Heartbreaker, a Hearstopper Story - Ch. 23

Gay Cuckold, Gay Erotica, +18, Cheating, Voyeurism

The dark room wasn’t dark at all. It was bathed in a deep red glow that clung to everything it touched, turning skin into something molten, painting shadows into the hollows of collarbones and the dips between muscles, making the whole space feel submerged, like being inside a pulse. The music from the main floor reached them muffled and low, all bass and no melody, a vibration that seemed to move through flesh before it reached sound.

The guy kneeling in front of him was much prettier than Nick had expected.

Grayson. That was the name he’d given at the bar, shouted close to Nick’s ear over the music, one hand already resting on Nick’s chest. He had blond curls falling loose across his forehead, not unlike Nick’s own, almost hiding his eyes. In the red wash of the light they looked copper, almost amber, eyes of something not entirely human, something designed to kneel in rooms like this and make men forget their own names. His lips were something else entirely. Full, flushed a deep crimson from the light and from ten solid minutes of Nick’s mouth on them, kissing him slow and then not slow at all, tasting tequila and salt and the faint sweetness of whatever he’d been drinking before Nick found him. They were slightly swollen now and the look on Grayson’s face as he gazed up at Nick from his knees was so openly, unashamedly hungry that it sent a bolt of heat straight down Nick’s spine.

Those lips were begging for cock. And fuck if Nick wasn’t going to give them exactly what they wanted.

“Fuck, Nick,” Devon said, and his voice landed close against the back of Nick’s neck, breath warm. Goosebumps scattered across Nick’s skin like a current had passed through him. “You don’t play when it come to the gym, do you?”

Devon’s hands hadn’t stopped moving since they’d walked in. Big hands, mapping Nick’s body, focused and appreciative, as if he knew exactly what he was looking at. They’d started at his shoulders, squeezing once, thumbs pressing into the muscle like he was testing the density of it, then drifted down over his biceps, fingers wrapping around them and lingering there for a moment before sliding lower to trace his abs. Nick’s stomach tightened involuntarily under the touch and he heard Devon exhale an approving sound against his ear. Then both hands settled on Nick’s chest. Devon cupped his pecs, palms flush against the muscle, and just — held them. Felt them. Fingers kneading slow, thumbs grazing across his nipples, learning the shape and the weight of them. Nick’s breath hitched. Devon kept going, like he’d found exactly where he wanted to be and wasn’t in any rush to leave.

“Nah. I already know you don’t. Body like this ain’t luck.”

Devon’s thumb dragged across Nick’s left nipple again, slow and purposeful, and Nick felt his cock twitch against Grayson’s cheek.

“Gotta chase the pump, mate,” Nick said, grinning. “No days off.”

He flexed his right bice, the third time he’d done it since meeting Grayson and Devon, which was bordering on obscene even by his standards, but he couldn’t help it. The reaction was addictive. Every time he did it Grayson’s eyes went glassy and unfocused, like someone had briefly disconnected him from the mains, and Devon made a sound in his throat that Nick could only describe as grateful. So he kept doing it. Sue him.

“I love how you say that,” Devon said, fingers closing around the peak of Nick’s bicep, squeezing with open admiration. His thumb traced the vein that ran along the underside and Nick felt the touch everywhere. “Mate. That accent of yours — I swear to God, bro.”

“You like that, mate?” Nick said, turning his body enough to look into Devon’s eyes properly for the first time since they’d come in.

Devon was grinning at him. It was, without exaggeration, one of the most gorgeous smiles Nick had ever seen on a man — wide and white and completely uninhibited, a smile that reorganised a face and made you forget what it looked like without it. His skin was dark and smooth in the red light, his eyes warm and hungry at the same time, amusement and desire coexisting there without either one crowding the other out. They were roughly the same height, but Devon was leaner than Nick, built long and athletic where Nick was broad and heavy. Judging by the cock Nick could feel pressed firm against his arse, hard and thick and making its presence very clearly known through the thin fabric still between them, Devon wasn’t trailing far behind Nick in that department either.

“Oh, you got no idea how much I like that,” Devon said.

Nick held his gaze. Then his own grin widened.

“You’re gonna love meeting my boyfriend, then.”

“Is Charlie as cute as you?” Devon asked.

“Cuter,” Nick said, without missing a beat.

“Is he cuter than me?” asked Grayson.

Nick and Devon both looked down. Grayson was still on his knees, head tilted back, those red-washed eyes gazing up at Nick with an expression so worshipful it bordered on devotional. In that moment, in that light, looking like that, Nick doubted there was a man alive who could have looked at Grayson and called him anything less than the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen.

“Don’t know about that,” Nick said, making a show of considering it, sucking air through his teeth. “Tough battle, that one.”

Grayson smiled. It was devastating.

“I bet Charlie don’t suck dick as good as Gray does, though,” Devon said. There was pride in his voice.

“That’s high praise,” Nick said.

And it was, because Nick had seen, in vivid and comprehensive detail over the preceding forty-five minutes, exactly how good Grayson was with his mouth, and if Devon was telling the truth that this was merely a preview, then Charlie was going to lose his mind when he heard about it.

