by Tanya Chris
“So what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to tell them what happened. The truth.”
Joe cocked his eyebrow.
“I’ll maybe leave out the sex bits,” Pyotr said with a wink, “but the truth is that Tanner changed his mind about selling those plans. He didn’t do it. And he was only thinking about doing it because he was in a bad way—trapped between an addiction and a drug dealer.”
“What, so you think if you tell them that they’ll just let him walk away?”
“No.” Pyotr slid his coffee cup across the table. “Get me another cup, would you? And maybe add a few drops of Kahlua. I got pretty cold out there.” He smiled, cool and composed.
Joe picked up the cup and stomped back into the kitchen and put on water to boil. Pyotr might be Secret Agent Man, used to wheeling and dealing, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t say he lived at Longline to get away from this shit, because he’d never imagined being involved in anything like what was going on, but he lived at Longline to stay away from all shit, from anything that got his heart beating too fast or his brain going around in circles—anything that made him want that sweet soothing high that settled his pulse and quieted his brain and made everything just all right again.
Tanner had handed him his kit that morning—dropped it in his hands like it wasn’t a time bomb. Why hadn’t Tanner given it to Pyotr? Why hadn’t he given it to Pyotr? Why hadn’t he done immediately what he should go do now?
But he hadn’t, and now, as he added a dollop of Kahlua into Pyotr’s coffee cup, he poured a glass of whiskey for himself too. There weren’t any ice cubes, and the fact that he could still see the sun through the kitchen window told him it wasn’t noon yet, but he needed something to still his anxiety and take his mind off what he had stashed in his room.
“All right,” he said as he put the cup down in front of Pyotr and took a seat across from him again. “What’s your plan?”
Somewhere between the kitchen and the table, or maybe it was that first nip of whiskey that had done it, he’d accepted that Pyotr did have a plan, that he wasn’t throwing Tanner under the bus.
“Pretty sure I can keep him out of jail and out of the news. He’ll go to a rehab, probably be permanently black-balled from ever holding a security clearance again, but he’ll come out of it OK.”
“What about those dealers he owes big bucks to? They don’t tend to be forgiving.”
“They’re especially not going to be forgiving after he fingers them, but they’ll hopefully be too busy being in jail to do anything about Tanner.”
“Nuh uh.” Tanner’s voice was almost too low to hear, but it conveyed enough pain that it broke into Joe’s consciousness.
“You OK?” He went over and put a hand on Tanner’s forehead. He’d been giving Tanner ibuprofen, not that it really touched the pain, but it seemed to keep the sweats down. Tanner was sticky and damp again and he uncapped the bottle he’d left nearby and rattled out two tablets.
“I can’t,” Tanner said.
“Sure you can. Have a sip of water with them.”
“Not that,” Tanner said, pushing his hand away. “I can’t rat out those dealers. You know I can’t.”
“Mm,” he said, neither agreeing or disagreeing. He poured the tablets into Tanner’s hand and held the glass up to his lips. “Tanner’s right to be worried,” he told Pyotr. “Snitching on a dealer is a dangerous thing to do.”
“We’ll keep him covered. He’s going to have the CIA protecting him. You think a drug dealer can get past that?”
Tanner choked on the water he’d just swallowed and Joe reached for the basin he’d stashed by the head of his bed in case the pills came back up, but Tanner wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“You don’t get it,” Tanner told Pyotr with a glare. “He gets it.” He gestured at Joe, then slumped all the way back down onto the mattress with his eyes closed and a scowl on his face that actually looked like he might be feeling better. It took energy to scowl that hard.
“OK, Joe,” Pyotr said. He got up from the table and came to stand over the two of them. “Tell me what you get. Or better yet, tell me why you have so much knowledge in this arena. Addiction, withdrawal, drug dealers. This all seems to be right up your alley. Why is that?”
“Because I’m a heroin addict too,” he admitted.
