Heartbreaker, a Heartstopper Story - Ch. 14

Gay Erotica; Gay Cuckold; +18, Cheating

The minutes between Luna opening that door and Nick leaving the room were the longest of Charlie’s life.

He stood frozen in the closet, hand still slick, heart slamming against his ribs, watching through the glass as Nick and Beto stared at each other in paralysed horror. Neither of them spoke. Neither of them moved. The music from downstairs thumped on, obscenely cheerful, a universe away from the catastrophe unfolding three feet from Charlie’s face. Nick’s hand had dropped from Beto’s throat but he hadn’t stepped back, hadn’t done anything at all, just stood there, chest rising and falling in unsteady bursts, the flush draining from his skin and leaving something grey and hollow in its place.

Then Nick turned, pulled the door open, and was gone. He didn’t look back. Didn’t even close the door behind him. Just walked out into the hallway and disappeared, and Charlie heard his footsteps on the stairs, heavy and fast, fading into the noise below.

Charlie waited three seconds. Then he shoved the closet door open and stumbled out.

Beto was on the floor, collapsed, as if his legs had simply given out the moment Nick left. He was pressed against the side of Harp’s bed, knees drawn up, still naked, his skin sheened with sweat that had nothing to do with heat. His hands were clamped over his mouth, fingers digging into his own cheeks, and his eyes were wide and unfocused, seeing something that wasn’t in the room.

“Meu Deus,” he was saying, the words muffled behind his hands. “Meu Deus. Meu Deus.”

His whole body was shaking, fully, visibly shaking, his shoulders jerking, his chest stuttering on breaths that were coming too fast and too shallow, the rapid, panicked rhythm as if his lungs had forgotten how to work properly. Charlie had seen panic attacks before. He’d had enough of his own to recognise the telltale signs: the hyperventilation, the tunnel vision, the feeling that the walls were closing in and the air was running out and nothing would ever be okay again.

“Ai meu Deus, Ai meu Deus, Ai meu Deus —”

The words had stopped being words. They were just sounds now, a loop, Beto’s voice cracking and splitting on each repetition, his body rocking slightly against the bed frame.

“Hey, Beto,” Charlie said gently. He knelt on the carpet in front of him, lowering himself until they were at eye level. “Just breathe, okay? It’s fine. Everything is fine.”

Beto’s eyes swam into focus and locked on Charlie’s face. His pupils were blown wide, the dark brown almost entirely swallowed by black.

“You think she saw me?” he asked, and his voice was pure, undiluted terror. “You— you think she knew it was me?”

Charlie winced. The answer must have been written plainly across his face, because Beto let out an anguished sound that barely qualified as human, a low, wrenched wail that came from somewhere deep in his chest, the sound of a man watching his entire social existence crumble in real time.

“Hey, it’s fine, Beto,” Charlie said quickly. He reached out and took Beto’s hands, wrapping his fingers around them, squeezing hard. They were ice cold. “Listen to me. It’s going to be fine.”

Beto was shaking his head, back and forth, a metronome of denial.

“She knew it was me. She saw my face. She’ll think that I — that I was —” His breathing hitched. “That Nick and I — that you —”

He trailed off, as if the words were too monstrous to release into the air, but Charlie understood.

Luna had seen Beto naked. She had seen Nick’s hand on his throat, their faces inches apart, the unmistakable charge between them. And she would draw the only conclusion any reasonable person would draw from that scene: that Charlie’s best friend was fucking Charlie’s boyfriend behind Charlie’s back. That Beto was a traitor. That Nick was a cheater. And that Charlie, somewhere downstairs watching a chariot race, was the last person to know.

Fuck.

The first tears spilled from Beto’s eyes, running quick and silent down his cheeks. He wiped them with his shoulder, but more followed immediately, helpless tears that he couldn’t blink away, that kept coming no matter how many times he turned his face and tried to hide them. Beto Montenegro, who wore his confidence like a second skin, who laughed in the face of awkwardness and danced through discomfort and made everything in the world feel lighter just by being in the room, was sitting naked on the floor of Harp’s bedroom, shaking and weeping, and it was Charlie’s fault.

All of it. Every bit of it. The plan, the manipulation, the lies, the fabricated schedule swap, Houston, tonight. Every thread led back to Charlie, sitting quietly at the centre of the web he’d spun, pulling strings and watching the people he loved most dance on them. And now one of those people was broken on the floor in front of him, and another was somewhere in this house carrying a guilt that Charlie had put there, and a third had just seen something that would make her question every friendship she’d built in that place.

Charlie looked at Beto’s face, the tears, the terror, the desperate shame of a good person convinced he was about to be seen as something terrible, and felt something click inside of him, like a lock turning. The game was over. The fantasy, the scheming, the delicious thrill of pulling invisible strings, all of it suddenly looked exactly like what it was: a boy playing with the people who trusted him most and calling it desire.

It was time to stop.

He needed to tell Luna the truth. Right now. He couldn’t wait until tomorrow. No more crafting the perfect words, no more careful planning. It had to be now. Tonight. Before she went to someone with what she’d seen, before the story calcified into something unforgivable, before the damage spread any further than this room. And he needed to tell Nick. Everything. The kink, the orchestration, Beto’s role, Houston, the closet. Every ugly, selfish, beautiful, complicated piece of it. No more chess moves. No more red ties on doorknobs while the truth rotted quietly on the other side.

