Page 10 of Coaching Prince Charming

At the end of the day, I returned to the soulless apartment to mix myself a drink. It wasn’t a cocktail I’d ever tried to make before, but it would do. Based on whiskey and with a few similar smoky flavors and a coffee bean, it wasn’t my favorite. I swiped through my notifications while sitting on a tall chair and leaning against the kitchen island’s counter. The subtle lights in the room were comforting to my eyes, but the blinding blue light of the screen caused a throb of headache in the front of my skull.

One of the notifications was the damned Grindr ping from this morning. Some random guy with a profile as empty of personal information as mine had dropped me a photo that I shouldn’t have opened. Rolling my eyes, I blocked the guy and scrolled around. The red dot indicating visitors made me tap on it instinctively, and I scrolled through the profiles that had checked me out. Not that there was anything to look at here. Instead of any dirty or creative nickname, my profile simply displayed my age, height, and weight. I debated removing the latter two because they were pointless identifiers to me. Superficial decisions about not dating anyone under six feet or of a certain weight were the fastest way to bore me to death and kill the conversation. Then again, I wasn’t dating anyone, so I couldn’t claim to be the authority on how people should do it.

I just knew I didn’t care for people who were exclusive about something so irrelevant.

I stopped scrolling and almost choked on a sip of my shitty attempt at a new hobby. My hand jerked away from the phone like it was a venomous viper. I stared at the square picture of a visitor to my profile and counted the hours to get the time stamp.

It was Carter.

Without opening his profile at all, I saw his head and torso photographed in front of a mirror. He had that cheeky grin of his and a daring look in his eyes as if to tempt me to hit him up. Not me, exactly, but the visitors. And he had looked at my profile sixteen hours ago, around when we had been in the same gym. Just the two of us.

My heart pounded, and my mouth burned from whiskey. He could pick me out even if the gym had been brimming with college students. Thirty-eight years old, six foot four, a hundred and ninety pounds. God dammit. I was a tragically stupid man. Had I seriously thought those numbers wouldn’t be enough for someone who knew me to put the pieces together? Besides, we had been the only two people in the locker room and the entire gym, aside from the girl who worked at the desk and was unlikely to pass herself as a middle-aged man on a gay hookup app. Simply seeing that I was ten feet away from him would have been enough for Carter to identify me.

Breathe, I snapped at myself. It was hard to obey that simple command when my chest collapsed. As if a piano dropped on my head, I was completely stunned.

Before I could think about it, I tapped on Carter’s profile, forced myself not to hesitate to look at the large gallery of images he had posted, and blocked him immediately. I would not look at a student of mine. Not even if he was the most attractive person I had ever seen. And especially not since his visit to my profile obviously only meant he had discovered the truth about me.

I walked my mind back to the drills. The grins he shot me between his turns were nothing unusual. He hadn’t dropped any hints that he knew.

Even so, I didn’t want to attract his attention. If he looked for me here, he wouldn’t find me. With time, he would begin to doubt if it had even been me. But just to be sure, I removed the remaining information from my profile.

I’d had a lifetime of hooking up discreetly and protecting my name and brand from the truth that would lose me far too many fans.

Envy glimmered deep in me. It soured my insides. These boys were lucky. I was happy for them. I was. But twenty years ago, I couldn’t have imagined being so free with kissing a guy in front of a crowd or, God forbid, posting my half-nude photos on a hookup app without an attempt to hide my identity.

Carter should have been smarter than this. There were nasty people out there who’d find a way to use this to embarrass him and belittle him, hinder his rise to stardom, and hurt his father. No, not the last one, I scolded myself. Nobody should change how they live to suit their parents.

But he still needed to be careful.

He was young and beautiful. He had the best years still ahead of him. If he wasn’t careful, he could make a blunder with the wrong person. He risked not just his career or reputation but his health and his mental well-being.

And I was in no place to give him advice. Not only would I not reveal to him that he’d discovered the truth, but I was an aging closet case who was in no position to lecture anyone. I’d let my life run me over. What were my words worth to someone who was living his life on his own terms?

FOUR

Carter

He knew that I knew.

My ears had been ringing all day after his naughty little Grindr alert. That rolling little sound of a new message was all too familiar to my ears. Hearing it from the locker room as I left Nate behind felt like getting slammed with a fire extinguisher in the back of my head. I had nearly lost my step and fallen down face-first when Nate’s message arrived.

By the time I had climbed upstairs to where the cardio equipment was lined up for use, my phone had been in my hand, and the nearest profile in my normally desired age range was an empty one with just enough info to guarantee that my suspicion was correct.

Nate Partridge was on Grindr.

And he had blocked me an hour ago.

Maybe he deleted his account, I thought fleetingly but decided it was probably the former. Not that I would have hit him up on a hookup site. Screw that. I hated the culture on the app, but having it in a new city was as good a way to dip my toe in as any.

For the better part of the day, the idea that Nate was hooking up with random men off an app was too big and thorny to fit inside my head. Not to mention the blazing jealousy that threatened to turn me into a pile of ash.

Nate Partridge, the world’s sexiest man in 2021, as well as three more times in the past, was gay. And he was sleeping around with guys in our area. And none of those guys was me.

I kicked the comforter off my body and punched the pillow to adjust it under my head. Anger boiled in me before I could let some cold reason calm me down.

Luckily, Ron was downstairs with a few of the other guys, and I could throw my tantrum in peace.

If I somehow turned off the rage at the obvious injustice of him not even bothering to check me out when I was all but naked two feet in front of him — and don’t get me started on the way he ran away when I asked him to feel my pecs! It wasn’t even a sexual proposition — I could see how it all made sense. The most desirable bachelor who had never been in a relationship media reported on turning out to be secretly gay was no big reveal. Sure, he’d had dates for big events, but he’d rarely been seen with the same woman more than once or twice. For a short time, reports swirled around that he was a playboy, but Nate stopped taking girls to heavily publicized events. Especially after he had once been spotted with his former sister-in-law and nephew. Stories of a secret relationship with his brother’s ex hit the headlines, and Nate went out of his way to squash that gossip.

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