Page 4 of Mistletoe Dreams
Knowing that was not possible, she finished her grocery shopping, stuck the bags in her car, and headed back to her grandmother's house.
No, she headedhome.
Chapter Three
"Idon't see why I have to get up at the butt crack of dawn," Mason muttered, throwing a disrespectful glance in Ben's direction.
Ben, off duty from his small-town sheriff position, pressed his lips together and tried to keep the anger from erupting inside of him.
"You can't lay in bed all day. It's one o'clock in the afternoon. I'm not asking for anything outrageously weird to have you up before noon."
"On a Saturday? There's no school. What do I have to be up for?"
"Why would you feel the need to sleep the day away? You went to bed at a decent time last night."
At least Ben had thought he had. But Ben had to admit, he hadn't checked on his fifteen-year-old son before he had gone to bed at midnight. And even at his age, thirty-five, which wasn't exceptionally old, although he didn't have the energy of youth, he had felt well rested by eight o'clock in the morning. Why did his son go to bed earlier and sleep later?
"You didn't tell me why it matters," Mason said, grabbing cereal from the cupboard and slamming a bowl down on the counter.
Ben bit off the words to tell him to stop slamming things around. He was already giving him a hard time for not getting up, and he'd mentioned that he needed to keep his room slightly neater. He didn't want to constantly pick at his son.
"I was hoping we could go fishing today. But at this rate, it's going to be dark before we get ready to leave."
"Fishing is stupid and boring," Mason spat his words, irritated and condescending, like Ben had suggested they go to McDonald's and play at the play place.
He didn't know how to reach his son. Hadn't for a while.
He bit his tongue again as Mason slopped wet cereal onto the counter as he dumped milk into his bowl, then Mason just left the entire mess as he grabbed the bowl and a spoon and walked into the living room to sit down in front of the TV.
He had already used the remote to turn the thing on before Ben found his tongue.
"We eat breakfast at the table," he said, feeling like all he'd done that entire morning was nag his son about all of the things he was doing wrong. And at the same time, he felt like he'd let a hundred things slide that should have been corrected. Where did he start? He wanted to have a relationship with his son, and he knew that wasn't going to be possible if all he did was complain about his behavior. Still, his behavior had been abhorrent, and there hadn't really been anything to praise.
"Are you serious? Why'd you wait until I sat down before you told me that? What's wrong with watching TV? It's better than just sitting down at the table across from you and feeling your condescension drip from every pore."
Mason made no move to either come back into the kitchen from the living room nor to turn off the TV set. In fact, Ben could've been wrong, but he was pretty sure Mason turned the TV up louder.
Some kind of weird music Ben didn't recognize thumped and pounded its way into his brain, making the headache that had been skirting around the edges of his temples start paining him in earnest.He had moved in with his mother, who was at a ladies’ aid meeting, and she would be upset at the mess in her house.
Not for the first time, he had to stop all the nasty thoughts that wanted to march through his mind over the way his ex-wife had acted.
Not only had she cheated on him, but when she divorced him, she'd demanded custody. He hadn't wanted to fight, but he'd also argued that Mason needed to be removed from the bad influences that he had fallen in with when he'd turned twelve.
His wife hadn't listened, and she'd insisted that not only did she get custody, but Ben had to stay in the same town and couldn't move away.
Thankfully, he'd been able to show the judge what a terrible idea that was, but not until Mason had turned fourteen and chosen to live with his mother.
He'd gone from bad to worse until Peyton, his ex, had said she couldn't handle him anymore. He was disrupting life with her live-in boyfriend, and they were expecting a child together, planning a wedding. She couldn't have an unruly teen who was in with the wrong crowd of people hanging out at her house. Of course, she blamed all of the kid's problems on Ben, saying that he hadn't spent enough time with his son since the divorce.
Funny, because he would've lived in the same house with his son if Peyton hadn't felt the need to cheat on him and then leave him and divorce him.
Ben failed to see how that was all his fault, but it didn't really make any difference. Mason had gotten caught in the crosshairs, and he was the one who had really suffered. Not that Ben hadn't suffered, because he had. Having a person's wife cheat on a man did something to his psyche that Ben almost thought was irreparable.
But as broken as he felt inside, he had to try to be the adult for his son.
He walked into the living room, grabbed the remote, and switched the TV off. Standing between the TV set and his son, hewaited until his son looked out from underneath his brows, his mouth full of cereal, before he spoke.
"Go to the kitchen table."
