Chapter 2: First Morning After: The Art of Holding Back
Roz’s breath hitched as Alasdair’s fingers traced the hem of her sleep shirt, his touch feather-light yet scorching against her thigh. The sudden, unfamiliar intimacy of it—the sheer thereness of his hand on her skin—sent a jolt through her. She instinctively curled away with a whimper, her body folding in on itself like a fern touched by frost.
He immediately stilled. His hand withdrew, leaving a cool absence where his warmth had been.
“Hey,” he murmured, his voice thick with sleep and something else—concern. “Roz. Look at me.”
She kept her eyes squeezed shut, embarrassment burning her cheeks. Her heart thudded against her ribs, a frantic, trapped bird. She wanted his touch, craved it with a deep, shameful ache, but her body had betrayed her with its own startled fear. “I’m sorry,” she whispered into the pillow.
“No,” he said, his voice firm but gentle. “Don’t be sorry.” He didn’t try to pull her back, just shifted onto his side, propping his head on his hand. The dawn light painted the stubble on his jaw in gold. “Look at me, sweetheart.”
Slowly, she turned her head. His eyes were soft, watching her with a patient intelligence that made her want to hide and be seen, all at once.
“You flinched,” he stated softly.
She nodded, biting her lip.
“Okay.” He breathed the word out like a sigh. “That’s okay. We just stop.” He smiled, a small, tender thing. “We have all the time in the world. Literally. Eilidh won’t expect us for hours. The world is asleep.”
His calm was a balm. The tension in her shoulders began to seep away. “It’s not that I don’t…”
“I know,” he interrupted, his fingers coming to brush a strand of hair from her forehead. The gesture was so pure, so caring, that her eyes stung. “It’s new. It’s big. Your body’s just being careful with you. I like that about it.”
She let out a shaky breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. “You’re not… disappointed?”
Alasdair actually laughed, a low, warm sound that vibrated through the mattress. “Disappointed? Christ, Roz. Last night was….” He shook his head, searching for the word. “It was monumental. This?” He gestured to the small space between them. “This is just now. It’s different.”
He rolled onto his back, staring up at the sloped ceiling where the morning light was growing stronger. “Come here,” he said, opening his arm.
She hesitated for a second, then moved, settling into the hollow of his shoulder. Her head found its familiar place on his chest. His arm came around her, solid and sure. Here, there was no demand, only sanctuary.
“When I was a boy,” he said, his voice a rumble beneath her ear, “I found a bird with a broken wing. A little thrush. I wanted to fix it. I had all these ideas about splints made from twigs. But my dad, he just made a nest for it in a box, gave it water, and left it the hell alone. It needed safety before it could even think about flying again.” His fingers drew slow circles on her arm. “I’m not comparing you to a bird. Well, maybe a bit. A really beautiful, brilliant thrush. My point is, the wanting to fix, to do, it’s sometimes the problem.”
She absorbed this, listening to the steady drum of his heart. The metaphor was clumsy and perfect. He was an architect. He saw broken things and wanted to design solutions. But with her, he was just… providing the box. The safety.
“I’m not broken,” she said softly.
“I know you’re not.” He kissed the top of her head. “But you’re new to this. To me. And that’s a sacred thing. I don’t want to trample it.”
They lay like that as the room brightened, the shapes of furniture emerging from the gloom. The silence was companionable, full of unspoken understanding. After a long while, Roz shifted. She placed her palm flat on his chest, over his heart, feeling its rhythm. Then, with a resolve that surprised her, she slid her hand down, over the warm plane of his stomach.
He inhaled sharply, his muscles tightening under her touch.
She looked up at him. His eyes were dark, watching her. There was no pressure in his gaze, only a waiting intensity.
Slowly, deliberately, she guided his hand back to her waist, under the soft cotton of her shirt. Her skin pebbled at the contact. This time, she didn’t flinch. She watched his face, saw the flare of tenderness there, the careful control.
“Okay?” he whispered, his thumb stroking the dip of her waist.
She nodded. “Okay.”
It was different this time. Slower. A conversation without words. His touch was a question, hers an answer. He learned the landscape of her, the arch of a rib, the softness of her belly, the sharp angle of her hip. She explored the hard lines of his shoulders, the dusting of hair on his forearms, the surprising strength in his elegant, drafting hands.
When his fingers brushed the underside of her breast, she arched into it, a small, helpless sound escaping her lips. The fear was gone, dissolved in a rising tide of pure sensation.
“Alasdair,” she breathed.
“I’m here.”
