Brother's Keeper✔️

37. Dreams in Magic

Taj POV

The start of finals weeks in his second to last semester of college. As it was, his grades were decent. He was nowhere on the boy genius grades. With the change of his major last year, he had to overload his courses to graduate on time. That meant more classes to study for.

He would be happy with all Cs. Didn't need a 4.0 GPA to get a decent job. He still had no idea if would he stick around in the Bloomington-Normal area or go back to Chicago. There were other options. If he wanted to continue to work in the field he was doing for the last four years, in an admissions office, he could move to any college town.

He would start looking at that soon.

Then he had Faye to think about. Things were going great in their sexless relationship. It was a good thing they were not having sex right off the top. They could get to know each other.

"Are you going home for break?" she asked him while they studied at her place sitting at the dining room table.

"For Christmas, I'm stopping by my mom's. I got gifts for her and my sister and brother. She might cook or something, we don't do it up big in my family."

"Why not? Hell, my family celebrates Christmas like two times. My mom's side, my dad's side. That's two family dinners."

"Well, my father never was in the picture. My younger sister and brother have a different father, and he was around for a bit, then not. And my mom never had much to buy us a ton of gifts, so she did what she could."

"Oh."

"Yeah, we were...hell, are, poor, poor. Like state assistance poor. Like barely had a roof over our heads poor. Like, go to the soup kitchen to eat a meal sometimes poor."

"Damn. I didn't grow up that poor, but my mother struggled a bit when she first divorced my father. By struggle I mean we moved from a nice big house to a smaller one. She had to get a job instead of being a stay-at-home mom. She didn't buy me a car at sixteen, but she did help me get one when I went off to college at eighteen."

"Yeah, you were not poor." Everything he had he got for himself, and when he had extra, he sent it to his mother. He knew she did the best she could. The struggle was real for a single parent. That was why he never wanted to be in that situation. He only wanted kids with his wife.

If something were to ever happen that they divorce, he would take care of his kids fifty-fifty. Men that made babies and ran off were the worse.

That's why he respected Faye for doing what she did with her daughter.

"Both your parents were in your life though, even after the divorce?"

"Yeah, I stayed with my father a lot, but all credit to my mom for raising me. My father kind of checked out and wanted to continue to play the field. Never remarried, while my mother has remarried."

This was an interesting conversation and he ignored his studies for now.

"So, you're interested in remarrying at some point?"

She chuckled. "I barely count this first time as one, so yeah. No time soon. Like I said, my focus is on my daughter."

No time soon? What did that mean? She was still young. He was young, but he knew he wanted to get married. And why wait five years into the future? He needed to know her timeline.

"So after you finish grad school? Another two years or so."

"Huh? No, maybe once my kid is self-sufficient, teenage years maybe."

Teenage years? She was four now! That was at over ten years away. And that was if her daughter turned out to be a kid that didn't wild out as most teens did.