Rónán

“Oh please, it takes me close to twenty minutes to say good bye to my mom and it’s usually her asking if I’ve eaten or if I’ve been doing my laundry.” Her finger tapped on her chin thinking as she laughed. “Come to think of it I should probably do that. But you have to be more excited than that it’s your birthday!”

“You just heard the fifth time she’s wished me happy birthday in a forty minute phone call, otherwise I might have sounded a bit more excited. Although, it feels a bit less exciting in general this year. I’m getting old, clearly. You should probably eat or you should probably do your laundry?”

“Oh you don’t have to explain anything to me. My mother is a full blown crazy person.”

“When I was younger I was naive enough to think that was just my mom who’s like that, but now I think I’ve come to realise it’s everyone’s moms.”

“You say the same thing about me, don’t you?”

“I’m not going to try and pretend that I never have. At least all the people in my life I say that about send me presents. Thanks, by the way.”

“You deal with the bad because they cooked you dinner every night, right? You probably broke her heart with that one.”

“Exactly. It wasn’t that long I was last there. It was like— Shit, I think it was July. Okay, that’s longer ago than I thought. But I’ll be back for Thanksgiving, so they’ll cope with it.”

Don’t even worry about it. Moms always end up having dibs anyways.

I’ve been on the phone over an hour, though, so it was good to have an excuse to shake her off. I got your presents. Thanks! The headphones are great. And did you make the cake yourself?

“I wish I could sympathize, but I don’t really know what that’s like.” Silas shrugged. “Where are you from?” He asked, raising an eyebrow. “Going to work on your day off? That doesn’t sound much like a party. Neither does Netflix. You need to blow it out the water, man.”

“Only child?” Ronan asked, curiously. “Ohio. Cleveland, more or less. Going to work on your day off is alright when you work in a club, and at least enough of the bar staff know it’s my birthday that I might get some free drinks out of it. I can even text in my song requests without having to go over to the docks. I’m not sure that 26 is really a ‘blow it out the water’ birthday. I did enough of that through college.”

“You’ll get used to it soon enough. It’s no worse than 25 or 24.”

“I’m not really worried about the getting older thing, that much. Just 24 and 25 are both twenty ‘-ef’ and then to start with an ‘es’ after doesn’t feel right at all. Not talking about my own age.”

“The leaving part probably didn’t help much.” He shrugged. “Nice, nice. Happy birthday, man. Doing anything fun or what?”

“No, probably not. I thought my siblings would be enough of a distraction, but instead they just seem to highlight that I’m the one who left. Thanks! I hadn’t thought about it much, but I’ll probably head to Intermezzo for a bit, and then On The Rocks if I decide it’s not too strange to go into work on my night-off. Or else just fall back on Netflix and whiskey.”

“No worries at all, man. My mother talks my ear off as well, I get it. You gotta love ‘em though, right?”

“Yeah, I could probably do without having the same conversation three times in one phonecall, but at least she rings. That’s better than some people get, and she didn’t push too much when I said I wasn’t going to be going to their house at all this month.”

“I don’t know, how old are you?”

“Twenty-six. That feels weird to say.”

“Sounds like someone’s getting old,” Emerson said, raising his eyebrows at Ronan and smirking.

“Am I old enough to join your senior citizen club, now, then?”

“Moms, right?” Silas tried to relate with a shrug, but really had no idea what else to say. “It your birthday?”

“You’d think that she’d have toned it down now I’m an adult and have been living away for the past seven years,” he said with a chuckle. “Yeah, twenty-six today.”

“I think the reason it took me so long to have one is because I normally don’t go to Starbucks. My friend Liam owns a coffee shop and I like to support local businesses so I usually go there. I just had to see what the hype was about, though. Oh I do love rainboots, even though I get tired of rain after about two weeks.”

“Me either. I only really go when I’m with a group of people and one of them decides that’s where we’re going or meeting. That’s why I go for things like Pumpkin Spice, though, if I’m going in that situation, because I feel guilty if I’m getting something I could be getting somewhere else. Liam McAllistair? I get tired of rain a lot quicker than that, and I’m not big on rainboots, either. I don’t think I even have any that still fit.”