And he was. Wholly, completely there. His focus was absolute, attuned to every hitch in her breath, every shiver. It was overwhelming, being seen so completely. When he finally, finally lowered his head and took her nipple into his mouth through the thin cotton, the world contracted to a single, bright point of feeling. She cried out, her fingers knotting in his hair.
He soothed her with his hands, with whispered words that were lost against her skin. He moved over her, a welcome weight, and when they joined, it was without hesitation. It was deeper, more certain than the night before. She wrapped her legs around him, anchoring herself as he moved, each stroke a revelation. He kept his eyes open, locked on hers, and the intimacy of that—being witnessed in her pleasure—tipped her over the edge. She shattered with a gasp, and he followed, his own release shuddering through him as he buried his face in the curve of her neck.
Later, they stumbled into the small, steamy bathroom together. He turned on the shower, and they stood under the weak, hot spray, washing each other with a drowsy, domestic tenderness. He soaped her back, his thumbs working the knots from her shoulders. She traced the Gaelic tattoo on his bicep, the ink blurred by water.
“What does it mean?” she asked.
“Mo chridhe,” he said softly. “My heart.”
She didn’t ask if it was for someone else. The way he was looking at her told her everything.
They dressed in comfortable silence. He lent her one of his heavy wool jumpers, which swallowed her frame, the sleeves flopping over her hands. She rolled them up, smelling him on the fabric—peat, salt, and him.
Downstairs, the cottage was warm and smelled of frying bacon. Eilidh was at the stove, her back to them.
“Finally,” she said without turning around. “I was about to send a search party. Or assume you’d choked on the peat smoke.” She turned, her sharp eyes taking in Roz’s flushed face, Alasdair’s relaxed posture, the way his hand rested possessively on the small of Roz’s back. A ghost of a smile touched her lips. “Sit. Eat. You’ll need your strength. The mist is lifting. I thought you might walk to the old kirk today. It’s a thinking sort of place.”
Over a breakfast of salty bacon, dense brown bread, and strong tea, the mood lifted into something lighter. Eilidh prodded Alasdair with stories of his childhood—the time he tried to build a treehouse using only a butter knife and string, his disastrous attempts at cooking foraged mushrooms.
“He nearly killed us all with his chanterelle casserole,” Eilidh said, deadpan. “A born architect. Beautiful plans, catastrophic execution.”
“I was ten!” Alasdair protested, grinning.
Roz laughed, the sound bright in the stone-walled room. She watched them, this easy, teasing dance between aunt and nephew, and felt a pang of longing for a family she’d never had. It was quickly followed by a warm rush of belonging. He had shared this with her. He was sharing them.
After breakfast, they pulled on boots and coats. The world outside was diamond-bright, the earlier mist burned away to reveal a sky of hard, clear blue. The air was cold and sharp, scoured clean by the wind that whispered through the rust-colored bracken.
They walked without a clear path, following sheep trails that ribboned over the hills. The silence between them was different now—easy, filled with the crunch of their footsteps and the distant cry of a buzzard. He pointed out things: the different types of lichen on a rock, the way the light hit the distant loch, turning it to beaten silver.
“It’s so quiet,” Roz said, her breath puffing white in the air.
“It’s not quiet,” Alasdair corrected, stopping and closing his eyes. “Listen.”
She did. Beyond the wind, there was a symphony: the trickle of hidden water, the rustle of a hundred small creatures in the undergrowth, the creak of ancient trees, the vast, breathing silence of the land itself.
“It’s just not noisy,” he said, opening his eyes. They were the colour of the loch today, grey and clear. “There’s a difference.”
She took his hand, their gloved fingers lacing together. They walked on, cresting a rise, and there it was: the old kirk. It was a ruin, a skeletal finger of stone pointing at the sky. Half the roof was gone, the walls clad in emerald moss. It stood in a hollow, surrounded by leaning, worn headstones, guardians of forgotten names.
They picked their way through the long, wet grass to the arched doorway, which stood open like a missing tooth. Inside, the floor was a carpet of soft, damp moss. The air was still and cold, holy in its emptiness. Shafts of sunlight pierced holes in the stonework, illuminating swirling motes of dust.
Roz walked to the center, where the altar would have been, and turned a slow circle. “It’s sad,” she said, her voice echoing slightly.
“Is it?” Alasdair leaned against the wall by the door, watching her. “I think it’s honest. It’s what’s left when all the words and the sermons are gone. Just the stone, and the sky, and the fact that people once cared enough to build something here.”
She looked at him, silhouetted in the broken archway, the vast Highland sky behind him. He belonged here, in this raw, beautiful, unsentimental place. A man who saw foundations, who understood what remained.
“What would you build here?” she asked.
