🔥 Item One 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Two’s Company, Three’s Coming by Jace Wilder

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place the Sunday after the epilogue of Two’s Company, Three’s Coming. It contains major spoilers and very explicit MMM sexual content (18+), and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.

There are three lines on the agenda. Gavin thinks item one is a truck. Explicit content — 18+.

Item One

The agenda had three lines on it.

1. New business (N. Bell). 2. The water heater. 3. Job walk.

It was the Sunday after the anniversary, ten in the morning, in Eli’s kitchen. Same table. Same header, eleven-point, same three copies. There was bacon, because there’s a standing order. I had my feet on the fourth chair and a hangover the size of a bass drum, and I looked at that page and felt nothing but peace.

I figured item one was the truck.

Nate had been talking about a second truck for a month. He’d been quiet all week, too, the kind where he rubs his beard and looks at a thing sideways. That’s how he gets before he spends money. And item two had been coming for a year and a half. Eleven minutes of hot water, three grown men. You do the math. Eli had.

“Is there a quorum?” I said.

“It’s all quorum,” said Eli. He didn’t look up. He was squaring his copy to the edge of the table. He’d already squared it twice.

I should’ve noticed that.

I should’ve noticed that he’d shaved on a Sunday. That he had on the good grey shirt. That when he poured my coffee his hand wasn’t quite steady, and Eli Hart’s hands are steady when he’s defusing a client. I didn’t notice any of it. I’m a drummer. I notice time. I don’t notice shirts.

“Item one,” Eli said. “New business. Nate.”

Nate stood up.

That got my feet off the chair. Nobody stands at a Sunday meeting. It’s bacon and a legal pad. But he pushed his chair back and got up, all six-three of him, and stood there at the end of Eli’s kitchen table like a man about to address a zoning board.

He’d trimmed his beard. He had on the brown sport coat. The one from the hearing, that was cut for a guy with a smaller back.

“Why are you wearing the coat?” I said.

“Seemed like a coat thing.”

“Is it the truck? You don’t need a coat for a truck. Just buy the truck, big man, we voted on the—”

“Gavin,” Eli said. Very quiet. “Let him.”

Nate reached into his shirt pocket.

He put three things down on the table. One at a time, in a row, each one with a little click on the wood. Then he straightened them with one finger, so they sat square.

They were washers.

Stainless. About the size of a nickel, with a hole through the middle. Bright, like he’d polished them. He had. I found that out later. He’d spent a week of nights in the old storeroom with a strip of emery cloth, easing the edges so they wouldn’t cut.

I looked at them. I looked at him.

I didn’t get it. That’s how dumb I am.

“I got married in one of those,” Nate said.

Oh.

Every hair on my body stood up.

“Five-eighths. First year, I could afford one ring, so she got it. I wore a washer eleven months.” He was looking at the table. His ears had gone red, and his voice was dead level, the way it goes when it’s costing him. “She kept it. She told me so last summer. Said it was hers, and it was real, and she wasn’t giving it back. She was right.”

Nobody moved. The bacon was spitting on the stove.

“I thought on it a year. What I’d want on this hand, if I wanted something.” He turned the left one over, palm down. Brown, wrist to nail. Nothing on it. “I could afford better now. I looked at better. I stood in a jewelry store in Dayton for forty minutes, and a kid in a tie showed me platinum.”

“And?” Eli said.

“And it wasn’t true.” Nate picked one of the washers up. It looked like nothing in those fingers. “This is what a promise looks like when I make one. It’s what I had the first time. I just didn’t know then what I was promising, or who to. I know now.”

He looked up. At me. Then at Eli. Brown eyes, steady, scared out of his mind.

“I’m not asking the state of Ohio. Eli looked into it. The state’s not ready.”

“The state,” Eli said, “has no form for it. I telephoned.”

“So I’m asking you two. That’s all. No paper.” He breathed in. “Eli Hart. Gavin Price. I want to wear this. I want you each to wear one. For as long as there’s a building. And after that, wherever we put the next one.”

That was Eli’s line. Eli said that to him, on the third floor, on a sawhorse night, the night we almost lost him. He’d kept it for a year. He’d been saving it to give back.

