Fast Connection (Cyberlove #2) (14 page)

Luke

It’d been a solid month of breaking almost every rule I had for Dominic. Because I couldn’t get enough of him. He was an addiction now, and I hadn’t decided yet if he was a healthy one like eating apples every day or an unhealthy one like meth.

I jiggled my leg, knowing the kids would be leaving for the weekend soon and Dominic would be coming over. Chelle was upstairs getting ready and Micah sat across from me, tapping away at his phone and ignoring my existence.

I’d bet my house he was talking to Adriana.

“Are you and Adriana sexually active?”

Micah jolted in his chair and dropped his phone into his half-eaten bowl of popcorn. “Dad!”

“What?”

“You can’t just… blurt out questions like that. You have to lead up to it.”

“Says who?”

“Says, like, everyone.”

I didn’t care about everyone. “Are you gonna answer me?”

“Dad, she’s not even my girlfriend, what the fuck?”

“Don’t curse in my house.”

He made a face. “You curse more than anyone I know. Besides, Mom doesn’t mind.”

“Different house. Different rules.”

Micah didn’t argue on that note. “Whatever you say. But like I said… she’s not my girlfriend.”

I was going to point out he didn’t have to be her boyfriend to have sex with her, but declined to add fuel to the fire. “She’s not?”

“No! We’re friends.” He wasn’t making eye contact as he wiped the butter and salt off his phone. “She says… she wants to be friends.”

“Okay, and how do you feel about it?”

“It’s fine. I like being friends with her too.”

“Why?”

Micah frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I’m just curious. Why do you want to be friends with her? What do you like about her?”

“She’s funny when she’s not being pissed off at her dad. She’s kinda spontaneous and I’m… not. But we both love
Fallen World Online.
We spend most of our time playing together.”

This was all pretty fucking cute. “What’s up with her and her dad?”

“He’s a jerk.”

“We established that.”

“But that’s it. He’s a jerk. He wants her to be exactly who he has pictured in his mind, and that’s not her. He wants her to be some perfect princess who cares about sweet sixteens and being daddy’s girl, but that’s never going to happen. She can’t wait to get out of there and go to college.”

This sounded familiar, except it’d been Dominic telling me all this. “Can she afford it?”

Micah shook his head. “They don’t make enough for her to go to the type of art school she’s interested in, and they make
too
much for financial aid. Or at least that’s what she said. I looked up some art scholarships and have been trying to convince her to apply. Her stuff is amazing, Dad.”

My son was sixteen, and he was growing into a good man. “Great. If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”

“I thought you hated her,” he said, voice full of skepticism.

“I don’t hate her. Like you said, she’s spontaneous, and spontaneous kids scare parents. I was worried about her influence on you, but it sounds like you’re doing some positive influencing on your end.”

He grinned as Chelle bounded down the stairs. “Ready?” Just as the question left her mouth, the horn of Nadia’s car sounded.

Micah grabbed his bag off the floor and slung it around his shoulder. “Thanks for the chat, Dad.”

I waved them away. Once the door shut, I breathed a sigh of relief. A half hour and I would get to see Dominic.

I came awake with a jolt. My calf was cramping, my ribs felt like they were in a vise, and something hard was poking me in the hip.

It was also five thousand degrees.

When I tried to move, the source of my discomfort made his presence known with a snuffle. I froze and slowly turned my head to see Dominic’s blond hair. His face was shoved into my neck.

I rewound to last night, when we’d fucked, showered, then fucked again before ordering a pizza and passing out. I managed to pull my hand out from under Dominic’s body to rub my eyes. The clock said it was seven-thirty in the morning.

Dominic made another contented sound and unraveled from me, rolling over to face the opposite direction.

I immediately wrapped my arm around him and tugged him back against my body. I was hard, my shaft snug in the crease of his ass. I could wake him up, shift my hips a little, and drive it home. All that texting about going raw had me thinking about it. A lot. Too much. I hadn’t gone without condoms since Jake. And until I knew Dominic and I were exclusive, I wouldn’t do it, but I couldn’t deny I wanted to.

Burrowing my face in his hair, I inhaled his scent—my shampoo and… Dominic. He murmured something, and I lightly scraped my teeth over his shoulder as a shudder ran down his back. He was warm, and my room was still mostly dark from the drawn shades. I wondered how long we could cocoon ourselves in here sans clothes.

Although, making breakfast would be nice. I could make pancakes. Or maybe French toast. Or we could go out to eat…

The fog of waking up was slowly lifting and with it came the dawning realization that Dominic had slept in my bed the whole night, I was planning breakfast, thinking about exclusivity, and we were cuddling.

Cuddling.

These things were not conducive to keeping whatever this was between us in the sex-only box. Sending him mixed signals wasn’t good for either of us.

