Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
JONAH
“Would you slap a teammate—”
“Yes.” The profound silence followed by an annoyed sigh told me I hadn’t been patient enough, so I shut my mouth and cleared my throat to let my little brother know he should go on.
“Would you slap a teammate,” Caleb said again, slower this time, “for twenty-five thousand dollars?”
“Dude. I would pay twenty-five thousand dollars to slap a teammate,” Micah interrupted.
I kicked to the side, grinning when I made contact with some part of his body. Probably his shin, if his grunt was anything to go by. As goalies, we were beat up there the most. Especially as totally blind goalies.
The pads helped, but not much.
Sitting back, I folded my arms over my chest and listened for the sounds of our mom in the kitchen. She was humming one of those creepy-as-fuck old showtunes, which told me she was in a good mood. But good-mood mom was never the best mom.
That was when she was most scary. When she was having one of her episodes that meant chaos for the rest of the family. Bile rose into the back of my throat, and my anxiety ramped up.
“Jonah,” Caleb said.
Right. Shit. I forgot Caleb had been distracting us with hypotheticals.
“For twenty-five grand, yes. There are a few I’d slap for free.
” More than a few, but I was trying to be kind to my team.
Unfortunately, the current owner was a gigantic fucking twat-waffle who insisted on drafting players who wanted to make asshole their entire personality.
An unfortunate side effect of being para hockey was that a lot of guys felt like they had something to prove.
Like they had to be bigger pieces of shit than NHL players, as though that would legitimize them or something.
There were two players on my team currently on six game suspensions for tossing out homophobic slurs during our last game against the Fury.
Chad—because of fucking course it was Chad—and Kevin. Because fuck Kevin. Goddamn rookies and their goddamn mouths. We’d pulled Mitch off the bench and some guy named Osric from the farm, but I was starting to contemplate poking out one of Ford’s eyes so he might qualify to come play with us.
I had no idea how well he’d skate with his prosthetic, but it was starting to feel worth the attempt. And I mean, it was just one little eye.
I had none, and I was just fine.
Killian might murder me if I further disabled his boyfriend, but whatever. He’d get over it.
“You’re being weird and quiet,” Micah said after a long stretch of silence.
Usually when I got quiet, the conversation moved along without me, but we were all tense today.
Mom had called us all in for some kind of big announcement, and the last time she’d done that, Micah and I had been in high school, and she sat us down to tell us she’d written a book about the “horrific struggles of being a mom to blind sons.”
She hadn’t transcribed the book into braille, but she narrated it herself, so I couldn’t even hate-read it unless I wanted to hear her whining at us over a recording about how difficult we’d made her life.
There wasn’t a chance in hell I was subjecting myself willingly to eight hours of her simpering Disability Mom voice.
Living with it was bad enough.
Life with her had been both really easy and really fucking hard.
She’d made our genetic condition her entire fucking personality, which meant everywhere we went, she was either picking a fight with perceived ableism, or she was talking loudly to anyone with the ability to hear about how brave her sons were.
And by her sons, she meant herself. That spoke to her weird, complicated, Greek-tragedy-style mental health disorder that didn’t have a name yet but should.
But because she’d made her personality having blind kids, our house was also probably the most accessible house that any kid like us could have ever wanted. Sometimes I wanted to thank her for it, but mostly, the three of us just hated her.
Because dear god, what it cost us was more than the therapy we’d all started going to the moment we left home.
At least Micah and I had hockey, so we could pick fights and shed some of the frustration whenever she really pissed us off.
Caleb had metalsmithing, and while he pretended half the noises he was making was twisting hot iron into artsy shapes to sell at his art shows, I knew he was probably just beating the fuck out of scraps to lift some of the weight off his chest.
Luckily, we were all adults now with our own lives and own homes, so whatever she had to say, at least we could politely tell her to fuck off. None of her problems were our problems, and the three of us had gotten together to decide that before we set foot in the house.
“Alright, boys,” she singsonged. Her feet gently tapped on the wood floors as she made her way back into the living room. “Tea is on the table.”
“Pass,” Micah said. He’d started shedding his obligatory parental deference a lot earlier than I had. “I don’t do leaf water.”
“But you’ll drink bean water like you need it to live?” Caleb asked.