Charlie squeezed Beto’s hands tighter.

“Hey, look, I’m going to fix this, okay?” he said. “I’ll talk to Luna.”

The look Beto gave him was so full of hope it almost broke Charlie’s heart.

“Y-you will?”

Charlie gave a small laugh, trying to sound more confident than he felt. “Of course. I’m not going to let her think badly of you, okay? I promise.”

Beto nodded. Swallowed hard.

“Okay,” he said, nodding again, faster this time, as if the repetition could make it true. “Okay.”

Charlie laughed again softly.

“Okay,” he echoed. He got to his feet. “Put some clothes on. Get back to the party. I’ll let you know after I’m done.”

Beto nodded once more, wiping his cheeks with the back of his hand, and Charlie could see him pulling himself together piece by piece, straightening his spine, steadying his breathing, reaching for the toga crumpled on the floor beside him. Charlie kissed the top of his head quickly, felt Beto lean into it for just a second, and left the room.

The hallway outside Harp’s room was empty, but the staircase below was a river of white togas and noise, the party churning on and showing no intention of stopping for anyone’s personal crisis. Charlie stood at the top of the stairs and gripped the banister. It seemed impossible that the world was still going, that people were still laughing, still drinking, still cannonballing off that ridiculous slide into the pool, as if his entire life wasn’t about to crack open like an egg.

He breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way his therapist had taught him years ago when the panic attacks were at their worst. It was going to be okay. He was going to be okay. He would talk to Luna, explain everything, and then he would find Nick and tell him the truth. All of it. And yes, Nick might be angry. Nick might shout, might go quiet in that terrible way he did when something hurt too badly for volume. But he would come around. He would forgive Charlie, because he was Nick and Charlie was Charlie and they were Nick-and-Charlie, and there was no version of this night that didn’t end with them sitting on Charlie’s narrow bed at Seaview Hall, foreheads touching, laughing at how mental and stupid and bloody insane Charlie’s little plan had been.

There wasn’t. Charlie was sure of it.

The ground floor was even more unhinged than when they’d arrived. The fog machine had been cranked to maximum and the bathhouse grotto was barely visible through the haze, just the glow of purple and blue LEDs and the occasional flash of a golden chalice catching the light. The paddling pools were overflowing, an inch of warm soapy water covering the hardwood. Charlie pushed through it all, scanning faces, looking for Luna’s silver stilettos.

He grabbed a girl he recognised from Luna’s design cohort by the arm. “Have you seen Luna? Luna DeLuca?”

The girl shook her head, shouting something about the pool.

He tried the garden. The DJ was playing something loud and Latin and the crowd was a sweating mass of white fabric and bare skin. He circled the dance floor, checked the queue at Zeus’s throne — Elliot Jameson was still holding court, now wearing three laurel crowns stacked on top of each other — checked the slide, checked the barbecue area. No Luna.

He found Torres near the tiki torches, arm around a cute blonde girl, both of them swaying gently to a song that didn’t match their rhythm at all.

“Torres, have you seen Luna DeLuca?”

Torres squinted at him. “Luna? Yeah, think she left, man. Like two minutes ago. Saw her heading toward the front.”

Charlie’s stomach lurched. He pushed back through the house, weaving through the fog and the labyrinth of bodies, slipping on the soaked floor, catching himself on a fake marble column that wobbled dangerously under his grip. He burst out through the front door into the warm night air, past the LAPD officers who were now sitting on the bonnet of their cruiser sharing a pizza, and went into Greek Row.

The chariot race had left Greek Row looking like the aftermath of a very small, very drunk riot. Overturned shopping carts lay scattered across the road, one of them missing a wheel, another draped in a bedsheet banner that had been trampled flat. Traffic cones had been kicked into gutters. A kiddie pool sat in the middle of the tarmac, half-deflated, murky water still sloshing inside it. Strips of cardboard horse heads littered the pavement like casualties. A girl was sitting on the kerb with her toga soaked to the waist, laughing hysterically into her phone while her friend tried to wring out the hem. Two lads were attempting to right an overturned stroller, arguing loudly about whose fault it was that they’d lost, neither of them sober enough to manage the task.

Charlie scanned Greek Row in both directions, his eyes sweeping the crowd with frantic precision. His heart leaped when he spotted a girl in white about thirty metres down — the right height, the right build, dark hair pinned up — but she turned and the face was wrong, a stranger, and Charlie’s stomach dropped back to the floor. Further down, a group of girls were taking a selfie in front of the LAPD cruisers, posing with peace signs while the officers watched, looking as if they wanted to join in the pictures.

Then his eyes sharpened on a pair of obscenely tall silver stilettos catching the streetlight, moving fast, already halfway down the block.

Luna.

She was walking as fast as nine-inch heels would allow, which was still impressively quick, her white dress flashing in the dark, her arms wrapped tight around herself. She moved as someone fleeing a house on fire and refusing to break into a run only because running would mean admitting how badly she needed to get away.

