Author: Alexa Land
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/alexa-land/page,3,529414-all_in.html
I thrust the bag at Dante. “Throw him a hamburger. That’ll distract him.” The dog was still shaking my pant leg violently, and Dante grabbed a burger out of the bag, pulled off the paper, and started to throw it to Peaches. “Not the bun,” I told him, holding onto the doorframe with both hands to keep from tipping over.
“Why not?” he asked as he shook the patty out onto the floor. Immediately, the dog let go of my leg and started scarfing down the meat.
I stood upright and pushed my hair off my forehead as I said, “Because Peaches has a gluten allergy. If he eats bread, he’ll have diarrhea for a week.”
Dante stared at me for a long moment with one eyebrow raised, as if I was totally insane. And then, while still maintaining eye contact with me, he tossed the bun to the dog. Peaches caught it and wolfed it down.
“Shame on you,” I said, crossing my arms and frowning at Dante.
“That thing deserves some intestinal distress. Hell, it deserves a bullet in the cranium. Shooting it would be a public service.”
The dog started to growl again, and I said, “Quick, throw him another burger. No bun this time.”
He rolled his eyes and did as I asked. I locked the front door and turned to head up the stairs. But something caught my eye, and I paused for a moment. “What’s wrong?” Dante wanted to know.
“Um…nothing. There just…well, there used to be pictures of me all along the wall here, going up the staircase, from when I was growing up. My parents took them all down. But whatever.” I felt like I’d just been kicked in the gut, but no way was I going to make a big deal out of this in front of my date. It was already embarrassing enough that I was involving him in my little family drama.
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I lied, and jogged up the stairs. Dante was right behind me, but had to pause long enough to throw more beef at Peaches when the dog started to growl and follow us.
I got to my room at the end of the hall, and opened the door and flipped the light switch. And totally froze in my tracks.
The room was bare, the only things left in it the stripped down mattress and an empty desk. The closet was open across the room, and that was empty, too. It looked small and stark and barren, blank rectangles on the faded blue walls where my posters had once been. “Damn it,” I murmured. “We’re too late.”
Dante threw another patty to the dog, then stepped into the empty room with me and shut the door behind us. “Fuck, that sucks. I’m so sorry, Charlie.”
I started to tell him it was fine, but the words wouldn’t form in my mouth. I looked around at my former home, at the room that had been mine for twenty three years. I swallowed hard against the lump in my throat, the pain raw, searing, and took a few deep breaths. Dante took my hand and held on tight, wordlessly, just giving me a minute. Eventually I said, “We have to get out of here. My parents will be home soon. And this is all bad enough without also getting hauled to jail for breaking and entering.”
Peaches was waiting patiently in the hall, and as soon as I opened the door, he stood up and started growling again. Dante reached into the bag and tossed the dog all the buns he’d been saving. And when he saw my disapproving expression, he said, “Your parents totally deserve a giant case of explosive diarrhea. They deserve far, far worse than that, actually.”
“That’s just mean,” I told him, shutting off the overhead light in my room and pulling the door shut behind me.
“I don’t have a problem with mean,” Dante said as he jogged down the stairs after me.
We left through the kitchen door since my parents were likely to pull up to the front of the house at any moment, locking it behind us. We made it outside without incident, because Peaches was still busy giving himself diarrhea. When we reached the back fence, both of us laced our fingers together and bent down to give the other a boost. “Go ahead,” he said.
“No, you go ahead,” I told him, still in position to give him a leg up.
Dante straightened up and said, fists on his hips, the paper bag still clutched in one hand, “I can make it over this fence without assistance, thank you very much.”
“No you can’t. You barely made it over with the aid of a trash can.”
He laughed at that and said indignantly, “That is not true.”
“It is true,” I teased. “And at your advanced age, you might break a hip or something. So come on, Dombruso, take the leg up.” I still held my hands laced together for him to step into.
“Advanced age! How old do you think I am?”
