Clear Water

by Amy Lane

  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

  WHEN 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 close
r 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.”

  Patrick looked at her again, startled. “Are you sure?”

  Whiskey nodded. “Oh, yeah. I couldn’t possibly forget the last time I heard that sound.”

  Fly Bait stopped that unholy racket for a minute and looked at Whiskey with big eyes, and then she started breathing in, and in, and in, like a baby about to cry, and when she let loose, it was….

  “Oh God!” Patrick shouted, glad they were at the abandoned dock this morning instead of at the big quay with the other docked boats. This was the sort of sound that would bring people in droves to see what in the hell was going on. “That’s even louder! What in the fuck did I do?”

  Whiskey kept his hand over his mouth and shook his head. “Uhm, well, it usually has something to do with a guy and his balls.”

  “Geeeeeeeeeeeeerrrkkkkkkk-wwwwwaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuggggggghhhhhhhhh!”

  “How do we make her stop?!” Oh, Jesus! Patrick was ready to cry!

  “We don’t.” Whiskey took his hand away from his mouth, and Fly Bait kept her hands around her middle and kept up that glass-cracking caterwauling without stopping. “Come on down, Patrick. Let’s have some breakfast and let her work her way out.”

  Down in the boat it was cool, and the smell of eggs and garlic salt made it feel homey.

  “Sit down and eat,” Whiskey said. “We’re going to leave Fly Bait here to do telemetry, and you’re going to come out with me into the field.”

  Patrick sat down and dished some scrambled eggs onto a piece of toast and nodded. “But aren’t I supposed to be working on the boat?”

  “Kid, we’ve got two months. You’ll have time. Right now, a third person would come in handy, and since we parked this thing right by the marsh we’re doing this next round of assessment in, I figured you’re it.”

  Patrick brightened—Fly Bait’s terrible laughter was still ringing through the boat, but this other thing sounded like it could be fun.

  “Really? I could come out and help you? That would be awesome.” Patrick took a big bite of eggs and then fished in his pocket for his little brown bottle of little brown pills. “Hey guys,” he murmured. “Didja miss me?”

  He threw one back with a big swallow of milk and took another bite of eggs, chewing quickly and swallowing with some joy. When he looked up, he realized that Whiskey was looking at him quizzically.

  “Wha’?” he asked, his mouth full of eggs. He swallowed abruptly and waited for an answer.

  Whiskey shook his head. “Uhm, what’s gonna be different about you?”

  “With the LBP?”

  “Yeah. What’s it do to you?”

  Patrick pretended to think. “Well, first I get hella horny, and then I start humping the furniture.”

  Whiskey threw a piece of toast at him, and Patrick grinned back. “Hilarious, asshole. I’ve had to deal with some pretty freaky people who take antipsychotics and shit. I just want to know, okay?”

  Patrick looked at him in surprise. “That sort of thing run big in hippie houseboat researchers?”

  Whiskey rolled his eyes. “I’ve got a doctorate, cuteness. High echelon scientists are very bright, and some of them are very antisocial, and some of them are very tightly wound. Not all of them, mind you, but high IQs come with their share of problems, ’kay? So just tell me what’s going to happen so I know!”

  He seemed pretty intense, and Patrick shrugged. “Nothing, really. I mellow out a little. It might look like I go all zombie mode sometimes, but that’s not what it feels like in my head.”

  Whiskey cocked his head. “What goes on in your head?”

  Oh. No one had ever asked him that before. He had to think about it for a minute and remembered the bed full of laundry laid out in perfect little rows.

  “You know how you get up in the morning and fish in your drawers and pull out wads of clothing and get dressed?”

  Whiskey’s eyebrows were as dark as his eyes and his thick, shoulder-length curling hair, and they made a graceful little arch when he was making his listening face. Patrick took it as a signal and went on.

