Chapter 1
CHAPTER
ONE
CONNOR
Of the eight million people in the city of New York, I am the last person who should be in this room right now.
Everyone is ripped, pumped, stacked, jacked, or however else you want to describe those guys whose muscles have muscles.
Me—I’m a little chonky and I’d rather sit on the couch watching movies than work out any night of the week.
And yet, here I am, sweating my balls off in the back corner of a room filled with bikes, voluntarily getting shouted at by the hottest silver fox spin instructor in the city.
What am I doing here again? I ask myself that about twenty minutes into every spin class. It’s partly because I’ve already paid for a year’s membership to Mars Fitness, partly because exercise is supposedly good for me, and—okay, fine, partly because of sexy spin instructor Donnie.
“You can do it! Almost there!” His voice comes through the sound system, his soft British accent barely noticeable above the driving, frenetic music.
Something fast-paced with a deep bass that booms through the walls, the floor, and me.
The thump-thump-thump competes with the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of my pulse until I’m one giant vibrating mass, hanging on to my bike for dear life.
“Five more! Four more! Three! Two! One!”
We all let out a collective groan of relief as the song finally ends and Donnie switches to something slower to cool us down.
I drag a towel over my face with one hand and turn the resistance on the bike down to zero with the other.
My feet spin uselessly in the pedals, my legs are jelly and I want to lie down on the floor and never get up again.
“Great job, guys!” Donnie’s gaze sweeps across the room, pausing for a micro-second at every single person like he’s congratulating us all individually.
When he gets to me, I can’t help but smile back, feeling like I’ve gotten a gold star. This is part of why I torture myself too: that slightly delirious euphoria at the end of every class. I’m weightless, floating, and everything is bright and shiny and happy.
Donnie leads us through the cool down and the all-important stretches, reminding us to “hydrate, hydrate, hydrate!” The moment the song ends, half a dozen guys hop off their bikes, as if they’ve merely taken a leisurely ride through the park, and swarm Donnie.
It happens every time. The gym bros are all ga-ga over Donnie, and hey, I don’t blame them.
He’s hot. He’s friendly. His accent is ear-candy.
If I thought I had even a fraction of a chance with him, I’d probably be up there elbowing my way through.
But I don’t, and besides, I’ve got a boyfriend waiting at home for me. A boyfriend who should’ve been at the class with me, who was the whole reason why I had a year’s membership to one of the more expensive gyms in town in the first place.
Miles heard about Mars from some co-worker of his, about how it catered to gay men, how it was “the place to be.” It was only after I let him strong-arm me into joining that I learned about the locker room—and the showers and the sauna and the steam room.
There’s a reason why Mars has branded condoms and single-serve packets of lube.
They sit in giant fish bowls in every corner of the locker room.
“Every good workout ends with a blowjob” might as well be the gym’s tagline.
I strip out of my sopping wet clothes and dump them into my gym bag.
There’s already a steady soundtrack of muffled moans bouncing off the tiled walls when I get to the showers.
I snag the last one and snap the privacy curtain closed.
Even then, my dick plumps at the sound of guys getting off all around me.
I give it a couple soapy tugs, then leave it alone.
I don’t need a hard-on while walking home and I’d rather come in Miles’s ass than all over the floors of a public shower room.
After I change into my street clothes, I take a minute to scroll through the food delivery app for my favorite Mexican place. On the agenda tonight is tacos and binging the latest season of Drag Race.
Connor
Ordered dinner. On my way home!
Miles doesn’t respond, but then, he never really does. He’s got terrible text messaging etiquette.
“Hey, Connor! How was class tonight?” Sawyer, the guy who mans the front desk on evenings and weekends waves me down as I’m on my way out. He showed me and Miles around when we first joined and he always says hello when he sees me.
“Great! Donnie’s always trying to put us in the grave.”
“No shit.” Sawyer laughs. “How’s your boyfriend? What’s his name? No, wait, don’t tell me…” He scrunches up his face. “Miles?”
“Yeah, it’s Miles.”
“Where’s his ass been? I never see him coming in with you.”
Don’t I know it. “He’s not that big on the whole exercise thing.”
Sawyer frowns at me. “What? Then why join a gym?”
Do I want to get into how Miles is always latching on to a brilliant idea, only to abandon it after a few months for the next shiny, new thing? I shrug at Sawyer. “Beats me.”
“Well, tell your man to get his ass in here, okay?”
“I’ll do my best!” I will do no such thing. I know a lost cause when I wake up next to it every morning.
Outside, winter is still clinging to the March air and the cold wind whips at my face.
I pull my hood over my wet hair and hunker down for the walk home.
Our apartment isn’t too far from the gym.
If my legs weren’t little more than jelly, it’d only take me ten minutes.
Right now, it’ll probably take me fifteen.
I’m unlocking the front door of my building when a delivery guy rolls to a stop on his bicycle beside me. The light from his phone is shining on his face.
“You from El Pescador?” I ask him.
“Yeah, unit 3B?”
“That’s me. Connor Hill.”
He checks my name against the info he has, then hands over the heavy bag of food. I can already smell the delicious aromas of the tacos, and my mouth waters as I go inside. I’m starving. Miles had damn well be ready to eat when I get up there because I’m not about to wait for him to start.
The climb up to the third floor isn’t fun on a normal day, but on spin days, it’s murder. Not gonna lie, I have to stop a couple times to wait out the stinging in my muscles. By the time I make it up to the apartment Miles and I share, I’m this close to eating my tacos while collapsed on the floor.
