Heartbreaker, a Heartstopper Story - Ch. 16

Gay Cuckold, Gay Erotica, +18, Cheating, Voyeur

The house wasn’t exactly what Nick expected. But then, to be fair, he didn’t really know what to expect from the house Beto Montenegro had grown up in. The truth was, Nick didn’t know much about the lad other than that he was Brazilian, extremely attractive, and extremely annoying. But if he’d had to guess, he would have imagined the Montenegro household to be pretty much like Beto himself: flashy, extravagant, a bit too much. Something closer to Harp’s Beverly Hills mansion, all glass and marble and staff who materialised silently to refill your water glass before you’d noticed it was empty. In reality, the house was much more like the one Nick had grown up in back in Kent.

It sat on a quiet side street off Venice Boulevard in Palms, a modest two-storey stucco building painted a white that the California sun had softened into something warm and tired. A small front yard behind a wrought-iron gate, the lawn patchy but clean, a pot of bright red geraniums on the front step that someone was clearly trying very hard to keep alive. The windows were open despite the heat, and from inside came the unmistakable sound of too many people in a small kitchen: voices layered over each other in what Nick guesses was rapid-fire Portuguese, a burst of laughter, the clatter of pots, and underneath all of it, music that Nick couldn’t identify but that sounded like it belonged exactly where it was.

The street smelled like garlic and something rich and meaty that he couldn’t place but that made his stomach growl traitorously. A Brazilian flag sticker on a parked Corolla caught the afternoon light. Two houses down, a group of older men sat around a plastic table on the pavement, tiny cups of coffee in their hands, arguing passionately about Brazil’s odds in the upcoming World Cup. It felt familiar, like home, in a way that Hillcrest Drive never had.

An hour earlier, Nick and Harp had been sprawled on the enormous sectional in the media room, controllers in hand, FIFA loaded on a screen the size of a small cinema. Nick was thoroughly kicking Harp’s arse, 4-1, and it would have been worse if Harp hadn’t scored a lucky deflection in the 80th minute that he was still insisting was intentional, when his phone buzzed on the cushion beside him. Unknown number. Nick glanced at the preview and his thumbs froze on the controller.

We need to talk, Nico.

He didn’t need to check who it was. There was only one person in the world who called him Nico.

At first, he ignored it. Turned back to the screen, scored a fifth goal that Harp protested was offside, and said nothing. But the message sat there at the edge of his vision, patient.

A whole week had passed since Toga Weekend, and Nick realised, with something close to surprise, that he hadn’t spared a single thought for Beto in all that time. Every ounce of rage and sadness and disappointment had been aimed squarely at Charlie, a laser-focused beam of misery pointed at one person, and Nick had pretty much forgotten there was a third corner to their little triangle.

Nick stared at the message and waited for the anger to arrive. The old, reliable fury that Beto’s name had triggered for months, the hot flash of resentment, the instinctive bristling. He waited for it like a bus you’d caught a thousand times. But it didn’t come. He wasn’t angry at Beto. For what felt like the first time in his life, the name Beto Montenegro didn’t make his blood pressure spike or his fists clench or his stomach churn with that complicated cocktail of desire and hostility that had defined their entire relationship. He didn’t want to see him, either. Didn’t know what Beto could possibly say that would make any of this better. But the anger, that faithful, exhausting, all-consuming anger that had been his constant companion for a week, had quietly packed its bags and left.

The truth was, Nick was tired of being angry. It had been eating him from the inside for a week, consuming everything, and he was running on fumes. Rage demanded fuel, and Nick had burned through all of his. What was left was an exhaustion that went deeper than muscles or sleep could reach. He didn’t have the energy to hate Beto Montenegro on top of everything else. He barely had the energy to hate anyone.

We have nothing to talk about, Nick typed back. He put his phone face down on the cushion, turned back to the game, and scored another goal, a curling shot from outside the box that bent around Harp’s keeper and nestled into the top corner.

“Dude, stop cheating!” Harp protested, throwing his hands up.

Nick wasn’t even slightly surprised when the phone buzzed again.

Stop being a little bitch. Of course we do. Come to my place. I’ll send you the address.

Nick ignored it and kept playing. He threaded a through ball to Saka, who skinned Harp’s right back and slotted it past the keeper at the near post. 7-1.

“Holy shit, how are you even doing this?” Harp stared at the screen in genuine bewilderment.

