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The waves break on the stone beach. The sky is overcast, threatening rain. Lewis draws his windbreaker hood tighter over his head as the wind threatens to pull it back. It tugs on the curls not contained by his hood and elastic. His ass is sore and wet from the hard rocks, and his feet are cold in his wet sneakers. The tide is coming in, and has soaked them, lapping at the seat of his jeans.
He’s been sitting with his knees drawn to his chest for the better part of the day. Ortega had always teased him, about how long he could sit without fidgeting or twitching. Ricardo was the kind of man who would struggle to sit still if his life depended on it. Then again, Ricardo’s life never had.
Lewis suppresses a shiver as another wave hits him, splashing up his ankles now. He lets his brain stay blissfully blank. Nothing but the crash of the waves as noise. This beach is empty, a combination of the rocky shore and poor weather. His only company is in the gulls, whose minds he distances from himself, even as he watches them soar low over the water. He dips into their minds carefully, letting himself touch their minds softly enough that he only absorbs the vague sense of flight. So different from falling.
The gulls are the only minds for miles. If he focuses, he can feel the flash of thoughts flying by on the highway several miles off, but relaxed, they fade into nothing. He wonders, idly, if there will be a point that he won’t ever be alone in his head. Unable to escape the press of other minds, his telepathy stretched so wide that no matter how far he ran…
He hears the crunch of gravel before he picks up the soft buzz of static. Lewis feels the familiar edges of a white-noise brain, and hugs his legs tighter. Ricardo stops behind him, and breathes a deep breath. He doesn’t say anything, just stands there.
The waves have soaked his jeans to just beneath his knees, dragging against the loose fabric of his sleeves, when Ortega finally speaks.
“Shitty weather for a beach day, huh?” Ricardo’s voice is raw. Lewis twitches his shoulders, a not quite shrug. Ricardo barks a laugh that sounds closer to a sob, and gravel crunches as he appears in Lewis's peripheral. He eases himself down with a groan and a small splash to sit on the rocks beside Lewis.
Lewis looks at him, moving for the first time in at least two hours. His neck cries out with the action. He’s looking out at the sea, mirroring Lewis’s position from the last few hours. Ricardo looks like hell, exhausted and drained. He looks old. Guilt pools in Lewis’s stomach. How many years has he added to that face?
“I’m sorry,” Lewis whispers.
“You scared me,” Ortega says back, just as quiet. He’s fidgeting with his hands, tracing the emitters in his palms. He’s had the habit as long as Lewis has known him. Lewis had picked it up, too, back before, and had replicated the motion whenever he’d held Ricardo’s hand in his own.
“I know.”
Lewis reaches over, setting a hand over Ortega’s fidgeting one. Ricardo looks at him finally, and his eyes are red and glassy. The pool of guilt twists harder. How much net pain has Lewis imparted on this man?
“I’m sorry,” Lewis says again, and scrubs at his face and eyes. They’re puffy, probably. The stress of the last six hours catches up, and he feels bulldozed by it. The wind catches his hood, and he doesn’t bother to stop it from falling back.
“Me too,” Ricardo murmurs, tugging Lewis closer to his side, wrapping an arm around the smaller man’s shoulders. Ricardo is warm, and Lewis struggles not to melt into him. He hadn’t registered how cold he’d gotten, sitting still in the surf and wind. He shivers slightly, and Ricardo holds him tighter, pulling his head to his shoulder. He presses a kiss onto Lewis’s hair, before letting his head drop to rest on Lewis’s own.
They sit and watch the gulls until the overcast sky begins to darken. The sun, so heavily obscured with pollution and cloud cover, must have set. The waves brush up the gravel beach to their end a foot or so behind them, soaking them continuously.
When Ricardo has begun to tremble, and when Lewis’s shivering has grown uncontainable, Ricardo braces himself on Lewis’s shoulder to get to his feet. He offers a hand up, which Lewis takes. His joints cry out as he stands, muscles numb with cold and inactivity. Ricardo doesn’t let go of his hand, lacing their fingers together instead.
“We’re both going to catch colds,” Ortega says, looking at Lewis, with only a faint hint of amusement in the sad slant of his eyes. Lewis gives a laugh that is barely a huff of air.
“Did you drive here?” Lewis asks, hoping that one of them was smart enough to actually drive the hour and a half out of Los Diablos, and hoping that Ortega didn’t take his bike.
Ortega nods, and leads them off the beach. The smooth stoned gravel turns to hard packed dirt, and then to cracked asphalt as they reach the parking lot. Ricardo’s sedan is the only vehicle in the lot. Small mercies. The bike would have been a cold ride.
Ricardo takes his hand back, and fumbles to get his keys out of his pocket. The car beeps as it unlocks, and Ricardo quickly gets in to start the car and the heating. Lewis is slower to follow, weighing the expensive leather seats against his saltwater soaked jeans. No chance in hell of stripping them off, so he settles for shucking his windbreaker and laying it over the seat. His shoes slosh disgustingly as steps in, and he toes them off, sticking his feet at the top of the foot well, directly beneath the vents there.
Beside him, Ortega has no such qualms, and has pulled his own wet pants to his knees, sitting in his underwear in the driver's seat. The sight is absurd, and pulls a laugh out of Lewis. Ricardo joins his laughter, and Lewis privately thinks the older man just likes laughing with him. Privately wonders, at what it says that Ortega laughs at all his shitty jokes, even the ones he doesn’t voice, just conveys with a look or a huff. The answer is an obvious one, one that Ricardo affirms the next moment.
“I love you.” Ricardo says, suddenly serious as he looks to the passenger seat. The words, which have become something not-quite-regular these days, still pierce Lewis through. Before he can say something stupid, like another apology, Ricardo flips the radio on and pulls forward.
The drive back into the city passes quietly between them, with just the comforting sounds of tires over asphalt, the blast of the heater, and Ortega’s tuneless humming to the softly playing radio. Ricardo’s right hand finds his thigh, and rests there, tapping along gently to the radio. Lewis relaxes for the first time that day, and lets his head rest against the car window. He watches the landscape fly by, fields gradually turning to city, and is lulled enough that his eyes slip shut. Street lights and headlights smudge faint illumination across his eyelids. The swarm of thoughts and minds becomes a white-noised background, and he succumbs to the pull of unconsciousness.