Sunday Mornings in Grey
The lager tin hissed open, a crisp little sound that bounced off the bare walls of the living room. Dale slumped onto the second-hand sofa-a sagging grey beast they’d hauled up three flights of stairs last weekend-and propped his trainers on the coffee table.
“Mate,” he said, tilting the can toward Chris. “We are properly, catastrophically fucked.”
Chris caught the second tin without looking up from his phone. His thumb kept scrolling through some banking app, the pale blue glow catching the angles of his jaw. “Define catastrophically.”
“I’ve got sixty-three quid until next Friday.”
“That’s not catastrophic.”
“That’s including what I owe Vodafone.”
Chris winced. The sofa groaned as he dropped onto the opposite end, long legs stretching out until his bare foot nudged Dale’s thigh. They’d been flatmates for eleven days, and already the boundaries had softened into something comfortable-feet on laps, shirts optional, fridge ownership communal. University had forged that kind of intimacy. Three years sharing a kitchen in halls, then two more in a grotty student house where the heating worked maybe forty percent of the time. You learned a man’s rhythms that way. Dale knew Chris took his coffee black before payday, milky after. Chris knew Dale couldn’t sleep without some nature documentary murmuring from his laptop.
“Right,” Chris said. “So what’s the play? We beg our parents?”
“My mum’s still paying off the flight she took to come to graduation. I can’t ask her for more.” Dale tipped his head back, stared at the ceiling. A crack ran from the light fixture to the window, fine as a hair. “Thought business grads were supposed to walk into sixty-k salaries.”
“Thought wrong. We’re in the same leaky boat, mate.”
Silence settled. Somewhere below them, a neighbour’s television muttered through the floorboards. The flat was in Peckham, a boxy two-bed on the fourth floor of a building that had probably been very modern in 1974. Now the lift smelled of bleach and disappointment, and the hallway carpets had patterns that made Dale’s eyes water. But the rent was cheap. Relatively. London-cheap, which meant still eye-watering, but survivable. Just.
Chris lifted his tin. “To being catastrophically fucked.”
“Fucking cheers to that.”
They drank. Lager was the cheap stuff-whatever Tesco had on three-for-a-fiver-and it tasted faintly metallic, but it was cold. That counted for something.
Dale let his gaze drift sideways. Chris was still on his phone, brow furrowed, and the angle of his neck made the tendon there stand out, a tight cord beneath skin that held the last warmth of summer. He had that lean-muscled build that looked effortless, the kind of body that made clothes hang well-broad through the shoulders, narrow at the waist. His grey joggers were slouched low on his hips, the waistband of his boxers visible, dark against his stomach. And lower down, where the fabric gathered, there was a suggestion of something. A weight. A heft that the joggers couldn’t quite hide.
Dale looked away. Blinked. Took another mouthful of lager.
It wasn’t that he’d been looking. Not looking. Just-noticing. You noticed things about the people you lived with. It was neutral. Observational.
“What about you?” Dale asked, voice a fraction louder than necessary. “How dire’s your situation?”
“Worse than yours. I’m thirty-eight quid deep and my credit card just got declined buying a meal deal.”
“Fucking hell.”
“Boots, mate. Boots meal deal. The saddest decline in retail history.” Chris tossed his phone onto the cushion between them. “I had to put the sandwich back. The woman behind me did that thing. You know the thing.”
“The pity grimace.”
“Full pity grimace. And a little head tilt.”
Dale laughed, the sound startling out of him. Chris grinned, and for a second they were just two lads fresh out of uni, the weight of rent and bills and London’s relentless expensive hum suspended above them like a ceiling they kept forgetting was there.
“We need money,” Dale said.
“Astute. Business degree really paying off there.”
“Piss off. I’m brainstorming.”
“Brainstorm faster. We’ve got a council tax bill coming that looks like a phone number.”
Dale finished his lager in three long swallows, crushed the can, and set it on the coffee table with more force than necessary. The table wobbled. Everything in this flat wobbled. “Alright. What’ve we got? Assets. Skills. Something we can sell.”
