Falling Into You (Falling 1)

“I’m dyslexic. Like, severely. I can read, but really, really bad, and it takes me f**king forever to get through even the simplest sentences. A goddamned first-grader can read better than me, okay? If I sit in an absolutely silent room with no distractions and focus really hard for an hour or two, I might be able to puzzle out one full article in a newspaper, which is written at a fifth-grade level or some shit.”

So much clicks into place now. “That’s part of why you’re here, in New York, isn’t it? Part of the issue with your parents.”

He bobs his head twice, a short, sharp jerk of acknowledgement. “Yeah. It’s been a problem my whole life. Back when I was a kid, shit was less figured out than it is now. Nowadays, you got all sorts of resources for ‘learning disabled’ kids like me,” he uses air quotes around the phrase. “They got IEDs and learning labs and tutors and all sorts of nifty shit. When I was a kid, in a rural district like where we grew up, I didn’t have none of that. They just thought I was stupid. So did my parents. They had me tested and stuff, but dyslexia wasn’t a huge thing on people’s radar, or whatever, so they didn’t know what to look for and I didn’t know how to explain what my deal was.”

“All I really know about dyslexia is that it’s got something to do with difficulty reading.” I rub my hand in circles on his granite shoulder

He nods, and finally turns to me. I swallow hard and decide to push past the barrier between us. I close in against him, push my body flush with his, slide my hands up underneath his arms and clutch his back. I tilt my head up to look at him, resting my chin on his chest. His scent and his heat and his hardness intoxicate me, a heady rush of need bolting through me.

“Yeah, basically, but it’s more than that,” he says. “It’s…nothing written down makes any sense to me. Letters, numbers, sentences, math equations…everything. I can do a shitload of fairly advanced math in my head, I’ve got a good vocabulary, I understand grammar, but it all has to be orally communicated to me. Tell me a word, what it means, and it’s mine. Explain a mathematical idea to me, I got it, no f**king problem. Write it down? Nothing. It’s like things just jumble up, rearrange into nonsense. I look at this paper here,” he taps the page in my hand with a forefinger, “and I see the letters. I know the alphabet, I can technically read, I can do ‘run spot run’. But when I look at the paper, I swear it’s all bullshit, just letters that make no sense. I have to focus on each letter at a time, each word, sound it out, figure it out. And then I have to go back and put the sentence all together and the paragraph and the page, and that usually means I have to work it all out all over again. It’s f**king laborious as all hell.”

“All the songs you write, the lyrics—”

“All in here.” He taps his head. “I compose the lyrics, the music, everything, in my head.”

I’m stunned. “You don’t have any of it written down anywhere?”

He laughs, a harsh cough. “No, baby. Not being able to read is bad enough. I can’t write for shit either. It’s just as hard. Harder, actually, because I start out writing what’s in my head, but other shit comes out, like random gibberish.”

“So you just have it all memorized?”

He shrugs. “It’s just how I am. I have a great memory, and musically, I have one of those perfect ears. I hear a piece of music, I can play it. The notes, the chords, it all just makes sense to me as soon as I hear it. Mechanical stuff is the same way. I just get it, instinctively. I mean, I had to learn how to do it, just like I had to learn how to play the guitar and use my voice right, but it comes naturally to me.”

“And your parents didn’t understand any of this?” I ask.

He sighs, and it’s laced with a growl. “God, I hate talking about this shit.” He absently brushes my hair back. “No, they really didn’t. I was their first kid. They made mistakes. I get that. Doesn’t make how it all happened less shitty.”

“What happened?”

He looks down into my eyes, and seems to draw strength from something he sees there. “Like I said, they couldn’t really understand why my problem was. I clearly wasn’t, like, slow or anything. I could talk fine, I could interact socially and tie my shoes and identify colors and patterns and all that, but when the lessons in Kindergarten started requiring me to look at things on the written page, I just couldn’t grasp it. It frustrated everyone. My dad was on the rise, back then, and he had big aspirations. Big plans for me, his firstborn son. I’d be his successor, a doctor or a lawyer or something great like that. He’d decided that’s what my destiny was, and nothing could change his mind. It kept getting harder and harder, because my comprehension of reading and writing was just…nil. I never progressed past the first grade, really. I had to work three times as hard as everyone else to get my homework done, to pass tests, all that. I was barely scraping by, all the way through school. Dad just thought I was lazy. He’d tell me to work harder, to not let anything stop me. He pushed and pushed and pushed, and never really saw how hard I was working just to get by. I barely passed middle school, and I mean barely, and that was with me studying and doing homework for literally four or five hours every night. Because everything is centered around writing the answers, reading the textbooks. Like I said, I can do it, it’s just…so hard as to be nearly impossible, and it takes forever. I was just a f**king kid. I wanted to play football and play with my friends, hang out, all that normal shit. I couldn’t, because I was always in my goddamned room, trying to finish reading the ten pages of history or The Giver.”

I rest my forehead against his chest, aching for him. “God, Colton.”

“Yeah, it sucked. And Dad just didn’t understand. He’s not a bad person. He’s great, he really is. When it wasn’t all about school, he was great with me. But that began to overshadow everything else as I got older. By high school, I was just angry. All the time. I hated school, I hated the teachers and the principal and my parents and everything. It didn’t help that by the time I was fifteen, Kyle was already this golden boy, perfectly behaved, athletic, all the friends and charming and shit. And I had to study for six hours a day just to get C’s and D’s. And the f**king worst part is that I knew I understood the basic concepts. I knew I wasn’t stupid. I could listen and understand what the lecture was about. I could listen to the lecture and probably recite the damn thing back to the teacher verbatim. If I’d been able to take tests orally, I probably would have been a straight A student. But that just wasn’t an option back then.” He traces the line of my jaw with a fingertip, down behind my ear, down my neck, and across my collarbone; I shivered under the heat of his touch. “I got in a lot of trouble at school because I was just so f**king angry, so frustrated. And kids made fun of me, of course, because I was always in trouble and barely passing, so I got in a lot of fights.”