Complete Bliss (a Her Billionaires novella #3) (12 page)

“No. Hell no.”

Dylan

Lucky bastards.

That was all he could think as he took good, long looks at Trevor and Joe. Ten or more years separated them, and an endless sea of experience. Trevor and Joe had youth and time on their side, and everything coming up would be new. Fresh. Exciting and unknown.

A cornucopia of opportunity awaited them, two young rock-star law students who had everything going for them.

He envied them deeply.

It wasn’t that he would change one bit of his life right now. He adored Laura, and he and Mike were…well…they just
were
. That wouldn’t change—not ever. Jillian was the light of his life, and now that they had a great nanny, Laura had relaxed. Chilled.

Warmed up, actually. Sex returned, the bright, brilliant spark of a really good fuck no longer something to count down for the rare moment, but a dependable source of fun and love. This was the phase of life he had signed up for, the rich, multilayered realm of settling down, barbecuing in the backyard, hanging with his (not quite) wife and kid and Mike, and it was everything he wanted. 

Until he looked across the table and saw what youth could bring.

The entire lunch was a game to him, a silly joke that he’d indulged in because Laura asked him to be here, asked him and Mike to talk to these guys. Talk? About what? Trevor was an overeager puppy and Joe was like Mike back in college, an unstable rageball who seemed to think that a hard edge on his own skin would keep him from getting hurt. Mike had made the same mistake when they’d met years ago, and it had been Jill who had softened him, working inside, worming her way into his heart.

Dylan had been along for the ride back then, breezy and fun, all about the party. He could sniff one out, or create a wild, fun scene with two people and enough beer and ganja. While Mike had needed someone to crack him open, Dylan had needed gravity. Someone to tether him.

Jill had been their touchstone, the keeper of truths and saver of souls.

Did Darla serve that purpose—that mission, really—for these two young fools in front of him? Who knew. None of his business, right? Laura was making it
her
business, though, to stick her nose into the younger threesome’s business, prodded by Josie.

Josie. Don’t even get him started. Bane of his existence and, somehow, also one of the best things to happen to Laura. Their friendship kept her going in ways he and Mike would never understand, so while he was grateful to Laura’s friend, did she have to be such an interfering pain in the ass?

“You afraid?” Dylan asked as silence reigned after Joe’s declaration that hell no, he hadn’t told his parents about his threesome. 

“Yes.” The answer was instantaneous, almost involuntary, and Trevor jolted. Dylan bit back a wry grin. He knew that feeling, too. Partnering with someone who was so cagey and confusing, hard to read yet teeming with anger, and at the same time so…right for you...meant accepting that you were going to be shocked.

A lot.

Because you never knew what was coming next, and you expected negativity. The vulnerable moments were the ones you lived for, though—because that was where the other person’s heart showed itself.

And why you stayed.

“Good.” Mike’s voice was flat and even, warm and tempered. Like he knew he was talking to a spooked animal. That’s all Joe was. A spooked, naïve kid who was in way over his head for the first time in his life. 

Same as he and Mike had been back when they’d come together with Jill.

“Good?” Joe scoffed, the mask descending like a trapdoor. “What do you mean, ‘good’? It’s good to be afraid of my own parents?”

“No, it’s not,” Mike said, pouring himself another coffee. His deliberate, steady motions were part of a general approach he was taking. “But it’s good to be realistic.” Anyone else wouldn’t catch the meaning behind Mike’s words, but Dylan did. On the surface, what he said was what he meant. 

Underneath? He had experienced that fear, faced it, anyway, and his fears had come true.

“Why?” Joe’s single-word question shot out toward Mike like a bullet. Part challenge, part insistence, part threat, it made Dylan clench his hands instinctively, as if he needed to prepare for a fight.

“Why?” Mike pitched forward on his elbows, face tipped up and across the table, ocean eyes stormy and more blue than green, like a darkening epicenter in a Category 5 hurricane. “Because they may love you, but they also may turn you away if they can’t handle the truth of who you are.”

Joe slumped forward, chest heaving with the effort of continuing to breathe through Mike’s words. Dylan’s stomach dropped, half from watching Joe’s reaction and half from the memory of Mike’s dad and mom the day he told them the truth.

