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Flynn

T here was a guy eye-fucking me from across the street, and he wasn’t even pretending to be subtle about it.

Lounging against the brick wall of Wilde Card’s smoking garden, he was all sharp angles and dark leather, watching me like a starved wolf tracking a wounded deer.

The brutal October wind whipped between the buildings, carrying the thrum of music each time the bar door swung open, but he didn’t seem bothered by the cold.

Conversely, I stood shivering in my new jumper. I’d purchased it with my first paycheck—gorgeously soft, a crocheted criss-cross of tawny wool with holes in, revealing a pattern of my bare, pale skin. Extremely risqué, for me.

But tonight was about change, about transforming from someone who tiptoed around his own town, afraid to be seen, to someone who wanted to be seen.

I checked my phone again. 21:47. No new messages from Emma.

Perfect. Seventeen minutes late and counting, leaving me to hover alone on this shadowy corner.

The neon signs above the bar painted everything in alternating splashes of pink and blue, including the growing queue of people waiting to get inside.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Should I message her again? No. Three texts in fifteen minutes was already edging into desperate territory.

My phone vibrated with an incoming call. Not Emma, but Tom. My stomach twisted into familiar knots—guilt, anger, longing—all the feelings I’d been running from. I jabbed the reject button before I could change my mind, shoving the phone deep into my pocket as if I could bury the past along with it.

I glanced up. Mystery man hadn’t moved, but his head was tilted now, a slight smile playing at the corners of his mouth. The pink light caught the sharp line of his jaw, the leather jacket stretched across broad shoulders. A silver chain glinted at his throat. What did he want from me?

This was exactly why I’d wanted Emma here. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing.

Earlier, we got talking at the end of our shift at the bakery, and I let slip that I’d lived in London for three weeks without a single night out.

She’d flicked her dirty drying towel at my head and begged me to come to her favourite gay bar that evening.

Of course, I jumped at the chance—anything was better than another night alone in my shoebox room, hiding from my weird new housemates.

To have finally made a “friend,” even if it was the loosest definition of one.

And the chance to potentially hook up with some random guy. Random hot guy. Random hot nice guy. Hopefully.

21:48. Still nothing. Was Emma coming? She didn’t seem the type to bail without warning…

The top of my phone burst into life with an incoming message, and my heart lifted.

Tom

If you’re not going to answer my calls, at least reply to my messages. Or your sister’s. This isn’t fucking funny. Everyone is so worried.

And there went my heart, free-falling back down into oblivion, painfully squeezing itself for good measure. Katie’s messages were the hardest to ignore—each one a reminder of how I’d abandoned the sister who’d helped raise me after Dad died.

I quickly swiped Tom’s message away, but the damage was done. I could almost feel the rough wood of the pier beneath my hands from that night, when Tom had casually announced he was leaving for the yachting circuit.

Escaping Braymore.

Leaving me behind.

One impulsive moment on that beach had shattered a decade of friendship. I’d known Tom was straight, had spent years carefully guarding my feelings, until that final night when everything fell apart.

The kiss had been a mistake—a desperate, last-ditch attempt to make him understand what he meant to me.

Everyone is so worried.

The worst part wasn’t even leaving—it was knowing I’d abandoned Katie and my mother to deal with the aftermath.

They’d supported me through everything, and how had I repaid them?

By disappearing in the middle of the night like a coward, leaving them to sort out the mess of Seabreeze Sailing in the wake of my grandfather’s death.

I wish they could have seen that staying would have killed me slowly—crushed under the weight of family legacy, the business I never wanted, the suffocating expectations. Every morning I’d wake up to another piece of myself drowning in that endless sea.

I couldn’t go back. Not yet. Not when the mere thought of those narrow streets and watchful eyes made my chest constrict, when every memory of that beach felt like another anchor trying to drag me under.

That didn’t make the guilt any easier to bear. Tom almost undoubtedly thought I’d fled from Braymore that night because he’d rejected me, but that wasn’t the truth. Not the whole truth, anyway.

It was what happened an hour later with Connor that was the nail in the coffin.

Before my thoughts could spiral into absolute oblivion, I looked up again. That man had shifted position. Both hands in his pockets now, but still watching. Still smiling that knowing little smile that made my stomach flip .

