Reading the Signs Read online

  READING THE SIGNS

  A Contemporary Gay Romance Short

  Dale Cameron Lowry

  Glass Earth Press

  USA

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  READING THE SIGNS

  First edition. February 6, 2018.

  Copyright © 2018 Dale Cameron Lowry.

  Written by Dale Cameron Lowry.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Reading the Signs

  Author’s Note

  Books by Dale Cameron Lowry

  Thank You Gift For Readers

  About Dale Cameron Lowry

  Published by:

  Glass Earth Press

  Madison, Wisconsin

  USA

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, business establishments, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher. All persons depicted on the cover are models used for illustrative purposes only. All trademarks and wordmarks used in this collection of fiction are the property of their respective owners.

  “Reading the Signs” by Dale Cameron Lowry Copyright © 2016, 2018. Second edition

  First published by Torquere Press LLC, October 2016.

  ILY (I love you) Sign icon by Till Teenck from the Noun Project.

  All rights reserved. Legal purchases of this book provide income so Dale can keep on writing. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dale Cameron Lowry at www.dalecameronlowry.com.

  Second edition published February 2018.

  Published in the USA

  Important Note

  My livelihood depends on book proceeds. If you received an unauthorized copy of this book through a pirating site or an online “library” that just seemed too good to be true, please consider buying an authorized copy through dalecameronlowry.com/books/. Alternatively, you can securely donate the suggested retail price of this book at dalecameronlowry.com/tip-jar/. Thanks so much! —Yours, Dale

  Reading the Signs

  Twenty-three-year-old Theo De Jong was in trouble. Deep, deep trouble.

  Here he was, five thousand miles from home at the University of New Mexico, for a rare opportunity to study with a few hundred of the world’s most brilliant linguists.

  And instead of paying attention on his first day of the summer session, his mind—and eyes—kept wandering over to the man two desks ahead of him.

  “Alfonso Grossman,” the man had said when they’d introduced themselves before class, speaking and fingerspelling his name at the same time.

  “I know who you are,” Theo had answered in English, his heart almost beating out of his chest as he shook Alfonso’s hand. Dr. Grossman was an American linguist who’d been traveling to Nicaragua for almost two decades to help document the evolution of the country’s sign language. “I’ve read your papers. I’m a bit of a fanboy.” Theo bit his tongue after the last word slipped out, but it was too late. Besides, it was true. “Intellectually speaking, of course.” That was also true. Theo had never seen a photo of Alfonso before, and in his wildest dreams couldn’t have imagined how appealing the American would be, with his head full of salt-and-pepper curls and crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes that made him look like he was perpetually smiling.

  The crow’s feet grew deeper as Alfonso broke into an actual grin. It was a nice look on him. Adorable. Theo felt something tug at his heart. “What’s your area?” Alfonso said.

  “Dutch Sign Language. My parents are deaf, so it’s my first language. I’m doing a comparative study of the dialects for my master’s thesis.”

  “Oh!” Alfonso bounced on his toes and brought his hands together in an excited clap. “I need to hear more about that. I adore dialectology, Mr. —” He glanced at Theo’s name tag. “Mr. De Jong.”

  “You don’t need to be so formal.”

  “Only I don’t know how to say your first name. Is it ‘tay-o’ or ‘thee-o’?”

  “‘Tay-o’ is how we say it in Holland, but whatever’s easiest for you.”

  Alfonso beamed. “I like ‘tay-o.’”

  Theo felt himself blushing. He hoped his sunburn camouflaged it.

  Now, Theo sat at his desk in his Comparative Syntax of Signed Languages seminar, gazing at Alfonso’s curls and the nape of his neck and the way his T-shirt clung to his shoulders. His intellectual crush was fast transforming into a full-blown one.

  Ah, well. Maybe there was nothing wrong with a harmless infatuation. As long as it didn’t distract from—

  A movement from the front of the room got Theo’s attention. It was their professor, and she was gesturing at him. “What country are you from?” she said in American Sign Language. An interpreter echoed her words in English.

  “The Netherlands. Holland,” Theo answered in English. He’d studied ASL online for months in preparation for this trip, but the sign suddenly escaped him.

  “Can you give us an example of a possible classifier in Dutch Sign Language?”

  Thank goodness she’d asked an easy question, because he hadn’t processed a word of what she’d signed before that point. He stood up and walked to the front of the room so the rest of the class could see, trying not to pay attention to Alfonso turning in his seat, his dark brown eyes fixed on Theo’s face.

  “I’ll show you an instance where a classifier can be used to indicate eyeglasses, as in ‘The eyeglasses fell off my face,’” Theo said in English, pausing for the interpreter to repeat his statement in ASL before he began signing in his mother language.

  “Neat,” was the professor’s response. “Let’s get some examples from Japanese Sign Language next.”

  Theo went back to his desk as another student took his place at the front of the room. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Alfonso’s head moving with him, following him right back to his desk. But when Theo looked over, Alfonso’s face was buried in his notebook.

  Theo resolved not to waste any more time staring at Alfonso. He was only in the United States for six weeks and could surely survive without harboring a stupid crush.

  But then the professor called Alfonso to the front to show examples from Nicaraguan Sign Language, and Theo noticed that in addition to the crow’s feet, a dimple formed in Alfonso’s right cheek when he smiled.

  He was so verrukkelijk, as they say in Dutch. Gorgeous.

  Theo was fucked.

  Theo managed to avoid Alfonso whenever he could. He sat in front of Alfonso during his comparative sign language class so he wouldn’t get distracted looking at him, only interacting with him a couple times when the professor assigned them to the same group to work on syntax problems. Theo kept it all business then, and faced Alfonso only when he was talking or signing. The rest of the time he focused on the other students or jotted down words in his notebook.

