Chapter 13
Chapter thirteen
Rory
The sun is shining.
I know this because it is coming through the small porthole above Tam’s bunk and hitting me directly in the face with the cheerful aggression of something that has not read the room. I blink at it. It blinks back. Neither of us moves for a moment.
Then it registers. The sun is shining. It is a rest day because a specialist crew has flown in to do something I don’t understand and don’t wish to.
I have absolutely nowhere to be and nothing I am required to do, and the entire day stretches out in front of me like a gift from a universe that has, up until very recently, not been particularly generous.
I am out of my bunk before I am fully awake.
Tam makes a noise from his pillow that is not a word in any language I recognize. He is sprawled at a diagonal that defies both physics and the dimensions of the bunk, one arm hanging off the side, mouth open, completely and magnificently unconscious.
I pull on clothes with the focused chaos of someone whose brain has already moved three steps ahead and is impatiently waiting for the rest of him to catch up.
Jeans. The good hoodie. Clean socks, which feels like a luxury out here.
I run a hand through my hair, decide that’s sufficient, and I’m out the door before Tam has so much as twitched.
The rig is quieter today. Not silent, it’s never silent, the rig hums and clanks in its bones regardless of what the crew are doing, but the specific purposeful noise of a full working shift is absent and the difference is noticeable.
I take the stairs two at a time and arrive in the mess hall with the energy of a man who has somewhere to be and something very good waiting for him there.
The mess hall on this unusual morning is a gentle, unhurried sort of place.
A few lads from Red Crew nursing mugs of tea.
Grigor reading something in what I think might be Ukrainian.
The smell of porridge and toast and the specific brand of institutional coffee that tastes terrible but is somehow still comforting.
I grab a tray. Two bowls of porridge, two glasses of orange juice, two mugs of coffee. I arrange it with the focused efficiency of a man with a plan.
Then I pick up the tray and walk out of the mess hall and head towards the supervisor’s corridor, and I am already three turns into the route before I stop.
I stop.
I stand in the corridor with a breakfast tray and look into the middle distance and have a word with myself.
What am I doing?
No, seriously. What am I doing? I am carrying a breakfast tray to my supervisor’s cabin on a rare rest day without being invited, without any indication that this would be welcome, without thinking it through for even a single second because thinking things through is not something my brain does before it launches itself at an idea with both hands.
I simply had a thought, and now I am here. With porridge.
This is impulsive even by my standards.
What if MacLeod doesn’t want breakfast? What if MacLeod doesn’t want to see me?
What if MacLeod is not a morning person and I am about to knock on his door at eight in the morning on his one day off, and he opens it and does the quiet devastating thing and I have to walk back down this corridor holding two bowls of porridge and the knowledge that I have made a complete idiot of myself?
I look at the tray.
Then again, MacLeod is always grumpy. That’s just his baseline.
It’s not as if I’m going to make things significantly worse by showing up with breakfast. And the worst he can do is say no and send me away and I have survived worse things, I have survived a supermarket trolley in a canal, I have survived drain inspection on a cold morning, I have survived several things in that cabin that I am not thinking about right now because I am standing in a corridor holding porridge and this is not the moment.
I shake myself. Straighten up. Adjust my grip on the tray.
I keep walking.
MacLeod’s door is exactly where it always is. Same gray metal. Same handle. Same door that has now featured in several significant moments of my life in ways I could not have anticipated when I arrived on this rig less than two weeks ago.
I knock.
The door opens instantly. Not after a pause, not after footsteps, instantly, as if MacLeod was standing directly on the other side of it, waiting for something.
He is fully dressed. Boots on, everything, at eight in the morning on a rest day.
He looks completely awake and alert, and he is staring at me with an intensity that makes my brain momentarily forget its own name.
His gaze drops to the tray.
Then back up to my face.
Then back to the tray.
“What is this?” he says.
“Breakfast!” I say, and my voice comes out approximately two octaves higher than intended. I wince. I cannot help the wince.
MacLeod looks at the two bowls of porridge. The two glasses of orange juice. The mugs of cooling coffee.
One dark eyebrow lifts.
“You’re bringing me breakfast in bed, Gallacher.”
It is not a question. It is a sentence that is doing a very great deal of work, and I can feel the heat rising up my neck, and there is nothing I can do about it.
“I guess. It seemed like a good idea at the time.” I pause. “I’m sorry. I’ll leave.”
