“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.
“And no spending money on me.”
“Excuse me, why are you allowed to make that a rule, and I’m the one with a dozen pairs of La Perla thongs that magically appeared in her drawer?”
“Because I have money to spend, and I’ll take great pleasure in taking those thongs off you. Consider them a birthday gift for me.”
“Well, consider this,” she said, reaching for the door. “I’m wearing one of your birthday gifts right now.”
That night, I made dinner while Ally worked on her laptop at the island with a glass of wine. It was a nice, normal scene that I was still having trouble adjusting to.
“How’s Gola working out?” she asked.
“We’re getting along reasonably well. She doesn’t yell at me as often as her predecessor.” Work had been going well. In an unforeseen consequence of announcing my relationship, the women of Label—with a few notable exceptions—had seemed to finally embrace me as human. Nina from advertising had actually told me a joke when we’d both arrived early for a meeting. And I’d actually laughed.
“Har har,” she said. “Have you heard from Greta?”
I sighed and threw a pinch of fresh herbs on top of the pasta I’d just plated. “Greta has decided to officially retire.” I still wasn’t ready to think about my life without her. I didn’t deal well with change. Especially change that I had no control over.
“Apparently sending her off on a European jaunt backfired,” Ally said, giving me a look over the rim of her wineglass.
“Or maybe I still got what I was after.” She grinned at me, and I slid her plate to her. “In here or at the table?”
“Uh-oh. Hang on,” she said, squinting at her screen.
“What?”
“Faith just sent this to me.” She turned the laptop so I could see. “It’s about us.”
It was a popular fashion gossip vlog run by a woman I considered to be an obnoxious pain in the ass. “Don’t waste your time with it.”
“Too late. Already playing.”
“Rumor on the catwalk has it that serial model dater Dominic Russo is finally settling down with a dancer he just met. Inside sources say Russo was so infatuated with her ‘moves’ he created a position just for her in his mother’s fashion empire.”
“That lying little twerp! She makes me sound like a stripper,” Ally said indignantly.
“Well—”
“Do not finish that sentence if you want to continue not breathing out of your neck,” she said, wielding her fork.
“This is why we don’t watch this garbage,” I told her, making a move to close the screen.
She swatted my hand away instead.
“Most of you will remember Russo’s scorching hot affair with model Elena Ostrovsky, a Russian beauty known for her Calvin Klein contract.”
Oh. Shit.
Ally slowly turned to face me. “Did you forget to tell me something?”
I took a hasty step back and put my hands up. “First of all, it was not a scorching hot affair. It was more like a series of lukewarm—”
“You mean to tell me you had a relationship with the cover girl of the May issue? And I’m just now hearing about it?”
“When you say relationship—”
She cracked a grin. “Relax, Charming. I’m just messing with you. You dated models. I know this. They’re disgustingly beautiful. It’s not news. Holy crap. Is she like a million feet tall?” She peered at the screen as the idiot vlogger plastered image after image of me with Elena during our short but unsatisfying relationship.
“We weren’t serious,” I insisted. At least not serious enough for me to feel anything but seriously pissed-off when I’d found out exactly what she’d been up to.
The last picture was one from New York Fashion Week two years ago. I was towing her by the hand through a crush of photographers outside a restaurant. I was scowling. She was smiling smugly. I’d had a reason to scowl. The paparazzi had an uncanny way of finding out where we were every time we went out. I didn’t like having cameras shoved in my face and questions hurled at me, but Elena didn’t seem to mind.
It was only a week or two later that I’d found out she was the reason they always knew where we were. That she’d been using me to grow her followers and, in turn, increase her visibility. She’d been the last person in a very long line who’d used me.
“This is a story about us, and they’re running more pictures of you with Elena, the long-legged gazelle. Oh, wait, here I am,” she said, cheering up.
It was my turn to get annoyed.
“Ally Morales is the mystery woman widely photographed with designer Christian James. So the question is: Is this real love, or will Delena find their way back together again? Cast your vote below—”
“Delena? Ew. Barf. Hey!” Ally said when I slammed the lid of the laptop closed.
“No more garbage gossip. It’s time for dinner.”
“Fine. I just have to do one thing first,” she said, opening her laptop again.
“What?”
“I’m writing that vlogger a strongly worded email and attaching some naked pictures of us,” she said, brown eyes sparkling. “Oh, and we need a celebrity couple name. How do you like the sound of Alominic?”
I sighed. “Eat your pasta, weirdo.”
