Heartbreaker, a Heartstopper Story - Ch. 21

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

The ceiling fan turned in slow lazy circles above the bed, pushing warm air across Nick’s damp skin without doing much to cool it. He was flat on his back, one arm behind his head, the other resting loosely across Jet’s shoulders, and his body felt like it had been taken apart and reassembled in a slightly different order. Every muscle was heavy and loose, his pulse still settling from its earlier chaos, sweat cooling in the dip of his collarbones and along the groove of his abs.

Jet was draped across him like an exhausted cat. His head rested on Nick’s chest, dark hair fanned across the golden skin, one leg hooked lazily over Nick’s thigh. His fingers were tracing idle patterns around Nick’s left nipple, circling it, grazing it, the touch absent-minded and comfortable in a way that suggested Jet had no intention of moving any time in the near future. His breathing had slowed to something deep and even, but he wasn’t asleep: every few seconds his thumb would brush across the nipple and Nick’s chest would twitch involuntarily and Jet would smile against his skin.

The room smelled like sex. There was no getting around it, unmistakable scent of sweat and cum and exertion hung in the warm air like something physical. The sheets beneath them were wrecked, damp and twisted, kicked to the foot of the bed at some point during the proceedings. Nick could feel the cooling evidence of what they’d done between Jet’s thighs where they pressed against his own — his cum, leaking from Jet’s body, warm and visceral and undeniable. He’d done it. He’d fucked Jet. He’d fucked another man, deliberately and consciously, with a camera pointed at him and his boyfriend watching from three thousand miles away, and the proof of it was everywhere. In the bite mark on his neck, in the scratches down his back, in the cum drying on both their stomachs, in the tripod lying on the carpet where the basketball had knocked it.

Nick stared at the ceiling fan and waited for something to arrive. Some feeling, some reckoning, some emotional invoice for what he’d just done. He lay very still and held the door open and waited. The fan turned. Jet’s finger circled his nipple. Somewhere outside, a car passed with its music playing too loud.

Nothing came.

Nick’s phone buzzed in his hand. He’d retrieved it from the floor about fifteen minutes ago, after the aftershocks had faded enough for him to feel like a functioning human being again and he’d noticed the toppled tripod and the dark screen and realised, with a lurch of panic, that the stream had cut out. He’d texted Charlie immediately — which color, love? — and then waited, phone on his chest, heart rate climbing again for entirely different reasons, because if the abrupt ending had ruined it, if Charlie was sitting in his bedroom in Kent feeling frustrated or abandoned or shut out, then the whole beautiful, terrifying, extraordinary thing they’d just built together would have a crack running through it before the foundation had even set. Fifteen minutes was a long time to wait for a text. Long enough for Nick to construct several catastrophic scenarios, each worse than the last.

He looked at the screen and snorted.

“He okay?” Jet mumbled against his chest, stirring slightly.

Nick tilted the phone so Jet could see. Charlie’s reply filled the screen — a single speech bubble so long it required scrolling, nothing but the word green typed over and over and over again, greengreengreengreengreengreengreengreengreengreengreen, the text stretching on and on, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, an endless cascade of green that kept going past the bottom of the screen and then kept going some more. So that was why it had taken him so long to reply. The idiot had been sitting there typing green for fifteen straight minutes.

“Looks like a yes,” said Jet, a smile in his voice.

“Looks like it.”

Nick half-expected Jet to settle back onto his chest, to tuck himself closer, to resume the lazy post-sex sprawl they’d been lying in. When he didn’t, when Jet simply stayed where he was, relaxed but not clinging, comfortable but not claiming, Nick felt a quiet wave of relief. He liked Jet. He’d liked fucking Jet a lot. But the afterwards, the intimacy of tangled limbs and shared pillows and the slow drift toward sleep — that belonged to someone else. And Nick was starting to run out of minutes before the distinction between fun sex with a mate and something that means more than it should began to blur.

He needed to leave. He just had to figure out how to do it without looking like a prick.

