Chapter 6 #2
“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?”
Frankie almost choked to death on his sandwich. “Why I—? You dragged me out here.”
Lucas waved him off. “You see it one way, I see it the other. Consider this repayment for those amazing cinnamon buns I made you. How much did you love them?”
“I didn’t try them.”
Lucas coughed. “I’m sorry? You…didn’t…I left them fresh baked on your doorstep. Oh my god, did you step on them? Why are sighted people so shitty at looking for things before they step down. I swear to god you all need canes too. Every fucking time I—”
“I didn’t step on them,” Frankie said quietly. Lucas’s jaw snapped shut. His hands, which had been flapping slightly, stilled midair. “I was late for work, so I didn’t have time. I told my brother he could share one with Elodie while I was at work, but he’s forbidden from eating them all.”
A grin spread across Lucas’s face, and Frankie’s stomach did a little flip. “You’d better tell me all the praises he sang for me.” Then he curled his hands into fists and dropped them very quickly into his lap. “Also, sorry about that.”
“Baking for me? You do not need to be sorry about that.”
Lucas’s entire body stiffened. “No, the…” He lifted one hand and did a half-flap with it. “It’s…I stim. Um…it’s a thing, but I know it’s annoying, so—”
Frankie cleared his throat. “My brother’s autistic. I get it, and it’s in no way annoying.”
Lucas dropped his elbow to the table and put his chin in his hand. For a moment, Frankie forgot those big, wide eyes of his couldn’t see him. “Blind sister, autistic brother? You’re really ticking all my boxes, aren’t you?”
Frankie was about ninety-eight percent sure that wasn’t meant as a dirty euphemism, but the two percent left kind of hoped he was at least flirting. But that also felt wrong to hope, so he swallowed it down and pushed his empty sandwich container a few inches away from him.
“So anyway—”
“About the food—” Lucas said at the same time. His cheeks pinked. “Sorry. You go first.”
“No. What were you going to say?” Frankie had just been trying to fill silence because the longer they were quiet, the more he kept indulging in looking at Lucas. Right then, he was distracted by a slightly curly wisp of hair that had broken free of his hair tie and was floating by his temple.
Lucas sat back and folded his arms. “I could cook for you. Or actually, I could teach you to cook. It sounds like your skills are tragic.”
His chest felt warm. “Oh, um…”
“I actually do know how to teach someone to cook, in case you were worried about that,” Lucas said, his voice a bit sharp.
Frankie snorted. “Definitely not worried about anything with you. But I’m not sure I know how to learn. I was never the best student.”
“I have the patience of a saint,” Lucas said, and when Frankie scoffed, he grinned wider. “Okay, the patience of a mostly full lion?”
“Only ready to eat me if I start looking like a snack?” Frankie chanced.
Lucas burst into laughter. “Oh my god, I’m starting to not totally hate you, and that is really annoying.”
Frankie shouldn’t have taken that as a compliment, but he did. “I could go back to insulting you if that’ll help.”
“Nah. Your kid already won me over. I am being serious though. I can show you how to put stuff together with actual vegetables in it that don’t take a hundred years or a culinary school education to figure out.”
Frankie bit his lip, then blew out a puff of air. It was a bad idea. A terrible idea. A no-good, life-ruining idea. “Yeah. Why not.”
Why was his mouth such a traitor?
Lucas brightened. “Really?”
“I can only make excuses about why I suck as a parent for so long,” he admitted. “I’d better start figuring my shit out now.” And he meant that. Truly. He’d gotten Fallon and Fenton to adulthood by sheer luck alone.
He was too old now to do it that way again, and he didn’t want to fail Elodie.
Lucas’s face went through a journey, like he wanted to say more but was choosing not to. Eventually, he pressed his hands to the table and pushed himself up. “Tomorrow night?”
“Yeah. I’m free tonight though, if—”
“I promised to be Gage’s emotional support stuffed animal tonight,” Lucas said, and Frankie felt that weird pulse of jealousy in his sternum again.
“He’s been through some shit, and he’s finally ready to talk.
I hope. He keeps blowing me off, but—never mind.
I’m rambling. Anyway, tomorrow night. You buy the groceries, and I will come show you how to fool your friends at parties about being an amazing cook. ”
Frankie stood, extended his hand, then cleared his throat. “Shake on it?”
Lucas put his own hand out, and Frankie took it. His palms were soft—a few burn calluses, but it still felt so good against his own.
“Big hands,” Lucas murmured. His fingers traveled around Frankie’s, exploring for a moment.
“Family curse.”
“Family gift,” Lucas said. “Now, point me back to my truck and make sure I don’t fall on my face. I want to make sure I look pretty for you tomorrow.”
Frankie was absolutely not going to take that to mean, well, anything. Nothing at all.
Absolutely fucking not.