Page 45 of Xavier

He nodded silently, working overtime at scrubbing the plate in his hands.

With a sigh, I dropped my arms and stepped away, giving him the space he clearly needed to decompress from this. My heart was heavy as I left the kitchen, and him, behind.

In the living room, the boys were crowded around the giant TV, all of them sitting on the floor and craning their necks up while some kind of video game was playing. I stood behind the couch and watched for a second, trying to distract myself from going back in and begging Gage to talk to me.

“Nice. See that pasture where all the wheat is? Mow over it so you can start making barrels to sell at the market,” Asher was saying, pointing to the screen.

“Got it,” Dexter replied. The tractor on the screen slowly puttered over to a different colored field with a very realistic sounding engine.

“Nice. It’s double drops,” Greyson said. “That’ll be perfect when you sell your first few barrels. You can buy a longer attachment so you can farm larger areas.”

Shaking my head, I stepped away from the living room and headed down the hall to my bedroom, or rather, one of the twin’s. Packing all my things up and zipping my bag, I carried it into Gage’s room to set it down on his bed.

Following Dexter’s suggestion of bunking with Gage was a smarter idea than forcing him to share a bed with me. After all, I’d be sneaking off to see him anyway after what just happened. Might as well kill two birds with one stone.

Heading back to the other room, I quickly changed the sheets on the bed and fluffed up the pillows nice and neat until I was satisfied with what I was leaving behind.

I swung the door shut behind me before making my way back to Gage’s room. I had a hunch that he was going to avoid me for as long as possible. Which meant that I was either going to have to drag him to bed, or he was going to pretend like everything was fine and try to go to sleep in order to avoid this conversation.

Both options had me feeling nauseous.

Lifting my bag up from the bed, I let it fall to the floor at my feet and kicked it to press flush against the wall out of the way of the main walkway. I grabbed my phone out of my pocket, and Kate’s name flashed across my screen.

Have Dexter call me, please,was all her text said.

Groaning, I let my body fall back onto the bed, bouncing slightly from the sudden weight fluctuation. If Kate was going to demand Dexter to come home a day early, I was going to actually lose it.

No, scratch that.

The more likely scenario was that I would be calling her up and demanding to know why the hell she was cutting our three-day weekend short when I’d been asking for very little from her from the beginning.

Lifting my phone up closer to my face, I typed out a quick‘sure’and sent it on its way.

I let myself wallow for a total of five entire minutes before forcing myself up from the bed and heading out of the bedroom to go find Dexter.

CHAPTER 19

Gage

“Another week?”I overheard Xavier saying from the living room right as I shut the water off for the sink. “That’s what she said?”

“You want to call her back and talk to her?” came Dexter’s reply.

Snagging the towel off of the rack to dry my now thoroughly pruned hands, I slapped it down onto the counter once I was done with it and headed into the living room. The game on the TV was paused while both the twins were patiently sitting on the floor in front of the couch while Xavier and Dexter were talking.

Xavier had his phone in his hands that he tossed between them every few seconds, a pensive look etched onto his face. “It’s just a little surprising, is all...”

Dexter offered his own phone over, waving it slightly in the space between them. “That’s all she said to me, but if you want to ask?—”

His father was shaking his head, putting both of his hands up in mock surrender. “As long as she’s not expecting us back on a flight Monday afternoon.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Xavier let out a soft sigh and then turned my way. “Kate called.” Holding back a grimace should’ve earned me some kind of award. “And said that we can stay the week if we want.”

There’s no way I heard that right. “Thewholeweek?”

He glanced back at Dexter who merely shrugged. “That’s what she told me.”

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