Heartbreaker, a Hearstopper Story - Ch. 10

Gay Erotica, +18, Cuckold, Cheating

It started with a promise Beto had made three weeks ago, slightly drunk and entirely sincere, to teach Charlie how to make Aunt Fernanda’s recipe for the perfect caipirinha.

The Trader Joe’s on Wilshire was busy as it always was on Friday evenings, all harried students and young professionals speed-walking the narrow aisles with focused intensity, nobody making eye contact, everyone with somewhere better to be. Charlie moved through it efficiently, a year of California grocery runs had taught him exactly where everything lived, and kept his momentum polite but firm.

He’d been on his feet since noon. His part-time job at Lavender Pages — a small queer bookstore tucked between a coffee shop and a dry cleaner two blocks from campus, permanently smelling of old paper and possibility — had kept him properly busy all afternoon. He loved it in a way he hadn’t anticipated loving a part-time job, the satisfaction of matching the right book to the right person, of knowing the stock well enough to make recommendations that actually landed.

The afternoon had been the good kind of busy, where the hours folded into each other without you noticing, where you looked up from shelving and the light through the front window had shifted from bright to amber without permission. A girl with box braids and paint-stained fingers had left with Audre Lorde and a Richard Siken. A nervous lad, couldn’t have been older than seventeen, had hovered near the YA shelf for five minutes before working up the courage to ask for something “like Heated Rivalry, but, um, less,” and had clutched the copy of The Music of What Happens Charlie handed him like a lifeline, paid in crumpled notes, and practically fled, ears burning.

It was Elena, his co-worker, who shattered the peace, as Elena tended to do.

A woman had come in looking for a single book for her son who’d just come out, very nervous but well-meaning, holding her handbag like a shield. Charlie had been halfway to the display table with a perfectly sensible recommendation when Elena materialised from the stockroom, took the woman’s hand, told her she was an incredible mother, and ushered her into the reading nook with a cup of herbal tea and a curated stack of six titles arranged in what Charlie could only describe as an emotional arc. She then proceeded to read aloud from three of them, transitioning between passages with impassioned commentary about visible parental love in gay narratives, while the woman wept and a bloke browsing the graphic novels section quietly decided this was above his pay grade and left.

The woman bought all six books, a tote bag, two bookmarks, and a lavender-scented candle that may not have had a price tag. Hundred and eighty-seven dollars in a single transaction. Elena was insufferable about it for the rest of the afternoon.

When they’d locked up, Elena had offered him a lift back to Westbridge. Charlie had declined, held up his shopping list by way of explanation, and she’d clocked the limes and raised an eyebrow. “Caipirinhas? In January?” Charlie had shrugged, and Elena had shaken her head with the weary resignation of someone who had long ago accepted that the British were beyond help, before heading off to her car.

He paid for his limes, his sugar, and a cheap wooden cutting board because Beto had complained last time that Charlie’s knife work had scarred his desk, tucked the bags into the crook of his arm, and pushed out into the cold January evening.

The walk back to campus was twenty minutes on foot and the air had that particular coastal California winter bite to it, nothing like the bone-deep cold of a Kent January, but sharp enough to make him pull his jacket tighter and wish he’d worn the thicker one. His breath misted faintly in front of him. The street was quiet for a Friday evening, shopfronts dimming, a few restaurants spilling warm light onto the pavement, the palms along the boulevard stripped of any golden hour flattery and looking vaguely skeletal against the darkening sky. He walked, thinking about nothing much at all, until he didn’t.

He was almost past it before he registered what he was looking at. Coastal Stack, a small, perpetually busy sandwich shop with a handwritten menu board and a queue that spilled onto the pavement most lunchtimes, the warm smell of toasted bread and melted cheese drifting out every time the door swung open. Charlie slowed. Then stopped. They made Nick’s favorite sandwich. The pulled pork and pickled jalapeños one, with that specific combination of sauces that Nick had described in enough detail on enough occasions that Charlie could have ordered it in his sleep.

He stood on the pavement and thought for a moment. Nick was working a double shift tonight, covering for Tsunami who’d been proper poorly all week. He’d been at Roosters since lunch and wouldn’t finish until closing, a knackering stretch that left very little room for anything as sensible as dinner. Charlie knew from experience that Nick’s approach to eating on long shifts was optimistic at best and catastrophic at worst. The lad had come home more than once having survived on nothing but bar snacks and sheer bloody-mindedness, which was not, Charlie had pointed out on several occasions, a nutritional strategy.

He looked at the menu board. Then at his shopping bags. The caipirinha ingredients weren’t going anywhere, and turning up to Beto’s on an empty stomach was a genuinely terrible idea. He’d learned that the hard way the first time Beto had made them, proper Brazilian strength, the sort that hit you about twenty minutes later with the subtlety of being run over. Something in his stomach first seemed only sensible.

He left twenty minutes later, stomach growling traitorously at the smell rising from the new bag in his hand. He’d got two sandwiches, Nick’s pulled pork and jalapeño and a chicken and avocado for himself, and the combined smell of them was doing nothing whatsoever for his self-control on the walk over. Thankfully, Roosters wasn’t far from Coastal Stack. A few more minutes of walking brought him to the familiar white brick building with its red roof, sitting back from the street with the cheerful confidence of a place that knew exactly what it was and wasn’t remotely bothered about it. The logo looked down from above the entrance: that comically muscular cockerel in his tiny red trunks, chest out, wearing an expression that suggested he had extremely specific and quite dodgy plans for anyone daft enough to walk through the door, and Charlie laughed at it the way he always did, because apparently no amount of exposure made it less ridiculous.

It was Friday night, which meant there was a proper queue snaking out the front of Roosters and halfway down the pavement. Mostly blokes, but a fair few women too, all dressed up and chatting and doing their best to look like they weren’t desperate to get in, which most of them clearly were. Charlie walked straight past the lot of them to the front, ignored a couple of indignant “hey, there’s a line” from people who didn’t know any better, and slipped inside.

Inside, Roosters was doing what Roosters did on a Friday night, which was absolutely everything at once.

The noise hit first, a solid wall of it, laughter and screams and catchy pop music that made it impossible to stand still and got lodged in your head for days whether you wanted it to or not. The smell followed immediately: burgers and fries and something sweet underneath, coconut or vanilla, and the warm press of too many bodies in an enthusiastically air-conditioned space. The lighting was low and red and gold, neon signs throwing coloured patches across the crowd, the whole place buzzing with that specific Friday energy that was slightly unhinged in the best possible way. Moving through all of it, trays balanced with practised ease, tiny red trunks leaving approximately nothing to the imagination, were the Roosters lads, every one of them stupidly attractive, every one of them completely unbothered about it. Charlie had been coming here long enough that the sight no longer made him walk into things, which he considered a genuine personal achievement.

