Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Hamish
There is no better way to start a morning than with your face between your wife's thighs.
I know this the way I know football, the way I know the weight of a ball against my instep, the way I know the exact angle of a cross that finds the back of the net. Some knowledge is intellectual. Some is physical.
And some is sacred.
Amy is spread out beneath me, one arm flung above her head, the other gripping the sheet, her body a landscape of curves and softness and heat.
The morning light through the curtains catches her skin and turns it golden, auburn hair spilled over her fair shoulders.
Her belly rises between us, round and taut, and I work around it the way I've learned to work around everything in our lives: with patience and creativity and the understanding that the best things require adaptation.
And a strong tongue.
She's gorgeous like this. Vulnerable and sweet and completely open to me, her knees apart, her breath coming in short, soft catches that I've spent years learning to read.
Every sound is information. Every shift of her hips is a signal.
I am paying attention with everything I have because this—this act, this gift, this chance to make her feel good—is the purest expression of love I know.
My altar is between her legs and I'm on my knees before her in reverence.
She's swollen, everywhere, from the pregnancy.
More sensitive than she's ever been. I can feel it in the way she responds, quicker and sharper, her fingers finding my hair and gripping, her back arching off the mattress as much as her belly will allow.
I love how aroused she gets, the flush that spreads down her chest, the way her thighs tremble when I find the right rhythm and hold it.
"Hamish," she breathes, and my name in her mouth is better than any goal I've ever scored.
Better than the standing ovation at Wembley.
Better than the night I scored twice against Bayern in the Champions League group stage and the entire pub in Glasgow where Da was watching went so mental, they broke three barstools and a window.
Better than every single moment of glory combined.
Giving her pleasure is my crowning achievement.
I press closer. Slower. Let her build. Her hips rock against me and her breath catches and holds and I can feel her right at the edge, that trembling threshold where her whole body tenses and her hand in my hair tightens and—
The doorbell buzzer shatters the moment.
Not a gentle buzz. A sustained, aggressive, someone-is-leaning-on-the-button-with-the-full-weight-of-their-conviction buzz that rips through the condo like a fire alarm.
"Ignore it," Amy whispers.
I ignore it.
My mouth returns to its mission. Amy's grip on my hair tightens. We are so close. She is so close.
The buzzer goes again. Longer this time, with feeling.
"Hamish—"
"Shh. Ignore."
I double down. Amy's back arches. Her thigh presses against my ear and I can hear her heartbeat through her femoral artery, which is either deeply romantic or anatomically concerning but I don't care because she's making that sound, the one that means—
Both our phones light up simultaneously.
The buzzer goes a third time, accompanied by a knock. A real knock. A series of knocks that sounds like a balled-up fist that was raised on the Scottish Highlands. It's a rhythm I know all too well.
"That's your mum," Amy says flatly.
I lift my head. My face is wet, her taste on my tongue, my head fuzzy with lust. My situation is, shall we say, profoundly visible as well as redolent, and I am in no state for company.
"It canna be ma mum. Ma mum is in Glasgow."
Amy grabs her phone. Holds it up.
Fiona McCormick: We're at the door, let us in! I've brought breakfast. Fergus says hello.
I stare at the screen. Then at Amy. Then at the ceiling, because God and I need to have a conversation about timing.
"How is she here?" Amy says.
"I dinna ken."
"Hamish, I was about thirty seconds from an orgasm."
"I'm aware, pet. I was providing it."
The buzzer goes again.
I roll off the bed and stand there, fully naked, fully erect, and fully at a loss for what to do with either of those conditions given that my mother is outside with a basket of breakfast food and my father in tow.
"You have to answer the door," Amy says.
"In this state?" I gesture at myself. The situation has not improved. If anything, the adrenaline has made it worse.
"Think about something unsexy."
"Like what?"
"Malcolm saying 'less banter.'"
I think about Malcolm saying "less banter." It helps marginally. I think about Malcolm's clipboard. Better. I think about Malcolm's clipboard and the way he eats a sandwich, methodically, from left to right, like he's mowing a lawn.
There we go.
I pull on shorts. T-shirt. Run a hand through my hair, which is wild because Amy had her fingers in it approximately forty-five seconds ago.
I look at Amy, who has wrapped herself in the duvet.
