Heartbreaker, a Hearstopper Story - Ch. 07

Gay Erotica; Cuckold, Cheating, +18

The bar at the Marriott Marquis Houston was called Rosette, and it was the kind of place Nick would’ve found dead impressive under any other circumstances, all moody lighting and dark oak. The hotel itself was something else, a converted post office from what Nick could gather, all brutalist bones dressed up in warm leather and polished concrete, the sort of American reinvention that shouldn’t have worked and somehow did. The Sharks had got a deal through the university, something about a corporate rate and the athletics department pulling strings, and Nick had spent approximately thirty seconds admiring the room before dropping face-first onto the bed and staring at the ceiling until his legs stopped shaking.

That had been hours ago.

It was close to midnight now, and he was on his third bourbon — Blanton’s Single Barrel, neat, no ice, because if he was going to do this he was going to do it properly — and the glass was most of the way down already.

Getting that drink had been its own special brand of misery.

He’d tried Midtown first. Someone, Grimmy, had mentioned Washington Avenue before everything had gone to shit, called it the place to be on a Saturday night, all bars and noise and the merciful anonymity of a crowd that didn’t know your face. Nick had walked there from the hotel in the thick Houston night, hands in pockets, jaw set, the kind of walking you did when you needed your body to be doing something because your mind absolutely could not be trusted on its own.

The first bar had a bouncer who’d looked at his Kent driving licence like it was written in a foreign language. Which, Nick supposed, technically—

“You’re twenty.”

“Observant,” Nick had said pleasantly.

The second hadn’t even entertained it. One look, one shake of the head, one gesture toward the pavement that required no translation whatsoever.

The third had seemed promising. Dim inside, loud, the barman already busy and not obviously interested in checking anything. Nick had made it three steps through the door before a woman materialised from somewhere in the back, plucked the licence from his hand, read it, handed it back, and said “no” with the serene finality of someone who had been saying no to people like Nick for twenty years and slept perfectly well at night.

He’d stood on Washington Avenue in the humidity and thought, with extraordinary feeling: Stupid America. Completely, irredeemably, pig-headedly stupid America and their stupid bloody laws.

He’d walked back to the hotel.

The barman at Rosette was a big, quiet bloke, mid-forties, shaved head, forearms like a man who’d done something physical before he’d done this. He’d looked up when Nick came in and dropped onto a stool at the far end of the bar, away from the few remaining couples and the group of suits near the window. Looked at him properly, the way experienced barmen did, a single read that took in everything worth knowing.

He hadn’t asked for ID. He hadn’t said anything at all. He’d just nodded and turned to his bottles. The Blanton’s had arrived two minutes later. Neat. No ceremony. Nick had wrapped both hands around it and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, and the barman had already moved away to give him his silence.

That was a while ago now.

He stared at the last inch of bourbon in his glass.

He wasn’t drunk enough.

That was the thing. Four Blanton’s deep and he could still see everything with perfect, merciless clarity, every moment replaying itself behind his eyes with the unasked-for precision of a highlight reel assembled specifically to cause him the maximum possible damage. His mind kept running it back. Kept finding the exact moments where a different choice, a sharper instinct, half a second’s better judgement might have —

He stopped that thought and picked up his glass.

The worst of it wasn’t the anger. He knew how to carry anger, had always found it almost comfortable, something solid to press against. What sat in his chest tonight was quieter and far more corrosive than anger. It was the specific weight of having let people down. People who had trusted him. People who had built something alongside him, and had looked at him at the critical moment with absolute certainty that he would deliver.

He hadn’t delivered.

Nick stared at his own reflection in the dark mirror behind the bar. He looked — Christ. He looked like what he was. A man, no, a boy, a stupid fucking boy, who had been somewhere terrible and come out the other side still wearing it. Eyes flat. Jaw tight. The particular hollowness of someone who’d held it together through everything that required holding together and had now, in the quiet and the dark, simply run out.

He wondered if his teammates were all right. Felt a fresh wave of something hot and wretched at the thought. Still, Nick didn’t reach for his phone. He wasn’t ready to be someone’s to talk to yet. Wasn’t ready to be looked at, even through a screen, by anyone who knew what tonight meant. There was a version of Nick Nelson, the reliable one, the one people counted on, the one who held the line, and that version felt very far away right now. Like something he’d misplaced and wasn’t sure he deserved to find again yet.

He took the last sip of bourbon. It burnt all the way down and settled nowhere useful.

They had lost. The Sharks had lost. Nick had lost.

Final score: 29-34.

The plane had been mental.

