Clear Water (11 page)

The phone was halfway cocked behind his ear, and Whiskey reached out and grabbed it from him hurriedly, hitting “end call” and putting the phone safely in his pocket.

Patrick didn’t look at him, just stared miserably at Whiskey’s old flip-flops and wiggled his toes for visual interest. “I’m sorry,” he said reflexively, and Whiskey sighed.

“Don’t be. Just, uhm, I don’t know, try not to throw something we need, okay? We can collect some river rocks, keep them up on the stern or something.”

That got him a small, grateful smile. “I’m, uhm, gonna talk to the frogs for a little while,” he apologized, and Whiskey wrapped a companionable arm around his shoulder.

“No you’re not. Come down and help Fly Bait and I wrap up this quadrant, and then we can go park the boat at the deserted dock and swim. We can even keep it there for a while, what do you say?”

“I’d like that,” Patrick told him, nakedly accepting the offer to cheer him up. Then another thought hit his rabbit brain. “Can I, uhm, call the yoga place too? Maybe they’ll have better news and I can stop playing that last conversation in my head like autoloop. Because I do that with zombie movies, and then I go to sleep and dream about them, and then I wake up all freaked out because the zombies are going to get me, and I don’t want to do that if we end up in the same bed again. I sort of flail about, and I might clock you.”

From yoga teaching to zombies to sex to violence. Whiskey was a little dizzy. “Yeah, sure, kid. But I’m gonna stay here for this one. We still need to buy Fly Bait a phone, and we’re running out of grant money, okay?”

Patrick nodded earnestly. “Yeah, yeah, okay.” And then took the phone and proceeded to get some good news.

T
HEY
parked the boat at the old dock and decided to call it a night there. Once again, Whiskey had the privilege of watching Patrick dive, pale-skinned, into the river in the evening. They pulled out some glycerin soap and soaped their hair so they didn’t have to tax the shower water without the hookups, and mostly just swam. They didn’t play—it was almost meditation time, with friends, although Whiskey noticed that Patrick enjoyed the hell out of striking out to the furthest reaches of the river and letting the current bear him back.

“If you’re not careful,” Whiskey called, “that current is going to sweep you downriver. You know that, right?”

“Not if I know where home is!” Patrick called, swimming back to the eddy on the upriver side of the boat.

Whiskey couldn’t argue with that, but it didn’t stop him from being afraid for that pale, slender figure as it threatened to whirl away from him. A figure that was getting pink, he noticed with a grimace, and he called out to Fly Bait to find the sun block, since she was the last one to have it.

“You gonna put it on him?” she asked as she paddled by, and Whiskey shuddered, heated in spite of the cool of the water.

“You’d better,” he muttered. “I’m not safe right now.”

“Coward,” she called softly, but she kept paddling.

He watched, though, as she stroked the sunblock onto his back and shoulders in that crisp, no-nonsense way she had. Patrick stood docilely, only the occasional twitch of his hands or jerk of his chin letting on that he was impatient for this part to be over, and all Whiskey could think of was the way he’d literally lit up inside when the woman on the other end of the line had told him that they could certainly hold the yoga instructor job until the end of August.

He’d turned to Whiskey with those big, blue, Bambi eyes shiny with gratitude and said, “Yay! Somebody wants me!” before flashing a winsome smile and handing Whiskey the phone. Patrick ran downstairs to tell Fly Bait, (who, to her credit, hadn’t asked why in the hell she should care) leaving Whiskey floored by an incontrovertible realization.

“I want you,” he said, surprised at himself. “I really, really do.”

T
HAT
night, after watching a movie on Fly Bait’s laptop (definitely a communal experience since they had to huddle together like cavemen over a fire to see the screen), they executed the complicated industrial origami that produced the fold-out bed out of the kitchen table, both of them gasping a little as the dust rose from the cushions. Whiskey grabbed his rolled-up sleeping bag from his berth, and they straightened it out for Patrick to sleep on.

Patrick looked at it soberly and nodded. “You’ll probably be
so
relieved to get rid of me,” he said in all seriousness, and Whiskey shrugged.

“Hard to sleep two people in such a small space.” And then he walked to his berth and proceeded to roll around for half an hour, obsessing about the completely trusting, limp way Patrick had slept next to him for two nights in a row.

