Page 28 of Dirty Rotten Love

I am in love with Rory Gallacher.

I say it plainly, in my own head, with no softening or qualification, because I have never seen the point of those. The facts are the facts.

I am thirty-eight years old and have spent the last nine years very carefully not doing this, not letting anyone close enough, not making myself available for the particular devastation that comes from giving someone everything and having them decide it wasn’t enough. I know what that costs. I have paid it once, and the debt took years and there are many ways in which I am still paying it.

But I’ve gone and done it again anyway.

Because Rory is twenty-two and on his first rotation and full of a brightness that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with who Rory is, and what is happening between us is new and exciting and probably, from Rory’s side, something like an adventure. A story to tell. Horizons broadened, exactly as advertised.

I am a chapter. I know this.

I know it the way I know the rig. Thoroughly and without sentiment. Rory will finish his rotation and go home to Edinburgh and think about this with a kind of fond bewilderment, and maybe it will help him understand something about himself, and that will be good. I want that for him. I want good things for Rory Gallacher with a fervency that is slightly alarming and that I have no intention of examining too closely.

I just also want, privately and without any expectation of it being granted, for Rory to look at me the way he looked at the rig on day five. With that unguarded, unperformed delight. I love it here. Said like he meant it all the way down.

I pull on a clean pair of boxers in the dark. I am good at this. I am good at a lot of things that require discipline and routine and the suppression of inconvenient feelings.

I should end it.

I should, and I will, and it will be the sensible thing and the right thing and the professional thing, and Rory will be fine, Rory is always fine, Rory has that quality of resilience that looks like sunshine and is actually something much tougher underneath and he will land on his feet and go on and be magnificent.

I will be fine too.

Eventually.

I sit on the edge of my bunk in the dark and think about Rory laughing at dinner with the crew earlier, the sound of it carrying through the walls, and I allow myself thirty seconds of something that is not quite hope and not quite grief but lives in the same neighborhood as both.

Then I lie down.

There is an early start tomorrow. There is always an early start. The rig does not stop and I do not stop, and that is the thing about this life that I chose deliberately and carefully and have never once regretted.

I chose it because it was far easier than the alternative.

Far easier than standing still long enough for people to get tired of me.

Chapter eleven

Rory

The rec room has a selection of ancient plastic chairs, a shelf of paperback books that have been read so many times they are basically held together by hope, a television that gets two fuzzy channels sometimes, and a PlayStation that is so old it qualifies as a historical artifact. I am sitting in one of the plastic chairs with my headphones on and my phone in my hand, waiting for Tam and Dazza, who were supposed to be here ten minutes ago and are probably arguing about something in the corridor.

I am not thinking about MacLeod.

I am categorically, comprehensively, with great focus and discipline, not thinking about MacLeod. I am thinking about absolutely nothing except the music in my ears and the game we are about to play and the fact that Dazza cheats at everything, including video games, and I intend to call him out on it this time. That is all I am thinking about.

The fact that my mind keeps drifting to a certain cabin on the supervisor’s deck is completely irrelevant and I am not engaging with it.

I am not thinking about the way MacLeod is surprisingly kind when there is nobody watching. I am not thinking about the low sound of his voice in the dark or the fact that he always seems to know exactly what I need before I know it myself or the way the whole shape of the world feels different inside that cabin than it does anywhere else on this rig. I am absolutely not thinking about any of that.

I am thinking about the PlayStation.

At the other end of the rec room, Brockie is sitting with his back against the wall and a battered paperback open in his lap. He has the particular stillness of someone who is genuinely absorbed in something and not merely pretending to be, which I find very relatable right now. His ears have their usual slight pink tinge that I am starting to think might just be his natural coloring.

Spanner is in the chair closest to him. Not next to him exactly, not crowding, just. Closest. He has a mug of something and he is not reading or watching the television or doing anything in particular. He is just there, in the easy, unhurried way that Spanner occupies all spaces, as if he has nowhere else to be and can think of nowhere he’d rather be either.

Brockie turns a page. Without looking up, he says, very quietly, “You don’t have to stay.”

Spanner takes a drink from his mug. “I know,” he says.