Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

Dawn lightened the tent enough to pull Martin from sleep, and he rolled to his side and stretched. They had a lot to do today: moving the technical equipment from the Jeep, transferring it to the approved site, and beginning to construct what was needed. He’d only looked at the parts briefly, aware he didn’t actually have to know what he was doing. After all, he was only providing the muscle.

He also needed to get the fourth tent finished. He’d put it up last night and installed the toilet, but the shower part was more complicated. Luxuries like that hadn’t been available to him as a kid, and he’d actually never seen a setup for camping like this. He had instructions though, and in the gentle early morning light, he pulled what he needed from the Jeep and began to construct the shower inside the bathroom tent. There was a tiny heater, pipes, and a large basin to stand in, and when he had it put together, he carried the water containers to the stream and filled them as best he could.

Once back, he tested the system out with cold water, satisfied that this worked and then he headed out of the tent, and the scent of bacon hit him head-on. Tyler was up, in jeans and a bulky sweater, standing by a new fire, poking at the wood.

“Morning,” Martin said as he drew closer and was amused when Tyler shot up in the air in surprise.

“Jesus, you need a bell,” he said and grabbed his chest in an exaggerated move. “And good morning. We have bacon. Every morning should start with bacon, don’t you think?”

“And coffee,” Martin added. “Mostly coffee.”

Tyler held out a mug. “Already on it.”

The coffee was dark, fragrant, and exactly what Martin needed to kick-start his day, and when he sat on his small chair opposite Tyler with a plate of bacon and biscuits, he couldn’t have been happier. Not to mention the view from there was perfect. Not of the mountains beyond or the rolling grass or even the water shimmering in the daylight, though. No, the view was all about stealing glances at a rumpled and grinning Tyler. He was a sight for sore eyes, his hair fluffy from sleep, his hazel eyes sparkling with excitement, and he was smiling even as he ate his bacon. He had so much unbridled enthusiasm in him for what he was doing; so much excitement. It was a good look on a man.

“Have you been up long?” Tyler asked.

Martin had to remember how to talk when he’d slipped into pretending-not-to-stare mode for so long. “A while. The bathroom tent is finished and the shower works. I didn’t check if the heater worked, but I don’t imagine it was meant to sustain long luxurious hours under steaming hot water.”

“Shame.” Tyler laughed. “I love standing under a hot shower for hours if I have something to keep me busy.” He winked then, but it wasn’t flirting or a come-on. It was just buddies joking. Right? Not that they were buddies, or that Martin thought he knew how to handle anything like being a buddy.

Martin focused back on the bacon and again took point in cleaning the empty plates, leaving them to dry outside the tent. They each used the bathroom, but it took a long time for Martin to truly relax. It was a tent on the side of a mountain; it felt… wrong. At least he could wash up and face the world with something like a fresh face and bright attitude. There was no way he was letting any blackness creep up on him while he was out here. He wouldn’t be any good to anyone if he was rocking in a corner whimpering about his shit life.

Then it was the two of them working to empty the Jeep. After the fifth journey up the hill carrying heavy boxes, the four hundred yards felt like miles. Tyler had stayed up there, cataloguing and working with equipment to locate the spot where the installation would be. Some of the items that he took up were awkwardly shaped, others in tiny boxes; quite a few were stamped fragile . On the other hand, the shovels and gravel were something that he could get behind using.

“That’s the last of it,” he advised as soon as the Jeep was empty. “What next?”

“Hmm?” Tyler looked up from his crouched position and blinked back to reality. Wherever he’d been was probably bursting full of technical information, and now he had to switch to telling Martin what to do next.

“Sorry to interrupt your thinking. Everything is up here now, so what’s next?”

Tyler stood and brushed at the seat of his jeans. “Next is coffee and a muffin if there are any in the supplies. I can’t work on an empty stomach, and bacon was a long time ago. Come on, I’ll make us some, and I can explain what we need to complete today.”

Martin followed Tyler, his calf muscles sore from all the trekking up and down the incline. He’d grown soft; it used to be he could trek for days without stopping, but working in a coffee shop had taken a toll on his love of walking for mile upon mile. Tyler made coffee and sat on his chair.

“So let me explain a bit about what we’re doing.”

Martin settled in for another essay, the word banana on the tip of his tongue only until Tyler started talking about earthquakes and the detail was interesting to hear.

