Playing to Win (8 page)

But when he’d gone to dry his hands and spied the odd-shaped towel rack made of a dozen polished metal rungs, then noticed the button above it, a button that glowed orange when pressed…

He had to sit down a wee while.

What am I doing here?

Perched on the edge of the white porcelain bathtub, Colin leaned forward to force the blood back to his brain. He saw his ragged shoes, held together by duct tape, their tongues scraping the frayed hem of his best jeans, the only ones without significant rips. Everything on him screamed NOT GOOD ENOUGH.

Gonnae stay with your own sort, lad, or you’ll embarrass yourself.

“Get tae fuck,” he whispered to the memory of his mother’s words. “I can handle this.”

A soft knock came on the bathroom door. “Almost ready?”

“Just a second.” Colin grabbed the edge of the black-marble sink and hauled himself to his feet. Then he splashed cold water on his face, trying to ignore how smoothly the tap turned, with no squeaks or resistance, and how easily it shut off, not needing to be jiggled to stop it leaking.

He reached for a clean towel. It was already warm and toasty.

“Fuck.” He slammed his palm against the button to shut off the heat, then buried his face in the towel and tried to steady his breath. Throughout his life’s trials, even in all the high-pressure football matches he’d played, he’d never come close to a panic attack. He was not about to start now. Not over a fucking towel warmer.

Out in their room, Colin found Andrew—where else?—in front of the mirror. He’d gone with a “modified Adam Smith” for the occasion: Black-framed glasses and straighter hair, but wearing gray khakis and a short-sleeved, button-down chambray shirt that was all the colors of a stormy sky. He looked classy but accessible, in a way that would normally have made Colin want to devour him.

“Everything to your satisfaction?” Andrew asked, studying his own hair with the intensity of a microbiologist peering at a potential cure for cancer.

“Yeah.” Colin examined one of the complimentary sleep kits, which included a velvet black eye mask, earplugs, and a tiny bottle of lavender oil. “The room is, erm…”
completely crisis-inducing
“…nice.”

“I was devastated there were no suites available. But on short notice we were fortunate to get anything, much less a castle view.” He motioned to the window, where the curtains were now open.

“Oh.” Colin crossed the enormous room, moving past the cushioned bench-type thing at the foot of the king-size bed. Outside, the giant medieval castle loomed over the city atop a high, sheer cliff. “It’s so unreal.”

“Isn’t it just? All the years I lived here during school, I could never grow accustomed to it. It’s like an alien spacecraft.”

Resting his knee on the window seat, Colin pressed his forehead to the glass. It was nearly ten years to the day since he’d last seen Edinburgh Castle. The memory made the back of his tongue all twisty with emotion. He was glad they were giving it a miss today in favor of Real Mary King’s Close, a tour of medieval underground Edinburgh. Colin wanted to keep the castle for his eight-year-old self, forever.

“I assume you had breakfast?” Andrew asked. “I thought we’d eat after we finish at the Close, about two o’clock? It’ll be between normal meal times, so the cafés shouldn’t be completely jammed.”

“Fine,” Colin said. He’d skipped breakfast, his stomach too fluttery for food. Last night’s sleep had been fractured into fifteen-minute dozings surrounded by hour-long bouts of staring at the ceiling in wondrous terror.

A light hand swept his back. “You all right?”

On reflex, Colin stepped away. “Aye, fine. Why? Do I look—do I not look okay?” Shattered as he was, he couldn’t show weakness to this man.

“You look wonderful.” Andrew dropped his hand, but then moved closer, cautiously, as if expecting him to bolt again. Then he pressed his lips to Colin’s in that same firm, soft kiss he’d given last weekend in Fergus’s kitchen. A kiss that tamed.

Colin felt his limbs unknot as his lungs slowly emptied. Andrew’s fingers found his, but didn’t grasp, only pressed for a long moment, steady and sure. Colin marveled that this man, who was so dangerous to his sanity, could make him feel so safe.

Perhaps that was Andrew’s most dangerous quality of all.

= = =

Katie Heath: Hope you’re having a good time. Edinburgh is soooo romantic!

Liam Carroll: I hope he’s spending bags of money on you. I hope you fuck him senseless. I hope you live to tell about it.

