18. Dominic
EIGHTEEN
Dominic
I’ve always been a diligent student. I’m used to being the best. I’m observant. I conduct research. I have a near photographic memory. I take copious notes.
It’s because of this, I think, that my girlfriend is currently dripping down her legs, while bent over her bed with both wrists tied to the middle slat of the headboard.
I like , nay, love being the reason this fierce siren creature is dripping with want. I love being the reason all intelligible speech been reduced to helpless whining. Not to mention seeing her ass pink from my hand. And if all it takes is a slight bit of disrespect, then give it to me.
I let slip to Lina one night that I liked being rough with her, that it satisfied some archaic mammalian part of me. She consequently forced me to recite any and all sexual fantasies and proclivities I have, have had, or have yet to explore. Every single one. Then she made a list of all of them in the Notes app of her phone. I asked if we could make one for her, but she shamelessly forwarded me the running list she already had on her phone.
This all ended with her hogtied on the bed.
Afterwards, taking advantage of my melted state, she called Tita Gloria and Tito Ben and asked them if they could babysit Frankie for an entire Saturday, something I hadn’t let happen yet. I didn’t really have a choice, because she did it while I was attempting to regain conscious thought.
Well, it’s Saturday now. And we’re here at her apartment. And for the past maybe… I look at my watch. Forty-five minutes or so? I’ve alternated between spanking, fingering, licking. Using the various vibrators she has. I let her have my dick twice. Once, I made her choke on it. The second time, I shoved it forcefully into her pussy, thrusting twice, enjoying the feeling of her bare for myself, before pulling out and starting the edging over again. I haven’t let her come once.
“Dom,” she wails, as I sit in the chair across the room, sipping on a bottle of water, idly jacking myself to the view of her bent over the bed.
“Whatever it is you want, you haven’t begged me hard enough for it.”
“Please,” she whispers. “I need you. I need your big cock inside me.”
“I’ve already given it to you, beautiful. Don’t be a spoiled brat.”
“Please.”
I put the bottle down and wander over to her. The internet said to consistently check for circulation when tying up a partner, especially if the appendage(s) is elevated above the heart, so I check her hands, her fingertips, make sure they’re still warm. She’s good.
Her head is tilted towards me, cheek pressed to the bed, her eyes almost all pupil, looking hopeful. Too bad. I step back, wind up, and slap the shit out of her ass again, putting a little more force behind this one, relishing in the way the red blooms, smoothing it away with my palm after admiring it and tracing the edges with my finger.
“Make me come, Dom,” she screams. Her entire body is writhing, trying for any sort of friction on her needy swollen clit.
“If you come before I say so, you’re going to regret it,” I warn.
I reach over to the bedside table and wrap myself up with the condom I put there. I bodily pick her up and flip her over, so that she’s on her back and her entire body is on the bed. I wrench her legs apart as she whimpers, tracing the wetness on the insides of her thighs. “Greedy,” I tell her. I’ve never seen a more beautiful thing.
Now up on my knees between her legs, I let saliva pool in my mouth. Then stick out my tongue and let it all drip off and down onto her clit, making the motion as lewd as possible, the strand obscene.
Her eyes are watching, unbelieving. “Fuck,” she whispers. “That’s the hottest?—”
She doesn’t continue, or can’t, because I shove two fingers into her mouth. “Make it wet,” I command. I scoop some more spit out of her mouth, hover my fingers above her clit, let her saliva drip down and mix with mine. I watch as it all drips down into her pussy.
Then I grip her thighs open and drive so deep she feels it in her throat.
“Fuck,” I manage to grit between clenched teeth, maybe regretting that in edging her for forty-five minutes, I’ve effectively done the same to myself. And now I’ve gone and shoved my dick into her sopping wet warmth. “Your pussy is insane.”
Lina is unable to answer me, incoherent at this point, pulling at her bindings and using it as leverage, grinding her body up and down on my dick with her heels on my ass, her clit scrambling for purchase on any part of my body.
I can sense we’re both operating on a hair-trigger at this point. Pushing up on my knees, letting her ass rest on my thighs and adjusting our angle, I wrap one hand around her throat, not choking (because I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for that regardless of the amount of homework I do… I mean, how could you even time such a thing?!) but gripping, and I know this is exactly what she needs because I feel her starting to tighten around me. “Fucking give it to me,” I grunt, maneuvering my other hand between us and pinching her clit.
