Page 87 of Tameron

I frowned. “Wrong about what?”

“About only being able to be yourself with us. I don’t think that’s true.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think you’re fully yourself with us. There’s always a part of you that you’re shielding…like you tried to do just now. You never show us your deepest emotions. The superficial ones, sure, but not the underlying ones.”

What the fuck was he talking about? “I have no idea what you mean.”

“You never get angry with us for forgetting that you can’t hear us if we look the other way when we talk. Or when we mumble. Or when we forget to turn the subtitles on.”

I shook my head furiously. “That’s on me. I have no right to be angry with you when you’re not doing it on purpose. It’s my problem that I can’t hear well. Not yours.”

“Why not? I’ve yelled at you guys plenty of times when you’ve left shit on the stairs, making it harder for me to navigate them, to name one example.”

My insides grew cold. “Yeah, but that’s…different.”

It was different, right? It wasn’t the same thing because…why, exactly?

“It’s not. If we are, as you say, your home, why can’t you be yourself with us? Why can’t you show us that anger,that annoyance, that frustration? You’re always adapting to us instead of the other way around, and it’s not right.”

I’d never heard Creek spout such wisdom, and inside me, pride and admiration battled with anger and frustration. Because he was right, dammit all to hell. He was absolutely, one hundred percent right, and I hated it.

I buried my face in my hands, needing a moment to compose myself. He was right. On some level, I’d been afraid that if I showed them everything, if I asked them to adapt the way I needed them to, that it would prove to be too much. That I would be too much. That they’d reject me, make me the outsider.

Iwasthe outsider. Despite their disabilities, Creek and Bean fit in. I didn’t.

And how could I consider them my home if I never showed them all of me? God, my head hurt from all that thinking, but I had to figure this out. It mattered.

“If you’re not my home, then…” Then what was? Who was? Wasn’t there any place I felt truly at ease, anyone I could be wholly myself with? Wasn’t there anywhere I didn’t feel like an outsider?

It struck me as if someone had lit a light in a dark tunnel, as if the clouds that had covered the sun suddenly drifted away, revealing this brightness in all its glory.

How had I been this blind?

“I’m in love with Dayton,” I said slowly, my voice filled with wonder. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph… I’m in love with Dayton.”

When I looked up, I found Bean watching me with teary eyes while Creek was looking downright smug, the son of a bitch. “You knew,” I accused him. “You knew I was in love with him.”

Creek rolled his eyes. “Of course I did. We all did. We were just waiting for you to figure it out.”

Lord help me. Dayton was it. Dayton was my home. He was the only person I could be myself with, who accepted allmy faults and shortcomings, all my limitations and sensitivities. Voice on or off, in English or ASL, he was there for me.

“I have to go.”

Creek and Bean shared a look, then laughed.

“Go,” Bean said. “He’s waiting for you.”

He was. And he probably had been for a while now. Because amid all the revelations that sparked inside me like fireworks lighting up the sky, I knew one thing with absolute certainty.

Dayton loved me too.

I drove on autopilot, as if in a dream. The traffic was as bad as always, but somehow, it didn’t matter because Dayton would be there. He always had been. I’d been pushing him away from the get-go, but he’d been like a rock, stable and unmoving.

Funnily enough, I wasn’t even nervous. I had nothing to stress about. I was about to tell the man I loved that he was my home, my everything, which was nothing to fear, only something to look forward to.

Because he loved me too. Now that my eyes had been opened, I could see it in a million different ways. Small things and big things. In his touch, his looks, his everything except his words.

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