for Stormymouse: "Islander" (Wilby Wonderful) by sageness
Title: Islander
Author: sageness
Recipient: stormymouse
Fandom: Wilby Wonderful
Rated: R
Summary: Buddy's still looking at his hands, or maybe the old worn-out rug at their feet, but then he turns his head toward Duck and says, "What was it like to get out?"
Islander
On the mainland, the cannery is always hiring. Duck does that for a while and it's mindless work, not near as good as putting fishing boat engines back together, like he used to in shop class. He comes home stinking on the ferry every evening after wading through nets and nets of fish before they get fed into the intake. He pulls out tires, rubber boots, squid, a child's naked plastic doll half-covered in barnacles. There are other things in the bycatch, too, worse things, that he does his best not to think about. Sea turtles that he knows are endangered. A dolphin calf once, more than once, mortally wounded and bleeding everywhere.
He stays until his mother dies and isn't surprised that she doesn't get to see summer. She doesn't have any last words. He sees her the night before, says "Bye, Mum" when he leaves and strokes her papery white hand with a calloused finger. She's wasted away almost to nothing. The next day he gets a telephone call at the cannery that she's gone. He cleans up and stands in the bow of the ferry and lets the hospital staff tell him what to do about the arrangements, which they have to because he's still not quite eighteen yet, and when it's all over, he doesn't feel any different at all. Bewildered, perhaps, that he doesn't have any better idea now of what to do with himself than he did the day before.
He walks around the island. Some of it is dense forest. Old Wilby is boring and residential and looks like any established coastal settlement in eastern Canada. He hikes out to the Watch and watches the fog bank up thick over the sea. He knows in a couple of hours they'll all be enshrouded, and that feels good.
He doesn’t say anything when Buddy sits down on the rock to his left. He'd wondered how long it would be before someone found him and who it would be. He hadn't really bet on it being Buddy.
"Hey," Buddy says.
Duck nods to him and turns his face back to the sea.
Buddy doesn't say anything else for a long time, which is fine. There isn't much of anything Duck wants to talk about with Buddy, except maybe who he thinks will make it to Stanley Cup finals next month, but it's not that kind of day. They sit in silence watching the waves and fog roll in, and after a while Buddy digs a battered pack of Camels out of his coat and lights up. He hands a cig to Duck and Duck leans in for Buddy to light it. Their shoulders brush together and Duck takes a deep drag. He's really fucking missed this. Buddy always liked auto mechanics better than marine mechanics, but that's okay. There'd been plenty of afternoons like this where they'd sat outside the classroom's open garage door and had a smoke while waiting for Coach to inspect their tune-ups.
Eventually Buddy asks, "You okay?"
Duck doesn't know. He ponders the cigarette. The cherry's glowing bright amber against the dark grey rock and the grey-blue ocean and the lighter-grey sky. He glances over at Buddy, gives him a sheepish smile. "Never dreamed I'd miss shop."
Buddy snorts and bumps their shoulders together. Duck doesn't pull away.
~
He can run a boat. He can fix an engine. He can run a fish grinder, drive a truck, load and unload semis and shipping containers. At the end of the day he goes and has a drink. Sometimes he has a lot of drinks. At the end of the night he staggers home, and at the end of every second week, or fourth if money's tight, he goes up the road from the docks and catches a ride into the heart of the nearest city to find the places where the faggots cruise. At first he's eighteen and then twenty-four and then thirty's only a memory and he's still doing the same thing, more or less, week after week, with his time. The jobs change. The ports change. But the routine remains.
Except when he falls in love.
Not that he'd ever call it that.
Sometimes it feels like more. Sometimes there are regular meet-ups in department store men's rooms and in the basement of the public library, down amidst the old musty newspapers. Sometimes the hook-ups lead to dinners and friendships and furtive nights together fucking in crazed silence, in abject fear of discovery. And sometimes, more and more often as he gets older, the dates break off without warning. A suspicious wife. A jealous boyfriend. Younger, cuter competition. All too often it's just the shine worn off, especially early on, with the age of easy-come, easy-go calling the shots for him, whether he likes it or not. And then he's back to cruising bathrooms and seedy bars and getting his face punched in half the time because who can fucking tell when a drunk and flirting straight guy is going to decide he's not into cocksucking after all.
