Clear Water (12 page)

Patrick looked at her again, startled. “Are you sure?”

Whiskey nodded. “Oh, yeah. I couldn’t possibly forget the last time I heard that sound.”

Fly Bait stopped that unholy racket for a minute and looked at Whiskey with big eyes, and then she started breathing in, and in, and in, like a baby about to cry, and when she let loose, it was….

“Oh God!” Patrick shouted, glad they were at the abandoned dock this morning instead of at the big quay with the other docked boats. This was the sort of sound that would bring people in droves to see what in the hell was going on. “That’s even louder! What in the fuck did I do?”

Whiskey kept his hand over his mouth and shook his head. “Uhm, well, it usually has something to do with a guy and his balls.”

“
Geeeeeeeeeeeeerrrkkkkkkk-wwwwwaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuggggggghhhhhhhhh
!”

“How do we make her stop?!” Oh, Jesus! Patrick was ready to cry!

“We don’t.” Whiskey took his hand away from his mouth, and Fly Bait kept her hands around her middle and kept up that glass-cracking caterwauling without stopping. “Come on down, Patrick. Let’s have some breakfast and let her work her way out.”

Down in the boat it was cool, and the smell of eggs and garlic salt made it feel homey.

“Sit down and eat,” Whiskey said. “We’re going to leave Fly Bait here to do telemetry, and you’re going to come out with me into the field.”

Patrick sat down and dished some scrambled eggs onto a piece of toast and nodded. “But aren’t I supposed to be working on the boat?”

“Kid, we’ve got two months. You’ll have time. Right now, a third person would come in handy, and since we parked this thing right by the marsh we’re doing this next round of assessment in, I figured you’re it.”

Patrick brightened—Fly Bait’s terrible laughter was still ringing through the boat, but this other thing sounded like it could be fun.

“Really? I could come out and help you? That would be
awesome.
” Patrick took a big bite of eggs and then fished in his pocket for his little brown bottle of little brown pills. “Hey guys,” he murmured. “Didja miss me?”

He threw one back with a big swallow of milk and took another bite of eggs, chewing quickly and swallowing with some joy. When he looked up, he realized that Whiskey was looking at him quizzically.

“Wha’?” he asked, his mouth full of eggs. He swallowed abruptly and waited for an answer.

Whiskey shook his head. “Uhm, what’s gonna be different about you?”

“With the LBP?”

“Yeah. What’s it do to you?”

Patrick pretended to think. “Well, first I get hella horny, and then I start humping the furniture.”

Whiskey threw a piece of toast at him, and Patrick grinned back. “Hilarious, asshole. I’ve had to deal with some pretty freaky people who take antipsychotics and shit. I just want to know, okay?”

Patrick looked at him in surprise. “That sort of thing run big in hippie houseboat researchers?”

Whiskey rolled his eyes. “I’ve got a doctorate, cuteness. High echelon scientists are very bright, and some of them are very antisocial, and some of them are very tightly wound. Not all of them, mind you, but high IQs come with their share of problems, ’kay? So just tell me what’s going to happen so I know!”

He seemed pretty intense, and Patrick shrugged. “Nothing, really. I mellow out a little. It might look like I go all zombie mode sometimes, but that’s not what it feels like in my head.”

Whiskey cocked his head. “What goes on in your head?”

Oh. No one had ever asked him that before. He had to think about it for a minute and remembered the bed full of laundry laid out in perfect little rows.

“You know how you get up in the morning and fish in your drawers and pull out wads of clothing and get dressed?”

Whiskey’s eyebrows were as dark as his eyes and his thick, shoulder-length curling hair, and they made a graceful little arch when he was making his listening face. Patrick took it as a signal and went on.

“Well, sometimes, when I had time and was organized, I used to do my laundry and fold my clothes on my bed and then put them away. It’s like that. When I don’t have the drugs, I’m all tangled. I’m jumping around and hitting my elbows and my knees on my brainpan when I’m fishing for my ideas. When I have the drugs, it’s like it’s all laid out in front of me and I can pick which shirt I want with which pants.” He stopped for a minute. “Which I sort of enjoyed, when I had clothes.” He smiled a little shyly at Whiskey, because he wanted him to know this. “I could actually make myself look pretty good, you know. When I had clothes and I could do my hair and shit. I’m only a fuckup in real life. In the mirror, I’m not bad.”

