Who knew that being destroyed could feel so good?
After talking with her mom, putting everything out there and being on the receiving end of support and understanding for the first time in my life, I’m clear on what I’ve got to do now. I need to do what Ms. T said and I’ve got to try.
Cadence walking away from me can’t be the end of this. I can’t let it be the end of me or of us. I might not be all that familiar with the way I feel about her, never feeling like this about any girl I’ve ever been involved with, but I know enough not to turn away from it just because for the first time in years, I don’t have all the control.
That’s what it’s been about all this time. I need to be in control. When I’m in a fight, whether one of the ones my father plans or the ones at school, I control it. Even that day in the parking lot with Kayden, even though he took me down, I was still in control because I didn’t let it end there. When I pick on kids, especially ones like Isabelle and Eric, I feed off the control I have over their fate.
When I’m in control, I’m strong and that’s what I’ve been holding on to for six years. It ends now. If it means that I have to appear weak for the first time in my life, then so be it. I care about this girl, more than I’ve ever cared about anyone in my pathetic existence and I’m willing to give it all up to prove it. Not only to her, but to me too.
The ride over here, I tried to work out what I would say when I saw her again. How I wanted to start things off and even how I would react to her response. I even had the entire way it would end mapped out. I wouldn’t settle for anything less than her being in my arms again.
Pulling up into her driveway, thankful that I managed to beat her mom home even though we left at the same time, I put the car in park and watch as the door opens and two bodies walk out on to the steps. One I expect to see, I mean it’s her that I’m here to see, but the other one surprises me. The knot in my stomach seeing them together gets even worse as I watch her wrap her arms around him in a hug.
The doubt creeps in as I wonder if I’ve been deluding myself all along. Eric is the one standing on her front step with his arms around her and I’m the chump sitting in the car staring them down, wanting nothing more than to get out of the car and slam his face off the side of the house.
Am I too late? Did Cadence not feel the same as I did during our time together and Eric is the one she’s wanted this whole time?
There’s no denying that he would be a better fit for her. He understands her in a way that despite wanting to, I don’t think I ever will. I’ve seen him signing to her before, which means he knows enough about her to want to make things easier. If I really want to be with this girl, learning all that I could about her disability and ways I can make it easier on her should have been the first step.
Instead I’d been the idiot and jumped ahead fifty steps. Yeah, Eric is definitely a better fit for her even though I can’t stand the thought of it. She’s mine and no matter what happens now, she’s always going to be mine. I need her. She makes me want to be a better person. She makes me want to be me again.
When they separate, I see her eyes lock on the car and her forehead creases. She’s spotted me. Now not only do I look like a stalker, sitting here watching them the way I have been, but I’m also bothering her.
I want to turn the key in the ignition and leave. She may have caught me in her driveway, but since we haven’t spoken and she’s not making a move to come closer, I can still pull out and take off. I don’t do that though. Instead, I keep her mom’s words running through my head and open the door and get out, not stopping until I’m directly behind them.
It’s time to face this head on. Even if the way I pictured it going in my head isn’t the way it turns out.
Looking up, seeing her eyes on me, I smile, hoping that with the small action, I can somehow put her at ease. I didn’t exactly want an audience doing this, but now that he’s here, I know he won’t leave until he knows she’s safe.
“Can we talk?”
Her hands start moving and it takes me no time at all to see what she’s doing. Her lips are frozen in the straightest line and she’s making no move to separate them, which means whatever she’s signing, it’s not meant for me. She knows I don’t know how to sign. It only makes me wanna kick myself more for not even attempting to learn.
It’s only when Eric turns and faces me that it all becomes clear.
“She has nothing to say to you.”
“Well, I’ve got some things to say to her.”
“Dillon, you really want me to tell her that?”
“If she can read lips, she already knows.”
Eric turns back to her and I watch them as they silently carry on a conversation. It bugs me. It’s like watching two people speaking in a different language and wondering if they’re saying something bad about you. I know I said I don’t care what people think of me, but Cadence is different. I actually give a shit what she thinks and I hate the idea of her saying anything right now that might be bad.
“Can you please just say this out loud?” I ask, no longer willing to sit here and watch the two of them go back and forth.
Eric turns back to me and takes the final two stairs down until he’s on the ground beside me.
“I was just telling her goodbye and to be careful with you. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I don’t feel right leaving her alone with you.”
“I’m not going to hurt her.”
“You’ve done that enough already don’t ya think?” he asks and it takes every bit of restraint I have not to punch him. He has no idea what’s going on with me and Cadence so he needs to butt out and keep his opinions to himself.
“None of your business. You don’t know anything.”
“So you didn’t single her out a couple weeks ago?”
His words make my blood run cold. How the hell does he know about the plan? The only people that knew what I wanted to do in the beginning were Tim, Amy and the others and I’m damn sure they didn’t go out of their way to tell Eric about it.
“You not arguing means I’m right. You did single her out. You wanted to hurt her.”
