Chapter 16: Strategic Distraction
The common room was a pocket of worn-in comfort, a stark contrast to the hotel's sleek corridors. The air held the faint, sweet scent of old books and peat smoke from the grand fireplace, where embers pulsed like a drowsy heart. Roz had claimed a deep armchair in a corner, a fortress of quiet with her pathology textbook open on her knees. The day’s clinic notes were transcribed, her observations on Ally’s side meticulously detailed, and now she was trying, and failing, to lose herself in the microscopic dramas of cell necrosis.
A shadow fell across the page, long and familiar. She startled, her pen skidding.
“There you are.” Ally’s voice was a low rumble. He reached down, his fingers brushing slowly, deliberately, across the shoulder of her cream jumper. “You’ve got crumbs. Studying so hard you’re shedding.”
She looked up. He was changed, wearing soft grey joggers and a dark hoodie, his hair still damp from a shower. The firelight caught the planes of his face, softening the fatigue but deepening the shadows under his eyes. He held a can of Coke, beads of condensation dripping onto his thumb.
“I wasn’t hiding,” she said, which was a lie.
“Aye, you were. It’s a talent.” He dropped into the adjacent armchair with a soft thud, a slight hitch in his movement he couldn’t quite conceal. He shook the Coke can near her face, the fizz inside rattling. “Here. Liquid sugar. For your nerves.”
“I don’t have nerves.”
“You will. It’s Monopoly night.” He gestured with his chin towards the large table in the centre of the room. Donnie was already there, meticulously stacking money into neater piles than the bank provided. Davide, a sleek winger, was staring disconsolately at a single pink five-pound note. Hamish was setting up the board with the solemnity of a surgeon preparing a theatre.
“Monopoly,” Roz repeated flatly.
“A tradition. A terrible, relationship-ending tradition. Donnie’s already cheating—he palmed a five-hundred when he was shuffling the chance cards. Davide’s spiritually bankrupt. And Hammy’s about to lecture us all on the Corinthian spirit of sportsmanship.” Ally took a swig from his own can. “It’s a disaster. You’ll love it.”
She looked from his deliberately casual smile to the chaotic, warm scene by the fire. The tension she’d been holding since the treatment room began to unspool, just a little. A tired laugh escaped her. It was all the surrender he needed.
“Right. Come on.” He stood, offering a hand.
She let him pull her up, leaving her textbook open on the chair like a abandoned thought. “I’m not playing. I’ll observe.”
“Observations are for the pitch. This is war. You can be my… advisor. Or my lucky charm.” He kept her hand in his, his thumb tracing a line across her knuckles, as he led her to the table.
“MacLeod’s brought a ringer,” Donnie announced, not looking up from his money. “You any good, Roz? Because I will exploit weakness.”
“She’s a strategist,” Ally said, pulling out a chair for her next to his. “She’s already diagnosed your tell.”
“I don’t have a tell.”
“You hum Highland Cathedral when you’re about to buy a utility. It’s pathetic.”
The game began with a ritualistic roll of the dice. Roz sipped her Coke, the cold sweetness a shock. She watched, initially from behind a professional detachment. But Monopoly, played by competitive giants with the collective subtlety of a sledgehammer, was hypnotically absurd.
Davide landed on Income Tax immediately and groaned as if actually wounded. Donnie bought the Water Works and began a detailed explanation of riparian rights that bored everyone into submission. Hamish, true to prediction, invoked the “spirit of fair play” every time someone suggested a under-the-table property trade.
Ally played with a focused, mischievous calm. He traded, cajoled, built a minor empire on the orange properties. He was fluid, adaptable. But Roz saw the other game being played beneath. She saw how he shifted in his chair every fifteen minutes, a slow, careful adjustment. She noted the moment he stopped stretching his left arm across the back of her chair, letting it rest in his lap instead. His laughter was genuine, but it sometimes tightened at the end, cut short by a thought or a twinge.
