Without Fear
masterlist | tag | wattpad
sorry I suck at updating. happy valentine’s day, here’s a new chapter!! 💕💕 have a lovely valentine’s
Chapter Eight. May.
When all of this is over, I;
Love me like there ain’t another day, lead with the heart, ain’t that the only way?
Keep thinking ‘bout how much I changed today.
It’s surprisingly easy, then, for Niall and Lu to figure things out. It’s easy to fall into the routine of two people who can’t get enough of each other—for Niall to swing by the cafe every day after work, and for Lu to clear her weekends to watch Niall coach. They have dinner together more often than not, Ruairí sleeping at Niall’s feet while he sits at Luna’s kitchen table. They kiss on the couch and fuck on a wool blanket in front of the fireplace, Niall’s lips at Luna’s neck, Luna’s fingers clawing down his bare back. Afterwards, she likes to lie with him and trace the scratches with her own fingers, caressing the patterns that mark him as her own.
Niall tells her that if they don’t keep it on the downlow news of their relationship will travel the island fast, and Luna will never escape questions about it—it makes her think back, so far back, to that night on the roof, when he mentioned how much Inis Mór loves its gossip. She remembers watching him that night, freezing cold on the roof of her unfamiliar flat, wondering what it would be like to truly know Niall. All she’d wanted to do then was reach out and touch his hand, feel his skin against hers—now, she does it nearly every night, without thinking twice.
It’s one of those nights, in early May, when things change forever.
She’s lying all over him in her bed, the way they both like to after sex, his hand tangled up in the curly mess of her hair, her fingers tracing patterns against his bare chest, the smattering of chest hair starting to bloom out across his freckled skin. Luna has the windows open and the smell of spring is delicious through the windows, even this late in the night. As a gentle breeze billows her curtains, Niall slides one hand up Luna’s bare back, from where he’d been resting it at the curve of her ass, coming to a gentle stop between her shoulder blades. She glances up at him, feeling his chest rise as he takes a deep breath, ready to speak.
“Do you remember my mate Conor? From the Paddy’s Day party?”
As if Luna could forget the way Conor’s brother had cornered her in the kitchen. She nods, and Niall exhales quickly.
“Well he works at this pub down in Dublin, helps manage it actually, and he rang me this morning while I was at work to ask if I wanted to come down and do a bit of a gig at the weekend.” His eyes are trained on the ceiling, his chest still as he holds his breath, waiting for Luna’s reaction.
“Niall,” Luna sits up in bed, and, finally, Niall looks at her. She can’t quite figure out why he looks so nervous. “This is fucking amazing.”
Niall breathes out a giggle, hands coming up to cover his eyes for a second. When he moves them and looks at Luna again, they’re sparkling wet. “I know it’s nothing big, just a mate doing a favor but I—my first gig in Dublin, Lunes.”
“It is something big,” Luna doesn’t even try to temper the excitement in her voice—Niall never makes her feel embarrassed about how she reacts to things, not the way Ida, the way her old job, used to. “It’s something massive, actually, Niall. I’m so proud of you.”
Underneath Luna, Niall flushes beautifully, his pale skin warming up with pride, love, a little embarrassment. Luna feels an impossible swell in her chest, a balloon of pride that she can’t keep from flying away, that makes it impossible to act like the chill, unbothered, cool girl she’d tried so hard to be in New York. Instead, she cups Niall’s cheek with her hand, feeling the way his skin burns up under her fingertips, and leans in for a kiss.
--
And so, Luna takes her very first trip to Dublin.
Niall can’t wrap his head around it, the fact that Luna’s been living on Inis Mór all this time and has never been off the island—not even to Galway, the closest mainland city—and Luna can’t quite figure out how to explain to him that nothing off the island is of interest to her when the island has him. Instead, she tells him it’s all for the best, anyway, that he’ll be the best tour guide or her first foray into the rest of Ireland. He smiles, and wraps his arms around her middle on the ferry over to Galway, his body sheltering her from the violent wind and the bitter cold. Spring is tantalizing in the air, Luna can smell it in her every breath, but winter clings on nonetheless, biting and threatening.
