Clear Water Read online

  Patrick stood up, and Whiskey winced because it sounded like he’d bumped his knees on the bottom of the table again. God, the guy wasn’t that tall, maybe five foot eight in his stocking feet, but he was all points, peaks, sharply angled bones and crooked joints when he wasn’t in the yoga zone, and Whiskey was afraid that any other zone they had for him would put the poor baby in danger of his life.

  “Omigod, omigod, omigod, whatamigoingtodo! What? What if he finds me? What if he thinks I’m going to call the police or he wants to sponge off my old man some more or he wants to kill me because I know he’s a total bastard, and not in the hyperbolic way either.” He looked up at Whiskey with big eyes. “Hyperbolic means totally exaggerated, so if he doesn’t want to kill me in the hyperbolic way, that means he really wants to kill me! Omigod, Whiskey, what did he want, what am I going to….”

  Whiskey stood up and clamped his hands on Patrick’s shoulders, feeling those thin clavicles through his tank top. Jesus, had he actually gone out in public like this? How many people, men and women, had ogled Whiskey’s poor, defenseless, tragic rabbit when he’d been shouldering a cart through Walmart trying to keep his rabbit brain from hopping all over the damned store?

  “Calm down,” Whiskey barked, probably more grimly than he’d intended. Patrick actually started to quiver, like the heartbeat of a captured squirrel, under Whiskey’s hands.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—”

  Whiskey clapped his hand over Patrick’s wide, mobile, fuckable mouth. “You don’t have to be sorry,” he said into the sudden (involuntary) silence.

  Patrick nodded silently, and Whiskey became aware of the warmth of Patrick’s breath on Whiskey’s calloused palm. Whiskey swallowed, hard, then swallowed again and said, “I’m going to move my hand now. I want you to calm down. Nod if that’s okay.”

  Patrick nodded, and then, damn him, his eyes crinkled in the corners and Whiskey felt it: Patrick’s pointed little tongue coming out to touch the center of his palm and tease it moistly. Then, while Whiskey was still startled—and, let’s face it, beguiled—he moved his lips gently at the center and followed it up with the tiniest little bunny nibble.

  Whiskey’s entire body went cold. He let out a long breath, the kind that felt like a sound wave, and he made that same sound that Fly Bait had, except his was charged with sex and wanting and need.

  He shook his head grimly, but Patrick’s eyes didn’t stop sparkling wickedly, even when Whiskey removed his hand and held onto the shudders that rattled his skin with the barest of control.

  “Are we done now?” Fly Bait’s sardonic voice cut through the sudden silence, and Whiskey shot her a look full of loathing. Done? Unless he and Patrick went humping for the berth to finish this moment off, he was nowhere close to done, and given Fly Bait’s assessment of his “principles,” he wasn’t likely to be, either.

  “Peachy,” Patrick said with a beatific smile.

  “Aces,” Whiskey all but snarled. “Let’s talk about what you’re going to do.”

  The sparkle died from Patrick’s eyes, and Whiskey realized he’d go back to being horny and frustrated if it meant Patrick didn’t look so flatly defeated.

  “What?” he asked, swallowing rapidly, and Whiskey looked at Fly Bait, who shrugged.

  “Nothing,” Whiskey said logically. “You’re going to call your dad and tell him you’re alive, you’re going to call your job and tell them you’ll take it at the start of the semester if they’ll hold it for you, and then you’re going to stay here with us. We’ve got shit you can do for the whole rest of the summer—”

  “We do?” Fly Bait’s surprise was genuine.

  “We do,” Whiskey insisted, even though he knew it was madness because this was a small project and they really didn’t. “I’m—” Crap, Whiskey, way to commit to something without forethought. “I’m fixing the houseboat up. After that Greenpeace thing I committed to in September, I’m thinking about moving back here. Making a home base. You and me, we can do the science shit, and the kid can do the cleanup and fix this shithole up.”

  Patrick looked around the dingy, overcrowded space with the tacky carpet, the cheap, peeling paneling, and the shredded vinyl furniture. “I think you have seriously overestimated any abilities I’ve ever had in any area ever,” he said with complete seriousness.