Eli made a sound like he’d been hit.

And me?

I had nine. I counted them. Nine bits, lined up and ready, the second he said washer. Do they come in a ten-pack. Is there a warranty. I’ve been turned down for less. Fifteen years ago I’d have taken all nine. A year ago I’d have taken one.

I looked for the window, the way I always do.

There wasn’t one. There was just a kitchen, and a man in a bad coat, and three little circles of steel on the table where a stranger once sat turning a beer bottle a quarter turn.

“Say that again,” I said.

It cracked right down the middle.

“Which part?”

“All of it. I want to hear it twice. I made you say it twice the first time, too.”

He nearly smiled. He remembered. A fire escape, forty-four degrees, his beer going warm.

“I want to marry you, Gavin,” he said. “Both of you. I don’t care what anybody calls it.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Jesus Christ. Yes, obviously, yes, I’ve been saying yes to you since I was eighteen years old, you just weren’t—”

I couldn’t finish. I had my hands over my face. I don’t cry pretty. Ask anybody who was on the third floor.

“Eli?” Nate said.

Eli had taken his glasses off.

“I’ve known for eleven days,” he said. “I do the laundry. You left them in a shirt pocket.” His voice was shaking all over the place, and he let it. “I had eleven days to prepare a reply. I drafted four. I attempted a Schedule D.”

“What’s in Schedule D?”

“Nothing. It wouldn’t go in a schedule. I sat here at five this morning with a blank page.” He put the glasses down. He didn’t square them. “Yes. That’s all I’ve got. Yes, Nate. I’d have said it in April of last year, on a roll of grey paper, if you’d had the washers.”

“Didn’t have the washers.”

“No. You hadn’t the first idea, had you? Neither had I.”

“Is that carried?” I said, into my hands. “Somebody say it’s carried.”

“Carried,” said Eli. “Unanimously. I’m not minuting it. I’ll remember.”

Nate came around the table.

He did Eli first. He does that now. He took Eli’s left hand, that neat little photographer’s hand with the scar across one fingertip, and slid the washer onto the third finger. It went on like it was made for it.

“How did you—”

“String,” Nate said. “Around your finger. While you slept. Did you in June. Did him in July. He drums in his sleep, it took four tries.”

Then he came to me.

He went down on one knee. I’m not kidding. On Eli’s kitchen floor, in that coat, and his knee went off like a nail.

“You didn’t kneel for him!”

“He’d have told me I was doing it wrong.”

“I would have,” Eli said, wet-faced. “It’s the left knee, traditionally.”

Nate took my hand. Mine are a mess. Calluses, a split knuckle, a blister I’ve had since I was nineteen. He turned it over like it was something he’d been asked to get right. The washer was cold. It caught on the knuckle, and he worked it over, gentle, a quarter turn, and it sat.

Stainless steel. Five-eighths. A dollar ten at a hardware store across the river.

I’ve never owned anything that cost more.

“Give me the last one,” I said.

He handed it up. I took his left hand in both of mine. I’d looked at that hand across a doorway once, with a towel around my waist and a screw in my fingers. There’d been a white stripe on it then, and I’d put my thumb on the stripe, and he’d looked at my mouth.

I put the washer on him. It went down over the knuckle with the white nick in it and stopped right where the stripe used to be.

“There,” I said. “Now you can’t get out.”

“That’s the whole design,” he said.

Then we were in a pile on the kitchen floor, the three of us, with the bacon burning.

Eli turned the stove off. Of course he did. He got up off the floor with his shirt half out and his face a wreck, and he moved the pan to a cold burner, and he stood there with his back to us and his hands flat on the counter.

“We have to telephone people,” he said. “Dean. Tess. Maddie will want to be first. Carla will want to see what three washers look like.”

“Dean’s going to throw a party,” I said.

“Let him,” said Nate.

I looked at him. “You’ll let him?”

“I’ve got something to throw one for.”

Eli hadn’t turned around.

“E?”

“I’m about to propose an amendment to the agenda,” he said. “I’d like it understood that I’ve thought about it. This isn’t impulse. I’ve been sensible in this kitchen for four years.”