“Wanna eat something?” Jet asked, sitting up on the mattress, stretching his arms above his head, completely unselfconscious about being naked in front of another person. “I’ve got leftover pepperoni from last night. It’s not bad cold.”

Nick sat up too, the sheets pooling around his waist. “I should probably get going, actually.”

“Yeah?” Jet glanced at him. “I was thinking pizza, then maybe round two. Really test that stamina everyone at Roosters keeps bragging about.”

“Tempting,” Nick said, and meant it more than was probably wise. “But my mate’s probably wondering where I am. Told him I’d be back like two hours ago.”

Please don’t make it weird. Please don’t make this into something it isn’t.

But Jet just shrugged, reaching for a T-shirt crumpled on the floor. “Fair enough. But I bet he’s more worried about his Porsche than about you.”

Nick grinned. The Porsche.

It had all begun with the Porsche.

After the call with Charlie on El Porto beach, Nick had walked back to the bus stop feeling like a completely different person. Renovated, stripped back to the foundations and rebuilt from the ground up in the space of a single phone conversation. He’d and the love of his life had been honest about the ugliest, most complicated parts of them, and they bot had listened, and understood, and forgiven, and the love between them had come out of it not weakened but strengthened, tempered by fire into something harder and brighter than it had been before.

He felt invincible. He felt like a man standing on the summit of something enormous, looking out at a view that stretched in every direction, and everything he could see was possible. Because if they could survive that, then what couldn’t they survive? What obstacle existed that their love wouldn’t find a way around, or through, or over? Nick had spent years believing that the strength of a relationship was measured by the absence of problems. Now he understood it was measured by what you did when the problems arrived, and he and Charlie had faced the worst thing either of them could imagine and chosen each other anyway.

He was so bloody happy. Grinning on the bus like a lunatic, grinning at Eduardo when he opened the gate, grinning at Diane when she asked if he wanted a late-night snack. He was grinning the next morning when Harp found him in the kitchen making his own eggs for the first time and he was still grinning that afternoon when he mentioned to Harp that he couldn’t join him at the country club because he had to catch the bus to Roosters for his shift.

“Dude,” Harp said for the hundredth time. “Just take the Porsche.”

Nick looked at him. Harp looked back, one eyebrow raised.

“Yeah, alright,” Nick said.

Harp’s mouth fell open. “Wait — seriously?”

“Yeah. Why not?” Nick took the keys from Harp’s frozen hand. “Life’s too short for the bus.”

Harp stared at him for a long, suspicious moment, as if trying to determine whether Nick had been replaced by an identical but significantly more agreeable clone. Then he broke into a grin so wide it threatened the structural integrity of his face.

“Who are you,” he said, “and what have you done with my cheap British roommate?”

The Porsche was a religious experience. Nick had driven plenty of cars over the years. His mum’s ancient Fiat Punto that shuddered above fifty and smelled permanently of dog despite them never having owned a dog. His dad’s Vauxhall Astra that pulled slightly to the left and had a passenger window that only opened if you hit the door panel at exactly the right angle. Charlie’s dad’s Peugeot, sensible and beige and so aggressively unremarkable it practically apologised for existing every time you turned the ignition. Even Harp’s Range Rover once, which had felt luxurious at the time but which Nick now understood had been the automotive equivalent of flying economy after experiencing first class.

The Porsche 911 Turbo S was none of those things. The engine came alive with throaty growl that settled into a purr so smooth it was almost obscene. The steering responded to the lightest touch of his fingers. The seat hugged him like it had been moulded to his specific body. Every surface was leather or carbon fibre or something else that probably cost more per square inch than Nick earned in a week, and the dashboard looked like it had been designed by someone who believed driving should be an emotional experience rather than a commute. He pulled onto Sunset Boulevard, TWICE blasting from the speakers at a volume that would have made Harp weep with pride and any music critic weep for different reasons entirely, and pressed the accelerator. The car surged forward with a force that shoved him back into the seat and rearranged something fundamental in his understanding of what velocity felt like. The palm trees blurred. The traffic parted. A woman in a convertible at a red light lowered her sunglasses to stare at the car and then, when she clocked Nick behind the wheel, kept staring for entirely different reasons.

