Page 7 of Not Your Golden Boy

Nikky shifted, cleared his throat again, and clasped his hands together as if the force of that hold was the only thing keeping him together. “Fame isn’t what I thought it would be,” he said, his voice shaking slightly. “There’s all this pressure, all this attention and—” He stopped and swallowed.

Alarm bells started to ping in Harry’s head. It didn’t take someone with his level of experience with fame to see there was more going on with Nikky than met the eye, but his experience had him immediately tuned into the young man. “You’re still at the beginning of your career,” he said carefully, fighting through surprise waves of jealousy and regret that rose up in him like full-moon tides. “Trust me, that phase doesn’t last forever. As likely as not, you’ll be yesterday’s news by the end of the year. Whatever problems you have now will fade, probably faster than you expect.”

Nikky shook his head tightly. “It’s not going away,” he said. “It’s just getting worse. All I want to do is make music and act in a few shows or movies, but celebrity demands so much more than that and I…I can’t handle it.”

Harry frowned. “So you want me to help you wreck a promising career because it’s not what you imagined it would be?”

Nikky blew out a breath. “It sounds weird, I know. But I can’t think of any other way to get…people to stop hounding me all the time.”

Another alarm ping sounded in Harry’s head. People were hounding Nikky or person? People were one thing, but if there was a specific person or persons who were on Nikky’s case, that would be something different.

He didn’t have time to dig deeper into that, though.

“I just need a little scandal to put people off me,” Nikky went on. “Nothing too big or horrific. Just something that will tarnish my image enough that the fans who set me on this pedestal will leave me alone. Something that will prove that I’m not the golden boy everyone has made me out to be.”

Harry nodded slowly. He peeked at Javier, who stared at him with an intense enough look to hint he wanted Harry to take this job and talk some sense into the young, naïve star sitting across from him.

If he was honest, Harry wanted to take the job, too. He wanted it for a heap of reasons, pure and impure. The part of him that held onto hope that the world was an okay place and people weren’t so bad wanted to help out a guy who was just getting started down the path he’d been dragging himself along for years. It was obvious from the uncertainty in Nikky’s eyes that he needed a mentor.

The far less savory part of himself straight-up wanted to get in Nikky’s pants. The man was gorgeous and gave off a tantalizing sort of subby bottom energy that had Harry thinking maybe he should attend Maggie and Laura’s knitting bondage night and bring Nikky with him as his toy for the night.

And the very worst part of himself, the part that gnashed its teeth and shook its fist at the gods of the music industry, loved the idea of smashing something sweet and pretty rather than letting the industry that had rejected him sink their claws into Nikky and turn him into, well, him. Stealing someone bright and shiny and keeping them away from the sharks that would eat Nikky alive, the sharks that had sliced all of his own hopes and dreams to shreds, was far too tempting a form of revenge for him to resist.

“Alright,” he said, shrugging one shoulder with pretend carelessness when really, he’d never wanted something more in his life. “I’ll do it. I’ll help you ruin your reputation forever. It’ll be fun.”

Nikky broke into a relieved smile. “Really? Thanks.”

Javier and Desmond exchanged a look like they’d started something that would quickly spin out of their control.

“It’ll be my pleasure,” Harry said, grinning at Nikky with wolfish intensity. If things ended up where he hoped they would, it would be Nikky’s pleasure, too.

three

​. . .​

It was going to work. As weird and wild as Nikky’s plan to disappoint the public and turn them against him was, after meeting Harry Bayonne in the office of Rent-A-Boyfriend, he was certain the whole thing was going to work.

Harry Bayonne. Nikky had admired the man since he was in high school, absorbing every sort of music in every genre that he could. Like everyone else, he’d been obsessed with Love on the Line when it’d first come out. It was a catchy tune that was great for dancing. The summer of Nikky’s freshman year it had been everywhere.

But there was so much more to that album than the hit song. Harry had depth and breadth in his writing. Some of the deep cut tracks from that album had sparked Nikky’s own creativity and inspired him to write his own songs. Harry had been hot as sin on top of that and had been instrumental in him coming to terms with being gay. He’d never understood why the world hadn’t embraced everything Harry could do instead of hyper fixating on that one song.

Well, now he would get a chance to ask Harry why himself.

“Lunch at noon today?”

The text from Harry came through as Nikky sat in the back of the car that the studio had sent to drive him to his first recording session two days after that meeting at Rent-A-Boyfriend. An excited buzz filled him as he read it. Harry Bayonne had his number and was texting him to make a date for lunch. A fake date, maybe, but still a date. If only he could go back and tell his teenage, hormone-filled, masturbating in the shower and praying his foster parents didn’t find out self.

“Sounds great. Can you come by the studio to meet me?”

Even more amazing, he was texting Harry Bayonne back like he was just another of Nikky’s friends, like he was Drew.

“Will do. See you then.”

The reply was crisp and direct, but Nikky didn’t feel slighted or dismissed by it at all. He and Harry, along with Javier and Desmond, who’d insisted he call them by their first names, had talked for more than half an hour during that first meeting at Rent-A-Boyfriend. They’d gotten to know each other in the most cursory way as Nikky’d explained what he wanted out of the charade they were about to embark on. In that time, he’d discovered that Harry had a direct, almost hard edge to him, like he felt he needed to be blunt to get his point across.

In so many ways, Harry was the exact opposite of Nikky. Just thinking about it as he was driven through the streets of London made Nikky grin. First impressions never told the entire story, but Harry had come off as cool and confident. He’d filled up the chair he’d sat in with a casual sprawl that made it seem like he had control of the entire room. He was the kind of guy who would get what he wanted in every situation and who could command the attention of everyone in any room he walked into.

By contrast, Nikky had always gone out of his way not to make waves or be seen. Standing out in the foster system is what landed you the label of problem child, which meant you’d bounce around from home to home without ever really feeling at peace. He’d seen it happen to more than a few kids throughout his childhood, and even though, after bouncing around for the first year, he’d stayed with Brad and Pamela for nearly his whole time in foster care, watching the shit that other kids went through had terrified him.