Charlie found Nick almost immediately. The romantic in him liked to think it was something like instinct, his heart functioning as a compass that always swung toward the boy he loved regardless of the crowd between them. The truth was considerably more straightforward: Nick was simply the best-looking person in the building by a margin that wasn’t particularly close, and locating him required approximately the same effort as locating the sun.

He was working a table near the far end of the bar, four blokes who looked like they’d been pre-drinking since early evening and were thoroughly delighted with where their night had taken them. Nick was in his element, red trunks sitting criminally low on those narrow hips, the thin fabric stretched obscenely tight across the outline of his cock, pressing insistently against the front like it was trying to escape the tiny scrap of red altogether. His heavy ball shifted with every breath he took, and the whole package swung just enough to draw every eye in the room without him seeming to notice or care. Every inch of him was golden and enormous and completely unbothered by it. He was giving the table his most dazzling smile, the full one, the one that had been making people forget what they were doing since he was sixteen years old.

It was having the desired effect. The blokes around the table had gone slightly glassy-eyed, leaning forward with the helpless, hazy attention of people who had stopped processing words and were simply basking. They seemed to be settling the bill. Charlie watched as one of them, a bloke who looked to be in his late forties, broad-shouldered and ruddy-faced and thoroughly smitten, pulled a folded note from his wallet and leaned forward to tuck it into the front of Nick’s trunks, fingers brushing dangerously close to the considerable outline of his cock with a boldness that only a third drink could fully explain. Nick let him, as if this was the most ordinary transaction in the world. He said something Charlie couldn’t hear over the music, and the whole table erupted, loud enough that the group beside them turned to look. The man laughed hardest of all, then reached back into his wallet and tucked a second note in right next to the first.

Charlie watched the man’s hand linger at the waistband of Nick’s trunks a beat longer than strictly required, fingers grazing the skin just above the fabric with the confidence of someone who had decided that he was entitled to the moment. Nick didn’t step back or shifted away.

Charlie stood very still.

There was something happening in his chest that he couldn’t immediately account for. Something quiet and considerably confusing. Something warm, low down, that had no business being there while he was standing in the middle of Roosters on a Friday night holding two sandwiches and a bag of caipirinha ingredients. He watched the man’s hand withdraw. Watched Nick tuck the second note alongside the first with a casual movement, the fabric of his trunks shifting with it.

Charlie’s face had gone slightly warm.

He looked away, scanning the room for somewhere to look that wasn’t on the place where his boyfriend was being groped, and found his eyes settling on Jet instead.

Jet was making his way through the crowd toward him, tray balanced in one hand, that easy water-polo swagger completely at home in the Friday night chaos. Tall, muscular and deeply tanned, with jet black hair and pale blue eyes that were almost startling against all that darkness. Nick had once declared, with complete conviction, that he looked exactly like Prince Eric from The Little Mermaid, and Charlie completely agreed.

He spotted Charlie and grinned.

“Charlie! Didn’t know you were coming in tonight.”

“I wasn’t,” Charlie answered, grinning back. “Thought I’d surprise Nick with dinner.”

“Aw, that’s sweet. Want me to help you find him?” Jet scanned the room for a second. “Wait, he’s right there.”

Charlie, briefly wondering whether Jet was as attuned to his boyfriend’s exact location as he apparently was, looked back across the room.

The blokes from the table had risen to leave. The one who’d stuffed the notes into Nick’s trunks was saying something, and Nick laughed before shifting his tray to one hand and flexing his free arm without particular ceremony, bicep rising to an frankly unreasonable size under the warm lighting. The man said something that Charlie was fairly certain was some variation of can I touch it, and Nick just shrugged. The man groped the exposed bicep with considerable enthusiasm, while simultaneously, a second bloke from the group reached out and placed a hand squarely on Nick’s pec, bold as anything.

The warm feeling returned. Low and quiet and thoroughly inconvenient.

“Seems like he’s busy,” Charlie said, laughing.

“Yeah, Brit has that effect on people,” Jet said, shaking his head with fond resignation. “I swear he pulls more tips in a week than I do in an entire month.”

He glanced back at Charlie, who was still watching the scene across the room, where a third bloke from the group had now joined the first two in their enthusiastic appreciation of Nick’s bicep situation.

“You really don’t mind, do you?” Jet asked.

“Hm?”

“Brit working here.” Jet nodded toward the spot where Nick was now being simultaneously groped by four different men with the serene patience of someone waiting for a bus. “People touching him like that.”

“Not really, no,” Charlie said. “It’s silly to mind.”

Jet watched him for another second, something quietly assessing in those pale blue eyes.

“Damn,” he said. “I wish I could be that confident someday.”

Charlie laughed. “It’s just a bit of harmless flirting.” He paused, glancing back at Nick, and added, almost casually, “Besides, Nick and I are open.”

The lie came out so easily he almost believed it himself. Perfectly shaped, completely convincing, already settling into the conversation like it had always belonged there. Charlie felt the faint surprise of someone who hadn’t known they were going to say something until they’d already said it.

Nick being attracted to Jet wasn’t exactly a state secret. It was just one of those things, the kind of low-level attraction that existed in the background of a relationship without meaning anything in particular. Nick had never hidden it especially, and Charlie had never felt the need to make a thing of it. He’d noticed the way Nick’s eyes sometimes tracked Jet across the room without meaning to, the way he’d laughed a little too readily at something Jet said once, the time Jet had emerged from the changing room still pulling his shirt on and Nick had very casually looked everywhere else in the room simultaneously. Nothing dramatic. Just Nick being human, which Charlie had always accepted as part of the deal.

He couldn’t have said exactly what he was hoping to see there… but there it was. Jet’s eyebrows lifted slightly, and his eyes lit up with something Charlie could identify easily enough: interest, recalibrated, that attention that shifted when a door you’d assumed was closed turned out to have some give in it. When he looked back at Nick, who was now following his punters toward the exit, it was with the focus of someone seeing a familiar thing slightly differently for the first time.

Interesting.

“Oh,” said Jet. “I didn’t know that.”

“I don’t imagine he’d have mentioned it,” Charlie said, keeping his voice very casual. “And please don’t say anything to him. I don’t want to embarrass him.”

“No, sure, of course,” Jet said quickly. He looked back at Nick again, then at Charlie, something settling behind his eyes. “I mean, it makes sense. Two hot guys away from home for the first time. Makes sense you’d want to explore your options a bit.”

