Page 2 of Stag

“I was just trying to say hi to her, she didn’t have to be so fucking rude!”

“Rude? I’ll give you rude, you fucking prick!” She shoved me again, and that was it, I was done being pushed around for talking to a fucking woman. Especially one so fucking stunning that she was a bitch.

“Touch me one more fucking time, and I’ll-”

“Finish that sentence at your own risk.” Grimm, the vampire guy who owned the place, was now here too, shoving me away with a palm against my chest. I opened my mouth to yell at him for it, and he shot me a glare.

“Don’t show up your club like this. Shut up.”

He turned to the women, and the one who’d hit me started bitching about me, but wait… what did she say?

“Deaf? She’s deaf?”

Fuck me. She didn’t ignore me. She couldn’t fucking hear me!

Talk about feeling like an asshole. It never even occurred to me that she couldn’t hear me because of something other than the heavy beat.

“Fuck. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Grimm, the vampire fucker, said something to the bitchqueen from hell, and she nodded, wrapping an arm around her sister and walking away, but he wasn’t done with me yet.

“That’s how you talk to women? I trusted your club. I trusted you guys to come here and be civil. To be fucking respectful. You call a woman a cunt? You’re out of here, and if you ever want to come back, you’ll be kissing some asses first.”

He called over another big guy, the one who’d been manning the stairs, and now two of them flanked me as the ‘Grimmpire’ stormed off. A moment later, Harley was approaching and encouraging the fuckers to kick me out. It was fucking humiliating, but the fact that I’d been yelling at a deaf woman, thinking the worst of her, fuck me. I did that. I really fucking did that.

So yeah, that was the beginning of the end of me, see, because she consumed my every fucking thought now. It wasn’t that she was deaf, but the fact that she was maybe the first woman who’d never rejected me, sure, she hadn’t been able to hear me, but still, it felt significant. So what if her sister had torn me a new one as a result? It wasn’t the end for us. We’d cross paths again, somehow.

“Neil, you got that budget ready? My meeting’s in five minutes.”

Fuck. I nodded vaguely, watching the boss walk off while I frantically added the last few figures into the shared document he’d be accessing once he got into the meeting. Ha. See, it wasn’t a lie. I was nearly there.

Of course, these weren’t the kinds of things you should rush, as I found out an hour later, when he was back at my desk, yelling at me for adding an extra zero that threw the entire fucking budget out.

So that was my day, and my ride home was my only fucking pleasure. At least until I saw her again.

Claudia

One of the things I learned when I stopped being able to hear things, was that people could get pissy if you weren’t paying attention to them, which was really hard to do when you couldn’t hear them in the first place.

One reason I loved going to Grimm’s was the heavy booming music. I couldn’t hear it, of course, but I could feel it. It resonated through the very building that housed the club. I could feel it in every wall, through the floor, and through the bar. The booming gave me something to move to, something to focus on, something that felt almost as if I could hear it, because it filled me, vibrating through me from every point of contact. There was even a ‘sweet spot’ near the centre of the dancefloor, where the powerful bass speaker system was so intense I could feel it throughout my body. No wonder I tended to gravitate to that spot to dance.

It made me feel almost normal, but interactions with people in the club, especially men, usually put a stop to me feeling like a hearing person. They tended to get pissed off, so it wasn’t the first time a guy got pissy with me for ‘ignoring him’ but that guy that night, the biker guy, it seemed to hit harder than it had with others.

Was it his rage at being ignored, the way it seemed like I’d damaged him personally, rather than just irritating him? Or was it the look in his brown eyes? Was it the insecurity and hurt I saw there?

Marissa was quick to attack, quick to defend me, so I didn’t get a chance to apologise, but I would have. I generally did anyway, but because it seemed to be so hurtful to him, I’d really wanted to.

Marissa could be terrifying when she went into one of her rages, and since she’d had to look out for me ever since we were twelve, and I became ‘disabled’, she’d become ferally protective of me. Her weaker twin.

Sometimes I wondered if it was guilt. Because she didn’t get meningitis and lose her hearing. She never really got sick at all. Did she feel like I felt it was unfair? We didn’t ever talk about it. About how she felt about it. She’d always change the subject, making it about me and what I’d lost.

I didn’t feel like it was a loss though. It’s true what they say about other senses being heightened, when one is removed.

Someone shoved past me as I walked down the high street, and my balance eluded me for long panicked moments, until I grabbed the wall and regained my equilibrium. The guy shot me a glare and kept marching onward, which told me he’d probably tried saying ‘excuse me’, and of course I hadn’t heard him.

Blind people had canes to show their situation to others, but for me? For people who were just completely deaf, there was nothing so obvious. Sure, I could choose to wear a damn t-shirt saying something like ‘Deaf Bitch Walking’, but they’d just think it was humour.

Someone ran past me, and I caught a flash of black leather, and bright colours, but before I could focus on it, he was gone, charging down the side street, and out of sight.