Page 5 of Tough Guy (Game Changers #3)

Fabian blinked awake and had to stifle a groan when he saw who he was snuggled up against.

All of the events of the previous evening came flooding back.

Fabian having a wonderful time at Ian’s Halloween party.

Fabian running into Claude at the party.

Claude looking so fucking good in a slim-cut dark denim shirt and tight black jeans, because Claude was too cool for costumes.

Claude’s breath tickling Fabian’s ear when he leaned in to tell him how much he missed him, his Québécois accent sounding a whole lot less ridiculous than when Tarek did his impression of it.

Fabian’s hand slipping into Claude’s, as if he had no control over it.

And then Claude coming home with him, back to the apartment that, while shitty, Fabian didn’t have to share with anyone.

He often felt that Claude mostly liked him because he had a place to himself.

They’d made out forever on Fabian’s bed, and Claude had told him that he missed him.

In the moment, that had sounded great. It had sounded great again later when Claude had been fucking him.

But now...

Fabian shifted carefully away from Claude, not wanting to wake him. Or maybe he should wake him so Claude would leave.

Fabian studied Claude’s face. When he was sleeping instead of talking, Claude was...

Oh god, he was pretty. His silky brown hair was covering the eye that wasn’t hidden by the pillow, and his full lips were parted. Claude’s lips were...well, they were distracting.

He had an artist’s body, slim to the point of almost appearing malnourished. His skin was pale, like a young, sexy vampire. And he may as well have been one because Fabian certainly seemed to be ensnared by him.

Fabian grabbed his phone from the nightstand. The screen was full of missed texts from Vanessa.

I saw you leave the party with Claude.

Did you go home with Claude???

DID YOU SLEEP WITH CLAUDE???

FABIAN! ARE YOU HAVING SEX WITH CLAUDE RIGHT NOW???

Stop having sex with Claude, Fabian. Right now.

Goddammit.

We are TALKING ABOUT THIS at Bargain Brunch. Don’t bring Claude.

Fine. You can bring him. But he’s not allowed to talk. Make this CLEAR.

Fabian snorted at that last one, which caused Claude to stir awake.

“Fuck,” Claude croaked. “What time is it?”

“Nine thirty,” Fabian said.

Claude made a face like the hour of nine o’clock was the grossest thing in the world. Fabian wanted him gone. He wanted to erase this entire bad decision.

“It’s Bargain Brunch day,” Fabian said. “You can come if you want.”

“God no.”

“Well, I’m leaving soon, so...”

“Fine.” Claude made a whole production of hauling himself out of bed and into the bathroom. When he came back, he started aggressively searching for his clothes. “Fuck, where are my smokes?”

“I don’t know, but you’re not smoking them in here.”

Claude snatched his jeans off the floor. “I know.” He glanced around. “I had a jacket.”

“On the chair,” Fabian said helpfully. He wanted Claude to leave so he could take a shower. He was more than ready to wash the sins—and residual glitter—of last night away.

Claude stopped grumpily throwing his clothes on and reached for Fabian. Fabian sighed, and stepped into his embrace. “We can keep doing this,” Claude said in that infuriatingly sexy voice. “It can just be casual.”

“I can’t keep doing this,” Fabian said. “It isn’t what I want. We have to stop.”

“You say that, but...”

He shook his head. “I mean it. I’ll see you around, all right?”

Claude stepped back, and gave him an obnoxious, knowing grin. “I am sure you will.”

Fabian cursed himself after Claude shut the door behind him.

He had finally broken things off for good with Claude, and then he’d run into Ryan goddamned Price of all fucking people.

Like, what the fuck, universe? Hi, Fabian.

Remember that hockey player you were obsessed with when you were seventeen?

Well, here he is! And he’s a giant, sexy lumberjack wet dream now!

Not that seeing Ryan had anything to do with sleeping with Claude again.

