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Dom sat with his tray in the cafeteria, half-listening to Vince complain about their upcoming chemistry test while watching Brian, already there with Roman and Tej, attempting to explain basketball plays to Roman using French fries as players.
"So if I'm the point guard," Roman said, moving a fry across the table, "and Tej is here-"
"You need to make the defender follow you into the pick," Brian interrupted. "That's how the pick and roll works."
Dom found himself smiling at the concentrated way Brian moved the fries around, completely serious about his makeshift court. Brian was always focused and excited about sports - the same couldn't be said about classes though, but he managed enough to get his parents off his back. Dom loved seeing him so passionate. He wasn't playing himself, but knew everything about it from watching all of Brian's games and listening to him talk about it.
A moment later, Mia and Letty appeared with their lunch trays. "Mind if we sit?" Mia asked, and Letty dropped into the seat next to him.
"Monica and her friends are having some drama about homecoming dresses. Boriiing," Letty said, stealing a fry from Brian.
"Hey, that was my power forward!" Brian complained, trying to steal the fry back, but Letty brought it to her mouth quicker.
"You'll have to play without him! Can't believe you're talking about basketball again - no wait, totally believable, who am I kidding?"
"Priorities," Brian said, pretending to be offended. "Basketball first, food second, then..." he stopped, looking like he was trying to find anything else on earth deserving third place.
Mia raised her eyebrow and not so discretely cleared her throat.
Brian clicked his fingers. "Yes. All of you. Unless you eat my players, and then you're down to fourth position," he said, squinting at Letty.
Letty smirked. "Can live with that, fourth position is already a success with you. It's actually a miracle that the first ten positions aren't just basketball."
"Oh trust me, they are, but I didn't want you - or the food - to take offense by being eleventh only," Brian said, his face lighting up with that grin that always made Dom forget to think straight - or breathe properly.
"Please someone save us from Brian's basketball explanations," Vince said, his tone dramatic. "I'm even ready for that damn chemistry test if it could make him not talk about it for at least one minute."
Tej put his arms around Brian's shoulders to comfort him while the rest of them laughed gently. Brian's smile didn't falter, even as he was grimacing teasingly in Vince's direction.
Without really meaning to, Dom found himself saying, "Hai un sorriso bellissimo." The words came out quiet, but Brian, who was right next to him, heard them. He looked over with a confused expression.
You have a beautiful smile.
"What was that? You practicing your Spanish for the test you got at the end of the week? You know my level - you won't progress with me."
Dom felt his face heat up. "Yeah. Spanish. That's it. Teacher always says we learn better by practicing out loud."
Brian playfully bumped his elbow against Dom's ribs and went back to his fry demonstration, but Dom caught Mia giving him a sharp look.
Spanish. Right. Mia knew that wasn't Spanish - and thank God Letty had been too far to hear. She would have known too.
:::
"So... wanna talk about it?" Mia asked later that afternoon. They were walking home from school, taking the long way because neither of them was in a hurry to start homework.
Dom kicked a rock down the sidewalk. "It's not a big deal."
"Except you looked like you were about to have a heart attack when he heard you. Which is understandable, considering what you said."
They walked in silence for a block. Dom knew Mia was waiting for him to explain, but how could he? How could he tell his sister that somewhere between freshman year and now, his best friend had become something different in his heart? Still his best friend, but also... someone he wanted to give his whole heart to, share his future with - and not have to watch that someone share his with someone else.
"Dom," Mia said gently. "You know you can talk to me, right?"
"I know." He did know. Mia had always been the one person he could tell anything to. But this felt too big, too scary to say out loud.
"I know it can't be easy... telling something special to someone special. But he's a good guy, that much I know. Even if it isn't reciprocated, he would never turn his back on you. He'll always be your best friend."
"Yeah," Dom sighed. And he was glad for that, because he knew it was the truth. He knew he would always be part of Brian's life and heart. "It's just... as long as I don't say anything, there's still this hope, you know? But once I tell him... I can't take it back. I can't take the hope back. The hope that my feelings might be shared."
Mia stopped and grabbed Dom's arm. Dom turned to her, his eyes probably showing all the fear that his voice and face refused to show. "Sometimes things don't happen the way we want... I won't ever push you to tell him anything, but my advice is still to not wait too long before telling him... You never know what might happen, and it's not worth it to dwell on regrets."
Dom hugged her. He had thought about it too - what if Brian suddenly moved away, what if something bad happened to one of them, what if someone else asked him out and Brian said yes and fell in love with them, and then Dom learned ten years later that his feelings had been reciprocated, but that now he was too late because Brian was about to get married?
Dom never had a wild imagination and was a pretty pragmatic guy, but regrets about Brian? That was running wild in his mind, and there were a thousand reasons why he wanted to confess his feelings to him.
It just required more courage than he could actually muster right now.
:::
The next week passed in a blur of normal high school stuff. Chemistry tests (which Vince failed spectacularly), basketball practice (which Dom attended religiously), and a group study session at Tej's house that turned into everyone arguing about which action movie to see on Saturday.
