Clear Water Read online

  And what pissed him off pissed Fly Bait off, and that made things unpleasant.

  “Fucking numbers. They don’t make any fucking sense. Been tramping all over the fucking swamp and half the riverfront between here and fucking Redding and… what in the fuck are you doing?” he snarled, and Fly Bait jumped back and looked at him.

  “Setting my clipboard down on the clipboard spot,” she said, a little puzzled, and Whiskey growled at her and then turned around and kicked his foot through one of the shitty cabinets beneath the sink.

  “Patrick’s going to want to fix that,” Fly Bait said, her voice dry and critical, and now Whiskey really felt like shit.

  “I know. God, I know. He’s above deck right now polishing the fucking chrome, and I’m abusing the goddamned cabinetry. I’m a bad fucking person. Fuck!”

  With that, he sank to his haunches and scrubbed his hand through his hair and tried to get a hold of his runaway emotions.

  This was so unlike him.

  He and Fly Bait, they had a pattern. It was dry. It was understated. There was snark. There was quiet empathy. There was teamwork and camaraderie, at the same time there was a nice emotional distance that said they had each other’s backs at the same time they didn’t have to get close. There was no talking about their feelings or bonding over old lovers or discussion of the great, grand meaning of the universe.

  And there were no overwrought emotions or kicking your foot through the cabinet door or needing to touch another human being so bad your skin hurt with it.

  “Fuuuuuuuuccccckkkkkkk!”

  Fly Bait was suddenly crouched down next to him. She shifted then, and sat cross-legged, and gestured for Whiskey to do the same. In a second, there they were, in the middle of the cramped floor space and itchy, orange-puke-colored carpet of the boat. “Man, you’ve got to get a hold of yourself.”

  “The data is frustrating,” he said earnestly, and she made a sound of pure disbelief.

  “Your horniness is frustrating. When are you going to cop to the fact that this isn’t just an attraction? You’ve been attracted to people before. Loretta said she thought you got off on self-denial.”

  Whiskey glared at her. “That’s so not true. Loretta was totally hot—I just didn’t feel right. She was an undergrad. That’s wrong.”

  Fly Bait colored. “Didn’t stop me.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the difference between wrong and true love.”

  Fly Bait caught her breath, and suddenly everything about her face softened. Her taut, flat mouth, her tight jaw, the furrows between her eyes. For the first time in forever, Whiskey remembered when she’d been an awkward, brooding girl named Freya who caught shit for everything from her name to her sexual orientation. Whiskey had been a little more popular—but just as lost, really—in the jungles of UC Santa Barbara, and Fly Bait had been so grateful for his quiet, undemanding friendship.

  They’d managed to secretly room together during their sophomore year. Whiskey’s roommate had been squicked out by his bisexuality, and Fly Bait had been totally copacetic with all things Whiskey—their RA had assumed they were sleeping together, and they’d been study buddies for life.

  But in nearly seventeen years of friendship, Whiskey had never seen her look like that.

  “It is true love,” she said now, throatily. “We’re practically living together. I miss her. I took this trip because I didn’t think I’d miss her, because I don’t miss anyone, except you when we haven’t worked together in too long, but I miss her. But I’m stupid. I’m bad with people. Of course it’s taken me two years to figure out I’d miss her.” Fly Bait looked at him seriously, her plain, freckled face relaxed into the face of a very pretty woman in love. “You’re smarter than I am with people, Wes. You are. You need to just give in, you know?”

  Whiskey groaned and propped his elbows up on his knees and his chin in his hands. “You think I don’t know that? It’s not me, Fly Bait. It’s him. He doesn’t want me. I mean… I’m pretty sure he wants me, but I don’t think he’s gonna let himself have me.”

  Fly Bait’s expression changed, and she was Fly Bait yet again and not soft, sweet little Freya Bitner. “You’re shitting me.”

  “I shit you not.”

  “No, no, no, no. It’s got to be his damage. I know he wants you. You can… God—have you seen the way he looks at you when you’re not looking?”

  Whiskey raised an eyebrow at her. “Obviously. Not.”

