Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

Xavier

Over the next few days, I’d gotten a solid plan together for traveling to Louisiana. With our housing secured for the weekend, all I needed to do now was somehow get in contact with Kate and get her to agree to let me take him for the weekend.

I had a feeling it was going to be an uphill battle with that one. Knowing my ex-wife, she was going to fight tooth and nail on keeping me from taking him anywhere, especially without her present.

So far, she’d been letting us see each other infrequently. I had a guess that she was only doing it because Dexter was turning eighteen soon and that meant he was going to come and seek me out regardless of her own personal thoughts on the matter.

But whatever her reasoning for her giving up a bit of control was, I wasn’t going to question it. I’d take what I could get at this point.

Going the easy route and getting Dexter to talk to her for me was an option. However, getting him involved in my and his mom’s personal affairs, or what we had left of them, left a sour taste in my mouth. He’d already been honest in telling me that our shit was too much for him to deal with.

Respecting that boundary he’d set up needed to happen for me to stay on his good side.

So, that left me with one other option.

I dialed her number and listened as it rang twice.

“Hello?”

Shit, why was I so nervous?

Speaking to my ex after all these years should not be causing my palms to sweat. We literally shared a kid together—there was no reason for me to feel like hanging up the phone and walking around the block to burn off my sudden excess energy.

“Kate, it’s me.”

There was a long, drawn out pause on the other end of the phone. One that had me pulling my cell back from my ear to check to make sure the call hadn’t disconnected. The numbers were still ticking on by, though.

“Kate?” I said.

“How the hell did you get this number?”

Sighing, I said, “It was in the court documents. I figured you never changed it.”

“What the hell could you possibly want, Xavier?”

All right, I really didn’t appreciate the hostility. I got that I fucked up in the past and broke her heart, but goddamn. After fifteen years, you’d think she would’ve let sleeping dogs lie.

“I’m calling about Dex.”

There was another drawn out pause that wasn’t as significantly long as the last, but still enough that it made me antsy the longer it went on. “And?”

“I want to take him on a trip.” Dancing around the subject was hard considering I still wasn’t sure if Dexter had told her about him getting accepted into college.

He hadn’t said anything to me since our dinner a few days ago, so I was going to act under the assumption that he hadn’t. I had a feeling he was waiting to tell her before he toured the campus. There was no sense in getting her wound up if he wasn’t even sure he wanted to go to Baton Rouge in the first place.

Kate’s influence over Dex, while he probably hated to admit it, was a lot. She was still his mom, after all. No matter how many times he’d told me that her neuroticism had weighed on him over the years, her opinion still mattered.

In the end, Dexter was searching for her approval. That’s just how it went with your parents.

“Where?” was all she asked.

“Louisiana.”

“What the hell could possibly be in Louisiana that you’d want to take my son there?”

My jaw ached from how hard I clenched my teeth at that.

“ Our son, Kate.”

“Don’t start with me.”

Jesus, fuck. This is precisely the reason why I was hesitant in calling her. No matter how I approached any of this, she was going to come at me combatively. I could try prancing around and sprinkling fairy dust in her face while trying to ask for her permission and she’d still see the devil in me.

“I’m not starting shit, Kate. I’m being honest and trying to communicate with you. He’s my son, too. I want to go on a trip with him before he’s off to college and we hardly hear from him.”

She scoffs. “You mean you’ll hardly hear from him.”

“I meant what I said. How often did either of us talk to our parents once we graduated high school?” The silence on the other end was all I needed to hear to know I hit the nail right on the head. “He’s a teenager, he’s going to want to go out and make friends and have fun. He’s not going to have time to talk to either of us every day. Let me take him on a vacation for a weekend before he leaves me in the dust.”

“I’m not comfortable with that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t trust you. How do I know you’re not going to take him to some… strip club? Or some gay bar and force him to drink?”

The paranoia in her voice was prominent. Normally, I’d be rolling my eyes and telling her to shove it. Realistically, I did want to do that. However, the true fear laced in her voice was what held me back from doing so.

Kate’s religious upbringing had been a contentious point in our relationship up to a point. I’d let a lot of stuff go, especially with my in-laws, on account that I’d been hiding my true self from everyone and blending in had made it easier to deny myself.

She’d never been pushy with her beliefs back when we were dating and only had been a little more so after we’d had Dexter. There was never a point where I considered her to be a zealot, not in the way that her parents were, at least.

So, it was sad to see her—or rather, hear her—acting like this. What I did to her back then had clearly broken her. I’d never be able to make it up to her, no matter how many times I tried to apologize to her or explain how much it had killed me to hide my true self from the world.

What did it matter in the grand scheme of things, anyway?

She’d walked in on the most devastating situation that could ever be imagined. She’d gone from being in a happy relationship as a wife and mother, to being a divorcee and a single mom.

That shit was fucked on so many levels and my grappling with my newly outed sexuality hadn’t helped any.

Now that Dexter was getting to be older, she was slowly losing her grip on him. He was coming to me more and more, no matter what she tried to do to stop it. All she could do was sit back and pray that I didn’t ‘corrupt’ our son like I had been.

I felt bad for her, I really did. Living in her mind must be hell.

“Kate.”

“I’m not letting you change him, Xavier.” She sounded out of breath. “It’s not happening.”

“I’m not going to do any of that. First of all, he’s still a minor. And second, it’s not my prerogative to force him into a lifestyle like that. He’s my son, Kate. I love him just as much as you do. I would never ever do anything to jeopardize his autonomy like that.”

Her sniffling on the other line broke my heart. As badly as our relationship had ended, I still cared for her. She was still the mother of my child and had been my wife. She hated me but that was all one sided.

I was mad at her for keeping Dexter from me, sure. Anyone would feel the same way. That didn’t mean I wanted her to suffer like she clearly was. Whatever conspiracies were running through her mind were obviously ones she’d thought about for a long time.

Fear was her best friend, unfortunately.

“Why don’t you think about it,” I suggested. “I’m not planning on this trip for another week or two, anyway.”

She didn’t say anything back, just continued to sniffle on the other end. Just as I was about to end the call, she said, “I’ll talk to Dan.”

All right, well at least that was one step in the right direction. “Okay. Just let me know. I’m planning the trip from Friday to Sunday. We’d fly back Sunday night.”

“Do you have a flight already picked out?”

“Kind of. I have some that are available but I wanted to ask you first before I made anything solid.”

“Oh.” Came her quiet response.

That was how it always went for us back in the day. I made the plans but she was the one with the final say. We worked that way, it gave her a sense of control that her upbringing never had. I’d recognized that early on—seen it in the way her parents treated her when we’d gone over for Sunday dinners.

It always made her happy in the end and was never any skin off my nose. Mostly because she usually agreed with me. Despite our differences, we, at one point, had made a pretty good team.

“All right. I’ll let you know,” she finally said.

“Thanks. You know how to reach me.”

Ending the call, I let out a long sigh before running my hands over my face. I knew going into this it was going to be a monumental task, I just never accounted for how much it would take out of me in the end.

It would be worth it, though.

Dexter was worth it.

So long as Kate agreed to letting me have him for the weekend, we’d finally get that father-son bonding time that I’d been desperate for over the past fifteen years.

Hopefully, luck was on my side this time around.