Complete Bliss (a Her Billionaires novella #3) Page 8

  Not stare at Dr. Perfect Who Hated His Guts, the Secret Billionaires and their hot blonde, and Darla and Josie, yammering at each other like litter mates.

  With big old surfer boy Trevor acting like some dopey teen out of a bad ’80s sitcom they laughed at in reruns on Nickelodeon.

  “Well,” Josie said, stretching the word out. Why didn’t she have the same accent as Darla? Joe wondered. “Ed told us that he and Madge plan to jump out of a plane and—I believe his exact words were—”

  “Fuck like bunnies,” Alex said, miserable as the table exploded with laughter.

  “Without parachutes,” Josie concluded. Joe gave a weak smile. Ha ha. How cute. Whatever. Old people smelled like rose-water and grease, and he avoided them as much as possible. Both sets of his grandparents had died when he was a toddler, so Madge was the equivalent of an alien life form to him.

  Though naked fucking stunt diving sounded pretty rad. Add in a camera and a Twitch.tv streaming channel and it might be cool.

  Darla had dragged them all here to talk with Mike and Dylan, and aside from thinking maybe—just maybe—he could salvage his time by being able to name-drop in a law clerk interview, or talk about scandal on a golf course, this afternoon was a complete time-sucking waste of air and thought.

  At least he would get a piece of Jeddy’s Boston cream pie. That was his only solace.

  Happy fucking weekend break. These people were about as interesting as reading case law on transportation codes. In German.

  Every single emotion he was capable of feeling had become unwoven, like a thick tapestry that turned into each individual thread, held in place by the memory of once having been intertwined with the others, but now free and unmoored. He carried inside himself a vague sense of once being able to live, day in and day out, within the chosen borders of this relationship with Darla and Trevor, but now…

  He was just a pile of thread. A loose pile that added up to nothing solid.

  Not that anyone could know that, though. These fuckers wouldn’t make him talk about his pussified feelings, or—God forbid—get him to talk about how he felt so misunderstood, or make him into some new-agey confessional star like those dumbass television shows his mother adored. No way.

  Somewhere in the Century of Selfies, society had gone off the rails, and Darla went right along for the ride, insisting he and Trevor join her in this lunch date, where she expected them to sit across from the human equivalent of a redwood and an Italian boxer dude who was half Rocky, half Joe Manganiello.

  Was this how it would go? The three women would sit in one booth and breathlessly talk and joke about the five men in the other booth, segregated by gender like sixth-grade health class?

  Not his idea of how he wanted to spend a precious weekend afternoon. In fact, he’d rather listen to his mother drone on about the latest research in medical genomics and how it related to his heart condition. His fingers involuntarily reached up and stroked the barest line of scar that he could feel through one layer of cotton. Most of the time he forgot about it, only three months old when the open-heart surgery took place.

  His mom lived with it on the surface, as if she had been ripped open then, too. Except she’d never formed a scar. It was a sucking chest wound that lived outside her body. But that wasn’t Joe’s fault.

  Why was he even thinking about this? His eyebrows twitched, and he felt the frown contract his muscles before he could control it. Darla picked up on the tiny change in his expression and tilted her head, trying to read him like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup.

  “You okay?” she asked. He let his eyes close halfway, his only public reaction to the rush of oh, shit inside him, because all conversation ground to a halt, seven sets of eyes on him suddenly.

  A whoosh of air behind him and there was that old waitress, delivering an impossibly large tray of food that made his salivary glands kick in.

  Make that eight.

  “You’re the only thing standing between a plate or ten of coconut shrimp and that table, bud,” Madge said. He moved swiftly, hands in his pockets, feeling like an obstacle. An obstruction.

  An outsider.

  The tray landed on the edge of the booth where Darla, Trevor, Josie, Alex, and Mike sat, and he watched as the old lady unloaded that food with such efficiency she might as well be a robot. Too bad his stomach had become a grinding mass of crushed glass and rusty nails, all churning in the flesh equivalent of a cement mixer.