  Fly Bait swore. “Okay. Okay. No wonder you just became a super-asshole. I see it now. Tell you what. We’re going to have a weekend off. I’m going to call Loretta, she’s going to come rent a really sweet hotel room, and we’re going to have so much sex the government is going to try to close us down because we’ll have the whole city going lesbo. I swear. And you and Patrick are going to be alone together, and you’re going to hammer this out, by which I mean you’re going to nail him until he’s flat.”

  Fly Bait nodded and stood, and Whiskey just looked at her like she’d turned another color or something.

  “Fly Bait, I don’t think—”

  She shook her head. “Don’t think. It’s not good for men to think too much with their neurons and shit. Just keep thinking with the smaller head between your legs—it’s where you do your best thinking. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  And with that, she trotted up above deck and into the light and the heat outside. Whiskey heard her call, “Hey, Patrick—Whiskey just broke a fucking cabinet. How much do you know about carpentry?” And then she was off the boat, presumably to have a private conversation on the new phone Whiskey had seen her pulling out of her pocket before she even got up the stairs.

  Patrick came clattering down, looking at Whiskey unhappily.

  “I don’t know anything about carpentry,” he said. “I’m sor—”

  “Fuck sorry,” Whiskey said with a sigh. “Let’s go buy some wood and make a patch, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure. Can we get a cherry slushy? For some reason I’ve been dying for one.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “Where’d Fly Bait go?”

  “Fuck if I know. Come on—we want to get this fixed before the weekend.”

  “Why? What’s happening during the weekend?”

  “Fuck if I know—but Fly Bait seems to think it’s gonna be extraordinary. C’mon.”

  They went and bought the plywood and the hinges and came back and fixed the cabinet in companionable quiet, and the whole time, Whiskey was hearing Fly Bait’s voice ringing in his head like cathedral bells. Nail him until he’s flat.

  Well, it wasn’t poetry, but it sure did lighten the hell out of his mood.

  Patrick

  Squinky

  “YOU’RE going where?”

  Patrick didn’t mean to feel betrayed, but he still did. The three of them had spent nearly four weeks setting up a nice little routine. It was like family. Fly Bait was, well, the older sister, and Patrick was the little brother, and Whiskey was… oh, shit. Okay. It was like family, but damned if Patrick would say Whiskey was any sort of a blood relative without getting hella squicked out. He just couldn’t.

  He turned to pudding with a boner whenever the guy so much as looked at him with those patient brown eyes, and Patrick couldn’t find any detectable trace of melt-be-gone in the guy’s makeup. He was hot, he was patient, he gave Patrick space at the same time he continued to be really nice to him—what wasn’t to melt over?

  Except Patrick had never had someone in his life who was this nice to him, and he was pretty sure that was all going to go the fuck away if they had sex.

  Which was why Fly Bait’s announcement after breakfast (and after he’d had one of his LBPs from a quickly diminishing supply) was really unwelcome.

  “My girlfriend is flying in from Seattle, we’re going to rent a hotel room and have more sex than should be allowed by law. Which part of that did you not understand?”

  Patrick’s hand lashed out in a frantic gesture that caugh
t Whiskey, who was standing behind him, square in the stomach. “The part where you leave me and Whiskey alone! Together!” His voice squeaked on the last word, but he didn’t care.

  “Jesus, Patrick, I’m not a rapist, and you’re not a Harlequin romance heroine! If you don’t want to have sex with me, by all means, continue saying no! It’s worked pretty damned good for the last three weeks!” And with that, Whiskey stomped off, and Patrick watched him go.

  “Fuck,” he said, feeling miserable.

  “Yeah.”

  “I hurt his feelings.”

  “A feat I would have once claimed impossible.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “He knows that.”

  Patrick groaned and buried his face in his hands. “Why you gotta go get laid, Fly Bait? I mean… can’t girls go longer without it than boys? Isn’t that why you’re here on a boat with a guy you don’t want to bone?”

  Fly Bait grunted and stood up to clear off the table. Patrick belatedly remembered that was his job and stood up to help her, but she sent him a look, even as he got to his feet, and he sat down. She nodded once and then proceeded to scrape the plates into the garbage disposal.

