Heartbreaker, a Heartstopper Story - Ch. 15

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

Nick didn’t miss Charlie at all.

Three days had passed since that terrible night at the cove. Three days. Seventy-two hours. Roughly two hundred and fifty-nine thousand seconds, give or take. Not that Nick was counting. He wasn’t. He didn’t miss Charlie. He was barely thinking about Charlie. What was there to think about, anyway? That Charlie had hurt him? Betrayed him? That the person he’d trusted more than anyone on earth had spent months manipulating him like a piece on a chess board, moving him square by square toward a checkmate Nick hadn’t even known he was playing? Nick didn’t want to think about that.

He didn’t think about it when he woke up in Harp’s guest bedroom and reached for the other side of the mattress before remembering there was no other side to reach for. He didn’t think about it when he brushed his teeth and caught his own reflection and noticed, for the first time, that he looked like shit. He didn’t think about it when he went for a run along the beach at six in the morning because he couldn’t sleep, and the waves sounded wrong because they weren’t the waves outside their cove, and even the Pacific Ocean had apparently been recruited into the conspiracy to remind him of Charlie fucking Spring.

He didn’t miss him. Not even slightly. Didn’t think about him. Because when he did, when he let the door crack open even a centimetre, the rage came through so fast and so total it scared him.

Nick had been angry before. He’d been angry on the pitch, angry at opponents, angry at himself after a bad game. He’d been furious at Ben Hope, furious enough to feel it in his teeth. But this was something else. This was a fury that had no edges, no ceiling, no shape he could grip and wrestle into submission. It filled every cavity inside him. He didn’t think it was possible to contain that much rage inside a single body and not detonate. Sometimes he was certain he would.

It happened when he was in Harp’s gym, three days in, grinding through deadlifts at a weight that had no business being on the bar, every fibre of his concentration aimed at the simple mechanics of lifting and lowering and not thinking. And it worked, for a while. Rep after rep, the iron asked nothing of him except effort, and effort was the one thing Nick had in surplus. But then his grip slipped, just for a second, and his mind slipped with it, and Charlie’s voice was there — I asked Beto to seduce you — and the rage detonated behind his eyes so violently that he dropped the bar, two hundred kilos crashing onto the platform hard enough to rattle the mirrors on the wall, and stood there with his hands shaking at his sides.

It was mad that he kept breathing. That his legs still held him up. That his heart kept pumping blood and his lungs kept pushing oxygen to the rest of his body as if nothing had changed, as if nothing had changed, as if the entire foundation of his world hadn’t been kicked to rubble. How could he feel that much fury and still have the strength to do anything else? How could the body just carry on, oblivious, servicing a person who felt like he’d been hollowed out with a spoon?

He never had an answer for that. His body just kept going, and Nick kept going with it. Kept being angry.

He was so fucking angry.

He was so fucking sad.

That was the worst part. The anger was easy. Nick could handle angry. He could channel angry into a barbell and add plates until his arms screamed. He could run along the Palisades until his lungs burned and his legs turned to jelly and the only thought left in his head was don’t stop moving. He could drag Harp onto the sparring mat and go at him until Harp stopped pissing about with the jabs and combinations and actually hit him, properly, a right hook that snapped Nick’s head sideways and split his lip and tasted like copper, and Nick had grinned through the blood and said again, because the pain on the outside was so much simpler than the pain on the inside.

But the sadness, that fucking ache that spread through his body like something leaking, slow and corrosive, pooling in places he didn’t know he had? The heaviness that sat on his chest when he woke up and was still there when he went to sleep, that made food taste like cardboard and music sound like noise and every beautiful thing Harp’s ridiculous house had to offer feel like scenery in someone else’s life? Nick didn’t know how to deal with that.

How could he? He’d never learned how to handle sadness on his own. Whenever Nick was down, with anything, about anything, over anything, it was to Charlie he went to. It had always been Charlie. When his dad had cancelled on Christmas for the third year running, it was Charlie who’d found him sitting in his car in the Tesco car park staring at nothing, and had climbed into the passenger seat without a word and held his hand until the shaking stopped. When he’d torn his shoulder ligament in Year 13 and the physio said he might not play again that season, it was Charlie who’d sat with him on the bathroom floor while Nick cried from frustration, stroking his hair, saying it’s just a season, Nicky, you’ve got hundreds more. When the move to California had hit him sideways three weeks in, the homesickness arriving late and savage, the sudden certainty that he’d made a terrible mistake, it was Charlie who’d shown up at his dorm at midnight with two mugs of tea and a packet of Hobnobs.

Charlie’s voice. Charlie’s laugh. Charlie’s hands in his hair. That was all Nick had ever needed to make the world bearable again. Charlie was his refuge. Charlie was the place he went when every other place felt hostile.

