Chapter 8: Collision in the Dark
The bass was a physical thing. It climbed up through the soles of Roz’s shoes, vibrated in her molars, and settled like a second heartbeat in her chest. The club was a writhing organism of neon and shadow, strobing lights cutting through a haze of artificial fog and condensation. She’d been dragged here by Sarah and Liam from her course, a celebratory “you survived the rugby lads” pint that had somehow morphed into sticky floors and shouted conversations over a remix she didn’t recognise.
She was wedged near a pillar, holding a lukewarm bottle of cider, trying to look like she was having fun. The noise was a wall. She watched the dance floor, a sea of undulating silhouettes, and felt a familiar detachment. She was studying them, a taxonomist of forced joy.
Then she saw him.
It was just a glimpse, a profile illuminated in a sudden sweep of blue light. Ally. He was taller than the crowd around him, moving with a group of bulky-shouldered men she vaguely recognised from the training grounds. They were a rampart of muscle and laughter, carving a path towards the bar. He was smiling, but it was the broadcast smile, the one that didn’t touch his eyes. He looked like he was performing.
Her stomach did a slow, sickening turn. The book, his number, the quiet promise of the medical room—it felt absurd here. A fiction. This was his natural habitat, not hers. She shrank back against the pillar, hoping the shadows would swallow her.
A surge in the crowd, a wave propelled by a popular song drop, pushed a knot of people backwards. Roz lost her footing on the slick floor. Her shoulder hit someone hard, and she stumbled forward, directly into the path of Ally’s group.
She collided with a solid wall of chest. Her hands flew up, fingers splaying against damp cotton. The cider bottle slipped, hitting the floor with a dull thud, foaming at their feet.
“Whoa, easy there.”
His voice was in her ear, low and familiar, cutting through the synth and screams. His hands came up, not to push her away, but to steady her, his fingers spanning her waist. The contact was electric, a jolt of pure, shocking reality in the chaotic dark.
She looked up. His face was inches from hers. The broadcast smile was gone, replaced by genuine, wide-eyed surprise. The strobe light caught the gold in his stubble, the deep green of his eyes. He smelled of clean sweat, aftershave, and the faint, sharp tang of beer.
“Careful, Doc,” he said, and the old nickname, spoken here, was intensely private. His breath was warm against her temple.
For a second, the world narrowed to that point of contact: his strong, sure hands on her hips, the solid plane of his torso against her. The noise faded to a dull roar. She saw his gaze drop to her mouth, then flick back up, a question in his eyes.
Then the spell shattered.
“OY! MACLEOD! Prescribing a different kind of treatment, are ya?” A booming voice, thick with drink and camaraderie, cut through the air. One of his teammates, a prop with a neck like a tree stump, loomed beside them, grinning wildly.
Another player whistled, sharp and piercing. “Found yourself a better physio, Ally? Looks like she’s got her hands full!”
Laughter erupted around them, crude and enclosing. Ally’s hands tightened on her waist for a fraction of a second—a reflex, possessive or protective, she couldn’t tell—before he let go, stepping back. The distance felt like a chasm. The wall of his public persona slid back into place, but his eyes were apologetic, urgent.
“Alright, you animals, shut it,” he said to his friends, his voice forcibly light. He looked back at Roz. The noise was too loud for real conversation. He leaned in again, his lips almost brushing her ear. “You okay?”
She nodded, speechless, her skin still burning where he’d touched her.
“This is… not how I pictured…” He shook his head, frustrated. The music swelled, swallowing his next words. His teammates were slapping his back, pulling him towards the bar, yelling about shots.
He was being absorbed back into the herd. He mouthed something that looked like “Sorry”, and then he was turning, swept away by the current of his own life. One of his friends, the big prop, gave her an exaggerated, cheesy wink before turning away.
Roz stood alone, the spilled cider seeping into the toe of her shoe. The sensory overload rushed back in, twice as loud, twice as harsh. The encounter had lasted less than thirty seconds. It felt like she’d been branded.
She found her friends near the fire exit, gulping lungfuls of marginally cleaner air. “Bloody hell, Roz, did you just face-plant into Scotland’s next captain?” Sarah yelled, eyes wide.
“I spilled my drink,” Roz said, her own voice sounding hollow.
“Forget the drink! That was Alistair MacLeod. And he was handsy. Are you seeing him?”
“No. I taped his ribs. That’s it.” The lie was automatic, a defence against the spectacle. She couldn’t explain the book in her bag at home. It would sound like a fantasy.
The rest of the night was a blur of muffled sound and false smiles. She kept scanning the crowd, catching flashes of him—his head thrown back in laughter, accepting a drink, always at the centre of a noisy orbit. He never looked her way again. Or if he did, she didn’t see it.