He tries to have boyfriends sometimes. He feels like it's something he should try. Some guys can do it, even long term. But, always, they each need so much and there's never enough whisky or vodka or beer to shut the need down, the loneliness down, the whining down when he can't tell them why he's so quiet, because he doesn't really know. It's just better this way. Especially after the dying starts and he's scared shitless to get tested but he's also scared shitless not to, but he does it as soon as they start the free anonymous blood draws and he's so relieved when he gets the results that he gets drunk and fucks a stranger in the bathroom of the first bar he finds. And he's careful of the condom, so careful, until somebody walks in on them, threatening to call the cops at the top of their lungs, filthy perverts.
They get thrown out and Duck pretends not to care, either about getting tossed or the awful look he gets from the guy he'd picked up before he turns and runs away into the night. Duck shrugs it off, goes to another bar, picks a fight, and gets his nose broken for the third or fourth time, both eyes blacked, a rib or three cracked, and a weird shallow gash that starts on his cheek and bisects his left ear. He walks out of the emergency room around dawn, looks at the sun climbing out of the waves, and thinks maybe, just maybe, this isn't how he wants his life to be.
~
He joins the crew of another fishing boat after his face heals. The seiner is peaceful and quiet and they're all a strange lot, so they don't bother each other much. Duck spends a lot of time beating the engine with a large wrench. The rest of the time he's hauling fish, like everyone else. It's hard work, but it's honest work and there's a good feeling to it. It's good for a long time, until they get caught in a storm they can't outrun, and Duck's only grateful they're not more than a half-day out of port. Still, he gets hurt on his way below, trying to get aft to the engine room. He's on a ladder when the hardest wave hits and his body goes one way, the ladder another, and he swings out by the elbow, torquing his back and shoulder in directions neither was meant to bend. He falls to the steel deck, cursing, but that's before the crates break free and bury him.
He only spends a couple of days in hospital afterwards, but that's all she wrote for the job.
He doesn't have anywhere to go. Portside flophouses and clapboard rooming houses exist for guys like him, but not for guys like him in the shape he's in. The hospital has a nun assisting the discharge nurse and she takes it upon herself to get his back pay cleared and get him wherever it is that he needs to be. It's an odd feeling to be helped and he wonders if she'd still do it if she knew he was going happily to hell on account of sodomy, wrath, drunken resentment, and a whole host of other mortal sins. He decides knowing the answer is less important than getting himself someplace to recuperate, and he surprises himself a little when he answers, "Wilby Island, ma'am." The house is still there, after all, all boarded up against the weather, but still his.
It isn't home. He's knows now that he never really had one, even when he still lived there, but maybe it'll do for now. He watches her open a bus schedule and begin to jot down numbers in a tiny, immaculate hand.
~
When he gets off the ferry, Duck can't believe how much and how little the place has changed. Cell phone towers, all the way out here. He shouldn't be surprised. He finds the Wilby taxi outside the little diner next to the ferry platform and Hank gives him a ride for free being as how Duck looks like eight-year-old shit warmed over. Duck promises to buy him a beer after he heals up a little and they call it even. The house is cold and musty and damp but intact enough for now, especially given the pittance he's sent Al McIntyre each year for basic upkeep. Duck hurts too much to relight the damned pilot light, so he puts mothballed sheets on his old bed, takes a pile of quilts out of the cedar chest, dry-swallows another pain pill, and goes to sleep.
It's two and a half months before he discovers the Watch has become what it's become.
It's another five before Buddy lets on that he's been following him while on his supposed patrols of the island. Not even following, really, as much as hiding in a dense thicket of brush and watching them all, but especially Duck.
