Heartbreaker, a Heartstopper Story - Ch. 17

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

That Tuesday morning, Charlie went downstairs and made breakfast himself. He’d woken up and, for the first time in days, his stomach had made a sound that he recognised as the sound of his body asking for something instead of refusing everything, and he’d followed it to the kitchen before his brain could talk him out of it. He made toast. Two slices, brown bread, buttered properly, just like Nick always —

He paused. Let the thought come, let it pass, and kept buttering.

His mum was already at the table, cup of tea in hand, reading something on her phone. She glanced up when Charlie sat down across from her with his plate and his own tea, and Charlie watched her eyes flick to the toast, to the butter, to the fact that there were two slices and not one, and then back to her phone with casualness that would have been completely convincing if her hand hadn’t tightened slightly on her mug. She said nothing, asked nothing. Just took a sip of her tea and scrolled to the next article, and if her eyes were a little brighter than usual, neither of them mentioned it.

Charlie did the same at lunch, filling his plate with shepherd’s pie and peas without being prompted, and later, when his mum set down a doorstep ham-and-cheese sandwich at tea time with the offhand comment that she’d made too much, Charlie ate the whole thing and didn’t miss the way Jane’s shoulders dropped half an inch as she turned back to the kettle. The next day he had cereal at breakfast, a jacket potato at lunch, and seconds of his dad’s chicken stir-fry at dinner. The day after that, the same. And the day after that. Each meal slightly less of a performance and slightly more of a habit, the act of feeding himself gradually remembering how to be ordinary.

By Friday, his mum had stopped glancing at his plate after dinner with that anxious inventory. His dad had stopped suggesting, very casually, that they might pop down to the harbour for fish and chips, as though the idea had just occurred to him and had nothing whatsoever to do with getting calories into his son. Charlie noticed both absences with relief, and with the faint awareness of how much worry he’d caused by making the silence necessary in the first place.

He left the house more often too. He began taking walks with Jane in the late afternoon, looping around the quiet streets near the house, the same route they used to take when Charlie was younger and friendless and his mum had been the only person willing to spend time with him without it feeling like charity. They didn’t talk about anything important. Jane pointed out gardens she admired and neighbours who’d done something irritating with their bins and a cat she’d been trying to befriend for three weeks that still wouldn’t let her touch it. Charlie walked beside her and let the ordinariness of it wash over him, the gentle rhythm of his mum’s voice and the smell of cut grass and the evening light stretching long across the pavement. When Julio mentioned he was heading to Sainsbury’s to pick up bits for dinner, Charlie offered to go with him, and what should have been a twenty-minute shop turned into almost two hours of wandering the aisles together, Julio consulting his list like a man on a mission while Charlie lobbed items into the trolley that were absolutely not on the list — a packet of Jaffa Cakes, a tub of Häagen-Dazs, a sharing bag of Maltesers that neither of them intended to share — both of them knowing perfectly well that Jane would scold them when she unpacked the bags.

The night before Tori flew back to Dublin, Charlie took her to the Old Neptune, their village local, a weathered pub on the shingle beach that had been serving pints to Whitstable since before either of them was born and that smelled permanently of salt air and chip fat. He bought her a pint of Guinness because she said it was the only thing the Irish had taught her to drink properly, and they spent the whole evening at a corner table, talking and laughing and playing darts. When two mouthy lads at the pool table, mid-twenties, bit too much lager in them, spotted them and suggested a tenner a game, clearly sizing up the skinny gay kid and the goth girl and liking their odds, Tori had accepted with a smile so serene it should have served as a warning. She proceeded to demolish them in three straight games, sinking the black with a casual, almost bored efficiency while Charlie leaned against the wall and provided commentary that grew more obnoxious with each frame. The lads paid up looking genuinely bewildered, and Tori pocketed the thirty quid without a flicker of expression and bought the next round with it.

It was the first time they’d gone out together like that. Not because their mum had made them, not as part of some family obligation where they happened to be in the same place at the same time, but because they genuinely wanted each other’s company. Charlie looked at his sister across the table and saw her, maybe for the first time, not as his older sister who tolerated him but as a friend. Someone he’d chosen and who’d chosen him back, and the distinction felt enormous.

