Belonging Read online

  Belonging

  by Alexa Land

  A M/M Love Story

  Book Eight in the Firsts and Forever Series

  Copyright 2015 by Alexa Land.

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission in whole or in part of this publication is permitted without express written consent from the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either used fictitiously or are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, business establishments or locales is purely coincidental.

  This book contains sexually explicit material.

  It is intended for ADULTS ONLY.

  Books by Alexa Land Include:

  Feral (prequel to Tinder)

  The Tinder Chronicles (Tinder, Hunted and Destined)

  And the Firsts and Forever Series:

  Way Off Plan

  All In

  In Pieces

  Gathering Storm

  Salvation

  Skye Blue

  Against the Wall

  Belonging

  Can two damaged men build a future together from the shattered pieces of their lives?

  Gianni Dombruso’s life was altered forever at the age of four, when his parents were murdered and he and his brothers went to live with their grandmother, the irrepressible Nana Dombruso. Now almost thirty, Gianni has spent his life bouncing from relationship to relationship, seeking but never finding the security and stability he so desperately craves.

  Alexzander Tillane was one of the biggest pop stars in the world when he walked away from it all in the middle of a concert in 2002. Almost destroyed by the pressure of fame, Zan retreated to a life of quiet solitude in an effort to heal. But the cure backfired, leaving him with more issues than answers.

  Zan knows he can’t give Gianni the stability he’s looking for, not with all his problems. He can’t even imagine why the beautiful younger man would want to get involved with someone so damaged, but the heat between them can’t be ignored. Giving in to it could be a huge mistake. Or maybe both men might end up right where they belong.

  Dedicated to

  Bec and Ky, with love

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Looking Ahead

  Chapter One

  My family was completely insane, every last one of them.

  I sighed as I watched my brother Vincent out in my grandmother’s backyard, methodically trimming the hedges. A wide central path was lined on both sides by two dozen Italian cypress trees shaped into tidy columns, each offset by a pair of low shrubs. Until that morning, the shrubs had been square. But Nana had decided she’d like them better if they were round, so my brother was out there doing as she asked.

  “Dude! Cocks and balls, as far as the eye can see. Epic!” I turned to look at Jessie. The slim blond was holding a coffee cup and wearing flannel pajamas with a repeating pattern of bacon and eggs all over them.

  “Good to know I’m not the only one seeing that.”

  “Twin rows of ten-foot-tall boners? Pretty hard to miss.”

  I followed him out of the sun porch and back into the kitchen as I asked, “Are you living here now?” My grandmother had hired Jessie as her chauffeur and assistant a few months ago. As far as I could tell, his only qualifications were that he was cute, young and gay. Nana had a habit of collecting people who fit those criteria.

  “For now. My apartment building is having a few issues, so Nana offered me one of her spare bedrooms until the situation is resolved.”

  “Define issues.”

  “You know that movie Arachnophobia? It was kind of like that. Only with ants. Lots of ants. And by lots I mean huge, reaming buttloads. One ant? No problem. Two, three ants? Still fine. But dude, it was like an ant tsunami. No, more than that. It was like...like the antpocalypse.”

  “The antpocalyse,” I repeated as I raised an eyebrow at him.

  He nodded. “It was so damn creepy. I’m still having ant-induced flashbacks. It was like living in an ant-based horror movie. I swear, those little fuckers were organizing. Mrs. Schumacher in three-thirteen? Her poodle went missing. I swear it was the ants. There’s no way to prove it, but mark my words. Someday they’re going to go in and excavate the giant mutant ant hill underneath my building and find Elmo’s pink, sparkly collar and just one little tuft of poodle fur. Poor Elmo.”

  “Why did a dog named Elmo have a pink collar?”

  “Don’t judge him.” I stared at Jessie for a long moment, and he flashed me a smile.

  My cousin Nico rushed into the kitchen and threw open a cupboard as he said, “Morning, Gianni and Jessie. Anyone know if there’s a travel mug around here?” His button-down shirt looked like he’d slept in it, and his normally perfect black hair was flattened on one side.

  “Rough night last night, Cuz?” I found a stainless steel cup and filled it for him, then popped on a lid.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, adjusting his glasses as he took the mug from me. “I had to force myself through two hundred pages of my comparative constitutional law textbook for class this morning.” He took a sip and said, “Oh man, that’s good. Thanks.”

  “You hate law school. You know this, right?”

  “I do, in fact, know this, but it’s a necessary evil if I want to be a lawyer,” Nico said. He took another long drink of coffee before saying, “Gotta go, I’m late.”

  “You really should examine your lifestyle choices,” I told him as he hurried from the room. “You’re not nearly douchey enough to be a lawyer.”

  “I’m pretty sure the douche enhancement curriculum begins next semester,” he called. A few moments later, the front door opened, then closed behind him.

  Jessie plucked a blueberry muffin from a basket on the kitchen island and hopped up on the counter. “Your cousin seems like an interesting guy,” he said. “And by interesting, I mean smoking hot. What’s his story?”