As much as I didn’t want to let go, I needed space. Physical space. I pushed away from him and climbed out of bed. In the bathroom, I stared at my reflection and tried to figure out what the hell was going on with me. He’d accepted my strict fuck-buddy guidelines and now I was the one drawing him into a murky gray area. The last thing I wanted was to confuse him, or lead him on, but I also couldn’t deny that the idea of crawling back into that bed was pretty damn alluring.

But it wasn’t going to happen.

I returned to the bedroom to find Dominic awake. He grinned when he saw me.

“I’m not gonna lie. I passed out here because your bed is better than mine.”

I pulled on a pair of jeans and smacked his thigh. “Great, well you’re up now.”

He watched me as I got dressed, clearly disappointed. “Yeah so… what’re you doing today?”

I clasped my watch. “Work.”

“You have to go out?”

“No, I have invoicing to do. Office work.”

He sat up with his hands braced behind him. “Oh.”

“You?”

“No plans.”

I eyed him. “If you don’t have to work at the deli, might be a good day to look into those EMT certs.”

I thought he’d be irritated at my insistence, but his mouth tilted up again.

“You’re really serious about wanting me to go through with it, aren’t you?”

“If it’s something you wanna do, of course I think you should do it.”

“And you’d rather fuck an EMT than a deli counter bitch?”

“You need to stop harping on that.” I narrowed my eyes. “Your profession doesn’t matter to me just because we’re sleeping together. This is about you. You want to do something with your life, so do it.”

Dominic nodded, causing strands of silky blond hair to tumble across his forehead. “Gotcha.”

I thought about the papers sitting on my printer. I could keep my mouth shut and let him do it himself, or I could help him out and deal with the fallout—whether that was him being pissed at my meddling or him thinking this meant I was going to ask him to move in.

The side that was starting to care for Dominic more than was comfortable won out. When it came down to it, I wanted him to be happy and successful. And after I inevitably drove him away with all my bullshit, maybe he’d fondly think back on my interference and see it as me trying to keep him motivated.

“Get dressed and I’ll meet you in the kitchen. I got something for you.”

Ignoring his questioning look, I went to my office and grabbed the information I’d printed. I found Dominic in the kitchen, hair sticking up on one side of his head. He held a mug of coffee, and my gaze drifted to the flex of his biceps as he lowered it.

Focus, Luke.

“These are for you.” I handed him the papers, then busied myself getting my own coffee, listening to the soft shuffle of copy paper as Dominic paged through the details on the EMT program I’d found at St. James’s University. “To sum up, the class is a hundred seventy-six hours with ambulance rotations. You can do a lot of the classes online except for the parts that require you to be at the hospital. It costs fifteen hundred dollars.”

After a sip of coffee for courage, I turned to him. He was still skimming the information, a furrow in his brow.

“Before you say it first, I didn’t print them because I didn’t think you could do it yourself. I know you have a lot going on, and I had some spare time, so I looked into it.” I raised one shoulder. “Don’t make it a thing.”

Dominic nodded, still not responding. My frustration mounted. I couldn’t tell if he was irritated or pleased.

“It’s a good job. Industry is growing. It’ll be fast-paced for you, so you won’t get bored. I can see you doing it and being good at it.”

Stop talking, Luke.

Finally, Dominic glanced up with a half-smile. “I appreciate you going out of your way. I’ve been dragging my feet. It’s easy to keep putting it off so I don’t really have to take the chance and fail. But I need to get over that bullshit.” He held up the sheaf of paper. “And now that I’m seeing it all laid out, it looks pretty goddamn doable.”

“Well, there you go.” I needed to end this, because right now he had this grateful expression plastered across his pretty-boy face, and I was too much of an asshole to be someone’s savior. I cleared my throat. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to see you this week.”

“Okay.”

“Might be two weeks. Really busy at work and with the kids.”

Dominic did the mouth twist again. “Why’re you being weird?”

“I’m not being weird.”

“Yeah, you are. You’re pulling back.”

“Pulling back from what?”

His mug clattered onto the counter. “Man, you think I can’t tell what’s up? I spent the night, you cuddled me for five minutes and gave me this info, and now you think I’m going to get ideas, right? Scary future ideas with strings attached?”

How did this kid read me so well?

He moved into my space until our chests were nearly pressed together. “Quit freaking out. It’s still just fucking, Luke.”

I wrapped an arm around his waist and tugged him closer. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

The corner of his mouth tilted up. “It’s okay.”

I kissed him, wondering if I could talk him out of his clothes, but he pulled back with a laugh. “Fuck you. You made me get dressed and shoved coffee in my face, so I’m leaving. Bastard.”

I pulled him in for one more hard kiss. “Fine. Leave. Get your shit organized with that course, yeah?”

He walked backward out of the kitchen. “I will.” He paused before stepping out into the living room. “And besides that, maybe you’re right. I should broaden my scope and stop depending on you for late-night movies and chats. Less pressure that way.”

Dominic was gone before the sentence fully processed in my mind.