"I'm telling you, this one is gonna be amazing," Roman insisted, sprawled across Tej's bedroom floor with his history notes scattered around him. "So many explosions!"
"You say that about every action movie, and the last one you made us watch was terrible," Brian pointed out from where he was sitting on Tej's bed, working through the rest of the history notes, trying to reorder them after the Romanado came by.
He smiled brightly when he finally found the page he was looking for.
"Nah, no explosions this time," Letty said without looking up from her English essay. "I wanna see that movie about that female author writing amazing books where she had to pretend she was a guy because otherwise they wouldn't publish her. She ended up famous, take that, you stupid publishers."
Roman and Letty began arguing about which movie to watch, while Dom was trying to focus on his own homework, but he kept getting distracted by the way Brian was chewing on his pencil while trying to focus on the words spread on the paper - which everybody in the room knew probably looked like hieroglyphs to Brian due to his complete lack of focus for more than a minute on anything that wasn't basketball.
Dom found it ridiculously endearing. "Sei proprio carino quando ti concentri così," he found himself saying, his voice low and eyes turned toward Brian next to him.
You're so cute when you focus like that.
Brian blinked, turning his eyes to him. "Okay, I definitely heard 'carino' in there, but the rest of it sounded complicated..."
Dom's stomach dropped. "It's just... advanced stuff."
"Wow, how much am I lacking in this language? My GPA is gonna drop low with the next test."
"Nah, you'll be fine," Dom said, trying to pretend like he actually didn't say anything revealing in 'Spanish'.
It didn't work. "What did you say, by the way?" Brian asked.
"Just that... concentration is good for studying," he answered, trying to ignore the way his heart was hammering.
Brian stared at him for a second longer. "Oh... yeah, you said something like... concen... tri... something," he smiled and went back to his notes. "Not good at concentri, but I'll try-i."
That was lame.
Dom laughed.
:::
That night, Dom stared at the ceiling, lying on his bed. The glow-in-the-dark stars he'd put up in middle school were starting to fade, but they were still visible.
"What am I doing...?" he asked himself. The stars didn't answer.
He wanted to tell Brian - but every time, it felt easier in Italian. Little revelations, little affectionate words, little signs that he was viewing Brian differently than what he pretended to.
He sighed. At this rate, the next thing that would happen was him writing an anonymous love letter and putting it in Brian's locker. It couldn't continue this way, but the words felt so hard to say out loud. Well, in English. Well - maybe in Italian too, actually, but at least Brian couldn't understand.
Dom knew Mia was right. He had to tell him before someone else seized their chance with Brian. But every time he thought about actually saying the words out loud - I like you, I think about you all the time, I'm pretty sure I'm falling in love with you - his throat closed up completely.
"What if he doesn't feel the same way?" Dom asked quietly. Again, the room stayed silent. He wondered how many times people had asked themselves this exact same question.
The voice in the back of his mind that answered sounded suspiciously like Mia's. "He'll always be your best friend, no matter what. Plus... what if he does?"
He rolled over and buried his face in his pillow.
:::
The Italian thing became a habit over the next few weeks. Not every day, and not obvious - just little comments here and there that Brian seemed to chalk up to Dom's increasingly creative approach to Spanish practice.
"Potrei perdermi nei tuoi occhi," Dom said one afternoon when Brian stayed after school to help a freshman with his basketball practice instead of going to Tej's house like they'd planned. The kid was looking at Brian as if he was his savior, and Brian's eyes were shining like crazy, so proud and happy to help.
I could get lost in your eyes.
"Your Spanish sounds so weird, is it because you're actually using an Italian accent rather than a Spanish one or something?" Brian said, his tone teasing, but he was smiling. "What was that one?"
"I said you won't ever lose any games..."
"Ooh, to lose - perder, right? That's what you said! Woohoo, I'm catching up!" Brian raised his hand, waiting for Dom to high five him, and looking actually happy to have understood one word - and it was true they looked similar in both languages.
He high-fived Brian.
:::
A few days later, during lunch, Roman was telling some story about his last disaster in chemistry class, and Brian was laughing so hard he was crying, and Dom felt that familiar warmth in his chest.
"Mi piace la tua risata incantevole," he said quietly, just loud enough for Brian to hear.
I love your lovely laugh.
"What? Singing risotto?" Brian said, wiping his eyes.
Vince looked up from his sandwich. "Singing risotto? What are you talking about?"
"I thought I heard 'cantar', and that means singing in Spanish, right? And... risotto...?" Brian said, looking skeptical about his own understanding.
Letty snorted, her eyebrow raised, and Dom could tell she had heard the sentence. And while she hadn't understood it, she was definitely aware it was not Spanish.
"Yeah, it does," she simply said, looking at Dom weirdly, like she was trying to decipher what was happening, and why Brian was talking about Spanish when it clearly was not Spanish.
"Basic food joke," Dom said, focusing very hard on his lunch and trying not to catch Letty's eye. This was getting dangerous.
