CHAPTER FOUR
Xander
“Can we have pizza now? Can we? Can we?”
I looked up at my daughter perched on my shoulders, her new stuffed giraffe in her arms. We spent the entire morning wandering around the zoo. “Pizza, huh? Is that your choice for your birthday meal?”
Beside me, Kylian groaned. His hands were stuffed into his pockets, his eyes on the sidewalk as he shuffled his feet beside me and his little sister.
I reached over and laid a hand on his shoulder, then fought back the frown as he twisted away. “Pizza not sound good to you, Kyl?” I asked, keeping my voice light. I didn’t want the annoyance to show, but I was annoyed at the grumpy boy who had complained about everything from the second I picked him and his sister up in front of their expensive Upper Laurel Canyon home yesterday evening.
He shrugged and mumbled something that sounded like, “It doesn’t matter.” But from the look he shot me, it was probably closer to fuck you, asshole.
“Well, if it doesn’t matter, then pizza it is,” I said, forcing cheer into my voice. “Ice cream afterwards. How does that sound?”
Another shrug was my only answer from the boy beside me, while a shrieking, “Yay,” nearly broke my eardrums from above. Kenzie bounced up and down on my shoulders. Damn, my little girl was getting heavy. I’d probably need to see a chiropractor when I got back home.
“Why did you drive that?” Kylian complained, nodding to the Escalade a few rows away.
I stared at the black family sized vehicle I’d bought so that rentals wouldn’t be necessary. “What’s wrong with it?” I asked the brown-haired boy, who had helped me pick it out less than a year ago. A little boy who was in desperate need of a haircut. I hadn’t mentioned it when I picked the kids up last night, but I deeply hoped he wasn’t going for the greasy rocker look like his stepfather.
He rolled his eyes, his shoulders going even slouchier, his hair falling forward and covering his face. “It’s an old man car, Dad. Don’t you know anything?”
Above me, Kenzie giggled, her soft hands stroking my beard. I looked up at her as I pulled the keys to my old-man vehicle out of my pocket and chirped the doors open. “Do you think I’m old too?”
She pulled my head back and looked down at me with a serious look on her face. She could have easily been a scientist looking through a microscope. “You do have some wrinkles.” I smiled. She still sometimes dropped her r’s, so wrinkles became winkles. She poked the outside of my right eye. “There.” She poked the other side. “And there.” She studied me closely, her hair falling around us. “I think you need to moisturize.”
I laughed. “What do you know about moisturizing, young lady?”
She gave me a look of pure despair. “Oh, Daddy. Mary Jenkins had her birthday party at the spa and we all got our nails done and they put cucumbers on our eyes. We got moisturizer in our goody bag. We got nail polish and other stuff, but the moisturizer had SPF 30 so we don’t get wrinkles like you.”
I frowned up at her. “How old is Mary Jenkins?”
She squeezed my cheeks together until my lips puffed out. “She’s four already, Daddy. You have so much to learn.”
I bent down, causing her to do a flip from my shoulders. She giggled all the way to the ground, the giraffe snug against her chest, the charms of her bracelet tinging together. “I’m trying to learn, honey. I’m trying.”
I patted her bottom, and she skipped the rest of the way to the SUV, her little hand planted firmly in mine. Kylian slammed his door shut while I buckled Kenzie into her booster seat. He was still pissed that I made him ride in the back seat, according to California law. Since he was tall for his age, I didn’t force him into the booster seat I’d purchased.
“Mom doesn’t make me ride in a baby seat,” he sneered the moment he’d seen it last night.
“Well, I’m Dad, and I say—”
“Holy shit,” Danielle had interjected, crossing her arms over her chest. Her breasts were even bigger than the last time I’d seen her. In fact, so were her lips. At least I knew where my child support payments were going. “Can’t you take the icicles out of your balls and break a rule on occasion?”
I gritted my teeth. I didn’t break rules. They were fucking there for a reason. But… my son’s expression had taken on a pleading tone, and against my good judgement, I relented.
Tossing the seat in the back, I’d conceded but made sure he buckled down tight. Kenzie was still in a harness and didn’t complain when I secured her in.
This morning, I’d found the booster seat in the garbage and said nothing. Some fights just weren’t worth it.
Without a look in our direction, Kylian stuffed earbuds into his ears while Kenz instructed to “buckle in Jerry.” I took the giraffe and fastened him in securely while Kylian started nodding his head to whatever music he was listening to way too loud.
I tapped him on the shoulder. “It’s too loud,” I said when the bass of the song poured from his ear canals.
He frowned and yelled. “What?”
I pointed at my own ear. “Too loud.”
