Page 48 of Dirty Rotten Love

He is the warmest person I have ever met.

I say this to myself the way I say most things in the privacy of my own head, plainly and without qualification, because it is simply true. I have met friendly people and gregarious people and people who are good at making others comfortable. Rory is something different. Rory has warmth the way the sun has light, not as a quality he deploys but as a thing he simply is, and it lands on everyone around him whether they asked for it or not.

It landed on me.

I was not asking for it. I was specifically and deliberately not asking for it, I had not been asking for anything from anyone for nine years. I had built something functional and sustainable and self-contained that did not require warmth from outside sources and was not vulnerable to the absence of it. And then Rory Gallacher arrived on my rig, with his wonky smile and his three alarms and his implacable cheerful determination to belong here, and the warmth landed anyway.

I watch him move across the mid deck. He stops at a valve and crouches down and checks it with the careful thoroughness I taught him, and even from this distance I can see him doing it correctly, properly, the way it is supposed to be done, and something in my chest does what it always does when I watch him work, which is something warm and quiet and deeply inconvenient.

Below me, Whelan says something, and Rory stands up and the late afternoon light catches him from the side and he is laughing at something, head tipped back slightly, and the gray North Sea behind him.

The North Sea behind him.

I have stood on this rig for twenty years and watched this water in every mood it has, every season, every light. It is the constant of my adult life, the thing that has been here through everything that changed and kept being here after, gray and vast and entirely indifferent to whatever was happening to me on top of it. I chose it deliberately and I have never regretted it, and I love it in the uncomplicated way that you love something that has never let you down.

And Rory is standing in front of it in the late afternoon light, looking like he belongs there. The light is catching him from the side, and he is, against all reason and all sense, the most beautiful thing I have seen in twenty years of watching this water.

I let myself look. Just for a moment. Just the length of the light.

He belongs here. Not just on this rig but here, in the shape of things, in the space the North Sea makes when it is gray and the light goes silver and something that has been alone for a long time suddenly has company. He fits in a way I cannot explain and have stopped trying to. He is warm where I am not, and loud where I am quiet, and he explains things in terms of dogs wagging their tails and somehow it is exactly right and I have thought about it every day since he said it.

He belongs in the shape of the life I have built out of this water and this work and these long rotations. Here, in the small cabin that has been just mine for longer than I can remember and that smells different now when I walk into it, warmer, more inhabited, as if the walls have noticed something I am still pretending not to.

The laughter has faded. The crew are working. Rory moves on from the valve and says something to Tam and claps him on the shoulder in that easy way he has, and moves on.

He does not know I am watching him.

He does not know that I heard the laughter and that it landed the way it always lands, in the same small old place, and that somehow knowing he was part of it hurts differently than it would have a month ago, carries a particular kind of weight that I was not expecting and am not equipped for.

He does not know any of it. He is twenty-two and warm and bright and he has half a rotation still to run and a whole life after it, and I am a chapter in that life and I know it, and knowing it has not stopped me from standing here on the upper deck watching him in the silver light and feeling the thing in my chest that I have completely run out of ways to talk myself out of.

I am not going to end it.

The admission sits in me the way the cold sits in the North Sea, all the way down, pervasive and complete. Not a decision. A discovery. The thing was already true, and I have simply stopped pretending otherwise because pretending has become more effort than I have to spare.

I will not end it. I will have whatever this is for however long it lasts, and when the rotation ends and Rory goes home to his mum’s house in Edinburgh, I will stand here in this light and watch this water and it will be enough because it will have to be enough because I am MacLeod and this is what I do, I make things be enough. I have been making things be enough for a very long time and I am very good at it.

Rory will finish his rotation and go home, but he will come back for the next one, and I will be here, and that will be enough, I have decided that it will be enough, and if there is a voice somewhere underneath that decision that says it won’t be, that more has already happened here than enough can contain, I am not listening to it.

Not today.

Today I watch Rory work against the backdrop of the North Sea in the late afternoon light, and I let myself have it, all of it, the warmth and the want and the quiet devastating hope of it, for exactly as long as the light lasts.

The light holds for a little longer.

I let myself have it.

Chapter twenty-one

Mac

It’s startling to realize that this is the new shape of my free time. My new routine.

This rotation is a run of day shifts for Green Crew, so it’s my nights that have fallen into this rhythm. The pattern of sitting in my cabin, pretending to read while listening acutely for the soft sound of Rory’s approaching footsteps.

He doesn’t come every night. Most nights, but not all. I keep telling myself it’s enough.

It’s not. It’s not even sufficient. But it is what I have, so I will cherish it.