Clear Water (9 page)

There was a silence, and Patrick’s heart sank and then established its normal rhythm.
Why would I expect him to be any different? It’s my problem, not his.

“Because you’re good at this,” Whiskey said, and Patrick’s heart started skipping rope like girls on a playground. “You’re good at this. And you’re not a fuckup. Find your center, enhance your calm, restore your peace, what-the-fuck-ever. Did you bring in the water?”

Patrick was back in the warrior-three position. “The flats are still in the car.”

“I’ll go get them. When I get back, you, me, Fly Bait, we’ll have a little powwow, okay? Don’t worry, Patrick. We’re not going to sell you out, okay?”

Patrick straightened, got both feet on the ground, and went into sun salutations. “I don’t know why,” he confessed, calm and able to say it without self-pity now. “I mean, I’ve got to be a colossal pain in the ass. But I’m really grateful. I’ll do whatever you need me to do, because I don’t ever want to take you guys for granted, ’kay?”

“We’ll hold you to that, Patrick,” Whiskey said, heading for the dock around Patrick’s stretching, breathing body. He didn’t sound like he was taking the promise seriously at all, but Patrick wasn’t wounded. As he commenced in another sun salutation, he thought with more confidence than was usual for him that he just had to prove that he meant it.

Whiskey
Fuckup Major

P
ATRICK
didn’t notice as Whiskey hauled the cases of water past him and down the steps into the relative cool of the boat quarters. Whiskey was glad, because he had a hard enough time keeping his hands from shaking as it was.

Something about the kid’s touch on his hips, his waist, his arms—hell, his chin—had made Whiskey sweat, and the worst part? Patrick had no idea. For a kid with a mouth that fuckable, Patrick was… God….

Whiskey set the water down and stared out the small window hungrily, watching as that tight, lithe young body twisted neatly into another seemingly impossible pose. He vibrated with strength and spun himself like caramel with flexibility, and Whiskey remembered the day before, when Patrick had stripped off his tank top and dove into the water, looking free and easy and happy.

The kid was overflowing with gratitude, and Whiskey would do more for him—hell, brave the badass father, the skeezemonkey boyfriend, the hinky private detective, all of them—just to have him smile and say something smart-assed and be happy.

“God, he’s a spaz,” Fly Bait said next to him, and Whiskey tried not to jump. He hadn’t realized she was there.

“He is.” There was no denying it.
I’m sorry! I’m sorry!
It set Whiskey’s teeth on edge and made him want to shake the kid. The only reason he didn’t was that he got the feeling Patrick had been shaken enough already.

“Why won’t he take his meds?”

Whiskey sighed. Stupid. He felt so stupid. He and Fly Bait worked with über-bright, über-antisocial people. Patrick was not the first person they’d ever dealt with who was taking some sort of antipsychotic or brain chemistry equalizer. They both knew that there were requirements—he couldn’t believe they’d both forgotten.

“Needed food. He forgot. Don’t know why he didn’t do the yoga—I think he got excited.”

“Excited?”

“He wants to help.”

Fly Bait grunted. “I feel stupid.”

“Me too.” Together they watched Patrick do something impossible, and Whiskey’s groin tightened again to the point of pain. A little bead of sweat trickled down his back and between his ass cheeks, and suddenly he remembered the last time he’d had sex. Sort of. It had been a while.

“You remember Richie Winston?”

Whiskey grunted. God, there was something unholy about a bio-chem med who looked like pinup and fucked anything—male
and
female—that climbed into his bed. “Hard to forget.”

“You ever hit that?”

Another grunt. This one negative.

“Me neither. Howzabout Loretta Kinsey?”

This time it was a happy sigh. “God, she was choice, wasn’t she?” Five foot eleven, Amazonian blonde who practiced archery and horseback riding to keep her exceptional rack from getting too soft and too out of hand.

“Yup. I hit that.”

“I know.” As far as he knew, they were still dating.

“She went for you first.”

“I know,” Whiskey said regretfully. She’d been an undergrad, and he wasn’t an asshole.

“You’ve got all these principles, you know?”

“Bullshit.”

Fly Bait tilted her chin in his direction, rolled her eyes, and went back to watching Patrick. Whiskey wondered if he had form-fitting yoga pants, because that would be interesting too. White. They should be white. And really tight. And he shouldn’t wear underwear with them either.