I turn to go. The tray is already turning with me, the orange juice sloshing dangerously, and I have approximately one second of believing I am going to escape this with some small fragment of dignity before MacLeod’s hand closes around my arm and I am yanked through the door with the decisive efficiency that is extremely familiar and does extremely unhelpful things to my nervous system.
The door shuts behind me.
Orange juice sloshes significantly. I rescue it with my elbow.
We stand in the small cabin and look at each other. The tray is between us like a shield. MacLeod is looking at me with an expression I cannot read, which is standard, except that there is something underneath it that is not standard at all, something that looks almost, almost like he is relieved.
“I’m hungry,” says MacLeod. Presumably in an attempt to explain why he just yanked me into his cabin.
But we both know he is lying. We both know he is really saying that he wants me to stay and that the thought of me walking away with the porridge was more than he could bear.
And then, almost imperceptibly, something shifts in his expression. A fractional tightening around the eyes. A man who has just said something more revealing than he intended and is very aware of it.
I feel a grin spread across my face. Wide and helpless and completely unstoppable. I have flustered MacLeod. I, Rory Gallacher, have caused this man to look flustered, and it is the most delightful thing that has happened to me in recent memory, and that is including the Northern Lights.
“Right then,” I say, very pleasantly. “Porridge it is.”
The cabin has one chair, at the desk, which is covered in neat stacks of papers and folders that suggest MacLeod has already been up for some time doing things that count as leisure for him, apparently.
We end up sitting on the bunk, the tray balanced between us, and it is the most domestically chaotic thing I have ever been involved in and I love it unreservedly.
MacLeod eats porridge with the same focused efficiency he applies to everything. I eat mine in a less organized fashion. Outside the porthole, the North Sea is behaving itself for once, gray but not aggressive, the kind of calm that feels borrowed and temporary.
“What are you doing today?” I ask.
MacLeod looks up briefly. “Procedure manuals.”
I blink. “Sorry?”
“There are three updates pending from head office. I want to go through them properly and flag anything that needs flagging before we are back on duty.”
I stare at him. “You’re going to spend your rest day reading procedure manuals?”
“Yes.”
“For fun.”
He gives me a look that suggests fun is not the word he would use, but that the distinction doesn’t particularly trouble him.
“Wow,” I say.
I mean it completely genuinely and without a trace of irony, and I think that is what makes him look at me the way he does, with that quick, searching glance, checking whether he is being mocked.
He is not being mocked. I genuinely, honestly mean wow. The idea of doing something so difficult and so detailed and so relentlessly procedural and just. Enjoying it. Being good at it. Finding it satisfying rather than like slowly pushing a boulder up a hill.
“I wish I was as clever as you,” I say.
It comes out completely unguarded because I wasn’t planning to say it and there is no performance in it at all.
It is simply true. I have always been the funny one because being the funny one is something I can do, something I worked out early and leaned into hard, but being the clever one was never on the table and I made my peace with that a long time ago.
MacLeod has gone very still.
He is looking at me with an expression I have never seen on his face before and cannot immediately categorize.
Not the grim baseline. Not the teaching voice.
Not the almost smile. Something else entirely, something that looks startled and unguarded and real in a way that makes me feel like I have accidentally seen something I wasn’t supposed to.
He looks away. Picks up the tray. Begins tidying things with the careful, methodical movements of a man who needs something to do with his hands.
“You’re not stupid, Gallacher,” he says, to the mug he is relocating.
My heart flutters like crazy. Apparently, praise is a thing. My thing. A whole thing.
“I’m really not clever though,” I say, because it is just a fact, it doesn’t hurt to say it, it is simply true. And despite my newfound praise thing, I like truth.
MacLeod says nothing. He finishes tidying. Sets the tray aside. And then he turns and looks at me, and the cabin is very small and quiet, and the North Sea is being calm outside the porthole, and there is nowhere to look except at him.
We look at each other.
The silence grows. It is not the disappointed silence, not the evaluation silence, not any of the silences I have catalogued over the last twelve days with the careful attention of a man learning a language.
This is a different silence entirely. It is warm and it is full and it is pulling at something in the center of my chest like gravity.
MacLeod’s eyes drop to my mouth.
And just like that, I close the distance between us with the same instinct that sent me to the mess hall this morning for two bowls of porridge, the same instinct that had me following him up the stairs to the helipad the other night, the same instinct that has been running the show since I knocked on this door at eleven o’clock at night with a desperate smile and a complete absence of a plan.
We are kissing.
And the North Sea is calm outside the porthole and the sun is still shining and it is a rest day, and I have absolutely nowhere better to be.