Tears rolled down my face. I missed my dad. What I wouldn’t give to have another year, month, week, year or day with him. I’d settle for a minute at this point. I needed to hear his voice and be held in his arms. To feel safe. For him to tell me he loved me, and to have one last opportunity to tell him just how much I loved him. I needed to know that everything would be okay, and he was the only one I might believe those words from. Would I ever be truly happy again? I wasn’t sure which might be why those fleeting moments with Dominic where I didn’t feel sad meant so much.
Drying my eyes with the crumpled tissue I had used to dry my tears when I’d cried myself to sleep the night before, I tried to focus. I needed to shake the memory of Dominic and get him out of my head or this wasn’t going to end well. Leaping from the bed, I made my way to the kitchen wearing an oversized T-shirt and sought a glass for a drink. The glasses were in a small overhead cupboard meaning it was something of a stretch to reach, but as I landed back on my feet with a glass in hand I found I was no longer alone. Dominic stood behind me.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“You don’t have to apologise,” he said, stepping towards me, closer and then closer still.
I drew in a short breath at his close proximity and the sensations his presence evoked as he stretched over me to retrieve a glass of his own.
“Milk?” he asked, but I was unable to respond due to my preoccupation with inhaling his scent that was deep, rich, andmasculine, making the heat in my belly rise again. “Clover, milk?” he repeated as he moved until he almost straddled me in order to get the milk from the fridge.
“I might not bother . . . I need a shower.” I didn’t trust myself to remain calm and collected while he stood so close and looked down at me…with his eyes, although I am unsure what else he’d could have looked at me with.
Pushing past him I thought I’d escaped when I felt the skin on my wrist scorch. Gazing down I saw his fingers wrapped around my arm, flexing as their grip tightened.
Shock coursed through me as I heard a hiss leave my mouth, but not as shocked as I was when his free hand cupped my chin and lifted it until I faced him.
Long silent seconds passed. The feel of my heart hammering in my chest was at risk of breaking free. “Please.” One word. A plea that seemed to be the catalyst for him to lose control. His lips crashed into mine, mine parting, begging more than inviting him in. We were lost in a tangle of arms, legs, arousal, and loud noises that echoed around us.
Unsure how it happened, I found myself hoisted onto the island in the kitchen without our kiss breaking. Instinctively I allowed my legs to part, making a space for Dom to fit between. I ached, everywhere, in the most exquisitely painful way. My nipples were hard and sore, desperate for some kind of relief, a touch, while my limbs felt tightly wound and between my thighs I could feel the wet heat of arousal escaping me courtesy of no underwear and coating my inner thighs while my core clenched tightly, sadly finding nothing to squeeze around.
The feel of a hard nipple being squeezed caused me to pull away and break our kiss in order to release a cry of both pain and pleasure. Dom’s eyes remained on mine as he did it again, and again until I was reaching for him, pulling his mouth back to mine as he chuckled a very cocky and self-satisfied laugh thattold me he knew exactly what he was doing to me. Before his lips reached mine, he shook his head, and instead dropped his mouth lower while one hand cupped my breast, raising it until his mouth closed around it. A shot of pleasure ran directly from my nipple to my core, causing my earlier wetness and aching to increase tenfold, so much so, that when my internal muscles squeezed of their own accord, I felt a tight burning tension fill everything below the waist that I didn’t recognise.
I cried out one word, a name, his. “Dom.”
Everything stopped in that moment and as if I had set him alight, Dom leapt back looking shocked at the sight of me before him.
“No! This is not happening, not ever. Go and shower, and for fuck’s sake, be sure to keep your fucking knickers on.” He stepped closer and with his hand closing over mine, he pulled me off the island and stormed off, the sound of a door slamming in the background representing another break in my heart.
