My god, I wrote something happy.  <boggle>  Not my usual territory--but this is for Bone, with love, a thank-you present in gratitude for much kindness, and for her I could do no less than to at least give happiness a shot.
Many thanks to Audra and Destina, for fast, smart, supportive beta.

Comments very welcome, to jones059@umn.edu.

___________________
 
 

DEEP END

Kat Allison

The third of October, Fraser reminded himself.  This is October.

It carried no conviction.  October meant crisp air and scarlet leaves, frosty nights with the shiver of winter in them.  Not this; not this languor, this sultry heat and green humid fragrance, this velvet-soft night air.

A warm breeze stirred the palm leaves and shimmered the surface of the pool, bringing him the tang of chlorine, a not-unpleasant top note to the bouquet of vegetative smells.  Lit from within, the pool glowed aquamarine, lovely and utterly unnatural.  The pool's surround was a tidy apron of pebbled aggregate, with potted sago palms set  here and there, and all of it, pool and patio and palm trees, was enclosed by a vaulted metal framework, a nave walled and roofed with screening.  It made an odd little church of hedonism.  For all that Fraser deplored the exclusion of the natural world, he was just as grateful for the screens; given a choice between facing down a grizzly and dealing with the multifarious unknown fauna of Florida, he'd take the bear.  He breathed in deeply, smelling growth and decay, humus and chlorine and honeysuckle.

It was good to be outside again, even in this strange climate, after days spent in meeting rooms under fluorescent lights, breathing processed air and being plied with sticky sweet rolls and coffee.  Everything about the conference hotel--its size, its plummy-toned pretensions to opulence, its stale smells, its obsequious staff--had rubbed him crossways, and he'd taken his pleasure instead in watching Ray's wholehearted enjoyment of the odd array of luxuries it offered.  Ray had ordered room service almost every night ("Isn't that awfully expensive?"  "Fraser, tell me this, you want to go down to the restaurant and have one of the crispy-shirt guys latch onto you with the 'Gentlemen, may we join you and bore you even more senseless over dinner than we already did today in the stupid meeting' thing?"  "Well, but the prices seem--"  "Goin' on the expense account, Fraser."  "It hardly seems right to--"  "Besides, this way we can get horizontal and fool around while we eat.")  Ray had appropriated the plush terrycloth robe supplied by the hotel as his preferred lying-around-eating-room-service attire (the memory of Ray lounging among the detritus of dinner, licking sauce off his fingers, naked in the loosely-wrapped and mostly askew robe, was one Fraser would retain), and had wielded the TV remote with authority, speeding up and down the channels and snickering at the titles on the "Adult Viewing" menu.  He had made extravagant inroads into the free shampoo and soaps, and had come up with some inventive uses for the frangipani body balm.

It had been as self-indulgent a descent into hedonism as could be reconciled with their attendance at  the annual meeting of the Association of Law Enforcement Professionals, and their rather public role as workshop presenters ("The Canada-Chicago Liaison Project: A Model of Cross-Jurisdictional Partnership in Urban Policing").  Their participation had been the brainchild of Inspector Gillmore, who was clearly determined to outdo the now-departed Thatcher by earning the Consulate a reputation for cutting-edge advances in law enforcement; and Lieutenant Welsh had found the whole concept hilarious enough to authorize the funds for Ray's airfare, and to grant him a full week's leave.  ("Just try not to disgrace the name of the Chicago PD in front of the think-tankers, got it, detective?")

And it had, on the whole, gone well.  Fraser had sat through a number of most interesting presentations ("Implementing and Evaluating Collaborations in Anti-Gang Initiatives"; "Clusters, Categories and Types of Homicide in Theory and Practice"), taking copious notes and collecting abstracts, while Ray had roamed restlessly from room to room, standing in the back and drinking coffee.  On the day of their panel, after a morning of pacing and muttering over his index cards, Ray had stood up before the audience of academics and administrators and rapped out his part of the presentation in a fast sharp voice that carried to the back of the room, without once glancing at his notes.  He'd worn his best suit, he'd gelled his hair to hedgehog-like quilliness, he'd stood very straight, chin raised, and he'd shown no sign of nerves, except for the one hand that only Fraser could see, behind the podium, clutching his index cards in a white-knuckled fist.  It had left Fraser so suffocated with pride and love that he'd missed his own cue, and Ray had had to give him a kick under the table.

