Chapter 5 #3
And it was — God, it was nothing Gus had let himself imagine, because he hadn't let himself imagine it, he'd been very careful, and now here it was undoing all the care at once.
Amos tasted of salt and the cold and the day's coffee.
His hands came up hard, one fisting in the front of Gus's soaked jacket and the other flat and warm against Gus's jaw, tilting him, taking him, a man who did everything without a wasted motion doing this the same way, sure and complete, no hesitation in him now at all.
The beard-rasp of him. The heat of him after a whole day of cold water.
He backed Gus half a step into the ice-shed wall and came with him and the kiss went deeper, and Gus heard himself make a sound he hadn't made in years, and his ruined shoulder didn't matter and the dead ice plant didn't matter and the number on the whiteboard didn't matter, there was only this, only the specific weight and heat and salt of this one man who had come around the point out of nowhere and started, quietly, taking one end of every single thing Gus carried, including, apparently, this.
He'd forgotten. That was the thing that reached up through the salt and the heat and undid him — he'd forgotten it could be like this, forgotten in twenty years of giving and never taking that there was a whole language his body still knew, that a kiss could be a conversation two starved men had been trying to have for three weeks and finally, finally got to finish.
Amos's hand slid up into his hair and Gus leaned into it the way you lean into a warm wall out of the wind.
Amos said something against his mouth that wasn't a word, low, rough, wanting, and Gus gave it back, and for one long spinning moment there was no co-op and no debt and no dead ice and no twenty years — there was a man wanting him and a man he wanted, and the black water full of the thing they'd both refused to lose, and Gus Ouellette, for the first time in longer than he could name, taking something for himself with both hands and not one thought of the bill.
This is mine, Gus thought, with a clarity that frightened him. I could keep this. I could have this for myself.
And that was the thought that did it. That was the thought that reached in and found the old wound and pressed.
Because Gus Ouellette did not get to keep things for himself.
That was the whole arrangement, the one he'd made with the harbor twenty years ago and never renegotiated: everything he had went out, out to the fleet, out to the debt, out and out, and nothing came back and nothing stayed and nothing was his, because a man who owed what Gus owed did not get to stand on a ledge in the dark and take something warm and alive for himself while the bill went unpaid.
He'd built his whole life on not getting to have this. And here he was having it.
He pulled back.
It cost him everything he had to do it — his body fought him the whole way, his hand not wanting to leave the warm nape of Amos's neck — but he pulled back, an inch, then another, breathing like he'd hauled the whole string by hand.
"I can't," Gus said. His voice came out wrecked.
"I'm sorry. I— that's not—" He shut his eyes.
Twenty years of the next useful thing and he had nothing, again, twice in one day.
"I don't get to have this," he said, finally, low, and it was the truest and worst thing he'd said out loud in two decades, and the saying of it landed in the dark between them like a stone going over the rail.
"I don't. You don't understand. I can't keep something for myself while I still—"
He couldn't finish it. He didn't have to.
Amos was looking at him with those dark eyes, and there was no surprise in them, no hurt even — just a terrible, quiet understanding, the understanding of a man who had heard Dee's whole story and watched Gus drown himself an inch at a time for three weeks and knew exactly, exactly, what he was looking at.
Amos didn't reach for him again. He didn't argue. He just stood there in the dark with his hands at his sides and the water lying full and alive below them, and he said, very quiet, not unkind, "There it is. Same disease. You'd sooner drown holding it than let yourself have it."
Gus didn't answer. He couldn't; there wasn't a true thing he could say that wouldn't be a door swinging open, and he'd spent twenty years learning to keep that particular door shut with his whole body against it.
So he said nothing, which for Gus was its own kind of confession, and Amos knew it was, and didn't press — because pressing wasn't Amos's way, because Amos set a thing down where you could see it and then left it lying there and trusted the tide to do the rest.
Then he turned and went down to check the gate on the falling tide, and left Gus standing against the ice-shed wall with the taste of him still in his mouth and the one thing he wanted in the whole world moving away from him in the dark, kept just out of reach by his own two hands, the way he'd kept everything for twenty years, the way he was apparently going to keep it forever, unless something he could not yet imagine came and pried his fingers loose.
Below him, in the black water, three hundred pounds of held lobster waited, alive, for a better price than the one the world was offering tonight.
Gus looked at it a long time.
Then he went down to help Amos with the gate, because that, at least, he still knew how to do.