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Isn’t this what Jared was scared was going to happen here?
I sigh. My fingers stop their slow caress of Carson’s arms when I feel a grumble vibrate through his chest and into my back. I don’t want to wake him up. I want to stay in his arms, like this, forever…
I don’t want to be scared. I don’t. I hate that I am so scared of this. Of him.
Why am I so scared?
Am I being unfair to him?
Am I transferring my own prejudices to him?
Am I scared he doesn’t know how to be with a deaf woman, or is it me?
Am I the issue?
Am I the one that doesn’t know how to be with a hearing-man?
And then there is the song…
Mom’s favorite.
Gabriel…
Should I take it for the sign that it seems to be?
Or am I just a scared little girl telling herself fairy tales because I can't face reality?
Thinking about Mom naturally leads me to think about Dad, too.
I remember once when I was little, maybe seven or eight, and I told him I didn’t want to play with the children that lived across the street because they could hear and I couldn’t, and I was scared it would go exactly like it had many times before, and I would end up the butt of some cruel joke… that they would mock me for who I was, for the things about me I could never change.
I see him in my mind, clear as day. He picks me up and sits me on his knee —right there on the very same steps I cried my eyes out on that birthday when he and Mom were gone and never coming back—, he looks down at me, the usual smile in his laughing blue eyes and he tells me something with lips and signs, and voice, sim-comming even if we are the only two people there and we’re both deaf.
He tells me that there are as many exceptions out there as there are rules.
He tells me that my parents, the other ones, the ones that gave me up… he tells me that they shouldn’t be the yardstick I measure other people up against. He tells me that I shouldn’t decide to trust someone based on if they are hearing or deaf.
He tells me that all people should be given a chance and should be judged based on the way their hearts work, not their ears.
So what am I doing here now? Right this minute?
Am I judging Carson’sheartor hisears?
CHAPTER19
Carson
One week later…
Ilook over at Mia as she sleeps in my messy bed on top of the comforter covered in bright yellow, pink, and green sticky notes. There are a dozen of books on speech therapy, body-language analysis, criminal profiling, and on her much-hated statistics spread all around her in a fan.
She's so fucking beautiful that my heart races in my chest, and my cock gets hard in my sweats in a matter of seconds as my eyes slowly sweep up and down her petite yet curvaceous form.
She’s half-lying, half-sitting on her side with yet another book opened in her lap, there are thick, pink socks on her tiny feet, and she’s wearing one of my tattered T-shirts that’s so big on her minute frame the fabric damn near swallows her whole. And I know for a fact she’s naked under that thing.
My little beauty does love to drive me fucking insane.
That first night she spent here, when she came to talk to me about Jared being all up in our business, she almost fucking killed me with how hot she made me.