But it was too late. The seed had been planted. Nick could tell himself all he wanted that he wasn’t interested in what Beto had to say, but the curiosity was already there, turning slowly in the back of his mind like a key in a lock. What would Beto even say? Would he apologise? Would he try to explain? Nick was certain Beto would take Charlie’s side — and then hated himself for thinking like that. There weren’t sides. He and Charlie weren’t enemies. They weren’t at war. The whole thing was just a mess, a spectacular, ugly mess, and framing it as a battle only made it messier.

Harp, seizing on Nick’s distraction, launched a counter-attack and scored, a scrappy tap-in off a rebound that he celebrated as if he’d just won the World Cup, leaping off the sofa, giving Nick the middle finger, and telling him to suck it. Nick retaliated by switching to Palmer, who collected the ball on the halfway line, drove past three defenders with arrogance only a Chelsea player could muster, and smashed it into the roof of the net. 8-3. Three minutes later, Palmer did it again. 9-3.

Harp threw his controller at Nick’s chest.

“Fuck this shit,” he snarled.

Nick beamed at him. “Gonna cry?”

“It’s not fair. Your British genes give you an advantage.” Harp slumped back against the sofa, arms crossed. “I’m American. We play football with our hands, like God intended.”

Nick was about to point out that Harp did not, in fact, played any version of football, British or American, because he played lacrosse like the pampered little prince he was, when Harp sat up abruptly and said, “Let’s go to the pool. I wanna skinny-dip.”

Nick’s smile faltered.

He’d been avoiding the pool ever since the other day in the car with Zoren Bautista. The lad had not taken rejection well. When Nick had lifted Zoren’s hand off his thigh and said, “Sorry, mate, I have a boyfriend,” Zoren had just laughed, as if Nick was being charmingly naive, and reached over and fully grabbed Nick’s bulge through his shorts. In Zoren’s defence, his cock had already been half-hard by that point. Nick had long ago accepted that the thing had a mind of its own and would do whatever it fancied regardless of what the rest of him had decided. He’d removed Zoren’s hand, firmly this time, wrapping his fingers around the lad’s wrist and placing it back on the steering wheel, and said, with as much politeness as he could manage while sporting an involuntary erection, that he was flattered but it wasn’t going to happen. Zoren’s expression had shifted then, the warm flirtation cooling into something harder, and before Nick fully understood what was happening he was standing on the pavement watching the Honda Civic reverse down Hillcrest Drive at speed, Zoren leaning out the window to shout that Nick “might be broke but he was just as stuck-up as those rich arseholes.”

He’d made the walk back up the hill on foot, hands in his pockets, hard-on fading, wondering how exactly he’d managed to get himself thrown out of a car on a street where he didn’t even live. He didn’t tell Harp anything about Zoren. He wasn’t sure what the policy in the Harper household was for employees who tried to get into their employer’s guest’s pants, but Nick didn’t want to risk the lad’s job — though he suspected Harp was much more likely to censure Nick for not taking the opportunity than anything else.

“I’ll pass on the pool,” Nick said to Harp. “Have something I gotta do.”

Harp smirked at him.

“Yeah?” he said, waggling his eyebrows. “Anything to do with the texts you just got?”

Nick rolled his eyes, told him to enjoy his skinny-dip, and not even half an hour later, he was standing in front of Beto’s house on a quiet side street in Palms.

He stood on the pavement for a full minute before making himself walk to the front door. Nick told himself to stop being a coward and rang the doorbell, mentally preparing himself to see Beto Montenegro again.

It wasn’t Beto who opened the door.

The woman standing on the threshold was so stunningly beautiful that Nick felt the blood rush to his cheeks before he’d even registered why. She was tall, almost Nick’s height, with Beto’s exact warm golden-brown skin, dark almond eyes, thick black hair that fell in loose waves past her shoulders. She was wearing a simple yellow sundress and no makeup and didn’t need either, because her face was one of those faces that made you briefly forget what you were doing with your own. She looked like Beto if Beto had been born a woman, and the resemblance was so striking it was almost disorienting.

“Oh,” she said, dark eyebrows lifting. She’d obviously been expecting someone else. “You’re not Luiz.”

“Uh, no. Sorry,” Nick said, not really knowing what he was apologising for. “I’m Nick? I’m here to see Beto?”

