Page 18 of Dirty Rotten Love

It is not a question. It is the voice of a man standing in front of something he cannot explain and has accepted he will never be able to.

I open my mouth. I close it again. I think about the mark on my neck and the three hours and the gentle thing that happened that I am absolutely not thinking about.

“Level three inspection,” I say to Whelan. “Shall we go?”

Whelan stares at me.

The entire room stares at me.

I stand up, tuck my chair in, and walk out of the briefing room with the steady, purposeful stride of a man who has absolutely everything under control and whose world has not been rocked in ways he doesn’t yet have words for.

Behind me, I hear Tam say something to Frasier in a very low voice.

I don’t hear what it is.

I think that’s probably for the best.

Chapter seven

Rory

The thing about having your entire worldview quietly dismantled at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night, is that the rig does not care. The rig does not pause to allow you to sit somewhere quiet and take stock of your life. The rig hums and clanks and demands your full attention, and your full attention is currently split approximately forty ways between the job in front of you and the absolute chaos happening inside your own skull.

I am on level three with Whelan and I am working and I am fine. I am completely fine. I am a professional.

I am also, somewhere underneath the professional, experiencing something that I don’t have a category for yet.

Here is what I know. Last night was. It was good. It was genuinely, undeniably, remarkably good, and not just in the obvious way, though obviously it was good in the obvious way too, because MacLeod is. Well. MacLeod. But there was also a moment, or possibly several moments, where he was. Where it felt like he was actually…

I tighten a bolt with slightly more force than necessary.

The point is, it happened and it was good and now I need to figure out what to do with that information and I have approximately zero time in which to do it because Whelan is right there and the level three inspection is not going to complete itself.

So. Fine. I’ll do it in my head. Quietly. While working. Like a normal person.

Am I gay?

That’s the question, isn’t it? That’s the thing that keeps floating to the surface every time I try to push it down. Am I gay? And the honest answer, if I’m being honest, which I apparently am because there’s nobody in here inside my skull except me, is that I don’t know. I have looked at men before. I have always told myself that this is fine, that it doesn’t mean anything, that being secure enough in yourself to notice that another person is attractive regardless of their gender is just. Confidence. Evolved thinking. Not a big deal.

Which is still true, actually. I stand by that.

But last night was somewhat more than noticing.

Okay, so maybe I’m not completely straight. Maybe I’m. Something else. Something with more range. And the thing is, when I turn that thought over and look at it properly, it doesn’t feel like a crisis. It feels like. Information. Useful, if slightly startling, information about myself that I am now in possession of and can file accordingly.

I don’t need a label for it. Labels are for other people. I am Rory Gallacher, and I contain multitudes and that is absolutely fine and I’m not going to make a big thing of it.

I’m not making a big thing of it.

I’m genuinely not.

The fact that I have now been thinking about nothing else for four hours is simply because my brain is thorough. It’s a feature, not a flaw.

What I keep coming back to, if I’m being completely truthful with the inside of my own head, is not the question of labels at all. It’s MacLeod. Specifically, it’s the thing MacLeod did, around about the second hour, where he. Where there was a moment of. It was gentle, and that’s the thing. I was not expecting gentle. I had braced myself for a lot of things when that door opened last night and gentle was not anywhere on the list and the fact that it was there, quietly and matter-of-factly, like it was the most natural thing in the world, has lodged itself somewhere in my chest and is refusing to move.

I am twenty-two years old and I have had a reasonable amount of experience and nobody has ever been quite that…

I tighten the next bolt.