Page 63 of Dirty Rotten Love

Not the ladder. Not anything I can immediately identify. Something that closes around me with a grip that is absolute and unyielding and completely, completely certain, and the falling stops with a violence that goes through my whole body, a jarring jolt that begins at the back of my knees and my shoulders. And then I am held by something, and I am swinging, I am dangling, I am suspended over the North Sea in a storm with the wind trying to finish what it started, but I am not falling anymore.

I look up.

Mac.

He is holding me in his arms like I’m his bride, and his harness is taut with both our weight, and his face is doing something I have never seen it do, something that is beyond the stern-looking baseline and beyond the teaching configurement of features and beyond every expression I have catalogued over the weeks, something that is stripped completely bare and entirely, devastatingly real.

We are dangling far from the ladder now, swinging in the wind, Mac’s harness the only thing between us and the North Sea far below. His grip on me is the only thing between me and the dark water. The rain is driving into both our faces, and the cold is the kind that has opinions, relentless and personal, and I am soaking through every layer I have and it does not matter, none of it matters, because Mac caught me.

Mac came up the ladder after me and caught me.

I look at his face. His jaw is set and his eyes are very dark and he is holding on with everything he has, I can feel it in his grip, the absolute refusal of it, and I think about protocol, I know enough now to know there is a protocol for this, and I know enough about Mac to know that he knew the protocol said do not go up, and Mac went up anyway and the going up was…

The going up was everything.

My arms find his shoulders, then his neck, holding back, and we hang in the storm together and the North Sea roars below us and the wind tries its best and fails, because Mac has me, Mac has me and Mac does not let go of things once he decides to hold on, I know this about him, I have known this about him for longer than I have been willing to admit.

I think I am going to die anyway. Not right now, not this second, but the situation is genuinely precarious and Mac’s harness is holding two people in a storm and the cold is extraordinary and the wind has not given up, and we are both very wet and wet things are slippery and I’m a full-grown man and Mac can’t hold me forever, and I am aware with a clarity that only comes from immediate proximity to one’s own mortality that there are things I have not said.

Things I ran towards saying and then got derailed by a mess hall and a frozen tableau and a tray being set down precisely and a door that would not open.

Things that have been true for longer than I understood them to be true.

It is probably cruel to tell someone you love them in the moments before you potentially slip out of their grip and fall into the North Sea. It is probably not the ideal circumstances for a declaration of any kind. Rory Gallacher has made some questionable decisions in his life, has stood in canals in supermarket trolleys and knocked on doors at eleven o’clock at night and climbed ladders in storms without the correct training, and this might be the most questionable of all of them.

But I cannot face dying, or the possibility of dying, without saying it. I cannot swing here over the dark water and look at Mac’s face and not say it, because not saying it now would mean I never said it and I cannot live with that, not even for however many seconds I have left, and so.

“It started as a dare,” I say, into the storm, into Mac’s face, and my voice comes out strange and stripped bare and entirely without performance because there is no performance left, there is only this, only the wind and the cold and Mac’s grip and the thing I have been running from since approximately the Northern Lights. “I know that. I know that is what it was. But Mac, it didn’t stay that.”

He is looking at me. Not looking away. Holding on and looking at me with that face that is stripped bare of everything and giving me nothing and everything simultaneously.

“It became something else,” I say. “It became the drain inspection and the gray beef thing and the Northern Lights. It became breakfast porridge and procedure manuals and dogs wagging their tails and the world going quiet when you kiss me because my brain finally shuts up for five minutes, which you have no idea what a gift that is.”

The wind howls. Mac holds on.

“I said it started as a dare, but actually, it started the first time I saw you,” I say. “I didn’t know that then. I was too busy being an idiot. But it started then, when you walked in and looked at me like I was a problem you hadn’t budgeted for, and I thought, who is this magnificent grumpy man, and then I never stopped thinking it.”

My fingers tighten on his arm.

“I think about you all the time. The constant kind. The, you are the first place my brain goes when it has somewhere to go, kind. The way my mum thinks about me. Underneath everything. Always.”

Mac’s jaw is doing the thing. The set thing. The thing that means something is happening inside him that he is not going to let out, because he is Mac and he keeps things quiet.

“And I love that about you,” I say, as if he is privy to my thoughts. Because right now, making sense is hard and my words are jumbling, and there is no time. My only hope is to throw enough word-salad at him that something sticks, something lands, and he understands me.

So I suck in a lungful of storm, and I keep talking. “I love your quiet and calm and the way you are so precise about everything, the way you line things up and check them twice and find the logic in things that look like chaos to everyone else. I love the way you explained the payphone to me like it was the most natural thing in the world. I love the way you take the time to make sure I have actually understood something rather than just nodded along. I love your silence, which is never empty but always full of something worth waiting for. I love your grumpy face and your grumpy voice and your grumpy eyes that miss nothing. I love that you checked the weather forecast so I could see the Northern Lights. I love that you remembered something I said on day one and held onto it for weeks. I love that you listened to my nonsense and thought my ramble about dogs wagging their tails was clever.”

I stop talking. But only because I need to breathe.

“I love all of it. Every single bit of it that makes you exactly and completely and irreplaceably you.”

I suck in another breath because the first one wasn’t nearly enough.

“You are the other half of my soul,” I say, and it comes out completely simple and completely true and not dramatic at all, just a fact. “I want to grow old with you. I want to sit on a rig in twenty years and watch the Northern Lights with you and eat the gray beef thing with you and I want you to look at me the way you are looking at me right now, for the rest of my life.”

I stop.

The storm does not stop. The wind does not stop. The North Sea far below us continues its comprehensive indifference to the interior lives of people suspended over it in harnesses.