One breakthrough per day is more than enough for a woman, but the Highland white nights were set on educating Ally one more time. Not contented with reminding her of her strengths in leadership and community-building today, they were set on offering up a reminder of what a waste of time mourning a broken heart had been these last few weeks.
As she stepped out of the bathroom, there stood Gray. Or rather, he was leaning on a column in the corner. She recognised the lean first. It was his sexy, tell-me-all-about-yourself-you-fascinating-creature lean. There’d be some poor woman faced with that rolled shirt-sleeve and Lynx Africa doused armpit. Who was he trying to seduce this time? She let herself take a quick peek as she passed.
It had been a thunderbolt at first, seeing Laura Mercer’s upturned face grinning at him. They were still seeing each other? After all her blustering and bracelet-chucking?
Ally crossed the dance floor, forcing people to part for her like a pissed-off Moses, and lifted herself back onto the stool, taking the straw between her teeth automatically.
‘Are you OK?’ Jamie asked.
‘Uh…’ she thought hard. ‘Actually…’ Was she OK? She mentally patted herself down, checking for injuries. Nerves? Pretty calm actually, now the surprise had worn off. Brain? Not running a montage of lovey-dovey moments during which Gray had looked at her in the wolfish way he was currently sizing up Laura. That’s progress, she told herself. Heart? Honestly? Fine.
She lifted her drink to Jamie, feeling like she was waking up from a long sleep. ‘I am OK,’ she said, surprised.
He touched his glass to hers.
‘In fact, I’m in better shape than I thought I was.’
He didn’t understand, but he was going with it. ‘Cheers. Here’s to being that.’
N-Trance was now blaring from the speakers and a whole laughing, singing Highland club crowd made post-ironic big fish and little fish with their hands.
Jamie downed his drink and set the glass on the bar, wiping his mouth. Ally copied him, her chest filling with lightness.
A wicked look had passed over his face.
She cocked her head, enquiringly. ‘What?’
He was moving his hands, forming little boxes. ‘Oh no,’ he was saying, his smile growing. Ally watched him as he rose to his feet as if under the DJs control. ‘It’s happening,’ he said, his arms jerking harder like a nineties raver.
Ally threw her head back in a laugh and stood too, mimicking his movements, making a big cardboard box in the air in front of her.
Grinning madly, they danced to the edge of the crowd and let the lasers claim them while the clubbers sang about being set free and pointed fingers in the air, not one person caring how they looked. They were young and cocktail-fuelled and it was Saturday night, and as Ally and Jamie laughed and sang in each other’s faces, both of them knew this was, more than likely, definitely a date now.
Later, after chucking out time, when the street had cleared and the ski slope lights were switched off, Ally and Jamie sat side by side on the Ptarmigan steps, tinnitus setting in.
They’d switched to drinking water at some point but not before they’d charged their cards with enough cocktails to power a lot of high energy retro dance moves. Ally hadn’t laughed so much or danced so hard in her life. Her body had absorbed every beat and was now enervated and delightfully buzzing.
‘You know?’ Jamie said, tipping his head towards Ally’s again. ‘Switzerland is kind of just an overpriced version of the Cairngorms, anyway.’
He’d said it out of nowhere. Had he been thinking about the possibility of her leaving? Was it playing on his mind? She observed him, his hair messy, the buttons of his Henley undone, revealing the kind of lightly corded neck Ally could imagine running her lips over. Had she shocked him with the revelation that she quite fancied a job in Europe? Had he wanted her to stay? A part of her hoped so.
‘Oh, it is, is it?’ She slurred a tiny bit when she said it, and they both laughed.
‘Sure.’ He shrugged. Was he comforting her or trying to convince her to stay? Not that there was any chance of her being offered the job, but she decided to go with this and see where it was taking them.
‘What does Zurich have that Cairn Dhu doesn’t, eh?’ he said.
‘Uh, a choice of more than one hairdresser, maybe?’
‘Hey!’ he complained, touching his fingertips to his recently shorn nape (which Ally absolutely had not thought about, wondering if it was as velvety to the touch as it looked). ‘Ozan’s a master with his clippers!’
‘I’ll give him that,’ she said, snapping her eyes away from the bristly soft areas over his ears where Ozan had indeed worked magic, ‘but you can’t argue we couldn’t do with a proper pizza place or a takeaway,’ she tried. ‘Other than the chippy?’
Jamie wouldn’t be bested. ‘You must be forgetting the Cairn Gourmet Sandwich Van in the lay-by on the bypass.’
‘Hah, OK, what about an actual clothes shop?’
‘What’s wrong with Kilt it! on the high street?’