“I dunno. Twenty eight, twenty nine?”
He grinned at me and said, “That’s actually right. I’m twenty nine. Still young enough to do this.” And he turned from me and tossed the fast food bag over the fence before grabbing the top of the wooden slats and pulling himself up gracefully. When he was sitting on the top of the fence, he looked down at me with a smug expression and said, “See?”
“If you can do that, why was it so hard to jump over the fence in the first place?”
“I was out of practice.” Something caught Dante’s eye, and he turned his head to the left, squinting into the darkness. “Hey, what do you suppose is in all those bags over there?”
I turned to look, and only now noticed about a dozen big, black garbage bags lined up along the edge of the yard. I jogged over to them and untangled one of the drawstrings, and took a look inside. “Holy crap, this is some of my stuff,” I exclaimed. I checked another bag and announced, “So’s this. I guess my parents hadn’t gotten around to hauling it to the dump yet.”
He smiled at that. “So, in other words, we just spent all that time breaking into your parents’ house and facing off against the zombie lap dog from hell for absolutely no reason.”
“Yeah, pretty much,” I said, carrying a couple bags over to the back gate. “Out of curiosity, how do you figure Peaches is a zombie?”
“It smells like it’s rotting.”
“That’s just his breath. He won’t let anyone brush his teeth, not even my mom.” I handed the bags up to him as I said, “Could you please lower these to the other side? I don’t know what’s breakable in here, so I don’t just want to chuck them over.”
When we got the eleven bags up and over the fence, Dante jumped into the alley, pulling his suit jacket down with him. When I climbed over the fence and landed in front of him, he kissed the tip of my nose and then went back to rolling down his sleeves and buttoning his cuffs.
“I’m going to go bring my truck around. Could you please stay here and keep an eye on my stuff?” I asked him.
“Sure.”
When I pulled up beside him a couple minutes later, Dante pointed his phone’s screen at me and said, “Turns out ‘Affenpinscher’ is a real breed.” A picture of a small, black, apelike dog was on the screen. “Did you know ‘aff’ means monkey in German?”
“I told you so. And yes, I did actually know that. Peaches isn’t a purebred, though. We don’t really know what else he is, since he was an unclaimed stray that my parents got at the pound.”
“Imagine that, such a sweet animal going unclaimed,” Dante deadpanned as he put his phone away and hoisted a couple bags into the bed of my pickup.
“It was my fault they got him in the first place. I pestered them to get a dog for years. Finally, they went to the shelter and picked that out.”
“How did you live with a dog that vicious?”
I shrugged and said, “I just dealt with it. He usually didn’t try to kill me when my parents were around. And if I was alone, I’d mostly just stay in my bedroom with the door closed, so it wasn’t so bad.”
“How long have your parents had that thing?”
“About twelve years.” I swung a particularly heavy bag into the truck bed.
Dante stopped what he was doing and looked at me. “Your parents got that thing when you were a kid? And then they kept it, even after it started terrorizing their son?”
“Really? That surprises you? M
y parents threw out their only child and all of his stuff, just because I had the audacity to be honest with them and tell them I was gay.” I swung another bag into the truck. “My mother loves that dog. No way was she getting rid of him.”
“That’s epically fucked up,” Dante muttered.
“Welcome to my world.”
When we were both seated in the cab of my pickup, Dante turned to me and said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. Want to grab something to go and take it back to your apartment? That way we can eat right after we haul all your stuff inside.”
“Good idea. Where should we go?”
“We’re only a few blocks from Flannigan’s. We could swing by there and pick up some of my grandmother’s pasta with marinara.”
“Nolan’s,” I corrected. “And what do you mean, your grandmother’s pasta?”
“I put a dish on the menu when I owned that place, before Dmitri cheated at cards and won it from me,” Dante told me as I started the truck and rolled down the alley. His door swung open, and he cursed and slammed it shut a couple times.
“I’d forgotten that the bar was yours for a while. How long did you own it?”
