6. Seth
Seth
I’m fully prepared for things with Nick to be awkward as we sit out on the forecastle under the stars.
I can’t imagine what it’s been like for him to hold everything inside for so long, but it’s not like I’m entirely open myself.
I understand the circumstances, the culture of our industry, that led him to keep this part of himself a secret.
So I don’t reach for his hand when we walk down to the deck, even though I want to. I sit down first, so he can decide how close is close enough, because I could never be too close to him.
I’m content to meet him where he’s at. Wherever that may be.
But I can’t deny, bubbles burst in my chest when he plops down right next to me. Our legs outstretched and touching, his shoulder bumping into mine when he leans back and drinks his brandy.
Holy shit. He likes me.
I match the length of his sip, smiling like a goofball against the rim of the glass. It’s been over a week since I last got a full night’s sleep, yet I feel like I could swim the English Channel.
“How are you feeling?” I ask.
“Ah. I don’t—” He coughs a little. “That was pretty much the best thing I’ve ever felt in my life. So…”
If my grin gets any wider, I’ll have to hitch a ride to the nearest ER to have my face sutured back together.
“Well that’s great to know, but I was talking about the other part. The coming out part.”
“Oh.” He bites his lip. “Relieved, I think. It went differently than I expected, that’s for sure.”
I rest my hand next to his, weaving our gloved pinkies together as we watch the pale green ribbons of the Aurora ripple across the sky.
“I was so fucking nervous the first time I told anyone. And afterward… it made me realize how angry I was. Angry I had to tell anyone anything. That I couldn’t just exist without having to explain myself. ”
“Who did you tell? Your family?”
“No. Well, eventually. But the first person I told was my high school English teacher, Ms. Schnieder.”
“Must’ve been one hell of a teacher,” he says.
“Oh, she was. Tough grader. Zero tolerance for bullshit. I drove her crazy. Got a D in her class.” I chuckle.
“That woman sent me to the dean’s office so many goddamned times—all well-deserved.
I was actually in detention with her when her girlfriend stopped by to pick her up because her truck battery was dead. ”
“Ah.” Nick nods.
“She was the first adult I’d ever met who was like me, you know? And she was just living her life.”
I’d gawked at Ms. Schnieder and her partner so blatantly, she definitely thought I was judging her. “Have you finished your homework?” she snapped, the smile melting off her face.
I had no intentions of doing my homework, but I stared at the blank worksheet in front of me anyway while I listened intently to the hushed conversation she had with the other woman. Not because it was interesting, but because it wasn’t.
They talked about going to the auto shop. What they needed to pick up at the grocery store for dinner. If the cat got its pills earlier that morning.
I wasn’t out of the closet whatsoever, but teenagers are assholes. By sixteen, I’d heard it all. Enough to know being gay wasn’t “normal”, I wasn’t normal.
But my teacher was gay. And her life looked pretty damn normal to me.
“It took me a while to say anything. I didn’t know how,” I continue, “but the next time she gave me detention, I was the only one there. Couldn’t keep it all inside anymore.”
“Do you know Leo Welch? In your third period?”
“I know all my students, Mr. Rittenburg. Even the ones who aren’t constantly disrupting class. If you can’t work quietly even in detention, I’ll have to make a call to—”
“He’s my… um. We’re…”
“She sat down on her desk, and we ended up talking for the whole hour. I asked her what it was like, growing up gay in a small town in the 80s. She told me about how she hadn’t seen most of her family since she moved to Alaska from Montana, twenty years ago, and I told her everything.
About the boyfriend I had at school. About how I didn’t know how to tell my folks and he couldn’t tell his.
About how all my friends would hate me if they found out the truth. ”
Nick moves his hand over more, covering mine. “I never want to meet anyone who could hate you.”
I take a sip of brandy. “Well, it doesn’t matter. I lost touch with all of them anyway. Took a few years of therapy, but I’ve made peace with that time of my life.”
His fingers tighten reassuringly. “What made you decide to go?”
“Lot of things.” I haven’t told anyone this before, but having the parts of Nick no one else knows makes me want to give him those parts of myself, too.
