Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
Rory
The rec room has a selection of ancient plastic chairs, a shelf of paperback books that have been read so many times they are basically held together by hope, a television that gets two fuzzy channels sometimes, and a PlayStation that is so old it qualifies as a historical artifact.
I am sitting in one of the plastic chairs with my headphones on and my phone in my hand, waiting for Tam and Dazza, who were supposed to be here ten minutes ago and are probably arguing about something in the corridor.
I am not thinking about MacLeod.
I am categorically, comprehensively, with great focus and discipline, not thinking about MacLeod.
I am thinking about absolutely nothing except the music in my ears and the game we are about to play and the fact that Dazza cheats at everything, including video games, and I intend to call him out on it this time. That is all I am thinking about.
The fact that my mind keeps drifting to a certain cabin on the supervisor’s deck is completely irrelevant and I am not engaging with it.
I am not thinking about the way MacLeod is surprisingly kind when there is nobody watching.
I am not thinking about the low sound of his voice in the dark or the fact that he always seems to know exactly what I need before I know it myself or the way the whole shape of the world feels different inside that cabin than it does anywhere else on this rig.
I am absolutely not thinking about any of that.
I am thinking about the PlayStation.
At the other end of the rec room, Brockie is sitting with his back against the wall and a battered paperback open in his lap.
He has the particular stillness of someone who is genuinely absorbed in something and not merely pretending to be, which I find very relatable right now.
His ears have their usual slight pink tinge that I am starting to think might just be his natural coloring.
Spanner is in the chair closest to him. Not next to him exactly, not crowding, just. Closest. He has a mug of something and he is not reading or watching the television or doing anything in particular.
He is just there, in the easy, unhurried way that Spanner occupies all spaces, as if he has nowhere else to be and can think of nowhere he’d rather be either.
Brockie turns a page. Without looking up, he says, very quietly, “You don’t have to stay.”
Spanner takes a drink from his mug. “I know,” he says.
Brockie looks up then, briefly, with the expression of someone who has received information they don’t quite know what to do with. Then he looks back at his book. His ears are a bit pinker than usual.
Spanner looks at the side of Brockie’s face with that expression of his, the one that is almost impossible to read until suddenly it isn’t, and then he looks away again, calm and unhurried, and takes another drink from his mug.
I pull one headphone off my ear and look at them for a moment.
Then I put it back. Some things are not mine to witness, and I have enough going on in my own head without adding anyone else’s complications to the pile.
The door opens. I look up expecting Tam and Dazza.
It is MacLeod.
He is in his off-duty clothes. Dark jumper, the kind that looks like it has been washed approximately eight hundred times and has reached a perfect softness that no new jumper could ever achieve.
He looks around the rec room and his gaze finds me with the directness it always has, as if I am simply where he expected me to be.
My heart does something extremely unprofessional.
“Gallacher,” he says. “A word.”
He gestures towards the corridor. His expression is its standard unreadable baseline and I have absolutely no way of knowing if I have done something wrong or if this is about something else entirely, which is extremely MacLeod of him, and I am pulling my headphones down around my neck and standing up before I have consciously decided to.
I follow him out. The corridor is quiet. He doesn’t speak, just walks, and I fall into step beside him and do not ask where we are going because with MacLeod you just go.
We take the stairs up. Then more stairs. Then a door I haven’t been through before that opens out onto the helipad, which is empty and enormous and swept by a wind that immediately tries to steal my soul.
I pull my jacket tighter and look at MacLeod. He is looking up.
“Weather’s been shite since you got here,” he says.
“Aye,” I say, because it has been relentlessly gray and choppy and aggressive in that particular North Sea way.
“Look up,” says MacLeod.
I look up.
The sky is clear. Completely, startlingly clear, and from horizon to horizon it is absolutely alive.
Great ribbons of green are moving across the darkness, shifting and shimmering and folding back on themselves, impossibly vast and impossibly beautiful, and through them the stars are so thick and bright they look unreal, like something someone painted rather than something that simply exists.
The Northern Lights.
I have never seen them before. I have wanted to see them my entire life and I have never seen them before, and here they are, here they actually are, dancing directly over my head on a clear night in the North Sea.
My throat does something complicated.
“I’ve never.” I stop. Start again. “I’ve never seen them.
I’ve always wanted to.” I suck in a breath.
“You don’t often get them in Edinburgh, and my neighborhood is all built up.
Lots of light pollution.” I can hear that I’m babbling and that my voice has gone slightly strange and I cannot fix it. “They’re. I mean. Look at them.”
I look at them. I cannot stop looking at them.
I pull my phone out of my pocket with hands that are not quite steady and start taking pictures, knowing even as I do it that no picture is ever going to come close to capturing this, the scale of it, the movement, the feeling of standing underneath something so enormous and so indifferent to your existence and finding it beautiful rather than frightening.
“I wish there was signal,” I say, mostly to myself. “I’d send these to my mum. She’d lose her mind.”
I take seventeen pictures. None of them are good enough. I take three more anyway.
Then I realize something, and I turn to look at MacLeod.
He is standing a little apart from me with his arms crossed against the wind and his face tipped up towards the lights, and he is watching them with an expression that I am not sure I have words for. Something quiet and steady and private that he probably doesn’t know is visible.
“How did you know to bring me up here?” I say.
He looks at me. “Clear sky doesn’t last long out here. I checked the forecast.”
“But how did you know I’d never seen them?”
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.”
“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.