Page 34 of Dirty Rotten Love

I turn to go. The tray is already turning with me, the orange juice sloshing dangerously, and I have approximately one second of believing I am going to escape this with some small fragment of dignity before MacLeod’s hand closes around my arm and I am yanked through the door with the decisive efficiency that is extremely familiar and does extremely unhelpful things to my nervous system.

The door shuts behind me.

Orange juice sloshes significantly. I rescue it with my elbow.

We stand in the small cabin and look at each other. The tray is between us like a shield. MacLeod is looking at me with an expression I cannot read, which is standard, except that there is something underneath it that is not standard at all, something that looks almost, almost like he is relieved.

“I’m hungry,” says MacLeod. Presumably in an attempt to explain why he just yanked me into his cabin.

But we both know he is lying. We both know he is really saying that he wants me to stay and that the thought of me walking away with the porridge was more than he could bear.

And then, almost imperceptibly, something shifts in his expression. A fractional tightening around the eyes. A man who has just said something more revealing than he intended and is very aware of it.

I feel a grin spread across my face. Wide and helpless and completely unstoppable. I have flustered MacLeod. I, Rory Gallacher, have caused this man to look flustered, and it is the most delightful thing that has happened to me in recent memory, and that is including the Northern Lights.

“Right then,” I say, very pleasantly. “Porridge it is.”

The cabin has one chair, at the desk, which is covered in neat stacks of papers and folders that suggest MacLeod has already been up for some time doing things that count as leisure for him, apparently. We end up sitting on the bunk, the tray balanced between us, and it is the most domestically chaotic thing I have ever been involved in and I love it unreservedly.

MacLeod eats porridge with the same focused efficiency he applies to everything. I eat mine in a less organized fashion. Outside the porthole, the North Sea is behaving itself for once, gray but not aggressive, the kind of calm that feels borrowed and temporary.

“What are you doing today?” I ask.

MacLeod looks up briefly. “Procedure manuals.”

I blink. “Sorry?”

“There are three updates pending from head office. I want to go through them properly and flag anything that needs flagging before we are back on duty.”

I stare at him. “You’re going to spend your rest day reading procedure manuals?”

“Yes.”

“For fun.”

He gives me a look that suggests fun is not the word he would use, but that the distinction doesn’t particularly trouble him.

“Wow,” I say.

I mean it completely genuinely and without a trace of irony, and I think that is what makes him look at me the way he does, with that quick, searching glance, checking whether he is being mocked.

He is not being mocked. I genuinely, honestly mean wow. The idea of doing something so difficult and so detailed and so relentlessly procedural and just. Enjoying it. Being good at it. Finding it satisfying rather than like slowly pushing a boulder up a hill.

“I wish I was as clever as you,” I say.

It comes out completely unguarded because I wasn’t planning to say it and there is no performance in it at all. It is simply true. I have always been the funny one because being the funny one is something I can do, something I worked out early and leaned into hard, but being the clever one was never on the table and I made my peace with that a long time ago.

MacLeod has gone very still.

He is looking at me with an expression I have never seen on his face before and cannot immediately categorize. Not the grim baseline. Not the teaching voice. Not the almost smile. Something else entirely, something that looks startled and unguarded and real in a way that makes me feel like I have accidentally seen something I wasn’t supposed to.

He looks away. Picks up the tray. Begins tidying things with the careful, methodical movements of a man who needs something to do with his hands.

“You’re not stupid, Gallacher,” he says, to the mug he is relocating.

My heart flutters like crazy. Apparently, praise is a thing. My thing. A whole thing.

“I’m really not clever though,” I say, because it is just a fact, it doesn’t hurt to say it, it is simply true. And despite my newfound praise thing, I like truth.