Charlie started running.

“Luna!” he shouted, and every head on the street swivelled toward him. “Oi, Luna! Wait up!”

She didn’t stop. Didn’t so much as twitch in his direction, and Charlie was absolutely certain it had nothing to do with the noise and everything to do with Luna deciding she was not having that conversation.

“LUNA!” he shouted again, louder. “WAIT UP!”

“YEAH, LUNA, WAIT UP!” yelled one of the drunk lads still wrestling with the overturned stroller as Charlie sprinted past them.

“LUNA, PLEASE, THE MAN’S IN A TOGA AND HE’S RUNNING FOR YOU!” bellowed the other one, cupping his hands around his mouth like a megaphone.

The whole street caught the fever. A girl on the kerb screamed “GO GET HER!” A bloke hanging out of a first-floor window started a slow clap. Someone near the LAPD cruisers began chanting “LU-NA, LU-NA” and within seconds half the block had picked it up, dozens of drunk strangers in togas rhythmically chanting the name of a woman they’d never met on behalf of a boy they didn’t know.

It must have been too much for Luna to pretend she couldn’t hear it. Luna stopped walking, but she didn’t turn around. She just stood there, rigid, silver stilettos planted on the pavement, arms still wrapped tight around herself. Charlie reached her, breathing hard, toga askew, laurel crown gone at some point during the sprint. Behind them, the entire street erupted into cheers and applause.

Charlie bent double, hands on his knees, lungs burning. Bloody hell, was he that out of shape? He really needed to start hitting the gym with Nick. The cheering behind them was fading into scattered whoops and laughter as Greek Row lost interest and returned to its own chaos.

“These... people... are... fucking... mad...” he managed between gasps.

“I can’t talk right now, Charlie,” Luna said. Her voice was flat and tight, aimed somewhere at the pavement in front of her

Charlie raised a finger in her direction, one minute, just give me one minute, and stayed folded over, hands on his knees, waiting for his breathing to settle into something that wouldn’t end in a collapsed lung. When he finally straightened up, he looked at her properly for the first time.

She was pale. The warm tan of her skin had drained to something ashen, her face drawn tight, her jaw clenched so hard the muscles stood out along her neck. The immaculate makeup from earlier in the evening was holding on, but her eyes were glassy and brimming, tears sitting right at the edge, refusing to fall only because Luna DeLuca did not cry in public and certainly not on a street full of drunk strangers in bedsheets. Her arms were still locked around herself, fingers gripping her own elbows, her whole body held together with rigid composure, as if she was one wrong word away from shattering.

Charlie’s chest ached. Another person he loved, standing in front of him with tears in their eyes, and every single one of them was his fault.

“Look, it’s alright, okay?” he said.

Luna’s eyes narrowed. “What... what are you talking about?”

“I, uh—I know. What you saw.” Charlie bit his lip. “And it’s fine. You don’t have to worry about... all that.”

“You... know?” Luna repeated slowly, her brow creasing. “Nick talked to you already?”

“Uh, wh—”

“Oh, Char, I’m so sorry.“ She launched herself at him, arms wrapping around his neck, pulling him into a fierce hug that smelled of perfume and bourbon. “I can’t believe Nick did that to you. And with Beto! Those two fucking backstabbing snakes. I’m so, so sorry, Char. You deserve so much better than that.”

Her voice cracked on the last word, and Charlie could feel her shaking against him. He took her gently by the arms and put some distance between them, forcing her to meet his eyes.

“No, Luna, listen to me,” he said firmly. “That’s not what’s happening.”

She looked at him through wet lashes, mascara threatening mutiny.

“What I meant is that I already knew about Nick and Beto, okay?”

She stared at him as if he’d sprouted a second head. “You... knew?”

“Yeah.” He felt the heat rising in his cheeks. “I knew. I, uh — I kind of set them up.”

Luna’s eyes went so wide they looked like they were going to leave her face entirely. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.

“Nick and I are... we’re, uh, experimenting,” he said. “It’s a thing we’re trying. Together. Well — sort of together. It’s complicated.”

It was just a white lie. A small, necessary simplification. It wasn’t as though Luna needed to know that Charlie had been in that closet, hand on his cock, watching through a one-way mirror. Or that the entire thing had been orchestrated over months. Or that what Charlie actually wanted wasn’t a neat, consensual experiment between adults but the devastating thrill of being cheated on — how would he even begin to explain that? All Luna needed to know was that Nick and Beto were not, as she had so colourfully put it, fucking backstabbing snakes.

He watched as Luna’s not-entirely-sober brain worked through what he’d just told her. He could practically see the gears turning, the pieces rearranging themselves, the scene she’d walked in on being reframed from betrayal to whatever this was. Her eyes went wider still, which Charlie hadn’t thought anatomically possible, and her hand flew to her mouth.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“Yeah,” Charlie agreed. Was it possible to spontaneously combust? He was fairly certain he was about to find out. “Nick and I, we…”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she said quickly, waving both hands as if physically clearing the air. “You don’t owe me any explanation, okay? Whatever that was, it’s between you and Nick and...” She paused, her face doing something complicated. “And B-Beto?”

