Chapter 2: First Sideline Session
The air at the training ground was different. It was a vast, open bowl of sound and motion, the green pitch striped white under a pale, high sky. Roz stood just inside the gate, the laminated pass Ally had arranged for her hanging awkwardly from a lanyard around her neck. It felt like a neon sign. Interloper.
The noise hit her first—a visceral symphony of shouts, whistles, and the deep, concussive thud of tackle bags being hit with terrifying force. The smell was next: damp earth, cut grass, liniment, and the sharp, animal scent of concentrated sweat. It was overwhelming, a world away from the contained aroma of coffee and pastries.
She saw him immediately. Even among thirty other colossal men, Ally moved with a distinctive, efficient grace. He was in the middle of a passing drill, spinning a long, spiral ball to a teammate twenty meters away without seeming to look. The motion was fluid, a full-body whip-crack that ended with his hands held in perfect follow-through. The ball hissed through the air.
Roz’s fingers itched. She forced herself to look away, to take in the whole scene—the coaches with clipboards, the water stations, the physio tables set up under a canopy. She found a spot on a low bench set back from the sideline, partly obscured by a equipment cart. Safe. Unobtrusive. She pulled out her largest sketchbook and a clutch of charcoal pencils.
For a while, she just watched, letting the chaos resolve into patterns. The drills were like violent ballet. She started to draw the shapes, not the individuals. The arc of a runner cutting against the grain. The collapsing pyramid of a ruck. The beautiful, desperate sprawl of a last-ditch ankle tap. She worked fast, her lines loose and confident, capturing the geometry of collision.
“Who’s the spy, MacLeod?” a voice bellowed. Euan. He was shirtless, sweating freely, pointing a water bottle in Roz’s general direction. “You bringing in performance analysts now? She’s wee. Is she from that Swedish tech place?”
Ally turned, following his gaze. He spotted her, a small, dark-haired figure hunched intently over her book. He raised a hand in a brief wave, then shoved Euan’s shoulder. “She’s an artist, you philistine. Now get your feet moving; you’re slower than a week in jail.”
An artist. He’d said it loud enough for others to hear, a simple, defining fact. It felt like a shield.
The session shifted into a contact drill. The mood changed. The joking ceased. The air thickened with focused aggression. Men crashed into each other with a sound like cars colliding. Grunts were punched out of lungs. Roz’s clinical focus wavered.
Ally was in the thick of it. He took the ball into a pod of three charging defenders. He didn’t avoid the contact; he met it, contorting his body at the last second to ride the hit, an act of brutal physics. His neck corded with strain. The muscles of his back and shoulders, slick with sweat and streaked with mud, rippled and bunched under the skin like separate living things. His kit, clinging to him, outlined the powerful sweep of his thighs, the tight curve of his—
Roz looked down at her page. Her hand had moved on its own. She’d drawn him. Not the shape of the play, but him. The detailed rendering of his torso as he braced for impact, the tension in his forearms as he gripped the ball, the intense, focused set of his jaw. It was intimate. It was anatomical. It felt like a violation and a revelation simultaneously.
A heat that had nothing to do with the sun bloomed low in her stomach. It was a unfamiliar, unwelcome pulse. This was supposed to be data. Raw data. But the data was the way a drop of sweat traced a path down the column of his spine. It was the sheer, shocking physicality of him, the vibrant, straining life of his body in motion. She was fascinated. She was appalled at her own fascination.
A whistle blew. The drill stopped. The players staggered apart, breathing hard. Ally ripped his scrum cap off, running a hand through his damp hair. He turned, his chest heaving, and his eyes found her again. This time, he started walking over.
Panic seized her. She snapped the sketchbook shut.
He was a storm of sensory information up close. The heat radiated off him. The smell of effort was profound, earthy and real. His face was flushed, a small cut on his eyebrow seeping a tiny bead of blood. He smiled, and it was tired but genuine.
“Surviving?” he asked, his voice a bit rough.
She nodded, unable to speak. Her heart was hammering against her ribs. She was acutely aware of the drawing just beneath her palm, a secret pressed between the pages.
“It’s a bit different from the coffee shop,” he said, gesturing at the controlled bedlam around them.
“It’s louder,” she managed.
