Married Ones

Chapter 1: Beth-2

Life was not about getting up at six o’clock in the morning on the first day of the summer holidays to drive to the bloody arse end of nowhere in buggering Scotland.

It was also not about getting landed with driving the first leg, because your nutter of a husband had gotten up at four to go for a run.

“It was nice weather!” Stephen said defensively as Mike hooked the suit bags up in the back seat, beside the just-in-case camping gear. Never knew when he’d have to flee into the Scottish wilderness to escape the in-laws after all. “And I couldn’t sleep with you snoring in my ear anyway.”

“Could’ve woken me up for a shag if you felt antsy.”

Stephen snorted. “Please. You’d have bitched and moaned then, too.”

“Only until you got your kit off.”

“It was already off,” Stephen said, folding his long limbs into the passenger seat. “You left it all on the stairs.”

Mike cracked a grin, swapping his glasses for his shades before getting behind the wheel. Stephen looked a picture, stretched out in his board shorts and T-shirt, sunglasses hiding hungover eyes, and suddenly Mike didn’t mind driving so much.

Couldn’t let that show, though. Berk might get ideas.

“You take over at the border.”

“S’fine.”

“Then it’s your fault if we get lost.”

“We won’t get lost.”

“Shame. Then we’d be late.”

“How lost do you think we’re going to get?”

“Twenty years in the wilderness lost?”

“You wish,” Stephen said sourly.

Mike did wish. Stephen came from money. Old money. His old man owned half the Highlands and three international law firms to boot. His old lady wasn’t exactly working-class stock herself. And money didn’t like its precocious eldest child chucking away a fully-funded PhD scholarship at Oxford to shack up in a grubby flat in a run-down city with an obese biology teacher. Stephen’s mother hadn’t spoken to them at all for a blissful six months after Stephen had started his own teacher training. Mike had hoped it would last.

But no, Dame Black—or Damn Black, as Mike called her—was like a mosquito. Immortal, and kept coming back to bite. The minute Stephen’s sisters had gotten engaged, Damn Black was on the blower, and insisting Stephen not only attend both weddings, but wear a kilt.

“Least I’ll get a good look at those legs,” Mike said jovially as they joined the Saturday morning traffic heading into town.

“Mm. Jury’s still out on that.”

The sun was blazing. They drove with the windows down to the motorway, then wound them up and blasted the air conditioning as Mike barrelled down the slip road and into the northbound traffic. The route was semi-familiar, and semi-not. They didn’t visit the Black family at all if anybody involved could help it, but Stephen was so in love with the Scottish mud and mountains that Mike usually ended up being dragged to some cabin in the woods at least once a year. He would find a pub, Stephen would find a mountain, and there was always a lot of genuine Scottish tablet involved afterwards. Bit of genuine Scottish shagging, too, if Mike was lucky.

Those weekends away, Mike could tolerate. Midges and bogs aside. But a six and a half hour drive to have Damn Black turn up her nose again? He’d rather roll around in honey and walk naked through the midge-ridden countryside than visit that old witch.

Still, he’d tried. Stephen had been raised with a proper old-fashioned idea of family, and it was only critical moments—like their own wedding—when he turned aside from them entirely. And his sister getting married wasn’t such a moment. “She’s my bloody twin,” he’d said. “I have to go.” And Stephen had given him the option of not coming, but Mike hadn’t wanted to make Stephen go into that wasps’ nest on his own.

So here they were.

Despite the destination, it was a nice drive. Stephen dozed until they passed Leeds, then woke up a bit and they played road rage for the next fifty miles or so, critiquing other drivers and shouting abuse at BMWs that flashed past in the fast lane. As the landscape grew darker and heavier, hills beginning to swell around them, Stephen’s soft accent—so gentle it was nearly gone most days—began to swell as well.

And if there was one thing Mike missed about their damp-ridden flat in Edinburgh, it was the way Stephen’s voice had carried in soft lilts and lows when he talked.

They stopped in Carlisle for lunch, had a brief but vicious argument over shortbread—Stephen utterly refused to touch anything made south of the border—and then had to jog back to the car when Cumbria performed its usual trick of turning a nice day wetter than a w***e’s drawers in under thirty seconds.

Then Mike started laughing at Stephen’s hair, flattened into a slab by the sudden downpour, Stephen dried it obnoxiously on Mike’s sleeve, and they ended up necking in the front seat like a couple of ruddy teenagers.

“Better than the back seat,” Stephen opined loftily, when Mike voiced the thought.

“Barely.”

“Definitely. We’d not fit, not with all that crap back there.”

“We fit on your graduation day.”

Stephen raised his eyebrows. “That was a taxi, not your Passat.”

“Still a back seat.”

“And you were about fifty pounds lighter then.”

“True, but you weren’t doing yoga back then either.”

Stephen snorted. “I keep telling you, that’s not what it’s for.”

“Bloody ought to be, places you can put your ankles these days…”

Stephen mimicked him in a high whine. Mike hit his knee, and turned the key in the ignition.

“t**t,” he said, just to get the last word in before they set off.

Stephen just smirked at the rain and said nothing.