It was a Friday. The temperature hadn’t dropped below thirty even after sundown, making the inside of Harp’s living room feel like a sauna despite the air conditioning running full blast. They’d been sprawled on the sofa in their shorts, controllers in hand, halfway through a FIFA match that neither of them was particularly invested in, the screen flickering in the dim room. Nick was winning four-one and Harp was insisting he was having a slow start, which was the same thing he’d been insisting for the past three games, and even he was starting to run out of conviction.

Harp had paused the game first. Tossed his controller onto the cushion and announced that they were twenty years old in Los Angeles in the middle of summer and sitting there playing FIFA like men in witness protection, and that this was, in his professional opinion, tragic. Nick had tried to mount a defence of FIFA as a legitimate Friday night activity, but the argument collapsed under the weight of fact that he’d been restless all evening, that brand of boredom that came from having energy and nowhere useful to put it. Even the pool outside looked too warm to bother with, the surface flat and still, radiating heat back at the sky.

When Nick suggested they go out, Harp moved with a speed that was almost frightening. One moment horizontal on the sofa, the next on his feet, phone already in hand, thumbs flying across the screen. Fever, he said. He was getting them on the list. Nick had opened his mouth to object and Harp, without looking up, had shut him down before the first syllable landed. New Nick, he’d said. Whatever-you-want-love Nick. Porsche Nick. Nick who fucks his coworkers on camera for his boyfriend. That Nick would go to Fever.

Nick had closed his mouth. The bastard had a point.

Fever was a institution in West Hollywood, a gay club that occupied a converted warehouse on Santa Monica Boulevard, all black glass and brushed concrete on the outside, three floors of carefully engineered debauchery on the inside. It was famous for two things. The first was its door policy, which was euphemistically described as “selective” and more accurately described as brutal: the bouncers curated the crowd with the merciless eye of gallery owners hanging a show, and the result was a clientele so uniformly attractive it felt like walking into a casting call. The second thing Fever was famous for — or infamous, depending on who you asked — was the dark room on the third floor. It was the worst-kept secret in West Hollywood nightlife, the thing people whispered about and pretended to be shocked by and then bought tickets specifically to visit. Harp had been trying to drag Nick through those doors since freshman year.

“Come on, man,” he’d said at least a dozen times over the past two years, in various states of sobriety and persistence. “You don’t have to do anything. Just come see it. Experience it. It’s iconic.”

And Nick, every single time, had declined. He and Charlie were happy. They were monogamous. They were closed. Fever, with its beautiful crowd and its dark room and its implicit promise that the night could end anywhere, was a door that had no business being open to a boy who’d already found everything he needed in a skinny lad with curly hair.

But circumstances, as they say, were different now.

Fever was everything Harp had promised and nothing Nick had expected. The main floor was vast and dark and thrumming, the DJ booth elevated above the crowd, laser lights cutting through manufactured fog. The bar stretched the full length of one wall, backlit in shifting colour, bartenders moving behind it with choreographed precision. The crowd was… yeah. Harp hadn’t been exaggerating about the door policy. Every direction Nick looked was another face that belonged on a magazine cover, bodies moving together in the strobing light, skin and muscle and confidence on display everywhere.

Nick had been at the bar, ordering a second beer, when he felt someone looking at him. He turned and found two pairs of eyes already on him, one pair blue, one pair dark brown, both attached to men who were standing close enough to each other that the word together was obvious before either of them opened their mouths.

Grayson and Devon. They’d introduced themselves in the same breath, Devon’s arm draped easy and proprietary across Grayson’s shoulders, Grayson leaning into his side. Devon had done most of the talking at first: where they were from, how long they’d been together, the usual currency of two strangers deciding whether a third was worth the investment. Grayson had watched Nick with those blue eyes and said less and smiled more, and every smile had been a sentence in a conversation only Nick seemed to be receiving.

They’d danced. The three of them, close and then closer, the music loud enough to make talking impossible, which suited Nick fine because their bodies were doing all the talking that was needed. Devon behind him, hands on his hips. Grayson in front, forehead almost touching Nick’s chest It had felt easy, like settling into a shape that fit him perfectly.

And then Devon had leaned in, lips brushing Nick’s ear, and said two words: “Come upstairs.”

Nick hadn’t hesitated.

The staircase to the third floor was narrow, painted black, lit only by a thin strip of violet LEDs that traced the edge of each step. The music thinned as they climbed, the bass still present but muffled, like hearing a heartbeat through a wall. Devon went first, one hand trailing the rail, his back a lean silhouette against the purple glow. Grayson followed, his fingers laced loosely through Nick’s, tugging him along with a gentle pull that Nick could have broken with the slightest effort and didn’t. At the top of the stairs there was a short corridor. Black walls, black ceiling, the violet light replaced by the warm red that seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere. A velvet curtain hung across the far end, heavy and dark, and beyond it Nick could hear… not sounds, exactly. Something lower than sound. A frequency. Some ambient hum that a room full of bodies and breath and movement produced when the talking stopped.

Devon reached the curtain first. He turned, one hand holding the fabric aside, and looked at Nick over Grayson’s shoulder. The red light caught the white of his smile.

Nick stood there for three seconds.

