Saturday, 25 June 2022 | 10.6°C Dublin

J une’s winning story

New Irish Writing illustration by Stephanie Teixeira Agbele

Mike Guerin, the winning short story selection for New Irish Writing in June

I watch him sleep. His chest has a few white hairs on it. It’s an impressive chest; tight with muscle even when he is at his most relaxed, it’s like something you’d imagine Clooney had in his prime. He is handsome, strong forearms, scarily blue eyes — he is so my type. He was funny, sweetly self-deprecating but not afraid to use big words; he thought I was clever too. He listened to me and laughed and smiled. I love him. I can feel it. The love started to course through me after we had sex again at dawn. I feel like a teenager. I feel like writing poetry. I feel like writing his name on my diary. I feel like naming an over-hugged teddy after him. I am overwhelmed by the potential of our life together, will he want children, will we travel, will we do jigsaws together whilst I wear his jumper and nothing else, him eyeing me like a wolf, waiting to pounce? The fantasy futures are piling in on top of each other, the possibilities are endless. Air seems to fill my lungs in a way that was not possible yesterday, here in this room, a room full of the smell of morning person, full of the musky scent of what we did, here, air seems purer. My eyes, even in this curtained room, feel sharper, reality is realer. The touch of the bog-standard bed sheet on my thighs feels like a silk caress when I move, it makes me flutter.

A t the meal, I touched my hair a lot. I accidentally touched him. I touched the back of his hand on purpose. I smiled all the time. And it’s the same as smiling. The wellness gurus tell you that if you smile, you feel happier. I believe it to be true, I believe in all the endorphins and hormones. If you do all the things that women are supposed to do when they fancy someone rotten, you start to fancy them rotten, and it makes it so much easier to fall madly in love in a short space of time.

We have all of today to celebrate our new-found love. We’ll probably have breakfast together, either here in bed or, if he is feeling it too, we might go somewhere nice. I don’t mind either way, I just want to feel the love in me, prickly, deep-breathed love. It feels so good. I like to drink, but not when I’m meeting someone, I want a clear head or else it doesn’t always work. I’ve smoked some weed and had a brief dalliance with cocaine, but neither of them holds a candle to oxytocin. In case you don’t know, oxytocin is what a woman’s brain releases during sex, the love drug they call it. It makes us fall in love. Men’s brains release dopamine, a fleeting pleasure, like sniffing a popper. Our brains go all out, they give us the hormonal equivalent of heroin. I don’t know why more women don’t do it, it’s a totally safe high, once you understand what you’re doing that is, once you recognise the oxytocin for what it is, a type of hallucinogenic.

There are certain rules. It can start on Friday or Saturday but it has to be over, completely over, by Monday morning. I’ve never had a love-hangover last past Wednesday. There’s to be no “hair of the dog”; no texting, no social media — I give the wrong phone number if asked. It is a real number though — I enjoy the idea of the person who owns the number answering their phone and being reminded of my name. You also have to meet somewhere you will not meet any friends or previous loves; I change gym memberships regularly, I shop in different supermarkets, I join different clubs and change hobbies pretty much monthly. They usually ask me for my number and I ask: “Why?”

“So I can ask you out.”

They like that and then they ask me out and then they ask me for my number again and I say: “Let’s do it the old-fashioned way and just meet at the restaurant.”

I get taken to nice restaurants because I do spend a lot of time on my appearance, I need to look desirable in order to get them to fall for me too. It helps if they do, fall for me, to a certain extent, even though it is just fleeting with men, they always get over their mixed-up, little “falling in lust” routine that they do, real love for them only comes with time, they get their oxytocin from long-term relationships. That’s why they want to spend so much time with the lads, because they do, actually, love them. Not many of them like to hear that though.

Some rules: no workmates or people you meet through work, no former classmates, no friends of friends, not that I have many friends because, like heroin, the drug does take over your life to an extent but I feel on balance it is worth it. Oh, and never at a wedding, people are obsessed with tracking the process of wedding hook-ups, I think it’s because they love when one wedding spawns another wedding. You can meet someone at a funeral.