One twilit evening Duck comes into another man's mouth, head back and gasping for air, and when he opens his eyes, he sees Buddy staring at him, mouth part-way open, body obscured by underbrush. In front of him, the guy is spurting onto the pine needles between Duck's feet, bracing himself against Duck's thigh. With a gentle squeeze to his shoulder, Duck murmurs, "Thanks, man," and then his eyes are back on the place where Buddy's crouching in the dimness. Duck tucks himself away and jerks his chin toward the road home.
He's been home more than thirty minutes when he hears boots on his porch. Duck pushes open the screen door with one splayed hand and waits. Buddy's pink in the face, but he scrapes the mud off his boots and shoulders through when Duck points him toward the battered old couch in the front room.
They don't say anything. Duck looks at Buddy and the boots and the coat and his disheveled hair. Duck hopes that Buddy creamed himself and feels just as clammy and uncomfortable as he should.
"What do you want me to say?" Buddy says, finally.
Duck hasn't sat down. He hasn't sat down since he got home. He's pissed, and the fucked up thing is that he's not pissed at being watched. He's pissed that it's Buddy. He wanders into the kitchen, opening cabinets and drawers, and stares hard at the bottle of vodka in the freezer before turning his back on it with a promise of Later. After Buddy leaves.
He goes back out to the living room and sees Buddy sitting there, looking guilty. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Duck spits out.
"I don't know," Buddy mumbles.
"You're a cop for god's sake."
"Don’t you think I know that?" Buddy's eyes flash. He's almost snarling.
Duck absorbs the look and wonders what the fuck happened to Buddy. The anger is mostly out of his voice when he says, "I don't know what you know, Buddy. It's been a lot of years."
Buddy scowls at his hands and says, "I know it has, believe me."
Duck listens to the way Buddy's voice breaks, watches the way he sits, hunched over, with a nameless, desolate expression on his face. They're not kids anymore. Duck takes a deep breath and drops onto the sofa next to him. "This is serious stuff," he says.
Buddy's still looking at his hands, or maybe the old worn-out rug at their feet, but then he turns his head toward Duck and says, "What was it like to get out?"
~
Duck knows he isn't asking about leaving the island. This is a bigger thing than that because everyone knows Buddy's never gotten out from under his mother's thumb. Back when they were kids, Buddy used to be the one with the crazy dreams of moving away to Toronto or Ottawa and changing the whole freakin world, but year by year the scope of Buddy's world has narrowed itself down to the length and breadth of Wilby Island.
So Duck tells him, sort of. He isn't good at telling stories; he's a hands-on kind of guy, always has been. He gives it a shot, though, because if he's learned anything in the last nearly-twenty-years of wandering, it's that freedom's a lot less scary than people like Buddy make it out to be. So he tells him a lot. He tells him things he's never told anyone.
When he stops talking, Buddy's lips are parted and he says, "Do you think we could do that?"
Duck thinks he must've heard wrong, but the hopeful look in Buddy's eyes isn't wrong and so Duck starts to protest that Buddy doesn't know what he's talking about.
Buddy flushes and shifts on the sofa. After a second he says, "Fuck…I'm sorry," and gets to his feet. "Forget I said anything, okay? I'll just go."
But then Duck's on his feet between Buddy and the door and he's watching Buddy, really seeing the turbulence clouding his face and thinking about what Buddy's whole entire life consists of: taking care of his ailing mother and driving in circles around Wilby. Buddy's still of a mind to push past Duck and get out, but now it's Duck stopping Buddy because he's been in that place and he can see what's going on in Buddy's eyes. "It's lonely, huh?" he says, and his hand curves around Buddy's bicep.
Buddy bites something back and makes a face. "Yeah."
"Yeah, okay," Duck answers.
"Okay?" Buddy asks, confused.
Duck says, "Yeah, come back here," and turns Buddy away from the door.
~
Duck gets out the vodka, wishing vaguely that it was more than just a third full, and they do shots while Buddy tells embarrassing stories about himself and catches him up on twenty years of fucked up Island life. It's really not all that different from the stupid shit people do in any of the places Duck has lived, and he takes a few minutes to ponder that. It makes him feel less like a transient here. It makes him want to finish moving the crap out of his mum's old bedroom, weed through what might be worth keeping, and reclaim the house for his own.
