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Thirty-something birthdays are a lot less fun than twenty-something ones, mused Erin, as she idly sketched patterns with one finger in the condensation on her wine glass.
Throughout Uni, and all the way through their twenties, celebrating each others’ birthdays was a big deal. It didn’t matter what any of them were doing — the girls would drop whatever other plans they had without a care, and meet up for a night on the town.
James had once flown back from Norway mid-shoot for Orla’s shindig, and had needed to take an obscenely early plane back the next morning whilst running on no sleep and nursing the mammy of all hangovers. Clare had feigned illness to delay a case she had been prosecuting to get the ferry back for one of Erin’s pissups, although she’d later claimed that her subsequent grouchiness the following day had proven a key asset in her success in court.
Even Michelle had done it, causing babysitters no end of grief by dumping her wain on them at short notice for overnight stays. She'd stood up a date once, when she’d realised she’d double booked on one of her cousin’s birthdays; it didn’t seem to be much of a big deal for her, and Erin secretly thought her friend had been looking for a half-believable excuse to drop the fella for weeks anyway.
Their 30ths had been the big ones, though; each celebration being a thing of legend as they congratulated each other on getting the adulting thing down pat while simultaneously drinking a selection of pubs dry.
Then, exactly a year ago, James had been the first to turn thirty one, and they’d seemingly all been hit by maturity at once.
Each of their 31sts had been a washout; whether it had been Clare trapped by a high-profile trial scuppering her flying over for Michelle’s get-together, James’s flight being delayed stopping him getting home for Erin’s, or Orla getting some form of stomach bug the day before her own (which didn’t stop her passing it on to what felt like half of Derry), life had seemed determined to make getting the girls together impossible.
So Erin hadn’t had high hopes for any effort being made for James’ 32nd.
All he’d gotten from Clare was an e-mailed birthday message and a brief call before having to dash, either unable or unwilling to tear herself away from work that year. Orla was stuck in America, of course, midway through her latest camogie tour; she’d given him a quick shout-out on her oddly popular ESPN interview the previous week, but other than the birthday card sitting on the mantle she’d been out of contact.
Michelle had come around about lunchtime, giving him the traditional slug in the arm and bottle of Bushmills, but she’d left fairly sharpish too; she’d not even taken the offered tot of whiskey to celebrate, saying that she needed to drive back to Belfast to pick up wee Séamus from the childminder’s before she got billed extra, again.
So, as was frequently the norm in their home on any other given evening, Erin and James spent his birthday sitting at their kitchen table, sharing a bottle of vino and chatting about everything and anything.
Only, she wasn’t really chatting much.
The birthday boy himself was having a good time, having decided to do an impromptu theatre performance for her. He was dashing around the kitchen doing an enthusiastic, if somewhat tipsy, re-enactment of their various escapades over the years, in a sort of ‘best of’ compilation.
She watched him with amusement as their cats, Romana and Seamus (who was named before Michelle’s wain, Erin always pointed out), wove themselves around his legs like they hadn’t just been fed, and threatened to trip him up while he sang the Spice Girls and did that stupid dance they’d spent a week learning back in the 90’s.
It wasn’t just amusement, though; she was in deep contemplation too, about him in particular. Erin had been having many thoughts about James going through her head, and it had not been helped by Anna’s parting comment to her at the ferry terminal a few weeks previously.
“You’re never going to find a better man for you than your not-boyfriend, so make a fucking move already; he’s a modern-day knight in shining armour, even if he does have the general profile of an upturned mop, and quite frankly everyone is getting tired of you two dancing around each other. It’s his birthday next month, so give him a good present.”
Those words had been running through her head pretty much constantly since she’d waved them off.
Not-boyfriend…
Erin would have been lying to herself if she said she didn’t still have feelings for James, despite more than five years of platonically sharing a house together; he was her best friend, but disturbing the equilibrium they’d settled into? That was an intriguing, if scary, thought.
When she’d first moved in, the butterflies in her stomach had been in full force whenever she was near James — whenever she even thought about him, even. She’d tried to stamp them down at first, but over the years she’d learned to cage them up instead; she could still admire them, she could acknowledge them. She could let herself feel them, even, but at least that way they wouldn’t inadvertently escape and risk fucking up her single most important friendship.
