Heartbreaker, a Heartstopper Story - Ch. 22

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

“There he is.” Nick’s voice came through the phone speaker low and warm. “Been wanting to see that face for a while.”

Charlie smiled into the camera. By the little square in the bottom corner of the screen, the one that showed his own camera, he looked an absolute state. His curls were everywhere, smashed flat on one side and rioting on the other from where he’d been lying face-down in the pillow, and his eyes had that heavy quality that made him look like he’d either just woken up or was about to fall asleep, which was fair, because both were true. It was close to four in the morning. His bedroom was dark except for the pale blue glow of his laptop screen on the desk and the light from his phone, and the house around him had that deep-night stillness where even the walls seemed to be out for the day.

He was still naked. He’d pulled the duvet up to his waist at some point, but above it he was bare, and he could feel the evidence of the evening drying on his skin. His stomach, mostly. His chest, a bit. The inside of his left thigh where he’d been too wrecked afterwards to do anything but lie there and stare at the ceiling and try to remember how his lungs worked. It was a little disgusting, honestly. Tacky and cooling and the kind of thing that Future Charlie would deal with by having a shower and putting his sheets in the wash and pretending he was a functioning adult. But right now, Current Charlie kind of liked it. It was proof that it had happened. That what he’d watched on his laptop screen an hour ago — Nick’s hands on someone else’s hips, Nick’s mouth on someone else’s neck, Nick’s body moving in ways that Charlie knew intimately but had never seen from the outside before — had been real. It had happened. Nick had fucked Jet. Nick had fucked Jet and Charlie had watched and Charlie had come so hard he’d actually, genuinely, seen white for a second. Charlie wanted to sob and scream and laugh and come all at once, again, because it had felt like being shoved off a ledge he’d been standing on for months, and the fall had been —

God. The fall had been extraordinary.

Charlie adjusted his grip on the phone and looked at Nick’s face, golden and poolside and impossibly beautiful, and smiled again, softer this time, with a kind of tenderness that had nothing to do with sleepiness and everything to do with the enormous fact that this boy trusted him enough to do what he’d just done.

“Hi,” Charlie said. His voice came out rough, thick with the residue of sleep. “You look stupidly attractive right now and I need you to know that I resent it deeply. I am an absolute mess.”

“A very cute mess,” Nick said, stating it like a scientific fact. Charlie pretended to scowl at him. “Were you sleeping?”

Charlie nodded, rubbing one eye with the heel of his hand. “Sort of. That — earlier — kind of knocked me out.”

He didn’t really needed to elaborate. The slight hitch in his voice probably said everything that the words I came so hard I nearly blacked out and then lay there like a dead man for twenty minutes would have said, but with considerably more dignity.

“Sorry,” Nick said, and he did look genuinely sorry, as if being woken from a post-orgasmic coma by the most beautiful face in the world was a terrible thing. “I just — I really wanted to see your face. That’s all I’ve thought about, honestly. Ever since I left Jet’s.”

“Not spending the night, then?” he asked, keeping his voice light, almost playful, because if he didn’t anchor it to something casual he was going to say something enormous and fragile and probably cry.

Nick’s mouth twitched. “Apparently I’m a love ‘em and leave ‘em kind of bloke.”

“Brutal,” Charlie said, clicking his tongue in mock disapproval. “Poor Jet. Used and discarded. He’ll never recover.”

“He offered me leftover pizza and another go, actually. I don’t think he’s exactly heartbroken.”

Charlie let out a laugh. He clamped his hand over his mouth immediately because it was too loud for four in the morning in a house full of sleeping people, and glanced reflexively toward his bedroom door as if his mum might materialise on the other side of it demanding to know what was so funny at this hour. On the screen, Nick was grinning.

“Left over pizza,” Charlie repeated, still half-laughing behind his hand. “The romance of it all.”

“I know. Proper swept off my feet.”

“And you turned that down? For me? Nicholas, I’m genuinely touched.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Too late. It’s already there. I’m the boy who beat cold pizza. I’m having it put on a plaque.”