Charlie visibly cringed. It sounded exponentially worse when someone else said it out loud.

“Yeah,” he said again, lamely. “Thanks.”

Luna pressed both hands against her cheeks, blowing out a long breath, eyes darting as her brain continued to recalibrate. Then her face crumpled.

“Oh God, I can’t believe I slapped Nick,” she said.

“Wait, what?

“He came to talk to me after I — after.” She gestured vaguely back toward the house. “And I just — I bitch-slapped the shit out of him, Charlie. Like, full swing. It was so loud.” She looked horrified. “Oh my God. He must be so mad at me. I’m so sorry, Charlie. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. I’m such a bitch.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Charlie said.

The words felt hollow in his mouth. Another consequence. Another person hurt. Nick was out there somewhere in that ridiculous toga, carrying a secret that was eating him alive, and now he had a handprint on his face to go with it, slapped by one of his closest friends for something that Charlie had engineered from the start. Every time Charlie thought he’d mapped the full extent of the damage, another corridor opened up, another person standing at the end of it looking wounded.

“He knows you’re just looking out for me. Don’t worry. I’ll talk to him, okay?” He was saying that a lot tonight, wasn’t he? “You know where he is?”

“No,” Luna said, wincing. “I was so angry I didn’t pay attention to anything after that. I just needed to get out.”

“Okay, I’ll find him. Go back to the party. Don’t let this dumb thing ruin Toga Weekend for you.”

He hesitated. He couldn’t let Luna talk to Beto before Charlie had a chance to tell him what he’d said to her. The stories needed to match. One more lie, one more small manipulation, one more thread added to the web, and Charlie hated how easy it was, how naturally the words assembled themselves in his mouth.

“Just, uh, let Beto be, okay? He’s quite embarrassed right now. Don’t try to talk to him or anything.”

“Yeah, sure, okay,” Luna said. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear with shaking fingers. “I’m sorry again, Char.”

“It really is fine, love,” Charlie said.

They hugged again, Luna holding on a beat longer than usual, and when she pulled back she looked steadier, the colour returning to her cheeks, the tears drying. She smoothed her dress, adjusted a stiletto, and squared her shoulders. Charlie watched her walk back toward the glow and noise of Greek Row, silver heels clicking on the pavement. When she disappeared around the corner, he let out a breath he felt like he’d been holding since the closet door opened.

Charlie stood alone on the pavement for a long moment after Luna disappeared, the distant thump of the party’s bass line pulsing through the warm night air like a heartbeat that wasn’t his.

He needed to find Nick. He needed to tell him the truth.

The strategist in him was already working, the same part of his brain that had mapped out Houston and engineered the closet and talked Luna down in under three minutes was quietly assembling the conversation, turning phrases over, testing angles, figuring out which words to lead with and which to hold back. He’d start with the kink. He’d frame it as vulnerability, not manipulation. He’d make Nick understand that everything had come from desire, not cruelty. That Charlie hadn’t been trying to hurt him. That this was about love, about wanting Nick so completely that even the darkest corners of that want were just more evidence of how much Nick consumed him. He could do this. He’d fixed Luna. He could fix Nick. He knew his boyfriend’s emotional wiring better than anyone on earth, knew which doors to knock on and which to leave alone, knew how to be soft when Nick needed soft and honest when Nick needed honest.

But underneath the strategy, quieter, harder to look at, something else churned.

Because that wasn’t Luna. Luna had needed a simple explanation and a hug. Nick would need the truth, the unedited truth, and the truth was… ugly. Not the kink itself. Charlie had made peace with that, or something close to it. The ugly part was everything he’d built around it. The months of quiet manipulation. The fabricated schedule swap. The way he’d handpicked Beto and aimed him at Nick like a weapon. The closet, twenty minutes ago, his hand on his cock while his boyfriend fought a war with himself three feet away. What if Nick heard I did this because I love you and didn’t feel reassured? What if Nick would head I did this because I love you and thought: if this is what your love looks like, what have I been trusting all this time?

That was the fear. It wasn’t Nick shouting, and it wasn’t even the possibility of him leaving—though that thought hit Charlie so hard he had to stop walking for a second. What truly terrified him, coiled at the center of everything, was the idea that Nick might look at him and question whether any of it had ever been real. The tenderness, the laughter, the whispered I love yous in the dark, had those been genuine, or had they been part of the performance too? Had Charlie ever been fully present with him, or had some part of Charlie always been somewhere else, manoeuvring, pulling strings?

Charlie knew the answer. He knew, with absolute certainty, that he loved Nick with everything he had. That the manipulation and the love existed side by side, tangled together, inseparable. That he could scheme and still mean every kiss. That he could orchestrate and still fall apart when Nick smiled at him. But knowing it himself and making Nick believe it were two very different things.

He started walking again, faster now, scanning the crowd. The fear was real. The dread was real. But so was something else, something stubborn and bright that refused to be extinguished no matter how many worst-case scenarios his brain threw at it. They had survived Ben Hope. They had survived the move to California, the long adjustment period where everything felt new and slightly wrong. They had survived Nick’s guilt and Charlie’s secrets and the thousand small fractures that any relationship accumulated over years. Their love wasn’t fragile. It was scarred and tested and reinforced at every break point, and if it could survive all of that, it could survive this. It could survive the truth.