:::
On a Wednesday afternoon, they were in the library, supposedly studying for their upcoming history test, but mostly just passing notes and trying not to get shushed by Mrs. Patterson.
Brian was working on an essay about World War II, completely absorbed in whatever he was writing. His hair was falling in his eyes, and he kept pushing it back with his pencil, and Dom was just looking at him, how he would frown when he was focused, lighting up when he was understanding something, and trying so hard not to draw too many basketballs on the side of his notes.
"Penso di essermi innamorato di te," Dom said quietly, the words slipping out before he could stop them.
I think I'm in love with you.
Brian looked up and blinked, his eyes and face confused.
Dom's mouth went dry. He'd just told Brian he was falling in love with him, in Italian, in the middle of the school library.
Brian opened his mouth, before closing it back. He stared at Dom for a long moment, and Dom was pretty sure his face was giving everything away. But then Brian just smiled and scoffed. "Dude, it's so unfair, you could be insulting me and I wouldn't know. You better not, by the way," he said, with a fake scowl on his face, before going back to his essay, not without his usual elbow in Dom's ribs and mischievous grin.
Dom spent the rest of the study session trying not to have a panic attack.
:::
Friday afternoon, Brian cornered him by his locker.
"I need to ask you something," Brian said without preamble.
Dom's stomach dropped. "Okay."
"Are you really speaking Spanish to me?"
Dom could feel his face getting hot. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, I've been thinking about it, and some of the stuff you've been saying doesn't sound like Spanish. What you've been saying... it's different. Like... another language different."
Dom closed his locker harder than necessary. "I don't know what you want me to say."
"I want you to say that you were speaking Italian. Why did you pretend it was Spanish? I was trying to understand stuff I just couldn't understand. My Spanish is bad, but not that bad, I should have guessed something was off... But why didn't you tell me?"
They stared at each other in the hallway. Students were flowing around them, heading for classrooms, but Dom felt like they were frozen in place.
"Does it matter?" Dom asked finally.
"Yeah," Brian said quietly. "It does. Because I looked it up."
Dom's heart stopped. "What?"
"Italian. I looked up how to say some things in Italian." Brian's voice was carefully neutral. "'Innamorato' was a long word, I thought I was going crazy when I heard 'amor' in what you said, turns out maybe I wasn't."
The hallway seemed to tilt sideways. Dom gripped his locker door to steady himself.
"Brian-"
"And 'carino' means cute, sweet, kind, stuff like that. And 'bellissimo' means beautiful." Brian stepped closer, lowering his voice. "'Penso di essermi innamorato di te' means 'I think I'm falling in love with you.' That's what you said, right? I spent like four hours on it last night, and I'm certain that's what you said."
Dom couldn't breathe. "Why were you looking up Italian?"
Brian's cheeks were pink now, but he didn't look away. "Because I wanted to tell you something. And I thought... I thought maybe if I said it in Italian, it would be easier. English is... it's hard. Not understanding the words I use - even though I know what they mean - it felt... easier."
"Tell me what?"
Brian took a breath. "Ti amo."
The words made Dom's heart beat fast. "You looked up Italian to tell me you-" It felt too beautiful to be true, maybe he was still dreaming. "To tell me you love me?"
"I- yes. It seemed easier this way... But then when I looked up words about... confessing... I noticed stuff you said, and I figured out a bit of what you've been telling me for weeks." Brian's smile was soft and a little shaky.
Dom laughed, and it came out breathless and a little hysterical. "Alright. Yes, I've been trying to confess to you for weeks, I just... Yeah, it is hard in English."
"I feel that." Brian reached out and took Dom's hand, right there in the hallway.
Dom looked down at their linked fingers, then back up at Brian's face. "But I think I can tell you now."
"Yeah?" Brian's face was open, eyes so big with expectation, smile so sweet as if Dom was about to announce he had won the lottery.
"I love you," Dom said, and the words came easily now. So easily.
Brian's smile could power up Dom's heart forever. "I had prepared this whole speech in Italian, and I was not confident in saying it at all. Like, with my accent I'll butcher the whole thing and you won't even understand it correctly. But I wrote it on a paper so..."
Dom took the small piece of paper Brian took out of his pocket. Brian tightened his hold on his hand and continued talking, his voice shaking a bit. "Can you just not read it right now? I mean... It's so sappy, like I wrote stuff like 'You are the best thing that ever happened to me', it felt okay when I wrote it because it was in Italian so it sounded poetic, but now I feel a bit self-conscious and it's actually so generic..."
Oh, Dom would kill to hear him say it in Italian one day. Hearing Brian speaking Italian probably became one of his favorite things in the world - and just the fact that Brian had been trying was warming Dom's heart. Although he never had any doubt that Brian was perfect for him, anyway.
Dom pulled him into a hug and he didn't care who saw them. He whispered "Ti amo tanto" against Brian's shoulder, repeating the words - he felt a useless want to actually say them again and again - and Brian was smiling like crazy, tightening his hold around him.
Maybe they could tell each other 'I love you' in every language that existed. Yeah. That sounded like a perfect plan.
:::
END