The waiting room of Dr. Schwinghammer’s surgery looked more like a spa than a hospital. It was decorated entirely in uniform, pristine white; even the laminate flooring underfoot was a pale shade of grey. Sebastian waited uneasily in one of the room’s low-slung sofas and tried to ignore the repeated glances of the reception staff.
The surgery occupied the second floor of a commercial office block at the fringes of Marbella’s city centre. The front desk at the Serenidad had called a car to take them into the city; its route passed along the southern edge of Old Town, with the lush jungle of Alameda Park along one side and a long, towering row of hotels, shops and restaurants on the other. Shortly after their arrival, just before 0700, a nurse had come to collect Jay. They’d disappeared into the inner halls of the surgery, leaving Sebastian at loose ends for the next four hours.
He’d had breakfast nearby, once the restaurants opened. Then he’d wandered Old Town for a while, thoroughly enjoying the sunshine while he made his way through narrow cobbled streets and historic, whitewashed buildings. He’d never been to Marbella before; his previous holidays had been in Ibiza and Barcelona, and his only other visit to the Costa del Sol involved a covert boat ride by night across the Strait of Gibraltar into Morocco.
Sebastian made his way back to the surgery around 1100, and had been waiting ever since.
By his estimate, Jay would be out of the operating room by now. The receptionists weren’t offering any hints; they couldn’t, since Sebastian wasn’t family. Which left Sebastian waiting to be fetched, and worrying.
“Sebastian?”
A nurse in canary-yellow scrubs had emerged from the doors that led to the inner rooms of the surgery. She approached with the smile of someone for whom smiling was part of the job; a badge clipped to the front pocket of her scrub top said her name was Celeste.
“Jay’s awake now,” she said. “Would you like to see him?”
Sebastian nodded; he didn’t trust his voice at the moment.
Celeste led him down the surgery’s inner halls toward the recovery rooms. She paused outside one of the doors, said, “wait here,” and stepped inside.
“Jay,” he heard her say. “Your boyfriend is here.”
Jay, groggy and confused, replied: “My what?”
Sebastian allowed himself a quiet laugh. Celeste reappeared and motioned for Sebastian to enter the room.
Jay was sitting upright, the top half of the bed folded up to support him. He was wearing a medical binder; from what he’d told Sebastian, it was meant to keep the swelling down and encourage his chest muscles to heal properly. There were two plastic bulbs—surgical drains—clipped to the bottom of the binder, attached to long tubes that emerged from a pair of small incisions under his arms.
At the sight of Sebastian, Jay’s face split into an uncharacteristically wide smile. “Hi.”
Sebastian couldn’t help but smile back. “Hi.”
Jay’s clothes were folded on a chair next to the bed. He’d worn a shirt that buttoned up in the front, and packed more like it for the trip; he wouldn’t be able to lift his arms much for the next few weeks. Sebastian carefully moved the bundle to the foot of the bed and settled in the chair. “How do you feel?”
“Like somebody cut my tits off.”
There was a quickly-suppressed snort of laughter from Celeste’s end of the room.
Despite the lingering anaesthesia, Jay was restless—shifting his weight against the bed, his knees moving under the blanket they’d draped over him.
“Ready to get out of here?” Sebastian guessed.
“God, yes,” Jay replied.
Sebastian kept close to Jay through the ride back to the hotel. He’d been relentlessly lively as they left the surgery, but that energy faded quickly; now, as they entered the lobby of the Serenidad, he looked about to fall over.
The security guard on duty wasn’t the same one that had been here when Jay and Sebastian checked in, but he was of the same type: fit and fifty going on sixty, watching the comings and goings of the hotel with the air of someone who not only tolerated monotony but welcomed it. This one had a faded, blurry ace of clubs tattooed on his forearm and a collapsible baton hanging from his belt.
Ahead of them, the inner doors of the lobby opened to reveal Mr. Tate, on his way out. As he passed, his shoulder carelessly clipped Jay’s. Jay hissed in a pained breath through his teeth as the impact jostled his chest.
Sebastian reacted on instinct, spinning on his heel with a barked, “Oi!”