All in all, Charlie was getting better, but getting better didn’t mean the missing stopped. It just meant Charlie had learned to carry it while standing upright.

Nick was still the first thing he thought about when he opened his eyes every morning, that half-second of warmth before the rest of it crashed in, and the last thing on his mind before sleep finally took him. He missed Nick while buttering toast. Missed him while walking with his mum. Missed him in Sainsbury’s when he reached for the Jaffa Cakes and remembered that Nick was the one who’d got him hooked on them in the first place, dunking them in tea. He missed Nick at the Old Neptune, watching Tori destroy those lads at pool, because Nick would have loved it, would have been howling with laughter, would have lifted Tori off the ground in celebration, and the empty space where that reaction should have been ached like a missing tooth.

He was still checking his phone. Less obsessively than before, but the habit hadn’t broken. Every morning, every night, and a couple times in between, his thumb would swipe to the messages thread and find it exactly as he’d left it. He was thinking about calling Nick more and more. The urge had shifted from a desperate, panicked need to something like a steady pull, like gravity. Just to hear his voice. To say I’m sorry and I love you and I’m here whenever you’re ready. But Tori’s words still held him back, on Nick’s timeline, not yours, and Charlie wasn’t brave enough yet to find out whether Nick’s timeline had room for him at all.

He waited. Ate his dinner. Went on walks with his mum. He missed Nick like breathing and kept going anyway, because that was all he could do.

He returned to the Old Neptune on Saturday. Tao had called him that afternoon, right after lunch, his voice carrying the manic energy it always did when he’d been travelling. He’d just got back from Leeds, where he was in his second year of a Film and Media Production degree, and had apparently spent six hours on a train next to a woman who wouldn’t stop showing him photos of her cats. Tao had been living up north for about as long as Nick and Charlie had been in California, and Charlie was ashamed to admit that he hadn’t kept in touch the way he should have. The odd text, a few comments on Tao’s Instagram posts, a FaceTime call at Christmas that had been cut short because Charlie was late for something he couldn’t remember now. Tao wanted to see both of them, Charlie and Nick, and the casual way he said it, as if the two names were inseparable, as if you couldn’t summon one without the other, made Charlie’s chest tighten.

Charlie arrived at the Old Neptune just before seven. Saturday night meant the place was a different animal from the quiet Wednesday he’d spent there with Tori. Almost every table and booth was taken, the low-ceilinged room packed with a cheerful crush of tourists in sunburnt shoulders and linen shirts and locals who’d staked out their usual spots with territorial confidence because they’d been drinking here since the smoking ban. The pub smelled of ale and vinegar and the sea breeze rolling in through the propped-open door. Horse brasses lined the beams above the bar. A chalkboard behind the counter advertised the catch of the day and a quiz night on Tuesdays. Someone had left a copy of the Whitstable Gazette folded on a windowsill next to a half-finished crossword. Through the back windows, the last of the evening light caught the shingle beach and the flat grey stretch of the estuary beyond, a handful of dog walkers still out, dark shapes moving against the water.

He found Tao almost immediately. He was leaning against the bar, talking to Maggie, the silver-haired barmaid who’d been pulling pints at the Neptune for as long as Charlie could remember and who treated every regular under forty as a grandchild in need of feeding. She was laughing at something Tao had said, shaking her head with fond exasperation. Tao had always had that effect on people, the ability to make strangers feel like old friends within thirty seconds.

As if he’d sensed Charlie’s arrival, Tao glanced toward the entrance. Their eyes met across the crowded room and Tao beamed at him, that wide Tao grin that hadn’t changed since they were eleven years old, and Charlie couldn’t help but laugh back, because some faces were just wired directly into the part of your brain that produced happiness whether you’d authorised it or not. Charlie nodded toward one of the few remaining empty booths tucked against the far wall and Tao nodded back. Barely two minutes after Charlie slid into the booth, Tao appeared in front of him carrying two enormous mugs of beer, foam sloshing over the rims, grinning as if he’d just accomplished something heroic.

“Come here, give me a hug,” said Tao, setting the mugs on the table and spreading his arms wide.