He knew this moment. He’d stood in it before, in a hotel corridor in Houston. He remembered that threshold with a precision that bordered on the surgical, the weight of it, the sick, lurching gravity, his body moving forward while every functioning part of his conscience screamed at him to turn around. He’d walked through that door knowing the damage was coming and choosing it anyway, because the alternative, going back, being good, being the version of himself who didn’t want what he wanted,had become more unbearable than the wreckage.

This was different.

He searched for the dread. He waited for the cold curl of guilt in his stomach, for the bile, for the voice to say what are you doing, what are you doing, what are you doing. The corridor stayed quiet. What Nick felt, standing at the threshold of Fever’s dark room with a beautiful man holding the curtain open and another beautiful man holding his hand, was something so clean and uncomplicated it almost embarrassed him.

He wanted to go in. No bargaining. No internal tribunal weighing the evidence and finding him guilty before he’d done anything. Just his body, and the warmth radiating from beyond the curtain, and two men who wanted him there, and a boyfriend six thousand miles away who wanted him there too.

Nick stepped through.

“Completely deserved.” Devon’s hands slid from Nick’s chest down to his hips, thumbs pressing into the grooves above his waistline, angling him forward just slightly. Then, softer, directed down at Grayson with a tenderness that cut through the heat like something from a different conversation entirely: “Why don’t you show him, Gray?”

Gray showed him.

His hands moved with a deftness that spoke of practice, the button of Nick’s jeans undone in one smooth motion, the zipper lowered with slowness that had no business being as erotic as it was. Nick’s cock was already hard, had been since somewhere around the second minute of kissing Grayson against the wall, and when Grayson peeled the denim down his thighs it sprang free, curving upward toward Grayson’s mouth like it had already decided where it belonged.

“Damn,” Devon said. He let out a short breath that Nick felt warm against his neck. “Ain’t nothing wrong with what they feeding y’all in Europe.”

“Thanks, ma—”

The rest of the word dissolved. Grayson’s lips closed around the head of his cock and the sound that left Nick’s mouth was something between a groan and a surrender, rough and involuntary, pulled from somewhere deeper than language. Grayson took Nick in with confidence that made it immediately, devastatingly clear that Devon’s praise had not been exaggeration. His tongue moved in slow patterns, each one a sentence in a language Nick didn’t speak but understood perfectly, and his hand wrapped around the base of what his mouth couldn’t reach, grip firm, rhythm steady.

Devon swallowed the next moan before it had a chance to fill the room. His mouth found Nick’s, turning his head with a firm hand on his jaw, and the kiss was deep and thorough and tasted faintly of rum. Devon’s tongue moved against Nick’s with the same intention his boyfriend was demonstrating below, and for a long, obliterating moment Nick existed only as the space between them, Devon’s mouth above, Grayson’s mouth below, two sets of hands on his body, two separate rhythms that somehow found the same pulse.

Nick closed his eyes. Let his head fall back against Devon’s shoulder. Let his hands find Grayson’s curls. And he let himself feel. What followed had no choreography to it. It was just exploration. Three bodies learning each other in the red half-light, finding the rhythms as they went.

Nick kissed Devon again. Properly this time, not the urgent, open-mouthed collision of a minute ago but something slower, more investigative. Devon kissed differently from anyone Nick had been with. Charlie kissed like a question — tentative at first, then deeper once he had his answer, always a little breathless, always tasting of whatever he’d been drinking and something underneath that was just him. Beto had kissed like a dare, all challenge and heat and teeth. Jet had barely kissed at all, preferred to use his mouth elsewhere, which had been its own kind of statement. Devon kissed like a conversation between equals. Give and take in even measure, his hand steady on the back of Nick’s neck, tongue unhurried, occasionally pulling back just far enough to catch Nick’s bottom lip between his teeth and hold it there for a beat before letting go. He was good at it. Confident without being performative. Nick liked that. He liked that Devon wasn’t trying to prove anything, wasn’t competing. He was just present, enjoying himself, enjoying Nick.

Below them, Grayson had settled into a rhythm that was making it progressively harder for Nick to think in complete sentences. He’d pulled off Nick’s cock long enough to mouth along the shaft, tongue flat and wet, tracing the vein on the underside with a patience, before taking him deep again, cheeks hollowing, a soft sound in his throat that vibrated through Nick’s entire body. Every time Nick looked down — which was often, because the sight of those blond curls moving between his thighs was something he intended to remember for a very long time — Grayson’s eyes were already on him. Watching Nick’s face. Reading his reactions. Adjusting.

Nick reached down and traced his thumb along Grayson’s jaw, feeling it work. Grayson’s eyes fluttered, a small, pleased sound humming around Nick’s cock, and Devon murmured something approving against Nick’s mouth that was more vibration than word. Nick let his hands wander. He’d been holding back without realising. His hands had stayed anchored, one in Grayson’s curls, the other gripping Devon’s hip, both of them keeping contact but not really exploring. Now he let them move. He mapped Devon’s chest with his palm, feeling the lean muscle shift beneath the skin, the terrain so different from his own body, less bulk, more sinew, ribs closer to the surface, nipples smaller and harder. Devon made a low, approving sound when Nick’s thumb found one and circled it, and his hips pressed forward involuntarily, the hard length of his cock grinding against the small of Nick’s back. Nick filed that away. Sensitive there. He trailed his other hand from Grayson’s jaw down to his shoulder, then lower, finding the smooth plane of his chest, the smaller, tighter build of him, compact where Devon was long, delicate where Devon was angular. Grayson shivered under the touch, a full-body tremor that Nick felt travel up through his cock, and pulled off long enough to press a kiss to Nick’s hip bone, lips soft, breath hot, before sinking back down.

