Chapter 6 #2
“I couldn’t sleep until I changed my sheets, because my bed smelled like you. Like us together.”
Dom squeezed the phone a little too tightly. “Really?”
“I don’t want to stop seeing you, Dom, but I don’t know how to make this work. You live a hundred miles from here, neither one of us has a car, and our bands hate each other.”
“We’ll figure it out.” Trey had said the magic words, and Dom would do anything to make it work. “Maybe we can’t do a lot together in person, but we can message and text and shit.”
Trey laughed. “I don’t think we know each other well enough to shit together.”
Dom realized what he’d said and started laughing too. “Asshole. You know what I meant.”
“Yeah, I did. You’re easy to mess with.” Fun and lightness was back in Trey’s voice.
“Mess all you want. I deserve it.”
“Probably, yeah. Just . . . please don’t lie to me again.”
“I promise.” Dom’s chest expanded, and he sucked in the first good breath he’d taken all day. “What about our bandmates?”
“It’s none of their business. I mean, obviously Dani knows we were together, but she thinks it’s over. No reason to tell her otherwise.”
“Agreed.” The idea of a secret relationship was oddly appealing. He liked having something that was completely, totally his. “I need to tell my parents, though. Trying to keep anything secret from them is like sneaking a rhino through a china shop. It never works.”
“Okay.”
“They’ll probably want to meet you.”
“I’ll probably disappoint them.”
“Never. I told my mom about us today, and she’ll love you just because you gave me a second chance.”
“You told your mother?”
Dom explained going home and needing advice, and how relaxing it had been to be with his family. “I know it sounds weird, but my mom and I are close. Always have been.” Especially after his senior year of high school.
“You’re lucky. My parents are assholes.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I know, but I keep going on about how awesome my parents are.”
“I don’t care.” Something rustled on Trey’s end of the line. “Tell me more. What do your parents do?”
Dom sat in one of the lounge chairs tucked beneath the yard’s towering oak tree. “My mom is a copywriter for a local news station, and my dad’s a history professor at Temple.”
“Damn. And they have five kids?”
“Yeah. Taisha’s the oldest. She’s working on her master’s degree in counseling, and her husband owns two auto repair shops.
They live out in Pittsburgh. My brother Percell is a lance corporal in the marines, and he’s overseas right now.
My first little sister Roxy is going to college in the fall in Florida, and my parents hate it but they let her pick her school. ”
“What’s she studying?”
“Engineering.”
Trey let out a slow whistle. “Smart kid.”
“She is now that she applies herself.”
“What about the last one? You have another sister, right?”
Dom loved that he’d remembered. “Yeah, Starr. She still has two years of high school.”
“She into any clubs at school? Sports?”
“No. Starr loves to read, though. She has a photographic memory and remembers anything she reads. Even ingredients on food labels.”
“Wow, that’s handy. You’ve got, like, a perfect family.”
“Not really. We fight just like anyone else. I mean, my dad silently hates that I’m pursuing music instead of going to college. He even let me use my college fund to live off of for four years. I promised if I didn’t have something real going by then, I’d come home and get a job.”
Trey didn’t speak right away. “How long ago was that?”
His stomach somersaulted. “Deadline’s almost up.”
“Shit, that’s why you’re playing at Unbound isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Dom glared at a fallen tree branch. “We’re kind of in the same boat, aren’t we? We both want to win to prove something to our fathers.”
“I guess so. But you’re running out of time.”
“Doesn’t matter. Your dream is just as important to you as mine is to me.”
“Why couldn’t we have been in the same band?”
“You could always defect.”
Trey made a snorting noise. “Danielle would murder me in my sleep. After she cut off my balls. Thanks, no.”
Dom wasn’t selfish enough to quit, either. Lincoln was his best friend and another brother, and Benji needed this as badly as the rest of them. He wouldn’t leave his friends any more than Trey would leave his.
“So we’re stuck on opposite sides,” Trey said.
“Only onstage. Offstage, none of that matters.”
“Deal.”
“So I’ve told you stuff about me. Tell me more about you.”
“I don’t want to talk about my family.”
The dark finality in Trey’s voice had Dom searching for another topic. “Okay, then tell me about your bandmates. How’d you guys meet?”
“Would you believe a Craigslist ad?”
“Actually, I would.”
“Well, that’s how it happened. My dad was pressuring me about college and applying myself to something useful, and I needed out of there, and I knew I wanted to move here so I started browsing want ads for this area.