Laughing, Charlie got up and wrapped his arms around him, squeezing maybe a bit harder than he needed to because, hell, he’d missed the crazy lad. Tao squeezed back just as hard, and for a second they were twelve again, saying goodbye at the school gates, promising to sit together on the bus tomorrow.

“Look at you,” Tao said, stepping back to properly look at Charlie, hands still on his shoulders, giving him a once-over. “You look good. Healthy.”

“Thanks,” Charlie said, blushing slightly. He could only hope his brief problems with food hadn’t reached Tao up in Leeds. “You look good too. No, actually, scratch that. You look hot. When the hell did that happen?”

It was slightly unsettling because, yes, Tao genuinely did look hot. He’d cut his hair, the old floppy style replaced by something more modern, his fine black hair swept across his forehead. His cheekbones were more defined. His biceps filled out his button-down in a way they never had before, the sleeves straining slightly when he moved. Two years in Leeds had done something to Tao Xu that Charlie hadn’t been prepared for. But behind all of it, behind the new hair and the sharper jaw and the quiet confidence that sat differently on him now, Charlie saw it. A tightness around the eyes. A smile that arrived half a beat too late. The slight, almost imperceptible effort of a person performing okay rather than being it. Charlie recognised the signs because he’d been wearing them himself for weeks, and he understood immediately that this invitation hadn’t been simply about catching up. Something had happened.

“You think so?” Tao asked, and launched into a series of ridiculous poses as if an invisible photographer had materialised beside the booth, blue steel, over-the-shoulder smoulder, a hand-on-hip number that nearly knocked over both pints.

“Now you look like an idiot,” Charlie said, settling back on his bench. “But yeah, you do. It’s weird.”

“Well, it’s universally known that the gays have the best taste, so I salute you, my friend,” Tao said, tipping an invisible hat to Charlie and sliding into the opposite side of the booth. He pulled his pint toward him, took a long sip, and set it down. “Right. How’ve you been? Tell me everything.”

It was not at all surprising how quickly they fell back into the rhythm of each other, as if the months apart had been nothing more than a long pause in a conversation that had never really stopped. Charlie told Tao about his classes at Westbridge, about Victorian Gothic Literature and how the professor had a habit of reading Brontë passages aloud in a voice so dramatic that half the lecture hall couldn’t tell if he was teaching or auditioning. He told him about Lavender Pages, about Elena and her increasingly unhinged sales tactics. He spent almost half an hour explaining the multidisciplinary project he’d presented and Tao, because he was just as much of a nerd as Charlie had always been, spent just as long grilling him about it. He pushed Charlie on his thesis from angles Charlie hadn’t considered, drew connections to films Charlie hadn’t seen, asked the kind of questions that made Charlie sit back in his seat and think why didn’t I see that? and then immediately scribble a note on his phone. By the time they’d exhausted the subject, Charlie was genuinely regretting not having this conversation six months earlier, before he’d presented the bloody thing.

Somewhere along the way they ordered more pints and, to soak up the beer, a plate of crab cakes with tartare sauce that Maggie brought over with the stern instruction to eat them while they were hot. They talked about Tao’s course, about a short film he’d directed that had been selected for a student showcase in Edinburgh, about his mum’s new tomato obsession and whether it was a hobby or a cry for help. They talked briefly about the rugby championship, and Charlie wasn’t at all surprised to learn that Tao and Elle had watched the final together from her flat in Manchester. Of course they had. They’d never missed a match when Nick was still playing at Truham, the three of them huddled on the stands with snacks and matching scarves that Elle had knitted herself.

“He played really well,” Tao said, shaking his head. “Such a shame they lost. Hope he didn’t take it too hard.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “It’s a shame.”

The shift was immediate. He’d been comfortable, the beer and the warmth of the pub and Tao’s familiar presence softening him into something close to his old self, but the mention of the match yanked him back like a hand on his collar. Because the match wasn’t just a match anymore, it was the night everything unravelled. It was Nick on a dark beach, voice shaking with fury, telling Charlie that he’d lost the final because he’d been looking for Charlie in the stands. That Charlie’s absence, his strategically engineered absence, had cost Nick the biggest game of his life.

