Hearbreaker, a Heartstopper Story - Ch. 09

Erotica, Gay Cuckold, +18, Voyeur, Cheating

Apr 01, 2026

“So, how do I look?”

“Gorgeous.”

“You didn’t even look, love.”

Charlie Spring rolled his eyes and lifted his gaze from his phone screen, where he’d been scrolling through a jobs website, to the face of his boyfriend, Nick Nelson. It was a formality, really. Nick could have walked in wearing a bin bag and Charlie’s answer would have been the same, like the sea didn’t need to check whether it was still blue. Some things simply were what they were.

But he looked anyway, because looking at Nick was never a hardship.

Nick was freshly showered, hair still slightly damp at the temples, wearing dark jeans and a fitted grey henley that had absolutely no business existing on a person with shoulders like that. He was enormous in the small dorm room, the way he always was, taking up space not aggressively but simply inevitably. The California months had done something unfair to him, packed muscle onto a frame that had already been unfairly generous to begin with, broadened his shoulders, deepened the cut of his jaw, turned him into something that made Charlie feel, on a semi-regular basis, that he ought to be hanging in a museum somewhere with a small explanatory plaque.

“Like I said,” Charlie said, returning to his phone. “Gorgeous.”

Nick beamed at him with that wide smile that had been undoing Charlie since he was fifteen years old, and then crossed the small dorm room in two strides of those ridiculous legs and dropped himself directly onto Charlie’s body with absolutely no regard for physics or Charlie’s lung capacity.

“Nick—”

His phone was gone before he could finish the protest, lifted neatly from his hands, and then Nick’s mouth was on his and Charlie’s objection dissolved completely, as it alays did, as it had been doing for two and a half years without showing any signs of stopping.

Nick kissed him the way he did everything, thoroughly, attentively, with his whole self behind it. One large hand cradling the back of Charlie’s head, fingers threading into his curls, tilting him exactly where he wanted him. Charlie’s hands found the front of the grey henley and held on, because it seemed the sensible thing to do when the ground shifted like this, when Nick kissed him slowly and deeply and with that particular focused warmth that made Charlie feel, every single time, like the most important thing in any room. He kissed back with everything he had, feeling Nick smile against his mouth halfway through, which made Charlie smile too, which made the kiss dissolve briefly into something more laughing than passionate before Nick pulled him back in and made it properly serious again.

When they finally separated Charlie was pink-cheeked and slightly breathless and his jobs website felt very far away.

“Don’t go to this stupid party,” he said.

“You know I promised Harp, Char.”

“You’ve known Harp for two weeks,” Charlie said, with the measured reasonableness of a man making an airtight legal argument. “I’ve been your boyfriend for over two years. I should take precedence.”

“You do,” Nick answered, in the tone he sometimes used that was more sincere than the moment technically required, the one that always caught Charlie slightly off guard. “In everything. But I promised I’d check out the Delta party with him.”

Charlie pouted. He must have been losing his touch, because once all it had taken was precisely this expression and Nick would drop whatever he was doing and kiss it off his face. This time Nick only laughed and pressed a quick kiss to his forehead instead.

“Don’t pout,” he said. “Besides, it’s not like you’re staying in tonight either, is it?”

Charlie groaned loudly.

“Is it?” Nick asked again, eyebrows raised, insufferably patient.

“Yes,” Charlie finally conceded. “It is.”

Half of him suspected Nick had only agreed to go to the Delta Tau Phi party with Ethan Harper — his new American best friend, who had apparently decided in the first week of term that Nick Nelson was his personal property and hadn’t let go since, attaching himself to Nick’s side with the unstoppable energy of a golden retriever who’d found his person — because he knew with complete certainty that Charlie would never, not in a million years, set foot inside a frat house voluntarily. Which left Charlie with no reasonable excuse to avoid the other invitation they’d received that Friday night.

It wasn’t even a party, technically. Just a small get-together in the common area of Seaview Hall. Music, pizza, absolutely no alcohol, a notice pinned to the board by the dorm’s RA in very neat handwriting. A chance for the freshmen on their floor to break the ice, put faces to the names they’d been reading off door plaques all week, maybe start building the kind of friendships that would carry them through the next few years. Perfectly civilised. Perfectly reasonable.

Perfectly not what Charlie felt like doing on a Friday night in a country that still felt slightly unreal around the edges.

“There you go, then,” said Nick, already reaching for his jacket.]

Charlie grabbed his wrist and pulled him back. Time to employ is greatest weapon.

