by P D Singer
“I’ll try not to make it harder for you.” The corners of Bobby’s eyes crinkled with his smile. “I like to push limits, but I shouldn’t push yours.”
“Appreciate that.” He blinked away the blur.
“Think there’s hope if we try again?”
He wasn’t leaking at the eyes, no, he wasn’t. It was the sea spray, had to be. They were men of the sea, and oh hell, he was crying and he couldn’t help it, but it was safe to cry in Bobby’s arms. Lee could no more hold back the tears than he could hold back the tide.
Bobby buried his face in Lee’s hair—he was shaking too. He’d been the one to walk away, but what had it cost him? How could Lee even begin to make amends for that kind of hurt?
Gradually he became aware of people walking by, making sympathetic noises in several languages. This memorial could be no stranger to tears.
However, this memorial had to be completely virgin to a couple of crazy Americans tearing their clothes off and going at each other while leaning against the tower, which was starting to feel like a really good idea. Lee wiped his arm across his face, enough to make a kiss feasible. So he did it, meeting Bobby’s lips with the longing he’d saved up over the past year. He barely avoided grinding his hips against his lover, who was definitely in a good state for grinding back. The reunion sex was gonna scorch their eyebrows, and when could they start?
The comments around them went from compassionate to critical—Lee zoned in on one he almost understood, the tone if not the words. “…Schlafzimmer!” with that snarl? Couldn’t be anything else.
Well, yes, he would like a bedroom, but they were here with a mission, and his heart was buoyed up enough he could perform it. “Guess we better save it for later.”
The sun that lit Lee’s world came out in noon glory—Bobby grinned. “Yeah. You have my notes? Let’s go find Herr Asbeck.”
Armed with a list of dates and call signs, Bobby stuck a pencil behind his ear and marched them halfway around the horseshoe. “No point in starting at the beginning. We already know that tower design came later.”
Lee couldn’t let his heartache take over now, not when they were so close. He had to think of this search as a puzzle, not of each name belonging to a man who had lived, loved, and been loved, and died younger than his time. Names, just names, or he’d break down again. Bobby reached out now and again for a shoulder squeeze that kept Lee centered.
Each bronze plaque had two columns; Bobby searched the left hand column, and Lee took the right. U-boat call sign, the commander’s name, the names of his crew. They had dozens of bronzes to read.
“Good thing our sailor isn’t named Schmidt,” Bobby observed. “We’d never sort this out.”
They read nine panels before Lee found their first Asbeck: Theodor Asbeck of U-780. His boat was listed as sunk in action by their references, but as Bobby reminded him, “Everyone thought U-869 was off Gibraltar. That’s a long way from New Jersey.”
Was this the owner of that Bakelite razor? Had they found the man who scraped his face to impress some sweetheart in port and let his beard grow while on patrol?
They read another twenty-seven panels before another Asbeck appeared: Hans-Georg of the U-823. Lee wanted to run his fingertips over the bronze letters, as if that could reassure the man someone still thought of him all these years later, when the men who’d sunk his sub were themselves passed on or grown old. The boat was listed as missing. Too much to hope that the crew had made a run for it, to beach on some forgotten isle where their grandkids grew papayas and drank coconut milk, speaking a Polynesian/German patois.
“I found one.” Bobby nudged Lee and crosschecked his notes. “Konrad Asbeck, U-919. Another boat listed as missing.”
“Poor guy. His family probably spent the whole war and years after hoping he was a prisoner somewhere, and he’d come home.” Lee shivered—the humanity of the dead kept intruding on the puzzle. He hadn’t run screaming yet, but tonight’s dreams might have him clinging to Bobby like a four-year-old who’d climbed into his parents’ bed because of the monsters.
Another brass panel listed boats numbered into the thousands, and then they’d reached the end.
“I think we found them all. I hope we found them all.” Lee was more than ready to leave. His back hurt, his eyes hurt, and most of all, his heart hurt. Good thing they’d given Eddy his walking papers before they’d come here and not after, else he might have gotten his nose broken for spouting crap about the dead. “Two good candidates, one possible.”