“They were both pretty,” Fly Bait replied, and Whiskey sighed.

“Is there a point here?”

“They didn’t make you sweat.”

“It’s a protection thing,” Whiskey lied. “I just want to take him in like a bunny and feed him and brush him and make sure everything’s okay.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Fly Bait snapped, and Whiskey turned to her in surprise.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” he replied mildly.

“You want him.”

“I wanted Richie and Loretta too,” he said, meaning it, and she snorted.

“You were locked in a cabin with Richie for two months—he said he could hear you beating off in the middle of the night, and you didn’t make a move once.”

Richie had all but begged him, but the kid had wanted it too much.

“It would have meant too much to him by then,” Whiskey said with a sigh.

“It already means too much to this kid—and you want him already.”

Whiskey was cheered for minute. “Which means I’ve got the fortitude to do what’s right by him,” he said, remembering how badly he’d wanted Richie and how badly he hadn’t wanted to lead the boy on. Besides, it would have been an incredible abuse of power.

“Maybe what’s right by him is giving in this time—you ever think of that?”

“I’ve known him for two days, Fly Bait—maybe you should stop shoving me into bed with a kid who might not want some old dude coming onto him.” But Patrick would want him. He knew that. Every glance from those tragic rabbit eyes brought that home.

“Two days with him, it already means more to you than two months with Richie.”

“Freya, dammit, why the sudden urge to fix me up with a random rescue kitten?”

“I left Loretta Kinsey in Seattle with her mouth open and a strap-on warmed up to come work this job for you, but I told her it would be the last fucking time.”

“Settling down?” Whiskey smiled at her genuinely. “That’s awesome! You got a job?”

“University up there. They’ve been knocking. Thinking about answering. Anyway, I won’t if you won’t.”

Whiskey looked at her, a little appalled. “That’s one of the dumbest goddamned things I’ve ever heard.”

Fly Bait shrugged. “You’re the one who’s breaking into a sweat and not copping to it. It’s just something to think about while you tell yourself all of the noble, self-sacrificing bullshit that makes you who you are.”

Whiskey would have closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, but Patrick had bent at the waist to touch his nose to his knees, and the perfect hairpin turn of his spine was absolutely mesmerizing. “He’s totally damaged, you know that, don’t you?”

Fly Bait shrugged. “He any more fucked up than you?”

Whiskey’s parents had died right after he and Fly Bait had gotten their BSes. He’d taken off and Fly Bait had found him working as a fry cook, and had gotten him a paid internship to work on his MA. That was two degrees and a shitload of grants and papers ago, and the thing he was most grateful for was the three hours she had listened to him mourn before he fell asleep on her couch that first night. It was one thing to tell yourself you were a grown up and could deal with grown-up shit, and it was another to kiss a home you’d loved goodbye because of a simple swerve of a car. So yeah, Whiskey had been fucked up, but he liked to think of his damage as a passing thing. Normal wear and tear on a grown man’s psyche, the shit that would hurt forever but that you got over in order to function as an adult in contemporary society.

Patrick was a little different.

“He’s way more fucked up than I was,” Whiskey confessed, feeling disloyal and mean. It was simple truth—damage like Patrick’s didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t disappear with a few simple kindnesses. But the results…. Whiskey watched longingly as Patrick put both hands on the ground and extended one leg up over his body, doing the vertical splits with perfect balance. God, that kind of discipline, that kind of dedication. The kid had it in him—he just didn’t realize it. No one had ever told him that the things that mattered to him were important. No one had ever told him that
he
was important.
I’m sorry! I’m sorry!
Had he spent his whole life apologizing for his very existence?

“Too fucked up to fix?” Fly Bait asked clinically, and reluctantly Whiskey remembered those eyes, colorless in the night, looking up at him in confusion.

Are there frogs in stars?
Nonsense, total and complete nonsense—but Whiskey had known it for what it was: a way of making his sudden shift into another universe fit, like a frog in a star. Whiskey could appreciate a man who identified with frogs.

“No,” he said quietly. “Not too fucked up to fix. As long as he does most of the fixing, maybe.”

Fly Bait hmm-ed in her throat, and Patrick stood up and shook himself out, obviously done with his routine for the day.

