Page 32 of Dirty Rotten Love

I think about it rarely. I have become very good at not thinking about it. The rig helps. The rig is relentless and loud and demanding and there is always something that needs doing and always someone who needs managing and very little space for the kind of silence where things creep back in. I chose this life deliberately, carefully, with both hands, and I have never once regretted it.

Except sometimes, late at night, when the rig is as quiet as it ever gets and the North Sea does its thing against the hull, I lie awake and think about the kitchen. About the note. About the fact that two people who knew me better than anyone in the world had looked at me and decided I wasn’t worth staying for.

I have never given anyone the chance to do that again. I was never going to. My husband and my best friend stabbed me in the heart. They broke it. And like any withered, useless body part, I amputated it. Cut myself off from at so its poison couldn’t destroy the rest of me.

And yet.

I breathe out slowly through my nose, the way the doctor taught me, and look at the lights for another long moment. Then I go back inside.

The corridor is warm after the helipad wind. I take the stairs down and walk the familiar route back towards my cabin, and as I pass the rec room I hear it, the specific sound of Green Crew being themselves at the end of a shift, loud and warm and helplessly funny, someone laughing at something Rory has said probably, the kind of laughter that spills under doors and through walls and fills the whole corridor with the feeling of people who are glad to be in each other’s company.

I stop walking for a moment.

I could go in. The thought arrives the way it always does, quiet and tentative and carrying all the weight of every time I have had the same thought and kept walking anyway. I could open the door and walk in and… And what? The laughter would stop. Maybe not immediately, possibly not all of it, but it would change, recalibrate, become the careful, cheerful noise that people make when their supervisor walks in and they are trying to appear at ease. It always does. I have never once in twenty years of offshore work walked into a room and had the atmosphere stay exactly as it was.

And I know it’s not just because I am their boss. It is because I am me. I am who I am, and it’s as simple as that. I have many flaws, but a lack of self-awareness is not one of them.

Rory lights up rooms. I bring the shadows.

I keep walking.

My cabin is exactly as I left it. Small, orderly, everything in its place, which is how I need things, how I have always needed things, the external order compensating for whatever the internal equivalent is when it works properly, which is not something I’ve ever had. There is a book on the nightstand. There is a mug on the desk. There are four walls that have never had much reason to feel like anything in particular.

Rory is the only other person who has ever been in this room.

I change into my sleep clothes with the quiet efficiency of someone who has performed this routine ten thousand times and sit on the edge of the bunk and pick up my book. I open it to the right page. I look at the words.

I am not thinking about the way Rory looks in this bunk. The particular way he takes up space, which is completely and without apology, diagonally if given the opportunity, warm and solid and real in a way that makes the whole room feel different. I am absolutely not thinking about that.

I am definitely not thinking about the way Rory looks spread out on these sheets. Naked and beautiful and trusting.

I am reading.

The words are not going in. This is fine. I will sit here and hold the book, and eventually my brain will cooperate and engage with the words and I will read several chapters and fall asleep, and tomorrow will be another shift and another briefing and another ordinary day on the rig.

Rory will not knock on this door tonight. He has gone to play video games with Tam and Dazza, and he is laughing at something, and he is warm and surrounded by people who adore him, which is exactly where Rory Gallacher belongs. He is not thinking about me. He is not standing in a corridor somewhere working up the nerve to knock. He is fine, Rory is always fine, and I am fine too, and tomorrow we will be professional and efficient, and everything will be exactly as it should be.

I turn a page I have not read.

The thing about hope is that it is completely indiscriminate. It does not care whether you have earned it or deserve it or have any reasonable basis for it whatsoever. It simply arrives, uninvited, and sits down, and makes itself at home in the wreckage of all the times it has let you down before, and looks at you with that particular expression that means it has absolutely no intention of leaving just because you want it to.

I look at the door.

I look at my book.

Hope is a terrible thing.

I turn another page.

Chapter thirteen

Rory

The sun is shining.

I know this because it is coming through the small porthole above Tam’s bunk and hitting me directly in the face with the cheerful aggression of something that has not read the room. I blink at it. It blinks back. Neither of us moves for a moment.

Then it registers. The sun is shining. It is a rest day because a specialist crew has flown in to do something I don’t understand and don’t wish to. I have absolutely nowhere to be and nothing I am required to do, and the entire day stretches out in front of me like a gift from a universe that has, up until very recently, not been particularly generous.