  “Who says he has one?” I hedged as I filled the tea kettle and put it on the stove.

  “Oh, he has a story,” my grandmother announced as she breezed into the kitchen. She was wearing a camouflage track suit, for reasons I couldn’t begin to guess. “That poor little cutie pie! He had his heart broken but good. His boyfriend cheated on him with Nico’s best friend. They were living in Los Angeles, and Nicky walked away from his whole life when he found out. I took him in, of course. Now he’s trying to move on and make a future for himself apart from that slimeball of an ex. I think he’s way off base with this law school thing, his heart’s not really in it. He needs to figure that out for himself, though.”

  “That’s Nico’s private business, Nana,” I told her. “I don’t think he wants us talking about this stuff.”

  She waved her hand and said, “Bah! Jessie’s family, and family doesn’t keep secrets from each other.” The chauffeur grinned at her as I suppressed a sigh. Nana changed the subject as she headed to the sun porch. “Now let’s see how your brother’s coming on my backyard redesign.”

  “Wait for it,” Jessie whispered, then w
inked at me and tossed a bit of muffin in his mouth.

  “Sweet baby Jesus!” Nana exclaimed. “Look at all those wienie dongles!”

  I leaned over and glanced through the doorway. My brother had just finished the final hedge and turned to look back at his handiwork. Jessie hopped off the counter, pulled a phone from his pajama pocket and zoomed in on Vincent. He snapped a photo and chuckled as my usually stoic brother’s eyes went wide and his mouth fell open. “How did Vinnie not realize he was carving giant balls until just that moment?” he asked as he zoomed out and took another picture.

  “That’s so him. He was probably totally focused on getting every sphere perfect and symmetrical, so he failed to see the giant balls right in his face. I need a copy of those photos, by the way,” I told him as Nana scurried out the back door.

  “You got it.” As he shot them to me in a text message, he murmured, “I love being a part of this family.”

  “Don’t you have a real family of tiny, blond, pseudo-Nordic people somewhere?”

  “Yes and no,” he said. “My father’s a Baptist minister. How thrilled do you suppose he was when he found out his kid was queer?”

  “Oh. Well, shit.”

  “I’d better go get dressed, Nana will probably want to head out soon. But let me leave you with this parting thought. What the song says? It’s totally true. The only guy that could really stretch you is the son of a preacher man.” He gave me a lascivious smile and wiggled his eyebrows at me before scooping up his mug and sauntering from the kitchen.

  It took me a moment to absorb that, and then I yelled after him, “Reach! Not stretch! What’s that even supposed to mean?”

  “Come to my room tonight if you want to find out,” he called before disappearing up the stairs.

  “Because this family needed more crazy,” I muttered.

  After doctoring up a travel mug of tea, I took one more look out the window. Nana and my brother were standing side by side. They’d struck identical poses, hands on their hips and heads tilted as they contemplated Cockhenge. I chuckled as I headed to the garage. Okay, so sometimes the crazy was pretty entertaining.

  *****

  When I met my friend Yoshiro at the gym twenty minutes later, he greeted me like he always did. “You’re late.”

  “By four minutes. You’re oddly uptight about punctuality, Yosh. You know that, right?”

  “I wouldn’t be if you weren’t always late.” He pulled off his sweatshirt, then quickly brushed his long bangs out of his dark eyes. When he did that, I noticed he’d added more details to the incredibly intricate black tattoo of a miniature city that sleeved his left forearm. My friend was a tattoo artist and tended to take his work home with him. He’d actually been a fairly nerdy business major when we met in college, and he’d ended up using those skills to run his own tattoo studio. The way he’d evolved in the nine years I’d known him never ceased to amaze me.

  “I’m not always late.”

  “You are! And always by four minutes.”

  “So maybe we should change our workouts to nine-oh-four. Then would you be happy?”

  “No, because I bet anything you’d start showing up at nine-oh-eight if we did that.”

  “Let’s test it out. Meet me at nine-oh-four tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday. It’s bad enough that we work out six days a week. We’re not making it seven.”

  “You know you love it.”

  “Um, no. Him, however,” he said, tilting his head toward a beefy jock across the room, bench pressing the equivalent of a Buick, “I would gladly love, for about an hour.”

  “Why is it that every guy you’ve ever pointed out to me looks like he used to beat up gay kids for fun in high school, in between failing Algebra and getting his brains scrambled inside his football helmet?”

  “Don’t stereotype.”

  “But really.”

  “Meanwhile, your taste in sex partners is freaking awesome,” he told me. I shot him a look as we stepped onto side-by-side elliptical trainers and he added, “Have you ever actually dated anyone your own age?”

  “Yeah, you. Look how that turned out.”

  “We didn’t really date. You had me in the bro category before we even made it to the entree.”

