I reach for my phone again, but it falls to the ground. God damn it. Scooting over to the edge of the bed, I stare down at it before leaning forward. I reach for it, but in the process, I lose my balance, toppling to the ground.
My arm hits the floor, and I let out a grunt of annoyance and pain. Fucking Dex.This is all his fault, I think as I swipe my phone from the floor and roll onto my back.
But as I try to delete the video, I notice my phone screen is broken.
Fucking hell.
I place it on my chest and let out a silent scream before deflating entirely.
It’s not a big deal. I can get my phone fixed, and when I do, I’ll delete that video entirely.
And if I haven’t deleted it by the time I finally fly home, then I’m a loser who loses.
CHAPTER SIX
ROME
Three years later…
Despite beingin France for what feels like forever, I never lost the American urge to work obscenely long hours without compensation. By five, everyone is long gone, but I like it when I’m by myself. It helps me think.
I’m no longer lost trying to navigate LSF—it was easy enough to gain conversational fluency since it’s so similar to ASL, but I still don’t feel entirely at home here. I love it, of course.
I love the food, the cobbled streets, and the quieter corners where the locals eat, drink, smoke, and shop. I love being able to take the train into the country and sit in a rental for a long weekend where I have zero obligation to do anything except exist.
Not that I’ve done a lot of those. Paris itself is lacking inaccessibility tech, so the contracts my dad managed to get together had me starting from the ground up. Installing the software for captions was easy. Working with interpreting agencies to find people willing to take on jobs with the relay services was harder.
Half the people I dealt with didn’t see the point in including that type of tech unless there was already a Deaf person working there, which didn’t happen often. The unemployment rate was high, and the willingness for companies to branch out was embarrassingly low.
So yeah, I was busy. Too busy for a lot of things, though maybe not too busy to occasionally stalk my friends back at home since I was so fucking alone.
Quinn and Theo came to visit the first summer I was there. They stayed with me for three weeks, and I took them to a couple of clubs for Bastille Day weekend. We got wasted on bottles of mystery liquor and danced to the beat of several bands playing music so loud that I could feel it through my feet, even on the stone streets.
But as they snagged dates to take back to their hotel rooms, I felt the pressing weight of my own loneliness. It wasn’t like I didn’t have the chance to pull someone. That part was easy.
But letting myself be backed into a corner and kissed by a man who looked nothing like the one I wanted made me so fucking angry I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Dex was still ruining my love life without even being here.
And eventually, my line of visitors fizzled into nothing.
For a short while, I started to freak out that maybe this was it. I rarely heard from my dad, and people stopped texting me all the time, asking me how I was. Work was never-ending, and there was no light at the end of any tunnel I’d gone into.
But this morning, I got a message from my dad that I had a feeling was going to change everything.
Dad: Need to talk business. Zoom this afternoon when everyone goes home. Would like to see your face.
Now, sitting at my desk, I’m staring at the computer screen, waiting for him to join the Zoom call. His name—Gabriel Moreau—is staring back at me. I lean back, glancing out the window at the café across the street. There are several people lounging back, having a beer, chatting about nothing.
I can see their lips moving, but I still haven’t managed to get a good grip on lipreading French, which is annoying as shit. They’re probably talking about their wonderful sex lives while I’ve been here with two boring, basic half hookups under my belt and way too much time with my left hand.
Before I can give in to the urge to pull up my phone and scroll social media, the screen flickers, and then my dad’s face appears. He looks older. It’s such a weird thing to notice, but it seems to happen faster and faster each year. His hair is greyer in the front, and there are new wrinkles on his forehead.
Then again, he’s always looked a little old. Or, at least, tired. My mom died years ago—before I could really remember her. He moved to the States with his sister when I was six months old and started up his company there to support the two of us.
I grew up with photos and stories, but my dad played the parts of both parents to a Deaf child, which I knew was hard on him. He was always the only dad in parenting sign classes. The only dad who showed up for school events, or field trips, or to chaperone dances.
We were close—a team of me and him and no one else for along, long time. It feels weird to have been so far away from him for such a long stretch.