He’s smiling in his sleep. I think he’s in deep. I have to let myself enjoy this and not think about the times that things have gone wrong. Rarely, very rarely, a fella will get a bit obsessed with finding me. One boy, who was very sweet, went on the radio and told the nation that he had met the love of his life but had obviously gotten my phone number wrong, he described me on the radio and made me sound even better looking that I am. I’m a solid eight but the boy had me worked up to a ten in his addled head, maybe his chemicals got mixed up, maybe his dopamine production centre was leaky. There were lots of calls about ways to find me and people who thought they might know me until a woman rang up and said maybe she gave you a fake number on purpose and to just leave me alone. That took the wind out of his sails. Another lad put a half-page ad in the paper. Mad stuff. I didn’t even think he had been that into me. He might not have been looking for me for the right reasons, he was potentially dangerous, the likes of him are why I don’t let anyone ever take my picture, social media would have me found in five minutes.

I’m making it sound very serious, and you do have to take it seriously but we’re getting off the point. The point is that every weekend that I have a date is Notting Hill, every time it’s Pretty Woman. I reference two of her films because I do look a bit like her and she’s a devil for falling hard. That emotional release that I used to get vicariously from a good romcom is something I can give myself for several hours at a time, I can swim in it — it. What is it? Bliss, romance, love? But what it is not is the waning love of a relationship. My love is a fresh, new moon every time. Heroin users lament the inability to recreate that first hit. Someone needs to get them on the love train, every time is as good as the first time. You do need to be able to compartmentalise, do a bit of double-think. You have to be able to know what you’re doing whilst simultaneously giving yourself entirely to the lie, sort of like method acting. I might have been a good actress but I wouldn’t have been able to do what I do if I was in the public eye.

The high is everything to me now, my nerve endings buzz coming up to a date, waiting for that sweet oxytocin hit. It’s a guilt-free drug, it is doing my body no harm, the opposite in fact, it is good for me. And I don’t feel guilty about using men as a type of needle to administer the drug, that’s what they want to be doing anyway. I sometimes think I’m engaged in a form of redress. I’m doing this for my sisters who have fallen for arseholes or fellas who weren’t ready for commitment or plain old liars. I’m lying when I tell myself that because I am really doing it for myself, for my high, there are no selfless addicts.

“I’m falling in love with you.”

I say this sometimes, when I think it will work, to increase the tempo, ratchet the intensity. He’s taken aback. He looks at me and smiles and shakes his head.

“I think I’m falling in love with you too.”

“Let’s go get breakfast.”

We get breakfast. The place is fancy. He tells me about his life. He tells me secrets and I tell him ones too, safe ones, but real secrets nonetheless; you have to give of yourself to make it work. He draws circles on the back of my hand and glances at me from under his besotted eyelids.

“This feels like a dream.”

“It is a dream,” I tell him.

He makes my answer mean, at this moment, what we both want it to.

Mike Guerin, the winning short story selection for New Irish Writing in June

Mike Guerin is a writer, drama teacher and ­strawboy. His writing was third in Kanturk Arts ­Festival’s flash fiction ­competition in 2018 and second in the ­Ballydonoghue Bardic Festival short story competition in 2021. He has had stories included in ‘The Same Page Anthology’ and ‘The Galway Review’ (online).

New Irish Writing, edited by Ciaran Carty and appearing in the Irish Independent on the last Saturday of each month, is open to writers who are Irish or resident in Ireland. Stories submitted should not exceed 2,000 words. Up to four poems may be submitted. There is no entry fee. Writers whose work is selected will receive €120 for fiction and €60 for poetry. You can email your entry, preferably as a Word document, to newirishwriting68@gmail.com. Please include your name, address and contact number, as well as a brief biographical paragraph. Only writers who have yet to publish their first book can be considered.

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