Nick stood there, between them, and let himself be curious. Just interested in the difference between Devon’s skin and Grayson’s skin under his fingers. In how Devon’s breathing changed when Nick scratched lightly down his stomach. In the small, helpless jerk of Grayson’s hips when Nick’s hand drifted from his shoulder to the nape of his neck and squeezed gently.

Devon’s hands found the remaining buttons of Nick’s shirt. He worked them open from behind, knuckles brushing Nick’s stomach, his chest, his collarbones, before he peeled the fabric off Nick’s shoulders and down his arms and let it fall somewhere into the dark. The air hit Nick’s bare skin, warm and close, and Devon’s palms followed immediately, sliding up the planes of his back with an open, covetous appreciation that made Nick’s spine arch. At the same monet, Grayson pulled off Nick’s cock, and Nick very much did not like that. His hips actually chased forward, an involuntary pursuit of the warmth that had just abandoned him, and Grayson laughed, pressing a brief, apologetic kiss to the tip before dropping his attention to Nick’s jeans, still bunched around his thighs. He tugged them down, guiding one leg free, then the other, fingers deft around the laces of Nick’s trainers, leaving them on.

Nick could feel sweat gathering at his temples and in the hollow of his throat, and the air was thick enough to taste, heat and bodies and the faint sweetness of whatever they pumped through the ventilation. Around them, beyond them, the dark room breathed with the sounds of other people doing other things in other corners, murmured voices and the occasional gasp and the constant, muffled throb of bass from the floors below. And Nick was standing in the middle of it, stripped bare, every inch of him exposed, his chest, his cock, the muscles he’d spent years building, the bite mark on his neck from a man he’d slept with five days ago, while Devon and Grayson remained fully clothed.

He should have felt vulnerable and the vulnerability was there but it wasn’t the kind that made you want to hide. It was the kind that made you want to step further into the light. The exposure did something to him he hadn’t expected. The knowledge that he was naked and they weren’t, that he was on display while they were covered, that the power dynamic had tilted in a direction he hadn’t chosen and he liked it there — it sent a current through him that had nothing to do with the hands on his body and everything to do with the fact of being seen.

He wanted more of it. He wanted the walls to come down. Wanted the red-lit dark room to crack open and spill him out onto the dance floor below, naked and hard and pinned between these two beautiful strangers, every eye in Fever on him. He wanted the entire club to see it. Let them look. Let them watch. Let them see Nick Nelson being worshipped by two people who wanted him, and know that somewhere across the ocean, someone wanted him even more.

Grayson took him back into his mouth and Nick’s entire train of thought derailed.

“You like that, don’t you, Nick?”

“So fucking much, m-mate,” Nick managed, and the last word came out half-wrecked because Grayson had done something with his tongue that made Nick’s thighs clench involuntarily.

“Bet you do.” Devon’s lips grazed the shell of Nick’s ear, his voice dropping into something thicker, heavier. “Bet you love my boy worshipping that cock like it’s the only thing keeping him alive.”

His hand drifted down Nick’s stomach, fingertips barely touching, tracing the grooves between his abs with a lightness that was almost cruel, enough to feel, not enough to satisfy.

“Look at him, Nick.”

Nick looked down.

Grayson’s eyes were on him. His cheeks were hollowed, lips stretched obscenely around Nick’s girth. A thin line of spit connected his bottom lip to the shaft each time he pulled back, catching the light before it broke. His lashes were dark against his flushed cheeks and his brow was creased with concentration, his focus so absolute it resembled devotion. He looked — Christ. He looked like something that shouldn’t exist outside of a fever dream. Beautiful and filthy and completely, transcendently reverent.

“He looks so fucking pretty with your cock in his mouth, right?” Devon said.

Devon’s free hand found Nick’s nipple and rolled it between his fingers, a slow pinch that sent a jolt straight down Nick’s spine and into Grayson’s throat. Nick gasped, a bitten-off sound that he couldn’t have stopped if he’d wanted to, and Grayson hummed around him in response.

“He looks gorgeous,” Nick said, and meant it with every atom of his body.

“That cock is something else, Nick, for real.” Devon’s fingers trailed back down Nick’s abs, circling his navel, drifting lower and then retreating before they reached anything useful. “Gray’s gonna be talking about it for days. For wees. I’mma have to hear about it every night.”

Nick let out a laugh that fractured into a groan halfway through because Grayson had chosen that exact moment to take him deeper, nose brushing the coarse hair at the base, throat constricting around the head in a swallow that made Nick’s vision go white at the edges.

“F-fancy a taste yourself, mate?” Nick asked, once he remembered how his lungs worked.

Devon chuckled. “Nah. I don’t really do cock.”

Nick turned his head, just enough to catch Devon’s eye over his shoulder, one brow raised. His breath was coming in uneven pulls now, each exhale shuddering out of him as Grayson worked him with that merciless, beautiful mouth.