Then he catches Buddy's eyes on him and they're black with lust and he can practically hear Mrs. French lecturing Buddy on why that girl couldn't possibly be good enough for her sweet boy.
"It isn't nice to watch your friends get off," Duck says, letting some of his anger resurface.
Buddy blushes and takes another swig from the bottle. Then he looks up at Duck, a smile quirking his lips. "What about strangers?"
Duck's laughing despite himself and then Buddy's leaning his way, not to kiss him, though. He feels Buddy's tongue move warm and wet around the edge of his ear and then Buddy's whispering close, "I want…to know what you taste like. Can I?"
Duck can think of a dozen reasons not to, but none of them override the memory of Buddy's face watching him while he got blown under the tree. It's a stupid choice and Buddy's still a cop, which makes it even stupider, but then Buddy's hand is cupping him through his pants and he can't pretend he isn't already hard again. So he lets him. Then he returns the favor, more out of a sense of fairness than any real desire to suck Buddy off, but he doesn’t really mind.
Afterwards, though, Buddy looks shell-shocked, so Duck puts the last of the vodka back in the freezer and piles a few heavy quilts on top of Buddy. He could offer him his mum's room, but that seems wrong somehow. And if Buddy throws up, it'd be easier to clean up out here anyway.
It doesn't even occur to him to share his own bed.
~
In the morning, Duck wakes Buddy with the smell of coffee percolating in the kitchen. Buddy lurches in and Duck sees that he's got creases from the pillow, the quilt, and the sofa upholstery all pressed into his face. His hair is sticking out in all directions. He looks stricken.
"Umm…" Buddy waves a hand vaguely at the wall behind him and Duck says, "Help yourself." A minute later he hears water running in the bathroom.
He's set out a second paper plate of toast and bacon next to a fresh cup of coffee when Buddy decides to come back. "Eat something," Duck says over the lip of his own mug and stares at Buddy until he pulls a chair back from the Formica table and sits down, stares at the toast and butter and jelly and bacon, and finally takes a sip of the coffee.
Duck doesn't say anything. Buddy doesn’t try to fill the silence.
Duck waits until Buddy finishes eating and clears the trash. When Duck's back is turned, Buddy says in a low voice, "This didn't happen."
Duck snorts and puts the skillet in the drainer. Turning around, he looks at the way the light falls through the kitchen window on Buddy's face. He looks like hell and Duck is more than a little glad.
Leaning back against the sink, Duck thumbs the belt-loops of his jeans and says, "It did happen, but the thing is, Buddy, it means a hell of a lot less than you think it does."
Buddy shoves his chair back. "Duck-"
"I don't want to see you down at the Watch anymore." He doesn't like being followed, and he's already had his fill of confused straight guys. He's had his fill of cops, too.
"I, um…" Buddy flushes with embarrassment and tugs at his collar.
"You can tell your mum we killed a bottle talking about old times and you passed out on my couch."
Buddy whines, "She won't-"
Narrowing his eyes, Duck tilts his head and lets all of his disgust show on his face. "Do you enjoy being treated like an overgrown ten-year-old?" Duck can be a prick when he's pissed. Maybe Buddy forgot.
Buddy's glaring as if to say that if he weren't so hung over, he'd knock some of Duck's dental work out, so Duck thinks maybe Buddy remembers what a prick he can be just fine. Maybe he'll also remember that he isn't like Duck, he doesn't actually like guys. Maybe he'll grow the balls to ask out that Asian painter-chick who just moved to the Island, the one that everyone knows he's got his eye on.
Or not. Buddy glowers for a moment and stalks out the kitchen door toward the living room.
A minute later, Duck hears the front door slam shut. He pours himself another cup of coffee, but doesn't do more than stare at it. He doesn't have to work today; he only made breakfast for Buddy's sake, for the sake of the friendship they used to have back before Buddy knew Duck was a queer. Now the coffee-stench makes Duck want to hit something, so he gets up and pours it down the drain.
He isn't thinking about anything at all as he takes the bottle from the freezer, that one last syrupy inch offering itself to him as promised. It bites Duck's throat going down, and that suits him just as well as anything.
