3. Chapter 3
Five Months Later
The car door swung open and he climbed out, sunlight filtering through his aviator sunglasses as he glanced up the cluttered steps of his mother's house.
Every house on the block had something going on—a barbecue, parties, kids running around screaming with laughter and holding squirt guns or playing basketball.
Except her house. It was quiet and eerily still.
The windows were shuttered closed and dark.
Sam’s jaw twitched, and he slid back inside the air-conditioned car, slamming the door closed.
“This the wrong place?” the driver asked in a thick Boston accent.
“No, we’re at the right place,” Sam sighed. “Do you know Tony Lou’s Bar?”
“Yeah, who doesn’t?”
“Take me there instead, please.”
The driver huffed, tapping irritably at his screen, indicating he had arrived at the correct destination and wouldn’t be budging unless Sam paid him again. Sam hurriedly pulled his wallet from his back pocket, took out a twenty, and handed it to him.
“Just tell them you dropped me off,” Sam said offering the cash, and the driver nodded, pulling away from the curb and putting distance between Sam and his mother’s house.
He ignorantly thought he’d be able to stomach seeing her. The motivation for actually seeing her would be that he could finally pick up Papi’s old boxes that he wanted.
Sam sighed, scrubbing a hand over his whiskered jawline.
Not today. Not on a holiday.
She was always worse on the holidays.
A few minutes later, the driver pulled up to a very busy bar. The party was both inside and out, with pop-up tents covering a smoker, an outdoor jockey box with half-barrel kegs, a beer pong table, and a PA system blasting music.
One of his favorite holidays was the Fourth of July because of this place.
Because the Casavani family always knew how to throw a party.
The smell of a grill wafted over him as he got out. He was already fantasizing about a cold beer and maybe sticking around long enough to enjoy some fireworks. The sound of people laughing and joking, having a good time, eased the tension in his shoulders as he stepped onto the hot curb.
He knew the sight of Tony Lou’s bar like the lines of his own face.
The countless days and nights spent working odd hours and shifts while he worked his way through med school had given him that extra cash he needed.
It had been his safe space when school got a little too much.
And of course, Frankie was always here. Every time he pushed open the door to Tony Lou’s, Frankie would look up, from wherever he was, and smile.
That roughish, charming fucking smile that would immobilize him temporarily.
And if Sam had been honest with himself back then, that’s why he kept coming back.
He was addicted to the way Frankie looked at him. Like he was the best part of his day, simply by walking through the door.
Sam swallowed, fluttering butterflies already beginning to flap their wings in his belly at the mere thought of seeing Frankie.
It had been five agonizingly long months.
Five months of thinking about how Frankie had looked at him at the end.
As if he didn’t recognize him at all, as if he had just single-handedly broken his heart and there was nothing in the world Sam could do to make it better.
He sighed.
He quickly grabbed his backpack and slung it over his shoulder, thanking his driver. He recognized a few faces standing outside the sunlit concrete parking lot, sipping from their red plastic solo cups, laughing and smiling. It was mostly Frankie’s cousins and some of their friends.
“Fuckin’ Sammy?!” He heard a screeching shout from a woman by the beer pong table and saw Tina, her classic golden hooped earrings swinging from her earlobes as she came running over to him, her flipflops snapping her heels, her high jet-black ponytail swinging behind her.
She launched herself onto him, and they hugged.
Tina squealed in excitement before jerking back to look at him, her fine-tipped acrylics snapping onto his jawline, assessing him.
“Jesus Christ, Sammy. You look good!” She trailed her nails adoringly over his cheeks, and he couldn’t resist the smile.
“The grayer you get, the hotter you get. I swear, God made beautiful men gay to torment us ladies. We want what we can’t have!
” She tutted, giving him a dramatic, wistful sigh before grabbing his bag off his shoulder.
“Let me buy you a beer. Hotshot LA doctor, comin’ through! ”
Tony, Tina’s brother, materialized from behind the jockey box, a frothy beer in his hand, wearing sunglasses and a broad smile.
Tina and Tony were fraternal twins who had identical pitch-black hair and dark brown eyes, like the rest of the Casavani clan.
But their personalities were complete opposites.
Where Tina was outspoken and brazen, Tony was more reserved and mild-mannered.
Tony, a handsome Italian man with broad shoulders and a kind smile, patted Sam’s back, giving him a side-hug and firm kiss on the cheek in greeting.