He laughed, a short, breathy sound. “Aye. That it is.” He took a long pull from a water bottle, his throat working. He watched her carefully. “Getting what you need?”
No. Yes. I don’t know.
“It’s… incredible movement. The forces involved. You can see them.” Her words were quiet, technical. A safe harbour.
He nodded, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You can feel them, too. In your bones the next morning.” He paused. “Listen, we’ve got video review now, then I’m done. There’s a cafe just over there, by the stands. The one I mentioned. It’s… well, it’s not Susan’s, but the tea’s hot. If you fancied… debriefing? On the data?”
He was asking her for a coffee. Again. But here, in his world, after she’d just spent an hour secretly drawing the lines of his body with a trembling, illicit intensity. The contradiction was dizzying.
A coach yelled his name. “MacLeod! Don’t make a career out of it!”
“Coming!” he called over his shoulder, but he kept his eyes on Roz, waiting.
The word came out before she could stop it. “Okay.”
His smile widened, bright and uncomplicated. “Give me twenty minutes. Don’t run away.”
He jogged back to the huddle of players, who were already heading inside. Euan slung an arm around Ally’s neck, saying something that made him duck away, laughing. He didn’t look back.
Roz sat on the bench, the noise of the emptying pitch fading to a buzz in her ears. She slowly opened the sketchbook. The drawing stared back at her. It was good. It was alive. It was charged with something she hadn’t intended to put there.
She carefully tore the page out. She folded it once, then again, small and square, and tucked it into the inner pocket of her jacket. A secret to keep. Then she packed her things, her hands steady now, and walked toward the small, steamy-windowed cafe under the stands, the ghost of his heat still lingering in the air around her.
The cafe was a stark contrast to the training ground, all muted clatter and the soft hiss of a milk steamer. It smelled of bacon rolls and weak disinfectant. Roz chose a corner table where she could see the door and kept her jacket on, the folded paper in its pocket a tangible weight against her chest.
She ordered a pot of tea, focusing on the ritual of warming the cup, the precise steep time. Control. The door opened, letting in a wedge of cold air and the sound of cleats on concrete. Ally walked in, changed into track pants and a soft-looking hoodie, his hair damp from a shower. He scanned the room, found her, and a easy smile broke across his face.
“You made it,” he said, sliding into the chair opposite. He moved with a tired looseness now, his energy banked. “I was half convinced you’d leg it. It’s a lot.”
“I considered it,” she admitted, pouring tea. The honesty surprised her. “It’s intense.”
“Aye, well. It has to be.” He ordered a black coffee and a full Scottish breakfast from a passing waitress, who knew him by name. He turned back to Roz, his eyes curious. “So. The data. What’s the verdict from an artistic perspective?”
She stirred her tea, buying a second. “It’s less about individuals. More about vectors. The lines of force.” She glanced up. “When you take a hit, you don’t just stop. You absorb and redirect. Your body tells a story of physics.”
He leaned back, considering. “Never heard it put like that. Usually the analysis is about metres gained or tackle completion. Not stories.”
“Everything’s a story,” she said softly, then immediately regretted how pretentious it sounded. “I mean, the morphology of effort. It’s visible.”
His food arrived, a heaping plate. He ate with a single-minded efficiency that was fascinating in its own right. “You studied door science, right?” he asked between bites. “At uni?”
“Door science?” The question was so unexpected she almost laughed.
“Sorry,” he chuckled, wiping his mouth. “My da calls it that. D-o-o-r-s. Design of… something. Engineering.”
“Oh. Product Design Engineering.” A flush of pleasure that he remembered. “Doors was close enough.”
“So you get it. The mechanics of things. Why they work.” He gestured with his fork. “This is just applied mechanics, really. With more bruising.”
The analogy unlocked something. She nodded, more animated now. “Exactly. The human body as a flawed machine. The stresses are visible. In the way a knee braces, or a shoulder drops before a change of direction. It’s beautiful engineering.”
He watched her talk, his coffee forgotten. “You see all that from the sidelines?”
“You all broadcast it. Every moment. Most people just watch the ball.”
A silence fell, but it was comfortable. He finished his plate, pushed it away. “The drawings in your sketchbook at the coffee shop. The rugby ones. Were they from telly?”