“Just six months. It was a pain in the ass. The profit margin was too small for the number of hours it took to run the place properly. That’s why I let Dmitri win it from me. I was glad to get rid of it.”
I pulled up in the back alley behind Nolan’s and parked illegally, and he took my hand as we went in the employee entrance. Dante greeted the cooks by name, and placed a to go order through the pass-through window. He still acted like he owned the place.
And then he swung me around and pinned me to the wall, and kissed me gently. He laced his fingers with mine and pulled my hands up and pinned them to the wall too, one on either side of my head.
“This is a lot of PDA,” I murmured, feeling the color rise in my cheeks.
“You’re already out at work. Everyone knows you’re Jamie’s ex,” Dante said. “And besides, this isn’t ‘public’ per se. It’s not like I’m sexually molesting you out in the dining room.” He kissed me again, more deeply this time.
I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye and turned my head to look at Dmitri, who’d just come out of the office. He assessed the situation quickly with raised eyebrows, then smiled and said, “Hi guys. Don’t tell me, let me guess. You’re here for the spaghetti, aren’t you, Dante?”
“Hi Dmitri,” he said with a friendly grin. “Of course I am. And if you ever take it off the menu, I’m going to kick your ass.” Embarrassingly enough, Dante kept me pinned to the wall during this little exchange, my hands still up beside my head.
“Good luck with that,” Dmitri told him, but he said it affectionately. The two were old friends. He turned and went back through the door.
Not five seconds later, Jamie poked his head out of the office and stared at me. Apparently Dmitri had ‘told on me’ and Jamie had come to see this for himself. Dante was busy kissing my neck, so I knit my brows at my ex over the top of Dante’s head and tried to will Jamie to go away.
Jamie mouthed the word, “Really?” He thought Dante was seriously bad news, so this wasn’t sitting well with him.
I rolled my eyes at him and said nothing. After a moment, Jamie frowned and ducked back into his office.
Cole was up next, coming to the pass-through to pick up an order. “Hey, you’re back,” he said to me. “Hi, Mr. Dombruso.”
“Hi Cole,” Dante replied, before kissing and nibbling my earlobe. As if this all wasn’t embarrassing enough, my cock leapt to attention at the thing he was doing to my ear. Who knew those two body parts were hardwired together?
“You’re still here,” I said to Cole lightly, even as my face burned with a ferocious blush.
“Yeah. Well, you know, after earning a whopping fourteen dollars during the lunch shift, I gladly agreed to stay and work a second shift when Ruby called in sick.” Cole leaned forward and tilted his head a couple inches to observe what Dante was doing to my ear. Then he looked at me and grinned. If embarrassment was lethal, someone would be making my funeral arrangements right about now. His food came up, and Cole grabbed a couple plates and headed back to the dining room with a cheerful, “Have fun, you two.”
“Oh, we will,” Dante said, grinning and looking into my eyes before going back to kissing me. Eventually one of the cooks came out of the kitchen carrying a big brown paper bag, which he handed to my date. Dante thanked him and gave him some cash, then took my hand and led me out the back door. Phase two of our date was under way.
Chapter Three
We cut through Golden Gate Park and double-parked in front of my apartment in the Sunset. Dante and I worked as a team, and got all the big black garbage bags lined up against a wall of my living room in just a couple minutes. He volunteered to go and park my truck, and while he did that I unpacked our dinner, using an upended plastic milk crate as our table.
He came in through my open front door and closed and locked it behind him as he said, “I like what you’ve done here,” indicating the milk crate with the two spaghetti dinners balanced on it. “Very Lady and the Tramp. But it’s missing something.” He sat down on the floor and reached into the pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out a sleek silver lighter, then juryrigged it somehow so it would stay on. He slid the end of the lighter between the diamond-shaped weave of the milk crate so it was standing upright, then said, “There we go. Candlelight.”
“Well, lighter light, technically, but it’s cute. Do you smoke?”
“No.”