He was driving faster than he probably should have been. Definitely faster than the speed limit allowed, almost certainly faster than Harp’s insurance covered, and absolutely faster than any responsible person would drive a car that cost more than a house in Kent. The wind roared through the window he’d cracked open, and TWICE’s Jihyo was hitting a high note that made his entire dashboard vibrate, and Nick was laughing out loud, alone in a car, on a California highway, with the sun on his face and the Pacific glittering somewhere off to his left.

Nick had never been a car person. He had always thought of cars as metal boxes that got you from one place to another, functionally identical to buses but with better seating and worse parking. He now understood why people lost their minds over these things. The Porsche wasn’t a ca, it was the physical manifestation of the mood he’d been in since that phone call with Charlie — fast, free, powerful, alive, and absolutely unwilling to slow down for anything.

Nick got to Roosters in record time. He even found a parking spot directly in front of the building, which was practically unheard of on Abbot Kinney, further proof that God, fate, or whatever superior force was running the show had decided, definitively, to be on Nick Nelson’s side that day. He stepped out of the car and — shit — he felt like a movie star. The late afternoon sun caught the midnight blue paint and threw it back in a gleam that turned heads up and down the pavement. People were looking at him. Tourists slowing their walk, a couple of girls on the opposite kerb nudging each other, a bloke with a coffee nearly walking into a lamppost. Even Tsunami, who was out front in the Rusty the Rooster costume doing his usual job of enthusiastically harassing pedestrians into coming inside, stopped mid-chicken-dance to stare.

“Damn, Brit.” Jet was coming out of Roosters just as Nick reached the door, gym bag over one shoulder, still in his work shorts and a tank top. “You rob a bank or something?”

Nick grinned at him. “My mate lent me his car.”

“Your mate lent you a Porsche?” Jet looked from Nick to the car and back again. “What kind of friends you have? Fuck, I need to upgrade my entire social circle.”

Nick laughed. The day was beautiful, the sky that particular shade of California blue that looked like it had been Photoshopped. He was driving a Porsche. He and Charlie were going to be okay, and Jet looked ridiculously fit — his cheeks slightly reddened, as if he’d caught too much sun without sunscreen, the flush making his pale eyes even more striking against the tan and giving him a warm look that was unfairly attractive.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” Jet asked, falling into step beside him.

“Working, what else?” Nick said, reaching for the door.

Jet frowned.

“Um, no you’re not. I literally just checked. Your next shift isn’t until tomorrow, man.”

Nick stopped.

“You’re joking.”

Jet pulled his phone from his pocket and held it up, the Roosters schedule app open on the screen.

“Thursday, six to close. It’s right there.”

Nick looked at the screen and, sure enough, there it was: Nelson — Thursday 6pm-close. Swapped with Maddigan(Wed). He closed the app and — fuck. It was right. He’d swapped shifts with Sunny because Sunny and his girlfriend were celebrating their two-year anniversary tomorrow and Nick, in a fit of post-phone-call generosity that now felt deeply misguided, had offered to cover for him.

“I’m such a wanker,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I swapped with Sunny. Him and his girl have their anniversary thing tomorrow. Completely forgot.”

“That’s rough, dude,” Jet said, leaning against the wall, looking thoroughly entertained by Nick’s predicament. “So what now?”

Nick shrugged. “Back to my mate’s, I guess.”

At least he wouldn’t have to wait until tomorrow to drive the Porsche again. Maybe he’d take the long way back, loop down the coast road, stretch the twenty-minute drive into forty. Maybe an hour, if he found the right playlist.

“Hey,” Jet said. His eyes had drifted back to the car, and the expression on his face was the same one he’d had earlier when he’d first seen it: naked, unashamed longing. “Can you give me a ride? I’ve never been in a Porsche before. I’ll literally sit in the back if I have to.”

“It doesn’t have a back seat, mate.”

“Then I’ll sit on the roof. I don’t care. Please. I’m begging you. Look at my face. This is my begging face.”