  “I’m fine,” he said pointedly to Darla, answering her earlier question, as the waitress disappeared so fast she might as well have teleported herself across the restaurant. Darla, though, ignored him, her mouth hanging open, one hand waving air into it as she bit into a steaming piece of coconut shrimp that was obviously burning her mouth.

  Joe reached for Trevor’s wet glass of ice water and held it out to her. Grateful eyes met his as she gulped it down.

  “Danks,” she said. “I dink I burd my tug.”

  Dylan’s laughter from the other booth was so loud, so raucous and unfiltered, that it seemed to help Joe’s stomach unclench just enough to feel a moment of amusement, too. “That happens here,” Dylan said, turning to look at Darla, who made a pouty face. “Occupational hazard.”

  “Occupational?” His voice surprised him. His smile surprised him more as he and Dylan looked at each other. “You guys professional diners now?”

  “Something like that,” Laura said, interrupting the flow while waving a fork that had what appeared to be a cheese-stuffed mushroom on it. “If I could do this for a living, I would.”

  But you can, Joe thought, but didn’t say. Two billionaires and she couldn’t just sit around and eat whatever she wanted, sampling the finest Boston—hell, the world—had to offer? Instead of doing that, she chose to run a threesome dating service where Darla and Josie worked?

  Women. More complicated than, well…transportation code case law.

  But infinitely more interesting. When he looked at Darla, that grinding cesspool inside his gut loosened just a little. Some day, he’d give her everything she wanted.

  Unless it involved sitting at a booth and talking about his feelings with these men.

  “How about we reconfigure?” Laura said in a voice that was both sweetness and light, and honed steel. There was no arguing with her, and the men stood, shuffling over to where Dylan sat, Laura picking up her plate and moving next to Josie, across from Darla. The other booth was bigger, U-shaped, and he waited until all the other guys were in place—Mike and Dylan in the middle, Trevor to Dylan’s left, Alex to Mike’s right—before grabbing a chair and turning it backwards, straddling it.

  If he were just a tinge more paranoid he’d check the exits so he’d know where to bolt in the event of a true emotional meltdown.

  And then his eyes did it.

  Telling Darla he loved her, sexting and coming back for long weekends where the three of them went into the world they created, jamming with the band and coming back on long train rides for performances—those were part of the flow of life.

  He didn’t want to scrutinize who they were, what they were, too much, because then you had to pop that dome of perfection, where the three of them lived as if everything they did were right and okay.

  As if society didn’t exist.

  His stomach betrayed him and growled. Alex pushed a plate of deep-fried cauliflower his way. “Try some. It’s really good when you dip it in the aioli.”

  “Thanks.” He did as suggested, and his mouth came to life. Damn. Jeddy’s was a shithole he remembered from college years, and the food had been standard gut-rot back then. Cheese fries and shakes and bad coffee. Looking around as he munched, he took in the torn seats, the shabby, threadbare carpet, the stained ceiling tiles, the scuffed stainless steel edges of the main counter. The place looked like something he wouldn’t set foot in. Too worn and broken for him. Too working class, too—

  Authentic.

  But you couldn’t deny the nuanced skill of the c
ook in the kitchen, how the richness of what was offered contrasted with the run-down outer shell.

  “This is amazing,” he said as Trevor grunted in assent and shoved what must have been his fourth or fifth coconut shrimp in his mouth.

  “I always forget about this place,” Trev mumbled around chipmunk cheeks, then swallowed. Did the man chew?

  “We practically live here,” Dylan said pleasantly. “It was Laura’s favorite restaurant when she was pregnant.”

  “And after,” Mike added.

  “And forever,” she said from across the booth, sighing with satisfaction as the old waitress delivered a tray of what looked like tiny cannoli covered in what smelled like a maple glaze. “Thanks, Madge,” she uttered through a mouthful to the old waitress.

  Madge. He did a double take. The same Madge his mom talked about being here when she went to Radcliffe? That old lady must be a vampire. A second tray covered in tiny cannoli appeared like magic on their table. Trevor grabbed two and shoveled them in while the other guys took a more leisurely approach.