Author: sageness
Recipient: stormymouse
Fandom: Wilby Wonderful
Rated: R
Summary: Buddy's still looking at his hands, or maybe the old worn-out rug at their feet, but then he turns his head toward Duck and says, "What was it like to get out?"
Islander
On the mainland, the cannery is always hiring. Duck does that for a while and it's mindless work, not near as good as putting fishing boat engines back together, like he used to in shop class. He comes home stinking on the ferry every evening after wading through nets and nets of fish before they get fed into the intake. He pulls out tires, rubber boots, squid, a child's naked plastic doll half-covered in barnacles. There are other things in the bycatch, too, worse things, that he does his best not to think about. Sea turtles that he knows are endangered. A dolphin calf once, more than once, mortally wounded and bleeding everywhere.
He stays until his mother dies and isn't surprised that she doesn't get to see summer. She doesn't have any last words. He sees her the night before, says "Bye, Mum" when he leaves and strokes her papery white hand with a calloused finger. She's wasted away almost to nothing. The next day he gets a telephone call at the cannery that she's gone. He cleans up and stands in the bow of the ferry and lets the hospital staff tell him what to do about the arrangements, which they have to because he's still not quite eighteen yet, and when it's all over, he doesn't feel any different at all. Bewildered, perhaps, that he doesn't have any better idea now of what to do with himself than he did the day before.
He walks around the island. Some of it is dense forest. Old Wilby is boring and residential and looks like any established coastal settlement in eastern Canada. He hikes out to the Watch and watches the fog bank up thick over the sea. He knows in a couple of hours they'll all be enshrouded, and that feels good.
He doesn’t say anything when Buddy sits down on the rock to his left. He'd wondered how long it would be before someone found him and who it would be. He hadn't really bet on it being Buddy.
"Hey," Buddy says.
Duck nods to him and turns his face back to the sea.
Buddy doesn't say anything else for a long time, which is fine. There isn't much of anything Duck wants to talk about with Buddy, except maybe who he thinks will make it to Stanley Cup finals next month, but it's not that kind of day. They sit in silence watching the waves and fog roll in, and after a while Buddy digs a battered pack of Camels out of his coat and lights up. He hands a cig to Duck and Duck leans in for Buddy to light it. Their shoulders brush together and Duck takes a deep drag. He's really fucking missed this. Buddy always liked auto mechanics better than marine mechanics, but that's okay. There'd been plenty of afternoons like this where they'd sat outside the classroom's open garage door and had a smoke while waiting for Coach to inspect their tune-ups.
Eventually Buddy asks, "You okay?"
Duck doesn't know. He ponders the cigarette. The cherry's glowing bright amber against the dark grey rock and the grey-blue ocean and the lighter-grey sky. He glances over at Buddy, gives him a sheepish smile. "Never dreamed I'd miss shop."
Buddy snorts and bumps their shoulders together. Duck doesn't pull away.
~
He can run a boat. He can fix an engine. He can run a fish grinder, drive a truck, load and unload semis and shipping containers. At the end of the day he goes and has a drink. Sometimes he has a lot of drinks. At the end of the night he staggers home, and at the end of every second week, or fourth if money's tight, he goes up the road from the docks and catches a ride into the heart of the nearest city to find the places where the faggots cruise. At first he's eighteen and then twenty-four and then thirty's only a memory and he's still doing the same thing, more or less, week after week, with his time. The jobs change. The ports change. But the routine remains.
Except when he falls in love.
Not that he'd ever call it that.
Sometimes it feels like more. Sometimes there are regular meet-ups in department store men's rooms and in the basement of the public library, down amidst the old musty newspapers. Sometimes the hook-ups lead to dinners and friendships and furtive nights together fucking in crazed silence, in abject fear of discovery. And sometimes, more and more often as he gets older, the dates break off without warning. A suspicious wife. A jealous boyfriend. Younger, cuter competition. All too often it's just the shine worn off, especially early on, with the age of easy-come, easy-go calling the shots for him, whether he likes it or not. And then he's back to cruising bathrooms and seedy bars and getting his face punched in half the time because who can fucking tell when a drunk and flirting straight guy is going to decide he's not into cocksucking after all.
