Clear Water (3 page)

“Yup,” Whiskey muttered, staggering down the stairs to the hold, through the tiny living/dining room space that also converted into a bed, and into his berth, where he stripped the kid out of his stinking clothes down to his underwear. Then, balancing the kid against his shoulder, where he exhaled fetid breath with a soothing regularity, Whiskey threw an oversized towel over his coverlet and then another one over the kid. He hated going to the Laundromat, but he was damned if he would sleep in that reechy mess that the kid smelled like when helpless kitten here finally went back to where he was supposed to go.

He emerged from the bedroom with a pair of boxer shorts, which was all he wore to bed and all Fly Bait cared that he wore,
period
, and promptly went to the head with its three-by-three shower cubicle of recycled water.

It was better than stinking up the boat even more than it already reeked, that was for certain.

He came out of the bathroom toweling his hair and sniffing experimentally at Fly Bait’s girl-floral shampoo, which still lingered in his hair. It was a hell of a lot better than river water and diesel oil, that was for damned sure.

“If he’s an acolyte,” Fly Bait said, looking up from her
Scientific American
as though their conversation had never been interrupted, “what’s he worship?”

Whiskey raised his eyebrows in thought. “Oxygen,” he said, nodding his head. “Since I bailed him out of the river, I think he’s a fan.”

Fly Bait blinked. For her, it was the equivalent of sitting up and shrieking, “Are you fucking
shitting
me?!” at the top of her lungs.

“Is this acolyte going to have any fellows?” she asked cautiously, obviously thinking hard.

Whiskey was way ahead of her. “I doubt it. The skeezemonkey who bailed out of the driver’s side isn’t coming back for him. Although….” Whiskey got a trash bag and stuck his hand into the bathroom for his wet clothes, then paused in front of his berth before getting Junior’s.

“Although?”

“Although it probably wasn’t skeezemonkey’s car.”

“What makes you say that?”

“’Cause it was sort of a sweet little ride, and skeezemonkey ditched it without a backward look. And… I’m probably thinking out of turn here….”

“Which would be different because?”

Whiskey shrugged. She had a point. The only time he wasn’t thinking out of turn was when he was applying for grants. “No reason. But I think he was drugged, and not in the fun way.”

Fly Bait’s eyes got
really
large at that. “So that would be the reason he hasn’t moved?”

“Yup. And it’s the reason I’m gonna stay up and shake him if he forgets to breathe, too. He threw up a lot of river water and probably anything else. If he wasn’t dead when the car hit the rail, I think he’ll be fine, but I want to make sure. Something about this whole thing….” Whiskey grunted. “Me no likey.”

He walked quietly into his tiny berth and pulled the wet clothes out of the plastic hamper, shoving them in the garbage bag. They were nice—slacks, summer weight blazer, a shirt that probably cost Whiskey’s clothing budget for the year if you counted underwear and socks. (Which were, actually, the things he wore the most.) Whiskey wondered about these clothes—they were a man’s size medium, but the belt was cinched up to an impossibly thin waist, and that boy… God, he’d looked fragile.

Whiskey walked the bag up to the deck, all the better to stink the next day when they visited the pier’s one washing machine, and returned down to the small living space, made even smaller by the equipment that he and Fly Bait were using this time out.

Fly Bait wasn’t even pretending to read her
Scientific American
anymore. He went to the small fridge and grabbed a soda and some salami and bread and plopped down on the couch to have himself a snack.

“He was pretty,” she said flatly, and Whiskey rolled his eyes.

“And very likely underage.”

“He’s in your bed.”

“Jealous?”

She blinked and canted her eyes to the side in a way that said she was honestly thinking about it. Then back. “No. Don’t think so. But we’ve got a very short time to do this—”

“I pulled him out of the river, Fly Bait—“

“Freya,” she corrected grimly, and she only did that when she was losing her patience with him.

“
Freya,
” he exaggerated. “Odds are good, when he wakes up, he’ll have something else to do. If nothing else, he’ll probably have a hangover that will rock a solid twelve on the Richter scale. So maybe stop prophesying doom for a second, and let me make sure he hasn’t choked on his own vomit before we kick him to the curb?”

“We could call the police,” she said pointedly, and he thought about it seriously.

“I don’t think so.”

“Any good reason why not?”

