Page 1 of That Defining Moment

Chapter One

The Reverie was a gorgeous hotel, nestled into the green hills of Pai like someone had airlifted a chunk of the Maldives and dropped it into northern Thailand. Lysander Huxley’s balcony looked out over rice paddies that glowed an offensively beautiful shade of green, so he jabbed the button on the wall panel until the blackout blinds hummed down over the balcony doors and he flopped face-first onto his bed to block out the world entirely.

He was supposed to be tipsy-tubing down the river with the Swedes. Lysander had been absorbed into the group at the Groovy Bar on Wednesday — four enormous, Nordic blond men who ordered drinks by the bucket and treated Pai like a theme park. Somewhere around their third bucket of warm Singha, Stanis had worked up the courage to invite Lysander along.

“Come have fun with us, Lysander,” he’d said, his big hand on the back of Lysander’s neck, thumb rubbing slow circles against his nape in a way that made his whole spine go liquid. Lysander had agreed, because it had seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. Floating down the river in a rubber ring with a bag of beer and a speaker blaring techno songs, nobody knowing or caring who TheoTheO was.

He’d ended up leaving the WhatsApp group thirty minutes before he should have left for the meet-up spot, because he couldn’t stomach the thought of being around Stanis.

Stanis was a six-foot-four, sun-gilded alpha who wouldn’t look out of place in a Paris Fashion Week runway show, and he’d spent the better part of the evening making it extremely clear that Lysander was welcome to climb him whenever the mood struck. Three months ago, Lysander would’ve let Stanis crowd him into the back corridor of the Groovy Bar and taken the initiative of pulling Stanis’s cock out right there and then, and guiding it into himself.

The problem was that Stanis didn’t have a beard.

Which was a deranged reason to turn down a sure thing in paradise, except that thanks to Hamish McNally, he now had specific sensory data about what a beard felt like against his inner thighs while someone sucked him off, and he couldn’t go back to a smooth-cheeked Adonis because he’d been primed to seek out bearded, bespectacled documentarians.

Lysander rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling fan. The blades turned in lazy circles, casting faint shadows that swept across the white plaster. His mobile sat on the bedside table. It was half ten in the morning in Pai, which made it — he did the maths — half three in the afternoon in Melbourne. Hamish would be in his edit suite, probably, headphones on, reviewing footage with a pen between his teeth and his battered pocket Moleskine open in front of him.

He could still feel it, even with Hamish six thousand kilometres away in Melbourne, the scratch of Hamish’s beard against the inside of his thigh. The way it had tickled at first so that Lysander had laughed mid-blowjob. Hamish had looked up at him from between his legs, his mouth wet, and instead of being offended he’d grinned and rubbed his bristly jaw deliberately against Lysander’s oversensitive cock, back and forth, until his laughter turned into a low moan. Then he’d taken Lysander all the way down his throat, and held him there while Lysander’s thighs shook and every thought in his head dissolved into white static.

Lysander’s cock was half-hard against his thigh at the memory. Instead of letting his hand drop down to it immediately, he shucked off his pants and picked up his mobile, turning the camera on himself.

He propped the mobile against the bedside lamp and spent a full minute adjusting the angle. The light from the overheads was wrong — too flat, washing him out — so he switched on the bathroom light and left the door ajar until a warm stripe fell across his stomach and the inside of one thigh. That was much better. The Reverie’s white sheets were a good clean background, high contrast against his tanned skin.

Lysander shifted his hips up, bent one knee, and checked the preview screen. His cock curved against his stomach, flushed dark at the head, and below it was the wet gleam of slick. He tilted his mobile down until his arsehole was in frame, then he hit record.

“Need you, alpha. Just thinking about your mouth made me so fucking wet…” His voice came out breathy and sweet, pitched high. He slid two fingers into himself, crooking them slightly so that his rim would cling to his knuckles on the pull-out. “Oh, alpha, I miss your big thick cock.” He added a third finger, and his breath hitched for real, his hips rolling up into his own hand. “My fingers are too small, alpha. I’m too small.” He fucked himself with short, precise strokes, angling for the spot that made his thighs shake. “Need your knot. Need you to — fuck —”

He pulled his fingers free and held them up to the lens, spreading them apart so the camera caught the slick webbing between them. Omega creaminess, thick and pearlescent, stretching and catching the light before it broke and dripped down his wrist.

“Wish you could taste me right now, alpha…” he moaned.

He stopped recording, then he watched it back three times with a critical eye. That was the thing about having been OnlyFans’ top male omega creator for so many years, he couldn’t just put subpar content out into the world. Especially not for Hamish.

The lighting was gorgeous. His voice hit exactly the right register: desperate enough to make an alpha’s hindbrain light up. The slick shot at the end was inspired. This was the kind of content he’d have charged a premium for, and would have earned him tens of thousands in tips.

He typed out a message to Hamish:

miss you. my fingers couldn’t reach as far as your huge alpha cock

Then he attached the video and sent it off. He didn’t have to wait long for a response.

Three messages arrived in quick succession. Lysander stretched out on the sheets and let himself enjoy the sensation of being desired before he picked up his mobile, because there was a particular pleasure in knowing that somewhere in Melbourne, Hamish McNally had just opened his video and had immediately dropped everything.

He tapped into the conversation with Hamish and frowned.

The first image was a close-up of something yellow and speckled with brown spots, pressed against tan corduroy. For one lurching second, Lysander’s brain tried to make sense of it as an anatomical feature. Something had happened to Hamish’s cock, some tropical disease he’d brought home from Thailand or horrific allergic reaction, and Lysander was already halfway to googling yellow spotted penis Australia when the shape resolved itself into a banana.

It was resting against Hamish’s corduroy-clad thigh, positioned in such a way that it resembled an erect curving penis. Lysander scrolled down to the next message, and then laughed so hard that he had to press his face into his pillow.

Hamish had taken a selfie holding the same banana up to his ear like a mobile. Call me, the text message urged, so Lysander did.

Hamish picked up on the second ring. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m buying the banana, now that I’ve had it down my trousers.”

“You’re selling yourself short with that,” Lysander said. “Significantly short, and you can trust me because I’m speaking from experience. You should have gone with a courgette, minimum.”

“Noted. I’ll aim more realistic next time and go for a butternut squash. Where are you?”

Lysander stretched out on his back, his mobile pressed to his ear, and closed his eyes. He could listen to Hamish read out an ingredients list with his unhurried Melbourne drawl for hours.