The cool night air outside was a physical relief, washing the sweat and sugar from her skin. She hugged her friends goodbye and started the walk back to her flat, the bass still echoing in her bones.
Her mind replayed the collision on a loop. The feel of his hands. The shift in his eyes from public charm to private recognition. The way it had been stolen by the roar of his world. He’d looked trapped by it, too.
Back in her silent room, she kicked off her sticky shoes. The old poetry book lay on her bedside table, a quiet, solid thing. She picked up her phone. The contact ‘Ally’ glowed on the screen.
She didn’t think. She just typed.
The treatment for a spilled cider is reportedly a proper drink. In a quiet pub. Where people can hear each other. No tape required.
She stared at the words. They were bold. They were nothing like her. They were a direct result of his hands on her waist in a neon darkness.
Before she could regret it, she hit send. The message whooshed away, a single sentence launched into the void between their two worlds. She placed the phone face down on the book, her heart hammering against her ribs.
Across the city, in a taxi heading from the club to an after-party he didn’t want to attend, Ally felt his phone buzz in his pocket. He pulled it out, the screen lighting his tired face. He read the message once, then again. A slow, real smile, unseen by his teammates, spread across his face. He typed a single word.
Finally.
The smile lingered on his face as the taxi crawled through Edinburgh’s late-night traffic. The after-party was in a penthouse apartment that smelled of rented luxury and spilled vodka. Ally accepted a beer, the cold bottle useless against the stuffy heat of too many bodies in a small space.
He leaned against a floor-to-ceiling window, the city lights shimmering below like a scattered circuit board. His phone was a weight in his pocket, Roz’s message a quiet hum beneath the bass pumping from a Bluetooth speaker. Someone shoved a shot into his hand; he pretended to sip it, the liquor burning a path he didn’t want.
A skinny girl with dyed blonde hair and a fake tan who kept telling him she was an influencer squeezed his knee. He flinched. Her touch was proprietary, sharp-nailed and lingering, a world away from the hesitant collision in the club. “You’re even fitter in person,” she shouted over the music, her eyes glazing past his to see who was watching them.
The room felt suddenly suffocating, a plastic box of noise and expectation. He looked at his two mates, who were grinning at him, egging him on with their eyebrows. He set the shot glass, still full, on the windowsill.
“Sorry guys,” he said, his voice cutting through their laughter. “Think I’m gonna bail here.”
“You’re what? It’s barely two!” one protested, but Ally was already grabbing his jacket from a pile on a designer chair.
“Got an early thing,” he lied, the words tasting stale. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
He was out the door, into the mercifully silent, carpeted hallway, before they could rally a proper argument. The elevator descended smoothly. He leaned his head against the cool metal wall, closing his eyes. The influencer’s perfume clung to his jeans, a cloying, sweet stench he couldn’t wait to wash off.
The night air was a cleansing shock. He walked, not toward his flat, but aimlessly, letting the chill clear the static from his head. His thumb hovered over his phone screen, the text thread with Roz open. Finally. He’d sent that over an hour ago. It hung there, a statement of intent.
He stopped under a streetlamp, its orange glow cutting a pool in the darkness. He typed, deleted, typed again, his breath making plumes in the cold.
Quiet pub sounds perfect. Tomorrow? The Witch’s Thorn on Cowgate. 7pm. I’ll be the one not yelling.
He hit send before he could tie himself in knots about it. The pub was a real place, old and tucked away, all dark wood and real ale. It felt like a place she might like. It felt like a place where he could breathe.
His phone buzzed almost immediately, a vibration that traveled up his arm.
I know it. I’ll be the one with a textbook. Just in case.
Another smile, this one private and deep. He finally turned towards home, the empty streets feeling full of potential. The memory of her steadying hands on his ribs, the weight of the poetry book, the feel of her waist under his palms—it all coalesced into a single, solid point of anticipation. For the first time all night, the performance was over. He was just a guy, walking home, thinking about a girl.
He was just a guy, walking home, thinking about a girl. The thought was so simple it felt revolutionary.
The Witch’s Thorn was all low, beamed ceilings and the earthy scent of old stone and polished oak. Ally arrived at ten to seven, his usual pre-match nerves replaced by a different, more fluttering anxiety. He’d chosen a simple grey sweater, and he’d been checking his phone for twenty minutes. He snagged a corner table, back to the wall, and watched the door.
At three minutes past, she slipped in. The damp evening air had curled tendrils of her dark hair against her temples. She wore a thick, cream-coloured jumper and carried a worn leather satchel, not a textbook in sight. Her eyes scanned the room, found him, and a small, tentative smile broke across her face. It hit him like a clean offload, straight to the chest.
