Page 88 of Unapologetic Love Story

‘Yes!’ Raina cheered, moving away from Tom and his friends to stand on the port side. A group of women who were clearly having a fantastic night on the other boat spotted her and seemed to immediately recognize her as one of their own. Tom watched in complete bemusement as the women belted ‘If It Wasn’t for the Nights’ at Raina, who belted it right back with matching choreography. The boat seemed to pulse and vibrate as it passed them, and the women screamed in disappointment as it became clear that Raina was going in the opposite direction on the river.

‘How embarrassing. ABBA is so basic,’ Ottie said stonily.

‘Hm,’ Raina said, waving enthusiastically to her new friends as they faded into the London skyline. ‘I think it’s glorious.’

‘Ottie hates singing,’ Tom told Raina conspiratorially.

‘Well, you have a beautiful voice,’ Raina said to him. ‘I heard you singing in the shower. That one time I wasn’t in there with you.’

Ottie inhaled sharply but Tom threw his head back and laughed. ‘I’m a Celt. We’re made of music.’

Ottie rolled her eyes while Seb took a long drink. ‘Whatever,’ she sighed. ‘Tom? Eleven o’clock.’

She turned away, heading to the indoor area of the boat. Seb followed obediently.

Tom moved to stand behind Raina, sliding his arms around her body as she continued to look out over the river. He pressed his face into her neck and she sighed. The boat moved towards West London with steady ease.

‘I love this city from the river,’ Raina said, leaning back against Tom. ‘And from all the bridges.’

He pressed his lips to her throat. ‘The bridges?’

‘I love the bridges here. They’re stunning. You have to stand on one of the less touristy ones, for sure. But they’re the best.’

‘Which one’s your favourite?’

‘Probably the Hammersmith Bridge because it makes all the people in my neighbourhood so angry when it’s being worked on.’

‘It’s right by your place.’

‘Yes, and beautiful at night.’

Tom looked back at the bridges stitching the north and south side of the city together. The hilariously ugly London Bridge. The famous Tower Bridge, now far in the distance. Millennium. Blackfriars. Waterloo.

‘I’ve never thought about them before,’ he said.

‘No bridges back home? Where in Scotland are you from again?’

‘Dalkeith. It’s a town near the Esk.’

‘Is it nice?’

Tom thought of his hometown and tried to picture it through the eyes of a stranger. There was the posh side of town. His mother had often made his father drive by those houses.

‘That’s where we’ll be when you make your millions,’ she would say to Mirren and Tom, both sitting in the back of the old, beaten-up car. ‘I’ll have my sewing room, and your dad can have his garden and piano.’

When Tom had got his scholarship to Fettes, his parents sat him down to tell him that he needed to keep certain things about their family private. They never said ‘secret’, always ‘private’. Tom felt wretched now, wishing that they hadn’t worried about any of that. Their council house was cleaner than some of the fancy six bedrooms his friends invited him over to. But his parents had been proud. They’d feared for him. Worried about barriers he was still too young to see.

‘It’s a pretty normal place,’ he finally said. ‘Church, shops, houses.’

‘Sounds like Woodstock.’

Tom smiled and nodded but he knew that wasn’t true. Somehow, he knew her little side of Oxfordshire wasn’t like his slice of Scotland. It probably had a few Tudor-style buildings, no brutalist architecture. Tom felt itchy just talking about home. Wondering if other people on the boat could sense things about him. Memories of paying for ibuprofen with pennies scraped from the bottom of a drawer. The day his father won fifty pounds at the football, and his mother had cried. The summer his father was made redundant but instead of telling the children, Tom and Mirren were sent to stay with their grandparents in Bathgate.

Tom didn’t feel shame about it. Instead, he felt a fearful protectiveness and an anxiety. Stood with his Cambridge friends and their friends, he was aware that his past had become a closed vault inside of himself. One that they never asked about. They’d made assumptions, and he’d let them. When he’d once named his hometown, they’d asked if it was near Gleneagles or Balmoral and then nothing more. They assumed things about Tom and Tom allowed it. Like so many privileged people in England, they heard his crisp accent and strong vocabulary and assumed that he had to be rich, because they’d always been led to believe that only the Scots with money could truly master English as well as the Scots language.

‘It’s not the richest part of Scotland.’

But he didn’t want to hide from Raina. Not even a little.