“It’s your biggest fear. Being rejected by your parents. The very people who set all the expectations inside you for how you conduct yourself through time and space as a human being.” Mike’s eyes softened. “I can see it now as we raise our daughter.” He gave Dylan a split second of eye contact, then rubbed his chin slowly with a sheepish look. “It’s so easy to plant in them the great paradox of parenting.” 

“Which is?” Trevor asked quietly.

“That you love them unconditionally but want them to be exactly what you imagine in your mind. That when they stray from your own set viewpoint of how the world should work, it’s like you’ve failed. You’re a little bit like God when you have a child, and when the child doesn’t do what you want, it’s easy to think it’s a reflection on the job you’ve done. Like it’s all about you.”

Joe nodded slowly, mesmerized. Dylan leaned in, wishing he could make Mike’s very real pain and Joe’s imagined future pain disappear.  

“You told your mom and dad?” Joe asked, blinking hard but otherwise immutable. “I take it that didn’t go well?”

Dylan and Mike exchanged a look that gave Mike permission to sigh, the slow hiss of release making Dylan glad he was here. Laura was of great comfort to Mike as they’d navigated time and family. She hadn’t understood how his parents could choose not only to shun him but also baby Jillian, but Dylan got it. All too well. Not because he agreed, for fuck’s sake.

Because he’d been there. Right there when it had all gone down.

His heart raged for Mike, and already just a little for Joe, if that was what Joe was afraid he might face.

“It was the biggest mistake of my life.” Mike’s words echoed through a lull in the restaurant’s busy background noise, giving them a dramatic weight that shook Dylan a bit. Laura looked over at them with an expression of unease and mouthed,
You okay?
 

Dylan just shrugged. She closed her eyes, nodded, then looked away, huddling once again with Josie and Darla. Whatever conversation they were having looked leaps and bounds better than
this
.

“The threesome?” Trevor asked in surprise, his voice up half an octave. 

“The telling. The threesome was the best fucking thing of my life up to that point. I felt whole. Full. Complete.” Mike swallowed hard. “Real.”

“And your parents…” Joe said, obviously not wanting to the know the answer, but Dylan saw he had to ask.
Had
to.

“My dad nearly beat the shit out of me. Dylan had to stop him.”

“You’re the size of a fucking redwood out of Muir Woods. How could your dad—?”

Mike’s sad grin made him look so forlorn it caught Laura’s attention again. Dylan reached up and scratched an eyebrow, finding the skin of his brow knitted so tightly it hurt.

“You think I’m tall? You should see Big Mike. I’m
Little
Mike.”

“It’s like Sam.” Trevor’s voice trembled just enough to make them all turn and stare at him. Alex had stayed quiet during all this.

“Sam? Your drummer?” Dylan had been to one of their concerts a few months ago with Laura and Mike. 

Trevor nodded. Joe just gave him a thousand-mile stare and looked at Mike. “Sam’s not in a threesome or anything. I just mean he has a dad who rejected him. Beat him up. Sent him away.”

“Ouch,” was all Dylan could think to say.

“What about Laura’s parents?” Joe asked.

“Dead,” Mike said. “She just has this one crazy uncle left, and no one’s heard from him since her mother died.” 

“And yours?” Joe’s eyes lasered on Dylan.

The question gave Dylan a chance to shake his shoulders, to unburden the tension that lingered there like the weight of a human on his back in a fire, like the responsibility of a person’s life.

“Mine? Mine tolerate it. I think my mom doesn’t know what it means, and Dad just pretends Mike’s my roommate. They create their own false sense of reality and go with it.” Shrug. He wasn’t about to get touchy-feely with these two. For so long the only lifeboat they had were Dylan’s parents and Jill’s mom. Her dad had tried to have her disinherited after her death, but her mom had put a full stop to that.

And now he and Mike were the beneficiaries of $2.2 billion that Jill’s dad had tried to deny them. Couldn’t blame the guy, really.

Would Dylan or Mike have done the same?

“They accept Laura and Mike?” Trevor asked.

“They
love
Laura.” Dylan smiled as Mike groaned. “And they really like Mike. They just don’t know what to do with Mike
and
Laura. They’re binary. They think relationships are in serial. Not parallel.”

