Playing to Win (44 page)

Not a chance.

Colin took a sharp right, dashing across the middle of the street to avoid the crowded intersection, slaloming between crawling, honking cars. At each pivot, his knee spiked with pain, but his gut told him,
Gonnae no stop, gonnae no ask for help. There’s no fucking time.

Rounding the corner of Frederick Street, Colin sped up. His knee gave a fiery warning throb that grew with each step.

He spied Andrew again a hundred feet away, standing on the curb across the street. He was arguing with Reggie, who was opening the rear door of a black car.

You won’t take him.
Darting through the stopped traffic, Colin urged his legs faster than they’d ever run on the pitch. This goal mattered more than any. If he missed it, nothing else would ever matter again.

Colin reached the pavement and pivoted, pushing off on his bad leg. He gave a loud grunt of pain.

Ten feet away, Andrew saw him. His face contorted in terror. “Colin, no!”

Reggie turned, a flash of silver in his hand. Colin was going too fast to stop, too fast to slow, too fast to turn.

Not that he would have if he could.

Colin hurled himself against the bodyguard, knocking him away from Andrew. Fire exploded in his belly, and still he clung, staring up into Reggie’s horrified face. With a great shove, he knocked the big man against the side of the black car. He raised his fists to fend off another punch to the stomach, but Reggie held up his hands.

“Mate…I’m so sorry.” The bodyguard dropped what was in his hand. A knife clattered to the pavement between them.

Colin looked down. It was a peculiar sort of knife, with a blade colored red instead of—
oh
.

He’d not been punched after all.

From what seemed a great distance, Andrew called his name. From an even greater distance, a woman screamed. Then another, then another, until Colin wasn’t sure if they were new screams or just echoes of the first.

Colin dropped to his knees—which, he realized, no longer hurt. His gut, however, had become a volcano.

“Colin…” Andrew was holding him now, laying him back on the cold pavement. “Colin, hold on. The police are here and an ambulance is coming straightaway. They’ll save you, I promise.”

Colin closed his eyes for a long moment, and when he opened them again Andrew was still there, still murmuring rubbish about how it was all going to be okay. For some reason his chest was now bare. His head blocked the glow of a streetlamp, giving him a halo. Colin had never believed in angels, but now he had to wonder.

“Andrew,” he whispered.

“Don’t talk, love. Save your strength.”

I used it all to save you, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
“I need to—need to say…”

“No.” Andrew took Colin’s blood-soaked hand and kissed it. “You don’t need to say a thing.”

So Colin shut up and kept his eyes locked with Andrew’s. Around them, the screams multiplied. A lass nearby was sobbing her lungs out, shrieking, “They’re stabbing Yessers! They’re stabbing Yessers!” He heard Katie crying, and Liam and Robert raging, all three of them trying to get closer. He heard the deep, commanding voices of police officers ordering everyone to stand back.

Everyone but Andrew, who held Colin’s hand and Colin’s gaze, anchoring him to this world.

Then the sky suddenly faded—and oddly, so did the streetlamp. As Colin closed his eyes for the last time, he thought,
Funny how quickly night falls in this city.

A
NDREW
STARED
OUT
the hospital window as Glasgow split itself in two.

He fidgeted with the hem of his rough cotton shirt, the top half of the outfit the hospital had given him to replace his blood-soaked clothes. Andrew wished he still had that blue Yes Scotland shirt, the one he’d removed to staunch Colin’s bleeding. At least then he’d have some tangible connection to the man he loved.

His faint reflection in the window made him look like the ghost he should be right now. The ghost he’d gladly become if he could go back in time and give his life for Colin’s, rather than the other way around.

Another reflection moved behind him, the pacing form of his friend John, who was phoning the rest of the Warriors to tell them Colin was fighting for survival on the operating table. Fergus was on his way to join Liam, Robert, and Katie here in the crowded waiting area, where they sat with Colin’s father, grandmother, and sister.

A hand touched Andrew’s elbow. “Did you phone your family, mate?” John asked in a hushed voice.

Andrew shook his head. “What family?”

“C’mon, they’ll find out soon enough from the police or the media.”