He woke up an hour later, fighting his way clear of a dream about being a super-ball bouncing off the walls of the berth while making a particular dry, rasping sound with every bounce. When he’d come to his senses and realized that he was
not
a super-ball, it hit him.

Patrick had been sneezing for an hour and a half.

Fuck.

He stood up in his boxers and stalked to the kitchen. “Get up,” he snapped.

Patrick stood up and looked up at him, his eyes watering too hard to object.

“My room.”

And that was all it took. Patrick followed him, his feet making little padding sounds on the kitchen linoleum, and then slid into bed in front of Whiskey.

“I’b sowwy,” he mumbled, and Whiskey sighed. He put his warm hand on Patrick’s cool, pale arm and smoothed it down, just once, because that was how you soothed a rabbit or a squirrel or a feral cat, wasn’t it?

“I’m relieved,” Whiskey told him honestly. “I can keep an eye on you this way.”

“I cab take cawe ob byself,” Patrick mumbled.

“Of course you can. But I like to do it,” he admitted. “It’s wholly self-serving. You should hate me. I feel so smug and noble—it’s insufferable.”

Patrick giggled through his clearing congestion and jerked an elbow back into Whiskey’s solar plexus, and Whiskey made an
oolf
sound and then caved to his baser desires and wrapped an arm around Patrick’s middle.

“Remember,” he warned, “I might get a hard-on in the morning. Don’t take it personally.”

Patrick made a last little giggle and said, “I won’t, I swear.”

Whiskey listened to his congested breathing in the shadowed recess of the berth and thought that it was a good thing he wasn’t as transparent as Patrick, or he might have embarrassed the hell out of himself and made a move already.

Patrick
Bumping Into Things Fore and Aft

W
HEN
Patrick hadn’t been drugged the night before, or spent his night sleepwalking or shivering on the deck of a boat that semi-terrified him, he tended to wake up like he’d been shot.

For about two and a half milliseconds, he thought,
There is a hard-on poking me in the lower back, and if I was smart, I’d reach back and grab it, just to hear Whiskey groan,
and then his basic Patrick-ness took over, and he sat straight up in the bed and said, “What should I cook for breakfast?”

“Oh, fuck.” Whiskey groaned, all right—he rolled over, buried his face in his pillow, and pulled the light blanket over his head. “What in the hell are you asking me?”

Patrick blinked and allowed his mouth to continue, since that was the part of him that seemed to wake up slightly after his morning wood and before the whole rest of his brain. “What should I cook for breakfast?”

“Fuck. Yoga, eggs, and your little brown pill, howzat?”

“Okay. When are you getting up?”

“Sometime between eggs and the little brown pill.”

“Excellent.” Impulsively, Patrick bent down and kissed Whiskey’s cheek, because that was what you did when you had a man in your bed and you were going off into the morning. Then he rooted through the drawer Whiskey had given him and pulled out some cargo shorts to go over his boxers and a clean T-shirt, this one baby blue. He actually liked Whiskey’s ribbed white tanks, twink-knot at the waist or not, but his shoulders were getting really red in the Sacramento summer sun, so the T-shirt was probably more prudent. Fly Bait had left him the sun block for his face, and he was grateful. He hadn’t wanted to complain, but his ears tended to blister if he wasn’t careful, and he obsessed a little about getting ear cancer and having them fall off.

It wasn’t your typical yoga outfit, but Patrick sort of liked the whole “living lean” thing that Whiskey and Fly Bait had going on in the boat. It was simple. Patrick’s brain got cluttered with too much, too many, too bright, too loud, too frantic. Simple clothes, a simple day, simple amusements—Patrick was starting to see the appeal. Even at home, where he’d had his choice of a thousand different video games/parties/movies/trips/diversions, the things he’d really enjoyed had been quiet, clean, and spare. A book in a silent room—that had made him very happy sometimes. Of course, life couldn’t always be that way, and when the noise started, Patrick was like a ping-pong ball paddled by noise and light, and that had been fun too.

But he enjoyed being a ping-pong ball at rest, a ferret in a pocket, or a rabbit in its warren. It was quiet here, and peaceful, and he didn’t think he needed the $100 yoga pants to make that work.

When he was halfway done with his yoga, he conceded that on this particular morning, they would have been a hell of a lot more comfortable.