A charter flight, another thing the athletics department had apparently decided was warranted for a collegiate final, and Nick had clocked the lads’ faces when they’d filed onto it, the way they’d gone uncharacteristically quiet for about thirty seconds before Harrington had broken the silence by declaring it the fanciest thing he’d ever been on and immediately tried to recline his seat so far back it was practically horizontal. Tank had photographed everything. The overhead lockers, the complimentary nuts, the little foil-wrapped chocolates on the seats. Torres had given a completely unprompted speech from the front of the aisle about destiny and legacy and the pride of Westbridge that had started as a joke and somehow, by the end of it, hadn’t been one at all, and twenty-one rugby players had cheered and banged the armrests until the flight attendant had looked at them all with the resigned warmth of someone who had drawn a particular short straw today and was making her peace with it.

Nick had sat by the window with Mallory in the aisle seat beside him, the two of them not talking much, which with Mallory meant something. He’d had his headphones on but one ear free, watching the California coastline give way to desert and then to the vastness of Texas spreading out below, and he’d felt it building in his chest the whole way. Something enormous and clean. The particular feeling of being exactly where you were supposed to be, moving toward exactly what you’d been moving toward all year. He’d turned it over in his mind and let himself have it, just this once, because it was the finals and they’d earned the right. Invincible. That was the word. Like everything, the early mornings, the brutal sessions, every drop of everything they’d put in, had calcified into something unbreakable inside him, and he was carrying it into Houston and nothing was going to touch it.

The stadium had done something to all of them.

Nick had been in proper grounds before. The Stoop with his uncle for Harlequins matches, even Twickenham once on a school trip he’d talked about for six months afterward. He knew what a real stadium felt like. But walking out of the tunnel at Shell Energy Stadium for the warm-up, with the late afternoon Houston sun blazing off twelve thousand empty seats that were going to be packed in two hours, made the lads stop. Just stopped, all of them, collectively, without anyone saying a word, a spontaneous halt at the tunnel mouth as the scale of it landed on them all at once. Tank, who was not generally given to poetry, had said quietly: “Oh, man.” Which had covered it, really. Nick had stood there and looked out at the pitch, the grass a vivid green under the floodlights already warming against the fading sky, the white lines sharp and clean, the try zones bright as fresh paint, and felt something shift in his chest that wasn’t nerves. Something bigger than nerves, something that lived on the other side of nerves where everything went very still and very clear. Torres had put a hand on his shoulder and said “this is ours” and Nick had believed it. Completely. Without reservation. The way you only believed things when they were true.

Coach Hendricks had given his pre-match talk in the home dressing room, theirs for the night, a proper one, nothing like the cramped concrete affairs at half the grounds they’d visited this season. Individual stalls, names above each one, the Westbridge white kit hanging up fresh and clean. The man had stood in the middle of it all in his match-day dark navy suit, and looked at them for a long moment before he said anything, and that silence had done more than the words that followed. He’d talked about the journey. Not the season, further back than that, back to building something from nothing at a university that had never cared much about rugby, back to losing the first three games and showing up anyway. He’d talked about belief in the specific, unglamorous sense, not the motivational poster kind but the kind that lived in your legs at the end of a session when everything in you wanted to stop and you didn’t stop. He’d said it quietly, without theatrics, and the room had been so still you could hear the distant noise of the Brigades’ warm-up filtering through the concrete walls.

Then Coach had looked at Nick, directly. “Nelson,” he’d said. “You know what to do.” Not a question. Not a command. A statement of fact from a man who had watched Nick for a full season and arrived at a conclusion he felt no need to qualify. Nick had felt it move through him like current.

For sixty minutes, Coach had been right.

The Sharks had played like something possessed in the first half, sharp and physical and completely alive, the kind of rugby that came from a team that had been building toward a single moment all year and could feel it finally arriving. The stadium was full by then, thousand of bodies generating a wall of noise that Nick had felt in his gut more than heard with his ears, and the Sharks had fed off it rather than been crushed by it, which was when Nick had known they were the real thing. Torres had been immense. Grimmy had put in a tackle in the thirty-fifth minute that the Houston crowd had actually responded to with a kind of stunned, reluctant appreciation. And Nick… Nick had played the first half like something had been unlocked.

Every move arrived a fraction of a second before it was needed, his body doing things his mind hadn’t quite consciously decided yet. Every line he ran was the right line. Every pass he took he was already in position for. Every contact he made he won, cleanly, decisively, the kind of rugby where you stopped thinking and started simply being it. He could feel it in his blood, something electric, entirely clean. Fire in his veins. That was the only way he could describe it afterward. He’d had fire in his veins for sixty minutes and for those sixty minutes he had been, without question, the best player on that pitch.