“Then why do you carry a lighter?”
“Because sometimes,” he said with a little smile, “you need a lighter.”
“Like when you’re recreating a scene from a Disney movie.”
“Exactly.” He picked up a bottle of red wine that I’d been surprised to find included in the takeout bag, and said, “Do you have a corkscrew?”
“Uh, no. I don’t even have a chair. Why would I have a corkscrew?”
He grinned and pulled out a little pocket knife, and folded out a tiny corkscrew.
“What else have you got in that jacket, MacGyver?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.” He winked at me and worked the corkscrew expertly, and soon pulled the cork out with a flourish. “Should I even ask about glasses?”
“Nope.”
He considered this for a beat, then said, “Alright,” and took a sip directly from the bottle before passing it to me. “This has been a night of many firsts. I don’t think I’ve ever drunk directly from a wine bottle before. Nor have I had a picnic on a milk crate.”
“Nor have you hopped fences, picked locks, or faced down killer zombie lap dogs. It has been a night of many firsts for you. Makes me think you don’t get out much,” I teased. It felt surprisingly comfortable, hanging out with Dante, joking with him. More so than I’d have ever predicted when I first met him.
“Apparently I don’t,” he agreed. “This night, and you, have been wonderfully unexpected.” He held my gaze, a slow, easy smile illuminating his handsome face.
“Here’s to more nights like this one.” I raised the wine bottle in a toast before taking a sip. Then I immediately erupted into a totally unflattering coughing fit, shielding my mouth with the crook of my elbow. His response to that was to offer me a clean handkerchief with a little grin. “Seriously?” I choked out, but as I said that, I took the handkerchief and used it to blot my watering eyes.
I loved the way his dark eyes sparkled when he found something funny. He asked, “So, how’s the wine?”
“So gross. Gah. It’s like drinking turpentine.”
“And you’d know this because you’ve drunk a lot of turpentine?”
“Uh, no. But I’ve smelled turpentine, and can easily imagine that it would taste exactly like that crap.”
Dante smiled widely, then picked up the bottle and took a sip. When he put it down again, he said, “This is actually an excellent vintage
.”
“Ugh. Don’t go all wine snob on me. That’s so annoying.” I was smiling though as I said that, and got up and went into the kitchen. I was back moments later with two cans of soda. “It’s bad enough you showed up to go breaking and entering in a three thousand dollar suit. If you prove to be a wine snob on top of that, then there’s just no hope for you.”
“I’m curious. How exactly did you arrive at that dollar amount for this suit?” he asked as he slipped out of his jacket and set it on the floor beside him.
“I picked what I considered a totally unreasonable amount to spend on a suit, and then I doubled it. How far off am I?”
“You’re fairly close,” he said with an enigmatic smile as he unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled his sleeves back.
“Oh man. If you tell me my three thousand dollar estimate is actually too low, then I really can’t hang out with you anymore,” I told him with a smirk, and reached for a slice of garlic bread.
“Wait!” he exclaimed, and I froze in mid-reach. He got on his hands and knees and crawled around the crate to me, and then he kissed me, deeply, passionately, before sitting down beside me and handing me a piece of bread. He got one for himself, too.
It took me a minute to regain the power of speech, my heart pounding and electricity shooting through my body. I asked, once I’d calmed down a little, “To what do I owe that moment of passion?”
He smiled at me cheerfully and said, holding up his slice of bread, “We’re both about to end up with truly offensive garlic breath. I have a theory that since we’re both eating the same thing, it’ll cancel itself out. But just in case I’m wrong, I wanted to do that before it became totally disagreeable to kiss me.”
“Good thought.”
As we ate our meal, Dante entertained me with tales of his bimonthly poker game. It included many prominent San Francisco business leaders, almost all of which, apparently, had to be watched like hawks because they were total cheaters. It was in that poker game that he’d won the bar from Bud Flannigan a few months back, and the same game in which Jamie’s husband had gone on to win it from Dante.