Nick looked at his face. It was, admittedly, a very effective begging face. Those blue eyes had gone wide and pleading, his lower lip pushed out just enough to be ridiculous, and he’d clasped his hands together in front of his chest in a gesture of supplication so exaggerated it belonged in a silent film.

Nick grinned. “Get in, then. But I’m warning you — it’s fast.”

Jet was already halfway to the passenger door.

“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” he said, practically vaulting over the door and landing in the seat with zero dignity and maximum enthusiasm.

The Porsche pulled away from the curb with and eased it into traffic, the midnight-blue paint catching the last of the afternoon light as they slid past the line of parked cars and headed toward the coast road. Once again, Nick marveled at how the engine responded to the lightest touch of his foot, surging forward with effortless power. Jet let out a low whistle the second they cleared the first intersection.

“Holy shit,” he breathed, one hand braced on the door as Nick took the next corner. The tires gripped the road like they were glued to it, the whole car leaning into the turn with a precision that would make any other car feel like a tank by comparison. “That sound. That’s not even fair. It’s like… purring and growling at the same time. How the fuck does it do that?”

Nick couldn’t help the small grin that tugged at his mouth. He shifted gears, the movement clean and satisfying under his palm, and pressed the accelerator just enough to let the engine sing a little louder. The car leapt forward, pressing them both back into the sculpted leather seats. Jet’s head tipped back against the headrest, eyes wide, a delighted laugh bursting out of him.

“Jesus Christ, Brit. This thing’s stupid. Like, actually stupid. The acceleration — I felt that in my teeth.

He twisted slightly in the seat, running one palm along the dashboard like he was checking it was real, then let his fingers trail over the carbon-fibre trim. The wind from the open window caught in his dark hair, tossing it across his forehead, and he didn’t bother pushing it back. He looked younger like this, lighter, the usual Roosters cockiness replaced by something closer to joy.

Nick glanced sideways at him.“So. Where am I taking you?”

Jet blinked, like he’d forgotten they were actually going somewhere.

“Oh. Right. Uh — 1427 Pacific Avenue. It’s one of those little two-storey places a couple blocks back from the beach.”

Nick nodded and tapped the address into the Porsche’s navigation system with one hand, the screen lighting up clean and responsive. The route popped up immediately.

“Twenty minutes, give or take,” he said, settling back into the drive.

The road ahead stretched out in front of them, the ocean flashing between buildings on their left, the city humming along on their right. The Porsche settled into a contented growl as they merged onto the coast road Jet had one arm resting on the open window, fingers tapping lightly against the door in time with the low thump of the music Nick had left playing. The wind kept tossing his dark hair across his forehead, and every so often he’d let out a small, appreciative noise when the car took a corner or surged forward at a light.

The conversation drifted to some Roosters gossip that filled the space without asking for anything heavy. Jet told him about Tsunami going full method with the Rusty the Rooster bit in Spanish for a table of tourists the night before and how one of them had tipped him extra because they’d thought it was some kind of telenovela performance. Nick huffed a quiet laugh at that, eyes still on the road, and said it sounded about right; the lad was proper committed once that foam head went on. Then Jet told him about the finance bros from a bachelor party who’d kept calling everyone “chief” and “king” like they were doing the Cocks a favour just by showing up, then left eight percent and a business card like they expected a LinkedIn connection out of it.

After a stretch of comfortable quiet, Jet glanced over, still loose in the passenger seat.

“So what are you still doin’ in LA for summer, anyway? Most of the college guys cleared out weeks ago.”

“Staying with a mate for a bit. Picked up some extra shifts at Roosters. Figured I might as well make the most of it while the weather’s decent.”

Jet nodded, like that tracked. “Fair. LA in summer’s not the worst place to be stuck. What about Charlie? He staying too?”

Nick took a second too long to answer. The silence was only a beat, barely anything, but Jet noticed. he glanced over, and Nick fixed his eyes on the road ahead with slightly too much deliberateness.

“Uh, no. He’s home,” Nick said. “Back in England.”

“Huh.” Jet turned back to the window. “That’s rough. Being apart right when you’ve both got time free.”

