Page 16 of Playing By Ear

A long vibration came from Jamie’s left side. Had his heart gone haywire? Would he collapse here in Perry’s arms, those dark, knowing eyes his life’s final sight?

Perry glanced down. “Is that your phone?”

“Oh!” Jamie groped at his shirt pocket. “Sometimes I forget these things can be used to call people.”

“Answer if you need to,” Perry said. “I’ll see to the tea.”

The word Supergrrrl sprawled across the screen. Tendrils of fear tickled Jamie’s spine. Belinda never phoned. And after yesterday’s cryptic text message about their dad…

He answered. “What’s happened?”

“Are you in Glasgow?” his sister asked.

“Aye, but⁠—”

“Meet me outside your flat.” She hung up.

Jamie stared at the phone screen. “What the…”

Perry turned from the cupboard with a box of tea. “Everything okay?”

Jamie shook his head, then remembered Perry couldn’t see the gesture across the room. “No. I gotta bolt. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right.” Perry looked as though he wanted to say something else, ask something else. Jamie knew he should be clear he wanted to see Perry again, but Belinda’s tone implied the future was too turbulent for concrete plans.

Still, he needed to do one thing before he left.

Their second kiss was longer than their first, and twice as sweet. Perhaps because it felt like goodbye.

Chapter 3

It should have been a fifteen-minute walk from Perry’s red-sandstone building in the fashionable Hyndland district to Jamie’s tenement flat in Partick. Jamie made it in five.

First he spied Belinda’s bodyguard in a shiny black sedan across the street. Rory had parked at the slight bend in the road, no doubt to get a clear eyeline in both directions.

Belinda was pacing on the pavement beside Jamie’s doorstep, an object in her hand flashing green under the streetlamp. She stopped when she saw him but didn’t smile or wave.

Jamie slowed as he approached, feeling sick from dread and from running with a full stomach. He gave her a hug, too breathless to speak.

“You shouldn’t have hurried,” she said low in his ear. “It looks suspicious.” She glanced back at Rory, who seemed content to remain in the car, then handed Jamie the biscuit tin. “Auntie Rosemary says happy belated St. Patrick’s Day.”

Was that code for something other than the world’s best shortbread? Dad’s gone and died, for instance?

Jamie led her up the front stairs—avoiding the crumbly one that always snagged his trolley wheels—and into the entrance hall, where the door to his ground-floor flat looked grimier than usual compared to Perry’s.

In his long, narrow kitchen/lounge, Belinda headed for the record player near the window. Jamie wanted to shout What’s going on?!? but of course she wouldn’t tell him until she could cover the sound of their voices. Just in case.

To ease the agony of waiting, Jamie pulled the lid off the biscuit tin. The smell of homemade shortbread banished his wooziness. He popped the stem of one of the shamrock-shaped pieces into his mouth, where it melted into orgasmic butteriness. “Fuck, that’s good.”

“Are these records not alphabetized?”

“I’ll get round to it once I can afford more than a dozen.” He took another bite of shortbread. Like his second kiss with Perry, it was even better than the first.

“Here we are.” She held up a classic They Might Be Giants LP. “Mind how we used to sing and dance to this?” She slipped Flood from its sleeve. “I would almost piss myself laughing at you pronouncing the word Constantinople when you were, like, four years old.”

“Aye, I remember.” He also remembered why she’d cranked the music so loud, to cover the ruckus downstairs. One of the dozen ways she’d tried to shield him from reality.

Now the music blared for another purpose. Jamie doubted his latest tiny flat was bugged, but there was no convincing Belinda, and humoring her cost him nothing.