“Bean water is superior water that actually makes you feel human, you turd.”
“Fuck you—”
“Fuck you!”
“Boys,” Mom said in her annoying reprimanding tone.
“Can we just get this over with?” Micah asked from behind a sigh. “I have places to be. A game to get ready for. Dudes to fuck—”
“Do you have to be so crass? I didn’t raise you like this,” she snapped.
That was what she always said. Usually, it was followed by some Bible verse about loving thy neighbor or…I don’t know, something about tongues—I never did pay attention, and considering the braille version of the bible was fifty billion volumes, it was a book I tended to skip.
There was silence, and I had a feeling she was looking at all of us, trying to gauge how well her announcement was going to go.
“I need you to know that I’m leaving the country.”
And, well, holy fuck. I didn’t think any of us were expecting her to say that.
I was the first to react, clearing my throat as I turned toward her voice. “You’re…leaving the country?”
“I met someone. A woman—and no, not like that,” she added when Micah sucked in a breath to say something that would only piss her off more. “She and I are writing another book together.”
“Moms of blind sons part deux?” Caleb asked.
I only just managed to hold in a laugh as she made a disgruntled noise. “No, Caleb. Her name is Elisa, and she lives in the UK.” She overpronounced it “youuuu kaaaay,” like a goddamn game show host. “We’ve decided to write a joint memoir about love, laughter—”
“Sex,” Micah said.
I bit both my lips.
“Family,” Mom corrected tersely. “I thought I’d get a little more support from you three, considering how hard I’ve worked to raise you over the years.”
None of us had anything to say to that. I didn’t know about my brothers, but my therapist had gently coached me into finally accepting that her hard work was only hard because she made it that way. And I needed to stop feeling guilty or taking responsibility for that.
“I’ll be selling the house,” she went on, “so I’d like you three to come by and go through your old things.”
“Toss whatever I have left,” Micah said. I heard him stand, then the click of him unfolding his cane. “There’s nothing I want.”
“Now, there might be—”
“No,” he snapped, cutting her off. “There is literally nothing I want. I don’t know why we needed to be subjected to this fucking attempt at an emotional circus, but I’m done with being manipulated.”
“Micah,” she said softly. I heard her shift in her seat, and then Micah grunted and stumbled.
“Touch my fucking cane like that again and you will regret it,” he snarled.
She’d always been more…hands-on in her methods of discipline. She’d take away our canes whenever she was trying to teach us a lesson—force us to be fully reliant on her for a sighted guide. And Micah was the one in trouble more than any of us.
My therapist called it cruelty cosplaying as punishment. Micah had never really fallen for it. I was a little softer than him growing up, and she’d attempted to mold me into her little puppet—a malleable little people pleaser, which was something I was still trying to unlearn.
And it wasn’t easy. Or fun.
But her methods of controlling us had created deep scars. Mine were tender, but Micah’s still bled.
“I was just trying to—”
“I know what you were trying to do. You don’t get to do that anymore,” he snapped. “Jonah?”
“Go ahead. I’ll handle whatever this is,” I told him quietly.
He was silent for a second. “No bullshit. You promised,” he reminded me.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
I ignored her. “No bullshit.” I wasn’t going to let her give me a task.
I wasn’t going to let her manipulate me into dragging Micah into something he wanted no part of.
And the same went for Caleb, though we all knew she’d only start leaning heavily on our youngest brother if Micah and I refused to give in to whatever she wanted.
Caleb had always been treated differently. He was the one son with some usable vision—though not much of it. Sometimes he wasn’t blind enough for her, so he was forgotten, and that created a whole new set of trauma that Micah and I couldn’t really relate to.
Of course, things might have been easier, and she might have reined it in a bit, if we’d had a father who gave even two whispers of a fuck.
But our dad found it easier to work eighty hours a week and let her handle all the kid stuff.
I could count on one hand how many hockey or beep ball games he’d come to, only to leave ten minutes after the first whistle blew.
Caleb played goalball for a while, and I remembered Dad being in the stands for one or two of the matches. But nothing more than that. An absent coward was the kindest name I could come up with for him.
It had been about a year and a half since we’d last spoken, and I was struggling to feel any regret.