The woman beamed at him, and the voltage of that smile could have powered the entire city of Rio de Janeiro.

“Hi, Nick! Come inside,” she said, already stepping back and pulling the door wider. “Fran didn’t tell me you were coming. Lunch is almost ready.”

Nick let the woman pull him inside by the hand, still slightly disoriented by her presence. The entrance hall was small and warm, terracotta tiles on the floor, a wooden crucifix on the wall, and the smell of whatever was cooking hitting him full force now, an aroma that wrapped around you and made your stomach issue demands your brain couldn’t override.

Thankfully, Beto appeared from the hallway before Nick had to make any more conversation he wasn’t equipped for. And there it was, that old, familiar wave of attraction rolling through him with the same inevitability of a tide he’d stopped trying to fight. Beto was wearing grey shorts that made his thighs look fantastic and a cerulean blue football jersey from some Brazilian team Nick had never heard of, the fabric clinging to his shoulders and chest in a way that suggested the manufacturers had consulted Beto’s specific measurements before cutting the pattern. Nick wondered, briefly and unhelpfully, if it was possible that Beto had got even more gorgeous in the days since he’d last seen him. It did not seem fair.

“I told you I was getting the door,” Beto said to the woman, a note of exasperation in his voice that Nick had never heard before. It sounded almost… teenage. “Hi, Nick.”

Nick nodded at him. He didn’t trust his voice yet.

“I thought it was your Tio Luiz,” the woman said, entirely unbothered by Beto’s tone. “Introduce me to your friend, Fran.”

“Nick, this is my mum, Tatiana,” Beto said, with robotic delivery of having been raised to have manners and was deploying them under duress. “Mom, this is Nick. He goes to Westbridge too.”

Nick turned back to the woman. Tatiana. Beto’s mum. This woman who didn’t look like she could be a day over thirty had an adult son who was currently enrolled in university. What the hell did the Montenegros have going on in their gene pool?

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Montenegro,” Nick said, remembering his own manners.

“Just Tati, please,” she said, squeezing his hand, which she still hadn’t let go of. “Mrs. Montenegro is my mother-in-law, and she’s a bitch.”

Beto snorted, and Nick wasn’t sure if he should laugh too.

“You like feijoada, Nick?” Tatiana asked.

“Never had it, ma’am,” he answered. He didn’t even know what feijoada was.

“Well, get ready to have your life changed,” Tatiana said. “Come, eat with us.”

“Oh, no, honestly,” Nick said quickly. “I appreciate it, but I don’t want to impose —”

Tatiana dismissed his words with a wave of her hand so identical to what Sarah Nelson would have done that something in Nick’s chest loosened involuntarily.

“Don’t be silly, meu filho. There’s plenty of food.” She reached up and smoothed a stray piece of Nick’s blonde hair back into place with a maternal ease that suggested she did this to people whether she’d met them before or not. “You’re very handsome, Nick. Are you Fran’s new boyfriend or something?”

Nick’s face went the colour of a letterbox.

“Mom! Oh my God, Nick is Charlie’s boyfriend!” Beto nearly shouted.

Nick was slightly mystified to witness, for the first time in recorded history, Beto Montenegro being genuinely embarrassed by something. His golden cheeks had flushed a deep bronze and he looked like he wanted the terracotta tiles to open up and swallow him whole.

“Oh, sorry,” Tatiana said, and she too had the grace to look sheepish, though her eyes were twinkling in a way that suggested she wasn’t entirely sorry at all. “How is Charlie? Is he coming too? He hasn’t been around in ages. Such a good boy.”

“He’s good, ma’am. Spending the summer back home in England.”

“Well, you tell him next time we make feijoada, he has to come,” Tatiana said firmly. “We love having him around.”

With that, she turned and disappeared down the hallway Beto had come from, and it was clear she expected Nick to follow.

“You should have told me you were having a party,” Nick said, glancing toward the hallway where Tatiana had disappeared.

“It’s not a party, it’s just lunch. We do this every week,” Beto said.

“I should go. I don’t want to intrude.”

He was already turning toward the door, but Beto caught his hand.

“Dude, stop. It’s no big deal. Just come and eat something and then we’ll talk.”

Nick looked down at Beto’s hand on his own. Golden fingers wrapped around his wrist, warm, the grip casual but certain.