He tries to have boyfriends sometimes. He feels like it's something he should try. Some guys can do it, even long term. But, always, they each need so much and there's never enough whisky or vodka or beer to shut the need down, the loneliness down, the whining down when he can't tell them why he's so quiet, because he doesn't really know. It's just better this way. Especially after the dying starts and he's scared shitless to get tested but he's also scared shitless not to, but he does it as soon as they start the free anonymous blood draws and he's so relieved when he gets the results that he gets drunk and fucks a stranger in the bathroom of the first bar he finds. And he's careful of the condom, so careful, until somebody walks in on them, threatening to call the cops at the top of their lungs, filthy perverts.
They get thrown out and Duck pretends not to care, either about getting tossed or the awful look he gets from the guy he'd picked up before he turns and runs away into the night. Duck shrugs it off, goes to another bar, picks a fight, and gets his nose broken for the third or fourth time, both eyes blacked, a rib or three cracked, and a weird shallow gash that starts on his cheek and bisects his left ear. He walks out of the emergency room around dawn, looks at the sun climbing out of the waves, and thinks maybe, just maybe, this isn't how he wants his life to be.
~
He joins the crew of another fishing boat after his face heals. The seiner is peaceful and quiet and they're all a strange lot, so they don't bother each other much. Duck spends a lot of time beating the engine with a large wrench. The rest of the time he's hauling fish, like everyone else. It's hard work, but it's honest work and there's a good feeling to it. It's good for a long time, until they get caught in a storm they can't outrun, and Duck's only grateful they're not more than a half-day out of port. Still, he gets hurt on his way below, trying to get aft to the engine room. He's on a ladder when the hardest wave hits and his body goes one way, the ladder another, and he swings out by the elbow, torquing his back and shoulder in directions neither was meant to bend. He falls to the steel deck, cursing, but that's before the crates break free and bury him.
He only spends a couple of days in hospital afterwards, but that's all she wrote for the job.
He doesn't have anywhere to go. Portside flophouses and clapboard rooming houses exist for guys like him, but not for guys like him in the shape he's in. The hospital has a nun assisting the discharge nurse and she takes it upon herself to get his back pay cleared and get him wherever it is that he needs to be. It's an odd feeling to be helped and he wonders if she'd still do it if she knew he was going happily to hell on account of sodomy, wrath, drunken resentment, and a whole host of other mortal sins. He decides knowing the answer is less important than getting himself someplace to recuperate, and he surprises himself a little when he answers, "Wilby Island, ma'am." The house is still there, after all, all boarded up against the weather, but still his.
It isn't home. He's knows now that he never really had one, even when he still lived there, but maybe it'll do for now. He watches her open a bus schedule and begin to jot down numbers in a tiny, immaculate hand.
~
When he gets off the ferry, Duck can't believe how much and how little the place has changed. Cell phone towers, all the way out here. He shouldn't be surprised. He finds the Wilby taxi outside the little diner next to the ferry platform and Hank gives him a ride for free being as how Duck looks like eight-year-old shit warmed over. Duck promises to buy him a beer after he heals up a little and they call it even. The house is cold and musty and damp but intact enough for now, especially given the pittance he's sent Al McIntyre each year for basic upkeep. Duck hurts too much to relight the damned pilot light, so he puts mothballed sheets on his old bed, takes a pile of quilts out of the cedar chest, dry-swallows another pain pill, and goes to sleep.
It's two and a half months before he discovers the Watch has become what it's become.
It's another five before Buddy lets on that he's been following him while on his supposed patrols of the island. Not even following, really, as much as hiding in a dense thicket of brush and watching them all, but especially Duck.
One twilit evening Duck comes into another man's mouth, head back and gasping for air, and when he opens his eyes, he sees Buddy staring at him, mouth part-way open, body obscured by underbrush. In front of him, the guy is spurting onto the pine needles between Duck's feet, bracing himself against Duck's thigh. With a gentle squeeze to his shoulder, Duck murmurs, "Thanks, man," and then his eyes are back on the place where Buddy's crouching in the dimness. Duck tucks himself away and jerks his chin toward the road home.
