Clear Water Read Online Free PDF

here! How am I supposed to remember to do anything when my elbows… fuck, my toe… Jesus, my knee—”
    “Jesus, fuck me, kid—stop talking! You turned off the water, we’re all good!”
    But it was too late. Patrick was already self-conscious and banging all the aforementioned body parts on the toilet, sink, shower, mirror, wall, and, at one point, the light fixture, and by the time he came out, he was flustered and upset and scattered. He wanted some music, or a video game or his LBP (little brown pill!) or something, because he wasn’t up for human beings right now. 
    But he came out of the bathroom, and instead of a bitchy, impatient woman (he thought) tapping her foot in front of the door, there was the calm researcher placidly reviewing the data produced by the telemetry devices on the table.
    Patrick waited for her to notice him for several minutes, and he’d about given up hope when she turned her back and said, “Jesus, Twink, do you want me to paint a target on your ass?”
    “It was the only thing that was clean,” he muttered. 
    “And you tied a knot at the waist because?”
    “It was too big.” 
    So, uhm, yeah. The tank knotted at the waist and the cut-off shorts really did scream “South Beach,” but, well, that wasn’t going to change, right?
    The girl grunted, and Patrick may or may not have detected some humor in the sound. Then she said, “Fruit, yoghurt, cereal, bread, lunch meat. Whatever.”
    She didn’t say anything after that, and for a moment, Patrick thought the “fruit” was referring to him. Then Patrick put together an offer to eat and said “Thank you” before padding to the small refrigerator in the one part of the kitchen space that looked like it might be meant for humans. 
    She didn’t answer, and he was left to hunt and gather on his own. He decided on bread (stale) and salami (not stinky) without mayo (questionable) and thought that maybe yoghurt would have been safer even with the expired date on the top. He didn’t even want to smell the milk. It didn’t matter—the bread settled his stomach, the meat gave him some protein and solidity, and after a few moments of eating, he felt his brain settle down and some of that horrible, flustered feeling he thought he’d gotten out of his system in high school passed.
    He started to pay attention to what she was doing. 
    God, he had liked this. The categorization of information, putting everything neatly in its place. When he’d been taking science classes, it had always seemed like doing these things to the natural world was simple, whereas organizing his own tangled brain was not. 
    He stood up and watched the woman quietly for a few moments before asking, “Can I help?”
    She blinked at him. “Don’t you have better things to do?”
    Call his father and tell him that not only was he still gay, he was also still a world-class fuckup instead of just a minor, pain-in-the-ass one? Call Cal and say, “Hey, I’m alive! Did you really drug me and leave me in a sinking car? And where the hell is my wallet and phone?” Call his mother, who sent him a birthday card every year, and say, “Hey—remember me? It’s not my birthday, but I’m in a jam here, could you help me out?”
    “No,” he said quietly. “I can’t think of another damned thing I’d rather be doing.”
    The woman raised her eyebrows, chewed her bottom lip and bobbed her head for a minute, and then said, “Can you count, kid?”
    “You mean in real whole numbers? Yes. I did pass first grade.”
    He caught it—a minor tightening of certain lip muscles that, if intensified, might pass as a smile. He wanted to do a victory dance and a chest bump for that alone. “Excellent. C’mere.” 
    She walked him up to the deck of what appeared to be a truly tacky and appalling flat-bottomed houseboat with a slightly raised deck/submerged living quarters and a secondary steering console on the roof (Deck? Top deck? Whatever. He didn’t fucking sail)