Chapter Text
Max is rummaging through the shelves in the supply room, which is very much a thing that Max never does. It isn’t necessarily that he thinks it’s beneath him, but Tristan and Avery tend to know more about what supplies they need, anyway. Max is a good doctor, if an occasionally infuriating one, but there are certainly situations that crop up on a cruise ship that are less common in everyday hospital situations, or even some of the stranger locations where Max has practiced medicine.
And sure, maybe Max is deciding to familiarize himself with their supply closet because he’s trying to learn more about these things, except Tristan thinks not. Max has been pretty comfortable relying on Tristan and Avery for that, too, and not in a condescending way. It’s been nice to have a doctor who defers to his greater experience, actually.
“Why are you angry?” Tristan asks, standing in the doorway. Max turns, looks at him, then looks away.
“I’m not angry,” Max says sedately, sliding a box back onto the shelf, angrily.
Well, that’s interesting. Max has been very even-keeled since the moment he’d gotten on the ship, and his tone doesn’t exactly betray anything now, either. Except that maybe Tristan knows Max better than he had when he’d first joined the crew.
“Okay,” Tristan agrees calmly, matching Max’s tone. And apparently that’s the right thing to do, or maybe very much the wrong thing to do, because Max turns to him and his eyes are flashing with anger. He’s practically vibrating with it. It’s actually kind of...fascinating, in its own way.
“I just can’t believe that you’d do that to Avery,” Max insists, and Tristan’s brow furrows. He has no idea what Max is even talking about. Except that, very suddenly, he does.
“Avery doesn’t care,” Tristan tells Max slowly. And she doesn’t. He’d talked to her about it before they’d docked, because there’s a girl he meets up with every time they stop at this port, and yeah, Tristan isn’t sure exactly what’s going on between the three of them, but it had seemed polite, at least, to get Avery’s feedback. Plus, he hadn’t really wanted to chance not being in her bed again, but Avery had just shrugged and said, “You do you.”
“Are you sure about that?” Max challenges. Tristan frowns.
“I asked her directly,” he confirms to the other man. “Anyway, don’t you think it’s a little paternalistic for you to be angry on Avery’s behalf? She’s a big girl; she can take care of herself.”
That riles Max up even more. Tristan isn’t sure what to make of it. Max has actually, generally speaking, been very open to being challenged about his own views. His own views about medicine, at least; maybe he’s not nearly so open to being challenged on his views about relationships.
“I just think it’s disrespectful,” Max declares, sounding like something a grandfather might say. Honestly Tristan hadn’t expected him to be so old-fashioned about it all, not considering the rather...unorthodox situation in which they’d found themselves. And Max really isn’t that much older than Tristan is.
For the first time, he wonders if maybe he should have asked Max before meeting up with someone else—because, yes, there is something going on with the three of them, but it’s mostly Tristan-and-Avery and Max-and-Avery, not so much Tristan-and-Max-and-Avery. They’re not some kind of throuple for godsakes; they’ve had sex, all three of them in the same room, a handful of times. He doesn’t really need Max’s permission, and he doesn’t want to feel like he has to get Max’s permission.
“Disrespectful to her, or disrespectful to you?” Tristan challenges, because he’s kind of a little shit sometimes and he knows it.
And Tristan is suddenly against the wall, air rushing from his lungs from the surprising force of the impact, and Max is kissing him. At first, Tristan has no idea what is happening, and then he feels Max’s hand on his neck and the barely-there rasp of Max’s evening stubble against his jaw and Max’s lips are soft and firm and Tristan is just...stunned into stillness.
Max pulls back after a second, and Tristan realizes they are both breathless. “Is this okay?” Max asks, chest heaving. “Do you want me to stop?”
Tristan has no idea. It hadn’t been bad; if some other guy kissed him, normally, he’d probably shove the guy away and ask him what the fuck he thought he was doing. While Max had been kissing him, he hadn’t once thought of doing that. Except there’s also quite a line between “I didn’t want to push you away” and “I want you to keep kissing me,” and Tristan actually isn’t sure where in that spectrum of responses his reaction lies. But Max is looking at him expectantly with those lovely blue-green eyes, and he knows he has to answer.
“I—” he begins.
Their watches go off with an alert.
He’s in Avery’s cabin later, and they’ve both had a handful of drinks when he tells her.
“Max and I kissed,” he says, and it’s interesting that that’s the way the words come out of his mouth. Not Max kissed me, but Max and I kissed, like Tristan had been a part of it, an active participant. Maybe he had, actually. Maybe some part of him had known, when he’d started goading the other man, exactly what reaction he was going to get. Maybe he’d been aiming for that exact reaction.
As Tristan expects, Avery’s whole face lights up with mischievous excitement. “Ooh!” she exclaims, grinning from ear to ear. “And did you like it?” Avery lowers her voice, almost conspiratorial. “I happen to know that Max is a very good kisser.”
That’s...well, that does things to Tristan that he’s not entirely sure how to define. Whatever he and Avery have now, they’d had a friendship first, and they have a friendship still. He’d talked—well, he’ll be honest with himself, he’d gossiped —with Avery before about women he’d been with, and it feels kind of like that, except that Max is a man, he hasn’t slept with Max, and Avery has slept with Max, so actually, it isn’t that much like it at all. And no matter what they are doing, it feels weird confessing to his friend, his coworker, about kissing his boss, who is also her boss, who she has also kissed and had sex with. And none of them being jealous about it, except for Max, who was apparently jealous that Tristan slept with a woman who is not Avery. Tristan is definitely too drunk for this conversation. No, he is not drunk enough for this conversation.
He takes a sip of his drink.
“We got interrupted,” he says, which is not, in fact, an answer. Avery clocks that pretty quickly.
“Well, do you want to do it again?” she asks, and there it is, that question again, like when Max had asked do you want me to stop. Because the alternative to stopping was continuing, doing it again, and Tristan hadn’t been able to answer then any better than he can answer now. Avery seems to think his silence is answer enough.
“Do you want me to teach you how to suck dick?” she grins. He is absolutely not drunk enough for this conversation.
“I don’t want to learn to suck dick,” he says, not entirely sure he doesn’t want to learn to suck dick. It’s definitely true that he’s never wanted to suck dick before. Dick, in isolation, is not all that appealing. Honestly, he’s not sure what people who are interested in dick really see in it, except that this particular dick is attached to Max, and that starts to get a little complicated in his mind when he tries to think about it. Avery apparently doesn’t believe him any more than he believes himself.
“Really?” she presses. “Because it’s a pretty good dick to suck. Objectively speaking.”
He knows that Max has a good dick—objectively speaking. It’s not like he hasn’t looked. People all over the world have threesomes, and it doesn’t necessarily make it queer to look at the other guy’s dick during. It’s unavoidable. It’s normal, at least in the context of threesomes. Maybe he’d just been curious about whether or not Max’s joke about being well-endowed was true, which is a normal thing to wonder about when someone basically declares to you that they have a big dick within a week of meeting them.
Avery must be thinking about the same thing, which is another strange situation when it comes to threesomes, both of them thinking about the same dick, and it isn’t Tristan’s.
“Might not be very beginner-friendly, actually,” she remarks thoughtfully. “I can be a pretty good teacher, though.”
Tristan groans and buries his face in his hands.