“Where’s Nick, by the way?” Tao asked, glancing around the pub as if he’d only just noticed the absence of a rugby player at their table. “I told you to bring him along.”

Charlie thought about telling the truth — not all of it, God no, but just enough that Tao would understand things were bad between them. But he could feel thing Tao was holding back, sitting just behind his eyes, waiting for its moment, and Charlie knew that once Tao found out about him and Nick, the conversation would pivot entirely. Tao’s thing, whatever it was, would get buried. Charlie wasn’t going to let that happen.

"He had to stay back in America. Couldn't leave work.”

“That’s a bugger,” Tao said. “He still works at that crazy place, then? Roosters?”

Charlie stuffed his mouth with another crab cake and nodded.

Tao snickered. “That place is insane. I see the reels on Insta sometimes. Who knew Nick could give such good lap dances?”

Charlie almost choked on his food and had to take a huge sip of his pint to force it down.

“Right?” he managed, eyes watering. “He’s a natural.”

“You’re still okay with Nick working there?” Tao asked, his tone shifting into something more serious. “People are very... handsy with him, from what I’ve seen.”

Charlie shrugged. “It’s fine. Most people are really respectful.”

Then, because he didn’t want to think about how he absolutely did not mind people being handsy with Nick, and because the conversation was drifting dangerously close to territory he couldn’t afford to enter, he said.

“What about your other half? Elle coming home too?”

There it was.

Charlie watched the way Tao’s face rearranged itself at the mention of Elle’s name. The slight tightening around his mouth. The way his eyes dropped to his pint and stayed there a beat too long. The almost imperceptible shift in his posture, shoulders drawing inward, as if bracing against something. They were small movements, barely perceptible to anyone who didn’t know Tao Xu inside and out, but Charlie had known him since they were six and could read him the way a sailor read the sky. Something heavy settled in Charlie’s stomach. Whatever Tao had been carrying all evening, whatever had been sitting behind those slightly-too-late smiles and that new haircut that now felt less like a choice and more like a reinvention was about Elle. Charlie was suddenly, horribly certain of it.

Shit.

“She’s coming home tomorrow,” Tao said, not looking at Charlie. He was turning his pint glass slowly on the table, leaving wet rings on the wood. “She wanted to be here tonight to see you, but it’s one of her mates’ birthdays this week and she’s taking her out to celebrate.”

“That’s fine, I’ll see her when she gets here,” Charlie said carefully. “Everything okay with you guys?”

Tao let out a laugh. It was the worst laugh Charlie had ever heard, scraped clean of anything resembling humour. The laugh of someone who was trying very hard not to fall apart in a crowded pub on a Saturday night.

“Uh, no. Not really,” Tao said. He stared at his glass. “Elle and I broke up.”

Charlie closed his eyes for a second. Something heavy and cold settled in his chest, pressing down. Tao and Elle. The couple who had been the backdrop to every significant moment of Charlie’s teenage years. They were supposed to be permanent. They were supposed to be the proof that love survived.

“Shit, Tao,” he said. He reached across the table and squeezed Tao’s hand for a moment. “What happened?”

“She was awarded a residency at the Tate St Ives,” Tao said. “Year-long funded residency for emerging artists.”

Charlie’s eyes went wide. “Bloody hell. That’s amazing.”

“It really is,” Tao said, and the pride in his voice was so genuine, so full of love for Elle and everything she’d accomplished, that it cracked something in Charlie’s chest. “But it’s in Cornwall. Six hours from Leeds. Different world, basically. She’d be down there for a full year, minimum, and the way she talked about it, the artists she’d be working with, the studio space, the coastline, I could tell she wasn’t coming back.”

“But you guys were already doing the long-distance thing,” Charlie said. “You’ve been managing it.”

“We have, but Leeds to Manchester is barely an hour on the train. We could see each other every weekend without even thinking about it. Her moving to Cornwall changes everything. Six hours each way, expensive tickets, whole weekends eaten up by travel. And that’s if our schedules even line up, which they wouldn’t, because she’d be working at the gallery and I’d be shooting my final-year project and —”

He stopped. Took a breath.

