That Defining Moment (Golden Boys #3)

Chapter One

The Reverie was a gorgeous hotel, nestled into the green hills of Pai like someone had airlifted a chunk of the Maldives and dropped it into northern Thailand.

Lysander Huxley’s balcony looked out over rice paddies that glowed an offensively beautiful shade of green, so he jabbed the button on the wall panel until the blackout blinds hummed down over the balcony doors and he flopped face-first onto his bed to block out the world entirely.

He was supposed to be tipsy-tubing down the river with the Swedes.

Lysander had been absorbed into the group at the Groovy Bar on Wednesday — four enormous, Nordic blond men who ordered drinks by the bucket and treated Pai like a theme park.

Somewhere around their third bucket of warm Singha, Stanis had worked up the courage to invite Lysander along.

“Come have fun with us, Lysander,” he’d said, his big hand on the back of Lysander’s neck, thumb rubbing slow circles against his nape in a way that made his whole spine go liquid.

Lysander had agreed, because it had seemed like a brilliant idea at the time.

Floating down the river in a rubber ring with a bag of beer and a speaker blaring techno songs, nobody knowing or caring who TheoTheO was.

He’d ended up leaving the WhatsApp group thirty minutes before he should have left for the meet-up spot, because he couldn’t stomach the thought of being around Stanis.

Stanis was a six-foot-four, sun-gilded alpha who wouldn’t look out of place in a Paris Fashion Week runway show, and he’d spent the better part of the evening making it extremely clear that Lysander was welcome to climb him whenever the mood struck.

Three months ago, Lysander would’ve let Stanis crowd him into the back corridor of the Groovy Bar and taken the initiative of pulling Stanis’s cock out right there and then, and guiding it into himself.

The problem was that Stanis didn’t have a beard.

Which was a deranged reason to turn down a sure thing in paradise, except that thanks to Hamish McNally, he now had specific sensory data about what a beard felt like against his inner thighs while someone sucked him off, and he couldn’t go back to a smooth-cheeked Adonis because he’d been primed to seek out bearded, bespectacled documentarians.

Lysander rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling fan.

The blades turned in lazy circles, casting faint shadows that swept across the white plaster.

His mobile sat on the bedside table. It was half ten in the morning in Pai, which made it — he did the maths — half three in the afternoon in Melbourne.

Hamish would be in his edit suite, probably, headphones on, reviewing footage with a pen between his teeth and his battered pocket Moleskine open in front of him.

He could still feel it, even with Hamish six thousand kilometres away in Melbourne, the scratch of Hamish’s beard against the inside of his thigh.

The way it had tickled at first so that Lysander had laughed mid-blowjob.

Hamish had looked up at him from between his legs, his mouth wet, and instead of being offended he’d grinned and rubbed his bristly jaw deliberately against Lysander’s oversensitive cock, back and forth, until his laughter turned into a low moan.

Then he’d taken Lysander all the way down his throat, and held him there while Lysander’s thighs shook and every thought in his head dissolved into white static.

Lysander’s cock was half-hard against his thigh at the memory. Instead of letting his hand drop down to it immediately, he shucked off his pants and picked up his mobile, turning the camera on himself.

He propped the mobile against the bedside lamp and spent a full minute adjusting the angle.

The light from the overheads was wrong — too flat, washing him out — so he switched on the bathroom light and left the door ajar until a warm stripe fell across his stomach and the inside of one thigh.

That was much better. The Reverie’s white sheets were a good clean background, high contrast against his tanned skin.

Lysander shifted his hips up, bent one knee, and checked the preview screen. His cock curved against his stomach, flushed dark at the head, and below it was the wet gleam of slick. He tilted his mobile down until his arsehole was in frame, then he hit record.

“Need you, alpha. Just thinking about your mouth made me so fucking wet…” His voice came out breathy and sweet, pitched high.

He slid two fingers into himself, crooking them slightly so that his rim would cling to his knuckles on the pull-out.

