Read Online Stand by Me by Sheila O'Flanagan - Free Book Online Page A

turning over the sports pages of the evening paper. He’d started to tell her about Cork’s great win in the all-Ireland hurling final, and she was trying to look interested, when the door opened and another man walked into the room. Brendan introduced him to her as Eamonn, who came from the same area of Cork as he did and who was an electrician.
     
    ‘You’re a fine-looking girl,’ Eamonn told her. ‘Jeez, Brendan, you get all the good ones, pal.’
     
    Dominique flushed with pleasure. It seemed to her that her life was getting better every single day. She liked her job, she had a great boyfriend, they were having incredible sex and other men thought she was a fine-looking girl. Maybe she was becoming more attractive, she thought. Maybe she was one of those people who were late bloomers. She flicked her hair out of her eyes with the same gesture that Emma Walsh used to use, and laughed.
     
     
    She fully intended to go to the family planning clinic and fulfil her promise to St Jude, but she was very nervous about it. What if someone she knew saw her? What if she actually met someone she knew? What if her mother got to hear about it? She told herself that she was an adult woman in a serious relationship taking sensible precautions. She knew that in most countries girls were having sex younger and younger these days - being a virgin past your early teens was practically shameful in some of them. So it was utterly ridiculous of her to feel like a naughty schoolgirl about such an important part of her life. But the problem was that thinking about family planning was admitting to herself that she was having sex for fun, and she hadn’t been brought up to think of sex as something you did for fun, no matter how the rest of the world viewed it. She hated Evelyn for having made her feel this way. She wished she could feel differently.
     
    But she couldn’t. She decided to leave going to the family planning clinic a little longer. Brendan had the condoms, with their ninety per cent success rate, after all.
     
     
    Gabriel came back to Ireland for a couple of weeks, much to Evelyn and Seamus’s delight. He was attending a conference in Maynooth but returned home each evening. Dominique told him that he was looking well on his time in Valladolid. He’d acquired a tan, which made him look even more handsome, especially when he wore white T-shirts and blue jeans. He didn’t, for one second, look like a priest. More than ever she wondered how any sane and rational God could have given Gabriel all the good-looking genes in the family. (Brendan’s constant assertion that she was a fine thing didn’t delude her into thinking that she actually was.)
     
    Hearing that Gabriel was in the country again, Emma Walsh called around. Dominique, who hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, realised that Emma had clearly raided the beauty counter before coming around to the house. She looked like she’d stepped off the cover of a glossy magazine, with her heavily kohled eyes, her dramatic eyelashes and her highly glossed lips. Her chestnut hair had been teased and moussed into studied messiness and was held back on one side by a diamanté clip. She wore two chunky diamanté crucifixes in her ears and a large crucifix with a long string of beads around her neck; she was dressed in a short denim skirt over black lace leggings, a cropped black T-shirt and a faded denim jacket covered in sequins. On her feet were black ankle boots. On her hands, black lace fingerless gloves.
     
    When she opened the door and let Emma in, Dominique couldn’t help thinking that the Madonna look was wildly inappropriate for anyone trying to attract her brother, but Gabriel smiled at Emma and said that it was nice to see her again. Emma sat down in the armchair opposite him, crossed her legs, and asked a litany of questions about Valladolid and his life there. Every so often she recrossed her legs and ran her fingers through her hair, which Dominique found