The air left the room. Her hand went instinctively to her jacket pocket. She forced it down to her lap. “No. From memory.”
“Memory?” His eyebrow raised. “That’s some detail.”
She could lie. She could give a vague answer. But he was watching her with those perceptive eyes, and the secret in her pocket felt like it was burning through the fabric. “I come to the games sometimes. The public ones. I sit high up. For the… the broader perspective.”
“You never said hello.” He said it lightly, but there was a genuine curiosity underneath.
“You’re a bit busy.” She took a sip of tea; it was lukewarm. “And it’s not about saying hello. It’s about capturing the movement. The anonymous form.”
He nodded slowly, accepting this. But then a flicker of something else crossed his face. A slight, knowing tilt of his head. “Anonymous, eh? Even the one with my number on the back? The one where I’m covered in mud after the France match? That was a very specific scrum.”
Roz froze. Her throat tightened. He’d seen it. Not just a glimpse. He’d recognized a specific moment, a specific drawing. He’d studied it.
The cafe sounds faded to a dull roar. She had no words.
“It’s okay,” he said, his voice lowering, softening around the edges. “It’s brilliant, actually. A bit weird, but brilliant. I just… I wanted to see if you’d tell me.”
“Why?” The word was a whisper.
“Because everyone tells me things.” He leaned forward, his arms on the table. “Fans, coaches, reporters, my da. They tell me I was great or I was shite, what I should’ve done, what I represent. It’s all noise. You just… observed. You saw the mechanics. The story.” He paused. “It’s the most real thing anyone’s shown me about what I do in a long time.”
The confession disarmed her completely. The famous Ally MacLeod, sitting in a greasy spoon, telling her his fanfare felt like noise. Her hidden sketch was a truth.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said. “For not saying. It felt intrusive.”
“Don’t be.” He finished his coffee. “Do you have it with you? The sketchbook?”
She shook her head, a sudden, protective panic seizing her. “No.”
“Next time, then.” He said it so casually, as if it were a given. “Maybe you could bring it. I’d like to see the others. The anonymous forms.”
There would be a next time. He had just authored it into existence.
“Okay,” she said, the word barely audible.
He glanced at his watch, a flicker of reluctance in the movement. “I’ve got a media thing. Pain in the arse.” He stood, pulling his wallet out, but she stopped him.
“I’ve got the tea. You bought the coffee last time.”
He smiled, that bright, public smile, but it felt different now. It felt like a shared thing. “Cheers. Right. I’ll… see you at Susan’s then? For the next data session?”
“Maybe,” she said, but she was already imagining the next page, the next line.
He left, giving her a small wave as the door chimed shut. Roz sat for a long time, until her tea was stone cold. She finally took the folded paper from her pocket. She didn’t open it. She simply placed it carefully into her main sketchbook, between two blank pages, a fossil of a moment that had just fundamentally shifted.
Then she walked out into the crisp afternoon, the echo of his words—“the most real thing”—mingling with the memory of his body in motion, a new and dangerous alchemy beginning to stir in her mind.
Then she walked out into the crisp afternoon, the echo of his words—“the most real thing”—mingling with the memory of his body in motion, a new and dangerous alchemy beginning to stir in her mind. The folded sketch in her bag felt like a live wire. She walked faster, the rhythmic tap of her boots on the pavement matching her quickened pulse. She was due at the college in an hour.
She had to go into college. She had a Critical Thinking seminar she was teaching for first years. The thought was a bucket of cold water, dragging her from the immersive world of muscle memory and charged glances into the sterile, fluorescent-lit reality of academic obligation. She hoped to god Creepy Colin wouldn’t be lurking.
The walk to the Edinburgh College of Art campus did nothing to settle her. Students swarmed the steps, smoking and laughing with an ease she’d never mastered. The grand old stone building, usually a sanctuary, today felt like a cage. She took the back stairs to the third-floor studio, avoiding the main thoroughfares.
The studio was already half-full when she entered, the air thick with the smell of gesso and adolescent anxiety. “Alright, settle,” she said, her voice firmer than she felt. She unzipped her bag, her fingers brushing the folded paper. A jolt. She pulled out her lesson plan instead. “Today we’re tearing apart adverts. Not literally. Visually. We’re looking for the argument hidden in the imagery.”
