Page 66 of Dirty Rotten Love

“What’s happening?” he says.

“Nothing,” I say. “Go back to sleep.”

He looks at the room full of celebrating Green Crew. He looks at me. Something moves across his face that is warm and wondering and entirely, completely real.

“Mac,” he says.

“Aye,” I say.

He grins. Wide and unstoppable and entirely himself, the actual happy, the one that costs him nothing because he has so much of it to spare, and it lands on me the way it always lands, whether I want it to or not.

I find that I want it to.

I find that I have wanted it to for a very long time.

Rory squeezes my hand and closes his eyes again and is asleep within approximately thirty seconds, which is one of his many extraordinary qualities, and I sit in the warm small sickbay with his hand in mine and Green Crew celebrating around us and Harris pretending very hard not to be smiling, and I let it be what it is.

Which is enough.

Which is, for the first time in a very long time, considerably more than enough.

Chapter thirty

Rory

The sky outside Mac’s kitchen window is doing something extraordinary.

It started as the particular gray that belongs to the hour before dawn, the gray that is not quite dark and not quite light and has a quality of held breath about it. And then, slowly and with great intention, it began to turn. Pink first, at the edges, tentative, the way all the best things start. Then deeper, richer, spreading across the Edinburgh skyline with the focused beauty of something that does not need an audience but has one anyway, in the form of one Rory Gallacher sitting at a kitchen table in his boyfriend’s flat with a mug of tea and absolutely nowhere to be.

Boyfriend.

I have been trying that word out in my head for approximately two weeks, and it still does something warm and slightly ridiculous to my chest every single time. Mac does not use that word. Mac uses the word partner, which is something precise and practical that communicates the same thing with considerably more seriousness, and I find that I love that about him, the same way I love everything about him, which is completely and without reservation and with a depth that still occasionally surprises me.

The flat is quiet. Mac’s flat is always quiet, which is one of its many excellent qualities, a particular quality of silence that is his, that I recognize now the way I recognize his footsteps and his voice and the specific way he looks at me when he thinks I am not paying attention and I always am. The flat is on the good side of Edinburgh, the part of town that Rory Gallacher from the two bedroom terrace with the unreliable boiler would have walked past and thought, nice, for people who are not me. And now I have slept here for two weeks, and I know where Mac keeps the tea and which mug is his and the specific sound the pipes make in the morning, and it is, without any qualification, the best place I have ever been.

Not because of the location. Not because of the posh part of town or the good views or the kitchen that is four times the size of my mum’s.

Because it has Mac in it.

We have been on shore leave for two weeks. This is officially a medical necessity and unofficially a bollocking. A bollocking that started with Mac delivering a lecture in the sickbay with Harris trying very hard not to smile in the background.

Rory, you will not climb anything without the correct certification ever again, and I will be ensuring that certification is completed before you are allowed back on rotation. And then, because he is Mac and because even bollockings follow a procedure, he had looked at his own hands and said, and I will be reviewing my own conduct in regard to protocol and the appropriate response to emergency situations. Which was, by any measure, the most Mac apology that has ever been delivered by any human being, and I had to look at the ceiling for a moment to compose myself.

Then Mac’s supervisors had agreed with his assessment and put us both on shore leave.

I don’t mind the shore leave. I thought I might, thought I would miss the rig and the grey beef thing and the specific quality of chaos that comes from being one of Green Crew, and I do miss it, I will always miss it when I’m not there, it is in my blood now in a way I did not anticipate when I first stepped off the helicopter onto the platform. But I will be back. We will both be back. The rig will be there and Green Crew will be there and Tam will make a face when I walk in and Dazza will say something without thinking and Frasier will be aggrieved about something and Spanner will be quietly near Brockie in a way that is going to resolve itself into something significant if I have anything to say about it.

All of that will be there.

In the meantime, there is this. Mac’s flat and the pink morning sky and the mug of tea and the knowledge that Mac is in the next room sleeping in a way that I have thoroughly contributed towards and do not feel remotely guilty about, despite the ribs, because Mac’s ribs are his business and he is a grown adult man who knows his limits and made his own decisions last night with considerable enthusiasm.

With a smile, I drag my thoughts away from last night, and start thinking about the day ahead.

My mum is making dinner tonight.

This was not negotiable. My mum, who I have been visiting every other day since we got back and who has taken to Mac with the focused warmth of a woman who has been waiting for this specific development for longer than Rory has, insisted with the gentle implacability that is one of her greatest qualities and that I have absolutely inherited.

Mac had stood in her hallway on the first visit looking like a man facing something he did not have a procedure for, and my mum had taken one look at him and said, you must be Mac, I’ve heard a great deal about you, come and have a cup of tea, in a tone that brooked absolutely no argument. And Mac had sat at her kitchen table and had a cup of tea and she had asked him precise questions about the rig and he had answered them precisely and by the end of it she had been looking at him the way she sometimes looks at me, with that particular warmth that means she has decided something.