Clear Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

frayed cut-offs and then a ribbed white tank top, which was the only thing that didn’t have holes in it.
    The berth was tiny—the pedestal bed took up most of it, and the drawer underneath that was a veritable walk-in closet compared to the rest of the plastic-paneled set-in cupboards—and at around ten-thirty in the morning, even with the round open windows, it was stifling. Patrick grabbed one of the towels off the bed and gave it a shake, then tucked everything under his arm like a parcel and ventured past the doorway.
    The rest of the boat was surprisingly big. There was a dining room/living room area, the kind with a dinette table and couches/benches on either side of it, a small kitchen, and a couple of swiveling captain’s chairs up by the steering console. The captain’s chairs could probably double as regular furniture—they looked comfortable enough—and they were one of the few spaces that could actually be used for human purposes. Every other flat space in the place, including one of the couch/benches, was covered in equipment.
    Patrick had once gone on a science field trip in junior college with his professor, and the school-funded RV had looked something like this. There were stacks of sanitized test tubes, and stacks of sanitized data sheets, and stacks of electronic monitoring devices, and stacks of reactive chemicals to test what went into the test tubes, and basically what looked to be a massive clutter of stuff that was only useful to the occupants of the boat. 
    It reminded Patrick of his brain sometimes. He could sort of relate.
    There was a thin, wiry, tanned, freckled person wandering among all of the equipment with an electronic clipboard in front her. She made notations every now and then, and for a moment, Patrick stopped, wondering if he should acknowledge her. 
    “Don’t use all the fucking water in the bathroom, Twink,” she said, her voice flat. It could have been she was being shitty, or it could have been she just wanted to remind him not to use all the fucking water in the bathroom. The twink part was something Patrick assumed was just to differentiate him from, oh, maybe that Whiskey person with the fifty-dollar-scotch voice.
    “Okay,” he said, trying to oblige. He got into the bathroom and tried not to grimace. Ewww. He’d seen what frat boys could do to a bathroom—he’d screwed a couple of them in his community college days. Not together, of course, but they had been roommates, and only one of them had been out. When he’d broken up with that one, the one who was still in the closet had comforted him and then laid him, promising to come out and be the he-man of Patrick’s sad little dreams. Of course, those sad little dreams had disappeared after a couple of months of being Chad’s dirty little secret, but Patrick still remembered the way Chad excused the nastiness in his bathroom as his way of saying only a gay man would give a shit. The entire exercise had taught Patrick, a) not to date anyone in the closet, and b) that if being gay meant that he could scrub a toilet before it started speaking in tongues, then he was damned glad he was gay!
    Or at least he had been, until his father had suggested that being gay was just another way he was fucking up.
    He wouldn’t think about that. Not now. His whole body was a mess of aches, even with Whiskey’s ibuprofen, and he’d focus on the hot water sluicing on his skin for just long enough—
    Bang bang bang! “Goddammit, Twink, how much water do you think we have?”
    Oh, shit. “Sorry!” Goddammit… of all the times to lose time. Patrick wondered where Whiskey had put his little brown pills, the ones that seemed to make it easier to keep track of minutes and what he was doing in them. He set a thirty-second record for soaping his hair, pits, and creases and was out of the shower almost before he had time to rinse.
    “Sorry!” he said again. “Sorry! I didn’t mean to. I was trying to… goddammit, it’s small in