Chapter 40
Dominic
Practice leaves me buzzing and wiped at the same time, that weird post-adrenaline crash where my muscles hum, and my brain is just white noise.
Keller rode our asses hard tonight, like he’s trying to squeeze every last drop of filmable greatness out of us before scouts show up again.
My shoulders ache, my legs are heavy, and my hands smell like chalk and leather when I grab my bag and head out to the lot.
My headlights sweep the gravel as I pull into the driveway and kill the engine. For a second, I just sit there, fingers still wrapped around the steering wheel, the quiet slamming into me after hours of whistles and yelling and the thud of bodies.
Home.
The word still feels fucking weird when I apply it to anything that isn’t a place my mother owned. It fits here, anyway.
I grab my duffel, slam the door shut with my hip, and make my way up the creaky porch steps.
Inside, the air smells like laundry detergent and the cinnamon tea Brendon got obsessed with this week.
The cottage is dark except for the soft glow spilling out from the bedroom at the end of the short hall.
My chest loosens just seeing that rectangle of light on the floorboards.
I toe my shoes off by the door, hang my keys on the hook, and move as quietly as a guy my size can, which is still more silent than it should be. Old habits. Soft footfalls. Avoid the squeaky boards. If she doesn’t hear you, she won’t look at you.
I shut that thought down before it can go anywhere and head for the bedroom.
I pause in the doorway and take a second just to look. My chest pulls tight and warm at the same time. It’s fucked up that this is what does it—not a win, not a scout in the stands, not Keller telling me I nailed a route. This. A boy and a cat in my bed.
Mine.
Brendon is curled on my side of the bed, which is a thing he does now without even thinking about it.
When he first started staying here full-time, he’d hover near the edge, tense and polite, waiting to see where I wanted him.
Now he starfishes when he’s alone and curls toward my pillow when he’s not.
Tonight, he’s small and tucked in, lying on his uninjured side, arm wrapped around my pillow like it’s me. The bandage under his T-shirt pulls the fabric just enough for me to see its outline.
Jericho is a black lump by his ankles, tail flicking lazily, golden eyes tracking me. There are a couple more new claw marks on the footboard. I’m not even surprised anymore.
Brendon’s hair is a mess, flattened on one side, sticking up on the other, face slack in sleep. His mouth is slightly open, lashes dark smudges against his cheeks. There’s still a faint shadow of exhaustion under his eyes even like this, but the tightness he carries when he’s awake is gone.
No pinched brow, no tension at the corners of his mouth. Just my boy, breathing slow and steady in my bed. My heart feels too big for my ribs for a second. It actually hurts.
I drop my bag in the corner, strip off my hoodie and shirt, tossing them in the hamper. Sweat and grass and a long day cling to my skin, so I head for the bathroom, feet automatically avoiding the spots that creak.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I turn the shower on. Same face, same hair tied back at the nape of my neck, same body that’s been weaponized since I was a teenager. The difference is in my eyes. Less empty. More… fucked, but in a way that has color now.
The water beats down hot and hard, washing away sweat and turf crumbs and the lingering annoyance from the idiots who tried to give me shit about being with a guy.
I scrub shampoo through my hair, let it rinse out, then just stand there—head bowed, palms flat against the tile, letting the spray pound across my shoulders.
When I’m done, I dry off, pull on a pair of boxers, and nothing else. The cottage is warm enough that I don’t need more, and Brendon likes skin. He sleeps better wrapped around me, so I won’t pretend I don’t love that.
Back in the bedroom, the light is still on, soft and yellow from the lamp on the nightstand.
I cross the room and turn it down to the lowest setting, not plunging us into full darkness yet.
Brendon murmurs something in his sleep and shifts, his hand groping blindly toward my side of the bed.
Jericho lifts his head, glares at me for daring to move things around, then decides I’m not worth the effort and curls back up.
I slide into bed carefully, mindful of Brendon’s wound.
We’ve got a system now: I always take the outside edge, so if he rolls, he hits me, not the floor, and I keep my body angled so I don’t press against the bandage.
Even half-asleep, my brain maps around it like it’s part of the field.
Avoid the injury. Protect the soft spots. Keep your vulnerable side covered.
The second I settle, Brendon gravitates toward me. It’s automatic, like breathing. He rolls, tucking his face against my chest, one arm winding around my waist. His leg hooks over mine, careful even in sleep not to jostle his stitches.