A hand shot up. “Roz—I mean, Miss McLeod—is this for the essay?”
“It’s for your survival,” she said, and a few of them chuckled. She began distributing photocopied advertisements, her movements automatic. Her mind, however, was a split screen. One half deconstructed the use of familial warmth in a dishwasher tablet commercial. The other replayed the exact pattern of mud on Ally’s left thigh.
She moved through the rows, offering terse feedback. “Look beyond the text. What is the shape telling you? Why is the mother always in soft focus?” Her own critique echoed in her head. Why did you draw him? Why that specific moment?
Then she saw him. Colin. He wasn’t in her class. He was a second-year printmaking student, but he had a habit of appearing in doorways, his gaze a slow, sticky thing. He stood there now, just outside in the corridor, pretending to examine a fire extinguisher. Her skin prickled.
“Carry on with the analysis,” she said to the class, walking towards the door. She closed it with a firm, definitive click, meeting his eyes through the narrow window. His expression didn’t change. He just stared, then smiled slowly before ambling away.
She turned back to the room, her heart a trapped bird. “Where were we?”
The next forty minutes were an exercise in compartmentalization. She functioned, she explained, she even sparked a decent debate about subliminal messaging. But a part of her was coiled tight, monitoring the door, the windows, the emotional fallout from the morning. The bell was a mercy.
“Read the handout for Friday,” she called over the scraping of chairs. She packed her bag with hurried efficiency, desperate to be gone before the corridor clogged.
She was almost to the stairwell when his voice oozed from behind her. “In a rush, Roz?”
Colin. He leaned against a wall, his hands stained faintly with etching ink. “Saw you teaching. You’re good with them. Very… authoritative.”
“I’m late, Colin.” She didn’t break stride.
He fell into step beside her, too close. “Heard a rumor. That you were down at the rugby grounds this morning. Sketching.” The way he said ‘sketching’ made it sound obscene. “Getting inspiration from the brutes?”
She stopped, forcing him to halt. The anger was sudden and clean, cutting through her fear. “What I do for my project is none of your business.”
“Just making conversation.” His smile was all teeth. “Seems an odd subject for you. All that pointless aggression. Unless you’re looking for a different kind of muse.”
She saw a flash of Ally’s face in the cafe, the earnest curiosity in his eyes as he called her work ‘brilliant.’ The contrast to the man beside her was so violent it gave her courage. “Piss off, Colin.”
She didn’t wait for a reaction. She took the stairs two at a time, her breath coming hard, not from exertion but from the need to outpace the creeping feeling he left behind. She burst out into the courtyard, the grey sky feeling like freedom.
She didn’t stop until she was three blocks away, leaning against the cold stone of a bank, gathering herself. The encounter had left a film on her skin. She needed a scalding shower. She needed to forget.
But her hand, moving of its own volition, dipped into her bag and pulled out her sketchbook. Right there on the street, she flipped past the blank pages shielding her secret. She unfolded the square of paper.
The drawing was even more raw than she remembered. It was all strain and potential energy, a body on the precipice of violence or survival. It was not a fan’s drawing. It was a study of a specific man, and every line confessed her fascination.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. A new message lit the screen.
Unknown Number: Hope the critical thinking went well. My media thing was as awful as predicted. All noise. —A
He’d gotten her number from Susan, probably. She stared at the words ‘all noise’. A callback, a shared secret. The film Colin left evaporated. A genuine, unfettered smile touched her lips for the first time all afternoon.
She typed back, her thumbs clumsy with adrenaline.
Roz: It was educational. First years are terrifying. The noise here is just different.
She hit send before she could overthink it. She looked from the phone in her hand to the drawing in the other. The alchemy in her mind wasn’t just stirring now; it was bubbling, volatile, and impossibly bright. She had no idea where it led, but for the first time, the uncertainty felt like a beginning, not a threat.
The phone stayed dark in her hand. She folded the drawing away, the paper whispering a secret back into the depths of her bag. The walk home was a blur of wet pavement and her own racing thoughts, each one a conflicting pulse: the invasive leer of Colin’s smile, the solid, weary honesty in Ally’s voice saying all noise.