Okay, Fabian pledged to himself as he stepped into the dingy shower stall, no more Claude. No more thinking about Ryan Price. Just music, and normal, healthy things from now on.

Fabian’s friends had a semi-regular Sunday tradition that they affectionately called Bargain Brunch.

The three major components were: frozen waffles, cheap skin masks from the drugstore, and gossip.

Everyone brought a topping that they thought would elevate the frozen waffles to haute cuisine.

After the week Fabian had been having, friends and facials were exactly what the doctor ordered.

He hit the buzzer on the door to an apartment that was next to the door for a vape shop and heard footsteps bounding down the stairs immediately. When the door opened, he was greeted by a very enthusiastic Vanessa.

“Fabian! Yay!” she said, and threw her arms around him.

Fabian laughed and hugged her back. “Miss me since last night?”

“You smell like Claude.”

“Fuck off. No I don’t.”

“You do. You smell like cigarettes and condescension.”

“Shut up.”

Bargain Brunch was hosted by Vanessa, Marcus, and Tarek, who lived platonically together in a two-bedroom apartment they had converted into a three-bedroom apartment.

Converted was perhaps too fancy a word for it: the living room was also Marcus’s bedroom.

Vanessa led Fabian up the stairs and through the front door that opened directly into the living room/Marcus’s bedroom.

Fabian slid his backpack off as he made his way to the futon where Marcus and Tarek were both sitting already.

“What did you bring?” Tarek asked.

“Pears.”

“And...”

Fabian pulled four thin packets out of his backpack. “Face masks! I have clay, avocado, sea kelp, and, uh...oh, grapefruit.” He spread them out on the coffee table like playing cards.

“What does sea kelp do?” Marcus asked.

“Moisturizes, nutrifies, and makes you glow like Zendaya,” Fabian said, with all the authority of someone who worked in the cosmetics section of a Savers Drug Mart.

“Sold.” Marcus leaned forward and snatched the sea kelp mask. He really didn’t need any help glowing; his dark skin was flawless.

Vanessa emerged from the kitchenette with four mugs, which she lined up on the coffee table. Marcus jumped up and went to the fridge to retrieve a container of orange juice, and a chilled bottle of Baby Duck Canadian “champagne.”

“The kettle is boiling for tea and coffee,” Vanessa said. She dropped into the worn-out armchair opposite the futon, draping one leg over the arm. “Mimosa me, Marcus.”

Marcus carefully filled the mugs with Baby Duck and orange juice, and distributed them. Fabian had barely taken a sip before Vanessa said, “I can’t believe you fucked Claude again.”

Fabian narrowed his eyes at her. “Moment of weakness,” he grumbled.

“I thought he was moving back to Montreal,” Tarek said.

“Well, he hasn’t yet. Obviously. And every time I see him I just...forget why he sucks.”

“I could make you a list,” Vanessa offered helpfully. “And you could carry it around with you.”

“That’s okay.”

“One!” she said, ignoring him. “He has absolutely no interest in you or anything you do.”

“He...is interested in me. Sometimes.”

“Two,” Marcus piped up. “He hates Bargain Brunch.”

Fabian pressed his lips together to keep himself from smiling.

“Three,” said Tarek. “He’s a snob.”

“All right, I get it.”

“Four.” Marcus again. “He is a filmmaker who is bad at making films.”

Fabian had to swallow his sip of mimosa quickly to stop himself from doing a spit-take.

“Five,” Vanessa said. “He complains when food isn’t organic, but he smokes cigarettes.”

Fabian was laughing now. He couldn’t help it. “Shut up. I know he’s awful, all right? He’s just...there. And I kind of needed someone last night.”

Vanessa stopped teasing him. “What’s wrong, babe?”

“Nothing really. I’m just burnt out, a little. I took some extra shifts at the drugstore this week, and I’ve been trying to finish some new songs. And get ready for the fundraiser show I’m doing this Saturday.”

