Chapter 3
Sab
I’m dying.
Or maybe I’m dead.
Four words stare back at me from my phone screen, but they don’t seem real.
HotCraic97: Like it better here? xox
Merde.
It’s him.
The smoking hot firefighter, every pun intended.
Has to be.
But it can’t be. That’s too fucking weird—for me, not him. There’s no way I spent all night awake and fantasising that he messaged me on the shiny new app he directed me to and then it actually fucking happened.
I shut my phone off and place it face down on the floor.
Step over it and move to the bathroom. Take a shower without a two-year old banging on the screen.
It should be the first chill morning I’ve had in weeks, but even without fretting over what time Esme had Tam up, my mind spins a mile a minute.
What if it isn’t him?
The hot firefighter.
What if it is?
The water runs cold for two solid minutes before I notice.
Shivering, I clamber out of the tub I installed for Esme, wet feet on the fluffy pink rug she loves. My phone feels like a homing beacon—like the North Pole to a fucking reindeer, and I’m standing over it again before I make the conscious decision to be there.
Water drips from my skin onto the dented phone case, pooling on the distorted baby Jesus sticker Tam slapped on there as a joke present last year. My only present until he’d given me a photo album with handwritten messages that had made me cry into my pineau.
Love that bastard.
Miss him too. He’s the best brother in the world, and he’s married to a literal man. There’s no tangible reason why I can’t talk to him about the angsty mess my sexuality has become, but I just…can’t.
Putain…quel abruti.
Me. I’m the idiot. Not Tam.
I reach for my phone and turn it over, activating the screen again. I’ve set the app to hide itself. Like TikTok when I found myself watching hours of angry cat videos when Esme was in bed. Out of sight, out of mind. It worked for the clock app, but there’s no chance with this.
The firefighter was right. This app is better.
I’ve had my entire brain buried in it since it landed on my phone last night.
And since that message, my dick hasn’t withered past a semi, a fact I can’t escape as I take my phone back to my bed and lie down, opening FlingIt to stare at the message again.
HotCraic97: Like it better here? xox
Not exactly a proposition, but heat floods my veins all the same, adding to the pole tenting my towel.
The fucking ache in my groin and somewhere deeper I haven’t had the nerve to contemplate.
One that makes my hand shake as I tap the profile attached to the message and Disneyland for this baby queer lights up the screen.
I—
Fuck.
My mouth goes dry.
There are no face pics on the profile. Just skin and muscles. Careful, angled shots of a strong chest, thick thighs dusted with copper hair, and below—
A fist, broad-knuckled and masculine, wrapped tight around a thick column that has me reaching for my own cock, shoving the towel aside.
The contact rolls my eyes.
The pressure.
But I don’t lean into it.
Can’t.
I need to see more, and I force myself to let go and focus on the screen. On the wrist with the faint burn scar I’ve seen before, when it was reaching through the van window to pass my phone back.
Fuck.
It’s definitely him.
I take a breath and scroll a little more, tapping through the photos, trying not to fixate on the cut of his abs and those thighs.
But I can’t help it. Never knew a man’s legs could do it for me, but every day’s a school day.
I find myself unable to break away from the dick pic, and I’m not even looking at his dick.
How the hell does that work?
I’m too frazzled to figure it out. To do much more than stare and stare and stare as my pulse throbs in my throat, all the while fighting to remind myself this dude has done nothing more than give me a tip and ask me a question. He might not be into the same things as me.
It’s a swingers app.
What if he’s only looking for women?
Anxiety gnaws at the thrill I’ve let build in my nerves, bullying it back to the low-grade panic I’ve carried since I told my ex I was starting to notice men and she laughed in my face.
Charmaine.
My dick shrivels and dies. I haven’t seen Esme’s mum in months. We haven’t been together for a long time. But somehow her derision still cuts deep. As if she caught me without armour and inflicted a wound that will never heal.
A stupid wound.
What do I care what she thinks of who I fuck?
What do I care what anyone thinks?
Tam never did and he turned out just fine, and if there’s one person I’ve ever sought to emulate it’s my superhuman older brother.
But it’s not that simple.
It’s just…not. I’ve tied a giant knot around myself I can’t seem to unpick. Not without help. Without something deeper than a faceless hookup, and I’m not going to find that on a fucking swingers app, am I?
A groan wrenches from the pit of my soul.
I toss my phone to the foot of the bed and roll myself upright, wishing I could hurl it out of the window.
But parental responsibility bears down on me.
I need my phone so Tam can reach me. So the nursery can when I’m at work.
So I can call 999 if something terrible happens and Bhodi’s not there to fix it.
Absolutely not so I can summon myself a hung firefighter to—
Stop.
I give my head a wobble, abandon my phone—it’s on loud—and go downstairs to raid the cupboards for breakfast. I don’t like eating alone and there’s a one hundred percent chance I’ll eat whatever Tam’s having when I get to his house.
But breakfast, man. It’s the meal of kings.