But the shelter and the storm had been the same thing all along, wearing each other’s face. The refuge was the thing that had hurt him. The safe place had been the danger all along, and Nick couldn’t wrap his head around that no matter how many times he turned it over. It was like discovering that the parachute you’d been trusting your life to had been packed wrong from the start. And the worst part, the part that made Nick want to put his fist through Harp’s pristine guest bathroom wall at three in the morning, was that he still wanted to go there. His body still reached for Charlie. His brain still defaulted to call Charlie every time something hurt, every time something was funny, every time he saw something beautiful or stupid or strange. Three days of silence and his entire nervous system was still wired to a person who had spent a year treating his heart and his cock like a fucking science experiment.

The question of where to go when the person you always went to was the problem had answered itself that night on the beach. Nick had stood on the trail above the cove for a long time, watching Charlie’s silhouette kneeling in the wet sand below, and had felt nothing at all, which was somehow worse than the rage, worse than the sadness, worse than everything. The nothing was vast and empty and he couldn’t stay in it, so he’d pulled out his phone with numb fingers and called the only person he could think of.

Harp picked up on the second ring. The music was deafening behind him, screaming and and what sounded like someone cannonballing into the pool.

“Yo, Nick! Where’d you go, bro? You’re missing the —”

“I need to leave,” Nick said. His voice came out flat and strange, like it belonged to someone standing very far away. “Can you — I just need to not be here right now.”

Harp went quiet. The party roared on behind him, but something in the silence on Harp’s end shifted.

“Where are you?”

“Main gate.”

“Don’t move. Two minutes.”

It took less than that. Nick was leaning against the wall outside the Westbridge main gate, arms wrapped around himself, staring at the pavement, when the Uber pulled up and Harp climbed out. He was still in his golden toga, still wearing the Zeus crown, and the sight of him, ridiculous and completely, absurdly loyal, almost cracked something open in Nick’s chest that he couldn’t afford to crack.

Harp took one look at him and his whole demeanour changed. The party energy, the Zeus act, the grinning king of Toga Weekend, all of it fell away like a costume being shed, and what was left was just Harp. Just his best mate, reading Nick’s face the way only someone who truly knew you could. He just stepped forward, pulled the Zeus crown off his own head and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

They rode to Beverly Hills in silence, the city sliding past the Uber windows in streaks of light and shadow. Harp sat beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched, and said nothing. When they pulled up to the house, Harp let them in, led Nick to one of the guest rooms (the house had three), and set a glass of water on the nightstand.

“Get some sleep,” he said from the doorway. “I’m down the hall if you need me.”

Nick had nodded. Harp had closed the door. And Nick had lain on top of the covers in his ruined toga and stared at the ceiling of a stranger’s house until the sky outside turned grey and the birds started and he realised, distantly, that he hadn’t slept at all.

It helped, being in Harp’s house. It didn’t fix anything, nothing short of a time machine and a lobotomy was going to fix anything, but it helped. The place was bloody incredible, one of those sprawling modern mansions, all clean lines and floor-to-ceiling glass, perched atop a hill with views of the city that looked like someone had spilled a box of jewels across black velvet. The kitchen alone was the size of Nick’s entire dorm floor. The pool was infinity-edged and heated. There was a home cinema, a wine cellar, and a gym that made Lift District look like a school PE cupboard.

Nick had known Harp came from money. He’d known his dad was some big-shot investment banker who collected first-growth Bordeaux and owned more properties than he could visit in a calendar year. But knowing it and standing barefoot in a marble hallway at seven in the morning while a woman in a white apron asked him what he’d like for breakfast were two very different things. When Nick had said “just some eggs, ma’am, please”, Diane, a soft-spoken Vermonter with flour-dusted aprons and a gentle smile, had looked at him with an expression that suggested just some eggs was something she was going to pretend she hadn’t heard.

Twenty minutes later she’d set down eggs Benedict with perfectly poached yolks and house-made hollandaise, a stack of buttermilk pancakes with Maine blueberries and real maple syrup, a tower of crispy bacon, fruit salad that looked like it had been styled for a magazine shoot, and a pot of coffee that made every cup Nick had ever drunk before it feel like a personal insult. It was probably the most delicious meal he’d ever had, and he’d cleaned the plate so thoroughly that Diane had squeezed his shoulder, called him a sweetheart, and immediately started making more pancakes despite his protests.

He got used to things he had no business getting used to. Not making his bed, because by the time he came back from a run the sheets had been changed and tucked with military precision. Not bothering with dishes, because the house had a small army of staff whose sole purpose, as far as Nick could tell, was ensuring that no surface remained untidy for longer than eleven seconds. Not worrying about food, because Diane had taken one look at his frame on that first morning and decided that her life’s mission was now to keep him fed, and she pursued this objective with a dedication that bordered on aggressive. When Nick had asked Harp where the nearest bus stop was — he still needed to get to Roosters, because if he wasn’t going home for summer then he could at least make some cash — Harp had looked at him as if he’d asked where to find the nearest horse and cart.

“Bus stop?” Harp repeated, blinking. “Bro. Just take the Porsche.”

