Chapter 2: Close Quarters
The interior of Ally’s SUV was a quiet sanctuary, smelling of leather, clean rain, and a faint, woody cologne. The steady thump of the windshield wipers provided a lazy rhythm as they pulled out of the Murrayfield car park. The world outside was a blur of grey stone and wet tarmac, the city lights smearing into long, brilliant streaks.
Roz watched his hands on the steering wheel. They were large, capable, with nicks and old scars across the knuckles, a map of his profession. He drove with a relaxed precision that was somehow at odds with the sheer power he contained.
“So,” he said, breaking the comfortable silence. “Where am I taking you?”
She gave him her address, a street in Stockbridge, and he nodded, making a smooth turn. “Nice area. Quiet.”
“It is. I like the quiet.”
He glanced at her, a quick, sidelong look. “Yeah. Me too, actually. It’s… hard to come by.”
The conversation lulled, but it wasn’t awkward. The space between them felt charged, yet peaceful. Roz’s eyes drifted over the dashboard. Among the sports magazines and a half-eaten packet of digestives was a well-worn copy of Pride and Prejudice. The spine was cracked, the pages soft with use. She couldn’t help herself.
“Heathcliff and Mr. Darcy,” she said, her voice soft with amusement. “That’s quite the range.”
Ally followed her gaze and a faint pinkness touched his ears. “Oh. That. It’s my sister’s. I ferry my niece around a lot, she leaves her stuff in here.” He paused, then shrugged, a sheepish grin tugging at his mouth. “Okay, fine, it’s mine. A re-read. You can’t beat Austen for a proper, slow-burn character assassination.”
Roz laughed, a real, unguarded sound that surprised her. “Is that what you think it is?”
“Absolutely. Darcy’s a masterclass in how to ruin your own chances through sheer, unadulterated pride. It’s brutal. And brilliant.” He shifted gears, his movement fluid. “It’s better than listening to the post-match analysis podcasts on the drive home, anyway.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“You should. They’re mostly drivel.” He drove for a moment, his focus on the road. “What about you? What’s the architect’ favourite book? Don’t tell me it’s Ayn Rand. I’ll have to stop the car.”
The question was so unexpected, so far from the usual ‘what do you do?’ that it threw her. She usually deflected, mumbled something about not having time to read. But the warmth of the car, the smell of the rain, the strange safety she felt in his presence—it loosened her tongue.
“Rebecca,” she said. “Daphne du Maurier.”
He considered this, navigating a roundabout before speaking. “The house,” he said. “Manderley. It’s practically the main character.”
A shiver, pleasant and sharp, went through her. No one had ever grasped that so quickly. “Yes. Exactly. The atmosphere is all in the architecture. The shadows in the west wing, the damp in the boat-house… it’s a blueprint for dread.”
“And the new wife,” Ally said, his voice dropping slightly, as if sharing a secret. “Trying to fit into a space that was designed for someone else. Never measuring up.”
Roz fell silent, staring out at the rain-streaked window. Never measuring up. The words landed with a disquieting precision. She thought of her boss, David, his constant, nit-picking corrections. She thought of the glamorous, confident women she assumed populated Ally’s world. For a terrifying second, she felt completely transparent, as if he’d read the insecurity that lived just beneath her trendy clothes and professional demeanor.
He must have sensed her shift in mood. “Sorry,” he said, his tone gentle. “That was… too much. I have a habit of dissecting things. Coach says I overthink the game, too.”
“No,” she said, turning to look at him. His profile was sharp against the gloomy twilight. “It wasn’t too much. It was… accurate.”
They pulled up outside her building, a classic Stockbridge tenement with bay windows and a heavy, dark-green door. The rain had softened to a fine mist, haloing the streetlights.
Ally put the car in park but left the engine running, the warmth still pumping through the vents. The sudden end to the motion left a vacuum, filled only by the quiet hum of the engine and the sound of their breathing.
“Well,” Roz said, reaching for her door handle. “Thanks for the rescue. And the… literary analysis.”
“Anytime.” His smile was back, a little hesitant now. “Listen, Roz… about Liam. What he said…”
“It’s fine,” she interrupted, not wanting to revisit the humiliation.
“It’s not,” he insisted, his voice low and serious. “But it’s dealt with. He won’t bother you again.” There was a finality in his tone that brooked no argument.
She believed him. “Okay.”
Another silence. This one was heavier, thick with something unsaid. She should get out. Now. But her hand stayed on the handle, not pulling it.
“I should…” she began, just as he said, “I was wondering…”
They both stopped. He laughed, a soft, nervous sound. “You first.”
“No, you.”
He took a breath, his large frame seeming to fill the driver’s seat. “I was wondering if you’d fancy getting that coffee. The proper kind. Not from a machine in a sweaty lounge. Sometime. When you’re not up to your eyes in conduit.”
