Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
The entire win and most of the rest of the night was a blur for Dom, because he spent it in a state of constant drunkenness.
And he didn’t care. He remembered the elation of winning once he was onstage with his friends and staring out at bright lights and cheering people.
He remembered partying in the talent lot until someone helped him roll into his sleeping bag at some hour of morning.
He half remembered Lincoln wrangling him to the building with the showers, getting washed up, and then puking into a toilet.
Mostly, though, he remembered the rage.
I’m not fucking him.
Dom had been too angry with Trey to risk texting him back, or allowing a face-to-face conversation. He needed to feel his emotions, and as long as Dom was that angry, he didn’t want to risk saying something to Trey that he couldn’t take back.
Lincoln stayed close the whole time, without Dom ever asking him to, and if Benji or Tyson or Joshua suspected what was wrong, they never asked.
The vendor tents were closed, because everyone was leaving the fairgrounds, so Dom settled on a warm, flat Coke to soothe his stomach.
It helped enough that he could assist in taking down their tent and packing everything away.
The talent lot was already half empty, with more cars, trucks, vans, and SUVs pulling out every couple of minutes.
“Hey, Dani,” Tyson said.
Dom looked up from the duffel bag he was stuffing into the van over one of the coolers. Danielle was walking toward them, her gaze fixed on Dom.
Lincoln slipped in between them. “We didn’t get a chance to congratulate you guys,” he said.
“Yeah thanks. Congrats on the top spot.”
“Thank you.”
She stepped to the side. “Dominic, can we talk for a minute?”
“I guess,” Dom said.
He led her a few dozen feet from his friends, then turned, arms crossed. “Did Trey send you?”
“No, this is all me.”
“Okay then. Talk.”
She didn’t cower under his snappish tone. “Are you dumping Trey?”
“According to him, we were never together.”
“Oh, come on.” She planted both hands on her hips. “Look, Trey doesn’t react well when he’s cornered. He tried sidestepping that asshole, but the dude wouldn’t let up.”
“Trey could have walked away.”
“Yeah, probably, but Trey also doesn’t back down from confrontations. He always has to get the last word, and yesterday he was stuck between doing what you wanted and doing what his instincts said, which was to shut the guy down. He hates himself for what he said.”
“Uh-huh.” Dom examined her words. “Does he hate what he said, or does he hate that I heard him say it.”
“Both. I know him, Dominic. I saw it in his face the moment he said those things about you two. He knew how awful it was, and he regretted it immediately.”
“Look, I get that you’re trying to defend Trey, but this is between him and me.
I’ve been out since I was fifteen, but I agreed to keep us a secret because it’s what he wanted.
I hid us from my friends because he asked me to.
The one thing I asked him to do, the only promise I asked him to make, and he breaks it in less than an hour. ”
“Not on purpose.”
“You don’t accidentally deny being gay or that you’re sleeping with someone. I would never deny him, and I told him so.”
“You guys aren’t the same person.” She threw both hands in the air. “You have a big, loving family and a strong support system, and you’ve been out forever. Trey doesn’t have that. All he has is Fading Daze. We’re it. I get that he hurt you, but he was also trying to protect the band.”
“By lying.”
“Yeah, apparently by lying. You know what? Him and me? We’ve both been lying for years. We play up the couple angle because it sells downloads of our songs and gets views on our pages. It gets people to our concerts and helps us sell CDs. I’m as much at fault for our perception as he is.”
“Except you aren’t pretending to be straight.”
Danielle made a frustrated noise. “Okay, we aren’t getting anywhere, so back to my original question. Are you breaking up with Trey?”
“I don’t know.” Dom didn’t want to end things. What he had with Trey was too fucking special to give up because of something said in the heat of a moment. But he was still too angry to make a decision about them. “I need some space.”
“Space, right.”
“I care about him, Dani. I care too much to talk to him about this right now, so I need space. I don’t want to talk to him while I’m still mad.”
She studied him a moment. “He really hurt you, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. He really did.”
“I get that. Honest. And I’ll tell Trey what you said about space.”
“Thanks. I’ll call him when I’m ready to talk.”
“All right. Take it easy, Dom.”
“You too.”
Dom ignored Lincoln’s curious glances while they finished packing up their stuff.