“Yeah. Are you hungry?” Bobby stretched backward, one hand on his hip. “We worked right through lunch.”
The sun had long since passed its zenith. Lee’s gut rumbled. “Let’s go find some chow.”
Lee slung his pack more securely on his shoulders and followed Bobby to a main street. Surely they’d find a restaurant just by following their noses.
The Scheerhaus beckoned them in with the tantalizing odor of hearty cooking, and the growing nip in the air sent them right past the outdoor tables. The wind would chill coming over the water, and the sun at its low angle wouldn’t warm it again.
The waiter spoke enough English that they were able to order their meals without too much hand waving. Lee used the latest addition to his slender vocabulary of German—his main beverage this trip would be Mineralwasser. He didn’t ask what was in the shot glasses another server carried by.
He also added to his equally slender knowledge of beer. Their server confused him with too many choices of bocks, lagers, and pilsners.
“Whatever popular pilsner goes well with the food,” Lee finally decided. The server nodded with pursed lips.
Color suffused Bobby’s face, rising like a barometer in a storm. When the server left, he exploded. “What the hell?”
“Guess I should have asked you first.”
“Asked me what? If beer counts as drinking? It most certainly does, Lee.” He closed his fist around the bundle of tableware as if it were Lee’s neck.
“I know it does, but I don’t drink beer. Nasty stuff.” Lee tried resting his hand over Bobby’s, only to have him jerk away. “But Germany runs on beer. They’re the experts of beer. And you do drink beer. I ordered it for you, and I’ll kiss you even if you taste like carbonated motor oil.”
The fork clattered to the tabletop when Bobby released it. “Why didn’t you just ask me if I wanted one?”
Shaking his head, Lee had to laugh. “Because you’d go all noble on me and say no, you didn’t want it, even if you did. Because you wouldn’t want to make things harder for me.”
That got him a dumbfounded stare. “Well, I don’t want to make things harder for you.”
“I know. But we’re in the land of good beer, if such a thing exists, and for you not to have any is like….” He had to think a moment. “Like going to Egypt and not seeing the pyramids, and we don’t need to be that stupid twice, do we?” Good—he was getting through. “I have to live in the world as it exists, Bobby. I’m not going to ask everyone else to do without because I can’t have any. Especially you. Being with me shouldn’t deprive you of things you like.”
“What if I like being with you better than I like drinking beer?” Bobby demanded.
Lee’s spirit soared—after a year of absence, he wanted to hear he was wanted. “It’s not a choice I’m asking you to make. I think you should have both, but especially me.”
The server returned with glassware and a tall green bottle for each of them, and a brown bottle marked Flensburger Pilsner, which he set before Lee. How the heck did he get that attached cap to open? Maybe if he pushed here….
The server took mercy on him and poured amber liquid into a footed glass.
Lee pushed the drink over to Bobby. “Enjoy.”
“Thank you.” Bobby took an appreciative sip. “It’s good stuff.”
Sure was. A trace of foam clung to Bobby’s lip. He tongued it off. Watching him do it—and he knew the effect this was having, the bastard—Lee
wondered how he was going to get through the meal without leaping over the table and taking Bobby to the floor. Even if he tasted like beer.
Whatever was in this unpronounceable meal tasted great. With no real idea what to call what he’d just eaten, Lee pushed his plate aside. Delicious, though, and filling enough they might not want anything more than a snack later. “Ready to sit on your butt for three and a half hours?”
That got a wry chuckle. “At least we can walk around on the train, and we have to change trains in Hamburg anyway. I’ll race you to the next platform.”
“Guess I’d better call about that room.” He called the second number Rafe had texted, secure in the memory of last night’s lodging, comfortable almost to the point of decadence. The woman who answered said, “Gästehaus Meereswoge.” At least he thought that’s what she said. Close enough to what he was expecting to hear.
“Hello. I’d like a room for tonight, for two, please.”
“One moment. Lutz speaks English.”
He listened to the silence for a long time. “I hope she finds Lutz soon,” he told Bobby.
