52. Noah
When I couldn’t sit still in elementary school and finish my schoolwork like everybody else, my father called it attention seeking.
When I finally got tested for ADHD after my mom read a blog, he told me it didn’t matter because I should’ve been able to will my mind to push past it and perform at the level my sister had all throughout school.
When I spent more time memorizing the shapes of words than reading and comprehending them, my father took me to the eye doctor, convinced there was something wrong with my vision and that’s why I couldn’t read on grade level.
When the doctor told him my eyes were fine, he looked at me in the parking lot and told me to “cut it out.”
When I brought home Cs and sometimes Ds on my report card, he threatened to take away my video games.
When it happened in my freshman year of college, he threatened to take away my car, so I had no choice but to stay on campus and study.
When I told him I was studying and still getting the grades I got, he told me to stop lying and try harder.
Trying harder had me pulling all-nighters to win his approval.
Pulling all-nighters had me jumpy and anxious.
I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t get anything higher than Cs in prerequisites that everybody else flew through. It killed any motivation I had to stay in school.
And when I told him that I might need a year off to get my head right because something was wrong, he told me I was attention seeking and to suck it up.
So, I sucked it up. I kept sucking it up until it felt like I was a robot going through the motions. The only difference between me and a robot was my lack of precision.
It wasn’t until I met with my advisor during what was supposed to be my junior year that things finally started to click. He looked at me while we were in the middle of registering for the same English and Math classes for the third semester in a row and told me I might have dyslexia.
When I found out I was dyslexic, I thought my father would finally hear me. I thought he would finally understand that I’d been telling the truth this whole time. But all he did was scoff and ask me if that meant it was going to take me twice as long before he could tell his friends I was a college graduate.
I could not remember a time in my life where Michael Hunt liked me. The way he spoiled my sister never trickled down to me. The way he celebrated her never extended to me.
By the time I came out as bisexual to my parents, I was so used to them dismissing me that I expected my father to call me attention seeking and tell me that part of me wasn’t valid either.
Instead, he and my mother had barely reacted, telling me to love whoever I wanted as long as the “burden” of that love didn’t somehow fall on them. It was a backhanded acceptance and the biggest mind fuck ’til this day.
But it had been freeing in a way.
I didn’t know who they wanted me to be, so I became who I was. Years of his disapproval had me numb to anything my father could say to me. And when I started therapy, my callouses toughened.
Michael Hunt was a bully and he wanted a reaction out of me. A reaction I refused to give him. It was more peaceful that way. He could say what he wanted and I never gave him the satisfaction of an argument.
He hated that. And that made him hate me.
He didn’t know what to do with a son who was no longer seeking his approval.
So every time we talked or saw each other, he went out of his way to try and humble me. The less I cared, the more aggressive he got. Somewhere along the line, my mother had joined him. She’d gone from neutral to his little sidekick, throwing me under the bus and trying to force a connection that I kept cutting.
Greyson didn’t understand it and six years ago, he exploded at them on Thanksgiving. So, I told him he shouldn’t be around my parents anymore. All my father wanted was a fight and I wasn’t giving it to him, not even in the form of my friends.
That plan had worked for six years. I kept my distance from them and only accepted my mother’s calls from time to time. Just enough to keep them from popping up on me.
Last night, True was around them for less than an hour and she was ready to fight the man I never stood up to.
She wasn’t scared. He didn’t intimidate her and she hadn’t stuttered when she told him exactly what she thought of him.
My carefully constructed bubble had popped. Her anger had burned through the armor of cold indifference I wore whenever I was around them.
She didn’t care about being polite. She didn’t care about saying the right thing. She only cared about defending me.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
The only other person who went that hard for me was Greyson. But Greyson made sense. I’d known him for twenty years. He was my best friend. He’d watched me deal with them for years before he got fed up.
But True…
True was new.
I didn’t want the woman I was falling for to feel like she had to defend me.
It sent me crawling back into my shell and I shut the fuck down.
I wished she hadn’t met them. I wished she hadn’t come to that reception so she would have never known that was who I came from.
The problem was I said those things to her and I didn’t know how to take them back or reshape them into something that hurt less.
I’d seen the hurt in her eyes. I’d seen the resolve on her face shatter from wanting to understand to wanting to get away from me.
And now I had to figure out how to make her listen to me and stay .
Because when I walked out of the door the next morning, True was in her front yard.
A suitcase sat by her feet as she used a shovel to clean the snow from her windshield.
I didn’t care how mad she was at me, I wasn’t letting her leave in that fucking car. Not like this.
Snow and gravel crunched under my boots when I jogged to close the distance between us. If she could hear my approach, she ignored it and moved to her back window to clear the snow.
When I got to her, she was dropping the shovel and heaving a heavy breath. Her hood was pulled up and her braids peeked through the sides, hiding the irritated frown on her face until I got closer.
“Shit, that’s a workout.” True tossed the shovel away from her and a smile tried to tug at my lips at the sound of her voice.
My heart sat in my throat when I said the only thing I could say. “True.”
She turned her whole body to look at me because of how puffy her coat was. And when her dark eyes flickered across my face, I caught a glimpse of warmth before her stare iced over. She tipped her head and slanted a brow at me. “What do you want, Noah?”