Page 33 of Dirty Rotten Love

I am out of my bunk before I am fully awake.

Tam makes a noise from his pillow that is not a word in any language I recognize. He is sprawled at a diagonal that defies both physics and the dimensions of the bunk, one arm hanging off the side, mouth open, completely and magnificently unconscious.

I pull on clothes with the focused chaos of someone whose brain has already moved three steps ahead and is impatiently waiting for the rest of him to catch up. Jeans. The good hoodie. Clean socks, which feels like a luxury out here. I run a hand through my hair, decide that’s sufficient, and I’m out the door before Tam has so much as twitched.

The rig is quieter today. Not silent, it’s never silent, the rig hums and clanks in its bones regardless of what the crew are doing, but the specific purposeful noise of a full working shift is absent and the difference is noticeable. I take the stairs two at a time and arrive in the mess hall with the energy of a man who has somewhere to be and something very good waiting for him there.

The mess hall on this unusual morning is a gentle, unhurried sort of place. A few lads from Red Crew nursing mugs of tea. Grigor reading something in what I think might be Ukrainian. The smell of porridge and toast and the specific brand of institutional coffee that tastes terrible but is somehow still comforting.

I grab a tray. Two bowls of porridge, two glasses of orange juice, two mugs of coffee. I arrange it with the focused efficiency of a man with a plan.

Then I pick up the tray and walk out of the mess hall and head towards the supervisor’s corridor, and I am already three turns into the route before I stop.

I stop.

I stand in the corridor with a breakfast tray and look into the middle distance and have a word with myself.

What am I doing?

No, seriously. What am I doing? I am carrying a breakfast tray to my supervisor’s cabin on a rare rest day without being invited, without any indication that this would be welcome, without thinking it through for even a single second because thinking things through is not something my brain does before it launches itself at an idea with both hands. I simply had a thought, and now I am here. With porridge.

This is impulsive even by my standards.

What if MacLeod doesn’t want breakfast? What if MacLeod doesn’t want to see me? What if MacLeod is not a morning person and I am about to knock on his door at eight in the morning on his one day off, and he opens it and does the quiet devastating thing and I have to walk back down this corridor holding two bowls of porridge and the knowledge that I have made a complete idiot of myself?

I look at the tray.

Then again, MacLeod is always grumpy. That’s just his baseline. It’s not as if I’m going to make things significantly worse by showing up with breakfast. And the worst he can do is say no and send me away and I have survived worse things, I have survived a supermarket trolley in a canal, I have survived drain inspection on a cold morning, I have survived several things in that cabin that I am not thinking about right now because I am standing in a corridor holding porridge and this is not the moment.

I shake myself. Straighten up. Adjust my grip on the tray.

I keep walking.

MacLeod’s door is exactly where it always is. Same gray metal. Same handle. Same door that has now featured in several significant moments of my life in ways I could not have anticipated when I arrived on this rig less than two weeks ago.

I knock.

The door opens instantly. Not after a pause, not after footsteps, instantly, as if MacLeod was standing directly on the other side of it, waiting for something. He is fully dressed. Boots on, everything, at eight in the morning on a rest day. He looks completely awake and alert, and he is staring at me with an intensity that makes my brain momentarily forget its own name.

His gaze drops to the tray.

Then back up to my face.

Then back to the tray.

“What is this?” he says.

“Breakfast!” I say, and my voice comes out approximately two octaves higher than intended. I wince. I cannot help the wince.

MacLeod looks at the two bowls of porridge. The two glasses of orange juice. The mugs of cooling coffee.

One dark eyebrow lifts.

“You’re bringing me breakfast in bed, Gallacher.”

It is not a question. It is a sentence that is doing a very great deal of work, and I can feel the heat rising up my neck, and there is nothing I can do about it.

“I guess. It seemed like a good idea at the time.” I pause. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave.”