The memory hit him before he could block it, those same hands on his chest in a Houston hotel room, pressing him backward onto the bed, sliding down his stomach, finding him hard and ready. The weight of Beto beneath him, the sound he’d made when Nick first pushed inside, that broken gasp that had short-circuited every synapse in Nick’s brain. How intense it had been, how overwhelming, how every nerve in his body had sung with the relief of finally, finally doing what he’d been fighting not to do for months. The heat of Beto’s skin against his. The way Beto had arched into him, demanding, fearless, matching Nick’s ferocity with his own. How incredible the sex had been. Something raw. Something selfish and savage and completely unchained, and Nick had lost himself in it so completely that for those hours in that room he’d forgotten who he was supposed to be and had simply been who he was.

It had been everything he’d imagined and worse, because the fantasy hadn’t come with a morning after. The fantasy hadn’t included the hollow silence of getting dressed in the dark, the click of the hotel door closing behind him, the taste of shame flooding in to fill the space where the pleasure had been.

How strange that something so wrong could feel so good. How fucked up that his body couldn’t tell the difference between the best sex of his life and the worst mistake he’d ever made, because they were the same thing, the exact same night, and Nick still didn’t know which memory to keep and which to burn.

He pulled his hand free.

“Fine,” he said. “But just lunch.”

Nick followed Beto down the hallway and into a dining room that was too small for the number of people crammed into it. A long wooden table dominated the space, mismatched chairs pushed together so tightly that elbows were going to be a problem. The walls were crowded with framed family photos — weddings, christenings, beach holidays, a faded portrait of an elderly couple Nick assumed were grandparents — and a shelf in the corner held a small ceramic statue of a saint surrounded by fresh flowers and a votive candle that was currently lit.

There were people everywhere, and Nick was quietly relieved to discover that whatever genetic sorcery had produced Tatiana and Beto seemed to be restricted exclusively to the two of them. Tatiana’s sister, Andressa, was pretty enough, but lacked the almost aggressive magnetism her sister radiated just by standing in a room. Beto’s cousin Maria Clara, a cheerful girl around their age with braces, was sweet-faced but firmly in the category of normal human being. The Montenegros were a good-looking family. Tatiana and Beto were simply something else entirely.

Beto introduced him around the table and the questions started immediately, coming from every direction at once .Where was he from in the UK? Kent, he said. Oh, like Canterbury? Yes, exactly. What did he study at Westbridge? History and education, because he wanted to be a teacher, which earned him an approving nod from Andressa and a delighted clap from Tatiana, who declared that the world needed more handsome teachers and that his students would never skip class. And how was Charlie? Was Charlie well? Was Charlie coming to visit soon?

They adored Charlie. That much became apparent within approximately ninety seconds. Every time a new member of the family discovered that Nick was Charlie’s boyfriend — whether it was Tio Henrique, a barrel-chested man with a magnificent moustache who spoke almost no English but communicated entirely through enthusiastic hand gestures, or Beto’s other cousin Juliana, a glamorous woman in her thirties who arrived late with a tray of brigadeiros and immediately demanded to know everything — they all launched into their own personal testimony about what a lovely menino Charlie was. How polite. How funny. How he’d once helped Taiana carry groceries from the car without being asked. How he’d sat with Tio Marcos for an entire afternoon watching football on a crackling laptop stream.

Soon enough, Tatiana emerged from the kitchen carrying a massive clay pot by its handles, the thing so comically large relative to her frame that Nick half-rose from his chair and asked if she needed help. She waved him off with a look that suggested she’d been carrying pots this size since before he was born, and set it down at the centre of the table with a satisfying thud. The lid came off and a cloud of steam rose toward the ceiling, carrying a smell so rich that Nick’s mouth watered instantly.

As Beto and Maria Clara went around the table filling glasses with something called guaraná, a sweet Brazilian soda that tasted like nothing Nick had ever encountered, Tatiana made sure to serve Nick first. Feijoada, she explained, spooning generous ladlefuls onto his plate, was a traditional dish from her home state of Minas Gerais, a slow-cooked black bean stew loaded with cuts of pork, smoked sausage, and dried beef, simmered for hours until the beans broke down into something thick and almost impossibly flavourful. Then came the rice, fluffy and white, piled high beside the stew. Then the buttery kale, sautéed with garlic until it wilted into something silky. Then a scoop of farofa, a golden, crumbly mixture of toasted cassava flour with bits of bacon and egg running through it, dry and crunchy in a way that made no sense next to the wet richness of the beans but somehow worked perfectly. And finally, to Nick’s confusion, slices of fresh orange arranged along the side of his plate, which shouldn’t have belonged anywhere near the rest of the food but cut through the heaviness with a brightness that made every other flavour sharper.