Roz’s heart performed a slow, heavy roll in her chest. This was the moment. The polite refusal was right there, rehearsed and ready. It was what she always did. It was safe.
She looked at him. At the earnest, gentle look in his grey eyes, so at odds with the brutal sport he played. She thought of steak bakes and Pride and Prejudice and the way he’d called Liam a wanker with such calm authority.
“Yes,” she heard herself say. The word felt both terrifying and exhilarating.
His smile was instant, dazzling, and entirely genuine. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Great.” He pulled out his phone. “Give me your number. I’ll… I’ll text you. We’ll figure it out.”
She recited her number, her voice surprisingly steady. He typed it in, his thumbs moving swiftly over the screen.
“Right,” he said, putting the phone away. “I’ll let you get in. Don’t want you catching a chill.”
It was a simple, almost old-fashioned thing to say. It made her feel strangely cared for.
She pushed the door open and stepped out into the cool, damp air. “Bye, Ally.”
“Bye, Roz.”
She closed the door and walked towards her building, feeling his eyes on her back until she reached the doorstep. She didn’t turn around. She fumbled for her keys, her hands trembling slightly, and let herself in.
Inside, she leaned against the heavy door, the silence of the hall pressing in on her. She could still smell his cologne on her clothes. Her phone, tucked in her pocket, buzzed.
She pulled it out. A text from an unknown number.
It’s Ally. Just making sure you got in alright. And so you have my number. In case of any further conduit-related emergencies.
She stared at the screen, a slow, unbidden smile spreading across her face. She typed a reply, her thumbs moving with a newfound certainty.
No emergencies yet. But I’ll keep you posted.
She hit send, the message whooshing away into the digital ether, a tiny spark in the quiet dark of the hall. For the first time in a long time, the silence felt like a promise, not a prison.
The sharp chill of the black and white tiled floor seeped through her socks. She stood there for a long moment, phone screen glowing in the dim hall, the message sent. A giddy, unsteady feeling bubbled up in her chest, unfamiliar and bright. It was the same dizzying rush she got when a structural concept finally clicked into place in her mind, all perfect lines and balanced weight.
Up in her flat, she dropped her bag and toed off her wet shoes. The central heating clicked on with a familiar groan. She padded into the kitchen, the lingering scent of his cologne on her jumper a ghost in the air around her. Her phone, now clutched in her hand, buzzed again.
Ally: Good. I’m an expert in conduit emergencies. And other, less exciting types of crises.
She smiled, leaning against the cool countertop. What did one even say back to that?
Roz: Noted. I’ll add it to your file.
Ally: My file? Should I be worried?
Roz: Extensive. Includes notes on rugby, postmodern literary theory, and preferred baked goods.
His reply was almost immediate.
Ally: You’re mocking me.
Roz: Just thorough.
She expected a text back. Instead, her phone started to ring, his name flashing on the screen. The sound was shockingly loud in the quiet flat. Her breath hitched. Answering felt like a bigger step than getting in his car, bigger than giving him her number. She slid her finger across the screen.
“Hello?”
“This feels too much like hard work,” his voice came through, warm and a little breathless. There was a background noise of city traffic, the purr of his engine gone. “And I’m terrible at texting. My thumbs are too big for the keyboard.”
She laughed, the sound easing the tension in her shoulders. “So you called instead? Bold strategy.”
“Is it working?” She could hear the grin in his voice.
“Maybe.” She traced a pattern on the granite counter. “Where are you?”
“Just got home. Well, to the flat. It doesn’t really feel like home, it’s just… a place with my stuff in it.” There was a rustle, the clink of what sounded like a kettle. “It’s mostly empty. And very beige.”
The image surprised her. Ally Kinghorn, in a beige, empty flat. It didn’t fit the persona at all. “No hearth and home? I’m shocked.”
“The real estate agent called it ‘a blank canvas’. I think she meant ‘soulless’.” He paused. “What’s yours like?”
“Crammed with books. Plants I’m trying not to kill. A truly tragic amount of model-making materials from architecture school.” She looked around at the chaos of her living space, seeing it through his imagined eyes. “It’s a mess.”
“Sounds lived in.” He said it with a note of genuine appreciation. “Sounds real.”
Silence stretched between them again, but it was the same comfortable, charged silence from the car. She heard him pour water, the gentle clink of a mug.
“So,” he said, his voice softening. “Coffee. When are you free?”
“I have to survive a meeting with my project manager, David, tomorrow.” She groaned internally just thinking about it. “He’s got opinions on my structural load calculations. Again.”
“Tell him he’s a wanker.”
She barked out a laugh. “I can’t say that to my boss.”
