Page 10 of Dirty Rotten Love

My brain has arrived at option three and is now refusing to continue. Option three is the one where MacLeod opens the door and he doesn’t kill me and he isn’t devastatingly contemptuous and instead he says yes and then I have to. And he. And we.

My brain starts loading the thought and then just. Stops. Like a video that buffers forever and never actually plays.

I start walking again. Faster this time, because standing still in the corridor thinking about option three is somehow worse than moving towards the door, and I need to not think about option three. Option three is not a thing I am equipped to process right now. Option three can wait until after this is over, if it ever happens, which it won’t, because option one or option two is obviously what’s going to happen.

Obviously.

The crew are watching. That’s the thing. That’s the only thing I need to focus on right now. Seven lads huddled around Whelan’s laptop with their beers, watching the CCTV feed from this corridor, and if I turn around and walk back to that mess hall without knocking on that door I will have to look at every single one of their faces, and Rory Gallacher does not back out.

That’s it. That’s all this is. A dare. A stupid dare that I lost because of a card game that may or may not have been engineered by people who are supposed to be my mates and who I am going to absolutely deal with later, after I survive this.

If I survive this.

The door is right there.

It is a completely normal door. It is the same door as every other door on this rig, the same grey painted metal, the same handle, the same nothing remarkable about it whatsoever. There is no reason for my heart to be doing what it is currently doing. There is no reason for my palms to be sweating. I have knocked on harder doors than this. I knocked on the headteacher’s door at fourteen to confess to putting cling film over the staff toilet seats, and I walked in there with my head up and my best smile ready and I came out with a two day suspension and the undying respect of the entire fourth year.

This is nothing like that.

This is so much worse than that.

MacLeod is not Mr. Henderson, who was a tired man in his fifties who wanted to get through to Friday. MacLeod is. MacLeod. The man who gets quieter when he’s angry. The man who has never once been moved by my best smile. The man who is tall and built like something geological and who I am not thinking about in any context other than the professional one, obviously, which is why option three has caused my brain to malfunction, because it is simply so far outside the realm of professional context that my mind cannot compute it.

Right.

I stand in front of the door.

I raise my hand.

From somewhere behind me, muffled through the walls and the hum of the rig, I hear it. The faintest echo of cheering. Seven idiots in the mess hall seeing me on the screen and losing their tiny minds.

I close my eyes for exactly one second.

I knock on the door.

There is a pause. Not a long one. Maybe three seconds, maybe four, but every one of them is its own individual eternity and I age approximately a decade in the space of them.

Then the door yanks open.

MacLeod fills the frame in the way that MacLeod always fills whatever space he is occupying, which is completely and with total authority, as if the space was built specifically for him and everything else is just visiting. He is looking at me with an expression that could strip paint. He is clearly off duty. He is clearly not expecting anyone. He is clearly not in the mood for whatever this is.

He is also in a towel.

Just a towel.

Only around his waist.

He is wet. His hair is dark with it and there are still drops of water on his shoulders, which are very broad, and his chest, which is very. And his jaw has got that thing going on where the light catches it and.

I drag my eyes back up to his face with an effort that I feel in my entire body.

“What?” says MacLeod, in a voice like gravel wrapped in thunder.

It is one word. Just one word. And it lands like a full sentence, like a paragraph, like an entire document of things that are wrong with this situation and the person responsible for it. I have interrupted his shower. I am standing at his door at eleven at night. I am about to say words that I have to say because seven people are watching and I do not back out.

“I.” I stop. Start again. “I was just. I mean.” I attempt the smile. My best smile, full wattage, the one that has been working since I was seven years old. But I am fairly certain it comes out wonky. “I was wondering if you wanted some. Company.”

MacLeod looks at me.