Nick, who honestly hadn’t been hungry when he’d arrived, polished his plate off quicker than anyone at the table, scraping the last smear of bean sauce with his fork while the rest of the family was still working through their first servings. Tatiana watched this happen with radiant satisfaction and insisted he serve himself as much as he wanted, gesturing toward the clay pot with both hands. Which he did. Twice.

The conversation flowed as freely as the guaraná. Football came first, which didn’t surprise Nick in the slightest. He had always been more of a rugby lad, but he’d grown up watching the Premier League with his dad on Saturday afternoons, so he held his own well enough, offering an opinion on Arsenal’s midfield that earned him a firm slap on the back from Marcos and a heated rebuttal from Maria Clara, who was a fan Manchester City and was prepared to die on that hill. Then the conversation drifted to Tatiana’s job. She worked as a dental hygienist in Culver City, and had strong opinions about Americans and their obsession with teeth whitening, and then to Andressa’s daughter’s quinceañera, which was three months away and already over budget. Juliana told a story about a disastrous date she’d been on the previous week that had the entire table in tears, Beto translating the punchline for Tio Marcos, who laughed so hard he choked on his guaraná.

Nick sat in the middle of all of it, smiling wide all the time. The Montenegros were exactly what he’d imagined a Brazilian family would be, loud, warm, generous to the point of excess, people who pulled you into their orbit whether you’d asked to be there or not and made you feel like you’d always belonged. They reminded him of home, of Sarah’s kitchen, Sunday roasts that ran long because nobody wanted to leave the table, his mum topping up everyone’s tea before they’d finished the first cup. He hadn’t felt this comfortable sitting among strangers in a long time.

And he noticed Beto, too.

Not how he usually noticed Beto, that involuntary pull toward the body, the golden skin, the arse that had caused Nick more psychological damage than any injury he’d sustained on a rugby pitch. Nick watched Beto clear plates without being asked, stacking them on his forearm with ease, as if he’d been doing it since he was tall enough to reach the table. He watched Beto translate patiently for Tio Marcos, leaning close to his uncle’s ear, switching between English and Portuguese mid-sentence without missing a beat, never making Marcos feel like a burden for not speaking the language. He watched Beto let Maria Clara steal a piece of sausage off his plate and only pretend to be annoyed, swatting at her hand a full second after she’d already taken it. He watched Beto help Tatiana carry the heavy pot back to the kitchen, one hand on the handle, the other on her elbow, guiding her through the narrow doorway with tenderness. He watched Beto call his mother mamãe in a voice Nick had never heard him use, stripped of every layer of performance and bravado, the voice of a son who loved his mum and didn’t need to make it cool or complicated.

This was someone Nick had never met before. All those months of proximity, and Nick had only ever seen the surface. The flirt, the provocateur, the shameless golden weapon Charlie had aimed at his heart. He’d never thought to look past it, never wondered what was underneath, because the surface had been so overwhelming and so infuriating that it had consumed all of Nick’s attention. But this Beto, the one who washed dishes in his mother’s kitchen and argued about football with his teenage cousin, this Beto was just a person. A good one, maybe. Someone who had been pulled into Charlie’s scheme and had gone along with it and had probably told himself the same flattering stories Charlie had, but who was also, underneath all of it, a twenty-year-old kid who was trying, like everyone else, to figure out who he was.

Nick found, to his quiet surprise, that he liked him. And that liking him was more confusing than anything that had come before.

Nick was drinking coffee with Maria Clara in the living room while she showed him the design portfolio she’d been building for her application to FIDM, intricate fashion sketches in coloured pencil that were genuinely impressive, when Beto appeared in the doorway. He’d spent the last half hour in the kitchen helping Tatiana with the dishes, and his forearms were still damp. He didn’t say anything. He only needed to look at Nick.

