Page 70 of Eight Seconds to Fly

Dylan whistled as he looked back out over Fresno. “Geez, now that's a million dollar view.”

The door swung open and a handsome older man with tanned skin and perfect teeth smiled back at us. “Thank you. You must be T.M. Moore. Huge fan,” he said, thrusting out a hand for me to shake.

“Uh, thank you?” I said, taking it. “These are, uh, my boyfriends. Frankie, Branch, Beau and Dylan.”

He shook their hands in turn. “Nice to meet you all.” There was no incredulousness in his tone, no surprise at all. Vanessa must have forewarned him. “I’m Trent, Vanessa’s husband. Come on in, we’re just grilling out the back.”

He led us through a house that was painfully perfect, interior designed down to the last throw pillow, but somehow it still managed to feel homey and lived in. It was a credit to whoever Vanessa and Trent’s interior decorator was, that’s for sure.

“Go on ahead, I’ll grab you some drinks? Beer? Champagne?”

We all asked for a beer, and he ushered us toward open french doors. We stepped out onto a large back deck, which overlooked an infinity pool and a beautiful tropical garden. It was a private paradise and I felt like a bumpkin when my mouth dropped open. A gorgeous woman, probably in her late forties, glided over to us.

“T.M., it’s wonderful to finally meet you. I’m Vanessa Sumich.” She stretched out a delicate hand and I shook it. Her grip was strong and sure, as was the look of absolute confidence on her face. She was a woman who knew her place in life, and it was a confidence I envied.

“Please, call me Tessa. This is Dylan, Frankie, Beau and Branch. My partners.” I said it with a lot more confidence this time, and Vanessa smiled pleasantly at them all.

She shook their hands and walked us down the wooden steps onto another more private deck area. A man was there, grilling on the world's most impressive grill. Honestly, it was better equipped than most kitchens. “Nathan, come and meet our guests. Tessa, this is my husband Nathan. Nathan, this is the talented bull rider that I am dying to sponsor.”

I frowned. Trent had said he was Vanessa’s husband at the front door, and now Nathan was her husband too? How could she have… “Oh!” I blurted out as it hit me. She didn’t care that the guys and I were polyamorous becauseshewas in a polyamorous relationship too. I realized I’d been just standing there gaping, and my cheeks flushed. “Sorry, it's nice to meet you Nathan. I was just, you know, sorry.” I winced and Beau chuckled behind me. Traitor.

Nathan shook my hand, his grin never faltering. “Are you kidding me? People's reactions are my favorite part.”

Frankie was smiling at Vanessa. “I guess that explains your willingness to embrace our unconventional, um, arrangement.”

Vanessa waved a hand as Trent reappeared with a six pack of beer, handing us each one and then another one to Nathan. “It’s less unconventional than you’d think in this current societal climate.”

I shrugged, my face still on fire. “I’ll take your word for that. I had to google it. I can tell you, googling ‘what do you call it when one woman has four boyfriends’ came up with some interesting results.”

They laughed and Vanessa ushered us to a large outdoor table made of polished concrete, with rustic timber benches running beneath it.

“Come, we’ll talk business until Antony gets home, and then we can talk about life.”

There was a leather document wallet sitting on the table and she motioned for us to sit. “You should get your lawyers to look these over, of course.” She slid the stack over to me. “Originally, I was just going to sponsor you, Tessa, because a woman making her mark in a male dominated industry? That was something I could support wholeheartedly. But I talked it over with my husbands, and in light of that terrible article, we imagine you guys are coming under quite a bit of pressure from your sponsors as well, am I correct?” Dylan nodded, and so did Branch. I frowned in his direction and he purposefully didn't meet my eyes. Hmm. We’d talk about that later. “So we discussed it and decided that perhaps we’d sponsor a team. All three of you would be sponsored by VANT Tech, each with your own individual contracts.”

We all gaped at her now. She was throwing us a literal lifeline like it was nothing. I looked down at the page in front of me. “Holy hell. That's five figures.” I flicked through the contracts of the other guys too. They were all that high. “Ma’am, that’s a lot of money. 75K each is an insane number to contemplate for a rookie rider. Maybe for Dylan, or Branch who is on track to be at the top of the leaderboard, but me? I’m not even going to crack the top thirty this year.”

Vanessa waved away my protests. “But having the honor to sponsor a trailblazer for women in sports? That is priceless.”

For the next hour we went over specifics of what would be required for the sponsorship, but it was all standard stuff. Some advertising campaigns, wearing their logo on our flak vests, the usual things. It just seemed too good. I’d have the lawyers go over everything but I desperately wanted to believe this was the break we needed.

Eventually whatever the hell Nathan was cooking on the grill was done and a well dressed Italian man walked onto the back deck, tugging at his tie, the jacket of his three piece suit already gone. He gave us a polite smile, but walked straight up to Vanessa and kissed her like he hasn’t seen her in a year.

“Antony, these are the bull riders I was telling you about.”

We introduced ourselves and Nathan delivered a perfectly slow cooked hunk of cow to the table. It smelled divine. Trent put out salads that are obviously catered from a restaurant in heaven, but other than that, it was like an average cookout.

Beau was always the most congenial of the three of us growing up, and apparently that extended to when we became five. He picked up our conversational slack easily. “So, Vanessa, I have to ask, what made you decide to sponsor a bull rider? I know you said it was because Tessa was a woman trying to make her way in a man’s world, but how does news of her even come into your world? No offense, but you don’t seem like rodeo people.”

Nathan grinned, pointing his steak knife at Beau. “You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, kid. I’m one hundred percent Wyoming born and raised. I prefer bronc riding, but I watch the WBRP coverage on the sports channel. When I saw your girl there pop up at the beginning of the season, I knew it was something that Vanessa would be interested in. Hell, that we’d all be interested in. The time for gently leading the world into equality has come and gone, in my opinion. Women can and will do everything a man can do. It’s time to get on board or get out of the way.”

They all murmured their agreement. Huh. It was obviously something they really believed, but I was from the South. It was going to take a few more decades I think, even if I did completely agree. I wouldn’t be doing what I dreamed of otherwise. We made general conversation, about California and the weather and bull riding. We asked about VANT Enterprises and learned that the company was formed after they all became committed to each other, which was obvious now that I thought about it. Vanessa, Antony, Nathan, Trent equalled VANT. Duh. But they had all met in college, gone into tech roles down in Silicon Valley. Eventually Vanessa got sick of being passed over for promotions or project leadership, and decided to head her own company. She called up her old college buddies Nathan and Trent, who’d agreed to turf over their jobs to help her get her start up off the ground. Antony had been their lawyer. As they say, the rest is history. Together they created an AI security system that was so intuitive it could read your vitals and call for help if you had a heart attack. It could sense your distress and call the police if you yelled for help. The whole thing was amazing and something out of a comic book movie.

We were on our third beer and sitting around a lit fire pit when Dylan asked the question we’d all been dying to know. “How did you guys get together?”

Trent laughed. “It was a long road, and it had some serious potholes and speed bumps along the way. Twenty years ago, the world had been a lot less accepting of relationships like ours. We lost clients, friends. Family.” He looked over at Antony who just smiled sadly but sipped his wine, his arm around Vanessa’s shoulders. “But we didn’t waver. We knew that we all wanted Vanessa, and we wanted this to work. Good communication is key, but that can be said for any relationship. It's just five times more important in situations like this.”

“Carve out one on one time too. I know it's hard, especially when there's five of you, but it's important to feel the connection on an individual basis as well as a polycule,” Nathan added.

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