Page 8 of Saving You

He looked over at his sister, who was typing on her phone, and he could see the pinched, annoyed look on her face. ‘Oz,’ she signed, using his sign name.

He shrugged and glanced over at her husband, Grady, who was leaning back in his chair, looking vaguely amused. ‘Don’t ask me to interpret,’ he signed. He used Signed English instead of ASL, so it always took Oz’s brain a second to catch up. ‘I’m not good.’

That wasn’t a lie. Alora was better at it, but not by much. Neither of them was fluent, and Alora made it loudly obviousshe preferred when he used his processors. He could hear with them—quite well, in fact. After several years of adjustments and updates, they’d been declared a resounding success. According to his medical team, anyway.

He had a Deaf accent, but not as strong as his parents feared he would, and he could hear most things so long as the room was quiet and the sounds weren’t too high or too low.

He could take calls, understand the lyrics of his favorite songs, he could have conversations in public so long as it wasn’t too crowded and the background noise wasn’t overwhelming. Hell, he could even sometimes make out what someone was shouting across the room.

But it didn’t change the fact that he was Deaf. He’d embraced it like a second skin, and he didn’t want to let go. He liked his language. He liked his people. Silence for him was a comfort. He wasn’t afraid of what was lurking around the corner where he couldn’t hear it.

He was content.

No, more than that. He was happy. And he was tired of giving in to their demands.

‘If this doesn’t involve me,’ he signed, knowing they wouldn’t follow more than a word or two, ‘I’m leaving. I have a kid to see for my mentor program and a bunch of essays to grade. Have fun with the party. See you later.’

‘Wait!’ Alora signed, then made a grab for him.

He spun and quirked a brow at her. ‘What?’

‘Promise me you’ll be at the party. No matter what.” She actually signed a little when she spoke, which made him realize she was actually worried he was going to neglect his niece on her birthday.

He sighed and dropped to a knee beside her chair. “I will be there,” he said slowly, hoping he was moderating his voice audible but not loud enough to startle the newborn. “But stopinviting me to these things. None of you will learn sign, and I’m Deaf. Learn or leave me out of it.”

“Oz,” he saw her say aloud.

He shook his head and rose, heading for the door. He was a thousand percent sure his mom and sister were calling after him, but he could easily ignore what he couldn’t hear, and he had a smile on his face as he made it to his car.

It didn’t last. The ache in his chest grew to the size of a goddamn meteor as he headed down the street. He’d grown up knowing he was both different and part of the very average statistic of Deaf kids born to hearing parents. He’d learned the statistics in his first Deaf studies class in college.

His family was amongst the over seventy percent who never learned sign for their Deaf child. He was one of too fucking many, and it was exhausting.

He was comforted by knowing more than a dozen hearing parents who had made signing in the home a priority, but it didn’t help with the stinging jealousy in his chest when he was around them. He hated the white-hot resentment that tended to bubble up whenever he saw how happy those kids were.

It was worse when the kids had CIs because looking through the window at the life he felt like he’d deserved was harder than he wanted to admit. And acknowledging that no matter what he said or what he did, his parents and sister would never change was damn near impossible. He wanted to believe in miracles.

Or he wanted to create a little family of his own—a child he could spoil in ways he was never spoiled. But that hadn’t panned out either.

His longest relationship had been with Darcy—his sister’s former college roommate and best friend. She was nice enough at the start, but moving in together had been the worst mistake of his life. She didn’t want him to take his processors off, ever. She didn’t want him to sign in public, ever. She knew the verybasics—her alphabet and about a dozen phrases—but she never used them.

At home, she’d respond verbally. If he signed in public, she’d turn bright red and demand he stop embarrassing her. And her demands worked for a while. He went from his newfound Deaf pride to feeling shy and humiliated every time people stared at him, and it took him far too long to realize it was her hang-up, not his own.

The first time they split up, she told him she would do better, and he was too afraid of being lonely to turn her down, so they got back together. The second time they split up, his family staged an intervention and guilted him into walking back his decision to end it.

The third time had resulted in a knock-down, drag-out fight that lasted three days, ending with him throwing his processors into his gym bag and refusing to put them on. Darcy snapped. She trashed the house, broke his flashing doorbell sensor, stole his three favorite coffee mugs, and dumped his imported, authentic Kona coffee bag into the toilet before she took her things and stormed out.

She’d apologized later, but he hadn’t forgiven her for not only the things she’d done but the things she’d said.

The words that had crossed her lips before he turned his hearing off had dug under his skin. Some of them were his biggest insecurities: he was never going to find someone willing to love him the way she loved him. He was broken. He didn’t fit in anywhere, and it showed.

Some of it was worse. Hateful, angry things he hadn’t seen or heard since the middle school courtyard. She mocked his signing, his accent, his body language. She mocked his inability to follow along, even when he could hear her. She used words he refused to repeat, even in his own head.

So when her apology came through in a three-paragraph text, he deleted it and blocked her number.

That would have been that, except his family had decided she was the one for him, and for months, every time he turned up to a family event, she was there. It took almost a year of icing them out for them to get the message, and it was only after his sister vowed she would never invite Darcy to a family gathering again that he finally relented and showed up to his dad’s sixtieth birthday.

And they were true to their word.

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