Being around the Casavanis so often, Sam slowly got used to all the affectionate hugs and kisses.
The Italians loved to love. The only other person outside of them who had shown Sam any sort of affection had been Papi.
“Good to see ya, man,” Tony said warmly.
Sam smiled, “You too. How are the kids?”
Tony, a dad of his own set of twins, beamed. “Good, man, real good. Brianna is comin’ around later tonight with them. She bought the twins these little headphones to cover their ears during the fireworks.”
“They’re three now, right?”
“Yeah,” Tony nodded, pulling out his phone. “Wanna see?”
Sam felt the dig of Tina’s nails into his shirt, tugging him along.
“Jesus, Tony, let this man get a beer first before you start showin’ him photos of the kids,” Tina chided. “He hasn’t even seen Frankie yet.”
Sam stiffened.
He knew Frankie would be here, but he came anyway, unable to stay away.
He had spent the last few months thinking about what Frankie had said, about trying to make their friendship work…
and their moment in the alleyway behind the Hot Dog Palace, where Sam had kissed the living hell out of him, and Frankie had let him.
The feeling of Frankie’s thick erection straining against him had been ingrained in his mind ever since. He knew it was wrong, what he had done to Frankie, pushing and cornering him. He had no business fucking with him like that, and he knew he needed to apologize.
Except… Frankie had gotten hard.
Really. Really. Hard.
Sam felt a sudden constriction in his chest as he entered the bar. He had convinced himself for a few weeks that Frankie’s reaction to him was nothing. That it was just his body’s natural reaction to stimuli. Friction, nothing more.
Just fucking friction.
Right… so then how come Frankie didn’t fight back? Didn’t throw a punch? How come he just stood there and let him touch him, taste him, feel him so intimately, so indiscriminately?
Was Frankie that scared of losing the relationship that he was willing to be fondled?
Sam closed his eyes, ashamed. He fucking hoped not.
He hoped that Frankie would have had enough backbone to tell him to stop if he crossed the line.
And he had. It just took him a lot longer than Sam had anticipated to finally push back.
“Frankie!” Tina shouted over the crowded bar.
He felt himself flush nervously and inhaled a deep, calming breath, refusing to show any emotion.
“Yeah?” Frankie shouted back, and Sam’s eyes followed the sound of his voice.
He was behind the bar as usual. His black hair had tumbled over his forehead as he was dragging something out of the walk-in fridge that cooled the kegs.
His arms were a delicious olive-gold color that most Californians worked all summer to get.
The thick corded muscles of his tattooed biceps and forearms strained as he yanked the keg upward, then dropped it with a thud, letting out a cursing sigh.
“Has anyone seen the goddamned dolly?” Frankie shouted irritably, glancing around the bar and freezing the second he saw him.
His aching, stupid fucking heart flipped when their eyes collided.
Fuck. I shouldn’t have come here.
Refusing to run away now, he carefully slid his sunglasses off, hanging them on the collar of his T-shirt.
It was impossible to look away from him.
No one else in the bar or outside mattered.
All he saw was him, and that was always the problem, he thought irritably.
He’d always been so obsessed, so fixated that he never saw anyone else but Frankie.
It was pathetic.
I am pathetic.
And it needed to change, which meant ignoring his fluttering heart and burying it in a fucking cave with the rest of his emotional baggage.
“Let me take your bag, Sammy. I’ll put it behind the bar,” Tina said, and he followed her, swallowing the nerves that had knotted in his throat.
Frankie was usually the most stylish man in the room.
Sam used to tease Frankie about his vanity, saying it was the inner peacock in him that liked to flash his feathers to the rest of the regular birds.
Today, however, Frankie’s outfit looked like something a kid would pick out, or an uncaring American tourist on vacation, and Sam couldn’t help but smirk, taking him in.
He wore a white tank top with a palm tree and pink flamingo-printed button-up shirt over it, along with matching pink swimming trunks and flip-flops.
Frankie straightened as Sam approached, shifting on his feet, glancing away and back, as though unsure where he was supposed to look.
He frowned. He rarely ever saw Frankie nervous, and trying to appear casual, Sam leaned forward, assessing the keg between Frankie’s legs. “Need a hand?”
Frankie's jaw twitched, and he nodded, still not looking at him. “Yeah, all right.”