His body had known it too. The Houston heat was a living thing, merciless even as the sun dipped low, turning the early evening air into something you could almost chew. By the twentieth minute Nick was soaked through, the Westbridge kit no longer clothing so much as a second, obscene skin. The white jersey clung desperately to his torso — plastered dark and transparent across the swell of his pecs, every line of muscle visible, nipples peaked and visible beneath the fabric like they were begging for attention. Sweat ran in steady rivulets down the flat plane of his stomach, pooling at the waistband before soaking lower. The white shorts were criminal. Nick’s bulge looked almost pornographic, the fat outline of his cock unmistakable even through the doubled layers of fabric and the cup he was wearing. The Brigades’ loosehead prop, a big cheerful Texan lad called Colt Barton, noticed around the half hour mark, straightening up from a scrum and taking one long look before turning to his teammates with an expression of theatrical bewilderment and saying something that Nick couldn’t fully hear over the crowd noise but that involved the words British and everything’s bigger in Texas and produced the kind of laughter that briefly threatened the structural integrity of the scrum.

He scored a try six minutes later purely out of spite, and then, just before the break, he scored another. Five metres out, the ball in his hands, two Brigades defenders hitting him simultaneously from either side with everything they had, and Nick had simply kept going, legs driving, body low, dragging both of them with him through sheer bloody-minded force until he got the ball down over the white paint. When he came up Torres was already in his face, screaming something incoherent, and the Westbridge contingent in the far corner of the stadium had lost their collective minds entirely. Nick stood there, chest heaving, both defenders still untangling themselves from his legs, and felt it again, that clean, enormous certainty settling back into his bones like it had never left. Nothing could touch him. Nothing could touch any of them.

They’d gone in at half time leading 17-12.

The second half had started well enough. The Brigades had adjusted, tightened their defensive line, began to slow the Sharks’ ball at the breakdown, and Nick had felt the rhythm shift but hadn’t been worried. You rode these periods. You kept your shape and you kept your discipline and you waited for the game to open back up. Standard. He’d done it a hundred times. Sixty-first minute, 17-19 down after two Brigades penalties had flipped the scoreline, and Nick had been tracking the Brigades’ centre, a big lad, Beaumont, who’d been causing problems all half, moving into position for what looked like a straightforward defensive read, the kind he made in his sleep. Close the angle, get his body in the channel, wrap and drive. Textbook. He’d done it in training that week, done it in the semifinal, done it in approximately every meaningful match he’d played in the past three years.

Except that in the sixty-first minute of the collegiate final, in the fraction of a second before contact, his eyes had moved.

Not far. Not for long. A flicker, involuntary, pulled by something in the crowd behind the far touchline. A shape, slight and dark-haired, standing in the wrong place for a Westbridge supporter, or maybe the right place, he couldn’t tell, the crowd a blur of colour and movement at that distance. Something about the silhouette had snagged him. The particular way someone was standing, slight and still amid all that noise, curly hair catching the floodlight. It had lasted less than a second. Less than half a second. The kind of thing that shouldn’t matter, that had never mattered before, because Nick had always been able to keep the important things in their separate compartments, the pitch in one place and everything else in another, and the compartments had always held.

They hadn’t held. Beaumont had gone through the gap like Nick was painted on.

He’d known immediately. Before he’d even turned, before he’d seen Torres’ face, before the Brigades were celebrating and the Westbridge contingent in the far corner had gone horribly quiet, he’d known with sick, total certainty exactly what he’d done and exactly why he’d done it. He’d been looking for Charlie. In the stands, in the wrong moment, in the sixty-first minute of the most important match of his life, he’d been looking for Charlie like a kid scanning the crowd for his mum. Like he needed him there. Like even now, even in the middle of everything that was supposed to be only his, he couldn’t stop reaching for the one person who had always made him feel like the ground was solid.

The Brigades had converted. 17-26.

The Sharks had fought back. Of course they had, they were too stubborn and too proud not to, and Nick had played the last nineteen minutes with everything he had left, had thrown his body into every tackle and every carry with a ferocity that was mostly self-punishment and he knew it, had dragged them back to 29-34 on sheer bloody-mindedness before the clock ran out.

It hadn’t been enough.

Nick set his empty glass down and caught the barman’s eye. The man came over, looked at the glass, looked at Nick, hesitated just a fraction. Then reached for the Blanton’s and poured. Before Nick could touch it, a large hand wrapped around the glass, and Nick turned just in time to see Coach Hendricks draining his drink in a single swallow, set it back down, and nodded slowly.