Tate’s steps slowed; he turned to face Sebastian, tipping his chin back with a challenging look in his eye. Sebastian met his gaze with a flat, unflinching glare. Tate’s brow furrowed a bit as he sized Sebastian up and quickly realised this confrontation might not go his way.
Then there was a hand on Sebastian’s arm. “Don’t.” Jay’s voice was a low mumble as he tugged Sebastian back, away from Tate. “Don’t do that.” His shoulders were tight, drawn in close; his head was tucked down, avoiding eye contact.
With a dismissive huff, Tate turned back around and strode away across the lobby.
Jay woke slowly as pain crept in at the edges of his awareness. He groaned low in his throat, shifting against the pillows he’d propped up to make sure he didn’t roll onto his side in the night. There was a powerful ache deep in his chest, pounding through his core in time with his pulse.
Without thinking, he braced his arms against the bed and attempted to sit up. The pain spiked, fresh and sharp; Jay gasped out a quiet, “Fuck!” and collapsed into his nest of pillows.
He’d spent most of the day in the room, drifting in and out of restless sleep. Either the anaesthesia had overstayed its welcome or his body was burning all its energy to heal; either way, he’d slept right through dinner into the evening. And now it was the middle of the night, and he was wide awake.
Moran was here, asleep next to him; so far, Jay’s pained flailing hadn’t disturbed him. If Jay moved closer, he might wake up—might put his arms around him, press in close and do his best to comfort him through the pain.
Which was stupid and needy and ridiculous. Jay rolled carefully onto his side and eased out of the bed.
Dr. Schwinghammer told Jay to take ibuprofen for any pain, so he had—and now he was at the maximum safe dose and still hurting, and couldn’t take any more for at least a few hours. And there was no way he’d get back to sleep until his chest stopped aching.
Jay stumbled to the sofa, crashing down next to where he’d left his laptop. The screen was obscenely bright in the dark of the room; he grunted and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment.
He hadn’t had much chance to check his feeds since arriving in Marbella. There was plenty to sift through, but he was in no state to process most of it. Fingers moving automatically, he instead pulled up the list of Wi-Fi networks in range.
The laptop was already connected to the guest Wi-Fi, but there was a second, locked network on the list. The Serenidad was a modern establishment: every computer, security camera, and payment terminal needed an internet connection to work properly, and a secure one at that.
It took minimal effort to break in. All the money in this place, and none of it spent on digital security.
Idle curiosity drove Jay to bring up a list of every device on the network. It wasn’t a short list. Line after line streamed its way down his screen, and Jay scrolled through, noting the usual: employee workstations, wireless card machines—
—and a massive block of devices, all with the same prefix: HT. There were hundreds of them.
Jay glanced at the television on the wall. In the pale light coming of his screen, he could just barely read the brand insignia along the bottom edge: HT.
He picked one of the devices at random: HT-262. A request for the device’s network configuration yielded its IP address, and seconds later he had access to a video feed from the device’s internal camera.
The room on the feed wasn’t entirely dissimilar to the one Jay was sitting in right now, but it was much smaller—one of the Serenidad’s budget options. The overhead lights were off, the room instead lit by a soft glow from the desk lamp. Mantled over said desk was a small, bespectacled woman; she was consulting something on her phone, jotting down notes with fevered intensity into a small notebook.
Jay closed out of the feed and brought up another: HT-117.
It took him a moment to recognise Mr. Tate without the tracksuit; he was dressed for bed in a vest and boxers, perched on the edge of the mattress. There was an exhausted set to his shoulders, head hanging low with his phone pressed to his ear.
Jay glanced toward the bed—Moran was still fast asleep—then turned up his laptop’s volume just enough to hear whatever was coming in through the camera’s microphone.
“They’ve got a backup wheelchair you can use, yeah?” Tate’s voice was soft and reassuring; the accent suggested solidly middle-class Essex. “I know it’s not as good, but it’ll do until yours turns up.” There was a pause as he listened to whoever he was talking to. “Yes, I know they’re hard to replace.” After a beat, his face twisted into a frustrated snarl. “I said I don’t know anything about it, all right? Maybe one of the nurses fucking stole it.” He winced, and his expression smoothed back out. “Sorry. Yeah, I’ll be home soon.” Another pause. “I told you, it’s a business trip. All this works out, we’ll get you into one of the nice private homes. Promise.”