“You found it,” he said as she approached, standing up too quickly and nearly knocking the table.
“I told you I knew it.” She slid into the chair opposite, her satchel hitting the floor with a thump. “No yelling. You kept your promise.”
“The boys think I’m at a film symposium.” He cringed internally as he said it, but her smile didn’t waver.
“And what film are you symposing about?”
“Something deeply intellectual. Probably with explosions.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Listen, about the club. My mates… they’re a lot. I’m sorry about that.”
Roz unwound her scarf, her movements deliberate. “It’s okay. It was just a collision. A very… loud collision.”
“It wasn’t just that.” The words came out quietly. He held her gaze, refusing to let the moment slip into casual banter. “I wanted to talk to you. Not get swallowed by the noise.”
A faint blush coloured her cheeks. She looked down, tracing a whorl in the wood grain with her fingertip. “The noise is part of your life, though. Isn’t it?”
“Not the part I like.” He signalled to the bartender for two pints. “The part I like is quiet. It’s reading a book that isn’t a playbook. It’s history documentaries. It’s…” He gestured between them, at the quiet table. “This.”
Her blue eyes were sharp, assessing. “Hammy said you were different. He said you asked about the marginalia in his medical journals.”
Ally laughed, a short, surprised burst of sound. “Hammy talks too much. But yeah. The notes are better than the text. All that human guesswork in the margins.” The pints arrived, a temporary diversion. He took a long drink. “The book I gave you. It wasn’t too… I don’t know. Obvious?”
Roz reached into her satchel and pulled out the slender, cloth-bound volume. She placed it on the table between them with a reverence that made his throat tight. “It’s the most thoughtful thing anyone has ever given me. This edition… it’s annotated. In pencil. Look.”
She opened it carefully to the title page. Neat, tiny script filled the margins, a reader’s private conversation with the poet from decades ago. “See here? They’ve drawn a line connecting this metaphor about stormy seas to the next stanza about a troubled mind. It’s a direct, visual link a critic might miss. It’s not just reading; it’s dissecting. It’s understanding the architecture.”
Her voice had changed. The hesitation was gone, replaced by a fluid, passionate clarity. She wasn’t just beautiful in the dim light; she was lit from within by a fierce, bright intelligence. He was utterly captivated.
“You see all that,” he said, his voice rough. “Just like that.”
She looked up, caught by his tone. The blush deepened. “It’s what I do. I look for the underlying structures. In poems. In the human body. It’s all systems and connections.”
“A very, very beautiful clever girl,” he said, the words leaving him in a breath, not a line, but a raw and undisguised observation.
Silence hung between them, charged and soft. The words, once out, couldn’t be retrieved. He didn’t want to. She didn’t look away. The noise of the pub faded to a distant murmur.
Roz slowly closed the book, her fingers resting on its cover. “Most people don’t look for the structures. They just see the surface. The score. The try. The… face.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s exhausting.”
“Is that why you do it? The rugby?”
He turned his pint glass, watching the liquid swirl. “It’s the one thing I’m good at that doesn’t feel like a secret. The history, the poetry… that’s mine. But the pitch? That’s for everyone. It’s simple. Sometimes I need simple.”
“Simple isn’t the word I’d use for a collapsing scrum.”
He grinned. “Okay, it’s brutally simple. But the rules don’t change. You know what I mean.”
“I do.” She took a sip of her drink. “I hide in plain sight too. Behind a stethoscope or a textbook. People see the student, or they see… well, they see what they see first. They don’t usually ask about the marginalia.”
“Their loss,” he said, and he meant it with every fibre.
They talked for two hours. About Robert Burns’s actual dental health, about the Roman wall that once cut through Edinburgh, about the precise mechanism of a high ankle sprain. The conversation flowed in unpredictable channels, merging and separating, easy and deep. He made her laugh with a story about Hammy diagnosing a prop’s ‘groin strain’ as chronic chafing from his lucky socks.
She described the silent focus of a dissection lab, the profound intimacy of holding a human heart. There was no pretense, no performance. Just the exchange of minds.
When the pub bell rang for last orders, a shared gloom settled over them. “I should let you go,” Ally said, not moving.
“Probably.” Roz didn’t move either. She slid the poetry book back into her satchel. “Thank you. For tonight. For the book.”
“Thank you for the textbook joke. I was worried you’d actually bring one.”
“I considered it. A safety net.”
“You don’t need one.” He stood, offering her a hand. She took it, her fingers cool and slim in his. He didn’t let go as they walked to the door. Out on the cobbled street, the cold was a shock. Her hand was still in his.
“Can I walk you home?” he asked.
“It’s in the opposite direction from yours. I checked a map.”
“I don’t mind.”