He's been home more than thirty minutes when he hears boots on his porch. Duck pushes open the screen door with one splayed hand and waits. Buddy's pink in the face, but he scrapes the mud off his boots and shoulders through when Duck points him toward the battered old couch in the front room.
They don't say anything. Duck looks at Buddy and the boots and the coat and his disheveled hair. Duck hopes that Buddy creamed himself and feels just as clammy and uncomfortable as he should.
"What do you want me to say?" Buddy says, finally.
Duck hasn't sat down. He hasn't sat down since he got home. He's pissed, and the fucked up thing is that he's not pissed at being watched. He's pissed that it's Buddy. He wanders into the kitchen, opening cabinets and drawers, and stares hard at the bottle of vodka in the freezer before turning his back on it with a promise of Later. After Buddy leaves.
He goes back out to the living room and sees Buddy sitting there, looking guilty. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Duck spits out.
"I don't know," Buddy mumbles.
"You're a cop for god's sake."
"Don’t you think I know that?" Buddy's eyes flash. He's almost snarling.
Duck absorbs the look and wonders what the fuck happened to Buddy. The anger is mostly out of his voice when he says, "I don't know what you know, Buddy. It's been a lot of years."
Buddy scowls at his hands and says, "I know it has, believe me."
Duck listens to the way Buddy's voice breaks, watches the way he sits, hunched over, with a nameless, desolate expression on his face. They're not kids anymore. Duck takes a deep breath and drops onto the sofa next to him. "This is serious stuff," he says.
Buddy's still looking at his hands, or maybe the old worn-out rug at their feet, but then he turns his head toward Duck and says, "What was it like to get out?"
~
Duck knows he isn't asking about leaving the island. This is a bigger thing than that because everyone knows Buddy's never gotten out from under his mother's thumb. Back when they were kids, Buddy used to be the one with the crazy dreams of moving away to Toronto or Ottawa and changing the whole freakin world, but year by year the scope of Buddy's world has narrowed itself down to the length and breadth of Wilby Island.
So Duck tells him, sort of. He isn't good at telling stories; he's a hands-on kind of guy, always has been. He gives it a shot, though, because if he's learned anything in the last nearly-twenty-years of wandering, it's that freedom's a lot less scary than people like Buddy make it out to be. So he tells him a lot. He tells him things he's never told anyone.
When he stops talking, Buddy's lips are parted and he says, "Do you think we could do that?"
Duck thinks he must've heard wrong, but the hopeful look in Buddy's eyes isn't wrong and so Duck starts to protest that Buddy doesn't know what he's talking about.
Buddy flushes and shifts on the sofa. After a second he says, "Fuck…I'm sorry," and gets to his feet. "Forget I said anything, okay? I'll just go."
But then Duck's on his feet between Buddy and the door and he's watching Buddy, really seeing the turbulence clouding his face and thinking about what Buddy's whole entire life consists of: taking care of his ailing mother and driving in circles around Wilby. Buddy's still of a mind to push past Duck and get out, but now it's Duck stopping Buddy because he's been in that place and he can see what's going on in Buddy's eyes. "It's lonely, huh?" he says, and his hand curves around Buddy's bicep.
Buddy bites something back and makes a face. "Yeah."
"Yeah, okay," Duck answers.
"Okay?" Buddy asks, confused.
Duck says, "Yeah, come back here," and turns Buddy away from the door.
~
Duck gets out the vodka, wishing vaguely that it was more than just a third full, and they do shots while Buddy tells embarrassing stories about himself and catches him up on twenty years of fucked up Island life. It's really not all that different from the stupid shit people do in any of the places Duck has lived, and he takes a few minutes to ponder that. It makes him feel less like a transient here. It makes him want to finish moving the crap out of his mum's old bedroom, weed through what might be worth keeping, and reclaim the house for his own.
