Heartbreaker, a Heartstopper Story - Ch. 11

Gay Erotica, +18, Gay Cuckold, Cheating

The celebration party was cancelled. So was the motorcade to the airport and the ceremony the university had been preparing on the quad, the one with the marching band and the oversized novelty cheque and the Dean’s speech that someone in Student Affairs had apparently been drafting for two weeks. All of it, gone. The Westbridge Sharks had lost the national final 29-34 to the Crescent City Bayou Brigades, and the campus had responded with nothing but a stunned silence, a community that had already started celebrating before the final whistle.

In the hours before, there had been nothing but euphoria. The Sharks were sent off to Houston like soldiers marching to war. The bus was scheduled to depart from the athletics lot at six in the morning, and Charlie had assumed, reasonably, that the send-off would be a modest affair, a few mates, some handshakes, maybe a banner if someone had been ambitious the night before. He’d been wrong. By quarter to six the lot was heaving, hundreds of students crammed into every available inch, spilling onto the grass and the access road and the steps of the adjacent buildings. It looked like half of Westbridge had dragged themselves out of bed on a Saturday morning, which for a campus that treated anything before ten as a personal affront was nothing short of extraordinary.

They came with flags and pennants, navy and white, waving in the pale dawn light. They came with handmade signs hoisted above the crowd — SHARKS EAT BRIGADES FOR BREAKFAST and HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM (HIS NAME IS GRIMSHAW), and one, held aloft by a group of lads Charlie vaguely recognised from the Delta Tau Phi house, that read NELSON’S GOT THE BIGGEST TACKLE IN COLLEGE RUGBY with a winking emoji drawn in marker so large it was visible from across the lot. Nick had spotted it, gone predictably scarlet, and Charlie laughed so hard he’d had to lean on Harp for support.

A rain of white and blue confetti poured over the Sharks as they filed toward the bus in single file, Coach Hendricks leading, kitbags slung over shoulders, the early California sun catching the paper flakes and turning them into something almost beautiful. The crowd roared. Someone had brought a megaphone. Someone else had brought an actual drum. The noise was enormous, rolling across the lot and bouncing off the buildings, and Charlie had stood in the thick of it with Luna on one side and a girl he didn’t know crying actual tears on the other, and felt his chest swell with something too big to name.

Then Nick had found him. Crossed the line, dropped his bag on the tarmac, took Charlie’s face in both hands, and kissed him with a ferocity he almost never showed in public, one hand sliding into Charlie’s curls, the other gripping the back of his neck, the crowd erupting around them until the noise became a deafening wall of sound. When they broke apart, foreheads touching, Charlie’s hands fisted in the front of Nick’s team jacket, Charlie had whispered, “Bring it home, Nicky.” Nick had smiled, a wide, certain smile, and said, “Watch me.”

Charlie had known, with every fibre of his being, that they would win.

The university had set up a twelve-foot screen on the quad, streaming the match live from some obscure college sports channel Charlie had never heard of and would almost certainly never find again, and by kick-off the lawn was a sea of navy and white. Charlie watched from a blanket near the front with Luna and Harp, surrounded by hundreds of students who had seemingly decided that Saturday afternoon plans were negotiable but Sharks rugby was not. Someone had organised a beer tent. Someone else had brought face paint. A group of freshers in the second row had spelled out S-H-A-R-K-S across their bare chests, though one of them had got confused and stood in the wrong position, so it actually read S-H-A-K-R-S, which nobody had the heart to correct.

Every Sharks try sent the quad into delirium, bodies leaping up, strangers hugging strangers, a roar that bounced off the library windows and startled a flock of birds out of the eucalyptus trees along the path. Every Brigades score drew a chorus of boos so theatrical it bordered on pantomime. Charlie was fairly certain that at least half the crowd couldn’t tell a ruck from a lineout, but it didn’t matter. The energy was infectious, a living thing that swelled and dipped with the scoreboard, and Charlie let himself be carried by it, shouting when Luna shouted, groaning when Harp buried his face in his hands, gripping the blanket when the camera found Nick sprinting down the wing, those powerful legs eating up the turf.

The camera loved Nick. It kept finding him, cutting away from the play to catch him resetting, chest rising and falling hard, golden hair darkened with sweat and plastered to his forehead. The white away kit clung to him more with every passing minute, the soaked fabric turning almost completely translucent across his massive chest and sculpted back. Sweat had turned the material sheer, revealing every mouth-watering detail: the pebbled circles of his nipples, hardened from the cool air and the exertion, the sparse golden hair matted flat against his skin, his abs flexing and contracting with every laboured breath. Lower down, the matching white shorts had ridden scandalously high up his tree-trunk thighs with every explosive stride and bone-rattling tackle, the thin material pulled drum-tight across his crotch in a way that was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. It looked almost obscene on the massive screen, impossible to look away from.

Charlie wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. A girl he knew from his Romantic Poetry seminar tilted her head sideways at one point, squinted at the screen, and said, “Is your boyfriend smuggling something in those shorts or is that just how he looks?” and Harp, without looking up from his phone, muttered, “That’s just how he looks, babe. Welcome to the Nick Nelson experience. A bloke behind them shouted “Jesus Christ, Nelson, put that thing away, there are children watching” after a slow-motion replay caught Nick adjusting himself mid-stride, and the entire section dissolved into laughter.

Nick was magnificent. There was no other word for it. He commanded the pitch like it belonged to him, like every blade of grass had been laid specifically for him to run on. He hit the defensive line like a battering ram, defenders bouncing off him or dragged along for metres before they could bring him down. He offloaded out of contact with a timing that made Harp swear under his breath. He tracked back on defence with a ferocity that seemed personal, every tackle landing like a grudge being settled. And between plays, when the camera caught him in those small still moments, hands on his knees, jaw set, eyes scanning the field, Charlie felt something swell in his chest so large it physically hurt.

