Cause for Concern ✓

thirteen

His eyes were still fixed on the awards but he knew his dad was staring at him. "What?" He asked, a gentle crease in his brow.

"All the pictures and stuff," he said. "The awards and the artwork and whatever. Why is it all still up?"

He and his dad hadn't talked much since he'd gotten here. It was like there was an unspoken understanding, the unforgettable memory of their last encounter etched deep into their brains. They hadn't recovered from it, not yet. The venom and the frustration was easier to brush over, easier to avoid, and the feelings weren't bursting out of swollen hearts anymore, but nothing had been forgotten.

They had spoken on the phone briefly over the past few weeks. Max never called, only ever answered (sometimes he rejected, waited for it to ring out) and when they talked it was mostly small talk but his dad was the kind of guy that made it work.

Sometimes he appreciated the phone calls, sometimes they made him feel better. Other times they felt like trying to put a bandaid on an arm that's been cut open.

"Why wouldn't it be?" He asked.

"I don't know," he shrugged and silence flooded between them. Any comfort to be found in such an awful noise was not theirs yet. "I thought you'd take them down."

"Why?"

"I don't know. I don't live here anymore," he suggested, "so I thought you'd put everything away."

"You didn't stop being my son when you stopped living here," his dad frowned.

This time he did bite his tongue. He clenched his jaw and refrained from snapping, from making some unnecessary scathing or biting remark. Instantly, his mind had flooded with a million things he could retort with that might be hurtful, that he could say to piss his dad off but he tried to forget them all. Saying something spiteful just to go on the offence wasn't going to do anything to help their relationship and he owed it to them to keep his mouth shut after they'd invited him over for dinner.

They were extending an olive branch to him and he didn't want to do anything that might make them retract it. Anyway, the guys had told him to accept the invitation and give it a go— it wasn't like he had anything better to do. Danny and Cole had actively encouraged it, too.

Not to mention, Wren would be proud to hear that he'd decided to go and be on his best behaviour. After Monday's act, he was pretty sure he owed her. The least he could do after actively going against her advice was take her advice. If things went wrong then whatever, right? It would sting a little and it would torment and frustrate him like bugs under his skin but it was a risk that he'd decided to take. All he had to do was try to resist his impulses, swallow down the venom, for one night. He could do that.

"I know," he murmured to break the awkwardness that was seeping between them. "I just didn't expect to see everything the same."

"Have you been upstairs yet?" He asked, folding his arms over his chest as he stood by the opposite end of the table.

He shook his head. Going upstairs didn't really feel like an option. Besides, he had nothing to really go upstairs for. He had decided beforehand, before he'd even been invited over, that his room had probably been transformed into a guest bedroom or maybe some kind of studio or spare room or something so there was nothing up there for him anyway. There was something embarrassing about going upstairs to your bedroom and finding that it wasn't your bedroom anymore.