The Porsche in question was a 911 Turbo S in midnight blue, sitting in the four-car garage between a vintage Mercedes and something Italian that Nick was afraid to look at directly. Nick had stared at it, stared at Harp, and said absolutely not. He ended up asking Eduardo, the Harpers’ driver, about the bus stop instead, because there was no bloody way he was taking a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar sports car to a restaurant where he served burgers in red thongs.

The best thing about living with Harp, however, was that it wasn’t Westbridge.

Westbridge was a minefield. Every corner of that campus had Charlie’s fingerprints on it, and Nick couldn’t walk ten metres without stepping on a memory that detonated on contact. Harp’s house had none of that. It was neutral. A place where no memories lived, where no ghost of Charlie Spring sat curled on the sofa or lingered in the hallway or whispered from the pillow beside him. There was only Diane’s cooking, a gym where Nick and Harp could beat the shit out of each other until neither of them could lift their arms, a sunset over the city that asked nothing of him, and the cute pool boy who could barely disguise his appreciation of the view whenever Nick and Harp were in the pool together.

—

“But are you sure everything’s alright, Nicky?”

Nick held back a sigh. That was probably the hundredth time his mum had asked him that question, and he was certain she’d ask another hundred more because Sarah Nelson refused to believe her son when her gut was telling her otherwise. She, like pretty much everyone in his life, had guessed something was wrong the moment the plane from LAX to Heathrow had taken off and Nick wasn’t on it.

“I’m fine, Mum,” Nick said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I told you. I just needed to stay back because of work.”

“But they didn’t make you stay last year!” Sarah argued, again, for the hundredth time.

Three days ago, when she’d called to ask why her son wasn’t coming home for summer, Nick had blurted the first thing his brain could assemble: that his manager at Roosters had asked him to stay in California to cover shifts. He hated lying to his mum, but it was vastly preferable to the truth, which was I can’t come home because I cheated on my boyfriend and then found out my boyfriend orchestrated the cheating and now I can’t look at him without wanting to scream and he’s in Kent and Kent is where you are so I’m staying in Beverly Hills with my rich mate eating pancakes and punching things.

“We’re understaffed this year, Mum,” Nick said, keeping his voice patient. “Firecracker, Gumby, and Peachy all left out of nowhere. It’s rubbish, but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Sarah said nothing for a while, and Nick hoped it wasn’t because she was trying to remember if he’d ever mentioned co-workers called Firecracker and Gumby. He did had a colleague called Peachy, to be fair, named like that for obvious reasons: the lad had a fantastic arse that, in Nick’s opinion, gave Jet a proper run for his money in the unofficial Best Bum at Roosters ranking. But he’d left months ago after graduating Westbridg. The other two Nick had invented on the spot, and he was already dreading the follow-up questions.

He was walking along Hillcrest Drive, the narrow, immaculate road that wound up the ridge to the Harpers’ gate. It was the kind of street that barely felt like California: quiet, clean, almost eerily still, lined with tall sandstone walls covered in jasmine and bougainvillea and security cameras mounted discreetly at every other gatepost. No pavement litter or traffic noise, just the occasional hum of a German car gliding past and the distant sound of someone’s gardener trimming hedges that were already perfect.

Nick always left the house whenever his mum called. Her rough Kent accent, warm and blunt and thoroughly working-class, felt wrong bouncing off the Harpers’ Carrara marble countertops. Hearing his mum talk about the dodgy boiler and the price of petrol while Nick stood in a kitchen that cost more than her house felt like two realities colliding, and the dissonance made his skin itch.

“It’s just...” Sarah kept going, her tone shifting into something more careful. “Charlie’s not himself either, love.”

Nick stopped walking. His trainers scuffed against the pavement and the silence of Hillcrest Drive pressed in around him.

“He said something?”

“He says everything’s fine too,” Sarah answered, and her tone told Nick exactly what she thought of that. “But Jane and Julio agree with me that something’s off with you lads. They’re worried about him, you know? About his… his eating thing.”

Nick’s stomach dropped through the pavement.

Charlie’s eating disorder lived in the background of their relationship like a shadow on a wall, sometimes barely visible, sometimes consuming everything. The thing that had put Charlie in hospital once and nearly done it twice more. The thing Nick had spent years learning to watch for, the skipped meals disguised as I had a late lunch, the sudden interest in cooking for others while barely touching his own plate, the way Charlie’s collarbones sharpened before anything else showed. Nick knew every warning sign the way a sailor knew the sky before a storm, and the thought that Charlie might be slipping back into those patterns, alone, in Kent, without Nick there to notice when the portions got smaller and the excuses got more creative, hit him with a force that made the anger and the hurt and the betrayal shrink to nothing for one terrible, clarifying second.

He wanted to be on a plane. Wanted to land at Heathrow and drive straight to Whitstable and walk into the Springs’ kitchen and check the fridge and the bin and Charlie’s face and make sure, absolutely sure, that Charlie was eating, that the darkness hadn’t crept back in through the cracks Nick had left when he’d walked away on that beach.