She does, and lets out a groan from the very bottom of her stomach, her back arching fully off the bed, she’s soaked into the sheets at this point, and it takes my entire almost forty years of self-control to press deep and hold so she can grind on it and milk as much pleasure as she can get.
I need to give myself a little pep talk before starting to pump again. “You’re going to give me one more before I’m done, gorgeous,” I tell her. I search blindly around the bed for her little bullet vibrator, glad it’s still on and running when I find it because there’s no way in hell I could operate a switch right now.
“Oh god,” she mumbles. “Oh shit. Oh fuck.”
“One more,” I repeat, then hold it on her clit. She doesn’t take too long this time, seconds, really, but I make sure she’s wrung every ounce of pleasure from my dick before really starting to fuck her senseless, the force of my thrusts shaking the headboard, and when I come it’s a religious experience.
Giving me no choice but to take more advantage of this all-day babysitting thing. Turns out ‘letting go’ as a general concept works out pretty well. Smart girl.
* * *
I run into Georgia when I’m on my way into the school and she’s on her way out. “It’s been really fun seeing Frankie so much lately,” she tells me, after a quick hug.
I frown, thinking of the last Flores family gathering. “We haven’t seen you in like two weeks.”
“I see her almost every day in Lina’s office,” she says, walking down the steps. “I’ve brought her a few books I’ve found about the Titanic. Lina has quite the Titanic collection on her bookshelf now. It almost takes up an entire shelf.”
“What? Why is she in Lina’s office every day?”
“Oh,” Georgia says, after seeing the look on my face. “After school. She hangs out there most days.”
“Oh,” I echo.
“‘Kay, well, this isn’t awkward at all, and I wasn’t the one who told you!” she says, now walking backwards down the block. “See ya at Tita Tess’s this weekend, bye!”
I take a moment to gather myself before stepping foot into the building, untangling some of the more immediate feelings I’m having about this new bit of information. Questions stack on top of themselves in my brain, and I realize I shouldn’t have any sort of reaction until I get some answers.
But Frankie’s already in the lobby. “Hey, Daddy!”
“Hey, beautiful.”
“Ready to go?”
“I wanted to talk to Lina for a second. Is she in her office?”
“She’s in a meeting,” Frankie says matter-of-factly. “She said she’d come over after it’s done.”
“Oh,” I say again, like an idiot. “How do you know?” I try to be sneaky.
“She told me,” Frankie says simply.
I remember that information from a five-year-old is like getting directions from a very drunk person (profoundly convoluted and full of holes), so I quickly abandon all hope and decide to wait for Lina to come over.
* * *
This newly formed Girl Gang freezes in the middle of dinner, Frankie with her spoon halfway to her mouth, and it would be kinda funny if it weren’t so obvious they were engaging in some sort of seemingly illicit activity.
“So I take this silence to mean I’ve been spending five hundred dollars a month for an after-school program you don’t even attend?” I continue.
“I’ve been hanging out with Lina.” Frankie decides to take the sanctimonious route. “You said she was family, and it’s okay to hang out with family after school.”
“But every day? What did we say about imposing on people?—”
“Hey,” Lina says calmly, placing her hand on top of mine. “Don’t get on her case about it. You shouldn’t be annoyed at anyone right now,” she says more pointedly, “but if you are going to be, it should be me.”
“I’m not annoyed,” I say, annoyed, “but the fact that no one told me about it combined with the fact that you two are acting very suspiciously makes me feel like I do actually have a reason to be annoyed.”
“Okay, you can be annoyed that we’ve essentially lit five hundred dollars on fire—” Lina begins to concede.
“I’ve already paid for October, so more like a thousand dollars at this point,” I make sure to clarify.
“—but Frankie is in no way imposing on me. Most of the work I have after school has to be done on my computer, so I’m there, anyway. She’s very well-behaved and she’d rather read a book than be social. I get it. I feel like that sometimes.”
“Frankie, why aren’t you hanging out with your friends in after-school?” I demand to know. “Isn’t Evie in the program with you? And Ramona? They’re your best friends. They’re the reason I signed you up for that program in the first place.”
