Page 27 of Winning You
Too good.
And wrong. It was very, very wrong.
“Sit on the left,” Frankie said, his voice going a little rough again as he stopped by the table. “Um…it’s right in front of you. Sorry, I’m still learning how to give verbal cues.”
“You’re overthinking it,” Lucas said. He reached for the table, then took the shaded seat and leaned back slightly against the back of the chair. “You need to breathe and stop fixating on whether or not you’re offending me.”
“Am I that obvious?”
“It’s kind of gross, actually. I mean, I guess it’s better than people who ask me how many fingers they’re holding up, but?—”
“People do that?” God, if someone did that to Elodie, he would have punched them in the fucking mouth.
“Only assholes.” Lucas’s voice had a note of sadness in it, and Frankie took that to mean there were probably a lot of assholes around.
He took a breath. “Are you…” He searched for the right words.
“Just ask, dude.”
“How blind are you?” The words tumbled from his lips, and his cheeks turned red. He fought the urge to shove the entire sandwich in his mouth just to shut himself up. Instead, he cleared his throat and picked off a piece of the crust. “Because I know it’s a spectrum.”
“On the blind Kinsey scale—which is a thing I just made up,” Lucas added. He touched the table with the tip of his finger and drew a straight line, stopping right at the edge. “I’m here. Hella gay and totally blind.”
“Totally? As in?—”
Lucas reached up and flicked his eyeball, making Frankie rear back before he realized it made a sort of hollow clicking sound. It took him way too long to process what that meant.
“Oh. Um. You were born that way, or?—”
“Or,” Lucas said. “Eat your food while I talk.” Frankie obeyed immediately and shoved a quarter of the sandwich into his mouth, tearing the bread with his teeth. “I had tumors when I was a baby. The doctors thought it was cancer—or that it was going to spread into my brain or something. I was basically a newborn, so obviously, I don’t remember the details. Anyway, they removed my eyes. I was pretty blind anyway. My dad thinks I could see some light, but whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to risk me dying.”
Frankie swallowed thickly, the warm, gooey peanut butter sticking to the back of his throat. He should have thought to grab a drink. “Was it cancer?”
“Not according to the tests, but there wasn’t any other treatment for it, so the whole removal thing couldn’t be avoided. It doesn’t matter,” Lucas said, drumming his fingers on the table in a pattern. “It’s been like this my whole life, so it’s hard to care.”
Frankie hummed. “Elodie’s eyes aren’t like yours.”
Lucas snorted. “I kind of figured. She recognized me in the hallway.”
“Her doctors think she tells people apart by the color of their clothes. She always knows where all her pink and purple shit is, but she can’t tell the difference between a pony and a Barbie until she touches it.”
“Sounds hard,” Lucas said. “I’d rather have this.”
Frankie hadn’t ever thought about it, and he wasn’t sure he’d ever ask Elodie. After all, her sight was the only thing she’d ever known. It probably wasn’t weird to her. “She seems happy enough.”
“She’s a cool kid. I was a nightmare. I’m autistic, so my world was all sensory overload until after I hit puberty. I think my dad wanted to throw himself off a cliff most days. My other dad—the shitty one,” he clarified, “just threw me into a boarding school for blind kids.”
“That’s…bad?” He actually had been considering a school like that for Elodie. Not because he didn’t want her around all the time, but he felt so damn ill-equipped to give her what she needed.
Lucas chewed on his bottom lip, and then he started to gently rock from side to side. “It was nice. It had all the shit we needed to get by. I never had to argue with teachers for access to lecture notes or whatever. But I was also entirely unprepared for the real world. I kind of knew that everything wasn’t going to be accessible to me, but it was a huge culture shock when we moved here.”
“Would you have rather known it was hard before?”
Lucas hummed. “That’s the million-dollar question, and I am broke as fuck. But if it helps, I doubt your kid is going to have a bunch of regrets. These are my deep childhood trauma issues, and I know for a fact they could be so much worse.”
Frankie hummed in agreement, considering he had his own. And the scars ran deep.
“So. Is that why you wanted to drag me outside? To ask me for blind-child parenting advice?”