“Yeah?” he said, the word more air than voice. “What you fancy, then?”

Devon’s hand left Nick’s abs. It travelled slowly, across his hip, over the curve of his side, around to his back, and then down, landing on his left glute with a grip that had nothing gentle about it. His fingers sank into the muscle and squeezed, possessive and hungry, pulling the cheek apart just slightly, and Nick felt the night air of the dark room touch skin that was not accustomed to being touched.

Ah, Nick thought, distantly. So that was what Devon fancied.

“Mate,” Nick started.

“What, Nick?” Devon’s voice was silk over gravel. His hand didn’t move. If anything, it settled in deeper, kneading the muscle with a thorough rhythm, mapping the shape of Nick’s arse like he was memorizing it through his palm.

“No funny business back there, yeah?” Nick said. He was going for firm but the effect was undermined considerably by the fact that Grayson had just done something with his throat that made Nick’s knees buckle. He locked them. Barely. “I’m— I’m a top.”

Devon was quiet for a moment. His hand stilled on Nick’s arse but didn’t leave.

“Damn,” he said finally, and there was genuine disappointment in it .”That’s a waste, Nick. For real. An ass like this?”

He squeezed again, both hands now, palms full, thumbs pressing into the crease where glute met thigh.

“I could spend a year on this ass. I bet you got the prettiest, pinkest little hole too. Goddamn.”

“I don’t—” Nick began.

But he felt the rest of the sentence dissolve somewhere between his mouth and the air in front of it, collapsing before it ever became sound. He didn’t — what? He didn’t want that? He didn’t do that? He didn’t let people touch him there? All of those things were true, had always been true, since the very first time with Charlie when they were sixteen and fumbling and Nick had known, with an instinct that preceded experience, that his body was built to be on the giving end. But whatever the rest of that sentence was supposed to be, it had been swallowed whole by Grayson’s mouth. Because Grayson had just taken him to the root again, throat working around him, one hand cupping his balls with a tenderness that was almost obscene in its gentleness, and every coherent thought in Nick’s head had packed its bags and left the building. His fingers tightened in Grayson’s curls. His mouth fell open. A sound came out of him that he would later deny under oath.

And Devon’s hands were still on his arse, still kneading, still there, and Nick couldn’t remember what he’d been about to say, and couldn’t quite bring himself to care. As long as Grayson kept doing what he was doing, as long as that mouth kept working him with that devastating, unholy skill — they could do whatever they wanted with him.

Devon took the moan as permission. And maybe it was., Nick wasn’t sure anymore where the line sat between the things his body was saying and the things he’d agreed to, because his body had apparently started conducting its own negotiations without consulting him. All he knew was that Devon’s hands were still on his arse and Devon’s mouth had left his neck and was now travelling south, and Nick could feel exactly where it was going. Devon kissed his way down, every pause and touch suggesting long familiarity with the art of making someone wait. His lips found the top of Nick’s spine, the notch between his shoulder blades, and pressed there. Then lower. Another kiss between his ribs, Devon’s hands sliding to Nick’s hips to hold him steady. Another in the dip of his lower back, where the muscle gave way to the beginning of the curve, and Nick felt Devon’s breath fan hot across the skin there, a slow exhale that raised every hair on his body.

Fuck.

Another kiss. Lower. The very base of his spine, where the tailbone began.

Fuck fuck fuck.

Devon’s hands moved from his hips to his glutes. He spread them, gently. There was care in it, a question in the pressure of his thumbs, yet every movement carried the weight of complete certainty

“Jesus Christ, Nick,” Devon said, and his voice had dropped into something that wasn’t playful anymore. “This ass. You — goddamn.”

A breath. His thumbs pressed deeper into the muscle, kneading once, slowly, feeling the density of it.

“This might be the most perfect ass I ever seen. And I looked, Nick. I did my research.”

Nick let out a breath that was half laugh, half something else. Because he knew. He bloody well knew.

His cock was genetics, twenty-two centimetres of biological generosity bestowed by a French father who’d contributed nothing else useful besides a surname Charlie couldn’t pronounce for three months. He’d done nothing to earn it. His arse was different. His arse was his. Years of heavy squats with the bar biting into his traps, Romanian deadlifts that left his hamstrings burning for days, hip thrusts, lunges across the rugby pitch at six in the morning with Coach Hendricks barking at him to go deeper, all of it compressed into two round, full, heavy glutes that sat high on his frame and refused to be ignored by anyone standing behind him. In jeans they were conspicuous. In his Roosters trunks they were borderline indecent. And right now, bare and spread open in Devon’s hands in the red light of Fever’s third floor, they were apparently worthy of being spoken about like a religious experience.

“Fuck, man,” Devon murmured, almost to himself. His thumb traced the crease where glute met thigh, following the line inward with something close to wonder.

Fuck fuck fuck.

“Squats,” Nick said. The word came out a little breathless. “Lots of squats.”

“Well,” Devon said, and Nick felt his breath move closer. “Whoever invented squats — I owe that man my life.”