  “And rightfully so. We’re far too alike, we would have ended up hating each other if we’d pursued a romantic relationship.” As I was talking, I adjusted a few settings on the machine, then grasped the handles and began moving at a steady pace.

  “Have you ever asked yourself why you’re attracted to people old enough to be your—” I cut him off with a sharp look and he finished with, “Fine, I won’t say it. So, how’s this? Old enough to trip most twenty-somethings’ ick meters.” When I frowned at him, he flashed me a smile wide enough to bring out his single dimple.

  “I just feel better with older partners, that’s all,” I muttered embarrassedly.

  “Because you don’t think someone in their twenties would take care of you?”

  “It could happen, but it’s pretty damn rare. My friend Christian found it, he’s engaged to this amazing guy who’s totally there for him. But his fiancé Shea is one in a million.”

  “That’s your friend that’s undergoing chemo, right?” Yosh asked as he dialed up the resistance on his elliptical trainer. When I nodded he said, “So I was right, you do want a caretaker.”

  “Not a caretaker.” I flailed for a way to explain it to Yosh and finally settled on, “I just...I guess I want someone who makes me feel safe.”

  He jumped gracefully off his machine and pulled me off mine, then clutched me in a bear hug. “What are you doing?” I asked as I stood there rigidly.

  “You sounded so vulnerable all of a sudden. Whenever I see that side of you, it makes me want to squeeze you.”

  “Dude, people are staring.”

  “It’s a gay gym, Gi. Nobody cares if two guys are hugging each other.”

  “They don’t care that two guys are hugging, they care that anybody is hugging. You’re bringing down the butch factor in here big time.”

  “Tough.”

  I frowned and asked, “How long are you planning to keep this up?”

  “Until you hug me back, dumbass.” I sighed and gave him a split second embrace. He didn’t let go. “Hug fail! Do it for real. Let me feel the love!”

  “But I hate you right now.”

  “Come on. Do it! Don’t make me resort to drastic measures.”

  “Such as?” I asked.

  “I could bust out a nice, loud rendition of Wind Beneath My Wings to enhance the moment. I know how much you love that song.”

  “Oh my God, don’t!”

  Yosh chuckled at that. “Only one way to stop it. Schmaltzy ballad in three...two....”

  “You suck so bad,” I said as I put my arms around him.

  “Not true. I’m actually incredibly proficient at it. You’d know that if you’d made it past the entree.” I chuckled at that as I let go of him, and he let go too, finally.

  “I don’t even know what I said to make you go all grabby.”

  He reached up and brushed my bangs out of my eyes. “Sometimes I’m reminded that there’s a little puppy beneath all this pretty.”

  “A puppy,” I repeated flatly.

  Yosh nodded. “Even after all these years, I still believe the packaging sometimes: confident, pulled-together Gianni Dombruso, man without a care. But every now and then, that little puppy peeks out and it makes me all squishy inside.”

  “Sometimes I believe your packaging, too. I start to think, wow, Yoshiro Miyazaki is this super cool guy. But then, you do something like making me hug it out in a gym and talking about going all squishy, and I catch a glimpse of the total freaking dork that lives under that perfect hair.”

  He smiled again. “I know, it really is perfect. Come on, let’s move to free weights, the elliptical is boring. It’s your turn to spot first.”

  “Did you hear the part where you’re a dork
?”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

  As we crossed the gym, Yosh changed the subject by saying, “Hey, before I forget, I need you to do something for me.”

  “Sure, anything.”

  “Aw. You still love me, even though you think I’m a dork.”

  “Not think, know. What do you need?”

  “I need you to come to a party with me tonight.”

  “Why does asking me to go to a party sound like you’re calling in a favor?”

  “Because the party is at Miles Harken’s apartment.”

  I stopped walking and stared at my friend. “Yosh, that fucker keeps using you, then throws you away like a dirty diaper. What the hell?”

  “I know, although ‘dirty diaper’ is overstating it a bit. Miles is a grade-A douche, no doubt about it, but wait until you hear who’s going to be at the party.”

  “What difference does that make? You promised me you’d stay the hell away from Miles! Remember how you felt the last time you caved and answered one of his booty calls? It took me days to talk you out of that shame spiral.”

  Yosh chuckled and said, “Shame spiral. Thank you for that, Oprah.”

  “You know I’m right.”

  “I’m not going because I want to see Miles, I swear. I’m going because you need this.”

  “I need this? What do I need?”

  “Jason Jax. He’s the guest of honor tonight and you’ve been crushing on him forever.”

  “You’re shitting me,” I murmured.

  “He’s in town filming a movie and I guess he and Miles are old friends.”

  “Jason Jax played Miles’ dad in that TV series about ten years ago, the one about the widower in Alaska with six kids.”

  “Oh, right! Randall’s Ridge. That show sucked ass.”

  “It totally did,” I said. “I only watched it for the scenes were Jason would strip off his flannel shirt and get all sweaty chopping wood for winter. He used to chop a lot of wood.”