Page 75 of Go Luck Yourself
“I don’t.”
He gives me a flat stare.
“I mean, it was magic. Unless I’m actively choosing to use magic to translate what you’re saying, I don’t speak a word of it.”
“So you were spying on me intentionally?”
“Yes.” I don’t try to cover. I hold his gaze and let the silence stretch, stretch, god it has to snap eventually, but his eyes go from suspicious to soft to—to—
I grab the vodka and take a long gulp because there’s a realization that’s swiftly fighting up through my chest with clawed fingers and once it gets into my head I am not going to be able to ignore it anymore. But for now, I can keep it down, choking for air in vodka and ale.
“It’s good Christmas’s magic lets me do that,” I add. “Half the time, it’s the only way I know what you’re even saying.”
Loch barks a laugh. “Fuck off. My accent is the pinnacle of sexy.”
“Yeah, that’s why Dublin’s the city of love? Or wait, no, that’s—” And I use magic to help me rattle off a stream of French. I’m getting tipsy and I want to see his reaction.
He has the vodka at his lips again. It holds there, his amusement careening into shock.
His cheeks pinken. “Neat trick,” he says into the bottle.
He sets it down without taking another drink, but his throat fluctuates.
I almost reach for my phone. Almost ask if I can take a picture of him and send it to Iris because that, there, that bob of his neck—something about it is worthy of being immortalized. In googly eyes or any other medium.
“Still.” He drags the back of his hand across his chin. “My accent’s a helluva lot better than yours, French or no. What you got going on, eh? Some American English inbred bullshite even though Christmas is inGreenland,which never made sense to me anyway. You lot could have your North Pole reputation without freezing your arses off. Bit of a pigheaded commitment to your mythos.”
The vodka is starting to take me and the beer is joining in so all I can do is laugh.
Loch smiles.
Mine slides right off, the way condensation’s dripping down my beer bottle.
“What’s going on with your uncle?” I whisper.
It kills the levity. Stabs it dead in the chest.
Loch picks at the label on his beer with his thumb. “You heard. He’s a bastard.”
“I gathered. But I mean—”
“I know what you mean.” He leans back and blows out a heavy exhale, and with it his armor unravels, showing exhaustion, and worry, and regret. Such potent, raging regret that I don’t know how I missed it before, glowing through the smallest cracks in his sarcastic, piss-taking exterior like molten embers burning him to ash.
He swallows more vodka. Winces at the taste, or himself.
“No one takes my Holiday seriously,” he says. “No one’s given a shite about us in generations. We’re the Holiday of drinking and partying and green fucking beer. My father believed that, and his father, and half our court. They do na take themselves seriously—what hope have we ever had, tobesomething?”
“Youdon’t believe that.” Not a question. A fact.
Loch takes another drink of vodka. Jesus, he’s going to finish half the bottle at this rate—I snatch it from him but just hold it.
“No,” he whispers to the table. “I do na believe that.”
Then he looks up at me with a burst of energy, soalivein an intoxicating joy, I feel spotlit by his passion.
“It’s a celebration of our people. A celebration of their survival in the face of political and religious instability. In the face of starvation and oppression and the fucking English’s attempts at genocide. It’s everyone from Queen Medb to Grace O’Malley to Mary Robinson. It has na always been that, I know, and there are problematic parts to be sure. I mentioned earlierthe luck of the Irish? The phrase itself came from racist pricks who thought Irish success could only be because ofluck,rather than anyskill;but even that’s na fair. Wedo have luck, in our folklore and pantheons. We were built on luck long before arseholes bastardized it. St. Patrick’s Day has become the one thing we agree on even when we’re divided, even when we’re scattered across the globe. So we embrace the bad with the good, because you would na only see someone as the shite they’ve overcome, but as the fact that they did overcome it at all. My Holiday is a uniting thread of who we are and what we’re capable of and I—”
He stops.
