Chapter 7: The Taste of Ash
Hugo pulled back slow, letting the head drag along my bottom lip before it slipped free. I sucked in air like a man coming up off the bottom of a lake. My jaw ached. My throat felt scraped raw, and I could still taste him, salt and something bitter and alive, coating my tongue.
I stayed there on my side on his cot, one hand braced on his thigh, head hanging. Hugo's hand was still in my hair, heavy and warm, fingers knotted loose against my scalp. He wasn't pulling. He wasn't letting go either. The weight of it kept me pinned to the moment, kept me from sliding off into wherever my head wanted to run.
John's fingers caught me under the chin and turned my face.
He turned me around, sat me up on the edge of the bed. He didn't say anything. He just looked at me for a second, kneeling in front of me. Looked at my wet mouth, at the tears I hadn't noticed were cutting tracks down from my eyes. Then he leaned in and kissed me.
His tongue slid against mine and I felt him taste it, taste Hugo in my mouth, and something in him went hard and hungry. He made a low sound against my lips and bit down on my bottom one.
"You taste like him," John said, breathing into my mouth. "That's a good."
I couldn't answer. My voice had gone.
John's hand moved to the back of my skull and pushed, gentle, insistent, guiding me down.
"Come on, warden. You said both."
I looked down at him. His cock stood up off the hair on his belly, the shaft thick, the head a dark flushed red, a string of clear fluid hanging from the tip. His was shorter than Hugo's and a little thinner, but the angle of it, the way it curved toward him, made it look meatier. My stomach did something I can't describe and I wanted him. Wanted his, too.
I asked for this. I had begged for it with a man's cock still wet on my chin.
Hugo shifted on the cot behind me. His big hand slid from my hair down the back of my neck and settled there, palm flat, thumb pushing into the dip at the base of my skull. Not moving. Just holding me where I was.
"Go on," he said.
I lowered my head. John's hand stayed in my hair, guiding, and I opened my mouth and took him in.
The taste hit different. Less salt, more skin, a faint soap-and-sweat thing under it that I'd never have thought I'd want. He was warm as a coal. I got maybe half of him and my throat closed, and I pulled off, coughing, spit strung between my lip and the head of his cock.
John laughed, soft, not unkind.
"Easy. Don't fight it. Breathe through your nose."
I tried again. Took him shallow, worked the first couple of inches with my tongue like Hugo had taught me without ever saying the words. Lapped at the underside where the vein ran. John's hips twitched and his grip in my hair tightened, and I felt a kind of joy break loose in my chest. I was doing it. I was making him feel it.
"That's it," John said, thick. "Knew you'd be a fast study."
Behind me Hugo's thumb dug slow circles into the base of my skull, and the fire popped. A knot of pitch cracked somewhere in the stove and spat, and the sound went through me like a promise. The morning light was coming in gray over the window, thin and cold, and it didn't matter. Nothing outside the three of us mattered.
I worked him deeper. Coughed once. Pushed past it. My spit ran down over my chin and dripped onto the cot, and my own cock hung hard and forgotten between my legs, leaking into the blanket. Every time Hugo's hand moved on my neck a shiver walked down my spine and dropped into my balls.
"How's he taste?" Hugo asked from behind me. His voice was a low gravel roll.
John answered for me. "Like he already knows what he's doing."
"No," Hugo said. "Let the man talk."
I pulled off, gasping. My lips were slick, my chin a mess, and I was so hard it hurt.
"Good," I said. My voice came out wrecked. "He tastes good. I want..."
I didn't finish. I didn't have to. John took my head in both hands and pushed me back down and this time he didn't let up, rocking into my mouth in slow even strokes, and I took it, gagging on every third one, my eyes streaming, my hands fisted in the blanket on either side of his hips.
Hugo's hand never left my neck. Heavy. Settled. It held me down when I would have panicked and come up for air.
"You're alright," he said. "Stay with it."
I stayed with it.
John's breathing changed, going short and rough, and his strokes lost their even measure. He fucked into my mouth faster, shallow and hard, and I heard him mutter something in Spanish under his breath, low and quick, and then his hands clamped on my head and he pulled me all the way down.