Nick shrugged. “Yeah. But honestly — we went through a tough time recently. I think the distance has actually done us some good.”

He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d said it. The words had come out before he’d thought them through. Nick and Jet got along fine. They kind of had to, they’d slow-danced together in front of screaming hen parties more times than either of them could count, and there was a particular intimacy that came from sharing a locker room and a uniform that left nothing to the imagination. But they’d never been close, not really. Their friendship existed in a specific register: a shared laugh over something a punter had said, a couple of drinks with the other guys after a closing shift, the easy camaraderie of people who spent a lot of time in close quarters without ever quite breaching the surface.

And maybe that was exactly why Nick had said it. Everyone else with a stake in his relationship had opinions they couldn’t help expressing. His mum’s voice went carefully neutral whenever Charlie’s name came up, which was its own kind of statement. Harp had been a steadfast presence through all of it, but Harp had also been there the night Nick showed up at the gate in a ruined toga, and that knowledge sat between them sometimes. Beto knew more about Nick’s private life than Nick was entirely comfortable. Even Torres had called him once, early in the summer, and said, quietly and without asking for details, that whatever Nick was going through, the lads were there.

Everyone cared. Everyone was watching. Jet wouldn’t give a shit either way. If Nick and Charlie imploded, Jet would nod sympathetically, buy him a beer, and move on with his life. There was something deeply restful about that.

“But you guys are doing better now?”

It was impossible for Nick not to smile. “Yeah. We got our shit together and figured it out.”

“Good.” Jet bit his lower lip, an absent gesture that had absolutely no business being as sexy as it was “You can tell me to fuck off if I’m overstepping — but does any of it have to do with you guys being in an open relationship?”

Nick frowned. “Where’d you hear that?”

“Charlie, actually.” Jet shifted slightly in his seat. “Like, a million years ago. He asked me not to say anything because he didn’t want to embarrass you. Which, apparently, I’m now doing anyway. Sorry.”

The coast road unspooled ahead of them, the ocean glinting between buildings on the left. Nick turned Jet’s words over — Charlie telling Jet they were open. A million years ago, apparently, so probably before Houston, before the beach, before all the wreckage and the rebuilding. Charlie had been laying groundwork Nick hadn’t even known existed. He wasn’t angry about it. That surprised him slightly. A few months ago, that particular piece of information would have landed like a stone in still water, sending ripples in every direction. Now it just settled quietly, another tile clicking into place in the mosaic of everything Charlie had been carrying, and feeling, and orchestrating, long before Nick had any idea what was happening.

“It’s fine,” Nick said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Yeah?” Jet glanced at him.

“Yeah.” Nick paused. “It’s complicated. But we’re working through it.”

“How so?”

“You know, figuring out what we actually want,” Nick said. He kept his eyes on the road, but his grip on the steering wheel had loosened. “Being honest about things we probably should’ve been honest about a long time ago.”

“That sounds healthy,” Jet said. There was no irony in it. He actually sounded like he respected what Nick and Charlie were doing.

“Yeah.” Nick surprised himself with how much he meant it. “It is, actually.”

The coast road curved and the ocean opened up properly on their left, wide and gold in the late afternoon light, the kind of view that made Nick understand why people moved to California and never left. Jet had his arm back out the window, fingers spread against the wind.

“So is that like — you both see other people? Or is it more like, you know, together-together but with flexibility?” Jet asked eventually.

“More like...” Nick thought about how to put it. “More like we’re figuring out what we want it to look like. There’s no rulebook. We’re writing it as we go.”

“That’s actually kind of cool,” Jet said. “Most people just do whatever they were told relationships are supposed to be and then wonder why they’re miserable.”

Nick glanced at him. “Yeah. Exactly.”

Jet was watching the ocean. When he spoke next, his voice was easy, almost casual, as if the words weren’t particularly loaded.

“For what it’s worth — what you two are doing takes a lot of trust. Most people couldn’t handle it.”

“I’m not sure I can either,” Nick said, smiling to show he wasn’t that serious.

