High Lonesome

by Tanya Chris

  But how could anyone ever be sure? That was the conclusion he’d come to. There was a lot he didn’t know about how things were going to work out—what life would be like as part of a triad, whether he could make it down in the world—but it was time to find out, and time to get honest.

  “Don’t hold my job,” he’d told Susan. He’d shaken her hand and then, because he was trying to learn to be more open, he’d pulled her into a hug.

  “High Lonesome won’t be the same without you,” she’d said when he’d released her.

  “Maybe it won’t be so lonesome,” he’d answered. But Longline would always be lonesome. It was him who was changing, not the mountain.

  It’d been one thing to tell Susan he wasn’t coming back. It was another to tell the men in front of him that he’d go with them. There was still something he needed to confess before he could take that step.

  He tossed his half-finished plate of Kung Pao Chicken into the trash on his way to the spot where their three packs rested next to each other. He’d made the hike up to Ganymede with nothing but a bottle of water and an extra layer for the higher altitudes, trusting that his pack would remain undisturbed in their room. At some point, he’d have to go up and clear his room of four years of accumulated shit, but what he needed right now was stashed in the top zipper pocket of that pack.

  He brought the eyeglass case over to the table and dropped it. Tanner’s eyes went wide in instant recognition, but it took Pyotr a moment longer. He pulled the case towards him and carefully cracked it, like he expected a snake to pop out. He snapped it shut again and pushed it away from him, then, noticing Tanner’s eyes on it, pulled it back into his protective grasp.

  “I thought you got rid of this when Tanner gave it to you.”

  He hadn’t, and he didn’t have a good reason for why he hadn’t. He’d told himself he’d kept it in case Tanner got really bad, but that wasn’t true and Tanner never had asked for it anyway. No, he’d kept it for himself. He’d kept it because throwing it away was too hard.

  “Did you use any?” Pyotr asked.

  He shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “But you brought it down from the mountain?”

  That he had a better answer for. “I didn’t want the CIA to find it.”

  Pyotr nodded in acknowledgement.

  “And I wanted to be honest with you about it. You should know, if you take me on, what you’re getting. I’ve been clean six years and I still couldn’t resist it when I came across it. How am I going to do when I’m back in a place where it’s on every downtown street corner? I just don’t know.”

  “You did resist it though,” Tanner said. He reached forward and pried the case from Pyotr’s reluctant hands. “It’s all still here.”

  “It’s all still there,” he agreed.

  “How?” Tanner asked, wonder coloring his voice, his eyes fixed on the bags of grey dust inside the case until Pyotr snapped it shut again. “I can’t imagine. It’s killing me right now. Even with both of you here, I just want to—” Tanner shook his head. “You think you’re not better? I could never have kept this without using it.”

  Maybe it was true. Maybe he was stronger than he thought. He took the case out of Pyotr’s hands and carried it into the bathroom. One by one, he opened the bags and poured their contents into the toilet, watching the grey dust settle on the surface of the water, then slowly melt into it.

  “Go ahead,” he told Tanner, and Tanner reached over and did the honors. The dirty water swirled away, leaving the three of them standing over a noisily-refilling toilet.

  “I’m afraid,” he admitted.

  “Me too,” Pyotr said. “All these missions I’ve been on, the number of times I’ve had a gun pointed in my direction or been with people I knew were carrying, people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill me if they figured out who I really was, I was never scared before. I guess I didn’t care what happened all that much. But watching you run after Lars, thinking he was Green Tea? Knowing Tanner was with Holly when I realized he wasn’t? I’ve never been so scared.”

  “Didn’t seem it,” Tanner said.

  “But I was then, and I am now. I hate that the two of you have to fight this battle, but I admire you for fighting it. I don’t feel the temptation you do, but I understand that you feel it and I don’t think you’re weak for feeling it. You’re strong for fighting it. And for the record, Joe, though I hesitate to say this because I don’t want you to ever do it again, I respect the way you charged out there to tackle Lars, because I know you were doing it to protect Tanner.”

  He nodded. He’d been so afraid that if the plans disappeared, Tanner would be locked up forever, that they’d never be able to prove Tanner had changed his mind about selling them.

  “I’ll never doubt that you have our backs.” Pyotr linked their hands together. Then Tanner took Joe’s other hand. They were still all three standing in front of a toilet, of all places. Smiling to himself, he used their linked hands to drag them out of the bathroom.

  “I want to go to DC,” he said. “I want to be with you. With both of you.”