“Blanton’s Single Barrel.” said Coach. He gave a small, approving nod. “Didn’t know you had taste, Nelson.”

He turned to the barman. “Nothing more for the lad or I’m calling the cops.”

The barman just shrugged with the detachment of a man who had not been consulted on any of this and had no strong feelings about the outcome either way. He put the Blanton’s back on the shelf and moved away down the bar. Coach Hendricks pulled out the stool beside Nick and sat down. He didn’t say anything immediately. Just sat there, forearms on the bar, looking straight ahead at the mirror behind the bottles, and the silence between them was so weighted and so familiar that Nick felt something in his throat tighten unexpectedly.

“How long you planning to sit here feeling sorry for yourself, kid?” Coach asked, not looking at him, eyes fixed on the mirror behind the bar the same way Nick’s had been for the past two hours.

Nick nodded at the empty glass. “Was planning to stay until I had enough of those to black out.”

“And that’s going to help you how, exactly?”

“It won’t, but at least I’ll be out.” He was quiet for a moment. “I fucked up, Coach.”

“You did,” Coach said.

Just that. No cushioning, no kindly reframing. Nick had always appreciated that about Hendricks: the man didn’t insult you with softness when you didn’t deserve it. It should have felt like a blow. Instead it felt, obscurely, like something closer to relief. But then he kept going.

“We all fucked up tonight.”

Something hot moved through Nick’s chest at that. His jaw tightened, a muscle jumping beneath the skin, and he felt his hand close around counter without meaning to, knuckles whitening slightly before he made himself set it back down. He knew what Coach was doing. He knew it was reasonable and correct and the kind of thing a good coach was supposed to say, and he resented every syllable of it.

“Don’t give me that we all did bollocks, either. Me. It was me.”

Hendricks turned on his stool then and looked at Nick with something tired and entirely unsurprised in his face, the look of a man who had been coaching long enough to have had this exact conversation in a dozen different bars in a dozen different cities.

“You know there were fourteen blokes on that pitch with you, right?”

“Fuck off, sir” Nick snarled. “I dropped Beaumont in the sixty-first. That was the match. That was me.”

“You did,” Coach said again, with the same flat calm. “And Torres lost his binding on their third try and gave away a penalty that cost us three points. And Harrington read the lineout wrong twice in the second half and we lost our own ball both times. And Grimshaw was so far offside in the seventy-fourth minute I nearly had a stroke on the sideline.” He paused. “You see where I’m going with this, kid?”

Nick said nothing.

“No? Should I keep going? Because I’ve got eleven more.”

Nick heard every word. Knew, in the rational, functioning part of his brain that was still just about operational beneath the bourbon and the self-loathing, that Coach was right. Of course he was right. Rugby was fifteen men and the mathematics of collective failure were never as simple as one moment, one player, one lapse in the sixty-first minute. He knew that. Had always known that.

He didn’t want it.

There was something almost desperate in the way he needed the fault to be his and his alone tonight, something that went beyond the match entirely, a hunger for the clean, uncomplicated pain of being solely, entirely to blame. He wanted to sit in it. Wanted to pull it over himself like a blanket and stay under it, because self-flagellation at least had a shape to it, had edges he could press against, and the alternative — distributing the guilt, diluting it, sharing it out among fifteen men until his portion became survivable — felt unbearable in a way he couldn’t have explained to Coach or to anyone else in this bar. He needed to be the villain of tonight. Needed it the way he’d needed the bourbon, not because it would help but because it was the only pain available that was straightforward.

Because the real reason his eyes had moved in the sixty-first minute wasn’t something he could give Coach. He’d been looking for Charlie. In the stands, in the wrong moment, he’d been scanning fifty thousand faces for that one that one — and the unbearable irony of it, the thing he couldn’t look at directly, was that Charlie wasn’t even there. Charlie was back in Westbridge. Had swapped his presentation date with Reyes. And Nick had said don’t be daft, it’s fine, sort your friend out and had kissed him on the forehead and meant every word of it.

He didn’t mean it now.

Now, sitting in the wreckage of the biggest match of his life with three bourbons in his bloodstream and Torres’ face burned behind his eyelids, he felt something ugly and unfair stirring in his chest that he wasn’t proud of. It had been a genuine mistake. A kind one, even, that was so bloody Charlie, wasn’t it, dropping everything to help someone who needed it, not even thinking about himself. Nick knew that. Knew it was irrational and ungenerous and exactly the sort of thing Charlie didn’t deserve from him.

