All Our Hidden Gifts by Caroline O’donoghue (ink ebook reader txt) 📕

upwards. I remember Michelle boring us all about “cat eyes” at school. Roe, though. He actually looks like a cat. I let him put on his own mascara because I’m too afraid of poking him in the eye. I dab a tiny bit of pearly highlighter on his cheekbones, so they glow when he catches the light.

All the while, I’m trying to avoid thinking about the fact that my skin is on his skin, my fingers on his face. I try to stop catching his eye when he looks up at me. We haven’t been this intimate since the day he walked me home and made fun of my driveway. And even then, we had barely started. We were still getting to know each other’s bodies, and then it was all cut short. And now I’ll never know his body in that way. He won’t be my first. Maybe no one will be.

“Maeve?”

“Hmmm?”

“You’ve gone all quiet.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

I pick up my mum’s handheld mirror and show him his face.

“Oooh, I like it.” He grins. “I usually just put on red lipstick. I haven’t done this whole smokey-eye thing before.”

“Lipstick is so messy,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “Hard to kiss with.”

I look at him, sitting on my parents’ bed with a face full of shadows and pearls, and wonder if anyone has ever been this beautiful. We stare at each other. What is he doing? Why is he throwing out lines like “hard to kiss with”?

“Yeah.”

I screw the tops back on my mother’s make-up and put it back on her dressing table.

“Maeve,” he says, grabbing my hand as I pass him. I snatch it away.

“You can borrow some of my clothes if you like,” I say quickly. “I have a fur coat you could borrow.”

“A fur COAT?”

“Don’t start. It’s inherited from my great-grandmother, or something.”

We go up to my room and I show him the coat. The room, lit by the single bulb of my bedside lamp, glows like a sunken sunset. The rabbit fur catches the light and shines a deep, steely silver. He puts it on over his T-shirt.

“You need to see the whole thing. With the silky top and the pearls and all that.”

“All right,” he says. “Pass me the bag.”

I throw him the tote and sit down on my bed. Roe takes the fur off and slowly eases his T-shirt over his head.

And I stare. God help me, I stare.

I’ve never been alone in a room with a boy with his top off before. I’ve been to the beach. I’ve idly watched lads playing football in the summer, shirts versus skins. But here, in the low light of my childhood bedroom, the place I’ve had chickenpox and sleepovers, the place I’ve slipped my hand under my pyjama pants and thought about … well, this. Him being here. In front of me. Like this.

The air shifts in the room. Roe looks at me, looking at him. I decide not to look away. This, after all, could be the last chance we get. I decide to admire him. His body, like him, is a series of contrasts. His thick, stocky shoulders against the slender, elegant collarbone. The muscled arms that have spent countless evenings lifting amps and drums in and out of practice rooms, versus the delicate arches where his stomach meets the button of his jeans. He’s like a puppy now, all big paws and feet. In a few years, he’s probably going to fill out like Pat did, strong and wide and thick as a brick.

He watches me, watching him. His face goes ruddy and red under the iridescent highlighter. He reaches for the navy top.

“Hey,” I say, softly. “You don’t have to put it back on.”

“I don’t?”

“No.” I smile. “I like looking at you.”

“I like looking at you,” he responds, his voice hoarse. “But I feel a little on display here.”

“Oh.”

I glance down at my own clothes. I’m wearing navy, as Fiona instructed. A woolly jumper dress with thick black tights underneath. I pull it over my head, standing up as I take it off.

I am standing opposite Roe O’Callaghan in my bra and tights. I want to laugh out loud, completely unable to believe what I just did. When did I become the kind of person who takes their clothes off in front of someone?

I answer myself, and the laugh stifles. When you decided that this could be your last day alive, Maeve.

Aaron’s right. It will be so interesting. If I live.

He steps forward and pushes my hair off my face, his hands following it to where it ends at my shoulder blades. Roe pulls me in closer to him, his warm body pressed against mine in the cool attic air.

“You’re so beautiful, Maeve,” he murmurs. “It really…”

“It really what?” I smile.

“It really makes life very … difficult for me.”

And then we’re kissing. Kisses that go from being slow and simple to frantic, urgent and hungry. We have never truly been alone together before, only ever snatching moments in the underpass or by the Beg. Our aloneness is driving us on, screaming, Go, now, now. Before it’s too late.

I can’t stop touching him. Every time I think I’m being too forward, too animal, he matches me, coming back even stronger. His hands are under my tights, his mouth is on my chest. Gravity seems to pull us onto the bed and I’m sitting astride him, his back propped against my bedroom wall.

It’s all too excruciatingly gorgeous, so heart-stompingly new. Everything I do, I can’t believe I’m doing it; then, I can’t be satisfied with it. I need to see all of him, experience all of it.

“Woahh, woahh.” Roe pulls his mouth away from mine, his voice breathless. “We need to calm down.”

“Why?” I say, nibbling his ear.

“Because for one, we’re due at the river soon.”

“We can be done by then.”

He pulls back from me, alarmed at the practicality in my voice. At the word “done”. He scans my face, which is now blotched with his eye