by A. J. Thomas
“Sex. It started with sex, and it consisted of sex.”
“Okay, when did you start sleeping together?”
“About three weeks after I came aboard the first summer.”
“When you were… nineteen? Sophomore year, right?”
“That’s right. I knew he was married—hell, he keeps a picture of his wife and kids above his bunk—but things just sort of happened.”
“How did things ‘just sort of happen’?”
“I was sitting out on deck one night after my rotation was done, and he handed me a beer. We stayed up talking for a few hours, mostly about the company and work. Then he kissed me and told me I was welcome to join him belowdecks if I was ever bored.” Sean ran his hands through his hair and laughed nervously. “I was nineteen and horny. He was offering, so I accepted. We agreed it was strictly an after-hours thing and we’d stay professional. That first summer, we did. We had sex, I went back to my bunk, we went back to work eight hours later. When we pulled into port, he’d meet his wife Julia at the docks, twirl her around, hug his kids, and leave. Every other port we pulled into, we’d go out together. Sometimes we’d get dinner with Cory and the guys, sometimes we’d get drinks and go to a hotel. It was always fun.”
“And you went back the next summer?”
“I applied with CPG again, yes. The money was good, and I can’t say I was disappointed to be assigned to the Republic Sea again. We picked up right where we left off, except I stayed in his bunk more often than not. At the end of the summer, Bruce told me he’d pull some strings and get me a full-time position right after graduation. I couldn’t believe the salary they offered, the benefit package—it was all insane. And it was such a relief to think I’d never have to worry about mooching off of somebody else or begging for change in the park again. I wanted to keep what we had going too. Even knowing I’d always have to share him with his wife and family wasn’t so bad, because we’d be out for weeks at a time, home for a few days, and then go back out.”
“So your relationship with Bruce resumed when you got back to the ship?”
“He didn’t even bother assigning me a separate cabin,” Sean admitted. “I guess I had started to care about him, and I thought he cared about me. Then I got hurt, and it ended.”
“It just ended?”
“Uh, duh. Two months in the hospital, a permanent disability, and skin that looks like a knife-wielding maniac decided to play tic-tac-toe in my flesh…. We were done.”
“Have you seen him before today? Since the accident, I mean?”
“No.”
“Have you talked to him? Did he call and check on you?”
“No.”
Nate made a mental note of that and felt himself getting pissed at Bruce Lancaster all over again. Sean was describing something consensual, but what kind of bastard could watch their lover get ripped apart and then not even call to see how he was doing?
“What did he say to you this afternoon by the elevator?”
“That no one can find out, because it’ll ruin his marriage and his career. I don’t know who he thinks we were fooling, because the whole crew knew. You can’t keep something like that a secret when you’re sharing the same living space with seven to nine other people. But he’s scared the truth will come out because of this case and that it’ll get back to his wife.”
“It doesn’t have to,” Nate said. “But I assure you, Gilman and the rest at CPG already know. And… I might have let the cat out of the bag with Harrison and Poole.”
“You ‘might have’?”
Nate’s mischievous smile grew bigger. “Okay, ‘might have’ is a little inaccurate. More like definitely and explicitly let the cat out of the bag.”
“How’d you know, anyway?”
“You said yourself you can’t keep something like that quiet on a small ship,” he pointed out. “The entire crew knew, and they were more than willing to testify about it in their depositions. The only one who didn’t bring it up was Lancaster himself.”
Sean cocked his head to the side and considered him.
“What?”
“You don’t care?”
“That Lancaster is a bastard who’ll cheat on his wife with a barely legal college intern he’s completely responsible for? I do care, actually, but you didn’t hire me to pursue a sexual harassment claim.”
Sean dropped his head back, trembling as he swallowed a laugh. “You make me sound so innocent in the whole mess, which I promise you is bullshit. I meant the gay part,” he managed when he could finally talk without laughing.
His own sexuality had nothing to do with this case, nothing to do with his representation of Sean at all, but it couldn’t hurt to build a bit of rapport. “You know, I was going to say it’d be a bit hypocritical of me, but I’ve met my share of closet cases who play the ‘homophobic asshole’ card like they were born to it. Not that it’d affect my ability to represent you one way or the other, but I’m out and proud.”
Sean’s mouth dropped open, his laughter fading as he seemed to look at Nate a little closer.
“Of course I’ve spent so much of the last two years working that I haven’t had a chance to meet many people,” Nate continued, trying to convince himself that letting Sean know he was available was also part of building rapport.
“I know how that goes,” Sean agreed.
“Thank you for telling me about him, though. I think it goes without saying, but if he tries to contact you again, you need to refuse to see him. He was there on the company’s behalf, not yours.”
“He won’t bother, anyway,” Sean said. For half a second, his expression was unguarded, and the sheer misery in his eyes hurt to look at. “Besides, he doesn’t know where I live, and I’m back on Hawk’s cell plan, so my number’s changed.”
“You weren’t even honest with him about where you live?”
Sean laughed again, but this time the sound was callous and filled with disdain. “Hell, no. You might think your devotion to this whole honesty thing is admirable, but all it’s really doing is proving that you’ve lived a very privileged life.”
