Cause for Concern ✓

thirteen

"Why don't you go up after dinner?" He asked. "Have a look around."

"Sure," he agreed, unable to stop a slight frown escaping onto his face. Telling him to go upstairs just to see that his room had been cleared out for something more beneficial was kind of a dick move but Wren had told him in one of his sessions that he shouldn't always be so hung up on making negative assumptions. Maybe there was something cool up there, something like the pool table that was in the backroom.

With that, his dad disappeared back into the adjacent kitchen to help his stepmom with the dinner and Josh came running back in the room, half looking like he'd climbed out of a frame and sprung into reality.

"Hey," Max said. His chair was tucked in close to the table and his elbows found their way either side of where his knife and fork had been laid out.

Dark blonde hair flopped over his forehead. His eyes moved like little blue spotlights, dancing all over the room. A grin of pearly white teeth, one was missing. "Hi," he said. "Haven't seen you in a long time."

"Few weeks," Max said. "Good few weeks. How've you been?"

His earlobe was pinched tight between his forefinger and thumb, and he was pulling gently at it. "Where've you been?"

"My mom's," he said, falling against the back of the chair, his head tilting to the side so that he was looking at Josh straight on. "I've been with my mom."

"Are you coming back?" He asked, squinting at Max like he'd never seen him before.

He hadn't thought about it. It didn't feel like something he'd had to think about it until he was asked about it. He'd never been asked about it until now. "No," he said. "I don't think so."

"Why?"

"Adult stuff." It felt like a cheap explanation because it was a cheap explanation but it was the finest he had to offer and that had to count for something.

"You're not an adult," he said.

"More of an adult than you," Max said, flicking him in the forehead.

Unimpressed and unsatisfied, he hummed, spotlight eyes scanning over the room again when his mom and dad came back into the room with dinner. Max felt ungrateful just sitting there, not helping out, but his stepmom had sent him to set the table and had insisted that it was enough.

When he'd insisted, she had told him firmly to sit down and he had told her that she would never say that to a guest, not like that. Just as firmly, she had told him that he wasn't a guest and that she, as his stepmom, was telling him to sit down.

"But you invited me," he had said. "That would make me a guest."

"You are not a guest in this home. Sit down. Let us do dinner."

He didn't have anything to say that and when he floundered uncertainty in the kitchen, she watched and waited with wide eyes and raised brows, her neat mouth in a line. So he sat down and let them do dinner.

It looked good. It felt like it had been forever since he'd had a home cooked meal— a real home cooked meal. His mom wasn't much of a cook and neither was he. It wasn't like she never cooked for them either, just that most meals were readymade or microwaveable or required only one step.