“I’m gonna go call Loretta. Try not to scare the shit out of him with the PI guy.”

Whiskey sighed and opened the refrigerator and the cupboards. Mac and cheese and hotdogs, he thought, reading that menu item with ease. Patrick still ate like a little kid. Well, didn’t they all? Hoping Patrick’s calm was all enhanced and shit, he started to boil water to make mac and cheese for lunch.

Patrick came in, and Whiskey looked over his shoulder. “Go clean up for lunch, ’kay?”

Patrick nodded, and this trip to the bathroom seemed to endanger neither life nor limb, nor did the setting of the table or the moving of the equipment. In fact, the kid’s movements were graceful and even when he wasn’t stressed about shit.

“You want to take your meds?” Whiskey asked as they sat down, and Patrick looked at him guiltily.

“It’s sort of a stimulant—it’ll keep me awake if I take it too late.” He sighed. “When I was a kid, it was a ritual. Mornings with juice, a vitamin, and the LBP.”

“LBP?”

“Little brown pill. My mom split, and my dad said I didn’t need them anymore, and my grades went promptly to shit. I started taking them again in junior college, because that’s the only place that would take me, and then….” He trailed off moodily over his mac and cheese. His exceptionally long fingers and hands spread out like a frog’s toes. He used them now to trace invisible patterns on the table, like he was letting his hand dance. “That part was my fault. I get discouraged easily.”

“What happened?”

“I got my AA—you know, the little two year degree.”

“Why was that bad?”

Patrick sighed. “No one came.”

Whiskey made a sound then, a reluctant one. He didn’t want to feel sorry for Patrick—Patrick didn’t seem to feel sorry for himself. He seemed to
blame
himself for an awful lot, but he tried so hard to make it right, to live like a grown up, as he kept saying, it was clear he didn’t want to be an object of pity.

But no one came.

“Why not?”

“My dad said it wasn’t a real degree. It didn’t count. My mom was out of the country. But it’s okay, I mean, I shouldn’t have let that keep me from going to college, but I did, and I worked a restaurant job because that’s what my boyfriend was doing, but then, he was apparently fucking someone else at the restaurant the whole time, and I started taking extra yoga classes because the meds didn’t seem to keep me from pounding holes in my wall at home, and then it sort of felt like I was getting my shit together, right?”

Whiskey nodded. It sounded like this kid had been doing nothing
but
trying to get his shit together.

“And then I had this plan, about teaching yoga and paying my tuition, and I applied and got accepted at state college. Cal wouldn’t like it, but, you know, I didn’t tell him, and I didn’t tell anyone I went back on the meds, and I thought the whole thing sounded pretty good, and my dad said, ‘Yeah, right!’ and I thought….”

Patrick pushed his bowl away.

“Eat.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Then finish your sentence.”

“I’m sorry to bore you with my bullshit. Can we fix the bed now?”

“Finish your goddamned sentence, Patrick.”

“I thought that maybe if my dad knew all of me, maybe knew that I was gay and that it was hard for me to tell him everything I was trying to do if I was holding back on the big G, that maybe he’d understand that I meant it about the yoga and the school and the degree in biology and shit. That I wanted to be a lawyer and save the world like he does and….” Patrick shrugged. “I can’t even save myself, right?”

Shawn Cleary saved the world? Interesting. He was on Whiskey’s top three list of possible polluters for the frog experiment—and his son thought he was a hero. Well, shit.

But not as interesting as Patrick’s dejection.

“What happened?” Whiskey asked, thinking he knew already.

He was wrong and right.

“He didn’t really believe I was gay so much as he thought sleeping with men was part of my minimal attention span.”

Whiskey blinked hard. “So… if you had a longer attention span, you’d notice tits?”

Patrick choke-snorted. “Yeah….”

Whiskey snickered. “Uhm, yanno, I think given that reasoning, all mankind would die out, wouldn’t it? None of us can hold a thought longer than it takes to come. Hell, in the brain trusts, real tits are optional if a guy’s got hand lotion and a decent computer.”

Patrick laughed so hard and so suddenly he spit out his water. “We’re not bright as a species, are we,” he giggled, and Whiskey giggled back.

“Nope. Sweartagod, even the het guys don’t take the time to notice tits sometimes. We’re
really
not that smart.”