Can't Fight the Fire (Straight to Gay MM Romance First Time Bundle)

Can’t Fight the Fire

The apartment was supposed to fix everything.

That was the pitch I'd sold myself back in June, anyway, when I'd signed the lease on a top-floor unit in The Bellamy — a building that the listing had described as "swanky urban living for the modern student" and that reality had revealed to be a six-story concrete box with delusions of grandeur and a landlord who responded to maintenance requests the way most people respond to spam emails: by ignoring them completely.

But I'd wanted off campus. I’d needed it, really, the way you need air after being held underwater.

My freshman year in the dorms had been a masterclass in loneliness—eleven months of communal bathrooms, paper-thin walls, and the particular social isolation that comes from being a swimmer at a school where nobody gives a shit about swimming.

I'd made a few friends on the team, sure, but the swim guys mostly kept to themselves—they were from the area and already had friends of their own from high school—and the rest of the student body treated us like we didn't exist.

It was the same old story: the football players got the girls, the frat guys got the parties, and the swimmers got to wake up at five in the morning and smell like chlorine for the rest of the day.

So, when sophomore year rolled around, I jumped at the chance to move off campus and closer to downtown, where the bars were—and theoretically, the girls.

A fresh start. New building, new neighborhood, new version of Andrew Whitfield that wasn't the quiet, pretty-faced, nerdy swimmer nobody remembered from the dorm.

That was the plan, anyway. I guess the universe had other ideas.

Because the apartment was proving to be “upscale” in name only.

The plumbing went out three weeks after I moved in.

And it was not a minor issue—a full, building-wide failure that left me showering at the campus rec center for nine days while a crew of increasingly irritated plumbers tore up the walls.

Then the A/C died in the middle of August, which in this part of the country meant spending four nights in a room that felt like the inside of a slow cooker, lying on top of the sheets in my boxers with a box fan pointed at my face, wondering what I'd done to personally offend the college gods.

Then the thunderstorms started, and with them, the ceiling leaks—brown water staining the drywall above my bed in patterns that looked like a Rorschach test designed to drive me crazy.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, my girlfriend Jess, dumped me.

She'd done it over text, which felt appropriate for a relationship that had mostly existed over text anyway.

Four months of dating that amounted to maybe six actual dates, a handful of mediocre hookups where she kept her clothes on, and a slow, mutual slide into the kind of indifference that doesn't even have the decency to hurt.

She said she needed "space to figure things out."

I said I understood. I didn't. But I also didn't fight it, because the truth—the one I couldn't say to her or to myself—was that I'd been relieved.

I'd been relieved, and I didn't know why, and not knowing why was its own kind of problem.

So, there I was: nineteen years old, single, friendless outside of the pool, living in an apartment that seemed as if it was actively trying to kill me, and spending most of my evenings sitting on my couch, eating cereal out of the box, and listening to the rain hammer the windows while I scrolled through my phone and pretended I wasn't lonely and confused about my entire life.

The only interesting thing about my living situation—the only thing I couldn't quite file away and forget—was my next-door neighbor.

His name was Callum.

I knew this because I'd seen it on a package outside his door once, and because the building manager had mentioned him in passing during one of my many complaint calls about the stupid, modern electronic key-fob locks on our front doors—Mr. Rourke in 6B has the same issue with the locks, so you're not alone—which had made me feel marginally less insane but hadn't actually fixed the locks.

I'd seen him a handful of times. He was a firefighter—I'd gathered that from the department t-shirts he wore and the shifts that pulled him out of the building at unpredictable hours.

He was also enormous in a way only a man can be. Six-three, probably two hundred and twenty pounds, the kind of dense, functional muscle that came from hauling equipment and kicking down doors rather than posing in a mirror.

He had a dirty-blonde crew cut, blue eyes, and a jaw that looked like it had been set with a carpenter's level.

He was thirty-nine—I'd heard him tell the building manager during a hallway conversation I'd shamelessly eavesdropped on—and he carried himself with the unhurried, wide-stanced confidence of a man who had been big his entire life and no longer thought about it.

I'd thought about him exactly twice.

