Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Evan
I’d cleaned the apartment twice before Nico knocked.
Not because it needed it, but because I needed something to do with my hands, something to organize while I waited, and straightening throw pillows and wiping down counters I’d already wiped was better than sitting on the couch and overthinking every possible version of the next few hours.
I’d seen his Wikipedia page. I’d read his contract number.
I’d scrolled through his followers—seven hundred and fifty-three thousand people who wanted something from him, and then I’d spent three hours not sleeping and another eight working on a brand audit I’d had to revise twice because I kept reading the same paragraph without retaining it.
And now he was at my door.
I opened it.
He was standing in the hallway in dark jeans and a gray Henley, a paper bag from Reyes Grill in one hand.
And he was just Nico. The same strong jaw, the same full mouth, the same dark eyes that did the thing to my pulse they’d been doing since a gay club on a Friday night in January.
The bruise along his jaw had faded to yellow at the edges.
He looked tired in the way of someone who’d had a long week and was glad it was over.
He looked like himself.
“Hey,” he said.
My chest unknotted.
“Hey.” I stepped back to let him in. He lifted the paper bag onto the counter and started unpacking it.
I felt something warm move through my chest. “You remembered.”
He glanced up. “Chicken tacos, rice and beans. Extra salsa.” A small smile. “You okay?”
“Getting there.” I reached past him for plates. “I looked you up.”
“I thought you would.” He leaned against the counter, watching me. “The Wikipedia page is pretty dry, for what it’s worth. Whoever wrote it has never actually watched a hockey game.”
I laughed, and it came out relieved. “The contract amount made me put my laptop down.”
“That’s fair.”
“The Instagram comments made me call Danny at three in the morning.”
His easy smile dropped, his eyes moving over my face the way they did when he was trying to figure out how I actually was versus how I said I was. “Evan—”
“He talked me down,” I said. “I’m fine. Or I’m getting there.” I met his eyes. “You’re still you. That’s what I keep landing on. I spent all night reading about Nicolás Briggs, and you showed up at my door and you’re still just… you.”
He looked at me for a moment. Then he crossed the kitchen and kissed me—not hungry, not urgent, just warm and deliberate, his hand cupping my jaw. When he pulled back, his forehead dropped to mine.
“Still just Nico,” he said quietly.
“I know.” I exhaled. “I know that.”
We ate at the kitchen island, close enough that our shoulders touched, and the nervousness that had lived in my chest all day dissolved somewhere between the first bite of tacos and Nico stealing a tortilla chip off my plate without asking.
He told me about practice, about a drill that had gone badly, his captain teasing him about his footwork, a joke someone had made that was too specific to hockey to translate but that made Nico laugh telling it.
I listened, asked questions, and ate my tacos, and by the time we’d cleaned up and moved to the couch, it felt like every other evening we’d spent here.
Except that nothing underneath it was hidden anymore.
We ended up the way we usually did—him with his arm around me, me against his side, the TV on low, and neither of us watching it. His thumb moved in slow circles on my shoulder. Someone passed by in the hallway, their footsteps muffled. Traffic droned by out on the street below.
“Can I tell you something?” I asked.
“Always.”
I grabbed his hand on my shoulder for a moment. Then I said, “You’re not the only one who’s been withholding.”
He went still—not tense, just attentive.
“My last name isn’t really Beckett,” I said.
“That’s my middle name. I started using it when I moved to San Jose.
” He said nothing. His arm stayed where it was, and he let me keep going.
“My name was Evan Hunter. It still is, legally. But after everything with Ryan, I needed to not be findable. So I became Evan Beckett.”
“So that if someone googled you,” Nico said quietly. “They wouldn’t find him.”
“Yes.”
He didn’t say anything else for a moment. Just confirmation without dramatizing or questions I wasn’t ready for. Something eased in me I hadn’t known was braced.
“Ryan Pierce,” I said. “We weren’t just together in my late twenties. We were… it started before that. A long time before that.”
And then I told him. All of it.
I started at sixteen, which surprised him—I felt it in the slight shift of his body, the way he turned fractionally toward me without pulling back. High school in LA, two teens who knew they were gay and found each other before they really understood what that meant.
“First love,” I said. “We were sixteen and stupid and completely sure of each other.”
Nico was quiet, listening.