“Right, MacLeod. Your roll. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you eyeing up my hotels,” Donnie grumbled.
Ally shook the dice, blew on them for luck, and scattered them across the board. He moved his boot, the thimble, six spaces. Straight onto Mayfair, where Donnie’s cluster of red hotels gleamed like a warning.
The table erupted. Donnie let out a roar of triumph. “Pay up, you poetic bastard! That’ll be… two thousand, four hundred, you pauper. Count it out.”
Ally stared at the board. His financial situation was precarious. Paying would clean him out. A slow, wicked smile spread across his face. He looked at Roz, then back at Donnie. “I have a counter-proposal.”
“This isn’t the UN. Pay your debts.”
“A trade.” Ally leaned forward, wincing almost imperceptibly as the movement compressed his side. “My three railroads. For a get-out-of-jail-free card and six hundred pounds.”
“Your railroads are worthless! I have the fourth!”
“Are they? Or do they represent a vital strand in the tapestry of your transport monopoly? Think, Donnie. The psychological victory of total control.”
Donnie squinted, his brain almost audibly grinding. Hamish put his head in his hands. “We’ll be here all night.”
As the negotiation descended into farcical rhetoric about economic theory, Ally’s hand found Roz’s under the table. His fingers were warm. He laced them with hers, a hidden anchor. He was putting on a show, the charming wheeler-dealer, but his grip was tight, almost urgent.
The deal was struck. Ally survived, weakened but still in the game. The turn passed. The fire crackled, casting jumping shadows on the walls.
Later, as Davide went bankrupt for the final time and Hamish declared the whole enterprise a “lesson in capitalist decay,” the group began to disperse. Donnie headed to the bar, claiming his victory required a pint. Hamish retreated with a book.
Roz and Ally were left by the dying fire. The common room was quiet, just the settling of embers and the distant chime of a lift.
“Your assessment, Doctor?” Ally said softly, staring into the glow. He had his good arm draped over the back of her chair again, his fingers playing with the ends of her hair.
“Clinically, or in terms of game theory?”
“Both.”
“You play a high-risk, high-reward game. You bluff well. But you protect your weaknesses so obviously it almost becomes a new kind of tell.” She turned to look at him. “How is the side?”
His smile faded. The performance was over. “It’s… present. A deep ache. Like a toothache in my ribs.”
“You should be icing it.”
“I will. Upstairs.” He paused. “Come with me?”
There was no joke attached, no charming veneer. It was a simple, raw request. She nodded.
In her room, the clinical overhead light was too harsh. She switched on the small bedside lamp, casting a warm, forgiving pool of gold. “Shirt off. Let me see.”
He obeyed, pulling the hoodie and t-shirt over his head with a cautious, measured motion. The bruise was now a lurid masterpiece, a swirl of violet and mustard yellow blooming across the left side of his ribcage and snaking down into his oblique muscle. In the lamplight, it looked even more violent.
Roz sucked in a quiet breath. Her clinical mind took over, distancing her from the man and focusing on the injury. She washed her hands in the bathroom sink, the water scalding. Her touch, when she returned, was cool and precise.
“Tell me where it’s worst.”
He guided her finger to a spot just below his lowest rib. “There. It’s a sharp catch. Like a hook.”
She palpated gently, feeling the heat of inflammation, the subtle, wrong tension in the muscle fibres compared to the other side. She watched his face. His eyes were closed, his breathing deliberately even.
“Take a deep breath. As deep as you can.”
He inhaled. The breath stuttered, hitched at about seventy percent capacity. A sharp hiss. His right hand fisted in the duvet.
“Okay. Stop.” She stepped back. “Ally, you have to get the ultrasound. This isn’t just a knock. You have all the signs of a intercostal strain, possibly a grade two. If you tear it properly, you’re out for months.”
He opened his eyes. They were bright with frustration and fear. “I can’t. Not now. The announcement is Friday.”
“What announcement?”