Jay frowned. Was Tasha Lamb expanding her operation? Was that why Tate was here?
“Goodnight, Mum,” Tate said, and hung up. As he eased back to lie on the bed, Jay switched to another device on the list.
The laptop’s speakers screamed, crackling a bit over the lyrics to some Lady Gaga song howled out in a thick Russian accent by a voice that preferred volume and enthusiasm over any sense of pitch.
Jay slammed the mute button and turned an anxious look toward the bed. Moran made a low noise, forehead wrinkling for a moment, but didn’t wake.
The room on this feed was much the same as the last one, although Jay spotted a stereo dock on the bedside table. An absolutely massive man with a long, thick beard emerged from the bathroom, wearing nothing but a towel. His chest was covered in tattoos, including two stars positioned above each pectoral muscle. He was drying off his hair with a second towel, mouth open and eyes closed as he continued to sing along to the music playing from his phone.
The towel around the man’s waist began to slip, and Jay hastily closed the feed.
The digits at the end of each device’s name were room numbers. Each room had a smart TV, with a built-in camera and microphone. And each of those was discoverable on the internal network.
Jay had a live video feed of every room in the hotel.
Sebastian woke to find he’d been sleeping alone.
A quick scan of the room revealed that Jay hadn’t gone far. He was out cold on the sofa, his head tipped back at what had to be an excruciating angle. His laptop sat open across his legs.
Sebastian checked the time, then rolled out of bed. He laid a hand gently on Jay’s shoulder and gave it a little shake, careful not to jostle him too much.
Jay woke with a start, then winced—no doubt the sudden motion had tugged something in his chest. “Shit.” He blinked up at Sebastian, as if confused to find him there; then, alarmed, he said, “What’s the time?”
“Just after 8:00,” Sebastian told him. “You said your follow-up appointment was at nine?”
Jay sighed in relief and set the laptop down on the coffee table, mashing the space bar to wake it up. As the screen flickered back on, Sebastian caught a glimpse of what Jay had been up to last night.
There were several windows open on his desktop, each of them displaying a video feed. Most of them were empty rooms, but in one room there was a lump under the covers—someone still asleep in bed.
“Are those live?” Sebastian couldn’t help but ask.
Jay nodded as he clicked around the screen, closing windows. “All the room TVs are exposed.” He glanced sidelong at Sebastian and added, “I couldn’t sleep,” as if that explained everything.
Which, to be fair, it mostly did.
Jay’s laptop closed with a snap. He carefully levered himself up off the sofa and staggered toward the bathroom.
Sebastian glanced at the television on the wall and noted, to his immense relief, that there was still a strip of electrical tape over the camera lens.
“Well.” Dr. Schwinghammer clapped her hands together, looking Jay up and down. “How are we feeling? Any pain?”
Lena Schwinghammer wouldn’t have looked out of place at the reins of a chariot, leading a barbarian army against the legions of Rome. Since she was at least a thousand years late for her calling in life, she instead contented herself with a career in cosmetic surgery. Jay first met her in person yesterday, but it wasn’t exactly a proper introduction; she’d been largely preoccupied drawing on Jay’s chest with a felt-tip pen, marking out incision sites with Teutonic precision. Their initial consultations had all been remote, over a series of e-mails and video calls.
He hadn’t expected her to be so tall.
“Hurts a bit,” Jay admitted. “Last night was … bad. Couldn’t sleep.”
“Hmm.” Schwinghammer gestured to Jay’s shirt. “Take that off. Let’s have a look.”
Moving carefully, Jay eased out of the shirt and binder. Schwinghammer bent slightly to inspect her work.
When Jay first started looking into this, he’d expected to end up with the typical scars beneath each pectoral muscle. As it turned out, though, his chest was small enough for a peri-areolar procedure: the incisions instead encircled each of his nipples.
“Looks good.” Schwinghammer gently prodded Jay’s chest; beneath two strips of surgical mesh, the area around his stitches was dark with bruises. “Very little swelling.” She took a step back and gestured to a mirror on the wall next to her. “Would you like to see for yourself?”
Jay hopped down from the exam table.
