Eric (Men of Honor 2)

“You’re not coming down with something, are you?” I took her hand and kissed the back of her fingers. “I’m perfectly fine. Go on and finish up what you were doing. We’ll go for one of those long drives you like later this evening, okay.” She looked pleased as she got up and left, and I waited until she cleared the door before pulling up Google on my phone. “Oh shit!”

Eric

The kid must be wondering what the hell is up with me since I keep staring at him ever since he walked through the door after school earlier this evening. “What’s your problem?” Fuck, the boy is all grown up, isn’t he? He didn’t even look at me when he asked me that, just kept paging through the book he was pretending to study.

I say pretend because his stepsister had just left the room when I walked in, and after knowing what I now know about those damn roses, I’m not sure what the hell they were doing in here before I came in.

I squinted at him until it got to be too much, and he closed the book and glared at me. “What dad? Damn! Why you clocking me so hard?” I’m not about to navigate my way through the asshole language of youth; I have no idea what the fuck he just said. “You dating anyone lately?”

“I don’t date, dad, I…”

“Hold it, sorry, I asked.” I held up my hand to ward him off. The last time I discussed sex with my son, he was fifteen. I ended the conversation about the birds and the bees by telling him he should come to me if he needed anything and to always be safe, and he ended it by saying thank heavens because he was getting tired of stealing my condoms since no one would sell them to him at the pharmacy.

I hid my surprise really well that day, but ever since then, I’ve made sure to keep him well supplied. I have no idea how much or how little he uses, but each month I stock him up and mind my own even though he’s old enough to buy his own now.

I’ve heard rumors here and there over the years, of course, but since no one has shown up at my door with a shotgun, I figured he was just being a teen. But the fact that he’s never brought anyone home was now glaringly obvious.

I kept side-eyeing him to see if he’d come clean, but the boy was so smooth he had me second-guessing myself. Maybe I got my shit wrong, or Google is full of shit. I’d been watching their interaction since they got home and hadn’t noticed anything different.

“Dad, you’re creeping me out what the hell.”

“Oh, your mother came by my office this morning.”

“Oh yeah, what does she want?”

“She said you called her husband.”

“Yeah, and?” He wasn’t even gonna try and hide it.

“Why did you do that?”

“I told her I would if she didn’t act right.”

“You blackmailing your mother because she didn’t let you have your way?”

“No, I’m showing your ex-wife that I mean it when I say I’ll destroy her life if she keeps messing with you. I don’t like that you kept her around because of me, dad. I know how much she hurt you, how hard it must’ve been all these years to have her in your life even as limited as it was, after the crap she pulled.”

“If it were me, I’d have cut her loose and never looked back, kid or no kid.”

“What if the kid wants to keep seeing his mom?”

“That’s no mom, and you should know better than to subject your kid to a toxic bi… to someone like that.”

“Are you really that angry at your mother, Tyler?”

“Dad, do you remember the first year she left? Remember when we were barely making it, and there was hardly anything to eat? I still remember those chucks I wore with the holes in the bottoms of them. I was walking home from my old elementary school one day, and it was raining hard. She passed me in her new fancy car.”

He stopped talking and gazed off as if reliving the moment he was describing. I sat up in my seat because this didn’t sound like something I’d heard before. “I was so excited when she rolled down the window, and I saw that it was her. I started running towards the car, thinking she was going to give me a ride home out of the rain. She laughed and rolled up the window before driving off, splashing me with dirty water in the process.”

“You never told me this, Tyler.” I gripped the chair arms so hard my fists turned white, but before I could say anything, Justine came barreling into the room.