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Nick’s mind had become a single word on a loop, a siren going off in a building where nobody was left to hear it. His body had gone rigid, every muscle he owned clenching at once, a wall of tension thrown up by reflex, years of instinct locking the gates before the conscious part of his brain had even processed what was happening. Mo one — not Charlie, not Beto, not Jet, not anyone — had ever put their mouth there. The idea had existed only in the abstract, something other people did, something he’d watched in porn occasionally and felt a curious, quickly buried flicker of interest in before closing the tab and putting it firmly out of his mind.

Devon paused. His breath was warm and close, close enough that Nick could feel the humidity of it against skin that had never been breathed on by another person. His thumbs held Nick open but his mouth stayed still, waiting, hovering at the threshold, giving Nick every chance to say the word.

Nick didn’t say it. That wasn’t who he was, but who he was had been changing all summer. Who he was had driven a Porsche and fucked a coworker on camera and walked into a dark room with two strangers and loved every minute of it. Who he was had stopped being a finished sentence and started being a draft, messy and incomplete, with whole sections he hadn’t written yet.

Nick exhaled. It took everything.

And he let go.

The tension in his body released. He felt himself opening, not just physically but somewhere further in, some locked door in the foundation of who he thought he was swinging wide on rusted hinges. Devon felt it. Nick knew he did, because he made a sound, something that might have been good or might have been yeah or might have been nothing at all — and then his mouth closed the final distance.

The first touch of Devon’s tongue undid him.

It was… Nick had no language for it. Every word he reached for crumbled on contact. It was warm and wet and impossibly soft and it was there, right there, in the place no one had ever touched, and the sensation was so foreign and so overwhelming and so unbearably, shockingly good that Nick’s entire body jerked forward as if he’d been electrocuted. Grayson’s hands steadied his hips from the front, holding him, and Devon’s grip tightened on his arse, holding him open, and between them Nick shuddered like a building in a gale.

“F—” was all he managed. Not even the full word. Just the consonant, bitten off, strangled.

Devon’s tongue moved again. A slow, flat stroke, base to tip, and Nick’s vision actually blurred. His hands found Grayson’s shoulders and gripped, hard enough that some functioning corner of his brain registered that he was probably leaving marks and didn’t care. His head dropped forward, chin to chest, eyes squeezed shut. The sound that left his mouth was one he’d never made before, high and broken and desperate, the sound of a man discovering a part of his own body for the first time at twenty years old and realising, with dawning, annihilating clarity, what he’d been missing.

Devon didn’t stop. He worked Nick with the same with confidence, long strokes that mapped every nerve ending, the tip of his tongue circling, pressing, teasing the muscle until Nick’s legs were trembling, then pushing gently past the resistance and Nick — Nick stopped thinking altogether.

There were no words left. The internal monologue, the running commentary that had narrated every sexual experience of his life, this feels good, I should do this, Charlie would like that, don’t finish yet, had gone dark. Blown fuse. Empty channel. What replaced it was pure sensation, vast and borderless, flooding in from a direction he’d never known existed. Grayson’s mouth found his cock again and the dual assault, Devon behind him, Grayson in front him, collapsed whatever remained of Nick’s ability to stand. His knees buckled, properly this time, and he would have gone down if Grayson’s hands hadn’t caught his hips and Devon’s arm hadn’t wrapped around his thigh from behind, both of them holding him up, holding him together, keeping him vertical while they systematically, beautifully, mercilessly took him apart.

After that, Nick lost the sequence of things.

Time stopped moving in a straight line and started pulsing instead, measured not in seconds but in sensation, each one arriving on top of the last before the last had finished, stacking until the boundaries between one feeling and the next dissolved completely and Nick existed in a single, continuous state of being taken apart.

Grayson’s mouth was on his cock. Devon’s tongue was inside him. And Nick was caught between them, suspended, a body with no agenda left except to feel, rocking forward and then back in a rhythm that had stopped being voluntary somewhere around the point where Devon’s tongue had pushed past the last of his resistance and found a depth that made Nick’s entire central nervous system short-circuit.

Forward into Grayson’s throat, the head of his cock hitting the back of Grayson’s mouth on every thrust, Grayson’s hands braced on his hips not to slow him but to steady him, taking it, taking all of it, those blue eyes streaming and his jaw stretched wide. Back onto Devon’s tongue, the tip working him open, sliding inside, and then — there, some spot Nick didn’t even know existed, some cluster of nerves buried deep enough that no one had ever found it because no one had ever been allowed to look, and Devon found it, and the sound Nick made when he did was not a sound he recognised as coming from his own body.

He was shaking, his thighs trembling so hard the muscles were jumping under the skin. Sweat ran in rivulets down his chest and stomach, pooling in the grooves of his abs. His hands were in Grayson’s hair, gripping, fingers twisted deep in those blond curls, and he couldn’t let go, couldn’t loosen his grip, because Grayson’s head was the only fixed point in a world that had started spinning. Forward. His cock buried to the hilt in Grayson’s throat, balls pressed against his chin, the tightness so perfect it made his vision pulse. Back. Devon’s tongue pushing inside him, his thumbs spreading Nick wider, eating him with a hunger that was audible. Forward. Back. Forward. Back. He couldn’t tell anymore which direction he was chasing. Couldn’t tell if he was fucking Grayson’s mouth or fucking himself back onto Devon’s tongue, or if the distinction had ever mattered. Every thrust forward sent a bolt of pleasure up through his cock, white-hot and blinding, and every push back drove Devon’s tongue deeper into him, hitting that spot again and again, each time harder, each time pulling a sound out of Nick that was louder and more wrecked than the last.