  Tanner was in his arms in an instant, spreading kisses over his face and neck. Pyotr was quieter. It wasn’t until he managed to separate himself slightly from Tanner that he saw why. Pyotr’s eyes were wet and his throat worked convulsively.

  “It’s OK,” he told Pyotr. “I’ll try to earn your trust.”

  “Idiot. Tanner and I already trust you. How about you let us show you how much?”

  He cocked his head in question, but when Pyotr pushed him back onto the bed he went willingly. If sex conveyed trust, he was up for it. Pyotr and Tanner covered him with kisses, Tanner on the upper half, Pyotr on the lower, removing his clothes and their own and each other’s in a slow cloth ballet until they were all three naked.

  He squirmed around in their arms, trying to get to one of them, to do his part, but they wouldn’t allow it. Their mouths and hands kept him pinned, kept him wild and hungry as they worked him higher and higher. Tanner slid down to join Pyotr and their mouths worked together over his cock, first one warm mouth, then the other, in a halting rhythm that kept him right on edge.

  Pyotr’s hand fondled his balls with the roughness he expected, while Tanner’s fingers slid slickly behind them to circle his sphincter.

  “Close, close,” he mumbled, grabbing at Tanner’s hair.

  Tanner fought his hand off and Pyotr grabbed it and pinned it to his stomach.

  “Pyotr, don’t.”

  But Pyotr didn’t stop and Tanner didn’t stop and suddenly he understood what they were trying to show him—that they trusted him when he said his viral load was under control, that they trusted him to use appropriate measures to keep them safe.

  “I don’t know if I can,” he said. His balls drew up tight and his dick wanted to let fly, but there was a barricade in his brain he couldn’t move past.

  “Please?” Tanner asked, looking up at him with wet eyes before dive bombing his cock again.

  Please, please, he echoed, begging his body to let go, to give them what they were asking for—this symbol of their commitment to each other in the form of bodily fluid exchange.

  “Just this though,” he said, his voice not very clear through the desperation with which he was clenching his teeth. “Still condoms until …” Until maybe. Maybe if they were on PrEP. Maybe he could. If they were exclusive and committed and he was getting tested regularly and … and, and, and.

  Or he could stop trying to control and trust.

  Tanner hooked a finger inside him and Pyotr swallowed a little deeper and he released, flooding Pyotr’s mouth with an agonized moan. He’d held back so long that his orgasm tore through him, long and intense, twisting up from his balls and wracking his body in shudders.

  He lifted his head so he could watch his two men share a kiss, share his fluids, then let it thump heavily back onto the bed, too drained to even consider how he could reciprocate. But Pyotr and Tanner didn’t
wait for him to recover.

  The kiss they’d swapped across his thighs turned into a full-on make out session. They squirmed over him, pressing him down into the mattress and then Tanner flipped around and they were sixty-nining each other, half on top of him.

  He laughed happily and found the energy to use his hands to grab at whatever he could get—Tanner’s ass, Pyotr’s nipples, a little dick here and a pair of juicy balls there, until they’d both come—Tanner first because he was young like that.

  Once they’d gotten Pyotr off too, the old man, they arranged themselves so they were heads up together and Tanner fell quickly asleep.

  “He’ll be OK,” Pyotr said.

  He nodded. He knew Pyotr couldn’t promise that, but he nodded anyway. For today, for now, they were all OK.

  Epilogue Joe

  Joe paused in his steady climb up to Longline to check on Pyotr. Tanner was somewhere up ahead, out of sight behind a pile of boulders. The healthier Tanner got, the more apparent the age gap between him and Pyotr became, at least when it came to climbing mountains.

  “You need to do more cardio,” he called down to Pyotr, appreciating the chance to catch his own breath in the guise of waiting for him.

  “I do leg day.” Pyotr’s breathlessness made it obvious that leg day wasn’t an adequate substitute for cardio, but the workouts did keep his legs sculpted to perfection.

  “You’re decorative,” he teased, “but you’re not functional.”

  “I functioned just fine in your ass last night.”

  He smiled, because it was true. They’d spent last night at the same hotel where the three of them had first made their plans to move forward together, and Pyotr had given it to him good while he’d struggled to focus on giving it to Tanner just as good.

  Thank God that bed was big. The three of them had formed a doggy-style chain of dirty hotness that had covered every inch of it.

  Now they were hiking up to Longline to spend their one year anniversary there, and if Pyotr’s legs were a little fatigued from last night’s shenanigans, well, it’d been worth it.

