From their height they could see the water funneling down onto the road. The drop served to create a vicious, elephantine current, and if they got much closer to the drop, they’d be lost in that madness, and Theo wasn’t sure the raft could take it.
“Veer right!” Spencer said grimly, forcing himself down the steps again. “And damned quick. C’mon, man, heave!”
The next twenty minutes were frantic. Theo was leaning over the edge of the railing at the front, his feet locked into the slats so he could get as much traction as possible with his pole. Spencer’s counter heaves to keep them straight were getting bigger and broader and more desperate with every push.
“Theo!” Spencer called, when Theo’s arms burned and his lungs were threatening to give out. “Do you see those trees?”
“Got ’em!” Theo called back. “They’ll hold us!”
Ahead was a small copse, thick enough to block the water, slowing it down a little and calming the current, but not so tight that they’d dam it up. A few more frantic minutes of poling and the raft bumped up against the trees with a now-familiar thump.
“Here,” Theo said, heading for the garden hose. “You get the fuck out of the water, and I’ll tie up the boat.”
“Sure,” Spencer said, and Theo watched as he took a shaky step up and then almost collapsed, arms wrapped around the railing.
“Fuck!” Theo snarled. “You stay right there. Right there, dammit, while I get us secure.”
They were up against a smaller tree, the trunk narrow enough that Theo could wrap his arms around it and pass the hose’s sprayer head from one hand to the other. He used the handle of the sprayer to fix the knot and then, keeping his hand on the rail, practically ran to Spencer.
“We should tie you to the raft,” Spencer mumbled, taking Theo’s offered hand to pull himself out of the water. “Like I was supposed to be secured to my chopper. Damned flight suit. Should have known better—probably time for a new one. You think about them as bombproof, but things wear down. Fabric. Cars. Hearts. Too many hits and things fall apart.”
“Wow. If this is you tired, you must be a blast after a beer or two.” Theo got him up one more step, pulled Spencer’s arm around his shoulder, and walked him to the ice chest where the wool blankets were stored. Carefully, he lowered Spencer down so he was sitting, back to a rail post, and started wrapping his torso and shoulders in blankets, pulling him forward to put one of the foil ones behind him.
“I used to live by a bar,” Spencer mumbled. “Didn’t get shitfaced that often. Went mostly to visit the dog. It was before Colonel, when me and Glen roomed in South San Francisco, by Burlingame. That was fun,” he said, smiling a little. “I thought at first, well, fuck. Living with the boss. That’s gonna be a wet blanket. As long as you treated the refrigerator with respect, Glen was all right. On days off we had sports games and PS4. Damien stayed there when he wasn’t down at his boyfriend’s. I was like, ‘Hey, got a bar, got a dog I can visit, this is okay.’”
Theo was too busy checking his sodden bandage to interrupt his rambling. Besides, maybe if he let Spencer talk, he’d say something real.
He stripped off what was left of the leg of the suit and looked unhappily at the bandage, which was still taped to Spencer’s shin. Ugh, what a mess!
“Spencer, I’m going to take the bandage off and wrap the wound in gauze but leave it open,” Theo said worriedly. Rent flesh in water for that amount of time—gangrene, rot, infection. God, Spencer was lucky his leg didn’t just fall off in punishment. “I’m going to drape one of those foil blankets over it to see if we can keep it dry, but that means we have to stay parked here for a bit.”
“They can’t see us down here,” Spencer told him, his voice thin. Theo looked up and saw he was shivering hard, from cold, pain, shock… whatever.
“I’ll do something,” Theo said, trying to think like Spencer. “We’ve got a zillion of those foil blankets. I’ll tie one to the side of the raft. They should see that.”
“Okay,” Spencer agreed. “Try that.”
Oh, he did not look good. Not good at all. He was shaking so hard Theo wasn’t sure how he could stay upright.
With hurried movements—and what he was starting to think of as “sea legs”—he secured one of the foil blankets around the fence rails, using the medical tape to fix it to itself. This one he pulled over their heads as a sort of waterproof overhang, and Spencer—once he saw what Theo was doing—helped by sitting up straight and using his own head as a support.
“Look at me.” Spencer giggled weakly. “I’m a tent pole!”
“Better than ballast,” Theo muttered. Spencer’s body was throwing off heat in catastrophic waves, and before Theo put on his gloves, he held a hand up to Spencer’s forehead, grimacing at the fever there.
And then Spencer did a surprising thing. He closed his eyes and leaned into the touch, like someone starving for it, someone who’d needed tenderness all his life.
Theo slid his hand from Spencer’s forehead to his cheek, and rubbed a high cheekbone with his thumb. “You gonna take a rest now?” he asked softly.
Spencer nodded, eyes still closed. “No choice.” One side of his mouth rose crookedly, and Theo gave in to temptation and rubbed that crooked little corner. Spencer’s lips were lean and firm, and the skin was soft under Theo’s thumb.
“Me neither,” Theo murmured. And with that, he leaned in and pressed his lips to Spencer’s for a brief kiss before rocking back on his heels and skinning on another pair of gloves.
Spencer’s eyes flew open as Theo was pulling on the gloves.
“Why did you do that?” he demanded suspiciously.
“Me? I’m a simple country boy,” Theo said, giving him a wink to show that his heart wasn’t pounding and his knees weren’t shaking from nothing more than a simple touch of lips to lips. “Never know when I’m gonna get a chance to hit on a big bad pilot again.”
Spencer gave a soft snort. “With your sweet little face? You would walk into any club, Woodchuck, and have a dozen heat-seeking missiles at your disposal, to do with as you pleased.”
Theo snorted, although the word picture was downright pornographic enough to start an ache in the only warm place in his body. “Yeah, not my speed. I bet you’ve had plenty of experience, though.” But nothing special. Theo didn’t even need to see Spencer’s eyes shift sideways in what looked like embarrassment to know that.
“Sex is mostly free and mostly fun,” he said. “Beats game shows when you’re bored.”
“Thought it might,” Theo replied, and suddenly his groin wasn’t the only thing aching. “Bet you’re good at it too. Make sure your partner’s all happy fine, make them breakfast, let them use the shower.”
“I try to be a gentleman,” Spencer agreed, but he sounded suspicious, and well he might.
“Right before you lose their number or tell them gently that you only do one-night stands but they were really sweet and this way you can be friends.”
Theo went to work on the bandage, tugging gently at the tape as Spencer’s muffled grunt told him that he’d hit a little close to the mark.