The pleasure was building. Flooding. Rising from everywhere at once, from his cock and from behind and from the hands on his body and from the animal knowledge that he was being consumed by two people at the same time, that every inch of him was being used and worshipped and devoured, and he couldn’t stop it, didn’t want to stop it. It surged through him in waves, each one taller than the last, each one cresting higher, and Nick felt his body tightening, everything pulling inward, every muscle coiling toward a centre he could feel but couldn’t name.

“I’m —” he gasped, the word barely a word, more breath than sound. “Fuck — I’m gonna —”

Grayson didn’t pull off. He pushed forward, taking Nick impossibly deeper, throat convulsing around him, and at the same time Devon’s tongue drove into him with a final, devastating stroke that hit that spot dead centre, and the two sensations crashed together somewhere at the base of Nick’s spine and detonated.

Nick came with a shout that ripped out of him like something that had been locked in a cage, completely beyond his control, echoing off the walls of the dark room, and he didn’t care, didn’t care who heard, didn’t care that his voice cracked on the peak of it, didn’t care that his legs finally gave out and the only things keeping him upright were Grayson’s hands on his hips and Devon’s arm locked around his thigh. His cock pulsed in Grayson’s throat, spilling in wrenching surges that seemed to go on forever, each one pulling another shudder from his body, another broken sound from his mouth. Grayson swallowed around him, swallowed everything, and Nick felt each swallow like an aftershock, a secondary detonation that lit up his entire nervous system while Devon’s tongue kept moving behind him, gentler now, easing him through it, slown strokes that drew out every last tremor until Nick was empty.

His body went limp, a puppet with every string cut simultaneously. He sagged forward and Grayson caught him, pulling off his spent cock with a final, gentle kiss to the head that made Nick’s whole body twitch, and Devon rose from behind him, hands sliding up his back, and between the two of them they lowered Nick to the padded surface beneath them that he’d been too far gone to notice existed. Nick lay against the wall and stared up at the red-washed ceiling and felt his heartbeat in every extremity. His chest rose and fell in deep heaves. His skin was slick with sweat. His cock lay heavy and softening against his thigh, still twitching faintly. His entire body hummed with the absolute absence of tension, every muscle wrung out, every nerve ending singing the same satisfied note.

“Fuck,” Nick breathed. “I can’t feel my legs.”

Devon and Grayson laughed, neither pretending they never heard that before.

“You okay there, man?” Devon asked.

His voice was different now. The velvet had been packed away, the bedroom bass replaced by something warmer and more ordinary, probably how he sounded over breakfast or in any context that didn’t involve putting his tongue somewhere no tongue had been before.

“Yeah, yeah,” Nick said, waving a hand vaguely at the ceiling. “Just give me a minute. Fuck. You lads are a bloody menace, you know that?”

They laughed again. He heard movement, the rustle of clothes being adjusted, a belt buckle clinking, the small domestic sounds of two people putting themselves back together. Nick was still staring at the ceiling, waiting for his central nervous system to reboot, when Grayson’s face appeared above him, those blue eyes bright even in the red light. His lips were swollen. He looked angelic and completely unrepentant.

“It was really nice meeting you, Nick,” Grayson said.

He pressed a sweet kiss to Nick’s forehead, chaste, almost brotherly, a baffling contrast to what that same mouth had been doing ninety seconds ago, and stood back up.

Nick registered, with a delay that spoke volumes about the current state of his cognitive function, that they were leaving, already moving toward the curtain while Nick lay sprawled on his back like a starfish that had washed up on the wrong beach.

“Wait — guys—” Nick tried to push himself up on his elbows. His legs did not cooperate. They lay there, heavy and tingling and absolutely fucking useless. “Hang on, I—”

But Devon was already at the curtain, holding it aside for Grayson the same way he had when they’d walked in, the same easy kindness, the same hand on the small of his boyfriend’s back. He glanced over his shoulder at Nick one last time, and the grin that spread across his face was magnificent and utterly without mercy.

He winked.

Then they were gone. The curtain swayed once, twice, and settled. The bass from the floors below throbbed through the walls. The red light hummed. Nick lay there. Naked, spent, alone, staring at the ceiling of Fever’s dark room, legs completely nonfunctional, the ghost of Devon’s tongue still imprinted on a part of his body he was going to have to fundamentally recategorise.

Nick started laughing. Quietly at first, then properly, his chest shaking, the sound bouncing off the close walls and coming back to him like company. He’d been used. That was what had just happened. Grayson and Devon hadn’t picked him up at the bar because they wanted a third. They’d picked him up because they wanted a toy. Something to play with together, something to take apart and enjoy and then put down when they were done. They’d walked into that dark room as a couple and they’d walked out as a couple, and Nick had been the evening’s entertainment. Right now, somewhere downstairs or in a cab or already back at their flat, Grayson was pressed against Devon and Devon’s hands were on Grayson and they were high on each other and on what they’d just done, buzzing with it, and they were going to go home and fuck each other senseless, and somewhere in the middle of it Devon would murmur something about the British boy, about his cock, about his arse, about the sound he’d made when Devon’s tongue found that spot, and they’d both laugh and fuck harder because of it.

