Chapter 13: Drafting Distance
The smell of frying bacon wound its way upstairs, pulling Roz from a thin, dream-chased sleep. The other side of the bed was empty, but the scent was a peace offering, or a flag of truce. She dressed in her own clothes, the ones from the bag Moira had brought, feeling both grateful and resentful for their clean, familiar touch.
Down in the kitchen, Ally stood at the stove. The morning light through the small window caught the steam rising from the pan. He was focused, precise in his movements, a contrast to the raw emotion of the night before. The contract papers were now stacked neatly beside the fruit bowl, a dormant beast on the checkered tablecloth.
“You cook,” she said, leaning against the doorframe.
“I survive.” He glanced over his shoulder, his expression unreadable. “Scrambled or fried?”
“Scrambled. Please.”
He nodded, cracking eggs one-handed into a bowl. The domesticity of it was jarring. This was how normal couples spent their mornings. Not hiding in a grandmother’s house, grappling with fame and relocation clauses.
They ate at the small table, the silence between them not quite comfortable, but not hostile either. It was the quiet of people navigating a minefield, careful where they placed their words.
Finally, Ally pushed his plate aside and reached for the papers. He didn’t open them. Just rested his hand on top. “We need to talk about this. Properly.”
“I know.”
“It’s not just a bad contract. It’s a different life.” He slid the top document toward her. His finger found a clause halfway down the page. “There. Relocation. London. Full season commitment, with options for two more.”
Roz read the legalese. It was cold, final. “London.”
“Saracens. It’s a top club. It’s… it’s what I should want. A fresh start, away from all the local drama. More money. A bigger stage.” He said the words as if reciting from a brochure. “My agent’s ecstatic.”
She heard the ‘but’ he hadn’t voiced. “But?”
He leaned back, the chair creaking under his weight. “But it’s not here. It’s not Scotland. It’s a three-hour train ride on a good day. It’s a tiny flat in a faceless building instead of a house with a garden. It’s you, here, trying to build your career in the place that inspires you, while I’m living out of a kit bag down there.”
The future he painted was bleak, bifurcated. Roz saw it instantly: the strained Sunday visits, the lonely studios, the slow, draining pull of separate lives. Her career was finally gaining momentum here, in the landscapes and the light she understood. Her contacts, her gallery, Moira—for all her faults—were here. Uprooting now would be like cutting a sapling’s roots just as it found purchase.
“You can’t turn it down because of me,” she said, the words tasting like ash.
“I’m not.” He met her eyes. “I’m considering turning it down because of me. Because what kind of life is that? Even if you came with me, and I’m not asking you to, what would you do? Paint views of Primrose Hill? Your work is here, Roz. The portrait, the acclaim, it’s rooted here. I saw it at the loch. You need the rain and the grey and the bloody heather.”
Tears pricked her eyes. He saw it. He saw the core of her in a way that was terrifying.
“So what’s the answer?” she whispered. “You stay, sign a terrible deal with your current club, and resent me for the career opportunities you lost?”
“No.” He stood up abruptly, pacing the short length of the kitchen. “The answer is we draw a new map. Together.” He stopped, pulled a pencil from a jar by the phone, and placed it on the contract, right over the relocation clause. “I won’t go unless we draw this together. Unless we both want the same picture.”
It was a profound gesture. An invitation. But it felt like he was handing her a leash and asking her to lead a lion. The weight of his career, his dreams, settled on her shoulders.
She stared at the pencil. It was just a cheap, yellow thing, chewed at the end. The instrument of their future.
“What if I don’t know what to draw?” Her voice was small. “What if my picture… what if it’s small? A studio in Glasgow, a quiet life. No London glamour. No following the rugby star to his next big adventure.”
His jaw tightened. A tiny muscle flickered. That was the fear, laid bare. That her ambitions couldn’t bend, wouldn’t stretch to encompass the scale of his. That her art required a rooted solitude his life would constantly disrupt.