Jet laughed. “Yeah, but you’re doing it anyway. That counts for something.”

The navigation announced a left turn, and Nick eased the car down a narrower street, residential now, the ocean just visible at the end of the block. Modest two-storey buildings lined both sides, bougainvillea climbing over fences, a cat watching them from a window ledge. He found the address and pulled smoothly to the curb, the engine settling to a low idle. Jet didn’t move immediately. He sat for a second, looking at the building, then turned to Nick with an expression that was relaxed but direct.

“So. Hypothetically. If you were ever looking for a willing participant in whatever you and Charlie are figuring out—” He let it hang, one corner of his mouth lifting. “I’m not exactly opposed.”

Nick looked at him. The late light was catching in those pale blue eyes, and Jet held his gaze with confidence. He’d said exactly what he meant and wasn’t embarrassed about it.

“That so?”

“Sure,” Jet said, easy as anything. “Come on, you’re hot as fuck, Brit. Your boyfriend always seemed really sweet so I never pushed anything — but if he’s okay with it...”

The afternoon light was doing something unfair to Jet’s face, catching the slight redness in his cheeks, illuminating his eyes. Nick let his gaze drift — the strong line of his jaw, the curve of his mouth, the way his arms filled out the tank top, muscle shifting under pale skin when he moved. Nick knew that body from hours of bumping shoulders in the locker room, the weight of him during Rooster’s Time with particularly grabby tables, the way Jet moved through a crowd. He’d catalogued it without meaning to, he had seen it enough times. Including that arse. Especially that arse, if Nick was being honest with himself. Jet had, objectively, one of the finest arses Nick had ever seen in his life, and Nick had seen a considerable number.

He was actually considering it.

The realisation arrived without fanfare. With no shame and suppression and the urgent need to look somewhere else, just a straightforward recognition. He was attracted to Jet. He was considering what Jet had just offered. And it didn’t feel like a betrayal of anything. It felt like the conversation he and Charlie had on the phone, made suddenly, unexpectedly tangible. That was what they’d talked about. That was what Charlie wanted. And more than that, that was what Nick was beginning to understand he wanted too. Not just for Charlie’s sake. For his own. The freedom of it. The possibility of wanting something and not immediately drowning in self-loathing about it.

“It would have to be no strings attached,” Nick said.

“Obviously.”

“And Charlie — I think he’d want to watch.”

Jet frowned. “But he’s not in the country. You want to wait until he gets back?”

Nick shook his head slowly. He knew waiting was the smart thing. The sensible, considerate thing. Talk to Charlie, get explicit permission, agree on the details together, the way they were supposed to be doing everything now. No more unilateral decisions. No more moving pieces without the other person knowing the board. But Nick didn’t want to wait. He wanted to take Jet upstairs and see what happened. The desire was clean and simple and entirely his own, and the newness of feeling something like that without immediately burying it under seventeen layers of guilt was intoxicating. He wanted to act on it before the wanting faded. Before he thought about it too long and the old reflexes kicked in.

And he suspected — he was fairly certain, actually — that Charlie wouldn’t want him to wait either.

“I have an idea,” Nick said.

The idea was currently lying on the floor, still attached to the tripod, where the basketball had sent it. Nick had considered using his own phone, but Jet, in what had turned out to be a genuinely thoughtful contribution to the whole enterprise, had pointed out that his was the latest iPhone, significantly better camera, better low-light performance, the whole thing. He’d argued that Charlie deserved the best filming possible.

It had been a bloody fantastic idea.

“Love ‘em and leave ‘em, right, Brit?”, Jet said, laughing.

Nick pulled on his shirt while Jet disappeared to the bathroom. By the time he came back, Nick had his shoes on and his phone in his pocket.

“We’re good, right?” Jet asked, leaning against the doorframe. “It won’t be weird at work?”

“Not on my end,” Nick said honestly. He thought he could manage it. If he’d survived feijoada at Beto’s family table under considerably more fraught circumstances, he could absolutely survive a Saturday shift without things getting strange.