He turned. Grey eyes, no glass in front of them. A steel ring on his hand, catching the light off the window over the sink.

“I should like item two tabled. And I should like to be fucked on this table.”

I made a noise I’ve never made before.

“We eat here,” I said. “That’s your line. You’ve said that to me. I put my feet on it once and you didn’t speak to me till supper.”

“I know what I’ve said.”

“It’ll hold,” Nate said. He was getting up off the floor. He ran his hand along the edge of the table like he was checking a beam. “I rebuilt the stretchers in May.”

“You rebuilt the—did you plan this?”

Neither of them answered.

They looked at each other. Quick. That look, like two guys on a job site who’ve worked together long enough to skip the talking.

I’ve seen that look before. I saw it at this table, a year and a half back, over a color-coded grid with a legend in the corner. The two of them up at six with their coffee, working something out between them while I slept. It nearly broke me, that time. I felt like a thing you sign out.

“What,” I said. “What did you two decide at six in the morning?”

“There’s one more item,” Eli said. “It’s not printed. Nate has it on his pad.”

“Has what?”

“A list.” Nate took off the coat. He hung it on the back of his chair. “Who’s had the middle. Eli had it, third floor, on the drop cloths. I had it, first night in the bed.” He started on his cuffs. “You never have. Not like that. You’ve been at one end or the other every time. You’re always doing something for somebody.”

“We’ve been keeping count,” Eli said. “We’re both rather good at it.”

I opened my mouth.

“No bit,” said Nate.

“I wasn’t—”

“You were. Your mouth does a thing.”

I shut it. My heart was going like a double kick.

They undressed me in the kitchen. Both of them, four hands, in the light from the window. Eli did my shirt. Nate got my belt. I had steel on my skin in two places I wasn’t used to it, cold little circles, one at my hip and one flat on my chest, turning my nipple ring with the edge of a washer. Metal on metal. I felt that in my teeth.

Then Eli took his own clothes off, folded nothing, and bent over his kitchen table.

I want you to picture that. I need somebody else to have it. Eli Hart, who alphabetizes the spices. Naked in the morning light, chest down on the wood, on top of three copies of his own agenda, with his arms stretched out and his hands gripping the far edge. One of those hands had a ring on it.

“There’s a bottle,” he said, “in the drawer with the tea towels.”

“Since when?”

“Since eleven days ago.”

Nate got it. He put it in my hand.

I opened Eli up over that table, slow, with my fingers, while he pushed back and breathed through his teeth and said my name like a man reading a sentence he’d waited a long time to get to. He was hot and tight and ready before I’d half started. He’d been ready since five that morning. I slicked myself, and I lined up, and I slid into him bare, all the way, and he groaned into an agenda.

“Stay there,” Nate said, behind me. “Don’t move yet.”

His hands came down on my hips. Both of them. They go most of the way around. One of them had a washer on it, and I felt it press into me, cool, right over the bone.

Then his fingers. Thick, slick, sure. One of his is two of anybody else’s. He didn’t ask. He hasn’t asked since a full bed in May of last year. He worked me open standing up, with my cock buried in Eli and my hands flat on the table on either side of Eli’s ribs, and I couldn’t go forward and I couldn’t go back.

“Nate. Nate. I’m going to—if you keep—”

“You’re not. Breathe.”

I breathed. I’m a talker. I had nothing. For once in my life I had no idea what to say.

“Look at the wall,” Eli said, muffled. He’d turned his cheek on the table. He was looking up at me sideways, flushed, undone, smiling. “Gavin. Look up.”

I looked up.

The whiteboard was right there, by the fridge. Nobody’s written on it in a year. Nobody’s wiped it.

ELI. GAVIN. NATE.

Mine’s in the middle. It always was. He ruled those columns three years before a stranger showed up with a duffel bag, and he put me in the center one, and I never once noticed.

“Oh,” I said.

Nate pushed into me.

He’s big. He went slow, and I felt all of it, the wide burn of the head and then the long heavy slide, splitting me open while I was sunk to the root in Eli. It shoved me forward. Eli cried out. I cried out. Nate just kept coming, steady, until his hips were flat against my ass and his chest was a hot wall down my whole back.