Tanner didn’t react to his confession. Though the words hadn’t been said between them, somewhere along the line they’d recognized each other, but Pyotr’s face fell. He stepped back a couple of feet and sat down hard in one of the chairs by the stove.
“Great,” he said. “I’m in— here with a couple of heroin addicts.”
“I’m not an addict anymore,” he said, softening the message. “Or I’m not an active addict, I should say. You can’t really use the past tense when it comes to addiction.”
“How long have you been clean?” Tanner asked.
“Six years now.” He smiled down at Tanner’s sweaty face. “You won’t always feel this way.”
“So they tell me.”
“Yeah, hard to believe, I know. Hey, you up for a shower?”
“A shower?” Tanner’s face beamed.
He remembered how his skin had felt when he’d been detoxing, like it was crawling with critters. Creepy and dirty and hot and painful. Showers had been the most beautiful thing.
“I’d like a shower almost as much as I’d like a hit.”
“Well, one of those things I can give you. I hung a bag of water outside this morning and it should be the perfect temperature by now. Pyotr can help you get undressed while I go rig it up.”
He knew Tanner would appreciate the shower, but it was an excuse to escape from the room too. He couldn’t stand the way Pyotr had been looking at him, that expression of disgust and pity and just … disappointment. It reminded him too much of how his parents had looked at him, his old friends who’d taken a straighter path, even the nurses in the detox—the nice ones at least. Some of them looked at him like he was a cockroach, but even the sympathetic ones had had an expression like he’d let them down.
He hardly knew Pyotr better than he’d known those nurses, but seeing that expression on his face hurt twice as bad as seeing it anywhere else, even on his own parents.
He went out back and grabbed the five-gallon bag of water he’d hung where it could catch the morning sun and carried it around to the porch. He was rigging it into the rafters so Tanner could stand right there on the decking and get a good rinse when Pyotr came out.
It was a pleasant day, all signs of the storm gone except for the blinding white of the snow that surrounded them. Joe hadn’t put on a coat to come outside and Pyotr walked out onto the porch in his long johns and those slippers.
“We going to talk about that?” Pyotr asked.
“What’s to say? It’s over, in the past.”
“How long were you using?”
“Long enough.”
How to quantify it? Those years had been endless, his entire life, with a before so far off as to belong to someone else and no conceivable after, but they’d also been a blip, a dream, a time so formless, smoothed soft by the drug, that it might only have been a day, a night—one dream that stretched out across forever.
“About three years as an IV user,” he answered, giving Pyotr what he wanted—the non-junkie accounting in terms of measurable elapsed time. “A lot of trouble leading up to that. I started using drugs when I was sixteen, finally got clean for real at twenty-two.”
“I don’t get how you do that to yourself. Either of you.”
“I’m not going to be able to explain it to you, Pyotr. It’s not like there was a spreadsheet or a flowchart. I didn’t make a conscious decision at sixteen to be a homeless addict selling his body for the next high.”
“Jesus.” Like he had inside earlier, Pyotr seemed to stagger backwards under the weight of his confession. “Prostitution, Joe? Really?”
“You think there’s a bette
r way to get the kind of money you need to feed a daily habit? Tanner’s selling state secrets. I sold my body. One way or another, your integrity has to go.”
“Wasn’t there anyone to help you?”
“I had family, but by the time I was reduced to giving blowjobs in alleys, they were done with me. Tough love, you know. Don’t enable.” He shrugged. It was true enough. There was no help they could’ve given him back then that he wouldn’t have found a way to turn into drug money. “I didn’t get lucky enough to be rescued by a spy with a heart of gold when I was ready to get clean. I did it in an inner city detox unit. Twice,” he added, because he was being honest.
“Nearly died in between those two detoxes and the second one sucked worse than the first, so don’t think because he turned over his stash to us this morning that it’s all going to be straight and narrow for him. You can arrest his dealer, but he’ll find another one if he wants one, and if word gets out he snitched on his last one, it won’t be pretty. No addict is so sure he’s getting clean that he wants to piss off every dealer in a hundred mile radius, believe me.”