“He’s lost.” Whiskey shrugged. “I found him. If he wanders off, he wanders off, but in the meantime, we can afford to feed him.”

“That makes no sense at all,” she muttered.

He paused for a minute, trying to find words for the way that wordless, sobless crying had sunk into his soul and refused to budge. “He cried. He’s got a story. Cops come, no story. Maybe I’m interested.” Besides, both of them had perfectly good reasons for a lingering distrust of policemen to hang out in their psyches like the ghost of doobies past.

Fly Bait sniffed. “God, Whiskey, you are such a
woman
sometimes.”

Whiskey rolled his eyes. They both knew that if he
were
a woman, they would have been doing something entirely different when that car had gone through the rail.

T
HE
bed in the berth was small, yes, but it could fit two, and eventually Whiskey pulled a blanket up over his shoulders and set his phone to wake him once an hour so he could check on Patrick’s breathing. Around four in the morning, the boy moaned and rolled over in his sleep, snuggling like an infant.

Whiskey sighed. “You know, kid, it’s a good thing I swing this way sometimes.”

It was wonderful, actually. The boy was trusting and soft. Whiskey didn’t trust it
himself
—he’d been jumping political hoops for far too long to have any faith in innocence. With a grunt, he pulled some of that crusty blond hair back from the delicate, small, round, pretty face and tried to analyze the kid’s motives even in his heavy, drug-induced sleep.

“Easy to trust, isn’t it, kid?” he muttered. “Easy to trust when you’ve got all that money to give you faith, huh?”

He said the words and then felt immediately guilty. The kid was as helpless as a tadpole in a shrinking pond. Whatever had happened to him, Whiskey thought it was more than apparent that he’d gotten here, in this tiny berth and in Whiskey’s bed, by trusting the wrong person.

The kid mumbled something in his sleep. It might have been anything, but Whiskey could have sworn he said, “Dad.”

Aw, fuck no! Not Daddy issues. Oh, Jesus. Kid—how did you end up here?
But it didn’t matter, because as the kid snuggled in closer, Whiskey’s insomnia seemed to melt away. It was four in the morning, Whiskey had done his good deed for the decade, and Daddy issues or no Daddy issues, Whiskey was going to get some top quality, armful-of-twink sleep.

At 8 a.m. his alarm went off, and he wriggled out from between the kid and the wall muttering, “Fuck my life” repeatedly and trying very hard to ignore that the kid’s presence against the front of his body had made his morning wood difficult to deal with.

And then, to make matters worse, he got to the bottom of the bunk and threw on a clean (holey) T-shirt and a clean (holey) pair of jeans over his boxers, and looked up to find himself under the scrutiny of a shockingly blue (bloodshot) pair of eyes.

“You’re not Cal,” the kid said, the picture of befuddlement.

“Nope,” Whiskey said, finding his tennis shoes (holey) and putting them on without socks (because those were holey too, and that was where he drew the line.)

“Where’s Cal?” the kid asked plaintively. “And why do I smell like a sewer? And why does my mouth taste like ass?” Those blue eyes closed and the kid groaned. “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, why does my head feel like a fuckin’ bomb?”

That last came out as a whimper, and Whiskey watched as tears leaked out the corners of the kid’s eyes, making tracks down the grime left from his little foray into the river.

“Fuck my life,” he muttered, and then reached around in his drawer for a bottle of ibuprofen. “Be right back.”

The kid hadn’t moved when he came back with a big bottle of drinking water and broke the seal. “Here, kid. I’ll give you something for the pain, but you’ve got to drink this entire thing, okay?”

The kid whimpered, and Whiskey put strong, tanned fingers under the kid’s chin, even as he huddled under the covers, and forced the kid to look at him.

“If you want the pain to stop, sit up and do what I’m telling ya,” he growled, and the kid did, sitting up slowly, like every muscle in his body ached, and dislodging the oversized towel that Whiskey had used to cover him with.

He was… well, fit. But thin. He probably used the gym regularly, but not to bulk up. He had long muscles, the kind that were comfortable on very young bodies, and Whiskey suppressed a groan. God, please let this kid be legal, just to make that whole wood thing less disgusting.

Whiskey pressed the tablets into his hand and then gave him the water and watched as he obediently drank all sixteen ounces.

