Connor My Dear Boy (FINISHED)

33

Connor, once again, found himself in the city, although under very different circumstances.

For one thing, he was sleeping in an actual bed, rather than on a bench in the park. It was sort of refreshing, even if it didn't quite feel like home.

The apartment was not as big as Haytham's house had been, but definitely more spacious than the one that Connor had shared with his mother. Most of the furniture was old and mix-matched. The room in which Connor was staying (it was not his room; he refused to accept it as his room) was painted blue and had a window facing the harbor.

Another difference was that Connor was in a completely different neighborhood than the one he had been in before. Yes, it still had its problems (graffiti, the occasional criminal), but that was to be expected when living in the city. The neighborhood was more of a middle-class area, and it certainly was not as rundown as his old one.

The final difference was that he wasn't alone. Connor found himself staying with an older man named Adéwalé. He was a dark skinned man with short gray hair, who was getting into his sixties. He had one son, but his child had long since grown and has had a child of his own. Adéwalé was still willing to take in foster children from time to time.

When Connor first arrived at Adéwalé's apartment, he jokingly told the teenager that he used to be a pirate. It didn't take long for Connor to figure out that the old man actually used to be a fisherman. This was evident by all of the pictures of ships hung up around the wall and the ever-present scent of fish that had lingered.

Adéwalé mostly left Connor to his own devices, which suited him just fine. He seemed to be perfectly fine with giving the teenager some space. They both recognized that this was just a temporary arrangement so there was no point in getting overly attached. That did not mean that they were unkind to one another, though.

As Connor didn't have any school to go to, he mostly spent his time reading the books that Adéwalé kept around the house. They were historical and informative, for the most part. Many were about the history of the slave trade in the Caribbean. Others were about sailing. Connor's favorite was about the types of birds found across the Eurasian continent. It appeared that Adéwalé had been reading it some time ago, bookmarked a page about a type of crow called a Jackdaw, and then completely forgot about the book. When the old man found Connor reading it, he said that the teenager could keep it if he wanted.

Connor did this to kill the anxiety that was steadily growing before his meeting with Lucy. She had dropped him off, promising to return in a couple days so that she could discuss his arrangement with him with Haytham.

"I'll be back in three days," she had promised, before giving her obligatory, "Be good!"

Connor wasn't usually the type to get excessively worried about things; he liked to think of himself as level headed and rational. There was no need to worry about something that didn't need to be worried about. The approaching meeting with Lucy, however… It was definitely something he needed to worry about. His entire future was hanging in the balance.

Nevertheless, Connor did his best to hide his apprehensions from Adéwalé. The arrangement was temporary, as Connor kept reminding himself; in just a couple of days it would officially no longer be any of Adéwalé's business what Connor was doing or thinking.

Finally, the day came where Lucy would retrieve Connor to talk to him about Haytham. Connor woke up in the early hours of the morning, although he knew that she would not be coming for him until around ten. His internal clock told him that it was around five.