Can’t function without it, and maybe that’s the problem here.
Low blood sugar making me crazy. I mean, the man cravings are years old by now, so I can’t blame the lack of croissants in my belly for that.
But maybe once I’ve filled my face I’ll stop obsessing over something that’s never going to happen.
Why won’t it happen? What are you in these apps for if you’re not going to do anything? Lurkers are lame.
Then call me fucking lame. Write it on a sticker and slap it to my forehead. Lame, lame, lame.
Shockingly, heckling myself doesn’t make me feel any better. Even after I’ve mainlined buttery pastry and sunk two mugs of tea in a lonely naked breakfast for one.
I trudge back upstairs. My phone taunts me from the bed and I manage to sling on some underwear and socks before I’m reaching for it again.
FlingIt is still open.
His profile right there.
That photo.
Those thighs.
I give myself another second to drink them in and reassure myself my dick didn’t truly expire at the mere thought of Charmaine.
And I get that reassurance in a flash of heat so intense it startles me.
Beyond arousal, it leaves me both dizzy and certain I’ll never survive a real encounter with this bloke.
Or any bloke, come to think of it. HotCraic97 is fit as fuck in and out of uniform, but he’s not the only hot dude in the world.
If they all feel like this, I’m better off with my hand.
You’re an idiot.
I think it in English this time. Which somehow makes it more real.
And I don’t break my stare with the phone screen.
I scroll through the photos a few more times.
As if one more look might flick the switch back.
Prove I’ve got it wrong and those swathes of bare skin and curved muscle, the way he grips himself with clever hands, haven’t left me forgetting how my lungs work.
Doesn’t happen.
I try to breathe through the ache the sharp rush of desire has left me with. But it’s not just my dick. I can handle that.
It’s the tug in my chest.
The way my racing thoughts quiet when I look at him.
The way he didn’t feel like a stranger when he grinned at me through the van window.
A smile like that shouldn’t hurt, but it does.
And like the worst things in life I know way too much about, the only balm for the pain is more.
I tap back through the photos until I come to his profile page and read it properly.
He’s six-three and pansexual.
Looking for men, women, and everything in between. His interests are one-on-one, three-ways, oral, and topping, and his location still has him fifty feet from where I stand.
I don’t have the words in any language to describe how that makes me feel. Just that the stress in my blood ebbs and flows as if it’s as lost for what to do with itself as I am.
The urge to run a mile remains as strong as ever, but…
I want more.
I need more.
And giving into that need, it doesn’t feel wrong.
I tap the screen again. Another thumbprint and I’m in the message he sent me and typing out a reply.
LeLionDuBois96: Much better…now you’re here xx
Lame.
Cheesy.
The truth.
I don’t look at my phone for six hours. Notifications for FlingIt are disabled and even though Tam extends his kidnapping operation until lunchtime, I have plenty to keep me occupied.
Tam and Bhodi want me to go back to the gym.
Like they think I lost half my personality when I quit going to be a full-time dad.
I’ve never got round to telling them I don’t miss it.
Can’t lie that I crave the buzz, though.
The endorphins. So I spend my morning grocery shopping, cleaning the house as if I’m expecting the social to come banging on my door, and lugging my old weight bench out of storage.
I set it up on the back deck. Pile some free weights next to it. Then I figure I might as well get round to fixing the lean-to style roof that protects it and shimmy up the side of the house.
It’s a cold day. My ladder’s iced up, so I leave it be and use the drainpipe instead. Fix the roof and slide back down.
My T-shirt’s wet.
I peel it off and stuff it in my back pocket, stealing a glance at my phone, face down on the weight bench where I left it. It’s still set to loud. I’d have heard it if Tam or Bhodi had tried to reach me. But it still calls to me and now I’ve run out of things to do, I’m weak to the tug in my gut.
Just a peek.
I take a pew on the bench and swipe my phone to life. Check I haven’t missed something that matters, then tap my daft self into FlingIt.
A dozen messages greet me. Faceless profiles, mostly. But definitely not dick-less.
Wowsers.
Okay.
I didn’t know it was possible for a cock to have bad angles, but it is.
Cringing, I click out of the worst photo I’ve ever seen and scan the rest of the messages from the safety of the previews.
They’re all horrible.
At least, they are to me right now, and the lonely pessimist I’ve become lately doesn’t hold out much hope for the only DM I’m interested in. The DM that’s probably never coming.
I almost click out of my inbox before I reach the end of the unopened messages.
Cut my losses.
Delete the app.
Roll in honey and staple my nuts to a beehive.
Before yesterday, I might’ve done it.
Not the beehive thing, but the rest of it.
I’ve had as many false starts with this shit as I have Christmas dinners.
But that firefighter. HotCraic97. Seeing him in person and on here…
it’s unlocked something in me. Not confidence—fuck no.
But something that has me scrolling to the bottom of my unread DMs and surviving the lurch in my chest at what I find there.
HotCraic97: Back atcha. Wasn’t lying when I called you a handsome fecker xx