Chapter 18 #2
Trey glanced around the house that was as familiar to Dom as breathing, probably taking in the wood walls and comfortable furniture.
His parents made decent money, but they didn’t flaunt it.
His mom always said she had five kids to put through college, so she’d rather invest in them than in expensive furnishings.
“Dom, who was at the door?” Roxy’s voice carried from the around the corner before she turned it. She stared at Trey. “Who are you?”
“Rox, this is my boyfriend Trey Cooper,” Dom said. “Trey, my sister Roxy.”
“Boyfriend?” Roxy put at least three exclamation points in that word. “When did that happen?”
“It’s been happening for a while now.”
Starr came into the foyer, probably to see what the commotion was about. She immediately started snapping her fingers.
“Hey, Starr in the sky,” Dom said. “This is my friend Trey.”
“Nice to meet you, Starr,” Trey said gently. “I love your T-shirt.”
Starr smiled at the floor. “Roxy gave it to me for my birthday. I’m sixteen, two months, and four days.”
“I’m twenty-one and one day.”
Dom startled. He was so busy being a total shit that he forgot about Trey’s twenty-first birthday.
“Twenty-one, huh?” Roxy slung an arm across Trey’s shoulders. “You’re useful to have around. Dom is too upstanding to buy beer for me and my friends.”
“Oh, no.” Trey slipped out of her grasp. “I’m not getting into trouble with Dominic for buying you alcohol.”
She pretended to pout. “Geez, Dom, why did you have to pick a respectable one to date?”
Dom laughed out loud. He wasn’t sure how respectable it was to let a guy fuck you in the backseat of a borrowed car on the first date. Not that he was going to share that particular thought with his sisters.
“The table isn’t set yet,” Starr said. “I’ll set the table.” She turned and headed for the kitchen. After a beat, Roxy followed her.
Dom grabbed Trey’s hand and tugged him upstairs, directly into his bedroom, and then shut the door.
“Dom, I’m sorr—”
He shut down Trey’s apology with a hard kiss.
Trey grabbed the front of his shirt and held on, opening to Dom’s seeking mouth.
Needing the taste of Trey back on his tongue, the feel of him in his arms. Needing this.
He held Trey close, feeling the thump of Trey’s heart against his chest, and the warm tickle of breath on his neck.
“I missed you,” Dom said after a moment of silence. “Didn’t realize how much until just now.”
“I missed you like crazy, too.”
He pulled back far enough to see Trey’s green eyes and the raw emotion in them. It woke up the part of Dom that wanted to protect Trey and to make everything all right again. “I’m sorry for how I reacted last week.”
“You don’t owe me an apology.” Trey curled one hand around the back of Dom’s neck. “I fucked up big time. I made you a promise and I broke it, and I’m sorry for that.”
“I know. I forgive you, as long as you forgive me.”
“For what?”
“Shutting you out. Not giving you a chance to explain last week when it happened. I just . . . when I get mad, Trey, I need space to sort through what I’m feeling.
I didn’t want to risk going off on you, or saying something really mean that I’d regret later.
I used to have a bad habit of bottling up what I felt, pretending everything was okay, instead of dealing with my emotions.
But that wasn’t healthy, and it took me to a dark place, so I needed space to deal. ”
“I get it.” Trey flashed a hopeful smile. “Does this mean we’re okay?”
“You faced your worst fear to drive two hours to talk to me. We’re definitely okay.”
“I told Bobby and Andy about us.”
Dom’s heart skipped. “You did?”
“Yeah, the night we got home from Unbound. Bobby’s pissed, as expected. If we aren’t practicing or talking about the set for New York, he ignores me. I hate it, but I guess it’s better than a big ‘fuck you, get out,’ right?”
“I guess so.” He hated Trey’s situation with Bobby, which could still go either way, but he also loved that Trey had finally come clean about them. “So does this mean you want to be out?”
“I mean, I didn’t post a coming-out video on our YouTube channel or anything, but I won’t deny you again, Dominic. I promise on my music career, I won’t.”
