“Celebrating.” he hisses. “Makes sense, you’ve always been the sort to grieve quick.”
It’s the timeline of it all that has always been truly fucked in Dominic’s opinion: their courtship that lasts several years; the sudden and stormy break up ( Can he really say ‘sudden’ though? Hadn’t it always been brewing?); and finally the offensive reveal - almost exactly a year after the termination of them, Dominic receives a save the date for the Montgomery-York wedding.
Dominic’s doesn’t go to the wedding ( his father does, but that’s because Marius would rather crucify himself with rusty nails than sleep on proper etiquette ) - Dominic does, however, go to the funeral. He sits in the back, unable to shake the way his head is head swimming with the gossip that’s filtered through New York high society. How supposedly Graham and Alec encountered Alec’s affliction because they had been searching for surrogates. He doesn’t say a word through the whole ceremony and leaves without a sound. This feral feeling that sits beneath the cage of his ribs has been years in the making. ‘Aren’t you always close to losing it?’ Yes. Dominic absolutely is and he has been teetering on that precipice for quite some time. He’s sure Graham is too, but at some point they’d decided: every man for himself.
He’s told Graham to get out and Graham is leaving. But how very Graham to do it in such a cowardly way. Throw down a few choice insults and then run? What a fucking coward. The comment about the submissive sickness has Dominic seeing red. They’re really getting into digging up graves now and unearthing the worst of the worst, huh? The distance and his own submissive sickness hadn’t been the only thing to end them, but it had certainly been a factor, hadn’t it?
Truly, Dominic wants to move on, he wants to forget, to erase, and, to above all else, stop this lingering sense of bitterness. Silvercreek is supposed to be his safe haven away from it all, and now it feels like a poisoned well. He’d rather go parched than drink from it. But Graham remains unbothered, unaffected, and in a sudden, impulsive decision Dominic decides to twist the knife. If Graham wants to continue living life as a unfeeling glacier, that’s fine. But Dominic is nothing short of a forest fire - and at least one of them should achieve some sort of catharsis from this interaction. Dominic’s clocked Graham’s jaw clench, which, on someone like Graham, is monumental. But it’s not enough. If they weren’t pulling their punches, perhaps actual punches should be thrown.
It’s why he takes long strides to catch up to Graham. He grabs the older man by the shoulder - yanks to spin him around - and then doesn’t pull his punch. Just lets his fist land on the other’s cheek with a sharp TWACK! and feels the skin on his knuckles split.
“You don’t get to pick a fight and then run away, you fucking coward.”
The dig at Graham's grieving was jarring to the Dominant. He was still in deep mourning over Alec with no end in sight. He sometimes felt so deep in his pain and hurt that he couldn't remember what it was like to wake up without it. What did Dominic know about grieving? Had he grieved anyone other than his mother? Did he know what it was like to carry that pain still?
And wasn't it just like Dominic to absolve himself of any semblance of responsibility? Sometimes he was so absent of it that Graham wanted to throttle him. The way he seemed to ACCUSE Graham of having started this fight. The way his memory seemed to conveniently forget how Graham's clothing ended up drenched and his meal ruined. It was enough that Graham felt hot beneath the pressed collar of his shirt and could hear his heart pounding in his ears.
The reverberating pain in his jaw from Dominic's punch was somehow grounding. It made Graham see red and it kicked his brain into a sort of primal mode where he saw no other recourse than what he did next.
"I started this fight?" Graham snarled. He wrapped his fingers tightly around Dominic's neck and bent his bicep to the point where Dominic's chin was forced to lift around it. Any more pressure and Graham would be lifting Dominic from the ground by his neck. A part of the Dominant considered doing just that. Considered lifting Dominic into the air and watching him thrash and struggle against Graham's grip. Graham's breath came heavy through his nostrils and his jaw clenched once more.
"You pour wine over my table, you cuss at me, you mock my dead husband," Graham lifted his brows. "But I started this fight?" Graham was incensed just thinking over the events that led to this moment and he tightened his grip to bring Dominic so close their breath mingled together.
"You are as irresponsible as you are classless; and you may be perpetually close to losing it but I am looking for any reason to finish a fight. No matter who started it."
Graham had never spoken to Dominic so harshly as this. In his worst of days he'd always had more self discipline. Perhaps that's what finally broke the spell. Graham realized just how drunk on rage he'd become. How truly swallowed up in his anger he'd let himself get. It had never happened to him before this. Perhaps Graham had encountered a bar fly or two that needed setting straight just after Alec's death, when Graham was busy drinking himself into amnesia, but Graham barely recalled that.
He'd had bouts of recklessness, woken only in circumstances of provocation, but Graham was coming to realize what that recklesness might be. A sense of having nothing left to lose. He swallowed and came back to himself. The noises of the pier and the quiet of the diners around them seemed to settle into Graham's senses. He let go of Dominic. A heat of a new sort flushed his cheeks. Not of rage. Of embarrassment.
"You're done," said Graham. "We're done."
