Page 29 of An Irish Summer

“Don’t sound so surprised.”

I looked at my feet on the floor, trying to avoid wondering how anyone could manage to be charming at this hour.

“Anyway,” he said, louder than he needed to, “I’ll see you in the lobby in an hour then, yeah?”

I nodded. “Anything else I need to know while I’m getting ready?” I asked before he turned to leave. “To blend in with the locals, I mean.”

“Trainers,” he said, kicking my bare foot with his. The contact of our skin was just enough to pull me fully from sleep and into the day. “And those plaits you do sometimes.”

I smoothed my hand over my hair, wondering what else he’s observed. “Surely all the locals aren’t wearing braids, are they?”

“No.” He smiled. “I just like it when you do.”

With that, he drummed his hands on the doorframe a few times and disappeared down the hallway. I stood still for a few seconds with my hand still in my hair, staring into the empty corridor. If that was the energy he was bringing to the morning, what did that mean for the rest of the day?

I shook the thought from my brain and focused on gettingready, reminding myself we were just two friends going to a hurling match.

My hopes were dashed as soon as I pulled the silky jersey over my head. How was anyone supposed to be platonic while wearing each other’s clothes? The jersey was perfectly oversized, and I stood in front of the mirror for a second too long, examining the way Collin’s clothes looked on my body. Then I immediately distracted myself to avoid thinking about the way Collin’s clothes look on Collin’s body. And the way Collin’s body would look without Collin’s clothes.

With only ten minutes before I needed to be in the lobby, I did the exact thing I told myself I wasn’t going to do: I braided my hair.

For the second time, Collin was already slumped in a lobby chair when I arrived.

“Lars,” he called out of the room as soon as he saw me. “Come get a look at this.”

“Oh, stop. Lars,” I said down the hallway, “don’t bother. There’s nothing to see here.” Lars showed up a second later, despite my protest.

“She’s a proper Galway supporter now, isn’t she?” Collin said, crossing his arms and smiling down at me like a proud parent.

“What have you done to her?” Lars laughed. “Chelsea,” he said, “get out while you can. Before you know it, he’ll have you working on the farm and playing the fiddle.”

“Oh, feck off, mate,” Collin said. “You got to admit she fits right in, doesn’t she?”

“Don’t say yes,” I said, pointing my finger at Lars.

“Maybe it’s just the jersey,” Lars said. “And the red hair, of course.”

“Don’t you have work to be doing?” I asked, shooing him outof the lobby. We could hear him chuckling to himself as he made his way back down the hall.

“Told ya the red hair made you look like one of us,” Collin said, flicking one of my braids off my shoulder. I went to swat his hand away but he grabbed my wrist before I could. “And you did the plaits,” he said.

“Only because it keeps my hair under control in this weather,” I said, nodding out the window at the darkening sky and fighting a smile.

“So you say.” He let my wrist slip through his fingers without breaking eye contact.

“Are we sure it’s not going to rain on us?” The more I looked out the window, the more menacing the clouds looked.

“It’s Ireland, Chels,” he said. “It’s gonna bloody pour.”

The sound of my name, or the first half of it, anyway, echoed in the empty lobby. Had it not been my name, it might have just been an indiscernible sound under the thick blanket of his accent. But it was my name, and it settled around us with the weight of the clouds.

“Are ya ready, then?” he asked, looking from my head to my toes and back again, probably because I was standing there like an idiot.

“Yeah, yeah. Let’s do it.”

The stadium was already pretty rowdy when we arrived, given the match was between Galway and Dublin, and I had to shove my hands into my back pockets so I wouldn’t reach for Collin’s as we wove through the crowd. Though he didn’t seem to get the hands-to-yourself memo, because he took every opportunity to rest his fingertips on my lower back while we wound our way to our seats.

“So,” he said, nodding toward the field. “Double or nothing, huh?”

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