“Assets,” Chris repeated, deadpan. “We’ve got this sofa. Which smells faintly of cheese. We’ve got a telly that’s technically a computer monitor. We’ve got our degrees. Which are currently worth less than the paper they’re printed on.”
“We’ve got our bodies.”
The words left Dale’s mouth before his brain had finished inspecting them. They hung in the air, a little too loud in the quiet flat.
Chris turned his head. One eyebrow lifted. “Our bodies.”
“Not like-I didn’t mean like that.” Dale felt heat creep up his neck. “I meant like, I don’t know, manual labour. We’re fit. We go to the gym. Could do removals or something.”
“Removals.”
“Yeah.”
“You want to spend our weekends hauling strangers’ sofas up flights of stairs for minimum wage.”
When he put it like that, it sounded less like a plan and more like a punishment. Dale rubbed the back of his neck. The heat was still there, stubborn. “Just thinking out loud.”
Chris studied him for a moment, something unreadable flickering behind his eyes. Then he shrugged, a loose roll of his shoulders, and the moment passed. “Fair enough. We are fit. Not to be a wanker about it, but we’ve put the hours in.”
It was true. They’d joined the same gym in second year-a grimy little place near campus that cost fifteen quid a month and smelled permanently of chalk and disinfectant-and they’d been consistent ever since. Four, sometimes five sessions a week. Dale had watched his own body change in increments: shoulders broadening, chest filling out, the softness of adolescence melting away to reveal something harder. Leaner. He’d stand in front of the bathroom mirror sometimes, fresh from the shower, and barely recognise the man looking back at him.
And Chris. Chris had done the same transformation, but with an edge that Dale couldn’t quite define. Something about the way he moved. The confidence in his posture. The way his gym kit clung to him after a session, sweat-darkened fabric plastered to the contours of his back, his chest, the thick solidity of his thighs.
Dale realised he’d been staring at a point somewhere around Chris’s collarbone and jerked his attention back to the window. The crack in the ceiling. Anything.
“Right,” Dale said. “So removals is a shit idea.”
“Monumentally shit.”
“Any better ones?”
Chris stretched, arms reaching overhead, and his t-shirt rode up to expose a strip of stomach. Tight. Defined. A trail of dark hair that started below his navel and disappeared into the waistband of his joggers. “Give me a minute. My brain’s still rebooting after the Boots trauma.”
Dale’s own brain was doing something strange. Short-circuiting. Firing off thoughts that didn’t quite form into words. He blamed the lager. The heat. London in September was muggy and close, and the flat had no air conditioning, just a single rotating fan that pushed warm air from one corner to another.
“I’m going to change,” Dale announced, pushing himself off the sofa. “These jeans are sticking to my arse.”
He didn’t wait for a response. In his room, he shucked off the jeans-cheap denim that had gone shiny at the knees-and pulled on a pair of shorts. They were gym shorts, black, loose through the leg but snug at the waist. He caught his reflection in the wardrobe mirror and paused.
The body that looked back at him was still a novelty. Years of being the skinny kid, the one who got picked last in PE, the one who hunched his shoulders in changing rooms. And now this. His chest had developed into something he was quietly proud of-full pectorals that sat high and round, the kind you could see even through a t-shirt. His stomach was flat, ridged with the suggestion of abdominal muscle. And his arms. Christ, his arms. Veins ran along his forearms in blue relief, surfacing after a pump, staying visible for hours.
But the thing that had changed most-the thing he was still getting used to-was his arse.
It had always been there, in embryo. A propensity. His mum used to joke that he’d come out of the womb with a builder’s bum. But the gym had sculpted it into something else entirely. Something that made his jeans fit strangely, tight across the seat even when the waist was loose. Something that bounced when he walked, a solid, rounded heft that he was half-embarrassed by and half-secretly-fascinated-with. He’d catch people looking sometimes-women, mostly, but occasionally men, their glances sliding away when he turned-and he never quite knew what to do with the attention.
In the mirror, he twisted, looking over his shoulder. The shorts did nothing to hide it. Nothing at all. The fabric draped over the curve like it had been poured there, a smooth black waterfall that ended at the top of his thighs. Squeeze and release. The muscle jumped, solid and responsive.