  “Come on,” Tanner called. He’d climbed on top of the boulders that had hidden him from view so he could peer down at the two of them. “You’re both slow if you ask me.”

  “Little fucker,” Pyotr mumbled, and Joe had to agree.

  He and Tanner hiked the trails around their new home in Colorado most weekends. Despite his own vastly superior outdoors experience, Tanner had the energy of a chihuahua these days, so Joe appreciated having someone slower tagging along today.

  “Let’s go, Petya.” He reached down and gave Pyotr a tug, towing him along until they caught up with Tanner. They were nearly at the top and he was excited to get up to Longline after a year away. Tomorrow morning he’d watch the sun rise over the rock band, see that first spill of pink and peach cresting the top and tumbling down the face.

  There wouldn’t be any good opportunities for screwing around while they were up there, not in those narrow bunks in that shared dormitory, but the three of them got it on nine days out of ten at home. The thing about having two lovers was that there always seemed to be somebody up for some action, and even if he wasn’t feeling it himself, he could watch and then … well, he didn’t think he’d ever managed to resist joining in.

  So there was no lack of sex in their lives. What he was looking forward to, just for a few days, was the peace of being disconnected that Longline brought him.

  Life down on the ground was challenging. Worth it, but challenging. Tanner would be celebrating eight months clean in a few days and, no, it wasn’t a year. There’d been a relapse not long after he’d gotten out of rehab, and he’d eventually spent another thirty days locked up, but he’d been clean since then.

  Joe sometimes bargained with himself that if Tanner could just make it to a year … but the addict in him knew better. There was no magic number, no day on which Tanner would be permanently safe from the siren call of the drug that had once owned him.

  Turned out that what he’d told Pyotr about needing to step back and let the addict walk his own path to recovery had all flown out the window when the addict in question was someone he loved. That was why he’d decided to go back to school to become a drug and alcohol counselor, so he could help somebody, because all he could do for Tanner was watch and pray.

  But even in the worst of Tanner’s relapse, he and Pyotr had stuck by each other, and they’d made sure Tanner had known he had a place to come back to when he was ready to come back. Pyotr would never understand addiction the way an addict did, but he loved the two of them without judgement. Most days. And Joe had discovered that his own recovery was more solid than he’d realized, that the time up at Longline had given him a serenity he’d been able to carry down the mountain with him.

  Watching Tanner struggle had helped him understand better how his own parents had felt when they’d had to watch him. He’d found himself reaching out to them more often and finally, last month, he’d flown back East to make some long overdue amends.

  His family didn’t exactly understand about Pyotr and Tanner, no more than Pyotr’s did, or Tanner’s, but not many people understood about that, which was why the three of them had moved to Boulder where any kind of alternative lifestyle was OK, even three men living together and loving each other.

  Boulder gave him easy access to the mountains too, and thank God for his job working at a camp for children at risk which kept him outside most days. Pyotr and Tanner didn’t seem to mind spending their days at a desk, though Tanner had only just started working again a few months ago. His new job was much lower key, and definitely unclassified, but he could tell Tanner liked it, that Tanner had gotten his degree in the right field, even if he had gotten sidetracked along the way.

  Pyotr’s innate need to control made him a good administrator for a regional branch of the CIA. He was in toppy heaven issuing orders all day and still somehow found the energy to come home and push Joe around in bed at night, though the way he was with Tanner never failed to ignite something deep and tender in Joe’s heart. He might not know how to accept that kind of love himself, but he could take it in through Tanner.

  Somehow they’d both gotten ahead of him this time. They were too far away for him to make out their conversation, but he could hear Tanner’s lilting voice, so joyful these days, as he chattered without any sign of breathlessness to a silent Pyotr, and he could see Pyotr’s shoulders, not bowed beneath his fatigue—wide and straight and strong. Perfectly rigid, ready to bear anything.

  “Yosya,” Tanner called down, using the Russian nickname for Joseph.

  “Who’s the old man now?” Pyotr joked.

  “You wanna race?”

  “Nah. I wanna take my time.” Pyotr pulled Tanner into a kiss and Joe stopped walking so he could watch. They were so beautiful together. Then Pyotr let go of Tanner’s ass with one hand and reached it back toward him and he scrambled up to take it.

  The three of them. The three of them were beautiful together.

  Thank You!

  Thank you for reading my book! I’d love to hear your feedback. Please consider leaving a review. You can also contact me via my website www.tanyachris.com or follow me on Twitter @tanyachrs

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