“Any chance your parents could watch Jagger tonight?” I asked as I quickly organized my desk and got ready for the next day’s lessons. Jagger was content in the imagination station, so much so that it was almost easy to forget we weren’t alone. Almost.
“I get to go back to Meemaw and Papa’s?” Jagger leaped off the floor and started shoving blocks back into their containers. God, I hoped I hadn’t just said something wrong.
“Yeah buddy, we’re going to go over there as soon as we leave here,” Michael said to his son, completely ignoring me. “Meemaw misses you and asked us if we were coming over for dinner.”
The momentary excitement faded when I realized he already had plans for the evening. I should have known better than to think he might’ve been wanting to spend some time with me as well.
“But it’s not Saturday. We do dinner with her on Saturday. Tonight’s supposed to be pizza and root beer,” he protested. It was silly, but it was a routine the three of us had gotten into over the last few weeks of summer. And wasn’t that a bitch, that I already thought of myself as part of their little unit.
“We’ll do that another night. Maybe Dax can come over on Friday before I have to go to work and we’ll have pizza and root beer then,” Michael suggested as a compromise. “You’ll be going to Meemaw’s at bedtime, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have pizza for dinner.”
“No!” Jagger’s outburst startled both of us. “I want to stay with Dax while you’re at work.” He looked up at me as if he thought he was about to get in trouble. “Is it okay if I call you Dax when we’re alone? It’s really hard to remember I’m not supposed to.”
And there went another sliver of my heart. If I wasn’t careful, the Underwood boys were going to own me. If I was honest with myself, we were already dangerously close to that point. I loved them. Not necessarily in the romantic sense, although I could see myself falling for Michael, but it was definitely a familial love. I was closer to them than I had been to my own family.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” I assured him. “And your dad is right, you should go spend time with your grandparents. There will be other nights when we can do pizza.”
“Jagger, finish picking up,” Michael told his son before turning his attention back to me. “Sorry I can’t make it tonight. Mom called this afternoon and asked us to come over. If you’d have called sooner, I would’ve passed on the family dinner.”
“Yeah, I guess I didn’t realize you had such a busy social schedule,” I quipped. I didn’t do well with guilt trips, and that’s exactly what Michael’s admonishment felt like.
“Obviously, I’m not the only one,” he chastised me. “And for your information, I had been planning on asking them to keep him for the night so I could figure out why in the hell you’ve been avoiding me.”
The way his eyes trailed over the length of my body, pausing just a moment too long near my waist, had me shifting uncomfortably. It may have been nothing, but my cock definitely liked the attention. Now, I’d spend the entire evening thinking about what I wanted to do to him.
“Maybe I could stop by after,” I offered. “I know I’ve been a shitty friend, and I think I owe you an explanation.”
I didn’t want to hang out with my coworkers and I didn’t wanthim tied up with his parents for the evening. What I wanted was a chance to sit down and talk without the possibility of my favorite little monster interrupting us. I wanted to find out what was with the way I’d caught him looking at me. And to do that, the two of us had to be in the same place at the same time.
“If you want, call me when you’re done,” Michael suggested. “I told my dad I was hoping for a night off from all my responsibilities, and I think he understood. There were some other things I told him, too, but I’ll wait until tonight to tell you about that.”
I followed Jagger and Michael out of the room and pulled the door closed behind me. Suddenly, I didn’t give a damn if anyone saw the three of us walking together.
The two of them said goodbye to me when we reached the front of my house and I bent down to give Jagger a quick hug. “I’m so proud of you, buddy. You did a great job today in class.”
“Thank you.” The little boy’s cheeks flushed. He wasn’t great at accepting compliments. It didn’t take a genius to know where he’d gotten that particular trait.
“Be careful tonight,” Michael requested quietly. The tenderness of the words touched me, wrapping that rope tighter around my heart. It’d been a long time since anyone cared about what I did.