They stayed like that for a while. Just looking at each other, not saying anything, smiling like absolute idiots, one of those smiles that would have been embarrassing if anyone else had been watching, just two boys on opposite sides of an ocean grinning into their phones like they’d each independently discovered something wonderful and it had turned out to be the same thing. Charlie could hear Nick breathing, and somewhere behind him the distant sound of water lapping against tile, and it struck him, with clarity that only arrived at four in the morning when your defences were down and your heart was doing something too large for your chest, that this was the most intimate moment of the entire night. This. Two faces in two rectangles of light, six thousand miles of water and continent between them, smiling at each other like the world was small enough to fit in a phone screen, and for right now, just for this moment, it was.

“Why didn’t you spend the night?” Charlie asked.

Nick’s face did something complicated on the screen, a frown that wasn’t quite a frown, more like the expression of someone trying to explain a feeling they hadn’t fully translated into language yet. He shifted on the lounger, the pool light sliding across his collarbones.

“Dunno, really. It just seemed... wrong? Too intimate, maybe.”

Charlie raised an eyebrow. “Having sex with someone is fine, but sleeping next to them is too intimate?”

Nick winced, just a small tightening around the eyes as he recognised, hearing his own logic played back to him, that it sounded mental.

“Yeah, I know,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand. “I know it makes no sense.”

But Charlie was already shaking his head, because the thing was — and this was the part that Nick probably couldn’t see from inside his own head — it made perfect sense.

“No, I get it,” Charlie said, quieter now. “I do.”

Nick looked at him, searching, a little uncertain.

“You wanted to have sex with Jet,” Charlie said. “But you didn’t want to be with him. There’s a difference.”

Nick exhaled. Something in his shoulders loosened, a tension Charlie hadn’t even noticed he’d been carrying releasing all at once, like a rope that had been pulled taut finally going slack.

“Yea. “That’s — yeah. Exactly.” He paused, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped to something low and honest and entirely unguarded. “I wanted to have sex with Jet. But you’re the only bloke I want to fall asleep next to.”

Charlie pressed his lips together very hard. His eyes were doing something traitorous and he blinked rapidly, twice, staring at a point just above his phone so Nick wouldn’t see. He was not going to cry. He’d made a pact with himself. He had dried cum on his stomach, about three hours before his alarm was due to go off and absolutely zero dignity left to spare, and he was not — he was not — going to lie here in the dark and cry because his boyfriend had said something so devastating that it had rearranged something fundamental in Charlie’s chest.

Nick saw it and his expression on the screen went soft and fond and a little bit broken in the way that only Charlie could break him.

“Shut up,” Charlie said, even though Nick hadn’t said anything.

“Didn’t say a word.”

“You were thinking it.”

Nick’s smile shifted, the warmth still there but something more serious moving underneath it, like a current beneath calm water.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, slowly. “Was it alright that I didn’t give you a heads up? Before, I mean. I thought about it. Thought about ringing you first, asking if it was — you know. If you were okay with it.” He shrugged, a small uncertain gesture that looked strange on someone that big. “But I didn’t. What that okay?”

Charlie didn’t hesitate.

“Yes,” he said. “God, yes. You absolutely made the right call.”

“Yeah?”

“Nick, if you’d told me in advance — if you’d rung me up and said hey, Char, I’m about to go upstairs and shag Jet, fancy watching? — I would have had a cardiac event probably before you’d even set the camera up.” He was gesturing with his free hand now, the way he did when a thought was running ahead of his mouth. “The fact that it just happened, that I opened the stream and it was already, that was better. That was so much better. My brain didn’t have time to get in the way.”

Nick was laughing quietly, shaking his head, the tension draining out of his face. “You’re mental.”

“I’m self-aware. There’s a difference.” Charlie let the smile settle, then spoke again, more carefully this time, each word placed with deliberate precision. “In the future — if we keep doing this — you don’t need to ask permission. Yeah? I mean that. If something feels right in the moment, if you want it and it’s safe and you’re happy, then just... do it. I trust you. I don’t need to approve every —”

“Are we going to keep doing this?” Nick asked.

