Connectivity Issues with a Cobra 🐍

Chapter 5: Dangerous Liaisons

"Here, you go, guys," the waitress said, setting down their plates.

Maybe it was wishful thinking on the father's part, but he couldn't help but look at the identical bacon cheeseburgers in front of them and muse over the realization they had more in common than simply their hankerings for extra onions?

The cop who insisted Robby was just a rotten apple who hadn't fallen far from the tree couldn't have been more wrong because his son was more kind-hearted, polite, and desperate for affection than he'd ever been.

Yet, at the same time, his son had gotten some of his worst qualities as well. Like his insecurity, temper, loneliness, and desperation to hide away from the world when things became tough.

Robby was everything he would fight to the death to protect from harm. Every ounce of innocence, naivety, and hope that hadn't been extinguished before he even reached adulthood burned brightly in his teenage son.

Johnny watched as one of the cuffs of his son's shirt slid down over his wrist when he reached over to grab a napkin. The shirt was loose around the collar, and the sleeves were too long for it to belong to a teenager.

'He's wearing Kreese's shirt,' the father realized.

The food turned to ash in his mouth.

Logically it made sense since Robby was living out of a duffle bag and likely didn't have an entire wardrobe at his disposal.

'...or was it someone else's shirt?'

At the beginning of their chats online, Robby mentioned to him that he'd talked to other guys on the app. Was this a shirt from one of the guys he'd mentioned when he hinted at hooking up with men in the past?

His father didn't like the thought of that.

Johnny nearly sent up a prayer hoping that his boy wasn't involved with either of those two dirtbags who'd been hanging around his mom's apartment. Trey and Cruz? The two creeps were far too close to his son for his liking.

Speaking of which?

'Why was his son even on a site like that one?' he thought warily.

He noticed his son looking at him with a quizzical look.

Embarrassed, Johnny released his death grip on his beer and forced himself to relax marginally. The color gradually returned to his knuckles which had turned white from how hard he was gripping the bottle.

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"W-What's with the computer name?" Johnny asked, chickening out at the last second.

It seemed like the easier topic to discuss without flipping over the table in an over-protective rage.

"It's a mix of two skateboarding terms," Robby explained with a nonchalant shrug as he reached over and picked up a french fry.

It had been amusing to discover the teenager liked bacon cheeseburgers with no tomato and extra onions — something he had in common with his old man. "An Acid Drop is when you freefall to the ground, and a McTwist is when you perform a 540-degree turn on a ramp."

Johnny felt his stomach churn in a way that had nothing to do with his meal.

He did NOT like the sound of that.

"You been skateboarding a lot lately?" he tried to play it casually, not wanting to piss off his kid. He'd never really been one of those helicopter parents.

"Sometimes, I've been kind of busy training lately, and they put up cameras near the mall so I can't jump off the handrails anymore."

"There's a rail near my dojo," Johnny said before his brain caught up with him.

"I've ridden that handrail a few times, but it gets too repetitive after a while," Robby eyed him with a hint of curiously like he was debating his next words. "I don't think that's really what you wanted to ask me, though, is it?"

His father smiled uneasily.

Robby had always been an observant little scamp.

"What were you doing on an app like that?" Johnny asked, deciding to bite the bullet. Only to vehemently hope he hadn't fucked this whole thing up. "Don't you know how dangerous this could have been?"

Despite there being over a decade of pain, anger, and misunderstandings between them. Robby was smart enough to know his dad was merely concerned for his welfare, and it made something warm flutter inside him.

"I know what kinds of people are out there, remember? Living on the street taught me a lot of things, and one of them was how to avoid people who looked at me like I was a four-course meal. Out there, you learn real quick that people who genuinely want to help you are few and far between."

Johnny shuddered at the thought of the kinds of skeevy people his son dealt with while on the run from the police for those two weeks. The streets of downtown Los Angeles were the least safe place he could imagine for a teenager.

His guilt over the part he played in his son's disappearance (the stupid feud that had affected so many of the kids) drove him to lose himself in the bottom of a bottle.

It only got worse every time the news showed his son's picture on the screen and reminded everyone within earshot that no one had so much as seen a trace of the teen runaway in all that time.

"Why risk using the app then?" it seemed unfathomable to the father.

"Probably for the same reason you did? I was tired of being alone, exhausted from the constant stress of trying to impress people who don't give a shit about me, and I wanted to find someone who would care."

"I've always cared about you, Robby," his dad said softly.

"Then why did it take this long for you to tell me?"

The question hung heavily in the air.