“Fuck’s sake,” he muttered, and turned away from his reflection.
--
When he padded back into the living room, Chris had fetched two more tins from the fridge. The fan was now pointed directly at the sofa, its blades chopping the air into something almost cool.
“Better?” Chris asked, glancing up.
“Less swampy.”
“Good. Because I’ve been thinking.”
Dale dropped back onto his end of the sofa. “Dangerous.”
“Hilarious. No, listen.” Chris sat forward, elbows on his knees, lager tin cradled in both hands. “You said assets. Bodies. And you were joking, but.”
“But?”
Chris’s tongue darted out, wetting his bottom lip. A quick, unconscious gesture. “There’s this app. Well, not an app. A website. OnlyFans.”
Dale stared. “OnlyFans.”
“Yeah.”
“Isn’t that…”
“It’s whatever you make it. Doesn’t have to be-” Chris waved a hand vaguely. “You know. You can post whatever. Fitness stuff. Modelling. People pay for all sorts.”
“People pay to look at fitness stuff?”
“Mate, people pay to look at feet. There’s a market for everything.”
Dale’s first instinct was to laugh. To make a joke and move on. But something kept him quiet. The memory of his reflection in the wardrobe mirror. The bounce of his arse in gym shorts. The way people looked-had been looking for years, probably, without him fully clocking it.
“We’re not doing porn,” Dale said, and his voice came out flatter than he’d intended. A statement, not a question. Almost.
“Obviously not. But think about it. We’re already in the gym five times a week. We’re already doing the work. All we’d be doing is filming some of it. Posting the odd photo. Building a following.” Chris shrugged. “Low effort. Potentially high reward. And nobody has to know it’s us if we’re smart about it.”
“How smart?”
“No faces. Or faces cropped out, anyway. Anonymous.”
Dale’s heart was doing something strange. A heavy, insistent thud against his sternum. Not quite anxiety. Not quite excitement. Something in the narrow space between.
“We’d have to talk about it,” he said. “Properly.”
“Obviously.”
“Like, what we’d post. How often. Whether we’d show…” He trailed off.
“Show what?”
Dale took a long swallow of lager to give himself time. “You know. Everything.”
Chris’s eyes did something then. A flicker. A brief, bright thing that was there and gone before Dale could name it. “We’d set boundaries. Figure out what we’re comfortable with. It’s not rocket science.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
They drank in sync, two men processing the same improbable idea from opposite ends of a sagging sofa. The fan whirred. Downstairs, the neighbour’s television switched from a soap opera to something with a laugh track.
“Hypothetically,” Dale said, and the word felt like stepping off a kerb. “What would we even post first? To like, test the waters.”
Chris’s phone was in his hand again, but this time he was scrolling with purpose. “There’s accounts we could look at. For reference. Guys who do the fitness-modelling thing. See how they pitch it.”
“Guys.”
“Yeah. Guys. The market’s mostly women, obviously, but for this kind of stuff…” Chris’s thumb paused on the screen. “There’s a big gay following. For fitness content.”
Dale felt that word land somewhere in his chest. Gay. He wasn’t bothered by it-he’d grown up in a household that was aggressively normal about sexuality, his mum’s best friend was a lesbian, it was fine-but the idea of being looked at that way, by men, specifically, was unfamiliar terrain. His brain didn’t quite know what to do with it.
“Right,” Dale said again, because his vocabulary had apparently shrunk to monosyllables.
“Is that weird for you?” Chris asked. The question was careful. Casually presented, but with a weight beneath it.
“No. I mean. I don’t think so.” Dale rolled the lager tin between his palms, the aluminium cool against his skin. “Just never really thought about it. Men looking at me. Like that.”
“Money’s money. Eyes are eyes.”
“True.”
Chris angled his phone so Dale could see. The screen showed an Instagram grid-a man, maybe mid-twenties, doing some sort of lat spread in front of a gym mirror. His face was cropped out. The focus was entirely on his back, the wide fan of muscle, the way his waist tapered into a narrow V above the waistband of his shorts. The comments underneath were various combinations of fire emojis and enthusiastic propositions.