“Right. Professional setting. Maybe just think it very loudly.” He took a sip of his drink. “How about Thursday? There’s a place in Dean Village, down by the water. Doesn’t do unicorn frappes or anything. Just… good coffee.”
“No unicorn frappes? You’re selling it to me.” She felt a flutter of nervous excitement. Thursday. The day after tomorrow. It was soon. Real.
“I’ll pick you up? Say, ten?”
“I can meet you there,” she said quickly, the old habit of self-preservation kicking in.
“Okay.” He didn’t push. “Okay, that’s fine. I’ll text you the address.”
She could hear the faint sound of pages turning. “Are you… reading?”
“Just looking over some plays for Saturday’s match.” The pages rustled again. “And maybe glancing at the bit where Darcy puts his foot in it at the Meryton ball. For research.”
“Research into being an idiot?”
“Exactly.” He sighed, a contented sound. “Right. I should let you go. You’ve got a wanker to mentally disagree with tomorrow.”
“I do. Thanks for the, uh, the ride. And the call.”
“Anytime, Roz. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Ally.”
She hung up, the phone warm in her hand. The silence in her flat was different now. It wasn’t empty. It was full of the echo of his voice, the promise of Thursday, and the thrilling, terrifying sense of a door she’d kept firmly locked beginning to swing open. She walked over to her bookshelf, her fingers trailing along the spines until they found her own worn copy of Rebecca. She pulled it out, the weight of it familiar in her hands. For the first time, the story of a woman overshadowed by a grander legacy felt less like a warning and more like a challenge she was suddenly, fiercely, ready to meet.
The book felt solid in her hands, its weight a comforting anchor. She slid it back onto the shelf, aligning it perfectly with its neighbors. Then she picked up her phone and typed a single word.
Roz: Thursday.
His reply was almost instantaneous, just a thumbs-up emoji. It was enough.
The next morning, the Murrayfield lounge felt different. The hum of the industrial dehumidifiers was just noise now, not an irritant. Roz stood over her spread blueprints, the complex web of lines and numbers making a new, sharp kind of sense. She didn’t look up when David, her project manager, strode in, his custom-tailored suit seeming to suck the oxygen from the room.
“The load-bearing calculations for the new East Stand hospitality boxes,” he said, his tone a flat statement of impending criticism. He tapped a perfectly manicured finger on a structural column she’d detailed. “This seems… ambitious.”
She kept her gaze level. “It’s sound. The reinforced steel support is more than adequate. I’ve run the simulations twice.”
“I’ve seen what ‘adequate’ looks like when it fails, Macdonald.” He leaned in, his voice dropping conspiratorially, a tactic he used to imply she was being let in on a secret rather than publicly corrected. “We need a thirty percent increase in the safety margin. I don’t care about the cost overrun.”
Roz felt the old habit tighten in her chest, the urge to defer, to make herself smaller. She thought of Ally’s voice on the phone, warm and sure. Tell him he’s a wanker. She didn’t say that. But she tapped her own pen on the blueprint, right next to his.
“A thirty percent increase isn’t just over-engineering, David. It’s inefficient. It compromises the aesthetic lines of the cantilever and adds unnecessary weight. The current design is the optimal balance of safety and form.” She met his eyes, her voice not wavering. “It’s my professional recommendation.”
David blinked, thrown by the pushback. He straightened up, his jaw working slightly. “Fine. But it’s on your head.” He turned and walked away, the crisp sound of his Oxfords echoing in the vast space.
Roz let out a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. Her hands were steady.
Ally’s Thursday started with a different kind of pressure. The physio room smelled of antiseptic and deep heat, the sharp tang of pain. His shoulder, wrenched during a collapsed scrum two days prior, was a hot, tight knot of protest.
“It’s just a grade one strain, Ally. You’re lucky,” the team physio said, her fingers digging expertly into the damaged muscle. “But you’re off contact drills for the rest of the week. No arguments.”
He grunted, swallowing a sharper curse. The timing was a special kind of hell. Saturday’s match was crucial. “I can manage it.”
“You can’t,” she said, her tone leaving no room for debate. “You’ll manage it straight into a full tear and six months on the sideline. Your body isn’t just machinery.”
He fell silent, staring at the stark white wall. His body was machinery. It was the entire point. The thought of sitting out, of being coddled, chafed worse than the injury. He showered quickly, the hot water needling his bruised skin, and dressed with careful, stiff movements. The beige flat awaited him, silent and empty. But today, it didn’t feel quite as hollow. He had a coffee to get to.
He arrived at the café in Dean Village twenty minutes early. The place was all exposed brick and the rich, earthy smell of roasted beans. He chose a table by the window overlooking the Water of Leith, the river churning brown and fast after the recent rains. He ordered a black coffee and a glass of water for the painkillers he’d taken.