We didn’t speakfor several days beyond routine conversation. Dominic took me to school. A private school that he thought was a girl’s only school, it wasn’t, and hadn’t been for some years. The horrified expression he wore gave me a sense of satisfaction. I was introduced to a group of girls who were tasked with looking after me and helping me to settle in. I was nervous having been home tutored for more years than I hadn’t been. Zoe and Gordon both sent good luck wishes and Zoe had sent me a gift of pens, notepads, my favourite treats, and an invitation for me to visit when I got home from my first day.
I had met Dominic’s housekeeper and his security personnel who had taken my fingerprints and a retina scan. The guy wasweird with his security obsession, but at least when he was being weird, I could pretend that he, my guardian, and the other man I knew him to be, Dom, were two completely different people. Occasionally I saw glimmers of Dom but one or both of us would shut that down and pretend like it hadn’t happened. The incident in the kitchen that morning wasn’t repeated or talked about, neither was our first meeting.
Dominic was busy with work and I focused on my new friends and school life which I enjoyed. I was thankful that he had enrolled me in school. I hadn’t realised all I had missed out on by being so isolated in village life and this really did feel like a new start. I missed my father and often went to sleep crying as I thought of him, remembered him, but now a few months later, there were days where my thoughts of him were only happy ones. School itself had brought its own comfort as I had discovered within a couple of weeks of starting there that it had been the school where my father and Dominic had met. Dominic hadn’t told me that initially as he was unsure if that might upset me. That is why he had thought it was a boy’s school because it had been some twenty-odd years before. They still had boarders, one of my friends, Marissa was a weekly boarder and had showed me the dorm she stayed in. I had told Dominic about it and when he described the dormitory he and my father had slept in it had been the same one as Marissa. Just knowing he had once walked those halls and possibly studied in the same rooms I had, gave me immense comfort, as if he was there with me.
Dominic had taken me to a few concerts he had played at, and he was incredibly talented. I’d had no idea that the piano could be so emotive when played well, but it was when Dominic played it, and his playing had brought me to my knees more than once. What I didn’t like when attending concerts was the green-eyed monster who took over my body whenever I saw him withwomen, especially the pretty ones who touched him, giggled, and acted as though they truly knew him. The worst part was that some of them did know him, intimately. He rarely brought a woman around our home and there had never been an inkling of one staying over but seeing that as a possibility hurt badly. When he was charming and showing an interest in a woman, he was Dom, and I considered him to be mine. I recognised that man well, knew him, and resented anyone seeing that side to him when he had been the only one to see that side of me.
It turned out that we shared an interest in movies. He loved horror, the gorier the better. I preferred a comedy or even a rom-com, which I usually watched alone or with my friends, however we both enjoyed the movies he had grown up with, the same titles my father had loved and shared with me, classics as they had both called them. We bonded over them and somehow during those times we shared our love of my father and our grief at not having him here in our lives. I would ask questions about him and their friendship during these times and although I always felt that Dominic didn’t share every detail with me, he didn’t lie to me, of that I was sure.
It was while we were watching one suchclassic,Top Gun,almost a year since I had moved in, that Dominic brought up the topic of my home, my childhood home. I hadn’t been back there and had no real drive to. Perhaps it was self-preservation on my part.
“We can go back whenever you want. I know I suggested your parent’s birthdays, but the anniversary of your dad’s death is coming up.”
“I don’t know that I need to go back, certainly not to commemorate his death.” I was snapping as a defence mechanism rather than crying.
“Okay, but the offer is there, always.”
He’d left it at that but as I turned back to the TV to find Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis getting down and dirty, I got to my feet and moved to my bedroom. Fortunately, he didn’t follow me but when I returned to him, it was to arrange the details of a visit back to the village I’d never imagined leaving until almost a year ago.
Sitting nextto Dominic in the car as we got closer to my former home was quiet. I felt unsure what I might get out of this visit or why I had agreed to it, but I had. Perhaps it would bring clarity or comfort, but it couldn’t do any harm, could it? If nothing else, it gave me time to reflect on my life. I had been living with Dominic for almost a year. It was still a little surreal, my day-to-day life. We existed together and had become close, but it wasn’t always easy. Dominic was regimented in every area of his life and strict like I had never known. I mean, I wasn’t a rebel or anything so he didn’t really need to be stern, but his expectations were clear and very high, so from time to time I earned his disapproval and I hated it.