“Does she know?” I ask, thankful that Eric is facing toward me more than her so she isn’t able to see what he’s saying. If she doesn’t know, I don’t want her to know. It will ruin everything.
“No. Seeing how screwed up she is over what happened with you, I figured it was smarter to keep it to myself.”
I want to breathe a sigh of relief so bad I can taste it, but I don’t. As thankful as I am that he didn’t tell her, I know it’s only a matter of time before it does come out. It means I need to be the one to tell her the truth, even if it screws up the entire way I had this planned in my head. I won’t try to fix this by keeping things from her.
She was a game to me in the beginning, but that didn’t last long once I got to know her. She pulled me to her in a completely different way and now that she has, I never want to look at her like a game ever again.
“How long have you been playing her?”
“A day or two at most. I tried to do it and couldn’t. I don’t expect you to believe me, but this is about more than a game now.”
His eyes lift, surprised with my answer, but his body tells a different story altogether. He doesn’t trust me even though for the first time since I’ve known him, I’m telling the truth.
“She said she’d be fine with you, so I’m gonna get out of here, but Dillon, don’t hurt her. She’s had enough of the stuff you and your friends do. You wanna pick on me, go ahead, but don’t do it to her.”
He walks away before I can respond and my eyes instantly make their way back up to where she’s standing on the step waiting. When our eyes meet, she motions behind her into the house and I make my way up and inside, not moving once I’m inside. Hearing the click of the door behind me, I turn and again flash a tiny smile her way.
I need to break the ice and I need to do it quick.
She mov
es and before I know it, she’s going around the corner into the kitchen and I’m jogging to catch up with her. When I see that she’s seated at the table, a paper in front of her, I follow her lead and sit down to her right. It’s only when I’m completely seated and comfortable that she slides the paper over to me and I read what’s on the page.
What are you doing here?
“We need to talk.” I say, passing the paper back to her and waiting as she starts writing across the page. I know that I’ve earned her doing things this way again, but I really hate that she’s not speaking to me, especially with the way I feel about the sound of her voice. Right now I need to hear it. Hearing her will make me right again.
What do we need to talk about?
Here goes nothing.
“I attacked Eric today. With you gone, I thought it would be easy sliding back into my old routine, so I went after him. Landing the first hit on him, it didn’t make me feel right at all. It felt wrong. All I could see when I hit him was you.”
Is that supposed to make me feel good? You saw me when you were beating up my friend?
“No Caddy, it’s not supposed to make you feel good. It’s supposed to make you hate me. Make you see that what you saw in me weeks ago, it was wrong from the start. I really am the asshole everyone makes me out to be. The way I make myself out to be.”
That’s a lie and an excuse.
I can’t argue with that. She’s right. I’m on my default setting right now and I need to stop. No more excuses.
“I thought in the beginning that me changing, it was because of you. I had to change in order to be good enough for you. The thing is, you were right. I didn’t have to change for you, it was just easier throwing it all on you. I didn’t think at all about what that kind of pressure would do to someone. What it would do to you.”
And you know now?
“Yeah I do. I wasn’t always an asshole. I think I might’ve been a pretty decent guy before, but I let things and people change me. I used you as my excuse to be better, but I wanted to be better all on my own.”
If that’s true, why did you attack Eric today?
“To feel something again, even if it was the wrong something. To deny what I just told you.”
Okay.
Her response isn’t much and seeing the one word on the paper should just make me quit while I’m ahead, but I can’t do that. I made a plan to come here and try to make things right, walking away wouldn’t solve anything but put us right back where we were before.
“Caddy, I miss you. I don’t want to miss you. I want to just go back to school and forget you exist, but I can’t do it. You’re there in my head, in the school. Every damn corner I take, there you are, your words on repeat. I can’t escape you. I don’t want to escape you. Not anymore.”
What do you want me to say?
“I want you to tell me the truth. Can I fix this? If I walk out right now, am I ever going to be able to come back? After everything that’s happened, can we be friends the way I wanted to be in the beginning?”
She sits completely still, her head facing down toward the paper, the pen dangling in her hand, no intent to write in sight. It physically hurts watching her like this. The silence is deafening. I just want her to say something, write anything so this torture can end.
After minutes pass and I come to terms with the fact that she’s never going to answer me, I try one more thing. So far, everything I’ve told her is the truth, but there’s still one thing she doesn’t know and even though it might mean she’ll be done with me forever, I need to make sure she knows it.
I need to be able to leave her, no matter what the outcome knowing that I left nothing unspoken.
Sliding the paper out from under her hand, not wanting to reach out and touch her so she can read my lips, I reach across and slide the pen out of her limp fingers and start writing, not looking up once until it’s all out there.
When I walked into your mom’s class the first day and saw you, after I got over how good looking I thought you were, I focused on just what was wrong with you that made you end up in the class. I decided that day to talk to you, get you to open up to me, even make you like me so that I could screw with you in the end. You were a game to me. I didn’t know at the time how I was gonna do it, like what I would do to you to end it, but I wanted you to hurt.
