IMPORTANT: This story is overall rated fairly 'T' in the vast majority of chapters but the opening is slightly 'M' rated. If you want to skip over these parts, I will put an 'XXX' on where to stop off and start reading again. Thanks!

Standby

...

Do you think about me at night?
When the sky is losing the light
I swear my head fills up with memories every time.

~Orla Gartland, Heavy

...

Six Years Earlier.

Tom's kisses were hungry and desperate, his hand caressing the length of her thigh and grabbing her hips with the enthusiasm of a drowning man panting for mouthfuls of lifesaving oxygen.

"Oh my darlin'!"

Their lips were crushed together, teeth clashing, tongues twining and bellies burning with desire.

Sybil wrapped her arms tightly around Tom, reversing their intertwined bodies until the back of her knees hit the edge of his mattress. They toppled on to it together; an utterly heartbroken mess.

They shouldn't be doing this—they had only just broken up! Well adjusted people do not go around shagging their exes!

XXX

With one hand lost in his thick sandy hair and the other making quick work of unbuttoning his jeans, Sybil gave back just as unrelentingly and insistently as she got. She felt his errection press hard against her already wet centre. Sybil clawed for Tom's t-shirt, pulling it over his head in one practiced swoop.

"Mmmmh Tommm."

She reached for her own shirt, tossing it off as Tom's lips quickly descended on her neck, collar and chest—peppering her burning and tingling flesh with hot open mouthed kisses.

Moaning softly, she arched her back up into him. It was hard not to get lost in a heady trance—especially when Tom was looking at her the way he was; his sea blue eyes filled with so much desire and longing. His lips reached her nipples, sucking so hard that she wanted to scream.

"Oh Sybil", he panted out, drawing her in for another long and heated kiss.

She didn't know how he did it, one look and Tom Branson could make her whole body shiver with pleasure, making her want him every bit as much as she did the day they first met.

She reached into his trousers, taking him in her hand. Tom groaned at her feather light touch.

They shouldn't be doing this—she was going to America soon!

Sybil felt Tom's familiar skin against her own, their bodies irrevocably entangled until it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. She didn't really want to leave him. She didn't really want to loose him.

Goodness, how the last few weeks they had spent apart had been utterly miserable!

Once again, his lips found her breasts and her teeth grazed his neck, fingers running across the expanse of his broad shoulders as she tussled him out of the remainder of his clothes.

Tom's fingers slipped between her legs, finding a steady rhythm that had Sybil gasping—longing for more as soon as the sweet sensation began to reach its peak.

Her hips rose up as his hand slipped away...the bloody tease!

"Tom, I need you!"

They shouldn't be doing this—they both knew it would never work between them!

With their fingers entwined above her head, Tom finally thrust into her. Sybil fingers cradled his face, thumb brushing over the cartilage of his ear as he finally filled her. She could feel his warm chest pressed against her own, and feel as his gorgeous forearms encircled her writhing body.

Sybil wrapped her legs around Tom's waist, kissing his sweaty brow and breathing in the scent of him—just him. Hands slipping from his shoulders to his backside, she urged him on, pleading him with her eyes to go harder. He responded in kind, his lips falling on Sybil's shoulder and his eyes never for a moment leaving hers.

Tom always watched her as they made love, and she him...

XXX

Despite the conflict that lingered in the back of her mind, Sybil still felt a swell of pride at how she made his lovely blue eyes so dark and dilated, so full of fire...she loved seeing Tom like this.

They lost themselves in the primal and intuitive movements of their bodies, every plunge sending a new shard of pleasure rocketing through them.

They shouldn't be doing this—not now, not when life would soon be separating them by three and half thousand miles.

Afterwards, they lay together—her head on his chest and his nose buried in her hair like nothing had ever changed between them.

Silently, they tried to hold on to the moment before it would be swept away forever.

Sybil listened to the sure and steady pounding of Tom's heart beneath her cheek, desperately trying to keep her tears at bay. Tom's fingers traced careful circles down her bare back, fingers brushing the length of Sybil's spine—as though wishing to feel every inch of her before he knew they would have to let go.

"I need to go, Tom. I have to be at the airport in a few hours."

Tom looked at her for a moment silently drinking in the sight of her.

He looked rather lost and immediately Sybil found herself feeling rather guilty...her wonderfully charismatic Irishman all of a sudden looking more vulnerable than she had ever seen him before.

"Are you sure we wouldn't be able to make this work, Sybil?"

She shook her head, wishing that she could (even in part) agree to his suggestion. But their timing, and their circumstances...it was all just so desperately wrong.

Surely no one could cope with the pressures of medical school, an internship at a top newspaper and a long distance relationship all at once...not even them.

"I don't think so."

Tom nodded, biting his bottom lip as though he were trying to hold back tears of his own. He reached out, taking her hand and squeezed her fingers.

"Tell me you don't love me?"

Rather startled, Sybil recoiled—choking back a sob. She had expected many different requests to fall from his lips, but not that, never that. Ever since they had first met, Tom had always been such an optimist—a man who would never have asked such a thing unless he was really, truly, hurting.

She crawled out from under the covers. "You know I can't!"

"Then stay?", Tom asked, his earnest tone suggesting that he was being perfectly serious. "You could go to medical school in Dublin."