Found one for a start-up band, brother and sister, who were looking for musicians. ”
The guy with Trey and Dani last night in the green room looked nothing like her. “Are the brother and sister still part of it?”
“Yes.” Trey chuckled. “I know, Bobby and Danielle don’t look a thing alike. But yeah, they’re a year apart. Music’s huge in their family, so naturally their parents are totally supportive of this.”
“Will it help your Perfect Family Complex if I tell you that Lincoln’s parents don’t speak to him? His sister still calls sometimes, but his parents cut him out when he came out to them. That was, like, six and a half years ago now.”
Trey was silent for a few moments. “That sucks.”
“Yeah. But my family loves him, so he isn’t alone.” He paused, unsure what to say next. “So where are you? At home?”
“Yeah, I work later, but Bobby said someone’s coming by in a little while to audition.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, Dom, honest. Like Lincoln said last night, they made Tyson an offer. He took it. We lost, you gained.”
“I know that part, but . . . sometimes I feel like one of the reasons Tyson joined us was because of me.”
Trey made a soft sound that was suspiciously similar to a growl. “He was giving you looks last night. Looks I didn’t like.”
“If it helps, I have a very strict policy about not sleeping with my bandmates.”
“Tempted a lot?”
“Have you seen Lincoln and Benji? I mean, Linc and I had a thing once back in high school, but nothing since then.”
“Wait, are all four of you gay?”
“Yes. Made sharing a hotel bathroom for a week kind of a bitch.”
Trey laughed. “I bet.”
“More for them than me. I grew up in a house with four women and two bathrooms. Time was limited, so I’m kind of no-fuss. Unless I’m performing, then I spend way too much time styling my hair.”
“I like your hair. If mine gets too long, it gets frizzy and curly and shit.”
Dom played with a few strands that had fallen across his forehead. His hair was thick and shiny, and he kept it about four inches long so he could style it up into waves, kind of like a pompadour but less puffy. Today it was just lying flat around his face looking artlessly cool.
A motorcycle engine revved on the street.
“Where are you at?” Trey asked. “Bike show?”
“Backyard. Some shithead’s trying to be cool.”
“Tanning?”
“No, came out to talk to you in private. My parents and two sisters are inside, and if I had to grovel I didn’t want witnesses.”
“You were prepared to grovel? Really?”
“Yes.” Dom had no shame in admitting that. Deep down, he knew that getting to know Trey would have been worth it.
“Damn, I should have made you work harder for my forgiveness. I take it back. I’m mad at you again.”
“Liar.”
Trey laugh-snorted. “Can I ask you something personal?”
“I guess so.”
“Why does it matter so much to you that I didn’t tell you I’d never done anal before?”
Darkness slithered in Dom’s gut, and he clenched the arm of the lounge chair. The hot summer air was suddenly stifling. “Look, I’m not some romantic idiot who thinks first times should be flowers and rainbows and champagne. I mean, you knew what you wanted.”
“But?”
He couldn’t even find humor in the innuendo. “No buts. Like I said, I could have hurt you by accident and I just . . . I don’t ever want to hurt someone like that.”
Trey was silent for so long that Dom braced for an epically personal follow-up question that he’d probably not answer.
“So do you have a computer at your parents’ house?” Trey asked.
Dom blinked at the rosebushes. “Um, no. It’s at the apartment. I’m staying one more night and going home tomorrow. Why?”
“FaceTime.”
“There’s an app for that, you know.”
“Yeah, but the screen’s bigger on a laptop, and I really want to jam with you again.”
“I’d like that.” Dom’s tension bled away now that the topic of sex was over. “I’d also love to hear you play one of your original songs.”
“I could do that.”
“Call me back tonight?”
“I can’t, I work until two in the morning.”
Dom shoved away a pang of disappointment. “I’ll set my alarm and get back up.”
“Really? Won’t we disturb your family?”
“The basement is soundproofed. They did that ages ago when I said I was serious about music. It kept me from driving everyone crazy at all hours.”
“Smart parents.”
“Very smart.”
“Okay, it’s a date then. Two thirty?”
“Yeah. It’s a date. See you, Trey.”
“See ya.”
Dom hung up with a sense of victory. Trey had forgiven him. He didn’t know or care if he deserved forgiveness, because all this meant more Trey and more music. Music had always been part of his life, and for a little while longer, so was Trey.
No matter what happened at Unbound, they had the next three weeks to be together and pretend they weren’t slowly edging their way over a cliff.