This time, I stood directly in front of Lex. But just like before, when he reached for the snack, his hand came nowhere near it.
It took every ounce of self-discipline I had to not make a sound. I placed the granola bar in Lex's hand and then stumbled over my next words. "I'm just going to go check the generator. I'll be back in a sec." I turned away before even giving Lex a chance to respond. I was sure he murmured something that sounded like "Okay," but I just kept moving because I was in too much of a state of shock to do anything else.
The truth hit me like a ton of bricks when I stepped outside. A cornucopia of emotions ran through me all at once. Surprise, pity, shock, and ultimately, sadness. The first three emotions made sense because anyone making the discovery I'd just made would feel the same. But the sadness I was feeling was so much more than that. It was bone-deep regret for the man inside the little building. The man who was not only dealing with a terrible disease with lifelong consequences, but who was also condemned to do it in the solitude that came with being blind.
I was on autopilot as I got the generator going, though I wished I wasn’t because it meant all my thoughts were on Lex and his situation. I wanted to ask him what he’d been thinking coming to a place like Fisher Cove with no one to support him, but it wasn’t my place. But I also knew I couldn’t just walk away from him. As I re-entered the cabin, I began preparing my argument for why the man should just go back to wherever he’d come from but as soon as I reached the living room and saw Lex lying on the couch with eyes closed and a soft snore falling from his lips, I knew I wouldn’t be making any speeches about being reasonable. Instead, I moved back to the couch and sat down next to his hip so I could test his blood sugar again. It was stable enough that I knew I could leave him and he’d be okay.
But I couldn’t find it in me to move. Then my eyes fell on the bottle of alcohol on the coffee table… and then the scrap of paper next to it. And just like that my blood ran cold and I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I wasn’t going anywhere.
At least not alone, anyway.
Chapter Three
Lex
He knows.
I wasn't sure why that was the first thing I thought of when I woke up. I had no clue where I was, what time it was, or what was going on, but the one thing I did know was that the man I'd callously dismissed the previous day was now privy to my biggest secret.
I had no one but myself to blame, of course. After all, I'd been a fool to think that I could somehow take care of myself in a strange cabin in the middle of nowhere. It was just another candle on my birthday cake of humiliation.
The diabetes on its own had always been a challenge, but throw in my failing vision and my life had become a nightmare. I'd made use of every app and technological advance in the field of at-home diabetes care so I could continue to monitor my own blood sugar and give myself the daily injections I needed to stay alive. But when the telltale blurriness had started to cloud my sight, I’d been terrified of anyone finding out the truth. I’d spent the last year avoiding any face-to-face meetings with my family under the pretense that I was traveling for work, and only my personal assistant, Angie, knew how quickly things had gotten bad in that time.
Well, that wasn’t quite true.
King knew.
But, like Angie, I’d sworn him to secrecy. My brother’s obvious devastation and rage that his little brother was going blind had been the reason I hadn’t been ready to tell the rest of my family. It had taken hours of conversation and ultimately downright pleading to get King to agree to keep my secret. I’d assured him that I was taking steps to ensure my personal safety, though that hadn’t been quite true.
Or at all true, really.
I'd known that coming to the isolated woods of Northern Maine would be a risk, but I just hadn't cared. And last night when I’d been at my lowest, I hadn’t cared about anything.
The thing that I did need to think about at the moment was where I was and if my unlikely rescuer was still around or not. I'd never actually made it to the bed in the master bedroom the night before, so I had no way of knowing what the mattress felt like. But I was definitely lying on top of a mattress now. I sat up and tried to feel around for the nightstand. The one thing I'd noticed the first day when I'd explored the cabin was that the nightstand in the master bedroom had felt smooth. The wood had had a lacquered feel to it whereas the nightstands in the other rooms had felt rougher beneath my fingers, leading me to believe the furniture in the master bedroom was either new or just fancier.
I reached my left hand out only to find that there was no nightstand at all. In fact, there was only solid wall beneath my hand. None of the bedrooms in my cabin had had beds that were pushed against the wall.
Damn.
Frustration welled within me because I already knew what it meant. Before I could dwell on it, I heard the click-clack of something sharp on hard floors outside the room. There was a soft knock followed by a creaking sound. An instant later, the entire bed bounced when a heavy weight landed on top of it. I let out a less than graceful yelp as something wet ran the length of my cheek.
"Brewer!" I heard someone call.
Not someone… him.
"Brewer, off," the man repeated. I'd managed to figure out that the very sloppy kiss I'd been given had been administered by a large dog, presumably the same one that had pressed its nose into my hands at my cabin. The large animal flopped down across my lap instead of getting off the bed like it had been ordered to. The weight of the animal would've been suffocating if there hadn't also been a certain comfort in it. I couldn’t make out the animal’s color other than to determine it was light rather than dark, but I loved how silky its fur felt between my fingers.
"Brewer," the man said again, his already deep voice going even deeper in warning.
"It's all right," I said. I cast my eyes downward so I could pretend to focus on the dog instead of having to search out the room for the man's shape. He already knew I was visually impaired, but I didn't really want to announce it since it wasn’t something that was open for discussion.
Visually impaired… Yeah, right. You're fucking blind, Lex.
"How are you feeling?" The question was standard and safe, but I wasn't interested in either of those things. I wasn't interested in anything other than getting away from the strange man who now knew something about me that my own family didn't. Well, most of my family.
"Where am I?" I asked.
"My place."
I didn't mean to be an asshole, I really didn't. But when I was raw and couldn't follow my first instinct to flee, I had a tendency to try and get the person I was with to be the one to walk away. Every relationship I'd had with a man since I'd been in my early twenties had been that way. And every single guy had walked.
Every. Single. One.
Okay, so that wasn’t quite true. There had been one guy who hadn’t walked away, though I wished he had.
"And your place is?" I prodded.
"A few miles from the cabins you're renting," the man responded. I heard the emphasis on the word cabins, but I ignored it. "I'm Gideon, by the way," he added.