Chapter 13
thirteen
. . .
Harry was about as far as it was possible to get from being a moony teenager with his first crush, but that didn’t stop him from thinking about Nikky with a smile on his face throughout the day, starting the moment the younger man left his flat.
Harry walked around with a smile as he tidied up from breakfast, as he hit the gym at the end of his street for his morning workout, and as he sat down for an unusual treat of coffee and a pastry at one of his local cafés.
He was in love. There was no getting around it.
Despite being way too old and curmudgeonly for something as ridiculous as love, there he was, thinking about Nikky with a smile on his face and accidentally starting to get hard in the middle of the café as he remembered the night they’d just spent together.
The whole thing had probably been a mistake.
Recording their lovemaking definitely had been.
But taking Nikky to bed, the two of them exploring each other and saying more about how they felt about each other through touch than they ever could with words had been amazing.
It was too early to call what they had anything other than infatuation and lust, but at the same time, it felt like more than Harry had had with anyone for ages.
Nikky made him happy. Very few things made Harry happy.
Nikky also made the resentment about his curtailed career he’d felt for more than a decade fade into the glittering possibility that everything might not be lost. Has-beens like him had made comebacks before.
Maybe now was his time to take the world stage again, not because he was riding Nikky’s coattails, but because Nikky had made him see what was possible.
“Oh, excuse me.” Harry flinched as a tall, decently handsome guy bumped into his shoulder as he brought his coffee to the table next to him.
There was plenty of space between the tables, so the contact made Harry frown.
“Sorry, really,” the man said with an apologetic smile as he took his seat.
He put his coffee and his phone on the table.
“I’m not used to how things are done over here,” he said.
The man was American. Harry wanted to roll his eyes. He was probably just another tourist there to gawp at the quaint shops and cafés of Notting Hill. He chose to be polite instead with a quick, “No worries,” then went back to savoring his coffee and looking out the window at passersby.
How much would it take for him to breathe new life back into the music career he’d thought had died ages ago?
Something about having Nikky around had ignited his creativity and had melodies and lyrics racing through his brain twenty-four-seven.
That well had been dry for years, but now it was overflowing.
His brief call with Rudy had been constantly on his mind from the moment he’d hung up, too.
He didn’t care if Rudy was only interested in what he was doing because he’d seen the photos of him and Nikky snogging each other’s brains out at the club.
If someone out there was willing to open the door for him, then why shouldn’t he stick his foot in the gap and get back to where he should have been all along?
His phone buzzed and Albion’s name appeared on the screen. With a dark scowl, Harry picked up his phone to see what the bastard had texted him.
“I thought you would want to see what your boy is getting up to,” The message read. It was followed by a link.
Without thinking, head already full of steam, Harry clicked on the link. If Albion was giving Nikky hell or trying to manipulate him the way he himself had been manipulated, Harry would march over to the studio immediately and throttle the man.
Curiously, the link only led to some random site with a video of Nikky dancing at the club the other night. It was nothing Harry hadn’t seen before.
“What’s the point of sending that to me?” he typed back.
Albion didn’t reply. As hard as Harry stared at his phone, daring the man to send something back and justify himself, the message window remained blank.
Harry shook his head and put his phone down, grabbing his coffee again. The energized sense that the world was a friendly place after all and he might just be able to get another piece of the pie was gone, though. The people passing outside the café window didn’t hold half as much appeal for him.
A few minutes later, the American got up from his table and headed quickly out the door, face flushed and a strange sense of urgency surrounding him. The weirdo had left half a cup of coffee and most of the croissant he’d ordered uneaten.
“Wasteful Americans,” Harry muttered, then finished his own coffee and pastry before getting up and heading home.
Harry’s mood improved as he reached his flat and headed into his music room.
Instead of regret and grief stabbing him, the sight of his guitar collection sparked excitement in him.
He set his phone down on one of the pair of stools in the room and grabbed an acoustic guitar before sitting on the other.