Joe barked out a laugh that made the table chuckle. “But…” His voice held a pleading tone, as if begging for the answer he wanted. Dylan steeled himself. He doubted he could give that. “But did they freak on you when you told them? Kick you out? Cut you off?” 

“Cut me off from what?”

“Money.”

Dylan made a dismissive noise. “What money? I had a paper route at twelve. A part-time job unloading trucks at fifteen. Mom and Dad did fine, but we weren’t rolling in it. It’s not like I got a shiny new BMW in the driveway with a ribbon on it for my sixteenth birthday.”

As the last sentence came out of his mouth Dylan realized it was the worst thing he could have said in that moment, because apparently that was the life Joe
did
live. And he’d just alienated him by making fun of it.

Too bad. His own truth wasn’t worth sacrificing so he could help some entitled kid.

“It works that way with your parents? They still give you money? Paying for law school?” he asked. 

Joe didn’t respond, but Trevor jumped in. “They do. Different worlds.” He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “And when you’re used to all that, you don’t know what to do.” 

“You go out and hustle and get a job,” Dylan muttered.

“It’s not that simple,” Joe said. “The money isn’t just love.”

Mike startled, touching Dylan’s forearm. “They’re right. It’s not just about the money. The money
is
love, though, in its own way.”

“Bullshit. Just because you don’t have money doesn’t mean you love your kids any less,” Dylan snapped. 

“No, not like that,” Mike said, shaking his head. “It’s more like cutting off money for not choosing a life someone else told you to live.”

Joe just blinked.

And then Madge got up from her spot at the booth with Laura, Darla, and Josie and began clearing plates.

“Want more?” 

“Whatcha got?” Trevor asked.

“Fried green tomatoes covered in parmesan with sauce?”

“Sure.”

She sized up the table. “I’ll bring three orders.”

“How many tapeworms do you have?” Dylan asked Trevor, giving him a friendly elbow shove.

“Enough to keep eating.”

“Oh, to be young and have that metabolism again.”

“Sucks growing old.”

Old
. Ouch. “Who’s old? We’re thirty-four!” Dylan’s cry of protest was met with smirks from the two younger men. 

“Speak for yourself! Thirty over here,” Alex added.

“I don’t mind growing old, as long as it’s with Laura,” Mike said in a voice designed for the women at the next table to hear it.

“Sure, Mr. Zen. And the first time you find a gray pube on your balls, you’ll be bitching about it like the rest of us,” Dylan challenged.

“You found a gray pube already? Dude.” Trevor spoke in a voice filled with alarmed sadness. “I’m so sorry. Time for Viagra, huh?”

What. The. Fuck.

“I do not have gray pubes on my nads!” Dylan shouted. “And I don’t need Viagra! In fact, I have a refractory period that would put you to shame. Four times in five hours. Just tested it last week!”

“That Viagra can really let you pump ‘em out, huh?” Joe commented.

“
I do not take Viagra!
”

“Okay. Whatever. We believe you.” Those two little assholes snickered away. Even Alex and Mike tried not to laugh. How the hell did the conversation go from a deep, painful reflection on how their families handled the revelation of their threesome to gray pubes and Viagra? In ten seconds flat? 

“You damn well better believe me. Mike can vouch for it.”

That made Trevor and Joe turn beet red. Huh.

“Not so comfortable with each other, are you?” Dylan’s turn to put them in the squirmy position of being under the spotlight. “Can’t admit that you like it.”

“Like what?” Alex asked, surprising everyone.

“Like being with each other.”

“We’re not
with
each other. We don’t…you know.”

“You don’t touch.” Dylan’s statement made Joe’s face lose a little of the flush.

“Right.”

“But you’re still together.”

“Huh?”

“You’re together. You wouldn’t be with Darla—both of you—if you didn’t feel better having him there than you do
not
having him there,” Dylan pointed out. 

“No, it’s not like that. It’s more like…” Trevor frowned, then made a face of acquiescence. “Um, I guess it
is
like that.” 

“We’re perverts,” Joe said, sighing, banging his head slowly against the back of his chair. “Might not even be able to get an attorney’s license if someone knew.”

“Not true. No one can strip you of that right,” Mike said. “Don’t overthink like that. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

Trevor shoved Joe’s leg, hard. “See? Told you.”