for it.”

“You shouldn’t be.” I wrap my arm around his waist and pull him against me. He puts his arm over my shoulders and does the same. We both stare out into the mist and listen to the waves crash against the rocks.

I can’t think of anything profound to say, so I just say what’s in my heart. “If you ever feel like you’re losing that battle, you call me, okay?”

“But ye’ll be in Boston.”