Chapter 21

CHAPTER 21

Xavier

Shoving open the double swinging door into the men’s stalls, I found a man standing at the back of the bathroom with his hand holding open one of the stall doors at the end. His head whipped around the second he heard me enter, his hands immediately coming up to either side of his head.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said to me.

He was around my age, maybe a little older, with a bald head, and wide-framed glasses that made his head look egg-shaped. He was tall and lanky, with a backpack slung over his one shoulder. His zip-up hoodie was parted funny, almost like he’d haphazardly zipped it in a hurry. The rest of him was dirty, stained with dark spots along his knees and pant cuffs.

“You followed me!” Dexter shouted from somewhere behind him.

“Get away from him,” I snapped, marching down the aisle.

The man flattened himself against the wall, his hands still raised in the air while he scooted along to inch toward the door.

Ignoring him, I headed over to Dexter’s stall that was still halfway open, finding him curled up against the corner of it and tucked practically behind the toilet. He had his arms wrapped tightly around him while his entire body shook violently.

His eyes were wide and dilated when they snapped to me.

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

“H-he…” With a shaky hand, Dexter pointed to the side of his door. “B... busted the lock.”

Grabbing the door again, I looked down to where the simple metal bar that was used to hold the door in place was now hanging on by a single screw, facing the floor instead of horizontal to the door. My heart sank in my stomach, the picture suddenly becoming clearer.

Whipping around to where the man had been standing, I spotted no one else inside of the small bathroom other than us.

Fuck.

“H-He...” Dexter choked out. “He just... I was trying to... go to the bathroom and...”

“You’re okay, Dex.” Shoving myself into the stall with him was difficult, even with the way he was pressed back against the far wall. I reached out to grab at his arm to try and gently coax him out but he refused to move.

Tears spilled down his cheeks, a loud sob following right after. He was shaking so hard that I was afraid he was actually having a seizure. Pivoting my body to the side, I got the door shoved closed behind me and kept it that way with a hand planted on the top of it.

Reaching across the short distance, I took Dexter by the arm again, but instead of trying to pull him toward me, I ushered him down to the floor instead, letting him cram himself back into his tight corner without the risk of him passing out and falling.

He buried his head into his knees and rocked himself, his sobs barely muffled while they reverberated against the tiled walls around us.

“Dex, you’re okay, I’m right here. I know that was scary.” I cupped the top of his head with my hand to run my fingers through his hair. “I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to you.”

When I caught that guy—because when I got this all sorted out I would hunt him down until I was able to wrap my hands around that skinny neck—he was going to wish he never stepped foot on this damn property.

My military training would be pinpoint focused on making sure that man never walked, let alone tried to peep on another teenager, again.

“How?” he managed to choke out, lifting his face away from his knees just enough to talk. “You—you didn’t... you didn’t know...”

This was definitely a panic attack, with how hard his breath was coming in and out of him. I’d had very little experience dealing with something like this for a kid, and had even less training on what to do to break someone out of it.

Dexter’s face was red from how hard he was crying. Tears continued to leak down his cheeks and pool onto the fabric of his jeans. He was heaving air into his lungs, not quite catching enough of it before another sob took over and forced it all back out again.

“You screamed and I came.” I swallowed the bile rising in my throat and tried to keep my voice level as I spoke. “That’s all I needed.”

“Not last time.”

What the fuck?

“What do you mean ‘last time’?”

He shook his head, burying it against his knees once more.

My throat clogged up, a wave of nausea hitting me. “Dex, what do you mean ‘last time’? What happened?”

The memories of Dexter’s almost confession to me late last year hit me like a train, slamming into me with enough force that I had to lean back against the door of the stall to steady myself.

The urge to deny the truth laid out in front of me—to beg for it to not be real—was bringing tears to my eyes. The evidence was too clear to deny, Dexter’s panic attack too severe for this to have been a first time thing.

This was the stuff of repeated trauma slapping you across the cheek with a swiftness that shocked you down to your core. The kind that I’d lived with for the past two decades that still stole my breath away at times.