Whiskey didn’t have that “I’m listening” face on anymore. He had his “Patrick just said something I don’t know how to respond to” expression now.

He swallowed a couple of times and then looked down at his eggs. “You look real good,” he said, and his voice sounded funny. If he had tried, even once, to get into Patrick’s pants, Patrick would have thought Whiskey wanted him. As it was, Patrick was reasonably certain that he was a pain in the ass—a charity case that Whiskey and Fly Bait had adopted. Maybe they knew people like him, except crazy geniuses, and were feeling sympathy pangs or something. Patrick wasn’t sure why, really, these two people had decided to adopt him, but he’d spent his entire life not questioning why the help Shawn had hired put olives in the refrigerator one week and asparagus the next. He figured that if he didn’t track the basic small things that made his world run, then he should probably not question the big things either.

“I’m okay,” Patrick said critically. “I’m small. I tried to bulk up, but I kept straining things, and then one of the gym people got me hooked on yoga.”

Whiskey had that “I don’t know how to respond to this” expression on again. “Why did you want to bulk up?”

Patrick blushed. “No reason.”

“I could spot that blush from space.”

He sighed. “Because I was tired of getting cheated on. I thought, you know, maybe if I had a better body, someone would want to stay with me.” Bigger sigh. “I got really good at yoga, and that’s when I met Cal.”

Whiskey made a sound like a growl in his throat, and Patrick was surprised to find that his knee—which had been bumping Whiskey’s knees under the tiny table throughout the entire conversation, was suddenly covered with a warm, calloused brown hand.

“Patrick, man… man, I’ve been listening to you for three days. And I don’t mean to tell you how to live but….” That hand squeezed, and Patrick almost shuddered. God, all those guys who just fucked him and then fucked around on him, and that hand on his knee… it offered so much more than a simple touch in a sensitive place. It was just… just….

Just solid. That was all. Solid. Like a big fat housecat. Whiskey’s hand felt comforting and warm and real, and Patrick felt a floating sensation, a sinking down, similar to the sinking into his meds sensation that he’d been waiting for, but this one was more flesh and less fiction. This was like sinking into a really firm mattress. He was afraid if he made too big a thing out of it, it would go away.

“But what?” Patrick asked through a dry throat.

“But stop… stop pimping yourself out to guys who don’t deserve you. You’re fine. You really are. There’s nothing wrong with Patrick. Patrick is a—”

“Spaz.” Patrick stood up abruptly after finishing the sentence. He didn’t want Whiskey’s pity. He gathered the dishes and took them to the sink, leaving a nice plate for Fly Bait and a healthy funk of silence at his back.

Whiskey’s hands on his shoulders were such a surprise that he dropped a dish in the sink with a clatter, and when Whiskey’s lips touched his ear, he dropped everything else.

“Patrick is a good guy,” he said quietly, right in Patrick’s tickle zone, but Patrick wasn’t laughing. “Patrick has more of his shit together than he thinks. Patrick is funny and smart, and if I met Patrick in a bar, I’d chat him up in a hot second.”

“Patrick’s a loser who picked the world’s nicest guy to almost drown in front of,” Patrick muttered. Whiskey’s hands felt so nice on his shoulders, and he was standing so close. “And I’m tired of talking about myself in the third person.” He jerked away because all he wanted to do was lean back. “What do I need to pack?”

Whiskey sighed and dragged his hand through his hair, but he didn’t back away. “Water, some sandwiches, maybe some trail mix. And sunblock. And wear your hat.”

Patrick felt a quiet smile from somewhere. “And Patrick is flammable,” he added, laughing a little at his own joke.

Whiskey nodded and looked away. “And Patrick is flammable,” he added, but he sounded, if anything, sad.

Patrick cranked up his smile about three notches and said, “Yeah, let me do the dishes, then I’ll pack. Go get Fly Bait and do your science-dude shit. I’ll be ready when you are.”

Whiskey was still looking some place past Patrick’s shoulder, and suddenly his brown eyes met Patrick’s with a sort of inscrutable intensity. “Patrick, this isn’t over, okay? You and me? You want to stay here, you want to keep sleeping in my bed, that’s fine. I like you there. You’re warm and you’re kind, and it’s comfortable, having you there. But I’m going to want you, and you’re going to want me, and if you don’t want to follow through on that, that’s fine too. But you’ll need to decide which way you want it, and you need to make it clear when you make your decision. I’m, like, twelve years older than you, and I don’t sleep around. I’m not going to hit on you just because you’re cute and you’re here. I need to know it’s something you want, and it’s something you need, and you’re not just doing it because you think you need to put out because I’m being human to you. You don’t. All you need to do is be human back.”

