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She petted the cat, who purred under her touch. “Challenged? Not anymore?”
“We’re no longer … friends. Well, we might be friends but nothing else. I bring a lot of drama and I don’t want to inflict that on her.”
She frowned. “Am I the reason you’re not with her anymore?”
No, I am. “She didn’t know the details about you, the whole story. I didn’t tell her until recently and it’s not fair to expect her to deal with that on top of everything else. She has a kid, a great kid, and I need to keep her safe.” He shook his head. “We didn’t break up because we weren’t officially together.”
Liar, liar, dumpster fire.
“I’m sorry that I’m still affecting your relationships, even now.”
He shot her a sharp look. “What did you expect would happen when you came back into my life? That we just become friends and it doesn’t have any impact on me and the people I care about? That I was going to be all calm and reasonable about it?”
Color flagged her cheeks. “I didn’t know what else to do. I waited until I was sober for a year. I wanted you to see that I’d changed, but maybe you won’t ever be able to understand that.”
He was here, wasn’t he? He was trying to initiate the first tentative steps in a truce, but it was so freakin’ hard.
“I can’t just wipe the slate clean and pretend nothing happened. You weren’t around. I fucked up and you left and?—”
She put her hand out over his. The touch, so unexpected and soft, electrified him.
“What do you mean you fucked up?”
He’d meant to say she did, but it came out wrong. The Freudian whatsit.
“I talked back to him. I started it. Made trouble and … that’s why we’re here.”
“Oh, Dex, that’s not why it happened. I was not in a good place. Self-medicating, accepting crap because it was easier than trying.”
He snorted. “Know what that’s like.”
“Well, maybe we’re not so different. But where we are miles apart is on the subject of culpability.”
“That’s a Willa word.” At her querying expression, he explained. “Ashley’s daughter. She learns a new word every day. I think she’d like that one.”
But he didn’t. Despite being a total dumbass, he understood perfectly its meaning.
“You’re not to blame for what happened to Kane. I did that. I hurt him.”
“Defending me.”
She shook her head. “Yes, but he started that fight. My reaction was all on me. I didn’t have to spend my life high as a kite, neglecting you, moving us from place to place because I couldn’t keep things steady. That was no way to live and no way to raise a child. What happened with Kane was my fault, but it was better that you were taken away from me. I wasn’t fit to be your mom.”
He shook his head. For so long, he’d carried this weight. He’d started it, the first of many acts of self-sabotage. Dex the troublemaker, Dex the fuckboy, Dex the sad little orphan.
“You think foster care was better?”
“You survived, didn’t you? You found hockey.” She squeezed his hand, and he found himself squeezing back. “Did you think that would have happened if I was around? Sports cost money and I would have rather spent it on drink and weed than my own boy. That’s a fact.”
Probably. But no one should have to grow up without his mom.
“I know it was a shitty situation, Dex. No matter which way you looked at it. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But something had to change. I needed a wake-up call and prison was it for me. I’d be dead now if it hadn’t happened. Instead of thinking that you started this sequence of events, think that maybe you saved my life. Me jumping in to defend you from him brought us here. One of us trying to get back on track, the other sitting on top of the world because he’s so beautiful and talented and amazing.” She brushed away a tear from her cheek. “I’m so proud of you and everything you’ve done. So proud of the man you’ve become. My wonderful son.”
He didn’t deserve her pride, not when he felt so unworthy.
“It would have been better if you were there.” His actions put his mom in prison and a ten-year-old boy in care, and he needed to deal with that.
She sighed, but it was a patient one, the kind a mother doled out to a son.