And Nick fucking loved it.

Loved being the thing they’d used to make each other want more. Loved that they’d taken exactly what they needed from him and then left without ceremony, without apology, without even waiting for him to stand up. Loved the shamelessness of it. The total, glorious absence of guilt or obligation or the need to perform some version of emotional connection that none of them were pretending to feel. They’d wanted him, they’d had him, and they’d gone.

Charlie was going to lose his absolute mind when he heard about this.

The laugh faded into a long, satisfied exhale that emptied his lungs completely. Slowly, it dawned on he was lying buck naked in a room where an unknowable number of other people had also been lying buck naked, doing things that would make his mother emigrate to a different planet if she ever found out. Nick hauled himself upright and stood. The room swayed gently, then settled. Good enough.

His clothes were scattered across the floor with no discernible logic. Jeans crumpled somewhere near the wall and Harp’s shirt, the Dolce & Gabbana button-down that Harp had pulled from his wardrobe with the reverence of a man handling religious artifacts, in a heap so far from the jeans that the two garments appeared to have had a disagreement and gone their separate ways. He picked it up, gave it a cursory inspection that revealed nothing catastrophic under the red light — which, he acknowledged, was probably the point of red light — and pulled it on, doing the buttons with fingers that were still slightly clumsy from the aftermath. He’d deal with Harp later. Or, more accurately, he’d never mention it and hope that whatever had happened to the shirt in its time on that floor would come out in the wash, both literally and metaphorically.

He was buttoning the last two buttons of the shirt, already composing the text he’d send Charlie, something brief, something that would give him just enough information to combust without the full story, because the full story deserved a proper FaceTime and the expression on Charlie’s face when Nick got to the part about Devon’s tongue. He fished his jeans off the floor, patted the pockets until he found his phone, and pulled it out. The screen lit up in his hand and Nick’s stomach dropped.

Fourteen missed calls. All from Tao. The first one timestamped over an hour ago, the last one six minutes before. Between them, a cascade of text, from Tao, from Charlie, from Isaac, from a group chat that appeared to have been created in the last ninety minutes and was already four hundred messages deep. Nick’s thumb hovered over the screen, his pulse climbing, the post-orgasmic warmth evaporating so fast he could practically feel it leaving his body.

Fourteen missed calls. While Nick had been in a dark room with his phone on silent and his brain switched off and his legs wrapped around two strangers.

He called back. It rang once.

“NICKY!”

The voice that came through the speaker was not Tao’s. It was Charlie’s, loud enough that Nick actually pulled the phone away from his ear, wincing, and even at arm’s length every syllable was perfectly audible, broadcast at a volume that suggested Charlie had forgotten how telephones worked and was trying to communicate through sheer force of enthusiasm.

“NICKY. WHERE ARE YOU. OH MY GOD. NICKY!“

“Char?” Nick said, bewildered. “What — why you got Tao’s phone?”

Behind Charlie’s voice, the line was chaos. Music thumping, the clatter of glasses, someone laughing in great, heaving bursts, and beneath it all a sound that might have been Tao shouting something like give me back my phone or possibly someone get him more water, it was impossible to tell. Charlie was clearly not at home. Charlie was clearly not sober. Charlie sounded, in fact, like he who had consumed a considerable quantity of alcohol in a short period of time and was now experiencing the results with maximum enthusiasm and minimum volume control.

“NICKY. Oh my god. Oh my GOD.“ Charlie’s breathing was ragged between the words, punctuated by a hiccup that he didn’t seem to notice. “You need — you need t’come home, Nicky. Right now. Right — right now.“

“Charlie, what’s going on? Are you pissed?”

“’M not — thass not the point, Nicky, lissen to me, are you liss’ning?” Another hiccup. A crash in the background that sounded like someone had knocked over a chair, followed by a cheer. “ELLE AND TAO ARE GETTING MARRIED!”

Nick blinked.

“Wh—”

“MARRIED, NICKY. MARRIED. He — he proposed, like, last night, or t’night, I don’t even know anymore, time is — time is fake—” A hiccup. “—nhe did it in the restaurant, the one with the — the candles, you know the one, an’ Elle was crying, Nicky, she was crying so much, an’ then we all started crying, we’ve been crying for — I don’t know how long, Isaac’s still crying, I think he might actually be broken, someone needs to check on him—”

Charlie half-laughed, half-sobbed, the two sounds colliding into something that didn’t fully commit to being either.

“—where are we?” Charlie pulled the phone away. Nick could hear him asking someone, voices tumbling over each other, a shriek of laughter, and Charlie came back. “We’re at a — a place, it doesn’t matter where we are, what matters is you need to get on a PLANE, Nicholas Nelson, you need to get your gorgeous arse on a plane and come HOME because our best friends are getting married and you’re not HERE and that’s — thass not acceptable, Nicky, thass not — COME HOME, NICKY!”

“Charlie—”

“JUST COME, NICKY. COME HOME!”

—

Two more chapters until the end. The epilogue will be an exclusive gift to my paid subscribers, so if you want to stay with Nick and Charlie until the very end, make sure to upgrade you subscription right now.