Clear Water

by Amy Lane

  “Three weeks isn’t a really long time,” Patrick mumbled, but his body was making a liar out of him with every smooth stroke along his shoulders. “I mean, I’m barely through my bottle of pills—”

  That hand stopped and moved away. “How many do you have left?”

  “Five. I was going to ask you if I could call in the prescription, but then I have to go in and fetch it myself, because there’s this whole big thing because everybody wants to just hype the fuck up on Ritalin, and they’re sort of a controlled substance, you know?”

  Patrick pulled up to his knees and then turned around and sat on his bottom, pulling one leg up to his chest. He looked at Whiskey earnestly, and Whiskey nodded in that way he had—the one that said he was surprised but not shocked and that he could deal with that.

  “No worries. Maybe we can do that this weekend, since Fly Bait is going to be gone. We’ll call it in, then go into town and pick it up. Maybe have dinner at a place that requires shoes or see a movie or something.”

  Patrick flushed. “Like a date?”

  Whiskey smiled a little and nodded. “Yeah. Sort of exactly like a date. And then we’ll come back here in the dark, and maybe, you’ll let me kiss you again. But this time, I won’t be seriously fucking pissed off, and it’ll be gentle. And sweet. And maybe you’ll kiss me back.”

  Patrick looked at him, feeling like his eyes were growing wider with every word. “What if I don’t? Can’t? Am really bad at it?”

  Whiskey raised a hand and cupped Patrick’s cheek. Patrick leaned into the touch and gave a little wiggle of happiness when a tanned, bony thumb stroked his cheekbone. “How about you just let me kiss you, and we see what happens next. Like I said, Patrick, I like the way you look at me. Like I’m a good guy. That’s important to me. Do you really think I’m going to do anything to fuck that up?”

  Patrick rested his chin on his knee. “It’s that important to you?”

  “It’s more important than frogs, even.”

  Patrick glanced behind him to where Cal and Catherine and Courtney and Christopher and Conrad and Chastity all sat in their tub and breathed.

  “God, I hope it’s at least more interesting!” he commented sourly, and was relieved when Whiskey’s eyes crinkled at the corners.

  “Hell yeah.” Whiskey leaned forward then, and Patrick closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see the inevitable and was surprised when their lips just brushed, barely brushed, and Patrick whimpered and opened his eyes.

  “So, Patrick. Do you trust me to go out on a date with me? I promise, baby—I won’t do you wrong.”

  Patrick nodded, and then Whiskey went the final distance, pressing his lips against Patrick’s, and Patrick opened his mouth and let him in. And he tasted wonderful, and his tongue swept in and tangled around, and Patrick just wanted to swallow him whole.

  Whiskey backed up a little and grinned. “Do you want to help me with the science stuff?” he asked, and Patrick blinked and tried to control his heart rate, which was skyrocketing.

  “I was gonna… you know, the carpet? It’s tacky. It really sucks. I was gonna rip that out, you think?”

  Whiskey shook his head and crinkled his eyes. “Come help me do science shit. It’ll be fun working together. We can start the carpet next week, okay?”

  God, it really was fun working with Whiskey. No yelling, no disapproval, just lots of “Thank you, Patrick” and “You’re right, Patrick—I didn’t see that!” All the shit that made Patrick feel good, and being not stupid and able to help Whiskey with something useful—that was what turned Patrick on.

  Patrick nodded, close to him, smelling Whiskey and river and sweat. “Maybe we can go swimming afterward,” he said hopefully, but Whiskey shook his head and rolled his eyes.

  “Swimming? Are you kidding? We’re going to take showers and put on shirts and jeans without holes and, you know, dress up like guys going out on a date. We can swim at night, if you like.”

  “Here?” He didn’t even know if the houseboat could go out at night.

  “We’ll take it out after we get back. It’ll be nice, Patrick.” Whiskey’s mouth pulled up at the side. “Almost romantic, even. You game?”

  God, yes. Yes. I’m game for anything you suggest. I’m pudding with a boner, but even worse, I’m stupid pudding with a boner, because I know how many ways this can go south and I know how bad a lover can make you feel and still, all I want is you.