They swapped duties at the border, Mike having never actually been to the Black estate, much less whatever arse-end-of-nowhere manor Beth had undoubtedly chosen to flash her new diamond ring. He took over the radio, trying to find a station without a Glaswegian murdering a cat and calling it music, and eventually gave up and rummaged in the glove box for a CD. And yes, the car was too old for the iPhone adaptor.

And the further they crept from the border, the grimmer the set of Stephen’s mouth became, and the slower he drove.

Dusk was falling by the time they arrived.

And they arrived quite out of nowhere. One moment they were following a winding, narrow road bracketed by dark trees, glimpses of a great shadow in the distance hinting at the Cairngorms close by, and the next, Stephen had jerked the car off into a hidden turning, and the tyres were squishing and crashing through muddy puddles.

And then the trees opened up, and the manor appeared.

“So,” Mike said conversationally, “Beth’s going for the quiet, low-key sort of affair is she?”

Stephen snorted.

The manor stuck out on the landscape like a boil. It was the typical sort of thing for a fancy, cash-flashing wedding: a hundred-room mansion, two hundred years old with spotty WiFi, and oozing money and opulence from every crevice like a flabby granddad sweating in a sauna. It was a brown blob in the midst of a green and grey classical painting, the setting sun bathing the distant mountains in pink and gold, and overlaying the grim wilderness with a touch of almost ethereal beauty.

Bit like Stephen in a grump then.

The car bounced onto gravel, crunched loudly enough that they might have run over a wild haggis, and slid into place between a freakishly clean Jaguar, and an obscenely large Land Rover that was too spotless for its owner to actually need a Land Rover.

It was the latest model, too, but the personalised number plate was familiar.

“Damn—I mean Dame—Black is here.”

Stephen didn’t rise to the barb.

Not two feet inside the architect’s-wet-dream of a lobby, Mike could hear the braying laugh of Dame Mary Ann Black. Or DAM3 MAB, as her number plate insisted. Stephen’s jaw tightened, and he made for the desk like he’d caught fire and the stuck-up looking receptionist had the only bucket of water for the next thousand miles.

“Parry,” he snapped. “We have a double suite.”

A perfectly plucked eyebrow rose. Lips pursed. A hand perused the register all too slowly, as that bored gaze slipped past Stephen to narrow on Mike.

“For the both of you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“If you have an issue with that, you ought to have checked the names on the booking,” Stephen said tartly.

“Oh. Oh no. No…problem.”

Stephen near-jerked the offered key away when it was held out to him, and it ended up being Mike who signed for the room, seeing as how Stephen had already disappeared towards the stairs. He offered the receptionist an apologetic shrug. She simply stared back, like a lobotomised lab rat. The droned, “Enjoy your stay,” could have come from a supermarket tannoy announcement.

Mike took the stairs slowly. He didn’t bother to catch up. Stephen in a snit wasn’t worth catching up to. Especially not when his mother was involved. Thankfully, their room was at the top of the flight, far away from the hyena in the hotel bar, and Stephen had relaxed against the wall by the door. Mike offered a kiss and a rude name, got a middle finger and a smirk, and decided it was probably safe again.

“Still waiting for the day you say sod it, and send the invite back unopened.”

“It’s Beth’s wedding.”

“So?”

“She’s my sister,” Stephen said, the same thing he’d been saying since Mike had first met him, and followed Mike into the room.

“We-ell. I guess this is the up side.”

It wasn’t a room, it was a small flat. In fact, Mike was reasonably sure it was bigger than the flat they’d shared in Edinburgh. It was definitely bigger than the one they’d shared in Sheffield, before Stephen had gotten his first teaching post. The bed was big enough to fit a rugby team in, and hide them thanks to the four-poster frame and the thick, heavy curtains. The bay window had a sofa built in underneath it. The mini-bar was an actual damn bar, and the port selection wasn’t to be sniffed at. The bathroom, when Mike peeked, had a bath that could have drowned an elephant, and a shower cubicle that could have been ripped out of the wall and used as a horse stall.

“Right,” Mike said, pointing a finger at the cubicle. “I reckon this is going to be our one and only chance at shower s*x. Get your clothes off.”

Stephen raised both eyebrows. “Bloody hell. Reign in the romance there, lover-boy. I might swoon.”

“Do you want a blowjob or not?”

“Yeah, all right then.”

So they had shower s*x. It was interesting enough but not as good as Mike would have thought. He was oddly distracted from having Stephen’s legs wrapped around his waist by the lack of a slip mat on the shower floor, and was too busy trying not to fall and kill them both to really enjoy Stephen soaking wet and covered in soap.

Stephen was a bit less moody afterwards, though, so they broke open one of the bottles of port and sprawled out to dry naked in the cavernous bed. Then Stephen got a bit pissed, cuddled up, and who was Mike to intervene if Stephen fancied giving him a handjob?

And so it was that they had arrived on Saturday evening, having promised to go to dinner with the hyena and Stephen’s useless sperm donor of a father, and…woke up at six o’clock on Sunday morning with raging hangovers instead.

“Bugger,” said Mike.

“You could sound like you mean it,” Stephen groused.

Mike thought about it.

“Ah, bugger it?”

“Close enough.”