My head shot up, and I caught her clear eyes, relieved, though still wary this whole night could be turned upside down by one incident we had yet to examine.
“I was actually coming to see you. Then when you came to the door, your sophisticated friends intimidated me. I made up the lawn-mowing on the fly.” I felt the aching tenderness of my teenage self, his nervousness at standing at her door and taking that risk, hoping to get a glimpse of her. He was a better and braver person than I’d been these last seven years.
She threw her head back in surprise. “Sophisticated?” She snorted with laughter, then covered her mouth. “Their whole life goals were snogging as many boys as they could and getting rotten on gin and tonics.”
My chest twisted with irrational jealousy at the thought of those adolescent boys snogging her, but they weren’t here now.
“You could also have come to see me,” I said.
Her demeanor changed to guarded again, her arms closing around her waist. “I did a couple of times, but no one was home. You were probably at cricket practice.”
Shit.I hadn’t known. How much time had we wasted not being honest with each other? But we’d been just teenagers.
“I wish I’d known,” I said. “You could have come down to the cricket pitch.”
“I actually did a couple of times, but there was a lineup of other girls at the fence.”
That surprised me, and maybe it would have even changed things at the time if I’d known or realized it. Truthfully, though, maybe I was too young to see the good thing in front of me, too caught up in my sports life and having the option of many girls feeding my ego.
Feeling warm, I took off my jacket and rolled up the sleeves of my shirt. Her gaze lingered on my bare forearms, and I suppressed a smile at her reaction. We took another sip of our drinks, and she lifted her gaze, maintaining eye contact.
“But what about your secondary school years?” she asked. “You left at sixteen and got an apprenticeship?”
“Yeah.” I scratched behind my neck, almost hesitant, which I normally was about my history, in case people used the knowledge against me or thought about me in a different way. I was expecting her to be kind, because she was, but I didn’t want her pity.
“Actually, I wanted to tell you something tonight. It’s about why I left school early.” When was the last time I’d talked about this? I cleared my throat. “I have dyslexia. I’ve learned how to live with it and work with it, but it was definitely the reason I left school as soon as I could. I don’t regret that—most days, I love building homes. The physical work suits me, using my body, being outside a lot. It was one of the blokes on-site who finally helped me with my reading—funnily enough, a plumber who had exactly the same issues, and to a similar degree. And then my sister nagged me to join a night class where everyone shared their techniques to get through the day.”
I always liked to be the boss, the team captain, strong and in control, and I almost couldn’t look her in the eye, worried about what I would see there.
Tabitha nodded, intrigued. “Tim, that sounds so tough to cope with, day to day.”
“Sometimes—a lot of times, actually—reading still makes me feel so frustrated and exhausted. I get so many things mixed up, days of the week, months, letters. I can’t make the words make sense like I can numbers or lining up timber, and there’ve been lots of times, in stores or professional offices, where I’ve felt really dumb again, like I did at school. But I try to move forward. I mean, I’m sure all this—” I swept a hand down my torso “—reinforces people’s ideas that I’m a hulking lump of stupidity sometimes, but…”
“Tim, what you’ve achieved is amazing. If people think that of you, they’re the bloody idiots.”
31
Tabitha
My eyes lockedwith his, and my body went still. Inside, I was melting. He was always glorious, of course—that chiseled face, that Greek god body—but nothing he’d done or said had ever made me want to close the distance between us, climb into his lap, wrap my arms around his neck, and kiss him senseless like his incredibly open, vulnerable words.
“I’m glad you’ve found a way to manage better.” I shifted closer to him. “I really am, and I hope that doesn’t sound patronizing. I can’t imagine how hard living with dyslexia is, how hard school was back then. Reading and writing is just something I don’t even think about. I love reading, and mostly, I love writing. Did any of the teachers at our school help you?”
He shrugged, indicating no. “As you know, I was a right little shit, upended desks and chairs when it came to readingtime to divert everyone’s attention from the fact that I was struggling. I spent a lot of time in the headmistress’s office or in the hallway or being sent home.”
“Yes, I do remember that. But surely that should have alerted someone to your issues.”
“I learned to cover it up and compensate, but eventually, they diagnosed me, and I kept that under wraps as I didn’t want to be asked about it.”
She nodded. “I remember you being pulled out of class. I’m sorry you couldn’t talk to me about it, Tim. Sorry about everything.”
“Right now,I’mnot.” He smiled down at my hand, which had somehow landed on his thigh. He put his hand on mine.
I was distracted by the feel of his hard thigh muscles under my hand and his callused hand on top of mine. My gaze traveled up his inked arm.
“What do your tattoos mean?” I asked, taking in his left forearm. When he’d rolled up his sleeves at the table, my attention had shot to his tattoos, like it often had when working together.
He held up his left hand. “I have them on this arm, because otherwise I can’t tell my left from my right.” I jolted back, shocked, and he nodded. “But yeah, just thought they were cool. Straight out of the artist’s folder—no more thought to them than that.”