He kissed Nick again, properly this time, with full deliberate intent, the kind of kiss designed to lodge itself in someone’s memory and ruin their evening from the inside. He wanted Nick to feel the precise weight of what he was choosing to walk away from. His hand slid from the nape of Nick’s neck downward, travelling slowly to his pec — Bloody hell, they were massive. How much Nick bench-pressing these days? His hand continued its journey south, tracing his abs through the henley, which was, frankly, a tad tighter than strictly necessary, not that Charlie was complaining, until his hand landed on Nick’s bulge.

Charlie wasn’t surprised to feel Nick getting hard against his hand in a matter of seconds. It was like California had done something to his boyfriend’s libido: Nick was horny all the time these days, as if the sun and the salt air and the freedom of being three thousand miles from home had rewired him from the inside out. The first few days on Nick’s room before Tyler Martin, Nick’s new roommate, had arrived to claim the other bed, had been nothing short of a fuck-fest. The very first night, they hadn’t even made it to the bed properly and, within minutes, Charlie was bent over the small desk, shorts around his ankles, while Nick took him hard from behind. The desk had rattled against the wall with every thrust, pens and notebooks scattering across the floor, but neither of them cared. They christened the floor, the bed (multiple times), even the wardrobe when Nick had pressed him up against it, lifting Charlie clean off his feet and holding him there while fucked with all he had.

It had been almost overwhelming. Nick’s appetite had seemed endless, waking Charlie up in the middle of the night with kisses along his spine, pulling him into his lap during what was supposed to be a study session, taking him against the wall while they were meant to be unpacking. Charlie had enjoyed every single moment of, delighted and slightly dazed by how much his boyfriend wanted him, how freely they could finally be together without the constant fear of being caught.

Nick’s breath hitched when Charlie started massaging his cock over the fabric of the jeans and almost immediately he pulled back from the kiss, breathing considerably harder than he had been a minute ago.

“You’re wicked,” he said.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Charlie said, the picture of innocence.

“You bloody well do, you little minx.” Nick was already rising from the bed and Charlie, who was enjoying the results of his experiment far too much to feel any guilt about it, watched him go with considerable satisfaction.

Nick stood, ran a hand through his damp hair, and fixed Charlie with a look that was trying very hard to be reproachful and not quite getting there.

“Gonna have to take a cold shower now,” he said.

Charlie laughed, his eyes dropping shamelessly to the front of Nick’s jeans. The heavy outline of his boyfriend’s cock was straining obscenely against the denim, making the efforts of his effort quite clear to anyone who had a pair of functioning eyes.

“Or,” Charlie said, “you could start wearing undies again. They do sell those here in America, you know.”

Nick smiled at him with the serene confidence of a man completely at peace with his life choices. “Nah,” he said simply. “I like freeballing.”

He gave his hips a small, demonstrative shake, his still hard cock swaying heavily from side to side beneath the denim like the pendulum of a very indecent clock. Charlie burst out laughing, dropping his head back against the pillow.

“You’re unbelievable,” he said, shaking his head.

“You like it too.”

Charlie did not dignify that with a response, which was, of course, its own kind of answer. But Nick wasn’t wrong, Charlie certainly didn’t mind his boyfriend’s newest dress code.

They left together at eight o’clock, stepping out into the warm California evening, the campus still buzzing with the particular restless energy of a Friday night on the beginning of a new term. Nick was meeting Harp at Tidewater House, his dorm on the other side of campus, so they said their goodbyes in the atrium of Seaview Hall, a proper goodbye, which stretched considerably longer than the situation required, neither of them apparently in any great hurry to be the one who stepped back first.

“Have fun,” Charlie said against Nick’s mouth.

“You too,” Nick murmured, and kissed him once more just to be contrary about it.

They finally separated. Nick headed down the front steps and Charlie stayed in the atrium doorway, watching him go with his arms crossed loosely over his chest. He was faintly aware, in his peripheral vision, of two girls sitting on the low wall to his left who had paused their conversation entirely, and a lad on the bench opposite who had lowered his book to roughly chest height without quite realising he’d done it, all three of them engaged in the same wordless, appreciative study of the way Nick Nelson’s jeans fitted him as he walked away.

Charlie couldn’t blame them.

He watched until Nick turned the corner and disappeared, then went back inside to find some pizza.

The Not-Quite-A-Party was already underway when Charlie pushed open the common room door at half past eight.