  Whiskey’s skepticism was palpable. “Sweetheart, I’m pretty sure there’s a few areas where you can completely blow my socks off.”

  Patrick grinned, completely unrepentant. “I could show you my expertise,” he said hopefully, and Whiskey just shook his head because he didn’t want to flirt when he was pretty sure the kid didn’t mean it, and changed the subject.

  “Okay. So Patrick helps with the science shit, and then he helps with the reconstruction shit, and in the meantime, we don’t tell anyone we don’t know who he is and what he’s doing here. It’s simple. It’s a plan. Fly Bait and I have to start collecting data now, any fucking objections?”

  Fly Bait took the obvious. “I never have any objections to fucking, ever.”

  “Jesus—”

  “Can I clean up and put the mac and cheese away and shit?” Patrick asked, and Whiskey and Fly Bait raised their eyebrows at each other, because normally they would have let the mac and cheese sit and eaten it out of the pot until it didn’t taste good anymore, then waited until the cheese sauce cracked off the Teflon surface of the pot before they dry-washed it. In the same way many doctors and nurses smoked cigarettes, Whiskey and Fly Bait were that breed of biologist who believed that salmonella happened to other people, and so far they’d been right.

  “Uhm, yeah,” said Fly Bait, looking pleased. “That’d be awesome. Knock yourself out.”

  Patrick’s smile was nuclear, but Whiskey looked at it too long anyway and maybe burnt out all of the non-Patrick receptors in his brains, or at least that was how he described it to people for the rest of his life.

  “CHLORINE?”

  “Sub.”

  “Come again?”

  “Did I stutter?”

  “Why would the chlorine be sub-level?”

  “Fuck if I know. Maybe there’s a baking soda plant nearby.” Fly Bait’s voice was sharp and wicked, and Whiskey glared at her. The numbers from this latest quadrant—not the quadrant that Patrick’s father’s recycling plant occupied, and not downriver either—were really wonky.

  “Baking soda?” Patrick said, looking over the edge of the counter. He’d cleared off the counter and stacked much of the equipment on top of it, making room for the table. When Whiskey asked him where he was going to prepare food, Patrick had produced a little plastic cutting board that was meant to fit over the tiny sink, and Whiskey had been suitably impressed. He’d bought it at Walmart, which meant that his rabbit brain probably bounded to the right directions more often than not.

  “Yeah, like that shit you just used to clean the counter with.” Patrick’s choice of cleaning supplies had been surprisingly green. He’d been making due with vinegar and baking soda and biodegradable dish soap, and Whiskey was, again, impressed. Patrick may have had a rabbit brain—and a vulnerable little heart—but anyone who thought Patrick was stupid hadn’t been paying attention.

  God, the world sucked for attention sometimes.

  “Yeah—my dad buys it by the truckload,” Patrick told him. “They use it to neutralize stuff that I can’t name yet.”

  “Good to know,” Whiskey said thoughtfully. “That could be it—but I don’t know what it’s doing upstream of your dad’s plant, and I really don’t know why it would make the damned frogs go freaky.”

  “They’re not freaky!” Patrick said with surprising heat. “They can’t help it! They were just born like that. Something didn’t work that should have worked and they were fucked—but that doesn’t make them freaks.”

  And then he stalked off. Whiskey watched him go and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Oh, God. What have I done?”

  “I think you just called him
a freak,” Fly Bait said, considering the question.

  “Not that, although… oh, fuck. I really did. No. What am I going to do about him?”

  “Yeah, he’s cute. It must totally suck to have him crushing like that all over your bisexual ass.”

  “I wish,” Whiskey said sullenly. Nothing but sexual fantasies for the last two hours. When Patrick wasn’t freaking out about something, he moved with the subtle lightness of a dancer, and Whiskey kept wondering what it would be like to hold that flighty grace captured and yielding in his arms.

  Oh, God. What a totally predictable cliché. Was there any possible way he could make this worse?

  “You could follow him out there and share a tender moment with him,” Fly Bait suggested, and Whiskey groaned, resting his head on his arms.

  “God, I really want to.”

  Fly Bait’s hand on his shoulder was perhaps the most they’d touched since that one ill-fated weekend waiting for fish to spawn.