Andrew nearly laughed.
The media.
On the wall-mounted TV,
BBC Ten O’Clock News
spoke of Prime Minister Cameron’s speech, First Minister Salmond’s resignation, and the upcoming Ryder Cup golf tournament, but not a word about the riots spreading through Glasgow from the tinderbox of George Square. It made this night feel more surreal than ever, like he barely shared a reality with the rest of the world.

John nudged him again. “Gies your phone and let me ring them.”

Andrew thumbed in his passcode and handed over the device. “Try Lady Karen, my cousin. She’s listed in my contacts as Killer Shrew.”

“You people are strange.” John gave Andrew’s back a comforting pat as he stepped away.

Andrew went to sit with the others. Emma slid over to make room on the orange vinyl sofa. She hadn’t cried yet, from what he’d seen, but her face was gray with fear.

“Tell me again,” she said, twisting her hands together so hard, her knuckles cracked. “Tell me how Colin saved you.”

Andrew’s stomach soured at the memory, but he shared it again in a whisper. He added no embellishment, for it needed none.

As he’d told the police, he wasn’t sure what fate had awaited him in that black car, where or to whom it would have taken him. But his walk toward it had felt like a death march.

It had all happened so fast, Reggie’s surprise appearance at the edge of George Square, offering a friendly hand to help him away from the scuffle. Once Andrew was within arm’s reach, that friendly hand had revealed a gleaming blade aimed at his kidney. Reggie had ordered Andrew to walk, to not look back when Colin called his name. To act against every instinct.

Get in the car or I’ll cut him too.

Andrew had tried to hurry, but hesitated at the last moment.

“If I’d just done as Reggie ordered,” Andrew told Emma, “your brother would be well and whole.”

“Naw, Colin’s too fast.” She laid her head on Andrew’s shoulder. “He was always gonnae reach you.”

Mr. MacDuff stood abruptly. Andrew looked up to see him hurrying across the waiting area to meet the surgeon. As the men spoke, too far away to hear, Emma reached out, taking her grandmother’s hand on one side and Andrew’s on the other. He gripped it so hard he thought he’d crush her bones, but she just squeezed back in response.

Finally Colin’s father turned from the surgeon with a grim nod and came back to them.

“Colin’s out of surgery,” he said, “but not out of the woods. His blood wasn’t clotting well enough for them to do the—the—” He waved a shaky hand at his own side. “To put him back together. Reconstruction, that is.”

“Now what, then?” Colin’s gran asked.

“He’s to stay in ICU for twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours, until he’s stable enough for them to operate again.”

“Can we see him?” Emma asked her dad.

“Aye, soon. But maybe only for a few minutes, and he’ll be—well, he’ll look a state, hooked up to all those machines. It can be scary for weans.”

“I’m not a wean.” She swiped at the tears dribbling down her cheeks. “And I’m not scared.”

“That’s a relief,” Andrew told her. “Because I’m terrified, and I’ll need a brave partner.” He wasn’t talking rubbish either, trying to buck up her spirits. The thought of seeing Colin on the edge of life scared him witless.

The only thing he feared more was never seeing Colin again at all.

= = =

Just after two a.m., Andrew finally sat at Colin’s side, in a chair squeezed between the bed and the array of beeping, sighing machines that kept his boyfriend alive.

“It’s me, love.” He reached out and slid his fingers over Colin’s, his breath hitching into a sob. “Sorry, I just need a moment. I didn’t know if I’d ever touch you again.” He drew in a deep, antiseptic-smelling breath, then let it out. “There. All emotions safely tucked away. Nothing to see. Which is good, because you can’t…see.” He swallowed hard. “They say you’re heavily sedated, but that you might still be able to hear me. Which is also good, because talking to oneself is an eccentricity not currently in vogue.”

Colin just lay there, of course, breathing with the help of the ventilator tube in his mouth.

“I’m sorry it took so long for me to get in here. That’s your fault, what with your capricious core temperature and breathing rate.” Andrew’s own lungs seized up at the memory of Colin’s respiratory arrest an hour ago. “It’s for the best, this delay, so I didn’t have to visit you in those dreadful hospital clothes. John went to my flat and fetched a decent shirt and trousers for me. They don’t go together—Fergus has all the fashion sense in that relationship—but his heart was in the right place.”