Nick excused himself from Maria Clara and followed Beto up a narrow staircase to the second floor. The hallway was small, three doors off it, family photos lining the walls all the way up. Beto pushed open the last door on the right — his bedroom, unmistakably, a Brazilian flag pinned above the bed, a bookshelf crammed with a mix of Portuguese and English paperbacks, a surfboard propped in the corner, and Nick stepped inside, wondering whether being alone in a bedroom with Beto Montenegro was a good idea and fairly certain it wasn’t. But Beto didn’t stop. He crossed the room, unlatched the window, pushed it wide, and climbed out. Nick followed and found Beto settling himself on the terracotta roof tiles, back against the warm stucco wall, legs stretched out in front of him.

“Is that safe?” Nick asked, eyeing the tiles and doing a quick mental calculation of their combined weight.

Beto snorted. “It’s reinforced. Mom had it done when I was a kid because I kept coming out here and she got tired of worrying.”

Nick shrugged and climbed through, lowering himself carefully onto the tiles beside Beto. They were warm from the afternoon sun and surprisingly solid beneath him. The roof looked out over the back of the house, a small courtyard with a modest pool and a bricked barbecue grill that looked like it had hosted a thousand weekends. Beyond the property walls, a grove of orange and lemon trees screened the neighbouring houses. Further out, rooftops and palm trees stretched toward the horizon, and the sun was sinking behind the Santa Monica Mountains, turning the sky into bands of copper and rose that bled into the deepening blue above.

A breeze swept across Nick’s skin, warm but gentle, carrying the faint smell of jasmine and smoke from someone else’s barbecue down the street. His belly was full. The coffee was still warm in his chest. Somewhere below, Maria Clara was laughing at something Tio Marcos had said.

For the first time since that night on the beach, Nick felt truly at peace.

“Liked the food?” Beto asked.

Nick actually groaned. “Mate, so fucking much. Jesus. You think it’s okay to ask your mum for some leftovers?”

“Only if you want to become her favourite British guy in the world.”

“I think that title already belongs to Charlie,” Nick said.

Beto smiled fondly at the mention of Charlie’s name.

“You’re probably right,” he said quietly.

They sat in silence for a while. Below them, the courtyard was empty. The pool sat still and blue, the barbecue grill cold. The only sounds were the rustle of the citrus trees, the distant hum of traffic on Venice Boulevard, and somewhere a few houses over, a dog barking lazily at nothing.

“You’re different when you’re here,” Nick said. He was still staring at the horizon, at the copper light bleeding across the rooftops.

Beto turned to him with a curious glance. “Different how?”

Nick felt himself blushing.

“It’s just that... you’re more — actually, you’re less you when you’re with your family.” He fumbled for the right words. “Less of the whole... performance. The flirting, all that. You’re just... normal. It’s nice.”

“I know,” Beto said, staring out at the same horizon. “It was the way I found to fit in, you know? People look at me and they expect me to be the sexy, funny Brazilian guy. The one who flirts with everyone and doesn’t take anything seriously. And I play the part because it’s easier.”

Nick looked at him. Really looked at him, maybe for the first time, at the person sitting beside him on a warm terracotta roof, knees drawn up, voice quiet, telling the truth without any armour on. And he understood, suddenly and completely, why Charlie loved Beto so much. The real person underneath. The one who was generous and loyal and braver than he let on, who had followed Charlie into a scheme that could have destroyed his reputation because Charlie had asked and Beto couldn’t say no to the people he loved.

“I like you better when you’re not calling me irmão every five minutes,” Nick said, nudging him with his elbow.

Beto elbowed him back softly. “Fuck off,” he said. “You love when I call you irmão.”

Beto’s face was centimetres from Nick’s. Close enough that Nick could see every fleck of gold in those brown eyes, could feel Beto’s breath warm against his skin, could catch the faint trace of soap and something sweeter underneath.

Leaning forward and taking Beto’s lips into his was the easiest thing in the world.

There was no guilt this time. No sense of committing a grave sin, no self-loathing crashing in behind the desire, no voice in his head screaming that he was betraying everything he stood for. Just Beto, warm and close and real, and the sunset bleeding copper across both of them, and a kiss that was gentle in a way Houston had never been. Two mouths learning each other without the fury and the alcohol and the desperation that had driven them together the first time. Beto hesitated for a fraction of a second, but then Nick cupped the back of his neck with one hand and pulled him closer, parting Beto’s lips with his tongue, deepening the kiss until there was no space left between them. Beto melted. A long sigh escaped him, spilling into Nick’s mouth, and he kissed Nick back with softness.