Normally the cargo shorts would have been fine—they were falling off his hips, and he had room. But yoga was usually a time of concentration for him, and this morning it wasn’t working, and to make matters worse, the thing that he
was
concentrating on was giving him a rather spectacular boner.

God, Whiskey had felt good. He’d been all hard and strong and solid. He’d smelled of river and of the lemon-scented glycerin soap and, because it was still hot until nearly midnight, sweat. But the sweat had been good, human, earthy. Patrick had been with guys who smelled like cologne and hair gel, and in Cal’s case, of this weird, minty, acidic smell that always made Patrick think of hair-remover but wasn’t. Even the guy who worked at the restaurant—at the end of the day he
should
have just smelled like rancid grease and food, the way Patrick always felt like
he
did, but not Ricky. Ricky had smelled like vanilla and lavender. Patrick used to wonder how many boxes of fabric softener he went through in a month. But that was par for the course for Patrick’s experience. The men’s skin had tasted bitter and chemical, and their balls had been shaved or covered in hair conditioner, and… well, it wasn’t like Patrick was all that excited about sex anyway. The vaguely inhuman, plastic smell of his lovers had seemed appropriate, somehow. The smell of a ping-pong paddle, right out of the box, ready to bat Patrick in yet another direction.

But not Whiskey. Whiskey smelled warm and human, pliant and real. Patrick questioned why Whiskey seemed so devoted to the ideas of making Patrick comfortable and of making him feel welcome, especially when he didn’t seem to want sex or anything else that most people wanted from Patrick. Whiskey didn’t want Patrick’s starry-eyed devotion to make him feel better, he didn’t want Patrick’s money—although he didn’t seem to have much of his own—and he didn’t seem to want to use Patrick for slave labor, although Patrick would do that out of a general sense of trying to be a decent person.

And Whiskey held him when he slept, and told him to have eggs and his little brown pill, and didn’t scream at him or confuse him when Patrick felt like he was jumping out of his skin with the force of the violent pulse in his own neck.

He moved seamlessly from Downward Dog to Child’s Pose, and while he was stretched there, like a three-year-old who had fallen asleep on his knees and his face, he remembered that moment between sleeping and waking, when Whiskey had been pushed up against his bottom, and Patrick had suddenly
wanted,
with an incredible amount of force. He knew all the things that guys liked to do, and that guys liked
him
to do, and suddenly, tasting Whiskey’s cock or licking his balls or even, maybe, rimming him (and it was a good thing the guys Patrick had done this to had never seen the faces Patrick made when he was doing it, or they wouldn’t have ever wanted to sleep with Patrick again) didn’t seem like a chore or like getting his hair cut or his chest waxed or like the things Patrick did because he felt he
had
to do to keep a boyfriend. They seemed… wonderful. They seemed like a chance to get closer to Whiskey’s skin, to get inside that rather enigmatic exterior, and that thought alone made Patrick’s groin swell and ache.

“Fuck!” His equipment was swelling and aching in the confines of his cargo shorts, and—“Oh, fuck, ouch!”

He pushed himself to his hands and knees and was right there on all fours, shaking his junk out of his jockeys, when Fly Bait said behind him, “I’ve never seen
that
move!” and scared him so badly the hand supporting his stupid body slid on the stupid towel he’d laid out and he fell on his shoulder, because his other hand was trying to disentangled his stupid erection from his stupid underwear.

Fly Bait made a peculiar sound, and Patrick finished adjusting himself (because that really
was
a priority) and then croaked, “It’s advanced.”

And then that peculiar sound, sort of a “geerk-waaauuugghhh!” grew and repeated, and Patrick sat up on his knees, and she was shaking, red-faced, and holding her middle like she was about to throw up.

“Are you okay?” Patrick asked, and the sound just got louder.

Whiskey pulled himself up from the quarters to the deck, looking at Fly Bait in bemusement. “What in the hell?”

“I don’t know!” Patrick said, a little panicked. “She got here just in time to watch me pull my balls out of my shorts and she started making that noise! Is that normal?”

Fly Bait looked up at him, tears streaming down her face, and made that noise some more.

Whiskey had his hand over his mouth, but the eyes that met with Patrick’s eyes were bright and crinkled at the corners. “Uhm,” he said through his hand, “she’s, uhm, laughing.”