“Television isn’t real.” Max regretted letting them watch television. If they hadn’t been hanging out on the edge of Earth space hijacking signals, Xander wouldn’t have screwed-up ideas about humans. Actually, he would rather the kids not have accurate ideas about them either.
“Are families together the way entertainment shows?” Xander asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Do genetic relatives gather for celebrations and continue with alliances after reaching independence?”
“Yeah,” Max said. “Of course we do.” The second the words came out of his mouth, he realized that the question implied that the Hidden People didn’t live like that. Xander was implying that he would grow up, move away and never come back. His breath caught and he stopped dead on the boardwalk. Xander continued for several feet before he stopped. Maybe something in Max’s expression registered because Xander abandoned the cart and hurried back.
“Max Father. Identify wrongness.”
The air burst out of Max’s mouth and he didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath. Xander curled tentacles around Max’s wrist and tugged at him. “Max Father.”
“I just realized you plan on leaving,” Max said weakly. Fuck. No wonder Rick tried to keep his distance. The cute little bastards were going to break their fathers’ hearts, or Max’s anyway.
“Query. Do not human offspring leave? Query. Did not Max Father leave?”
Max sat in the middle of the boardwalk. The raised seam dug into his ass, but he didn’t give a shit. After a second, Xander inched close enough to rest his leg tentacle against Max’s knee. “I left, but I never meant to leave forever. Before the law-enforcement poop faces took me away from Earth, I called my parents every few weeks.” Okay, that was almost true. Max hadn’t called them often enough, but if six or eight or ten qualified as a “few,” then he managed it every few weeks. “My mom was always asking if I had met anyone I wanted to pairbond with.” When Max had failed at having any long-term relationship work, he’d started avoiding her. “But I planned to go home for either Thanksgiving or Christmas. I always visited home.”
Max stared at Xander, wondering how he was supposed to react to the idea of losing his little boy. Intellectually he knew that Rick’s people preferred novelty. Intellectually, he knew they weren’t the most affectionate parents in the world. Emotionally, he was an idiot because he had never processed what steps one and two meant.
“Query. Identify wrongness,” Xander said in a voice that was almost soft.
“I want you to be happy, but I don’t want you to go away and never visit. I want to know your happiness. I want to meet anyone you feel is worth pairbonding with. I want to see your offspring. Shit. I’ll never get to spoil grandbabies.”
Xander rotated, catching Max’s wrist with a new tentacle when he rotated too far to hold on.
Shaking his head, Max pushed himself up off the walk. “I can have a mental breakdown later. We have business to do.”
“Max Father,” Xander said, but Max had to focus. It was like when he was flying into difficult maneuvers—he had to focus on the horizon, on the instruments, on the feel of the engine vibration in the seat and the stick in his hand. He didn’t have enough space in his brain to worry about anything else, so it all had to wait until after he’d landed the plane.
He strode down the walk, all his attention on the tall, black ship that Carrington owned. He tried very hard not to hear theclick-clackof the cart behind him.
Chapter Twelve
Max touched the pedestalin front of Carrington’s ship . The yellow glow shifted to a darker orange, and Max went to parade rest as he waited for someone to answer his call. Xander stopped behind him, and Max hoped he would remain silent. Max needed to concentrate on the enemy in front of him, not on his own personal dramas. It was a rule in the air that pilots forgot any conflicts and focused on the plane, the instruments, the act of flying itself. If a wife ran off or a kid was in the hospital, pilots drank and complained and emotionally fell apart on the ground—not in the air. Never in the air.
