22. Indy
TWENTY-TWO
INDY
The house is quiet when I stumble out of my bedroom. I pass Dia’s door. She’s off at her acting courses in LA and the most I’ve heard from her since we dropped her off at the airport has been a few sporadic text messages.
It’s a sunny morning, so I grab an apple and head outside. I stop on the back porch and try to resist the urge.
It doesn’t work.
A moment later, I’m jogging up the stairs. I hesitate for a bit in front of Nick’s door, but then I knock on it anyway.
No reply.
He came home sometime in the middle of the night after working a gig his boss offered him as a waiter at a wedding, so there’s a very good chance he’s sleeping. Even so, I give the door one more quick rap of my knuckles before I give up and head back outside.
You’d think working a job that takes me out on the water for hours every day would mean I get sick of it, but I never do.
Being out on the water is freedom.
I hum while I walk, and when I clear the trees and make it to the dock, there’s Nick, sitting on the edge with his feet in the water, looking almost impossibly relaxed and at peace in a way he almost never is.
I go and sit down next to him. He doesn’t seem surprised in the least. Instead, it feels like he’s been waiting for me.
That shouldn’t feel as good as it does, but I don’t even care right now.
“I figured you’d still be sleeping,” I say.
We’ve both been busy all week, so there haven’t been a lot of chances for us to be alone together.
There have been a lot of quick, stolen moments in his car on the way to and from work though, making out on abandoned roads and in dark parking lots, straddling him in the confines of the driver’s seat, hands roaming over bodies and strips of exposed skin, mouths devouring until we’re both panting and so turned on we’re a second away from combusting.
“Didn’t feel like it.”
He looks tired, but it’s not like I’m going to convince him to go back to bed and leave me here alone.
“I guess you can always take a nap.”
“I have an afternoon shift,” he says.
“You do know you’re supposed to have time off here and there, right?”
“Should I?”
“I mean, yeah. Rest and relaxation and all that.”
He squints. “You should probably show me how that’s done.”
I grin and nod toward the bay. “Want to come with me?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I do.”
It’s not as if he’s promising me the world.
But it feels like it.
I rest my paddle on my thighs and watch the perfectly flat surface of the bay all around us. It almost looks like glass, it’s so still. The sky and the sea blend into one so seamlessly it’s impossible to say where one ends and the other starts.
I dip my hand in and move my fingers to break the surface. The ripple spreads out in slow circles. I lift my hand out, turn, and flick water at Nick.
He makes a face and glares at me, but it turns out once you’ve licked someone else’s tongue, their glares lose a lot of their potency.
I see him. Clearer and clearer with every passing day.
He cups his hand and throws water back at me.
“Asshole,” I say. Funny how that turns into a pet name after you’ve had your hands down someone’s pants.
I retaliate.
He throws more water.
“Hey!” I start to laugh, half-heartedly trying to shield myself from the shower of droplets that rain down on me.
“You started it.” He’s already reaching out again.
“You looked hot.” I grin at him. “I was just trying to help. Don’t punish me for good intentions!”
“Good intentions my ass.” He dips the tip of his paddle into the water.
“Truce.” I hold both my hands up.
“It’s a bit late for that.” He lowers his hand into the water again.
I quirk my brow at him before I lean, and the kayak tilts just a bit.
He stills.
I look at the water pointedly, then at him.
“You wouldn’t,” he says.
I narrow my eyes. “Wouldn’t I?”
“Blue,” he says sternly.
I grin.
And jerk my whole body to the left.
The kayak tips. There’s a split second when his mouth opens as if he’s about to say something, then cold water rushes over us.
I come up laughing, spluttering, pushing wet hair out of my face.
Nick surfaces a second later, gasping. “What the hell?”
“You started looking even hotter. I did you a favor.” I’m barely holding back laughter, but I do my best to look serious, even if my lips keep twitching. “You could have overheated, Nicholas.”
He drags his hand over his face and shakes his head. He tries to look stern, but there’s a beat, and then he snorts. He starts to laugh.
We drift for a second, both moving our arms and legs slowly, both with one hand on top of the kayak.
He lunges for me and grabs the back of my neck, and then he’s pulling me closer until his mouth covers mine. My hands go to his cheeks. We’re pressed together, chest to chest, not an inch of space between us.
We kiss.
Nick’s teeth sink into my lower lip, and even though the water is cold, we’re both hard.
And I do my best to catalogue everything about this moment.
He groans into my mouth, and I drink down every sound and the way his fingers grip my back and my neck and his feet tangling with mine.
The kiss grows hungry and impatient. His hand moves from my back to my shorts, where he cups my dick, and all my brain activity comes to an abrupt halt. My body stills because I forget I’m supposed to move. I go under. Nick wraps his hand around my forearm and pulls me back to the surface.
“Idiot.” He says it with the same affectionate tone I used when I called him a dick earlier.
“Turns out you’re still too hot.” I sound breathless. Stupidly, revealingly so. But I don’t care.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” he says.
I dunk him.
He comes up spluttering.
And I laugh until my face starts to hurt.
It becomes a thing.
Me and him.
On the water.
Not every morning. But a few times a week without fail.
I don’t know how he knows when I’m headed out, but most days he does. If he doesn’t, I’ll find him.
It becomes a thing.