“It just became this thing we couldn’t solve. We tried. We really tried, Char. But every conversation turned into logistics, and the logistics never worked, and eventually she looked at me and said she didn’t want us to become two people who loved each other but only saw each other once a month and spent the whole visit stressed about when the next one would be.”

Charlie understood completely, with a depth that went beyond sympathy and straight into recognition, because he’d stood in almost exactly the same place two years ago. When Westbridge had accepted him and the plan was to go, California, three thousand miles, a nine-hour flight and an eight-hour time difference, but they hadn’t known about Aunt Estelle’s inheritance yet, and it had looked like Nick would be staying home. The distance had stretched out in front of Charlie like an ocean he’d have to swim every single day, and the terror of it had been so total, so paralysing, that he’d genuinely considered not going. Choosing Nick over everything else, because the thought of being that far away from him, of waking up every morning in a country where Nick wasn’t, had filled him with a dread so physical he could taste it. He hadn’t told anyone that, but he’d sat with it for weeks, turning the decision over in his head before Aunt Estelle’s money had arrived and rendered the whole agonising question moot. The relief had been so enormous he’d cried in the shower.

“You think it’s definitive?” Charlie asked.

Tao shrugged. “Who knows? It’s not what either of us wants, but... a lot can happen in a year. Who knows who we’re going to be after all that time apart. If we — if she’ll even still want to —”

His voice choked off and his eyes filled with tears. He blinked them back hard, the muscles in his face fighting a visible war against the rest of him.

“I’m so sorry, Tao,” Charlie said. He reached across the table for his hand again.

“Yeah. Me too,” Tao said bitterly. He squeezed Charlie’s fingers once, tight, then let go and forced a laugh that sounded like it had been dragged over gravel. “Shit. Way to kill the mood.”

He stood up abruptly, chair scraping against the floor.

“Gonna get us more beer, okay?”

He was gone before Charlie could say anything else, weaving through the Saturday crowd toward the bathroom. Charlie let him go, because he knew the leaving had less to do with pints and more to do with Tao needing sixty seconds to put himself back together without an audience. His phone burned in his pocket. Suddenly, desperately, violently, he wanted to call Nick. Wanted to hear his voice, wanted to say I love you, please don’t let us become this, wanted to beg and grovel and promise anything if it meant they wouldn’t end up on opposite sides of a pub table delivering the news of their own ending to their best mates over flat beer.

Tao returned with two fresh pints and his smile plastered firmly back on. They looked at each other for a second, and a silent agreement passed between them — the sad part of the night was over and whatever came next was going to be loud and stupid and fun.

They ordered more food, chips and whitebait and another round of crab cakes. They drank more beer. They played darts, and Charlie was delighted to notice that the two mouthy lads from the other night were back at the pool table but were, this time, conspicuously not making eye contact with their corner of the pub. Tori’s reign of terror had clearly left an impression. When Maggie announced it was karaoke night, Tao’s eyes lit up with an excitement so pure it was almost childlike, and he made sure to be first in the queue, signing them up before Charlie had even registered what was happening. He chose “Under Pressure,” and Charlie was briefly excited to see how Tao would handle switching between Freddie and Bowie’s parts… until Tao shoved the second microphone into his hand and made it very clear that Charlie was expected to be the Bowie to his Freddie.

Charlie went despite the certain knowledge that he could not, in any meaningful sense of the word, sing. He went because he’d had more beer than was advisable and because he loved Tao enough to embrace the humiliation of performing in public on a Saturday night in their village local. They were terrible. Tao’s Freddie was enthusiastic but bore only a passing resemblance to any known musical key. Charlie’s Bowie was thin and reedy and cracked on every high note. They forgot half the words and made up the other half. Tao knocked over a pint glass during the instrumental bridge. They were so bad that Charlie was genuinely surprised they weren’t booed off the stage. Instead, inexplicably, the pub loved them, cheering, clapping along, a table of middle-aged women near the front singing the chorus louder than either of them. When they finished, breathless and laughing and slightly sweaty, the Old Neptune gave them a standing ovation that was either deeply sincere or deeply sarcastic.

Charlie stumbled through his home’s front door just after two, one hand on the wall, very aware of how much beer was currently sloshing around inside him and very focused on not waking his parents. He eased the door shut, winced when the latch clicked louder than expected, and stood frozen in the hallway for ten seconds, listening for movement upstairs. Nothing. He exhaled.