  “Well, sometimes, when I had time and was organized, I used to do my laundry and fold my clothes on my bed and then put them away. It’s like that. When I don’t have the drugs, I’m all tangled. I’m jumping around and hitting my elbows and my knees on my brainpan when I’m fishing for my ideas. When I have the drugs, it’s like it’s all laid out in front of me and I can pick which shirt I want with which pants.” He stopped for a minute. “Which I sort of enjoyed, when I had clothes.” He smiled a little shyly at Whiskey, because he wanted him to know this. “I could actually make myself look pretty good, you know. When I had clothes and I could do my hair and shit. I’m only a fuckup in real life. In the mirror, I’m not bad.”

  Whiskey didn’t have that “I’m listening” face on anymore. He had his “Patrick just said something I don’t know how to respond to” expression now.

  He swallowed a couple of times and then looked down at his eggs. “You look real good,” he said, and his voice sounded funny. If he had tried, even once, to get into Patrick’s pants, Patrick would have thought Whiskey wanted him. As it was, Patrick was reasonably certain that he was a pain in the ass—a charity case that Whiskey and Fly Bait had adopted. Maybe they knew people like him, except crazy geniuses, and were feeling sympathy pangs or something. Patrick wasn’t sure why, really, these two people had decided to adopt him, but he’d spent his entire life not questioning why the help Shawn had hired put olives in the refrigerator one week and asparagus the next. He figured that if he didn’t track the basic small things that made his world run, then he should probably not question the big things either.

  “I’m okay,” Patrick said critically. “I’m small. I tried to bulk up, but I kept straining things, and then one of the gym people got me hooked on yoga.”

  Whiskey had that “I don’t know how to respond to this” expression on again. “Why did you want to bulk up?”

  Patrick blushed. “No reason.”

  “I could spot that blush from space.”

  He sighed. “Because I was tired of getting cheated on. I thought, you know, maybe if I had a better body, someone would want to stay with me.” Bigger sigh. “I got really good at yoga, and that’s when I met Cal.”

  Whiskey made a sound like a growl in his throat, and Patrick was surprised to find that his knee—which had been bumping Whiskey
’s knees under the tiny table throughout the entire conversation, was suddenly covered with a warm, calloused brown hand.

  “Patrick, man… man, I’ve been listening to you for three days. And I don’t mean to tell you how to live but….” That hand squeezed, and Patrick almost shuddered. God, all those guys who just fucked him and then fucked around on him, and that hand on his knee… it offered so much more than a simple touch in a sensitive place. It was just… just….

  Just solid. That was all. Solid. Like a big fat housecat. Whiskey’s hand felt comforting and warm and real, and Patrick felt a floating sensation, a sinking down, similar to the sinking into his meds sensation that he’d been waiting for, but this one was more flesh and less fiction. This was like sinking into a really firm mattress. He was afraid if he made too big a thing out of it, it would go away.

  “But what?” Patrick asked through a dry throat.

  “But stop… stop pimping yourself out to guys who don’t deserve you. You’re fine. You really are. There’s nothing wrong with Patrick. Patrick is a—”

  “Spaz.” Patrick stood up abruptly after finishing the sentence. He didn’t want Whiskey’s pity. He gathered the dishes and took them to the sink, leaving a nice plate for Fly Bait and a healthy funk of silence at his back.

  Whiskey’s hands on his shoulders were such a surprise that he dropped a dish in the sink with a clatter, and when Whiskey’s lips touched his ear, he dropped everything else.

  “Patrick is a good guy,” he said quietly, right in Patrick’s tickle zone, but Patrick wasn’t laughing. “Patrick has more of his shit together than he thinks. Patrick is funny and smart, and if I met Patrick in a bar, I’d chat him up in a hot second.”

  “Patrick’s a loser who picked the world’s nicest guy to almost drown in front of,” Patrick muttered. Whiskey’s hands felt so nice on his shoulders, and he was standing so close. “And I’m tired of talking about myself in the third person.” He jerked away because all he wanted to do was lean back. “What do I need to pack?”