“I won’t have a one-night stand with you,” I say.

“Of course, you won’t,” he agrees easily. Freely. Not believing a word.

“I mean it,” I warn. “Over my dead body.”

Laughing harder, he taps the passenger door.

“Chop-chop now, Princess.”

Mal directs me out of Dublin in his own peculiar way (“Take a left. No, your other left. Never mind, the original left”), and though I’m terrified driving on the other side of the road, and despite the fact I don’t have an international driver’s license, I still find myself behind the wheel.

Maybe it’s the setting that unchains me from any type of reasonable logic. Maybe it’s Mal himself. All I know is I’m eighteen, newly orphaned by a dad I didn’t know, and I feel like I’m suspended in the air, like a marionette. Between sky and earth. Nothing to lose, nothing to gain.

We roll into a small village, tucked between green hills a stone’s throw from Dublin, with a white wooden sign announcing our arrival in Tolka, Co Wicklow. There’s a river to our right, an old stone-arch bridge over it, and old houses with bright red doors edging the town’s entrance. It’s more like a main street with a few houses scattered around it, like spots of hair on an otherwise bald head. We drive down Main Street, passing a bright blue house, a church, a row of inns, pubs, and a little cinema Mal tells me offers actual individual seats, and the people operating it still use traditional reels.

The road winds, snaking up and down, and my heart feels strangely full when I park the car, as instructed by Mal, a few buildings down from a pub called The Boar’s Head.

When we exit the car, I stop and take my camera out. The pub is painted stark white, with green windows decorated by flowerpots with marigolds and cornflowers spilling out of them. The Irish flag hangs on a pole by the door.

It looks like something out of folklore, a tale my late father would have told me in another life.

“What’s keeping you, Rory?” Mal turns around mid-stride into the pub and catches me crouching down on one knee, squinting and aiming the camera at him.

“Make love to the camera, gorgeous,” I say in a creepy, old-man voice, expecting him to tell me to quit it.

Instead, Mal breaks into a huge grin, covers an imaginary blowing-in-the-air dress, and sends a kiss to the camera, a la Marilyn Monroe. Only his dripping masculinity makes it look one hundred percent hilarious and zero percent feminine.

Click. Click. Click.

I stand up and walk over to him. He offers me his arm. I take it, too tired to resist.

“Is this where you live?” I motion around us. “In this village?”

“Just under that hill.” He runs his fingers through my hair to pull it out of my face, and my spine tingles in unexpected delight. He smiles, because he notices. “With all the arsehole sheep I told you about earlier. You’ll meet them in a bit.”