Page 11 of Xavier

“I love you,” I sighed into the phone, flopping down onto my bed as soon as I reached it.

He laughed. “I love you, too, Xavier. You should probably get some sleep. Let me know about those flights and I’ll rearrange my schedule.”

“Will do.”

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 mewasan 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.

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