“Something like that,” Charlie said pleasantly.

Nick was still across the room, working another table, completely oblivious. Charlie took the opportunity, almost without deciding to, to test the ground a little further.

“You and Nick have never...” he said, letting the question hang in the air with deliberate casualness.

Jet’s eyes went wide.

“No, dude, of course not. No way.” He shook his head firmly. “Nick’s nothing but a complete pro with everyone here, I swear.”

“Right, of course,” Charlie said, nodding as if this was entirely unsurprising information that confirmed what he’d already known.

In fact, it did. He’d never once doubted Nick’s faithfulness, not for a single moment. That wasn’t what this was about.

“I don’t even think it’s a good idea to mess around with co-workers,” Jet went on, as if he had considered the matter seriously. He paused. His eyes drifted across the room to where Nick was. “But if I was ever gonna break that rule...”

Charlie followed his gaze. Nick was laughing at something a punter had said, completely unaware he was being discussed. Charlie’s mind went somewhere briefly, involuntarily: Nick and Jet tangled together on their narrow dorm bed. Nick’s massive golden frame pinning Jet down. Sweat glistening across the heavy curve of his pecs as he thrust deep and slow into him. Striking blue eyes locked on Nick’s while full lips parted on a wrecked moan. Jet’s long legs hooked high around Nick’s waist while Nick drove into him.

He pulled it back with the practised ease of someone who’d learned not to examine certain thoughts too closely in public. Still, he couldn’t ignore the way his undies were suddenly feeling a little bit tighter.

“Mm,” said Charlie pleasantly.

He looked at Nick. Then at Jet again, who was still watching Nick with those pale blue eyes and that newly recalibrated expression. Charlie made a quiet decision that he didn’t yet have a name for.

“I have to go,” he said. He held out the Coastal Stack bag to Jet. “Can you give those to Nick, please?”

Jet took it, glancing inside. “You sure you don’t want to say hi yourself? I bet he’d love eat with you.”

“Don’t want to bother him,” Charlie said simply.

Jet looked at him for a moment, something quietly curious in his eyes, but didn’t push it.

“There’s two in there,” Charlie added, already stepping back. “You can have mine.”

“Dude, you sure?”

“Absolutely.” Charlie smiled, shifting his bags to both hands. “Tell him I said hi. And that I’ll see him later.”

He turned before Jet could say anything else, weaving back through the Friday night crowd toward the exit, the music and the laughter and the warm red light closing behind him as he pushed out into the cool evening air.

Abbot Kinney held its breath in January. The taco trucks had pulled inward, awnings rolled up, fairy lights still strung between poles but illuminating mostly empty patios. The jasmine that would soften every block in a few months was dormant, replaced by the cleaner smell of salt air and damp concrete. A few couples moved briskly between restaurants, collars turned up, breath misting, and the palms lining the boulevard looked oddly severe against the dark sky, all sharp angles and rattling fronds without any golden light to make them pretty. Charlie walked quickly, the bags knocking gently against his thighs, and the cold pressed in through his jacket, finding the gaps at his wrists and collar with quiet efficiency. It was the kind of evening that made you want to be indoors, under a blanket, next to someone warm… and yet the chill wasn’t quite enough to tamp down the heat still sitting insistent in Charlie’s undies, stubborn as an ember that didn’t know it was supposed to have gone out.

It kept happening. It had been happening for months now, ever since the night he met Beto at that Seaview Hall get-together, though he hadn’t recognised it for what it was back then. He’d be in the middle of something perfectly ordinary, a conversation, a lecture, shelving books at Lavender Pages with Radio 1 murmuring from Elena’s phone, and then someone would say something, or he’d catch a glance, or Nick would come home and mention some punter who’d been flirting outrageously, and Charlie’s mind would take a sharp left into somewhere it had absolutely no business going. Nick with someone else. Nick pressing someone into a mattress, mouth on their throat, those massive arms pinning them down Nick kissing someone who wasn’t him, fucking someone who wasn’t him, doing all the things he was only supposed to do with Charlie.

It had started years ago, when they were still at Truham. Back then, dating Nick Nelson, rugby squad star, six foot three of golden muscle, the kind of fit that made entire rooms go quiet when he walked in, had felt like a dream Charlie was going to wake up from any minute. He was always aware of how Nick looked. More than that, he was always aware of how he looked next to Nick. Slender where Nick was broad, pale where Nick was tanned, quiet where Nick filled every room just by standing in it. He knew what people thought when they saw them together. He could practically hear it, those whispers pitched just loud enough to carry. How the hell did that weird kid land that stud. What does he see in him. Give it six months. Charlie had smiled through it, because he loved Nick and Nick loved him and that was supposed to be enough. And it was. It was enough. Except for the nights when it wasn’t, when the dark got in through the cracks Ben Hope had left unsealed and Charlie lay awake cataloguing all the reasons Nick would eventually come to his senses.

So when the images first started, he’d chalked them up to exactly that. His self-esteem, broken and rebuilt and broken again, finding a new way to sabotage the best thing that had ever happened to him. Because that’s what damage did, wasn’t it? It didn’t just sit there politely. It mutated. It found the thing you loved most and it whispered, you don’t deserve this, and here’s how you’ll lose it. The images would come late at night, crawling in through the dark like something with teeth. Nick meeting someone. Someone taller, broader, more up to his league. Someone who matched him the way Charlie never could. And Nick would try to resist, of course he would, because Nick was good, Nick was loyal, Nick was everythin, but eventually he’d break, because how could he not, when the other person was right there and Charlie was just... Charlie. And Charlie would shove a hand down his pants and come so hard his vision went white, and for those few devastating seconds it was the most intense thing he’d ever felt.

Then the high would pass. His breathing would slow. The ceiling would come back into focus.

And the disgust would hit like a boot to the chest.

Because how could he do that? How could he take something that was supposed to be sacred — Nick’s love, Nick’s loyalty, the thing Charlie had built his entire sense of self around — and turn it into this? Who the fuck got off on the thought of being cheated on? What kind of person lay in the bed where Nick held him and called him love and kissed his forehead goodnight, and wanked himself raw imagining Nick doing those things to someone else?

A broken one. Obviously. A properly fucked-up one who’d let Ben Hope crawl so deep inside his head that even the good things came out twisted.

That’s what Charlie had told himself, anyway. For a long time.

