Page 2

Chapter 2

“Sorry about your match. That cup thing, I mean.”

Duncan winced at the mention of the Warriors’ crushing quarterfinal defeat, then continued opening the tin of chicken soup.

“Nae bother,” he told Brodie, who was sitting behind him at their flat’s kitchen table, head resting on his crossed arms. “Life goes on.”

“It’s not fair.” Brodie’s voice slurred with exhaustion. “You worked so hard.”

“Who ever said football was fair?”

“Still, it must’ve been difficult to lose your captain.”

Duncan froze at the sound of the final word. That wasn’t all we lost. By ditching the Warriors to run off with his lover, Evan Hollister had fulfilled the worst gay stereotype—that of a shallow, fickle man following his prick. He’d made the team a laughingstock. Ultimately, he’d robbed the Warriors of not only a captain and an attacking midfielder, but their pride in themselves.

“Aye, it pure sucked.” Duncan chucked the tin opener back in the drawer with a bang. “But what do you care? You don’t even like football.”

“I’m only expressing sympathy.”

“I don’t need it,” he snapped. Duncan hated hearing the hostility in his own voice. It wasn’t like him to lash out at those who didn’t deserve it, or even those who did deserve it. But lately, he couldn’t help it.

Anyway, he was lying. He did need sympathy. After Evan’s departure, Duncan had seriously considered borrowing his parents’ car to drive up to Brodie’s wee village.

But for what? he wondered as he started microwaving the bowl of soup. He and Brodie weren’t even close friends. They were in the psychology course together, so they saw each other nearly every weekday, between lectures and study groups. But they didn’t pal about on a Friday night or anything. Duncan had his football mates, and Brodie had his…well, his gay mates, the activists at Glasgow Uni’s LGBTQ club.

Besides, as flatmates they were careful to keep each other at arm’s length to avoid domestic awkwardness. If they’d started something, then split up, it would’ve made their home a living hell—not just for them, but for the ten other students living here. Their flat had already suffered two heterosexual breakups this year. Slammed doors, late-night screaming matches, broken dishes—Duncan had no desire to enact the gay version of that scene.

If only it hadn’t bothered him more and more to see Brodie bring his dates home. If only Duncan could view their own recent hookup the way Brodie did, as a booze-fueled mistake. If only he could stop remembering Brodie’s half-naked body, or stop dreaming of his fully naked body.

The electric kettle dinged, snapping Duncan back to the present, back to their prickly conversation.

“We should have won,” he told Brodie. “We’d had last-minute substitutions before and always adapted. Even without Evan, Warriors were still the better team. It should’ve at least been close.”

He poured water for tea—Earl Grey for himself, and for Brodie, some medicinal herbal stuff their flatmate Petra had offered for public consumption after deciding she hated the taste.

“But it wasn’t a close match,” he continued. “We got fucking destroyed. We couldn’t pass, couldn’t defend. It was like we’d forgotten how to play the game. In the two league matches since then, we’ve been complete crap. We’ve lost control of our fate in the division.” And I’ve lost control of myself. “It’s like Evan stole our mojo. Know what I mean?”

There was no response.

He turned to Brodie, who was fast asleep, cheek pressed to the dining table’s shiny, wood-effect surface, his dark lashes lying still against his fair skin.

Something softened inside Duncan at the sight, and he felt a chunk of his rage melt away. Maybe this lad could make him feel more himself again. Surely he couldn’t be unkind to someone so sweet and fragile as Brodie.

Could he?

* * *

Brodie woke, sort of, several times that day and night. He’d had a vague vision of Duncan feeding him soup, tea, and ibuprofen—a vision that repeated itself, illuminated by different shades of sunlight through his window. Twice, maybe three times, this Duncan-vision helped him to the toilet and waited outside the door to make sure he didn’t fall asleep mid-piss.

It was morning now, judging by the toxic taste in Brodie’s parched mouth. He rolled over and found a cup of water within reach on the windowsill. Expecting it to taste stale, he sat up and took a tentative sip. It was cool and fresh.

Exhausted from this effort, Brodie sank back onto his pillow and checked his phone. He noticed a new text message from Lorna, from late last night. It simply read Ohhhhhhhhhh followed by a see-no-evil monkey emoji. Brodie scrolled up the thread and cursed when he saw messages he barely remembered receiving and sending.

Lorna

You OK sweetie? Can I bring you anything?

Brodie

No thanks Duncan is hereditary

In what way?

Tea and soup and tycoon

I thought his parents were merchants. No idea he was a secret oil baron

Or is this some sort of kinky role play you’ve got going?

Fucking autocorrect. Duncan is HERE, with tea and soup and a TUCKING IN

Not a TUCKING IN like a big meal. A TUCKING IN like into bed

Lorna must have loved that. At least his phone hadn’t changed “tucking” to “fucking,” though it often did the opposite.

A soft knock came at his door, which slowly swung open.

“Sorry,” Duncan said as he slid inside. “I know it’s early, but you’ve slept off and on for about eighteen hours.”

Conscious of his terrible breath, Brodie took another sip of water and tried to be subtle about swishing it through his mouth.

“Micky D’s breakfast.” Duncan set a pair of drinks on the desk, then held up a white paper bag with the golden-arches logo. “Sausage-and-egg McMuffin or bacon-and-egg? I also bought an apple-and-cherry porridge, in case you were feeling poorly or had gone vegetarian or something. And hash browns, of course.” When Brodie just stared at him, stunned, Duncan took a step back. “You look about to boak. Is it the food smell?”

“No, I’m…” Amazed you’re here. “Bacon-and-egg sounds brilliant.”