Lutz was apparently off doing other things. The woman returned and said something Lee couldn’t decipher, but he had a vocabulary sufficient to his needs, if not a verb in the lot. He hoped. “Bitte, ein Zimmer mit zwei….”
“Yes.”
Score! The woman gave him an address in carefully enunciated words, which he wrote down with faint hope that he’d spelled everything correctly. If the taxi driver couldn’t decipher it, he’d just call again, and they could talk to each other in any language they liked. On their way out the door, Lee said, “We should have grabbed a phrase book at the airport.”
“We barely made the train as it was. You were doing pretty good.” Bobby had checked with the server during the interminable hunt for Lutz, and their cab was waiting to take them to the train station.
“I asked for one room for two, but it may have come out as ‘bathtub full of earwigs.’” The room wouldn’t matter if they didn’t get on the right train, though it looked like getting anywhere from Kiel meant going through Hamburg.
“If you did, you sleep in it by yourself.” Bobby winked. “But I think that phrase needs more syllables.”
Their tickets gave them access to a rail car with a few tables set up between the rows of seats. Perfect—Bobby spread out pages of notes while Lee set up the laptop. “I hope between the research and the video that we can ask some good questions at the museum.”
“Just having as much information as we do should help.” They spent the next hour and a half trying to find reasons to favor one of their three possibilities over another. Changing trains in Hamburg gave them another two hours to wrestle with the question, but they’d run out of fresh ideas.
Bobby leaned back, his legs crossed ankle to knee. “I could get to like train travel.”
“Me too.” Lee had discovered the foot rest that swung down from the seat ahead. “Maybe one day we’ll go somewhere on one of the high-speed trains. A hundred plus miles an hour, on the ground.”
“That’ll be fun,” Bobby agreed.
Lee both hated to ask and hated not knowing. “Did you go anywhere fun this last year?” was as close as he’d come to asking if Bobby had dated at all while they were apart.
“No place that wasn’t underwater. Dove the Texel and the Carolina, but you know trips like that. Bunch of divers on a boat talking shit, and you find out that ten out of fourteen people in the bunk room fart in their sleep.” Bobby patted Lee’s knee. “You’d enjoy the Carolina. The wreck’s in better shape than the Andrea Doria. Not half-explored yet either.”
Well, that did not sound like Bobby dated anyone else, and Bobby tended to blurt things out just to get them said and out of the way.
“I’d rather see our sub.” Not everything secondhand in video and stills, or in drawings with the substance but not the life of the boat. Not to hear about it from divers who had been down to see for themselves. He wanted to go with Bobby and share the glory of being the discoverers and the identifiers, and to touch a piece of history where he’d helped to write the parts of the tale yet untold.
“Mmm.”
That sounded like the warm-up to a blurt, and one Lee did not want to hear. This had been a day of miracles and new beginnings for them, and one huge question remained. Time for a blurt of his own.
“Bobby, what would it take to make you think I’m safe to dive again?” The secondhand thrill of taking divers out to places he dared not go wasn’t anything at all like putting on a mask and fins and going down to look for himself. Considering the way his divers scared the shit out of him sometimes, not going down to see for himself was a big reason for the next drink.
Bobby sucked air in through his teeth. “That is a tough one, Lee. Your sobriety’s so new, it’s like the paint’s not dry on it yet. I don’t know if the bolts are tightened or the glue is set, or what’ll happen if it’s tested. Seemed kind of rickety a time or two recently.”
“Not sure it’s something that the glue ever sets.” Lee wouldn’t dispute how rickety his grip was. “Think it’s something that takes more maintenance than a boat. If such can be imagined.”
“That is a hella lotta maintenance.”
“That ‘one day at a time’ stuff? Completely true. Sometimes one hour at a time. Sometimes the only thing between me and ‘Fuck it, I want a drink’ is wanting to keep you around.” Right now was one of those times. Honesty went down better with a little lube.
“That’s a lot to lay on me. You already know how I feel about that.” Bobby went silent, gazing past Lee to the scenes flashing by outside the train window. “But what I know is that you quit being safe to dive once you started drinking regularly.”
“So….” Part hope, part confusion made Lee ask, “If it’s just once in a while, it’s okay? Social drinking?”
