Hear Me Now (13 page)

If I hoped to stop the tears, I failed because it’s obvious that my choice of words only makes everything that much worse even though I didn’t mean it the way it sounds.

“I can’t hear you remember? I’m deaf.”

“I didn’t mean it like that. Cadence…”

“Let me go, Dillon.”

“I can’t. Not until you hear me out.”

“No.”

There’s something in the way she says no that drives me crazy and before I know it, my hands are around her and I’m swinging her around, pushing her backwards until she’s completely blocked in against the wall, her face raised up and meeting my eyes, a look of complete fear reflected back at me.

Shit. This is not goi
ng at all the way I wanted it to when I made the decision to pull her in here. That moment of peace, the feeling of doing the right thing is gone and it’s replaced with the gut wrenching agony that comes when you completely screw everything up.

“This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be.”

She’s staring right at me so I know she saw what I said, but where I expect her to answer, to question me in some way, she does the complete opposite and before I know it she’s shoving her hands into me until there’s a gap of space between us and she can move herself off the wall.

“You were supposed to hate me. Come back after what I said at the ravine, ignore me, not care that I even exist at all. Go back to your life. You weren’t supposed to fucking cry Caddy!”

“What does that even mean?” she asks, not making any motion to come near me, but also not making any effort to leave either. She’s standing completely in place, a few steps away from the wall, her arms now crossed across her chest, foot tapping as she waits for me to respond.

“It means that I screwed up!”

“Yes, you did.”

Her feet start moving forward and I know what’s coming. She’s going to walk straight out the door if
I don’t do something right now; something big to stop her.

Reaching out and grabbing her hand, I lock my fingers in hers, not willing to let her leave, not until I’ve said what I need to say. If she wants to walk out after that, I can’t stop her but I can’t let her leave like this.  Not yet.

“Cadence…”

“What Dillon?”

The right thing. It’s there in the way she says my name. It’s music. She has no idea how perfect it is because I made her believe that it wasn’t. I did the one thing that makes me no better than any other person she’s spoken to before. I made her feel like less when the truth is, she’s more. So much more.

“Did you mean it?”

“Mean what?”

“What you said to me the first
day. What you believe about me. Did you mean it? Is that how you see me?”

She nods and I resist the urge to pull her to me. There’s still something I need to know and I can’t take a step like that with her again until she gives me the answer. No matter how badly I want to. What she tells me when I ask her this question, it’s going to determine where I go from here and exactly what I do next. It’s going to be the answer that determines everything.

“After what you went through yesterday; everything you’ve seen me do and be a part of, do you still see me that way?”

“Yes.”

For the first time in five days, I’ve got everything I need in order to do the right thing. Not the same tired stuff I’ve been doing for the past four years, but what I should have been doing from the start. In order to do the right thing, we’ve got to start over, from the very beginning.

It’s time for Cadence to meet the real me.

Chapter Fourteen

Cadence

When Dillon told me on Friday he wanted to start over with me; that he wanted to do things differently this time around because the way we met and everything that happened after wasn’t the way he wanted to remember our time together, I didn’t believe it.

Not believing him, it has nothing to do with the things he’s done before and what he would probably do again in the future. It was because words are too easy to come by.

It’s easy to tell someone something you know they want to hear. What’s not so easy is following up on those easy words and making what you said come to life. It’s in taking the words and turning them into actions where most people give up and bail out. This is what I see happening with Dillon, which is why I don’t give much thought to his words even though the minute we’re back out of the bathroom he starts putting them in motion.

~*~*~

We’ve been holding hands since my attempt to leave when he yelled at me and it stayed that way the entire walk from the bathroom, up the stairs and straight to the door of my mom’s class. It’s only then when he changed things up and released my hand, walking straight through the door, knowing that because we were late, he was going to get in trouble.

My mom gave him a look when he walked in and it’s one I’ve seen her do loads of times before. She’s even done it with me, that’s how often she uses it. She rolls her eyes at him, as if walking in late is something she’d been expecting and it just proved her point about what a flake he is. It’s only when I walk in behind him that the entire dynamic of the room changes.

Her eyes raise in surprise and I know that she wants to ask me just what the hell I’m doing with Dillon. Being where she is right now, all the eyes trained on her, she can’t.  It means I’m definitely in for a long talking to when she gets me out in the car later, but for now, not having to answer her look brings me a whole lot of happiness.

It’s none of this that surprises me though. Sure, I’d been surprised when he started walking with me to class because I thought it would be the last place he’d want to be after everything that happened, but past that, everything else was as normal as always. It’s what happened when we were both seated that changed everything.

Waiting until my mom’s back was turned back toward the board, he leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder, his hand laying out in front of him. One side of his mouth is raised in a smirk and as if knowing that what he’s doing makes absolutely no sense to me, his lips start moving and just like always, I’m completely locked on them.

“Hi.
I’m Dillon.”

It takes a minute but putting together the way his hand is held out, now hanging across the space between our desks, and the way he just introduced himself, I see what he’s doing and despite not totally believing his words, I can’t help but smile at the attempt he’s making.

Reaching into my backpack and grabbing the pad of post it notes, I scribble my response. I could have easily spoken to him, but with the way my mom looked at me when I walked in and how sensitive I am to how she really feels about him, the last thing I want to do is call even more attention to it by speaking out loud for everyone to hear.

Holding up the paper with one hand and reaching the other out to meet his, I shake his hand and as I watch his eyes read my words, I’m comforted by the way the other side of his mouth raises until he’s full on smiling at me.

Nice to meet you Dillon. I’m Cadence.

~*~*~

It was that moment, where he started to make good on his words about starting over that the disbelief I had in him began to fade. It
wasn’t gone completely, but with the way he’s trying, I’m as into the new start as he is.