Then he catches Buddy's eyes on him and they're black with lust and he can practically hear Mrs. French lecturing Buddy on why that girl couldn't possibly be good enough for her sweet boy.
"It isn't nice to watch your friends get off," Duck says, letting some of his anger resurface.
Buddy blushes and takes another swig from the bottle. Then he looks up at Duck, a smile quirking his lips. "What about strangers?"
Duck's laughing despite himself and then Buddy's leaning his way, not to kiss him, though. He feels Buddy's tongue move warm and wet around the edge of his ear and then Buddy's whispering close, "I want…to know what you taste like. Can I?"
Duck can think of a dozen reasons not to, but none of them override the memory of Buddy's face watching him while he got blown under the tree. It's a stupid choice and Buddy's still a cop, which makes it even stupider, but then Buddy's hand is cupping him through his pants and he can't pretend he isn't already hard again. So he lets him. Then he returns the favor, more out of a sense of fairness than any real desire to suck Buddy off, but he doesn’t really mind.
Afterwards, though, Buddy looks shell-shocked, so Duck puts the last of the vodka back in the freezer and piles a few heavy quilts on top of Buddy. He could offer him his mum's room, but that seems wrong somehow. And if Buddy throws up, it'd be easier to clean up out here anyway.
It doesn't even occur to him to share his own bed.
~
In the morning, Duck wakes Buddy with the smell of coffee percolating in the kitchen. Buddy lurches in and Duck sees that he's got creases from the pillow, the quilt, and the sofa upholstery all pressed into his face. His hair is sticking out in all directions. He looks stricken.
"Umm…" Buddy waves a hand vaguely at the wall behind him and Duck says, "Help yourself." A minute later he hears water running in the bathroom.
He's set out a second paper plate of toast and bacon next to a fresh cup of coffee when Buddy decides to come back. "Eat something," Duck says over the lip of his own mug and stares at Buddy until he pulls a chair back from the Formica table and sits down, stares at the toast and butter and jelly and bacon, and finally takes a sip of the coffee.
Duck doesn't say anything. Buddy doesn’t try to fill the silence.
Duck waits until Buddy finishes eating and clears the trash. When Duck's back is turned, Buddy says in a low voice, "This didn't happen."
Duck snorts and puts the skillet in the drainer. Turning around, he looks at the way the light falls through the kitchen window on Buddy's face. He looks like hell and Duck is more than a little glad.
Leaning back against the sink, Duck thumbs the belt-loops of his jeans and says, "It did happen, but the thing is, Buddy, it means a hell of a lot less than you think it does."
Buddy shoves his chair back. "Duck-"
"I don't want to see you down at the Watch anymore." He doesn't like being followed, and he's already had his fill of confused straight guys. He's had his fill of cops, too.
"I, um…" Buddy flushes with embarrassment and tugs at his collar.
"You can tell your mum we killed a bottle talking about old times and you passed out on my couch."
Buddy whines, "She won't-"
Narrowing his eyes, Duck tilts his head and lets all of his disgust show on his face. "Do you enjoy being treated like an overgrown ten-year-old?" Duck can be a prick when he's pissed. Maybe Buddy forgot.
Buddy's glaring as if to say that if he weren't so hung over, he'd knock some of Duck's dental work out, so Duck thinks maybe Buddy remembers what a prick he can be just fine. Maybe he'll also remember that he isn't like Duck, he doesn't actually like guys. Maybe he'll grow the balls to ask out that Asian painter-chick who just moved to the Island, the one that everyone knows he's got his eye on.
Or not. Buddy glowers for a moment and stalks out the kitchen door toward the living room.
A minute later, Duck hears the front door slam shut. He pours himself another cup of coffee, but doesn't do more than stare at it. He doesn't have to work today; he only made breakfast for Buddy's sake, for the sake of the friendship they used to have back before Buddy knew Duck was a queer. Now the coffee-stench makes Duck want to hit something, so he gets up and pours it down the drain.
He isn't thinking about anything at all as he takes the bottle from the freezer, that one last syrupy inch offering itself to him as promised. It bites Duck's throat going down, and that suits him just as well as anything.