“This guy’s got an OnlyFans linked in his bio,” Chris said. “Three thousand followers on there. At ten quid a month minimum, that’s-”
“Thirty grand.”
“Minus the platform’s cut. But yeah. Thirty grand a month. For posting photos of his back.”
Dale’s brain, sluggish with cheap lager and the day’s accumulated heat, was starting to catch up. Thirty grand a month. Even half that. Even a quarter. They could pay off the council tax. The Vodafone bill. They could stop eating own-brand beans on toast five nights a week. They could breathe.
“We’d need a name,” Dale heard himself say. “For the account.”
Chris’s grin returned, sharp and quick. “Is that a yes? Hypothetically?”
“Hypothetically, I’m not saying no.”
“That’s basically a yes.”
“That’s a maybe and you know it.”
But Dale was smiling now too, and the idea had taken root somewhere in the back of his mind, a small green shoot pushing up through the cracked earth of their collective financial despair. Why not? Why the fuck not? They were young, they were fit, they’d put the work in. If someone wanted to pay to look at the results, that was their business. Their money. Money that could sit in Dale’s bank account instead of evaporating on rent and ready meals.
“We’d need to test it,” Chris said. “See what we look like on camera. Figure out the angles.”
“Now?”
“Why not? We’re just sitting here.”
Dale’s stomach performed a slow, complicated flip. “What, like, take photos now?”
“Just to see. Relax, I’m not suggesting we launch tonight.” Chris was already standing, his phone raised, the camera app open. “Just a test shot. See what works.”
“What, me? Now? Looking like this?”
Chris gave him a slow, evaluating look that started at Dale’s face and travelled downward, taking in the sweat-damp t-shirt, the gym shorts, the bare legs, the sprawl of his posture on the sofa. Dale felt that look like a physical thing. A fingertip drawn down his sternum.
“You look fine,” Chris said. “Lean back. Put your arm up. Behind your head.”
Dale’s body obeyed before his brain had finished processing the instruction. His left arm lifted, hand resting against the back of his neck, and the movement pulled his t-shirt taut across his chest. The fabric clung to the curve of his pectorals, the slight definition of his upper abdominals. The shorts rode higher on his thighs. He was suddenly, acutely aware of every inch of exposed skin.
Chris moved the phone, framing the shot. “Jesus,” he muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just. You photograph well. The lighting’s shit in here but you can still see…” He trailed off. Took the photo anyway, the shutter sound a small digital click in the quiet room. “There. Look.”
He tossed the phone onto the cushion between them. Dale picked it up.
The man on the screen looked like someone else. Someone who belonged in a magazine, or on a billboard, or in the kind of advertisement that made you feel inadequate about your own body. The shadows carved out his muscles in high relief: the swell of his chest, the ridges of his stomach, the long clean line of his thighs. His face was out of frame, the top of the photo cutting off just below his chin, and somehow that made it more striking. More intentional. He was just a body. A very good body. A body that people might pay to see more of.
“Holy shit,” Dale said softly.
“Right?”
“I didn’t know I looked like that.”
Chris was still standing, looking down at him with an expression Dale couldn’t quite read. Pride, maybe. Or something adjacent to pride. “You’ve got the goods, mate. Always have.”
Dale should have handed the phone back. Instead, he found himself saying: “Your turn.”
“What?”
“Fair’s fair. You’ve got photos of me now. I want photos of you.”
The words came out differently than he’d intended. Bolder. There was a challenge in them, a line drawn in sand, and Dale wasn’t entirely sure why he’d drawn it. Chris held his gaze for a long moment. Then he shrugged, a loose easy movement, and pulled his t-shirt over his head.
Dale’s throat went dry.
He’d seen Chris shirtless before. Hundreds of times. The gym, the beach that one summer in second year, the flat every morning when Chris stumbled from his room to the bathroom in just his boxers. This was different. This was deliberate. Chris was standing in the middle of their living room, stripped to the waist, the fan’s breeze stirring the hair that fell across his forehead, and he was waiting for Dale to look at him.