Andrew ran his gaze over Colin’s body. They’d removed the warming pad from his chest, as his temperature had finally stabilized. Now the white sheet made him seem so pristine. But Andrew knew that beneath it, Colin’s wound was still partly open, his innards too swollen with fluid to allow full closure yet.

“All the Warriors were here tonight. The waiting area was one big gay vigil. I took pictures, of course, but for your eyes only, not the public’s. Not every moment in life needs social-media documentation.”

He slid his fingers back to touch their tips to Colin’s, remembering how once, lying in bed, they’d compared the lengths of each of their fingers, with a final scoreline of 5 - 5. Now he had to fight the urge to clutch Colin’s hand and beg him not to die.

“Oh! John also fetched my earphones.” Andrew pulled his phone from his shirt pocket. “He’s a star, isn’t he? He offered to stay here all night with me, but then—” Andrew cleared his throat. “But then my parents and brother arrived, so they’ve got that sorted.” His throat thickened at the memory of his family’s tears as they’d held him. “George looked as though he’d have actually missed me if I’d died. Needless to say, I’ve been dis-disowned.” He paused, his chest aching with his next words. “Elizabeth didn’t come, of course. Things are very…difficult for her at the moment.”

Andrew straightened up and wiped his eyes. “Enough about my family.” He opened his music app and cued Colin’s current favorite tune, “Every Other Freckle” by alt-j. “We loved this song from the first time we heard it. You said it made you ‘pure dead horny.’” He put one of the earphones in his own left ear and tested the volume. “Not sure how you could tell the difference between that and your usual state.”

Andrew inserted the other earphone into Colin’s right ear, then started the track. To keep the wire between them slack, he scooted closer, folding his hands atop the bed railing and resting his chin upon them.

Gazing at Colin, Andrew mouthed each dreamy, obsessive lyric along with the singer, then hummed the intricate, overlapping interludes.

When the track ended, he played it again. “Remember how you didn’t get the song’s
Flashdance
reference, so we watched the film? And you said, ‘I’ve finally found my heteroception’? And I told you Jennifer Beals would be fifty years old now, and you said you didn’t care?” He reached out to touch a lock of Colin’s ink-black hair. “I think that was when I fell in love with you. Because I imagined a day in the distant future, in the highly unlikely but theoretically possible event I am no longer beautiful—and it felt like on that day, you would still be by my side.”

Toward the end of the song’s third play Andrew stopped humming, stopped talking, stopped lip-synching, for he now realized the lyrics were written almost entirely in future tense. It was a list of things the singer was “gonna” do to his beloved. Even the imperative chorus, the command to “Devour me,” was a hope and a plan.

“You will do everything one day,” Andrew whispered to Colin’s pale, still form. “I promise.”

= = =

Andrew was blethering again.

Over the last…Colin didn’t know how long (hours? days? weeks?), he’d heard many voices, some real, some imagined. His uncle James’s voice clearly fell into the latter category, talking about a soldier he’d served with who’d lost an entire torso to an IED, yet somehow survived. His mother’s voice, promising that if Colin lived she’d never miss another birthday—well, he wasn’t sure which category that belonged to.

But one voice he knew was real, because it spoke utter nonsense.

Andrew
had
mentioned a few important bits, like the Warriors winning Saturday’s match after nearly canceling it on Colin’s account. Or like Andrew’s family showing up to support and dis-disown him, his brother going so far as to stay by Andrew’s side while Colin underwent another…however many surgeries he’d had. Or like Andrew’s plan to oversee Colin’s full home recovery at his own flat, which was cleaner and quieter than Colin’s and had “an extra bedroom for any family members who’d care to stay a maximum of two consecutive nights.”

Mostly, though, Andrew had prattled on about the London Fashion Show, along with his theories on who killed Lucy Beale on
EastEnders
and who deserved to win the Great British Bake Off.

At first, Colin had considered shuffling off his mortal coil to escape Andrew’s endless chatter. But after a while, it began to soothe him, like a white-noise machine. More importantly, it anchored him to this world more than any of the medical contraptions attached to his body.

He’d saved Andrew’s life, and now Andrew was saving his.

“You probably don’t want to hear about politics,” Andrew was saying now, “but there’s sensational news on that front at last.”