“I’m not denying that. I know I’ve had things easier than most people, but I’ve met folks from every walk of life who were open and honest. It’s not a class thing.”
“It’s absolutely a class thing,” Sean argued. “How do you think someone feels when they fill out a job application and they’ve got nothing to put in the ‘home address’ slot? When I was a kid, we spent entire days in the library because my mom would put the number of the pay phone in the lobby down on job applications as her contact number. When people found out the truth, they never went out of their way to help her—they decided she was a thief or a whore and found excuses to fire her.”
“But you’re not homeless, your home is just unconventional. You’re an engineer. You graduated at the top of your class. CPG wouldn’t have fired you just because of where you came from.”
Sean sneered. “Fire me? They never would have brought me back for a second internship, much less offered me a job.”
Nate shook his head, not so much to deny the truth of what Sean was saying, but because it wasn’t right. “I know I can’t say you’re wrong, but it….”
“Sucks?”
“Yes, it does.”
After they finished eating, they wandered around Market Square talking. In the afternoon heat, most people had scrambled to get into a climate-controlled building as quickly as possible, so it somehow felt more intimate than a simple walk. The conversation shifted to politics, then to music, and finally to the sketchbook Nate had been trying damn hard not to think about.
“Do you have other tattoos that are the same style as that sea shell?” he asked, remembering the nautilus once again.
“I don’t have anything that’s like this. I’ve got my snake here,” Sean said, extending his right arm, where a classic green snake was wrapped around his bicep, elbow, and forearm. “Then I’ve got two skulls and a scythe on my back
that Hawk insisted I earned. Whatever I end up deciding on, I want it to be big, so I’ll have to tweak it to cover up the skulls.”
“You ‘earned’ skulls?”
“Each one represents a moment of stupidity,” Sean explained, leaning forward and shifting his collar so Nate could see.
He wanted to see them, whether it was appropriate or not, so he peered down Sean’s shirt at the white, gray, silver, and black colors decorating his skin. One laughing skull was poised on each of his shoulder blades, the scythe arching between them. The warm skin around the tattoos commanded his attention as much as the ink itself, and he was stunned by how badly he wanted to run his fingers over each line and spot of contrast. His hand seemed to move of its own accord, reaching toward the bare flesh on the back of Sean’s neck before he forced himself to behave. “Stupidity?” he asked, hoping Sean hadn’t noticed his reaction.
Sean pulled out his cell phone and swiped through dozens of pictures before passing the phone to him. The picture was just a guy’s abdomen above the line of his pubic hair, where the words Choking Hazard had been inked in a dark Gothic script. “Is this you?” Nate couldn’t resist asking.
“No. I was stupid, but not that stupid. Hawk inked that, after nearly two hours of trying to talk the guy out of it. I was still learning the basics at the time, and Hawk had me photograph every tattoo we did. I showed it to the guy’s girlfriend, and I mentioned that I thought they only put that label on packages that contain small parts.”
It took a few seconds for Nate to catch his breath once he stopped laughing. “I take it he was offended?”
“That’s putting it lightly. I ended up with a cracked cheekbone and a bruise the size of a softball, Hawk ended up deciding to keep a crowbar under the counter, and ‘Choking Hazard’ got added to the official list of shit we won’t do.”
“You’ve got a list?”
“Every studio has a list. Ours is a little bigger than most, and it’s almost all my fault.”
Nate leaned closer. “What else is on it?” he asked, because it was hard to resist.
“Gang symbols, racist stuff, swastikas… that kind of thing.”
“Why would someone want a swastika tattoo?”
“Because people like to advertise the fact that they’re complete dicks? I don’t know. But saying no to one was how I earned skull number two. Some big guy Hawk met at a biker bar wanted one on his neck, so I told him to get the fuck out.”
“Did you end up with bruises to show for that one?”
“Not that time. I wasn’t fifteen anymore, and I knew where Hawk kept the crowbar,” Sean said with a sly grin. “Thankfully, I wasn’t quite eighteen yet, otherwise I’d probably have been charged with assault.”
“I’d have figured you’d be fixing to get a new skull after the oil rig.”
“Nope. That was… it’s not something I want to remember. With the right design, I can cover the skulls up if I’ve got to. I just haven’t quite managed to figure out what’ll work yet.”
“Not the nautilus shell?”
“I can’t believe you know what they are,” Sean said, running his fingers along the side of the page.
“I was a spoiled kid,” Nate admitted. “We had a summer house in Galveston, and my mom bought a membership to the Moody Gardens aquarium every year.”
“The big pyramid thing?”
“Yeah. We’d go all the time.”
“Huh. I’ve never actually seen a nautilus except in pictures,” Sean said, staring at the almost photo-perfect drawing. “There’s a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes called ‘The Chambered Nautilus.’ The minister who kept bugging me in the hospital brought me a copy when I told him I wasn’t interested in hearing about God’s plan. It’s… sad. Kind of. It’s about moving on from one part of your life to the next, building the life you want, and eventually making it into heaven.”