So Dale looked.
The same broad shoulders, the same defined chest-but Chris’s chest was different than Dale’s. Denser, somehow. His pectorals sat heavier, the line between them a deep groove that caught the light and held it. His stomach was a flat plane of muscle, the obliques visible as subtle shelves above the V of his hips. And his joggers. Those grey joggers, slouched low, the waistband of his boxers showing dark against his skin. The fabric draped in a way that was almost obscene, outlining something that shifted as Chris adjusted his stance.
“Well?” Chris asked, and his voice was lighter than his expression. “Going to take the photo or just stare?”
Dale fumbled for the phone. Raised it. The camera app was still open, and he framed Chris the same way Chris had framed him-no face, just body, the shot starting at the collarbones and ending mid-thigh.
The phone screen showed him things his eyes had been trying not to notice.
The joggers left nothing to the imagination. Nothing at all. Dale could see the outline of Chris’s cock clearly, a thick curve that ran along his left hip, and the weight of it was significant. Substantial. It was the kind of outline that made you do a double-take, that made your brain stutter over the logistics, that made you wonder how he walked around with that thing all day without it being a constant, tangible presence.
Dale took the photo.
“Let’s see it then,” Chris said, and dropped onto the sofa beside him. Closer than before. His bare shoulder brushed Dale’s t-shirted one, warm and dry.
Dale showed him the screen. Chris studied it for a moment, head tilted, and then he laughed-a short, surprised sound.
“Well. That’s not exactly subtle.”
“No,” Dale agreed. “No, it’s not.”
“Is that going to be a problem? For the account?”
Dale looked at the photo again. The outline. The heft. The way the joggers clung like they were trying their best but ultimately failing. “It might be,” he said slowly, “the opposite of a problem.”
Chris’s eyebrow lifted. “What do you mean?”
“I mean if people are paying to look at bodies, and we’ve got…” Dale gestured vaguely at the phone, at Chris, at the whole unlikely situation. “That. Then that’s probably a selling point.”
Silence. The fan whirred. Chris’s arm was still pressed against Dale’s, skin to cotton, a point of warmth that Dale was very aware of.
“You’re not wrong,” Chris said eventually. “But we’d have to be careful. The platform’s got rules about what you can show on the public feed. Behind the paywall’s different, but to start with…”
“We pace ourselves.”
“Exactly.”
They sat with that for a minute. Two men on a second-hand sofa in a shitty flat in Peckham, half-drunk on cheap lager, looking at photos of each other’s bodies on a cracked iPhone screen. The whole thing was surreal. Dale kept waiting for the moment where it would tip over into absurdity-where one of them would laugh and say joke’s over and they’d go back to worrying about council tax-but the moment didn’t come.
“I think,” Dale said, “we should do something with the gym.”
“What do you mean?”
“For the first posts. Not just us sitting around. Proper content. Show people what they’re paying for.” The business-degree part of his brain was flickering to life, sluggish but functional. “Before-and-after stuff is good, but we haven’t got the before. So we show the after. The maintenance. The work that goes into looking like this.”
Chris nodded slowly. “Gym montage. Training clips. Posing routines.”
“Exactly.”
“Could film tomorrow. We’re both going in the morning anyway.”
The session was already planned-they’d synced their schedules weeks ago, a habit carried over from university that neither of them had bothered to break. Five days a week, seven a.m., the same budget gym now located in an industrial estate near the flat instead of across from the library. Some things didn’t change.
“We’d need to plan it,” Dale said. “What we’re going to film. How we’re going to frame it.”
“We’d need to figure out what we’re wearing.”
That stopped Dale short. “What we’re wearing?”
“Yeah. You can’t film a fitness video in baggy joggers and a hoodie. People want to see the muscles working. They want definition. Pump. Veins.” Chris’s voice was matter-of-fact. Clinical. Like he was discussing a marketing strategy, which Dale supposed he was. “Tight shorts. Tanks. Maybe shirtless eventually, but we build up to that.”
“Right.”
