CHAPTER 1
MATEO
Have you ever had to sit by and watch the love of your life meet the love of his life? Have you had to just sit there, relegated to the sidelines, and watch him fall irrevocably in love with someone else? Have you had to sit there and pretend you were oh-so okay with it? Because, you know, you were supposed to have moved on by now.
Yeah right.
How the hell did anyone simply justmove onfrom the love of their life? Especially after having waited patiently for eight long, long years for it to finally be your turn to be with him? Eight years of pining and secretly yearning for the man who thought of you only as his friend. Eight years of watching him fall easily in and out of relationships with other guys, never single long enough for you to get your chance with him.
Eight years of desperate longing and sad, lonely pining until finally,finally, you get your shot and you take it and you grab it with everything you have and you hold on tight with both hands. As tight as you dare without scaring him off with the intensity of your love. But not tight enough to stop him from walking away from you at the end of it.
Six months of loving him. Six months of waking up beside him, sharing kisses and bodies and hearts and minds. And then nothing. Gone.
Concluso. Terminato. È finito.
But you don’t give up on hope just yet. No, you hold onto that cruellest of dreams with everything you have because you and Nick are meant to be – end game, fated, forever, your future husband with a dream house on the coast and a hoard of kids and a love that will never die. One of you will break eventually and everything will be all right with the world. Right?Right?
And then suddenly Ajay Olivier and his sweet, pretty face and his big, innocent eyes walk onto your beach and the final nail in your failed relationship hits the coffin. Because I knew. I knew the minute I laid eyes on Ajay Olivier that Nick was going to fall for him. It didn’t matter that Ajay might have had a girl on his arm. It didn’t even matter that he might have thought himself entirely straight. He had caught the full force of Nick’s incredible attention and I knew it was only a matter of time.
Ajay was gorgeous, okay. As much as it pained me to admit, I could acknowledge the guy was hot and so pretty to look at that it hurt sometimes. That, I could compete with. But Ajay also had that sweetness and kindness about him, attributes I’d never even remotely possessed, plus that slightly innocent façade that I knew would make Nick weak at the knees.
And so, I’d had to just stand by and watch as the love of my life fell head over heels for the boy with the big brown eyes and head full of cute brown curls. Oh, I’d done my best to wedge myself in between them. I’d taken every opportunity I could to subtly imply that Nick was mine and I wouldn’t be letting him go anytime soon. Took opportunities to put my hands on him or try to keep his attention my way.
None of it worked. None of it mattered. Because Nick’s eyes and Nick’s attention had been stolen by Ajay and I no longer existed to him.
I was desperate enough that I’d even resorted to the leopard print speedos, the ones that had worked for me in the past on that best day of my life when Nick had finally looked my way. It was almost a year ago to the day when Nick had finally looked and actually seen me, not his best friend, not his housemate but me, a guy who clearly wanted him.
Nick had been freshly single though not overly cut up over breaking up with the guy whose name I no longer cared to remember. That preppy accountant who must have had some kind of magic dick because he was otherwise a total bore. Snooze fest alert.
But I digress. Back to that fateful day, the one with the leopard print speedos and just Nick and me and a hot summer’s day, the tang of fate in the air. We were at the Tempe family home, the dream house that sat on the boardwalk overlooking the sand and sea in our home town of Esperance on the South Coast, three hours from Sydney. The house that was a second home to me. The only place where I had ever been able to be myself.
Rob, our other best friend and my current housemate, had been held up for some forgotten reason long since consigned to history. So it had just been me and Nick out on his back deck, enjoying the hot sun on a lazy Sunday afternoon. We had gone swimming in the pool, something I knew Nick had only done for me given how much he and Rob loved the ocean. Personally I could live without all that sand and salt but it ran in Nick’s veins, he lived and breathed it. So I put up with it. For him.
Nick was swimming and I was sunbaking on the deck, watching him the way I always did. The way I had always done. He was so at home in the water, like a second skin on him ashe swam laps. He came out of the pool eventually, the water dripping down his golden torso, the sun glistening on his skin and highlighting the streaks in his long, golden brown hair.
I can say with true honesty that one of the most unfortunate things about Australian men was their propensity to wear long board shorts. Hideous things really but I couldn’t lie that I had other motives for wishing Nick would shed them for something more appealing to the eye.
Not that he needed any assistance in that regard. His body was a wonderland and my body reacted to him the way it always did, the way it had been doing since I’d first moved to Australia from Italy and met the thirteen-year-old boy who would become my closest friend.
I was used to my reaction and I was adept at hiding it from him. But I hadn’t that day, a boldness creeping over me as he had padded towards me for his towel, bright blue eyes doing a double take when they landed on me.
“That boner for me?” he’d said, the joke apparent on his face. And why not? Yes we were both gay men, him openly so since the age of sixteen when he’d announced his sexuality to the world and broken my young heart for the first time when he’d immediately started dating the year twelve sports captain. Me still hidden deeply within the darkest reaches and confines of the closet. Only Rob, Nick and Nick’s parents knew my darkest secret.
But he and I had never gone there before. Never flirted. Never hinted. Never crossed even the most innocent of lines. Hidden and locked away from what I really felt for him.
“What if it is?” I’d returned, watching as confusion flitted across Nick’s perfectly gorgeous face before it was replaced with something that had my heart pounding hard in my chest. It was enough to give me the boldness to say words I thought I’d never say. Not to him. Not to Nick.
“Want to suck it?” I’d offered, leaning casually back on my sun lounge as though it was neither here nor there to me whether he did or not. I knew I had a body worth looking at and I found great pleasure in watching Nick’s eyes light a path down my skin, leaving a blaze in his wake.
His brows lifted, amusement streaking across his eyes at my outrageous flirting before that predatory grin had taken over. The grin that I had witnessed but never had directed my way before. My pulse spiked in my chest as he took one artful step towards me. Then another.
He knelt on my sun lounge, eyes on mine as he slowly leaned forward, waiting for me to blink first and call it out as a joke. We’d never crossed this line before. Not even close. But I didn’t, my breath hitching as his eyes tracked down my body like a caress, right to my rock hard dick before they drifted back up to mine. Held.
“You sure this is what you want?” he asked, one solitary knuckle tracing up the length of my dick, causing me to suck in a sharp breath.
“Yes. Suck me, Nick,” I’d returned, all pretences gone. He noticed the change, the reality of the situation dawning on us both. He knew what it would mean if we did this, if we crossed those clearly demarcated boundaries that formed our solid friendship. I could see the thousands of thoughts crossing Nick’s mind, uncertainty, confusion, fear. And then I saw the moment he made up his mind, the moment he agreed to cross the boundaries with me and test out our years of friendship.
“If I’m going to suck your dick, I think I should at least kiss you first,” he’d said. He spoke calmly, like this was any other day of the week between us while my heart was fit to burst as it pounded like a herd of stampeding elephants in my chest.