“No.” That full-on glare could double as the train’s headlight. “Because it won’t stay that way. It didn’t last time. You drank a little more one day and said, ‘Oh, it was that once,’ but it became the new baseline, and then one day you drank a little more than that. Been down that road, Lee. Not going there again. Don’t try to bargain with me about how much is okay. How much I’ll tolerate. I have to trust you to dive. Even more than I need to trust you as my partner. Because I don’t ever want to bring your body back out of a wreck. Or get us both killed trying to extricate you from some situation.”
The words he’d both expected and feared were out in the open, mixing with the clack, clack, clack of the rails below. “Spoken by the King of Situations.”
“I’m a solo diver. If I get into situations, they’re my problem. I may have scared you half to death now and then, but I’ve never needed to be extricated. I wouldn’t count that last dive with the asshole you stuck me with. Since I should have just let him die.”
But Bobby wouldn’t, no more than Lee could have waited on the surface for him. They’d cheated the wreck that day. Good luck and not good planning, and their relationship died of it even if the cocky asshat diver didn’t. “You couldn’t have done that. Not and still be you.”
“Yeah, remember that.” Bobby slipped his hand between the seats and then over Lee’s thigh. The train car was dimmed for the evening of travel, but still he was discreet. Better part of valor, and the touching was a comfort. “You keep it firmly in mind while you’re drinking more Mineralwasser and doing refresher dives. With Rafe, not only with me. I’m biased. Our pal in Florida’s teaching advanced wreck theory again this winter. Might be a good idea.”
Good idea, Lee’s ass. He taught that level of certification.
Back when.
A man lost some skills over a couple of years out of the water. He’d lost a lot of trust.
A man had his pride.
His pride didn’t go diving, and it sure as hell didn’t keep him warm at night. He’d insist anyone who’d been out of the water as long as he had start easy, ramp up, and then tackle th
e big, technical dives. Make them take a class. Maybe two. He’d learned the hard way not to trust the diver who said he had the qualifications and didn’t.
He’d be an ass not to fulfill his own requirements.
Might be fun too. Welcome-back dives, no-demands dives. Good-time dives. Sharpening his skills on high alert, not Defcon-1. When had he last entered the water with those kinds of expectations? At Sharm el-Sheikh?
To be underwater again. To have the ocean cradle him at neutral buoyancy and fin through the dangers and the beauties. To sink into the water with Bobby, and Rafe, and John in Florida. To see their submarine for himself.
With Bobby at his side. “Think we ought to see Disney World while we’re down there? Or Universal Studios?”
Bobby squeezed Lee’s thigh. “Why not both?”
A FEW euro away from the train station, the cab dropped them at a modest two-story building. The innkeeper charged them a pittance, a third of what they’d paid the night before. Lee’s “grate in the entrance” alarm beeped.
The innkeeper led them upstairs. “Badezimmer” got a tap on the door as they passed down the hallway. Okay, bathroom down the hall: good-bye, decadence. “Ein Zimmer, zwei Betten,” she announced, opening the door and handing over the key.
“Danke.” Lee dredged out his last word of German and never felt less thankful. The room was clean, spare, and furnished with twin beds. The puffy striped duvets didn’t do a thing to make them more attractive.
“Looks like you got your earwigs.” Bobby dropped his pack at the foot of a narrow bed.
“We could push them together?” But no, they could not—the headboards were bolted to the wall.
“Doesn’t matter.” Bobby held out his arms. “I’m alone in a bedroom with you.”
“Good enough.” Lee stepped into Bobby’s embrace and met his lips. More than good enough. Because Bobby kissed him back.
Besides, a twin bed was wide enough if the occupants loved each other. And if someone was on top.
They had all the time in the world tonight. Time to unbutton Bobby’s jeans and slide the zipper down, and time enough to lift his arms to escape his shirt. Time to run the flat of his hand across the muscular planes of Bobby’s chest and around his back. Time to find out how time had changed Bobby, or left him the same. Same was good, same was wonderful, same was coming home to an embrace Lee wished he’d never had to leave.