“Oh, alpha, I miss your big thick cock.” He added a third finger, and his breath hitched for real, his hips rolling up into his own hand.

“My fingers are too small, alpha. I’m too small.

” He fucked himself with short, precise strokes, angling for the spot that made his thighs shake. “Need your knot. Need you to — fuck —”

He pulled his fingers free and held them up to the lens, spreading them apart so the camera caught the slick webbing between them. Omega creaminess, thick and pearlescent, stretching and catching the light before it broke and dripped down his wrist.

“Wish you could taste me right now, alpha…” he moaned.

He stopped recording, then he watched it back three times with a critical eye. That was the thing about having been OnlyFans’ top male omega creator for so many years, he couldn’t just put subpar content out into the world. Especially not for Hamish.

The lighting was gorgeous. His voice hit exactly the right register: desperate enough to make an alpha’s hindbrain light up. The slick shot at the end was inspired. This was the kind of content he’d have charged a premium for, and would have earned him tens of thousands in tips.

He typed out a message to Hamish:

miss you. my fingers couldn’t reach as far as your huge alpha cock

Then he attached the video and sent it off. He didn’t have to wait long for a response.

Three messages arrived in quick succession.

Lysander stretched out on the sheets and let himself enjoy the sensation of being desired before he picked up his mobile, because there was a particular pleasure in knowing that somewhere in Melbourne, Hamish McNally had just opened his video and had immediately dropped everything.

He tapped into the conversation with Hamish and frowned.

The first image was a close-up of something yellow and speckled with brown spots, pressed against tan corduroy.

For one lurching second, Lysander’s brain tried to make sense of it as an anatomical feature.

Something had happened to Hamish’s cock, some tropical disease he’d brought home from Thailand or horrific allergic reaction, and Lysander was already halfway to googling yellow spotted penis Australia when the shape resolved itself into a banana.

It was resting against Hamish’s corduroy-clad thigh, positioned in such a way that it resembled an erect curving penis. Lysander scrolled down to the next message, and then laughed so hard that he had to press his face into his pillow.

Hamish had taken a selfie holding the same banana up to his ear like a mobile. Call me, the text message urged, so Lysander did.

Hamish picked up on the second ring. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m buying the banana, now that I’ve had it down my trousers.”

“You’re selling yourself short with that,” Lysander said. “Significantly short, and you can trust me because I’m speaking from experience. You should have gone with a courgette, minimum.”

“Noted. I’ll aim more realistic next time and go for a butternut squash. Where are you?”

Lysander stretched out on his back, his mobile pressed to his ear, and closed his eyes. He could listen to Hamish read out an ingredients list with his unhurried Melbourne drawl for hours.

“I’m in bed,” he said. “Being a recluse. What about you?”

“Woolies,” Hamish said. “Picking up stuff for dinner. Reckon I’ll just grab a roast chook and make a wrap.” There was the distant shuffle of paper bags. “You? Any dinner plans?”

“Room service, I guess.”

“Room service?” Hamish’s voice lifted with genuine incredulity. “Lysander Huxley, ordering room service. The man who dragged me into a street stall in Chiang Rai at midnight because you needed to find out what pad kra pao jing jok was?”

“It was delicious.”

“I’m fairly sure you made me eat bat as well, which makes me feel vaguely criminal about not declaring that to Customs when I got home. I think that meant I broke all sorts of Aussie biosecurity laws, so cheers for that. Room service isn’t you.”

Lysander pressed his thumb into the corner of the pillowcase and traced the stitching. He could hear the bustle of the supermarket behind Hamish’s voice, the clacking of trolley wheels and someone’s kid shrieking about yoghurt, the whole mundane orchestra of an afternoon in Brunswick East.

“Things are different without you,” he said. “It’s not as fun.”

“Lysander,” Hamish said, his voice dropping to a private register.