The Sharks were winning. Of course they were winning. Charlie had always known they would.

He could almost see it already, the final whistle, the trophy hoisted under the Houston lights. And later, back at the hotel, Nick with a big golden medal hanging from his chest, grinning that ridiculous grin, buzzing with victory and adrenaline. And Beto right there with him, ready to give Nick the champion’s treatment he deserved. A warrior claiming his spoils after conquering the enemy, except the spoils would be golden-skinned and willing and waiting behind the door of room 1412. Charlie’s stomach had tightened at the thought, and he’d let it sit there, let himself feel it, because for once the fantasy was close enough to touch.

He had never loved Nick more than he did watching him on that screen. It hit him with a force that surprised him, even after all this time, this fierce, aching, almost unbearable pride in the person Nick was, in the body he’d built and the will that drove it and the heart that held all of it together. Charlie’s throat went tight. His eyes stung. He wanted, desperately and suddenly, to be there, in that stadium, in those stands, close enough to hear Nick’s breathing, close enough that when Nick looked up into the crowd he’d find the face he was looking for.

Then came the 61st minute.

Charlie saw it before he understood it. Nick turning, head swivelling away from his man, eyes scanning the stands instead of tracking the play. Just a fraction of a second, barely anything, but Beaumont was already through the gap, and by the time Nick’s attention snapped back the damage was done. The Brigades’ centre was over the tryline, ball pressed to the turf, and the crowd was deafening even through the laptop speakers. The quad groaned, a collective exhale of disappointment that rippled across the lawn. Charlie straightened up, but kept his voice steady. “It’s fine. One try. Plenty of time.” Luna nodded beside him, arms crossed tight, jaw set. Harp had finally put his phone away. But Charlie’s stomach dropped.

He told himself it was nothing. The Sharks were still in it, only a converted try behind. But the Brigades had tasted blood and they kept coming, phase after phase, their forwards grinding forward with a suffocating patience that hadn’t been there in the first half. Another penalty. Another three points. The gap on the scoreboard stretched from five to eight to eleven, and the quad grew quieter with each update, the earlier euphoria thinning like air at altitude.

The Sharks fought bravely. Torres threw himself into every breakdown like a man possessed. Grimmy made a try-saving tackle on the Brigades’ winger that drew a roar even from the Brigades’ crowd. Nick gave everything he had left, every last scrap of energy and fury, carrying the ball into contact again and again, dragging defenders with him, refusing to go down, his white kit now brown with dirt and pink with someone’s blood. Charlie watched him and loved him and felt something cold and certain settle at the base of his spine.

But he knew. Before the final whistle, before the scoreboard confirmed it, before Luna’s hand found his arm and squeezed. He knew the game had been lost in that single, small moment and that the distance on the scoreboard had only been catching up to a defeat that had already happened.

The final whistle blew. 34-29 to the Brigades.

The quad was silent.

Most of the crowd had drifted away before the final whistle even sounded, slipping off with their heads down, the party atmosphere evaporating as quietly as it had arrived. A few stopped by Charlie on their way out, clasping his shoulder, murmuring that they were sorry, asking him to give Nick their love. Charlie nodded and smiled and said he would, and felt absolutely nothing. Luna had tears running silently down her cheeks. When a group of freshers a few rows back burst out laughing at something on one of their phones Harp whipped around and snapped, “Show some fucking respect, we fucking lost,” with enough venom that the entire group flinched and went quiet. Luna put a hand on his arm. He shook it off, turned back to the screen, and didn’t speak again.

They stayed for the medal ceremony, because the feeling that leaving now would be one more small abandonment in an evening already full of them. The Cal Poly Mustangs went first, third place, polite applause, quick handshakes, forgettable. Then the Sharks filed up, one by one, and Charlie watched every face. Torres with his jaw clenched so tight a muscle jumped in his cheek, eyes bright with tears he was clearly never going to let fall in front of a camera. Grimmy staring at his shoes. Tank touching his silver medal once, gently, like it might burn him. Coach Hendricks moved down the line after the medals were hung, stopping at each player, gripping their shoulder or pulling them into a firm embrace, murmuring something the cameras couldn’t pick up. Whatever he said to Torres made the captain’s composure crack for just a second, a quick nod, a hard blink, a hand pressed to his eyes before he straightened and walked on. Then the Brigades, jubilant, golden medals glinting under the stadium lights, confetti raining down, the full Hollywood spectacle of a victory that belonged to someone else.

The camera found Nick one last time before the transmission cut. He was standing slightly apart from the rest of the team, silver medal hanging from his neck where gold should have been. His face was completely empty. He didn't look angry, or sad, or anything Charlie had a word for. Just blank, as if every emotion had been pulled out of him at once and nothing had rushed in to fill the space. He was staring at some fixed point in the distance, past the celebrating Brigades, past the crowd, past everything, someone who had gone somewhere very far away inside himself and wasn’t sure how to come back.

Then the screen went dark, and it was over.

Charlie was on his phone before they’d even left the quad. He called Nick once. Twice. Three times. Each one rang through to voicemail, Nick’s voice slightly awkward because he’d never got comfortable talking to machines, “Hey, it’s Nick, leave a message or just text me, cheers”, and each time Charlie hung up without leaving one. He wasn’t surprised. Nick probably hadn’t even left the pitch yet, or was buried in the changing room with the lads. But he kept calling anyway, because doing nothing felt worse. He texted between calls. I’m so sorry Nicky and You played so well, I’m so proud of you and Please call me when you can ok? and finally, after staring at the screen for a long time, I love you so much. More than anything. Medal or no medal. He watched the messages deliver. He watched them sit there, unread.