“Mum, you have to make sure he’s eating properly,” Nick said through gritted teeth. His free hand was clenched at his side. “Please.”

“His family’s keeping an eye on him,” Sarah said gently. “But you still want me to believe nothing’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Nick repeated. “Okay? I promise, Mum.”

Sarah sighed.

“Alright, love. You’re a man now. You’ve got the right to keep things about your relationship to yourself.”

Nick had expected her to fight him more. He’d braced for the persistent prodding, the refusal to drop it that was practically a Nelson family trait. The acceptance landed harder than resistance would have, and the guilt about staying in America doubled in his chest, stacking on top of everything else until he wasn’t sure how much more the structure could hold.

“I’m sorry I’m not home,” he said. His voice came out rougher than he wanted. “I’ll try to visit for a weekend or something, okay?”

“I’d love that, love,” Sarah said softly. “I miss you lots and lots.”

“I miss you too, Mum.”

She let him go after that, claiming her tea was ready and her favourite show was about to start, and Nick began the slow walk back up the hill.

The conversation had left him feeling worse than he already did, which he hadn’t thought possible. His mum had sounded properly sad on the phone and he hated it. Hated that his mess with Charlie was bleeding into the people they loved back home, seeping under doors and across the ocean. His mum in her kitchen in Kent while she waited for the kettle to boil. Mrs. and Mr. Spring. Tori too, probably. People who had nothing to do with closets and kinks and caipirinhas and the spectacular implosion of a relationship they’d all believed was unbreakable. They didn’t deserve to spend their summer worrying.

He hated that he’d stayed back. He’d been counting on this summer, months of Sarah’s cooking, lazy afternoons in the garden, driving to Margate for fish and chips, making up for all the time California had stolen. Maybe he’d been too hasty. Maybe the decision to stay had been pure stubbornness dressed up as self-preservation. He could have time and space back in England, couldn’t he? Kent was big enough. He could stay with his mum, avoid Whitstable town centre, keep his head down. Yeah. Maybe he was being stupid. Maybe he should just book a flight and—

Two loud honks snapped him out of his thoughts.

A car had pulled up beside him on the narrow road. Nick ignored it at first, probably someone lost, looking for directions to some mansion or another, but then he glanced over and did a double take. The car was a sun-faded Honda Civic, dented on the passenger side, a crack spidering across the windscreen, a surfboard strapped to the roof rack with bungee cords that didn’t inspire confidence. It was so violently out of place on Hillcrest Drive that it looked like it had wandered in from a different postcode and was hoping nobody would notice.

“Hey, Nick!” called the driver. “You okay, man?”

It took Nick a second to match the face to a name, probably because every other time he’d seen Zoren Bautista the lad had been wearing nothing but swim trunks and a layer of sunscreen while he cleaned the Harpers’ pool. He was a cute boy, outrageously tanned, with almond-shaped eyes that spoke to Filipino heritage and a gorgeous, bright smile that he was currently aiming at Nick through the open window with considerable wattage.

“Yo, mate,” Nick said, smiling despite himself. “Yeah, just went for a walk. You done for today?”

“Just left the house,” Zoren said. “Get in, I’ll take you back up.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t make you drive all the way back—”

“Come on, it’ll take like five minutes,” Zoren said, and to prove he was serious he leaned across and shoved the passenger door open, nearly dislodging what looked like an empty Gatorade bottle. “Hop in.”

Shrugging, Nick folded himself into the Civic. It was a tight fit, the seat was pushed forward for someone considerably shorter than six foot three, and his knees pressed against the glovebox at an angle that suggested the car had not been designed with rugby players in mind. He pulled the door shut and something in the dashboard rattled sympathetically.

“Cheers, mate,” Nick said.

Zoren snorted. “You British people really do say mate all the time, don’t you? I thought the movies were exaggerating.”

“Oi, we bloody well do, mate,” Nick said, leaning hard into his accent.

Zoren laughed, a warm and easy sound that filled the small car and made the rattle in the dashboard seem almost charming.

“Sorry about the mess,” Zoren said, gesturing vaguely at the chaos of the footwell. “This dump is leagues away from Ethan’s Porsche.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. I’m used to the bus, so any car’s an upgrade for me.”

“For real?” Zoren glanced at him sideways. “When I first saw you the other day I thought you were one of Ethan’s rich-boy buddies.”

“No way, man. I’m just larping as the one percent over here,” Nick said. “Give it a couple of weeks and I’ll be back to the real life of taking the bus to work.”

“Where you work?”

Nick noticed that Zoren hadn’t started driving yet. The engine idled, the car sat in the middle of Hillcrest Drive, and Zoren had angled himself slightly in his seat, one hand draped over the steering wheel, giving Nick his full attention.

“Roosters,” Nick said. “Ever heard of it?”