“Who the fuck hurt you, Dexter?”

When he finally lifted his head again, he whispered, “Father Thomas.”

My heart shattered to pieces.

Does your mother know?

Those words were what almost came out of my mouth next before I bit my tongue hard enough to hurt. Now was not the time to be asking him questions. Right now, I needed to snap him back into reality before he actually passed out and hurt himself.

Pushing away from the stall door again gave me enough room to lift Dexter up from where he was and slide him over to me. He crumbled against my chest the second I wrapped my arms around him, clinging to me in the same way he had when he was a toddler.

He buried his face against my shoulder and continued to tremble. I rocked him with me, keeping my hand steady against his back to try and ground him while I spoke to him softly like I had when he had nightmares after Kate and I put him to bed as a baby.

This horrible secret he’d been carrying with him this whole time, not able to talk about it as it festered away at his soul, was the worst injustice I’d ever seen.

Who in their right mind would hurt someone like Dexter?

Take advantage of him in the most sickest and twisted way possible?

I didn’t need to know the details to know how bad they were. Dexter wasn’t the kind of person to crack easily, not like this. So whatever this Father Thomas had done to him was horrific enough to break him apart.

“Breathe with me, Dex,” I said, pulling in a lungful of air.

It took a few tries, but eventually, he was able to suck in enough oxygen to start calming down his nervous system. After a few more deep breathing exercises, he turned to jello in my arms—utterly exhausted from his adrenaline finally crashing.

I hardly felt his weight while throwing one of his arms over my shoulder and hiking him up enough to get one of my arms tucked around his legs, allowing me to stand and get us both up off the floor.

He hardly moved as I readjusted him and carried him out of the bathroom in a half-fireman hold, half-lifted up onto my shoulder. The man from earlier was still nowhere to be found, probably halfway to the parking lot by now.

How long he’d been following my son, I had no clue. We’d been too focused on our conversation to really pay attention to anyone else around us, outside of the occasional need to move out of the way.

It sickened me to think that my son had been targeted, whether abruptly or through a series of carefully planned moves that I hadn’t caught on to at all by the predator lurking right out in broad daylight.

What kind of father was I?

I had the kind of military training that would make more people blanch at, and to have something like this slip past my radar?

Fuck.

I was no better than a random man off the street with no training.

The people passing us by on the trail shot me strange looks when I passed them, though none of them seemed to be reaching for their phones to call the authorities, thankfully. An attendant called to me on the way off the trail but I ignored them in favor of heading right for the parking lot where our rental car was waiting for us.

I tucked a sleeping Dexter into the backseat and strapped him in, trying my best not to wake him while I shut the door and headed over to the driver’s side. My hands shook taking the wheel and pulling the car out of park, even more so when I glanced back in my mirror to see my sleeping son’s face.

How did I not know?

How could I have known?

Two warring thoughts in my head that wouldn’t leave me alone the entire fifteen minutes it took to get back to Gage’s house. Forcing back my own panic with practiced ease helped me get my kid out of the car and behind the safety of a locked front door.

Dexter stirred slightly when I laid him down in bed and pulled the covers over him, mumbling something in his sleep that I couldn’t quite catch.

I didn’t know how long I stayed with him, sitting on the side of his bed while I stroked his hair as he slept. Not until I heard voices coming from the front of the house that sounded like Gage talking to someone on the phone.

Slipping out of Dexter’s room and shutting the door behind me, I found Gage tossing his work duffle bag onto the floor by the door while he bent at the waist to wrestle his shoes off. He jumped when he turned and spotted me standing there, the person who he was talking to continued to rattle on about something—a party?

Oh, his work party.

“Hey, baby.” He smiled, and then glanced down at his phone. “Ellie, I’ll call you back later.”

He cut her off mid-sentence to drop the call and shove his phone back into his pocket. I watched in real time as his expression fell from the ‘happy to see me’ down to deep concern.