His chest had never been particularly big. He could usually pass—so long as he wore a binder or a baggy jumper, kept himself covered up to the neck, stood with his shoulders forward, hunched in his seat, didn’t run much, didn’t move too suddenly … a million little calculations, every minute of every day for years, eating up so much of his focus.
And now, overnight, it was all just … gone.
Already, standing in front of the mirror, he found himself standing a little straighter, his shoulders rolling back. His chest was perfectly flat, and it looked good—even stitched together and bruised as he was, with the drains sticking out from under his arms.
“You are pleased with the results?” Schwinghammer asked.
Jay’s eyes prickled. He blinked rapidly to clear them. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s … it looks good.”
Schwinghammer nodded, taking pride in a job well done. “The pain is nothing to worry about. Take more ibuprofen.”
“If I take any more, I’ll burn a hole in my stomach lining.”
Schwinghammer gave him a surprised look.
A bit sheepish, Jay added, “My tolerance for pain isn’t exactly high. Can you give me something stronger?”
Schwinghammer exhaled loudly through her nose. “I can give you a prescription for oxycodone. A very small prescription. Only for breakthrough pain, you understand?”
Jay nodded, and Schwinghammer helped him back into the binder.
“Keep that on for three more weeks,” she said, as Jay buttoned his shirt back up. “You may take it off to shower.” Then she all but shoved him out the door.
Moran was waiting for him in the reception area; at the sight of Jay, surprise flickered across his face.
“What?” Jay asked, suspicious.
“Nothing,” Moran said, then: “You’re smiling.”
“I need a shower,” Jay announced upon their return to the hotel room. He still smelled like hospital, and his tolerance for that state of affairs was coming to a rapid end.
He opened his suitcase and dug through it for the lanyard he’d packed; his research had indicated he’d need something to clip his drains to, once he took off the binder. Stepping into the bathroom, he carefully undressed and climbed into the shower.
The hot water immediately soothed muscles that had been locked up tight since the procedure, and Jay allowed himself a private little sigh of relief. There was, however, an immediate challenge: he could only lift his arms so high, which made washing his hair problematic.
Moran was here, on the other side of the door. He’d probably come and help, if Jay asked—but the thought of asking made Jay want to curl up and hide.
No. He’d have to figure this out on his own.
By hunching over and tucking his head down, he managed to haphazardly lather up and rinse his hair. He towelled off as best he could with his limited range of motion, shrugged the binder back on, and took a breath before opening the bathroom door.
Moran was on the sofa, scrolling through something on his phone. He glanced up at the sound of the door opening; his eyes flicked across Jay’s body for a moment before he asked, “How are you feeling?”
Jay felt like shit, frustration tangled up and seething inside him. “Fine,” he said with a shrug.
“Think you’re up to the beach?”
It was an earnest, hopeful question—one Jay felt compelled not to say “no” to.
A thin strip of waterfront property allowed the Serenidad to dub itself a beach hotel. Row upon row of lounge chairs and parasols lined the sands, crowded in close to take full advantage of the space. Off to one side, perched along the water’s edge, was the beach club: an open-air deck with an overhead canopy and—most importantly—a bar.
Jay had laid claim to a pair of the lounge chairs and already defended them from several other guests by the time Moran returned from the bar. He had a glass in each hand, both of them containing some kind of fruity beach cocktail.
Eyeing the drinks, Jay said, “I shouldn’t be mixing alcohol and opiates.”
“I know.” Moran held one of the glasses out to Jay; its straw was white, while the straw in the other was black. “No liquor in this one.”
Jay took the glass; there was an odd swelling sensation in his chest.
With a soft sigh, Moran settled into the other chair Jay had claimed. He had his shirt off and was wearing only a pair of swim trunks and sandals; Jay’s eyes trailed over the wiry muscle of his chest with a peculiar mix of appreciation and envy. He himself had to wear a loose shirt to cover the binder and the drains hanging off it.
But that was a temporary issue. Before long, taking his shirt off at the beach would finally be an option.
It was a terrifying, alluring thought.
“Yes, I know the trip was a gift for both of us!” The woman who’d checked in ahead of them—Mrs. Bray—was sitting bolt upright on one of the beach chairs off to Jay’s left, her phone pressed to her ear. “She’s the one who ran off to Paris. Why are you taking her side?” She rolled her eyes. “Yes, you are!”