Judging by the way Nick had caught Zoren watching him the other afternoon, his brown eyes tracking the water rolling down Nick’s chest while Nick sunbathed in nothing but a pair of Harp’s borrowed trunks that were at least one size too small, Nick was fairly confident he knew exactly what Roosters was.

“Yeah, I follow their page on Insta,” Zoren said, confirming Nick’s suspicions about his sexuality in a single sentence. No straight lad followed @roostersbar. “But I’ve never actually been. Can’t spend ninety bucks on a burger, no matter how cute the waiters are.”

Nick was suddenly very aware that Zoren was flirting with him.

“Well, you should come by sometime,” he said. “I can sort you out with a good deal.”

“Yeah?” Zoren’s smile widened. “Is it as crazy as it looks in the Insta videos?”

Nick smirked at him. “Crazier.”

He was suddenly very aware that he was flirting back.

So what, he told himself. It was no big deal. He flirted with punters all the time at work. It was basically in the job description. It didn’t mean anything.

Yeah, said a voice in his head. But Zoren isn’t a punter, is he?

Potential punter, Nick told the voice.

He could almost hear it snort. Is that what we’re telling ourselves now? Alright. Hey, I’m not judging. It’s not like Charlie would mind, right?

“You single, Nick?” Zoren asked.

Nick hesitated.

The hesitation lasted one second. Maybe less. A fraction of a breath, a micro-pause that no reasonable person would have noticed. But Nick noticed. Nick felt it like a opening under his feet, because he knew what that hesitation meant, knew what lived inside it: the fact that for one terrible instant, he had considered saying yes.

What the fuck was he doing? He wasn’t bloody single. He had a boyfriend. He had Charlie. Whatever Charlie had done, whatever wreckage was still smouldering between them, Nick hadn’t said the words and neither had Charlie and until someone did, he had a boyfriend.

It’s not like Charlie would mind, right?

“No,” he said. “No, I’ve got a boyfriend. Charlie.”

Zoren didn’t look remotely bothered. If anything, his posture relaxed further, as if the information had simply been filed away without altering his plans in the slightest.

“So why aren’t you spending the summer with Charlie?” he asked.

Nick almost laughed. How could he even begin to explain?

“It’s complicated,” he said.

Zoren’s smile only got bigger.

“Well, I think Charlie’s either very confident or very naive,” he said. “I’d never let a hot guy like you roam around alone over summer.”

Nick was taken aback by the directness. He wasn’t used to being hit on like this by people who weren’t Beto Montenegro. Sure, punters flirted with him at Roosters constantly, but that was theatre, their interest was no more serious than Nick’s performance, a mutual game that ended when the bill arrived. At Westbridge, pretty much everyone knew he and Charlie were a package deal, so people stopped bothering to hit on them because it was clearly a waste of time. And those who didn’t know him, well, Nick was a hundred-and-twelve-kilo rugby player with arms like industrial equipment, and the vast majority of gay lads weren’t going to risk getting too friendly on the off chance he turned out to be a homophobe who expressed his discomfort with his fists.

Zoren, apparently, did not share these concerns.

“He’s got nothing to worry about,” Nick said.

“Well, you’re sitting in a car with a guy who’s looking at you like a piece of meat,” Zoren said, and his voice had dropped into something lower, more charged. “Sure he doesn’t?”

Then he put his hand on Nick’s thigh.

It landed high, dangerously close to where the loose leg of Nick’s basketball shorts gave way to considerably more personal territory, and squeezed softly. Nick’s cock, ever the traitor, twitched, and because Nick wasn’t wearing any undies, because Nick was apparently constitutionally forbidden of wearing undies, the twitch was immediately and obscenely visible against the thin fabric.

“Bet this thing is fucking huge,” Zoren murmured.

He squeezed Nick’s thigh again, fingers pressing into the muscle, the heel of his palm grazing the edge of Nick’s shorts. Nick’s cock twitched again, thickening now, and the rational part of his brain, the part that was screaming what are you doing, get out of the car, you have a boyfriend, was being steadily drowned out by something older and louder and considerably less interested in morality.

Zoren looked up at him, those dark almond eyes warm and certain and completely unafraid.

“What do you say you ditch those rich fuckers,” he said, “And come to my place instead?”

—

Charlie missed Nick so much it fucking hurt.

It was physical. Brutal. Nothing like that poetic kind of missing, the bittersweet ache of distance that songs and novels made sound almost beautiful. It was a constant absence that had lodged itself somewhere inside him and refused to leave, like a stone he’d swallowed that was too big to pass and too sharp to ignore. He missed Nick as if he was oxygen, with panic, a creeping awareness that something essential had been removed and his body didn’t know how to function without it.

He missed Nick’s hands. The size of them, the warmth, the way one of them could span the entire small of Charlie’s back and make him feel like nothing in the world could reach him. He missed Nick’s laugh, that big, stupid, full-body laugh that started in his chest and shook his shoulders and made everyone in the room want to be in on whatever the joke was. He missed the weight of him in bed, that enormous furnace-warm presence that turned every mattress into the safest place on earth. He missed the way Nick hummed in the shower without realising he was doing it, always slightly off-key, always something Charlie had been playing in the dorm that week.