  “Yeah,” he said blithely. Because after all, what was one more failed relationship if this didn’t pan out? “I’m game.”

  Whiskey smiled, and Patrick’s heart did a complete barrel roll, and half of it was panic.

  What was one more failed relationship? Oh, fuck. Who was he kidding? This wasn’t “one more failed relationship.” This was the relationship, the one that, if it failed, would make him pretty sure he’d fucked everything up beyond repair. He had to ask—he just had to.

  “Whiskey, do you really think I’m not a fuckup?”

  Whiskey swallowed and placed a little butterfly kiss over Patrick’s eyebrow, and Patrick closed his eye and let him.

  “I’d bet my life on it, why?”

  “Because this is really fucking important, and I really don’t want to fuck this up.”

  Whiskey nuzzled next to his ear, and Patrick got to smell his hair—it smelled like sun and river, and Patrick could get lost in the thick, coarse curliness of it all.

  “Patrick, making love isn’t like driving a car or running a test or doing the dishes,” Whiskey said, pulling back a little. “It’s like… like a conversation. You can’t fuck up a good conversation. Even if you say something just dumbass stupid, the other person will forgive you, and you’ll keep talking. Trust me. Conversating is one of your specialties.”

  Patrick felt a smile and the first stirrings of confidence. “Really? Because I can talk, can’t I?”

  Whiskey’s smile was a little bit crooked, but still good. “Like stopping was a crime,” he confirmed.

  Patrick smiled at him all moon-eyed for a minute, and then Whiskey kissed him briefly on the mouth and pulled away. He stood up and offered Patrick a hand.

  “Come on—let’s get this data crunched, and that way, when Loretta comes to get Fly Bait, we can just get ready and have ourselves a weekend, what do you say?”

  Patrick nodded happily and took his hand, only to find himself hauled up into Whiskey’s arms. This time, he hugged back and laid his head on Whiskey’s shoulder and everything.

  It was sublime—a thousand times better than sex had ever been. He thought that maybe if having sex got him more hugs like this, it would be worth it, even if that whole “sex with me will be better!” thing didn’t pan out, and then Whiskey pulled back and lowered his head for a kiss and all thoughts ceased for a moment, even when the neighbors in the next boat got out of their boat and stared at them like they were two-headed frogs.

  FLY BAIT came back with his gigantic Oreo shake and a hamburger with mushrooms and cheese on it, just like he liked ’em, and handed him his food without comment. Patrick took it from her and then watched as she scurried into her own room, and looked at Whiskey unhappily.

  “Did I totally offend her?”

  Whiskey looked up and then looked in the direction Fly Bait had just vanished. She’d brought him a chicken sandwich, and he bit off some, chewed, and swallowed before he answered.

  “Probably not,” he said, wiping his mouth on his shoulder. “She just tries to make it a policy to keep her distance—I think she’s just discovered that she gives a shit about you, and that scares her.”

  Patrick raised his eyebrows. “Hunh. Who knew?” Then he raised his voice and pitched it so she could hear it through the door. “I like you too, Fly Bait!”

  “Fuck you, Patrick!”

  Patrick actually heard it then—the affection Whiskey had talked about but that Patrick had thought was a myth. He smiled, took a big drink of his shake, and went back to recording Whiskey’s numbers, thinking
happily of Oreos and vanilla ice cream in every bite.

  Around four o’clock, Fly bait came out of her room looking very un-Fly Bait.

  Whiskey let out a low whistle. “Verra nice!” he purred. “Verra, verra naheece!”

  Fly Bait heard his praise and flushed. Patrick hadn’t noticed it, but she must have gotten her bird’s nest of hair trimmed when she’d gone to town, because it was cut and layered neatly around her thin, small face. She’d put on a little bit of make-up—enough to bring attention away from her freckles and put it where it belonged, on her wide hazel eyes. And she wasn’t wearing a tank top and cut-offs, either.

  “Omigod!” Patrick gasped. “That’s a dress. A summer dress. It’s pretty.” It was too. It was green with an off-white batik sort of pattern, and it wrapped tightly around Fly Bait’s thin body, making her not thin exactly, but more slender and willowy. She had something on her lips that made them shine softly—no color, but shiny and soft and not as grim and compressed as Patrick and Whiskey were used to.

