Playing to Win (45 page)

Colin fought to stay conscious. His mind felt draped in a heavy gray blanket.

“There’s a group online calling themselves ‘the forty-five percent,’ after the Yes proportion of the vote. Seems a silly label to me, drawing attention to the fact we lost, but it’s given people something to rally around, so I suppose it’s healthy in the short term.”

Colin imagined Andrew’s voice dismantling the gray blanket.

“It’s totally taken over Twitter. Everyone’s got 45s on their profile pics where Yes badges used to be. Not me, of course. I
set
trends, I don’t follow them. Talking of followers, you’ve got ten thousand now. Including me.”

Thread by thread, word by word, the blanket unraveled.

“And you’ll love this. In George Square, there’s now a peace flag hanging beside a Saltire, on the fence by the war memorial. People have been leaving hundreds of bags of food-bank donations all weekend. Yes, I know, if you were conscious, you’d be saying food banks shouldn’t need to exist at all. But the point is, George Square is a place of hope again, and after Friday night’s riots—oh, you missed that, didn’t you? Forget I said anything. There were no riots.”

Riots?

“Seemed like it at the time, though,” Andrew muttered. “Erm…what else? Oh, the Scottish Nationalist Party’s membership has increased by fifty percent since Thursday’s referendum. They’re getting hundreds of new applications every hour. Soon they’ll be the third largest party in all of the UK.

“But what this all adds up to, of course, is me being right. I said Scotland wouldn’t be put back in its box. People like you have found your voice and now you all won’t shut up. You won’t
give
up.” He squeezed Colin’s hand harder. “Right?” he whispered. “Don’t die just to prove me wrong. That’d be so bloody…typical of you.” Andrew’s voice broke, and his next breath was a sob. “I’m sorry.” Warm lips, much wetter than usual, pressed against the back of Colin’s hand. “I’m so, so, so sorry.”

Using every bit of his strength, Colin parted his lips with a dry pop. “National,” he whispered. God, his throat was killing him.

Andrew jerked. “Colin? Was that you?”

Colin swallowed, which hurt even more than speaking. “Scottish
National
Party.” He opened his eyes and laid his hazy gaze upon Andrew’s face. “Not ‘National
ist
,’ ya knob.”

Andrew laughed and wiped his eyes. “I knew that. I was only trying to get a rise out of your miserable self. And it worked. I’ve resurrected you.” He kissed Colin’s palm and held it against his own cheek. “My brave warrior has returned to me.”

“Shhhhhut up.” Colin’s lashes fluttered shut, then open again. “I love you, Lord Andrew.”

At long last, his boyfriend was speechless.

The door opened, and a blurry figure in blue scrubs entered. “Mr. MacDuff, welcome back.” He recognized the friendly female voice as one of his nurses.

“Thanks,” he whispered, though such a small word could never convey the gratitude he felt toward her and her colleagues. “Water?”

“Not for a few days,” she said. “We need to be sure your plumbing’s in working order. You needed quite a lot of repairs down there.”

His fingers found the top of his sheet, and he started to lift it to look. The nurse gently pushed it back down.

“Trust me,” she said. “You’d rather not see at the moment.”

Fine, I’ll wait until you’ve left the room.

He held still while the nurse—Rita, according to her laminated name badge—gave his lips and the inside of his mouth a generous swab of something more thirst-quenching than water. The relief was immeasurable. “What about my knee?”

Rita blinked at him. “Knee?”

“I hurt it. Before I got stabbed. Did I tear a ligament again? When can I play football?”

She shared a look with Andrew that filled Colin with dread.

“Oh no,” he said. “Was it my ACL this time?” An anterior cruciate ligament tear would mean months of recovery, maybe even surgery.

Andrew spoke slowly. “Colin, you nearly died.”

“I know, but I didn’t, and I need to get back on the pitch.”

“I’ll fetch the doctor,” Rita said. “She can explain it all.”

When the nurse left, he looked at Andrew. “Is there room for two in this bed?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then go home and sleep. You look complete shit.”

“Firstly, I’m incapable of looking
complete
shit. Secondly, I can’t leave your side, because you could still die, of sepsis or pneumonia or an embolism.”

Colin stared at him, waiting for the
thirdly
that never came. “Perhaps a bouquet of flowers would have been more cheery.”

