Page 89 of Finding You

Dallas grinned at him. “Yeah. I guess that’s true.”

Meeting the guys didn’t go as badly as he’d feared. They were overexcited—especially Frey and Bowen, but it helped that Frey and Kylen were already acquainted outside of the group. After a little while, Kylen walked off with Frey and Bowen to take the kids outside, and Dallas found himself in the kitchen with Lane and Adele.

Audra was finally awake, gnawing on a teething toy in her swing, watching them with wide eyes like she was drinking it all in.

“Tell me I’m doing a good job, please,” Dallas begged, running his finger around the rim of his water glass.

Lane frowned at him. “At what?”

“Being a dad. Being a boyfriend.” Dallas looked at both of them. “Being a friend.”

“You’re not doing a good job,” Adele said, and Dallas’s heart threatened to stop. “You’re doing an amazing one.”

“I hate you.”

Adele laughed. “You used that one already today. But trust us, will you? You know for a fact we’ll call you out if you start fucking things up.”

“And you haven’t. You’re doing a lot better than I did when I first started falling for Bowen,” Lane told him. “I loved him, and I hurt him.”

Dallas didn’t know if he’d hurt Kylen. He hadn’t been able to give him what he wanted right away, but he’d tried to communicate what he needed right from the start. So maybe that made a difference. “I think he’s happy. He’s still quiet.”

“After everything his family said?” Adele’s voice was a low, angry growl. He was a protector by nature, and the one thing he couldn’t stand was for the people he cared about to be mistreated. He hadn’t even known Kylen, but he was already under Adele’s wing of protection. “You know I would have said a hell of a lot worse.”

“Like you did with Sana?” Lane asked.

Adele had the grace to blush. Neither of them was sure who’d told Lane—likely Frey since the man couldn’t keep his mouth shut. But Dallas knew Adele didn’t regret it, and neither did he. Besides, Lane didn’t seem too put out about it.

“It was worth it,” Adele said with a sniff.

Lane’s lips twitched, holding back a smile. “If you say so. Anyway, he’s right, and I think all of us would have been a lot less kind if we’d been there.”

“I just…I don’t know. I didn’t want it to feel like I was fighting his battles for him,” Dallas admitted.

Lane smiled and shook his head. “I can say from experience that when you’ve spent most of your life being walked on and no one bothers to stand up for you, the first time someone does it, it doesn’t feel like they’re fighting in your place. It feels like you finally have an army at your back, and you’re allowed to take a breath.”

That helped, more than Dallas could say.

“We’ve got you both,” Adele told him.

Closing his eyes, Dallas let himself feel those words deep in his chest. He was happy—truly happy—for the first time in a long, long time.

“Daaaa da da da da.”

He jolted and looked over at Audra, who was grinning at him. “Yeah?”

She threw her toy across the room, and he reached down, unbuckling her from the swing and setting her on the edge of the table. “You like him, right? You want to keep Kylen?”

Audra stared at him, then smacked him in the face. If he was going to take anything as a yes, it was that.

Chapter Twenty-Six

KYLEN

“Can we talk?” Kylen knew how those words sounded, so he wasn’t surprised to see Dallas go a little pale. He didn’t mean them that way though. At all. He did just want to talk.

Things were slowly getting back to whatever normal meant after the whole incident with his family. He wasn’t speaking to them, and he’d blocked their numbers. He’d gotten a report that his mom had tried to have his gran discharged from her facility, but as she had no rights, she’d been turned away.

His life felt chaotic, and he kept waiting for more shoes to drop, but the one steady thing had been Dallas. He’d given Kylen space when he needed it and held him close when he didn’t. He gave him a group of friends that had welcomed Kylen without reservation, with open arms and love in ways Kylen wasn’t used to.

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