Someone had made an effort, which Charlie found immediately touching. A hand-painted banner stretched across the back wall in slightly uneven letters — WELCOME TO SEAVIEW, FRESHIES! — the exclamation mark noticeably more enthusiastic than the rest of it, as if whoever had painted it had run out of conviction by the end and then rallied at the last second. A long table against one wall held the kind of spread that existed in the specific register of institutional socialising: paper plates of pizza slices going slightly cold, a bowl of tortilla chips with three different dips, brownies cut into cautious little squares, and an enormous glass bowl of fruit punch the colour of a traffic cone, a hand-written card propped beside it reading COMPLETELY NON-ALCOHOLIC with a smiley face that was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

The Resident Director, Mr. Okafor, a tall man Charlie had met briefly during check-in and who radiated the energy of someone who had seen everything and retained his optimism through sheer force of will, was nowhere to be seen. His RA, however, was very much present. Maya, a junior with box braids and the confident warmth of someone born for exactly this kind of role, spotted Charlie the moment he walked in and gave him a smile big enough to be genuinely welcoming rather than performative.

“Charlie! Grab some punch, get in there.”

Charlie grabbed some punch.

He did a quiet survey of the room. There was Mason Briggs from Tennessee, broad-shouldered and friendly-faced, studying sports medicine, who had already somehow accumulated three new friends and a slice of pizza in each hand. There was Felix Park, who Charlie had clocked earlier in the week because Felix had been doing a Rubik’s cube in the lift with the focused intensity of a man defusing a bomb, which turned out to be less a quirk and more a competitive pursuit. Felix, it emerged, was ranked. Then there was the girl holding court near the brownie table, loud and sharp and completely at ease, who introduced herself approximately thirty seconds after making eye contact with Charlie as Luna DeLuca, from Queens, said with the particular emphasis of someone for whom Queens was not merely a place of origin but a personality trait and possibly a philosophy.

He still remembered the advice, delivered with varying degrees of diplomacy, from both his parents and Sarah Nelson before they’d left for California. Don’t lock yourselves in your own little world. Don’t let the relationship become a hiding place. This is an opportunity. Use it.

It would be considerably easier for Nick, obviously. His boyfriend was a natural, always had been. He’d moved through Truham with effortless ease, somehow equally at home with the popular rugby lads and with Charlie’s small, chaotic little constellation of misfits: Tao, Elle, Isaac, all of them so different, all of them instantly won over by Nick. People gravitated toward Nick like plants turned toward light, not because they’d decided to, but because it was simply what living things did in the presence of something warm. And yes, some of that was almost certainly attributable to the fact that Nick Nelson was, by any reasonable metric, the hottest guy Charlie had ever seen in his life. But his looks only explained the initial gravitational pull. The loyalty Nick inspired, the genuine fondness people developed for him, that belonged entirely to his kindness, his generosity, and his ability to make anyone feel just as tall as he.

Charlie, however, was still working on it. That was the most honest way he knew to put it. He was working on it, had been working on it for years now, with the unglamorous patience of someone rebuilding something that had been damaged before he’d fully understood its value. The Ben Hope months had left their marks in places that didn’t show, in the quiet, persistent voice that occasionally surfaced in unfamiliar rooms full of unfamiliar people to remind him that he was too much, or not enough, or both simultaneously. That his presence was something people tolerated rather than sought. That the space he took up in other people’s lives was borrowed rather than earned.

He knew, intellectually, that none of that was true. He’d done enough therapy, had enough honest conversations with his mum and with Tao and with Nick to understand where those thoughts came from and what they were worth. Knowing didn’t always silence them.

Nick helped. Nick helped more than Charlie had words for, if he was being honest. Two and a half years of being loved so straightforwardly, so consistently, so without condition or agenda, had done things for Charlie’s sense of his own worth that no amount of therapy could fully replicate. Nick looked at him like he was something rare. Had always looked at him like that, since they were fifteen, and had never once given Charlie reason to doubt it.

But Nick wasn’t there tonight. And Charlie was standing alone near a punch bowl in a country that wasn’t his, about to introduce himself to a room full of strangers, reminding himself quietly, as he sometimes still needed to, that he was not a burden. That he was someone worth knowing. That he deserved to be in rooms.

He straightened his shoulders, picked up his cup, and went to find someone to talk to.

In the end, it wasn’t so bad.

It started with Luna, which in retrospect felt inevitable: Luna DeLuca was not the kind of person who left you standing alone near a punch bowl for long. She’d materialised at his elbow within minutes of him arriving, looked him up and down with the frank assessment of someone who’d grown up in Queens and had therefore been evaluating strangers since birth, and said: “British, right? I can always tell. It’s the shoes.”

Charlie looked down at his shoes.

“What’s wrong with my shoes?”

“Nothing,” Luna said, already refilling her punch. “That’s how I can tell.”

He wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but she was already talking again, and within ten minutes Charlie had learned that she was from Flushing, that she had three older brothers who had collectively ruined her for nonsense of any kind, that she was studying graphic design, and that she had very strong opinions about the punch, none of them positive.

“It tastes like someone described fruit to a person who’d never had fruit,” she said, “and then that person made a drink.”

“It’s really quite bad,” Charlie agreed.

“Right? Thank you.” She pointed at him. “I like you.”

From there it got easier, because these things always get easier after someone decides to adopt you. Luna moved through the room like she owned it, pulling Charlie along in her wake, and he found himself in conversation after conversation without quite having decided to be, laughing at something, offering an opinion on something else, finding that the anxiety of being somewhere new and unknown had quietly, without announcement, packed its bags and left somewhere between the second cup of terrible punch and a surprisingly heated debate about whether New York or London had better pizza.

At some point he ended up sitting on one of the common room sofas with a plate of brownies, deep in conversation with a group of four people he hadn’t known existed three hours ago, and he thought, with the slightly surprised pleasure of someone whose expectations have been quietly exceeded, that this was actually rather nice. That these were actually rather good people. That Westbridge University might turn out to have things in it worth finding.

He’d completely forgotten, by then, that he’d ever wanted to skip it. He was reaching for a second brownie, laughing at something Luna had just said about her graphic design professor, when he became aware of someone settling into the empty space on the sofa beside him.

“Those are actually really good,” the someone said, nodding at the brownie in Charlie’s hand. “Maya made them. She puts sea salt on top, which sounds wrong but isn’t.”

Charlie turned.

“I’m Beto,” the guy said, extending his free hand. “Room 334.”

And that was how he met Beto Montenegro.

He had to have just arrived. There was no way Charlie would have missed him otherwise.

Beto was… gorgeous didn’t begin to cover it. Stunning came closer. Breathtaking closer still, but even that felt slightly inadequate, like describing the Grand Canyon as “really large”. He was easily the most beautiful person Charlie had ever seen, and that included Nick. Nick was beautiful too, obviously. Nick was objectively, empirically, almost aggressively handsome, all that solid golden mass of him, the kind of looks that made people stop mid-sentence. But Nick’s beauty was grounded, real, something you could put your hands on. Beto looked like he’d been assembled somewhere else entirely, somewhere the laws of proportion and symmetry were taken considerably more seriously than they were here.

He was tall and lean, golden-skinned even in the flat light of the common room, curly dark hair falling across his forehead in a way that managed to look both effortless and architectural. He was wearing shorts and those ubiquitous flip-flops that apparently every single person west of Nevada owned and wore constantly regardless of occasion, and he still somehow looked like he’d made a considered aesthetic choice.

Charlie glanced down at his own carefully ironed chinos. He looked like a slop.

“Charlie. Room 333.” he said. “Guess we’re neighbours.”

“Nice to meet you, irmão,” Beto said, smiling a dazzling wide smile to Charlie. “Love you accent, by the way. Brit’s got the sexiest accent.”

“And I love yours,” said Luna immediately, leaning across Charlie with zero subtlety. “Where are you from?”

“Here in L.A., but I was born in Brazil.”

Luna’s eyes lit up. “Oh, Brazil is so nice. I really wanna visit someday. You miss it?”

“Every day,” said Beto, simply, and something warm and unguarded moved across his face for just a second before the easy smile came back. He turned to Charlie. “And you? Whereabouts in the UK?”

“This town called Whitstable. Doubt you’ve heard of it.” Charlie tilted his head. “You?”

“Place called Belo Horizonte. You probably haven’t heard of it either.”

“I haven’t,” Charlie admitted. “Though honestly my knowledge of Brazil is embarrassingly limited. I know it’s big, I know the football team, and I know, very importantly, that you guys don’t speak Spanish. Learned that one early.”

Beto raised his eyebrows. “Oh yeah?”

“I said muchas gracias to a bloke wearing a Brazil national team shirt once,” Charlie said. “Man, the look he gave me. I thought he was going to have me arrested.”

Beto threw his head back and laughed, a real laugh, loud and completely unself-conscious.

“Oh man, big mistake.” Beto looked at him, pretending to be serious. “And since we’re on the subject: Brazil’s capital is Brasília, not Rio. Those two little pieces of information will genuinely prevent you from being murdered if you ever meet another Brazilian.”

“I won’t forget it,” Charlie said solemnly.

Luna rose from the sofa at that moment, saying something about finding the loo and disappearing into the crowd, and Charlie turned to give Beto his full attention.

“What’s Beto short for?”

Beto’s smile turned wicked. “Guess.”

Charlie considered. “Roberto?”