He’d tried to stop. Christ, he’d tried. He’d lie there afterwards, shame still hot in his throat, and swear to himself that was the last time. He’d think about Nick, the real Nick. The one who brought him tea without being asked and learned his panic attack breathing exercises by heart and once sat on the floor of Charlie’s bedroom for two hours holding his hand because Charlie couldn’t stop crying and didn’t know why. The Nick who looked at him like he was the only person in any room, every room, always. What would that Nick think if he knew? If he could see inside Charlie’s head on those nights? The thought alone was enough to make Charlie’s stomach turn inside out. Nick would be hurt. No, worse than hurt. Devastated. That crease between his brows would deepen, his voice would go quiet, and Charlie knew he’d see it in those brown eyes before Nick could hide it: Am I not enough for you?

The thought was unbearable. So Charlie did what Charlie did best, he buried it. Shoved it down into the same locked room where he kept Ben Hope’s voice and the memory of his worst nights and all the other things that had no place in the life he was trying to build. He went weeks without letting himself think about it, then months. He focused on Nick, real Nick, present Nick, the warm solid weight of him in Charlie’s bed, the taste of his mouth, the sound of his laugh. He told himself the fantasies had been a glitch. A misfiring. Some residual damage from a time when he hadn’t known what healthy love looked like, and now that he did, it would fade on its own. He just had to wait it out.

It didn’t fade.

It went quiet for stretches, sometimes long ones, and Charlie would feel a flood of relief so strong it made him dizzy, see, it’s gone, you’re fine, you’re normal. Then Nick would mention that some girl had been staring at him at the gym, or a lad at a party would touch Nick’s arm while laughing at something he’d said, and the image would slam back through Charlie with the force of something that had been holding its breath. Nick’s hands on someone else. Someone else’s mouth on Nick’s neck. And Charlie would excuse himself to the bathroom and grip the sink and stare at his own reflection and think, what is wrong with you.

But time passed, as it tends to do. Charlie got older, more settled in himself, perhaps even a little wiser, despite what Tori seemed to think. His love with Nick survived Truham and deepened into something sturdier, something that had weathered enough small storms to stop flinching at every gust. They learned each other properly, the ugly mornings and the petty irritations and the specific silence that meant I need ten minutes before I can be a person, and none of it diminished a thing. If anything, the ordinary parts made the extraordinary ones feel more real. Charlie’s self-esteem, that fragile scaffolding he’d been rebuilding since Ben Hope kicked it out from under him, began to hold weight. He started therapy. He started believing the things his therapist said, which was harder. He started hitting the gym with Nick, first as a joke, then as a habit, then as something he genuinely looked forward to. No, he was never going to be a muscle god like Nick, that ship had sailed and frankly had never been docked at his harbour in the first place, but somewhere along the months his shoulders squared out, his arms found definition, his reflection started looking like someone who took up space on purpose. He’d catch himself in the mirror after a shower and think, right then, not so bad after all, which for Charlie Spring was practically megalomania.

And the desire was still there. Quiet sometimes, loud others, but always present, humming underneath everything like a frequency only Charlie could hear. He was starting to think it would never leave. That it wasn’t a glitch. It was just... part of him. And this new Charlie, the one with the squared shoulders and the therapist and the growing suspicion that he might actually deserve the life he had, was beginning to make a reluctant peace with that. He still wasn’t entirely comfortable with it. Still flinched at the word cuckold when he came across it online. But the self-loathing had lost its teeth. What used to feel like standing trial now felt more like a conversation he was having with himself, ongoing and unresolved, but no longer cruel.

It didn’t help that somewhere along the way, Nick had apparently decided that clothes were more of a suggestion than a requirement. California had done something to him. The Kent boy who used to layer up in hoodies and joggers had slowly shed fabric like a snake discovering it preferred being naked, and by the time they’d settled into Westbridge, Nick’s default state indoors was shirtless at minimum, starkers at every opportunity. He’d joined the Sharks, which meant practices that ran late into the California dusk, and Charlie, who had never once in his life cared about rugby, found his mind drifting on those evenings with alarming specificity. Nick and Torres and Grimmy, all sweat-slick and caked in mud, peeling off their kits and stepping under the same scalding spray, steam curling thick around their bodies while hot water carved paths down hard muscle and someone made a joke and someone laughed and maybe, just maybe, the proximity and the adrenaline and the looseness that came after a brutal session tipped into something else. Hands finding skin that wasn’t their own. A mouth on a shoulder. Nick’s massive frame crowding someone against the tile while the water hammered down and —

Charlie would blink, realise he’d been staring at the same page of his Virginia Woolf essay for eleven minutes, and calmly close his laptop.

Then Nick became a Cock, and Charlie’s imagination went into proper overdrive.

The job itself was almost too much. Nick spending four or five nights a week in nothing but those tiny red trunks, every muscle on display, that ridiculous bulge swinging heavy and obvious for a room full of people who were there for precisely that reason. And the other Cocks. God, the other Cocks. Captain America with those baby blue eyes and that all-American jaw that belonged on a recruiting poster. Big Z, whose trunks strained with a bulge that suggested he was just as hung as Nick. And Jet, bloody fucking Jet, with that black hair that gave him his nickname and those pale eyes and an arse so round and perfect it should have been classified as a public disturbance.

Charlie’s mind would catch fire at the smallest things. A text from Nick at half eleven — covering for Hawk, gonna be another hour xx — and Charlie would be gone, lying in the dark with his phone still glowing on the pillow beside him, constructing entire scenarios with the efficiency of a man who’d had far too much practice.

A wealthy older bloke in an expensive suit, the kind who drove something German and tipped in hundreds, offering Nick a lift home after closing. The car pulling over on some dark stretch of Pacific Coast Highway, Nick’s red trunks shoved down just enough for that his cock to spring free, the older man’s hand wrapping around it, stroking slow and greedy while Nick let his head fall back against the seat, hips rolling up into the touch because the night was warm, the tips had been ridiculous, and Charlie was asleep back at the dorm.

Or Sunny staying behind after the others had left, showing Nick how to do a proper lap dance on one of the empty tables, hands guiding his hips, bodies pressed too close, the music still playing from the speakers, until the demonstration went further than either of them planned. Sunny on his knees, mouth stretched wide around the head of Nick’s cock, tongue working the underside while Nick’s fingers tangled in ginger hair, guiding him deeper, groaning loud as Sunny took him to the root, throat working around him, the whole thing messy and urgent and secret.

Or simply Nick and Jet tangled together on the narrow locker-room bench after a Friday shift, still buzzing with adrenaline and sweat, Nick’s frame pinning Jet down as he drove his cock deep into him with those powerful thrusts that Charlie knew so well. Jet’s long legs hooked high around Nick’s waist, arse stretched wide and glistening around every inch of Nick, while Nick’s big hand clamped tight over Jet’s mouth to muffle the desperate moans spilling because they had to be quick, Charlie was waiting, and Nick would text him on my way love twelve minutes later smelling of someone else’s shower gel and Charlie would never, ever know.

