Page 7 of Tameron

He turned around. “And a good morning to you too, Tameron,” he said, flashing me a smile while also signing ‘Good morning.’

“You don’t need to sign. I can hear you.”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t sure if you wore your hearing aids to class.”

“How else would I hear the instructions?”

“Watch what everyone else is doing? It wouldn’t matter to me.”

Oh, so I could turn him off? There was an appealing thought…though it wouldn’t even matter. It wasn’t his voice that annoyed me. It was the whole package. “Why did you tell Nash?”

“Because I was concerned about you. Your records showed you rarely miss a class, so I wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

Fuck, how was I supposed to argue with that? “You could’ve asked me directly.”

“Sure, but I’ve been around you enough that I know Nash is the more effective way.”

He wasn’t wrong, which obviously annoyed me even more. “He was all on my ass about it this morning, so thanks a lot for that.”

His mouth quivered like he was fighting not to laugh. “It clearly worked, didn’t it?”

I put my hands on my hips. “Don’t go behind my back. I can fight my own battles.”

His smile vanished, and he stepped closer to me. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I didn’t look at it that way, but you’re absolutely right. I took agency away from you, and I shouldn’t have.”

Christ on a bike, why did he have to go and be all nice and apologetic about it? Now I couldn’t even ream him out in my head anymore. “Yeah, whatever. Don’t do it again.”

He nodded solemnly. “I won’t. You have my word.”

Why did he always take everything so seriously?

He signed something, but when he saw I’d tuned in too late, he repeated it. ‘How are your ASL lessons going?’

I brought my hand to the middle of my chest, my thumb toward me, and tapped my thumb a few times against my chest. ‘Fine.’

‘What level are you now?’

‘Level four.’

Learning ASL was so much harder than I had imagined. My teacher was a bit of a dick, which didn’t help, but the nuances of the various signs were so goddamn hard to remember, not to mention the fact that it was a whole different language with its own rules and grammar.

Two other students—a lovely grandmother named Shelley, who was battling arthritis, and her grandson Misha, a shy twenty-three-year-old dude who’d been hurt in a car crash—were coming in, and I’d never been more relieved in my life to see them.

“Hey, Misha!” I waved at him.

His face lit up with surprise, probably because I’d never greeted him with that much exuberance. “Hi, T-t-tameron.”

Now that I’d set the tone, I needed to sell the act, or Dayton would realize what I was doing, so I walked over to Shelley and Misha. “How was your weekend?”

“G-good,” he said. “I went s-surfing.”

“He found an amazing new teacher,” Shelley said. “One who has a lot of experience working with differently abled people. He’s missing a leg himself, though if not for the prosthesis, you’d never be able to tell by the way he surfs. His balance is amazing.And he’s so freaking nice. I saw a flyer he put out at a surf shop and immediately told Misha, ‘You should try this. He looks like a guy who could teach you.’ And I was right, wasn’t I?” She said the last part with a loving look toward Misha, who nodded even as he rolled his eyes at me in clear embarrassment over his grandmother.

Shelley was like a faulty jukebox. If you threw in a quarter’s worth of questions, she’d give you at least ten minutes of conversation. But she was so lovely that it was hard to mind her chatty nature…or the fact that she used a phrase likedifferently abled people, not exactly an appropriate term, though one that a lot of older folks still had in their vocabulary.

Then what she said clicked. “Oh, you’re talking about Heath, right?”

“Yes,” Shelley said. “You know him?”

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