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Percy’s gaze flickered over Wren’s processors, and his fingers twitched like he wanted to reach up and touch. After a long beat, Percy nodded. “Yeah, alright. You’ll text me where to meet you, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Wren echoed. He took several steps back, then raised his hands to sign, “See you later.”
Percy copied the signs without asking what they were, and Wren assumed the man inferred the parting phrase. He nearly laughed again when Percy turned on his heel and marched away without so much as a goodbye, and Wren quickly adjusted his uncomfortably plump dick before heading back into the shop to deal with the aftermath of the poor bastard’s fuckup.
CHAPTER TWO
“You’re joking.”
Wren looked over his shoulder in the mirror, where Ravi was standing behind him with his arms crossed, looking like a disgruntled parent. It was a familiar expression on most of the people in Wren’s life who called themselves family or friends.
“It’s not like I’m going to marry the guy,” Wren shot back before dragging fingers through his hair. His own was a lighter brown than his brother’s by a few shades, and apart from a similar nose and crooked eyeteeth, he and Caleb looked almost nothing alike.
Wren had been the do-over child anyway, after Caleb had been born profoundly deaf and the doctors hadn’t been able to come up with a reason why. His parents had panicked, and when Caleb’s implants failed, they decided to start over.
Try again.
Whatever ridiculous bullshit hearing parents always thought when they realized their child was going to be different than them and not “fixable.”
Of course, Wren had gotten the same results as Caleb, and their parents had gone through the same steps—having some doctor drill holes into his skull and dig around and implant things in order to make him closer to their version of normal.
The difference was Wren’s surgery worked—at least well enough for his parents to call it a success. Well enough to make excuses about not learning sign language and hoping that Caleb would just…sit quietly in the background and not be a nuisance.
Wren became the unwilling golden child after that, and Caleb had been shipped off to a Deaf school. Wren was left to horrific speech therapy classes with hateful pathologists who told him he would be a failure in life if he used ASL. And, not to mention, the constant migraines and facial twitches from his implants that plagued him every time he was tired or stressed or sneezed wrong.
When he was a kid, he idolized Caleb to the point that it was probably unhealthy. He used to fantasize about Caleb coming home during holidays and vacations and looking at Wren and finally seeing someone worthy of his time. Seeing someone who was Deaf instead of some assimilated little ankle biter who couldn’t hold more than a few words of conversation with him.
He would imagine telling Caleb all the ways his life was hard. And how he felt like he didn’t belong in his parents’ world and how kids would make fun of him for his weird deaf voice. He had no friends, and his teachers were always mad at him because he couldn’t hear them properly, and his parents were so angry all the time because the implants hadn’t done their job of curing him.
He’d picture Caleb understanding. He’d picture him holding Wren close—hugging him and telling him that it was shitty but it was okay. That he’d teach him ASL so he didn’t have to work so goddamn hard anymore, and that he’d take Wren back to the Deaf school, where he could belong.
But that never happened. Every school break, Caleb looked at him the way he’d look at dog shit on the bottom of his shoe. When Wren would try to use the rudimentary signs he’d learned from a book in the library, Caleb would roll his eyes, and his hands would move so fast they were nothing more than a blur.
And it would remind Wren that he didn’t belong in Caleb’s world either.
Wren still worked his ass off to quietly learn the basics of ASL, but when Caleb finally did acknowledge him with sign, it was to tell him what a shitty job he was doing and to leave him alone.
So he did.
He felt lost at sea, totally by himself. He never gave up hope, but it took years and years for Caleb to even try to understand what life was like for Wren. And it took him even longer than that to acknowledge that Wren hadn’t had it easy. That assimilation had been forced on him, and he hadn’t wanted to wear the mantle of golden child.
It didn’t erase Wren’s trauma at the hands of both his parents and his brother, but when Caleb was finally willing to listen—and to understand and then apologize for shutting Wren out—Wren was so starved for a place to belong that he didn’t even hesitate in forgiving his brother. And he took every crumb of acceptance and treated them like they were mountains.
Of course, life was different now, which was the only reason Wren wasn’t a worse mess, but his life had gotten infinitely more complicated the older he got. Like when he started developing an attraction to men and women but got itchy and sick to his stomach at the thought of actually dating. That had led him to a long string of short-lived affairs with a field of broken hearts and no way to stop himself from fucking people over except to refuse to do more than spend a single night with a person.
He was a good man. He loved people. He had a massive heart. But there was something wrong with it, and he just didn’t understand what it was.
Turning, he fixed Ravi with a stare and waved his hand up and down his body. “Well?”
“You look hot,” Ravi answered. “But you’re seriously going to go out and have sex with the guy who yelled at my brother?”
Wren scoffed. “He didn’t yell at Bodhi. He yelled near him, and then he felt like shit about it. He was mad at himself for being an ass.”
At least, that’s what Wren had taken away from Percy’s breakdown in the café when he realized that BSL and ASL were so different that there was no chance of using his education to understand American sign.
Ravi didn’t look convinced, but he also didn’t look like he was going to try and stop Wren. “Just wear a condom.”
Wren grinned widely. “I always wear a condom. Even with blow jobs. Trust me, nothing gets strangers hotter than rolling one on with your mouth.”
