Page 13 of Good Losers (Lochkelvin Academy)

“But—”

“Go.”

I sigh, feeling like I’m being dismissed by my own father, and the thought alone has my heart throbbing for an entirely new reason.

With luck, or perhaps an improving muscle memory, I’m able to find my way back to my room. I pass Rory’s bedroom, the one signified byRuairidhon the door, and try to understand the strange secrets of this house.

I strip out of my clothes, stalking around the room bare-naked and lounging on the sumptuously soft bed for a blissful moment. I trace my lips with my fingers, imagining them to be Rory’s. Did today really happen? Already it’s quickly fading from my memory, as though it happened to someone else, or maybe in a dream, something I once read in a book…

Sighing, I head to the plush en suite, turning on the shower and waiting for the flow of water to heat. It’s almost instantaneous, because of course it is. It isn’t like school, with the shared shower cubicle and the creaking, groaning pipes that take forever to alter from ice-cold to a more reluctant tepid.

The water feels like warm rain on my skin. I remember kissing in the rain, of lips and tongue and teeth. I clean myself free of mud, scrubbing at my skin until it’s red-raw, watching the flecks of caked-in dirt swirl down the plughole. Steam fogs up the glass, and with the heat, I find I’m becoming more like myself, less numb and needy, as one tenet of my basic human rights is catered to.

Warmth is seriously underrated.

I begin to sing in the shower. Stupid songs, love songs. Royal Element nonsense that would embarrass anyone in public, but it cheers me up in private. I sing my heart out, rubbing my hands down clean, wet skin, feeling a kind of rebirth as I scrub my hair free of leaves and twigs.

I don’t expect to be heard.

I don’t expect someone else to be singing in response.

But that’s what happens. A male voice joins in with me in harmony, until I pause my own singing to adjust my ears. No. No, there’s definitely someone singing in my bedroom.

What the hell?

In a flash, I turn off the shower and wrap a thick white towel around me. It’s not much and I’ve worn more risqué attire, but that was on my own terms. This is the invasion of my private space.

The voice keeps singing as though I hadn’t stopped, as though singing isn’t the furthest thing from my mind right now. I think about using something as a weapon and scan the bathroom for ideas. Even the towel rack is some fancy contraption that’s heated and drilled into the wall. Damn it. There’s a toilet brush but… I scrunch my nose up. Really? A toilet brush?

Weaponless, I unlock the en suite door and step out, plumes of steam billowing all around me.

Lying stretched out across the large bed with his eyes closed is Finlay, his hands behind his head and his inky hair in tousled disarray. A tight red flannel shirt is unbuttoned to his chest, its sleeves rolled up and showing off his latest hand-drawn tattoo: a jet-black rectangle, of sharp edges and lethal pointed corners.

He drums a rhythmic beat on my plump pillows and sings up at the canopy of the four-poster bed, stopping only when he realizes I’m standing in front of him. He opens his eyes, sliding his gaze down at me.

“Hi,” Finlay drawls, drinking me in with a slow, languid gaze that burns every inch of me it lands on.

His attention is something I could dive into, something cool that could soothe each ache in my heart. I shake my head. I need a clear mind around the chiefs. “What are you doing here?”

“Here,” he muses. “This bed? Rory’s hoose? The planet?”

“My room.”

“Yourroom,” Finlay repeats dully, and he scoffs at this. “Ye’ve been here for, whit, three whole days? And ye think ye can usurp me so easily.” He gazes at me, his eyes lingering at the towel bunched across my chest before sliding down the curve of my hips. Quietly, Finlay adds, “Mebbe ye can.”

I’m overcome with a sudden weariness. It takes effort to translate Finlay when he isn’t sober. His intensely Scottish accent is slurred and roughened, but I get the sense he’s trying hard not to let it show.

“Are you drunk?”

“Always.”

“Why?”

“Because…” He lies back into the pillows, then cranes his neck toward me as though he needs me constantly in his line of sight. “A hink I’ve fucked up, sassenach.”

The last time I saw Finlay, he’d been drinking with Danny and kissing the life out of him. Before that, he’d been getting me hot on the school dance floor, and beforethathe’d been with me, assisting a political hostage in his treacherous escape, the prelude to a coup.

“Where’s Rory?” I ask sharply.

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