He walked with Luna and Harp back across campus in near-silence, the three of them moving through the empty pathways like survivors of something. They dropped Harp at the Delta Tau Phi house first. He hugged Charlie hard at the door, a bone-crushing hug Harp had never given him before, that said everything his voice couldn’t manage, and disappeared inside without a word. Luna lasted until the entrance of Seaview Hall, where she squeezed Charlie’s hand, told him Nick would be okay, and went upstairs with mascara tracks still drying on her cheeks. Charlie checked his phone on the doorstep. Nothing.

An hour later, nothing. Two hours later, after Charlie had taken a long shower that did nothing useful and nuked a frozen lasagne in the communal microwave downstairs that he ate standing up in the kitchen without tasting a single bite, still nothing. The lasagne sat in his stomach like cement. His phone sat on the desk like a bomb.

He started calling the other Sharks. Tank first, because Charlie had his number from the group chat Nick had added him to months ago. Voicemail. He tried Grimmy next — a girl from Seaview Hall, Priya something, who’d been seeing him on and off since November, gave Charlie his number when he knocked on her door looking desperate enough that she didn’t ask questions, but Grimmy didn’t picked either. He couldn’t find numbers for Harrigton or Bear or Whitaker, so he went to Instagram and sent each of them the same message: Hey, it’s Charlie, Nick’s boyfriend. Have you seen him tonight? He’s not answering his phone and I’m getting worried. Please let me know if you hear from him, and watched the little sent ticks appear one by one and tried not to think about what it meant that nobody was answering anything tonight.

By midnight his worry had curdled into something physical. He was sitting on his bed with his laptop open to nothing in particular, refreshing Nick’s Instagram and WhatsApp profile in rotation, looking for a last-seen timestamp, an online indicator, anything, when his phone buzzed against the desk so loudly he nearly fell off the mattress. He lunged for it, heart slamming into his throat, certain it was Nick—

“Charlie, hey. It’s Anthony Torres here.” Torres’ voice as tired but steady, and Charlie felt the disappointment like a needle slipping between his ribs. “Listen, Nick’s fine. He went out for some drinks on his own. I ran into him downstairs at the hotel a little while ago. He’s okay, bro, just… you know. Processing.”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. His voice came out smaller than he wanted. “Yeah, I know.”

“I’ll make sure he calls you when I see him again, alright? I promise.”

“Thanks, Torres. And I’m —” Charlie swallowed. “I’m really sorry. About the match. You lot deserved better.”

There was a pause on the other end, the kind that carried weight. “Appreciate that, man. Get some sleep, okay?”

Charlie hung up and set the phone down gently on the desk. He sat there for a while in the quiet of his room, the muffled thump of someone’s music bleeding through from down the hall, the faint orange glow of the campus lights pressing through his half-drawn blinds.

Because he should have been there.

He should have been in that stadium. He should have been the first person Nick saw when he walked off that pitch, the one waiting outside the changing room with open arms and the right words and the presence Nick always said made everything feel survivable. He should be there now, in Houston, in whatever hotel room Nick was sitting in alone, holding him, kissing the top of his head, telling him it was just a game, that it didn’t define him, that Charlie loved him exactly the same whether there was gold around his neck or nothing at all.

Instead, Nick was a thousand miles away and not answering his phone, and Charlie was sitting in a dorm room in California with a cold lasagne in his stomach and guilt eating through him like acid.

Because there was no Reyes.

There was no classmate whose father had cancer, no surgery, no compassionate schedule swap that just happened to clash with the biggest match of Nick’s life. There was only Charlie and Beto, sitting cross-legged on Beto’s bed three weeks ago, mapping out the the plan. Charlie would tell Nick he’d swapped his presentation date as a favour, a story bland enough to be unquestionable, some small academic inconvenience that happened all the time. Nick wouldn’t check. Nick would never check, because Nick trusted Charlie completely, like you trusted gravity or the ground beneath your feet, without thinking, without verifying, because the alternative was unthinkable.

The plan had been simple. Nick would go to Houston. He would play the final. He would win, because of course he would win, because the Sharks were the better team and Nick was the best player on it. And afterwards, in the golden glow of victory, adrenaline still singing through his veins, Nick would be buzzing, loose, euphoric, and Beto would be there. Gorgeous, shameless, patient Beto, who had spent months laying groundwork, building tension, becoming the itch Nick couldn’t scratch. And in that moment of triumph, with his defences down and his blood running hot and no Charlie to anchor him to the person he was supposed to be, the thing Nick had been fighting all those months would finally, finally spill over.

That was the plan. Beto as the reward Nick would never have allowed himself sober and grounded and faithful. Charlie, conveniently absent, learning about it later, the thought alone enough to make his breath catch and his skin go hot.

Neither of them had considered that the Sharks might lose. It hadn’t even come up. Not once, in all their planning, had either of them paused and said but what if they don’t win? It had seemed impossible. Absurd. The Sharks were too good, Nick was too good, and the story Charlie had been writing in his head for months only had one ending: Victory. Desire. Surrender. And now Nick was alone in a Houston bar. And instead of Charlie being there to hold him through the worst night of his rugby career, there was no one.