“Right, here you go.” Duncan tossed him the sandwich, which Brodie fumbled but managed to grab before it bounced onto the floor. “I brewed you a cup of tea in the kitchen.” He handed over Brodie’s favorite mug, which pictured a cat reclining on a slice of pizza floating in front of the Helix Nebula.

“That’s…thank you.”

“Nae bother. McDonald’s tea is shit.” Popping the lid on his own cardboard cup, Duncan inhaled the steam as he sat at the desk. “But their coffee’s pure heaven.”

They ate in silence. The caffeine awakened Brodie’s brain, and with it, his swirling emotions. Though he appreciated Duncan’s help during his illness, he hated being weak in front of him.

Weaker than usual, that is. Duncan’s strength and grace—especially obvious when he was walking out of their flat’s shower room—only made Brodie more self-conscious about his own lack of athleticism. Though Brodie wasn’t interested in sports, he found himself annoyingly attracted to those who were. Now here he was, with the virus sapping what little strength he had, in front of the one who made him feel most inadequate—and the one he most wanted to impress.

“Library’s open now.” Brodie shifted his legs under the covers as if to get up, but in his current state, dressing in real clothes and leaving this building seemed a superhuman act. “You should go now if you want a seat.”

“Naw, I’ll work here, if it’s all right with you.” Without waiting for a response, Duncan reached into his rucksack and pulled out his tablet. “We could review for the Psych 1B exam together.”

“That’s not until a week on Wednesday. I’ve a statistics exam Monday.” He felt a flutter of panic in his chest as he realized he’d lost an entire day to sleep.

“I’ve got a chemistry one then too, but I’m in denial about it, since I’m certain to fail.” Duncan peeked into the McDonald’s bag. “You want the last hash brown?”

“Why are you being so nice to me?”

Duncan looked at him, startled. “Am I?”

“We’re not exactly pals.”

“Aren’t we?””

“Stop doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Turning everything I say into a question, like I’ve lost my grip on reality.”

“Haven’t you?”

Brodie laughed, which made his head feel like it would shatter. He put a hand to it. “Ow. This is the worst.”

“I know, mate. Feels like your skull’s stuffed with cotton, right? People who’ve never gotten mono love to have a banter about it, hahaha, kissing disease and all. They think it’s like a bad cold.” Duncan opened the bottle of ibuprofen on the desk and shook out a pair of brown pills. “A cold won’t drop you to the floor a month later. A cold won’t cripple your liver and spleen so you can’t play contact sports for eight weeks, or have two drinks in one night without boaking. The only consolation is once you’ve had glandular fever, you’ll never get it again.” He wheeled the desk chair over and handed Brodie the pills, fingertips brushing his palm. “If I gave you this virus, I’m really sorry.”

So that’s why Duncan was being so nice to him—out of guilt. “It’s not like you did it on purpose.” As Brodie swallowed the ibuprofen, he realized the two of them were skating perilously close to the subject of kissing. “You couldn’t play football for eight weeks?”

“Luckily this was during my gap year in San Francisco, so I wasn’t in a league at the time anyway.” Duncan leaned back in the chair, resting the toes of his Nikes on the frame of Brodie’s bed. “It took forever to rebuild my stamina. But our captain, Evan—our former captain—he promised before I left Scotland that when I came back to Glasgow I’d have a trial with the Warriors. So it gave me something to work for.”

Duncan’s face turned sad at as he spoke of his team. He stared at his feet for a moment, rocking them against the frame, then pushed back and swiveled his chair to face the desk. “Talking of things to work for. Exams.”

Brodie managed to stand and totter a single step to reach the shelf atop his desk. As he retrieved the heavy statistics textbook, he swayed a bit, but a warm hand on his ribs steadied him—physically, at least. Inside, he felt more wobbly than ever.

Duncan let go without looking up from his notes. Of course he was unaffected by a mere touch. Their disastrous hookup had been but a joke to him, even as it had mortified Brodie. They were miles apart.

Brodie returned to bed, determined to focus on standard deviations and probabilities. But his room had never felt so small. The desk sat three feet from his bed, so he’d barely need to lean forward to touch Duncan’s hair. The ends of the short strands, a shade lighter than Brodie’s own chestnut brown, glimmered in the light from the desk lamp. Brodie’s fingertips tingled as he remembered caressing the fuzz at Duncan’s nape, which now looked freshly shaven. If Brodie did reach out and stroke it, he wondered, would it be perfectly smooth, or would he feel a faint stubble?

A wave of fatigue swept over him, making his lids heavy. It felt like the virus had poked a hole in some hidden corner of his body so that it might drain his life force, drop by drop.

Was Duncan the source of this illness? He wasn’t the only lad Brodie had kissed in the last…well, hmm, what was the incubation period? A week? Two weeks?

A month before Duncan, Brodie and his mate John had had a wee, what-the-hell snogging session. John was a brilliant kisser, but the chemistry wasn’t there, so they’d abandoned the effort before moving further.

Kissing Duncan was the opposite. They’d both been so blootered, their lips barely functioned. Yet every cell in Brodie’s body had burned, wanting to melt into liquid so they could soak into Duncan’s skin.

He found his phone and typed glandular fever incubation period into the search bar. The results came up instantly:

Symptoms of glandular fever take around one to two months to develop after infection with the Epstein-Barr virus.

So Duncan couldn’t have given him the virus, as Brodie had taken ill only a week after they’d kissed. It wasn’t fair to let him feel guilty for nothing. Brodie had to tell him the truth. He would tell him the truth.

And then Duncan would leave forever.