On the train ride from Galway to Dublin, Luna and Niall sit across from each other, Niall’s guitar at pride of place in the seat next to him. Niall takes the seat travelling backwards, so Luna can get a proper view to watch out the window as the Irish countryside blows past her, a blur of impossible green and infinite horizon. He falls asleep somewhere near Mullingar, in the middle of the country, and Luna finds herself watching him more than the passing landscape—the way his eyelashes cast shadows on his cheeks, the tangle of freckles on his neck, the gentle parting of his lips, the constant, comforting rise and fall of his chest as he dreams.
They arrive in Dublin late that night, the city illuminated by golden street lights and car headlights in a way the island never is, and as they board the Luas on their way to Conor’s flat Luna finds that she’s not taking in the sights around her, but staring instead at the sky above, squinting, strangely desperate to catch a glimpse of any of the stars that make the Inis Mór nights so bright.
All she can see are lights from planes, taking their passengers far away.
—
In the morning, Luna wakes up to the sound of Niall’s laughter. She’s on the air mattress in Conor’s living room, where she and Niall had fallen asleep the night before, and she can tell from the sound of his laugh that Niall’s only in the kitchen, a room away, chatting with Conor. But for some reason, it feels like a million miles.
She stretches out in bed, the air mattress creaking and deflating underneath her, and lets the sounds of the city wake her up, too, so that if she closes her eyes she can pretend this is New York—can feel like she’s back in Williamsburg, Ida next to her, the city bustling below them. As much as she denies it, as much as she loves her life on Inis Mór, Luna can’t shake the fact that there’s a part of her, small it may be, that misses living in a city. But then she hears Niall again, his giggle from the kitchen, and the feeling slips away without a second thought.
Niall is where she wants to be.
She pads into the kitchen, the sleeves of Niall’s sweatshirt pulled down over her fingers, and stills in the doorway for a second, the morning’s first smile working its way across her face as she watches Niall and Conor laugh over some video on Conor’s phone, their heads close together so they can both look at the screen. It hits Luna like a pang in the stomach, the fact that Niall is so far away from his friends all the time—the fact that, by staying where he is, he’s losing out on all of this.
She thinks about herself, too, her early days in New York, before things got so bad. The late nights out with her friends and Ida, crashing at whoever’s apartment was closest to the bar they’d ended the night at, waking up in the afternoon in a pile on the couch, heads throbbing with hangovers and someone, the least hungover usually, standing with her phone out, writing down everyone’s order for the bagel place. Looking at it now, a million miles away, a whole ocean between it all, Luna knows that those moments were the most precious: those exhausted mornings, giggling over Snapchat stories from the night before, splitting bagels so everyone could get at least one bite of every flavor. There was no better feeling than that—nothing more intimate than the morning after the night before.
Standing in the doorway of Conor’s flat, Luna realizes that Niall hasn’t had the chance to have any of those mornings.
He hasn’t let himself.
“Hey, petal. You’re up!”
Luna shakes herself out of her thoughts, eyes focusing on Niall, who’s looking at her with a smile on his face that makes her heart flip the same way it did back in January, when he walked into the cafe for the first time, wind blown and nervous. “We made a fry up, I put yours in the oven to keep it warm.”
“Thank you,” she tells him, her voice coming out a little croaky from lack of use. “That’s nice of you.”
“Wasn’t gonna leave you starving,” Niall smiles, standing up and making his way over to the coffee pot. “Sit down, lover, I’ll get your coffee ready too.”
—
Despite Luna’s dreams of spending the afternoon wandering around the city hand in hand with Niall, she finds that they hardly have any time to sightsee before they find themselves packed into the pub, Niall sitting next to her on a barstool, jiggling his leg up and down anxiously. It feels to Luna like there are more people in this pub alone than on the entire island of Inis Mór. She puts her hand on Niall’s knee, and feels him calm down, just a notch.
She’s only on her second Guinness (and Niall’s barely managed to get halfway through his first), but it’s been a long time since Luna’s been drunk in a bar, and she can feel the effects of it—the alcohol coursing through her in a way it only does when you’re surrounded by other drunk people, the heady smell of the bar adding to her intoxication. She’s overwhelmed, like she knew she would be, but it’s not as bad as she anticipated—not scary and claustrophobic, but fun, something new and different and familiar, all at the same time. She drops her head onto Niall’s shoulder and closes her eyes, safe and sure here, with him by her side.
