Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

Xavier

“You’re late,” was all my son said to me the second I sat down in the booth across from him. He had his nose already buried in his menu, a drink half gone with pearls of condensation rolling down the side of the glass and creating a pool on the table.

Wincing, I slipped my jacket off of my shoulders and shoved it into the corner of my side. “Sorry, kid. I got over here as fast as I could.”

He wasn’t looking up from the menu as I talked. Not even a subtle shift in his brow that indicated he was listening to me. Just his eyes darting over the menu while he scanned it, looking for something to eat.

I loved my kid a lot but sometimes he was difficult to read. Actually, scratch that. He was like a fucking dictionary in a foreign language and I was the idiot trying to translate it.

“Dex?”

He sighed and looked up. “Yeah?”

“I’m sorry.”

His face finally faltered, going from that neutral expression to an actual frown. I knew he was upset, even if I was only a couple minutes late. We’d been working on this relationship between us for a couple of months and it seemed that the more I got to know him, the more walls he’d been throwing up lately.

My therapist was adamant that it was Dexter’s way of trying to gain control of the situation. I’d been out of his life for a long time, no thanks to his mother. But the logistics of that weren’t all that important.

At least not at this stage.

He was a child still, even at the cusp of turning eighteen, and his view of the world was still small. Giving him the space to express himself, no matter if it was happiness or disappointment at me, was what was going to be the thing that would help him in starting to trust me.

I just had to trust the process and not be impatient.

But fuck was it hard not to reach over and pull him into a tight hug and promise him the damn world. He was my pride and joy, my baby, my everything. Losing him had been what hurt the most back then.

The PTSD from the military had only compounded my depression and spiraled me into a person that I barely recognized whenever I got the courage to look in the mirror. A year ago, I’d been a man that was incapable of being there for my son, no matter how much I’d tried to convince myself otherwise.

Here, today, I wanted to prove that old me wrong.

Leaning back in my seat, I slipped my hand into my pocket and pulled out my chip. It made a rough sound as I slid it across the table toward him, the light overhead catching the gold plating that made the thing shine nicely.

He stared down at it, his eyes widening a little bit.

“I was at my meeting to accept my chip,” I explained, smiling. “I wanted to get it before our dinner to give it to you.”

“Me?” he said, incredulously.

“Yeah, Dex. I want you to know how serious I am about all of this. I know that I wasn’t… I haven’t been there for you in the past, and trust me, I regret every single second of it, but this is hopefully a small step in proving to you that I’m going to do everything I can to make it up to you. I want to be there for you.”

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing while he carefully picked up the chip. He rotated it in his hand a few times, much like I had back at the meeting. “One year, huh…”

“Yup.”

He was quiet for another moment. “That’s pretty impressive.”

Grinning, I said, “Just wait until I get my ten year one. I hear that it’s real gold.”

He glanced up at me. “Ten years?”

I could tell by the way that he said that it was laced with hope and mixed with a little bit of skepticism. I could work with that, though. I could prove to him that I was going to keep this thing going. We had the rest of our lives together, and like hell I was going to screw it up any further.

When Dexter slowly set the chip down, he pulled in a deep breath. “Can I talk to you about something?”

My heart stuttered in my chest. “Yeah, of course. Anything.”

I hoped it was about whatever had happened to him that he’d been refusing to talk about. While I didn’t want my kid to have to relive any kind of trauma that he might have endured, I knew from experience that getting it out was the first step in recovering from it.

Talking about horrible experiences, even through therapy, had taken a lot out of me. But now with nine months under my belt, that weight that had been settled on my shoulders for so long was slowly beginning to get lighter and lighter as the days passed.

I wanted that for Dexter, too. He deserved that. Suffering with whatever he was keeping locked inside himself would eventually eat away at him like it had me. We Cruz boys had been cursed with that prideful sense of self that made it almost impossible to open up about our deepest darkest secrets.

Even to our own family.

“So, I’ve been applying to colleges,” he said, focusing his gaze back down at the chip on the table.

Okay, not exactly what I was expecting. But hey, at least he was opening up to me about something.

“And,” he went on. “I got accepted into one for an early admissions.”

My jaw dropped. “Dex, that’s amazing! Congratulations!”

His smile was a little worn when he finally looked at me again. “The problem is that it’s kind of far away.”

Oh fuck.

“How far away are we talking?”

Please don’t say on the other side of the damn world .

I’d only just gotten him back. Having to say goodbye after only a year would fucking wreck me.

“Louisiana,” he said slowly.

My body all but collapsed back into my booth, relief practically jello-ifying my damn bones. Oh thank fuck. I could handle Louisiana. “Where abouts?”

“Baton Rouge.”

That’s near Gage.

“Mom know yet?”

Dexter shook his head.

Interesting.

I wondered why he wasn’t telling Kate. Maybe he was afraid she wasn’t going to let him go, or try to talk him into going to a local school here. Having a mom like her, one that was steadfast in her beliefs and convictions, could be both a blessing and a curse.

She’d kept him safe all these years, but she’d also kept him away from many things—namely me—by doing so. It wasn’t healthy to raise a child, let alone a boy, locked in a bubble. It created too much confusion once they were thrust into the real world. And while I had no doubts my son was a smart boy, he was also naive to a fault.

“I actually have a friend out that way,” I said.

Calling Gage a ‘friend’ put a sour taste in my mouth. I’d been careful in tiptoeing around the ‘boyfriend’ talk with Dex, not wanting to freak him out too much by shoving all of my personal affairs down his throat.

It had been hard not to talk about my personal life with him, especially since hiding things from him felt wrong, especially about a relationship.

That wasn’t something I was sure about, though. With Kate raising him in the church, I wasn’t sure how deeply ingrained her beliefs—and his—were. So pushing the subject didn’t seem fair game at this point.

In the future, definitely. But for now, I wanted to focus on our dynamic.

Dexter nodded slowly, tapping his fingers absently on the table. “I wanted to go on a campus tour before I accepted.”

He was obviously telling me all of this for a reason. With his mother not involved in any of this, that meant that I had fair dibs. “You want to take a trip out there? I’m sure we could crash at my friend’s place.”

His eyes lit up. “Really?”

God, he reminds me of when he was a baby.

Blinking back the sudden tears that prickled at the corners of my eyes, I said, “ Yeah, of course. Why don’t I talk to him and figure out a good time to fly us out. We’ll tour the campus and make a weekend of it.”

For once, Dexter actually looked excited. “I’d love that.”

Pride bloomed in my chest for the second time today. I really hoped this was the beginning to us finally bridging the gap between us.