Page 53 of Dirty Rotten Love

I follow his gaze.

Mac is standing at the far end of the mess hall near the serving hatch with a tray in his hands. He must have slipped in quietly the way he sometimes does, alone the way he always is, just coming in for food at the end of a long day, and he has clearly been there long enough to hear whatever Dazza said because he is standing very still and his tray is tilting very slightly in his grip, the angle of a man whose hands have forgotten what they are doing, and he was staring at Dazza and now he is staring at me.

I have never seen Mac’s face look like this.

All the armor is gone. Every layer of it, the professional distance and the careful silence and the gruffness that I now know is not coldness, all of it stripped away in a single moment, and what is underneath is something so raw and so unguarded that it physically hurts to look at it.

The table between us is frozen. Whelan is not moving. Frasier is not moving. Even the rig seems to have gone quiet, the constant hum of it receding somehow, as if the world has taken a breath and is holding it.

I understand, with the horrible clarity of someone who reads rooms incredibly well, that something has happened in this room. Something that has to do with me. Something that Dazza, brilliant, oblivious, utterly well-meaning Dazza, has said without thinking, the way he always says things without thinking, and which cannot be unsaid.

With the relentless inevitability of an approaching tsunami, my mind puts the puzzle pieces together.

Dazza, Whelen and Frasier were drinking and playing cards. The conversation turned to a different card game, a very eventful card game. None of them noticed that Mac had slipped quietly in.

Mac stares at me across the mess hall, and the hurt in his eyes is greater than any tsunami. Far more devastating. Way more immense.

“It was a dare?”

Mac’s voice is very quiet. It is always quiet, but this is a different quiet, a stripped bare quiet, the quiet of someone asking a question they already know the answer to and are asking anyway because some part of them needs to hear it said.

There is so much pain in it.

I feel it go through me like something physical, like the cold North Sea wind finding the gap between my collar and my neck, except it goes all the way in, all the way down, and does not stop.

My mouth opens. All the words are there, I love you, it started as a dare but it became everything, it became you, it became the Northern Lights and breakfast porridge in bed and dogs wagging their tails and the world going quiet when you kiss me. All of it is right there and none of it will come.

I nod.

It is the smallest movement I have ever made, and it costs me more than anything I have ever done.

Mac looks at me for one more moment. One long, quiet, completely unguarded moment in which I can see everything he has never shown anyone, everything he keeps behind the silence and the procedure and the careful distance, and it is devastating and it is mine and I am losing it in real time and there is nothing I can do.

He sets his tray down on the nearest surface with a precise, careful movement that is somehow the most heartbreaking thing I have ever witnessed.

And then he walks out.

No words. No door slam. No scene. Just Mac, walking out of the mess hall with quiet dignity.

The mess hall door swings shut behind him.

The silence that follows is the loudest thing I have ever heard.

Chapter twenty-three

Mac

The cabin door closes behind me.

I stand in the dark for a moment. I do not turn the light on. The dark is easier and I have always been good at finding my way around in it, have always been better in the dark than in the light, which is something Daniel used to say about me that was not meant kindly and that I have spent nine years deciding not to think about.

I think about it now.

I sit on the edge of the bunk. The same bunk. The bunk that smells different than it used to, that has been warmer than it used to be, that I have been pretending not to notice for weeks because noticing would require me to think about what it meant and what it meant was something I was not ready to look at directly.

I am looking at it directly now.

I am looking at all of it.