“Montana has a history of earthquakes, but it’s not as publicized as, say, earthquakes in LA or volcanoes in Yellowstone. Ask anyone who’s been to the movies to see a disaster movie, and an earthquake in the ass end of Montana will never make the list of what they covered. Apart from a BBC movie about the Yellowstone super volcano. But the only thing that movie got right was the volcano was capable of burying states like Wyoming with volcanic ash and set off all kinds of seismic reactions beneath our feet. So yeah, earthquake action all over the state. Scary, right?”

“Yeah.” What else could Martin say. He loved a good disaster movie but hadn’t caught one about a super volcano.

“Sorry, I’m getting off topic.” Tyler took a breath. “Actually, some earthquakes here are so large they can cause extensive damage, and they’re happening all the time.” He placed his hands next to each other. “An earthquake happens when rock underground abruptly breaks along a fault. When two blocks of rock are rubbing against each other, they stick,” He moved his hands quickly and then stopped them at an angle to each other, probably to indicate the movement of the rocks he was describing. It didn’t matter what he did with his hands, because Martin was fixated by the passion in his expression and wanted to focus on his face. “When the rocks break, that is when an earthquake happens. So all this sudden release of energy causes seismic waves. I mean, that is what makes the ground shake.”

It sounded to Martin as if Tyler was using words with limited syllables, probably imagining that Martin wouldn’t understand anything too technical. There was no way he was going to disabuse that notion, because then he’d have to explain how he’d gotten his degree in math, and elaborate on how his freaky brain worked.

“Okay,” Martin offered when he realized Tyler was waiting for some kind of acknowledgment of what he’d said so far. “Two rocks, rub, catch, break, earthquake.”

Tyler beamed at him, and a warmth sparked inside Martin’s chest. Stupid how he so desperately needed approval from this man.

Tyler spoke with authority and great enthusiasm. “Some of the faults are actually visible, like the San Andreas Fault, which is a continental transform fault—it forms the tectonic boundary between plates.” He did the movement thing with his hand again and finished it off with opening and closing his hands as if he was miming explosions. “But other earthquakes occur along faults that don’t reach the Earth's surface. We haven’t mapped them, and they’re an unknown to us. We call them blind faults.”

“And the equipment we’re installing will check for movements in these blind faults?”

Tyler nodded furiously, his glasses slipping down his nose. He pushed them back, and that damn smile was back again. “That’s it in a nutshell. We can’t track the faults through traditional geologic studies. We need data from a permanent network of seismograph stations, and this installation will become the latest addition to the Montana Regional Seismic Network, which collates everything to become what is, in effect, an early warning system.”

He sat back in his chair, his explanation complete, and Martin considered what he’d read in the essay he’d downloaded to his Kindle to bring with him. He should keep his mouth shut—people like Tyler wouldn’t understand how his head worked—but he wasn’t an idiot. He was able to understand way more than people gave him credit for. He hadn’t received much of a formal education, but he’d worked damn hard to get a degree because he loved math, and his brain retained all kinds of information in a near perfect photographic way. He wanted Tyler to explain things to him using words of more than one syllable and maybe not with the hand gestures to demonstrate the theory. On the one hand, he could say nothing and have Tyler spend the entire week assuming Martin wasn’t able to understand. On the other, he could just come out with it. After all, what did it matter? After this week, they would be done, and he’d leave Crooked Tree and head south. What did it hurt to have one person see evidence of his thought process?

He cleared his throat and dipped his gaze, unable to look Tyler in the face as he spoke.

“I read this thing last night that the network monitors seismicity along the northern Intermountain Seismic Belt in the Northern Rocky Mountains and into surrounding regions, producing records of ground movement at all the seismograph stations in the Montana Seismograph. That’s right, isn’t it?”

Tyler mouth fell open, and he shut it again. “You know that?”

“It was in an essay about interpreting waveforms.” Martin shrugged as if it was nothing, but it was everything to give Tyler even the remotest idea he had an actual brain. Not only that, but that he was smart in his own way.

“You read an essay on interpreting waveforms?” Tyler blinked at him. “Waveforms.” It appeared that was the important keyword here, but to Martin, at the end of the day, it was just math.

“I have the article on my Kindle. It didn’t all make sense, not the technical definitions, but I think I got a feel for what we’re doing here.”

“Did you understand the waveforms?” Tyler pressed and sat forward in his chair, his eyes gleaming with unrestrained enthusiasm.