She stopped, turning to face him. The streetlight caught the silver in her eyes. “Another time. Tonight was… perfect. I’d like to end it here, before we have to figure out the logistics of goodbye on a doorstep.”
He understood. She was preserving the bubble. “Okay. Another time, then.”
He still hadn’t released her hand. She squeezed his fingers once, gently, and pulled away. The loss of contact was immediate.
“Goodnight, Ally.”
“Goodnight, Roz.”
He watched her walk up the Cowgate, her figure growing smaller and fainter until she turned a corner and was gone. The city felt different. Larger, but less empty. He shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling the ghost of her fingers in his, and started the long walk home, the words of a hundred poems suddenly making a new, specific kind of sense.
He shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling the ghost of her fingers in his, and started the long walk home, the words of a hundred poems suddenly making a new, specific kind of sense.
The key turned in the lock with a scrape that echoed in the silent stairwell. Roz pushed open the door to her flat, enveloped by the familiar smell of old books, lemon cleaner, and the faint, always-present hint of toast. The living room was dark except for the blue-grey glow of the muted television, where a late-night talk show host mouthed silently at a celebrity.
“You’re back.” The voice came from the armchair. Cat was curled in it, a blanket over her legs, her laptop casting a square of white light on her face. She didn’t look up from her screen. “You’re late. For you.”
“It’s not that late,” Roz said, hanging her coat. The satchel with the book inside went carefully on the table.
“It’s after eleven on a Tuesday. For you, that’s a weeknight bender.” Cat finally swivelled her head. Her eyes, sharp behind her glasses, performed a quick scan. “You’re smiling. And you’re not wearing your ‘I just memorised the brachial plexus’ frown.” She closed her laptop with a decisive click. “Someone’s been on a date,” she said, eyes narrowing.
Roz busied herself filling the kettle, her back to Cat’s scrutiny. “It was a drink. At a pub. It wasn’t a formal date.”
“A drink. At a pub. With a human male. That’s a date, Roz.” Cat’s voice was dry, amused. “Details. Now. Or I will diagnose you with a rare social disorder and prescribe a full debrief.”
Roz sighed, the sound giving way to a laugh she couldn’t suppress. She leaned against the counter as the kettle began its rumble. “It was the rugby player. The one I told you about. With the ribs.”
Cat’s eyebrows disappeared into her fringe. “The Adonis with the poetry book? You actually went? I thought you’d just cherish the artifact and develop a complex.”
“We went to The Witch’s Thorn. It was quiet. We just talked.”
“For two and a half hours,” Cat stated, glancing at the clock. “Talked about what? Scrum techniques? The romantic symbolism of the offside line?”
“We talked about marginalia.” Roz brought two mugs over, the tea bags already in them. “And Roman walls. And the clinical difference between a sprain and a strain. He knew about Hammy’s journals.”
Cat accepted the mug, her expression shifting from teasing to genuine interest. “Okay. That’s… unexpectedly non-horrible. He listened?”
“He talked too. Not about rugby. About how he feels like his interests are a secret. It was just… easy.” The word felt inadequate, but it was the only one that fit. “It wasn’t like the club. There was no performance.”
“And?” Cat prompted, sipping her tea. “The verdict? Is he actually a person, or just a very pretty monument to athleticism?”
Roz thought of his laugh, the way he’d leaned in to see the pencil notes in the book, the rough sound of his voice when he’d called her clever. “He’s a person,” she said quietly. “A really interesting one.”
“Well, well.” Cat smiled a proper, warm smile. “The quiet ones always get the interesting ones. Did he kiss you?”
“No.” Roz’s face heated. “He walked me to the door of the pub. He held my hand. Then he let go.”
“A gentleman. Potentially disastrous.” Cat’s tone was light. “Are you going to see him again?”
The phone in Roz’s satchel felt like a beacon. She hadn’t checked it since the final ‘goodnight’ message she’d sent after turning the corner, a necessary period to let the evening settle. “I don’t know. Maybe. I think so.”
“Good.” Cat uncurled herself from the chair, stretching. “I’m going to bed. Try not to over-analyse every syllable until dawn. Just let it be a nice night.”
The flat settled into a deeper silence after Cat’s door clicked shut. Roz washed the mugs, her movements slow and deliberate. She took the poetry book from her satchel, running her thumb over the cloth cover. The annotations inside felt like a shared language now, a precursor to their own conversation.
She retrieved her phone. His last message, Finally, was still there. Below it, her own: I know it. I’ll be the one with a textbook. Just in case.
No new notifications. A small, stupid pang of disappointment hit her. What had she expected? A midnight sonnet?
She was about to plug the phone in when the screen lit up. A new message. Not a sonnet. Three simple words.
Ally: Walk tomorrow?