“He was nice about it. Gave me a few months to find a job and a place to live. Gave me some cash. But no one wanted to hire me. I had no real job experience. Sweet Buns was it. On the bright side, the tips are great and it’s a free commute to work.”
She stopped talking, closed her eyes, and leaned back on her elbows while he worked over her feet, massaging her arches with his thumbs.
He focused on working out the deep cleft her shoes had made. When he looked up, she had an odd expression on her face.
He stilled his hands. “Am I hurting you?”
She shook her head, then lifted her hand to cover her mouth. The side of her jaw moved.
He heard the sound of her talking, but couldn’t shift the odd pieces into words.
She was testing him—and he’d failed. She fucking knew he had hearing problems. Now would come the sympathy and the exaggerated lip movements and treating him like he’d lost his brain instead of his hearing. He set her feet on the floor and stood, trying to turn away, but she grabbed his arm. “Were you just going to keep it from me forever?”
Forever? She thought they’d have forever together, when he never dared to think beyond the moment? Each second she spent with him was a gift he’d never expected, when his entire existence had been dominated by his genetic anomaly.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
From the moment he’d awakened in the hospital after the attack, he’d realized that having trouble hearing wasn’t the worst thing. Dealing with everyone else was the problem. “I don’t want your pity.”
Her eyes snapped with anger. She smelled of burning cinnamon, not pity. “Good. Because I don’t pity you. I’m pissed at you for not telling me. I feel like everyone was in on the secret except me. I just got done telling you about being a kitten. That wasn’t easy for me. And you couldn’t share this one thing about yourself?”
“I hate being treated differently.”
“I hate being made a fool of.”
“That was never my intention.”
“What was your intention?”
“For you to know me first. Before my hearing problems. To see that I’m normal.” The words rushed directly from his heart and out his mouth. Who the fuck was he kidding? Like the tattoo on his face made him normal. Or the SMs.
“So, you read lips?”
“Mostly. I hear some things but not others; there’s no reason to it. The combination of reading speech and what hearing I have left works for the most part. Sometimes I miss a few words, but usually I understand everything from the context.”
“Is it hard? Reading speech.”
His parents, Gill, none of them had ever asked him that. “It takes a lot of concentration. Lots of words are formed inside the mouth, so I only understand them within the context of the sentence. Some words look exactly the same. The better I know a person, the easier it is for me.”
“Have you had trouble reading my words?”
“Only a few times. I didn’t know your name for a while. V’s and f’s look the same, and I’d never seen the name Evanee before.” Whoa. He hadn’t exactly written a novel on being hearing impaired, but he’d just talked about it more with her than he had with anyone else. It felt kinda…good. To not hide it. To be able to be himself.
“So that’s why you called me Honey. Because you didn’t know my name.” Nothing in her words conveyed disappointment, but her eyes spoke it.
“I call you Honey because you smell sweet, like honey, to me.”
“I smell sweet?”
Damn. Damn. Damn. Don’t go down that road. Not now. Not yet. “I couldn’t read your guy’s name either.”
“Matthew Stone. Everyone calls him Matt.” She wrapped her arms around herself like she got cold just mentioning him.
Lathan wanted to go to her, to hold her, but he wasn’t certain yet if he would be welcome. “Got it.”
“Were you born with hearing problems?”
How should he answer the question? He couldn’t tell her about being in the psych unit. Couldn’t tell her about the other patient jumping him from behind and jamming sharpened pencils into his eardrums to kill the demon he believed lived between Lathan’s ears. Couldn’t tell her that he half believed he did have a demon in his head. He hadn’t known the visions were SMs until he underwent extensive testing as an adult. “At thirteen I was attacked. My ears were damaged.”
“That’s why you’re jumpy when someone comes up behind you?”
“Yeah.” Change the subject. Quick. “Come stay with me for awhile. It’s nicer than this place.”
“Why?”
Why was a lot better than a flat-out no. “I don’t have any expectations. I’ll even sleep on the couch.”
She shook her head. She was about to reject him for this nasty motel room.
“I don’t have a ride back and forth to work.”
“I’ll bring you and pick you up.” He tried to keep the relief, the excitement out of his voice. “As long as you don’t mind riding on the back of the bike.” He was gonna need to get a car. Never thought the day would come.
“Why would you do all this for me?”
“Because you and I both know Junior isn’t done yet. And I won’t let him have an opportunity to hurt you again.” He’d wait to mention the Strategist until she was good and moved in.
In her eyes, he saw complete trust. And something more. He couldn’t exactly place a name on it, but he recognized it because it exactly mirrored what was inside him.
“You don’t have to sleep on the couch.”
“You stay with me, you’re not sleeping on the couch. You’re sleeping in the bed.” His barely resisted the urge to say my bed.
She stood on her tippy-toes. “You aren’t sleeping on the couch.” He started to protest, but she put her hand over his mouth. “And neither am I.”
Chapter 9
The sky was the color of gloom. Or maybe doom. Definitely doom. Impending doom.
“Eight a.m. is too early for an appointment. Especially since I didn’t get off work until midnight and didn’t get to bed until after two.” Damn if she hadn’t fallen asleep the moment her body hit Lathan’s mattress. That hadn’t been her intention.