He reached for his phone and tried Beto too. It rang four times and went to voicemail, which Charlie supposed he should have expected, since apparently nobody in the city of Houston was capable of answering a phone tonight. He texted instead.

oh fuck

can’t believe they lost

He waited. Nothing. The messages sat there, delivered but unread, joining the growing graveyard of unanswered texts on his screen. He tried again.

this is such a mess

i should be there

FUCK

Still nothing. The minutes stretched. Charlie paced the small room, phone in hand, checking it every thirty seconds with compulsive desperation, knowing it was pointless but not being able to stop. By midnight, annoyance had started bleeding through the worry, sharpening it into something with edges.

you better not be bouncing on some cowboys’s cock while my boyfriend is out there trying to drown in a glass of whiskey

He stared at the message after he sent it, half-expecting a laughing emoji in response, one of those quick Beto deflections that would at least confirm the man was alive and in possession of his phone. Nothing came.

The hours crept forward. Charlie’s eyelids grew heavy. The adrenaline that had been keeping him upright since the final whistle was thinning out, leaving behind a exhaustion that pulled at him like a current. He changed into joggers and an old Truham hoodie that still smelled faintly of Nick’s cologne and crawled into bed with his phone on the pillow beside him. A little after two, he typed one last message, the bravado gone, the annoyance spent, nothing left but the tired worry underneath.

please let me know if you see nick ok? i’m really worried about him

He fell asleep with the phone still glowing against the pillow, and didn’t dream of anything at all.

—

Charlie woke a few hours later to the disoriented blankness that still caught him sometimes in those first seconds after waking, his brain briefly insisting that the ceiling was wrong, the walls were wrong, that he should be in his bedroom in Kent with the rain tapping at the window and his mum’s radio murmuring downstairs. It passed, as it always did, the dorm room reassembling itself around him, the desk, the lamp, the Lavender Pages tote bag hanging from the door handle.

His cock was hard against his thigh, straining at the fabric of his boxers with mindless insistence it. If Nick had been there, Charlie would have rolled onto his side and pressed himself against Nick’s bulge, nudging his bulge into the warm length of him, and Nick would already be hard too because Nick was always hard in the morning, and he’d make that sleepy sound that meant he was surfacing, and then their mouths would find each other, slow and lazy, tasting of morning breath and warmth and something that was just them, and the boxers would come off and Charlie’s hand would wrap around both of them and—

The night crashed back in.

The match. The loss. Nick’s face on the screen, blank and silver-medalled and staring at nothing. The unanswered calls. Torres saying he went out for drinks on his own. The texts sitting unread in a row on his phone.

Charlie grabbed his phone from the pillow and almost let out a roar of fury when he saw the screen. Nothing. Not a single reply from anyone. Not Nick, not Beto, not even bloody Whitaker or Mallory or Harrington, whose Instagram messages still showed as seen with no response, which was somehow worse than being ignored entirely. His texts to Nick sat in a pathetic column, a one-sided conversation with a ghost. He sat on the edge of the bed for a full minute, annoyed, and made a decision. He would get up. He would shower. He would go to Bruin’s, the campus dining hall that served breakfast until eleven. He would eat something. He would behave like a functioning human being for exactly one hour. And if by the time he got back to room 333 Nick still hadn’t answered, Charlie was calling the Houston police and he didn’t care how mental that sounded.

He was halfway to the bathroom, towel over his shoulder, when he glanced at his phone one more time and noticed something he’d missed. A small red circle on his Instagram icon. He opened it with numb fingers and his heart lurched sideways.

@nickfnelson. Sent at 5:14am.

im ok. sorry. long night. talk when i get back x

Nine words. No capitals. One kiss. Sent to Instagram, of all places, instead of the forty texts and twelve missed calls sitting right there in his messages, as if Nick couldn’t quite bring himself to open that thread, to see all the worry Charlie had poured into it, and had chosen instead the one channel that felt like slipping a note under a door rather than walking through it. Charlie sat down on the floor, right there in the middle of the room, and read the message four times. His eyes burned. His throat ached. The relief was so enormous it came out as a single, shaky breath that sounded embarrassingly close to a sob.

He padded down the hall to the communal bathroom in his boxers, grateful that it was still early enough on a Sunday morning for the floor to be deserted, because his cock was still absurdly hard and the thin fabric was doing absolutely nothing to disguise that fact. He splashed cold water on his face, brushed his teeth, avoided his reflection, and padded back to his room feeling marginally more like a person. That’s when his phone buzzed in his hand.

Beto.

you heard from your man yet?

Charlie leaned against the door and typed back.

he texted this morning but we still haven’t talked

he must be ashamed about losing or something

The reply came quickly.

well he was still alive when I last saw him so don’t worry ok

Charlie rolled his eyes. It would have been nice to hear that twelve hours and fifteen unanswered messages ago. He was composing something appropriately cutting about the concept of replying to texts within the same calendar day when two more messages dropped in quick succession.

I last saw him when he left my room btw

at 2am

Charlie’s thumb stopped moving. He stared at the screen. The two messages sat there, stacked neatly, perfectly casual, as if Beto had just told him what he’d had for breakfast. His brain, which had been functioning more or less adequately for the past several minutes, stalled completely.

Nick. And Beto. At 2am. In Houston. Nick, who couldn’t be in the same room as Beto without going rigid. Nick, who wouldn’t come near Beto with a twenty-metre pole unless Charlie was physically there to insist. That Nick had been in Beto’s hotel room. At two in the morning. A thousand miles from home.

Charlie lowered himself slowly onto the edge of the bed, phone held in both hands now, and let his brain do what it was doing.

Could it have happened? Even with the loss? The plan had been built on victory, on adrenaline and euphoria. None of those conditions had been met. Nick would have been devastated last night. Gutted. Sex would have been the last thing on his mind. Charlie knew Nick. He knew how Nick processed defeat, silence first, then anger, then the private grief he never let anyone see. There was no version of that Nick who would have knocked on Beto’s door looking for anything other than — what? Company? A drink? Someone who wasn’t a teammate and wouldn’t want to talk about the match?