“My parents weren’t terrible or anything.
They made sure I knew they loved me, but they were shocked.
For a while, it was like they didn’t know how to treat me anymore.
Audrey was my only support system, but then she moved out and went to college.
Got busy with her own life. And going into commercial fishing was like jumping back into high school all over again.
Worse, maybe. There aren’t a whole lot of openly gay guys around. Not any, that I’ve run into.”
He absently toys with the edges of the bandage wrapped around my hand. “Things are better now, I hope?”
“Right now? Yeah. I’d say things are pretty fucking good.”
The best they’ve ever been.
Nick drains the rest of his brandy, setting his glass aside, and reclining all the way. One knee bent. I finish my drink too and lie beside him, cushioning his head with my arm while the boat rises and falls with the tranquil motions of the water.
The warm clouds of our breath rise, tangling and swirling. Hanging low without any breeze to carry them away.
I catch the movement then. The faint glimmer of green that’s been bending across the sky intensifies. Bright streaks of lime and seafoam appear.
Nick points it out at the same time as I do, as if the colors aren’t impossible to miss. Dancing and jumping and consuming the night. We both grow quiet, wonderstruck as the substorm expands and strengthens.
At first, I watch it play out above us. But then I see what all those flickering hues look like reflected in the stormy gray of Nick’s eyes, and it’s hard to imagine I ever found the Aurora so beautiful in any other way.
“I don’t know why I haven’t told my parents,” he says eventually. “I’ve never felt judgment from them, but I guess I’ve always felt… pressure. A lot of it. Pressure to know the answers and to do the right thing. Pressure to be perfect.”
I’m glad he feels like he can tell me, even though that pressure isn’t the invisible force he thinks it is. I’ve seen it weighing on him all along.
“From your dad?” I ask.
“I don’t think all of it was from him. Or, maybe it started there, and then I put ten times more pressure on myself than he ever did. But I understand why he pushed me so hard. He worried about me. He wanted me to be safe.
“I know it has nothing to do with my sexuality, but my sexuality felt like an imperfection, for so long. For so long, I wished I could be someone else. But if I couldn’t change, then I convinced myself I needed to make up for who I am, somehow.
I used to think I needed a real reason to tell them—a serious relationship, something to prove I wasn’t… defective.
“So that’s what I kept waiting for. Only, it never happened. And hooking up with people in secret only made me feel more like a failure. Like I didn’t matter. The longer I waited, the harder it got to say anything.” He sighs through his nose. “And here we are.”
“Here we are.” I scoot closer, squeezing his neck with my bicep as I drape my forearm over his chest. “I’m happy you are who you are. You are the furthest thing from a failure. And you matter to me, Nicky.”
He smiles serenely. Acceptingly, I hope. His fingertips trace my knuckles. “Sometimes I wish my family was the type to pressure me about marriage and grandkids, just so I could finally have an excuse to say something.”
“Careful what you wish for. My mom’s still on my ass to get married anyway. Used to remind me about adoption and surrogacy too, until Audrey started asking us all to babysit and she remembered how much work those things are.”
Nick laughs softly, still watching the sky. “What ever happened to your boyfriend?”
“Leo? We were only together for a year. Didn’t really have anything in common, apart from being the only gay guys at school. When I told him I was dropping out, he asked me to move to California with him. He couldn’t wait to get out of Alaska. Never felt like he could truly be himself here.”
“And you didn’t think about going?”
“Nah.” I trace the side of Nick’s hand with my thumb.
“I hope he found what he was looking for there, but this is where I feel like my true self. Guess I held out hope that I’m not the only one—that eventually, I’d meet someone who loves this place like I do.
Someone who makes it feel even more like home. ”
If he can tell I’m describing him, he doesn’t let on, but he does turn his head toward me.
The cold tip of his nose knocks into mine, both of us laughing at the abruptness of it. His hand slides up to the side of my neck, and I close the rest of the space. Fusing my lips to his.
