Chapter 30
Chapter thirty
Rory
The sky outside Mac’s kitchen window is doing something extraordinary.
It started as the particular gray that belongs to the hour before dawn, the gray that is not quite dark and not quite light and has a quality of held breath about it.
And then, slowly and with great intention, it began to turn.
Pink first, at the edges, tentative, the way all the best things start.
Then deeper, richer, spreading across the Edinburgh skyline with the focused beauty of something that does not need an audience but has one anyway, in the form of one Rory Gallacher sitting at a kitchen table in his boyfriend’s flat with a mug of tea and absolutely nowhere to be.
Boyfriend.
I have been trying that word out in my head for approximately two weeks, and it still does something warm and slightly ridiculous to my chest every single time.
Mac does not use that word. Mac uses the word partner, which is something precise and practical that communicates the same thing with considerably more seriousness, and I find that I love that about him, the same way I love everything about him, which is completely and without reservation and with a depth that still occasionally surprises me.
The flat is quiet. Mac’s flat is always quiet, which is one of its many excellent qualities, a particular quality of silence that is his, that I recognize now the way I recognize his footsteps and his voice and the specific way he looks at me when he thinks I am not paying attention and I always am.
The flat is on the good side of Edinburgh, the part of town that Rory Gallacher from the two bedroom terrace with the unreliable boiler would have walked past and thought, nice, for people who are not me.
And now I have slept here for two weeks, and I know where Mac keeps the tea and which mug is his and the specific sound the pipes make in the morning, and it is, without any qualification, the best place I have ever been.
Not because of the location. Not because of the posh part of town or the good views or the kitchen that is four times the size of my mum’s.
Because it has Mac in it.
We have been on shore leave for two weeks. This is officially a medical necessity and unofficially a bollocking. A bollocking that started with Mac delivering a lecture in the sickbay with Harris trying very hard not to smile in the background.
Rory, you will not climb anything without the correct certification ever again, and I will be ensuring that certification is completed before you are allowed back on rotation.
And then, because he is Mac and because even bollockings follow a procedure, he had looked at his own hands and said, and I will be reviewing my own conduct in regard to protocol and the appropriate response to emergency situations.
Which was, by any measure, the most Mac apology that has ever been delivered by any human being, and I had to look at the ceiling for a moment to compose myself.
Then Mac’s supervisors had agreed with his assessment and put us both on shore leave.
I don’t mind the shore leave. I thought I might, thought I would miss the rig and the grey beef thing and the specific quality of chaos that comes from being one of Green Crew, and I do miss it, I will always miss it when I’m not there, it is in my blood now in a way I did not anticipate when I first stepped off the helicopter onto the platform.
But I will be back. We will both be back.
The rig will be there and Green Crew will be there and Tam will make a face when I walk in and Dazza will say something without thinking and Frasier will be aggrieved about something and Spanner will be quietly near Brockie in a way that is going to resolve itself into something significant if I have anything to say about it.
All of that will be there.
In the meantime, there is this. Mac’s flat and the pink morning sky and the mug of tea and the knowledge that Mac is in the next room sleeping in a way that I have thoroughly contributed towards and do not feel remotely guilty about, despite the ribs, because Mac’s ribs are his business and he is a grown adult man who knows his limits and made his own decisions last night with considerable enthusiasm.
With a smile, I drag my thoughts away from last night, and start thinking about the day ahead.
My mum is making dinner tonight.
This was not negotiable. My mum, who I have been visiting every other day since we got back and who has taken to Mac with the focused warmth of a woman who has been waiting for this specific development for longer than Rory has, insisted with the gentle implacability that is one of her greatest qualities and that I have absolutely inherited.
Mac had stood in her hallway on the first visit looking like a man facing something he did not have a procedure for, and my mum had taken one look at him and said, you must be Mac, I’ve heard a great deal about you, come and have a cup of tea, in a tone that brooked absolutely no argument.
And Mac had sat at her kitchen table and had a cup of tea and she had asked him precise questions about the rig and he had answered them precisely and by the end of it she had been looking at him the way she sometimes looks at me, with that particular warmth that means she has decided something.