“Mhm, Daddy,” he mumbles against my skin, voice thick with sleep, and I swear to God my heart just fucking melts. “You’re late.”
The words curl through me slow and sweet and almost painful in how much they matter. I lower my mouth to his hair and kiss the top of his head.
“Practice,” I murmur. “Go back to sleep, Little Sin.”
He does, instantly, like he was only waiting for me to slot into place before letting go completely. Within a minute, his breathing evens out again. Jericho sighs in his sleep. The cottage settles around us. My body, finally, follows.
I fall asleep with Brendon tucked under my arm and the taste of peace still on my tongue.
Sleep takes me clean.
It doesn’t stay clean.
At first, it’s just darkness and that awful, weightless sense that comes right before a bad dream digs its claws in.
Then the room forms around me, not this room, not my bed, not anything safe.
The wallpaper is wrong. The air smells wrong.
Sweet perfume over bleach. The house from years ago sits around me like a trap, every shadow full of memory.
I know this dream.
I know it the way you know an old scar when the weather changes.
I know it before the first voice speaks, before the floor creaks, before that old dread starts unspooling through my limbs.
It’s the one memory my brain keeps tucked behind a locked door until stress or grief or some cosmic cruelty decides to pick it open.
There’s a hand where there shouldn’t be one. A voice where there shouldn’t be one—soft, coaxing, wrong. The room presses in. My body goes cold in that old, helpless way I thought I outgrew when I got big enough to kill back.
“No,” I hear myself whimper. Not my grown voice, but me at fifteen. “Don’t touch me.”
The room in the dream doesn’t care. It never did.
The words bounce uselessly off the walls. The nightmare folds tighter around me. I know what comes next. My brain knows, my body knows, every nerve in me lights up with old fear, and I still can’t stop it because that’s what nightmares do—they pin you in memories and make you live in them again.
“Stop,” I whisper, then louder, and more desperate. “Please—don’t touch me.”
The voice in the dream croons words I can’t hear fully anymore, and thank fuck for that. My brain has blurred some details over time, probably to keep me functional. It doesn’t blur the helplessness. It doesn’t blur the certainty that I was trapped and no one was coming.
“Dom. Hey. Dominic, baby, wake up.”
The words hit like light under a door. I still can’t move.
My eyes feel open and shut at the same time, the dream room and my bedroom overlaid for a horrible few seconds, so I can’t tell which is real.
I hear my own breath stuttering, hear the catch in it.
Hear Brendon now, properly, panic held in a tight leash.
“You’re okay,” he whispers. “You’re here. You’re with me. Come on, Daddy, come back.”
Something brushes my temple—fingers, careful and warm. Then his mouth near my ear, his voice dropping even softer, right into that place in my head where fear usually crowds everything else out.
“I love you,” he murmurs. “I’ve got you. Breathe for me. That’s it. In. Out. You’re not there. You’re in bed with me. I’ve got you.”
The words reach me one by one and not all at once. The way you hear someone underwater before you break the surface.
I drag a breath in. It shudders, catches, but it comes. Then another. The dream starts to peel back, the wrong room fades, and the smell of perfume disappears. There’s only clean sheets and his shampoo and my own skin gone cold with sweat.
When I finally wrench all the way awake, my eyes lock on Brendon’s face hovering over mine.
He looks terrified.
His hair is a mess from sleep, sticking out at the crown.
His eyes are too wide, green ringed dark in the low light, mouth parted.
One hand cups my jaw, the other braces lightly on my chest, careful of the scars and the places he knows can spark me if he touches wrong.
He’s pale and breathing too fast, but he’s here. Real. Not a memory and not a threat.
I stare at him for a second, still not fully back in my body. My throat hurts and my chest aches. There’s dampness on my face, but I’m not willing to identify it yet.
“Hey,” Brendon says, voice shaking, and I hate myself for putting the tremor there. “Hey, you’re back. You’re okay. I’ve got you, Daddy.”
I blink up at him and force another breath into my lungs. Then another.
The shame comes right on its heels—hot, immediate, and familiar.
This part pisses me off—being seen like this, and that he heard me, that he knows there are dreams bad enough to pull those sounds even out of me.
That my body can still turn traitor and freeze like I’m that kid again instead of the man who put a knife through his mother’s chest.