That had to be it. Nick had gone for a drink with Beto. They’d… talked? And Nick had left at 2am because he’d finally run out of reasons to avoid his own room? That was the obvious explanation, right? The sensible one. The one that didn’t make Charlie’s pulse hammer against his wrists or his stomach drop through the floor or his skin go hot in places that had no business being hot right now.

But then why was Beto telling him like that?

He deleted the message he’d been composing. Typed something else. Deleted that too. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, trembling slightly, his brain churning through possibilities faster than his hands could keep up. He started a third message, got four words in, and erased them.

wait

He sent it before he could overthink it.

what

what is that supposed to mean

His heart was hammering so hard he could feel it in his ears, in his fingertips, in the base of his throat. The three dots appeared on Beto’s side of the screen. Charlie gripped the phone with both hands and stared at those dots like they contained the answer to every question he’d ever been afraid to ask.

well

just that you were right

distance made him crack

Charlie stopped breathing.

your little diabolical plan worked, carlinhos

The room tilted. Charlie sat perfectly still on the edge of the bed, phone glowing in his hands, and did not let himself think. Not until he saw it confirmed in actual words, black text on a white screen, something he couldn’t misread or reinterpret or explain away. He needed Beto to say it. Plainly, unmistakably, in a sentence that left no room for anything other than exactly what it meant. The seconds stretched. His lungs burned. He realised he still wasn’t breathing and forced himself to inhale, shallow and shaky, eyes locked on the screen.

The message arrived.

congratulations carlinhos. you’re officially a cuck

Charlie read the message three times. Then he locked his phone, set it face down on the mattress, and pressed both hands flat against his thighs.

It had happened.

His fantasy. His deepest, most private, most shameful secret, the one he’d carried since Truham, the one he’d buried and exhumed and buried again, the one he’d whispered to Beto on a January night with cachaça on his breath and his heart in his throat. It had happened. Nick had fucked Beto. Nick had cheated on him. Charlie Spring was, as Beto had so eloquently put it, officially a cuck.

He waited for the feeling to arrive. Braced himself for it, like a wave he could see building on the horizon. And when it hit, it hit as two things at once, simultaneous and contradictory and so tangled together he couldn’t have separated them with a scalpel.

The first was euphoria. Pure euphoria, dyzzing, that lit up every nerve ending and made the room feel too small. It had worked. After months of patience, months of Beto’s careful escalation and Charlie’s quiet orchestration, after all the moments he’d lain awake wondering if Nick’s loyalty was simply too strong, too deeply wired to ever crack, it had cracked. Nick, his perfect, faithful, monogamous Nick, had crossed the line. Had taken Beto to bed and done the things Charlie had spent years imagining in the dark. The images came flooding in, vivid and immediate: Nick’s massive frame over Beto’s golden body, those hands he knew so well gripping skin that wasn’t his, Nick’s mouth forming sounds Charlie had only ever heard directed at him. It was everything he’d wanted. Everything.

The second was jealousy, and it was blinding.

Because Nick had fucked someone else. Nick, who was his, who had been his since they shared a desk at school, his Nick had touched another person. Had wanted another person badly enough to betray everything he believed about himself. Beto had felt Nick inside him. Beto knew what Nick’s face looked like when he came undone. Beto had something now that had only ever belonged to Charlie, and instead of the devastation Charlie had always feared he’d feel if this moment ever became real, the jealousy burned through him like electricity. It didn’t diminish the euphoria. It fed it.

The two feelings wrapped around each other, tightening, each one making the other more intense, and Charlie understood, sitting there on the edge of his bed with his phone face down on the mattress and his pulse roaring in his ears, that this was exactly what he’d been chasing all along. Not the thrill despite the sting. The thrill because of the sting. The jealousy wasn’t the price of the fantasy. It was the fantasy. It had always been the fantasy.

A wave of heat rolled through him, starting somewhere behind his ribs and spreading outward, down through his stomach, through his hips, until it settled heavy and undeniable between his legs.

Charlie picked up his phone and called Beto, because what had just happened was too enormous for text messages. It went straight to voicemail. The bloody bastard had rejected his call. Charlie knew it, could picture him perfectly, sprawled on that Houston hotel bed, grinning at the ceiling like the insufferable menace he was. He called again. This time Beto let it ring four times, long enough for Charlie to hear the first bar of the ringtone in his imagination, before sending it to voicemail a second time.

Charlie opened the messages app and started typing.

i swear to god francisberto if you don’t pick up your bloody phone right now i will fly to houston and shove that phone so far up your

The phone buzzed in his hand before he could finish. Beto’s contact photo, a ridiculous selfie from the car wash party, tongue out and still annoyingly photogenic, filled the screen. Charlie answered before the first ring finished.

“Yes?” came Beto’s voice, impossibly casual, the voice of someone discussing the weather, not someone who had just confessed to fucking Charlie’s boyfriend six hours ago.

Charlie’s imagination was already running ahead of him, that voice, that warm, melodic voice, how it must have sounded last night, breaking apart under Nick’s weight, moaning against the pillow, begging for more, begging for everything that belonged to Charlie.

“Hi,” Charlie said, and his own voice came out coarse, as if he’d been the one up until 2am doing things that destroyed lives.

“Hello, Carlinhos,” Beto said, and Charlie could hear the grin. “Bom dia! What can I do for you this nice morning?”

Charlie opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

He wanted to say you can start by telling me exactly what you did with my boyfriend last night. Every detail. Every second. What Nick looked like, what Nick sounded like, whether Nick had been rough or desperate or both, whether Beto had begged or whether Nick hadn’t given him the choice. He wanted to hear all of it, wanted it so badly his hands were shaking, but the words jammed somewhere between his brain and his throat, too big, too many, too tangled with everything he was feeling to arrange themselves into anything resembling a sentence.