Of course he understood them. The crude rudimentary screen captures were a small part of what he imagined was unaccountable amounts of data. So much data it would take a lifetime to work through.

“The diagrams they used were easy enough to understand, but I know it’s only part of the data.”

“But it’s a start, right? I have so much I can tell you about that.”

Martin imagined him rubbing his hands in glee at the thought he could talk crazy earth science with the guy who’d said he wasn’t a cowboy and just moved things.

“I need to be honest with you, though.” Martin hesitated a moment. “I tend to recall things I’ve read, and a lot of it can go over my head, apart from math. I have a skill with math. I have an eidetic memory. At least that is what I think it is.”

“Eidetic? So you read something and then remember the words?” Tyler sounded almost disappointed, which was a different reaction to the few others he’d told. They’d all wanted to put him on quiz shows or make them money in other ways, but Tyler was different. For a brief moment he’d been visibly dissatisfied at Martin’s admission he was repeating information he’d read. Then he brightened. “That is so cool.”

When they headed back up to the work area, Tyler chatted on about memory and knowledge, and not for one moment did he say he thought Martin’s head was fucked up.

That was a first.

They began to dig, and it was backbreaking work, but it wasn’t just Martin who dug. Tyler was happy to get down and dirty, and the two of them managed to move the earth by the end of day one. What was left was a large hole, four foot by six, and down five. Of course it would have been easier with some kind of excavator, but that hadn’t been in the budget, or so Tyler explained. It was backbreaking but honest work. They left a box in the bottom of the hole, enough to step onto, so they could scramble out when they needed, but with legs and arms like jelly now, it was more of a drag and flop to the ground. They’d long since discarded their coats. Even though the air was cold, the sun had shone its best, and they were both hot from work.

They got into each other’s spaces a lot, sharing water, accidentally bumping one another, and as the day went on, the awareness of Tyler being super close to him was a hell of a big thing. Martin didn’t do enforced proximity; the thought of being stuck in this small space without a view of the sky and with another person next to him was enough for his throat to close up on a couple of occasions. He breathed through the panic attacks or excused himself for a break, and they’d actually made it through nearly the entire day, but by the time they were done, he was vibrating with feelings, the strongest of which was lust. Because as Tyler stripped off each layer as they grew hotter, more of him was exposed, and Martin couldn’t fight the attraction.

Been too long since I’ve felt anything. Way too long.

All he could think was that this was dangerous, and he needed to fight the lust with every fiber of him.

Martin scraped the last of the mud onto his shovel and tipped it up and over the top of the hole and then patted the level so it was smooth.

“Tomorrow we need to place two vaults inside the space: one for the seismometer and one for the digitizer and battery. I was going to suggest today, but it’s delicate work, and my limbs are like noodles. You ready to go?”

Martin nodded, sweat trickling down his face. He pulled up his shirt and wiped at his face, then tilted his head to the sky. The blue, cloudless, endless view was enough to make him catch his breath. When he glanced back, Tyler was staring at his belly, and he followed the gaze to where his shirt had caught on the undershirt and displayed a strip of flesh that really shouldn’t have been causing Tyler to seem so dazed. He probably had something else on his mind and wasn’t actually staring at Martin’s body as if it were a puzzle to be solved.

“Sorry,” Tyler apologized and checked out in a very deliberate way anything that wasn’t Martin. The sky, rocks, even the clumps of mud that had rolled away from the site.

“What for?” Martin asked, confused about what it was that Tyler was apologizing for. The chance of the lust in Martin burning inside Tyler as well was unlikely, so it couldn’t have been that. Only Tyler’s tongue poked out and wet his lips, and he forced his hands into his jeans pockets.

“I’m going to be honest here,” Tyler began. “You stretched, and then you looked up, and when you pulled your shirt, you looked… I need to stop talking.”

Martin felt hot not just from the work but from the insidious creep of vulnerability mixed with that lust. He’d had enough of people saying shit to him to throw him off-balance, and he didn’t want Tyler to be like them.

“Would it help if I said banana?” Martin murmured, and Tyler shook his head.

“I’m a grown man. I can…”

Martin moved around him to pick up the shovels, and Tyler made a noise that could only be identified as a groan. It sounded as if he was hurt, and Martin turned to face him, concerned, wanting to check him out. Only this put them very close, face-to-face, Tyler pressed against the wall of soil and Martin so near that if they leaned in a little more, they could kiss.

