“Guilty.” Elliott slid the cup across with a flourish that stopped short of being theatrical. His smile was practiced: crooked, charming, and slightly dangerous.
The kind of smile that let people think they’d won something by earning it.
When the customer drifted away, Elliott wiped down the counter, humming softly under his breath. A scrap of melody,unfinished, caught and held in his throat. He shoved it back down where it belonged.
No one here got therealsongs anymore, the ones that spoke from his heart.
A flyer tacked onto the local information board snagged his attention. It stood out against a sea of business cards, LGBTQ+ events, and a poster sharing hotlines. Elliott wandered over to get a better look. Blood red letters on a black background that looked like leather.
Auditions: Hot Leather Guys.
All-gay leather a cappella. Vocals only. Voices welcome. Leather mandatory.
Contacts: Theo Sinclair & Max Rivers.
Elliott smirked. Theo meant nothing to him, but Max Rivers? That was a name he knew. He’d seen him once across the dark of Obsidian, the leather club Nico used to haunt. Max had a reputation there: bass voice like velvet, a Dom with a taste for precision. Nico had admired him, had even joked about introducing them.
Elliott had said no.
Nico.Christ. Even the name felt like smoke in his lungs.
He flicked his towel onto the counter, deliberately turning his back on the flyer. His pulse refused to settle, however.
A leather-clad a cappella group?
At first it sounded like a ridiculous idea, but then he amended that thought.
It was tempting, maybe even dangerous.
“Hot Leather Guys,” he muttered under his breath, letting the syllables drag with irony. “Yeah. Sounds like trouble.”
He told himself he wasn’t interested, that he’d left that scene, that kind of entanglement. But the flyer clung to him like Superglue, impossible to shake once it seeped into his skin.
The hiss of the steam wand cut out, leaving a brief pocket of silence. Into that quiet slipped another sound—Nico’s voice, low, wrecked, trembling from the inside out, in the deepest fold of subspace.
I love you.
Three words Elliott had wanted to hear, but had pretended he didn’t need. They also engendered a small amount of fear. He’d answered them with careful joy. He’d let himself believe.
The milk pitcher in Elliott’s hand rattled against the counter. He blinked, snapping back into the present, his heart thumping like a warning.
It’s been three years. Isn’t it about time you forgot him?
He poured the flat white, then etched a leaf into the foam with unsteady precision. His customer smiled, thanked him, and walked away. Elliott barely heard the words.
Heartache wasn’t in his chest anymore. It was in his hands.
Muscle memory.
After closing up at Haven, Elliott hurried home to search through his wardrobe. His hands trembled as he removed the harness from its plastic covering, untouched since…
Yeah. Don’t go there.
He shoved it into a bag, slung it over his shoulder, then left. He cut across town toward the theatre his mum ran, a tiny place but still putting on shows, managing to survive in a city overstuffed with theatres. The play was over, its audience long since departed. Elliott breathed in that familiar smell of dust, velvet curtains, faint whiffs of greasepaint ground into the wood.The kind of place that made his chest ache in ways he never said out loud.
He padded down the aisle, slipped onto the stage, and stood there for a beat. The cavernous dark waited, and when he hummed a single note, the acoustics kissed it back to him, rounder and fuller. He closed his eyes, let his voice climb, slip, fall into scales until the emptiness became orchestra.
This wasn’t subspace, or him surrendering part of himself.
