“Yeah, apparently by lying. You know what? Him and me? We’ve both been lying for years. We play up the couple angle because it sells downloads of our songs and gets views on our pages. It gets people to our concerts and helps us sell CDs. I’m as much at fault for our perception as he is.”
“Except you aren’t pretending to be straight.”
Danielle made a frustrated noise. “Okay, we aren’t getting anywhere, so back to my original question. Are you breaking up with Trey?”
“I don’t know.” Dom didn’t want to end things. What he had with Trey was too fucking special to give up because of something said in the heat of a moment. But he was still too angry to make a decision about them. “I need some space.”
“Space, right.”
“I care about him, Dani. I care too much to talk to him about this right now, so I need space. I don’t want to talk to him while I’m still mad.”
She studied him a moment. “He really hurt you, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. He really did.”
“I get that. Honest. And I’ll tell Trey what you said about space.”
“Thanks. I’ll call him when I’m ready to talk.”
“All right. Take it easy, Dom.”
“You too.”
Dom ignored Lincoln’s curious glances while they finished packing up their stuff. He wasn’t in the mood to talk. Not to Lincoln, not to Trey, not to anyone. He wanted to go home, take a long shower, and spend the rest of the weekend doing nothing more taxing than staring at the bedroom ceiling. Maybe play a little Xbox.
Definitely lots of sleeping.
The rest of the week passed by in a blur of activity. Emily Ryan, the talent coordinator for Unbound, set up a conference call with the band Monday night to discuss the particulars of the national competition, which was the last weekend in August. Five weeks. That call propelled Lincoln off on a quest to choose the perfect set based on the specific song restrictions Emily outlined on the call. All of Dom’s spare time that wasn’t spent working for his uncle was spent practicing.
He didn’t have time to think too hard about Trey until it was Sunday night, and Dom had nothing to do. Tyson begged off practice because of a family issue, Lincoln had a date, and Benji and Joshua were off together, probably having all kinds ofawesome sex, and Dom was alone. Exactly a week and a day after their Unbound win, and Dom was sprawled on the apartment sofa, mind racing, too wound up to even rub one out.
He missed Trey.
Now that he had time to think, Trey was the thing that had been missing from his life all week. The funny texts. The late-night jam sessions. The way Trey smiled while he played. The sound of his voice.
Dom wasn’t mad anymore. Most of his anger had come from the awful timing of everything that had happened that final day of the competition. From the stress of Roxy’s attack and the anxiety of who would win, Dom had found some peace with Trey only to have that peace thrown back in his face. Not on purpose, obviously, and with the sharp lens of distance and time, he saw that clearly.
He stared at his phone for a long time before texting Trey:Sorry for the radio silence. Wanna talk?
Nothing came through for a while after, so he turned on the TV and put a game in the Xbox. He didn’t even care what it was, and he lost himself to the story for a while.
His phone stayed quiet.
Dom tossed and turned most of the night, and when Trey still hadn’t replied that morning, Dom shut off his phone, grabbed his violin, and then drove to his parents’ house. His parents were both at work, but Roxy greeted him with a hug and a huge smile. He spent a couple of hours playing his violin downstairs, sometimes with an audience, but mostly alone.
He took Roxy to lunch at her favorite pizza place, and then they picked up Starr from her day group, and the three of them went out for ice cream at one of those places that let you build your own sundae and charged by the ounce. Roxy decided the three of them should make dinner, so after a stop at the grocery store, they converged in the kitchen.
Dom let Roxy direct the proceedings, trusting her to brown the ground beef without burning it, while he helped Starr chop tomatoes and shred lettuce. Make-your-own-taco night was always an adventure in the Bounds household.
The doorbell gonged around five. Starr was focused on arranging the taco shells on a cookie sheet for oven warming, and Roxy had disappeared into the bathroom while the meat and spices simmered. Dom wiped his hands on a dish towel, and then went to see who the hell was at the door on a Monday night.
The last person on earth he expected to see on the porch was Trey. “Hi,” he said, a little bug-eyed.
“What are you doing here?” Not the smoothest opening line of Dom’s life.
“You weren’t answering your phone.”
“I turned it off.”