The kiss goes on languidly. An exchange of body heat and comfort. A bid for long-denied closeness. Our sweats pad the press of our bodies, skin rapidly warming as our brandy-tinged breaths fan each other’s faces.
“Do you want to go back to—?”
Nick doesn’t get the chance to finish that question—the question I really, really want him to finish—because there’s some drunkard booming down the ramp to the dock, improvising his own sea shanty. Loudly.
A drunkard that sounds suspiciously like Konrad Jorgensen.
Nick jerks upright, shuffling to put some space between us before he shrinks under the realization that they’re nowhere near close enough to see us. “Sorry.”
“You’re fine.” I sigh as I sit up, stretching my shoulders. “Jorgensen, on the other hand, is gonna be scrubbing the live tanks tomorrow.”
Nick laughs.
“Do you think crabs can get wasted?” Jorg asks when he’s finished serenading the entire fucking harbor.
“How are they s’posed to drink when they’re un-der-wa-ter?” Zach enunciates.
“Same way they drink water underwater, I dunno.”
“They don’t drink water. They, like, breathe it. That’s what gills are for, dumbass.”
“So, they could drink beer through their gills then. Or… breathe it?”
A hiccup reverberates off the water. “Why do you even care?”
“Iz’za business idea,” he slurs. “Spirit-infused crab legs. Y’know, like beer-battered fish.”
“That’s not how they make beer-battered fish. Do you actually think that? Do you think they get the fish drunk before they fry them?”
Jorgensen doesn’t respond to that question, but a beat passes before he switches gears. “So, if crabs breathe the water they drink, do you think they think we’re drinking the air we breathe? Wait… are we drinking air?”
“You are definitely not drinking enough air. Not enough oxygen in your brain,” Pyotr says. “And you are going to fall off the—”
Splash.
“—dock.”
Nick springs to his feet, and I’m not far behind him. Both of us peer over the gunwale where, two slips over, Orlov is fishing Jorg out of the water. Perry is laughing his ass off so hard, it looks like he’s about to fall in next.
“Fuck,” Jorgensen sputters. “I think I’m sober now.”
“Not a chance,” Zach says.
“Walk straighter next time,” Orlov suggests.
Nick smothers his laugh with his palm, but not before half of it bubbles out through his nose. He turns to me, a slash of a smile on his face. “Is this what you deal with all day?”
“Worse, sometimes. I’ll take too many beers over too many energy drinks any day of the week.” I lean against the cold steel of the gunwale. “They’re a great crew, though. Best I’ve ever worked with, but that makes sense. The best captains get to hold on to the best guys.”
“I like how you complimented yourself too there.”
“Well, since we’re in the habit of being honest tonight,” I tease.
His amusement fades, giving way to something more earnest. “You haven’t told them, have you?”
“That I’m gay? No, no. Not because I think these guys would take it badly, but… I just didn’t want you to know.”
“I’m sure you've worked with plenty of old-school assholes around here, but I hope I never came across like—”
“It’s not that.” I smile. “I thought if you found out, you’d be able to tell how I feel about you.”
“Oh.” His voice comes out low and fragile, a lap of water against the hull. “I wouldn’t have. I was too hung up on the way I feel about you.”
I’ll have to replay those words later, when I’m not distracted by the booming footsteps approaching the Suoja, or the uproar of laughter as Jorg tells a heavily embellished tale about how a barracuda nearly amputated his thumb.
Nick glances up at the dock again. “I hate asking this, but… do you mind not telling them for a while longer? I’m not sure if I… well. It complicates things for me. Being their boss. I don’t want to lose good workers, lose business. You know how word travels around here.”
“Hey.” I hunch over, stealing one last kiss before the guys come clambering on board.
“You don’t have to justify anything to me, alright?
It’s easy to say, ‘If they have a problem with it, you don’t want them working for you anyway,’ but reality isn’t so cut and dry.
Whatever you decide, I support you. If you need me to stand with you while you tell them, I’ll be there.
If you never want to tell anyone at all, you already know I can keep a secret. I’m with you. Okay?”
His eyes soften, his deep exhale fogging up the air between us. “Okay.”