Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
One Flew East Part 1
They were sitting on the couch in his apartment, planning out what they would do with Phillip and Jamie over the weekend. He had spent time with them over a couple weekends and several evenings, and slowly he was beginning to be accepted as a part of their lives as "Mom's boyfriend". But the boys had not come to Lee's apartment yet, and he wanted to make a good impression.
He was a little nervous about it. This relationship with the boys had to work. He had already married their mother; he could not afford to misstep or sabotage himself now.
"You know, everything that I have ever read on the subject says that I am the one that has to start breaking the ice as soon as possible," he told her, keenly aware of the amount of ice he still had to break.
"Well, that ought to be easy with Phillip. He already thinks you're pretty terrific."
There was a time when he would have focused on the fact that Phillip thought him terrific, but he liked to think he had grown up a little since then. A kid who called his brother Wormbrain and was obsessed with girls and cars was hardly difficult to impress.
"Yeah, he is the easiest, but...I think Jamie is going to be tough."
She smiled a little, running her hand over his hair the way she always did when she mothered anyone.
"Well, Jamie's always been my baby. It'll just take a little more time, that's all."
The morning had been going so well that he really should have been able to predict the knock on the door at that precise moment, signaling Billy's arrival with bad news.
He couldn't keep doing this — running between a case and his family. He couldn't keep investigating in an impeccable suit one moment and playing basketball with his stepsons, drenched with sweat despite the coolness of the day, the next moment. One or the other would have to give, and he was determined that it would not be his growing relationship with his boys.
Granted, his relationship with Jamie, such as it was, was going to need a lot of work before it could be called a growing one. There was deep-seated jealousy there, both of his popular, braces-less, glasses-less, acne-less older brother who always seemed to get his way, and of Lee, the person who got to spend more time than anyone else with Amanda, Jamie's favorite person in the world. Maybe he could work that angle. After all, she was his favorite person, too. It was something they had in common.
As he left the apartment, leaving the boys behind, he glanced back at them. He loved both of them so much more than they would ever know, and his heart ached at the thought of the precedent he was setting by leaving them alone on this first day they had come over. He smiled a little, ruefully, at the sight of Phillip already engrossed in the TV, and Jamie dead to the world, buried in his encyclopedia.
On the surface, it looked exactly like everything he had ever wanted from life — but the foundation of a relationship, trust based on consistency over time, was missing. That was what he would have to build.