He missed the stupid things most. The way Nick left cupboard doors open in every room he passed through. The way he ate cereal standing up, leaning against the kitchen counter, scrolling his phone with one hand and shovelling Weetabix with the other. The way he said love as a reflex, dropped into sentences without thinking, thanks love, night love, pass the remote love, until the word stopped being a word and became just another way of saying you’re mine and I’m yours and neither of us needs to think about it.

Charlie hadn’t heard that word in three days. He was counting. He couldn’t stop counting.

His phone had become an instrument of torture. He kept it on him always, on his pocket, his hand, the pillow, the bathroom counter while he showered, because the thought of missing a notification from Nick, of being in another room when those three dots finally appeared on his screen, was so unbearable it bordered on superstition. Every buzz made his heart lurch. Every vibration sent a spike of adrenaline through his chest that left his fingers tingling and his mouth dry. And every single time, without exception, it was someone else. Luna checking in. Beto with a careful how’re you, carlinhos?. Elena sending him a photo of a cat she’d seen outside Lavender Pages with the caption your new coworker. His mum asking if he wanted peas or green beans with dinner. Group chat notifications he couldn’t bring himself to open. Instagram likes from people whose names he couldn’t remember.

Never Nick.

Not once. Not a text, not a missed call, not even a like on a photo. Three days of absolute, airtight silence, and Charlie was starting to understand that I need time to think might not have been a request for a few days. It might have been a door closing. He’d drafted messages. Dozens of them. Sitting on his childhood bed at two in the morning, screen brightness turned low so the light wouldn’t leak under the door and alert his mum that he was still awake, thumbs moving across the keyboard.

Nick, I know you need space but I just want you to know

Delete.

I’m so sorry. I know that’s not enough but

Delete.

Can we please just talk? Even for 5 minutes. I just need to hear your

Delete.

I love you. I know I fucked up. I know what I did was wrong and I’m not going to make excuses for it. But I love you and I need you to know that was always real. Every single part of it. Please

His thumb hovered over send for forty-five seconds. Then he deleted that one too.

He checked his screen time once, on day two, and the number was so catastrophic he immediately closed the app and decided that data was a social construct he no longer believed in. He was spending hours — actual, literal hours — staring at a conversation thread that contained exactly one message from Nick: im ok. sorry. long night. talk when i get back x. Sent to Instagram, days ago, from a hotel room in Houston. Charlie had read it so many times the words had lost all meaning and become just shapes, pixels arranged in a pattern his eyes traced automatically.

He respected the silence. He hated himself for respecting it because every atom in his body was screaming at him to call Nick, to text Nick, to get on a plane and show up at wherever Nick was and force the conversation that needed to happen. But Nick had asked for space. Nick had said I can’t talk to you right now. And Charlie owed him that. After everything he’d taken from Nick without asking, the least he could give him was the one thing Nick had actually requested.

So he waited. And he checked his phone. And he waited. And he checked his phone. And Nick didn’t call.

The worst part was the memories he couldn’t unsee. They kept ambushing him, moments he’d lived through once and filed away as beautiful, as intimate, as proof of how strong their love was, and now, replayed through the lens of what he knew he’d been doing, they curdled into something unrecognisable. Those days after Houston. The red tie on the doorknob. Nick worshipping him with a desperation Charlie had mistaken for passion but now understood was penance. Nick’s hands trembling as they touched him, not from desire but from the terror of a man trying to earn back something he believed he’d destroyed. Nick whispering I love you so much, Char, you’re everything with his fingers inside him, and Charlie lying there receiving it, eyes closed, hard as a rock, knowing exactly why Nick was being so tender and getting off on it.

He’d used Nick’s guilt as foreplay.

The thought arrived fully formed one night around three in the morning, and Charlie had to get out of bed and stand at the bathroom sink gripping the porcelain until his knuckles went white. He stared at his reflection in the mirror and tried to find the person who had lain in that dorm bed and let his boyfriend atone with his body while silently cataloguing every desperate touch for future use. He’d known. The entire time. He’d known Nick was suffering, known the guilt was crushing him, and instead of saying it’s okay, Nicky, I know, let me explain, instead of ending it right there, in that first hour, when a single honest sentence could have spared both of them weeks of damage, Charlie had closed his eyes and spread his legs and let it all happen.

He wanted to be sick. He actually might have been, if there’d been anything in his stomach to bring up. But even that, the horror of it, the self-disgust, was only the surface layer. Underneath it, deeper, sat something Charlie had been circling for days, approaching from different angles, retreating each time he got too close. A thought with edges so sharp he could feel them before he touched it. He kept telling himself he wasn’t ready, that he needed more time, more distance, more perspective. But in the small hours of his first night home, lying rigid in his childhood bed with the duvet kicked to the floor and the window cracked open to let in the cool Kent air that still wasn’t enough to stop him overheating, he ran out of ways to avoid it.

