Page 62 of Dirty Rotten Love

Soon not even the deck will be safe. There is absolutely zero point in risking anyone else’s life today.

A pause. One second. The pause of a man who knows there is nothing useful to say and is choosing not to say it.

“Aye, boss,” says Frasier.

I take hold of the ladder.

The cold hits through my gloves immediately. The wind hits from every direction at once, not randomly but with the coordinated hostility of something that knows what it wants. The rain is in my eyes before I have climbed the first rung, but I have been on this rig for twenty years and I know how to move on it in conditions that would stop other people, I have always known how to do this.

I start to climb.

I do not look down. I look up at Rory, who is still moving, still working, still using his one rope with the careful focus of someone who believes he is doing the right thing and has no idea that he is not.

The ladder is slick and the wind is trying to peel me off it with every rung and I climb anyway, steadily and with the focused efficiency of a man who has a procedure and is following it, because even now, even here, I am following a procedure. The procedure is, get to Rory. Every other consideration is secondary to the procedure.

I look up at Rory, who has not seen me, who has reached the top and is now working at the bracket with the intense concentration of someone who has decided to do a thing and is doing it regardless of everything the weather has to say about it.

This is so completely and entirely him that I feel something move through me that is not fury and not fear but some third thing that lives in the same neighborhood as both and is considerably more dangerous than either.

I am most of the way up when he sees me.

He looks down and our eyes meet through the roaring wind and the driving rain, and the impossible height of the ladder between us and the deck and the churning water far below, and his face does something complicated, surprise and something else, something that has no business being on the face of someone clinging to a ladder in a storm.

I keep climbing.

I need to get to him before he decides to come down, before the next moment when he unclips that rope and there is nothing between him and the North Sea.

Almost there.

Almost.

I am three rungs below him when he moves. He saw me, and must have figured out there was a problem, and decided to come down, towards me.

I watch it happen with the terrible clarity of something you see coming and cannot stop. His hand goes to the rope. The clip releases. His weight shifts as he reaches for the next point, just slightly, just the fraction that the wind has been waiting for, and the wind takes the opportunity it has been building towards for the last twenty minutes with the slick satisfaction of something patient.

Rory’s foot slips.

Time does something strange. It does not slow down exactly, but it becomes very specific, very detailed, every fraction of a second distinct and complete. His hand grabbing for the ladder rail and not finding it. His body swinging out from the ladder buffered on the wind. The rope, the one rope, unclipped, useless, trailing.

I hear myself make a sound.

It is not a word. It is not anything I have ever made before, torn out of somewhere I did not know existed, and it contains everything, the Northern Lights and breakfast porridge and dogs wagging their tails and all the long lonely years of making things be enough and the particular unbearable truth that none of it, none of it, is sufficient now, in this moment, with Rory’s hands scrabbling for the ladder in the roaring storm.

I let go of the ladder. I let go of everything, because nothing else matters. Only Rory.

With all the strength my body possesses, I lunge.

Chapter twenty-eight

Rory

Iam falling.

It is not like anything I expected falling to be, which is strange because I have not spent significant time thinking about what falling would be like, but there must have been some background assumption because this is not it. It is not slow. It is not silent. It is the wind and the rain and the roar of the storm and my own hands scrabbling at nothing and the ladder that was there a second ago and is not there anymore and the grey churning nothing below me that is very far down and getting less far down with every fraction of a second.

I think, with tremendous clarity, that I am going to die.

And then something catches me.