And it’s not like he hadn’t been tiptoeing around her when she’d initially moved in either, no-doubt handling Lepidoptera of his own, but they’d soon settled down into a comfortable arrangement.
Erin thought back to Dicky, her one-time fiancé who she’d left at the altar the day she’d run home to Derry. Being with him had been the most boring few years of her life. But despite the mundanity of day-to-day life being practically identical with James as with Dicky, aside from the lack of unsatisfying sex, it felt so much better.
Being around James was comfortable.
They shared a bank account and both their names were on the bills, they split the cooking and the chores (despite Erin’s offer to take the majority since he’d outright refused to take a single penny of rent from her), they spent nearly every evening sprawled out on the sofa next to each other while watching TV, and they practically sat on each other’s laps when they were both working in the cramped room they laughably called their study.
Hell, they’d caught each other in various states of undress often enough — he certainly had nothing to complain about, in her opinion — but, after the first few encounters where they’d shared blazing faces and stuttered apologies about uncovered unmentionables, it had become almost second nature to simply about-face and do something else until the other was decent.
It was almost laughable that they still considered themselves not together. Certainly all of their friends and families had taken months, if not years, to be convinced they weren’t hooked up.
Michelle had visited practically every day for the first couple of months they had lived together, looking for any sign they were riding each other. Erin thought she might have actually been disappointed they weren’t, although her friend would never admit it to either of them.
Both sets of parents had been sniffing around too. Her Ma had gone as far as to hide a ladle in Erin’s bed shortly after she’d moved in, in an effort to prove she wasn’t sleeping in it; it was a rather unpleasant discovery when she’d slipped under her covers just to end up with cold metal pressed against her back. James had nearly taken the door off its hinges as he burst in to see what her scream was about.
After that, her Ma and Deidre had made pointed comments for ages until James had politely but firmly asked them to stop. And wonder of wonders, they did!
Even her Granda had been under the misapprehension they were in a relationship, until she’d gently stepped in and explained. Mostly to stop him from tearing strips off of James, to be fair; Joe was well past ninety, but still could still scare the bejesus out of someone if he got riled up.
Their lack of dates with other people hadn’t helped dissuade their families’ suspicions. Erin had gone on a grand total of three since she’d moved in, and James hadn’t even reached that number; none of them had gone past one evening at a pub, and all of the men she’d been set up with had something missing.
They weren’t James.
They’d grown so close together it was rare that someone referred to either of them alone; instead they were always addressed as one unit, such as ‘are Erin and James coming?’, or ‘James and Erin said such and such’ — the terminally romantic Clare had even referred to them as Jerin of all things once or twice, like they were some kind of celebrity power couple or a pairing from a TV show she was rooting for. Erin had quickly put the kibosh on that.
She couldn’t deny it sounded nice, though.
The more she thought about it, the more she found that she didn’t have a good answer as to why they weren’t together.
She found herself staring at him, and chewing her bottom lip as he dropped heavily into the chair next to her, his enthusiastic mime of pissing into their rubbish bin having drawn his re-enactments to an end. He was oblivious to her internal musings as he chuckled to himself at the memory of his first day at Our Lady Immaculate, picking up his glass and draining the last half an inch of wine in one go.
Erin was struck with a sense of clarity and boldness as he watched him, and seventeen years of friendship and feelings suddenly crystallised. Before she could overthink and second-guess herself, she reached out and grabbed James’ free hand, lacing her fingers between his own.
His smile deepened at her touch, and he gave her hand a brief squeeze before going to pull it away, but she held on firmly. She felt her heart drumming against her ribcage as his brow wrinkled, and time seemed to slow as she waited for him to react.
“What’s this, then?” he said, nodding to where she was gripping him.
“I love you.” The words slipped out of her mouth on their own accord, before she could even think. But for once in her life she didn’t want to immediately bite a confession back.
It was the truth. She knew that she had never loved anyone more than she did him, right then.
“I’m in love with you, James.”
Erin’s tone was so matter of fact, so mismatched to the truth bomb she’d just dropped on him, that she could feel her teenage self screaming at her from across the years. She was meant to have waited for a grand declaration from him, or at least done it herself in a romantically dramatic way; where were the fireworks going off, the rose petals scattered around? Her school days had been filled with daydreams of how she and the boys she’d lusted after would proclaim their love for each other, and in none of them had she been sitting half-blocked in her kitchen, wearing old PJs and with the dirty dishes still stacked on the counter.