He felt it anyway. Hot and small and mean and entirely his own.

So he’d take the rugby. All of it, every point, every lapse, every one of the fifteen men on that pitch piled onto his shoulders where it didn’t entirely belong. It was simpler than the truth. And tonight, simple was the only thing he could carry.

Coach let the silence sit for a moment longer. Then he exhaled through his nose and leaned back on his stool.

“You know how many finals I’ve lost?” he said. “As a player, as a coach. You want the number?”

Once again, Nick said nothing.

“Seven,” Coach said. “Seven finals. Including one I was absolutely certain we’d win.” He paused. “We were up by twelve with ten minutes to go.”

Nick looked at him.

“That’s rugby, kid.” Hendrick shrugged, and there was nothing performed about it, no theatrical wisdom, just a big South African man stating a fact he’d made his peace with a long time ago. “You win some. You lose some. Some you lose when you shouldn’t. Some you lose because fifteen blokes on the other side wanted it more on the day. That’s the game. That’s always been the game.” He picked up a bar napkin, looked at it, put it back down. “The ones who can’t handle losing have no business playing it.”

Nick stared at the bar. He wanted to say something back, wanted to find the argument, the rebuttal, the specific reason why this time was different from Coach’s seven finals and all his hard-won philosophical acceptance of defeat. He wanted to explain that it wasn’t just the loss itself but the manner of it, the inexcusable, self-inflicted stupidity of it, a man of his experience losing his focus in the sixty-first minute of a collegiate final because he was looking for his boyfriend in the stands like some lovesick teenager on his first date. He wanted to say he had let down twenty-one people who had trusted him and that no amount of training was going to scrub that clean. He wanted to say all of it.

He said none of it. Just sat there with his jaw tight and his hands flat on the mahogany and the weight of the evening pressing down on him from every direction, and after a moment the urge to argue deflated as quickly as it had risen, leaving nothing behind but the same exhausted shame that had been sitting in his chest all night. Coach was right. He knew Coach was right. He just wasn’t ready to let it be right yet, and some part of him suspected Coach knew that too, which was probably why he hadn’t pushed.

“So here’s what’s going to happen,” Coach said, his voice dropping into that particular register that meant the conversation was nearly over. “Tonight you sit here, you feel like shit, you go to bed. Tomorrow you get on the plane. Monday you’re back in training.” He stood up from the stool, straightening his suit jacket with the brisk finality of a man who had said what he came to say. “We’ve got a full pre-season and I intend to make it absolutely miserable for all of you.”

He clapped Nick once on the shoulder, firm and brief.

“Ring your boyfriend,” he said, already turning to leave. “In my experience there’s no loss in the world a good shag won’t at least put a dent in.”

“Charlie’s in California,” Nick said, bitterly.

Coach Hendricks paused. Turned back just enough to look at him over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised with the expression of a man who considered this a logistical problem rather than an emotional one.

“Go find someone else to fuck then, Nelson,” he said, with a shrug of magnificent indifference. “You’re a long way from home.”

He walked away before Nick could think of a single thing to say to that. Nick stayed.

Not because the bar held him, not because the bourbon had anything left to offer. He stayed because moving meant deciding where to go, and every direction led somewhere he didn’t want to be. Back to the room meant lying in the dark listening to Whittaker snore through the adjoining wall, staring at the ceiling with the match replaying behind his eyes on a loop he couldn’t kill. The lobby meant people, bright lights, the possibility of running into one of the lads still riding the grief in packs, and Nick couldn’t stomach the thought of another hand on his shoulder, another tough shit, man, another well-meaning face that would require him to perform something human in return.

So he sat. The Rosette had thinned around him while Coach was there, and now it was nearly empty, just a couple at a far booth speaking in murmurs, and a man in a grey suit two stools down who’d been nursing the same old fashioned for the better part of an hour, scrolling his phone with the glazed focus of someone avoiding a hotel room of his own. The jazz had shifted to something slower, a piano figure that repeated and repeated without resolving. Nick turned his glass in his fingers. The ice had melted, diluting the last finger of Blanton’s into something pale and thin. He thought about ordering another, even lifted his hand halfway before letting it settle back to the bar top. But the bourbon wasn’t what he wanted. Hadn’t been for a while now, if he was honest, and Nick was suddenly, dangerously, very tired of not being honest.

He gestured for the tab instead.