The friends I had enjoyed coming round to see my hot stepdad, as they liked to call him if only to wind me up. I preferred to think of us as more like friends. When we went out people would mistake him for my father and to begin with I would let that assumption go unchallenged, in part because it was easier to let people believe what they assumed we were, but more than that I didn’t feel the need to explain myself to strangers, to discuss the loss of my parents and relive the pain of that. However, over the last couple of months, I had simply corrected their misunderstanding with a simple, ‘he’s not my dad’ but I wasn’t sure why I felt so compelled to correct people. Dominic seemed to have no issue with either option, allowing me to take the lead. Perhaps he didn’t want to say he was orwasn’t my parent for fear of the reaction causing me offence or pain. The truth was, I wouldn’t be offended and I was sure that he couldn’t do anything to hurt me as much as his reaction to me that day in the kitchen had. He hadn’t just rejected me, he had humiliated me, he almost seemed to blame me for his part in what happened between us. Like he resented me for making him do something so distasteful and disgusting, in his mind. Focusing on those feelings allowed me to separate Dom and Dominic, and I would never mistake them as the same person again.
My friends did have a point about Dominic being hot. He was, scorchingly so. No matter what had happened between us, I wouldn’t, couldn’t deny that. Perhaps because in my mind Dominic was a different person to Dom, my friend’s views on him didn’t affect me like those women he knew. He was all the things they said, mature but took really good care of himself. He had a home gym and could be found in there most days. Then there was his mind. For me, I could appreciate that as much, maybe more so. He knew things about everything and when discussing current affairs he always brought a perspective I hadn’t even considered. He was attractive, articulate, in several languages I had discovered, intelligent, and the sheer gift that must have been given by God himself when it came to musicianship was sublime. I had seen him play to sellout crowds, but they paled when compared to watching or listening to him play at home. It seemed intimate and private as if each note was personally played for me and me alone. I much preferred the many occasions when I lay in bed and listened to him play on his prized Steinway that held centre stage in the open plan living area of the apartment. A kaleidoscope of emotions rushed through me with every note he played, creating the perfect cacophony of the sweetest sounds that spoke to me on every level, including my heart.
Dominic didn’t have a girlfriend, and aside from my jealousy, I worried that if he did that I would be in the way, even if I would be eighteen soon enough. I once asked him about a girlfriend and where I would fit in. He had quickly dismissed that and assured me that I would never have to worry about that. That he was a confirmed bachelor and always would be. I wasn’t sure how he could make that claim, but he spoke with such conviction that I believed him. That’s not to say he didn’t go out on dates, he did, but would usually wait until I was visiting Zoe to have them. Sometimes I would find little clues around the apartment when I returned that confirmed a woman had been there like a cup with lipstick on. One time an earring, and another time a very small item of underwear had turned up in my clean washing because the housekeeper had assumed they were mine. They absolutely weren’t. I wasn’t sure how I felt about Dominic being with a woman . . . of course I didn’t expect him to live like a monk, but it wasn’t something I had ever encountered before meeting him. I had never heard my parents have sex, but they’d been affectionate in a loving way, and after my mother’s death, Dad had never shown an interest in another woman, so this was new. Plus, Dominic wasn’t my dad.
A boy had asked me out and I felt a little unsure if I should tell Dominic, although if I ever hoped to see anyone outside of the home or school, college as it now was, he would know, he always did, and I had fallen easily into the pattern of telling him these things. He’d seemed angry about me seeing a boy initially, but then he was quite cool about it, even going so far as to invite him home. Things had never gone anywhere with him or anyone since. I wondered if I was destined to forever being friendzoned.
