Butterfly Hunter 01 (21 page)

Nicholas smoothly added,
“Thank you very much.”

And there was no way in
hell Dave was heading up there now, even if it
was
only to unpack. He
turned to Nicholas. “Pub.”

“
Excellent
idea,” Nicholas agreed. “We’ll see you later, Marge.”

“
See you,
boys!”

And they headed off out
the door, shoulder to shoulder, and Dave said, “Oh God, I am just
going to
die
.”

Charlie didn’t even need
telling. He was already sitting there, on his own at the same table
as last time, as if waiting for them. He took one look at Dave and
Nicholas as they walked towards him, his gaze encompassing
all
of
them, and he
knew
, damn it. He knew they were
together. In response, bless him, Charlie grinned like a
particularly happy loon.

They had barely sat down
when, in this pub with emphatically
no
table service, Rosie brought
over three Cascades. “Here you are,” she said, setting them down –
and she
winked
at Dave. “On the house, boys.”

The other two said their
thanks very nicely, while Dave sank down further in his chair and
just withered. God. It must be written all over him.
This man is in sexual thraldom to a
queer English earling.

He wondered how long it
would take for the news to spread from the hotel and the pub on
outwards. He was gonna be losing the very last shreds of his
tattered virginity that night, and the whole damned town was gonna
know exactly what was going on.
Dave Taylor is taking it up the arse … and loving
it!

Really. Dying would be so very
much easier.

“
You two have
had a busy couple of weeks,” Charlie eventually
observed.

Nicholas laughed. “We
have,” he agreed quite happily. “The butterflies, Charles: they’re
so beautiful! More than I could have ever hoped for. Last week I
got to watch them emerge, watch their wings drying out and
spreading – and then flying for the first time! Well,” he added
with a chuckle, “that’s never going to get old, but with these
particular beauties …”

“
And you’re
the first white fella to find them?”

“
I think so,
yes. Or the first to really identify them, anyway. There’s nothing
quite like them in the CSIRO field guide.” Nicholas was looking
pleased and proud, but he attempted to turn the conversation. “All
that’s for later, though. For now it’s just a privilege to have all
this time to spend with them.”

Charlie persisted. “What
white fella name you gonna give them?”

Nicholas’s cheekbones
turned pink, and he turned towards Charlie, shielding his mouth as
if telling him a secret – but Dave was certainly meant to hear his
loud whisper. “Actually, I think I’ll name them after David.” At
which Dave went waratah red again. “But don’t tell him! I’m
mortifying him enough already.”

That drew a rumbling
chuckle from Charlie, who considered Dave for long excruciating
minutes. But eventually all Charlie said was, “So, you found old
man grunter’s waterhole.”

“
Yes,” Dave
replied, feeling the ground a little firmer under his feet. “It’s
an odd place. But there’s no sign of any fish there, so I don’t
know if it’s really –”

“
Yeah, you
found it all right.”

“
There’s
nothing there but the butterflies. It’s beautiful, but there’s no
birds or animals, no fish, no insects. Just the butterflies. Isn’t
that kind of weird?”

Charlie shrugged. “How
does it feel to you?”

Dave sighed, and looked
away.

“
He
feels like it
should
feel wrong,” Nicholas supplied. “But it
doesn’t.”

“
Of course it
doesn’t,” Charlie stoutly agreed. “You don’t go drinking the water,
though. You know that much?”

“
Yeah, we
know,” Dave agreed. “We swam a couple of times, but we were
careful.” And now he thought about it, they had instinctively
avoided bathing very much, when really he’d have expected them to
be taking a dip every afternoon in that gorgeous jewel–like
water.

Charlie nodded. “There’s a
mystery, a strangeness. My compass didn’t like the place. It kept
pointing me away.”

“
The satnav
doesn’t like it, either.”

“
Minerals,”
they concluded. “Heavy–duty mineral deposits.”

Nicholas contemplated
this. “Would that keep the birds and animals away from the water?
But the butterflies have managed to adapt somehow?”

Charlie nodded. “Could be
… Could be.”

After a moment, when it
seemed that they’d said all that could be said about that, Nicholas
nudged Charlie with a friendly elbow. “If I have Butterfly
Dreaming, what kind of Dreaming does David have?”

And Charlie considered
Dave again for long long moments. “I don’t know, Nicholas,” he
eventually said. “I look at him now, and all I see is
you.”

Nicholas squirmed in
pink–faced delight, giggling like he was still in high school,
while Dave muttered, “Yeah, yeah. You always know just what to say,
don’t you, mate?”

“
I always do,”
Charlie complacently agreed.

A while later, Dave
decided that if Charlie knew, then it was only fair to tell Denise
as well. And she would be expecting him to call anyway, in line
with their new routine. He took the three empty glasses back to the
bar, and speed–dialled Denise’s number while he was waiting. Rosie
was wise enough to leave him be for the moment.

The first thing Denise
said when she picked up the call was, “Davey! I missed
you!”

Even now his heart skipped
a beat to hear her greet him so. “Yes. I’m used to talking with you
every day. I missed it, too.”

“
How’s the
trip going? Are you all right?”

“
Yes,
everything’s fine. Denise –”

“
Are you still
camped at the waterhole?”

“
Yes.
Look,” he said. And he sighed. She knew enough to wait now, when in
many ways he would have preferred her to insist on doing all the
talking. He was sure she would have gotten to the truth in the end.
“Look. Denny … I’m, uh –” he wasn’t sure what verb to use, so he
left the word incoherent. “I’m
nnngh
… with
Nicholas.”