Dom grasped that sliver of hope and held tight. “But we aren’t finished with Unbound. We’re both performing at nationals.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m with you, and you’re with me, and fuck whoever doesn’t like it. Even Bobby.”
“Thank you.” Dom kissed him, a firm press with a lot of silent promises. “I mean it, thank you.”
“I shouldn’t have hid in the first place but I can’t change that I did. No more hiding, though.”
“No more hiding.”
A knock on his bedroom door startled Dom into turning around, his body immediately missing the heat of Trey in his arms. The door swung open and Mom poked her head inside. “Starr said you had a visitor.”
“Yeah, Mom, this is Trey Cooper. Trey, my mother Zelda Bounds.”
It took Trey a second to react—probably because Trey knew that Dom and his siblings were all adopted and every color of the rainbow, but he hadn’t mentioned his parents were black. “A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Bounds,” Trey said.
“Likewise.” She came fully into the room. “It looks like the girls made plenty of taco fixings, so I hope you’ll join us for dinner.”
“I’d like that, thank you, ma’am.”
Mom seemed suitably impressed by Trey’s manners, so she excused herself—and left the door wide open.
“I think that’s code for ‘Come downstairs,’” Dom said.
“Does she think I’m going to ravish you in your bedroom while the family eats tacos?”
Dom tried to shove aside all thoughts of Trey shutting the door and going to his knees on Dom’s bedroom floor, because he didn’t need to show up at the dinner table at half-mast. “Come on, babe, it’s time for my dad to give you the third degree.”
The panic on Trey’s face was all kinds of adorable. “Seriously?”
“No, he’ll love you for the simple fact that I brought you home to meet them.”
“Technically I brought myself to meet—wait, you’ve never brought a guy home before?”
Dom shook his head. “Never met anyone worth the effort.”
Trey kissed him hard. “Mister, lines like that will get you laid tonight.”
“I am so down with that.” Dom wasn’t sure where the sex would happen, but he had Trey and he planned to make the most of their time together. Maybe they could go back to the apartment in the city to fuck, just to mess with Lincoln.
The dining room table was set for five, which made Dom stop short. Mom put the platter of steaming taco meat on a trivet, then turned to smile at him. “Your father won’t be home until later, so he said to eat without us.”
“Stuck at work?”
“He had an errand to run.”
“Cool.”
Starr neatly arranged all of the taco fixings in the center of the table, with spoons and tongs all facing to the left. No one picked anything up with their fingers anymore, not even dinner rolls. Once Starr learned about germs and bare hands, it was game over.
Trey sat next to him on one side of the table, his sisters on the other.
It was truly bizarre to have Trey eating dinner at his house, but not his dad.
His parents had always done their best to be home for dinner every night, because it was usually the only hour during their very busy weeks that everyone was able to get together for a little family time.
Eating tacos was a uniquely messy experience each and every time.
No matter how Dom built it, that first bite always shattered the shell and the fixings went onto his plate.
He watched Trey suffer the same way. He had to resist licking sour cream off Trey’s cheek at one point, and that led to dirty thoughts he shouldn’t be having at the dinner table.
Trey chatted easily with his mom and Roxy, telling them about Fading Daze and living full-time at the shore. Roxy seemed suitably enamored of him the more he talked.
“You write your own songs, too?” she said. “Geez, Dom, could you have found a more perfect boyfriend?”
Mom’s eyebrow went up at that one because, yeah, the label was new to everyone.
“I am far from perfect, just ask Dom,” Trey said.
Maybe he wasn’t perfect, but Trey was very definitely Dom’s. He wanted to squeeze Trey’s hand or thigh, but his fingers were covered in taco slop, so he settled on a very significant look that made Trey’s cheeks pink up.
Since the girls had done the bulk of the prep, Dom and Trey teamed up to fill the dishwasher and clear the table.
They worked together in a kind of harmony that lent itself to years of practice, and Dom liked the idea of doing this with Trey again.
Sharing meals and cleaning up afterward. In a place of their own one day.
In between their world tours, of course.
When Dom dreamed, he dreamed big—any other way simply wasn’t worth it.