Except Charlie wanted to know. That was the whole point. That was the part that still made his breath catch if he examined it too closely. Not the infidelity itself, but the wanting of it. The ache to be the one who knew and watched and burned.

Still, despite all of it, Charlie held the line. The fantasies stayed fantasies. They lived in the dark and Charlie kept them there because he understood that some doors, once opened, couldn’t be closed again. He loved Nick. Nick loved him. That was real, and solid, and Charlie was not going to be the one who contaminated it by saying the unsayable. So he didn’t. He filed it all away, tidied the edges, and got on with the business of being a good boyfriend who absolutely did not spend an unreasonable portion of his mental energy imagining his partner shagging other men.

Then he met Beto Montenegro, and every wall he’d built came down like wet cardboard.

It had taken only a couple of hours. That was all. One evening in a Seaview Hall common room with probably-spiked punch, and Charlie had looked at Beto and understood that he was completely and irreversibly fucked. It wasn’t just that Beto was beautiful, though he was. It was the whole of him. The voice warm with that Portuguese music running underneath it. The body moving through space with the easy confidence of someone who had never once questioned whether he deserved to be looked at. The laugh, the charm, the way he’d kissed both of Charlie’s cheeks at the top of the stairs and said foi um prazer te conhecer, irmão like they’d known each other for years instead of hours.

And the images had come roaring back, louder and more vivid than they’d ever been. Nick and Beto. Beto and Nick. The two most beautiful men Charlie had ever seen, fucking like it was the end of the world.

And this time, the images stayed.

The Westbridge gates were a welcome sight because Charlie’s fingers had gone properly numb somewhere around the last two blocks. Campus was Friday-night quiet, most people either out or getting ready to be out, the walkways mostly empty save for a couple of joggers and a girl in a puffer coat arguing passionately into her phone in what sounded like Mandarin. The dorm hallway smelled of whatever body spray the lad in 331 seemed to apply by the gallon and the faint chemical sweetness of someone straightening their hair three doors down. He showered quickly, just long enough to thaw his fingers and wash the day off. He towelled dry, pulled on clean sweatpants and a soft navy jumper that Nick always said made his eyes look darker, and ran his fingers through his damp curls until they sat somewhere between intentional and hopeless. Good enough. He picked the Trader Joe’s bag, crossed the three steps of hallway between 333 and 334, and knocked.

Beto opened the door in nothing but a pair of bright yellow shorts that made his skin glow even more golden than usual, which Charlie had not previously considered possible. His hair was damp, his feet were bare, and he looked like he’d just stepped off a beach in Rio rather than out of a dorm shower in January.

“It’s twelve degrees, Beto.”

Beto leaned against the doorframe and smirked. “If it’s too hot for caipirinhas, it’s too hot for clothes.”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“It does in Portuguese. You coming in or what?”

Charlie held up the Trader Joe’s bag. “Couldn’t find a muddler anywhere, but I got everything else.”

Beto took the bag and peered inside, nodding approvingly. “Don’t worry about it, man. I’ve got a wooden spoon that works better anyway. Come on, let’s do this.”

For the next hour, Beto’s dorm room became a caipirinha laboratory, and Charlie was the least talented student it had ever produced.

They cleared Beto’s desk and laid everything out with the seriousness of a surgical prep: limes, sugar, ice from the communal kitchen down the hall, the wooden spoon that was apparently superior to any muddler ever manufactured, and the star of the evening, a bottle of premium cachaça, golden as Beto’s skin, that his aunt Fernanda had sent over from Minas Gerais where she still lived. Beto handled it with a reverence that bordered on religious, tilting the label toward Charlie so he could appreciate the hand-printed lettering and the wax seal. Charlie nodded with the appropriate gravity, pretending he had any idea of made cachaça good or bad.

The recipe itself was deceptively simple. Squeeze the lime to loosen the juice. Cut it into half-moon slices, removing the white pith from the centre first, crucial, Beto stressed, tapping the knife against the cutting board for emphasis, because the pith would bitter the whole drink and then you might as well be drinking dishwater. Add the slices directly to a glass with the sugar and muddle gently, gently, Carlinhos, you’re not trying to kill it, until the juice ran and the sugar dissolved. Fill the glass with ice. Pour a measure of cachaça — but before that, Beto uncapped Aunt Fernanda’s bottle, tilted it toward the floor, and let a thin stream of cachaça splash onto the linoleum. Charlie stared. Beto caught his expression and shrugged. “You always give the first pour to the saint,” he said, as if this explained everything. Charlie decided not to ask which saint was currently being honoured via Beto’s dormitory floor, and moved on. Stir well.

Simple. Elegant. Just a couple of steps. A child could do it.

Charlie could not do it.

His first attempt produced something so weak it tasted like the blandest lemonade ever committed to glass, a drink they’d serve at a church fête to someone’s nan. Beto took one sip, closed his eyes, and set the glass down without a word. His second attempt swung violently in the opposite direction. He’d poured the cachaça with confidence and the resulting drink hit his throat like a flaming tennis ball. One sip and the room tilted. Beto laughed so hard he had to hold onto the desk. The third was too sweet. The fourth was somehow both too sweet and too strong, which Beto said shouldn’t have been physically possible and yet here they were. The fifth had promise, real promise, until Charlie forgot to remove the pith and the whole thing turned so bitter they both pulled faces like they’d licked a battery.

They laughed through all of it, loud and loose and increasingly unsteady, mostly because they’d been sampling every failed attempt along the way and the cachaça was doing its work with quiet efficiency. By the time Charlie’s sixth attempt sat on the desk between them, slightly lopsided in the glass, ice melting at the edges, but structurally sound, they were both flushed and grinning and speaking at a volume that the neighbours would have opinions about.

Beto picked it up. Swirled it once. Took a long, considered sip, eyes narrowing with the focus of a sommelier at a blind tasting.

Charlie held his breath.

“Now that is a caipirinha.”

Charlie punched the air.

By that point, the two of them were more pissed than a pair of sixth-formers behind the bike sheds on results day. They ordered pizza. Charlie suggested pineapple to keep with the tropical theme, and Beto looked at him with genuine horror, declaring that he was Brazilian, not a savage, so they settled for pepperoni and mushroom, which arrived in twenty minutes and was gone in ten. They ate cross-legged on Beto’s bed, straight from the box, grease on their fingers, cachaça on the desk within easy reach. Charlie made another batch of caipirinhas, his seventh and eighth, and noticeably better than anything that had come before. Beto tasted it, raised his glass in a solemn toast to Charlie’s progress, and declared that Aunt Fernanda herself might have given him a nod of grudging approval, which from a woman who had been making caipirinhas since before either of them were born was practically a knighthood.