I see her face drop the minute she reads the words and I know I’ve put the final nail in my coffin. Any hope of getting her to forgive me for all the shit I did that final week is now blown to shit because of the way it all began. I did the right thing telling her the truth, but that right thing didn’t give me the calm I wanted.
Doing the right thing this time, knowing that I hurt her—again, it made me sick inside.
Whoever said that the truth will set you free was full of shit.
Cadence
His words, what he wrote to me, I already knew all of this. No one had to tell me, it’s just something I knew all on my own. I’ve heard my mom talk about Dillon, the way he is, the things he does, so him seeing me that first day and choosing to play a game to keep himself entertained, it’s not surprising.
With the way I feel about him, there’s no way his words won’t get to me. They hurt, because like I told him when we got into it a couple of weeks ago, I think there’s more to him buried underneath, but not enough to change anything.
I should probably hate him, but I can’t. He’s standing here admitting to things that are probably better left quiet. Picking on Eric, playing a game with me, wanting me to hurt the same way he does, you don’t admit to those things unless you’ve got nothing left to lose. I believe everything he’s telling me despite the nagging voice inside that wants me to think this is just another game.
So after a few minutes of complete quiet, where I process everything he’s said and done since he showed up in my driveway earlier, I do the only thing left to do. If he’s gonna stand here now, putting everything on the line in order to tell me the truth, it’s time I do the same.
Picking the pen up off the table and flipping the sheet over so that I’ve got a free space to write, I let the words pour out of me. I don’t know what he’s going to think, but this, what I’m writing to him now, good or bad has to be the end of it. Walking away from him should have done it, but it didn’t. This has to be it now.
I’m deaf, Dillon. Not blind. I know what you thought about me the first day. I show up in a class full of special needs kids, it’s obvious that I would have been one of them. It must have felt like Christmas for you that day. You had someone new to pick on.
I get it. It hurts hearing it, but I get it.
I miss you too. You’re not the only one that’s haunted. It should have been easy to get back to my life here, going back to school and hanging out with my friends, but I haven’t been able to separate myself from the last two weeks and I’m not sure I’m ever gonna be able to.
You’re not the only one that changed during those two weeks together. I did too. I don’t know if we can fix this, but the only way that this is your last visit here is if you let it be. The same thing goes for the friend thing. It only changes if you want it to change.
There’s so much that I want to put on the paper, but the words won’t come, at least not yet, so I just slide it across the table to him. It’s going to have to be enough for now.
When his eyes finish scanning over the paper, he slides his hand across the table until his fingers are barely resting on top of mine. As I look up his lips start moving and just like every other time he’s spoken to me, I’m locked in place watching, completely unable to look away.
“You mean it?”
Nodding, I watch as his lips lift in a smile.
“Will you go to prom with me?”
I shake my head slowly and using my free hand I reach for the paper, knowing that he’s going to take this the wrong way and needing to explain before things get out of hand. Dillon might be different, but things just don’t change overnight
and with one misunderstanding already happening between us because of something I said, I’m not eager to repeat it with another one.
I can’t go with you because Eric asked me and I said yes. I want to do this for him. He deserves it.
He sighs, pulling his hand away from mine and raking it through his hair.
“You know he likes you right? He asked you because he has a thing for you.”
I shake my head the second he says the words. He couldn’t be more wrong. Eric doesn’t have a thing for me other than wanting to be my friend. I don’t know where he gets his information, but this is most definitely wrong.
“Shit. I sound like Amy right now.”
Now he’s lost me. What this has to do with Amy, I don’t get but I hate anything remotely attached to me being compared to her.
What does that mean?
“When we were together, all I did was ride her about her jealousy. I hated the way she always thought every girl on the planet wanted to get in my pants. Pissed me off huge.” As I nod my head, he continues. “Your mom told me that Eric likes you, so I swear it’s not jealousy. Well, it is a little, but it’s more than that. Caddy, you can’t go with him.”
I want to know how my mom knows that Eric likes me, but since she’s not here to ask and I’m pretty sure she didn’t share that much with Dillon, it looks like I’m gonna have to wait until she’s home later and ask her. Right now though, it looks like I’ve got to deal with the rest of it.
I already said yes to him. I’m not backing out. I’m sorry.
“Do you want to be with me?” he asks as he reads what I wrote. Reaching out to take the paper from him, more than ready to give him an answer, he pulls it away from me. “No more writing. Just say it.”
The way the muscles in his cheek twitch make me think there’s an edge to his voice and I’m thankful I can’t hear it. When he asked, my answer, it was so easy. Now though, I’m not so sure. He knows how I feel about speaking, no matter how comfortable I feel around him. I might be able to do what he says and say it out loud easily enough, but forcing me to do it, it’s not going to work out well for him.
Hear Me Now Page 21