He came in long pulses. Hot and thick down the back of my throat, more than I could hold, and I swallowed and swallowed and still some of it slid out past my lip. I stayed there until he was done, until his cock started to soften and twitch, and then he let me go.
I came off him with a wet gasp and folded forward onto my elbows, chest heaving, forehead pressed against the blanket between his knees.
For a while there was just the fire and my breathing and the two of them above me.
Hugo's hand slid off my neck and came to rest low on my back, between my shoulder blades, warm and broad. John was stroking my hair, sort of absently, like you'd pet a dog that had done well. Neither of them said anything. I couldn't have stood it if they had, that softness, that patience, directed at me, at whatever was left of me down here on this cot in a cabin in the woods at the ass end of the county.
The mess I'd made earlier was cold and dry on my belly. My jaw throbbed. There was spit all over my face and I didn't care. I'd never been this quiet inside my own head in my whole life.
I felt Hugo shift behind me. He lay down on the cot and rolled onto his side, close up against my back, his chest to my shoulder blades, one arm going over my ribs. Not holding me. Just there. The hair of his chest scratched my spine. His breath moved slow against the back of my neck.
John lay down on my other side, facing me, on his elbow, and looked at me for a long time without saying a word.
Then he reached over and wiped my chin with the heel of his hand, like a man wiping blood off a knife.
I felt John's hand rest on the back of my head, warm, staying there. And that was what broke me. Not the cocks, not the swallowing, not the two men pressed against me front and back. That hand, resting, like I was worth resting on.
My elbows gave.
I slid down sideways between them, face first into the blanket, and I heard myself make a sound I'd never made before, some low animal thing that wasn't pain and wasn't crying but was kin to both. The cot was narrow and three men didn't fit on it, and we fit. Hugo's arm tightened over my ribs. John eased back an inch to give me room and ended up with his knee hooked over mine anyway.
"There he is," John said softly. "Down goes the law."
I couldn't laugh. I tried and it came out as a breath. My whole body felt poured out, wrung like a rag, every muscle in my legs and belly shaking in small useless waves. My hip, the one I'd cracked on the ice, throbbed dully under everything else, and even that felt far away. My mouth was wrecked. I ran my tongue over my teeth and tasted both of them at once, layered, and my cock gave one last weak twitch against the blanket and gave up.
"Easy," Hugo said, close against my ear. His beard scratched my jaw. "Breathe slow. You took a lot tonight."
I nodded into the blanket. Words were somewhere down a long road and I wasn't going to go get them.
The stove ticked as the pitch burned down. Gray light was strengthening at the window, cold and clean, and somewhere outside a crow called once and quit. Hugo pulled the corner of a wool blanket off the foot of the bed and dragged it up over my shoulders without asking. It smelled of woodsmoke and him.
John settled onto his back beside me and exhaled long. His hand found mine on the blanket and didn't squeeze, just covered it, palm to knuckles. His ring was cool against my fingers.
"Still with us, warden?" he asked.
I made a sound that might have been a yes. My eyes were already closing. My head had gone quiet in a way I'd only ever gotten near the bottom of a bottle, but this was different. Nothing was waiting for me. No reports, no county, no wide-brimmed hat and no badge, none of the shape I'd worn for three years of watching other men live. Just heat at my back and heat at my front and the slow animal peace of having been used well and having wanted it.
Hugo's thumb moved once along my ribs, a slow idle stroke, like checking stock in a field.
"Sleep if you're sleeping," he said. "Truck's not going anywhere. Neither are we."
I was already mostly gone when John said something quieter, to Hugo, over the top of my head. I caught maybe half of it.
"Think he'll come back?"
Hugo was quiet a moment. His chest rose and fell against my spine.
"His truck'll need a part," he said. "Takes days to get one out here."
John huffed a laugh into the dark. His hand stayed on mine.
I let go then, properly, heavy as a stone dropping into deep water, the three of us breathing slow in the thin morning light while the fire burned itself down to red coals, and the last thing I felt before sleep took me was Hugo's arm settling heavier over my ribs, pulling me in.
I didn't want to be anywhere else in the world.