I feel Lina’s foot pressing down on mine under the table. She gives me a look, a minute shake of her head to drop it .
Frankie is pushing the food around on her plate.
“You know you can tell us about anything,” I say more gently.
“I just want to hang out with Lina after school,” Frankie says sorely.
“It’s also okay if you aren’t ready to talk about it,” Lina says to both of us.
Frankie mulls this over. “I’m not ready to talk about it.”
“Okay,” Lina says, ending the conversation.
I’m not done. “But I still don’t like that you’re spending every day after school in Lina’s office. She’s in charge of a thousand people, and she’s very busy, and I don’t want you to be in there.”
“Drop it, Dom,” Lina says dangerously. “I told you it’s okay. And whenever it’s not okay, if I have a meeting or if I can’t be in my office, I always communicate this to Frankie and she takes herself to after-school.”
“Why wouldn’t you tell me about this?”
She shrugs. “Frankie wasn’t comfortable talking about it, so I wanted to respect her wishes.”
Frankie’s head is bouncing between the two of us, looking alarmed.
I model taking deep, cleansing breaths. Then some more. Lina is doing the same. “Okay,” I say finally. “I can respect that you don’t want to tell me about what’s keeping you from after-school, but I need you to tell me when you’re going to be with Lina. For safety reasons. I just want to know where you are, and it doesn’t make me feel good that I thought you were somewhere every day for a month and you weren’t actually there.”
“I was in the school,” she mutters grumpily.
“But not in the cafeteria. What if there was an emergency, and I had to come get you in the cafeteria and you weren’t there?”
“Then I’d be safe with Lina,” she says, because of course she makes a valid point, because she is five going on thirty-five.
Lina decides to help. “Your dad’s right about that, Frankie. We should always let him know where you are.”
“Fine,” Frankie grumbles.
Nice to know Frankie listens to someone .
* * *
I’m still feeling prickly later, after Frankie goes down and we’re getting ready for bed.
“That wasn’t very cool,” I tell Lina.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I should have told you, but she specifically asked me not to. I was in a difficult position. I figured she was safe with me, and that she would tell you, or both of us really, when she was ready to talk about it, which she’s clearly not.”
“That’s just one piece of it. It’s also probably not easy to have a five-year-old sitting in your office while you’re trying to work. I don’t like that it’s an extra thing to pile on your plate?—”
She turns from the sink to look me directly in the eye. Her eyes are glowing hot, ready to eat me alive, but in such a different context than the way she looked at me at the beach house. “How many times do I have to tell you that it isn’t a big lift before you actually believe me? What are you more mad about, anyway?—”
“I’m not mad?—”
“—that you didn’t know where she was or that you think you’re ‘imposing’ on me? What the hell is your deal with this imposing business, anyway? With Mama Flores? With me? People help other people, Dom. Parents get help all the time—it doesn’t make you any less of a dad.”
This is a direct hit to the sternum. I feel it there. I’m surprised at her ability to target the issue with alarming accuracy. I exit the bathroom.
“You’re just going to leave?” she asks from behind me, sounding surprisingly fragile for someone so normally fierce.
Fuck . I turn back. “Sorry. No, I’m not walking away from you. I’m never going to do that.” I wrap her in my arms, and she burrows her face in my chest. I take deep breaths. “Can we finish up and talk about this in bed?”
She nods.
We finish up the chores in silence. I take the time to gather my thoughts while I pick up stray clothing from the living room. Lina starts making Frankie’s lunch. I watch her take out the bread and the Totoro cookie cutters and am about to blurt out that she doesn’t have to do it, when I realize that this , this right here is my problem. I keep my mouth shut.
We finally crawl into bed, sit up with our backs on the headboard. I pull her into my side, and she snuggles into my chest.
“ Dime ,” she commands.
I wonder what it is about her that is able to claw this information out of my black heart. I wonder why I got so prickly. It’s probably because I’m falling a little in love with her.
I shove this realization aside, because whoa.
“My parents…” I attempt to search for words that are diplomatic and mature and don’t reveal that I’m still mildly traumatized. “…had really, really high expectations of me,” I decide to say. “To an extreme degree, most people would probably say. I didn’t have your typical American upbringing, which makes sense, because they immigrated here right before I was born. Most of the time, their values didn’t… match what was going on here culturally.”