  “Do it, Whiskey. You don’t have to boink him—you’ve only known him two days. You’re classier than that. But I like who you are when you’re with him.”

  Whiskey glared at her sourly. “Who in the fuck would that be?”

  “You’re a goddamned hero. Now go be a hero.”

  “God, you’re weird,” he grumbled, but he set his clipboard down and took a much-needed stretch break into the fresh air and impossible heat of the Sacramento Delta.

  “I don’t want to talk,” Patrick muttered when he got up top, and Whiskey almost fell over in an effort not to trip on him.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Watching a frog talk to itself,” Patrick muttered, and sure enough, he was on his stomach, under the overhang, staring intently into Cal and Catherine’s box.

  “How do you know it’s not two frogs having a conversation?” Whiskey asked curiously.

  “I don’t. That’s what makes it so fascinating.” There wasn’t a trace of sarcasm in his voice, either.

  “You’re not a two-headed frog,” Whiskey told him bluntly, and Patrick threw him a glare over his shoulder before going back to contemplating the frogs.

  “I’m not a normal human being,” he said logically, and Whiskey took advantage of that pert, yoga-toned bottom looking him in the face and smacked it.

  “The fuck you aren’t.”

  “ADHD is a behavioral disorder that shows itself in a shortened attention span and poor impulse control. When I don’t want to hear what you say, I ignore you, and when I get pissed off, I throw phones even though I know that’s not a good thing. I am not normal.”

  Fabulous. Another excellent definition from Patrick’s “abnormal” brain. Why couldn’t he ever define the good shit about himself?

  “You’re totally and completely normal. You’re a high-maintenance spaz, but that’s just you.”

  This time, the look Patrick shot him was much less irritable. “It’s a good thing you’re not trying to get in my pants,” he said mildly. “Your technique sucks.”

  “My technique is fine.” It was in bed, anyway. “But I just wanted you to not feel sorry for yourself up here when you’ve almost made Fly Bait fall in love with that whole ‘clean the workspace’ idea. It’s damned sexy, actually. Would be a shame to waste all that effort.”

  Patrick’s smile was just as gorgeous this time, and he pulled himself up to his feet and threw his arms around Whiskey in a totally spontaneous hug that caught him so totally by surprise that Whiskey almost fell off the boat and onto the hard dock below.

  He told himself that he had no choice but to return the hug if he wanted to keep them upright, but he finally got to hold that thin, vibrating body in his arms, and that was the real reason. God, he felt good. His narrow chest, his narrow hips, his swollen groin…. Aw, fuck.

  “Hey,” he snapped, backing up. “None of that, you little perv. We’re being professional here.”

  Patrick’s face fell. “Jesus. At least when I waited tables I got laid in the walk-in refrigerator.”

  Whiskey shook his head, honestly at a loss. “Have a little respect for yourself,” he said seriously. “God, at least try for car sex. That’s got some class.”

  Patrick’s mouth twisted. “Not in a Honda Jazz.” Patrick met his eyes then, the gaze absolutely naked with honesty. “Besides—you’re really hot, but we both know I’d crash and burn anything we started. Hands off is a really good idea.” Then he sighed.

  Whiskey sighed back because it probably was a good idea but now it sounded stupid and frustrating, even though he still didn’t want to come on to the guy when he was trying to be responsible. Feeling frustrated, he pulled out his phone.

  “Here. You’ll feel like shit until you call him, okay?”

  “Yeah. And if I hurry, he’ll still be at work, so I can leave a message.”

  Ouch. “You really think he’ll be at work?”

  Patrick’s small round face was so earnest it hurt. “Where else would he be?” He started dialing and then looked embarrassed. “Uhm… I’m some random guy, but… yeah. Don’t leave, okay?”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

  That mobile mouth opened up in a grin. “’Kay. Thanks.” A quick punch of keys into the phone and then, “Oh shit. Dad? I was gonna leave a message. Shit. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I wasn’t driving—I swear I wasn’t driving.” Patrick started bouncing up and down on his toes as he talked, his body becoming a living tuning fork for all his emotional agitation—probably in response to all the yelling that Whiskey could hear burning through the other end of the phone. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to freak you out. Don’t worry bout me. Don’t worry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I canceled my credit cards, okay? I didn’t spend any of that money, okay? Cal stole them. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You don’t have to worry about me ever again!”

