Page 23 of Xavier

I was sure if I thought about it longer than a few seconds, I’d find more I needed torepent for,or whatever it was that Kate’s parents had spat out at me after finding out I was gay.

“Actually. He kind of surprised me,” Dexter finally said.

I glanced over at him as we walked down the street, heading toward a cafe from his itinerary that he was interested in visiting. Apparently, it was one of those fancy cat cafes that allowed you rent a table while cats came and went during your stay.

Funny, I’d never considered my son to be a cat person—seeing as how his mother was deathly allergic—but the more I was getting to know him, the clearer I was beginning to see it. There was so much to Dexter that I justdidn’t knowand my desperate need to figure him out was blinding.

“Really?” I asked. “What makes you say that?”

He shrugged at me, shoving both of his hands into his pockets. “I don’t know. He’s really nice. And accommodating.”

“What, you don’t think I can be friends with nice people?”

He rolled his eyes at me. Such a teenager. “That’s not what I meant.”

“Tell me, then.”Because I’m seriously dying to know.

He shrugged again. “I don’t know. I guess… I kind of pictured you being friends with a bunch of meatheads.”

Huffing out a laugh, I grabbed onto the door to the cafe when we approached it and nodded for him to duck under my arm and head inside. “The only true meathead I know is currently engaged to an ex-felon.”

And what a fucking phone callthatwas to receive on a Friday night after coming back from one of my AA meetings.

Did I expect anything less from Jackson fucking Hall to have fallen in love with someone with a rap sheet?

Not exactly. Getting it out of him onhowhe met this man was actually the more wild part of the story that I still couldn’t exactly wrap my head around.

But whatever.

Love was love, right?

“What?” Dexter gave me a bewildered look.

I shook my head, grabbing him lightly by the shoulder in order to steer him toward the register. “It’s a long story. Point is, I’ve got friends in all sorts of varieties.”

“I see that,” he mumbled at me.

After paying for drinks and two small pastries, we grabbed a small floor table and settled down comfortably.

The cafe turned out to be really nice and clean considering they had about thirty cats roaming around. Some sat on perches nailed to the walls above our heads, some wandered the floor looking for handouts, and some, like the two that were currently occupyingourtable, were just plain old cuddle bugs looking for attention.

I sipped my coffee silently while watching Dexter’s rare smile grace his face, one of his hands buried in the long fur of a pretty white cat and his other stroking over the head of an orange tabby that had completely commandeered his lap the moment we sat down.

Seeing my son happy was a nice change of pace from our usual standoffs. I liked seeing this side of him, even if it was only for the small window he’d let me in today.

“Too bad we can’t take one home,” he said after a while.

“I know. You could always come back here and adopt one if you decide to go to LSU.”

His mouth thinned into a straight line. “Yeah… maybe.”

“You thinking about going somewhere else?”

Dexter sighed. “I don’t know. Mom’s going to kill me either way, so...”

Setting down my mug slowly gave me the time to reel back my sudden shock of anger and the snap back reaction I would normally have come up with. The protectiveness I felt for him regarding his mother was always going to be there, no matter what I did or how much time passed. My therapist had been pretty straightforward in telling me that it was a trauma response from Dexter being ripped away from me as he had been and my having no say in the matter afterward.

Here was the thing, though—I didn’twantto still hold onto this resentment. It ate away at me little by little each time it flared up. Just like my PTSD did from my military days. Letting it go was my goal, and damn was it hard to do anytime something like this reared its ugly head.

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