Her flat was a silent, paint-splattered sanctuary. She dropped her bag by the door and went straight to the sink, scrubbing her hands under water too hot, as if she could scour the feeling of being watched from her skin. It didn’t work.
The large canvas leaning against the far wall was a taunt. Her proposed master’s project: “Kinetic Tension: The Architectural Body.” It was supposed to be abstract, geometric studies of athletes in motion. A safe, clinical dissection. That was the proposal her tutor had approved. The blank gesso surface glared back at her, accusingly pristine.
Her sketchbook felt heavier than her textbooks. She hauled it onto the cluttered worktable, the spine cracking as she opened it to a fresh page. She picked up a stick of vine charcoal. It snapped in her tense fingers. She grabbed another.
Her hand hovered. She closed her eyes, not summoning an image but a sensation. The thud of the tackle bag. The grating intake of breath. The heat coming off him in the cafe. She opened her eyes and her hand moved, not with the controlled lines of study, but with a frantic, searching energy.
It wasn’t a person she drew. It was a vortex of force. Dark, smudged arcs of charcoal swept across the page, converging and colliding. She used her fingers, her thumb, smearing the black dust into shadows that suggested the crush of bodies. She carved back into it with a rubber, creating sharp, white lines of strain—a tendon, the hard edge of a shoulder pad, the stark curve of a jaw. It was messy. It was emotional. It was nothing like her proposal.
Her phone buzzed on the table, rattling against the wood.
Ally: What’s the most terrifying thing a first year has ever said to you?
A laugh punched out of her, sudden and relieving. She wiped her charcoal-dusted hand on her jeans and picked up the phone.
Roz: One asked if the ‘subtext’ in their cereal advertisement critique could be that the mascot was a repressed patriarch. I think they were serious.
Ally: Sounds like a future national coach. Brutal.
Roz: How was the noise?
Ally: Same script. ‘How’s the knee, Ally?’ ‘Feeling confident, Ally?’ ‘Give us a smile, Ally.’ Felt like a parrot. A very large, sore parrot.
She could see it. The bright lights, the repetitive questions, the performance of being himself. Her eyes drifted to the chaotic, powerful drawing on the table. That was him too. More him.
Roz: Did you smile?
Ally: Like a deranged clown. It’s in my contract. Page 7, clause 3: Mandatory Deranged Clown Smile.
She was grinning now, curled on her stool in the dim pool of her angled lamp. The flat didn’t feel so silent.
Roz: I’m working. On the project. It’s… different now.
Three dots appeared. They hovered. Then vanished. Then reappeared.
Ally: Good different or ‘set-fire-to-it’ different?
She looked at the wild, dark drawing. It was a truth, not a diagram.
Roz: Good different. I think. It’s less about doors.
Ally: Knew my door science chat would pay off. I’m a muse for engineers.
Roz: You’re a terrible muse. You ask too many questions.
Ally: That’s the job. My next question: are you at the coffee shop tomorrow?
Her breath caught. The familiar dread of an invitation coiled in her stomach, but it was tangled now with a bright, urgent thread of want.
Roz: Probably. My shift starts at 10.
Ally: I’ll be in at 11. Mud optional. I’ll need a massive coffee. And possibly a critique of my form.
She didn’t write back immediately. She placed the phone down and looked at her hands, stained black with the evidence of her own shift. The uncertainty was still there, a low hum. But beneath it was a new, solid frequency. A thread pulled taut between them.
She picked up the charcoal again. This time, her lines were more deliberate. She began to map the ghost of the morning’s movements onto the fresh page, the memory filtered through everything that came after. The drawing that emerged was quieter, more focused. It was the specific angle of a spine in tension, the architecture of a man poised between action and rest. It was for him, though she’d never say it.
She finally texted back, just as the streetlights outside her window flickered on.
Roz: I’ll have the coffee ready. The critique is extra.
His reply was almost immediate.
Ally: Worth it.
Outside, the Edinburgh night settled in, a damp blanket over the city. Inside, under the single lamp, Roz drew until her eyes burned, the world narrowing to the friction of charcoal on paper, the silent conversation flowing through her fingertips, and the palpable, impending shape of 11 AM.