“First of all, I need you to know that your video was incredibly hot. Genuinely spectacular. It was slightly unfortunate that I opened it while standing a few feet from a mother and her kids, but I had my AirPods in, so we’re all good.

” He chuckled, and the sound of it made Lysander’s chest ache.

“Next time, though, if you’re feeling lonely and you want to talk, just know that a simple call will do.

But also, and I must emphasise this, I will never say no to naughty videos from you.

Each one will go straight into my wank bank. ”

“You gonna make a deposit tonight?” Lysander asked.

“Multiple. Now, tell me about your day, Sander.”

So Lysander told him about the tipsy-tubing plans, the god-like Swedes, the way Stanis’s hand had felt on him, then the fact that he’d bailed thirty minutes before the meet-up and come back to the hotel to film himself for Hamish instead.

He left nothing out. Hamish never judged; he just asked a follow-up question.

“He sounds fit,” Hamish said at the end of it all.

“He’s like if you combined Alexander Skarsg?rd’s face with Gustaf’s body and Bill’s mouth.”

“I don’t know who any of those people are.”

“They’re brothers, Hamish. They’re Swedish, and they’re all devastatingly attractive in slightly different configurations. I need you to google them immediately.”

“I’m in Woolies holding a roast chicken and my banana.”

“Then put the chicken down and google them right now. The point is that Stanis is essentially a composite Skarsg?rd, which is about as good as it gets, genetically speaking.”

“Right. So then the problem with Stanis is…?”

“The problem is that he doesn’t have a beard, Hamish.”

There was a pause. “That’s very flattering,” Hamish said.

“It’s not flattery. It’s a genuine obstacle. I’ve been ruined for smooth faces and I’m holding you personally responsible.”

“I’ll add it to my IMDb page. Ruined a twenty-seven-year-old male omega for all other men due to tickly beard and butternut squash sized cock.

That’ll get the ratings up.” The self-checkout beeped its approval.

“What else did you do today besides standing up Scandinavian sex gods and sending me pornography?”

Lysander told him about Janet, the street cat who’d adopted him outside the 7-Eleven on his third day in Pai and now appeared at his ankles every evening.

She liked roti with condensed milk, which Lysander bought from the night market stall on the corner, and she tolerated being held only if Lysander kept completely still and didn’t try to stroke behind her ears.

“She sounds like every cat I’ve ever met,” Hamish said. “Deeply conditional with her love.”

“She’s teaching me boundaries.”

“God knows you need the practice.”

By the time they’d been talking for forty minutes, Lysander was smiling into his pillow.

“Right,” Hamish said. “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to get off that bed, put on something that isn’t pants, and go out for dinner.”

“I don’t want to go out for dinner.”

“I know you don’t. That’s why you’re going to. Go find Janet, stick her on your lap, and order yourself some gaeng hung lay. I won’t have you eating room service in a blacked out room like a depressed businessman.”

Lysander pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. “Fine.”

“Good. Go eat, Sander. I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.”

They hung up with no drawn-out goodbyes. There was just the click of the call ending and then the silence of an empty hotel room pressing back in around Lysander.

He immediately reached for his laptop. He balanced it on his knees and opened a browser tab. The Qantas homepage loaded with a photograph of the Sydney Opera House at sunset, and he typed Chiang Mai to Melbourne into the search bar.

He’d been in Thailand for nearly five months, and he’d spent the last two of those pretending that his restlessness was just because of his homesickness for London and his family.

Come find me in Melbourne when you’re done sunning yourself, Hamish had said at their hotel lobby, right before he was due to be picked up to be taken away to Chiang Mai airport.

Well, Lysander was done sunning himself.

He selected a business class seat on a flight departing in four days, typed in his card details, and hit confirm before he could talk himself out of it. The booking email arrived within seconds. QF014, Chiang Mai to Melbourne via Bangkok. Departing 14th March. Business Class. 1 passenger.

Lysander closed the laptop, dropped it onto the mattress beside him, and went to find Janet.