“Metaphor.”
“Babe,”—he smoothed a hand over my hip—“I work out and do what some might consider tough-guy shit for a living, but I still read.”
Some might consider?
I saw him drag a man out of a car one-handed.
After deflating the dude’s airbag with a bullet from his gun.
I didn’t get into that.
“I didn’t mean to—” I began.
“Shh,” he shushed me, verbally as well as by touching his lips to mine.
That felt so nice, I shushed.
“In one of my psychology lectures, a professor said there’s some research to support the theory that if you keep your mind active, specifically learning new things, you can stave off Alzheimer’s.”
Fascinating.
“Really?” I asked.
“That’s the theory,” he answered.
If that was true, I needed to notch stepping out of my box on my daily to-do list.
And then he went on, sadly making me realize my innocuous question, which I thought was just more getting to know my man, was not that at all.
“My gran, Mom’s mom, had early-onset Alzheimer’s. It tore Mom up. It tearing Mom up tore Dad up, and he was torn up already because he loved Gran too. And me and Kacie hated every minute of all of it, especially what that disease was doing to Gran. She was a great gran, not like that stereotypical shit about milk and cookies. She was about adventure. Taking us on bike rides. Going off the beaten path. Dragging us all to different restaurants to try different foods. Talking Mom and Dad into letting her take us on a tour of Europe on a bus when me and Kacie were old enough to appreciate it.”
Wow.
His grandmother sounded awesome.
“She does sound like a great gran,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “So when she started losing it, and how fast she declined, what my professor said stuck.”
“I can imagine,” I murmured, pressing closer to him because, regrettably, though unknowingly, I’d led him into sharing yet another unfun story.
“So since then, even if this obviously didn’t work for her, just in case, I make myself watch TV, read books or hit movies I normally wouldn’t be into,” he shared. “And try food I think I might not like. Or I do shit I wouldn’t normally do. Anything to keep my brain engaged, challenged, learning something new, experiencing something different. I got on a jag of reading shit like Dickens and Austen, which led me to read some history books about England, the politics, the aristocracy, the class structure. And I watched some documentaries about all of that too. So that’s where it came from. Though, I only saw pictures of that stuff, I didn’t get into any culinary history.”
Although I thoroughly enjoyed learning this about him, and I thought it was super cool he did this stuff, I really had no other response other than, “Oh.”
“Thinking about it, it makes sense. A narrow mind leads to a closed mind, and I can see that might even happen neurologically,” Gabe continued.
It was also super cool my guy was so smart.
“You’re right, it does make sense,” I replied.
There was humor in his deep voice when he asked, “That answer your question?”
“Yes.”
He pulled me closer, and his voice dipped lower, “I know you wanna know, baby, and you don’t want to take me there, but so you have the full story, it was a relief when Gran passed. I hate it that it was, but she went downhill so fast, it not lasting long was a good thing.”
Ugh.
