Page 64 of Dirty Rotten Love

Mac says nothing.

I am not surprised. Mac has never been a man of words when other things are available to him and I have learned to read his silences the way you learn to read weather, by paying close attention over a long time, and this silence is not the professional silence or the disappointed silence or any of the silences I catalogued in the first weeks. This silence is something else entirely. This silence is full.

And then Mac kisses me.

It is not a gentle kiss. It is not the first kiss on the helipad, tentative and wondering and new and full of things neither of us was ready to say. This is something completely different, fierce and certain and absolute, the kiss of a man who has made a decision and is not interested in further discussion, and I stop thinking about the storm and the cold and the North Sea below and the harness and everything else because Mac is kissing me over the roaring dark water and it is the most extraordinary thing that has ever happened to me and I have seen the Northern Lights.

The world goes quiet.

My brain goes quiet. The beautiful, rare, extraordinary quiet that only Mac gives me, the silence inside the noise, and I hold on to him and kiss him back with everything I have and everything I am and everything I was too slow to understand until I was dangling over the North Sea in a storm.

I hear it distantly. The clang of boots on the metal of the ladder below us. Multiple sets of boots, purposeful and fast, the sound of people coming with a plan and the specific energy of Green Crew when one of their own needs them.

I should stop kissing Mac.

I know I should stop kissing Mac. They are going to reach us in approximately thirty seconds and they are going to see and it is going to be, by any reasonable measure, A Whole Thing, and the sensible and professional course of action is to stop kissing Mac before they get here.

I cannot stop kissing Mac.

I try. I genuinely try, I make a sincere internal effort to prioritize the approaching crew and the professional implications and the fact that we are still technically dangling over the North Sea in a storm, and none of it is more important than kissing Mac, none of it comes close, and so I keep kissing him and the boots keep coming and I still cannot stop.

I don’t stop.

Chapter twenty-nine

Mac

The sickbay on this rig is not large.

I know its dimensions precisely because I know the dimensions of every room on this rig, and the sickbay is four metres by six, which is sufficient for its usual purpose and considerably less than sufficient for the current situation, which involves two gurneys, one medic, and what appears to be the majority of Green Crew attempting to occupy the same space simultaneously.

I should say something about this. There are protocols for sickbay visits. There are limits on numbers and noise levels and the general principle that a medical facility is not a social venue, and I am the person who enforces these protocols on Green Crew, and I am lying on a narrow gurney with two possibly broken ribs and Rory’s hand in mine and I find, when I examine the question honestly, that I have absolutely nothing to say about any of it.

Let them stay.

I should, however, write them all up for breaking every rule, procedure and protocol in the book by climbing up an exterior ladder in a storm with nothing more than a rope and foolish hope. I should not have climbed up after Rory, and the rest of Green Crew definitely should not have risked themselves to save us. But in doing so, they saved Rory’s life. I know this because I am a logical man and logic tells me that I would not have been able to hold him forever.

So Green Crew broke the rules to save Rory, and I only feel one way about that.

I’m glad they did it. Rory is safe. The rules are irrelevant.

I have never thought that before. In twenty years of running this rig, I have never looked at a breach of protocol and thought, it doesn’t matter. And the novelty of that sits in me alongside the bruising from the harness and the ache of the possibly broken ribs and something else entirely that is considerably more significant than either.

Rory’s hand is warm. It no longer feels like a thing carved from ice. This is the thing I keep coming back to in between the medic’s assessments and the noise of Green Crew and the various things my body is reporting. His hand is warm and his grip is easy and certain and he fell asleep approximately twenty minutes ago with the immediate completeness of someone whose body has made an executive decision, and he is lying on the gurney next to mine with his face turned towards me and he looks, for the first time in days, entirely at peace.

I look at him for longer than is strictly necessary.

The medic, whose name is Harris and who has been on this rig for three years and has the practiced calm of someone who has seen a great deal and learned not to be surprised by most of it, has confirmed that Rory has bruised ribs, a bruised shoulder, and the kind of comprehensive chill that requires warming up slowly and carefully rather than quickly and dramatically. He will be sore for a week, and he is not to do anything stupid for at least forty-eight hours, which I intend to enforce personally and with considerable conviction.

Harris looked at my ribs and said, possibly two fractures, we won’t know until the scan, and I nodded, and he gave me something for the pain that I took without argument because argument requires energy and my energy is currently allocated elsewhere.

Specifically, it is allocated to thinking about the things Rory said as I held him in my arms as we swung in a storm while my harness was the only thing preventing us from falling to a watery grave.

I have been thinking about them since he said them, and I have not stopped thinking about them and I do not expect to stop thinking about them for a considerable time.

The drain inspection and the grey beef thing and the dogs wagging their tails. The way the world goes quiet when you kiss me. The first place my brain goes when it has somewhere to go.

The other half of my soul.