TOO LATE - a Pride's Children prequel short story

McDuff's Pub, Dublin. December

Too late. It was the big one, sudden fame, everyone wanting a bloody piece of me. Me? I wanted more than anything in the world to share it with her.

She knew where to find me. She came to our old pub, McDuff's, one night in early December. Crisp, cold out; warm, thick in. Her hair gleamed dully, reflecting the dim lights.

The lads shielding me from the new vampires vanished, leaving a sudden hole round me at the scarred oak bar. She took a barstool just like old times. "Thought I'd find you here, Andy. I knew you had it in you." And her face was full of joy. For me?

"Heard you had the baby." She hadn't changed her perfume. My perfume. The gold sheath she wore, with an open gold leather coat, backdropped her coloring. Damn if she hadn't shrunk quick back to size. "Where'd you leave him?"

"A pub's no place for a baby, Andy. He's with me ma."

"Not with..." I could'na speak the supplanter's name. I could'na ask her about him. The thought of his touch on her perfect skin...

"Sure a mott has to get out once in a while, right?" She glanced over her shoulder, and there he stood, dark, soft, impeccable, holding a Guinness for her. She took the pint from him. "Thanks, Fitz." She looked at me. "It's good for the nursing."

He slid the coat off her shoulders, possessive. He put out the other meaty paw. "Congratulations, fella."

I would 'a been a boor in front of all me new fans had I not shaken it.

Ritual completed, the room's air suddenly relaxed. Best man wins.

But I hadn't. I had what I'd thought I wanted most: me face on billboards, a contract for another film with numbers me folks had never seen, talk of golden statuettes.

Even in that ratty pub, girls of all hair colors waited impatiently for the ceremony to end.

He held her gaze. "Don't keep us waiting, luv." He kissed her crown to mark his territory, jerked his head toward a table in the far corner where some other young couple stared our way, nodded to me.

She watched him go, turned back to me. "Would ya like to see a picture, Andy?" She didn't wait, pulled out the zippered wallet I well remembered, showed me a snap of a fat copper-fuzzed baby, coaxed into grinning as he drooled.

"He's a beauty." What else could I say? I'd checked: under Irish law, and her a married woman, in spite of it being a new Millennium, I couldn't even ask if he was mine. For the life of me, I could'na put out me hand to touch the plastic sleeve... but I stared long enough to make her twitch.

"Think we'll keep him." She closed the wallet, tucked it away. Her eyes were somber, but only for a moment. Then she twinkled as of before, when I'd bring unexpected Chinese in printed cartons to our tiny two-room flat for supper and we'd toss lines back and forth and talk 'til dawn. "I really am happy for you, Andy. It's what you always wanted." She left me there, joined her friends. And him.

The pack descended on me, loud and needy and obsequious, and the next time I turned round her table was empty.

And I can't get it out of me head, this image of a growing lad, copper-topped and cradled in her lap, but looking a little like me? Too much like me?