Chapter 15
Paxton
The first time I noticed, I told myself I was probably wrong.
It was a plain old Tuesday at the office. Grizzly and I were going over a sponsorship proposal that had come in from a company interested in connecting with queer athletes.
He’d printed the out proposal, which I had come to understand was his preference for anything requiring detailed review. He liked paper the same way my pops did, which I had decided early on wasn’t a coincidence about who they both were.
He was reading through it with an intense sort of focus. I watched him as I always did during these moments. At one point he moved the paper slightly closer, then reached up and adjusted his glasses. None of it was done in a way to make me think anything other than he wanted a closer look.
Individually, it didn’t mean much.
But I had been watching him for a while by that point, and I had started to understand the difference between Grizzly adjusting his glasses because he was thinking and Grizzly adjusting his glasses because his eyes weren't cooperating.
This was the second type.
He moved on quickly after that. I didn't say a word about it because it wasn't mine to say anything about yet. Not until I was officially his Daddy.
I did, however, start paying closer attention after that.
Over the next several days I catalogued things quietly to help me know what was normal and what wasn't. The font on his computer was larger than standard.
I could probably read it from halfway across the room if I needed to.
And his phone screen brightness was turned all the way up at all times.
In meetings, if something was written on a whiteboard and someone pointed to a specific section from across the room, he would move toward it rather than squinting from where he stood.
He preferred phone calls to text messages, though voice notes were also accepted.
In the afternoon when the sun came through the window in his office at a low angle, he would close the blind without commenting on it, even if we were mid-conversation.
None of it was obvious. It didn’t truly spell anything out. Not unless you were deeply invested in Grizzly as a whole. My boy had practiced making his needs invisible.
I sat with my thoughts for a few days so as to not startle him with all the changes I planned on making to make his life better.
When I decided to gather intel, I went to the best source. I found Moseley in the small kitchen area one morning when Grizzly was on a call and Cheyenne had stepped out. He was making coffee, body hunched forward, eyes barely open.
"Hey," I said, leaning against the counter.
"Hey." He looked up briefly. "You want some?"
"Nah, I'm good. Can I ask you something though? And I’d need it to stay between us."
He set the spoon down, giving me his full attention. His expression was wary. Like he didn’t know what the heck I wanted, but he was curious enough to proceed. "Sure. What do you want to know?"
"Grizzly. Is there something going on with his vision?"
Moseley went still, giving away more than an answer could have. He looked like he was deciding what he should and shouldn’t say.
I respected that. I wasn't trying to get him to break anyone's confidence.
"I'm not asking for details," I said after a beat. "I'm not going to bring it up to him unless he brings it up to me first. I just want to know if I'm right about what I'm seeing, because if I am, I want to make sure I'm not making things harder for him without realizing it."
Moseley looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at his coffee. "I can't tell you specifics."
"Again, I'm not asking for that."
"But I can tell you that he's managing something. And that he's been managing it alone for a while, which is—" He stopped himself. "He'd want to tell you himself. If and when he's ready."
I pushed off the counter. "I know. That's why I'm not asking you what it is. Thanks, Moseley."
He nodded once, and I could see from the way his shoulders settled that I had relieved some of his nerves. These people cared about Grizzly. The last thing I wanted was to make any of them feel like they had to choose between protecting him and trusting me.
I went back to the desk I’d brought in to use. Pulling up a search window, I began to delve into what could be happening with my boy. When he eventually wanted to share, I would have the tools to help him.
It turned out there was a significant amount of information available about vision loss if you looked for it. I didn't know for certain his condition, but the pattern of what I had observed lined up with what I found when the phrase macular degeneration showed up.
I spent two full evenings going through it. Two evenings of sitting at my kitchen table with my laptop, a notebook, and a glass of water I never remembered to drink. The more I uncovered, the more questions I had.
I learned about contrast first. It was the most immediate adjustment I could make. High contrast between text and background made reading significantly easier. Default gray-on-white document formatting was one of the worst options available.
Realizing that was also what I had been using in every email I had sent him for weeks made me sick to my stomach. I changed my default font to black, bumped the size up a few notches, and switched the background color to be more accessible.
All of these were small changes. Hopefully they looked like a personal preference rather than anything deliberate.
I learned about lighting next. Warm light was easier than cool light, and indirect was better than direct.
Overhead fluorescents were particularly rough.
I started leaving the overhead off in whatever room we were working in when I had any say over it.
I bought a floor lamp for his office and warm bulbs for the conference space.
Grizzly had done a double take the first he picked up on the change. After a few minutes, he visibly settled into the rest of the meeting with a relaxed expression.
Physical space became an important thing to consider as well. Hardwood or tile would be easier to navigate than carpet if his vision deteriorated further. You could feel transitions underfoot with the former two. The surface also gave more reflected light, a plus in the pro/con column of things.
High contrast on floor transitions and door frames helped with spatial awareness.
Lever door handles were significantly easier than round knobs for someone with narrowing central vision.
These things were relevant to living spaces more than to an office, but I wrote them down anyway and told myself it was purely informational for the time being.
I knew better than to lie to myself.
Because here was the thing that the research couldn't account for: I was falling in love with Grizzly. It wasn’t a halfway sort of feeling. I was deep in the trenches, fighting for my life to not show all my cards at once.