In seconds Beto was in Nick’s lap, knees straddling his thighs on the warm tiles, one hand holding Nick’s chin, tilting his face up, the other resting flat over the heavy swell of Nick’s pec, fingers pressing gently into the muscle as if grounding himself. Nick’s hands moved on instinct, up Beto’s back, tracing his spine through the thin jersey, down to his waist where the fabric rode up and his fingertips found bare, warm skin, and finally lower, settling on the curve of his arse, filling both palms, and squeezing. Beto’s hips rolled forward, and Nick’s cock, already swelling fast, pushing up against the front of his shorts, dragged right along the cleft of Beto’s arse. Nick felt himself thicken, the sudden, aching pulse of blood making him throb hard against the tight fabric. The way Beto’s whole body was saying more, please, now without a single word made Nick’s blood run so hot he could feel his pulse in his fingertips.

“We should take this inside,” Nick whispered against Beto’s lips. “Don’t want to give the neighbours a show.”

Beto laughed, breathless, and kissed him again, harder this time, hungrier, his fingers twisting into the front of Nick’s shirt, pulling him closer as if closer was a place they hadn’t reached yet and he was determined to find it. Nick was ready to hoist Beto off the tiles and carry him through the window, already calculating whether he could manage it without breaking the kiss, when Beto pulled back.

His lips were swollen. His eyes were dark. His chest was rising and falling unevenly, one hand still fisted in Nick’s shirt.

“Before we do this,” he said quietly, “I need to know something.”

Nick blinked, still hazy, his hands still cupping Beto’s arse

“Are you doing this because you want to?” Beto asked. “Or are you just trying to get back at Charlie?”

The spell broke.

It was like stepping out of warm water into cold air, the haze of the kiss evaporating instantly, reality rushing back in, harsh and bright and unwelcome. Nick blinked. He was on a roof. In Palms. With Beto Montenegro in his lap. His hands were on Beto’s arse. His cock was hard. His boyfriend was three thousand miles away, and Nick was doing the exact thing he’d sworn he would never do again.

“Suddenly you’ve got morals?” he asked. It came out meaner than he’d intended, and he realised he didn’t care a bit.

“I don’t mind being used,” Beto said, still close enough that his lips brushed Nick’s when he spoke. “But I’m not going to hurt my best friend.”

Nick snorted, humourless and sharp. Beto, sensing the shift in the air, climbed off his lap and settled back onto the tiles beside him, putting distance between them. The warmth where his body had been went cold immediately.

“Come on, Nick,” Beto said gently. “This isn’t you.”

“The fuck you know about me, mate?” Nick snarled.

He wanted to leave. He should never have come to this house in the first place. Should never have sat at that table and eaten that food and let himself feel comfortable, let himself feel normal, because normal had led him here, to a rooftop with Beto’s taste still on his lips and his hands still tingling with the memory of golden skin.

“I know you don’t want to hurt Charlie,” Beto said.

“I don’t really care about Charlie right now, do I?”

“Yeah?” Beto tilted his head. “Look into my eyes and say that again.”

Nick turned to him. Beto’s brown eyes, which seconds ago had been dark and heavy with want, were steady now, unflinching, carrying the quiet certainty of someone who already knew the answer. Nick looked away. He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t lie, not with those eyes on him.

Beto sighed.

“I know you’re hurt,” Beto said. “You have every right to be hurt.”

“Oh, cheers, thanks for being so generous,” Nick shot back, sarcasm dripping from every syllable.

He wanted a fight. Wanted Beto to snap back, to give him something to push against, something to aim the residual fury at. Beto didn’t take the bait.

“This is why I invited you over,” he said quietly. “I wanted to apologise. What Charlie and I did... it wasn’t right. I’m sorry for that.”

Nick said nothing.

“But I need you to know that we never wanted to hurt you, okay?” Beto went on. “It was never supposed to be like this. To make you feel — used. Manipulated. I promise you, Nick.”

Nick nodded at him.

“I know that,” he admitted, the words leaving him before he could stop them.

He did know it. Somewhere beneath the anger and the humiliation and the suffocating sense of betrayal, in the rational part of himself that the rage hadn’t managed to burn through, Nick knew that Charlie wasn’t cruel. Charlie was reckless. Charlie was selfish. Charlie had made a catastrophically stupid decision and executed it with a precision that was, frankly, impressive in the worst possible way. But cruelty required intent, and Charlie had never, in all the years Nick had known him, intended to cause pain. Not to Nick, not to anyone. Charlie’s worst quality had always been the opposite, he cared so much, felt so deeply, wanted so desperately to make the people he loved happy, that he sometimes forgot to ask whether they wanted the kind of happiness he was offering.