Afterward, they'd collected handshakes and business cards; Fraser had attended a few more panels; and the conference had closed.  But they weren't due back in Chicago until Monday, and, much to Fraser's surprise, Ray had availed himself of a long-standing invitation from some old friends, a couple he'd known since Stella's law-school days, who had moved to a nearby community.  So their business trip had segued unexpectedly into a holiday; a shared vacation, in fact, their first since their return from Canada and from the exhausting, terrifying, transformative journey--the Quest in which the only reaching-out hands they had discovered had, finally, been their own.

From an ice shelf on the edge of the Beaufort Sea to the brim of a Florida swimming pool was about as radical a leap as Fraser could imagine; and yet it was nothing compared to the transformation in his life, from then to now.

He heard the slithering sound of the patio door opening, and then a voice behind him, rough-edged, a scatter of broken glass against the velvet of the evening air. "God, it's hot out here.  Friggin' tropics."  Ray walked to the pool's edge and stared down into the lambent depths.  "Water looks good."

"You ought to take a dip, Ray."

"Me, nah.  Me and water's not a good mix, you know that."  Despite his dismissive tone, Ray gave him a little sidelong grin, a glance with an edge of dare in it.

"I don't know what you mean.  You may not be an accomplished swimmer, but that's hardly called for in a backyard pool.  A little immersion would probably be refreshing.  Salubrious."

"Yeah?"  The grin was a little larger now, wickeder.  "You want to put your money where your mouth is, Mountie?"  Ray reached into his pocket and pulled out a tightly folded square of fabric, shook it out.  A rather abbreviated swimsuit, printed in a tropical pattern.  He tossed it to Fraser, who caught it automatically, staring at the gaudy scrap of nylon.

"Ray, I distinctly remember packing for this trip, and I don't recall packing anything like--"  He held the garment out between thumb and forefinger, inspecting it.  "--this."

"And the reason for that, Fraser, would be that you haven't seen it.  Till now.  Bought it at the airport, while you were busy telling those Japanese tourists how to find the bus to Disneyworld.  How come you don't have swim trunks, anyway?  I figured you'd be grabbing your chance to show me the Canadian backstroke or something."

"Canada has no eponymous swimming strokes, Ray.  You may perhaps be thinking of the Australian crawl, or the--"

Ray, clearly not to be distracted, pointed at the swim suit.  "Go on, Fraser, put it on.  You want to get yourself all, uh, salubrious, or you want to piss me off?"

He hesitated, the fabric dangling from his fingers.  "It seems a little odd to be using a stranger's private pool."

"They aren't strangers, not any more, you met 'em, you like 'em, they like you, what's the problem?  You think they got cooties?  Hey, they told us to use the pool, right?  So--"  He made a shooing gesture, toward the door.  "Go hit the changing room, Fraser.  Follow directions."

Fraser obediently turned and went back into the house, pausing a moment as he slid the glass door shut behind him.  Being in someone else's home often gave him an uneasy sense of intrusion, but Andy and Julia had welcomed him with genuine warmth, and had taken in his role in Ray's life with a total lack of the fluster he'd come to expect.  The guest wing, with its queen-sized bed, had been given over to them without so much as a quirked brow, and when a grandmother's sudden illness had called them out of town, they'd turned the house over to their guests for the weekend with a few calm instructions about keys and garbage collection.

