Bastian's Storm (Surviving Raine 2)

My heart skipped and my diaphragm constricted. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

“Me?” I finally choked out.

He nodded and went back to coloring.

I stepped the rest of the way into the room to get a better look. The drawing was definitely of a person, but I wasn’t too sure anyone would think it was me. The figure’s head was just as big as his body, and Alex had colored in red shorts over stick legs. The arms were large balloon shapes, and the hands were little round balls with five tiny sticks coming out of them.

I couldn’t help but smile.

“How do you know it’s me?” I asked.

“Right here,” Alex said as he pointed to the blue dots on the oversized head. “Your eyes are the same color as mine. Raine said so.”

“She did, huh?”

“Uh huh.”

I wondered what else she had told him.

I pulled out the extra chair from the other side of the table and dragged it around to sit next to Alex. My ass barely fit in the seat, and I was a little worried it was going to break under my weigh

t. I shifted a little, deciding the chair would at least hold me for a while, and looked down at the simple piece of printer paper covered in crayon marks.

“What are these?” I asked, pointing to a couple of objects near the feet of the figure.

“Dumbbells,” he said. He looked up, and his eyes traveled over my arms. “You work out a lot. That’s why your muscles are so big.”

He pointed at the balloon arms.

“Well, that makes sense,” I said.

We sat in silence as Alex continued to draw. I knew I ought to say something else, but I didn’t know what it should be. I hadn’t spent any time around kids since I was one myself, and I had no idea how to interact with them. He obviously knew something about me, but how far that knowledge reached was a mystery. Did he only know about me through Raine, or had Jillian divulged information as well? If she had, what would she have said?

I was totally lost, so I decided sticking to something simple would be best.

“It’s a good drawing,” I finally said.

He stopped drawing and looked at me with a creased forehead and slightly narrowed eyes.

“Are you going to be my dad now?” he asked bluntly.

Whatever he had been told, it was enough for him to understand some of what was happening. I wanted to ask him what he knew about me and the death of his mother, but I couldn’t bring myself to change the tone of the setting quite so much. It was the first time we had ever laid eyes on each other, and I wasn’t going to fuck it up.

“I’d like to be,” I said.

“Okay.” He turned back to the drawing and started to make a second figure in the picture. This person was smaller than the image of me, with no balloon arms but the same blue dots for eyes.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Me,” Alex said as he shrugged his shoulder. “If you’re going to be my dad, I have to be in the picture, too.”

Apparently, that was all there was to it.

“I guess that makes sense,” I replied with a nod. “Will anyone else be in the picture?”

He placed the end of the crayon up against his lip, creating a little depression there. He stared down at the picture in contemplation.

“I think maybe Raine, too,” he said. “She’s not my mom, though. She’s your mom.”