Binding 13

Weeks pass. Shannon¹ settles at Tommen with startling ease — no taunts, no targets. She suspects Johnny² is responsible but can't confirm it. She begins watching him between classes, cataloguing his movements, and learns through gossip that he was involved with Bella Wilkinson,⁷ a sixth-year, in a purely physical arrangement now ended.

Meanwhile, Johnny² spends nights Googling eye-color charts to identify the shade of Shannon's¹ eyes — midnight blue, the closest match. He's hiding a chronic groin injury from his coaches at the elite Irish Rugby Academy, having had surgery in December that isn't healing.

Bella⁷ left him for his teammate Cormac Ryan;¹⁵ he feels nothing about the breakup. He feels everything about Shannon.¹ The age gap — eighteen in May versus her recent sixteenth birthday — keeps him awake.

Tommen wins the School Boys Shield, Johnny² scoring the dramatic winning try in the final seconds. Afterward, he approaches Shannon¹ on the pitch for the first time since the no-contact order — awkward, hopeful, asking how she's doing.

A photographer interrupts; Johnny² pulls Shannon¹ to his side, hand clamped on her hip, and they beam for the camera. The photo runs full-page in a national newspaper. That evening, Shannon's father⁸ — drunk on children's allowance money — spots the picture and erupts.

He slaps her with the rolled-up paper, pins her against the refrigerator by her throat, and calls her a whore. Joey⁵ arrives just in time to intervene. Shannon¹ spends the night in her brother's⁵ bed while Joey⁵ guards the floor, promising he'll take her with him when he finally escapes this house.

Ronan McGarry¹⁴ waits outside the girls' bathroom after school, tells Shannon¹ he saw her underwear that day on the pitch, and pressures her to come inside the bathroom with him. Shannon¹ freezes — her default response to confrontation, honed by a lifetime of abuse.

Gibsie³ appears, drags Ronan¹⁴ out by the scruff of his neck, and locks him outside the building. Johnny² arrives, learns what happened from Gibsie,³ and gives Ronan¹⁴ a five-second head start before chasing him down and headbutting him, breaking his nose.

Shannon,¹ trembling in the corridor, witnesses the aftermath. Later, Johnny² waits outside the bathroom until she emerges and offers to drive her home. She's missed her bus. The alternative is a fifteen-mile walk in the dark. She accepts.

What begins as a fifteen-minute drive stretches into two hours parked in the school lot. They talk about everything — her five brothers, his only-child loneliness, her father's⁸ GAA obsession, his childhood fear of Chicken Licken.

When Shannon¹ notices his constant thigh-rubbing and mentions his limp, the conversation detonates. Johnny² accidentally reveals his groin surgery and the fact that it isn't healing. The confession terrifies him — he's handed a virtual stranger power over his career at the Academy.

He snaps, warns her not to tell anyone, questions her trustworthiness. Shannon¹ fires back that he's in denial, playing a dangerous game with his body, that his doctors would never have cleared him if they knew. She exits the car at the wrong house and walks away without looking back.

The next morning, Shannon¹ marches up to Johnny² at his locker and does what no girl has ever done: she gives him an out. She tells him she knows he was ordered to stay away, that her mother⁹ won't cause more trouble, and she's sorry for the car fight — not because she was wrong, but because she now understands what's at stake.

She reveals she looked him up online and learned the full scope of who he is: an Irish youth international, contracted by the Academy, headed for professional rugby. She promises to keep his injury secret because she understands fear. Then she turns and walks away. Johnny² stands there gutted, watching her disappear, and spends the next week seeking her out in hallways where she now refuses to meet his eyes.

On Shannon's¹ sixteenth birthday, Joey⁵ drives to Johnny's² sprawling country estate to return a forgotten phone. Shannon¹ refuses to go inside but gets mauled by his two golden retrievers and dragged into the house. Johnny² cooks for her. She demolishes him at Grand Theft Auto with memorized cheat codes, and he's absurdly delighted by her skill.

She falls asleep on his couch against his side; he covers her with his hoodie and strokes her hair for hours. Then Joey⁵ calls: their mother⁹ had a miscarriage on Friday, their father⁸ is coming home. Shannon¹ crawls onto Johnny's² lap and sobs while he rocks her. Joey⁵ arrives and takes her. Johnny² stands in the rain watching the car disappear, feeling something essential being ripped from his chest.

Johnny's mother¹⁰ ambushes them by driving Shannon¹ to the Kavanagh house instead of home. Shannon¹ showers in Johnny's² ensuite — again — and emerges in a towel to find him in boxer shorts from his own shower. She accidentally flashes him. On the bed, with his elderly Labrador snoring between them, the tension becomes unbearable. Shannon¹ grabs his neck and presses her lips to his.

Johnny² freezes — eyes open, body rigid, not breathing. She panics and locks herself in his bathroom for thirty minutes. On the drive home, he explains he's leaving in months, can't commit, doesn't want to hurt her. She hears only rejection. He insists he's mad about her but can't follow through. She tells him to forget it ever happened. Neither can.