He had never asked Nick. Charlie had decided, unilaterally, what Nick would do, with whom, and when. He had appointed himself the architect of Nick’s sexual life without Nick ever knowing there were blueprints. He’d told himself a story about it, a generous, flattering story in which Charlie was liberating Nick from the prison of his own repression, giving him permission to explore a desire he was too loyal and too afraid to act on alone. I’m doing this for us. I’m opening a door Nick doesn’t know he wants opened. He’ll thank me when he understands. But Nick had never asked for that door to be opened. Nick’s attraction to Beto had been private. It belonged to Nick, something he was managing on his own terms, in his own way, at his own pace. Maybe he would have acted on it eventually, or maybe he would have let it fade, or maybe he would have come to Charlie one day and said I need to tell you something and they could have navigated it together, honestly, as equals. Charlie would never know, because Charlie had stolen that choice from him. Had reached into the most private corner of Nick’s inner life, extracted the thing Nick was most conflicted about, and weaponised it.

Charlie had decided what was best for Nick without asking Nick what Nick wanted. He had treated Nick’s boundaries not as limits to be respected but as obstacles to be engineered around. He had stripped away Nick’s agency and dressed it up as a gift. There was a word for that. Charlie knew it. He’d encountered it in enough of the online forums and Reddit threads he’d read while researching his kink. Consent. The thing that separated fantasy from violation. The line that made the difference between something shared and something taken.

Charlie had taken. And how did that make him any different from Ben Hope?

No.

Charlie recoiled from it so hard he physically turned over in bed, pressing his face into the pillow as if he could smother the thought before it fully formed. No. That was different. That was completely, entirely, categorically different. Ben was a monster. Ben had kept Charlie as a dirty secret, kissed him in empty classrooms and then pretended he didn’t exist in the corridors. Ben had told him he was too much and not enough in the same breath, had made Charlie feel like loving him was something to be ashamed of, had twisted every interaction until Charlie couldn’t tell which way was up and whose fault anything was. Ben had manipulated him, gaslit him, hollowed out his self-worth and filled the space with dependence. Charlie would never do that. He was nothing like Ben Hope.

Except.

Except Ben had also decided he knew what was best for someone else. Had looked at another person and thought I know what you need better than you do. Had manipulated someone who trusted him, rewritten the rules of their relationship without permission, and constructed a justification afterwards, it’s for the best, you’ll understand eventually, this is how things have to be. Charlie hadn’t used cruelty. He’d used love, which might have been worse, because Nick never thought to defend himself against it.

The methods were different. The entitlement was the same.

I know what’s best for you. I know what you really want. Your resistance is just something I need to work around.

Charlie pressed his face harder into the pillow and felt tears soak into the cotton and thought: I’m not Ben Hope. I’m not. I’m no—

“Jesus Christ!” Charlie nearly launched himself off the bed, one hand clutching his chest, heart slamming against his ribs so hard he could feel it in his ears. “What the — how long have you been standing there?”

Tori Spring was leaning against his bedroom doorframe, arms crossed, watching him with the unblinking stare of a cat that had been observing a wounded bird and was still deciding what to do about it. She was wearing all black, which was not news, and her hair was shorter than the last time he’d seen her, in a way that made her look older, like someone you wouldn’t want to argue with in a drugstore line. She looked nice. Pretty, even, in her particular dark, vaguely unsettling way that had been making people uncomfortable since she was fourteen.

“Long enough,” she said.

“You’re not supposed to be here for two weeks.”

“Surprise.”

“Does Mum know you’re—”

“Who do you think picked me up from the airport?”

Charlie stared at her. His parents were supposed to be at some garden centre in Canterbury. His mum had mentioned it at breakfast, or possibly lunch, the meals had started blurring together, and Charlie had nodded without listening because nodding without listening was pretty much all he did these days.

“Mum said you were being pathetic.” Tori said,

She stepped into the room uninvited and cast a slow look around, at the drawn curtains, the phone face-down on the pillow, the general atmosphere of a person who had been marinading in his own misery for the better part of a week.

“But I assumed she was overreacting.” She looked back at Charlie. “She was not overreacting.”

“Go away,” Charlie said, turning over and burying his face in the pillow again.

“No,” Tori said simply, and with a strength that was surprising for someone who weighed approximately as much as a medium-sized dog, she grabbed the pillow from underneath his head and pulled it free. Charlie’s face hit the bare mattress. “You’re done being pathetic. Come on. Let’s eat something.”

“Not hungry,” Charlie mumbled into the sheet.

“Did I ask if you’re hungry? I told you to eat. Shove it down your throat for all I care, but eat.”

Charlie rolled his eyes at her from his horizontal position, which lost most of its effect against the mattress. “You’d make a terrible therapist.”