“Sorry.” Andrew swiped his hands through his hair, which somehow still looked decent. “I’m so scared for you.”

“Why am I here?” When Andrew looked at him with alarm, he added, “I know I was stabbed. But why Reggie?”

“Because he was paid to. He told the police he was to scare me and turn me against you and your, erm, sort of people. He threw the rock through my window, but when I didn’t report it, it scuttled their whole plan. So he marked up my Bystander photo and—”

“Wait, whose plan?”

Andrew looked miserable. “The one person in my family who always treated me like an adult. All along he was manipulating me like a puppet.”

“Who?”

“Jeremy. And when I didn’t dance when he pulled my strings, he—he tried to cut them.”

If not for the sedatives, Colin knew his skin would be crawling with horror. “Your brother-in-law? He seemed so nice.”
Despite being a Tory.
“Was this a hit by the Conservative Party?”

Andrew shook his head. “They weren’t planning to kill me, according to Reggie. They just wanted to get me alone, talk sense into me. Jeremy hoped I’d return to the fold, repentant. But they knew I wouldn’t come quietly or voluntarily. Hence the knife.” He sighed. “As for the Tories, there’s no evidence that anyone but Jeremy and Reggie knew about this quasi-kidnapping plot.”

“Are you sure? I’ve seen
House of Cards
, both versions.”

Andrew gave a bitter laugh. “Jeremy, of course, denies it all, says Reggie has grievances against me or some such nonsense. I suppose the police and eventually the courts will sort out who’s telling the truth.”

Fatigue suddenly overwhelmed Colin, and he turned his eyes to the ceiling, a view he sensed would become excruciatingly familiar.

Andrew kept going. “If I’d not been so strident online Friday, he wouldn’t have felt the need to—to contain me. I should’ve listened to you when you told me to keep my mouth shut. Tweeting that image of my disownment telegram was the stupidest, most drama-queeny thing I’ve ever done. Which is saying a lot.”

Colin was too tired to comment, so he let Andrew continue.

“Then I had to go and tweet those pics at George Square, which made it easy for Reggie to track me down.” Andrew’s voice choked again. “And I almost got you killed. I will never, ever forgive myself.”

Colin said nothing. He was out of breath, out of words. So he reached out his hand until Andrew took it, and kissed it, and wept fresh tears upon it.

Then Colin closed his eyes and smiled. He’d had something worth giving after all.

“G
OOD
MORNING
,
LOVELIES
!” Andrew smiled at his phone’s video camera and tried not to shiver in the stiff breeze blowing off the Firth of Forth. “And Happy Thanksgiving to my mates across the Atlantic. Hope you enjoyed your turkey carcasses.”

He carefully angled the camera up, panning across the ruins of MacDuff Castle, its stones gleaming red in the late afternoon sun. “You’re probably wondering why I’ve brought you to this magnificent place. I hinted at it in last week’s vlog. Oh yes oh yes oh yes, there’s someone you need to meet!”

The camera came to rest on Colin, who offered a self-conscious wave, avoiding the camera’s eye.

“Want to try that again,” Andrew said in his off-the-air voice, “and this time pretend you want to be here?”

“I want to
be
here. I just don’t want to document the whole thing.”

“We won’t document the sex. Just the talking.”

Colin laughed, finally relaxing. He waved again, this time adding a wink and a smile.

“Gorgeous.” Andrew paused the camera. “Let’s go inside the walls where the wind won’t blow against the microphone.”

Colin gave an eager grin, then reached for Andrew’s hand to pull him along. It was a relief to feel Colin’s strength again, after his difficult eight-week recovery. He’d needed two more abdominal reconstructive operations and now possessed thirty percent less intestines than before. His doctors said it would take months to regain his stamina, but he’d vowed to be back on the pitch by New Year’s.

After the stabbing incident, Colin had become a national hero. Not because Andrew was a national treasure worth saving—though Lady Kirkross would disagree—but because Colin had laid down his life for another human. It helped that the human in question was already famous.

More famous than ever, in fact, if Andrew’s social-media followership was any measure. Though he still suffered cyber-harassment—mostly from his former political allies—on the whole, the public seemed to admire his loyalty to Colin and his determination to break down the walls of class division for the sake of love. Seeing Andrew was now an ex-Tory, many Scottish National Party members had pressured him to join them, but after the referendum madness, he’d had enough of politics to last him the rest of…

Well, the rest of this year.