Shannon¹ gets her first proper period at school — at sixteen — and bleeds through her grey skirt. A sixth-year girl points it out. Mortified and doubled over with cramps, she's in tears when Johnny² finds her. He walks her to the boys' changing room, feeds her ibuprofen from his gear bag, and sits beside her in silence on the bench until the pain eases. He drives her home.

Later, he returns with her forgotten schoolbag and she invites him inside the Lynch house for the first time. In her box-sized bedroom, he tutors her in math for four hours with patient precision. She straddles his lap in a hug-that-isn't-just-a-hug. The contact electrifies them both. He forces himself to leave, standing at her window until he can walk straight.

Bella⁷ corners Shannon¹ in the school bathroom, identifies herself, and delivers a chilling promise: whatever her old bullies did will feel like a stroll compared to what Bella⁷ will unleash if Shannon¹ doesn't back away from Johnny.² At lunch, Bella⁷ screams the word slut across the hall.

Johnny² vaults from his chair, storms across the room, and punches Cormac Ryan¹⁵ in the face — the logic being that since he can't hit Bella,⁷ her boyfriend absorbs retaliation. Shannon¹ bolts from the building.

She doesn't return for two days, paralyzed by the collision of her two greatest fears: being targeted again, and being the reason Johnny² self-destructs. Meanwhile, Bella⁷ spreads rumors that Shannon¹ is the reason she and Johnny² split, and that Shannon¹ must be incredible in bed to turn his head.

For the playoff match in Dublin, Shannon¹ is thrown onto the team bus without warning. The only free seat is next to Johnny.² Over three and a half hours, they play quiz games together — winning twelve Easter eggs — and he teaches her rugby positions using her pink-bobbled pen.

He scrawls a friendship contract in her notebook, complete with checkboxes, a lawsuit disclaimer, and his signature. She signs it. Then every wall crumbles. She tells him about the bullying that haunted her entire childhood.

He confesses his terror about a looming fitness test that could end his career. He presses his forehead to hers and whispers that she's the only thing distracting him from the pain. She discovers a playlist on his iPod labeled Songs for Shannon. Every track is a love song.

After Tommen's dominant victory, Shannon¹ waits in the rain outside the visitors' changing room for over an hour. Inside, Johnny² is bleeding — the old surgical wound ripped open by an opponent's boot studs, emergency stitches applied. Gibsie³ tells her to go in. She finds Johnny² alone on a bench, trembling in boxer shorts. She kneels between his legs, examines his weeping wound, and presses her lips to his thigh.

He fists her hair and pulls her face to his. This time, when she kisses him, he kisses her back — deeply, hungrily, pulling her onto his lap with her skirt hiked to her hips. Coach Mulcahy walks in with two paramedics and finds them entwined. The school will be notified. Shannon's father⁸ will learn about the changing room incident.

Johnny² undergoes emergency surgery. Doctors discover a massive adhesion blocking his sperm cord, an undiagnosed sports hernia, and a severe infection. On morphine, he becomes spectacularly uninhibited — telling his father¹¹ his equipment works, declaring he loves Shannon,¹ asking her to have his babies, calling her his wife.

His mortified mother¹⁰ watches helplessly. Shannon¹ sneaks to the hospital with Gibsie³ at dawn. Johnny² refuses to release her hand; his mother¹⁰ relents and leaves them alone.

He begs Shannon¹ to say she loves him. She does — believing he won't remember. He falls asleep curled around her. She leans into his ear and whispers the one truth she has never spoken aloud: her father⁸ is the one hurting her. He doesn't hear it. He's already gone under.

Johnny² wakes lucid and devastated. He asks Shannon¹ to leave — not from cruelty, but because he can't let her see him shatter. His father¹¹ delivers the truth: six weeks minimum on the sidelines, a slim chance at the U20's summer campaign, but the Academy contract holds. Johnny² cries on his father's¹¹ shoulder for the first time in years.

His father¹¹ tells him that even if he never plays again, he's still his best decision. Johnny² finds resolve. He remembers Shannon¹ whispering something about her father⁸ as he was falling asleep, but the morphine has stolen the words. The detail nags — something vital was said, something she trusted him with. He doesn't have her phone number. He can't reach her. She's already on a bus heading back toward danger.

Shannon¹ walks through the front door and her father's⁸ fist arrives before hello does. The school called about the changing room incident. He drags her by the hair, slams her face into the kitchen table, punches and kicks her while she curls on the tiles.

Eleven-year-old Tadhg¹⁸ throws himself over his sister's body, screaming. Nine-year-old Ollie bolts next door. Joey⁵ bursts through the door and beats their father⁸ to the floor. When the violence stops, their mother⁹ kneels — not beside her bleeding daughter, but beside her husband.⁸

Joey⁵ sees this. He gives her an ultimatum: put this man out forever, or he takes the children and none of them come back. The book ends on a kitchen floor stained with blood, an ultimatum hanging in the air, and a cliffhanger that refuses to let the reader breathe.