Padding barefoot down the hallway, Fraser found himself pausing to contemplate the framed photo collages on the wall.  One of them included a large photograph of what was clearly a graduation party, featuring Julia with her arm around the shoulders of a younger but very recognizable Stella Kowalski, both grinning, mortarboards askew, and among the crowd in the background--Fraser had examined the photo with great care, and surreptitious use of a magnifying glass--was Ray, in an odd-looking paisley shirt, caught in the act of turning away from the camera.  Fraser's eyes automatically went to that small blurred form, and he found himself wondering where he himself had been the moment that photo had been snapped--June 1987, it must have been ... in the Yukon, no doubt, thousands of miles from Chicago, likely tramping through the woods, alone.  Dief not yet born, his father not yet dead, his life all before him, and he unaware of what an unlikely path it would take him on, what a cosmically implausible intersection it was leading him toward.

He moved on to the next collage.  Family photos, from reunions and birthdays and Chistmases and weddings, a medley of faces all different and yet oddly similar.  Kin.  The pictures almost glowed, in the dim hallway, filled with warmth and laughter, the faces of people who belonged with each other, belonged together; people who kept the net of affection, connection, woven tight, a mesh so close and sturdy that it caught even a pair of odd fish like Ray and himself.

There was a time, not so long ago, when he would have paused longer over the family pictures, loitered, indulged himself in a poignant moment of longing.  Would then have told himself, sternly, that some things were not meant to be; would have kept his yearnings locked away, and all his clothes on.

Now he turned, smiling a little, and went on to the bedroom, to undress and change into the preposterous swimsuit Ray had bought for him.

Once he had, with some difficulty, slithered into the tight coil of nylon, he looked in the mirror and was briefly appalled.  Ray had, perhaps, bought a smaller size than ... it was so--tight, so revealing, so extremely skimpy.   He felt the air conditioning wash over his bare skin, leaving prickles of chill, and for just a moment he was afraid, bare like this, open and helpless, a sea-creature molted out of its shell, sport for the predators.  But then he squared his shoulders, staring down the pale apparition in the mirror, drawing himself upright.  The Olympic swimmers, after all, competed before the eyes of the world wearing no more than this, and he, Benton Fraser, RCMP, was not to be found less courageous than some Californian teenager.

And besides, Ray was waiting for him, and it wouldn't do to keep Ray waiting.

He moved quickly down the hall, shivering a little, and stepped back outside, grateful for the night air that wrapped around him, warm and tender as skin.  He could almost feel his own skin relax, feel himself slide into the supple ease of living in his flesh.

It had been like that often, the past half-year.  Having finally cracked the casing of his uniform, the shell of his role and his solitude, and stepped outside, his life had been like that of a moth newly hatched from its chrysalis, uncrimping, unclenching, relaxing into the astonishing discovery of antennae, legs ... and wings, the shock of rebirth into life with wings.  No more creeping, but flight.  How terrifying it must be for the moth, he had thought, to take that first fling into the air; and he himself had stood on the brink a long time, shaken by terror and longing, before he'd leapt.

Now he stood on the lip of the pool, feeling--no terror, just the tremble of night air stroking his skin, a warm breath that lifted tiny hairs on his legs and belly, and the sense of Ray's eyes on him, hotter than the air.

"Yeah."  A lazy drawn-out growl of appreciation.  "That's pretty much what I had in mind."  Suddenly self-conscious, he stood still--being looked at this way was still a novel and uneasy pleasure for him--until Ray said, "Well?  You planning to dive in anytime soon, or just stand there showing off your assets?"

Fraser took a breath, squared his stance, and dove.  A quick unshowy dive with a fair amount of splash in it--his mind had been wandering far afield from diving technique--but the shock of wet chill brisked him up, and he swam a couple of quick laps, glorying in the sense of his body's strength and the feel of water sliding over him.

He fetched up at the shallow end, where Ray stood watching, and stood, pushing his wet hair back and catching his breath.  "Are you planning to join me, Ray?"

"Told you before, me and water don't mix.  Besides..."  He sauntered over and squatted down at the pool's edge, close to Fraser.  "I like the view from up here."

Close, temptingly close, and, Fraser noted, rather precariously balanced...  Without looking up, he slid his hand nonchalantly down the lip of the pool, as if getting a better grip, moving closer--and then he grabbed and yanked, and Ray tipped into the pool, with a loud yelp and a monumental splash.

