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Luke swiped his phone from the kitchen island. No missed distress calls or texts from her, so maybe she was doing fine.
Maybe she was doing great actually.
Maybe she was flirting up a storm with Kyle and enchanting the man with all her weirdly charming ways and squeezy-cuddly tendencies and tiny perfect smiles—
Cold water doused Luke’s hand as he strangled the bottle in his grip. Setting it on the coffee table, he shook his head.
Jesus. He needed to get his shit together.
No,what he needed to do was make a decision. Stay or go.
Staying meant pacing around like a pussy crushing plastic bottles.
Going meant putting his heart on the line and waiting to see if Andy would crush it.
Because if Luke stepped foot in the Sin Spot tonight, there was no way he’d be able to keep pretending he wasn’t falling for her. No way he could stand by and watch her leave with someone else.
At least not without making it abundantly clear he’d like her to leave withhimfirst.
Luke hadn’t wanted to spell things out for her earlier at Suni’s, but maybe Andy really needed him to. She’d mentioned before she wasn’t very good at reading people. And he’d seen on a number of occasions how she took things more literally and didn’t pick up on certain nuances, subtleties, and things left unsaid.
Halting midstride, Luke’s gaze shot to the picture above his couch. The one Andy stopped to look at every time she came over after a surf lesson.
The things left unsaid.
Suddenly, as Luke stared at the Clay Marzo poster, his pulse picked up. Whenever he looked at it, he saw someone like him. A fellow surfer. A man who got it. The pure joy of riding waves.
But when Andy looked at it, was that what she saw? Or did she see something more? Did she see someone who was like her in a different way?
Someone who had Asperger’s.
The diagnosis was retired and folded into the umbrella term of Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Andy’s words whispered back to Luke as he sank onto the couch. As did countless other moments with her. Moments where he should have seen it. All the ways she was subtly telling him she was different. Not just “quirky” different either. But neurologically different.
Holy shit, had he missed it. The thing she’d left unsaid.
Andy was autistic.
A stunned laugh stuttered from Luke as he sat there, mind completely blown by the realization. One he knew with every fiber of his being was true.
Some people have sensory processing disorder, you know.
Jesus, she’d all but told him today at Suni’s. Weren’t sensory processing issues a pretty common thing for autistic people?
Luke rocked forward, fingers suddenly flying over the phone still clutched in his hand. A quick search of sensory processing disorder and ASD confirmed the two were often linked and turned up a staggering amount of information on both.
For several minutes, Luke sifted through various articles, heart racing faster and faster as everything he read only confirmed what he’d just realized about Andy. But it didn’t take long for something else to occur to him.
Andy had SPD, and she was currently at a club where the music was loud, the dancing was close-contact, and the entire vibe was sinful, sensory overload. Not to mention she probably only knew a small handful of people in the whole joint.
“Fuck,” he hissed, swiping his bike keys from the coffee table and jumping to his feet.
Andy had asked him to be her wingman.
He wasn’t about to leave her hanging.
Chapter twenty-four