“Then we draw small,” he said, but the words were strained. “But we have to be honest about the canvas. If it’s small, then my career here stays small. Diminished. And that has consequences. For my pride, for my bank account, for my… my legacy.” He breathed out, a long, slow sigh. “I’m not asking for glamour. I’m asking for a partnership. A team. If we’re a team, then your career is as important as mine. But that means mine can’t just be an inconvenience we work around.”
The kitchen clock ticked. The bacon fat congealed on the plates.
Roz picked up the pencil. It was warm from his hand. She turned it over, her mind a blank page. The pressure was paralyzing. To sketch a life was one thing. To ink it in contract-law reality was another.
“I need to think,” she said, setting the pencil down. It made a faint, definitive tap on the wood.
The hope in his eyes dimmed, just a fraction. He’d offered her the pen, and she’d hesitated. In his world, hesitation was a weakness opponents exploited. He covered it quickly, nodding, stacking the plates. “Right. Of course.”
“It’s not a no, Ally. It’s just… it’s the biggest decision.”
“I know.” He ran the hot water, his back to her. “Take the day. Paint. Think. I’ve got to call my agent, tell him I’m still reviewing. He’ll have a coronary.”
She left him at the sink, the gulf between them no longer filled with shouting, but with a thick, silent dread. She climbed the stairs to the back bedroom. Her unfinished painting sat on the easel. The worried man. Now she felt like she was painting his future, and she was the one holding the brush that might dash it.
She didn’t paint. She sat on the edge of the bed, staring at her phone. She scrolled through her gallery website, the portraits of stern-faced judges and celebrated authors. A tidy, respectable career. Then she looked at the tabs left open from her frantic searches days ago: Ally Fraser Saracens rumour mill, Scottish rugby star in contract standoff, Who is the mystery artist?
Two worlds. They existed in the same digital space, but they were crashing into each other with the force of continents.
Her phone buzzed. An unknown number with a London prefix.
She answered, her throat tight. “Hello?”
“Roz MacDonald? It’s Eleanor Vance, from the Herald magazine. Moira said you might be open to a chat?”
The timing was grotesque. Roz closed her eyes. “I… now isn’t a great time.”
“I understand completely. Just a quick, informal chat? Background, really. Moira mentioned you were at a bit of a crossroads, with Ally’s potential move and your own exhibition plans. I’d love to get your perspective, in your own words.”
The woman’s voice was smooth, intelligent. Not a tabloid hack. A professional who wrote long-form pieces about artists and thinkers. The temptation was a sharp, sweet ache. To explain herself, on her terms. To define the narrative before it defined her.
Downstairs, she heard the low rumble of Ally’s voice. He was on his call, his tone clipped, professional, frustrated.
“Alright,” Roz heard herself say. “I can talk for ten minutes.”
“Wonderful,” Eleanor said. “So, the portrait of Ally Fraser. It’s been called a revelation. What were you trying to capture about him that the cameras normally miss?”
Roz looked at the painting on the easel. The private worry. The weight. She thought of the man downstairs, trying to protect her from a machine he understood far better than she did. She thought of the pencil on the kitchen table.
She began to speak, choosing her words with the same care she mixed her paints. She talked about light, and shadow, and the difference between a public face and a private soul. She did not mention the contract. She did not mention London. She spoke only of the art, and the man she saw when the crowds weren’t looking.
As she talked, she realized she was drawing a line. Not with a pencil on a contract, but with words in the air. This part of her life, the creative core, was hers to explain. The rest—the messy, real, terrifying future—that was a drawing they still had to make together. And the page, for now, remained terrifyingly blank.
The interview ended with Eleanor’s polished thanks, the call dissolving into a silence that felt thicker than before. Roz set the phone down on the windowsill, the cool glass against her fingertips. Outside, the world continued with a mundane indifference that was almost offensive.