  “Question is,” she muttered, grimacing as Patrick’s oatmeal literally slid out of the pot because it had so much butter and sugar in it, “why don’t you want to get laid?”

  “I just got rid of a boyfriend,” Patrick mumbled, turning red. “He was a drug-dealing scumbag, and he was an improvement on the serial cheaters that came before him. Maybe I should just give up sex altogether.”

  “That wasn’t a boyfriend,” Fly Bait said, looking at him like he was a little bit insane. “That was a car wreck. Literally—that was your car through a levee rail grade car wreck. That doesn’t count.”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway!” Patrick couldn’t sit down. He couldn’t. “It’s not like sex is anything to shout about! It’s icky, and the guy never wants to wear a condom, and I have to give a frickin’ health and safety lesson every time I give a blow job because they think I’m stupid, and I know you can get shit from giving head, and I’m not putting that thing in my mouth unless I get a written fucking guarantee that it’s not going to drop off or explode or give me some life-threatening disease or mutant antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea!”

  He was bruising his hands because he kept hitting them on the back of the couch or the counter, and Fly Bait was backing up against the sink because she looked in fear for her life, but he wasn’t done yet.

  “And they never want to give me head back—they tell me that I’ve got a fuckable mouth and that’s what it’s made for, but dammit, just once, it would be good if someone went down on me, but you don’t want to say that, oh no, you don’t, because then some guy is just gonna flounce off and leave you with a boner and your fist, and hell, I can do that in the bathroom! Well, not this bathroom, because I’d probably open my carotid on the sink and die just from whacking off, and then all the Republicans would be right, right?”

  “Is there a point here somewhere?” Fly Bait asked him, but he was getting to it, so he just kept going.

  “And when you’re not getting head or giving head or getting hand jobs in the back of some club or the back of a car or in a guy’s bathroom because his gay male roommate who he’s probably cheating with anyway is still asleep, what’s left?”

  “Ritual suicide?” Fly Bait asked seriously, and Patrick shook his head with passion.

  “I’ll tell you what’s left! Butt sex! And it’s not fun like they make it out in the porno mags or on the vids, either! In the mags or the vids, they spend like forever and half a bottle of lube getting a guy ready for that. And they use condoms, but they never show those fuckers putting them on, oh no they don’t! They just show the guy with it on! And when that thing goes on, it takes forever, and the guy putting it on is whining the entire fucking time. ‘I’m clean, Patrick, would I lie to you, baby, why won’t you believe me, do I look sick?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t care if you’ve got the cock of a fucking elephant, I don’t want to touch it without a clean bill of health or a fucking condom, and right now the condom’s what we’ve fucking got!’, right? So it’s like they’re all pissed off by the time they get it on, and they’re not gentle, and there is no stretching, I repeat, no stretching, and they never use enough lubricant! I mean, why does it come in the big fucking bottle if you’re only supposed to use a dime-sized portion, right?”

  “I have no idea,” Fly Bait mumbled. She was looking a little pale, and her eyes were glazing over, but Patrick was almost done, so he figured she could take it.

  “I mean, it’s not hair gel, for Christ’s sake, dump some fucking lube on your cock! But they don’t! So what’s left—it’s just a condom and your asshole, and it’s painful and it’s… it’s… squinky, so there’s the blowjob where the guy is always trying to get you to play ‘guess when I’ll come in your mouth,’ and then there’s squinky butt sex, and it’s painful, and it’s embarrassing, and some guy’s got you by the hair going, ‘C’mon, baby, give it to me’, and I don’t wanna anymore! I don’t wanna give it to him! I never wanted to give it to him! I just wanted to be held and maybe get a kiss or, hell, a hand on my neck or something, but nooooooo, it had to be ‘guess when I’ll come in your mouth’ followed by squinky butt sex, and I hate it and it sucks and the last thing I want to do on the fucking planet is be in a place where Whiskey does that to me and realizes that I’m a shitty lay and why would he want to do it again!”

  Fly Bait had buried her face in her hands at this point, and Patrick sat down abruptly.

  “I’m still hungry,” he said unhappily. “I should have eaten the last of that oatmeal.”