“Babe!” I call out as the door swings shut behind me. “Food’s here!”
There’s a commotion in the bedroom like Miles is stumbling around and cursing under his breath.
“Babe, you okay in there?”
No response. In fact, it’s gone silent. I’m about to poke my head into the bedroom to make sure he isn’t dead when the bathroom door opens behind me. Wait, what? Isn’t Miles in the bedroom?
“Oh, fuck.”
I turn to find Miles standing in the bathroom doorway, wearing nothing but a towel and a look of shock.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, even as my stomach starts to sink.
Miles’s gaze flits over my shoulder and his eyes burgeon at what he sees.
“Hey, Connor.”
The voice is familiar but there’s something off about the way it sounds. I spin around. Wyatt, my best friend from film school, is standing in the bedroom doorway. He’s straightening his sweater like he’s pulled it on in a hurry. His hair is standing up on end.
Was Wyatt supposed to come over today? I don’t remember him mentioning anything.
On my left, Miles looks like he’s about to have a panic attack. On my right, Wyatt looks like he wants the floor to open up and swallow him whole. My stomach is somewhere around my knees, but wait—don’t jump to conclusions.
There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation for why they’re acting so weird.
This isn’t the first time I’ve come home to find Wyatt at our place.
He’s never needed an invitation to drop by.
We’ve all known each other long enough that Miles and Wyatt consider themselves friends and they hang out without me all the time when I’m busy.
Except their matching guilty faces look so fucking guilty.
“What’s—” The rest of the sentence dies on my tongue. My stomach plummets out of my body. Miles and Wyatt exchange wide-eyed horrified stares that speak so many volumes, they’re practically shouting.
I think I laugh. My precious tacos definitely go splat on the floor. Disbelief roars in my ears and I barely hear one of them say, “Connor, we can explain. Connor, wait!”
I’m already halfway out the door. Maybe if I run backward fast enough, I can rewind the last five minutes and pretend I didn’t see what I saw.
I crash into a wall while flying down the stairs. I trip over myself at some point and a slight twinge flashes through my ankle. I run past someone and almost knock them over. I don’t stop until the cold wind is biting at my cheeks again.
What. The fuck. Just happened? Am I dreaming? Did I take something and now I’m hallucinating? Is this some kind of sick, twisted joke?
If I turn around and go back upstairs, they’ll be ROFL-ing and yelling “April fools” or some shit.
Or better yet, it’ll just be Miles, pouring cheap boxed wine with Drag Race all cued up on the TV.
He’ll smile and give me a kiss and we’ll settle down on the couch with our dinner.
That is how this evening is supposed to go.
Not whatever crap that’s left me on a darkened sidewalk in the middle of the night.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and I scramble to pull it out.
Miles
Babe, come back. Please. It’s not what you think.
Wyatt
Connor, I’m really sorry. We need to talk.
Nope. No fucking way. Absolutely not. My hands tremble as I shut the phone off and stuff it into my pocket again. I am not going back up there. Not tonight.
Maybe not ever.
Their faces. Fuck, their faces are burned into my fucking retinas. Guilty, but not the right kind of guilty. Mortified that they’d gotten caught, but not sorry for fucking each other behind my back.
Jesus. I’ve been living with Miles for over a year now.
I fall asleep and wake up next to him almost every goddamn day.
Wyatt has been my ride-or-die since the first day of film school.
We’ve gotten drunk together, high together, laid together.
We’ve pulled countless all-nighters, eating cold pizza at three in the morning.
They’re the two most important people in my life, the ones I turn to when shit hits the fan.
Even now, when they’re the shit that’s hit my fan, my first instinct is still to call up one of them and tell them what happened.
Except, they aren’t the people I thought they were.
The boyfriend I know and the best friend I have would never do that to me.
They wouldn’t lie to me and betray my trust and do it all right under my fucking nose.
In my apartment—the one I spent months looking for when Miles wanted us to move in together. In my goddamn bed.
And where else? The couch, the shower, the kitchen counter? If my stomach wasn’t already empty, I might just hurl. Bile burns in my chest either way.
I straggle down the street. My legs are already useless from the spin class and now the cold helps numb them even more.
But nothing can mute the riot in my head.
Questions and accusations and denials crash into each other until I want to scream at the top of my lungs.
Maybe then I’ll wake up and find that this is all a horrible, very bad nightmare.
I walk. My feet take me down streets and around corners until there’s a bright storefront beside me. I wrench the door open and stumble inside. Warm stale air, sharp and tangy like air isn’t supposed to be, assaults my nose. I push back the hood of my coat and stare at my surroundings.
I’m at Mars Fitness.
“Hey, Connor.”
I flinch. My name doesn’t sound like mine anymore. My body doesn’t feel like mine either. The life I thought I had less than an hour ago was a sham and now I don’t trust anything.
“What’s up? You forget something?” Sawyer eyes me curiously from behind the front desk.
Donnie’s at the far end. He’s changed from his cycling gear into a staff t-shirt, the Mars logo a bright crest on his chest. Black-rimmed glasses are perched on his nose and he’s tapping a pen on a stack of papers.
Oh god. What am I doing here? I need to leave. I need to hide.
My feet stay planted exactly where they are.
I need to pretend I’m okay so they won’t guess what happened. Can they tell by looking at me? Do I have it written across my face?
I open my mouth and the sound that comes out isn’t human. It’s a cross between a dying duck and nails on the chalkboard. My vision goes blurry and suddenly, the floor is rushing at me. I make it halfway down before strong arms come out of nowhere and catch me.