Dom #2
“Look,” I said desperately, reaching out and grabbing his wrist. “I’m serious. I don’t know if he’ll hurt you or your mom on purpose, but he’s definitely going to do it. He’s—”
It was his eyes. You could make your smile reach your eyes, you could inject warmth into your voice with enough practice, but there was always something someone could pick up, and with his dad, it was the eyes.
I’d seen eyes as dark as his before; that wasn’t what bothered me.
The weird part was that they were constantly sucking all the light and color from everything around him.
Like they were two miniature black holes that devoured everything because they could never be full, they could only eat, eat, and eat.
Of course, Augustine turned out to be the second-in-command of the goddamn Marelli Family, the biggest crime syndicate in the western United States. Within a few years, he was going to be the head, those hungry eyes gobbling up even more.
Wait, no...that wasn’t right. I didn’t know that...did I?
Levi looked at me, then his eyes went to my hand, which was wrapped around his wrist. I felt my face flush and jerked my hand away. I knew what he was thinking, and now he knew I was thinking about it too.
That kiss, that goddamn kiss.
Being fourteen meant it was difficult to get your hands on booze, but when your family ran a hotel with a bar, you could find ways.
It was always kept under lock and key, but when your best friend knew how to pick locks, all you had to do was make sure you didn’t end up on camera.
Levi had been smart enough to realize that grabbing liquor was a quick way to have the missing booze noticed, so we grabbed a few bottles of beer from the back.
Half a dozen beers later, and we were feeling it quite nicely.
I didn’t know it then, but there would be far drunker nights in my future, but none as memorable.
I didn’t remember how we got to that point, but the two of us were sprawled on my bed, our limbs overlapping.
A heat I had never associated with any guy, let alone Levi, had taken over me, and the next thing I knew, I was on top of him, my hands wrapped around his wrists.
After a moment of wavering, I’d kissed him.
“I mean it,” I told him hoarsely, wondering if I really felt a lingering warmth from his wrist on my hand or if that was just my imagination. We hadn’t spoken of that kiss, or of the way I had been hard enough to break bricks with my dick, and right now wasn’t the time. “He’s bad news.”
“Look,” he said after a minute, his smile disappearing. “If I’m ever in trouble, I’ve got you, right? So if he really turns out to be dangerous, a liar, or whatever, I’ll call you. Then you can swoop in and save little ol’ me.”
I didn’t know about little. If I ignored the fact that my brain still remembered how hard he had been under me, he wasn’t so little in the other departments.
The past half a year, he’d shot up, and was no longer hovering below my chin but could almost look me in the eyes when.
He was still pretty skinny, but his shirts were getting tight in the shoulders.
Levi had been a pretty small kid compared to other boys, so I knew he was self-conscious about his size and secretly wished to get bigger.
“I ain’t saving you,” I grumbled. “If you aren’t smart enough to listen to me, then I’m not going to be dumb enough to come save you.”
“Liar,” he said with a smirk. “No matter what, even if you hate me, you’ll still come flying in because you’re a big teddy bear under all that attitude and you know it.”
“I’m not going to save you.”
He looked up. “No, I guess you’re not.”
I froze. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t how it… “Levi?”
A drop of blood became a trickle down his finger, and then down another as he reached out to set down a tile, staining it with blood.
“You won’t be able to save me. Mom’s going to die, and all I’m going to have left is my mob boss of a dad to take care of me.
I’ll stick around for a bit, but it’s going to be too late by then, isn’t it? ”
“Levi,” I repeated softly. His hands were now dripping with blood, and I recoiled as he tapped the side of his face thoughtfully while looking down at the table, turning his thoughtful expression into a gore-streaked horror show.
“I’ll get in too deep, and you’ll try to save me too late.
Then I’m going to leave, and I’m going to be stuck with people like my dad, and you’ll never be able to stop me.
You’ll keep an eye out constantly for my name in the news or the obits, looking for my name as a killer or the killed, but you won’t be able to save me.
There will be blood on my hands, and you’ll never be able to save me or look at me the same way again,” he said, looking up, and I gasped as blood ran from his eyes like tears. “Never.”