“Carlinhos? You there?”

Silence.

“Hey, Charlie?” Beto’s voice changed, the playfulness dimming, something more careful taking its place. “You okay, man?”

“I’m fine,” Charlie managed, finally. “I’m here.”

The silence stretched between them, filling with static and three thousand miles of distance.

“Soooo,” Beto said eventually, drawing the word out the way he did when he was waiting for someone else to go first.

“So,” Charlie said.

He pressed his free hand against his thigh, hard, grounding himself. He needed to think clearly. He needed to approach this the way he approached a difficult text in a seminar, step back, observe, analyse, keep the emotional response contained until the intellectual framework was in place. Clinical. Measured. Not at all like a man whose heart was trying to beat its way out of his chest.

“You and Nick. It really happened?”

“It really happened,” Beto said, his voice still measured, “Um. Are you okay about it?”

Yes, Charlie wanted to scream. I’m more than okay. I’m on fire. I’ve been on fire since I read your text and I might never stop being on fire. But he held his tongue, because he needed to be steady about this. Needed Beto to know this was real, considered, not some manic reaction he’d regret in an hour.

“You’re not teasing, right?” he asked instead. “This isn’t some wind-up?”

“I swear I’m not, man.” Beto’s voice dropped, low and sincere. “I would never mess with you about —”

“Tell me,” Charlie cut in. “Everything. Right now.”

A pause. When Beto spoke again, his voice had settled back into something warmer, easier, closer to the Beto Charlie knew. “Don’t you wanna wait until I’m back? I’d love to see your face when I tell you all the things Nico did to me.”

“No.” Charlie’s grip tightened on the phone. “No way. Tell me right now, Beto.”

“What do you wanna know?”

Everything. Charlie’s mind screamed. Every second, every sound, every detail his imagination hadn’t been able to supply on its own. His actual response was more careful.

“How... how was it?” he asked.

He heard Beto open his mouth and close it again, a small sound of recalibration, as if reconsidering his words. Charlie’s heart was slamming against his ribs and he realised he’d been holding his breath, his whole body suspended, waiting for whatever came next. He didn’t exhale.

“It was...” Beto laughed, incredulous sound, almost disbelieving at what he was about to say. “It was insane, Carlinhos. Fuck. Your man is — fuck, he’s something else.”

“Yeah?” Charlie managed. Still not breathing.

“He’s just as good as you said. Even better.”

Charlie nodded, forgetting for a second that Beto wasn’t in the room with him, because of course Nick was. Of course he was even better

“H-how was he?” he asked. “Gentle?”

He didn’t know which answer he was hoping for. Nick with Beto the way he was with Charlie, tender, attentive, giving Beto the same loving care that was supposed to belong only to him… or Nick as someone else entirely, someone Charlie had never met, giving Beto a version of himself that Charlie would never have. Both possibilities burned. Both possibilities thrilled him. He couldn’t tell the difference anymore.

“Fuck no,” Beto said, and laughed again, a low, wondering sound. “He was an animal, Carlinhos.”

“Yeah?” The word came out barely above a whisper. “Was he rough?”

“He treated me like a whore, man.” Beto’s voice had dropped, carrying a thread of awe that Charlie had never heard from him before. “Remember what I told you? About pain? He went right there, man. He took me right there and beyond.”

Charlie exhaled at last, a shuddering breath that emptied his lungs completely. His eyes had closed at some point, he wasn’t sure when, and behind his lids the images were already assembling themselves with a vividness that bordered on cruelty. Nick, his gentle Nick, who held Charlie afterwards like he was something precious, that Nick had pinned Beto down and taken him apart without asking permission. Had given Beto the violence he craved, the pain he’d confessed to want, and had done it with a ferocity that had left Beto — shameless, unshockable Beto — sounding genuinely awestruck the morning after.

Charlie pressed his forehead against his knees. His free hand was gripping the edge of the mattress so hard his knuckles had gone white. His cock was straining against his boxers with an urgency that made rational thought increasingly difficult.

“Carlinhos?” Beto’s voice came through the phone, softer now. “You still there?”

“I’m here,” Charlie said. His voice didn’t sound like his own. “Keep going.”

“He showed up around midnight,” Beto went on. “Knocked on the door. And the way he looked at me, Charlie, fuck. I thought he was there to beat the shit out of me. Genuinely. He looked like he hated my guts.”

“What did he say?”

“I said something like, took you long enough. And he just… he just went cold, man. Told me to shut the fuck up.” Beto paused, letting it land. “Just like that. Shut the fuck up and suck my cock.“

Charlie’s breath caught. He tried to picture it, Nick standing in a hotel doorway and saying those words with enough venom to make Beto, who was afraid of nothing, obey. He couldn’t reconcile it. Couldn’t make the image fit with the person he knew, the person who kissed his forehead before bed and brought him tea without being asked. And yet his body had no trouble with the contradiction whatsoever.

“And you?” he asked.

“I sucked his cock,” Beto said simply. Then he let out a low whistle that carried the full weight of genuine appreciation. “And fucking hell, Carlinhos, that cock of his. You never warned me, man. I thought I was ready. I was not ready. You are so fucking lucky. Best cock I’ve had in a long, long time.”

It was, Charlie thought distantly, one of the more surreal moments of his life. He was sitting cross-legged on his dorm bed in California on a Sunday morning, still in his boxers, listening to his best friend describe his boyfriend’s cock with the awed enthusiasm of a restaurant critic who had just discovered a new favourite dish. This was his life now. This was an actual conversation he was having with an actual person about an actual event that had actually happened.

