Emma Donoghue Two-Book Bundle Read Online Free Page B

Her elbows dug into her thighs.
    ‘I didn’t want the child of some pickup,’ she said at last, very slowly, the words emerging like pebbles. ‘Quite apart from what else I might pick up from him.’ She waited till her voice had steadied enough for her to go on. ‘I wanted the child of a nice man, and all the nice men were taken.’
    After a long minute, she felt the bed bounce as Padraic sat down beside her. ‘Not all, surely,’ he said after a minute. He sounded like a child who’d just been told the truth about Santa Claus.
    Her smile came out a bit twisted. She turned her head. ‘Don’t worry about it, Padraic,’ she drawled. ‘I get by just fine without the husband and the SUV and the house in the suburbs.’
    He didn’t know how to take that. She watched him staring at his shoes.
    ‘All I want is a child.’ Sarah said it softly. She was never so sure of anything in her life.
    ‘OK,’ he said after a minute. ‘I’ll have another bash.’ He stood up. ‘You haven’t seen me at my best tonight,’ he added hoarsely.
    She gave a little sniff of amusement and wiped her eyes. ‘I suppose not.’
    ‘You try getting an erection in a toilet without so much as a copy of
Playboy.
I’m not seventeen any more, you know.’
    Sarah giggled and blew her nose. ‘Sorry.’
Go on,
she told herself.
Make the offer.
‘Shall we just call the whole thing off, then?’
    She could tell he was tempted. Just for a minute. Until he thought of what Carmel would say.
    ‘Not at all,’ said Padraic. He stood up. ‘A man’s gotta do.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘I’m going back in there,’ he declared, ‘and I’m not coming back out empty-handed. You just lie down and think of Ireland.’
    ‘No,’ she said, jumping up, ‘I’ll go in the bathroom. You could do with a change of scenery.’
    She handed him out his jar, then locked the door. She looked herself in the eye, then turned on the cold tap and washed the salt off her face.
    Padraic stood before the wardrobe mirror and stared down into his trousers. Not an enticing sight. Visibly tired, old before its time. He eyed his face and counted his wrinkles. Salmon couldn’t eat after they mated, he remembered; they just shrivelled away. What was there left for him in this life, now he had served his time, genetically speaking?
    But tonight’s job wasn’t quite over yet.
    He felt utterly exhausted. Nerves, alcohol, and a fight to round it all off. But he had to rise to the occasion now.
Noblesse oblige.
He thought of Carmel’s last birthday. He’d been knackered from work, and half a bottle of champagne hadn’t helped, but he knew she wanted to be ravished, he could almost smell it off her. So he had claimed to be full of beans, and though it took an enormous effort, it was all right in the end. He’d known it would work. It always worked in the end, him and Carmel.
    Padraic lay down on the bed. He wanted to be home in her arms.
    This room had no more resources than the bathroom, really. He flicked through the TV channels (with the sound down, so Sarah wouldn’t think he was time wasting). Not a drop of tit-illation. After five minutes of
Dirty Dancing,
he realized he was finding Patrick Swayze far more appealing than the girl, and that raised such disturbance in the back of his head that he switched off the telly.
    He lay down again and scanned the room. The prints were garish abstracts; nothing doing there. There was the phone, of course. If only he had memorized a number for one of those chat lines. He’d rung one once, in a hotel room much nastier than this one, somewhere in the North of England. All he remembered was that the woman on the line had a terribly royal-family accent, and spoke very, very slowly to bump up his bill.
    If he rang downstairs and asked for the number of a chat line, he was sure to get Máire. She’d tell her mother. She’d probably tell
his
mother.
    Padraic shut his eyes and tried out a couple of trusty old fantasies. Only they