Robert McKenzie: What Liam said. PS: please take pics.

Colin slipped his phone into his pocket without replying to his mates’ texts. Waiting in the Real Mary King’s Close gift shop while Andrew fetched their tickets, he watched the tourists jostle one another through the narrow aisles. They spoke a mind-boggling array of languages, and most carried bags from the Royal Mile souvenir shops trafficking in cringe-worthy Scottish clichés. Through the open door, Colin could hear a bagpiper on the street outside, playing an incessant, indecipherable tune. The hubbub, along with his lack of breakfast and sleep, was giving him a skull-gripping headache.

“What a madhouse!” Andrew slipped into the tour queue in front of Colin, curling his lip at a pair of jimmy-hat-wearing tourists. “I should’ve taken you farther away. Seems all Scotland’s been invaded by Commonwealth Games visitors.”

“Why
did
you bring me to Edinburgh? Not that I’m complaining,” he hurried to add. Despite his unease, Colin was still marveling at Andrew’s generosity.

“I wanted to show you my home city.” Andrew slid one of the tour tickets into Colin’s T-shirt pocket, a gesture that felt strangely intimate.

“Home city? I thought you’d a castle in the countryside.”

“My family’s estate is in Fife, yes. But I came to Edinburgh for boarding school when I was seven, so I consider it my home.”

Colin gaped at him, imagining the terror of leaving home at such an age. “Seven years old? That’s mad, sending weans off to fend for themselves.”

“Fettes Prep wasn’t exactly the Outback. Besides, it builds character.”

“But what about—I mean, someone like you—”

“Someone like me?” Andrew gave him a sharp look.

Colin lowered his voice. “Someone so obviously gay.”

Andrew lifted his chin imperiously. “I don’t take that as an insult, but you should know that in my circle, refinement and fashion sense are signs of good breeding, not orientation.”

Did he actually use the phrase
good breeding
?
“I’m just saying, kids can be cruel.” Colin rubbed the insides of his forearms, where his tattoos lay, then stopped when he saw Andrew noticing the gesture. “At a boarding school there’d be no escape from bullies.”

“Who says I was bullied?”

He studied Andrew, who suddenly wouldn’t meet his eyes. Before Colin could respond, their tour guide arrived in front of their group.

“Greetings, everyone!” Dressed in medieval garb, the guide introduced himself as William. First he apologized for his “heavy Scottish brogue”—which to Colin’s ears sounded pure faint—then warned that claustrophobics might want to give this tour a miss.

“Once we’re down there,” William said, “it’s to stay. There’s no back door, and no doctors save the one in the plague mask. Seeing as he’s three hundred years old, he’ll not be much help. So if you think that might be an issue—”

“Right. I’m out.” An Australian woman behind Colin stepped away from the queue. Her friends protested, but she gave a firm head shake and said, “Meet me in the pub across the street when you escape.
If
you escape.”
 

As she marched from the gift shop, Colin felt fortunate he’d never been claustrophobic. It’d be humiliating to chicken out on Andrew now.

“Any others?” William asked, gesturing to the door. “There’s no shame in it. My own phobia is cats. If the Real Mary King’s Close was packed with kittens, I’d never set foot in it again. Though it might sell more tickets.”

The tour group descended a long stone incline as William explained the history of the place. They passed warrens of alleyways between shops and flats, going ever deeper underground. Holding onto the railing to keep his footing on the uneven stairs, Colin looked up to see washing strung across the street. On one line, a single red dress stood out amongst the grays and whites.

“And you thought modern-day Glasgow was crowded,” Andrew whispered as they were shown cramped, single-room homes stacked atop one another, accessible only through windows and ladders. Colin thought of the lass on the bus last Sunday and wondered how a pregnant woman would get around a place like this.

As they entered a tiny chamber lit only by fake candles, Colin considered his own block of flats—the contemporary equivalent to these slums. There was definitely something to be said for the twenty-first century. At least Colin’s family had privacy. At least they had a bathroom with running water instead of a waste bucket to be dumped out the window. At least they were only metaphorically shat upon by the upper classes instead of literally, like these poor souls.

Also, in medieval times, he could never have touched up an aristocrat in public.

Andrew shifted closer at the first brush of Colin’s fingers over his lower back. There was no one behind them to see, and the rest of the tour group’s attention seemed focused on William’s ghost story.