They climbed a grassy bank to sit between two of the sixteenth-century tower’s three remaining walls. From here they could see all the way to the town of Buckhaven in one direction and Wemyss in the other.

“This is so cool.” Colin slid his palm down the crumbling stone wall. “Just think—in a few hundred years, Dunleven will look like this.”

“Maybe not that long.” Andrew sighed. “I hope it’s replaced by something equally grand, like a spaceport.”

“Naw, think of all the tract housing that could fit on those twenty thousand acres.”

“Or think of how I could push you off this cliff and make it look an accident.”

Laughing, Colin put his arm around Andrew and pulled him close. “That’d be a waste of all your grand efforts to keep me alive.”

As they kissed, Andrew thought what a gift it had been to care for this man each day these last two months, and to lie beside him each night. In contrast to his previous stance on cuddling, Andrew now found it hard to sleep without at least a hand or a foot touching his boyfriend, to make sure he was still there.

If Colin had been stolen from him, Andrew would have never forgiven himself. He didn’t know if he’d ever forgive Reggie, despite the bodyguard’s agreement to plead guilty in exchange for testifying in Jeremy’s trial, scheduled for next year.

A swift, swirling breeze cut into their sanctuary between the castle walls. With a shiver, Colin let go of Andrew and pointed to the phone. “Right, let’s do this.”

His shoulder still pressed tight to Colin’s, Andrew hit Record. “This is Colin MacDuff. He and I are…” Andrew’s voice trailed off as he tried to find the words to describe what they shared.

“Frequently fucking.” When Andrew punched his arm, Colin said, “What? You paused, so I thought I was to finish your sentence.”

Still recording, Andrew said, “We’ll try again. He and I are—”

“Notorious sodomites.”

“He and I are—”

“Monstrously in love.”

Andrew met Colin’s eyes on the screen, as if standing side by side facing a mirror. A warmth flowed through him, a warmth no firth-side wind could diminish.

“Yes,” he whispered, then looked at the camera again. “I was going to say, Colin and I are different in all the obvious ways, that is to say, all the ways which don’t matter.”

“Different can be good, though,” Colin said. “Think of the things we’ve taught each other.” He turned to the camera. “Andrew’s taught me how to reel, and how to eat pasta with just a fork—nae spoon and nae knife.”

Andrew gave an exaggerated shudder. “Definitely no knife. And in return, Colin has taught me to see all of the world.”

“Even the crap parts.”

“Especially the crap parts.” Andrew kissed Colin’s cheek and gazed at him, hoping his adoration would shine through on the video. “Tell them more about yourself.”

“Right.” Colin cleared his throat. “I was a starting forward for Woodstoun Warriors, an all-LGBT football club based in Glasgow. After I recover from getting stabbed in the gut, I will return to the starting eleven. I study business and management at Glasgow Caledonian University, which aye, is a real fucking university.” He glared at Andrew. “I’m taking a wee break this trimester, thanks to all the surgeries. Pretty much my full-time job is recovering from being stabbed. I do not recommend this as a vocation, kids.”

Andrew straightened up, relishing the part coming up. “Talking of jobs, you forgot the most interesting part. Your new source of income?”

“Oh. I’d rather not—”

“Colin is the official spokesman for—”

“Wheesht!” Colin’s face reddened. “I cannae say the company’s name yet, but I’ve got an endorsement deal with a certain luxury condom maker. Apparently they plan to play up my working-class background, so my tagline will be ‘I only splash cash on one thing.’” He gave a wicked smile. “Which is true. Those condoms are a dream. I’d endorse them even if they weren’t paying me.”

“Shhh! Your agent will kill you if she hears that.”

“Then edit it out.”

“Of course.” Andrew winked at the camera. He would not be editing it out.

After a bit more banter, they wrapped up the video. While Colin explored the ruins of his family’s historic seat of power, Andrew took a few more establishing shots of the area. Then he returned to the tower to watch the sunset, which arrived so rapidly this time of year.

From here, the two of them would drive to his brother George’s house for dinner, followed by one final weekend at the Dunleven boathouse, the sale of which had been delayed, but not scrapped, by Andrew’s attempted kidnapping. His family’s estate was still being drawn and quartered to avoid its own demise.