He considered, his gaze sweeping the ruins. “Nothing. I’d stabilize it. Make it safe. And then I’d leave it. Some things shouldn’t be rebuilt. They should just… be witnessed.”
He pushed off the wall and came to her. In the sanctity of the broken kirk, with only the wind for a choir, he took her face in his hands. His gloves were rough against her skin. “I want to witness you, Roz Elliot,” he said, his voice low and full of a terrifying certainty. “All of you. The quiet parts and the loud ones. The ruins and the rising bits. For as long as you’ll let me.”
Her breath caught. This was it. The thing she’d been waiting for, dreading, longing for. Not a proposal, but a declaration of intent. A blueprint for a shared future, drawn not in lines, but in promise.
Tears welled, hot and sudden. She didn’t try to stop them.
He wiped one away with his thumb, a look of mild panic in his eyes. “Ah, hell. Too much?”
She shook her head, a laugh hiccuping through her tears. “No. It’s just right.” She stood on her toes and kissed him, a soft, salty kiss. “I want that too,” she whispered against his lips.
He pulled her into an embrace, holding her tight as the wind moaned through the empty windows. They stood like that for a long time, two figures in a ruin, building something new from the old, silent stones. Outside, the buzzard called again, a lonely, hopeful sound that carried across the endless, waiting hills.
Outside, the buzzard called again, a lonely, hopeful sound that carried across the endless, waiting hills. Alasdair finally released her, the ghost of his breath warm against her temple. "You're freezing," he murmured, feeling her shiver through the thick wool of his jumper.
He kept an arm around her as they left the kirk’s hollow silence, leading her back onto the sheep-cropped grass. The wind had picked up, biting now. They walked back towards the cottage faster, their earlier meandering replaced by a shared purpose, a need for warmth and the simple comfort of walls.
"You build safe things," Roz said after a while, her voice almost lost to the gusts. "You said you’d just stabilize the kirk. Make it safe."
He glanced at her, his eyes curious. "Aye. That’s the job."
"Is that what you're doing with me?" The question was out before she could cage it, blunt and startling.
Alasdair stopped walking. He turned her to face him, his hands on her shoulders. The wind whipped her hair across her face. "No," he said, the word absolute. "That kirk is finished. Its story is written in erosion. You're... you're a blank page on my drafting table. All potential. The safest thing I could do is leave you alone. Not touch the page."
His honesty was a physical thing, a third presence in the space between them. She searched his face. "And you're not going to do that."
"Not a chance." A slow smile spread across his face, softening his intensity. "I'm going to make a mess of that page. A beautiful, complicated, brilliant mess. With you." He pulled her close, tucking her under his chin. "Come on, wee one, fancy a pub lunch?"
He put his arm round her and they walked away to the pub.
The pub, The Hanging Stone, was a low, whitewashed building hunched against the weather. Inside, it was all peat-smoke darkness and the low hum of conversation. A few old men in flat caps turned from the bar as they entered, their gazes lingering on Roz with a frank, uncomplicated curiosity.
"Alasdair MacLeod," one of them grunted, raising a pint. "Heard you were back. And with a visitor."
"Tam," Alasdair nodded, his hand firm on Roz's back. "This is Roz."
"Sorted you out a table by the fire," the barman called, wiping his hands on a towel. He gestured to a corner where a deep stone fireplace held a crackling blaze. It was a gesture of kindness, or privacy. Perhaps both.
They settled into worn leather chairs, the heat from the flames immediate and grateful on their skin. Alasdair ordered pies and a half-pint of heavy for himself, a ginger beer for her. The familiarity of the place was on him, the ease with which he navigated it. This was another part of his world, one she was only just seeing.
"Those men..." she started, self-consciously smoothing the oversized jumper.
"Just looking," he said, not unkindly. "You’re new. You’re with me. That’s news. It’ll be all over the glen by teatime." He took a sip of his dark beer. "Does it bother you?"
She thought about it, watching the firelight dance on the polished wood of the table. "A little. It feels like... being assessed."
"You are," he said simply. "And you passed. Tam wouldn’t have nodded if you hadn’t." He leaned forward, his eyes reflecting the fire. "It's not a judgment on you, Roz. It's a vigilance over me. They've known me since I was in nappies. Eilidh’s people. My people."
The food arrived, steaming and fragrant. The pie crust was golden, the gravy rich. It was uncomplicated, hearty fuel. As they ate, the tension from the walk and the ruin began to seep away, replaced by a mundane contentment.
"So, a blank page," she said later, tracing the rim of her bottle. "What's the first line?"