“Nope.”

“Alberto”

“Getting colder, actually.”

Charlie dredged through the ruins of two years of Spanish GCSE, hoping it wasn’t too different from Portuguese. “Um… Norberto?”

“Francisberto.”

Charlie blinked.

“That sounds...” Charlie searched for the diplomatic phrasing.

“Hideous,” Beto finished for him. “I know. Mom and dad thought it would be a wonderful idea to honour both grandfathers in one name. Francisco and Roberto.” He spread his hands. “And so that abomination was born. I’ve been going by Beto since I was old enough to have an opinion about it.”

“Beto is really sweet though,” said Charlie, laughing. “How would Charlie translate? Carlitos?”

“Only Spanish speakers use ito for diminutives,” Beto said, shaking his head. “In Portuguese we use inho. So you’d be Carlinhos.”

“Carliños,” Charlie repeated.

“Carlinhos,” Beto said again, slower this time, separating it out with patient enunciation. “The nhos sound, think of the ni in onion, but softer, coming through your nose. Car-li-nhos.”

“Car-li-nhos,” Charlie tried, feeling approximately three years old.

Beto nodded with the approving solemnity of a language teacher passing a borderline student on a technicality. “You’re a natural.”

“What about Nick?”

“Nico, probably. Though honestly it’s not very common in Brazil, we’d mostly just say Nick.” Beto tilted his head. “Why? Who’s Nick?”

“My boyfriend.”

Beto closed his eyes briefly. Opened them. Looked at Charlie with an expression of profound, theatrical resignation.

“Of course,” he said. “Of course the cutest guy on the floor is already taken. Naturally. Why would it be any other way.”

Charlie felt warmth rise in his cheeks and hoped the common room lighting was doing him any favours. His instinct, honed by years of not quite believing compliments when they arrived, was to assume he’d misread it. That Beto was one of those people that were naturally friendly. Just American niceness, or Brazilian niceness, or some combination of the two that Charlie hadn’t encountered before and was therefore misreading as something more pointed than it was. But he could tell Beto meant it.

“Is Nick here too?” Beto asked, glancing around the room as if expecting to spot someone with a sign hanging from his neck reading CHARLIE’S BOYFRIEND.

“No, he went to a party at Delta Tau Phi,” Charlie said, reaching into his pocket for his phone. “Let me show you.”

“Really?” Beto raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t take you for a guy who dated frat bros, Carlinhos.”

“He’s still deciding whether to rush,” Charlie said, unlocking his screen. “And I’m quietly hoping he doesn’t, if I’m honest. Here, that’s my Nico.”

He opened Nick’s Instagram and scrolled to the most recent post, uploaded just yesterday. Nick on the beach, sprawled in a low wooden beach chair with the ease of someone completely comfortable in his own skin, wearing nothing but a tiny American flag-themed Speedo, stars on one side, stripes on the other, that made his bulge look borderline obscene for a public beach. He was looking straight at the camera, one beefy arm raised in a casual flex, sun-golden and grinning, every inch the California golden boy he was slowly becoming.

Charlie held the phone out.

Beto took it, and Charlie watched his face carefully, not obviously, just a sidelong attention, the curiosity of someone who had been showing off their boyfriend for two and a half years and still hadn’t quite got tired of clocking the exact moment it landed. It always landed the same way, a small involuntary recalibration, the eyes doing something they couldn’t quite help. Charlie found it delightful every single time.

Beto looked at the screen for a long moment. There it was. The half-second pause. The slight shift in his expression.

“Caramba,“ he said finally, shaking his head with genuine approval. “That’s your man?” He handed the phone back. “Good job, Carlinhos. Damn.”

Charlie accepted the phone back with the serene satisfaction of a curator whose favourite painting had just received the correct response.

“I know. He’s way too hot for me, honestly.”

Beto pointed at him immediately.

“I was actually going to say the opposite. A twink like you and a hunk like that?” He gestured between the phone and Charlie with the decisive authority of someone who had given this genuine aesthetic consideration. “Perfect match. The fujoshis must absolutely lose their minds.”

They kept talking for a long time. That was the thing that surprised Charlie most, not that the conversation started easily, because Beto was clearly the kind of person who could start a conversation with a lamppost and have it engaged within thirty seconds, but that it stayed easy. That it deepened, without effort, the way good conversations did when both people were genuinely paying attention. They moved from hometowns to courses: — Beto was studying photography, which he mentioned with the confidence of someone who had already made his peace with every practical objection anyone had ever raised about it, and Charlie had found that immediately compelling. — to music to films to the particular disorientation of arriving somewhere new and having to rebuild your entire social world from scratch.