“Now I want you to go back to sleep,” Whiskey said sternly. “There will be another bottle here—drink it when you wake up, okay?”

The kid nodded, and again, that image of a kitten, a little white one with tousled fuzz on the top of its head and blue eyes. “Why does everything hurt?” he asked, his eyes so dark with pain they looked like bruises.

“Two reasons,” Whiskey told him shortly, taking the empty bottle for the recycling bin. “The first is that you were in a car wreck.” While the kid’s eyes got really big over that, Whiskey added the kicker. “The second is that you were drugged to the gills. Any idea what you took?”

The kid scrubbed his face with his hands, closing his eyes and making a sound like Whiskey had hit him. “Oh Jesus, fuck… shit, shit, shit, shit….” The kid collapsed on the bed and groaned, turning his head toward the wall.

“Kid?”

“Was I driving?” His voice was flat and emotionless.

“No.”

“Where’s my car?”

“In the bottom of the river. I would imagine by now someone’s noticed the hole in the guardrail and they’re probably hauling it out by now.”

“Where’s the person who was driving?” he asked in that same flat, incurious voice.

“I couldn’t tell you, kid. He bailed. I pulled you out and you… you hadn’t even noticed we’d gone in.”

There was a deep breath and it came out shuddery, like a wobbly antique table. And another one. And another one.

“Oh for Christ’s sake… kid, are you crying?”

“No.”

Worst. Lie. Ever.

“Look, kid—do you want me to tell the police you’re here?”

A sudden pause, almost optimistic. “Do you have to?” came the muffled reply, and Whiskey shrugged.

“No. Are you in trouble with the law?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Do you have any idea what kind of drugs you were on?”

The kid groaned. “Roofies, Ritalin, and beer.”

Whiskey crossed his eyes with the pain of all of that. “Jesus, kid—what were you trying to do?”

Again, that suspicious sniffle. “I was trying to get my life together. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to wallow in how well that worked out, okay?”

Whiskey’s mouth lifted in appreciation. The kid was a smart-ass. Of all the wide variety of asses—feminine and soft, male and hard, open and begging, reluctant and tight, Whiskey’s most favorite, very bestest type of ass was this type right here. The snark-at-the-world smart-ass.

He dropped a hand to the kid’s shoulder and squeezed. “Okay. You’re entitled. When you wake up, there’s clothes in the drawer and a shower in the head. It’s a small boat. You’ll find your way around. We’ll talk when I get back, okay?”

There was another sniffle, this one bravely held back. “Did you pull me out of the car?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you. Should have spared yourself the trouble.”

“Wasn’t any trouble,” he lied. “I wasn’t getting any sleep anyway.”

One of those horrible sounds followed—the kind when you laughed reluctantly through tears. “Glad to help,” the kid mumbled. “Now please go away?”

“Yeah. Hey, kid—your scrip bottle—it says Patrick. That your name?”

“Yeah.”

“You can call me Whiskey.”

Patrick turned away from the wall, looking as pathetic as any kid ever did. “Whiskey?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re a good guy, but I’m a lot of fucking trouble. I’ll try and be out of your hair soon, okay?”

Whiskey ruffled his crusty hair. “No worries. We can always use slave labor. Help when you’re ready.”

And with that, he turned around and left the tiny, dark-paneled berth. He didn’t hear any more sobs as he went, but he imagined he wouldn’t hear any giggles either. Didn’t matter. He had shit to do.

Trix
Counting Tadpoles

P
ATRICK
did eventually fall back asleep, and when he woke up, he was surprised to find that his head was mostly okay but that his mouth still tasted like ass and his body felt like it had been worked over by a steamroller.

He smelled pretty rank too.

Whiskey. Was that really the guy’s name? Patrick liked it. It suited him. His dark hair was curly and long, his eyes were dark amber-brown, his voice was rough, he had a cheek full of black stubble, and most of the skin Patrick had seen peeking out of his shredded clothing had been tan.

He
looked
like whiskey, and not the shitty kind that Cal used to down, either. He looked like the good kind, the dark tawny kind that his dad kept in the bar at home and only broke out when he had clients or employees over for carefully orchestrated dinners.

His growly voice alone made Patrick’s cock hard the minute he opened his mouth, and considering how gawd-fucking-awful the rest of Patrick had felt, that had been
some
voice.