Page 3 of Fluttering Heart

“It was already here and you’re gonna enjoy it, okay?” Charlie says, clearly done with my shit. “You two go to your room now,” he says and looks down at the little envelope the nice lady at the counter gave him. “It’s room twelve twenty-one. Be at the arena at five, Gab set everything up for you guys. I’ll send you the location of the entrance you’re gonna use and we’ll have dinner and figure out what to do after, okay?” He looks at me and nods down at Beau. “Keep him out of trouble.”

“Yeah, I’ll try,” I tell him with a nod, then force myself to smile brightly at my twin when Charlie walks away. “Let’s go up.”

* * *

I do manageto keep Beau out of trouble all day and dare I say he even enjoys himself at the game. He and Gab spend most of the game talking about Beau’s unfortunate situation, and then she encourages him to go eat his feelings.

Charlie walks over to us after his win, with Nikolay in tow, and tells us he’s coming out with us. “Don’t ask,” he warns Beau, when he opens his mouth with what I’m sure is a protest ready to go.

“We are going out,” Santa—as he commanded us to call him—calls out from the back seat once we’re in the ridiculously awesome G-Wagon. “Benny has a boyfriend who owns a club in Winner Resort. We go there after dinner and Beau can drown his sorrows.”

I don’t know about that, but I keep my mouth shut.

We do manage to have a relatively drama-free dinner, mostly catching Charlie up on everything going on in Crushville. He and Santa seem to be getting along a lot better than they did the last time I saw them, but they’re... weird. They don’t really talk to each other much, but they seem to be joined at the hip, even going to the bathroom together, which I thought was only a women’s ritual.

We do end up going to Lure, a gay club where Santa declares Beau will get a lot of attention but not be tempted to get over Lu by getting under someone else. I’m surprised by the insightfulness of the Russian until two giant bottles of top-shelf Vodka arrive at our table and he starts drinking and... doesn’t stop.

His accent disappears more and more with every drink, and he gets even funnier. I’m shit-faced at two in the morning when Beau declares he’s going to sleep and I see no problem with hanging out with Charlie and Santa a while longer.

I am at a gay club after all, and the view is spectacular.

Charlie won’t let me go out to dance at around three-thirty in the morning, when he sees my intentions. Instead, he drags us all out of the club, and pushes me out of the elevator on the twelfth floor with a stern look on his face.

“Take care of Beau.”

I grumble all the way to the bedroom door, and when I see the expected one-two-one-two, I realize I never grabbed the second key from the stupid envelope. And so, with a lot of regret and knowing I’m going to earn the slap over the head that’s waiting for me, I start knocking on the door.

Jesus, Beau’s gonna kill me.

TWO

Lou Yates

“Open up, Beau,”comes a deep voice from the hallway. It takes my groggy mind more than a few minutes to realize that whoever the man is outside, he’s knocking onmydoor.

After the day I’ve had, after theweekI’ve had, I seriously can’t believe that this is my life. That on what’s supposed to be a kind of vacation, I get woken up at—I reach over to the nightstand and check the time on my phone—at four in the fudging morning by a stranger looking for theirbeau.

I throw the covers away and stalk to the door, yanking it open only to be frozen in place when two almost-black eyes land on me.

The man looks like an Italian god, like the model who’s in all those cologne ads. His thin lips tip up slowly in a smile that I imagine he wants to be seductive—and dammit, it works—and his eyes trail down my pajama-clad frame, setting my body on fire.

“C-can I help you?” I hate myself for the tiny stutter, but I need to stand my ground. I can’t let myself be swept away by another pretty face like I have too many damn times before.

The Italian god opens his mouth only to slap a hand over it the next second. His eyes open in panic and he’s shoving the door and running into my bathroom like his ass is on fire.

The bathroom door bangs behind him and I see the light come on from the slit under the door. I stand there, frozen once more, and without a clue what the hell just happened.

Then, the awful sound of retching comes from the other side and I sigh. It figures that with my distaste for intoxicated people, fate would drop one right on my doorstep and now in my bathroom.

What the hell am I supposed to do now?

He could be a murderer, no matter how hot he is. Hot people can be killers too. And fuck, he’s probably going to leave the bathroom a mess.

I close the door to the room and walk over to my tiny sitting room. Well, right now all I can do is wait and see what happens I guess.

I take one of the water bottles I bought the other day—because I’m not paying for the insanely expensive bottles in the mini fridge—and put it right outside the bathroom on the floor.

“I put some water outside so you can take it when you’re done,” I call out through the door. I’m hoping that will not only incentivize the stranger to clean up, but also get him to get a move on. I stand there for a moment longer, trying to hear what’s happening, but step back when the sound of the man puking rings out once more.

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