I couldn’t help it—stealing repeated glances at the gorgeous stranger who’d apparently decided I was the most interesting thing on this entire street. Though, to be fair, my competition was a lamppost.

Several other guys had noticed him, standing there alone—not surprising, given that he was six feet worth of pure hotness. But he seemed hellbent on ignoring them to stare at me.

I checked behind my shoulder.

Nope.

Nothing.

Should I… smile? Wave? Run for the hills?

Fuck it.

Back home, I was known for my stubbornness. Like a tide against a cliff face , my grandfather often said, when my freezing stiff fingers fumbled with the last knot. Katie called it infuriating, my sheer bloody-minded persistence.

Besides, I most certainly didn’t come out tonight wearing this cute-as-fuck jumper just to stand on a roadside.

Twenty-five years old and still a virgin—that’s what happens when you spend your youth in a tiny tourist town where everyone knows your business. But London was different. Here, I could finally be myself. Tonight was about new beginnings, about finally living my life on my terms.

My feet carried me across the road before my brain could catch up.

A car passed in front of me, and when I looked back into the smoking garden, the man had disappeared inside.

I joined the queue, the memory of that stranger’s gaze still following me, prickling across my skin like static electricity.

A hen party laughed ahead of me, while theatre performers chatted behind.

Everyone seemed to be part of a group. A team. Something.

And here was me all alone, Billy No Mates .

I shrank further into my jumper. What was I even doing here? Emma clearly wasn’t coming. I should just go back to the flat, take a long hot shower until the water ran out, pretend tonight never happened—

The bouncer waved me forward. Though butterflies exploded in my gut, I flashed my ID, paid the charge, and stepped into another world.

Wilde Card spread before me in a sprawling maze of levels and alcoves. Rainbow strobe lights swept across a dance floor that pulsed with a sea of brightly coloured bodies surging and swelling as one, a tide of laughter and joy.

The crowd here dwarfed anything I’d seen back in Braymore, even when the tourists descended en masse to the historic seaside town, often searching for their Irish roots.

But this—hundreds of strangers pressed together, each caught in their own private moment—made me feel more alone than any empty street back home ever had.

Circular booths lined the walls, upholstered in deep-purple velvet. To my left, the bar stretched the entire length of the wall. Three bartenders danced between stations. One of them—tall, with close-cropped, dyed silver hair—caught my eye and winked.

Suddenly the air tasted of sweat, artificial fog, and… possibility .

I wasn’t sure what I’d imagined a gay bar would be like inside, but watching everyone move so freely, so goddamn comfortably in their own skin…

It made my chest ache with something between envy and hope.

The back of my neck prickled, and I knew—I just knew —it was the staring, smoking-hot dude before I even turned around.

I spun, and there he was. Close. Way, way too close.

I stumbled backwards, catching my foot on absolutely nothing. His hand shot out, steadying my arm, and every nerve ending in my body decided to focus on that single point of contact. Long fingers wrapped around me, warm through the gaps in my jumper.

Up close, he was beyond ridiculously attractive.

I almost wanted to snap a picture for evidence.

Thick dark hair fell across one eye in an artful sweep.

A thin scar curved up from the corner of his mouth, somehow making him even more attractive, the bastard.

And his eyes… In this light, they weren’t just dark; they were black . No distinction between iris and pupil.

Those dark eyes reminded me of the deep, unfathomable ocean—pulling at me like the tides ever seeking to claim what lay upon the shore.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Uhh…” What the fuck did anyone say to that? “Thanks?”

He stepped closer, and I caught a whiff of something earthy. “What are you drinking?”

An alarm bell went off at the back of my head—what if this guy spiked my drink?

Stop that.

Here was an incredibly attractive guy who had chosen me , out of everyone in this bar, to flirt with—and I was going to ruin it with paranoia.

Heart hammering, I batted my eyelashes at him. “Whatever you want to buy me,” I purred, aiming for a semi-seductive voice but achieving something closer to a seagull with laryngitis.

Yet my boldness earned me a raised eyebrow and a slight widening of that crooked smile. He looked me up and down, gaze lingering on the patches of exposed skin. “You look like a whiskey sour sort of guy.”

“Uhh… why not?” I said, too brightly, digging my nails into my palms.

“What’s your name, handsome?”

“Flynn.”