Swink (Landry Family 5)

“To hell with them,” I say, trying to simultaneously keep my irritation at a minimum and think back to their reactions. “Did they really? What did they say?”

“Nothing. You know how they roll—they’d never say something publicly. That would hurt their stock. Just, you know, be ready for your mom to get a call about it.”

He focuses on the road and makes a valiant attempt at keeping his features void of emotion. But I know him well enough to see it for the façade it is.

The corners of his lips barely turn down, the sadness in his eyes only noticeable if you look for it. Dominic excels at hiding his feelings, and when we first met, I thought maybe he didn’t really have deep emotions. Over the weeks and months we’ve been together, I know differently. I suspect, even, that if he were broken open, maybe he feels them more deeply than most.

My chest squeezes at the signs he’s not meaning to give off, and I wish I could get my hands on my mother’s friends and straight tell them what I think of them. How dare they make Dominic feel any which way? They don’t even know him.

I touch his arm, letting my hand lie gently on the curve of his bicep. It’s as if the contact releases some of his tension because I can actually feel him relax.

“I’m sorry they looked at you that way,” I whisper.

“Don’t worry about it. Women like that—if I wasn’t with you, they’d be asking for me to be their dirty little secret.” He watches for my reaction. “When I go to houses like that—”

“Like mine?”

“Like yours,” he concedes, “those women like the tattooed, blue-collar asshole. We’re what they’re not supposed to have. I’m exactly what their missionary-style, four-inch-cocked husbands are not.”

“Dom.” His name is a sentence, not a question or the start to anything more. I remove my hand slowly.

“So it’s nothing for you to apologize for. If I wasn’t sitting with you, it would’ve been a different ballgame.”

There’s so much I want to discuss, so many directions I want to go with this, that I can’t pick one. I just sit, buckled in my seat, and wish there was a way to strap in my thoughts too.

“For the record,” he says, smirking, “the brunette has fucked Ford too.”

“How do you know that?”

He just laughs.

“Is that what you think of me?” I ask guardedly. “That I’m with you because I shouldn’t be?”

He

takes a moment to respond and with each passing second, my anxiety grows. “Maybe.”

“Really? That’s offensive, Dominic.”

“That’s the truth.” He bites his lip as he waits for the guard at the gate of my subdivision to let us in. “Do I think that’s what got your attention at the start? Yeah. Absolutely.”

The gate moves up and he eases the car through. “Is that why you’re still here? No.”

“I hate that you think I’m so shallow.”

“I didn’t say that. I said you wanted me at first because you shouldn’t. The same way you always want a pint of butter pecan ice cream that you lament you shouldn’t eat because of the calories. Then we buy it and you eat a couple of spoonfuls and then you’re done because it’s not really what you wanted. You wanted the lemon sorbet. You just were proving to yourself you had choices and could go off-script.”

“So you’re the butter pecan ice cream?” I ask, trying to follow along.

“Yes. I was at first. Now, maybe, I’m . . . those little chocolate cookies you keep in the back of your cabinet behind the cereal.”

“Wait,” I laugh. “I thought we were talking ice cream.”

“We were, but let’s broaden it to food.”

“Fine. Keep going. This is interesting.”

He whips the car into my driveway, but not without a quick squeal of the tires that he knows pisses off my neighbor. The black marks in the maintained streets are undesirable, the guy two houses down calls it.