She told me afterwards that she loved him.
She also told me, with the casual certainty of someone delivering a long established fact, that she had always known I was gay.
I had stared at her.
She had shrugged and said, a mother knows, Rory, and poured me more tea.
I have some thoughts about this information and that the appropriate time to share it would have been perhaps at any point in the last twenty-two years, and I have expressed these thoughts to my mum and she has received them with the equanimity of a woman who is completely untroubled by them, and the conversation has happened several times and always ends the same way, with her refilling my tea and changing the subject.
I find, when I examine it honestly, that I don’t actually mind.
Finding it out for myself was, on balance, an extremely good time.
It involved the North Sea and a grumpy Scottish man and breakfast porridge and the Northern Lights and dangling from a harness in a storm over very cold water, and if my mum had just told me at sixteen, it would have been considerably less dramatic and I would not have the story I have now, which is the best story I have ever been part of.
I am still thinking about this when the kitchen door opens.
Mac is in the doorway.
He is wearing just his boxers, which is information I receive the way I always receive it, with the focused appreciation of a man who considers himself very lucky and intends to keep considering himself very lucky for as long as possible.
His hair is doing the morning thing. His jaw has two days of growth on it.
He has the slight squint of someone who has just woken up and is waiting for his eyes to agree to be fully open, and he is standing in the doorway of his own kitchen looking at me.
Looking at me like I am something marvelous. As if the sight of me sitting at his kitchen table is something wonderful. A thing to be cherished.
I know this look. I have been learning Mac’s looks for weeks now and I know all of them, the professional ones and the private ones and the ones he doesn’t know he is making, and this one is the one I love the most, the one he gets when he comes into a room and finds me in it, as if finding me there is still surprising and the surprise is good.
The sky outside the window is properly pink now, full and vivid, the best it has been since I sat down, and the kitchen is warm and quiet and it smells like tea and Mac’s flat and the particular combination of things that has become, in two weeks, the smell of somewhere I belong.
I think about Mac coming home to this kitchen nine years ago and finding it empty. The note on the table. Standing there for a long time before he could move.
I think about the pain in his voice and the hurt in his eyes when he told me the story of his husband and his best friend.
And the way he had looked at me afterwards, as if he expected me to get up and leave too.
As if hearing about his ex-husband’s decision would make me see sense and understand that Mac is not somebody worth having.
I think about the fact that the table Mac’s heart broke at, is the exact same table I am sitting at right now, with a mug of tea and the pink morning sky. And the thought lands somewhere very deep and very still.
I smile at him. I’m not going anywhere. Not ever.
“Kettle’s still warm,” I say. “Want a brew?”
Mac looks at me for a moment. At me and the mug and the kitchen and the pink sky through the window, taking it in with the focused attention he gives to everything that matters, and his expression does the thing it does now, the thing that I spent weeks hoping to see and have been seeing every day for two weeks and have not once gotten used to.
He almost smiles. Then he does smile. Fully and completely and without reservation, the smile that is still new and still extraordinary every single time.
“Aye,” he says. “In a minute.”
I cock my head.
“I want a kiss first,” says Mac.
I am out of the chair before he has finished the sentence.
This is simply who I am. I am Rory Gallacher and I do not sit still when there is something important to move towards, and there is nothing more important than this, than Mac in the doorway of his kitchen in the pink morning light wanting a kiss first.
I cross the kitchen in four steps and he meets me halfway, and the kiss is warm and certain and entirely unhurried, the kind that has nowhere to be and all the time in the world, and his hands find my face the way they always do, steady and sure, and the world goes quiet.
My beautiful, rare, extraordinary quiet.
One thing leads to another the way things do when you are in love and the morning is pink and the tea can wait, and we stumble back towards the bedroom laughing, and the tea sits on the kitchen table getting cold, and I cannot think of a single thing in the world I would rather be doing.
I love it here. I genuinely, absolutely love it here.
The rig will be there when we get back. In the meantime there is this.
And this, as it turns out, is everything.