The first time was in passing—one of those hallway encounters where you nod, half-smile, and keep moving, and the only thing you retain is a vague impression of big guy, seems fine.

The second time was different.

It was about a month after I'd moved in.

Around one in the morning on a weeknight, I'd been heading downstairs to the laundry room with a duffel bag of dirty practice suits and towels, and I'd rounded the corner of the sixth-floor hallway to find Callum walking toward me from the elevator.

He was wearing nothing but a pair of powder-blue boxer briefs.

That was it; no shirt, no shoes, no towel slung over his shoulder—just the briefs and whatever was making the massive bulge inside them, walking through the hallway like it was the most natural thing in the world.

His body was—I didn't have a word for it at the time, and I'm not sure I have one now.

Built was too generic. Jacked was too fratty.

He was just big, in the way that certain men are big—thick chest covered in dark-blonde hair, heavy shoulders scrolled with tattoos that climbed from his wrists to his deltoids, a torso that tapered into a narrow waist but never lost its density.

His thighs were enormous, too, straining the leg openings of the briefs.

"Hey," he'd said as he passed. Low voice. Unhurried. I looked in his blue eyes and felt like he probably had a million wild stories inside them. I quickly looked away like the cowardly nineteen-year-old boy I was.

"Hey," I'd managed, and kept walking, and spent the next twenty minutes in the laundry room staring at a dryer cycle and trying to figure out why my heart was beating so fast.

I'd told myself it was the surprise of it; that I hadn't expected to see a near-naked man in the hallway at one in the morning, and the adrenaline was just a startle response—normal and meaningless.

But the image had stayed with me: the tattoos, the hair on his chest, the way the powder-blue fabric had hugged the heavy, prominent bulge between his thighs—in a way that surprise didn't fully explain.

I'd filed it away and buried it. The way I buried everything that didn't fit the version of myself I was trying to maintain.

There was also the matter of the… sounds.

Some nights—not every night, but often enough that I'd started unconsciously listening for them—I could hear something through the shared wall between our apartments.

It was a low, masculine moaning; a rhythmic, muffled percussion that could have been a headboard or could have been something else.

It was deep, guttural sounds that went on for fifteen, twenty, sometimes thirty minutes, rising and falling in intensity before climaxing in a final, drawn-out groan that vibrated faintly through the drywall and into my bedroom.

And, curiously, I never heard a woman's voice. Not once.

I told myself it didn't matter. I told myself I wasn't even curious. I was too busy dealing with leaking ceilings and broken locks and the general entropy of my life to care about what my neighbor was doing—or who he was doing it with—at midnight on a Tuesday.

But I heard it, every time. And every time, something low in my stomach tightened in a way I refused to examine.

That was the state of things on the Thursday evening when the sky opened up with the storm of the century and the universe decided to deliver its punchline to the joke that had become my life.

I'd missed the bus.

Not by much—maybe thirty seconds, just enough to watch the taillights pull away from the stop while I stood on the curb with my backpack over one shoulder and my swim bag over the other, already feeling the first fat drops of rain hit my scalp.

I'd been wearing what I always wore after evening practice: a white t-shirt, swim trunks, and flip-flops. Not exactly storm gear.

By the time I made it back to The Bellamy—a twenty-minute walk that the rain turned into a fifteen-minute jog—I was soaked.

Not damp. Not wet. Soaked, the way you get when you stop bothering to dodge puddles because your shoes are already flooded and your shirt is already plastered to your chest like a second skin and your dignity has already left the building.

I stood in front of my door, shivering, water streaming down my face and pooling around my flip-flops on the hallway carpet.

My white t-shirt had gone completely transparent—I could see my own nipples, the faint shadow of my abs, every contour of my torso visible through the clinging, translucent cotton.

My swim trunks were even worse. They were suctioned to my thighs and my ass, and I could feel the wet fabric pressing against my cold-shrunk dick and balls with an intimacy that would've been embarrassing if anyone had been around to see it.

I pressed my fob to the lock. Nothing. No beep. No green light. No click.

“Fuck, come on,” I grumbled. “I do not have time for this shit today.”

I tried again. And again. Pressed it flat, angled it, tapped it, held it. Nothing.