If the way he was in class that afternoon wasn’t enough, he took it a step further this weekend, showing up at my house the
way he did. It wasn’t only me that he wanted a fresh start with. It was my mom too and by the end of it, I’m pretty sure he even had her believing in him, which given everything she’s witnessed him do, is a pretty big deal.

After hearing the speech from her again on the way home, yet another warning about Dillon and her belief that I needed to stay as far away from him as possible, even going so far as to warn me that she would keep me in class with her if I didn’t go along with what she wanted, I didn’t think anything would get past her protective defenses. As it turns out though, I didn’t give Dillon nearly enough credit.

Spending the day together like we always do on the weekend while my dad works, we settle into our routine of lounging around on the sofa and flicking through the channels looking for something to watch together. It’s only when the light she installed so I’d always be able to tell when someone rang our doorbell starting flicking off and on that I pulled myself away enough to go and find out just who would be waiting on the other side.

~*~*~

“Hey.”

“Hi?”

“I know it’s weird, me being here like this, especially when I tell you what I had to go through to find out your address, but um—do you think I can come in?”

The talk my mom had comes to mind and I shake
my head, pointing inside where she’s sitting, hoping that he’ll get the hint. If she’s home, it means he can’t be anywhere near me or this house.

“I’m actually here bec
ause I want to talk to her. So can you ask her if it’s alright for me to come in?” he asks again, the smile never once leaving his face, meaning that whatever he’s here to do, he feels pretty secure with.

I do as he asks and disappear inside the house and the minute I get to the living room and catch her eye, I motion to the door and sign to her.

Dillon is here. He wants to talk to you.

If I thought I was surprised with opening the door and finding him standing there, the look on my mom’s face is even more so. It’s obvious that Dillon being here is the last thing she expected and I can’t say that I’m not right there with her. I know he said he wanted to start over, but is this really one of the ways he has to do it?

It’s not exactly a secret how my mom feels about him, so I just don’t see this going the way he assumes it will. At this rate, she’s gonna have me cuffed to her until my school is fixed.

“Well
don’t leave him standing out there, Caddy. Let the boy in.”

Going back to the door, I smile and motion for him to come in. Closing the door once he’s made his way inside, I point toward the living room and following behind me, he doesn’t say another word until he’s standing about three feet away from my mom.

Tapping me on the shoulder he hands me a paper when I turn to him and before I have a chance to question exactly what’s going on, he focuses his attention back on my mom and his lips start moving.

“I know that showing up like this, it’s not right, but I need to speak with you about something and I didn’t want to wait until Monday. I hope that’s alright.”

Turning to my mom I see her nod her head, her face a completely blank slate of emotion which doesn’t do anything for the nervous flipping going on in my stomach. If she’s not showing how she feels then I have no idea what she’s thinking or what she’s going to do next.

“I can’t say that I’ve ever had a student show up at my front door, on a weekend no less, but if this can’t wait until Monday then it’s fine. What is it that you want to talk about, Dillon?”

“Do you think we could do it privately?”

What he says, it makes me laugh and it’s not really the question that does
it, it’s the way that even knowing what he does about me, he still treats me like I’m the same as everyone else. He doesn’t want to talk around me even though he knows it doesn’t get more private for him then the way it is now. It’s not like I’m going to hear a word he says unless I spend the entire time focusing on his lips.

Wait;
never mind. Maybe he gets it more than I thought.

“Of course. We can go into the kitchen. Cadence,” she says, shifting her body in my direction and away from the boy standing behind me. “I know how tempted you’re going to be to follow us, but I’m asking you to stay here.”

With the paper still in my hands, no doubt something he wrote in order to explain what the hell he’s doing here, I’m pretty sure this one time I can heed her warning. I don’t plan on going anywhere until I start making sense of this whole thing. I might wanna know what it is that he wants to talk to her about, but not enough to risk him being unable to say it at all.

Okay.
I sign and as they both turn and leave the room, I slide open the paper and see the familiar scrawl across the page, this time, far less spacey and easier to understand. In a few lines, he’s given me all the answers I need. I just hope he gets what he wants.

I know you’re gonna be pretty freaked that I’m here. I swear, I’m doing this for you. I meant what I said yesterday. I want to start fresh and that means starting fresh with your mom too. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make her see me differently, well, at least not without a lot of work, but if I don’t try then we’re never going to be able to move forward and I want to move forward. I’ll explain what I mean by that later, promise. 

Wish me luck, I’m gonna need it.

~*~*~

Whatever he said to her, it must have worked at least a little because for the rest of the weekend, even though she wouldn’t tell me what they talked about, she also didn
’t warn me away from him. He’s right; with her he’s gonna have a lot of work to do with everything he’s done to the students in her class and his part in what happened to me, but seeing her giving him a chance, it gives me hope.

She’s not nearly as anti-Dillon as she used to be and this morning, passing notes back and forth with him in class, her even witnessing it a few times, it’s the first time since my school shut down that I’m completely comfortable.

Lunch at the ravine?

Yes.

Good because I already asked your mom and she said it was okay as long as we didn’t skip out on class.

It never ceases to amaze me, the lengths he’s going to in order to make me believe in what he said Friday. Just when I think he can’t do anything more than he’s already done, he finds a way to do it and leave me even more speechless than I was when I first met him.

Dillon doesn’t realize it, but what he’s doing, the steps he’s taking to prove to me that he can be a decent guy, he’s restoring my faith in something that I gave up on a long time ago.

He’s reminding m
e that people really can change; if they want it bad enough and are willing to do whatever it takes to make it happen and if I didn’t already know it beyond a shadow of a doubt, knowing that he asked my mom before asking me would have sealed it.

I like him. I like him a lot.