Charlie found himself talking more than he’d expected to. More than he usually did with people he’d known less than an hour. He wasn’t proud of it, but there had always been a small, uncharitable part of him that assumed people who looked like Beto Montenegro didn’t bother developing much beyond the surface. Why would you, when the surface was doing that much work for you already? It was an ugly assumption and he knew it, and Beto was dismantling it efficiently and without even trying, which was somehow the most thorough possible refutation of it.

Because Beto was genuinely, almost disarmingly kind.

He complimented Charlie’s course with what seemed like actual curiosity rather than politeness, asking which writers he loved and then listening to the answer like it mattered. He laughed at Charlie’s jokes a beat before the punchline, which meant he was actually following rather than waiting for his turn to speak. When a girl from down the hall drifted over to introduce herself, Beto greeted her warmly and asked about her course with genuine interest, and when a lad Charlie vaguely recognised from the lift stopped by, Beto asked whether he’d managed to sort out the issue with his housing allocation he’d apparently mentioned to someone at some point and whether it had been resolved.

But each time, after a minute or two, his attention came back. To Charlie. Fully, completely, as if Charlie was simply the most interesting thing in the room and Beto saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

Charlie was aware, with a kind of distant, observational clarity, of what that attention was doing to him. It wasn’t anything inappropriate. It wasn’t even anything he could properly name. It was just.. warmth. That warmth of being found interesting by someone who had no obligation to find you interesting, someone who could have been talking to anyone in the room and had chosen, repeatedly and apparently deliberately, to keep talking to you. Charlie knew what it felt like to be loved by Nick, and this was nothing like that, was a completely different category of thing. But it rhymed with something. With the feeling of being seen. Of taking up space in someone else’s attention without apologising for it.

He hadn’t felt that, outside of Nick, in a very long time.

As the night wore on, Charlie got progressively looser. He chose to blame the punch, which he was becoming increasingly convinced had not been as non-alcoholic as the hand-written card had promised. There was simply no other explanation for the fact that he was now, at nearly eleven o’clock, engaged in an enthusiastic and completely unironic dance-off with Beto and Luna to a song he’d never heard before and couldn’t name, in the middle of a common room in California, three thousand miles from home, having what was objectively an excellent time.

He would not normally have done this. Charlie Spring did not, as a rule, dance in public. He had opinions about dancing in public. And yet here he was, completely unbothered, laughing so hard his sides hurt while Beto demonstrated something he claimed was called the passinho and Luna immediately tried to copy it. Charlie was laughing at her attempts when he felt his phone buzzing on his pocket.

Nick had sent a photo. He and a tall, tanned, broadly grinning lad Charlie recognise as Harp had their arms locked around each other’s shoulders, both making exaggerated kissing faces at the camera, red plastic cups raised high. DELTA BROS FOR LIFE, Nick had captioned it. Charlie snorted, turned to Luna and Beto, and pulled them both in without explanation. Luna threw her arm around his shoulder from the left, Beto leaned in from the right, pressing his warm cheek to Charlie’s, and Charlie stuck his tongue out and took the photo. He typed your party sucks and sent it before pocketing the phone, still grinning.

Thirty seconds later his phone buzzed again. Nick had replied with a string of crying-laughing emojis and: who’s the fit bloke?

Charlie looked at Beto, who was demonstrating the passinho again with complete commitment.

He typed back: my new best friend. be jealous

He pocketed the phone and went back to dancing, but a few minutes later it buzzed again, a video this time. Charlie stepped sideways out of the dancing to look at it, and felt his chin drop.

Nick was standing in front of a beer pong table, completely naked. Both hands were cupped firmly over his bits, which was doing the bare minimum and absolutely nothing else to preserve his dignity, because every other inch of him was on full display. Other guys were beside him in various states of equal undress, all of them howling with laughter, and the crowd around them was enormous, phones raised in every direction, the whole scene lit up by screens and string lights and the anarchic energy of a frat party that had gone fully off the rails.

The video wasn’t long, not even twenty seconds, and Charlie watched it again. Then again. A message appeared beneath it: your man sucks at beer pong lmaooo followed by a crying laughing emoji, sent presumably by Harp from Nick’s phone.

He wasn’t a jealous person. He’d made his peace with that early on, because jealousy and Nick Nelson were a combination that would have sent a lesser man to an early grave. You couldn’t date someone who looked like Nick and spend your energy resenting every double-take, every turned head, every person who watched him walk past and forgot, briefly, what they’d been doing. It would be exhausting. Charlie had decided, somewhere around the third month of their relationship, that he would simply accept it as a fact of life.