“Good.” Jet smiled. “Because I like you, Brit. And I’m going to want this again.”

Nick smirked. “We’ll see about that.”

He said it lightly, leaving it ambiguous, because the alternative was admitting the thought that had already taken quiet shape on the drive over: probably not a good idea to repeat. If he and Charlie were genuinely building a life that had room for this, then variety was likely part of the architecture. The same person twice started to feel like something else. Something with the potential to complicate things in ways that neither of them needed.

But that was a thought for another day. Tonight had been good. Tonight had been, by any reasonable measure, a success.

“Night, Jet,” Nick said, and let himself out.

The trip back to Beverly Hills took forty minutes, and Nick spent all of them waiting for the guilt to arrive, for the familiar, suffocating weight of it, the cold creep of self-recrimination that had followed him home from Houston like a shadow with teeth. He knew what that felt like. He’d stood under a freezing shower at the Marriott Marquis with the water hammering down on him and thought what have you done, what have you done, what have you done until the thought lost all meaning and the cold finally drove everything else out. He’d spent weeks carrying like a stone in his chest, growing heavier every day Charlie said I love you and Nick said it back and thought about what he’d done.

He sat in the Porsche with the window down and the warm night air moving through the car and waited for it, but It didn’t come.

The coast road gave way to wider, quieter streets as he moved inland, the city settling into that Beverly Hills hush that felt like money resting. The Porsche purred contentedly beneath him and Nick had one hand on the wheel and the radio low and he felt — fine. Better than fine. Genuinely, straightforwardly fine, in a way that was almost suspicious, like when you are suspicious of a day that was too sunny, scanning the horizon for the storm that had to be coming.

No storm. Just the warm leather of the seat and the memory of Jet’s face when the car had surged forward earlier, and satisfaction of a boy who had done something he wanted to do and hadn’t broken anything in the doing of it.

He thought about Houston. About the way desire had felt then, poisoned at the source by guilt before it had even finished happening. He’d wanted Beto and hated himself for wanting Beto and acted on it anyway and then hated himself more, and the whole thing had been a knot of shame and need so tangled he couldn’t find where one ended and the other began. Tonight he’d wanted Jet and known he wanted Jet and talked to his boyfriend about earlier and done it with a camera running and texted Charlie immediately after. The same act, structurally. The same crossing of what he’d always assumed was an uncrossable line. And the difference wasn’t in the act itself — it was in everything around it. The honesty. The permission. The knowledge that Charlie was on the other side of the world going absolutely feral about it.

Nick smiled at the road ahead. He caught himself in the rear-view mirror and shook his head slightly because he looked like someone who’d just won something.

He wanted to do it again. That landed clearly, without drama or qualification. He’d had fun, he’d liked Jet, he’d liked the feeling of choosing something freely and walking away from it intact. More than anything, though — more than Jet or the Porsche or the strange buoyancy of guilt that hadn’t come — he wanted Charlie. The evening had sharpened that rather than dulled it. He wanted to see his face. Not on a screen, not through the slight lag of a video call, but actually, physically in front of him. Same room, same air, close enough to put his hands on him and feel him solid and real. He wanted to look at Charlie and know that all of this, every strange and complicated and terrifying and wonderful inch of it, was leading them somewhere worth going.

He turned onto Hillcrest Drive, the familiar gate sliding open ahead of him, and pulled the Porsche into the garage. He sat in the silence for a moment after switching the engine off, the tick of the cooling metal the only sound.

Still waiting. Still nothing.

Nick got out of the car, tossed the keys onto the kitchen counter, and went to find Harp. He was in the kitchen when Nick walked in, standing at the counter in a Westbridge lacrosse hoodie and boxers, eating cereal directly from the box.

“You’re back early,” Harp said, shaking more cereal into his palm. “Shift not start until later?”

“Shift no starts until tomorrow,” Nick said. He opened the fridge and surveyed its contents — Diane had left two covered plates with a handwritten note that said dinner, heat 3 mins in her neat, slanted hand. He took both out, put them in the microwave, and leaned against the counter. “I swapped with Sunny a couple weeks ago. Completely forgot.”