“I’ve never read it,” Nate said, wishing he had. “It sounds inspiring, though.” Like a fortune cookie, it was the type of universal theme that people tended to see reflected in their own lives. Nate could so easily see a correlation with the changes in his career, and maybe in his life.
Sean closed his eyes and nodded. “It’s a good fit, but I’m…. I can’t seem to look at this without thinking about the end, about embracing death instead of moving on with life, and I’m not ready to do that yet.” The silence hung between them for a long moment before Sean opened his eyes and grinned. “Which sucks, because I love this design. We’ve started playing with some ultraviolet ink that glows under a black light, and I thought I could use the red to highlight the lines on the shell. It would look so damn cool.”
Nate shoved his hands into his pockets, considering the safest way to respond. “You mentioned the ink in the hospital. It didn’t sound like Hawk was too keen on the idea.”
“Uh….” Sean’s mouth hung open. “Shit.”
“You don’t remember?” he asked.
“There were a lot of drugs,” Sean admitted, his cheeks coloring. “The only thing I remember about ink is Hawk getting phosphorus and sucralose mixed up, and for some reason thinking that was funny as hell.”
“That was probably it,” Nate admitted. “Would the bright red cover the whole thing?”
“I’d just do it along the line work and a bit of the shading. The goal is to make something that looks awesome in mixed light, under a black light, or just outside. But something less depressing, for me.”
“The design is amazing, but if it will make you feel worse rather than better….” The thought of seeing the swirling red, white, and silver shell on Sean’s back made him squirm, both because he was picturing his client half-naked and because he couldn’t imagine Sean’s expression would reflect anything beyond the hopelessness Nate saw in his eyes now. “You should think about an octopus instead.”
“Huh?”
“You should consider an octopus. With the tentacles, it could be however big you want, and it could be positioned however you want. Plus, it’d be perfect.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because an octopus keeps going after it loses a limb. For most animals, losing a limb is akin to a death sentence. But the octopus manages just fine.”
“Don’t their limbs grow back?” Sean asked.
“Technically, yes, but it takes a long time. They make do without them because they’re one of the smartest things in the ocean.”
Sean looked incredulous. “Plus they’ve got seven more limbs.”
“Yes. But they’re brilliant, just like you. No one really thinks it to look at them, but they are ridiculously smart compared to everything else around them.”
Sean kept staring.
“It’s just a suggestion,” Nate added quickly.
Sean fumbled with his phone as a familiar base guitar and a chanted chorus came from his lap.
“Your ring tone is Metallica’s ‘Master of Puppets’?”
Sean nodded enthusiastically. “It’s the ringtone I set for Hawk,” he explained before answering. “He gets a kick out of it.”
Nate tried not to listen in, but he got the distinct impression he’d kept Sean later than expected. He glanced at his watch, surprised that it was nearly six o’clock. It had been after two when they walked out of Harrison and Poole’s office. He wasn’t quite sure how they’d spent four hours talking, but the time had vanished somewhere.
“Everything okay?” he asked after Sean hung up.
“Yeah. Hawk’s closing up early to go to an AA meeting. He wanted to make sure I had my keys and to tell me there’s food in the fridge.”
“I didn’t realize how late it was getting. Back to the shop?”
Chapter 4
SEAN SLOWED down half a block away from his Jeep, almost rolling to a dead stop. Bruce was leaning against the passenger door, his arms folded across his chest.
“What’s up?” Nate asked, glancing down at him and then following his gaze. “Oh. If you want, we can double back a block. I can
get your car and then drive around and pick you up.”
Sean couldn’t help but smile. The last thing he’d expected to find in Nate Delany was an understanding ally, but he was grateful. “It’s fine,” he lied.
“You sure?”
Sean glared at him.
“Okay, fine. But I really do need to stick with you, if nothing else so he remembers to be polite.”
“Yeah, okay.” Learning that Bruce was officially blaming him for the accident, when he knew about the forged maintenance records, had hurt more than he’d ever admit out loud. Seeing him at that conference table had made Sean realize just how transparent his feelings had probably been. Bruce knew Sean was crazy about him—he knew there’d been a time when Sean might have done anything he’d asked. He’d had no delusions about Bruce ever returning his feelings, but even after the accident, Sean had trusted him.
But he’d thrown that trust back in Sean’s face when he’d tried to use their relationship to manipulate him, and he’d made it painfully clear that he valued his position at CPG more than Sean’s life.
As he was trying to figure out what the hell to say to him, Bruce saw them both. It was impossible to read his expression. Sean took a deep breath and forced himself to smile, confident that so long as he stayed angry, everything would be okay.
“Took your sweet time,” Bruce said, approaching them. “Can we talk? Just you and me?”
Sean steered around him, heading for the Jeep. He couldn’t possibly get into the car with anything like the urgency he felt, but he still rushed. “No. I don’t think we’ve got anything to talk about.”
“I wanted to see you,” Bruce said, moving to stand between Sean and the door. “I know I should have figured out a way months ago, while you were still in the hospital.”
“I’m sure you were busy,” Sean said automatically, trying to move past him.
“We were all told if we talked to you without a company lawyer in the room, we’d be fired.”