“Can you give me examples?”
“Everything I did had to revolve around their idea of perfectionism. I needed to be the perfect student, get perfect grades, perfect test scores. Needed to be well-rounded, play exactly two instruments. I wasn’t allowed to leave the house to do normal kid and teen shit, like hang out or go to sleepovers or anything.” I pause. “I was allowed to play soccer, though. I could leave the house for practice. But anyway, it was expected that I stay home all the time and study. And I did, for the most part. All so I could get into the top high school in the city. All so I could go to a top Ivy League college, become a doctor, or a lawyer, or something.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“Stuy for high school,” I say, assuming she would know about Stuyvesant, the top specialized public high school in New York City, feeder school to the Ivies, since she’s born and bred Brooklyn and all. “And then I went to college outside Boston.” I mumble this last part.
“If what you’re not saying is that you went to Harvard, then I’m leaving,” she says pointedly.
“I didn’t go to Harvard,” I mutter.
“Where’d you go, then?”
“MIT,” I whisper.
“Goodbye.” She attempts to leave.
I wrench her back into my side. “I’ve always had to do everything on my own,” I continue. “They believed that in order to be truly successful, you need to be independent, and you need to get to the top all on your own.”
“I definitely understand the need to do everything on your own, but it’s for a different reason for me,” she says.
I hum.
“I guess I grew up just seeing my mom do everything for everyone. That was my measure of success. I feel good when I do everything. Because I think I’m supposed to.”
“You’re successful at everything you do, too,” I make sure she knows.
I feel her smile against my chest.
“Anyway, I made a mistake after a lifetime of perfectionism. And that led to Frankie. And…” I pause, thinking about the sessions I’ve had with my therapist. “…I feel like I need to make up for it. Constantly.”
She digests this. “You’re trying to fix it… or you’re compensating for it in the way you know success. Doing it all on your own.”
I blow out a breath after letting this statement sink into my skin, not surprised at all that Lina gets it immediately, is patient and understanding yet not afraid to call me out on my shit. This is why you’re falling for her , again, pops unbidden into my head. “Yep.”
“I’m sorry that you feel that way. For what it’s worth, I’m impressed you’ve made it this far, this long, being the absolute Number One Dad, without having a mental breakdown.”
I laugh without humor. “I’ve come pretty close.” I don’t want to leave out this last part, but I’d imagine it’s a difficult thing for non-Filipinos to understand. It’s all connected though, so I try anyway. “There’s also this weird cultural part of it,” I begin. “It’s kind of hard to explain.”
“Try me.”
I organize some thoughts in my head, think more about my therapy conversations. Play with her fingers entwined with mine. “There’s this concept in Filipino culture called hiya . It directly translates to ‘shame.’”
“So you’re embarrassed to ask for help?”
I shake my head. “It’s a little more nuanced than that. Embarrassment is more… personal? I guess? But hiya is really tied to the community, to community expectations and reputation. And further than that, maintaining harmony within relationships.”
She looks confused. I barrel on.
“For example, someone might avoid asking for help, not just because they’re embarrassed, but because they don’t want to be a burden or seem weak to others. You kind of avoid actions that could bring shame to yourself, or to your family, or your community. It’s also tied to respect—you don’t want to inconvenience others or disrupt social balance.”
“So why can’t you just not care about what other people think?” she asks.
I squeeze her tighter, kiss her hair, because that’s so easy for her, and that’s one of the things I love about her. “I’m working on it. Believe me, I am. And you’ve helped me with that, and it seems like small steps, but they’re huge for me. But it’s hard. It’s like this deeply ingrained cultural phenomenon. I was born with it, raised with it.”
Lina hums. “So all Filipinos feel this way?”
I shrug. “We’re not a monolith, and there are some differences between Filipinos and Filipino-Americans, but it’s definitely a big, shared part of our culture. Tita Gloria doesn’t give a shit, obviously,” I chuckle, “but my parents definitely did.”
“Okay,” she says simply. “Thanks for telling me. I can’t presume to ever understand, but I hear you.” She snuggles further into my side. “This doesn’t change our goals, though.”
“I agree.”
“They apply to both of us. We have to let go. And delegate. And be a little more selfish and take care of ourselves.”
