Dirty Rotten Love

The corridor has grown.

I know this because I have walked it approximately forty times since I landed on the rig and it has never once felt long before. It is objectively not a long corridor. I have measured it in my head and it is maybe thirty metres from the mess hall to MacLeod's quarters and thirty metres is nothing, thirty metres is the length of a swimming pool, I used to run thirty metres in under five seconds when I was seventeen and doing athletics at school, thirty metres is not a distance that should cause any problems whatsoever.

And yet here I am. Walking the longest corridor in human history.

My footsteps sound very loud. The rig hums underneath everything the way it always does, that constant low vibration that lives in your bones after the first couple of days, but right now it is doing nothing to cover the sound of my own feet on the floor and I am extremely aware of every single step I am taking towards what is almost certainly my own destruction.

Right. Okay. Let's think about this rationally.

Option one. MacLeod opens the door and immediately kills me. This is probably the most likely outcome. He is going to look at me standing there at eleven o'clock at night and something in him is going to snap and that will be the end of Rory Gallacher. His mum will be very sad. The money will stop. They will have to find a new funniest man on the platform.

Option two. MacLeod opens the door, doesn't kill me, but the humiliation is so complete and thorough that death would have been preferable. He looks at me with that expression, the one that goes so far beyond grim that it needs its own category, and he says something in that very quiet devastating voice and I have to walk back down this corridor past the camera and into the mess hall and face eight people who witnessed every second of it and I will never, not once, for the rest of my natural life, hear the end of it.

Option three.

I stop walking.

My brain has arrived at option three and is now refusing to continue. Option three is the one where MacLeod opens the door and he doesn't kill me and he isn't devastatingly contemptuous and instead he says yes and then I have to. And he. And we.

My brain makes a noise like a dial up modem attempting to connect to a server that doesn't exist and then gives up entirely.

I start walking again. Faster this time, because standing still in the corridor thinking about option three is somehow worse than moving towards the door and I need to not think about option three. Option three is not a thing I am equipped to process right now. Option three can wait until after this is over, if it ever happens, which it won't, because option one or option two is obviously what's going to happen.

Obviously.

The crew are watching. That's the thing. That's the only thing I need to focus on right now. Eight lads huddled around Whelan's laptop with their beers, watching the CCTV feed from this corridor, and if I turn around and walk back to that mess hall without knocking on that door I will have to look at every single one of their faces, and Rory Gallacher does not back out.

That's it. That's all this is. A dare. A stupid dare that I lost because of a card game that may or may not have been engineered by people who are supposed to be my mates and who I am going to absolutely deal with later, after I survive this.

If I survive this.

The door is right there.

It is a completely normal door. It is the same door as every other door on this rig, the same grey painted metal, the same handle, the same nothing remarkable about it whatsoever. There is no reason for my heart to be doing what it is currently doing. There is no reason for my palms to be sweating. I have knocked on harder doors than this. I knocked on the headteacher's door at fourteen to confess to putting cling film over the staff toilet seats, and I walked in there with my head up and my best smile ready and I came out with a two day suspension and the undying respect of the entire fourth year.

This is nothing like that.

This is so much worse than that.

MacLeod is not Mr Henderson, who was a tired man in his fifties who wanted to get through to Friday. MacLeod is. MacLeod. The man who gets quieter when he's angry. The man who has never once been moved by my best smile. The man who is tall and built like something geological and who I am not thinking about in any context other than the professional one, obviously, which is why option three has caused my brain to malfunction, because it is simply so far outside the realm of professional context that my mind cannot compute it.

Right.

I stand in front of the door.

I raise my hand.

From somewhere behind me, muffled through the walls and the hum of the rig, I hear it. The faintest echo of cheering. Eight idiots in the mess hall seeing me on the screen and losing their tiny minds.

I close my eyes for exactly one second.

I knock on the door.

There is a pause. Not a long one. Maybe three seconds, maybe four, but every one of them is its own individual eternity and I age approximately a decade in the space of them.

Then the door yanks open.

MacLeod fills the frame in the way that MacLeod always fills whatever space he is occupying, which is completely and with total authority, as if the space was built specifically for him and everything else is just visiting. He is looking at me with an expression that could strip paint. He is clearly off duty. He is clearly not expecting anyone. He is clearly not in the mood for whatever this is.

He is also in a towel.

Just a towel.

Only around his waist.

He is wet. His hair is dark with it and there are still drops of water on his shoulders, which are very broad, and his chest, which is very. And his jaw has got that thing going on where the light catches it and.

I drag my eyes back up to his face with an effort that I feel in my entire body.

"What?" says MacLeod, in a voice like gravel wrapped in thunder.

It is one word. Just one word. And it lands like a full sentence, like a paragraph, like an entire document of things that are wrong with this situation and the person responsible for it. I have interrupted his shower. I am standing at his door at eleven at night. I am about to say words that I have to say because eight people are watching and I do not back out.

"I." I stop. Start again. "I was just. I mean." I attempt the smile. My best smile, full wattage, the one that has been working since I was seven years old. But I am fairly certain it comes out wonky. "I was wondering if you wanted some. Company."

MacLeod looks at me.

The silence is not neutral. The silence is the opposite of neutral. The silence is the sound of a man whose patience was already extremely limited being pushed into territory he did not anticipate on a Tuesday evening.

One dark eyebrow lifts.

"You're gay, Gallacher."

It is not a question. Nothing MacLeod says is ever a question.

"I'm not. Technically. I mean." I can hear myself talking and I cannot stop. "It's more of a. As the lads say. Options. Limited options. Out here. Horizons." I swallow. "Broadening them."

MacLeod stares at me.

I think about the canal. The supermarket trolley. The forty minutes of sitting in cold water while my mates lost their minds on the bank. I have survived worse than this. This is fine. I am fine. I am not going to wet myself. Almost certainly.

"You're offering me your virgin ass," says MacLeod slowly, "because you're out of options."

I open my mouth. I close it again. The virgin comment lands somewhere that I need to absolutely not examine right now and I gulp and nod instead because words have left me entirely and nodding is the best I can do.

MacLeod looks at me for a long moment. His expression is completely unreadable. His hair is still dripping. There is a drop of water making its way down his collarbone and I am not watching it, I am looking at his face, I am a professional.

Then he breathes. A long, slow exhale through his nose, the sound of a man making a decision.

"No privileges," he says. His voice has dropped even quieter, which I did not think was possible. "No special treatment. No skipped shifts." A pause. "I'll make you fall apart several times, but that’s the only benefit you get."

I lose approximately three seconds of my life.

Several times.

He said several times. That is a number greater than one. That is a number greater than two. That is a number that implies a level of. That implies he intends to. That means he is actually considering.

Several.

"But there are no other benefits," MacLeod clarifies. He can clearly tell I’m having a little difficulty processing right now.

His eyes are very dark and very steady and giving absolutely nothing away. "Deal?"

My mouth is open. I am aware of this and I cannot fix it. The word several is bouncing around my skull like it is looking for somewhere to land and not finding anywhere that makes sense.

MacLeod's eyes narrow slightly. "Gallacher."

"Deal," I hear myself say.

MacLeod's hand closes around my arm and I am yanked through the door with a decisive efficiency that suggests this is a man who has made up his mind and is not interested in further discussion.

The door slams shut behind me.

The corridor is now abruptly empty.

Somewhere in the mess hall, eight lads are staring at a laptop screen showing nothing but a closed grey door.

And I’m all alone with Mcleod.