“I’m not your therapist, am I?” She dropped the pillow on the floor, deliberately out of his reach. “I’m the person who just spent two hours in a car listening to Mum talk about how worried she is about you. You’re not being fair to her, Charlie.”

That one landed. Charlie sat up slowly, guilt twisting fresh in his chest, because Tori was right. He wasn’t being fair to his mum. He’d seen the way Jane watched him at mealtimes. The way her eyes flicked to his plate and back to her own in the space of a blink, calculating how much he’d actually eaten versus how much he’d rearranged. The way she offered seconds with a brightness that was just slightly too bright, or mentioned that she’d made extra of something accidentally.

He hadn’t meant to stop eating. That was the insidious thing about it. There was no moment where Charlie had looked at a plate and thought I’m not going to eat this. It was subtler than that. Quieter. Food had simply started losing its taste, meals blurring into obligations he performed rather than enjoyed, portions shrinking by degrees so small he didn’t notice until his jeans sat differently on his hips and his mum’s eyes started doing that thing. He’d catch himself pushing pasta around his plate for ten minutes without taking a bite, or realising at four in the afternoon that he’d had nothing since a cup of tea at breakfast, and neither of those things had felt like choices. They’d felt like forgetting. Like his body had decided, somewhere below the level of conscious thought, that maintaining itself wasn’t a priority anymore.

He knew the signs. He’d lived through them before, and his therapist had given him the language to recognise them — restriction as a response to emotional distress, the body enacting the control the mind feels it’s lost — and he knew, with a clarity that cut through even the thickest fog of self-pity, that he couldn’t go back there. He had promised Nick. Years ago, sitting on the floor of his bedroom at home, Nick’s arms around him. Charlie had looked Nick in the eyes and said I won’t do that again, I promise. And whatever else Charlie had broken, whatever other promises he’d shattered and scattered across that beach, that one still held. It had to. Because if he let that one go too, then there was nothing left of him that was worth saving.

“Fine,” he said to Tori. “I’ll eat.”

But he made no motion of moving. Tori watched him with those big green eyes, sighed, and sat down next to him on the bed. The mattress barely dipped under her weight.

“You can tell us what’s going on, you know,” she said.

Charlie shook his head. There was no way he could tell his sister everything. It was too personal, too shameful. He wouldn’t want Tori to know about his cheating kink even if everything else was perfect, and everything else was so far from perfect he couldn’t even see perfect from where he was sitting. But he looked at his sister’s green eyes, stripped of their usual deadpan armour, and decided he could tell her something. She deserved that much. His family deserved that much.

“I fucked up,” he said. “Badly.”

“I gathered that much,” she said, and her answer was so perfectly Tori that Charlie laughed despite himself. A short, broken thing, but a laugh.

“Why, couldn’t Nick be the one who fucked up?” he asked.

“He could, sure. But if Nick had done something wrong, he’d be here banging on the door begging to be forgiven. He’s not even in the country, so yeah. I gathered you fucked up.” She pushed him softly with her shoulder. “The question is, why aren’t you in America banging on his door and begging to be forgiven?”

“Nick doesn’t want to see me right now,” Charlie said quietly.

Tori scoffed. “Nick Nelson? I find that very hard to believe.”

“I fucked up,” Charlie said again. He stared at his hands in his lap, picking at a loose thread on the duvet. “I... I did something I knew he wouldn’t want me to do, because I really wanted it and I thought that, once he saw things my way, he’d want it too.”

“And he doesn’t want the thing, after all?”

Charlie shrugged.

“I don’t know. It’s complicated. But the thing is, I manipulated him. I was selfish. I decided I knew better than him about what he wanted, and I went behind his back, and I —” His voice snagged. “And now he’s so angry at me he doesn’t even want to be on the same continent.”

The tears came before he could stop them, sudden and humiliating, spilling down his cheeks in a rush that caught him off guard. He wiped them away quickly, jaw clenched against the rest that were pushing to follow. Tori said nothing. She sat beside him on the narrow bed, close enough that their arms touched, and let the silence hold. She just waited, until Charlie’s breathing evened out and the tears slowed to something he could manage.

“I don’t know how to make things right,” he said finally. His voice was small and scraped thin, the voice of someone who had run out of strategies.

“I don’t think you can,” Tori answered. “You fucked up. The only thing you can do now is show up and ask for forgiveness.”

“How? He doesn’t want to look at me, Tori.”

“Not on your timeline, Charlie,” she said. “On Nick’s. He needs to be ready to forgive you first. You can’t force that.”

Charlie stared at the carpet. The afternoon light was fading through the gap in the curtains, turning everything in the room a dull, tired grey. Somewhere downstairs, their mum’s key turned in the front door.

“And what if he’s never ready?” he asked, miserably.

Tori didn’t answer that.

—

Chapter Fifteen. Both sides of the same wound. We're into Part Three now, and things are about to get complicated in ways neither of them saw coming. If this story has been living in your head the way it's been living in mine, consider becoming a paid subscriber. See you in Chapter Sixteen. Bring tissues.