The small open park opposite Nana Fraser’s house was a patch of scrappy grass bordered by tired railings. Two boys, maybe ten years old, were kicking a football back and forth. Their shouts were muffhered by the glass, their movements chaotic and free. They weren’t thinking about contracts or clauses or relocation. They were just playing.
Roz watched them, her mind unspooling.
Ally would still have to come up to Edinburgh a lot. He’d still play for Scotland. Murrayfield was a huge part of his life, a cathedral he wouldn’t abandon. A Scottish sportsman based in London was still a Scottish sportsman. The travel was a grind, but it was a known grind.
And her? She was a Scottish artist, but she could paint in London. Travel up if she needed. She could keep the same agent; she’d exhibited in London a lot anyway, those frantic trips down for private views and stiff conversations. Her work wasn’t about the dirt under her feet, but the light on a face, the tension in a shoulder. Light existed in London, too. Different, but it existed.
It’s not forever, she thought. Contracts had term lengths. Careers had phases. This was a phase, not a tomb.
The boys below scrambled for the ball, one tumbling over in a heap of limbs before bouncing back up, laughing. The simplicity of it was a hook in her chest.
She turned from the window.
The worn floorboards creaked under her feet as she walked to the top of the stairs. Down in the kitchen, she could hear the low murmur of the radio, the clink of a cup. She drew a breath, her heart a solid, steady drum against her ribs.
“Ally?” she called down, her voice clearer than she expected.
The radio went silent. A chair scraped. His footsteps approached the bottom of the staircase, but he didn’t appear. He was waiting, giving her the space of the stairs between them. “Aye?”
“Come up here a minute?”
He appeared then, looking up at her. His face was careful, neutral, the same look he wore in press conferences before a tough question. “Everything okay?”
“No,” she said. “But it might be.” She nodded back toward the bedroom. “Bring the contract. And that pencil.”
A flicker of something—not quite hope, but a kind of focused intensity—passed behind his eyes. He turned without a word, retrieving the documents from the kitchen table. He took the stairs two at a time, the papers rustling in his hand.
He followed her into the sunlit back room. She didn’t go to the easel. She sat on the edge of the bed and patted the space beside her. He sat, the mattress dipping under his weight, and placed the contract between them like a shared puzzle.
“You were right,” she began, picking up the pencil. It felt different now. Not a weapon, not a leash. A tool. “We draw it together. But we don’t start with the signature line.”
“Where do we start?” he asked, his voice low.
She flipped past the front pages, past the legal jargon, to a clean sheet at the back. She drew a rough vertical line down the center. On the left, at the top, she wrote London. On the right, she wrote Here.
“We start with the truth. All of it.” She pointed to London. “What you actually get. Not what your agent sells. The flat, the training ground, the travel schedule. The isolation.” She tapped Here. “What I actually have. The studio, the gallery relationship, my network. The rain.”
He watched her hand, the firmness of her strokes. “Okay.”
“Then,” she said, drawing connecting lines, “we map the bridges. You’re here for Scotland games, for training camps. I’m there for… maybe a month at first. I can work from a flat. I’ll need a space. Not a cupboard. A real space.”
“We find a flat with a space,” he said, his shoulder brushing hers as he leaned in. “A requirement. Not an afterthought.”
“We keep my studio in Glasgow. Sublet it short-term, maybe. But we keep it.” Saying ‘we’ felt dangerous and necessary.
“Of course.”
“And we check in. Not just ‘how was your day.’ Proper check-ins. Like… team talks.” She glanced at him. “Is this insane?”
“It’s the least insane thing we’ve done in weeks.” He took the pencil from her fingers, his hand warm over hers. He wrote under London: 2-year option. Then he circled it. “We treat it as a two-year project. A joint venture. We review everything after eighteen months. No automatic extensions. A conscious choice.”
The blank page was filling. Not with dreams, but with logistics. With exit strategies and defined terms. It felt sturdy.
“What if I hate it?” she whispered, the core fear finally voiced.
