After kissing Millie on the forehead and getting fussed at because a twelve year old should be able to stay up later than nine p.m., he went to Clint’s room. Bethany passed him in the hall. “Hey, I’ll go finish putting the dishes in the dishwasher.”
Jay knew it was too late for Bethany to drive back to Atlanta, possibly too late for her to go over to her parents’ house at this hour. He didn’t want to kick her out, but he also didn’t want her—or even Landon, really—around tonight. He wanted things back to the new normal of just him and the kids for a couple of nights so he could think. And wasn’t that amusing, since he’d done his best not to do so for so very long.
He knocked and popped his head in Clint’s room. “Hey, bud. You all set?”
Clint looked up and gave a good natured grin. “Yeah, Dad.” He set aside his laptop and stretched. “Just working on this project. Sorry if we busted up your weekend plans.”
Jay tilted his head, heart beating a little faster, nervously. “Nothing big. We were just finishing up some odd jobs around the house.” Clint’s face was expressionless, but he shrugged. “Did you have fun in Atlanta?” Did you see me and Landon kissing?
Clint shrugged. He wasn’t normally any more or less moody than one would expect a sixteen year old boy to be. But something was on his mind. “You need to talk about anything?”
Clint looked at Jay straight on, studied him, then shrugged again. Jay gritted his teeth, knowing then how Bethany must have felt all those years when shrugs were Jay’s favorite response to questions. But Jay shrugged because he honestly hadn’t thought anything was going on; Clint had something tumbling around that busy brain of his.
“You know, if you do. If you have any questions.”
“Maybe later,” Clint said, full of meaning. Jay swallowed thickly. He felt a heavy weight settle in his chest. If Clint knew something, he obviously needed to work it out for himself. That scared the shit out of Jay. He hoped he wasn’t right, but only time would tell.
“Night, then. Don’t stay up too late.”
“Night, Dad.”
Jay shut Clint’s door behind him, letting out a shaky breath. The look he’d gotten from Clint was similar to, if not a bit kinder, than ones he’d noticed from Ms. Lynne lately. He hoped they were speculative, rather than knowing looks, because even if he was pretty sure what he himself knew now, he wasn’t a hundred percent. And how could he answer questions he didn’t know how to answer for himself?
It was too soon to know now, right? A couple months friendship had morphed into an unexpected affair with a man for the first time. Even if he realized he obviously had feelings like that for another man, didn’t mean he was strictly dickly all of a sudden.
Speaking of.
He went downstairs and found Bethany sitting on the sofa, going through her cell phone. She looked up at his entrance. “Hey, you. Sorry I ended up here so late. I can probably go to my folks’ house.” She tensed, probably expecting another rude comment like the one that’d slipped out of his mouth when she’d been making herself comfortable in his house earlier.
Not for the first time, he realized, the part of his life that included Bethany as a day-to-day part of his life—aside from as the mother of his children—appeared to well and truly have started feeling like a chapter almost closed. Maybe her being here, helping him come to that realization, hadn’t been a bad thing. He did have a flicker of sadness at the thought, but really, he knew what being happy felt like. And what they had, had never truly been that.
“No. You can crash in the guest room if you like.”
Her shoulders dropped a fraction, relieved and not disappointed, he hoped. “Thanks, Jay. I finished the dishes.”
“Thanks, Beths.” He smiled and walked around to take a seat on the sofa beside her. “How are you doing?”