Colin stroked slowly, letting his palm travel down over the impossibly round curve of Andrew’s arse, his thumb tracing the arcs of his tightening glutes. He could feel every contour of every muscle through Andrew’s thin cotton trousers, under which he seemed to be wearing a jock brief, a thong, or nothing at all.

“How much longer?” Colin whispered to him.

“Half an hour. The plague room’s next, I believe. You’ll fancy that.”

“Is it as dark as this?”

Andrew smiled and shook his head.

Colin sighed against the back of his neck. “Then I won’t fancy it.”

“On we go, then,” William said in a hushed voice, “to one of the most horrific moments in all of European history—the Black Plague.”

The tour moved out into the hallway, then down to the next chamber, which was a bit larger than the previous one and featured a bunk bed on either side. In one corner lurked a long, gray lump that Colin couldn’t identify. To their left, a black-draped figure bent over the lower bed. William instructed the group to stand across the narrow room.

As Colin took his place beside the other bunk, he saw a model of a sick child huddling beneath the covers. At her feet, a mother cradled a wee baby. All three faces bore blackened, rotting noses and lips. His stomach twisted.

When he turned back to William, Colin could now see that the bent figure in black was wearing a grotesque bird’s-head mask covering his entire head.
Worst football mascot ever
, he thought, suppressing a nervous laugh.

As William listed the symptoms of bubonic plague—swollen lymph nodes, fever, chills, continuous vomiting of blood—Colin felt his fingers begin to tingle. When William described how victims’ skin would decompose while they were still alive, the tingling spread up Colin’s arms and shoulders, then swept over his scalp.

“Is it hot in here?” he whispered to Andrew.

“Shh. He’s explaining the doctor.”

“This gentleman,” William said, gesturing to the figure in black, “was the local physician. You’re probably wondering why he’s wearing such a macabre mask. After all, you’d think in a home like this, they could do with a bit of cheer.”

Get on with it, ya knob.
As Colin stared at the doctor with the crow-shaped head, the room began to waver. Hoping it was the fake candlelight blurring his vision, he blinked hard and rubbed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw the long, gray lump in the corner for what it was—a blanket-covered corpse.

His temples flared with heat.
Please let’s move on now. Please. Now.

“The crow was thought by some to be a sacred animal which warded off evil spirits,” William said. “This strange outfit did protect the doctors, but for entirely natural reasons. The shroud kept off the plague-ridden fleas, spread by these wee beasties.” The guide tapped the top bunk, where two rubber rats with gleaming red eyes peered down at the visitors. “See, the bacteria blocks the flea’s digestive system, so when it tries to feed, it regurgitates the infected blood into the bite wound.”

The room seemed to drain of oxygen. Colin swayed, his gut twisting harder.

Gonnae no throw up on this medieval floor,
he commanded himself.
Your stomach acid’ll ruin the wood. And what if your boaking makes everyone else sick? You’ll start a new plague. The Boak Plague.

The thought of the tour group becoming a giant vomit-fest made Colin’s choice clear.

“I need to go.” He took a step toward the exit.

Andrew grabbed his arm. “Wait, what are you—”

Colin spun to free himself, then felt his legs give out. The room pitched and swooped like a carnival ride. Reaching out in desperation, his hands found coarse cloth and clung tight.

“Watch it, mate!” William cried out. “Gonnae no—”

Colin slumped to the floor, pulling the plague doctor down. The dead, dull eyes of the mask stared through him, then began to fade.

“S
ORRY
I
RUINED
your city.”

Andrew could barely hear Colin’s muffled voice, what with the lad’s head being wedged between his own knees. “You ruined nothing,” he replied as they sat side-by-side on a bench in the Close’s dim corridor. “William said you’re far from the first person to faint in there.” He eyed the door of the plague room, where the rest of their tourist group were still gathered. “Some claim it’s haunted by the ghosts of plague victims.”

“I didnae feel haunted.” Colin slowly straightened up, face damp with sweat. “I just felt sick. All the talk of blood-boaking and decomposing skin and—” He shuddered and gulped.

“Here.” Andrew gave Colin a gentle push. “Lean your face against the wall. It’s nice and cold.”