“Hey, what happened? You look white as a ghost.”

He grabbed both of my arms to guide me into the living room, apparently realizing before I had—most likely from his training—that I was about to drop. Right as he hovered me over the couch, my legs collapsed out from under me, sending me catapulting onto the soft cushion.

“Xavier?”

I bent forward to curl my hands over my face, doubling over while the nausea was strong enough to bring stars into my vision. My whole world—the entire axis of it—was now completely off kilter. I’d left this morning living a completely different life to the one I came home with.

My baby boy had been hurt and I wasn’t there to protect him.

God, the way he’d said you weren’t there last time, was going to fucking haunt me.

Gage ran a hand down my back a few times, patiently waiting for me to talk.

How in the world was I supposed to get any words out when all I could focus on was the utter terror on my son’s face?

Was that the expression Father Thomas had seen when he’d hurt my son?

Was that enough to stop him or was it the green light to keep going?

Fuck.

“I’m gonna be sick.”

Gage snapped into action immediately. Both of his arms hooked under mine to yank me up from the couch and drag me down the hallway to the bathroom. We both stumbled inside, the brightness from the hallway our only light source. I sank onto the floor just as Gage lifted up the toilet seat and pushed my head forward to hover over the clean porcelain bowl.

I clung to the rim, coughing up my entire lunch and breakfast. The clenching in my stomach was painful, causing tears to prickle at the corners of my eyes while I held on for dear life.

Gage rubbed my back through bouts of nausea, not at all cringing away from my spitting bile out of my mouth.

My breathing echoed against the walls of the small bathroom, reminding me of the way Dexter’s had inside of that tiny stall.

“Dexter okay?” Gage asked, once it seemed that there was nothing left in my stomach to throw up.

I shook my head, squeezing my eyes shut. “He told me what happened.”

His hand froze on my back.

Both of us had gone back and forth on what Dexter had told me last year, or rather what he didn’t tell me, on what we thought was possibly going on with him. Neither of us had ever guessed anything remotely close to this mess.

“The fucking priest.” My voice was gravely and my throat burned as I spoke. “At that fucking church she was taking him to.”

“Fuck,” Gage breathed out. “Where is he?”

“Sleeping.”

Peeling my eyes back open, I reached across the way to snag a few squares of toilet paper to wipe my mouth with before tossing it into the bowl and flushing the whole thing. Pitching backward, I settled myself back against the cool tile of the floor, letting my body relax into it.

I had a sense of déjà vu as Gage hovered over me as I lay there, panting, his silhouette shrouded from the light coming from the hallway.

“Oh, honey...”

He gently swiped his fingers under my eyes and belatedly, I realized I was crying.

“I wasn’t there...” I said.

The guilt crushed me—more than it had when he’d told me how I was a stranger to him an entire year ago. This was something entirely different, the kind of guilt that I’d felt being the only survivor among my troop and now had to grapple with living when they didn’t.

How could I be there for Dexter when I hadn’t been at his most vulnerable moment?

How could I call myself a father ?

“You didn’t know,” Gage soothed.

“I should’ve been there,” I whispered back.

He shook his head at me. “You didn’t know what you didn’t know, baby. It’s not your fault or anyone else’s other than that bastard who hurt him.”

More tears stung my eyes. “I failed him.”

“Baby...”

I stared up at the ceiling, tracing the weird shadows with my gaze.

What now?

How did I go from here?

It wasn’t like I could go to that church and find the bastard and kill him. Getting myself thrown in jail was the last thing Dexter needed. He needed me to be there to protect him, something that I couldn’t do locked behind bars for the next twenty-five years.

What he needed was to be home with familiarity. To have the comforts of what he knew, not out here trying to put on a brave face and forced to be around people he really didn’t know while we toured a random city for the next few more days before Christmas.

How could I, in good conscience, keep him away from all of that when this was the time he needed it most?

“I think... I going to take him home,” I said.

Gage’s voice was quiet as he said, “Do what you need to do.”