Nick would be angry. He would be hurt. He might not speak to Charlie for a day, or two, or a week. But eventually, eventually, he would look at Charlie the way he always looked at Charlie, and they would find their way back to each other, because that was what they did. That was what they had always done.

Charlie adjusted his toga, wiped his palms on the fabric, and went to find his boyfriend. He thought briefly about doing what he’d done with Luna, asking around, scanning crowds, chasing down leads, but Westbridge campus was enormous and too much time had passed. Nick could be anywhere. He could be back at Seaview Hall, or sitting in the athletics lot, or walking the streets with no destination, the way he did sometimes when his head got too loud.

But Charlie already knew where he’d find him.

He liked to think it was something romantic, their bodies attuned to each other across distance, some invisible frequency that only the two of them could hear, his heart a compass whose needle always swung true north toward Nick’s. The reality was simpler and sadder than that. Charlie knew where Nick was because he knew Nick, and he knew that when Nick believed he’d destroyed the most important thing in his life, he would go to the place where that thing felt most real. The small cove by the beach, tucked behind the rocks at the far end of campus, where the noise of the university faded to nothing and the waves came in low and steady. Their spot. The place where Nick had first told him he loved California. The place where they’d sat on a blanket and talked about the future as if it were something they could hold in their hands. It was where Charlie would have gone, if the roles were reversed and he was the one sitting alone with the conviction that he’d ruined everything.

He walked. Not running this time, partly because his lungs were still protesting the sprint down Greek Row, but mostly because he wasn’t ready. Each step toward the beach was a step closer to the conversation he’d been postponing for over a year, and the courage he needed for it was assembling itself slowly, piece by piece, like armour he was building as he moved. The party noise faded behind him. The streets gave way to campus paths, the paths to the boardwalk, the boardwalk to the narrow trail that wound through the scrub grass and down toward the sand. The ocean grew louder. The air cooled, carrying salt and kelp and the faint mineral smell of wet rock.

He rounded the last outcrop, the one that hid the cove from the rest of the beach, and stopped.

Nick was there.

Nick was crying.

Every opening line Charlie had rehearsed on the walk over, every careful phrase, every gentle lead-in, every version of Nicky, I need to tell you something, dissolved like footprints in the tide. Gone, all of it, washed clean by the sound coming from the figure hunched on the sand thirty feet in front of him.

Nick was sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around them, the ridiculous toga bunched and sand-streaked around his thighs. His shoulders heaved in uneven, shuddering jerks, and even from this distance Charlie could hear the sobs, broken, ugly sounds that Nick was trying and failing to muffle against his own forearms. The sound of a man falling apart.

Charlie couldn’t move.

His heart was breaking. He could feel it happening and it was no poetic metaphor or romantic cliché, it was the actual physical sensation of something cracking behind his ribs, a fracture that spread outward with every sob that reached him across the sand. His eyes burned. His throat closed. His hands hung useless at his sides.

No.

No no no no no.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. None of this was supposed to happen. It was supposed to be fun. Sexy. Harmless. A secret thrill, a private game, something that made their love a little hotter, a little more exciting, a little wider than the conventional box it had always lived in. It was supposed to end with Charlie confessing and Nick being surprised and maybe a little embarrassed and then the two of them laughing about it, tangled together in bed, marvelling at how mad and hot and insane the whole thing had been.

It was not supposed to end with Nick crying alone on a beach in the dark.

Charlie had never seen Nick cry. Not once, in nearly three years together. Nick was the strong one. Nick was the rock, the steady centre, the person who held Charlie together when Charlie couldn’t hold himself. Nick smiled through pain and laughed through exhaustion and carried other people’s weight without complaint, and if Charlie, Charlie, the person Nick trusted most, the person Nick had built his entire sense of safety around, had broken through all of that and reduced him to this...

How the hell did they come back from here?

“Nick?” Charlie whispered, but the wind caught his voice and carried it across the sand.

Nick’s head snapped up. His eyes searched the darkness until they found Charlie, and he wiped his face quickly with the back of his hand. His cheeks were streaked and swollen, his eyes red-rimmed, and the sight of it sent a spike of pain through Charlie so sharp it nearly buckled his knees.

He was already running. In seconds he was kneeling in the sand in front of Nick, grabbing his hands where they gripped his knees, wrapping his fingers around them, holding on.

“No, baby, don’t cry. Please, Nicky. Don’t cry, okay?”

Nick’s lower lip trembled and he looked away, jaw working, fighting for control and losing.

“You don’t know what I did,” he said, his voice thick and barely recognisable.

“I do, okay? I know and it’s fine, Nicky, it’s fine!” Charlie squeezed his hands harder. “Look at me. It’s fine.”

Nick turned back to him. His blue eyes were bloodshot and swimming and full of a confusion so naked it hurt to look at.

“Y-you know?” he asked.

“Yes.” Charlie swallowed. “I know about you and Beto.”