But this was something different.

He watched the video a third time. All those phones raised. All those people laughing and filming, and Nick standing there completely oblivious, hands over his crotch, muscles catching the light, grinning that enormous grin. The kind of video that travelled. That got screenshotted and shared and sent around group chats until it had covered the entire campus and then kept going. Thousandof people, maybe more, watching it in the next few days and thinking what anyone with eyes would think. Look at that body. Nick Nelson is so fucking hot. He’s single? Who cares if he’s single?

Charlie was aware, distantly and with some confusion, that his face had gone slightly warm and his undies were a little more tighter than they were moments ago. He didn’t examine it too closely. Just typed back a string of crying laughing emojis, pocketed his phone, and went to find Luna… but the feeling stayed.

It stayed with him when he and Beto ended up attempting to teach Luna a card game neither of them could fully remember the rules of, all three of them arguing cheerfully over a increasingly disputed version of it. It stayed when someone put a playlist on that was somehow exactly right for eleven o’clock in a common room full of people who’d stopped being strangers, and Charlie found himself singing along to Queen. It stayed through the last of the terrible punch and the final brownies and the gradual thinning of the crowd as people drifted off in twos and threes toward their rooms. Around two in the morning, when most people had gone and the RA was quietly stacking chairs, Charlie and Beto climbed the stairs to the third floor together. They were both considerably more drunk than the non-alcoholic punch had any right to have made them, and were laughing at something that had stopped being funny four flights ago and somehow kept getting funnier, shushing each other theatrically on the landings and then immediately laughing harder.

When they stopped in front of room 333, Beto turned to him, swaying only a bit, and kissed one cheek with warm lips, then the other, his mouth warm against Charlie’s skin as he slurred something soft and Portuguese against his neck — foi um prazer te conhecer, irmão — which Charlie filed away to ask about later since his brain was currently in no condition to translate anything. Then Beto pulled back, looked at him with great solemnity, and declared that he was counting the minutes until their coffee date tomorrow.

“Goodnight, irmão,” he said, already moving toward 334.

“Goodnight,” Charlie said, smiling at the closed door for a moment longer than necessary before letting himself into his own room.

He lay down on his bed in the dark, still warm from the evening, still smiling faintly, and the feeling was still there, somewhere in his gut. His mind was going a million kilometres an hour. He should sleep. He should shower. He should text Nick, check he’d found somewhere safe to crash. He was horny.

When that thought arrived it rather crowded everything else out. He lay with it for a moment, mildly surprised by its specificity and persistence. He was horny, had been horny ever since watching that video, which was nearly three hours ago now, which meant it had sat with him through the card game and the singing and the stairs and Beto’s goodbye, patient, waiting for him to have a moment alone to acknowledge it.

Well. There he was. Alone.

The other bed sat empty across the room, his roommate, Lucas Adams downtown for the night at some friend’s gaming thing. The room was quiet in a way it usually wasn’t. Charlie stared at the ceiling in the dark. If Nick were there, they’d have made excellent use of the empty room and the privacy and the hour. But Nick wasn’t there. Nick was, somewhere across campus, presumably clothed again by now, probably asleep on someone’s sofa.

Charlie reached over and turned off the bedside lamp.

He let his eyes drift shut, one arm flung lazily over his head, the other already sliding down the front of his undies before he could talk himself out of it. The fabric was warm from the evening’s dancing, a little sticky at the waistband where sweat had gathered during the passinho attempts. He palmed himself through it first, testing, feeling the way his body responded with that familiar twitch.

Nick.

Charlie’s breath hitched as he pictured it again: that grainy thirty-second clip Harp had sent from Nick’s phone. Nick standing there in the middle of a beer pong table, completely bare, hands cupped over himself in that half-hearted attempt at modesty that did nothing to hide the sheer power of him. The way the string lights had caught on the broad line of his shoulders, the heavy curve of his chest, the solid strength of his thighs planted wide. Charlie let his mind wander further, the way it always did on nights like this. Nick coming back later, still buzzing from the party, stripping Charlie out of these same undies with that focused hunger he got sometimes. Nick pressing him down onto the bed, all that familiar weight and warmth, the press of lips to his neck, the quiet murmur of his voice saying missed you, Char like it was the simplest truth in the world.

Charlie’s hand moved in slow strokes, building the rhythm they both knew so well, the one that always left them tangled and breathless and laughing into each other’s mouths afterward. It felt good. Safe. Like slipping into the exact shape they’d carved out together over the years. Charlie’s hips rolled up once, chasing the memory, a soft sound slipping out before he could catch it.