Harp stared at him. “You drove all the way to Roosters on the wrong day.”

“In your Porsche, yeah.”

“Dumbass,” Harp said. “How was the drive? How did she feel?”

And Nick, who had spent the better part of two years insisting to Harp that cars were just transportation and anyone who got emotional about them needed to seriously reconsider their priorities, proceeded to spend the next four minutes describing the Porsche in terms that could only be described as venerating. The engine note. The steering. The way it leaned into corners. The acceleration on the coast road that had made Jet laugh like a kid. He was gesturing with his hands before he even realised he was doing it, and Harp was leaning forward on the counter with his chin in his palm, listening very delighted.

“I have been telling you this for days, you idiot. I offered you those keys on day one and you looked at me like I’d suggested you commit a crime.” He shook his head, somewhere between exasperated and triumphant. “I should have charged you admission.”

“Maybe I just needed the right day,” Nick said.

Harp’s eyes dropped briefly to Nick’s collar, where the bite mark sat just above the neckline.

“Does it have anything to do with that hickey on your neck?” he asked, nodding at Nick’s neck.

Nick touched his collar instinctively. Harp’s mouth curved. The microwave beeped. Nick took the plates out, carried them both to the kitchen table, and sat down. Chicken, roasted vegetables, something with herbs that smelled incredible. Diane was a marvel.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Harp kept going, abandoning the cereal box in favour of actual food. “But then you walked in looking like that, and now I’m saying something.”

“Looking like what?”

“Like a guy who just had the best lay of his life and left them walking funny.”

“It’s none of your business,” Nick said pleasantly, cutting into his chicken.

“One hundred percent correct.” Harp pointed his fork at him. “But you’re smiling, man. Like, actually smiling. I haven’t seen that face in some time.”

Nick said nothing. He was smiling. He could feel it, the persistent, slightly ridiculous warmth of it pulling at the corners of his mouth, and every time he tried to dial it back it just came back again like something that had decided to stay.

“I’m good,” Nick said. “Everything’s good.”

Harp studied him for one more moment. Then he nodded, apparently satisfied, and turned his attention back to his plate. “Okay,” he said. “Good.”

They ate in comfortable silence, the kitchen warm, the night outside the floor-to-ceiling windows scattered with city lights. At some point Harp started telling him about something that had happened at the club that afternoon involving a golf cart, a peacock, and his father’s business partner, and Nick listened and laughed and ate Diane’s excellent chicken, and the evening settled into exactly what it was: simple, easy. Good.

Nick changed into a clean T-shirt and shorts, grabbed a beer from the outdoor fridge, and settled into one of the loungers by the pool. The water was lit from underneath, casting that shifting, pale blue light across the tiles and up the surrounding walls, and the night was warm and quiet, the city humming distantly somewhere below the ridge. He could hear the faint sound of a television from somewhere inside the house — Harp watching something.

He’d been sitting there for maybe ten minutes, just being still, before he picked up his phone. Nick had been thinking about this call for the past hour, or the past three days really, or the past month if he was being honest. Not really about the content of it, they’d covered the important things on the phone already, talked until Charlie was yawning and Nick had made him go to sleep. Nick just wanted to see Charlie’s face again.

He opened FaceTime and found Charlie’s name and stared at it for a second. Then he pressed call. It rang twice. Three times. Nick watched the screen, the pool light moving across his hand, and then —

Charlie’s face appeared, filling the screen, and Nick stopped breathing for just a moment.

“”There he is. Been wanting to see that face for a while.”

—

I hope the lightness here feels earned. I hope it makes up, at least a little, for all the angst I’ve put you (and Nick and Charlie, hah) through. We’re really close to the end now, but I promise it’s all sunshine from here.

If you’ve been enjoying Heartbreaker and want to keep reading as it unfolds, I’d love it if you considered becoming a paid subscriber. It means the world to me and it’s what keeps this story going. But paid or free, the fact that you’re here, reading, feeling things about these two, that’s already more than I ever expected. Thank you. Truly.

Charli’s POV next.