“I was going to relocate him.”
“Huh?”
“I live in DC. I mean, I’m not there much, but I have an apartment in DC.” Pyotr shrugged, looking a little embarrassed. “He’s going to lose his job, and I just figured … he’ll need help, right? Things are going to be rocky for him for a while.”
“So you’re going to move him in with you? A heroin addict you just met? You got some kind of subconscious wish to have your apartment cleaned out?”
“Maybe. I know it’s stupid. I just … like him.”
“Yeah, I like him too, but I’m not taking him on. There’s a long, ugly road ahead of him and I’ve already been down it once.”
Pyotr came over and untangled his hands from the tubing he’d been furiously trying to get threaded properly. “Joe, stop. Why are you so angry?”
“Because you’re judging me.” He released the valve on his feelings as he slumped into Pyotr’s embrace.
“I’m sorry. I’m not judging. You just, you scared me. I like you as much as I like Tanner. I want you to be OK. Both of you.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t make that happen, not when it comes to heroin. Concentrate on Green Tea.”
“And this,” Pyotr said. He took Joe’s face between his hands and held him still for his mouth. Joe felt himself soften further.
He knew Pyotr couldn’t fix anyone—not Tanner and not him—but it felt so good to let him try. The kiss only lasted for a minute and stayed soft without becoming passionate, which was weird. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d kissed without it heading somewhere. Maybe never.
Even after Pyotr let his lips go, he didn’t let his hips go, keeping them tight to each other in what became a hug, a mutual leaning. Finally, when he felt tears pricking at the backs of his eyes over how good it felt to lean on someone, he drew back.
“You don’t have to be involved in Tanner’s rehabilitation if you don’t want,” Pyotr said, “but I need you to take him down to the valley tomorrow.”
“Can’t. I work here.”
“And I’m sure you’ve got a way to handle coverage when you’re sick or otherwise indisposed. Activate it.”
Yes, he could call down to Ganymede and they’d send a temporary caretaker up, one of the revolving cast of employees they had at the better-staffed hut who covered for him during his bi-monthly week off, but he’d never missed a day of work before. Even when he came down with something, which didn’t happen often now that he was a healthy weight and not destroying his immune system by injecting poison into his veins, he just slogged through it.
“You know it makes sense,” Pyotr said when he didn’t answer. “I need to be here in case Green Tea shows up and you’ve got the skills to get a sick person down safely. Me and him together would be a recipe for disaster. I don’t know who would end up killing who. And you know he can’t go down alone.”
“No, he’s not going down alone. But why can’t we keep him in my room for another day or two? The other patrons won’t bother him there.”
“Because one of those other patrons might be Green Tea. I don’t want Tanner anywhere near him. Get him down to the valley floor, turn him over to my people.”
“Who’ll throw him in a jail cell.”
“I’ll give you a letter. They’ll put him in a rehab and put a guard on him. This is the CIA, Joe. They’re not animals.”
His opinion of the CIA wasn’t as high as Pyotr’s, but he supposed Tanner would be safer in a rehab than most places. When he’d been in rehab, his own parents hadn’t even been able to get in to see him except on visitor days after his counselor had signed her approval.
“Yeah, all right.” It would take him a day to get down, a day to get back. Susan could find someone to cover the hut for two days and he and Pyotr would both feel better knowing Tanner wasn’t in harm’s way anymore.
“Thanks.” Pyotr slapped his ass, making him jump. That hadn’t just been a friendly tap. “Later,” Pyotr promised. “Now, you ready for Tanner?”
Chapter 12
Tanner
The water sluicing down over his shoulders wasn’t shower-hot, but it was warmer than he’d expected when he’d been carried naked out onto the porch and stood up under a plastic bag. It felt fantastic, like salvation raining over him. Joe rubbed him down with a soapy washcloth, leaving behind clean skin that didn’t ooze sick sweat or feel like the sticky side of Scotch tape.