His cock twitched hard against the fabric of his boxers, so stiff now it was almost painful, and Charlie shifted on the mattress because sitting still had become genuinely difficult.

“Keep going,” he said.

“So after I sucked him off —”

“Wait,” Charlie interrupted. “You sucked him off and then what? Did he finish in your mouth?”

“No, man. He pulled me off before he could. Grabbed my hair, yanked me up. I don’t think he wanted it to end that fast.” A pause. “And then he just… picked me up. Like I weighed nothing. Threw me on the bed.”

Charlie’s hand had moved to his thigh. He told himself it was just resting there.

“He pinned me down and, I don’t know how to explain it,” Beto continued. “He was angry. Like, really angry. But not at me. It was like he was angry at himself for being there and he was taking it out on my body. And honestly?” Beto laughed softly. “I fucking loved it.”

“Did he kiss you?” Charlie asked. His hand had moved higher on his thigh without his permission. His voice was steady, which he considered a minor miracle.

“Yeah. But it wasn’t a nice kiss. It was like he was trying to bite my mouth off. After that he didn’t kiss me again. He just —” Beto exhaled. “He turned me over.”

Charlie’s fingers slipped beneath the waistband of his boxers. He closed his eyes.

“And when he was inside me… Beto’s voice had gone quieter, almost reflective, the bravado thinning into something more honest. “God, Charlie. I’ve been with big guys before. You know that. But Nick was… he was different. It’s not just the size. It’s the way he uses it. Like he knows exactly what he’s doing to you and he doesn’t care. No, that’s not right. He cares. He just can’t stop.”

Charlie wrapped his hand around his throbbing, leaking cock and stroked himself with desperate pulls, biting down hard on his bottom lip until he tasted the sharp metallic tang of copper. His hips bucked up off the mattress, fucking into the tight heat of his fist as another wave of pleasure crashed through him. On the other end of the phone, Beto kept talking, his warm Brazilian accent painting every filthy detail of what he’d done to Nick, and each word poured over Charlie like gasoline on an open flame.

“He held me down the whole time. One hand on my neck, one on my hip. And he just… he didn’t stop, Carlinhos. Didn’t slow down. Didn’t check if I was okay, didn’t ask what I wanted, didn’t do any of that. He just took. Like I was there for him to use and nothing else mattered.”

Charlie’s breath stuttered.

“It wasn’t for me, you understand? None of it. He was doing it because he wanted to. I just happened to want the same thing.”, Beto laughed. “I don’t think he gave a single shit about me the entire time, Carlinhos. I could have been anyone.”

That wasn’t Nick. That was the thing that made Charlie’s head swim and his hand tighten around himself beneath the waistband. That wasn’t the Nick he knew, the generous lover who watched Charlie’s face for every reaction, who adjusted his rhythm to Charlie’s breathing, who whispered you okay, love? even when Charlie was clearly more than okay. The Nick that Beto was describing was someone else entirely. Someone selfish. Someone brutal. Someone who had walked into that room carrying months of suppressed hunger and hadn’t bothered to dress it up as anything other than what it was.

Beto had met a Nick that Charlie never had. Beto knew something about his boyfriend that Charlie, after two and a half years of sharing a bed with him, had never once seen. There was a room inside Nick that Charlie had never been invited into, and Beto had kicked the door down in a single night.

The jealousy hit him so hard his vision blurred. It rolled through his chest, electric, and instead of dampening the arousal it detonated it, the two feelings crashing into each other and fusing into something new, something that had no name, something that made every nerve ending in his body light up simultaneously. Beto has something I don’t have. Beto knows a Nick I’ll never know. My boyfriend fucked my best friend and I wasn’t there and I’ll never get that back and I want it so badly I can’t breathe.

His hand was moving faster now, stroking his cock with frantic pulls that made wet sounds in the quiet room as another vicious spike of jealousy tore through him. The thought that Beto had been the one underneath Nick last night, that Beto had taken every thick inch of Nick’s cock, had felt that powerful body lose control, had heard those broken sounds that were supposed to belong only to Charlie, made something dark twist in his belly, sharpening the pleasure until it was almost unbearable.

“How long?” Charlie managed, his breathing carefully controlled so the phone wouldn’t pick it up.

“I don’t even know. An hour? More? He made me come twice before he finished.” Beto said this with the casual wonder as if he was still processing it. “Twice, Charlie. I didn’t even know I could do that.”

Charlie pressed the phone harder against his ear, desperate to catch every single filthy word and moan, as if proximity to Beto’s vouce could somehow transport him straight into that Houston hotel room, onto the very bed where Nick had taken his best friend apart.

God, how he wished he’d been there. Hidden in a dark corner of the room, completely ignored, stroking himself just like he was doing right now, watching the love of his life give himself over so completely to another man. Watching Nick’s massive body pin Beto down, those powerful hips thrusting forward again and again, that heavy cock stretching Beto wide open while Nick lost control in a way Charlie had never been allowed to see.

“And when he came?” Charlie’s voice had dropped to something barely above a breath. “What was that like?”

Beto was quiet for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped into something hushed, almost worshipful.

“And when he came, Carlinhos — fuck.” He exhaled slowly. “He buried his face in my neck and just held on. Like he couldn’t control himself anymore, like his whole body just gave out. And the sound he made, man. This raw sound, like it was being pulled out of him from somewhere he didn’t even know existed. I felt it vibrate through my whole body.” He paused for a second. “I’ve made a lot of guys come, Charlie. That was something else. That was something I’m gonna remember for a long, long time.”

Charlie was close. He could feel it building at the base of his spine, gathering force, his hand moving even faster now, grip tight, his whole body trembling with the effort of keeping silent. His jaw was clenched so hard his teeth ached, every muscle locked against the sounds fighting to escape, because Beto was right there on the other end of the line and Charlie was not going to make a sound, he was not —

“Carlinhos? You still there?”

