Seacliff

Chapter sixteen: Looking for love

1919

The tea had gone cold by the end of her tale. Saoirse's fingers quivered as she poured it into cups.

"I killed her," she whispered. "The war took my husband and my selfishness killed my daughter."

She lifted the teacup and sipped the bitter brew. It tasted rotten to her.

Saoirse got up to toss the liquid in the sink and dug around the cupboards for a suitable replacement. She found the bottle at the back of a tall shelf, filled her teacup, and downed the whiskey in one. It burned its way to her stomach, but her head felt lighter already. Another cup and her senses swam. On her third attempt, she saw the bottle was almost empty and drank it all at once.

It made her dizzy, and her arms floundered for purchase. Sorley was by her side in an instant, holding her steady. She gave in and cried at his chest for the second time that day. He said nothing – instead, he swept her up in his arms and carried her upstairs, to bed. He laid her down and stretched alongside her.

Images floated in her mind, blunted by the whiskey vapours. The amber had tinged her cheeks pink, or maybe it was the bare torso, heaving with breath mere inches from her face. Drawn to it like moths to a flame, her fingertips traced the lines of his pectorals, then ventured lower to his abdomen, sculpted like Michelangelo's David...

Except he wasn't carved in cold, lifeless marble. No, he was all hot, living flesh, twitching and gasping at her touch. Saoirse thought she could hear his heart beat, feel it in the blood rushing through his veins. Though perhaps it was her own, overpowering her perception.

The thumping built up in her ribcage and her skull. It sizzled, suffocating her. She tumbled out of bed to rid herself of her constricting skirt and fumbled with the buttons of her collared blouse. Stood in her translucent chemise, she finally cooled and regained her ease of breathing.

Behind her, Sorley shuffled across the bed. He was sitting up on the edge of the mattress, eyes gleaming as he watched her. His hesitant hands reached up to her waist and pulled her gently forward. She propped herself on his shoulders, but he stood and took his hands with him, framing her face as he kissed her.

One of his palms cupped her breast and she knew he could feel her heart pound against her ribs – she had her thumb on his erratic pulse, which slowly evened out as it matched her own. Certainly not as innocent as he looked, and she was most glad of it.

Smiling, Saoirse untied the lace keeping her chemise in place and let it flow to the floor as she rolled her shoulders back. Her fingers made quick work of his breeches and at last they stood before one another as they were. His eyes drank her in, unashamedly, hungrily, and suddenly she realised how ugly she must be.

Pregnancy, motherhood, war, each had taken its own toll over the years and her body bore the signs. Scarred and uneven with all the wrong curves, sagging in places where it should have been pert and firm. Whereas Sorley...

Oh, Sorley was a work of art. His chiselled figure could have been used to teach muscle groups in an anatomy class. His pale skin exhibited only faint or minor blemishes, which strengthened her belief that he wasn't human. Such flawless beauty couldn't possibly be human.

Saoirse hugged herself and tucked her chin into her chest, shrinking away from him. His feet inched forward. He grabbed her by the shoulders, but she didn't dare look up.

"My Saoirse," he mumbled and stooped to peck her forehead. "You are beautiful... the most beautiful, I – "

She raised her head to meet his eyes. His hands went to the small of her back as she closed in. It hadn't occurred to her how much she wanted, needed to be touched, until that split second in his arms when everything else became irrelevant. She pleaded with him, incomprehensible to her own ears, and he kissed her deeply, harder and heavier than before. Hoisted her up so their bodies blended together.

He paid homage to her every scar, to every line telling the story of the life she had lived. He drowned her in his adoration, tending to her needs while disregarding his own. But she wanted to worship him in return, to acquaint herself intimately with the intricacies of his physique.

It baffled him when she directed him to lie down and began to kiss his neck, his collarbones, his sternum, his navel... The taut muscles in his thighs twitched as she touched them. He was gasping for breath when she sat astride him and closed his eyes when their bodies joined as one, like two halves of a whole.

A wave of bliss overwhelmed Saoirse. She wept with it – happy tears, for a change – and he rose, confused, to comfort her, unintelligible in his tender mutterings.

Reassured by her smile, he flipped them around, hovering above her, watching her as he moved, quickening his pace as her hold on him tightened. This must have been something he'd done before, too, because he expertly kept the bulk of his weight off her without breaking skin contact.

Saoirse arched her back into him, ecstatic, elated, erupting, meeting the plunge of his hips halfway, crying out his name and her euphoria and deities she wouldn't otherwise mention, until her womb harvested his heat, and Sorley, spent, collapsed on top of her, his elbows barely keeping him from crushing her.

He continued to mumble in her ear, either gibberish or some foreign selkie language, and she gingerly coaxed him to slide off on his side. He grinned, his eyes hooded, and cuddled up to her after she pulled the duvet up over their sweat-coated bodies.

*

Queenie barking for her dinner roused Saoirse from her slumber. She lay paralysed in Sorley's arms for a minute, trapped between reverie and reality. Prising her eyelids apart, she forced her lead-lined limbs to move and yawned. Queenie never ceased yapping.

Lars greeted her excitedly when Saoirse came out in her winter coat. Queenie's grumbles persisted despite the head scratches. The horses were less bothered by her lengthy absence and the chickens had already gone to sleep. Once everyone had been fed and watered, Saoirse checked on the furnace in the cellar before stopping in the kitchen for a sandwich.

Hot coals still smouldered inside the cooking stove, keeping the massive iron contraption warm enough to make the room pleasant. As she munched on her supper, Saoirse became exceedingly aware of the ring on her finger and rubbed at the smooth silver with her thumb. A family heirloom from her home village of Claddagh, she had inherited it from her aunt on her eighteenth birthday and worn it both as an engagement and a wedding ring.

According to Aoife, depending on how the ring was worn, it could mean one of four things – that you were looking for love, had your heart captured, become engaged or gotten married. A rhyme rang in her head now, reminding her what the ring's symbolic design of hands clasped over a crowned heart meant:

The hands are there for friendship

The heart is there for love

For loyalty throughout the years the crown raised above.

It'd been buried in a drawer with the bloodied picture of Ciara, but at her aunt's insistence, Saoirse had unearthed the ring when moving to Scotland. She was now wearing it on her right hand, with the point of the heart towards the fingertips, to show that she was open to romance.

Had Aunt Aoife told Sorley about the ring?

"The picture..."

Sorley remembered the picture from her eighteenth birthday, where her ring was on display. He must have seen it. Must have stared at it and committed it to memory if it'd come back to him before anything else. Saoirse rushed upstairs into the study, flicked on the lights and cleared the desk to make room for Aoife's diaries from 1908 onwards.

If he'd seen the photograph, he was sure to show up after it was taken in August 1908. Maybe not for the first time, and certainly not the last, yet somehow... that picture had lodged itself in his brain and stayed there.

What had made it so memorable?