Still, at least she’d chosen a ride to say it to.
She heard his breath catch, and she didn’t want to look at him; her eyes instead danced around the room, flicking between the dishes beside the sink, the big clock, the ironing board in the corner. Three ticks of the clock passed before she gave in, even if they felt like they’d taken hours.
She took a deep breath, and met his gaze.
His face was frozen, for just a moment, for a heartbeat that seemed to stretch to a frightening eternity, before his face split into the widest grin she thought she’d ever seen on him and he leant in like he was going to whisper the biggest secret into her ear.
“I’m in love with you too. I’ve never stopped being in love with you, Erin.”
A glass smashed against the floor, knocked down by an errant elbow, and sent the cats thundering out of the room in surprise. Erin found herself breaking apart from him, her lips numb and as breathless as if she’d just run a marathon. It wasn’t like she’d never been kissed before, but what they had just got up to… Jesus, that had been a Kiss — one which deserved the capital ‘K’.
Ironically, considering how long the second or two had felt after her confession, the five minutes or so she’d spent kissing him had gone past like a blur. When had she moved to sit in his lap? How had their pyjama shirts come unbuttoned? Had she been purring?
She fumbled to keep ahold of him, unsure whether it was to weave his hands back into her now-flyaway hair — where he had been doing God’s work with his fingers against her scalp — or to press his mouth back against her collarbone so he could do that sucking thing again.
He stilled her with a touch though, cupping her cheeks and staring into her eyes.
“Marry me.”
Now it was her turn to blink in surprise. She gestured between them.
“Marr— But we’ve only just become… whatever this is. We can’t get married yet.” She felt her own smile get bigger, as visions of veils and bouquets and morning suits (and wedding nights) started to dance through her head. “Can we?”
He chuckled, his eyes shining as he took her in. “Erin. Love. Darling. We’ve been practically married for years already. I want it to be official, if you’ll let me.”
The caged up feeling in her belly burst free. A kaleidoscope of butterflies filled her as the pet names sunk in, and it was all she could do not to sweep the other glass and bottle onto the floor and ride him there on the table. Their lips crashed together again for another flurry of snogging, and Erin couldn’t help but reflect that they were making up for lost time.
Enthusiastically.
She was midway through scratching her nails down his back when a thought struck her, and she pulled back again.
His eyes were slightly glazed, but there was still a hint of disappointment in his expression as she extracted her tongue from his mouth.
“Why’d you stop?” he muttered as he pecked kisses along her jaw, clearly keen to get back to it.
She looked at him with mock disapproval. “Typical Englishman, doing things completely half-arsed. Where’s the engagement ring, Love?” The word felt so natural, after all this time.
He feigned his own look of affront, his hand going to his chest and mouth opening in scandal, before they both broke into chuckles. He tilted his head in thought for a moment, before his smile returned.
Standing, making her grumble as she was forced to move from sitting in his lap, he went to their junk drawer and pulled it open. With his back to her she couldn’t see what he was doing, but there was a quick snip of the kitchen scissors before he slid the drawer shut again and turned back to her.
“Oddly, I didn’t think to get one. That’s my mistake I suppose. But for now…”
He dropped to one knee, his hands covering hers, and she felt something being wrapped around her ring finger. Tied there, once he’d pulled back, was a neat loop of kitchen twine.
She thought it was perfect.
“Erin Josephine Quinn, will you marry me?”
Her own grin reappeared, and she felt like she was floating. “Yes, of course I will, you fecking dose. Yes.”
She would never be able to justify why she’d even noticed, but she’d always remember the time it took for them to go from just housemates to engaged. Nine minutes and twenty-three seconds.
She grabbed her fiancé’s — her fiancé’s! — hand again and began to drag him up to her bedroom. Their bedroom? At that point she didn’t care, she just wanted him.
They left a trail of clothes as they went, peppering each other with kisses as each item was removed and dropped to the floor. The next morning they’d both call out from work and visit a jeweller to get her a proper ring, before sharing their news with their unsurprised and long suffering families and friends.
But that night, at least, Erin could make sure James’ birthday ended with a bang.