Page 31 of Dirty Rotten Love

“You have not,” I say, and drop into my chair and hold out my hand for a controller with the focused energy of a man who needs a distraction immediately.

Tam hands it over and gives me a look. “You alright?”

“Fine,” I say. “Completely fine. Whose turn is it to pick the game?”

I am not fine.

I am the opposite of fine.

But the game loads and Dazza immediately does something that is definitely cheating and I yell at him about it and the noise and the chaos closes over my head like water and I let it, I let it completely, and I do not think about the helipad or the lights or the way the whole world went quiet when MacLeod kissed me back.

I don’t think about it at all.

Chapter twelve

MacLeod

The helipad is very quiet after Rory leaves.

The Northern Lights are still dancing. They don’t care that the best thing that has happened to me in nine years just fled down a staircase babbling about a PlayStation. They are vast and ancient and entirely indifferent to the interior life of one broken man on a North Sea oil rig, and I find, after a moment, that I am grateful for that. The indifference is easier than pity would be.

I stand where I am and look up at them and allow myself, just for a moment, to feel it.

The kiss.

I have kissed people before. Obviously I have kissed people before. I was married for three years, and there was a time, a long time, when kissing felt like the most natural thing in the world, like breathing, like coming home. And then it stopped and everything stopped with it, and I put that part of myself somewhere very deep and very dark and told myself I didn’t need it.

That was nine years ago.

Rory Gallacher has been on my rig for less than two weeks and I am standing on a helipad in the North Sea with the aurora borealis overhead and my hand is still warm from the side of his face and something that I was absolutely certain was buried under nine years of scar tissue has just sat up and looked around.

I thought I was in love with Rory Gallcher before. I was wrong. Before, I was besotted. Before, I was feeling the potential, the tendrils of a beginning. The flames of love were lapping over me gently.

Now I am consumed.

This is a disaster.

I knew it was going to be a disaster. I knew it the moment he showed up at my door at eleven o’clock at night with the wonky smile and the wide eyes and I said yes anyway because I am apparently incapable of saying no to Rory Gallacher, which is a new development and not a welcome one.

But the kiss.

And more than that, and what I was not prepared for, what I had absolutely no defense against, was watching Rory Gallacher see the northern lights for the first time.

He went so still. Just for a moment, just a breath, before the delight took over completely and he was pulling out his phone and taking endless pictures and talking about his mum, and I stood there watching him and felt something so enormous and so quiet move through me that I had to look away. The way he looked at the sky. All of him, completely present, completely unguarded, the performance dropped entirely because something was too beautiful to perform in front of.

He looked at them, and he wanted to tell someone that the Northern Lights are beautiful. He wished there was signal to call his mum. Because his first instinct was to share it, to reach out, to bring someone else into the wonder of it, and that is the thing about Rory that I cannot protect myself from, no matter how many procedures I put between us. He is relentlessly, helplessly generous with his joy. He cannot keep it to himself. It spills out of him constantly and lands on everyone around him and makes everything brighter whether they want it to or not.

And then he kissed me.

Or I kissed him. Both, probably. The distinction stopped mattering approximately two seconds in. His hand found the front of my jumper and held on, and I put my hand against his face and thought, with the particular clarity of a man who has run completely out of road, that I would give almost anything to stay exactly here.

He tasted of hope. That’s the thing I can’t shake. He tasted of something I had decided I was finished with and now it is sitting in my chest like an ember that I cannot put out no matter how much cold logic I pour on it.

The last time I felt this, I lost everything.

Fourteen years of friendship and three years of marriage, and one morning I came home to find them both gone, which was the thing about it that I have never told anyone, the thing that lives in me like a splinter too deep to remove. They hadn’t even had the decency to be there. Just a note on the kitchen table. Just my husband’s handwriting and my best friend’s name and the particular silence of a flat that used to be full of people and is now just mine.

I had stood in that kitchen for a long time.