Page 21 of Dirty Rotten Love

“Okay,” I splutter, when I am able. “Aye. Yes. Okay.”

MacLeod nods once. He picks up his fork. The conversation is, apparently, concluded. We eat in silence for a few minutes, the kind of silence that has a different quality to every other silence I have ever shared with this man, and I cannot fully name what the difference is yet, but I know that it’s there.

I look down at my tray. At the gray beef thing, which I am inexplicably still eating. At the table where MacLeod’s tray is sitting across from mine like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

I have no idea what is happening to my life.

But tomorrow night I am going to accept that invitation, I already know I am. I didn’t just say yes to be polite. I’m actually going to go. The decision was made somewhere around the word invitation and has not wavered since.

I go back to my food.

MacLeod goes back to his.

Outside the mess hall window, the North Sea is gray and choppy and completely indifferent to the fact that Rory Gallacher’s entire universe has quietly rearranged itself over a plate of gray beef and a mug of tea.

Chapter eight

Rory

Dinner on the rig starts serving at six, which means that today, by five fifty-eight Green Crew were assembled in the mess hall with the focused energy of people who have somewhere to be and something very important to discuss and have been waiting all day to discuss it.

I know this because I walk in at six on the dot and every single one of them is already there. All eight. Tam and Dazza side by side with the coordinated air of men who have been comparing notes. Frasier with his arms folded and his chin up, wearing the expression of a man expecting a full debrief. Whelan and Grigor and Brockie clustered at one end of the table. Spanner at the other end, unhurried as always, a plate of food in front of him that he is eating with perfect calm while the table hums with barely contained energy around him.

I get my food. I carry my tray to the table. I sit down.

“Right,” says Tam.

“Evening,” I say pleasantly, and start eating.

There is a pause of approximately two seconds.

“Rory,” says Dazza.

“Dazza.”

“We have been waiting all day.”

“Have you.” I reach for the salt. “How was your afternoon?”

The noise that Frasier makes is not a word but it communicates volumes. I look up at him with an expression of serene innocence that I have been practising since approximately three o’clock and feel reasonably confident about.

“I don’t kiss and tell,” I say.

The table erupts.

I sit in the middle of it and eat my dinner and feel, despite everything, despite the mark on my neck and the question I don’t have a label for and the invitation sitting warm and private somewhere in my chest, genuinely and comprehensively delighted with myself. This is what I was built for. This exact thing. Eight people losing their minds and me at the center of it, easy and unbothered, the picture of a man with absolutely nothing to hide.

I am hiding several things. But they can’t tell that.

“You don’t kiss and tell,” Whelan repeats, as if the sentence has broken something in him. “You went to MacLeod’s door on a dare. At eleven o’clock at night. And you don’t kiss and tell.”

“I’m a man of principle,” I say.

“He’s a man of principle,” says Tam, to the table at large, with an air of devastation..

“Did you actually?” Grigor stops. Starts again. His enormous, solemn eyes are very wide. “Did it actually… Did he actually…”

“Did he actually what, Grigor?”