He came up spluttering, spraying water and curses, and Fraser reached out helpfully to steady his arm, until he got himself righted and stood waist-deep in the water, dripping and glaring, his t-shirt plastered to his body.

"Sneaky fucking bastard--Fraser, you know what you get for bodily assault on a police officer?"  He pushed his sodden hair off his forehead with a quick swipe.  "Felony assault, that's what it is, on top of which, 'cause you could drown in a swimming pool, that means a deadly weapon, and--"

"I hardly think a little innocent horseplay constitutes a felony, Ray."

"Horseplay, that is so--unMountie-like, that's exactly the kind of thing that if you were some six-year-old screwing around with the other kids you'd be telling yourself to desist from."

"Well, Ray, as you've pointed out before, partners means sharing, and I merely assumed you'd want to share in the refreshing properties of the pool which you were so eager to advance to me."  He said it in his calmest, most reasonable tone, knowing the power of that tone to provoke.

Ray glared a moment longer, and then Fraser saw a different, more evil glint in his eyes, saw the knife's edge of a smile crease the corner of his mouth.  Trying to best Ray Kowalski in a bluffing contest was a fool's game, but one he could never resist.

"Ohhh-kay."  Ray took hold of the hem of his t-shirt, slowly peeled it up, revealing his torso a deliberate inch at a time, then pulled it over his head with a quick tug and lobbed it onto the patio.  He unfastened his shorts and slid them slowly down over his hips and legs, with perhaps more provocative undulation than was strictly necessary.  He lifted the sodden garment from the pool's bottom with one foot, and tossed it away after the t-shirt.  He had nothing on underneath.

He gave Fraser another look, put his shoulders back, and stood, bare, his skin gleaming wet in the dim light, traced with rivulets of water.  Fraser's swimsuit, which had begun to feel comfortable, was suddenly too tight again.  He counselled himself to be patient; he recognized in Ray's face the familiar look of a plan being hatched, and he had of late learned to trust the enjoyable potentialities of Ray's plans.

"I got an idea, Fraser, now that you got me in here, how about another swimming lesson?  I mean, it's been a while since the whole bloom-close thing, right?  You probably got some more stuff you could teach me."  Ray's voice dropped a little on the last sentence.

Fraser judged it an opening gambit whose excellence was in no way diminished by its obviousness, and he put a little extra pedantry into his response.  "Certainly a controlled environment of this sort is much more conducive to such instruction than was the middle of Lake Superior."

"Conducive, yeah.  Conducive to lots of things."  Ray waded over until he was standing bare inches from him, and Fraser tamped down the temptation to simply grab; it was much too early in the game for that.

"Very well.  The first and most important lesson in swimming is to learn to trust the water."

Ray squinted at him; clearly this was not the next move he'd been expecting.  "Water, Fraser, is not one of those trustworthy things.  It's--it's wet, and you can't breathe in it, and--"

"Floating, therefore, is the first thing to learn.  Until you learn to relax and trust the water to hold you up, you're merely thrashing about.  Turn around, Ray."  He took hold of Ray's shoulders and pivoted him until Ray's back was facing him, a prospect just as tempting though in slightly different ways, and again he curbed his baser impulses.  "Now.  Let your feet come up off the bottom, lean back, and just allow yourself to float."

It took several tries, accompanied by some arm-flailing and protests, but finally Ray was more or less horizontal.  Fraser supported his back, the sharp angles of shoulderblades fitting pleasantly into his palms, but Ray's legs kept sinking downwards.

"Fraser, how the hell am I supposed to trust the water to hold me up when it's not doing it?"

"You're too lean to really float efficiently, I suppose.  Body fat lends buoyancy.  Perhaps if you tried kicking, just a little..."

