Page 128 of Men in Shorts

The organ crescendoed, silencing all chatter. Evan kept eating, but Andrew just poked at his kale crisps, nudging them to form a moat around his untouched sandwich.

He’d yet to tell Colin about quitting uni, knowing he’d be angry Andrew had tossed away his higher education, something people like himself struggled so hard to earn a place in. Worse, Colin might feel guilty for not stopping this downward spiral. This past week he’d asked again and again how Andrew was feeling. Andrew hadn’t the heart to tell him that most of the time he felt nothing at all.

When the organ paused, he said, “The second movement’s much quieter, so we’ve a few minutes to talk.”

“You know this piece?” Evan asked.

“Yes, it’s Liszt’s Prelude and…something.”

“Interesting tale about Franz Liszt.” Evan picked up his coffee. “When he was in his twenties he fell in love with one of his piano students, but her father broke them up. Liszt got deathly ill—from heartbreak, they say—to the point where a newspaper printed his premature obituary. Of course then he recovered.” He tilted his head. “I don’t know if the paper ever posted a retraction.”

“You’re just chockablock with morbid factoids, aren’t you?”

Evan shrugged. “I remember things. So you were saying, about university?”

“Right.” Andrew tried to work out how to explain without sounding pathetic. “My field no longer interests me. And since tuition is free in Scotland, I refuse to waste taxpayers’ money by pottering about campus with no purpose. To do so would offend what remains of my Tory principles.”

Evan seemed to fend off a smirk. Andrew had to admit his saving-government-expenditures rationalization sounded weak.

“You’re only in your second year.” Evan put his napkin to his mouth in that distinctly middle-class half-wipe/half-dab, a gesture neither strictly proper nor entirely crude. “What about a change in course of study, maybe a combined degree?”

“They offered to let me do that. I looked at the course list, but nothing seemed…”

“Interesting?”

“Possible.” Andrew sat back, appalled at his own confession of inadequacy. “This isn’t like me. I’ve never been short of confidence. But last week when I looked at each syllabus and saw what was required…it felt like I was being asked to climb the sky.”

Evan rotated the cardboard sleeve of his coffee cup, looking pensive. “Go on.”

“I thought, ‘I can’t do this,’ and then I thought, ‘I don’t care.’” He gave a hoarse laugh. “How spoiled of me, right? To be granted so many opportunities, only to walk away.”

“Sounds like you did it out of instinct. Sometimes when things aren’t right on the inside, we make big changes on the outside.”

“Maybe,” Andrew said, by which he meantYes! Yes! How did you know?“You’ve felt like this, then?”

“Aye.” Evan glanced back at a group of loud tourists laughing by the reception desk. “Sometimes I still do. But it’s rare now, maybe one day out of twenty.”

That sounded heavenly. “How did you get better?”

“I took time off, focused on my own health and happiness. Football helped. It’s always been something of a refuge for me.” He looked down at his half-eaten sandwich, his golden eyelashes flickering. “I stopped drinking for a while.”

“Seems sensible.”

“And I got therapy,” Evan said.

Andrew braced his feet against the floor. “That’s not an option.” He didn’t bother addingfor someone in my position; Colin had already regaled him with a dozen examples of celebrities in therapy.

Instead of arguing, Evan gave a conciliatory nod. “I felt the same way. But I wasn’t given a choice. Counseling was mandatory. So I figured the fastest way to end that torture was to jump in with both feet, be completely honest about how…disarranged I was. The plan was to make a quick recovery so I could get back to my life.”

A warning bell went off in Andrew’s mind. Architecture wasn’t usually a profession requiring trauma counseling. “How did that go?”

“It worked.” Evan spread his hands like a magician after a trick. “I actually got better. Not all at once, of course. I’m still a work in progress. There’s the occasional nightmare, and I have certain…limits.” His gaze darted to the museum’s back exit, then the front one. “But nothing like the state I was in six months ago.”

Interesting.Evan had always seemed so cool and in control at Warriors matches. Then again, Andrew probably seemed fine to most people, even as he was crumbling inside.

The organ’s volume swelled again. Andrew moved his chair closer to Evan’s and raised his voice above the music. “How did they fix you? With drugs?”

“They didn’tfixme,” Evan said, “and no, I didn’t need more than the occasional sedative to help me sleep. Mostly my therapist let me talk through what happened, gave me a safe place to air my thoughts.” Evan paused, peering up at one of the arched openings to the upper-floor galleries. “The hardest thing to admit wasn’t the fear. It was the anger. I worried that if I said how I truly felt, it would cost me everything.”

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