Chapter 6: Noon at the Pool

The pool was a granite bowl a quarter mile above the camp.

The creek dropped six feet over a lip there and filled a basin of green water.

Perry got there first.

He had watched Dad lead the class up the ridge at eleven, twenty-four hats bobbing in a line.

He had counted to three hundred before he followed the stream.

Now he stood on the warm flat slab at the water's edge and listened to the fall.

He did not know what to do with his hands.

A boot scraped behind him.

Blaine came out of the trees in his work boots and shorts with a towel over his shoulder, and stopped.

He looked at Perry's face, then at the water, then at the sky.

"It's noon," he said.

"I know," Perry said.

"I said if you were here I wasn't stopping."

"I know what you said."

Blaine dropped the towel on the rock.

He walked across the slab in the full sun with nothing in his face to hide behind.

He put both hands on Perry's waist.

"Daylight," he said.

"Yes."

"You're really going to make me do this where I can see everything."

"Yes," Perry said, and unbuttoned his shirt.

They undressed each other on the warm stone.

It took a long time, because Blaine kept stopping to look.

He looked at Perry's shoulders and his stomach and the pale hollow of his hip.

He touched each one, slowly, checking that it was real.

When Perry was bare he stood there with his chin up and let him.

"You're so," Blaine said, and gave up, and kissed him.

The sun was heavy on Perry's back.

Blaine's hands were rough and slow, mapping him, and his mouth tasted of coffee and the clean cold water he'd drunk on the climb.

Perry walked him backward until the stone ended and Blaine's heels met the water.

"In," Perry said.

"Per, it's freezing."

"You're a big man. You'll cope."

They went in together.

The water hit Perry's thighs and he yelped.

Blaine laughed, deep and unguarded, a sound Perry had not heard from him in two years.

They kissed standing waist-deep with the fall pounding behind them.

Blaine's hands slid down Perry's back and gripped his ass and hauled him up against him.

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