The music shifted when Beto commandeered the laptop. Charlie’s Spotify queue, a comfortable rotation of Arctic Monkeys, Hozier, and whatever Luna had added to their shared playlist that week, was unceremoniously replaced by what Beto called his cultural education. Ney Matogrosso first, that extraordinary voice filling the small room, fierce and androgynous and unlike anything Charlie had heard before. Then Belchior, whose melancholy Portuguese lyrics Beto half-translated between sips, occasionally giving up and just saying “trust me, it’s beautiful.” Then Raul Seixas, louder and wilder, and Beto was on his feet doing air guitar on the bed, nearly spilling his drink, singing along at full volume, completely unbothered by the fact that he couldn’t carry a tune to save his life.

Beto took approximately two hundred photos over the course of the evening. Charlie pulling a face mid-sip. Charlie laughing at something with his eyes shut. Charlie and Beto together, cheeks pressed close, the cachaça bottle raised between them like a trophy. Every single one went straight to his Instagram stories, each with a different filter, each with a caption more dramatic than the last. Charlie took only one photo himself. Beto was sitting against the headboard, glass resting on one bare thigh, head tilted back against the wall, eyes half-closed, lips curved in that drunk, gorgeous smile, the yellow shorts riding up just enough to show the tan line where his skin went a shade lighter. It was innocent. It was also, Charlie noted with the detached honesty of someone on their fourth caipirinha, unreasonably hot. He sent it to Nick, captioned with Wish you were here and a single heart emoji.

Nick viewed it nine minutes later. No reply. Just a like.

Charlie wasn’t surprised.

The lull came between songs, Raul Seixas fading out and the laptop taking a few seconds to queue up the next track. Beto was on his back on the bed, glass balanced on his stomach, staring at the ceiling with the heavy-lidded contentment of someone who had drunk exactly the right amount. Charlie was cross-legged at the other end, back against the wall, working on what he’d decided would be his last caipirinha because the room had started doing something subtle and unhelpful at the edges.

Beto was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed. A short, private thing, like he’d remembered something funny and was deciding whether to share it.

“Can I tell you something?” he said, still looking at the ceiling. “And you promise you won’t be mad at me?”

Charlie raised an eyebrow. In his experience, no sentence that began with promise you won’t be mad at me had ever been followed by something that didn’t make someone at least a little bit mad. But the cachaça had sanded down his edges, and Beto’s voice carried something soft underneath the mischief: amusement at himself, mostly, with a thin thread of genuine caution, so Charlie took a sip and said, “Depends on what it is.”

Beto rolled his head sideways on the pillow to look at him. That lazy smile was still there, but something else sat behind his eyes now, watchful beneath the alcohol.

“You know how Nick’s been hitting the gym at Lift District?”

Charlie’s stomach did something very small and very quiet.

“Yeah,” he said carefully.

“So I was at Lift District last week. Tuesday, I think. And Nick was there, doing his chest thing, headphones in, completely locked in.” He paused. “And I needed someone to spot me on squats.”

“You asked Nick to spot you,” Charlie said.

“I did.”

“In the short shorts.”

“In the short shorts.” Beto had the decency to look approximately two percent sheepish. “So he’s behind me, right, hands on the bar, and on the first rep I push back a little. Barely anything. And I swear the first time was a genuine accident —”

“Really?”

“I swear it was!” Beto said, laughing. “And his face, Charlie. Meu Deus. He went so red I thought he was having a medical emergency. Shoved the bar back and jumped away like I’d burned him.”

Charlie was already smiling, that treacherous warmth pooling low in his stomach, but he kept his voice steady. “And then you did it again.”

“He put a full metre between us. Looked ridiculous, like he was spotting me from another postcode. And it was fine for two reps, and then I just —” He made a backwards motion with his hips that left nothing to the imagination. “One more time.”

“Beto.”

“I know. I know. He got so angry after that. Got in my face, you know, whole body shaking. Two guys came over because they thought I was in trouble.” The laughter thinned. “That’s when I knew I’d pushed it too far. I apologised. Told him I was just being stupid. And he told me not to say a word to you about it, and stormed off to the showers.”

Charlie had been losing the battle with his composure since approximately the second sentence. By the time Beto got to the full-metre spotting distance his shoulders were shaking. By the hip demonstration he had his hand over his mouth. And by stormed off to the showers he was properly gone, bent forward, laughing so hard no sound came out for the first few seconds.

“The squeaky voice,” he managed, barely. “Did he do the squeaky voice?”

“He did the squeaky voice.”

Charlie made a sound that wasn’t quite human and pressed his forehead to his knees.

“Stop torturing my boyfriend,” he said, voice still cracking with laughter.

“I promise I will,” Beto swore, hand on his chest, grinning wide. “But you’re not mad, right?”

Charlie shook his head, straightening up, wiping his eyes with the heel of his palm.

“I’m not. I stopped by Nick’s work today, actually, right before coming here. And the second I walked in, there were these blokes, like, four of them, properly feeling him up. Groping his arms, his chest, stuffing money in his trunks. And one of his co-workers looked at me and was like, dude, how can you not care about that?“ Charlie gestured loosely in Beto’s direction. “That’s how. I’ve got nothing to worry about with Nick. He’s the most loyal person I’ve ever met.”

“You really don’t,” Beto agreed. “That man is faithful like a dog.”

The laughter faded but didn’t fully leave. It lingered in the corners of the room, in the looseness of their shoulders, in the easy quiet that followed. Charlie traced the rim of his glass with one finger, watching the lime slice turn slowly in the melting ice.

“He’s got a crush on you, you know,” Charlie said.

Beto looked at him like he’d just suggested putting ketchup on feijoada.

“Sorry, what? Have you met your boyfriend? Dude can’t stand me.”

“That’s how I know,” Charlie said, shrugging. “He’s got a crush on you but he doesn’t know what to do with it, so he acts like he hates you to hide it. Nick’s not exactly subtle when he’s uncomfortable.”

The humour drained from Beto’s face so fast it was almost comical, the easy grin collapsing into something stiff and uncertain, his mouth opening and closing once without producing anything useful. For the first time all evening, Beto looked genuinely awkward, and Charlie found it so disarming on a face that usually wore nothing but confidence that he burst out laughing.

“Ok, don’t look like that. It’s fine.” Charlie kicked him lightly on the shin. “I kind of have a crush on you too, so we’re even.”