“The squad for the autumn internationals. They’re naming it. It’s… it’s everything. If I’m even ‘under assessment’…” He shook his head. “Leo’s words. ‘The wrong kind of headlines.’ They’ll say I’m brittle. A talent, but brittle.”
“That’s not true.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s true! It matters what they print. What people believe. I’m the new boy. I have no credit in the bank.” He reached for his t-shirt, but she stopped his hand.
“Wait.” She fetched the ice pack from her mini-fridge, wrapped it in a thin towel. “Here. Twenty minutes.” She guided his hand to hold it in place. His skin was so warm.
He lay back on her bed, ice pressed to his side, staring at the ceiling. She sat beside him, her back against the headboard.
“What would you do,” he said to the ceiling, his voice hollow, “if you were one step away from the thing you’d worked for your whole life, and your own body was about to betray you?”
She thought about it. About the years of study, the sacrifices, the quiet dread of failure that lived beneath her own disciplined surface. “I’d probably do exactly what you’re doing. And my best friend would call me an idiot.”
A faint smile touched his lips. “Jenni.”
“Jenni,” she confirmed. She ran her fingers through his hair, a slow, soothing rhythm. “But as your medic, I’m telling you, you’re an idiot.”
“Noted.” He was silent for a long time. The ice crackled softly. “My dad played. Not at this level. Club stuff. He was hard as nails. Broke his nose once, set it himself with a whisky and a door jamb.” Ally’s voice was soft, remote. “He thinks the poetry is… a nice hobby. Like bird-watching. He tolerates it. But this,” he gestured weakly at his own torso, at the idea of the rugby, “this is the real thing. This is what a man does.”
Roz’s hand stilled. The weight of his confession was immense, a key turning in a lock she hadn’t fully known existed. It wasn’t just the media or Leo. It was the bedrock of his identity, laid down by a father’s approval.
“You are a man,” she said quietly, firmly. “A man who reads poetry and scores tries and is currently lying on my bed with a bag of frozen peas on his ribs. All of those things are true at once.”
He turned his head to look at her. The lamp light caught the sheen in his eyes. He didn’t cry. He just looked at her, as if she’d spoken a truth in a forgotten language. He lifted his free hand, cupped the back of her neck, and pulled her gently down to him.
The kiss tasted of Coca-Cola and salt. It was slow, deep, and full of a desperate gratitude. When they parted, he rested his forehead against hers.
“What do I do, Roz?” he whispered again, the question now shared, no longer his alone.
She closed her eyes, her mind racing through scenarios, protocols, risks. The clinician and the woman warred, and found, in him, a common cause.
“You rest. Properly. Tomorrow, you tell Hamish the pain is manageable but persistent. You do every stretch, take every anti-inflammatory, wear every piece of tape we give you. You avoid contact drills. You become the model patient.” She opened her eyes, her gaze fierce. “And you let me manage it. I’ll monitor you. If it gets one percent worse, you get the scan, announcement or not. We gamble, but we gamble smart. Together.”
He searched her face, looking for the doubt. He found none. Just a steady, blue resolve.
“Together,” he echoed, the word a vow in the quiet room.
He stayed there, icing his injury, until the pack grew lukewarm. She took it from him, her fingers brushing his stomach. He caught her wrist.
“Stay with me tonight,” he said. “Just to sleep. I… I don’t want to be alone with it.”
She knew the rules. She knew what Hamish would say. She looked at the bruise, at the fear still lurking in his eyes, at the man who carried the weight of so many expectations and hid a volume of poetry under his bed.
“Okay,” she said.
She switched off the lamp. In the near-dark, they arranged themselves carefully, her back to his front, his right arm around her, his injured left side protected. He buried his face in her hair.
“Roz?” His voice was a sleepy murmur.
“Hmm?”
“Thank you for not saying I told you so.”
She smiled into the darkness, her hand covering his where it rested on her stomach. “The night is young.”