“Martin, would it be…?” He took his hands from his pockets and used his index finger to push an errant curl from Martin’s face. Then he moved slowly, so slowly that Martin had every chance to step away, but he didn’t. He was frozen in place, and the kiss when it came was so gentle, so damn soft, that Martin could have cried. The lust was gone, replaced by a need for someone to care about him, and that was dangerous. He pulled back, confused by how he felt, and Tyler smiled.

“I’ve wanted to do that all day; do I need to apologize?” he asked. “I mean, I don’t technically employ you. You’re just getting expenses, and you’re here on?—”

Martin pressed an answering kiss to Tyler’s lips, mostly to stop him from talking, but also because he wanted one small taste before he put an end to this.

“That makes us even,” he said. “Now, let’s get out of here.”

Martin didn’t have to imagine the relief that passed over Tyler’s face.

Tyler stood on the box, and it wobbled, but he managed to scramble out when Martin gave him a helping hand on his ass. An ass, which was hard and muscled, and he was so not thinking about that right now. He passed up the tools, and then it was his turn to climb out. He used the box himself, but it wasn’t stable and would need to be wedged in place for the next day. Still, he managed to get halfway up before it slid away, and Tyler was there with his hand extended to help Martin out. He used his body weight to support the simple climb and toppled onto his back, Martin sprawling over him. For a second they lay there, belly to groin, so close that Martin could see the green flecks in Tyler’s hazel eyes. Tyler gripped his arms, but whether it was to push Martin away or pull him closer, Martin couldn’t tell.

The thought of kissing, of touching, spooked Martin, and he heaved himself up and ended on his back next to Tyler. That had been a weird moment, but Martin wasn’t stupid. He’d seen interest in Tyler’s expression, and coupled with the kiss was more proof that something was going on in Tyler’s head.

I kissed him back.

I liked it.

I want more, even if I can’t have it.

“We won’t be able to move tomorrow,” Tyler said with a groan, rolling onto his knees and standing. Martin followed suit. Then with tarpaulins pulled over everything, they headed downhill. Neither mentioned the couple of awkward moments, and between them, they organized heating the contents of a vacuum-packed stew and used the small stove to boil potatoes. Right now, the potatoes were fresh. It would be a few days before they moved on to canned food, and that was only if they needed to stay for calibration of the instruments if anything went wrong.

“If you need to charge your Kindle, I have a solar charger,” Tyler announced just as Martin had taken a mouthful of beef. He chewed and swallowed; his Kindle was his escape, and he’d brought chargers and hoped to have used the small generator, but of course the power of the sun didn’t cost them valuable fuel.

“Thank you.”

Tyler poked at the fire with a stick, and Martin knew there were going to be more questions. “So you read a lot, then?”

“All the time.”

“And you recall all of it.”

“Mostly.”

“Your head…” Tyler tapped his temple. “It must be so full of all the good things and the bad.”

Too full. Of useless information, of things that he wanted to keep forever, and others that he’d never wanted to think about again. The fact that Tyler understood that made him edgy. He didn’t like the direction of this conversation, and avoidance was called for.

“Why now for the monitoring station out here on Crooked Tree? The rest of the units in the network have been installed a lot longer.” He was changing the subject and he knew it.

Tyler took the bait and rambled on for a long time about budgets and proposals. Not once did Martin think to say banana because listening to Tyler talk and laugh was his new drug, and he was slowly becoming addicted.

They didn’t mention the kisses. They didn’t act on anything that had passed between them, and that was fine by Martin. The last thing he needed in his life right now was pity sex with a desperate man who was in the middle of nowhere and who had an itch to scratch.

The nightmares visited that night.

Martin knew they would.

Inevitably they ended in fire and tasted of pain and regret, and when he woke, he was exhausted, edgy, and filled with a familiar self-hatred.

So much for peace and calm with a man who actually seemed to want to know him.

For the longest time he sat on his cot, head bowed, following all the advice he’d been given in order to be able to center himself. He was on a hair-trigger, and it would take every single ounce of self-control for him to interact with the world today. These days happened, but back in Vermont, he would open the coffee shop, stay behind the counter, do his work, then quietly shut the place before hiding on the roof. It didn’t matter if it was raining or freezing or the sun baked him, he’d lay flat on his back and stare.

Today they were working on the installation satellite dish and GPS array.

All he had to do was focus. Get through the day. Not lose his shit.

Easy.