“Russo here is afraid of getting old,” his friend Kevin chimed in.
“But he just keeps getting better looking,” Missie said, the wine loosening her tongue a bit. “If I were him, I’d be celebrating every year as a sexy milestone.”
“How long were we up there? They’re all shitfaced,” I whispered to Dominic.
“Delaney, I’ve been meaning to ask you where you got your bed linens,” Dominic said.
Harry shot him a dirty look as Delaney’s hands fluttered to her chest. “I found the most amazing duvets and sheets,” she began.
“Middle finger gif,” Harry coughed into his hand.
58
Dominic
“You’ve got a little spackle right here,” Ally said, gently scraping a finger over my neck just below the ear.
It wasn’t meant to be a come-on, but my dick—as it did with most things related to Ally—took it as such.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked with suspicion.
“No reason,” I lied, giving Brownie’s leash a tug so he’d get his face out of the neighbor’s flower bed. “Where are we going again?”
“Ice cream,” she said, cheerfully taking my free hand and pulling me down the sidewalk.
“Who goes for ice cream in the middle of winter?” I asked gruffly. We’d spent five straight hours drywalling the bathroom in her father’s house because the only help she would accept from me was from my own two hands and not my bank account.
I could have hired someone, a crew of someones, and it would have been done while I went down on my girlfriend. But no, Ally “Do It Yourself” Morales drew the line at the wallet. So instead of spending our precious weekend naked and in bed like I wanted to, we did our best impression of HGTV weekend warriors.
Turns out, I wasn’t half bad at drywall. However, I still would have preferred Plan A. The naked in bed thing.
“It’s in the mid-thirties. This is practically a heat wave,” she said, flashing a grin up at me. “Consider it a celebration of surviving the fallout.”
We’d made it through the first week post-relationship announcement. The last few days consisted mostly of conversations cutting off mid-sentence when I entered the room and me wondering when the whiplash workers’ comp claims would start pouring in from people pretending not to look at us.
But we were officially dating and both still employed. Besides the home improvement eating into our quality naked time, everything was going well.
Ally certainly wasn’t complaining. She loved her new position. And she was a great addition to the graphics department. Not that I was checking up on her.
Okay, so I was checking up on her. I wanted to make sure no one was saying or doing anything to her that would hurt her or piss me off.
There had been a few items about us in the gossip blogs. Someone had leaked the office-wide memo, and it had been shared far and wide. But there hadn’t been any real fuss.
Yet.
It would come. It always did. And when it did, it wouldn’t be a warm and fuzzy “we wish them the best.”
Ally stopped on the sidewalk.
“This doesn’t look like an ice cream shop,” I observed, checking out the three-story brick house behind the iron fence and neatly trimmed hedgerow.
“It’s not,” she said. “This is the big house on the corner.”
“I can see that.”
She hugged herself, and I stepped closer to block the wind.
“When I was growing up, I always dreamed of living here. I’d put the Christmas tree there,” she said, pointing at a wide wall of glass on the front. “And the piano over there in that window on the north side.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
She grinned. “I’ve been obsessed with this place since I was eleven.”
Right around the time her mother left. I guessed it wasn’t a coincidence.
“What is it you like about it?” Brownie joined us in our real estate perusal and gave the fence a good sniffing.
“I think it was the life that went on inside it. There were kids who lived here who were a few years older than me. They had a mom and a dad and each other. A basketball hoop in the driveway. Lemonade stands in the summer. It just always looked idyllic. Still does. Their kids are grown. Now it’s the grandkids playing basketball. They have dinner parties here and Christmas mornings.” She shrugged. “It’s stupid. I know.”
“It’s not stupid,” I told her, taking her hand again. I’d known that kind of longing too. Not that I’d admit it. For siblings. For parents who were around and not fighting or ignoring each other in stony silence. For a family to belong to.
We started walking again, but I noticed she kept her gaze on the house until we crossed the street.
“Do you still play the piano?”
“Not really. If Dad’s having a good day, I’ll sit with him, but I haven’t practiced in forever. Did you ever play?”
I shook my head. “I was into baseball,” I said.
“I bet your butt looked really cute in those uniform pants,” she teased.
“My butt looks good in all pants,” I insisted.
“Speaking of birthdays—”
“We were not.”
“We are now,” she said, guiding me down the block toward the ice cream sign. “What’s with the birthday hating?”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t hate birthdays.” Just my own.
“Just your own,” she said, apparently reading my mind.
“It’s just another day,” I insisted.
“It’s just the anniversary of you surviving another entire year on this planet. It’s a celebration of being here. Didn’t you love birthday parties when you were a kid?”
“Growing up, it wasn’t so much of a celebration as just one more day for my father to either disappoint me or pit himself against me in a competition.”
She stopped outside the cheerily painted shop with a hand-lettered sign in the window promising homemade hot chocolate. “That’s terrible.”
“Ally, I’ll be forty-five. I don’t need or want a celebration. I don’t like receiving gifts. If there’s something I want, I buy it for myself. My worst nightmare is a bunch of people who have better things to do singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.”
“But, Dom—”
I shook my head. “Stop looking at me with pity eyes.” Her brown eyes were wide and sad for a privileged kid she’d never known.
“Can I please do something for you for your birthday? Please?”
She was not going to let me say no. And letting her do something for me would make her happy, which would make me happy. This was one of those stupid compromises she’d been talking about.
“Fine,” I said. “One thing. One small, inexpensive thing.”
“Yes!” She threw her arms around my neck and pressed a noisy kiss to my cheek.
I realized I’d be willing to say yes to a lot of things if it always got that reaction out of her.
“No singing,” I warned her.
“No singing,” she agreed.