Clear Water (17 page)

“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.

Whiskey came up top in a clean pair of jeans—no holes—and a button-down Hawaiian shirt. His hair was combed neatly back, where it curled against his collar, and he’d shaved clean and bare as a supermodel’s bikini wax. Patrick just looked at him with big eyes as Whiskey walked forward, took his hand, and kissed him.

“We’re going to have a good time,” Whiskey murmured, and Patrick nodded dumbly. “Now let’s go get your prescription so we can do the fun shit later, okay?”

T
HE
line at the pharmacy was short, so they got to the steakhouse right before things got crowded. Because they got their steak early, they got to see the early show at the movies, and the theatre was almost empty, even though it was a big money superhero action flick. They sat next to each other in the center of the theatre and cracked quiet jokes about the superhero’s six-pack abs and unspoken affection for his male sidekick. Whiskey was funny, and Patrick had success making him laugh in return, and basically, they had a good time.

The ride back to the houseboat was relaxed and happy and companionably silent.

“So,” Whiskey said into the darkening gray of summer night, “I grew up in Alaska, right? And my parents died in a car crash when I was an undergrad. And I almost just cashed it in, and then Fly Bait came and told me that if she was in the master’s program I’d damned well better be, so I did.”

“Yeah?” Patrick asked carefully, but inside, he could barely breathe. Unlike Patrick, who had sort of fallen from the sky spewing his personal life into Whiskey’s space, Whiskey had never really explained his personal life. His entire world seemed to be the houseboat and Fly Bait, and Patrick could deal with that.

“Yeah,” Whiskey confirmed. “See, the thing is, the houseboat, that’s the closest thing I’ve had to a home in… well, shit, fourteen or so years, and I want it to be a home. I want to make it not suck so when we give all the science equipment back, I can knock around in there. Maybe get a television or something. I like it. I can go upriver or downriver, and maybe it’s not the most exciting stretch of real estate on the planet, but… I think I could be happy here.”

Patrick blinked, trying to think of something he could say, because this was important, and he was excited, but he didn’t want to come across as, well, a big old spaz.

“Anyway,” Whiskey continued, and Patrick could tell he was fighting the strain of talking about important shit all by himself, “I have to go on this trip with Greenpeace in September. I signed up about two years ago, and it’s not something you just ditch out on. But I’m coming back. I’m coming back to this houseboat on this river, and, you know….”

Patrick pulled his focus from the overcast clouds over the horizon and looked at Whiskey, blinking slowly. “What?” he asked, feeling his hands grow clammy in his lap with the need to know.

Whiskey reached out a hand and grabbed one of Patrick’s clammy hands, wincing a little as he threaded his fingers through Patrick’s cold fingers. “I’m saying that if you and me work, Patrick, I’ll be back. March next year, I’ll be here, and I’ve got some job offers in the area, and I can stay. You’re probably thinking, ‘Yeah, I’ll sleep with this guy once, maybe for the summer, and then he’ll be gone.’ But I won’t. For a little while, yeah, but I’m coming back. However you want that to work, I’ll be coming back.”

Patrick flushed and tightened his hand in Whiskey’s even though he probably shouldn’t. “I’ve got a real short attention span,” he apologized. “You really trust a guy named Trix to be faithful for six months?”

“No,” Whiskey said, kissing the back of his hand. “But I trust a guy named Patrick to try if he thinks it’s worth it.”

Patrick wiped his hand across his eyes. “You know, I’ve spent, like… my whole adult life putting out to get a guy to come back. Here you are, promising to come back and I ain’t even put out yet. You’d think I could keep
that
fixed in my spastic little noggin, right?”

Whiskey kept his eyes on the road and turned Patrick’s hand over so he could kiss the center of his palm. Patrick made an “ungghhh!” sound and squirmed in his seat.

Whiskey pulled back and kissed it again before putting it—warm now and not clammy—back in his lap. “I think your brain is fine, Patrick, but it’s not what I’m worried about?”

“No?”

“No. I’m thinking before the night’s over, it’s going to be all about the heart.”

All about the heart? Patrick’s heart was going a mile a nanosecond, and it wasn’t slowing down. He tripped getting out of the car when they parked at the dock and knocked Whiskey in the solar plexus when he grabbed Patrick’s hand to try to steady him.

Whiskey caught his breath and laughed and put those big hands on Patrick’s shoulder blades and pulled him close. “Patrick,” he whispered, “are you nervous because this feels important, or because you don’t want to do it?”

Patrick swallowed and rested his head on Whiskey’s shoulder. It fit so well there—Whiskey was six foot something, and Patrick wasn’t tall. It was nice and safe, and it just felt so wonderful… he was safe there. “It’s important,” he murmured. “It’s so important.”

“Then we’re on the same page. Don’t be nervous.”

With that, Whiskey captured his chin and kissed him, there in the final orange rays of the solstice sunset, and Patrick’s heart both sped up and became steadier. It was no longer a question of
can I do this?
It very quickly became a question of
can I even wait for it?

Patrick groaned, opened his mouth, pulled Whiskey in. He took that dear, lean face (but not stubbled, not tonight,) between his hands and responded with everything in him, and in return, Whiskey’s hands tightened on his shoulders roughly, and Patrick was dragged against a hardened body. He wasted no time wiggling his hips up against Whiskey’s, trying hard to get them both closer, and Whiskey, to his intense frustration, pulled back.