Beto’s voice reached him from very far away, muffled, as if Charlie were underwater. He couldn’t answer. His lips parted but nothing came out. He was too far gone, too lost in the images crashing through him, Nick’s face buried in Beto’s neck, Nick’s body giving out, that raw sound vibrating through golden skin, and his hips jerked up off the mattress and his hand moved once, twice, three more times —

It hit him like nothing he’d ever felt.

The orgasm tore through his entire body, so intense his back arched off the bed and his vision whited out completely. He came in long, shuddering waves, spilling hot over his fist and his stomach, his thighs shaking, his free hand fisting the sheets so hard the fitted corner popped off the mattress. It went on and on and on, each pulse stronger than the last, until he was empty and gasping and the phone had slipped from between his ear and shoulder and was lying somewhere on the pillow beside him, Beto’s voice tinny and distant, still saying his name.

Charlie lay there, boneless, staring at the ceiling through half-closed eyes, vaguely aware that the call had ended at some point during the last thirty seconds. His phone buzzed against the pillow. He turned his head and squinted at the screen through the haze. Beto. Calling back. He must have thought the line had dropped.

Charlie waited. Let his breathing slow. Counted to five. Wiped his hand on the sheets. Then he answered.

Hey,” he said, and there was absolutely no way Beto missed the way his voice came out, absolutely wrecked.

“I think the call got cut off,” Beto said.

“Yeah,” Charlie managed. “Must have been the signal.”

Beto said nothing for a long moment. The silence was knowing. Charlie felt the heat creep up his neck and across his cheeks, because Beto knew. Of course Beto knew. Beto had always been able to read a room, even when the room was three thousand miles away and connected by a phone line, and Charlie’s voice had just told him everything his mouth hadn’t.

“So,” Beto said gently. “How… you okay? Now that it’s happened? For real?”

Charlie stared at the ceiling. The come was cooling on his stomach. His heartbeat was settling back to something that resembled a normal rhythm. And he thought about it, really thought about it, properly, the way he hadn’t been able to since Beto’s first text had blown his world open an hour ago. He searched for regret and found none. Searched for the disgust, the old familiar shame that used to arrive like clockwork after every fantasy, every late-night session with his hand and his imagination, and it wasn’t there. The peak of the orgasm had passed but something still glowed inside him, an ember that showed no sign of going out. Nick had slept with Beto. Nick had cheated on him. And Charlie felt alive. Awake. Like a door he’d been pressing against for years had finally swung open and the room on the other side was exactly what he’d hoped it would be.

It hurt. It did. The jealousy was still there, still sharp, still real. But the hurt and the want were the same thing, had always been the same thing, and Charlie wondered briefly how something that ached this much could feel this good.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, Beto. I’m okay.”

He meant it.

“Listen, Carlinhos,” Beto said, and his voice had shifted into something firmer, the warmth still there but edged with something that sounded like responsibility. “You gotta talk to him. For real this time. You sit him down and you tell him everything. The kink, the plan, me, all of it.”

“I know,” Charlie said.

“I mean it. He’s gonna come home and he’s gonna be carrying this like a boulder on his chest. You know how he is. He’s probably already convinced himself he’s the worst person alive. You can’t let him sit in that, man. It’s not fair.”

“I know, Beto.”

And he meant it. He did. He knew Beto was right, knew it with the same rational part of his brain that had always known this moment would come, the moment where the fantasy crossed into reality and required an honest conversation with the person he loved most in the world. It had gone on long enough, that careful manipulation of a man who trusted him completely. It needed to end. Nick had always deserved the truth, and every day Charlie hadn’t given it to him was a day he’d stolen something from their relationship that he could never give back. He would sit Nick down. He would hold his hands. He would tell him everything and he would watch Nick’s face and accept whatever came next, because that was what love required when you’d bent it this far out of shape.

He would do it. Soon. When Nick got home.

But.

Charlie lay on his back in the quiet of his room, phone resting on his chest. His body was still humming. The orgasm had faded but the afterglow hadn’t, it pulsed through him in warm waves, endorphins thick in his blood, his skin still tingling, every nerve ending still tuned to the frequency of what he’d just felt. The most powerful orgasm of his life, conjured by nothing more than Beto’s voice and the knowledge that it had actually happened. It was’snt a fantasy anymore,a image constructed in the dark and dismantled by morning. It was real. Nick buried deep inside Beto in a Houston hotel room, and Charlie three thousand miles away, burning.

He wanted it again.

The thought arrived without shame, without apology. He wanted to feel that again. Wanted the jealousy to sink its teeth in and the arousal to meet it and the two of them to spiral upward together until he couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

He wanted more.

He wanted worse.

And what could be worse than this, than knowing, than being told about it secondhand like one of those erotic stories he still read on Reddit sometimes?

“But not yet,” Charlie said, before he could second-guess himself. “I’ll talk to him, Beto, I promise. But I... I want to watch this time.”

There was a beat of silence on the other end. Then: “Okay. Okay, man. Talk to him and we’ll set it up. Won’t be a sacrifice for me, that’s for sure.”

“No, not like that, Beto.”

Charlie’s voice was steady. His eyes were open. The ceiling stared back at him, blank and white and utterly indifferent to the line he was about to cross.

“I want to watch Nick cheating.”

—

Part Two is picking up speed, and what’s coming next is going to change everything you think you know about Charlie Spring. If you’ve been reading for free and you want to keep riding this thing wherever it’s going, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Hit the subscribe button. Come be part of this. I promise it’ll hurt in the best way.