“Do you not want to?” Charlie asked.

Charlie watched Nick’s face process the question, the flicker of something quick and unguarded crossing his features before he could arrange them.

“I had a lot of fun today”, Nick said. “And you --- you had too, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“So yeah. I guess I’d like to do it again.”

Charlie watched Nick’s face settle on the screen, the faint pool light from California catching the edges of his jaw and the small, honest curve of his mouth. The relief came over him and loosened something tight and long-held in his chest. It wasn’t a one-off. It wasn’t something Nick had tried once and then decided wasn’t for him. Nick had tried it, and he had fun, and Charlie had fun too, and they would do it again. The kink that had lived locked inside Charlie’s mind for so long, hidden away in dreams and fantasies he had never let himself speak out loud, was finally out there in the real world. It was no longer just a private, feverish thing he carried alone. It was going to be a part of the love he and Nick shared, something they had both touched and chosen and brought back into the light between them. On the screen Nick was still smiling, small and real, and Charlie felt the last of the old fear ease out of him with every breath, replaced by something entirely new.

“But if we’re doing this properly,” Nick said, “there should probably be some kind of — I don’t know. Ground rules.”

“Sure. Of course.” Charlie sat up a little straighter, the duvet pooling around his waist. “What are you thinking?”

Nick exhaled, scratching the back of his neck.

“I don’t think I should fuck the same bloke twice. Not right now, anyway.” He said it like he was testing the weight of it as it came out. “It just seems like — that’s where it stops being simple. Someone starts reading into it, expecting something. Gets messy.”

“That makes sense,” Charlie nodded vehemently.

“And I think — I’d want to tell you. After. Not ask in advance, like you said. But tell you. That same night, or the next day. So there’s nothing sitting between us that one of us is carrying alone.” He looked at the screen. “We’ve done enough of that.”

That landed quietly, carrying no more weight than any other words in that conversation. But Charlie felt it all the same.

“Yes,” he said. “Absolutely that.”

Nick glanced away for a second, the pool light shifting across his jaw. “That’s sort of all I’ve got, to be honest. Didn’t exactly have time to prepare a presentation.”

Charlie laughed. “Shocking. No slides?”

“Next time.” Nick almost smiled. “What are you thinking?”

Charlie was quiet for a moment. He looked down at his own hand resting on the duvet, thumb tracing a slow line across the fabric while he turned Nick’s words over. He really thought about, because that part mattered and he wanted to get it right.

“Honesty,” he said finally. “That’s the only rule that actually covers everything else. Not just about who you’re with or what happens. “If something feels wrong, you say so. If I do something that upsets you, you tell me. If this stops feeling good and starts feeling like — like something you’re doing for my sake—”

“We talk.” Nick finished for him.

“We talk,” Charlie repeated. “We don’t bottle it up. We don’t let it sit there going rotten until it turns to resentment.”

Nick nodded. His expression had settled into something serious and unguarded. “Yeah,” he said. “Deal.”

“Deal.”

Charlie became aware, somewhere in the small silence after “deal,” of how profoundly strange this moment was. Kind of surreal, really, a thing you have kept in the dark for so long that you stopped believing it could exist in the light, and then it does, and the light doesn’t kill it, and you find yourself blinking at it in mild disbelief. He had been having that conversation in his head for years. Different versions of it, different settings, sometimes brave and direct, sometimes so hedged with qualifications it barely said anything at all. Nick finding out somehow and Charlie having to explain. Charlie finally confessing over dinner, or on a walk, or in the dark after sex when the defences were down. He’d rehearsed the shape of Nick’s face when he understood what Charlie was actually telling him. Rehearsed the silences, the questions, the possible outcomes, all of them.

He’d thought, if Nick ever found out, that it would be a grenade. He’d thought it for years with such certainty that the certainty had become indistinguishable from fact. And instead it was — that. Nick finishing his sentences. Nick saying we talk like it was the simplest thing in the world, like the two of them talking had ever been anything other than the answer to every question.

Charlie looked at his face on the screen. He looked tired and beautiful and entirely real, and he was still here, and they had just made a deal, and the grenade had turned out to be something else entirely.