  “Fly Bait!” Patrick said in awe. “You’re beautiful. And that’s saying something—I don’t usually notice things with tits.”

  Fly Bait looked down at her chest and blushed. “Then you should have noticed me. They’re not exactly out for show.”

  Whiskey was over at her side in two seconds, engulfing her in a really big, really comfortable hug. She batted at him with her hands ineffectually but finally gave in. Patrick thought that maybe he wasn’t the only one who had problems with people being nice to them, and that made him feel strangely better.

  “You look really beautiful, Freya,” Whiskey said softly, and Patrick was a little bit horrified to see her eyes get really bright.

  “Thanks, Wes.”

  At that moment (Thank God!), to keep the things from getting maudlin or anything really terrifying, there was the sound of footsteps on the deck of the boat and a call down into the quarters.

  “Hullo! Hullo! Freya, is that you?”

  “Down here, Letty!” Fly Bait called, and what walked down the stairs (confident, in spite of high heels) was possibly the last thing Patrick expected.

  Fly Bait looked damned pretty all dressed up as a girl. This girl was… well, beautiful, and she didn’t just dress like a girl—she was woman, from the top of her cascading waist-length blonde ponytail with the little wrap of hair that went around it at the base to the ends of her brightly painted sparkly pink toenails. Even Patrick, who had never really looked at a woman in his life, was stunned and a little bit besotted by the complete package of beauty gliding down their little set of crappy stairs like a brick shithouse on fuck-me stilts.

  Fly Bait’s reaction was unprecedented. “Letty!” She launched her tiny, fly-weight body at her girlfriend with not quite enough force to knock her on her ass, and “Letty” embraced her so tenderly it hurt to watch. Patrick met Whiskey’s eyes instead, and the two of them shared a moment of extreme discomfort while Fly Bait and the woman of her dreams shared a kiss that literally raised the air temperature inside the houseboat five degrees.

  And it went on. And on. And on.

  Whiskey locked eyes with Patrick the entire time, and as Patrick blushed, Whiskey’s look became more and more… devilish. Patrick blushed more when he realized that the kiss—complete with wandering hands and sweet murmurings of “I missed you… oh, God, I missed you!”—was probably giving him ideas.

  Patrick wasn’t ready for him to have ideas. He cleared his throat loudly and clumsily, and the two lovebirds finally came up for breath.

  “I’m sorry,” Loretta apologized, her voice deeper than it had been when she’d come down. Her lipstick was a mess, and her hair was falling from its carefully pretty ’do, and Patrick was embarrassed to be in the same room with her.

  “So nice to meet you,” Patrick said, taking a few steps forward and extending a hand.

  Loretta smiled, both bemused and kind, and stepped forward (Fly Bait tucked under her arm) and shook his hand back. “Nice to meet you too! You must be Patrick.”

  Patrick grinned. “Yeah. I’m Patrick. I’m sort of the stray they couldn’t get rid of.”

  Loretta shook her head and winked at Whiskey, who winked back. “That’s not what I heard. I heard they’ve been abusing you like an undergrad and working you like a galley slave—and I should know. I was their last lab rat—that was a fun summer!”

  Whiskey shook his head. “Second-to-last lab rat—we had some poor—”

  “Asshole,” Fly Bait snorted. “He was stupid, and he was an asshole. Dumbest fucker I’ve ever worked with. Patrick is an improvement. I refuse to even remember the last asshole’s name.”

  Patrick rolled his eyes. “He couldn’t have been that bad,” he muttered. “If he had been, I would have dated him.”

  Loretta had a deep, throaty laugh, the kind that almost sounded like a man’s, but it lilted like a woman’s. God, Patrick thought that if he were a woman, he would have hated her on general jealousy alone, but as a gay man, he was just… charmed.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re working out, then.” She smiled and moved toward Whiskey, who gave her the same kind of hug he’d just given Fly Bait, and then whispered something in his ear.

  Patrick found himself glaring. Unlike Whiskey’s hug with Fly Bait, there was an edge to this hug… a sizzle, an attraction, and he might have done something stupid, like growl, but Fly Bait touched his arm and whispered, “Don’t worry—we were stuck in a boat off the coast of Florida for three months. I’m the one who caved and bedded her first. Nothing’s gonna happen with them, okay?”