He tilted his face up so the water ran over his forehead and down his scalp, washing the last suds of shampoo from his squeaky-clean tangles. He lowered his chin and opened his eyes. Pyotr sat at on top of the picnic table with his eyes on him. He winked when he saw Tanner had caught him ogling and reached a lazy hand down to adjust himself.
Tanner flushed. How could Pyotr be thinking sexy thoughts about him? He felt so awful that he could only assume he looked worse, but being under the water, clean for the first time in days, with Pyotr’s hot eyes on him, he started to regain some confidence. His naked body stretched surprisingly straight down to the ground. In his mind, he saw himself as twisted and bent, but his eyes showed him what Pyotr saw.
His skin was pale, despite it being the end of summer. Until this bizarre trip up a mountain to meet a Russian spy, he hadn’t stepped foot outdoors except from car to work to street corner to home—quick, hurried rounds of survival—for years. But he wasn’t marked by his addiction other than the row of small, white scars running down his left arm and those two gouges he’d had to give himself to get the needle in yesterday.
His body wasn’t as bulky as it used to be, but it still retained some of the muscle he’d had back when he’d played baseball, before everything had gone to shit. He’d been a pitcher—tall, lanky, graceful—and his athleticism still showed in the long lines of his limbs, but his right arm wasn’t good for much these days except working a needle into his left arm.
Still, he could see what Pyotr found to appreciate about his naked body. The thought made his own dick plump up a little—that and the fact that Joe was dabbing around in that area with the washcloth. Then Joe moved the washcloth farther back and he yelped.
“What?” Joe asked. “Figured I’d clean out any lube left over from the other day.”
“You could warn a guy first,” he said, but he spread his legs so Joe could work between his cheeks.
“You let Joe fuck you?” Pyotr’s voice was curious, not angry, and when he looked over, Pyotr spread his own legs wider and cupped his hand around his package.
“He liked getting fucked,” Joe said. “He’s going to like it even more in a day or two.”
“I can’t wait,” Pyotr said, still gently massaging himself. “When you feel better, Tasha.”
Pyotr definitely made it sound like something to look forward to, and Tanner’s dick firmed up a little more. He felt pretty good at the moment—admired and cared for and clean. He didn’t feel up
to sex, but he almost felt like he could eat something.
“I’m hungry,” he announced, trying it out.
“Yeah?” Joe extended the tubing that came out of the plastic bag of water and used it to give him a last rinse all over.
Tanner couldn’t help evaluating the setup with an eye towards making it more efficient. They could have hot showers every day with a little basic engineering.
“Let’s get you dried off and I’ll see what I can rustle up to eat.”
He let himself be patted down with a small, scratchy towel. Then Pyotr picked him back up—this was his life now, apparently; he didn’t walk anywhere—and carried him inside and put him down, still naked except for an insufficient towel, in front of the stove.
Despite having said he was hungry, he found himself drowsy again. Joe was in the kitchen and Pyotr had gone outside to use the last of the water for himself. He let his eyes close and his head sink back and his body go lax. There was still a deep ache in every bone and muscle of his body, but he’d felt worse.
The sun was setting out of the window that faced the front of the hut. He’d dozed most of the day away and now the rays coming through the window to warm the backs of his eyelids were the only thing keeping him from falling asleep. He should probably appreciate the sunset, but it just hurt.
Pyotr scurried in the door, naked and dripping water everywhere. “You have any more towels?” he asked Joe, who was coming back into the great room with a bowl in one hand and a plate in another.
“I don’t suppose either of you brought one. This isn’t a hotel.”
“I’ll just drip dry then.” Pyotr turned his naked ass to the stove, which meant Tanner was looking at his front—the chiseled muscles and the gorgeous thick dick, still a little plump.
Joe set the dishes down on the table and disappeared into his room. Pyotr grinned at Tanner and sure enough a moment later Joe returned with a towel, which he threw at Pyotr.