“I’ve been thinking about coming home.”

Charlie blinked. “To England?”

“Yeah. Summer’s half gone but there’s still time. I could be back in a few weeks, we’d have the rest before term starts. And I miss you. I want to actually see you. Not just—” Nick nodded faintly at the screen between them “—this.”

Charlie’s chest pulled in two directions at once, the part of him that wanted to say yes, now, come now, come tomorrow, and the part that was thinking.

“What?” Nick said.

“I’m thinking,”

“Thinking what?”

Charlie chewed the inside of his cheek, looking at Nick’s face on the screen, the slight uncertainty there, the readiness to be told yes, come home. And the thing was, Charlie wanted to say it. Part of him wanted Nick on the next available flight, wanted him in this bedroom, wanted to touch him and smell him and sleep next to him and not have to use a phone screen as a substitute for a person. That part of him was quite loud, actually, and normally it would have won. But — Nick in Los Angeles. Nick Alone. Nick free and wanted and choosing it. Meeting some at a bar after a Roosters shift maybe, or a stranger at a party who caught Nick’s eye across the room and held it. Nick in that city full of beautiful people, making his way through it on his own terms.

It made Charlie’s blood run hot in a way that had nothing peaceful about it.

He wanted Nick to stay in Los Angeles. He wanted Nick to go to a bar on Abbot Kinney and let someone take him home. He wanted to lie in this bedroom in Kent and think about it happening, somewhere in the Pacific time zone, three in the morning here and early evening there, Nick in some stranger’s sheets while Charlie burned quietly on the other side of the world.

“I think you should stay.”

“Stay? You don’t want me to—”

“I do. Of course I do, Nicky.” Charlie’s pulse was doing something inconvenient, climbing steadily. “But the idea of you alone in that city, working at Roosters, going out after your shifts, taking someone home because you felt like it—”

Charlie actually licked his lips.

“That’s really fucking hot to me.”

He could hear how it sounded. He could hear the rawness of it, the greed, and a part of him, the curated part that had spent years packaging this thing into something palatable, something he could hint at without fully exposing, wanted to soften it, qualify it, add a caveat. Only if you want to. I’m not pressuring you. It’s just a thought.

He didn’t. Nick deserved the unedited version.

“So when you say you’re thinking about coming home,” Charlie said, “I’m asking you to think about not doing that just yet.”

Nick’s eyes moved across Charlie’s face on the screen, searching, reading, doing that thing he did when he was sorting through what someone had said to find out whether they meant it or were trying to mean it, because Nick had always known the difference. Charlie held still. Let himself be read.

Then something changed in Nick’s face. It happened slowly, starting at the jaw, a loosening, then moving to his mouth. The uncertainty didn’t vanish, it just got shouldered aside by something else, something hotter and darker and altogether more dangerous. The corner of his lips curled upward, and the smile that settled there wasn’t the Nick he showed to the world — the golden boy, the easy grin, the lad everyone loved. This was the other one. The one Charlie had only ever seen in bed, or in glimpses when Nick forgot to put it away quickly enough. His eyes had gone half-lidded, and the pool light caught them at an angle that made the blue look almost black.

“Yeah?” Nick said, low.

Charlie’s mouth went dry. He nodded once.

Nick held his gaze through the screen for another second, letting it stretch, letting Charlie feel the full weight of being looked at like that from six thousand miles away. Then he leaned back on the lounger, one arm behind his head, body opening up in a way that was so casually, devastatingly confident it should have been illegal through a phone camera.

“Whatever you want, love,” he said.

—

Romance is alive and well, folks. It just looks a bit different than the movies promised. It look like Nick poolside in Beverly Hills looking like a golden retriever who just learned he's allowed on the couch, and Charlie in his childhood bedroom at 4am covered in cum and negotiating kink boundaries through a phone screen.

If you’re enjoying my writing and want to keep following me into whatever beautiful chaos comes next, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support is genuinely what keeps this story alive, and I’m not above begging. Look at my face. This is my begging face. I learned it from Jet. 🙏