I knew Aurnia made me want to do things to her that I never could.
What help would that be in finding her?
“Where all did you check?” Mason asked when he noticed me at last. “We’ve been texting you all day.”
That’s when I went for the whiskey.
I drove drunk that night. Just followed the night down empty streets, swerving and squinting for any sign of her. It was futile, I knew. It was better than sitting in Dublin Ink. It was better than doing nothing, or worse, accepting the truth: I knew exactly where Aurnia was. As far away as fucking possible. That’s where I’d driven her. That’s where I’d ensured that she would go.
I’m not sure which night it was that I returned to Aurnia’s father’s house again, the best shot I had at stumbling upon her before she was gone forever. I was in enough of a drunken, guilt-ridden fog that I probably lurked outside in the shadows for nights on end before finally stumbling toward the door. This time I stood a chance in hell of convincing them that I was Aurnia’s JLO. The moment her name came slurred and desperate from my lips the jig was up.
Without a pretend badge to protect me, it wasn’t much of a fight: one against a dozen. I returned to Dublin Ink bloody and barely conscious. Rian found me in the morning and I’m pretty sure it was the first time in days that he spoke to me as he held a frozen bag of peas against my swollen eye.
“You’re not telling us everything.”
It was a chance for me to come clean. To be honest with my friend. To let him in.
I just took the bag from his hand and crawled up to the guest bedroom in Mason’s loft. Rian went back to not talking to me.
I’d broken something between us. I wasn’t entirely sure that it had ever been whole in the first place. Our friendship had started on a lie. Why the hell wouldn’t it end on one?
Mason had to cover for me with Diarmuid, who began to call with more regularity. “Nasty cold,” I heard him saying as I came back one morning from hours on my motorcycle driving Dublin streets looking for Aurnia.
Mason eyed me mistrustfully as I went straight to the liquor cabinet in the kitchen. “Can’t even say a fucking word,” he said to Diarmuid. Loud so that I could hear it.
I lived in a constant state of misery those weeks. Physically. Emotionally. Psychologically. I grew more and more distant with Mason and Rian. My drives out on the motorcycle went longer and longer.
If I was drinking, I’d blink to find myself in some suburb an hour away. Outside some nice home. I’d rub my red-rimmed eyes, my black eye still sore and throbbing, and watch as a blurry family sat down to dinner. Maybe I ended up in those parts of town because that’s where I wanted to find Aurnia. In front of a plate of Sunday roast. Her hand in her father’s for grace. Candlelight soft on her cheeks.
I’d return to see Mason and Rian alone in the kitchen, chatting quietly over some takeout boxes. They’d look up at me, but I never joined them. I went to my drafting desk. To my whiskey. To my bad choices.
This was because of me.
This was because I kept her at arm’s length. A violent, mean arm’s length.
This was because in trying not to let her too close, I pushed her too far away.
These thoughts rolled over and over again in my mind till I couldn’t stand it any longer. That was when I returned to my motorcycle. It was in this hopeless cycle.
After Aurnia went missing, whenever Mason saw me, he would say, “We’ll find her, Conor. We’ll find her.”
I wasn’t not sure when he stopped saying that.
Or when I stopped hearing it.
It probably didn’t matter: I didn’t think I ever really believed it.