“Of course I can read,” Darcy snapped. “When did I ever say I can’t read?”
Teagan didn’t respond, big hazel eyes wide and watchful.
She grimaced. She hadn’t realized that he’d noticed anything. But of course he wouldn’t have said anything at the time, because Teagan was unfailingly kind, and now she’d bitten his head off.
Of course he’d noticed. It wasn’t like Teagan wouldn’t notice the same issues that had caused her to fail half a dozen college courses, doomed her Navy career, and gotten her demoted from wilderness educator to handyman at Rachel’s wellness retreat.
Teagan’s face was nothing but concerned for her.
What a jerk—it made it impossible to argue with him when he just wouldn’t fight.
“It’s not that I can’t read.”
“Okay,” he said gently.
He didn’t even ask what the problem was. He’d sit there waiting all afternoon, and he’d never ask. How was she expected to stomp off if he didn’t give her an opening to do that?
Fuck. She was just going to have to talk about it.
She wrinkled her nose at her coffee.
“I can’t read very fast,” she amended in what she hoped was a calmer tone. “Writing’s a bigger problem, actually. I could probably handle reading the reports, if they were the same stuff every week. But I can’t write anything unless the software has spellcheck and will read it back to me.”
Rachel had demanded a written agenda for Darcy’s proposed educational hikes. On fancy paper, so it could be pinned to the corkboard at breakfast and fit with the desired aesthetic. Darcy’s big mistake had been trying to do it by hand. But all her spelling mistakes had convinced Rachel that Darcy couldn’t possibly be an authority on the actual content she’d planned to deliver, and her exciting job opportunity in wilderness therapy had turned into nothing but manual labor.
“You’re dyslexic?” Teagan asked.
“Yeah, I mean, I assume so,” Darcy said uncomfortably. She’d never said that out loud before. Mostly because nobody had asked, and she’d kept her own conclusions to herself.
“You never got tested for it?”
She shook her head. “My mom kept moving us all up and down the West Coast, a new school every time she broke upwith a boyfriend or got evicted, so I was never in any one school long enough for anyone to notice.”
By the time she’d made it to high school, she’d figured out how to cope. There had been audio versions of all the textbooks in the library for the students with low vision. Her English scores were never great, but she’d kept up her GPA with math and science electives.
Her grades had been good enough to get into college, but when her professors stopped working from textbooks and started assigning handouts and journal articles, she just hadn’t been able to work fast enough.
“But lots of people are dyslexic, in any job you can think of. And especially for a government job, you’d think they’d accommodate you, get you whatever software you need—”
Darcy forced herself to remain calm. He meant well. He had no idea what the real world was like, having never lived there.
In the real world, nobody helps you. If you can’t pass the test, you fail. If you’re bad at your job, you get fired.
“I’d rather just have a job I’m good at to start with,” she said.
“You’d be good at this job, Darcy. Someone else can handle the paperwork,” he insisted.
“It’s all theoretical, isn’t it? Because I don’t have equivalent experience, and I don’t have a degree,” she said.
“How many hours do you still need?” Teagan asked. “Maybe you could just saydegree expected.”
“Twenty-eight.”
Teagan blinked a few times, no doubt doing the math about how long Darcy had been enrolled in college. She could have been a doctor after twelve years. Doctors went to school for less time than she had.
“Okay, but that’s—you could do that in one year, if you went full time,” he said.
Darcy twisted in her seat, feeling itchy and exposed. They were really playing the greatest hits of all her life’s failures this morning, weren’t they? Maybe he’d like to talk about her dating history next or ask why she hadn’t been promoted to petty officer second class.