“Oh, right! I’ll be there for sure,” Vanessa said. “I don’t work on Saturday at all!” She worked at a very cool lesbian-owned sex toy store in the Village, only a couple of blocks away from her apartment.

“I’m working that night,” Marcus said. “Sorry.” That was no surprise; he was a bartender at Force, the biggest gay nightclub in town.

“No problem.”

“I can go,” Tarek said. He was the only one of the four of them who had a nine-to-five job. He worked as an office assistant for an immigration services organization.

“Cool. It’s a good lineup.”

“Yeah, but you’re the one I’m going to see,” Tarek said.

“He’s the one everyone is going to see,” Vanessa said.

“As if,” Fabian said. He took a sip of mimosa from his tacky Niagara Falls souvenir mug. “I think I might debut a new song at the show.”

“Yay!” Vanessa said. “Oh my god, is it so beautiful? Am I going to cry?”

“Probably.”

“I’m totally going to cry. I still cry whenever you play ‘Ravine.’”

“That song is eight years old, Van.”

“Every. Time.”

Later, after their waffles were eaten, and the Baby Duck bottle was empty, the four friends lounged around with skin masks on their faces.

“I know I ask this every week,” Tarek said, “but is it supposed to burn this much?”

“Yes,” Fabian said. “It burns because your face sucks. It has to work extra hard to fix it.”

Tarek flipped him off.

“Oh!” Vanessa said suddenly. “I have something for you, Fabian.” She grabbed her messenger bag from the floor. It was covered in patches and buttons that loudly identified her as the queer, sex-positive feminist that she was.

“Does it vibrate?” As well as working at a sex shop, Vanessa also had a reasonably popular sex toy review blog. It wasn’t unusual for her coerce her friends into being product testers.

“Honey, it does so much more than that.” She produced a shiny purple box from her bag and handed it to him. “Be sure to tell me what you think.”

“Do I have to?” Fabian peeled his mask off, crumpled it into a ball, and set it on his empty waffle plate.

“Come on. I don’t have time to review all of these toys myself! And it’s not like I have a prostate!”

“You get bullet points,” he said. “If I even use the thing.”

“You’ll use it. It does all the stuff. And it’s purple!”

“Does that...make it better?”

“It makes it cuter. Be a better lover than Claude, probably.”

Fabian glared at her.

“More pleasant to talk to, for sure,” she added, grinning. “Better Instagram posts.”

“Anyway,” Fabian said, desperate to change the subject to anything else. “How was work last night, Marcus?”

He rolled his eyes dramatically. “Exhausting. I hate it when Halloween is a Thursday because it turns it into a week-long festival. The club was packed with barely legal kids in devil horns being sloppy all over the place. I was so done when we finally closed I couldn’t even be bothered to go home with the Cillian Murphy-looking guy who’d been flirting with me all night. ”

“Tragic,” Fabian said.

“No one looks like Cillian Murphy except Cillian Murphy, but okay,” added Tarek.

“He was hot, he was into me, I turned him down.” Marcus glowered at them. “Now I’m eating waffles with you assholes instead of sharing a morning shower with Cillian-light.”

“Mm,” Tarek said. “I was going to fuck Nick Jonas last night but I didn’t want to.”

“Fuck. You,” Marcus said. But he was laughing.

Fabian almost mentioned running into Ryan to his friends, but it was too confusing to explain and too insignificant to bother with. He’d run into someone he hadn’t seen in over a decade, and now he would probably never see him again. The end.

It’s not like he’d been thinking about Ryan since running into him. It’s not like he had been secretly looking for him whenever he was walking around the Village.

God. Enough. Ryan was a hockey player. He wore one of those blue jerseys Fabian hated so much to work. And Fabian didn’t need any distractions right now, no matter how tall they were, or how adorable their smile was.

So he thanked his friends for yet another lovely time, grabbed his bag—now heavier, thanks to the dildo—and headed home to hopefully lose himself in music.

And, he supposed, if he got bored, he had a new toy to play with.