The barman produced it without comment, the leather folio placed with quiet precision. Nick tapped his phone against the terminal, the soft chirp absurdly cheerful against the stillness, and added a tip generous enough to cover the discretion as much as the drinks. The barman picked up the folio, glanced at the total, and then looked at Nick for a moment longer than the transaction required. Something passed between them. Not pity… more like recognition, the appraisal of a man who’d tended enough late nights to read the weather shifting behind a stranger’s eyes, who could see the exact moment a person stopped fighting the current and turned to face where it had been pulling them all along. For a breath, Nick thought he was going to say something.

He didn’t. Just gave a small nod, something between acknowledgment and farewell, and moved to the far end of the bar.

Good. Nick was done with wisdom from men old enough to know better. Done with Coach’s practical kindness. Done with the match, with the replay, with the scoreboard, with the version of himself who’d walked onto that pitch believing he was enough.

Done, mostly, with pretending.

He sat there a final moment, palms flat on the cool wood. Something had gone quiet inside him. Not peace, nothing so pure as that. It was the silence that comes after a long argument when one side finally stops answering. For months Nick had been holding a door shut with everything he had, shoulder braced, feet planted, every muscle straining against the weight on the other side. And now, sitting in this half-empty bar in a city that wasn’t his, a country that wasn’t his, three bourbons deep with a loss carved into his chest and Charlie a thousand miles away, he felt his hands drop from the wood and understood, with a clarity so calm it almost didn’t hurt, that he was going to stop holding it. Not because he’d been convinced. Not because Harp was right, or Coach had given him permission, or because the bourbon had dissolved his principles. But because he was so bloody tired. Tired in his bones, in the marrow, in whatever part of a man was supposed to keep the walls standing. The fight had used him up, and what was left wasn’t strong enough to keep saying no to something his whole body had been screaming yes to.

Nick became very still. His breathing changed, slower, deeper, settling into a rhythm that belonged to a man who’d made a decision, even if he hadn’t formed the words for it yet. The tightness he’d been carrying in his shoulders for months, so constant he’d forgotten it was there, loosened. Not all at once. Gradually, like a fist uncurling finger by finger. His jaw unclenched. His spine straightened. He looked different, sitting there, something in his posture had shifted from resistance to resolve, and if the difference was invisible to anyone watching, Nick felt it everywhere, a change in gravity, as though the ground beneath him had tilted just enough to make the next step inevitable.

He pulled his phone from his pocket. He held it in his palm for a moment, thumb resting on the dark screen, and the face that looked back at him in the glass was someone he almost didn’t recognise.

He didn’t ring Charlie.

He put the phone back in his pocket, slid off the stool, and stood. The bar was quiet around him, the piano still circling its unfinished phrase, the barman polishing a glass at the far end with his back half-turned. Nick rolled his shoulders once, the way he did before a match, a habit so deep it lived in his muscle memory, and walked toward the door.

The lobby of the Marriott Marquis opened before him, all warm limestone and bronze, and Nick turned left toward the lifts without breaking stride.

He wasn’t drunk. That was the thing. That was the thing he’d carry with him long after tonight became a scar he’d spend the rest of his life pressing his thumb against. Three bourbons over — that was warmth, not impairment. A looseness in his limbs, a softness at the edges of the night, but his thoughts were clear. Cruelly, mercilessly clear. He could feel every one of them, laid out in a neat row like evidence on a table, and he examined them with the detached precision of a man building the case for his own prosecution.

He knew what he was doing.

He knew it was wrong.

He knew he was going to do it anyway.

Tomorrow, Nick Nelson would hate himself for this. Tomorrow, he’d wake up and the full weight of it would land on his chest like a stone slab, and he’d have to live inside the skin of the man who did what he was about to do. Tomorrow would be unspeakable. But tomorrow was Tomorrow Nick’s problem. And Tonight Nick, this hollowed-out, loss-wrecked, quietly monstrous version of himself, riding a lift in a Houston hotel with his principles in a body bag, had stopped caring.

The display above the doors counted upward. Three. Four. Five.

Nick watched the numbers climb. His hands hung at his sides and he noticed with distant interest that they weren’t shaking. They should have been. Weeks ago, in that bathroom at Eaton Arts, his whole body had trembled like a fault line about to crack, every muscle fighting what his blood was screaming for. Now there was nothing. Just the low hum of the lif and the damning rhythm of his own heartbeat, calm as a man walking to church. That was worse, he thought. The shaking had at least been proof he was still fighting.

Seven. Eight.

The lift stopped. His floor. The doors slid open with a polite whisper, revealing the eighth-floor corridor, its patterned carpet stretching away under the soft glow of wall sconces toward the block of rooms the Sharks had been assigned. Whittaker was in 806. Torres in 810. Nick’s own room, 812, was halfway down on the right, the keycard still in his back pocket, the bed still made from this morning when he’d smoothed the covers with military precision because that was what you did on match day, you controlled the controllable, you built your rituals like walls against the chaos.