Patrick couldn’t look at him anymore. He stared at his hands instead. “I thought we already established I’m a spaz,” he muttered.

Whiskey’s half-irritated laugh was less intense than the long speech that Patrick, thanks to his fucking LBP, had been able to keep track of through each painful, embarrassing word. “All we’ve really established is that you sleep with the wrong men.”

Patrick thought of Cal, thought of waking up half-dead and bereft of his credit cards and his cash and his phone and his car. “Can’t argue with that,” he muttered. “Not really sure I want to fuck with the one guy who hasn’t tried to take advantage of me,” he said apologetically.

Whiskey nodded. “Well, you let me know if you change your mind about that.” He turned then, before Patrick could say anything, and Patrick watched him go. God, he was easy to look at. And kind. And unassuming. And not trying to get Patrick’s money or a piece of his ass.

He was, in short, everything Patrick didn’t know what to do with in a man. Patrick, in fact, was probably more comfortable with the two-headed frog.

H
ELPING
Whiskey plant the probes should have been a pain in the ass. It was hot; the marsh grass kept razoring Patrick’s legs; every step sank him into the mud, and it was smelly and gross; and there were
bugs
,
and they were making Patrick just plain old apeshit. But listening to Whiskey’s conversation with Fly Bait and his general grump-funking at the world in general was high amusement. Patrick managed not to talk for most of the time simply because Whiskey was so entertaining.

“Yeah, I’m putting the goddamned probe in. No, I don’t know which one it is. Should I? Well, no shit, Fly Bait, I’m not going to put the sulfur probe in a place with too much vegetation. I’ve got as many goddamned letters after my name as you do—why not tell me not to put the methane probe in a pile of cowshit while you’re at it?”

Fly Bait—in spite of her unusual nickname—didn’t rise to the bait often. In fact, most of the time, her response was, “Fuck you, Whiskey,” and then she’d move on to the next task. She did this often enough that Patrick could mimic her timing perfectly.

“Oh, Jesus, is that one registering? It looks dinged. I fucking dinged it last time I used it. Fuck. Well, they say they’ll withstand anything. Fly Bait, are you getting that one yet? Fly Bait? Jesus, Fly Bait, how fucking long does it take to register a fucking probe?”

“Fuck you, Whiskey. I’ve got it.”

And so on. Until suddenly Whiskey brought up something that neither of them could blow off.

“Aw, fuck. Did we bring any of the fucking Off? The mosquitoes are eating the fuck out of me. Patrick here is a walking bite. This is a fucking West Nile zone, isn’t it? Goddammit….”

“Oh, fuck.” Fly Bait’s voice was succinct. “Jesus, Whiskey—I didn’t even think when you guys went out there. They’ve been pretty good with the standing water protocols—Jesus, sometimes the letters behind the name… you know the rest.”

“Only spell dumbass,” Whiskey finished for her. He looked over his shoulder at Patrick, who looked back, scratching at his neck.

“Am I gonna die of the bird flu?” he asked without interest.

“Probably not. But if you are, you won’t know it until you wake up blind or with some sort of shitty side effect that no one’s heard of.”

“Fucking awesome. Are we almost done? If I’m going to die, I want to swim first.”

Whiskey grinned at him, the first absolutely voluntary action of non-irritation that Patrick had seen since they’d hiked down the little dirt road by the abandoned dock and taken a right into the wetlands. “Me too. But let’s go back early, and then we can go in town and get some mosquito repellent.”

Patrick sighed. “Yeah. Fine. Fucking bugs—they really are going to fuck up the best part of the day, aren’t they?”

Again that irrepressible, oh-so-sexy, confident grin. The best thing about it was that Patrick could see the Wesley Keenan in it, the undergrad who couldn’t get laid. The worst thing was that it made his heart race, his stomach cramp, and his breathing come so fast he was light headed. “You mean listening to me swear at equipment wasn’t a treat?”

Aw, fuckitall. Patrick grinned back. “Okay. The second-best part of the day.”

Whiskey chuckled and asked for the next neatly labeled probe. Patrick handed it over, Whiskey reported where he was sticking it, and Fly Bait registered that it was sending telemetry.