  “Yeah.” Patrick nodded and then watched as the two of them laughed and smiled and continued to touch, and realized that Fly Bait trusted Whiskey. She’d known him for seventeen years—that was a hella long time, and if she trusted him, maybe Patrick could too.

  None of them were big on niceties, and within minutes, Loretta and Fly Bait were on their way to town in Loretta’s rental car, and Patrick and Whiskey were back down in the quarters, looking at each other like one half of a two-headed frog looked at the other.

  “I…,” Patrick started, and then flushed. “I… uhm… do you want to use the bathroom first, or should I?”

  Whiskey smiled. “How about you first, okay? Then you won’t feel rushed.”

  Patrick shook his head and nodded, then started forward and knocked his knee on the table, then fell back and ran into the equipment that he’d managed to leave unmolested for nearly two weeks.

  Whiskey waited for him to stop rattling around like a pinball on a curio shelf and then nodded his head and said, “How about you first, okay? Then you won’t feel rushed.”

  Patrick swallowed. “Just because you repeat it doesn’t make me less freaked out.”

  “I know, but I thought we could ignore the first try and do it again.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll go shower first. Do you think Fly Bait has any hair gel? My hair curls like a yeti’s pubes in this humidity—I’m starting to figure out why product was invented!”

  Whiskey shrugged and said he’d look in her room, and Patrick managed to make it to their berth for some clothes and then to the bathroom without falling over and impaling himself on a carpet tack or anything dire. He only smacked the counter twice when he was getting ready. He used Whiskey’s razor for maybe the fifth time since he’d arrived on the boat, and he didn’t nick himself while shaving the seven strands of his beard hair, either. Whiskey had come through with the hair gel, and Patrick was pleased to see that with a little gel and a little combing, he looked a little more like the pretty boy who used to get picked up in clubs and a little less like the hard-working (happy!) grunt that Whiskey had known for the last four weeks.

  It wasn’t that he wanted to be that other person again, but he surely did want for Whiskey to think he was pretty.

  He came out of the bathroom and Whiskey looked at him and said, “Wow!” so softly, and with so much oomph, that Patrick had no choice but to believe him.

>   Patrick blushed and looked away. “I, uhm, left some hot water.”

  “Thanks—I’ll use that!” And then Whiskey disappeared to do his own thing. Patrick wondered if he was going to spend nearly as much time soaping his privates and then rinsing them and then getting the inside places too to make sure everything was all squeaky clean and not stinky or gross as Patrick had just done. Trust, Patrick thought, shifting uncomfortably in his newly scrubbed skin. He trusted that those places were going to come under some heavy-duty scrutiny and not just be squashed, prodded, and probed. He wanted to make sure they were nice for the visit.

  He couldn’t take too much of those thoughts before he absolutely had to go up top to get some air. He stopped and said “hi!” to the frogs for a minute, enjoying the placid way their chests just kept moving in and out, the extra sets of limbs flopping uselessly. Unlike Patrick, for whom things might be changing drastically, nothing at all really changed for Cal and Catherine.

  “Hey, guys,” Patrick murmured. “So, do you guys ever get nervous about sex? Probably not. For all we know, you’re just constantly locked together—that’s why you don’t move. You’ve been fucking nonstop since birth, and you just don’t want to break the streak.”

  Catherine stuck out a long, sticky tongue and licked her eyeball.

  “Yeah,” Patrick agreed. “You guys probably got it all figured out. You start out fucking, you don’t break the streak, and everything else just falls by the wayside. And besides—you’re totally banging another freak of nature. No one’s going to say, ‘Hey! You! The frogs who’ve been fucking since birth! You can’t do that! Catherine is way out of Cal’s league!’ You’re both pretty fucked up—there’s no contest.”

  Whiskey was clattering around below him after having taken what seemed like a really quick shower. “Yeah, well, I’m the freak, and he’s the one who was Prince Charming before the kiss—you guys tell me how it’s supposed to end, okay?”

  The frogs, all three (six) of them, did what they did best: breathed and ignored Patrick, and it didn’t look like he was getting any answers from them.