Ray made some thrashing motions with his legs, roiling the water's surface, and slowly rose.  At the same time, his kicking propelled him backwards, so that his head bumped up against Fraser.  He kept it there, arching his neck and making little pushing movements, rubbing his wet hair back and forth across Fraser's belly.  "OK, this is good, this is working."  Now that his lower body had risen, it was more clearly visible through the water's blur-- pale legs and hips, darker tangle of pubic hair, penis gently floating, breaking the water's surface from time to time, not quite within reach...

Fraser cleared his throat.  "All right.  Now.  Movement through the water, and the hydroplaning effects of such motion, will help keep you afloat, just as movement through the air, and the dynamics of lift and thrust, are what keeps an airplane aloft."

"Don't want to move."  Ray's eyes were closed, and he kept rubbing his head in a slow repetitive caress against Fraser's stomach.

"I thought you wanted a swimming lesson"  He shifted his hands a little on Ray's back, and Ray stiffened up, flailing his arms.

"Fraser, you drop me now and I'll ... I'll ..."

"I'm not going to drop you, Ray, please just relax.  I have an idea."  He took a quick glance over his shoulder, gauging the distance to the pool's edge, and then took a step backward, and another, drawing Ray along with him.  Ray reached up and grabbed his arm at first, as if to assure himself he wasn't being left behind, and then relaxed, letting his hand fall back into the water with a splash.  Just as Fraser had thought, the movement slowly lifted his body, and he drifted along in Fraser's wake.  The spikes of his hair had softened in the water, and they floated loose, like the tentacles of some strange sea anemone.

They made a few circuits of the shallow end that way, until Ray was wholly relaxed, eyes closed, and Fraser was slightly out of breath.  He felt clumsy, laboring backward through the heavy water, trying to keep his own balance, and his feet kept losing their grip on the tile of the pool's bottom.

He had a thought, then, and turned them slowly, carefully, until they were headed for the far end.  As he walked, he felt the water deepening around him, the bottom dropping away--and then he gave a kick and a push, and they were floating together.

He sculled with his legs, careful not to kick Ray; a gentle movement, not enough to propel them very fast, just enough to keep them from sinking.  The motion brought his body up just as Ray's started to drift downward, and they bumped gently together.

Though Ray kept his eyes closed, his teeth flashed in a quick grin, and he moved deliberately this time, pushing himself down against Fraser's groin and adding a little wiggle.

"If I'd known swimming lessons were like this, Fraser, I'd've--"  He closed his mouth abruptly as a wavelet washed against his chin, and then let the sentence float away, unfinished.

For long moments they drifted.  Fraser closed his eyes, temporarily abandoning his vigilance and his responsibilities, just feeling Ray's body against his, and the water holding them both.  There was no way to tell, in that moment, where the one became the other, where water became flesh became air, all of them warm, wet, caressing; moving together, gently, up and then down, push and pull, the rhythm of Ray's body, over him, under his hands, following the rhythm of the waves, creating that rhythm.  When Ray finally spoke, he could feel the words as clearly as he could hear them.

"We're in the deep end, aren't we, Fraser?"

"We are indeed."  His voice was muffled, lips moving against damp hair, realizing as he spoke that the game, whatever it had been, had been left behind some time before.

"Mmm.  Don't let me drown, OK?"

"I'd never let you drown, Ray."

"Yeah."  Simple trust, simple acceptance; like the trust of the body given over to him, resting in his arms.  Strange how something that so buoyed him could at the same time be such a weight.  He thought of the depths of water beneath them, and felt a quick irrational lurch of fear; it seemed fathomless all of a sudden, full of unknown dangers, and he a reckless fool to have swum them out into the middle of it.  Was it holding them up, or was it pulling them down?  He wasn't sure; suddenly it seemed impossible that they could be floating here together like this, impossible and perilous.

Just relax and trust the water to hold you up--he could hear himself again, lecturing Ray, and he winced at the smug complacency in his voice, the presumption that he could manage, that he knew what he was doing, that the universe was a trustworthy place.  There was danger everywhere, and once again he'd pulled Ray in after him, not onto an ice floe this time, but into the far greater peril of these warm, lulling, seductive depths.

