Chapter 12
Chapter twelve
MacLeod
The helipad is very quiet after Rory leaves.
The Northern Lights are still dancing. They don’t care that the best thing that has happened to me in nine years just fled down a staircase babbling about a PlayStation.
They are vast and ancient and entirely indifferent to the interior life of one broken man on a North Sea oil rig, and I find, after a moment, that I am grateful for that.
The indifference is easier than pity would be.
I stand where I am and look up at them and allow myself, just for a moment, to feel it.
The kiss.
I have kissed people before. Obviously I have kissed people before.
I was married for three years, and there was a time, a long time, when kissing felt like the most natural thing in the world, like breathing, like coming home.
And then it stopped and everything stopped with it, and I put that part of myself somewhere very deep and very dark and told myself I didn’t need it.
That was nine years ago.
Rory Gallacher has been on my rig for less than two weeks and I am standing on a helipad in the North Sea with the aurora borealis overhead and my hand is still warm from the side of his face and something that I was absolutely certain was buried under nine years of scar tissue has just sat up and looked around.
I thought I was in love with Rory Gallcher before. I was wrong. Before, I was besotted. Before, I was feeling the potential, the tendrils of a beginning. The flames of love were lapping over me gently.
Now I am consumed.
This is a disaster.
I knew it was going to be a disaster. I knew it the moment he showed up at my door at eleven o’clock at night with the wonky smile and the wide eyes and I said yes anyway because I am apparently incapable of saying no to Rory Gallacher, which is a new development and not a welcome one.
But the kiss.
And more than that, and what I was not prepared for, what I had absolutely no defense against, was watching Rory Gallacher see the northern lights for the first time.
He went so still. Just for a moment, just a breath, before the delight took over completely and he was pulling out his phone and taking endless pictures and talking about his mum, and I stood there watching him and felt something so enormous and so quiet move through me that I had to look away.
The way he looked at the sky. All of him, completely present, completely unguarded, the performance dropped entirely because something was too beautiful to perform in front of.
He looked at them, and he wanted to tell someone that the Northern Lights are beautiful.
He wished there was signal to call his mum.
Because his first instinct was to share it, to reach out, to bring someone else into the wonder of it, and that is the thing about Rory that I cannot protect myself from, no matter how many procedures I put between us.
He is relentlessly, helplessly generous with his joy.
He cannot keep it to himself. It spills out of him constantly and lands on everyone around him and makes everything brighter whether they want it to or not.
And then he kissed me.
Or I kissed him. Both, probably. The distinction stopped mattering approximately two seconds in.
His hand found the front of my jumper and held on, and I put my hand against his face and thought, with the particular clarity of a man who has run completely out of road, that I would give almost anything to stay exactly here.
He tasted of hope. That’s the thing I can’t shake. He tasted of something I had decided I was finished with and now it is sitting in my chest like an ember that I cannot put out no matter how much cold logic I pour on it.
The last time I felt this, I lost everything.
Fourteen years of friendship and three years of marriage, and one morning I came home to find them both gone, which was the thing about it that I have never told anyone, the thing that lives in me like a splinter too deep to remove.
They hadn’t even had the decency to be there.
Just a note on the kitchen table. Just my husband’s handwriting and my best friend’s name and the particular silence of a flat that used to be full of people and is now just mine.
I had stood in that kitchen for a long time.
I think about it rarely. I have become very good at not thinking about it.
The rig helps. The rig is relentless and loud and demanding and there is always something that needs doing and always someone who needs managing and very little space for the kind of silence where things creep back in.
I chose this life deliberately, carefully, with both hands, and I have never once regretted it.
Except sometimes, late at night, when the rig is as quiet as it ever gets and the North Sea does its thing against the hull, I lie awake and think about the kitchen.
About the note. About the fact that two people who knew me better than anyone in the world had looked at me and decided I wasn’t worth staying for.
I have never given anyone the chance to do that again. I was never going to. My husband and my best friend stabbed me in the heart. They broke it. And like any withered, useless body part, I amputated it. Cut myself off from at so its poison couldn’t destroy the rest of me.
And yet.
I breathe out slowly through my nose, the way the doctor taught me, and look at the lights for another long moment. Then I go back inside.
The corridor is warm after the helipad wind.
I take the stairs down and walk the familiar route back towards my cabin, and as I pass the rec room I hear it, the specific sound of Green Crew being themselves at the end of a shift, loud and warm and helplessly funny, someone laughing at something Rory has said probably, the kind of laughter that spills under doors and through walls and fills the whole corridor with the feeling of people who are glad to be in each other’s company.
I stop walking for a moment.
I could go in. The thought arrives the way it always does, quiet and tentative and carrying all the weight of every time I have had the same thought and kept walking anyway.
I could open the door and walk in and… And what?
The laughter would stop. Maybe not immediately, possibly not all of it, but it would change, recalibrate, become the careful, cheerful noise that people make when their supervisor walks in and they are trying to appear at ease.
It always does. I have never once in twenty years of offshore work walked into a room and had the atmosphere stay exactly as it was.
And I know it’s not just because I am their boss. It is because I am me. I am who I am, and it’s as simple as that. I have many flaws, but a lack of self-awareness is not one of them.
Rory lights up rooms. I bring the shadows.
I keep walking.
My cabin is exactly as I left it. Small, orderly, everything in its place, which is how I need things, how I have always needed things, the external order compensating for whatever the internal equivalent is when it works properly, which is not something I’ve ever had.
There is a book on the nightstand. There is a mug on the desk.
There are four walls that have never had much reason to feel like anything in particular.
Rory is the only other person who has ever been in this room.
I change into my sleep clothes with the quiet efficiency of someone who has performed this routine ten thousand times and sit on the edge of the bunk and pick up my book. I open it to the right page. I look at the words.
I am not thinking about the way Rory looks in this bunk. The particular way he takes up space, which is completely and without apology, diagonally if given the opportunity, warm and solid and real in a way that makes the whole room feel different. I am absolutely not thinking about that.
I am definitely not thinking about the way Rory looks spread out on these sheets. Naked and beautiful and trusting.
I am reading.
The words are not going in. This is fine. I will sit here and hold the book, and eventually my brain will cooperate and engage with the words and I will read several chapters and fall asleep, and tomorrow will be another shift and another briefing and another ordinary day on the rig.
Rory will not knock on this door tonight.
He has gone to play video games with Tam and Dazza, and he is laughing at something, and he is warm and surrounded by people who adore him, which is exactly where Rory Gallacher belongs.
He is not thinking about me. He is not standing in a corridor somewhere working up the nerve to knock.
He is fine, Rory is always fine, and I am fine too, and tomorrow we will be professional and efficient, and everything will be exactly as it should be.
I turn a page I have not read.
The thing about hope is that it is completely indiscriminate.
It does not care whether you have earned it or deserve it or have any reasonable basis for it whatsoever.
It simply arrives, uninvited, and sits down, and makes itself at home in the wreckage of all the times it has let you down before, and looks at you with that particular expression that means it has absolutely no intention of leaving just because you want it to.
I look at the door.
I look at my book.
Hope is a terrible thing.
I turn another page.