“Is that weird?”
“No.” Dale paused. “Maybe a little.”
“We can figure it out. Experiment. See what works.” Chris took the phone back, swiped through the photos they’d taken. “Worst case, we delete the whole thing and pretend it never happened. Best case, we make rent without selling a kidney.”
Dale laughed, and the tension that had been building in his shoulders loosened a fraction. Chris was right. This didn’t have to be a big deal. It was just photos. Just videos. Just two blokes monetising something they were already doing anyway. And if the people paying happened to be men-if they happened to be looking at Dale’s arse or Chris’s cock outline with intentions that weren’t strictly fitness-related-that was their business. Their money. Money didn’t care about orientation.
“Alright,” Dale said. “Tomorrow morning. Gym. We film some test stuff and see how it looks.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Let’s fucking do it.”
Chris grinned, and it was the same grin he’d worn when they’d decided to move in together-conspiratorial, reckless, buoyed by the certainty that even if the whole thing went tits-up, they’d have a good story to tell. “This is going to be interesting.”
“That’s one word for it.”
“What other word would you use?”
Dale considered. The lager was warm now, the last mouthful in his tin tasting flat and metallic, but he drained it anyway and set it aside. The photos sat on Chris’s phone like a secret, two headless bodies frozen in the shitty light of their living room, and tomorrow they were going to take more. A lot more. And then they were going to put those photos on the internet and wait for strangers to decide whether their bodies were worth paying for.
“Terrifying,” Dale said. “The word I’d use is terrifying.”
Chris’s laugh was quiet, but genuine. “Yeah. That too.”
--
Dale didn’t sleep well that night.
The heat was part of it-London holding onto summer like a grudge, the air in his bedroom thick and still-but mostly it was his brain, refusing to power down. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the photos. His own chest, the shadows carving out muscle he’d worked years to build. Chris’s body, bare and golden in the lamplight. That outline in the joggers.
He rolled onto his stomach. His cock pressed against the mattress, half-hard the way it got sometimes when he couldn’t settle, nothing to do with arousal and everything to do with the body’s stubborn plumbing. He ignored it.
Chris’s room was across the hall. The walls were thin-Dale could hear the occasional creak of bedsprings, the soft pad of footsteps, the distant flush of the toilet. At one point he thought he heard Chris’s voice, low and murmuring, and he wondered if he was on the phone. Who would he be calling at this hour? A girlfriend? Chris hadn’t mentioned anyone, but that didn’t mean much. They didn’t talk about that kind of thing. Their friendship existed in a comfortable lacuna where certain topics simply didn’t surface. Sex was one of them. Relationships were another.
Dale turned onto his side. The sheets were damp with sweat.
Tomorrow. Gym. Filming. The weight of Chris’s shoulder against his, warm and solid. The way Chris had looked at him when he’d pulled his t-shirt off-expectant, maybe. Curious. Like he was waiting to see what Dale would do.
Dale didn’t know what he was going to do. That was the problem. Or maybe it wasn’t a problem. Maybe it was just a thing that was happening, a door swinging open that he hadn’t known existed, and all he had to do was walk through it and see what was on the other side.
At some point, exhaustion won. He sank into sleep like a stone into water, and when he dreamed, the dreams were indistinct and strange. Bodies moving in dim light. The sound of a camera shutter. The weight of someone’s gaze on his skin, heavy as a hand.
--
The alarm went off at six-thirty.
Dale’s hand found his phone and silenced it. For a long moment he lay still, staring at the ceiling crack-still there, still hair-fine, still running from the light fixture to the window. The morning light was grey and tentative, filtering through the cheap blinds.
From across the hall, he heard Chris’s alarm go off. Then the thud of feet hitting the floor.
Dale swung his legs out of bed. His body moved on autopilot: piss, brush teeth, splash water on face, pull on gym kit. He’d chosen carefully the night before-black compression shorts that hugged his thighs and arse like a second skin, a deep red tank top with armholes cut low enough to show the lateral curve of his pectorals. He’d bought the tank as a joke, something lurid from a sale rack, but now he was looking at himself in the bathroom mirror and realising it was no joke at all. The colour made his skin look warm. The cut made his shoulders look broader. And the shorts. Christ, the shorts.
