Chapter 1

They woke up the next morning, stuck to the sheets and to each other. Andrew kissed Suzanne and they managed to separate without losing too much hair. They were gentle in the shower cleaning each other, there was absolutely no chance of any more action, they were both too sore and tender. Andrew dried her in his arms smiling down on the gloriously curvy creature that was Suzanne Jenner.

“Stop smiling at me like that, I ache everywhere you beast.”

They went back into the room and the smell of sex hit them.

“Wow, no hiding what went on in here then.”

The sheets were revolting, all sticky and stained. Heaven help the poor maid that had to clean the room. Once they were dressed, Andrew gave Suzanne the car key and told her he would be right there. One of them at the counter checking out would be suspicious enough but the two of them would raise questions best left unasked. He settled up and escaped without a fuss and caught up with Suzanne at the car. There was a nice little café at Haymarket where he was able to park the car and they sat and had breakfast and finally talked about the previous night.

“Thank you for everything last week. You have relieved a burden that was eating away at me. I missed being honest with Leslie and you most of all. As Leslie said, in many ways you know me better now.”

“I am glad that you feel back to your usual self. You had a lot of pent up energy that you needed to release last night.”

She smiled and blushed prettily.

“You did some things to me that we need to investigate further, as well.”

Andrew blushed as well and raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t look at me like that, it was your finger and you knew where you were sticking it.”

His blush deepened and she laughed.

“Exactly. Bad Andrew. Talking of being bad, you were so you last night. Medium smacks, a nice sting but let’s stop at two because we haven’t talked about it. You would not have done any more if I hadn’t suggested the other 10. I am not sure how I feel about all that but it is something else that we will need to investigate further.”

There was no blush this time just a look of determination.

“But I am talking around the main point. When I asked you to unleash on me, to let your passion go wild, what did you do? Made love to way in such a blatant and erotic fashion it makes me tingle all over just to think about it. You could not have said thank you any better or any louder. When you asked me if I was on the pill, I was thrown. You always wear condoms and for me, for us, to fuck skin to skin for the first time was totally magical. So many different things that you did to completely shower me with passion. The look in your eyes that first time, it is making me wet just thinking about it.”

“You deserved it, everything that I did, I did deliberately. Including taking you one last time when you were semi-comatose. I am sorry about that.”

“Stop it, when I saw the look in your eyes and I could feel the lust radiating from your body I wanted you one more time. I knew right then that we were going for the big finale.”

Breakfast arrived and they ate ravenously having failed to have any dinner the previous evening. On the drive back to her house Suzanne asked an unsettling question.

“Are you going to go and see Ara?”

“Em, I don’t think so. There has been no contact for two months and I think it is best to accept that I let her down and move on. I don’t know whether she is in town and I don’t want the door slammed in my face if she is. In three months she will be heading south and then we will pass on the motorway at the end of the summer going in opposite directions. I wish that I had done things differently with her but our whole relationship has been nothing but misunderstandings from the start.”

“I see all that I suppose. Okay then.”

Suzanne let it drop almost too quickly. Since she was supposed to be at Leslie’s Andrew dropped her off at the end of the street. He got out of the car and gave her a hug and murmured a final word of thanks in her ear. Andrew watched Suzanne sashay down the street and when she turned to check he was still looking, like there would be any doubt, she smiled and waved.

He only had time to get his double bass before he had to head straight back into town for his rearranged Food Bank session. His parents, thinking he had crashed at Julian’s, did not question what he had been up to. As usual. By the time he got to the Campbells after the last rehearsal he was dragging. Mary and Brian were pleased to see him, after four years of coming for Sunday dinner they were a second set of parents to him, and Brian especially was a business mentor to all three of them. It was nice to catch up with them after two months of absence. The polite fiction of being busy on his OU studies was both accepted as well as understood to be a lie. Leslie had been antsy all dinner and after they had helped clean up dragged him through to her room.

“What did you do to that poor woman?”

“You know me Leslie. I tried to tell her how much she meant to me and went over the top as usual.”

“I cried when she told me what you did, you really are a big old romantic. Mixed in with a complete beast obviously.”

“You should have seen and smelled the room this morning, that poor maid.”

It was a short, light conversation but the weeks of absence vanished and all was well with the world. He and Suzanne met to swim as usual, although at 8.00 rather than 7.15, they were on break after all. Warm up for them both took a while but Andrew swam for an hour, Suzanne for 45 minutes and they were in the lobby at 9.10.