It’s a dream! Some part of me screamed as the blood dripped from his cheeks onto the table, splattering the tiles.
“But you didn’t really try...did you?” he asked in a raspy voice that made me shudder.
It sounded nothing like him, nothing like him at all.
It was the voice of someone who had smoked three packs a day for thirty years, died from the worst sort of throat cancer, and crawled out of their grave a few months later to condemn me.
Oh God, I was going to smell him soon, wasn’t I?
The rot that had to be inside him, eating away at his insides like a wild, feral animal that could never be sated as it twisted in his guts.
His teeth were stained with the blood covering his face, and he was grinning.
No, not grinning, leering...he was leering at me in a way he had never and would never have done before.
“And now I’m...” he began in that horrible croak and reached out to grab my wrist in the same way I’d done only a week—years?—ago. Nails bit into my skin, and I screamed as I felt the icy cold touch of his skin against mine as he leaned in close.
Like a lover looking for a kiss.
I was aware of being awake the moment I jerked back to reality, a scream locked in my chest, clawing its way out as I sucked in a breath.
Terror at something I knew didn’t exist and had never happened wriggled and shifted under my skin, and my stomach rolled like it was stuck on the high seas during a storm.
I forced myself to take a deep breath, taking it slow and steady as the horror of the dream rippled across the surface of my mind violently.
God, it had been years since I’d had a dream so.
..awful. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had dreamed about Levi, though fuck knows I’d thought about him plenty.
He had haunted my dreams for a few years after he’d disappeared off to whatever part of the country he’d decided was better for him and his ambitions.
Well, I suppose it was his dad’s ambitions, but Levi, as stubborn and prideful as ever, had refused to see that.
God, I hated how the brain worked sometimes. There was no reason to dream about Levi, none at all, and now—
A thump made me flinch, and my eyes flashed open as two people, muttering to each other, came through the door.
I forced myself to relax when I heard Arlo’s voice, and he sounded.
..happy. Strong emotions weren’t typically his thing, or at least he wasn’t one to show them.
So that meant he’d had a good night, and I had no intention of marring that by making him worry about me over a stupid ass dream.
I opened my mouth, probably to say something smart assed about the noise they were making. I heard fumbling and a hard thump as someone was...oh...pushed into the wall, and...was that the sound of a zipper?
“I see your personal motto,” I heard someone say softly, “is speak softly and wield a big stick.”
Oh.
Fuck my life.
“Oh God!” I cried out, sitting straight up and glancing at the dark figures to make sure they could see me, yet not wanting to look at them directly. “I did not need to hear that!”
Arlo let out a gasp. “Dom? What the hell are you doing out here?”
“I fell asleep listening to a podcast,” I explained as I tossed the Afghan off with an indignant huff. “I didn’t realize you were going to come stumbling back in and get handsy with your date.”
“Good evening,” the other voice, clearly Arlo’s extremely handsy date, said politely.
I didn’t know what the protocol was when you were caught groping your date by your date’s brother, but he seemed to be handling it well.
A little too well, actually, and I thought I could hear amusement in his voice, which was way too much like Mason, “random person I do not know.”
“That would be my brother, Dom,” Arlo explained, and I could hear clothes rustling. I hoped it meant they were getting themselves decent because I did not need to see that ‘big stick’ that was mentioned.
“Ah, well, my apologies for scarring you,” came the ever-polite apology.
Again, it was hard to tell whether he was genuinely sorry or just really good at sounding polite.
Considering Arlo and I had discussed who his date was before he’d left, I was betting it was probably the latter.
It still made me shake my head that Arlo hadn’t realized he was going on a date with the Governor’s son, but I would bet good money that Ward was well-trained in manners despite his playboy reputation. “I didn’t know you were there.”
I gave a heavy sigh, wondering what it was I’d done in a previous life to deserve bearing half-witness to Arlo, freaking Arlo, getting groped.
“God, between Mason and Jace groping each other in the worst hiding places, Milo and Eli constantly making out and hugging each other, I was getting more than enough scarring for a lifetime. Never in my life would I have thought that you, of all people, would participate in it, even by accident.”