He sat back, considering. The fire popped, sending a spiral of sparks up the chimney. "I think," he said slowly, "the first line is you telling me what you're afraid of. Not the flinching. The deeper thing. The thing that makes the flinching happen."
She looked into the flames, the question settling heavily in her gut. It was the same question Eilidh had implied, wrapped in different words. Ye cannae shield her forever.
"The first line," she repeated, her voice quiet. "What if it's boring?"
"Impossible." He didn't smile. He was waiting, his full attention on her like a physical touch.
She took a breath. "I'm afraid..." The words clung to her throat. She tried again, forcing them out. "I'm afraid you'll get bored. That you'll finish the... the drawing, and there won't be anything else to add. That you'll realize I'm just a nice, simple sketch, and you need a grander design."
There it was. The fear, laid bare between the pie crumbs and empty glasses. It was shocking in its plainness, its pathetic need. She wanted to snatch it back.
Alasdair didn't move for a long moment. He just looked at her, his expression unreadable. Then he reached across the table and took her hand, his thumb pressing into her palm. "Roz," he said, his voice rough. "Listen to me. You are not a project. You are not a client. A building is a defined problem with a defined solution. You are... infinite variables. You’re a storm front rolling in off the Atlantic. I can’t solve you. I don’t want to."
He let that hang in the smoky air. "I want to stand in the rain. I want to get soaked to the skin." He gave a short, breathless laugh. "Christ, I am getting soaked. And I love it."
Her eyes filled again, but this time it was a clean, sharp feeling. Not shame, but a piercing relief.
Before she could respond, Tam appeared beside their table, holding two small glasses of amber liquid. "A wee dram," he said, his voice gravelly. "From my own cask. For the lassie. To warm her from the inside."
He placed the glasses down with a final nod and shuffled away. It was a sacrament. An acceptance.
Alasdair raised his glass. "Slàinte mhath."
They drank. The whisky was fire and honey and smoke, burning a path of bold warmth down her chest. She coughed, then smiled, a real, wide smile.
"Okay," she said, setting the glass down with a decisive click. The fear was still there, a small, cold stone in her pocket. But it was outweighed now by the heat of the fire, the taste of the whisky, the solid weight of his hand holding hers. "Okay."
He paid the bill, helping her into her coat. As they stepped back out into the brilliant, cold afternoon, the world felt newly calibrated. The hills seemed closer, the sky more intimate. He pulled her into his side as they walked back up the track, his arm a fixed, welcome weight.
Back at Eilidh’s cottage, the herbalist was at her potting bench in the glass-framed porch, repotting seedlings. She looked up as they came in, her sharp eyes missing nothing: Roz’s flushed cheeks, the relaxed set of Alasdair’s shoulders, the new, quiet understanding between them.
"Survived the Hanging Stone, then?" Eilidh asked, wiping her earthy hands on her apron.
"Aye. Tam gave her a dram," Alasdair said, hanging their coats.
Eilidh’s eyebrows rose. "High praise." She gave Roz an appraising look. "You must have a strong spine, lass. That stuff would peel varnish."
Roz just smiled, feeling the truth of it. She did feel stronger. The quiet in her head, for the first time in days, was a peaceful one.
The afternoon melted into evening. They drank more tea. Alasdair sketched by the fire, loose, flowing drawings of the kirk ruins. Roz watched his hands, the sure, graceful lines, the way he bit his lip in concentration. She saw the architect in him now, the maker of structures, the seer of potential forms in broken things.
Eilidh told stories of the local folklore, tales of each-uisge and bean-nighe, her voice a low, mesmerizing rhythm. The fire burned down to embers. The wind sang its old song against the windows.
Later, in the small bedroom under the eaves, Roz lay awake listening to Alasdair’s steady breathing. The blank page he’d spoken of didn’t feel so terrifying now. It felt… spacious. Full of light. She turned onto her side, watching the moonlight trace the line of his jaw, the dark fan of his lashes against his cheek.
She thought of the thrush with the broken wing. He had wanted to fix it. His father had known to just give it a safe place to heal. She wasn’t broken. But she was healing from something she couldn't even name—the quiet ache of a life unlived, of a self unseen.
Alasdair wasn’t building a cage around her fragility. He was clearing a space. And in that space, for the first time, she felt the faint, terrifying, thrilling impulse to move. To test a wing. Not because he was pushing her, but because he had finally, quietly, stopped the world from pushing in.
She inched closer, pressing her forehead between his shoulder blades. He murmured in his sleep, his hand finding hers in the tangle of blankets, holding it even in unconsciousness. She closed her eyes. Outside, the wind hummed through the heather, a secret shared between the hills and two hearts learning the same, new rhythm.