Motion further up the beach caught Jay’s eye. Mr. Tate was on his way down the boardwalk that led from the hotel to the beach; his tracksuit wasn’t exactly the same as the one he’d worn yesterday, but it was a variation on a theme. There was an attentiveness to him, a latent tension that felt … wrong.
As if echoing Jay’s thoughts, Moran said, “He’s a bit nervy for someone on holiday.”
“He said he’s here on a business trip,” Jay replied, thinking out loud.
Moran raised an eyebrow. “When?”
“Last night.” At Moran’s perplexed look, Jay explained: “On the feeds I found. I saw him talking to his mum on the phone.”
Tate didn’t make his way very far down the beach; he hovered around the edges, casting his eyes over the other guests. As if he were looking for someone.
“Maybe he’s meeting somebody here,” Moran speculated.
“Maybe.” Jay lifted his glass to his lips, watching Tate over the edge of it.
Bray’s voice raised into a shout: “Well, fuck you too, Mum!” She jabbed a thumb at the “end call” button and tossed her phone onto the chair next to her.
A server approached, carrying a glass in one hand. He stopped beside Bray’s chair and offered it to her.
With polite confusion, Bray said, “I didn’t order anything.”
“It’s from the man at the bar,” the server replied. “He said, ‘she looks like she needs it.’”
Jay looked toward the beach club at the same moment Bray did. The gigantic Russian he’d spotted on the feeds last night was sitting at the bar, dressed in cut-off denim shorts and a tropical-print shirt. He offered Bray a casual, friendly wave.
Bray replied with a wave of her own.
When Jay looked back up the beach, Tate was gone.
Jay wore out by mid-afternoon. Moran had clearly noticed, but didn’t say anything besides a casual, innocent suggestion that they head back to the room.
The moment they were inside, Jay toppled into the bed. He just needed to lie down for a moment.
Then he blinked, and it was four hours later. That deep, dull ache in his chest was back. Jay made a low noise of pain.
Moran appeared at the open balcony door. There was a book in his hand; he’d been reading while Jay slept. “All right?”
“Fine,” Jay ground out. “Just … sore.”
“Need one of your pills?”
“I’ve got them.” Jay eased up out of the bed and snagged the box from the bedside table. He popped one from the pack and swallowed it with a handful of water from the bathroom tap; that done, he dropped down onto the sofa.
The sun hung close to the horizon, and there was a distinct chill to the breeze coming in off the water. “S’getting late,” Jay observed.
Moran nodded. “Room service?”
Jay contemplated the effort it would take to even reach the restaurant downstairs, much less sit through an entire meal. With a defeated groan, he nodded.
Moran picked up the room phone while Jay hooked the edge of his laptop, pulling it closer.
It was hard to pinpoint the exact moment the drugs kicked in. Jay only noticed the pain had faded well after the fact; the oxycodone put him into a state of hazy blankness that made it impossible to maintain a train of thought. He didn’t like it.
Jay’s experience with drugs was, admittedly, limited. He liked cannabis well enough, but hated the smell and found the act of smoking logistically annoying. He’d tried magic mushrooms exactly once with a group of friends on the town moor and spent the entire time arguing they should leave and go back inside because he didn’t like the look of the huge swirling vortex in the sky.
The sofa cushions dipped as Moran settled in next to him. “Spying on everyone’s sordid affairs?”
Jay frowned, confused, and looked at the screen of his laptop. It showed the interior of a huge, multi-bedroom suite with what appeared to be a private pool out on the terrace. The American they’d spotted at the bar the other night sat on the sofa with a laptop of his own, oddly small and alone in the vast space of the room.
Without really thinking about it, Jay had pulled up the feeds from the smart TVs. A glance at the clock on the taskbar told him he’d been mindlessly cycling through them for nearly an hour.
Moran’s arm was around Jay’s shoulders, fingers tracing idly along Jay’s upper arm. Jay leaned a little into him; he still wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his chest was solid and warm against Jay’s side.
For lack of anything else to do with his hands, Jay switched to another of the feeds.
Mrs. Bray sat at the little dining table in her room; she had a tablet on the table in front of her and her phone to her ear once again. “Yes, there’s a prenup.” Her voice was passionless and professional. “I don’t know who she’s hired yet.” There was a pause, and then she sighed. “No, no children. We have a dog, though—she might try for custody.”