A moment of silence. Then
she burst out,
“Seriously?”

“
Yeah.”

Another beat resounded
before, “Oh, Davey, that’s
marvellous
.”

“
Um.
Really?”

“
Yes.
Yes, of
course
. God, I’ve hated that
you’ve been alone all this time.”

He laughed a little, under
his breath.
Well, whose fault
was that?
he thought. But all the heat of
it had gone. All the bitterness had left him.

“
Davey, I’m so
happy for you.”

“
It’s not too
weird?”

“
No, of course
not. Love is love, wherever you find it.”

“
Oh. Uh, no
one’s using words like that, Denny.”

She laughed. “Then a fling
is a fling is a damned fine thing, Davey. Enjoy yourself, and I’ll
hear from you in a week’s time, all right?”

“
All
right.” And once she’d ended the call, he murmured,
“Goodbye.”

“
You right,
Dave?” Rosie asked, once she’d finally worked her way down the
bar.

Dave smiled at her. “Three
Cascades, thanks, mate.”

The three of them spent quite
some time poring over various maps, but they were really no closer
to pinpointing the waterhole, or working out whose land it was on.
There was a large Aboriginal reserve in the area, and the edges of
two different privately held properties. But where the waterhole
sat in relation to these seemed almost impossible to fathom.

“
It’s almost
as if,” Dave said, feeling idiotic but saying it anyway – “as if
it’s in–between.”

“
It’s in the
interstices,” Nicholas said, as if he were agreeing.

Charlie just contemplated them
both for a while, and then drifted off in thought.

After scratching their heads
over the maps for a while longer, Nicholas and Dave left him to
it.

Pretty much as soon as it
was decently dark, Dave and Nicholas snuck up to their room with
their overnight bags, managing to avoid Marge’s notice – though
Dave suspected that was more due to her tact than their own
cunning.

Then it was just the two
of them, which felt so familiar these days, it felt so safe.
Nicholas wandered into the room while Dave locked the door. They
put down their bags, but neither of them turned on the light –
which was hardly needed, as there was a street light nearby pouring
a block of cool light in through the net curtains. It was certainly
enough to help them see what they were doing.

Nicholas must have
realised that something needed sorting out, for he didn’t kiss Dave
or even touch him, but simply heeled off his shoes and sat on the
bed, his back against the pillows and the iron railings of the bed
head, and his legs stretched out long. And he waited patiently with
his hands held loosely together in his lap.

Dave picked up the
straight–backed chair and turned it around so he could sit facing
the man, and then he thought about what he needed to say and how to
say it. But in the end, of course, he just blurted it out. “Does
everyone know what we’re doing tonight?”

“
Well, it
seems that most of them have the general idea by now.”

“
I mean you
fucking me. Is it really obvious? It feels like it’s really
obvious.”

Nicholas took a moment
with that, as if determined not to let this faze him – or not to
freak Dave out by showing that it fazed him. “I would have
thought,” Nicholas eventually said, “if they
are
speculating about
the details, they’ll assume it’s the other way round.”

“
Really?”

“
Yes, what
with me being gay and you being otherwise straight. I think that
tends to be the assumption.”

“
Oh.”

Nicholas let a silence
drift by, before asking, “What bothers you: the fact that that’s
what we had planned, or the idea that everyone knows about
it?”

Of course it was the latter, but
Dave was too ashamed of his lack of courage to say so.

“
I don’t care
what we do, David,” Nicholas said, sincerely but also a bit coolly.
“You can fuck me, if you’d prefer. I really don’t mind.”

“
Yeah?” Dave
had hardly even thought about doing that, but now that he
considered it, he reckoned he could.

“
Of course. We
can save the rest for some other time. Or we can just do the things
we’ve already done. Then again, we don’t actually have to do
anything at all.” Finally he added, a bit more warmly, “David, I’ll
do anything you want.”

The problem was, however,
that Dave wanted to be fucked. He sighed. “How did you know? That
this is what I’d end up wanting. Is it that obvious?”

“
Not at
all.”

“
I feel like
it’s … blazoned across my forehead, or something. In neon
lights.”

Nicholas settled in a bit,
and began comfortably telling his side of the story. “When I first
saw you, I assumed it would all be the other way round. I like to
be in charge when it comes to sex. Doesn’t say a lot about me as a
person, but in bed, that’s what works best for me. When I saw you …
You’re gorgeous, David. I don’t think you realise how bloody
gorgeous you are. I fancied you like nothing else. And you were
this tough strong Aussie hunk of a man. And that first morning!”
Nicholas laughed at the memories. “You were so efficient, so in
control. You were laying down the rules, telling me how things
would be, and I was following you around like a smitten little
puppy with my tongue hanging out. I thought, well, nothing’s going
to happen, because you’re straight, but if it ever did … then you’d
be the one in charge. And I thought, that’s how it must be when you
holiday Down Under, everything goes topsy–turvy.”

“
So when did
you realise?”

“
It took me a
while. I’m not usually that slow, or I hope not, anyway. I realised
that a lot of the efficiency was about you being the best tour
guide you could be, about you knowing the dangers, and making sure
that no one in your care ever got hurt. There was another David
underneath that, a more private man, who was happier to just go
with the flow. There were times I felt as if you were … waiting for
me. Then I’d tell myself that was just wishful thinking. It was
only when we began …” He paused. Apparently Nicholas wasn’t sure of
the right verb either. “It was only when I kissed you properly for
the first time that I started feeling the lure of you … the tug of
you … inviting me in.”