She'ss staring at me with the expression of a woman who was about to arrive at her destination but has been given a detour past a pig farm instead.
"I'll handle this," I say.
"You will handle this."
"I will handle this."
I walk to the intercom and press the button.
"Mum?"
"Hamish! Yer da and I are downstairs. Let us in, it's Baltic out here." It's not Baltic. It's sixty-two degrees.
I buzz them in, standing behind the front door to hide the fact that my shorts are doing very little to conceal the aftermath. My mother rounds the corner carrying a basket the size of a small automobile.
"Surprise!" she announces, sweeping past me into the condo like a Highland wind. Behind her, Da follows, carrying two shopping bags and wearing the resigned expression of a man who stopped questioning his wife's decisions sometime around 1991.
"Mum. Da. What—How—?"
"We flew in last night," Mum says, setting the basket on the counter with a thud. "I told yer da, I said, Fergus, our grandchild is comin' any day now and I willna be sittin' in Glasgow waitin' fer a phone call like some auld biddy. So we booked the flight and here we are."
"The bairn's no' due fer another four weeks, Mum."
"Babies can come early. I had ye three weeks early and yer brother Darren two weeks early and yer wee sister Bridget came so fast, I barely made it ta the toilet, never mind the hospital."
"All right, son," Da says, and in those two words is every conversation we've ever had about Mum's nature, namely: acknowledge, accept, suffer, and have a lot of dart league nights at the pub.
"All right, Da."
Mum has already begun unpacking the basket. The contents emerge one by one, each item announced with the ceremonial pride of a woman who transported a complete Scottish breakfast across the Atlantic in her carry-on bag.
"Right. Ayrshire back bacon—I brought it in a cool bag and it's perfectly fine, dinna give me that look, Hamish.
Link sausages from McKinnon's, and Lorne sausage, square, the way God intended.
" She holds up a flat, dense slab of meat pressed into a perfect rectangle.
"Stornoway black pudding from the wee shop on Cromwell Street.
Tattie scones, I made these maself on Thursday and froze them, they'll fry up lovely.
Eggs, I didna bring eggs on a plane, I'm no' mental, I'll use yers.
Beans. Mushrooms and tomatoes, sourced locally, I'm no' a lunatic. "
She pauses.
"And haggis."
"Ye brought haggis through customs?"
"I brought haggis through customs." She says this with quiet defiance. Her middle name should be Subversive. "Dinna ask me how. I have ma ways."
"She put it in a Tupperware labeled 'oatmeal,'" Da says, taking a seat at the kitchen table.
"Fergus."
"What? The boy should ken he's an accessory."
Amy emerges from the bedroom in sweatpants and one of my old Scotland tops, her hair in a knot.
On her face is the specific expression of someone who has transitioned from near-orgasm to unexpected in-laws in under three minutes and is processing the emotional whiplash.
She is smiling, but the smile shows no teeth.
"Fiona! Fergus! What a... surprise."
"Amy, darlin'!" Mum wraps her in a hug, hands immediately going to the belly. "Oh, look at ye. Ye're enormous. In the most beautiful way. Ye're carrying high, which means the bairn's engaged. Have ye had yer cervix checked?"
"Not in the last forty-five seconds," Amy says, giving me a look, "but it's definitely something I need more of."
Mum is already at the stove. She has commandeered a pan, located the olive oil, rejected it and produced her own bottle of sunflower oil from the basket, and is laying out the Ayrshire bacon in neat rows.
"This is a proper stove," she says. "I'll give ye that. No' like that wee thing in yer London flat, Hamish, the one wi' the burner that leaned ta the left so every fried egg slid off the pan like it was tryin' ta escape."
"Imagine that, trying to escape," Amy murmurs. I get another look.
The kitchen fills with the smell of sizzling bacon and frying Lorne sausage, and despite everything—the interrupted morning, the ambush, the contraband haggis—my mouth waters. There is nothing on this earth like a full Scottish breakfast made by my mum, and she knows it.
She fries the tattie scones in the bacon fat until they're golden and crisp.
She slices the black pudding into thick rounds.
The haggis she crumbles and fries loose, letting it get crispy at the edges.
Mushrooms in butter. Tomatoes halved and grilled face down.
Toast cut into triangles because, as she insists, "it makes more sense that way. "