Charlie thought how surreal it was to finally say those words out loud, words he’d been carrying for weeks, turning over in his mind a thousand different ways, imagining a thousand different versions of this moment. And here it was. On a dark beach, in the sand, both of them in ruined togas, Nick’s face wrecked with tears.

Nick stared at him as if the ground had opened beneath him and he was still falling.

“And you forgive me?” he asked. His voice cracked on the last word.

Charlie sighed. He closed his eyes. The waves rolled in behind him, steady and indifferent.

“There’s nothing to forgive, Nick,” he said.

“How can you say that?” Nick’s voice rose, desperate. “I cheated on you. I betrayed you. I betrayed us.”

Charlie shook his head slowly. Then he opened his eyes, looked directly into Nick’s, and said the thing he’d been building toward for over a year.

“I knew it all along, Nick.” His voice was much steadier than he felt. “It was my idea. I asked Beto to seduce you.”

Nick didn’t react. That was the worst part. Instead of an explosion, of shouting, of some dramatic pulling away, he just stared at Charlie, and his face went through something Charlie couldn’t track. Confusion, then disbelief, then something that looked like the beginning of understanding, and then nothing at all. A blankness that settled over his features like a shutter coming down. His hands, still in Charlie’s grip, went limp. Not pulling away. Just... vacant. As if the part of Nick that animated his body had stepped out of the room.

“What?” he said finally. His voice was flat. Totally flat, no inflection of any kind, and it was the most frightening thing Charlie had ever heard. “What did you just say?”

Charlie took a deep breath. The salt air filled his lungs and did nothing useful.

“I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” he said, eyes fixed on the sand between Nick’s knees. He couldn’t look at him. “For a long time, actually. Before we even moved here. I have this — this kink, you know? This fantasy. Of you. And o-other blokes.”

“You want to see me fuck other blokes?” Nick’s voice came from somewhere above him, and without looking Charlie couldn’t read it, couldn’t tell if it was flat or sharp or broken or all three at once.

It would be so easy to say yes. So much simpler to let Nick think this was just a voyeur thing. A bit unusual, maybe, but within the bounds of something explainable, something they could file under adventurous and move past. Charlie could feel the easier lie sitting right there on his tongue, ready, and all he had to do was say yeah, that’s it, I just want to watch and the worst of this conversation would be over.

But he’d come here to stop lying.

“It’s not just seeing,” he said quietly. “Seeing isn’t even the most important part of it. It’s more like...” He searched for the words, his fingers curling into the cold sand. “Like I want you to cheat. You know? Not — not with permission. Not arranged. I want it to feel real. I want you to actually —”

“What?” Nick’s voice cut through the dark, and this time there was no ambiguity. Disgust. Pure, undiluted disgust, the word pulled from somewhere deep and visceral. “You want me to cheat on you?”

The disgust in Nick’s voice went through Charlie like a blade.

There it was. The thing he’d been terrified of since Truham, since the first time he’d shoved a hand down his pants and come to the image of Nick with someone else and hated himself for it afterwards. The confirmation that he was exactly what he’d always feared he was, wrong in some fundamental way that therapy and squared shoulders couldn’t fix. Nick knew now. Nick could see him, really see him, the full ugly shape of what lived inside Charlie Spring, and the sound he’d made, that single, revolted what, was the verdict Charlie had been dreading for years.

His eyes stung. His throat seized. He stared at the sand and willed himself not to cry, because if he cried now Nick would comfort him, because that’s what Nick did, and Charlie didn’t deserve that. He didn’t deserve Nick’s arms around him while Nick was still processing the fact that his boyfriend had spent months manipulating him into bed with another man for his own gratification.

“Yeah,” Charlie said. His voice came out thin and stripped. “I know it sounds weird, but it can be done in a really healthy way for—”

“Healthy?” Nick repeated, and at least the disgust was gone, replaced by something closer to sheer, bewildered disbelief. “Healthy? You want me to fucking cheat on you and you asked your best friend to fucking seduce me and you think any of this is healthy?”

Charlie winced. “I — I realise now that I didn’t go about it in the best way,” he said. “I thought — I thought it could be fun. Could be hot. I know you’re attracted to Beto and—”

“And instead of fucking talking to me you decided to use that against me?” Nick’s voice cracked, rising. “Do you hear what you’re saying right now, Char? Do you actually hear yourself? Do you know how fucked up all of this is?”

Nick was on his feet. Charlie didn’t remember him standing. One moment he was hunched on the sand and the next he was up, pacing, three strides in one direction, a sharp turn, three strides back. His hands were in his hair, fingers gripping the golden strands, pulling, and the toga had slipped further off his shoulder, hanging loose and crooked, sand clinging to the white fabric. His chest was heaving, the muscles across his stomach clenching and releasing with each ragged breath, and his jaw was working constantly, teeth grinding, as if his body was chewing through emotions faster than his mouth could process them into words. He looked like a man trying very hard not to put his fist through something and running out of alternatives.

“How long has this shit with Beto been going on?” Nick demanded.

“Since January,” Charlie said quietly.

Nick stopped pacing.

“January? What the fuck, Charlie? That’s—” He counted backward, his face twisting. “That’s months. That’s half a bloody year.”

