“I completely see where you’re coming from,” I said, punctuating my scribbles with an emphatic period. “It should obviously be, ‘Long as I got a cucumber finger sandwich, you got half.’”
Kane narrowed his eyes. “You know that’s not the point.”
I ignored him and gestured my pen toward Shay.
“Tell me what happened next,” I said. “What did you and Ms Evans converse about?”
Shay laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
“To be honest, I couldn’t really get a word in otherwise,” he explained as I chewed thoughtfully on the end of my pen while making murmurs of acknowledgement like “hmm” and “ah, yes”. “I commented on the lovely summer weather we’ve been enjoying and she agreed before launching into a tirade about summers in Texas. It was frankly horrifying the amount of detail she went into. I heard extensively about—what did she call it?”
Shay turned to Kane, who groaned as if physically in pain.
“Don’t make me say it,” Kane protested before finally relenting with a frustrated sigh. “She called it ‘under-boob sweat’.”
“‘Under-boob sweat’,” Shay said, snapping his fingers. “Ronan, she said it was stickier… down there… than ‘when you spill sweet tea in your cup holder and forget to clean it up right away because you shotgunned one too many Coors Lights.”
I paused my diligent note, taking to tapping my pen against my chin. “Was that a quote from Queen Elizabeth?” I asked.
“You know it is not,” Kane said, clearly not amused.
“Hmm… you sure?”
“You know I am.”
Shay leaned forward, glanced nervously toward the closed parlour door. He lowered his voice like he was horribly embarrassed to give voice to what he was about to say.
“She just went on and on about it being so hot that she had to go around naked all the time,” he said. “She said she’d go to the mailbox naked.”
“‘In her goddamn birthday suit’ was how she put it,” Kane sighed, shaking his head.
“Naked like a crazy woman!” Shay added, fixing his wide-eyed stare on me.
I had to keep a smile from my lips. She was a crazy woman. A crazy, bewitching woman. It was difficult to hide just how much I enjoyed the way Delaney had clearly ruffled the feathers of my fellow prim birds. We were used to high-class ladies with quiet voices and even quieter opinions. Delaney was a slap in the face, a bullhorn in the ear, a strike of lightning in the chest: she was brash and loud and garish and intoxicating.
“Perhaps, and hear me out here,” I said, struggling to keep my faux professorial professionalism. “Perhaps Ms Evans was subtly commenting on the commercialisation of the female form. By reclaiming her nudity and declaring it for all to be free, she was undercutting the patriarchal money-making machine, hitting the proverbial ‘man’ where it hurts most: his wallet. Perhaps, after all, Ms Evans was challenging your limited scope of a proper lady’s ‘place’ in life.”
Both Kane and Shay stared at me silently, neither barely even blinking. I looked from one to the other and back and then tapped my pen against my knee.
“I’ll just put that down as a ‘maybe’,” I said.
“Ronan, she’s going to offend half of Dublin’s high society,” Shay said seriously.
“And scare away the other half,” Kane added, brushing something from the lapels of his dark suit.
I raised an eyebrow at this. “You found her frightening?”
“Terribly.”
“Hmm… do go on, sir,” I said, pen at the ready.
“She still talks loud like she’s in the middle of robbing a bank,” Kane explained. “She has no concept of personal space—I still have toxic orange fingerprints on my suit from where she touched me rudely and presumptuously.”
“I believe they’re called ‘Cheetos.’”
“I don’t care what they’re called,” Kane grumbled irritably. “When she gets close you except her to hiss in your ear and demand your lunch money.”
Shay shook his head and added, “All that she’s missing is a shiv against your lower belly.”
“I’m not fully convinced she doesn’t have one hidden against her thigh.”
The mental image made me groan. I immediately received looks from Kane and Shay. I pounded my chest and coughed and said, “Frog or something.”
Kane eyed me, obviously unconvinced, and then went on, “She looks you up and down like she’s sizing you up for a fight. She’s antagonistic, to say the very least.”
“Without any provocation,” Shay added.
Kane nodded in agreement. “She seems ready to take anything and everything you say as a reason to launch into a nonsensical tirade.”
“All I said was that it can get quite hot here in Ireland during the summer as well, quite muggy, at least,” Shay said. “That’s all I said, a polite, inconsequential reply. That’s it.”
Shay’s eyes went vacant as he appeared to go somewhere else, or sometime else. Perhaps a time where an American bully shook him upside down for the pennies in his pockets.
To keep myself from chuckling at the image of Delaney swinging Shay by his ankles, I prompted, “And you were not satisfied with her response?”
Kane snorted and Shay shook his head clear, looking again at me.
“She didn’t stop yelling for five minutes, five minutes at least, Ronan,” Shay told me. “She said it must be so terrible enduring the heat in our air-conditioned mansions or Olympic-size pools or open-topped Porsche convertibles or shade provided by naked cabana girls waving palm fronds. Ronan, we don’t have naked cabana girls waving palm fronds!”
Shay laughed as he threw his hands up into the air in utter disbelief.
I pursed my lips around the end of my pen. “And you’re upset because you wish you did have naked cabana girls waving palm fronds?” I asked, playing stupid to annoy my friends. “You know, I have a few I could recommend. Should I send over a CV or two?”
“Her sarcasm was very unpleasant,” Kane said.
“Less sarcasm,” I mumbled as I pretended to jot it down (really, I was drawing boobs, just like I’d been drawing the whole time).
“Less volume,” Shay added, pointing at the notepad.
“Emhmm,” I said, pen moving again.
Boobs. Boobs. Delaney’s boobs.
“Less antagonism,” Kane said. “Less temper.”
“Fewer death stares.”
“Death stares,” I repeated. “Big no-no.”
I looked up at Kane and Shay for more, but then both remained quiet, seemingly drained by their traumatising interaction with the deliciously notorious Delaney Evans.
“And how did the small talk end?” I asked in conclusion.
Kane rubbed tiredly at his temples and Shay leaned back in his chair to stare up at the ceiling. I waited and then Kane sighed once more.
“She called me a piece of fucking shit.”
“And me a steaming hog turd,” jumped in Shay.
I had to cover my mouth with my notepad to hide the smile that I could no longer repress.