And with it, we start to settle into something.
“Okay, but this is the part where it gets interesting,” I say, leaning back against the counter while Nick moves around the kitchen with the kind of confidence that makes it clear he knows exactly what he’s doing.
“Say you’re really good at throwing a baseball.
You’ve been practicing since you were a kid.
So, what’s the explanation for why you still have the ability even if you haven’t even picked up a baseball in years? ”
“Muscle memory.” He looks up from the pan where he’s sautéing mushrooms.
“Muscle memory.” I nod. “Only it’s not actually your muscles remembering that stuff.
It’s your brain. Specifically, this loop between your motor cortex and the basal ganglia.
The motor cortex plans and executes actions, and the basal ganglia automates these actions by strengthening cortical connections and storing procedural habits.
Your brain automates patterns, so you don’t have to think about them anymore.
And that’s great, right? It’d take a lot of time if every movement required concentration every time.
Now here’s the—” Nick holds out a spoon, looking at me.
I lean forward and taste the mushroom, then give him a thumbs-up.
“—the interesting part. It also means your body can do things before you consciously decide to do them. Like, there’s a delay between the action starting and you being aware that you chose to do it. ”
He takes a cup of rice and adds it to the mushrooms and leeks. I push myself off the counter and lean closer.
“And the article mentions this study where they measured brain activity that predicts a movement before the person even says they’ve decided to do it.
I’m talking seconds before. So according to neuroscientific research, we are mostly becoming aware of decisions our brains have already initiated.
Brain activity can predict simple choices seconds before conscious awareness, which means your unconscious mind processes decisions faster, and your conscious thought is more like an observer or a type of final endorser, and not a real-time initiator. ”
He looks up from his pan again, an amused expression on his face, but he’s not laughing at me.
Instead, he motions for me to continue. With the rest of my family I sometimes get the feeling they’re just humoring me and not actually listening.
Nick listens. Really listens. I ramble, and he listens.
Asks questions. Thinks about whatever I’m trying to tell him.
“That’s why it’s so difficult to change how you do something once it’s become automatic?” he asks. “Because your brain has already sent the command to do something a certain way, and then you have to override that command and make a conscious effort to change the program?”
“Exactly.”
“So what you’re saying is that I’m basically on autopilot.”
I pick up one of the asparagus stalks on the chopping board and bite into it, chewing thoughtfully. “I mean, we all are to a degree. It’s like… habits pretending to be choices. Two-thirds of your daily habits happen on autopilot. At least according to some estimates.”
He pops a mushroom into his mouth and chews thoughtfully.
“Okay. What about a gut feeling, then? How does that fit into this? Because that’s also kind of an automatic reaction.
Say I meet somebody and they give me a bad feeling.
That’s not a conscious decision. But it’s not automatic either because I’ve never met that person before. ”
“Still an automatic reaction, though, isn’t it? Your brain has stored some kind of information and past experience, and then something triggers the automatic reaction so you don’t have to think. Kind of like a survival mechanism.”
He tilts his head to the side and looks at me, a small smile on his face.
My face heats at the intense perusal.
“What?” I ask when he doesn’t say anything.
His eyes remain on me for another few seconds before he blinks and shakes his head. “Nothing.”
He holds the spoon out for me again, and I take another bite. I close my eyes and hum.
“That’s perfect,” I say.
He laughs. “You’re easy to please.” He looks at the pan thoughtfully. “It’s getting there.”
Later, we sit on the kitchen floor and eat. I tell him about the latest stories from work. At first, he smiles. Later, he laughs.
And when I look at him… I have this acute understanding that some things don’t feel like choices at all and instead things that were always supposed to happen.
There are mornings when the water is perfectly still, and there are evenings when it’s choppy enough that we have to really work together.
Either way, it’s easy out there.
That’s the problem, I think.
No one sees us out there. No one asks questions.
There’s no need to define anything.
Not much reason to hide anything either.
It’s just the two of us, and the water.
And whatever this thing is between us.
“That’s the old lighthouse.” I point to the tower in the distance. “I used to come here a lot when I was younger.”
Nick studies the tilting structure with a skeptical look.
“It looks like it’s about to keel over.”
I laugh. “Yup. Been like this for close to half a century as far as I know. The area around it is closed off, so you’re not allowed to go there anymore. Mom was never a fan anyway, but my grandfather always brought me here when school was out in the summer.”
“I thought your grandfather lived in Massachusetts.”
“My other grandfather. Pops. He was the one who taught me to row. He had a small blue house near Annapolis and a private dock. Back then we used to live in New York, so every summer I begged my parents to send me here.”
Nick nods. “I can’t really picture you living somewhere that doesn’t have access to water, let alone in a city.”
I laugh. “Yeah, I’m pretty much a fish at this point.
” I look around and breathe in. “Being out here always reminds me of him. When he died, I swore off boats because being out here was too painful without him. But then we moved here and it got better. Bit by bit. Now being out here is easy. It’s the kind of freedom you don’t get anywhere else. ”
His gaze is somewhere on the horizon for a while.
“Yeah,” he says softly. “I get that.”
“Why do you call me Blue?” I ask.
“Because I want to.”
“But why?”
He looks at me for the longest time.
“You’re Indy for everybody else. When you’re Blue… you’re mine.”