He stepped into the hallway.
Chris was already there, leaning against the kitchen counter with a glass of water in his hand. Grey shorts. Tight grey shorts. A white tank that was practically translucent where it stretched across his chest. His hair was still messy from sleep, and there was a crease on his cheek from the pillow.
He looked Dale up and down. The glass paused halfway to his mouth.
“Well,” Chris said. “Someone’s committed.”
Dale felt the heat rise again, but this time he didn’t look away. “We said tight shorts.”
“We did say tight shorts.”
“So here I am. In tight shorts.”
Chris’s mouth did something. A twitch. Not quite a smile. “You look good, mate. The red works.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
They stood there for a moment, the hallway narrow between them. The fan was still running in the living room, its blades cutting air nobody was there to feel. Somewhere outside, a bus groaned past, diesel and distance.
“Ready?” Chris asked.
“Ready.”
The word felt heavier than it should. Ready for what, exactly? A gym session. Some test footage. The beginning of something Dale couldn’t quite name but could feel, already, buzzing beneath his skin like a current. He grabbed his gym bag and followed Chris out the door, down the three flights of stairs, past the lift that smelled of bleach and disappointment, and into the grey London morning.
The gym was a fifteen-minute walk. They didn’t talk much on the way, but the silence wasn’t uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people holding an idea between them, turning it over like a stone, waiting to see what it looked like in a different light.
At reception, they swiped their membership cards. The girl behind the desk didn’t look up from her phone. The gym was quiet at this hour-a few dedicated regulars on the treadmills, an older man doing something complicated with resistance bands, the usual cast of characters who treated seven a.m. like a secret society.
“Weights first,” Chris said. “We’ll do the posing stuff after, when we’ve got a pump going.”
“Yeah. Good plan.”
They found a corner near the mirrors. The squat rack was free. Dale loaded the bar while Chris stretched, his movements loose and practiced, the white tank riding up to reveal the ladder of his abdominals. Dale caught himself watching and forced his attention back to the weight plates.
Forty kilos. Sixty. Eighty.
“Spot me?” Chris asked, and Dale stepped behind him.
The squat was textbook. Chris dropped low, thighs parallel to the floor, the grey shorts straining across the curve of his arse. The fabric went tight. Impossibly tight. And then he drove upward, muscles bunching, the bar steady across his shoulders, and every line of his body was sharp and deliberate and absurdly photogenic.
Dale’s mouth was dry. “Good set,” he managed.
“Your turn.”
They traded places. Dale settled under the bar and let the weight settle into him, grounding. The mirror showed him his own reflection-red tank vivid against the grey walls, black shorts hugging the arse that he still didn’t quite know what to do with-and behind him, Chris, watching. Phone in hand.
“Just doing some test footage,” Chris said, and his voice was casual. Relaxed. Like filming your flatmate’s squat set at seven in the morning was the most normal thing in the world.
Dale didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He was too focused on the weight, the movement, the slow controlled descent and the explosive drive upward. The bar rattled slightly as he racked it. His breath came in short hard bursts. His muscles were already swelling, blood rushing to the surface, and when he caught his reflection again, his chest looked fuller. Rounder. The pectorals rose and fell with each breath, and the veins in his forearms stood out in blue relief.
Chris lowered the phone. “Got it,” he said. “Looks incredible.”
The word landed somewhere in Dale’s chest and stayed there, warm and unexpected. He’d been called a lot of things. Incredible wasn’t usually one of them.
“Let me see,” he said.
Chris stepped closer, angling the screen. They stood shoulder to shoulder, both of them breathing hard from the set, and Dale watched himself squat. The footage was good. Better than good. The angle caught the full curve of his arse at the bottom of the movement, the way the shorts pulled tight and then released as he rose. And when he racked the bar, turning slightly, the camera caught his chest in profile-the high round swell of his pectorals, the flat plane of his stomach, the sheen of sweat that was already starting to glisten on his skin.
