Didn’t see her arrive — that’s the first small betrayal — she was simply there when the room decided to reassemble itself around her, a quiet shift in the pressure, like someone had reached in and tuned a string I never knew was hanging slack, and I’m propped near the doorway, faking interest in some half-dead talk about rent hikes and broken boilers, when the corners of the place soften, when the sound dips a careful half-note, and there she is, half-turned, laughing at something someone else tossed out, her laugh quick, unguarded, already moving on before it lands.

     Róisín. The name drifts in from nowhere, spoken once, casual as a coin flicked onto a bar top — Róisín, have you seen the new place on — and that’s all it gets, one careless drop, but it sticks, lodges sideways between ribs, refuses to slide off, a soft Irish curl of vowel with a small sharp bite at the end, a name like a door left ajar that you don’t knock on twice because you already know it opens into something you’re not ready to walk through.

     She’s by the window for a breath, framed against the black glass and the smear of streetlight, then she’s not, then she’s leaning against the mantel with one elbow propped, easy, economical in every move, the kind of grace that belongs to people who’ve spent enough nights in crowded rooms to know exactly how much space they need and exactly how little they have to take. I clock the details without wanting to, without permission — the way she listens with her whole face, eyes and mouth and the faint lift of brows all paying attention, the way her hands stay busy with nothing, turning a glass, tracing the rim, brushing hair back that doesn’t need brushing, the way she tilts her head just a fraction when someone’s sentence is still halfway out, patient, waiting for the rest to arrive.

     I don’t move toward her. Important that. Maybe it was just gravity behaving badly, pulling in the wrong direction or no direction at all. The whiskey has warmed deeper now, laid its rough, grainy hand on my shoulder like an old mate saying easy, lad, easy, and I feel that old alignment trying to happen, that dangerous sense that if I shifted two inches left, or three to the right, the whole night would snap into clearer focus, but nights like this don’t reward calibration, they reward accidents, they reward the stumble, the spill, the thing you didn’t plan.

     She glances my way once — only once — a passing scan that happens to sweep across me like weather passing over a field, nothing I could swear to later without lying to my own reflection, but the contact is enough, microscopic, electric, a small internal chk, like a switch being tested in a dark corridor, lights flickering once before deciding whether to stay on.

     Around us the party keeps grinding its gears — music swells and falls, laughter cracks open like dry wood, glasses change hands in a slow clumsy ballet — but I’m hyper-tuned now, every sound sharpened, every light warmer, the room suddenly edged around her presence like a photograph developing in chemicals, and I hate that part of myself that does this, that turns a stranger into a low-pressure system without asking, that makes the air heavier, the temperature rise, the whole night tilt just because someone breathed in it.

     She’s talking to someone I don’t know, gesturing with the glass, and the story seems to move fast and bright, and I catch the fragments that float my way — no, honestly, that was years ago, I’d never do that again — the usual party archaeology, old lives brushed clean enough to be presentable, scars sanded down to faint white lines, and I wonder which version of herself she carried through the door tonight, which chapters she left folded in a drawer back home, which versions of the truth she decided were too heavy for a Thursday in January.

     I imagine saying something — nothing clever, nothing weighted, just a plain sentence that opens a small space between two people — but the thought stays theoretical, safer in the head than out in the air where it might break, and I take another sip instead, let the liar-mouth smile wide now, whispering there’s time, whispering you’re not wrong for wanting this, whispering wait, wait, the night’s still young, the room’s still spinning.

     Someone brushes past her, shoulder to shoulder, another laugh erupts nearby, and suddenly she’s folded into a different group, orbit shifted, path diverted, the moment missed like a train that left the platform while you were still buying the ticket, and I feel it settle in the chest, a soft bruise already turning the first faint colours of regret.

     This is the rhythm I know too well — desire without claim, attention without transaction, the quiet ache of noticing someone completely while staying perfectly unremarked, a background chord you carry through the rest of the night like a low hum in the blood, persistent, uninvited, almost comforting in its futility.

     Later — much later, when the bottles are lighter and the ashtrays heavier — someone will ask if we spoke, and I’ll say aye, a bit, because proximity passes for conversation in rooms like this, because the truth would take too long to explain, would require diagrams, timelines, admissions of cowardice and wonder, and I’m not ready for that inventory. For now I stay where I am, rooted near the doorway like a man guarding an exit he won’t use, and I let the night move her in and out of view like a tide-controlled light on a distant pier, now bright, now dim, now swallowed by the dark between bodies, and her name hums low in the bloodstream, Róisín, Róisín, Róisín, a presence the party has decided to gift me without instructions, without return address, without mercy.

     The room keeps spinning its slow, drunken waltz. The drink keeps lying in its soft amber voice. And I keep pretending I’m not already listening for her laugh again, already waiting for the next accidental glance, already half-broken by the simple, stupid beauty of someone who doesn’t know she’s become the weather inside my head for one long, unclaimed night.