He rolled his eyes but didn’t change the volume. He was challenging me at every turn, but there seemed to be something more behind the defiance. I considered my options. I couldn’t let him keep getting away with it. Could I? Damn. Where was my fucking parenting manual?
I pulled the earbud from his ear, and the kid went batshit ballistic. “Hey, that’s mine,” he yelled. “Don’t touch me! Don’t you ever touch me!” He yanked on the cord so hard, the bud ripped off in my hand, leaving the exposed wire to fall to the seat. “Look what you did!” he screamed. “You ruined them. You ruin everything.”
Kenzie began to cry, and I unbuckled her, pulling her from the car while Kylian kicked the passenger seat in front of him, hit the windows with his fists. I shut the car door, Kenzie clinging to me until my son had exhausted himself.
I’d never felt so helpless as in that moment.
The rest of the day was the same. A smiling and happy Kenzie versus a sullen and spiteful Kylian. Each time I tried to talk to my son, all I got was hateful glares, if he even looked my way at all.
It was exhausting. And worrying. And downright annoying at times.
Here I was, the chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 company. I employed over two thousand people all over the world. I’d hit the Hottest Billionaire Bachelors list a few months before I turned thirty last year. And a seven-year-old was cutting me off at my knees. And I had no idea how to stop it or make anything better.
When Kenz was tucked into her pink and purple bedroom after I’d read her four books, because, “I’m four now,” I went in search of my son.
He looked like a starfish, splayed out on his bed, staring at the ceiling like he’d lost his best friend. I sat down beside him but didn’t reach out and touch him. I didn’t want to give him a reason to pull away.
“You okay?” He didn’t answer me, just continued to stare at the ceiling. “Come on, Kyl. You can talk to me, you know?”
Concern flared when tears welled into his eyes. He dropped an arm over his face so I couldn’t see. “Yeah, right. Then you’ll just leave again. Fat good it’ll do me.”
I thought back to the therapy sessions I’d gone through after my mom died suddenly when I was ten. She’d left to go to a charity meeting and never returned home. A drunk driver had veered up on the sidewalk where she’d been walking, ending her life way too soon.
The therapist always fed my concerns back to me in the form of a question, which had been annoying at the time, but after a while, it seemed to work. I’d slowly gotten over my fear of cars, my fear of my father leaving. My fear of sidewalks and people swerving up onto them.
“So, you’re upset that I’ll be leaving on Sunday?”
He shrugged, but from his position, it was more of a flailing of limbs. “Why do you care?”
I pulled his arm down and waited until he looked over at me. “I care because you’re my son and I love you. Tell me what’s going on.”
To my surprise, he started talking. To my surprise, I wasn’t surprised by what I learned.
“Jet’s an asshole.” He shot me a look, daring me to correct his bad language. I let it slide for the moment, knowing I had bigger mountains to climb than the potty-mouthed ones. “And I hate it here.”
“What has Jet been doing?”
Kylian sighed and rolled over until his back was to me. I pulled until he was facing me again.
“He bought me this drum set, then made me practice all the time. Last Saturday, I wanted to go to my friend’s birthday party, but he said I had to practice. Dad, he didn’t let me stop until bedtime.”
I frowned.
There was a terrible, horrible part of me that wanted to say, Well, that isn’t so bad. I wanted to discount his feelings, tell him about all the times my father had pulled out his belt, intent on “whipping the sense” into me.
But there was something else, I sensed it.
“Do you want to play drums?” I asked instead, trying to put myself in his seven-year-old shoes.
“I thought I did, but I don’t anymore.” His voice cracked, and he coughed, clearing his throat. It didn’t work. The next words came out just as ragged. “I don’t want to play the guitar or keyboard either.”
There was something more to this. Something he wasn’t telling me. This wasn’t about music or practice. But what was it?
“What aren’t you telling me, Kylian?”
His face crumbled, and he placed his hands over it, holding back the tears and the sobs tearing from his mouth.
It broke my heart.
Moving closer, I tried to pull him to me, hold him like I did just a year ago.
“No!” he screamed and pulled away, rolling from the bed and running to the bathroom. I could hear him cry so hard he threw up, then cry some more.
I was still there when he came out an hour later. His face fell when he opened the door and found me sitting on the side of his bed, waiting. I’d planned on waiting right there all night if needed.
“Kylian, tell me what’s happening, and I’ll do everything in my power to fix it.”
He shook his head, tears dripping down his face and off his chin. “I can’t.” The words were barely audible.
“Why?”
He swiped at his nose with his hand, then finally met my gaze. “I’m not supposed to tell.”