“I asked him that night he taught me how to make caipirinhas, remember? A little after that day at the gym when he teased you during squats.”

Nick’s eyes widened. “You know about that?”

Charlie nodded.

“And you know about when he came on to me in the Eaton Arts Building bathroom?”

Charlie nodded again.

“I know everything, Nick. He always tells me everything.”

Nick stared at him. Something was recalculating behind his eyes, months of memories being replayed and reexamined, every encounter with Beto reframed, every moment of confusion and guilt and self-hatred suddenly illuminated from a completely different angle.

“So you know that fucking arsehole has been harassing me this entire time and — what, you thought it was funny?” His voice was climbing again, incredulous. “Were you getting off on it?”

Charlie said nothing.

Because the truth was yes. He had thought it was funny. He’d thought it was hilarious. His perfect, devoted Nick, slowly unravelling under his own desire for Beto, fighting it with everything he had and losing ground inch by inch. Charlie had lost count of how many times he’d wanked thinking about it. After the Eaton Arts Building bathroom, Beto’s breathless retelling of how he’d cornered Nick, how Nick had gone rigid, how close it had come, Charlie had locked his door and come so hard he’d seen stars, and then done it again twenty minutes later because once hadn’t been enough.

His silence answered the question more clearly than any words could have.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Nick said. He turned away from Charlie, both hands pressed against the back of his skull, fingers laced tight, staring at the black ocean as if it might offer him something the conversation couldn’t.

Charlie sat in the sand and watched his boyfriend’s back and felt the ground shift beneath him.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. This wasn’t the conversation he’d rehearsed on the walk over, the gentle confession, the surprised pause, the slow dawning of understanding, the eventual laughter. There was no laughter here. There was no warmth, no curiosity, no cautious but willing okay, tell me more. There was just Nick, rigid and shaking, staring at the waves with his fists in his hair, and a silence between them that felt nothing like the comfortable silences they’d built their relationship on. That silence had teeth.

Nick was furious. Nick was feeling betrayed by the person who was supposed to be the safe place. The one constant. The reason Nick could walk into any room and know that whatever else went wrong, at least one thing in his life was solid and true and exactly what it appeared to be. Charlie had taken that from him. Had hollowed it out from the inside while keeping the surface intact, and now Nick was standing at the edge of the ocean realising that the thing he’d been leaning on all this time had been partly hollow, and Charlie could see it in the rigid line of his spine, in the way he wouldn’t turn around, in the silence that stretched and stretched and offered nothing.

For the first time in his life, in nearly three years of loving Nick Nelson, Charlie genuinely did not know what would happen next. He didn’t know if Nick would turn around and scream at him or walk away without a word or sink to the sand and cry again. He didn’t know if they would go home together tonight. He didn’t know if Nick would look at him tomorrow the way he’d looked at him this morning, like Charlie was everything, or if that look was gone now, replaced by something Charlie couldn’t survive.

The not-knowing terrified him more than anything he’d ever felt. More than Ben Hope. More than the worst nights, the ones he didn’t talk about, the ones that had left scars his therapist was still carefully mapping years later. Because those had been terrors that happened to him, things he’d endured, survived.This was something he’d built with his own hands. This was Charlie Spring, sitting in the wreckage of his own design, watching the person he loved most in the world stand ten feet away with his back turned, and understanding, for the first time, that love alone might not be enough to fix what love had broken.

“There was no friend with a sick mum, was there?” Nick asked.

He turned. Charlie raised his eyes to look at him through the blur of tears.

“No,” he whispered. “No, Beto and I thought— I thought that if you won the game and I wasn’t there with you, that you’d let loose and...”

He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. Nick’s face told him the rest had landed.

A tear slipped down Charlie’s cheek. He didn’t wipe it.

“You’re crying?” Nick said, disbelieving, as if Charlie’s tears were the final insult in a night already overflowing with them. As if Charlie had somehow found a way to make even this about himself.

“You wanna know what your little plan did, Char?”

Charlie closed his eyes. No. He wanted to scream it. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to have this conversation anymore, didn’t want to be on this beach, didn’t want to be inside his own skin. He wanted to rewind, all the way back, past tonight, past Houston, past the caipirinhas, past the January night where he’d opened his mouth and said you could do it for me. Back to the version of himself who kept the fantasy locked away and never let it touch anything real. Because whatever he’d felt in that closet, whatever he’d felt on the phone with Beto, whatever devastating orgasm he’d wrung from his own body while listening to the details of his boyfriend’s infidelity, none of it, not a single second of it, was worth the dread sitting in his chest right now.

“I lost that fucking game because I was looking for you,” Nick said. His voice was low and shaking and savage. “The whole time. My head wasn’t in the game because every five seconds I was scanning the stands thinking I’d seen you. Thinking you were there. Getting distracted because I couldn’t find your face.”

Charlie opened his eyes.

The person standing in front of him was a stranger. The same face, the same body, the same golden hair whipping in the ocean wind… but the eyes were wrong. Every trace of warmth, of tenderness, of the devotion that had lived in Nick’s gaze for as long as Charlie had known him, was gone. In its place was something Charlie had never been on the receiving end of. Something cold and flat, the look of a man reassessing everything he thought he knew about the person in front of him and not liking what he found. Nick had looked at opponents like this on the pitch. He had looked at Ben Hope like this, once, across a crowded corridor at Truham. He had never looked at Charlie like this.