You can't breathe in it, Ray had said, and he felt his lungs clenching, his chest tightening up.  He shifted his grip, realizing as he did how slippery Ray's skin felt--as if he might suddenly slide away, out of his hands, and be lost to him.  He clutched, almost panicky, pulling in air fast and hard.  In over his head, far over; he couldn't manage this.

"Fraser, you OK?  You getting tired?  Damn, I shouldn't have been letting you do all the work here."  He almost answered That's how it needs to be, but Ray was all at once in motion, floundering a little as he grabbed Fraser's arms, rearranging them so they wrapped tight around his own chest.  "Hang on," Ray said; and all of a sudden, instead of holding Ray up, he was being supported; Ray was paddling, clumsily but efficiently, with arms and legs, swimming them over to the edge, near the diving board.

He heard Ray's head bump the concrete, and a muttered curse, and he unwrapped one arm to grope for the curved lip of the pool.  But Ray said, "Relax, Fraser, I got it, just hang on to me."  And then Ray had one arm hooked over the edge, and the other holding Fraser's arms securely in place around him.

He held on.  Safe; he was safe, Ray would never let him drown.  He wanted to say thank you, or possibly I love you; instead, after a moment, he said, "That was most adroitly done, Ray.  You're a stronger swimmer than you give yourself credit for." Then something in him that he told himself was honesty compelled him to add, "But we weren't really in any danger, Ray.  I don't actually need rescuing."

"Yeah?  You think so?"  Ray let his head fall back, onto Fraser's shoulder, and gave him a quick upside-down look before closing his eyes.  "Maybe I like doing it sometimes, Fraser, you ever think of that?"

He was silent, listening to the water-sounds.  The waves from their brief churning swim murmured around them both; shifting tides, an unstable force that pushed and slapped against the hard cement shell of the pool and finally fell still.

"What happened there, anyway?  You get a cramp or something?"

It wasn't accurate, but it was true enough.  "A small cramp.  Yes."

"Yeah, well, you just hang on.  I got the edge, you got me, we're good.  Relax."

Fraser could feel the strength of the wiry body he clung to, the lean muscles under his arm, the fast steady beat of the heart.  That body, so familiar to him now, so solid, tensed with the effort of holding them both up, but equal to the task. Still gripping with one hand, he let the other slide slowly down to Ray's groin, as if it were drawn there, stroking and cradling, feeling the familiar sensation of soft flesh hardening against his palm.  A suburban backyard was no place for such indulgences, he knew, but he felt entirely unable to stop himself.

"Hey.  Fraser." Ray's voice was husky.  "You know what's great about a swimming pool?"  The question was clearly rhetorical, and before he could begin to fumble for a non-literal response, Ray abruptly slithered off of him, out of his grip, took hold of the pool's edge, and with one quick effortless motion surged up and out of the water.   "It's 'cause even when you're in the water you're still really on dry land the whole time."

Ray straightened, shook himself once and then stood there in the dim light, gleaming, water running over his skin, trickling off his hair and arms and half-hard erection.  "Plus, you know what's cool about this swimming pool in particular?"

Fraser clung to the edge of the pool, bereft.  Without Ray's body against his, the water seemed shockingly chilly.  Ray stared down at him for a moment--looming over him, beautiful as a sculpture, remote, eyes in shadow, so very far away--

Then he squatted down and reached out, Fraser let go of the edge to grab his hands, and he pulled Fraser up with a quick powerful tug, until they stood together, face to face.

"The fact that it's only about fifty feet from a bedroom."  They stared at each other for a moment--so close that Fraser could almost feel the heat of him--and then Ray's deadpan look of innocence cracked into a sinful grin, and he jerked his head toward the house.  "C'mon, we've given the neighbors enough of a peepshow for one night."

He turned, still gripping Fraser's hand, pulling him across the patio, and Fraser let himself be towed right along behind, over dry land, toward the anchorage of a dry and solid bed.  For once in his life, he didn't even worry about dripping onto the carpeting.
 

END