My research wasn’t actually research. It was me building a care plan. It was me preparing for our future. It was me showing I cared.
I thought about what it meant too, from the Daddy side of things.
Being someone's Daddy was already about attentiveness and consistency. It meant the other person didn’t have to spell out every need.
I’d practiced versions of it in the past. I knew what it felt like to be that kind of steady for someone.
However, this was different. What Grizzly was managing with his vision was going to be a part of the future we built. And that meant the Daddy part of me needed to be built to navigate it too.
I wanted it to be instinct. I wanted him to never feel like he was being managed or accommodated in a way that drew a border around what he could and couldn't do.
Settled.
Capable.
That was the kind of Daddy I wanted to be for him. And that meant I had to know what I was working with.
I learned about what it felt like to have something happening to your sight that you couldn't stop. I read accounts from people who had gone through it. That part took the longest because I kept having to set the laptop down and look out the window for a few minutes before I could keep going.
Grizzly was going through this same thing. Their words were probably the same as what he was thinking each day.
They talked about the energy it took to manage things quietly. About calibrating every room and every piece of paper and every screen before anyone else noticed, because the alternative was someone treating you like you had become less than what you were.
They shared how the loneliest part wasn't the vision itself but the distance it created. The wall you built to hide behind that ended up keeping out the people who would have stayed anyway if you'd let them.
I thought about Grizzly at the diner adjusting his glasses and saying nothing. The way he’d said the words “new glasses” as if that would explain things away.
I thought about all the ways the man I was falling in love with had been building that wall for a long time, and how much I wanted to be standing close enough on the other side that the moment he decided to stop, he’d see me ready and waiting.
Grief hit me hard the further my research went. I wasn’t the one experiencing the loss. It wasn’t my place to feel sad about this. It shouldn’t have affected me so much.
But my heart hurt all the same for my boy. For the way this had to have been tearing him up inside.
The truth of it all was that this wasn’t a complication. This was part of who he was. And I wanted all of it. If he let me in, he’d see how true my intentions were.
I just had to wait for him to trust me with it.
The adjustments I made in my day-to-day life were easy to ignore. Most of it was subtle since I didn’t want to draw attention.
I started narrating things out loud in a natural way—reading a text before handing him my phone, describing what was on the screen before turning the laptop toward him, giving verbal directions even when the visual was right there.
I stopped pointing at things from across the room and started walking to them.
I positioned myself on his stronger side when we were reviewing things together.
When I sent documents, they went out in the format I’d set to be easiest on his eyes.
I didn’t make any of it a thing. I didn't hint at it or look at him in a way that suggested I was doing anything differently.
The closest I came to losing my composure was one afternoon when we were reviewing a draft contract I had printed out and formatted carefully. He picked it up and read through it without any of the small adjustments I had come to recognize.
He looked up when he was done. Told me it was well organized and easy to follow, his tone almost confused. It was like he expected the struggle. When it didn’t come, he couldn’t make sense of things.
That night, I sat on the back porch in the dark for a while and let myself feel it. All of it. The wanting and the tenderness I felt towards Grizzly. The ache I had when he was around and I couldn’t have him.
I still kept my vow to wait for him. Waiting didn’t translate to being absent. It meant keeping close, so that when the time came he could trust me, I’d be waiting with open arms.
Grizzly had been quieter than usual the morning things changed. It wasn’t his normal quiet though. Something was brewing.
I gave him the space for it, instead focusing on my own work. We went most of the morning without anything other than the ordinary shuffle of the four of us around the office.
Around noon I went to refill my water and came back to find him standing at my desk, looking at the document I had open on my laptop. He didn’t look like he was snooping. More like it had caught his attention unexpectedly.
He looked up as I approached, expression unreadable. In all my time of watching Grizzly, he’d never looked like this. I had no clue what to think about it.
"Your formatting," he said. "On the documents. The emails."
I set my water bottle down. "Yeah?"
"It changed a few weeks ago. And the way you describe things when you hand me stuff before I even look at it.”
My gaze remained locked with his. I wanted him to get all the way there. Wanted him to see what I’d been doing.
He gasped softly. “The lighting in the conference room. You've been doing all of this without saying a word. Why?"
"I noticed some things," I said, keeping my voice easy. "I wanted to be useful without making it a conversation you weren’t ready to have yet."
He looked at me for a long while. It was just the two of us since the others had left to get food. I appreciated the timing. We didn’t need an audience.
"I need to tell you something. But not here. Would you come over tonight? To my place."
"Yes," I replied quickly.
He nodded. “Can you do seven?”
"I'll be there. Should I bring anything with me?"
“Just yourself.” He went back to his office, leaving me alone at my desk, shaken to my core.
Tonight he was going to tell me.
Whatever it was—and I was fairly certain I already knew—he was going to say it out loud, to me, which meant he had decided I was safe enough to say it to. That wasn’t a small thing. That was, by my count, monumental.
And I was ready. More than ready.
I picked up my phone and sent him one text before I could second-guess the impulse.
Paxton: I know you said I didn’t need to, but I'm going to bring food. You shouldn’t have to worry about anything.
Grizzly: Thank you, Paxi.