Coming out together. The sweetness of being seventeen and in love and thinking the hard part was already over. Then college. The natural drift, the friendly distance, the years of separate lives that felt like growth at the time.
“What happened?” Nico asked.
“We ran into each other at twenty-two. A mutual friend’s party.
He was across the room, and he looked like someone I used to know and also someone I was meeting for the first time.
” I paused. “We chose each other. It felt deliberate. I thought that meant it was real. He was landing small roles,” I said.
“Commercials, TV stuff. We moved in together when he got a recurring part on a cable show. It was good. It was really good… for a while.”
Nico’s arm tightened slightly around me.
“Then the movie.” I kept my voice even. “One role. One film that became… you know the kind. The kind that changes everything overnight. Within a year his face was everywhere, and mine was next to it, and I hadn’t agreed to any of it.”
I told him about the paparazzi. The way it escalated from occasional to constant, from manageable to suffocating.
The photographers outside our house, the ones who followed me to work, the ones who published photos of me buying groceries with a caption that used my full name and Ryan’s in the same sentence as if I’d consented to being a detail in his story.
“He started keeping me out of it,” I said. “Premieres, events, press stuff. He said it was to protect my privacy.” I paused. “I believed him. For a while I was even grateful.”
Nico’s jaw tightened. I felt it against my hair.
“It wasn’t about my privacy,” I said. “Or it wasn’t only about that.”
I told him about the evasiveness—the travel schedules that didn’t quite add up, the calls that went to voicemail, the way Ryan had become someone I lived with who was also somehow unreachable.
And then the morning I’d opened my phone to seventeen notifications and found the entertainment news photos before Ryan had said a word to me.
Ryan and his co-star in Vancouver, where he’d told me he was “doing press, can’t talk much, crazy schedule. ”
“He suggested an open relationship,” I said. “After. Like that was the reasonable middle ground.”
“Figlio di puttana,” Nico said under his breath.
Despite everything, something loosened in my chest. “I moved out within a week. And then the paparazzi wanted a comment, the gossip sites wanted a story, and someone had taken photos of me carrying boxes out of our house without me even knowing.” I felt the old tightness in my throat and didn’t try to push it back down.
“My face was everywhere. Strangers sent messages to my work email. Someone posted my personal phone number online. I had to change it.” I swallowed.
“I couldn’t stay in LA. There was nothing left there that was mine. ”
Nico was silent for a moment. His hand had moved from my shoulder to the back of my neck, warm and steady. His whole body had gone tense. He was angry—I could feel it—and he was holding it together because I needed him to.
“So you came here,” he said finally.
“I came here. Changed my name. Started my consulting business. Built something that was only mine, that didn’t have his name attached to it.” I looked up at him. “And then I met you at a gay club and you seemed so normal. So private. I thought… I actually thought I was finally safe.”
A wince flickered across his face. “Evan—”
“I’m not saying that as an accusation.” I meant it. “I know you’re not Ryan. I knew it at two in the morning reading Instagram comments, and I know it now.” I held his gaze. “But I need you to understand what you’re asking me to step back into. Even a version of it.”
“I know.” His voice was rough. “I know exactly what I’m asking. And I’m sorry it took me so long to give you the information you needed to decide.” He brought his hand around to my jaw, tilting my face up. “For what it’s worth, I will never, for the rest of my life, watch a Ryan Pierce film.”
The laugh came out of nowhere, slightly wrecked, more genuine than anything I’d felt all day. “That’s not necessary.”
“It absolutely is.” His expression was completely serious. “I’m going to tell André, my captain. He’ll never watch one either. We’ll start a thing.”
“Please don’t start a thing.”
“The thing is already started.” He wiped a thumb under my eye, catching a tear I hadn’t realized had escaped. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” I was surprised to find that I meant it. “Yeah, I actually am.”
He studied me for a long moment in a way that made me feel like the only thing in the room worth looking at. Then he leaned in and kissed me, softly at first, just his mouth on mine, his hand still cradling my jaw.
It shifted. Not urgently, but gradually, the way things between us always found their way there. His hand slid into my hair, I turned toward him, and the careful tenderness of the last hour poured itself into something warmer, more present, more necessary.
“Hey,” he murmured against my mouth.
“Hey.”
“Can we—”
“Yes,” I said. “Yeah.”
We made it to the bedroom.