It was the worst thing Charlie had ever seen.

“But yeah, I fucked Beto that night,” Nick kept going, and Charlie thought about how many times he’d imagined hearing those exact words from Nick’s mouth and the reality was nothing like any of them. “So I guess your fantasy came true and that’s what matters to you, right?”

Charlie scrambled to his feet, sand clinging to his knees, and moved toward Nick.

Nick took a step back. A single, deliberate step, as if Charlie’s proximity was something he couldn’t bear. The gesture was so small and it nearly destroyed Charlie completely.

“That’s not true, Nicky,” he said. His voice was shaking so badly the words came out fractured, barely intelligible. “It was supposed to be something that could be fun for both of us, I swear to you. I never wanted to hurt you. I never —”

“I don’t know what lies you’ve been telling yourself to justify what you did,” Nick said. His voice had gone quiet now, which was worse than the shouting, worse than the disgust, worse than everything. Quiet Nick was the one who had already made up his mind. “But none of this shit has anything to do with me.”

Nick turned and started walking away.

The panic was instant, flooding every part of Charlie’s body at once. He was leaving. Nick was leaving, walking away from him across the dark sand, and Charlie couldn’t let that happen, not now, not while everything was fractured and unfinished.

That couldn’t be the end of it.

“Wait — where are you going?” His voice cracked with his despair. “We need to talk about this, Nick. Please.”

“I can’t talk to you right now,” Nick said, without turning. He sounded exhausted, scraped down to nothing. “I need time to think. To — to try to understand — to see if there’s any way to —”

He didn’t finish, but the unfinished sentence, dangling in the salt air between them, was enough. Charlie’s breathing steadied, just slightly. If Nick wanted to think, wanted to try to understand, then things weren’t lost. The door wasn’t closed. It was barely open, hanging by a hinge, but it was there.

“Okay,” Charlie said, nodding to himself. “Okay. I’ll give you space. We’ll talk about it again back home. When you’ve had time to think.”

Nick’s head whipped around. His eyes were red and hard and full of something that made Charlie’s stomach drop through the sand.

“I’m not going home with you,” Nick said. “I can’t fucking look at you right now, Char. You think I’m gonna spend the next two months playing happy couple with you in front of our families and our friends? Pretending everything’s fine? Sitting at your mum’s dinner table knowing what I know?”

Each word landed like a fist. Charlie stood there and took them because he deserved every single one. He could feel the pain of it settling into his bones, heavy and precise, and some part of him recognised it for what it was. The cost. The real cost, not the fantasy version where jealousy was electric and thrilling and fed the fire, but the actual price of what he’d done, measured in the distance between himself and the person he loved most, widening with every second Nick spent looking at him with those terrible, unfamiliar eyes.

He deserved this. He knew that. The knowing didn’t make it hurt any less.

Nick started walking again. His silhouette moved across the dark sand toward the trail, getting smaller, the white of his toga fading into the grey of the rocks, and Charlie stood perfectly still and watched him go and felt something fundamental shift inside him, because in almost three years, in every goodbye at every door and every parting at every corner and every night where one of them left before the other, Nick had never once walked away without kissing him goodbye.

“Nick,” Charlie called out. His voice broke on the single syllable, splintering into something small and afraid. “Are we going to break up because of this?”

Nick stopped. The waves came in and pulled back. The wind moved through the scrub grass on the bluff above them. Somewhere far away, the party impossibly still pulsed.

He turned.

They looked at each other across the dark stretch of sand between them, and the distance felt infinite, wider than the ocean behind Nick, wider than the three thousand miles between California and Kent, wider than anything Charlie had ever tried to cross. Nick’s face was unreadable. His eyes, those blue eyes that had looked at Charlie with nothing but love for nearly three years, held something Charlie couldn’t identify, and that was the most terrifying part of all. That for the first time, he couldn’t read Nick.

Nick shook his head. Not a no. Not a yes. Nick didn’t have an answer and couldn’t pretend he did. Then he turned away and kept walking, and the darkness swallowed him whole.

Charlie stood alone on the beach. The tide was coming in, cold water reaching his bare feet, soaking through the hem of his ruined toga. The laurel crown was gone. The sand was in his hair, under his nails, between his teeth. He pressed his hand flat against his own chest and felt his heartbeat hammering there, rapid and useless, pumping blood through a body that suddenly felt like an empty room, and understood, with the terrible, sober clarity that only comes after you’ve burned something down and the smoke has cleared enough to see what’s left, that he might have just lost the only thing that ever mattered.

The waves came in. The waves pulled back.

Charlie sank to his knees in the wet sand and didn’t get up for a very long time.

END OF PART TWO

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This chapter took a lot out of me. It's the hardest thing I've written for this story, and I rewrote the beach scene three times before it felt right. Honestly, I’m still not sure if I like it, hah Charlie's been our guide through Part Two, and I needed his world to crack the same way Nick's did at the end of Part One. Whether it stays cracked... well, you'll have to keep reading.

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