  Joe wished his stomach would stop being so uncooperative.

  Like you.

  He was only doing this for Darla. She’d insisted, so angry at his jealousy. That, plus Laura was her boss. You do what the boss wants, even if you sneer behind her back while you do it. Not that Darla was like that—she really liked Laura. And so did he.

  This entire lunch was the stupidest stunt he had been part of since they went to the island of Eden, though. And that place had been the epitome of stupid. And crazy.

  The “I love yous” had been wonderful, and he’d thought he would come home and feel different, but instead he’d just been more forlorn. More torn.

  Missed them more.

  “We’re supposed to talk about something,” Mike said slowly, wiping his hands on a napkin and setting it neatly under his clean plate.

  Joe rested his chin on his hands on the back of the chair and watched. He wasn’t about to say a damn word. Not now. Not in that vast danger zone of being the first to crack. You couldn’t shove a genie back in a bottle, no matter how hard you tried. His heart rubbed against one of the rods of the chair’s back, a gentle pressure that grounded him.

  “Sex,” Dylan said as he finished off one of those cannoli.

  “Sex?” Trevor choked on something, the painful sound of air being blocked triggering a weird wheeze that made Joe sit up, ramrod straight. Alex whacked him on the back and went blank, his face neutral, on complete alert in the way only a well-trained doctor could be.

  Trevor made a strangled sound and then took in a huge whoop of air, eyes watering so badly Joe could see the tears run down his face as Trev dipped his head and reached for a glass of water—anyone’s water—and drank it greedily, stopping only to breathe in hitched gulps.

  “I’m okay,” he rasped, holding up one hand to stem the expressions of concern, then hacking furiously.

  “What’s wrong?” Darla called out from the table next to them.

  “We started to talk about sex and it made Trevor gag,” Joe said quietly.

  The entire group burst into laughter, making one side of Joe’s mouth tip up in a reluctant grin. His heart hammered in his chest, skipping a beat here and there, otherwise pattering along at a healthy clip, his worry for Trevor fading as everything normalized into what passed for “normal” on this day.

  Sex? They were going to talk about sex? He let out a huge sigh of relief. He thought they were going to talk about feelings.

  Mike

  Poor kids.

  That was all Mike could think as he looked around the horseshoe table at Trevor and Joe. No, they weren’t kids, and he remembered being twenty-three and hating being referred to as a kid. But now that he was ten-plus years out of that early adulthood phase, he couldn’t help but view them as just that—kids.

  Was it fair? No. Did he feel bad? Yes. He remembered that first year with Jill and Dylan, the tension between him and the cocky sonofabitch, how they were fluid and graceful, yet teeming with a swarm of emotion that didn’t really settle until their third or fourth year together.

  He didn’t often let himself think about Jill these days, and the pang of pain that stabbed his heart was all too real. Jillian may have been her namesake, and he said the J word hundreds of times a day, but Jill was not Jillian.

  And Laura was not Jill.

  He had lived two different lives, truly. Before Jill. After Jill. Except it seemed unfair to Laura to call her something as simplistic as “After Jill,” as if Jill were the standard by which time was marked.

  Perhaps he should train his mind to think differently.

  Before Laura.

  After Laura.

  Some part of him eased a little, a tiny obstacle removed, as the thought poured through and over him, providing a balm for a discomfort he didn’t recognize, but that nonetheless had been in him, all-pervasive and omnipresent. Time was an elusive commodity these days, but even more elusive was time alone. With his thoughts. On the road, pounding out the confusion.

  He hadn’t gone for a run in four days, and that might as well have been an eternity for him. Coming here meant sacrificing what could have been ten miles of therapy, each footstep a confession, each stride a release.

  Trevor’s breathing went even just as Madge appeared with a tray of tiny red cakes shaped like lobsters, and a sundae bigger than his one-year-old daughter.

  “What the hell is that?” Joe’s exclamation made Mike smile. The Beefeater had cracked. Poor kid was wound tighter than a fishing line.

