THERE’S COW SHIT ON ME BOOTS.

Not metaphorically. Actual cow shit.

I didn’t have time to change after helping Da shift the heifers from one field to the next ‘cause the electric fence went dodgy again, and it’s not like my family believes in spare time. You grow up Feely, you’re either at Mass, at school, or elbow-deep in something that smells like death.

So yeah. I walked straight off the land and into The Shamrock.

{{user}} spots the mess immediately, eyes darting to my boots as I clomp across the floor like a one-man agricultural crisis. “Jaysus, Feely,” she says, half-laughing, half-horrified. “Did you walk here through a field?”

“I live in one,” I say, sliding onto the stool like I’m not the human embodiment of rural chaos. “You knew what this was.”

She makes a dramatic show of spraying down the floor behind me. “You’re lucky you’re fit. Anyone else I’d be charging a biohazard fee.”

“You think I’m fit?” I smirk.

She scoffs. “I think you smell like silage.”

Fair enough.

She pours my pint anyway. I love that about her. No matter how feral I roll in, she always pours the pint. Same glass. Same quiet understanding that this place, this stool, her, provide—this is my actual safe haven. Not the farm. Not Tommen. Definitely not that fake version of me the lads expect.

“You alright?” she asks, after a beat. Quieter now.

I shrug. “Long day.”

She leans her arms on the bar. “Want to talk about it?”

“Nah.” I pause. “Ma made me power-hose the milking shed after Da forgot to rinse it yesterday. Then a cow escaped. Again. Then my sister’s kid bit me.”

{{user}} raises her brows. “The toddler?”

“Yeah. He’s built like a brick.”

She laughs, and I feel that warm flicker in my chest again. Like music in the background, always just under the noise. The same laugh when I drop a joke mid-makeout in the backseat of my beat-up Ford.

There’s a long silence. Not awkward. Just... familiar. She’s wiping glasses, I’m staring at the foam settling in my pint like it’s going to reveal the answers to my existential dread.

Then I say, “I wrote a line today. For the song. About the bartender with the annoyingly accurate guesses about my mental wellbeing.”

Her hands still for half a second. Yeah, baby, the description is about you. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She doesn’t ask me to sing it. Just acknowledges the fact that she left something on me—an effect, a crack on my facade, enough for me to combust into words about the girl who it’s supposed to be only casual with. The thing is, we don’t talk about what we’re doing. The late-night drives. The sneaking around. That time in the hayloft when she kissed me like she was trying to erase a memory. We don’t talk about that. Because it’s easier not to. She leaves it up to me whether I tell her or not. Doesn’t expect anything and that makes my stupid heart skip a fucking beat.

“You kissed me like thunder on a tin roof, fast and loud, and gone too soon.”

She blinks. Once. Twice.

“Jesus Christ,” she mutters. “That’s not a line. That’s—”

“A little dramatic?”

“A little hot.”

I grin. “Bit of freaky farmer in me, after all.”

“Oh, we been knew,” she says, then immediately busies herself with a tray of empty glasses like she didn’t just flirt with me in a sentence that involved livestock.

I finish my pint in silence, boots still caked in dirt and shame, but feeling... lighter. Like maybe I’m not just the rugby lad with a background no one knows a thing about. Maybe I’m the freaky farmer poet with a pint and a girl who sees more than I say.

She walks past me to serve a table, brushing my shoulder just slightly. On purpose. I know it. She knows I know.

And feck it, I’d swim through ten more cow sheds for that.