Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

Xavier

“Your friend seems…”

Inwardly, I winced, waiting for Dexter to finish his sentence and tell me he absolutely hated Gage. That would be my luck, honestly, after finally finding a boyfriend I clicked with so damn well that I could’ve sworn the man was my soul mate.

In an ironic sense, I deserved something like that coming my way for absolutely fucking up Dexter’s life with my alcoholism and breaking his mother’s heart, among the thousand other things I’d done to hurt others in my past. Those were just my two biggest transgressions at the moment.

I was sure if I thought about it longer than a few seconds, I’d find more I needed to repent for, or whatever it was that Kate’s parents had spat out at me after finding out I was gay.

“Actually. He kind of surprised me,” Dexter finally said.

I glanced over at him as we walked down the street, heading toward a cafe from his itinerary that he was interested in visiting. Apparently, it was one of those fancy cat cafes that allowed you rent a table while cats came and went during your stay.

Funny, I’d never considered my son to be a cat person—seeing as how his mother was deathly allergic—but the more I was getting to know him, the clearer I was beginning to see it. There was so much to Dexter that I just didn’t know and my desperate need to figure him out was blinding.

“Really?” I asked. “What makes you say that?”

He shrugged at me, shoving both of his hands into his pockets. “I don’t know. He’s really nice. And accommodating.”

“What, you don’t think I can be friends with nice people?”

He rolled his eyes at me. Such a teenager. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Tell me, then.” Because I’m seriously dying to know.

He shrugged again. “I don’t know. I guess… I kind of pictured you being friends with a bunch of meatheads.”

Huffing out a laugh, I grabbed onto the door to the cafe when we approached it and nodded for him to duck under my arm and head inside. “The only true meathead I know is currently engaged to an ex-felon.”

And what a fucking phone call that was to receive on a Friday night after coming back from one of my AA meetings.

Did I expect anything less from Jackson fucking Hall to have fallen in love with someone with a rap sheet?

Not exactly. Getting it out of him on how he met this man was actually the more wild part of the story that I still couldn’t exactly wrap my head around.

But whatever.

Love was love, right?

“What? ” Dexter gave me a bewildered look.

I shook my head, grabbing him lightly by the shoulder in order to steer him toward the register. “It’s a long story. Point is, I’ve got friends in all sorts of varieties.”

“I see that,” he mumbled at me.

After paying for drinks and two small pastries, we grabbed a small floor table and settled down comfortably.

The cafe turned out to be really nice and clean considering they had about thirty cats roaming around. Some sat on perches nailed to the walls above our heads, some wandered the floor looking for handouts, and some, like the two that were currently occupying our table, were just plain old cuddle bugs looking for attention.

I sipped my coffee silently while watching Dexter’s rare smile grace his face, one of his hands buried in the long fur of a pretty white cat and his other stroking over the head of an orange tabby that had completely commandeered his lap the moment we sat down.

Seeing my son happy was a nice change of pace from our usual standoffs. I liked seeing this side of him, even if it was only for the small window he’d let me in today.

“Too bad we can’t take one home,” he said after a while.

“I know. You could always come back here and adopt one if you decide to go to LSU.”

His mouth thinned into a straight line. “Yeah… maybe.”

“You thinking about going somewhere else?”

Dexter sighed. “I don’t know. Mom’s going to kill me either way, so...”

Setting down my mug slowly gave me the time to reel back my sudden shock of anger and the snap back reaction I would normally have come up with. The protectiveness I felt for him regarding his mother was always going to be there, no matter what I did or how much time passed. My therapist had been pretty straightforward in telling me that it was a trauma response from Dexter being ripped away from me as he had been and my having no say in the matter afterward.

Here was the thing, though—I didn’t want to still hold onto this resentment. It ate away at me little by little each time it flared up. Just like my PTSD did from my military days. Letting it go was my goal, and damn was it hard to do anytime something like this reared its ugly head.

Whatever Kate’s reasons are, they make sense to her.

Even if sometimes I felt like she was being way too fucking paranoid.

“Why do you say that, Dex?”

“Because she’s expecting me to go to the local community college. Apparently, Dan’s got some in with the Dean or whatever and they can get me in without having me take an admissions test.”

Not to turn my nose up at a community college or anything but that seemed like a rather strange solution, seeing as how Dexter was clearly smart enough—and had the grades—to get into a state school. On top of that, it was a school not even in our home state.

That said a lot about his academic prowess.

“Hm.” Drumming my fingers on the table, I focused my attention on the cat in his lap who was happily licking at his hand. “You tell her about applying elsewhere?”

He shook his head. “Like I said, she’d freak out. She doesn’t even want me staying in a dorm.”

“ Why ?”

Dexter glanced up at me, his lips parting to say something just as one of the bus boys was coming around with a small bucket tucked under his arm to collect the stray dishes left by other customers. When he reached our table, he glanced down at the two cats in Dexter’s lap and grinned widely.

“You got the best ones in the house.” He squatted down to our table so he wasn’t hovering above us. His long wavy hair fell across his shoulder when he reached out to offer his hand to the white cat. “They’re a bonded pair, but you probably guessed that already.”

Dexter stared at him with slightly wide eyes. They were around the same age, if I had to take a stab in the dark. Unlike my son, though, this boy had a lip hoop punched into either side of his mouth and wore a few bangles around his wrist that clanged together when he teased the cat with his fingers.

He was a handsome kid, if not a little gangly for a teenager. A soft laugh escaped him when the white cat turned to rub up against his hand comfortably.

“His name’s Fritz,” he said, not talking to me at all. “The one in your lap is Steve.”

“O-oh,” was all Dexter stuttered out.

“They’re both up for adoption. But I do have to warn you, they have to go together.”

Dexter merely nodded mutely in response, his cheeks slightly colored in a soft shade of red.

Oh.

I think… I was beginning to see why Kate was digging her nails so hard into our kid. Why she was so damn adamant on keeping a watchful eye on both Dexter and I while we were off on this trip. Maybe it wasn’t some kind of motherly paranoia after all, but something else entirely.

The bus boy finally lifted himself back up to his feet, bidding us a farewell while throwing a wink at Dexter that had my son quickly averting his eyes and focusing back down at the cat in his lap.

Leaning over slowly, I let both of my arms rest on top of the table while I wrestled with reaching over and grabbing at him to get him to look at me. I settled on giving him space instead because he clearly needed it. “Dex. You… know you can tell me anything, right? I won’t ever judge you.”

God, I hoped he knew that.

There was nothing in this world that would ever make me love him less. Especially… something like this. Feelings were so damn complicated and as a teenager trying to figure out your place in the world, that made it all the more harder to come to terms with being different than everyone else around you.

Especially in an evangelical household.

His Adam’s apple visibly bobbed as he swallowed. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever. Can we go?”