Beto laughed, but it came out wrong: too short, too tight, nothing like his usual easy warmth.

“Charlie, I would never —”

“Beto, I know. Relax,” Charlie said. “I don’t know why everyone acts like people in relationships can’t have crushes on other people. It’s harmless. It’s not like Nick’s in love with you or anything.”

Beto still looked unsettled, his glass held motionless against his thigh, that golden confidence dimmed to something cautious and still. “You and Nick are open or something?”

“No. God, no.” Charlie almost laughed at the thought. “He’d have a heart attack if I even suggested it.”

The memory surfaced before he could stop it, Jet’s pale blue eyes recalibrating, that flicker of new interest crossing his face when Charlie had said Nick and I are open, the lie sitting so perfectly in the air between them. He pushed it aside. Beto shifted on the bed, sitting up properly now, the lazy sprawl gone. His eyes were careful, searching, the look of someone trying to read a page written in a language he only half spoke.

“But you, like, want to be open?” he asked.

Charlie considered that for a moment, turning the glass slowly in his hands.

“I don’t know. Not really. I don’t really want to shag other blokes,” he said. He paused, and the pause stretched a beat longer than it should have. “But I guess I’d like to try something. Like, I don’t know. A threesome. That could be hot. Or —”

“Or...?” Beto wasn’t even blinking.

Charlie laughed and looked away. “Never mind. I’m not drunk enough to talk about that.”

The noise Beto made was practically wounded. He sat bolt upright, mouth hanging open, arms thrown wide in outraged disbelief, a grown man who’d just had a sweet ripped from his hand mid-unwrap. “You can’t do that to me, Carlinhos! You can’t just say or and then stop. That’s a crime. In Brazil that’s actually a crime.”

“It’s not a crime in Brazil.”

“It should be. It should be punishable by law. Tell me.” He grabbed Charlie’s ankle and shook it. “Tell me.“

Charlie was laughing properly now, shaking his head, one hand up to fend off Beto’s grip. “Absolutely not.”

“Charlie.”

“No.”

“Carlinhos.“

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” Charlie said.

“Mine what? My kink?” Beto asked. Charlie nodded, and Beto didn’t miss a breath. “Pain.”

The confession caught Charlie completely off guard. He’d expected deflection, or a joke, or at least the kind of coy circling that usually preceded this sort of confession. Instead Beto had just said it, like someone announcing their favourite colour.

“Really?” Charlie blinked. “Like, slaps and all that?”

“God, you’re so cute,” Beto said, shaking his head fondness. “Stronger than slaps, baby. Like, whips. Candle wax. Gang-bangs. Being stretched by a cock so big all you can do is focus on not passing out. I really wanna try fisting some day. “ He ticked each one off with his fingers, casual as a shopping list. “Pain like that.”

Charlie’s mouth was open. He was aware of it being open and could not, for the moment, do anything about it. His caipirinha sat forgotten in his hand, the ice melting quietly, while his brain attempted to process the image of Beto, begging to be wrecked, and found that it processed it rather too well.

He saw it in merciless flashes: Beto on all fours in some dim, unfamiliar room, back arched deep, that perfect round arse pushed high and already glistening with lube and sweat as a thick, veined cock far bigger than anything Charlie had ever taken stretched him open to the limit. Beto’s warm brown eyes would be glassy, half-lidded, lashes wet, while another man’s hand cracked a whip across the smooth golden skin of his back, leaving bright red lines that made those lean muscles flex and tremble. Hot wax would drip in trails down the deep curve of his spine, pooling at the base of his tailbone before sliding lower, making Beto gasp and push back desperately for more. Then the gang-bang vision hit harder, multiple hands on that perfect body, cocks sliding into his mouth, stretching his hole, Beto’s muffled sounds turning desperate and needy as he took them all until he was shaking, ruined, and still begging for the final fist to slide inside him, slow and relentless, filling him in a way no one ever had.

Charlie’s undies were suddenly embarrassingly tight. He shifted on the bed, cheeks burning, and forced his mouth shut before Beto could notice the way his breathing had changed.

“For real?” he managed.

“For real, irmão,” Beto said, and took a calm sip of his drink as if he’d just told Charlie his shoe size. “Come on. Your turn.”

Charlie hesitated for just a second.

“I want to watch,” he said. “Nick. With other guys.”

Beto tilted his head, processing, then shrugged. “Oh, that’s not too weird.”

“Yeah, but not like… not consensually.” Charlie’s grip tightened on his glass. “I don’t want to, like, have a conversation about it. Agree on rules. Make everything perfectly safe and equal and above board, you know?”

He stopped. The room felt smaller than it had thirty seconds ago. Elza Soares sang softly from the laptop, oblivious, and somewhere down the hall a door opened and closed. Charlie could hear his own breathing, could feel his pulse in his fingertips against the cold glass. Beto was watching him with those dark eyes, perfectly still, and for a horrible, lurching moment Charlie thought this is where I lose him. This was the line. Everything before it, the crushes, the threesome comment, even the gym story, was the kind of thing friends laughed about over drinks. What lived on the other side of this sentence was something else entirely. Something he’d never said out loud to another human being.

But Beto had said whips and fisting and focus on not passing out without flinching. Beto had offered his darkest thing first, freely, like handing someone a key and trusting them not to break it. Charlie owed him the same.

He looked down at his caipirinha. Then back up.

“I want Nick to cheat,” he said.

Beto sat upright on the bed, the lazy sprawl gone. He looked at Charlie for a long, still moment, and Charlie waited, heart hammering, throat tight, the cachaça suddenly useless against the cold dread pooling in his chest. This was it. The part where Beto’s face changed. The part where he said that’s fucked up, man or have you talked to someone about that? or simply looked at Charlie differently, permanently, the way people looked at things they couldn’t un-know.

Then Beto smirked.

“Now that’s something,” he said, appreciative, like Charlie had just shown him a card trick he genuinely hadn’t seen coming. “You want to be cuckolded then?”

Charlie winced. “I don’t really like that word.”

“But yeah?”

“But yeah. I do.”

Beto’s smirk stretched wider, his whole face lighting up with delighted disbelief. “Look at you, Charlie Spring, you little freak! Who’d have thought, huh?”

“Not me,” Charlie said quietly. “Trust me. Not me.”

Beto burst out laughing after that, full-bodied and loose, collapsing back onto the bed with his arms spread wide, and Charlie felt the knot in his stomach release so fast it almost made him dizzy. Because there was nothing in that laugh, not a single thing, that sounded like judgement. It wasn’t the nervous laughter of someone who didn’t know what else to do, or the careful laughter of someone performing acceptance while quietly filing the information away for later. It was pure Beto, warm, generous, the laughter of a person who had just been handed someone’s most fragile secret and understood, instinctively, that the only correct response was to make it feel ordinary.