  The phone was halfway cocked behind his ear, and Whiskey reached out and grabbed it from him hurriedly, hitting “end call” and putting the phone safely in his pocket.

  Patrick didn’t look at him, just stared miserably at Whiskey’s old flip-flops and wiggled his toes for visual interest. “I’m sorry,” he said reflexively, and Whiskey sighed.

  “Don’t be. Just, uhm, I don’t know, try not to throw something we need, okay? We can collect some river rocks, keep them up on the stern or something.”

  That got him a small, grateful smile. “I’m, uhm, gonna talk to the frogs for a little while,” he apologized, and Whiskey wrapped a companionable arm around his shoulder.

  “No you’re not. Come down and help Fly Bait and I wrap up this quadrant, and then we can go park the boat at the deserted dock and swim. We can even keep it there for a while, what do you say?”

  “I’d like that,” Patrick told him, nakedly accepting the offer to cheer him up. Then another thought hit his rabbit brain. “Can I, uhm, call the yoga place too? Maybe they’ll have better news and I can stop playing that last conversation in my head like autoloop. Because I do that with zombie movies, and then I go to sleep and dream about them, and then I wake up all freaked out because the zombies are going to get me, and I don’t want to do that if we end up in the same bed again. I sort of flail about, and I might clock you.”

  From yoga teaching to zombies to sex to violence. Whiskey was a little dizzy. “Yeah, sure, kid. But I’m gonna stay here for this one. We still need to buy Fly Bait a phone, and we’re running out of grant money, okay?”

  Patrick nodded earnestly. “Yeah, yeah, okay.” And then took the phone and proceeded to get some good news.

  THEY parked the boat at the old dock and decided to call it a night there. Once again, Whiskey had the privilege of watching Patrick dive, pale-skinned, into the river in the evening. They pulled out some glycerin soap and soaped their hair so they didn’t have to tax the shower water without the hookups, and mostly just swam. They didn’t play—it was almost meditation time, with friends, although Whisk
ey noticed that Patrick enjoyed the hell out of striking out to the furthest reaches of the river and letting the current bear him back.

  “If you’re not careful,” Whiskey called, “that current is going to sweep you downriver. You know that, right?”

  “Not if I know where home is!” Patrick called, swimming back to the eddy on the upriver side of the boat.

  Whiskey couldn’t argue with that, but it didn’t stop him from being afraid for that pale, slender figure as it threatened to whirl away from him. A figure that was getting pink, he noticed with a grimace, and he called out to Fly Bait to find the sun block, since she was the last one to have it.

  “You gonna put it on him?” she asked as she paddled by, and Whiskey shuddered, heated in spite of the cool of the water.

  “You’d better,” he muttered. “I’m not safe right now.”

  “Coward,” she called softly, but she kept paddling.

  He watched, though, as she stroked the sunblock onto his back and shoulders in that crisp, no-nonsense way she had. Patrick stood docilely, only the occasional twitch of his hands or jerk of his chin letting on that he was impatient for this part to be over, and all Whiskey could think of was the way he’d literally lit up inside when the woman on the other end of the line had told him that they could certainly hold the yoga instructor job until the end of August.

  He’d turned to Whiskey with those big, blue, Bambi eyes shiny with gratitude and said, “Yay! Somebody wants me!” before flashing a winsome smile and handing Whiskey the phone. Patrick ran downstairs to tell Fly Bait, (who, to her credit, hadn’t asked why in the hell she should care) leaving Whiskey floored by an incontrovertible realization.

  “I want you,” he said, surprised at himself. “I really, really do.”

  THAT night, after watching a movie on Fly Bait’s laptop (definitely a communal experience since they had to huddle together like cavemen over a fire to see the screen), they executed the complicated industrial origami that produced the fold-out bed out of the kitchen table, both of them gasping a little as the dust rose from the cushions. Whiskey grabbed his rolled-up sleeping bag from his berth, and they straightened it out for Patrick to sleep on.