“You gonna stand there all day or are you coming down for coffee?”
Xavier’s voice jolted me out of my trance. He hadn’t turned around—how had he known I was there? I cleared my throat, willing my body to cooperate, to not betray me with visible evidence of where my thoughts had wandered.
“Yeah, just... forgot my phone,” I lied as I retreated. “Be right down.”
I ducked back into my room, grabbed my phone from the nightstand, and took several deep breaths. This was bad. This was catastrophically bad. I spent nearly all of my free time with Xavier. I couldn’t get a boner every time he walked into the room.
When I finally made it downstairs, I kept my eyes deliberately away from Xavier, focusing instead on my phone as I sank onto the couch. My hands weren’t quite steady, and my heart raced like I’d just finished a hard ride.
“Coffee’s fresh,” X called from the kitchenette.
“Thanks,” I said, scrolling through unread notifications. Anything to avoid looking up, to avoid seeing him and feeling that new, terrifying awareness all over again.
My phone buzzed in my hand, then buzzed again, like an angry hornet trapped in my palm. At first, I thought someone was calling me, but when I looked down, I saw notifications stacking up—TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. What the hell?
I tapped the most recent one, a comment from someone called @RomanceReadyOrNot that said “HELMET DADDY CHOKE ME” with fifty exclamation points. I blinked, tried to process what I was seeing, then switched to TikTok. Our last bookstore video, the one I’d posted on a whim three days ago, had over a hundred thousand views overnight.
This was it. My hard work, attention to the algorithm, and careful study of the trends, was finally paying off with a viral video. “X!” I yelped, nearly spilling my coffee as I sat bolt upright on the couch. “X, you need to see this!”
He ambled over from the kitchenette, a half-eaten bagel in one hand, still shirtless.
“What?” he asked, mouth full.
“We’re fucking famous!” I held up the phone, showing him the view count. “The bookstore video went viral. Look at this shit!”
Xavier leaned down to peer at my screen, his shoulder brushing mine. I caught a whiff of his scent—sleep-warm skin and that sandalwood soap he used.
“Huh,” he said, sounding underwhelmed but with that slight lift at the end that I recognized as genuine surprise. “How’d that happen?”
“No idea.” I scrolled through the analytics, trying to trace the explosion. “Looks like some romance author with a big following shared it last night, and then it just... took off. We’ve got followers now, X. Like, actual followers. Tens of thousands of them.”
“Great,” he deadpanned. “Popularity has always been my dream.”
He settled on the couch beside me, close enough that our thighs almost touched, and I could tell he was intrigued despite himself. I scrolled to the comments section, which was overflowing with reactions.
“Listen to these,” I said, clearing my throat dramatically. “‘Helmet Daddy can get it any day of the week.’ ‘The quiet one radiates big dick energy and I am HERE FOR IT.’”
Xavier snorted, but I caught the hint of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “What the hell is ‘big dick energy’?”
“It means you seem confident because you’re packing,” I explained, then immediately regretted it as the image of Xavier’s very real, very impressive dick flashed through my mind. I scrolled quickly to another comment. “They’re calling me ‘Golden Retriever Biker.’ I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.”
“It’s accurate,” Xavier said, taking another bite of his bagel. “You’re definitely a human golden retriever.”
“Fuck off,” I laughed. “Oh wait, these are getting better. ‘The way Silent Biker watches his friend like he’s barely restraining himself from jumping his bones... that’s love, baby.’”
The words hung in the air between us. I tried to laugh it off, but it came out strangled and awkward. Xavier didn’t react, just kept chewing his bagel with methodical precision as I pictured him jumping my bones.
Which would never happen.
I scrolled further, finding more comments to read aloud, carefully avoiding the increasingly numerous ones that speculated about us being boyfriends. But as I read, I felt heat crawling up my neck. There were too many comments noticing how “obvious” it was that I was into him. Had I been that transparent? Or were these strangers projecting their own fantasies onto two random guys in helmets?
“Oh, and TikTok sent a notification saying we could be monetized,” I said, latching onto the notification that had just popped up. “We could actually make money from this.”
“What? Like $2?”
“$2 more than we have if we don’t monetize,” I said, accepting the offer without a second thought.
Xavier was quiet for a moment, finishing his bagel as I sipped on my coffee and clicked through the monetization information, unable to stop myself from daydreaming about what we could do if it really made a decent amount of extra income. My bike needed new brakes, his needed new tires. And that project bike we’d bought from a friend needed new… everything.
