Page 70 of To Love You

“I didn’t want to intrude if you were busy.”

“It’s your house.”

Adam closed the door behind him and kicked off his sneakers. “On paper. It’s yours for the next few weeks, isn’t it?”

Wyatt frowned and jerked his head toward the kitchen, shuffling off without another word. Adam followed behind in time to watch Wyatt pull a pizza out of the oven and slide it onto a cutting board.

“Do you remember you got pizza the first night I was here after high school,” Wyatt said, shoulders heaving with a breath.

“We used to get pizza a lot.” Adam sat down at the table and let Wyatt take the lead in the kitchen.

“Is that a no?”

He shrugged.

Wyatt cast him a sideways glance and sliced the pizza through the middle.

“You used to like pizza,” Adam said.

“I still do.” Wyatt finished slicing the pizza into pieces and carried it to the table. He slid into the seat that had always been his and fanned his hand over top of the still-hot cheese.

They lapsed into a silence that wasn’t awkward, but it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t like the days Cooper and Adam spent together on the couch, playing on their phones while a TV echoed quietly in the background, and it wasn’t like the long nights Grant and Adam had spent side by side on Grant’s back patio, staring up at the stars.

“Have you talked to Mike?” he asked, blowing on a slice of pizza before raising it up to his mouth.

Wyatt shook his head. “I don’t really want to.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“How did you and mom do it?” Wyatt appeared so young when he looked up, and Adam was taken aback by memories of a much younger Wyatt sitting across from him over pizza at the very same table. While he didn’t remember the specific night Wyatt had asked him about, the memory clearly existed in his head somewhere.

“Do what?” he asked. “Get along? Talk?”

“Yeah.”

“We didn’t have a choice.” Adam set down his half-eaten slice of pizza and wiped his fingers on a paper towel. “We had you.”

“I’ve seen plenty of ugly divorces where kids were involved.”

“It just never felt like an option,” he said. “We were young and shouldn’t have been in bed with each other in the first place. Neither of us felt like it was fair to make you pay for our bad decisions.”

Wyatt frowned.

“Not that you’re a bad decision,” Adam quickly said. “I wouldn’t trade you for anything in the world. I hope you know that’s not how I meant it.”

“I know,” Wyatt said softly. “You might not say the same thing if you’d been around more like Mom was.”

“You don’t really think that, do you?”

Wyatt made a flippant gesture with his hand. “I don’t know. You left. Mike left.”

“I didn’t leave,” he interrupted, leaning forward and waiting for Wyatt to look at him. “You didn’t want to come anymore. I worried if I forced you, you’d end up resenting me. You know, Wyatt, I wasn’t so far off from being a teenager when that happened. I remember it clearly.”

“Don’t you think there was…I don’t know, some kind of parental responsibility?”

“You have two parents,” he said. “Three, actually.”

“Clark isn’t my dad.”