Page 30 of Dirty Rotten Love

A pause that is approximately one second long but feels considerably longer.

“You mentioned it,” he says. “Your first day.”

I stare at him.

My first day. He is telling me that he remembered something I said in passing on my first day, something throwaway and unimportant, and he held onto it and checked the weather forecast and came to find me in the rec room so that I wouldn’t miss it.

I don’t have a category for that. I have been putting a lot of things in boxes and closing the lids this past week and a half, but this one will not fit in any box I currently own.

I look back at the lights because looking at MacLeod right now feels like too much and the lights are safer and also extraordinary and also currently doing that thing where they shift from green to the faintest edge of purple which I did not know they did and which is making my chest ache in a way I cannot explain.

“I could kiss you for this,” I say.

It comes out before I have authorized it. My mouth, operating independently again, as it apparently does around this man. I feel it land in the air between us and brace for something, I don’t know what, a raised eyebrow, a silence, the standard MacLeod response to things he finds unnecessary.

“If you want,” says MacLeod quietly.

I freeze.

We have not kissed. I have been aware of this in a distant, carefully unexamined way, the way you are aware of something that doesn’t quite fit the story you are telling yourself. We have done everything else. We have spent two nights in that cabin, and MacLeod has been unexpectedly gentle and has said things in the dark that I have been storing in that box with the closed lid. But we have not kissed, and there is a reason for that, I think, a reason I have not looked at directly because looking at it directly would require me to think about what this is and what I want it to be and I am not ready to do that.

Friends with benefits don’t kiss. Except we are not friends. I would not dare call MacLeod a friend. Colleagues with benefits, then. Whatever this is. Whatever category this falls into. Whatever box this belongs in.

If you want.

I look at him. He is looking at the lights again, very deliberately, giving me the space to decide, and I recognize that, I recognize the deliberateness of it, and something about the recognition makes the decision for me before I have consciously made it.

I close the distance between us, and I squish my lips onto his.

It starts clumsy. Tentative. My hand finding the front of that ancient soft jumper and holding on. And then something shifts and it becomes something else entirely, something slow and thorough and unbearably tender, and MacLeod’s hand comes up to the side of my face and I feel it everywhere, the warmth of it, the steadiness of it, and the Northern Lights are dancing above us and the North Sea is roaring below us and I am kissing MacLeod on a helipad at nine p.m and the world has gone completely quiet.

His lips are soft and warm, and he is taking control in that way that he does, the way that makes me feel safe and stops the ceaseless buzzing in my brain.

He tastes of Macleod, and I think it is my new favorite flavor. It’s him, through and through, and it’s delicious and wholesome and I can’t get enough.

I don’t think kissing your coworker-with-benefits is supposed to feel like this.

I step back.

I need to step back because something has happened in my chest that I do not have words for yet and if I don’t step back right now, I am going to do something embarrassing like tell him that.

I stare at him. He is looking at me with that expression I cannot read, and the northern lights are moving in his eyes, and he is so…

“The PlayStation,” I say.

MacLeod blinks.

“Tam and Dazza. They’ll be waiting. I said I’d.” I take another step back. My hand is still faintly tingling from his jumper. “I should go.”

MacLeod looks at me for a long moment. Something moves across his face that is gone before I can identify it.

“Aye,” he says. “Go.”

I go. I take the stairs fast, one hand on the railing, and I do not look back because if I look back I will see him standing there with the northern lights reflected in his eyes and I will not be able to make myself leave and I need to leave, I need the noise and the chaos and Tam and Dazza and the ancient PlayStation. I need something loud and simple and familiar while I figure out what on earth is happening to me.

I burst back into the rec room. Tam and Dazza are finally there, sprawled across two of the plastic chairs with the controllers already in hand.

“There you are,” says Tam. “We’ve been here ages.”