He watched the water rush past, his good arm resting on the table. He felt oddly naked without the structure of training, the constant, physical purpose. This quiet, this waiting, was a foreign country. He checked his phone. No messages. The sudden, jagged fear that she wouldn’t come, that he’d misread everything, felt more acute than the throb in his shoulder.
Then the bell above the door chimed.
Roz stood there, backlit by the grey morning light, her eyes scanning the room. She wore a dark green coat, her hair a wild cascade against the collar. She looked utterly, beautifully out of place, like a sketch from a fashion magazine stumbled into a rugby player’s Tuesday.
He raised a hand, a tentative gesture.
She saw him and a small, relieved smile touched her lips. She weaved through the tables, her movements graceful and sure.
“You found it,” he said as she reached the table. His voice was a bit rough.
“I did. It’s nice.” She slid into the chair opposite him, unbuttoning her coat. Her eyes, a warm, intelligent brown, scanned his face, then dropped to the way he was holding his right arm slightly away from his body. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.” The lie was automatic. He shifted, and a jolt of pain made him wince. “Okay. Not fine. Twisted my shoulder at practice.”
Her brow furrowed with genuine concern. “Should you even be here? Shouldn’t you be… icing it?”
“Probably.” He gave her a lopsided smile. “But then I’d be sitting in my beige flat, talking to the walls. This is better.”
She smiled back, a proper one this time that reached her eyes. “Less beige.”
“Infinitely.” A waitress came over and Roz ordered a flat white. The simple, mundane ritual of it settled his nerves. “So. How was the wanker?”
Roz let out a short, surprised laugh. “David? He was… himself. I told him his safety margins were inefficient.”
Ally’s eyebrows shot up. “No kidding? And what did he say?”
“He didn’t like it. But he backed down.” She said it with a quiet pride that was more compelling than any boast. “It felt good. Thanks for the advice, even if I didn’t follow it verbatim.”
“The sentiment was the important part.” He took a sip of his coffee, watching her. “You’re different here. Away from the stadium.”
“So are you.” She tilted her head, studying him. “You’re quieter.”
“The noise is mostly for the cameras. And the pitch.” He looked down at his hands, at the scars across his knuckles. “It’s easier to be loud when you’re wearing a jersey. It’s like a costume.”
Her coffee arrived and she wrapped her hands around the warm mug. “What’s it like? Out there, I mean. When it’s just starting.”
He considered it, wanting to give her a real answer, not a soundbite. “It’s… a kind of organized chaos. The crowd is just a wall of sound, you stop hearing individual voices. It’s all feeling. Then the first hit comes, and it all narrows down to just that. The next second. The next meter of ground.” He looked out the window at the rushing water. “It’s the only time my brain actually shuts up.”
“The overthinking stops.”
“Exactly.”
“I get that,” she said softly. “When a design finally clicks. When all the lines and forces just… balance. The noise in my head goes quiet too.”
They looked at each other then, and the understanding that passed between them was as solid and surprising as a handshake. It wasn’t about rugby or architecture. It was about the need to find a silence within the storm.
He winced again as he moved to pick up his cup, a sharp, involuntary intake of breath.
“You’re in real pain,” she stated, her tone shifting from curious to practical.
“It’s manageable.”
“Let me see.”
The request caught him off guard. “What?”
“Your shoulder. I’ve taken enough anatomy and physics courses to know a unstable joint from a stable one. Let me see.”
Hesitantly, he turned in his chair, giving her his back. He felt her fingertips, cool and precise, press gently along the line of his trapezius muscle, then down to the angry joint of his shoulder. Her touch was clinical, searching, but the simple human contact sent a current through him that had nothing to do with pain.
“There’s a lot of heat here,” she murmured, her voice close to his ear. “The swelling is making everything seize up.” Her fingers found a specific, brutal point of tension near his scapula and pressed.
A grunt was torn from him, a mix of agony and shocking relief as the muscle yielded slightly under her pressure. “Christ.”
“Sorry.” Her hand pulled away.
“Don’t be,” he breathed, turning back to face her. The pain was still there, a dull, hot ache, but the edge was gone. He felt looser. “How did you do that?”
“I told you. Physics.” She shrugged, a faint blush coloring her cheeks. “It’s all just levers and tension. Your body is a structure. A complicated, stubborn, incredibly well-built one, but a structure nonetheless.”
He stared at her, this woman who saw the world in lines and forces, who had just dismantled a knot of pain with the same calm focus she’d use to critique a blueprint. The glamour models and influencers he occasionally dated existed in a world of surfaces. Roz Macdonald saw the foundations.
“No one’s ever called me a structure before,” he said, his voice low.
“Well,” she said, picking up her coffee again, her eyes glittering with a mischief that undid him completely. “There’s a first time for everything.”