  “Patrick?” Fly Bait said, her voice still muffled by her hands.

  “Yeah?”

  “If I drive to town and get you something ridiculously fattening to eat, would you do me a fucking favor?”

  “Yeah, Fly Bait. Anything. I’m solid for it.”

  “Uhm, would you a), believe that Whiskey is a better lover than that on his worst day, even with a cranky lesbian who never should have talked him into it, and b), never talk about this conversation again?”

  Patrick shrugged. “Can it be a giant Oreo milkshake?”

  “Sure.” She hadn’t taken her hands away from her face.

  “Aces. I’m going up top to get the tools. I want to rip the carpet out of your room this weekend, since you’re deserting me and all.”

  “Fuck you, Patrick.”

  “Yeah, just don’t forget the goddamned lube.” And with that, he wandered up to the deck to talk to the fucking frogs.

  He got up top of the deck and lay down on his stomach to look at Cal and Catherine. Sometimes one of them would move a back leg and the other one would try to coordinate, and that could be kind of exciting, but nine out of ten times, that whole enterprise sort of fell through. Mostly, Patrick just looked at them. They looked back and breathed. They didn’t croak, really—maybe their croaker had broken when the two of them split as tadpoles, he had no idea. But they breathed, and blinked, and that was peaceful. He could deal with that.

  He was in the shade under the awning, in the almost-cool little place he’d made to keep the research frogs and tadpoles cool in the sweltering late June heat, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel Whiskey’s shadow over him or feel it when Whiskey crouched down beside him.

  Patrick’s legs (Cal had called them skinny little chicken legs. Fucker!) were sticking out from his cargo shorts, and he was not anticipating Whiskey’s hand on the back of his thigh under the hem of his shorts.

  He was laying on a hard, flat surface, and suddenly he had a hard, round erection, and he groaned and thunked his forehead on the deck in the hollow made by his arms.

  “Patrick?”

  “Go away.”

  That hand caressed—seriously caressed—the back of Patrick’s leg, and Patrick shuddered.

  “Patrick, you do realize all the hatches were open to let in
the cooler air, right? I was up here counting anomalous tadpoles—I heard everything you said.”

  Oh, fuck!

  “’Kay. Change of plan. Kill me first. Then go away.”

  He heard that soft exhalation that meant that Whiskey was smiling. Not really laughing, but breathing with a smile. “I’ll leave you alone in a minute, but first, can I say something?”

  That hand was cupping the back of his thigh, and the thumb attached to it was tracing the edge of Patrick’s boxer-briefs. Patrick made a whimpering sound that must have counted as a “go ahead,” and bucked his hips, and the hand continued to torture him sweetly.

  “I would never do any of those things to any lover, okay? I get tested every six months, and I wear a condom unless I’m in a long-term relationship with someone who also tests negative regularly. And I’ve never cheated on a lover, and it’s not good for me unless it’s good for them. So if that’s what all of this is about, then maybe you could trust me on this part, you think?”

  Patrick sighed and started to respond rather shamelessly to Whiskey’s hand, which was now cupping his ass through his underwear.

  “You’re so nice to me,” he said after a few quiet moments in the sunshine. “You’re so nice to me, and I like you so much. I couldn’t stand it if sex made things different. How could I look at you like the good guy if you… I don’t know… play games and… do that other shit.” He couldn’t say those things to Whiskey—not like he had to Fly Bait. When he had unloaded on Fly Bait, it felt like he was simply venting. Telling Whiskey, it felt like an accusation, and that was wrong, because Whiskey had never treated him anything but decent.

  That hand moved out from Patrick’s shorts and then moved up to stroke the soft skin at the small of Patrick’s back. “Patrick, you think I’m a good guy. Do you think I’d put that in jeopardy by being a selfish bastard in pursuit of a one-off? Haven’t I earned any trust in the last three and a half weeks?”

  Oh, that hand. It was really sinful—it moved down his spine, and then up to his shoulders, and then it rubbed his neck under his rucked-up T-shirt. Patrick started to wiggle a little, right there on the deck, under the awning, with the frogs.