“I needed that, although everything ached for most of it.”

She was not wrong.

“I know. I felt worse this morning than I did yesterday. I was an arthritic old man on my run.”

Over breakfast they chatted normally and then Andrew ran her home. The first couple of days of the break followed the same pattern, a long swim followed by full days of studying. On the Wednesday evening of that first week of the break, Gail Robertson called to take him up on his offer from back in the first term.

“Do you have any plans for Saturday night Andrew?”

“None at all Gail. Would you like to go out, see a movie, dinner? What?”

“Could we have dinner and chat please Andrew?”

“Sure.”

As she lived on the route into the city from his parents’ house Andrew agreed to pick her up at 7.00 on Saturday night. He had no idea what Gail wanted for the next three months and revelled in the fact he didn’t really care. You can be a horny teenager as much as you want but opportunities are limited. He studied at the Central Library on the Thursday and had his final bass lesson before the concert three days away. Andrew was a competent double bass player, but had not played in an orchestra for many years. Continuing his bass playing after the end of April was one of the things he would have to decide about. He couldn’t see him taking his double bass all the way to Cambridge for instance.

Friday was the Good Friday holiday and so all the pools were closed. Andrew ran longer in the morning and then settled down to study as usual. All five of his exams were scheduled during the weeks of May 16^th and 23^rd, that meant he had six weeks of studying left. The last week of the Easter break, three weeks at school and then two weeks of study leave. This was the last day he was looking at any Open University material until June. His manic February and March meant he had submitted all of the modules for the penultimate course and was only waiting for the grades on the final two. His project was on track but he would still need a productive June to get it completed and ready to present to the Computer Science faculty.

Friday nights were still full of memories of Ara, and although things were getting back to a more balanced existence, Suzanne’s words of the previous Sunday kept coming back to him. As Andrew sat at his desk, backing up all his project material, he contemplated doing as Suzanne suggested and going over to Ara’s flat and trying to talk to her. By thinking about it, he knew he was weakening and that sometime in the next week he would be standing at her door, his heart in his throat, waiting to see if she was even there, and if she would talk to him. He didn’t know whether the prospect scared him or not. Then the phone rang.

For one serendipitous moment he was sure that it was Ara for him and when his dad shouted that it was for him Andrew all but ran down the hall. Never had he been more disappointed to hear Julian’s voice than he was at that moment. Once the vision of Ara in a swimsuit and braids faded from his brain Andrew focused on what Julian was saying. It wasn’t much actually, other than he asked if Andrew could come over to his parent’s place in the morning. When he got there Andrew saw Leslie’s car in the street as well so it was going to be business. Julian senior opened the door and led him through to the study. Julian and Leslie were sitting there already.

“Thanks for coming, I know that that you all are busy with classes and studying so I will get to the point. Several members of the club, myself included, have decided to invest in a distillery.”

He meant members of the Murrayfield Golf Club, one of the exclusive private clubs in Edinburgh.

“Julian was telling me about your decision to invest together, to do something for the local economy. He asked me if I was aware of any ideas, any businesses looking for investment, so here we are. I will tell you what we plan to do and then leave you to decide if you want to look at it further.

“First of all, and you need to be fully aware of this, it will be a risky venture. There have been six distilleries close already this year and there is a lot of talk of more closing, a lot more. That is where we are getting a lot of our equipment, from distilleries that are closing down.”

Andrew sat there unsure about this. Distilleries were closing and Mr. Strong wanted to build one. Hmmm.

“It will cost at least £1.5m and no one will see any money for at least 10 years. Half the money will be needed up front for construction of the buildings and the installation of all the equipment. The rest, and this is the part that may increase, is for the annual operating costs until we have whisky available for sale. That is the 10 years part.”

They all sat there absorbing these sobering facts.

“We decided to budget for £2m to make sure that we the operating budget to see this through. 20 shares of £100,000 with half needed immediately. I have 15 people signed up already, including me.”

He paused here and looked expectantly at the three of them. Leslie obliged.

“Why?”

“Cutting to the chase as usual. Three reasons. We disagree with the decision to close the distilleries, both from a heritage point of view and a business point of view. Some of the closures do not seem to make sense except to a large corporation based who knows where. Sadly the largest of these companies is based just down the street, The Distillers Company. We think there is a market for malt whisky and we are modelling the business after Wm. Grant. Finally, we should acknowledge that there is a large amount of vanity and ego attached to this as well. It appeals to us to know that we own a distillery.”