1 Chapter 1

“Are you excited?” Rick Pruitt asked, glancing in the rearview mirror.

His eight-year-old son Micah sat in the back seat, a Slurpee held fast in both hands, the straw clenched tightly between thin lips. Micah turned away from the window long enough to meet his father’s gaze in the mirror’s reflection and nod, then looked back out at the crowded, rainy parking lot. A loud slurp on the straw was his only audible response to Rick’s question.

“Funny,” Rick mused aloud, “you don’t lookexcited.”

Micah let the straw slip free. “I am, Dad. Really.”

Slowing the car to a crawl, Rick began looking for a free parking space. To his son, he said, “You’ve been talking about this movie nonstop since you first heard about it months ago. Here we are finally, opening weekend, and all I get is a nod and a really? It’s like you don’t even want to be here.”

“I do,” Micah protested, throwing a bit more enthusiasm into his voice this time.

“Then act like it, kiddo.” Rick saw backup lights ahead and shot forward a few feet, flipping on his turn signal. As he hit the brake, ready to wait for the other car to pull out so he could get the spot, he glanced in the mirror again at his son’s pout. “I’m giving up my whole Saturday for this, you know. I have a lot of work I need to get done—”

“I know,” Micah mumbled.

“I could’ve asked your mother to take you to see this instead of me,” Rick added.

Micah pouted harder. “She doesn’t like Pokémon.”

Yeah, well, here’s a newsflash for you,Rick thought, inching forward to make sure the other car coming down the aisle towards him didn’t steal his spot. Neither do I.

To be honest, Rick wasn’t quite sure what Pokémon was, exactly. Some sort of animal, maybe? A Japanese cartoon and only the hottest app at the moment, that much he knew. And judging from the amount of merchandising in Micah’s bedroom, it was also a silly little gimmick that was making someone overseas a shitload of money. His son had posters, and toys, and action figures, and DVDs. Bed sheets, bath towels, T-shirts, a jacket, shoes, and socks. A backpack, a pencil box, pens, notebooks, even a lunch box. And a board game, a card game, video games, and comic books. Hell, somehow he even managed to convince his mother to let him download the app, though Rick thought they had agreed when they bought him an iPad Mini tablet that he could only use it for reading and schoolwork, not games. Some yellow thing with a lightning bolt for a tail seemed to be Micah’s favorite character—it was on everything he owned—but when asked, he claimed he liked them all.

Rick didn’t get it. Back in his day, it’d been G.I. Joes and He-Man, which at least lookedhuman. His son would be turning nine in a few months, and was already too old to be sleeping with a stuffed animal, in his opinion. Excuse me, a plush toy, Rick thought, jockeying into the freed parking space ahead of the other waiting car. As Micah’s mother had explained more than once, “stuffed animals” were for girls, but “plush toys” were gender neutral.

Yeah, right. If you sleep with it, it’s a stuffed animal, as far as I’m concerned. You can try calling a twelve-inch G.I. Joe an action figure, but the moment you take off his fatigues and put him into a boating outfit of Ken’s, he becomes a fashion doll, plain and simple.

Not that Rick had anything against that. If his son wanted to sleep with a stuffed animal, more power to the kid. Hell, Rick was a gay man who ended up with a son because he’d made a bad decision at a college party he’d been too drunk at to remember, so who was he to tell Micah what to do? Just don’t fool yourself,he wanted to say. Call a spade a spade, be happy with who you are, and don’t try to pretend you’re anything different—not for others, and not for yourself, either.

But he couldn’t say that to a little kid, especially not one as sensitive as Micah was. The boy wasn’t old enough yet to understand Rick wasn’t being mean.

And then Susan won’t let me hear the end of it.

Putting the car into park, he cut off the engine and half-turned in the seat to study his son. He didn’t speak, just waited for Micah to look at him. After a long moment, Micah did, one corner of his mouth quirking up into a half-smile above the Slurpee’s straw.

“Hey,” Rick said gently. “What’s wrong really? Tell your old dad.”

“You’re not that old,” Micah countered.