He played. Harry played old songs and new ideas that had just popped into his head. The music swelled up in him and gushed out onto the strings. He even caught himself singing along once or twice. More shocking still, some of the words he caught himself randomly singing formed into a love song.
An actual, freaking love song.
What was wrong with him?
It wasn’t just the creative aspect of the morning. Just before lunch, he felt compelled to record what he’d been working on. He grabbed his phone—and was surprised that the battery was at six percent. It was hot to the touch, too.
“What the hell?” he mumbled, getting up and taking his phone out to his flat’s main room so he could plug it in to charge.
He could have sworn he’d remembered to charge it that morning, especially since it’d almost run out of battery after filming himself and Nikky in bed.
“Shit,” he hissed as he plugged the phone in, then navigated to the file where the video of the two of them was stored. He should have deleted it that morning, but he’d been too busy saying goodbye to Nikky and floating on the bubbles of happiness being with the man had given him.
He hesitated as the video played once he clicked on it.
The picture was surprisingly clear, and fuck, the two of them looked great together.
He knew he shouldn’t have, he knew he needed to delete it, but before he did, he had a seat on the sofa and let it play.
The charging cord reached far enough for him to watch with his phone plugged in.
Nikky would probably kill him for watching the two of them going at each other like they had.
Then again, Nikky would probably want to watch the video with him.
Watching turned into watching while holding his growing erection through his jeans, then watching while unzipping his jeans and stroking his cock.
All the while, Harry smirked and laughed at himself, shaking his head over what a dirty old man he’d become.
If it wasn’t for the fact that Nikky would definitely approve and get off on knowing what he was doing, he would have stopped.
It was the best porn wank he’d ever had.
He didn’t care about what he was doing in the video, he just loved watching Nikky enjoying himself.
And he’d definitely enjoyed himself. The proof was right there on the screen.
The phone had even managed to record a great shot of Nikky coming, although not everything was shown.
That was enough to push Harry over the edge. He came all over his hand with a satisfying burst of pleasure, then laughed at himself as the video and his orgasm ended.
“Unbelievable,” he snorted as he reached for several tissues from the box on the table beside the sofa to clean himself up.
Once that was done, he did what he should have done from the start and deleted the video. Something like that was far too dangerous to keep around.
The rest of the day passed in a happy haze of productivity.
Harry checked in on Nikky and was happy to hear that he was doing well, his manager was actually sticking up for him, and that he had plans with his friends for dinner.
He didn’t begrudge Drew Oberlin the time he would get to spend with Nikky at all.
Well, not much.
Even that made Harry laugh, which wasn’t like him at all. What had happened to the bitter one-hit wonder with a chip on his shoulder who thought the world owed him something? Not that it would be any great tragedy if that arsehole took a backseat for a while.
Since Nikky was busy with his friends, Harry had supper with Maggie and Laura. They teased him mercilessly about cradle-robbing, which Harry defended by insisting he wasn’t that old and Nikky wasn’t that young.
“He’s young enough,” Laura said. “We’ve met him, remember.”
“He’s certainly pretty,” Maggie said with a teasing smile. “Go on, show us all the photos you’ve taken of him, the more salacious the better.”
“I haven’t taken that many pictures,” Harry argued, heat infusing his face as he reached into his pocket for his phone…which was still warmer than it should be. “I certainly haven’t taken any NSFW pics.”
He had, but he’d wisely deleted those from his phone as well.
As he tapped to open his phone, he was surprised to find that the battery was down to fifteen percent.
“What the—” he muttered, then tapped into the systems app to see what had gone wrong.
He knew he’d plugged the phone in. He’d watched the video with the cord draped over his thigh.
The phone wasn’t that old. It shouldn’t have been losing its charge so fast.
“Something wrong?” Maggie asked.
“I don’t know,” Harry said, putting his phone down, unease spreading inside him. “I think my phone is acting up.”
“That’s not good,” Laura said, concerned as much as she could be for someone who didn’t have time for technology.