Too depressing. Jay switched feeds again.
This camera showed another suite: just a single bedroom this time, but with an extended sofa-bed in the living room. Sprawled across it was a teenager that Jay remembered seeing in the restaurant, the night they’d arrived. The hood of his black jumper was pulled up around his face, and there was a tablet propped up in front of him.
“No, I’m going to tell them,” the kid said aloud—the tablet was on a video call. “I just don’t know when. Got to pick the right moment.” He gave a little jump and glanced toward the door. “Hang on, they’re back. I’ll call later.”
The kid ended the call and sat up, setting the tablet aside as his parents walked into the room.
Moran made a thoughtful sound in his throat. “Never easy, telling the parents you’re gay.”
Jay shook his head. “Twenty-five degrees out, and he’s dressed like that? I know a dysphoria hoodie when I see one.”
There was a mischievous gleam in Moran’s eye. He sat up a little to dig his wallet out of his pocket and laid a five-euro note on Jay’s keyboard.
Jay mustered a glare. “Don’t you think that’s a bit inappropriate?”
Moran smirked at him. “Worried you’re wrong?”
Jay glared at him for a moment longer, then fumbled his wallet open and placed his own five euros on the keyboard.
On-screen, the kid’s parents bustled around the room and took no notice of their son, who sat on the bed with an attentive, anticipatory air—until the mother turned to him and said, “Evan, we’re going down to dinner in a minute. You should get changed.”
The kid’s posture deflated; he mumbled agreement and rolled off the bed. In unison, Jay and Moran groaned their disappointment.
The family filed out of the room, and Jay switched to a different feed.
Room 117 popped up on-screen—Tate’s room. He was unzipping the huge square case he’d checked in with, which opened to reveal a folding wheelchair.
Jay made a confused noise.
“What?” Moran asked.
“When Tate was on the phone with his mum, she said her wheelchair was missing.”
“So he stole his mum’s wheelchair.”
“But why?” Jay sighed and carefully reached up to rub his eyes. “There’s something … off. About Tate. Can’t figure out what it is.” His hand dropped back into his lap. “Maybe I’m just paranoid.”
Moran shook his head. “I think you’re seeing something. It’s too many details, all at once.” He cocked his head to the side and grinned. “Unless we’re both paranoid.”
Jay realised he wanted to kiss Moran a few seconds after he’d started doing it.
Sebastian huffed with surprise into Jay’s mouth but kissed back with enthusiasm, one hand coming up to brace Jay’s jaw. Jay shoved the laptop aside and swayed up onto his knees on the sofa, haphazardly throwing a leg over Sebastian’s lap. Their lips slid lazily against each other, Jay’s movements a little clumsy as he steadied himself against the bare skin of Sebastian’s chest; Sebastian’s hands were on Jay’s thighs, stroking callused palms up through the legs of his shorts.
It was nice. But “nice” was all it was—whether it was the drugs or the exhaustion, Jay could tell things weren’t going to go much further than this.
Sebastian didn’t seem to mind. As Jay slumped further against him, his hands moved to settle against the small of Jay’s back—holding him in place while they traded slow, unhurried kisses.
Jay wasn’t sure how much time passed before he sighed and pulled back, tucking his face into Sebastian’s neck.
“What’s the time?” Sebastian murmured against his ear; he’d left his watch on the bedside table.
Jay’s phone was at the other end of the sofa. He carefully crawled off Sebastian’s lap and fumbled for it. “Almost 8:00.”
Sebastian frowned. “Our dinner should’ve been here by now.” He lifted himself up off the sofa and reached for the room phone again.
Jay suddenly remembered the thing he should’ve remembered before now. “Wait. Shit.”
Sebastian hesitated, phone in hand. “What did you do?”
“I changed our room number. In the hotel records.”
With polite restraint, Sebastian asked, “Why?”
“I do it at every hotel,” Jay explained. “In case someone comes looking for me. I would’ve done it the first night we were here, but I was, ah … distracted.”
Sebastian raised an eyebrow. “Can you change it back long enough for our dinner to find us?”
Jay nodded and reached for his laptop.
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