“I know.”
“And that means letting Frankie sit in my office without freaking out, and letting Frankie do overnights with Mama Flores or Oliver so we can go have a proper date or get a hotel room and have extremely loud, aggressive, borderline disrespectful sex.”
This time I do laugh with humor. “Okay.”
“Disrespectful towards me,” she clarifies.
“Got that.”
* * *
I set some lofty goals for myself this week. To truly let go—let Frankie sit in Lina’s office all week without commenting on it, and to let Frankie have a sleepover at Tita Gloria’s Friday night so that Lina and I can stay out late. To not spill my guts about my new realization and scare Lina away, because she’s trying not to lose herself right now, and she’s trying to rebuild. As much as I would love it to be, ‘herself’ on a theoretical level does not include me and my five-year-old daughter.
I go straight to Lina’s office right after work and keep my mouth zipped shut about Frankie sitting on the floor, happily surrounded by a pile of books about the Titanic. She doesn’t bring up after-school. Lina comes home with us on Monday.
It becomes increasingly difficult to keep my mouth shut as the week progresses, though. Not because of Frankie, but because of Lina. She’s looking more and more frazzled as each day crawls by, with each day I show up in her office.
It’s little details, minutia, only noticeable if you spend as much time obsessing over her face and body as I do.
The slight inward curve of her shoulders. The incremental darkening of the circles under her eyes. The juicy pink of her lips losing color and moisture, getting chapped. The strain on her face.
The dampening of her smile.
By Thursday, I can’t take it anymore, so I don’t quite meet my goals for the week.
“Are you okay?” I finally ask her. I sit on the other side of Lina’s desk while Frankie runs to the bathroom.
“What do you mean?” she says with a forced brightness. “I thought we were going to let Frankie sit in here without freaking out this week.”
“I’m not asking about Frankie, I’m asking about you.”
“Do I really have to tell you again that I’m fine with it?” She starts to get testy quite quickly.
“That’s not it. How are you doing with your goals this week? Are you balancing? Letting go? Are you taking care of yourself? Have you looked at AP resumes?” I find myself delivering rapid-fire questions, much in the same way my mom did when she noticed I wasn’t doing my best.
Lina rubs her eyes. Her hair is up in a limp topknot, frizzy strands falling out the sides. “I’m not doing a great job this week. I’m insanely busy. I haven’t had time to look at AP resumes. I’ve been getting home at like nine and collapsing. My body feels like it’s shutting down.”
I don’t tell her that it looks like her body is shutting down, too, because I still have some tact. “Do you want to cancel our date tomorrow, so that you can just go home and sleep all weekend?” I don’t add that it looks like her body seriously needs it.
Her eyes are glazed when she answers me. “Hard no. We’ve had this planned all week. I’ve been looking forward to it, and it’s part of my relaxing plan. And yours, too.”
“It’s not relaxing if what you really need is sleep,” I attempt.
“I’m fine,” she huffs.
“Do you want to sit together and make some lists? We can prioritize some of your workload?”
Lina stands and starts walking towards the door. I bury a smirk, because I know this trick. I adopted it in my early thirties, when I was fresh out of the venture capitalist firm and started off on my own.
“I don’t have time to do that,” Lina says. “It would take me hours to make the list because the list is so long. And I have an order of prioritization in my head.” She stands next to the open door.
Instead of leaving, I embrace her. Her body temperature seems a little high. She might be coming down with something. I try to transfer what little energy I have into her body and she allows herself to wilt a little in my arms. I feel like I’m holding a dehydrated dandelion—one that’s typically hardy and vibrant but hasn’t been rained on in a while. “Okay,” I whisper. “I don’t want to tell you how to do your job?—”
“—then don’t.”
“—but I think you should maybe prioritize hiring an AP.” I find myself carrying some of her weight while she melts against me.
“Okay,” she whispers.
“I’ll come over and pick you up at your apartment tomorrow,” I say, before kissing her hair and stepping away and making sure she’s steady on her feet. “Our dinner is in your neighborhood.”
“Okay,” she repeats, still a little wobbly.
And because she is an expert at it, she pastes on a huge smile that covers up the thin stretch of her life, and I let it go, because that’s my goal for the week.