But the evening had layered other things on top of it, and they refused to stay in the background.

Beto.

His laugh, warm and unself-conscious, echoing in his ear during the dance-off. The way he had leaned in close for that ridiculous photo, cheek brushing Charlie’s, the faint scent of something tropical and sun-warmed still clinging to his skin hours later. The way Beto had listened when Charlie rambled about his capstone ideas, dark eyes interested, like Charlie’s words were something worth holding onto. Carlinhos, he’d called him, the name rolling off his tongue like it already belonged there.

Charlie’s strokes didn’t falter, but the fantasy shifted, just a fraction. Not enough to notice at first. Just the memory of warm brown eyes catching his across the sofa, holding a beat longer than they needed to. Nick’s hands, those big, familiar hands, sliding over someone else’s shoulders now. Not Charlie’s. Golden skin gleaming under the fairy lights of their dorm room, warm brown eyes locked on Nick’s with that same interested gaze from the sofa. Nick’s mouth on a neck that wasn’t his, the sexy drawl of his voice saying something soft and hungry against skin that caught the light like it had been brushed with sun even at midnight. Charlie’s breath caught. He tried to pull the image back, but the new details kept sliding in, uninvited and vivid. The subtle flex of those different muscles under golden skin as Nick’s hands mapped them. The way warm brown eyes would flutter half-closed in pleasure, the kind of look that said I see you without needing words.

He told himself to stop. To drag it back to the safe place where it was just him and Nick, the way it had always been. But his hand kept moving, tighter now, thumb sweeping over the slick head of his cock as the fantasy deepened against his will.

Nick was on his back on his narrow bed, fairy lights casting golden flecks across his sweat-slick chest. Those full lips, fuller than Charlie’s, plush and dark and parted on a moan, were wrapped around the thick base of Nick’s cock, taking him deep, slow, like the person attached to them had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it. Nick’s big hand was tangled in dark hair, guiding, his hips rolling up in that powerful way Charlie knew so well. Sweat beaded on Nick’s skin, tracing the grooves of his abs, the deep cut of his V-line, glistening as he fucked into a mouth that wasn’t Charlie’s. The Brazilian accent spilled out, completely foreign in that place, but entirely welcomed, wrapping around Nick’s name like it belonged there. “Nico… fuck, you taste so good, irmão…” The words curled through the fantasy, warm and rough, and Nick groaned in response, the sound deep and wrecked in a way that made Charlie’s own strokes falter for half a second before speeding up.

He could see it so clearly now. Nick flipping him, that strength lifting and turning until the golden body was on all fours, back arched, arse presented high and perfect. Nick’s hands gripping those hips, hips narrower than his own but firmer, more defined, and sliding in, slow at first, then deeper, harder, sweat dripping from his brow onto the smooth golden back beneath him. The accent again, broken this time on a gasp: “Yes, right there, Nico, harder—” Nick’s rhythm picking up, the slap of skin on skin loud in the quiet room, his own voice rough and possessive as he leaned down to bite at that sun-kissed shoulder.

Charlie’s free hand fisted in the sheets, hips jerking up into his fist as the image burned behind his eyelids. He wasn’t supposed to be seeing this. Wasn’t supposed to feel the hot twist in his gut at the sight of Nick like that, lost, sweating, driving into someone who looked at him with those warm brown eyes blazing with pure want. But the ache was undeniable now, the fantasy refusing to let go. The way Nick’s muscles would flex with every thrust, sweat sliding down the curve of his spine, the filthy sounds mixing with that accent curling around moans of Nico, please, don’t stop—

It hit him hard and sudden, the orgasm ripping through him with a choked sound muffled against his own forearm. Thick stripes of come painted his stomach and chest, warm and messy, his cock pulsing hard in his grip as he rode it out, hips stuttering, toes curling into the sheets. For a hazy second the world narrowed to nothing but the aftershocks and the sound of his own breathing.

Then the room came back. The quiet. The settling awareness of what his mind had just done.

Charlie lay there, chest heaving, a faint sheen of sweat cooling on his skin, and let out a soft, breathless laugh that was equal parts surprised and mortified.

He couldn’t wait for Nick to meet Beto tomorrow.

Welcome to Part Two of Heartstealer!

We’re in Charlie’s head now, and I know you guys are probably desperate to get back to the aftermath of Houston. I promise we’ll get there. But first I needed to take some time to show you how Charlie got to the point of asking Beto to do what he did. Also, we have a cover now!

Please don’t forget to comment” And if you’ve been on the fence about a paid subscription, today is the last day of March and I am exactly one subscriber away from my monthly goal. One. If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is.