Page 20 of Dirty Rotten Love

I look up.

MacLeod sits down with the unhurried ease of a man who has decided to do something and is not interested in making a production of it. He has a plate of food and a mug of something, and he looks, as always, completely unreadable.

I stop chewing. I remember to start again. I swallow.

MacLeod is eating lunch. At the same table as me. In the mess hall. Which is currently empty of everyone except us because Green Crew take their lunch in rotation and I am apparently on the same rotation as my supervisor and I did not know this until this exact moment.

He eats for a moment in silence. I eat for a moment in silence. This is normal. We are two colleagues having lunch. This is completely normal.

“Are you alright?” says MacLeod.

“It was just a dousing in oil,” I say, and my voice comes out admirably casual. “Nothing a shower couldn’t fix.”

MacLeod looks at me steadily. “I meant about last night.”

I open my mouth. Several things attempt to come out at once, and the resulting traffic jam produces something that is not quite any of them.

“I mean. Aye. Fine. Just a bit, you know. Sore. Here and there. Nothing major. Bit of. Aye.” I reach for my water. “Fine.”

Something happens at the corner of MacLeod’s mouth. It is very brief and very small, and it is absolutely, unmistakably, the beginning of a smile. On MacLeod’s face. I have never seen anything like it. I’m not entirely sure it’s real. I might be hallucinating from hunger.

“Good to know,” he says. “But I meant emotionally.”

The tips of my ears go nuclear. This is devastating and unprecedented. I am Rory Gallacher, I was crowned funniest man on the platform, I revel in being the butt of the joke, any joke, and I have spent my entire life performing my way through uncomfortable situations with a grin and a punchline, and right now I cannot locate a single one.

“I’m fine,” I manage. “Emotionally. All good. No issues.” I pause. “No need to. I’m fine.”

MacLeod watches me for a moment with the patience of a very large and very calm geographical feature. Then he nods.

“No regrets?” he says.

I open my mouth to say something breezy and deflective, and what comes out instead is the truth, which ambushes me completely.

“No,” I say. “No regrets.”

And I sit with that for half a second and find that it is simply, straightforwardly true. Whatever is happening in my head, whatever questions I don’t have answers to yet, last night was something I chose and something I don’t regret, and that is actually quite a solid place to stand.

MacLeod nods again, as if this is the answer he expected. He takes a drink from his mug.

“You should rest tonight,” he says, in the same tone he uses to tell people about valve maintenance schedules and documentation procedures. Utterly matter of fact. “But you could come back to my cabin tomorrow night.”

I stare at him.

He is looking at his food.

I continue to stare at him.

“Is that an order?” I say, because my mouth has decided to operate independently of my brain again, and apparently this is just who I am now.

MacLeod looks up. The scowl that crosses his face is so deeply, perfectly, fundamentally MacLeod that something in my chest loosens with relief. There he is. That’s him. Whatever else is happening, that scowl is completely real and completely familiar, and I find it enormously reassuring.

“Of course not,” he snaps.

A beat.

“It’s an invitation,” he says. And then, as if the word cost him something, he looks back at his food.

I inhale a piece of gray beef and spend several seconds in genuine physical peril, coughing into my elbow while MacLeod sits across from me with the expression of a man who is waiting for something to run its course.