I was full, and I was held. Both. At once.

I’ve had a lot of sex. I’ve been at both ends of this. I’d never been in the middle of it, where there’s nothing to keep. I’m a drummer. Limb independence, two rhythms, the pocket between. That’s the job. This wasn’t the job. There wasn’t a job. Nate drew back and drove in, and it went straight through me into Eli. I didn’t do a thing. I was just the place it passed through.

“There he is,” Nate said in my ear. His beard was rough on my neck. “That’s it. You don’t have to hold anything up.”

“I can’t—I don’t know what to do with my—”

“Nothing. That’s the idea.” His arm came around my chest and locked. “We’ve got the time. You just take it.”

They had the time. They kept it between them, those two, the way they keep everything, without a word. Nate deep and heavy behind me, the table creaking, every stroke of his fucking me into Eli. Eli pushing back, tight and slick, his ring hand white on the table’s edge. And me in the pocket. Not playing it. Just in it.

Eli let go of the table with the ring hand and reached back and got hold of my hip, and pulled, like I wasn’t deep enough. I was as deep as a man goes. He wanted the rest of it anyway.

“Harder, Nate,” he said, into the wood. “I can’t feel you yet. Put him through me.”

“Bossy,” Nate said.

“I’m being fucked on my own agenda. I’ll be what I like.”

Nate laughed, low, right against my spine, and gave him what he’d asked for. He took me by the hips and drove. Every stroke slammed me into Eli to the root and dragged me back out, slick and helpless, and I got it at both ends at once. The tight wet heat of Eli clenching around my cock. Nate, thick as my wrist, bare, pounding over that one place inside me until my thighs shook. I was leaking in Eli. I could feel it. I could feel Nate leaking in me. The table walked an inch across the floor.

I started talking. I couldn’t help that. It wasn’t patter.

“I love you. Oh, God. Both of you. I can feel both—E, you’re so tight, you’re so—Nate, right there, right there—I’ve got a ring on. I’ve got a ring on, I’m thirty-four years old, somebody married me—”

“Two somebodies,” Eli gasped.

“Good,” Nate said. He said it flat. Exact. He set it like a nail. “You’re so good, Gav. Look at you. Right in the middle.”

That’s my word. I gave it to him on a fire escape. He handed it back, with his cock in me and his ring cold on my chest, and I felt my knees go, and there was nowhere to fall. He had me. Eli had me. I couldn’t get out.

That’s the whole design.

“Eli,” I said. “E, I can’t last, I’m—”

“Don’t last.” He’d got a hand under himself. I could feel his arm working. “Don’t you dare. I want it. Come in me, Gavin, on my kitchen table, on a Sunday.”

I came so hard I saw the names go white. I emptied into him, bare, shouting, with Nate pounding it out of me from behind. Eli went a second after, clenching around me, saying yes into the wood. And Nate’s arm crushed the breath out of my chest, and he buried himself in me and groaned, long and loud and wrecked, and I felt him flood me.

A man who was quiet in a bed for twenty years. In my grandfather’s building. With a washer on his hand.

Nobody moved for a long time.

Then something over our heads started to shriek.

“Walt,” I said. On reflex.

“It’s the smoke alarm,” said Eli, into the table. “It’s the bacon.”

It was. The kitchen was blue with it. Nate reached straight up, without pulling out of me, and twisted the thing off the ceiling one-handed. He can do that. He’s the only one in the house who can.

The shrieking stopped.

“Item one,” Eli said, after a while. He hadn’t lifted his head. He had a sheet of his own agenda stuck to his cheek. “Carried.”

“You said you weren’t minuting it.”

“I’ve reconsidered. I want it in writing.”

I laid my face between his shoulder blades. I could see three hands from there. Eli’s, on the edge of the table. Mine, flat beside his ribs. Nate’s, come around to rest on top of mine. Three little rings of steel, a dollar ten apiece, shining like something.

“Item two,” Nate said, into the back of my neck. “The water heater.”

“Tabled,” said Eli.

“We’re a mess. All three of us.”

“It’s eleven minutes,” I said.

“We’ll fit.”

It does not fit three.

We went anyway.

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