He wasn’t in the mood to talk. Not to Lincoln, not to Trey, not to anyone.
He wanted to go home, take a long shower, and spend the rest of the weekend doing nothing more taxing than staring at the bedroom ceiling. Maybe play a little Xbox.
Definitely lots of sleeping.
The rest of the week passed by in a blur of activity.
Emily Ryan, the talent coordinator for Unbound, set up a conference call with the band Monday night to discuss the particulars of the national competition, which was the last weekend in August. Five weeks.
That call propelled Lincoln off on a quest to choose the perfect set based on the specific song restrictions Emily outlined on the call.
All of Dom’s spare time that wasn’t spent working for his uncle was spent practicing.
He didn’t have time to think too hard about Trey until it was Sunday night, and Dom had nothing to do.
Tyson begged off practice because of a family issue, Lincoln had a date, and Benji and Joshua were off together, probably having all kinds of awesome sex, and Dom was alone.
Exactly a week and a day after their Unbound win, and Dom was sprawled on the apartment sofa, mind racing, too wound up to even rub one out.
He missed Trey.
Now that he had time to think, Trey was the thing that had been missing from his life all week. The funny texts. The late-night jam sessions. The way Trey smiled while he played. The sound of his voice.
Dom wasn’t mad anymore. Most of his anger had come from the awful timing of everything that had happened that final day of the competition.
From the stress of Roxy’s attack and the anxiety of who would win, Dom had found some peace with Trey only to have that peace thrown back in his face.
Not on purpose, obviously, and with the sharp lens of distance and time, he saw that clearly.
He stared at his phone for a long time before texting Trey: Sorry for the radio silence. Wanna talk?
Nothing came through for a while after, so he turned on the TV and put a game in the Xbox. He didn’t even care what it was, and he lost himself to the story for a while.
His phone stayed quiet.
Dom tossed and turned most of the night, and when Trey still hadn’t replied that morning, Dom shut off his phone, grabbed his violin, and then drove to his parents’ house.
His parents were both at work, but Roxy greeted him with a hug and a huge smile.
He spent a couple of hours playing his violin downstairs, sometimes with an audience, but mostly alone.
He took Roxy to lunch at her favorite pizza place, and then they picked up Starr from her day group, and the three of them went out for ice cream at one of those places that let you build your own sundae and charged by the ounce.
Roxy decided the three of them should make dinner, so after a stop at the grocery store, they converged in the kitchen.
Dom let Roxy direct the proceedings, trusting her to brown the ground beef without burning it, while he helped Starr chop tomatoes and shred lettuce. Make-your-own-taco night was always an adventure in the Bounds household.
The doorbell gonged around five. Starr was focused on arranging the taco shells on a cookie sheet for oven warming, and Roxy had disappeared into the bathroom while the meat and spices simmered.
Dom wiped his hands on a dish towel, and then went to see who the hell was at the door on a Monday night.
The last person on earth he expected to see on the porch was Trey. “Hi,” he said, a little bug-eyed.
“What are you doing here?” Not the smoothest opening line of Dom’s life.
“You weren’t answering your phone.”
“I turned it off.”
Trey held out his hands, palms up, a gesture of surrender.
“Look, I know I fucked up last week with that guy, and I’m sorry.
And I didn’t get your text until this morning because I dropped my phone in the sink last night and the damned thing wouldn’t turn on until it spent all night in dry rice, and then you weren’t answering me, and I panicked. ”
“So you drove all the way up here?”
“Yes.”
“In a car by yourself?”
Trey gave a shaky laugh. “I might have parked down the block for about half an hour while I collected my panicking self. I needed to see you. I didn’t want you to think I blew you off last night.
I almost pissed myself when I saw you’d reached out, and then I freaked when you ignored me all day, so I called Tyson and got Lincoln’s number, and then I might have groveled a little bit to get him to give me your address. ”
Dom blinked. “You groveled? To Lincoln?”
“A little bit, yeah. But isn’t that what you’re supposed to do with your boyfriend’s best friend when you accidentally hurt them? Grovel and make nice?”
Boyfriend. A warmth spread in his chest from such a simple word, and for the fact that it applied to Trey. Trey, who was still standing on the porch like a solicitor, because Dom had forgotten his manners. “Come in, so I stop air-conditioning the entire outdoors.”