Page 56 of Dirty Rotten Love

I remember his hand on my face.

I remember the jumper, the ancient soft jumper, and holding onto it while the lights moved overhead and the world went quiet in a way it never goes quiet for me, and the kiss that started as an accident and became the least accidental thing I have ever done.

I remember saying I could kiss you for this and meaning the lights and also not meaning the lights at all, not really, not if I am being honest in the way I have been too slow to be honest with myself. I meant him. I meant Mac standing in the cold with his face tipped up to the sky, checking the forecast so I wouldn’t miss it, remembering something I said on day one because he was already paying attention to me before I was paying attention to myself.

The lights move. Green and slow and completely indifferent.

I don’t know what to do, and then I do know, suddenly and completely, the way I always know things when they finally come, and I am moving before the thought has fully finished.

I have to try.

That’s all. I don’t know if it will work and I don’t know what I will say and I don’t have a plan, I never have a plan, but I have to try because not trying is not who I am and has never been who I am and whatever else is true tonight that is still true.

I take the stairs fast, one hand on the railing. Mac’s corridor. Mac’s door.

I try the handle. It’s locked.

I knock.

The sound of it echoes and then disappears into silence. The corridor is very cold. It’s little more than a few sheets of metal between the rig and the endless North Sea and the night. I didn’t bring a jacket when I left the mess hall and I am in just my long-sleeved teeshirt, and the cold is finding all the same gaps it always finds, the collar and the sleeve and the thin places, and I don’t move.

“Mac.” My voice comes out strange. Smaller than usual. “It’s me.”

Silence.

I knock again. Harder this time, not angry, just desperate, the knock of someone who needs the door to open the way you need air, completely and urgently and without any ability to consider alternatives.

“Mac, please.” The please costs me something. I am not a person who pleads. I have never in my life stood in a corridor and pleaded with a closed door, and the word comes out unvarnished and raw and entirely true. “Please. Just. Let me in.”

Silence.

He is in there. I know he is in there the way I know things I have no logical basis for knowing, the way I know when Tam is awake in the bunk below me even when he is completely still, some sense that has nothing to do with sound or sight. He is in there and he is not going to open the door and I knew this before I knocked, and I knocked anyway because what else was I going to do.

“I’m sorry,” I say to the door, to the silence, to Mac sitting in the dark on the other side of it if that is where he is. My voice is doing something I cannot control. “I’m really sorry.” I stop. The corridor is very cold and very quiet, and the words that were so clear and so ready when I was running here have gone somewhere I cannot reach them. “I never meant to hurt you, Mac.”

Silence.

I lean my forehead against the door. The metal is cold. I press my forehead against it anyway because it is there, and it is solid and I need something to be solid right now.

I knock one more time. Quiet. Almost gentle.

“Please,” I say again, very softly.

Nothing.

I stand in the corridor with my forehead against the cold door, and I do not know how long I stand there. Long enough that the cold has worked its way properly in, through the shirt and through everything else, finding all the places that were already cold and making them colder.

“Rory.”

I turn around.

Spanner is at the end of the corridor. He is in his off duty clothes, a mug in each hand, and he is looking at me with that expression of his, the one that is almost impossible to read until suddenly it isn’t, and right now it is not impossible to read at all. It is very simple and very clear and it is the expression of a man who has seen something and come anyway, no questions, no fuss, just come.

He holds up one of the mugs.

I look at it. I look at him. The corridor is very cold and the door behind me is very silent and I have nothing left, not a single performing happy in reserve, not one grin or deflection or spatial logic of bunk organization, nothing.

I walk to Spanner and he turns and I follow him, and he doesn’t say a word.