Page 24 of Not Catching Love

“You’re asking my permission?”

“Not geriatric enough to get away with anything else.”

There’s a war going on behind his eyes. I love those eyes. I assume they’re hazel, but they have flecks of just about every color ever in them. Gold, brown, green, blue, black. If I had eyes like that, I’d never have to wear contacts.

“I saw you painting.”

That throws me. “What?”

“Well, I saw you helping some of the residents paint. I didn’t know you volunteered here.”

“I don’t.”

He lifts his eyebrows like he wants me to go on. Talking about myself is a tricky line to manage because I don’t usually know when to shut up. My trauma dump is more of an avalanche, and once I start, that mess keeps coming.

Which isn’t a great thing when the more people learn about me, the faster they run.

“My neighbor Aggy thought running a class here would help.”

“Help with what?”

I twirl a finger by my ear. “All this.”

He clamps down on his lip, and I know what he’s about to say before he says it.

“Notherapy.” I groan. “Don’t bring it up. We’re having a perfectly normal conversation, and I don’t need the reminder that all you see when you look at me is how fucked-up I am.”

Derek sighs, and the sound tugs at me. “You’re not fucked-up.”

“If you really thought that you wouldn’t keep using the T-word on me.”

He wants to fight back. I can read it all over his face, and if he pushes, I’ll be ready for a fight. It’s one of the things I’m good at. I’m always ready to go claws out.

He derails me with his next question. “How was it?”

At first, I think Derek is talking about therapy, and that’s not at all a can of worms I want to open around him, but then it clicks. The class. He’s not pushing the issue.

“Shit.”

“You didn’t like it?”

“I don’t think I said that.”

Derek lists his head. “If the class is shit, that sort of tells me that you didn’t like it.”

My instinct is to point out to him that everything is shit, but this is the first time we’ve had a conversation that he hasn’t been reluctant about. Having his attention is the single greatest blast of light I’ve felt in a long time, and so I dig deeper.

I lean my shoulder against the wall and scratch at the paint on my hands. “Their paintings were shit. They had no idea what they were doing. A lot of them couldn’t hear what I was saying, and Kevin is the rudest jerk I’ve ever met. The second I walked in, he asked if I’d dumped paint over my hair to make a point, and when I said no, he asked if I was one of those fairy types.”

“Hewhat?” Derek’s whole posture stiffens, and I set a reassuring hand on his arm without even thinking about it. We both freeze at the contact, and it takes me a second to yank my hand away again.

“I don’t care,” I say. “Having my life … as my life, pretty much nothing gets a reaction out of me. He could call me the nastiest words he’s ever learned, and it wouldn’t have an impact.”

“It doesn’t mean he can say whatever he wants.”

“Of course it does. We live in a free country. There’s a thing called freedom of speech. If he wants to be a bigoted piece of crap, that’s his right.”

“Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you’re free from the consequences of what you say.”

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