“Then we have the review. And we adjust. Radically.” He turned his head, his blue eyes holding hers. “What if I hate it? What if I’m just another face down there?”
“Then you come home. You play out your contract here, on your terms, and we build something else.” She took the pencil back. In the margin, she drew a small, shaky rugby post and a painter’s palette, linked by a single, firm line. “But we only hate it if we’re doing it alone. The deal is, we’re not alone. Even when we’re in different cities.”
He was silent for a long moment, looking at her crude drawing. Then he took the contract, the official one, and turned it over to the blank back page. “This,” he said, pointing to their makeshift chart, “is the only contract that matters. The rest is just paperwork for accountants.”
He folded the official document and shoved it into his back pocket, dismissed. The gesture was so final it stole her breath.
“So we’re doing this?” she asked.
“We’re trying this.” He stood, offering her his hand. “First step. We go downstairs, and I call my agent. You call Moira. We tell them the plan. Then we get out of this house and go for a walk. I need to not look at these walls for a bit.”
She put her hand in his, letting him pull her up. The momentum was there, a current they had created together. It was terrifying. It was theirs.
It was theirs. The plan, scribbled on the back of discarded contract pages, felt more binding than any lawyer's clause. Roz followed Ally down the narrow stairs, her eyes tracing the familiar slope of his shoulders. The kitchen still smelled of bacon and anxiety.
Ally pulled his phone from his pocket, thumb hovering over his agent's number. He exhaled, a sharp burst of air. "Right. Let's get the shouting over with."
"You want me to go?" Roz asked, already moving toward the back door to give him privacy.
"Nope." He caught her wrist, his grip gentle but insistent. "Stay. This is the 'together' part. It's probably gonna be ugly." He tapped the screen and put it on speaker, the dial tone a brittle echo in the quiet room.
The agent answered on the second ring. "Ally. Tell me you've signed." The voice was all brisk efficiency.
"Not exactly, Craig." Ally's tone was calm, a flat stone dropped into water. "I'm not taking the Saracens deal as written."
A beat of static-filled silence. "What does that mean, 'not as written'? They're not moving on the relocation. It's non-negotiable."
"I know. I'm agreeing to relocate." Ally’s eyes found Roz’s. "But we're adding terms. A minimum square footage for a proper workspace in the flat. A review clause at eighteen months, not two years. And I need a guaranteed travel budget for return trips outside international windows. Four a season."
Craig sputtered. "You don't get to make demands like that! This is a take-it-or-leave-it offer from a top-four club!"
"I am leaving it," Ally said, his voice dropping, a quiet force that tightened the air. "I'm leaving it unless they can see me as a whole person with a life, not just a jersey. My partner is an artist with a career here. We're a package deal now. Frame it as securing my well-being, avoiding off-field distraction. Use your spin."
Roz heard the agent's exasperated sigh. "You're betting a seven-figure contract on... on square footage?"
"I'm betting my career on my sanity. Pitch it."
After a string of creative curses, Craig grumbled, "I'll pitch it. They'll say no."
"Then I stay in Scotland on a one-year and re-evaluate everything next summer. The leverage shifts then, and they know it." Ally’s logic was cold, clinical. A player assessing the field. "Call me back."
He ended the call. The kitchen settled around them, the old refrigerator humming into the new silence. Ally ran a hand through his hair. "Well. That's my bridge burned if they call the bluff."
"Was it a bluff?" Roz asked.
He looked at her, the professional mask melting away to reveal the weary man beneath. "No. It wasn't."
Her turn. She scrolled for Moira's number, her stomach a nest of wires. Moira answered with her customary, "Roz, darling, tell me you've finished the portrait and not gotten pregnant."
"Neither." Roz switched her phone to speaker, placing it on the table between them. "But Ally and I have been planning. He's likely moving to London."
A pause. "I see. And you?"
"I'll be going with him. Part-time, at first. I'll keep the Glasgow studio, but I'll need to base myself down there for chunks of the season."