The shower was necessary. He smelled of pub and he stood under the hot water for longer than he needed to, letting it drum against his shoulders, sobering up by degrees. He brushed his teeth twice because the first time didn’t feel convincing. He pulled on an old T-shirt and boxers and climbed into bed and lay there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, and knew immediately that sleep wasn’t coming.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Tao and Elle.

He’d managed to keep it at bay for the rest of the evening, had shoved it into a compartment and locked the door because it was Tao’s night and Tao needed his mate to be present, not spiralling. He’d sung badly and laughed loudly and bought another round and walked Tao to his mum’s house and hugged him at the door and said it’s going to be okay, mate, I promise, and meant it as much as he could. But now, alone in his bedroom, the dark pressing in and the beer thinning into a headache, it was impossible to hold back.

If they couldn’t make it, how could he and Nick?

Tao and Elle had been together for almost exactly as long. Their love had weathered its own storms, the transition to different cities, the long weeks apart, the slow negotiation of becoming adults in separate places. And they’d come through it. They’d been strong, one of those couples you looked at and thought yeah, they’re going to be fine. And they weren’t fine. Years of devotion, thousands of FaceTime calls, all those train tickets and all that effort, and it hadn’t been enough.

Maybe it wouldn’t be enough for him and Nick either. Maybe Nick would never call. Maybe when summer ended and Charlie flew back to Westbridge, he’d walk into Seaview Hall and find Nick’s side of his dorm quietly emptied out, his clothes gone from the drawer, his protein shaker missing from the stand, his name removed from the door. Maybe Nick would be living with Harp, or Torres, or worse, some other lad, some fit, funny, uncomplicated lad he’d met over the summer, someone who made him laugh without making him bleed, someone who loved him simply and cleanly without the lies and the manipulation and the dark hunger that Charlie had dressed up as desire and fed to Nick like poison disguised as —

No. Stop. Don’t do this to yourself.

Charlie pressed his palms against his eyes and breathed.

Nick loved him. He loved him. Charlie was sure of it, as sure as he’d ever been of anything, as sure as gravity, as sure as the tide coming in on the ocean . Whatever Nick was feeling right now, however deep the hurt went, the love was still there. Charlie had seen it on the beach, had seen it in the way Nick’s face had crumbled when Charlie told him the truth, because you didn’t crumble like that over something you’d stopped caring about. You crumbled because it mattered. Because it mattered so much it broke you.

Nick wouldn’t leave. He would never leave. They would be fine. They would survive this, because their love wasn’t the fragile kind that buckled under pressure. It was the stubborn kind. The kind that got knocked down and got back up and kept getting back up. You just drank too much, Charlie told himself. That’s all this is. Shut your eyes. Go to sleep. Everything will be fine in —

His phone was ringing.

The sound cut through the dark bedroom so completely that Charlie froze, his brain taking a full second to identify what it was. It had been so long since his phone had actually rung, days of silence, days of texts that deleted and calls that were never made, that the sound felt foreign, almost alarming, vibrating on the nightstand with an urgency that made his heart slam into his throat.

It could only mean one thing. There was only one person in the world who would call him at almost three in the morning.

He lunged across the bed, fumbling in the dark. His fingers found the phone. The screen lit up his face. His hands were shaking so badly he almost couldn’t swipe to answer. He pressed the phone against his ear and closed his eyes and opened his mouth and nothing came out for a second because his throat had sealed shut.

“Hi,” Charlie whispered.

A second of silence. The faint hiss of a transatlantic connection. The sound of someone breathing on the other end, three thousand miles away, where the sun had just set.

“Hi,” said Nick.

—

Fun fact: Heartbreaker is officially longer than The Legend of Big Ben now — 343 pages on my Microsoft Word doc for Nick and Charlie versus 341 for Jordan and Ben. So if you’ve been a Stagger since page one of TLoBB but still haven’t become a paid subscriber… I think it might be time, haha. It’s just 8 bucks a month, and every single dollar goes toward helping this poor Brazilian writer pay his bills and keep the stories coming. Come on. Do it for the boys!