The doors stayed open. They stayed open for what felt like a very long time, long enough for Nick to see, with perfect clarity, the simplicity of what stepping out would mean. Ten paces to 812. Keycard. Door. Bed. Lie down. Stare at the ceiling. Hate himself for wanting it but not for doing it. Wake up tomorrow still able to look Charlie in the eye without flinching.

Ten paces. That was all.

The doors waited. Patient. Impartial.

Nick didn’t move.

The doors closed.

The eighth floor disappeared behind brushed bronze, and with it the last version of Nick Nelson who could have walked away clean. He felt it go, a quiet severance, like a rope cut in the dark, and the lift resumed its climb with the same indifferent hum, carrying him upward through the building’s spine as the numbers ticked higher.

Nine. Ten. Eleven.

Twelve. Thirteen.

Fourteen.

The doors opened onto a corridor identical to his own and completely different. Same patterned carpet, same warm sconces, same hushed, climate-controlled air that every hotel in the world pumped through its veins like anaesthetic. But up here the quiet was thicker, more absolute. Nick stepped out.

Room 1412.

He didn’t need to check. He had heard it two days ago, casual as anything, tossed into some group conversation in the hotel lobby while they were all checking in — yeah, man, fourteenth floor, room 1412, they hooked me up — and Nick had said nothing, hadn’t reacted, hadn’t even paid attention. But his brain had caught it like a hand snatching a ball from the air, automatic, reflexive, and filed it somewhere deep and dark where Nick apparently kept the things he was planning to do before he’d admitted he was planning them. That fact, more than anything else tonight made Nick want to be sick. Because it meant this wasn’t a decision he’d made in a bar at midnight. It meant some part of him, some traitorous, calculating part buried beneath all the shame and the fighting and the I love Charlie, I love Charlie, I love Charlie had been building toward this room for months. Had been quietly, methodically packing for a trip Nick swore he’d never take.

He stopped in front of 1412. The door was identical to every other door in the corridor. Unremarkable. Nick was going to remember this door for the rest of his life. He stood there for three seconds. Maybe four. Long enough to feel the air conditioning ghost across his neck. Long enough to hear his own breathing, steady and even, the breathing of a man who had no excuse and knew it.

He rang the bell, and the door opened before the chime had finished its second note.

Beto stood in the doorway of room 1412 wearing nothing but a white towel slung low around his hips, the fabric barely clinging to the sharp cut of his Adonis belt, one careless tug from falling. His skin was still damp, water beading in scattered constellations across his chest and shoulders, catching the warm light from the room behind him like he’d been gilded by it. His dark hair was pushed back and those deep brown almond eyes that held Nick’s gaze with the calm, absolute certainty of someone who had never, not once, doubted this moment would come. Even from the doorway, from the careful distance Nick hadn’t yet closed, he could smell him — not the cologne this time, not that tropical weapon he usually deployed, but something rawer underneath, fresh soap and warm skin and the clean, damp heat of a body just stepped from water. Beto looked like something carved from light. Radiant. Golden. Inevitable.

And Nick hated him.

The revulsion hit like a physical wave that surged up from some deep, primal place in his gut and flooded his whole body with something hot and sick. Not desire. Not yet. Just pure, blinding, white-knuckled hate — for the way Beto stood there looking like that, looking like every filthy vision Nick had been torturing himself with for months, not a hair out of place, not a flicker of guilt or hesitation in those dark eyes, just that gorgeous, maddening, infuriating perfection that made Nick want to put his fist through the wall beside the doorframe. He hated the symmetry of him. Hated the water droplets tracing the lines of muscle as if even gravity was charmed by the bastard. Hated that Beto had clearly showered and prepared like this was a date, like this was something planned and welcomed and wanted, while Nick had been downstairs dismantling himself one bourbon at a time. Hated, most of all, the quiet knowing in Beto’s expression, the absence of surprise, the settled patience of a man who had simply been waiting for Nick to stop pretending.

Because that meant Beto had seen this in him before Nick had seen it in himself. Had read the ending while Nick was still on the first page, still telling himself the story had a different arc. And that knowledge, that Beto had known him better than he’d known himself, understood the precise dimensions of his weakness before Nick had even admitted it existed, that was the thing that made the bile rise sharp and burning in his throat.