"Roz." Moira's sigh was theatrical. "This is precisely the kind of lateral relationship energy that derails promising careers. You cannot be a trailing spouse."
"I'm not a spouse. And I'm not trailing." The words came out sharper than Roz intended. "I'm relocating my business. London has galleries. It has patrons. I can work from anywhere. This is an expansion, not a retreat."
"You have momentum here. The Herald piece is about your Scottish soul, your connection to the land and its people!"
"My connection is to people, full stop. One person in particular." Roz felt Ally's gaze, a physical warmth on her cheek. "I'll do the Herald interview. I'll talk about my work. And I'll mention my upcoming London projects. Frame it as growth. You're good at that."
A longer silence. Then, a shift in Moira’s tone, from disapproval to calculation. "The 'artist follows rugby star' narrative is cheap. The 'artist and athlete build dual-career partnership' narrative is... modern. Potentially lucrative. Can you sound intelligent about it?"
"I can try."
"Don't try. Be definitive. I'll draft some talking points." The line clicked dead.
Roz put her phone down. Her hand was trembling. Ally covered it with his own, his palm rough and entirely steady. "Two bombs defused. Or at least, the timers paused."
They sat in the aftermath of the calls, the adrenaline leaching away, leaving a hollowed-out calm. The morning was slipping away, the light through the lace curtains softening. The house felt like a waiting room.
"We need air," Ally said, standing suddenly. "I can't sit here waiting for the phone to ring. Let's walk. Up to the crags. Blow the shite out of our heads."
He fetched their coats from the hook in the hall. Roz shrugged into hers, the wool smelling of peat smoke and Nana Fraser. They stepped out the front door into a crisp Edinburgh day, the wind off the Firth slicing through the calm.
They walked without speaking for a long time, climbing the steep paths away from the cottages, the city spreading out below them in a grey and green patchwork. The physical effort burned away the last of the nervous energy. Here, there were no contracts, no agents, just the burn in their thighs and the vast, indifferent sky.
At a lookout, they stopped, leaning against a weathered stone wall. The wind whipped Roz's hair across her face. Ally studied the horizon, his profile stark against the scudding clouds.
"It's a massive risk," he said, not looking at her. "For both of us. My career could stall. Yours could get lost in the noise of mine. We could end up resenting each other in a cramped London flat."
"I know."
He turned to her then, his eyes the colour of the winter sea behind him. "So why does it feel like the only choice?"
"Because the other choice was being apart." She said it simply. The core truth, stripped of all logistics. "And that wasn't a choice at all."
He reached for her, pulling her into the shelter of his body, tucking her head under his chin. The wind screamed around them, but where they stood was quiet. She felt the solid thump of his heart against her ear, a rhythm more reliable than any promise.
"Listen," he murmured into her hair, his voice a low vibration in his chest. "It's going to be hard. There will be paparazzi shit, and lonely nights, and times we get it wrong."
She nodded against him.
"So we need a rule. Simpler than any contract." He pulled back just enough to look at her, his hands firm on her shoulders. "No matter what happens down there, no matter how bad the press gets or how lonely you feel or how shite I play... we don't let the outside in between us. We come back to this. Right here."
He tapped a finger gently against her chest, then against his own. "Okay? You and me, Roz. Ally and Roz. We look after each other."
The words weren't poetic. They were a pact, gritty and real. A vow for the trenches, not the chapel. She saw the absolute sincerity in his face, the fierce, protective clarity that had drawn her to him in a noisy pub a lifetime ago.
"Okay," she said, the wind stealing her breath but not her voice. "Ally and Roz. We look after each other."
He kissed her then, a seal on the bargain. It tasted of salt and cold and a future they would have to fight for. When they broke apart, he kept his forehead pressed to hers.
"Good," he whispered. "Now, let's go home. The phone's going to ring soon, and we should face it together." He took her hand, their fingers interlacing, a new kind of grip. They turned from the vast view and started back down the path, toward the waiting city and the ringing phones, step for step.