—
Niall gives, without a doubt, the best performance Luna has ever borne witness to.
He starts playing to a loud, rowdy, packed pub, his voice barely carrying over the sounds of friends chatting to one another, their laughter flitting across the room—but by the time he’s three songs in he’s got the whole place captivated, all eyes on him, smiles on faces and pints raised in the air. By song five people are shouting out requests and Niall’s taking them, slinging a few jokes in between songs, and Luna could swear her heart has never felt so swollen, her stomach never so full with butterflies.
It’s midway through his set, when Niall makes the ground fall out underneath Luna’s feet.
“I wasn’t planning on doing this tonight,” he says into the microphone, “because I wasn’t sure anyone would be interested, but you lot seem like a kind enough audience. I wrote this tune myself, if you don’t mind me playing it? It’s called This Town.”
—
This Town is about Cormac. Luna can tell from the first lyric. It plays in her head on repeat for the rest of the night—through the rest of Niall’s set, through the heart-stopping smile on his face when he sits back down next to her afterward, through the unfathomable hour of strangers coming up to them and offering to buy Niall a pint for his performance, clapping him on the back and letting him know how much they enjoyed listening. It plays on repeat while Luna tells Niall how proud she is of him, leaning in for a kiss and tasting the Guinness on his lips, the lyrics on his tongue. It plays on repeat through the end of the night, too, Niall helping Conor put away some of the glasses after they lock up, Luna feeling like she’s watching herself through someone else’s eyes, spilling beer everywhere when she tries to help.
Niall cleans up her mess without a single complaint, but Luna can’t stop feeling sick to her stomach.
This Town still plays in her mind late that night, when Niall goes down on her in Conor’s living room, the air mattress rocking below them, and it plays in her mind the next morning, when they finally do walk hand in hand through Dublin, Niall stopping for selfies every time they pass a tourist spot. It plays on her mind when they board a train to Galway in the early afternoon, and, still, on the ferry back to Inis Mór late, late that night. Niall drives her home and they make out in the car for ages, his hands up under her sweater, windows open to let the spring air in. It smells like Niall and newness—the coming warmth, the longer days, the hope and life and breath that spring brings to everything.
It smells, to Luna, like everything thawing away.
—
Luna’s grateful for work on Monday, the constant orders and customers a distraction from the feelings that she knows are out of line. Niall adores her, she tells herself as she brings Mr. O’Keefe his usual coffee, a song is just a song, and nothing more.
But it’s hard to shake, Niall’s voice, “over and over, the only truth, everything comes back to you.” For so long, Luna realizes, Niall’s voice has been something special for her—something she hears in her cafe, in her bedroom, in her bathroom when the shower is on. Niall’s voice is the soundtrack to her washing dishes, to her curled up on the sofa reading while he plays guitar across the room. It’s the soundtrack to long car rides in the middle of the night, the moon and stars illuminating the cliffs ahead just for them. It’s the soundtrack to them, to Niall and Luna, and it hurts her more than she thought it would—more than it should—to realize that she has to share that with the rest of the world.
When Niall bustles into the cafe that evening, Luna can’t hide her excitement. It feels like a million years, a million miles, since last night, when he pulled her in for one more kiss before driving home to his mom’s house. His cheeks are redder than usual when he comes up to the counter, despite the warm spring day outside.
“Hiya,” Luna leans over the counter for a kiss, her anxieties melting a little when Niall’s lips meet hers. “You alright?”
“Lu,” Niall’s breathless, handing his phone to Luna across the counter. “Look at this.”
She glances down at his phone, open to the YouTube app, and her hands start to shake before Niall speaks. She knows exactly what’s happening—it used to be her job, to help make things like this happen.
“Someone recorded my gig down in Dublin,” he’s telling her, his voice so distant that it sounds muffled, distorted, in Luna’s ears. “It has a million views on YouTube, Lu. It’s—I’m going viral. People are asking if it’s on Spotify, I even had to take my Instagram page off private. Conor says I should come back down for another gig, people have been asking after me. I—Lu. I think we made it.”
####
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