Page 23 of Dirty Rotten Love

I am laughing too. Real and unforced, the warm chaos of these people who have been my people for less than two weeks and already feel like something permanent. The rota idea is very funny and completely absurd, and I am absolutely going to laugh about it, and I am also, somewhere underneath the laughing, experiencing something I don’t have a name for yet.

Something that feels a lot like not wanting anyone else on the rota, even if it is only a joke.

Something that feels a lot like the idea of Dazza knocking on that door being considerably less funny than it should be.

Something that’s almost a need to declare that Macleod gave me an invitation at lunch. Me. Rory, no one else.

But strangely, even though I know this information would be received with immense glee and utter delight by my crew, I don’t want to share it. I don’t want the attention, the laughter, the respect. Instead, I want it for myself. It’s for me and Macleod and no one else.

I pick up my fork and keep eating and do not examine this at all.

“Can I say something?” says Brockie.

The table goes slightly quieter in the way it always does when Brockie speaks, because Brockie speaks so rarely that when he does it tends to carry a certain weight simply by virtue of being surprising. He is looking at his plate, and his ears have gone a bit pink, and he has the look of someone who has been building up to something for several hours and has finally decided to say it.

“Obviously none of this is my business,” he says. “And I know it was a bet and everything. But.” He stops. Looks up briefly and then back at his plate. “You’re alright, aren’t you, Rory? I mean. You wanted to, didn’t you?”

The table goes very still.

I look at Brockie. He is very young and very sincere, and the tips of his ears are extremely pink, and he is clearly absolutely mortified to have said anything at all but said it anyway because he genuinely felt it should be checked.

Something in my chest does something unexpectedly warm.

“Aye,” I say, and I mean it completely. “I wanted to. Totally fine. Better than fine.”

Brockie nods, visibly relieved, and goes back to his dinner with the focused intensity of a man who has used up his entire social reserves for the week.

I happen to glance at Spanner. Just for a moment. He is looking at Brockie with an expression that is very quiet and very contained and almost impossible to read, except that it isn’t quite, not entirely, because there is something in it that is unmistakably soft. He catches me looking, and the expression is gone in an instant, replaced with his usual unhurried calm. He gives me a small nod. I give it back.

“For what it’s worth,” says Spanner, to the table, in the measured way he says everything, “MacLeod is many things. But he would never do anything that wasn’t wanted.” A pause. “He’s not that kind of man.”

Nobody argues with this. When Spanner says something with that particular quality of certainty it tends to settle the matter, and this settles it. There is a collective nodding, the nodding of people who know something to be true and are glad to hear it confirmed.

Tam refills his water glass. Frasier reaches for the last of the bread. The moment moves on the way moments do, naturally and without ceremony, and the table noise builds back up around us.

“So,” says Dazza, leaning forward with renewed energy. “You really won’t tell us anything?”

“I really won’t,” I say.

“Not one detail?”

“Not one.”

“Not even.” He pauses. “I mean. Is he? You know?” He holds his hands up, a fair distance apart. An obscene, anatomically impossible distance apart.

Everyone cracks up. Snorts, wheezes, bangs cups on the table, the whole thing.

I look at Dazza with the serene, unreadable expression of a man who is taking every single thing he knows to his grave.

Dazza groans. “Rory.”

“I don’t kiss and tell,” I say again, with great satisfaction.

Everyone groans. There is some swearing. Someone throws a napkin at me. A general air of great exasperation fills the mess hall.

It’s wonderful. I grin and lap it up, every delicious ounce of it.

Spanner decisively turns the conversation to the footy, and Green Crew happily follow his lead. The attention drifts from me and I don’t mind, I’ve had enough to last a fair while. So I grin, eat my food and listen to my mates argue about football.