  “It’s The Orgy.” Madge winked at Dylan, then dropped the grin for the two younger men. “Of all the tables to bring this to, I figured you guys would enjoy it.”

  Joe went pale as her words hit him. Alex tried not to laugh, while Dylan just picked up a spoon and stabbed at some kind of ice cream with peanut butter cups in it.

  “Do we get an Orgy, too?” called out a voice from the other table. Darla. All five men turned in unison to find her eying Trevor and Joe with a coy innocence that made Mike, Dylan, and Alex chuckle.

  Trevor and Joe just stared at her, and Mike felt less pity for him and Joe. A kindling of admiration began to form inside him. The way the three of them looked at each other gave him pause.

  With no one else—ever—to talk about what he, Jill, and Dylan had created twelve years ago, he didn’t have a roadmap. A pattern. A plan. They’d quite simply invented it all, from soup to nuts, those many years ago. He’d lost his parents—emotionally, for they’d cut him off when he’d finally told them the real nature of their relationship—and being left adrift like that from his family of origin had meant Dylan and Jill unfairly had to play two roles in his life, instead of the already single, complicated role they’d all chosen.

  He watched Trevor return to his food, but Joe’s eyes remained on Darla, the flicker of his upper lids moving, widening slightly, the only way to measure the guy’s emotions. He was such a pressure cooker. Mike saw a little of himself in Joe—the self he’d been in college, a bundle of negativity stewing in itself, trying to break free but chained by his own expectations.

  While Joe could easily pass for Dylan’s younger brother, and Trevor was a shorter version of Mike (and that, alone, was disquieting), the personalities were swapped. Trevor was more like Dylan had been years ago, and Mike saw his former self in Joe.

  God help him. The awakening that was coming—if Joe had the courage to go inward and explore the richness that the intimacy with Trevor and Darla could bring—would be a supernova. Cataclysmic and soul churning. Would Joe, Darla, and Trevor make it through to the other side?

  Who knew?

  Suddenly, he realized why this meeting was so important to Laura. And Darla. And especially Josie.

  And it filled him with a resonating grief and comfort that made him fight back tears.

  “I count twelve scoops of ice cream in there, seven sauces, four different kinds of cookies, and a bunch of Thin Mints,” Darla c
alled out as Madge shot past. “Where’s my Orgy?”

  Mike coughed hard, clearing his throat and covering the massive wave of emotion that threatened to render him useless today. This was harder than he’d thought. The relationship between him, Dylan, and Laura was stronger than ever, and the addition of Cyndi as a nanny had opened up time for the three of them to reconnect consistently, to get a sense of equanimity, to revel in the joy of intimacy and laughter, of sensuality and bonds that made their family so much stronger.

  He never imagined he could have this back in those early days when just wanting Jill and Dylan, wanting what he wanted, was considered so subversive that, in the end, it cost him his parents.

  Being true to himself had meant losing the very people who created him.

  Which was a bit like losing God.

  Over the years he’d tracked his parents through understanding and loving family members who either didn’t know the truth about the rift, or knew and didn’t care. Mom was still working and Dad had retired. Did they know about his life at all? Had the news channel stories and the newspaper articles trickled out to them?

  They’d never reached out. Not once. After being raised in such a conservative, religious household he’d been frightened to tell the truth, and it turned out he’d been right.

  All too right.

  For them, their beliefs and faith formed a core so solid they couldn’t let him be himself without it shattering their view of the world. When the two came into conflict, they’d chosen—

  Not him.

  Joe was going through the same thing. Mike softened, watching the younger man, knowing that the anger that simmered inside came from a deep fear of rejection. Of not meeting expectations. Of not being good enough.

  Of never, ever being good enough.

  Dylan hadn’t been that way. Some part of him had always been casual, letting problems roll off his back, remaining more centered, more stable in the face of challenge. And Dylan’s parents—as staunchly Catholic as they were—had been more understanding of the truth about Dylan, Mike, and Jill. While they hadn’t been unconditionally accepting, they’d been bemused, a bit awkward, but never seeming to invalidate their son for simply loving a different way.