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She pursed her lips. “Is alliteration your only complaint about him?”
He was pretty sure he knew what alliteration meant, but he wasn’t one hundred percent on it, so he just shrugged. “We don’t get on that well in spite of his clever sexting.” That wasn’t entirely a lie. Dan worked at the gym, and he never hesitated to bring it into any and every conversation. He was a bloody walking Crossfit meme and obsessed with the idea that people wanted to stroke his abs.
Which they didn’t.
They were only sort of okay.
But Dom was almost positive the man had a fetish for getting his partners worked up by telling them how much other men wanted to rail him.
“Okay…and you’re sure you don’t want to give women a go?” She glanced up and winked at him, and he rolled his eyes.
He hadn’t entirely ruled women out. His sexuality was fluid enough that he’d been attracted to plenty of women. He just hadn’t dated any so far, and he was pretty sure it had everything to do with the fact that he only wanted one person.
“Oh, wait. Look at this one. Kellen. You two look like you’ve been getting on.”
The back of Dom’s neck flushed. He had been flirting with Kellen a rather lot, and he also knew—something that Sarah was sure to pick up on—it was entirely because he and Shiloh could have been brothers. He’d moved to Benld a year back to open up a chip shop masquerading as a gastropub. It was a sister restaurant to the one his parents were running successfully in London.
Dom had almost entirely lost his Italian accent, developed an unnatural love for tea over coffee and meat pies, but he could never get behind the oil-drenched fried fish, no matter how hipster and modern it was dressed up.
He knew it was likely that he was spoilt by all the fresh food from Shiloh’s farm and the fact that he constantly cooked enough for Dom to survive any winter. But it was also a little bit that he was being hard on Kellen because he didn’twantto fancy someone else.
He didn’t want a Shiloh replacement.
It was unfair to them both because Kellen was perfectly nice and deserved a lot better than being sloppy seconds.
He winced when he saw Sarah’s fingers were flying over the keyboard, and he knew his time was up.
“He said yes,” she said after a beat.
Dom’s eyes narrowed. “Did you tell him it was you sending that invite?”
“You mean did I tell him that you’re such a mess your second best friend had to get a date with him for you?” she asked, putting one hand on her hip.
“That’s not…” he said with a sigh. He carefully set his tray aside after inspecting he hadn’t ruined the entire batch with his frustration, then he turned to face her. “Icouldget a date. I get dates all the time. I’ve had plenty of one-offs. My dry spell isn’t because no one’s interested, Sarah. I’m not a bloody monk just because I’m in love with someone who won’t ever want me back.”
There was something in her eyes when he said that about Shiloh not wanting him. Not pity, not even sympathy. It sort of felt like he was the only man outside of a joke the entire village shared.
“What?” he grunted.
She passed a hand down her face. “It’s not just you who’s hopeless, babes. I’ve told you time and time again, if you proposed to Shiloh tomorrow, he’d say yes.”
Dom rolled his eyes. “Of course he would. He’s a fool, and he’d do almost anything if he thought it would make me happy. But if he wanted me—” Dom’s voiced thickened, and he measured it so his ache wasn’t as obvious. “If heproperwanted me, he’d have told me by now. If he proper wanted me,” he clarified, “we’d be together, and you wouldn’t need to be finding me a date to your party. But you and I both know it’s never going to be like that.”
“You’re hopeless,” she breathed out. “If that’s what you think—no, if that’s what you reallybelieve—go to the party with Kellen. You can still hang round with Shiloh all you want, but then you’ll have someone to go home with. And maybe you’ll get the chance to see you deserve to be with someone who…” She stopped, then shrugged. “Someone who knows your worth and shows you every day.”
He immediately wanted to argue that Shiloh did that. He’d never hesitated, not even once, to stroke Dom’s ego and make him feel better and more attractive and smarter than he actually was. But his love would never cross the line into the reality Dom so desperately wanted it to, and that wasn’t Shiloh’s fault.
Dom just needed to accept he would never get what he wanted.
Three
Dom only fell asleep on Benjamin’s sofa when Shiloh was away. And on the occasional night when he’d had a few too many and didn’t want to make the walk back to his place. He told himself it was only to keep an eye on things, but in reality, it was just an excuse not to feel lonely for a bit. He’d never impose when Shiloh was home, but Benjamin never sold him out whenever his son was away.
Dom loved the shit out of the old man—nearly as much as he loved his own dad who still FaceTimed him three times a week in spite of insisting he didn’t know how to work FaceTime and that it was wasted technology. Dom didn’t regret his parents moving back to Italy. He’d gotten his bakery out of it, and he got to see his parents retired and happy.
His mum was constantly complaining, though, that his dad’s lack of work made him vulnerable to things like stray cats and stray children who came round for pets and baked goods respectively. Dom had seen it with his own eyes when he’d visited for his birthday the year before, and it settled some of the worry in his gut that his parents would just waste away without having something to do all the time.
Of course, he rarely visited but only because he didn’t want to hear them nattering on about his not having a boyfriend or a girlfriend and letting his parents grow old and die without being able to hold at least one of his children. Never mind each of his sisters had a bloody litter of children and his parents were never short of small, sticky hands to clean and dirty faces to wipe.