That was the thing that would keep Nick up for years to come, the detail he’d return to in the dark hours when sleep wouldn’t have him and the guilt sat on his chest like a living thing. The revulsion was real. Every molecule of it, genuine. He looked at Beto Montenegro and felt sick with disgust, at Beto, at himself, at the obscene ease of this choreography, and it changed absolutely nothing. His feet didn’t move. His body didn’t turn. The hatred and the want existed in the same breath, occupied the same square inch of his chest, and the want was not even stronger. That would have been simpler, something he could have understood. It was just quieter. Patient. A hum beneath the roar of his self-loathing, steady as a pulse, impossible to outlast.

“Come inside,” Beto said.

That was all. No smirk, no loaded whisper, no Portuguese curling through the syllables like smoke. He stepped aside, one hand holding the door open, and the warm light from the room spilled into the corridor like an invitation Nick’s body had already accepted.

Nick walked in.

The room registered in fragments: a king-size bed with the covers pulled tight, a window showing Houston’s skyline glittering in the dark, the faint hiss of the air conditioning, a suitcase open on the luggage rack with clothes folded neatly inside because Beto was apparently the kind of person who folded things in hotel rooms, and somehow that small, domestic detail made Nick want to scream. The bathroom door was ajar, steam still curling out in thin wisps, the mirror inside fogged. The air smelled of shower heat and clean skin and that soap, warm scent that had hit him in the doorway, stronger now, everywhere, filling the room like something alive.

He heard the door click shut behind him and then Beto stopped in front of him. Close, but not touching. Maybe three feet between them, enough space for Nick to see all of him. Without ceremony, without theatre, without a single word, Beto hooked his thumb under the towel at his hip and let it fall. Completely naked. Not posing, not performing, just being, bare and unashamed and so staggeringly beautiful that Nick’s vision actually blurred for a half-second, like his eyes couldn’t process the whole of him at once.

And there it was. The desire. His old friend. His greatest enemy. It surged up from the place where he’d been drowning it for months, burying it under cold showers and sparring sessions and Charlie’s name repeated like a prayer, and it overwhelmed everything, the revulsion, the self-loathing, the bile, the grief, the loss, the guilt, swallowed them whole the way a wave swallows a stone, not destroying them but simply making them irrelevant, pulling them under the surface where they couldn’t reach him, not now, not yet.

Nick drank in the sight of him like a man who’d been crawling through a desert and had finally, finally been allowed to put his lips to water. His gaze moved slow and starving, tracing the architecture of Beto’s body with the raw hunger of someone who’d memorised every line from a distance and was now, for the first time, allowed to look without pretending he wasn’t. The broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist. Pecs meaty and gleaming where the water still clung. The abs. Those thighs, powerful and golden, built for wrapping around someone and not letting go. And even here, even now, Nick’s eyes travelled further, tracing the line of his hips to the curve of his arse that he knew was there even from the front, that impossible, gravity-defying swell that had started all of this in a gym on a cold January day that felt like another lifetime.

Then, when Nick’s eyes finally dragged back up to his face, Beto smiled. Not the predatory smirk from the bathroom. Not the knowing grin from the art studio. Something warmer, almost fond, the kind of smile you’d give someone who’d finally arrived at a party they’d spent all night insisting they weren’t coming to.

“Took you long enough, Nico,” he said softly. “I was starting to think I’d have to come—”

“Shut the fuck up.”

The words ripped out of Nick low and savage, a snarl that didn’t sound like his own voice, didn’t sound like any version of himself he’d ever known. It came from somewhere beneath the bourbon and the grief and the months resistance, somewhere feral and black and done, done, with Beto’s voice, with that smooth charm that had been threading through his thoughts like poison since last year, curling into his dreams, whispering his name wrong until it sounded right.

“I don’t want to hear your fucking voice,” Nick said, and each word landed separate and hard, bitten off at the edges. “You got it?”

Beto’s mouth closed. His eyebrow lifted, just a fraction, just enough to register genuine surprise, but it didn’t last long. Then the smirk appeared, spreading across Beto’s full lips like ink in water, that same curl that Nick had learned to hate and long for in equal, annihilating measure. His dark eyes changed, the calm patience replaced by something hotter, deeper, a hunger that matched Nick’s own but wore no shame at all, pupils widening until the brown was almost gone.

“You gonna fucking destroy me, aren’t you, Nico?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper, and the question wasn’t afraid. It was thrilled.

“I said shut the fuck up,“ Nick growled. His hands were already at his belt. “And suck my cock.”

—

Nick made his choice. If you want see what it costs him, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Nothing motivates me to write faster than knowing someone enjoyed this enough to trust me with their money. Thank you for reading! It means more than I know how to say.