“You never talked to Nick about it?” Beto asked, once he had control of his face again.

“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Charlie stared at his glass. “I know Nick would never cheat. But if I told him I’m okay with him shagging someone else, even if he agrees to do it... then it’s not cheating. It’s just… permission. And that’s not what I—” He trailed off, frustrated by the inadequacy of the words. “That’s not what I want.”

“I hear you,” Beto said. He was quiet for a moment, turning it over. Then that smirk crept back. “So maybe you could ask some really hot guy to seduce him.”

He was joking. Of course he was joking. Charlie could hear it in the lightness of his voice, could see it in the playful tilt of his eyebrows. It was the kind of ridiculous, drunken, half-midnight suggestion that was supposed to make them both laugh and then dissolve into nothing. A crazy, stupid idea. Something you said because you were eight caipirinhas deep and the conversation had wandered somewhere reckless and it was funny, it was just funny, and tomorrow they’d both pretend this entire exchange had been the cachaça talking.

Except Charlie’s mouth was already open.

Except the words were already forming.

Except now that he’d finally said it out loud. This thing he’d carried alone for years, this dark, pulsing want that he’d buried and dug up and buried again. It was like a valve had cracked and everything behind it was rushing forward and he couldn’t stop it, didn’t want to stop it, because Beto was sitting there looking at him without judgement and the room was warm and the music was soft and for the first time in his life someone knew, someone actually knew, and the relief of that was so enormous it made him brave enough to be stupid.

“You could do it for me,” Charlie said.

He’d thought about it. Countless times. His boyfriend and his best friend, the two people closest to him on this side of the Atlantic, together, behind his back. Betraying him in the worst, hottest way imaginable. He’d thought about it in the shower, in bed, in the middle of lectures he was supposed to be paying attention to. He’d wanked to it again and again and again, and each time the fantasy ended, the desire to make it real didn’t fade. It grew. It thickened. It sank its roots deeper into him until Charlie couldn’t tell where the fantasy stopped and the wanting began.

The silence that followed was the loudest thing Charlie had ever heard.

Beto stared at him. Not the playful, teasing stare, not the searching curiosity from earlier. This was something else, mouth slightly open, glass frozen halfway to his lips, almond eyes wide and completely still. He let out a long breath and set his glass down on the bedside table.

“Carlinhos,” he said gently. “You’re drunk.”

“I’m not that drunk.”

“You’re asking me to seduce your boyfriend.”

“I know what I’m asking.”

Beto rubbed his face with both hands, dragging them slowly down his cheeks, and when they dropped he looked at Charlie with something caught between affection and alarm. “Charlie, that’s... that’s a lot, irmão. That’s not just trying something new in the bedroom. You’re talking about me going behind Nico’s back. Behind your back, technically. And he already can’t stand me half the time, you really think he wouldn’t see right through it?”

“He wouldn’t,” Charlie said. “Not if it came from you.”

Beto shook his head slowly, but it wasn’t dismissive. More like a man trying to clear fog.

“And what happens after? Say I do it, say it works, then what? He’s going to be wrecked, Charlie. You know him. It would eat him alive.”

“I would talk to him,” Charlie said, with a confidence he didn’t entirely feel. “Afterwards. I’d let him know it’s fine. That it’s no big deal. That I thought it was hot. And then, you know, it could be the start of something new for him and me. A door we open together.”

Beto didn’t answer straight away. He picked up his glass again, took a slow sip, set it back down. His eyes were fixed somewhere on the middle distance, his jaw working slightly, and Charlie could almost see the argument happening behind his face. The impulse to shut it down wrestling with something else, something quieter, that hadn’t been there a minute ago. The immediate no had softened into something more uncertain. Not a yes. Not even close to a yes. But the wall had a crack in it, and Charlie could feel it.

His pulse quickened. He leaned forward, just slightly, and decided to push.

“If it wasn’t for me,” he said carefully, “would you shag Nick?”

Beto’s eyes snapped to his. “Charlie.”

“Would you?”

“That’s not—”

“Would you?”

Beto held his gaze for a long moment. Then he looked away, rubbed the back of his neck, and let out a breath that sounded like it had been sitting in his chest for a while.

“Of course I would,” he said quietly. “He’s really, really fucking hot.”

Charlie smirked.

“Then just think of it as you trying to get a fit guy into bed,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal if we don’t make it one.”

“Irmão, you know that’s bullshit,” Beto protested. “This isn’t some random hookup. This is—”

“It’s not bullshit,” Charlie said. “It’s simple. You’re attracted to him. He’s attracted to you, whether he admits it or not. The only thing standing in the way is me, and I’m telling you I’m not in the way.”

Beto opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. Charlie recognised the look, the same one Nick got when Charlie outmanoeuvred him in an argument and he hadn’t figured out how yet. It would have been easy to keep going, to press the advantage while Beto was off-balance and the cachaça was doing its work. But Charlie knew better. He’d watched enough people push too hard at the wrong moment, in friendships, in relationships, in the quiet politics of every group he’d ever been part of, and he knew that Beto would snap shut like a trap if he felt cornered. The crack in the wall would seal over and they’d never speak about this again. So he pulled back.

“Look, just think about it, okay?” He kept his voice light, easy, as if they’d been discussing where to grab lunch tomorrow. “I think it could be hot. That’s all.”

Beto looked at him for a long moment. The music had stopped again, the laptop gone quiet between tracks, and the only sound was the faint hum of the heating vent and someone laughing distantly down the hall. His dark eyes searched Charlie’s face, looking for doubt, maybe, or regret, or any sign that this had been the cachaça talking and would evaporate by morning.

Whatever he found there, it wasn’t any of those things.

He nodded. Once. The nod of a man who wasn’t saying yes but had stopped saying no.

Charlie nodded back, and took a long sip of his caipirinha to hide the smile pulling at the corners of his mouth.

Aunt Fernanda’s caipirinha really was exceptional.

—

So now you know. Now you know how it started, not in a Houston hotel room, not on a bar stool at Rosette. It started with limes and cachaça and a promise Charlie Spring should never have made on a Friday night in January.

If you’ve been reading Heartstealer and enjoying the ride, now’s a great time to become a paid subscriber. Paid members get access to my exclusive stories (Indecent Proposal II is coming!) and the warm satisfaction of knowing you’re directly responsible for keeping me caffeinated enough to write scenes like this. Hit the button below and come along! Part Two is just getting started, and trust me, you don’t want to be late for what’s coming next.