Sybil frowned, the pair of them already having had this argument. "Come with me?", she rebutted, giving the very same response as she had before. "You could get a job in New York?"

They were both silent, both knowing that either suggestion was not a viable option...not right now, and maybe not ever. They both knew Sybil had always wanted to finish her training in America, just as they both knew Tom would always favour writing on Irish issues over any other political or social subject—something he couldn't do anywhere but Dublin.

Silently, they got up and started to redress.

No more words were shared between them from that point on, their only acknowledgment of the other's presence being a handful of lonely glances over morning coffee and buttered toast.

Sybil grimaced as she looked up at the clock in Tom's slightly chaotic looking flat, feeling her head hurt and her stomach twist uncomfortably at the harrowing thought of leaving him.

Tom nodded solemnly, realising the time as well but clearly not wanting to be the first to say goodbye.

"I'll see you, Tom", Sybil said simply, not wanting to sound so final.

She took in the sight of him, bedraggled and heartbroken, and supposed that she must have looked somewhat similar herself.

He nodded in return, crossing his arms over his chest.

Tom seemed to be restraining himself from reaching over to hug or kiss her one last time, both of them knowing that such an action would break them altogether.

"God, I hope so."

Present Day.

Tom sighed deeply, burying his face in his hands. His head pounded, his mouth was dry and the lights in his Ma's tourist office made his eyes burn painfully.

There were hangovers, then there were killer hangovers...this one was the latter.

It had been an absolutely shite couple of weeks...no, it had been a shite couple of months.

Despite his best efforts, Tom Branson had found himself between jobs—back working in his mother's tourist office in Dublin Airport like he'd done all the way through secondary school.

His editor had told him to stop poking his nose into the government's mismanagement of the housing crisis. Tom had been warned that their readership wasn't interested in how international developers were knocking down the homes of people who'd lived in North Dublin all their lives, forcing them to sell up and move. 'It's just not our angle', they'd told him.

So Tom had left...and found it bloody hard to find work ever since.

Downing his mug of black coffee, he silently cursed Kieran and Seamus for encouraging him to go out and 'paint the town green' with them the night before.

"We'll start in your Da's and go on to Coppers, it'll be a right blast", Seamus had encouraged, knowing full well that both he and Kieran could drink Tom under the table without so much as lifting a finger.

Ahh feck them!

"So Ma, what's the story for today?", Tom asked watching as his mother, Margaret Branson, joined him up at the front desk.

She shrugged noncommittally, sticking a brightly coloured post-it with some random bed and breakfast's phone number up on the small clipboard at their side of the counter. "Nothin' much, a few rooms opened up in Flynn's that's about it."

Tom shook his head, sighing deeply. "Remind me again what our job is?"

Margaret smirked affectionately, reminded—as she so often was of late—of the years Tom had spent working for her as a grumpy teenager.

"We love Dublin", she deadpanned with a small sympathetic smile, a smile that told Tom that she knew just how much the job was slowly killing him.

"Will you open up now, Tommy? The morning flights will be landing soon."

Tom saluted playfully, groggily getting up out of his seat. "Will do."

Gritting his teeth, Tom plastered on a smile as he tried to remain calm and collected.

'Somebody put a bullet in my head now!', he thought frustratedly.

Working behind the counter of Dublin Airport's tourist office, Tom had seen it all; folks trying to convince him to charge children's bus tour fairs for their clearly adult offspring, the stuffy businessmen who claimed they knew him from school and the poor eejit who was obsessively looking to be pointed in the direction of the nearest toilets.

"Why did nobody tell me that it rains here ALL the time, twenty four hours a day. How do you get anything done!", a particularly irritated tourist exclaimed, growing redder and redder in the face as Tom adamantly refused to argue back.

"People NEVER shut up about the weather! Has anyone told you that the beer in Temple Bar costs THE EARTH! And don't get me started on the price of sandwiches!"

Tom shook his head in agreement, pretending to listen even though his mind was miles away.

He glanced over at Ethel, his ma's other employee, who promptly stuck a post-it note up on their side of the counter, smiling at Tom wearily.

'Fuck this guy!', it said, with a scribbled arrow that pointed over the desk in the direction of their particularly curmudgeonly customer.

Tom smirked, shaking his head—hardly able to blame her for throwing him to the dogs when Ethel sluggishly got up and headed for the back office.

Lunchtime had come and gone by the time things had finally settled back into their usual midday mundanity. Sitting next to his mother, Tom slouched in one of the office chairs—dreaming of his escape from this bloody airport!

"I'm sorry, could somebody help me? I'm looking for a room, any kind of room."

The woman's voice, polite and husky and British, was one he would have known anywhere...it jolted him from his reverie.

Unable to believe his ears, Tom glanced up in utter amazement—coming face to face with someone he hadn't seen in six years, someone he hadn't been able to completely forget no matter how hard he'd tried.

Even after all this time, she still made his heart pound.

Sybil Crawley.

...

There is nothing worse than meeting the right person at the wrong time.

~Anon

...

Hello guys! Hope you are all well! Let me know if you liked the first chapter, if you would like to read more or you world rather I focus on my other stories :) BTW, this is going to be loosely based off the romcom of the same name, it's fantastic!

Anyways wishing you all the best in these weird times,

Pearlydewdrop xx

'Coppers': Short for Copper Faced Jacks (a real and very famous night club in Dublin)