“Charlie’s really sorry too,” Beto said, quietly, as if testing whether mentioning Charlie’s name would detonate something.

“You been talking to him?” Nick asked.

“Not a lot. I think he’s embarrassed around me right now,” Beto said, and he sounded genuinely upset about it, a flicker of hurt crossing his face that had nothing to do with Nick. “But you should talk to him. Give him the chance to at least explain himself.”

Nick looked back toward the horizon. The sun was almost fully gone now, just a thin sliver of copper clinging to the ridge of the mountains, the sky above it deepening into violet.

“I don’t want to hear his explanations yet,” he said.

To his surprise, Beto scowled.

“So you can forgive the guy you hate, but you can’t forgive the guy you love?”

Nick scowled right back.

“No offence, mate, but you don’t matter enough for me to hate you, okay?” he said, and it was vicious, deliberately so, aimed to wound. “Charlie is the love of my life. I wanted to marry him. Have children with him. His lies hurt way more than anything you could ever do to me.”

Something shifted in Beto’s face. The patience that had been holding his expression together, measured calm he’d maintained since they’d sat down on this roof, cracked.

“You know what, Nick? I’m tired of this shit,” Beto said. His voice had dropped the gentleness entirely. “I’m tired of you sitting there acting like you’re the only person in this mess who got hurt. I’m tired of you pretending you’re some innocent victim that got dragged into something against his will.”

“I was —”

“You were not.” Beto cut him off, sharp and final. “Nobody dragged you into that hotel room in Houston. Nobody held a gun to your head. Nobody slipped something into your drink. You walked in there on your own two legs, and you fucked me because you wanted to fuck me, and you’ve wanted to fuck me since the day we met.”

Nick actually gasped, righteous indignation burning white-hot inside him.

“So what?” he shot back. “It’s not like Charlie minded, is it? Quite the bloody opposite.”

“Oh, and you knew that, Nick?” Beto answered without missing a beat. “Or did you do what you wanted to do not really caring if it would hurt Charlie? Which, guess what, is exactly what he did.”

The words landed like a punch Nick hadn’t seen coming. He sat there on the warm tiles, mouth half-open, the retort he’d been building collapsing in his throat. Beto got to his feet, brushing dust off his shorts, and looked down at Nick with an expression that held no anger, no cruelty, just the blunt honesty.

“Charlie fucked up. I know that. He knows that. He fucked up badly and he’s sitting in England right now tearing himself apart over it. But you?” Beto jabbed a finger at Nick’s chest. “You are not blameless in this. You didn’t cheat because Charlie tricked you into it. You cheated because you wanted to, and it’s easier to be angry at him than to admit that to yourself.”

Nick wanted to argue, to fire back with something that would dismantle Beto’s logic and restore the simple narrative he’d been clinging to for a week, the one where Charlie was the villain and Nick was the victim and the line between them was clear and uncrossable. He searched for the words, felt them forming and dissolving before they reached his tongue, each attempt crumbling under the weight of the truth Beto had just dropped on him.

He couldn’t find it. He’d looked for it, turned Beto’s words over, prodded them for weaknesses, and there was nothing to grab onto. Every sentence held.

“So get off your fucking high horse and call your boyfriend,” Beto said. “Because the only thing worse than what Charlie did is letting it destroy something that the rest of us would kill to have.”

He climbed through the window, his silhouette disappearing into the dim bedroom, and Nick heard his footsteps cross the floor and fade down the hallway. Nick sat alone on the roof.

The sun was gone. The sky had turned a deep, bruised purple, the first stars beginning to show over the Santa Monica Mountains. He sat there for a long time, watching the place where Beto had been, processing the strange, disorienting experience of being the one left behind. For the first time, Beto had walked away from Nick. And the silence they’d left behind didn’t feel like victory or vindication or even relief.

It felt like the truth.

—

Charlie’s POV is coming up next. Before you read Chapter Seventeen, make sure you liked and restacked this one, please. Also, if you’re still not a paid subscribers, what the bloody hell are you waiting for, mate?