“We can work with this,” Dale said.
“Yeah.” Chris’s voice was quieter now. Contained. “Yeah, we can.”
They did three more sets each. Filmed everything. Chris got creative with the angles-crouching low for the squats, standing to the side for the bench press, catching the flex of Dale’s biceps during curls in a way that made the muscle jump on screen. And Dale returned the favour. Filmed Chris doing pull-ups, the white tank yanked up and tucked under his chin, his back a landscape of shifting planes and shadows. Filmed the way his shorts sat on his hips, the trail of dark hair that disappeared beneath the waistband, the outline that was even harder to ignore in the gym’s fluorescent light.
By the time they finished, the gym was starting to fill up. The post-work crowd trickling in, fresh-faced and caffeinated. Dale and Chris retreated to the stretching area, grabbing foam mats and collapsing side by side.
“That was-” Dale started.
“Yeah.”
“I mean, we actually got some decent stuff.”
“Decent?” Chris propped himself up on his elbows, looking at Dale with an expression that was almost offended. “Mate, we got gold. Pure gold. If those shots don’t get subscribers, I’ll eat my own shorts.”
Dale laughed, and the sound surprised him. He felt loose. Good. The endorphins were flooding his system, the pump still singing in his muscles, and the anxiety that had kept him awake the night before had dissolved into something else. Anticipation. Eagerness.
“When do we post?” he asked.
“Tonight. I’ll set up the account. We’ll start with the tame stuff-teasers, basically-and see what kind of response we get.”
“And the name?”
“Still working on it. Has to be something that doesn’t give us away. Something that fits the vibe.”
Dale stretched his arms overhead, feeling the pull in his lats. “We’ll figure it out.”
“Yeah.” Chris reached for his water bottle, took a long drink. A bead of sweat traced a path from his temple to his jaw, and Dale watched it fall, catching the light. “We’ll figure it out.”
They gathered their things and headed for the exit. The girl at reception still didn’t look up from her phone. Outside, the morning had brightened into something closer to actual daylight, the grey burning off to reveal a pale blue sky. The walk back to the flat felt different than the walk there. Charged. Electric. Like the air before a storm.
“Hey,” Chris said as they climbed the stairs. “What we talked about last night. The gay following thing.”
Dale’s foot paused on the step. “What about it?”
“I just wanted to check. You’re actually okay with it? Because once we put this stuff out there, we can’t control who looks at it. Or what they think about.”
Dale considered the question. The photos. The footage. The way his arse looked in the compression shorts. The way Chris’s cock pushed against the grey fabric. And somewhere in the back of his mind, a thought that had been forming since last night, slowly taking shape like a Polaroid developing.
“I know,” Dale said. “And yeah. I’m okay with it.”
Chris nodded, something unreadable flickering across his face. Then he unlocked the door to the flat, and the smell of last night’s lager hit them both, and everything was ordinary again. Almost.
Chris’s phone buzzed as they were taking off their trainers.
A notification. Then another. Then three more in quick succession.
“What the fuck?” Chris muttered, swiping the screen.
Dale leaned over to look. The screen showed an OnlyFans setup page-account created, profile picture selected, a handful of photos already uploaded. Their photos. The test shots from last night, the gym footage from this morning.
“You already set it up?” Dale asked.
“I was messing around while you were in the shower. Just getting the layout ready. I didn’t think anyone would find it yet.”
But someone had. The notifications kept coming. Follows. Likes. A comment that was just three flame emojis and the word fuck. And then a direct message, already opened, already read.
Chris’s jaw went tight.
“What does it say?” Dale asked, though something in Chris’s expression told him he already knew the answer.
Chris turned the phone so Dale could read the message himself.
The screen was bright in the dim hallway. The words sat there, plain and unapologetic, in the flat grey box of the OnlyFans messenger:
I want to see more of that fat arse. What do I have to pay to watch it bounce?
Dale stared at the message. His heart was doing that thing again-the heavy thud, the too-loud beating-and he could feel Chris’s eyes on him, waiting. Watching. The same curiosity from last night, the same held-breath tension.
Dale took the phone.
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