Page 45 of Dirty Rotten Love

I pick up the pace. I moan. Mac groans. Pleasure floods every inch of my body and soul. Flesh slaps against flesh. The wind sings.

Mac’s dark eyes watch me. Staring at me as if I’m something holy. A gift. A blessing.

I stare back at him. His cheeks are flushed. His jaw is magnificent. I’m caught in his gaze and I can’t look away. I don’t want to. Right here is my favorite place.

He looks at me, and I can see all of him. Beyond the grumpy man who holds everyone to high standards, especially himself. When he is like this, I can see his kindness, his quiet, his gentle nature. His deep intelligence. I can see his pain that he bears so nobly. His loneliness.

And I can see that he sees me. Not the funniest man on the rig, not a clueless deckhand on his first rotation. He sees Rory. All of me and all that I am.

When I look into his eyes, this doesn’t feel like hooking up. It doesn’t feel remotely casual. I feel like I’m baring my soul and it feels perfect. And there is a light in Mac’s eyes that’s as ethereal as the Northern Lights but a thousand times more beautiful. A light that looks like love.

My orgasm starts to boil over. I cry out and my muscles go lax and weak, just when I need them most.

Mac’s hands tighten on my hips. He thrusts up, into me. He does it again and again. Bucking up off the mattress. Strong. Manly. Confident. Driving his cock deep into me over and over again with ruthless unending efficiency.

I’m pretty much just bouncing helplessly on his cock. My thighs have turned to jelly. Pleasure and sensation are burning through me, I’m on fire. I’m sobbing with the intensity.

I start to cum. I don’t stop sobbing. I’m shuddering and cumming and sobbing and completely and utterly overwhelmed. It is magnificent.

Mac thrusts a few more times, jerky, stuttering and uncoordinated. He grunts, long and low. Shudders as he fills the condom. I feel the heat of it and whimper as the sensation shoots another blast of euphoria through me.

Mac yanks me down, pulling me flush against his chest. His hand tangles in my hair and angles my face toward him. He kisses me, savagely and deeply. As if he is still desperate for me. I kiss him back, matching his hunger, while my toes curl and my stomach swoops.

It’s official. I have never been happier.

Chapter nineteen

Rory

The wind has picked up since morning.

It does that out here, decides mid afternoon that whatever it was doing before was not enough and escalates dramatically, and now it is doing the thing where it gets inside your collar no matter how high you pull it and finds the exact gap between your glove and your sleeve with the focused persistence of something with a personal grievance. I have been on this rig long enough to know this is just Tuesday, and I pull my collar up anyway because at least it is something to do.

We are on the lower deck doing routine checks, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds, and Green Crew are doing what Green Crew always do when the work is routine and the wind is annoying, which is talking. Constantly. About everything and nothing in the specific overlapping way of people who have spent enough time together that conversations don’t need beginnings or endings, they just continue from wherever they were last left.

Dazza is telling someone about his ex-wife’s cat, which he apparently has complicated feelings about. Whelan is arguing with Frasier about something that started as a technical disagreement and has evolved into something more philosophical. Tam is beside me, working through his section with quiet efficiency, occasionally contributing a word or a look to whatever conversation is nearest. Brockie is at the far end, focused and careful the way he always is.

Spanner is working near Brockie. He has been working near Brockie for days now, and I have started to notice the specific geography of it, the way the distance between them is always the same, close enough to be present, far enough to not crowd. At one point Brockie reaches for something just out of his range, and Spanner passes it to him without being asked and without making anything of it, not even a look, just a hand extending with the thing in it and then returning to work. Brockie says something quietly. Spanner nods once.

I watch this for approximately three seconds and then go back to my own section because it is not mine to watch and I have work to do.

I also have other things happening in my head that are taking up more space than is strictly convenient for routine checks. Things from last night that I am not examining because I am at work and examination is for later, for the small cabin at the end of the day, except that the examination keeps starting anyway, keeps surfacing without permission, the way certain memories do when they have weight to them.

It was different last night. That’s all I will say about it, to myself, in my own head, where nobody can hear it. It was different, and I know it was different, and I am not thinking about why because why is a door I am not opening right now in the wind on the lower deck.

I focus on my work. My work is good. I am thorough and careful and I have come a long way from the valve incident and the oil, which I choose to remember as a moment of dignity rather than chaos, and my documentation is immaculate, and I belong here, and everything is fine.

The boots.

Everyone hears them before they see him, we always do, and the adjustment happens automatically, the way it always does, papers straightened, posture improved, faces arranged into the expressions of people who have been doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing because they have been doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing.

Mac comes around the corner.

He does his walkabout the way he always does, systematic and thorough, moving from station to station with the quiet authority of someone who knows this rig the way other people know their own homes. He checks Whelan’s work first, says something brief, and moves on. He checks Frasier’s documentation, nods, and moves on. He works his way down the line with the focused efficiency of a man who has a procedure and follows it.

I watch him while pretending not to watch him, which I have become very good at.

He stops at Brockie’s station. Brockie is one of the newer crew members, and Mac always spends a little more time at the newer stations, not because he expects to find problems but because he is thorough, and thoroughness doesn’t discriminate. He looks at Brockie’s work and asks something. Brockie answers. Mac asks something else, a follow-up, the kind of question that is checking whether Brockie understood the principle rather than just the procedure.