Page 41 of Dirty Rotten Love

“Aye, cheers, Pete. Mum’s grand. Boiler’s playing up again but what’s new.”

Pete laughs. “Tell me about it. Mine’s been making a noise like a dying seagull since October. You get used to it.”

“The soundtrack of home,” says Rory.

“Exactly right.” Pete claps him on the shoulder. “Right, I’ve got a vat of something to get back to. You coming to the quiz tomorrow?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

“Good man.” Pete nods at me briefly, the nod of a man acknowledging a presence without quite making eye contact, and heads off down the corridor.

I am scowling. I am aware that I am scowling, and I cannot immediately locate the reason for it, except that the whole exchange has produced in me a specific low-level irritation that I have never been able to fully explain or resolve.

Rory is looking at me with his head tilted. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re doing the face.”

“I have one face.”

“You have many faces, and that one means something bothered you.” He leans against the wall with his arms folded, comfortable and curious. “What was it?”

There was the whole hand on Rory’s shoulder. A hand that wasn’t mine. And a whole lot of smiling and inane talking. But my irritation has nothing to do with irrational jealousy. Right now, I don’t know why it’s annoyed me so much, but it can’t be jealousy. There is no reason to be jealous. I’m probably just irritated because inane conversations like that always leave me unsettled.

I look down the corridor where Pete disappeared. “I’ve never seen the point,” I say, “in all of that.”

Rory blinks. “All of what?”

“That.” I pause, trying to locate the correct words for something I have only ever experienced as an absence. “The.” I make a short gesture in the direction Pete went. “The boiler. The dying seagull. None of it meant anything.”

Rory stares at me for a moment. Then, slowly, his expression shifts into something that is not quite a smile but is warm in the same way. “Small talk,” he says.

“It’s not a conversation. It’s noise that sounds like a conversation.”

“Right.” Rory tilts his head the other way, thinking, and I have learned that this particular look means he is following something to its end, and it is worth waiting for. “You know when dogs meet?”

I look at him.

“They wag their tails. Or they don’t, and that means something different. But the wagging, it’s not them saying anything specific. It’s just.” He pauses, working it out as he speaks, which is how Rory thinks, out loud and in motion. “It’s a signal. I’m not a threat. I’m friendly. It’s safe to keep going.” He shrugs. “Small talk is that. Pete wasn’t telling me about his boiler. He was wagging his tail. Showing me it was safe and he’s friendly. That’s all it is.”

I stand very still.

He is not looking at me. He is looking at the middle distance with the slightly unfocused expression of someone following a thought to its end, completely unaware that he has just handed me something I have been trying to find for thirty-eight years. The mechanism. The thing underneath the thing. Not a rule to follow but a function to understand, and once I understand the function, I can work with it, I can apply it the way I apply any procedure once the logic becomes clear.

It is not noise that sounds like a conversation. It is a sequence with its own internal logic. And I can follow sequences.

“Right,” I say. My voice comes out slightly differently than usual. I cannot help that.

Rory comes back from wherever he was and looks at me. Something flickers in his expression. “Did that actually help?”

“Yes,” I say.

He grins. Wide and warm and entirely himself. “Huh.” He says it like something has surprised him, like he has just discovered something about himself without meaning to. “Good.”

“You’re good at a great many things,” I say, and I mean it so completely and so plainly that it lands in the air between us with more weight than I intended.

Rory looks at me. His grin softens into something quieter and less performed, and the alcove is very narrow and the corridor is empty, and he is close enough that I can see the particular way his eyes look when the performance drops entirely.