  Outside of class, Theo only socialized at the dining hall, where he usually ate with a group from his Writing Systems for Signed Languages workshop and practiced ASL. He spent the rest of his time buried in books or exploring the city on his own.

  It was a nice routine, if slightly lonely at times. But one could never expect to feel completely at ease in a foreign land. This was Theo’
s first time in the United States, and this part of the country couldn’t have been more different than his home in Rotterdam. Albuquerque was in the middle of a desert plateau, while Rotterdam was under sea level and famously wet, covered in a network of canals and rainy year-round. And Albuquerque was hot as Madrid in July.

  Even after almost two weeks of being at the international linguistics summer program, Theo couldn’t get over how bright the sun was. It seemed somehow nearer to the earth than it had back home, making the air at noon feel like a candle flame against his skin, and bleaching most of the landscape to a pale beige.

  There were few trees, either, to filter the light—and the ones planted by the university’s landscape crew seemed as out of place as a cactus growing out of one of Rotterdam’s canals. No matter where he looked, there was nowhere for his eyes to rest: the sun was bright, the sky was bright, and the land and buildings were bright. It was like having snow blindness, but without the snow.

  Theo had never had a habit of wearing sunglasses before, but he now wore them every time he stepped outside. And even then he found himself squinting against the light.

  Which was how, on his second Sunday morning in New Mexico, Theo managed to walk head-on into another student about three seconds after stepping outside, sending their books skittering across the sidewalk.

  It was only after the collision that Theo’s pupils finally adjusted enough that he could see the person.

  It was a terrifyingly attractive man.

  It was Alfonso Grossman.

  Fortunately, Alfonso was still standing instead of sprawled across the concrete with broken bones. Unfortunately, he was also looking straight at Theo. It was impossible to avoid Alfonso’s verrukkelijk brown eyes.

  “Sorry,” Theo’s apology was automatic and bilingual, in both English and ASL. He was getting less terrible each day at the latter. At least the ASL sign for sorry wasn’t so different from the one he’d used with his parents back home.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Alfonso said, crouching down at the same time as Theo to pick up the books. They almost crashed their heads together. Theo pulled back just in time so that, instead of cracking skulls, he merely felt Alfonso’s thick curls brush against his cheek. The sensation of Alfonso’s hair sent shivers of pleasure through Theo’s skin. Theo held back a sigh.

  Alfonso touched the back of Theo’s hand—casually, almost imperceptibly, there one moment and gone the next, like the hummingbird that flitted past Theo’s dorm window some mornings. “Actually, I’m glad I ran into you.”

  “Literally?” Theo said.

  Alfonso laughed. It was low and scratchy, not melodious at all. But for some reason, it evoked the same lightheartedness in Theo as birdsong. “I meant it idiomatically, but it works on a literal level too.” Alfonso picked the last book up and stood. “I want to talk to you more about your research. I’ve never met someone working on Dutch Sign Language before. We should compare notes.”

  “Um, okay. When?”

  “What are you doing for dinner?”

  A lump filled Theo’s throat. He swallowed around it. “I don’t have plans. Probably the dining hall.”

  “Do you like the food at the dining hall?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “How do you feel about Mexican food?”

  “I’m in New Mexico. I should be eating more of it.”

  “I like that attitude. I found a good place not too far from campus last week. Just like my abuela’s cooking. We could walk there?”

  Theo didn’t need to ask what abuela meant. Yearly vacations with his cousins in Madrid and Seville had given him a passing familiarity with Spanish. Apparently Alfonso’s grandmother was Mexican.

  Theo tried to think of a reason to turn Alfonso down, but failed to come up with one. Maybe getting to know Alfonso better would burst the bubble of intrigue around him and make Theo’s silly crush less acute. Alfonso was probably straight, anyway. “Sure.”

  They met at seven in the courtyard outside Theo’s dorm building, a three-story stucco structure near the center of campus meant to evoke a traditional Pueblo adobe dwelling. The sun was less relentless at this time of day, so low in the sky that it only caused Theo trouble if he looked straight into it. Thankfully, the buildings were blocking his view.

  “You know, I should probably see an actual Pueblo building before I leave this country. I really don’t know anything about the indigenous cultures.”

  “I have a car. We could drive up to Taos Pueblo one weekend.”

  “Isn’t Taos a hundred miles away?”

  “A hundred and thirty, actually.”

  Theo did the conversion from miles to kilometers in his head. “So it would take two and a half hours to get there, yes?”

  “More or less.”

  “Maybe you should wait until we’re done with dinner to decide if you want to be stuck in a car with me for five hours.”

  Alfonso laughed. “I’ve shared a class with you for two weeks and you haven’t given me a bad impression yet.”

  “You Americans are much more gregarious than the Dutch. In Holland, offering to spend five hours in a car with someone you barely know is about as serious as asking them to get married.” Theo instantly regretted the comparison. Alfonso was going to think he was some kind of creeper. Theo needed to learn to think first, talk later.

  But Alfonso simply shrugged it off. “Don’t worry,” he said, eyes glimmering. “I won’t ask you to marry me until we’ve known each other for at least a year.”

  Dinner was mind-blowing on both the linguistic and gustatory fronts. Theo tasted huaraches and tamales and fell in love with both, and he conversed almost non-stop with Alfonso—dancing back and forth between English and ASL, with smatterings of Spanish, Nicaraguan Sign Language and Dutch Sign Language thrown in. Alfonso had been using the first three languages since he’d been a kid. He’d grown up a few blocks from the Maryland School for the Deaf with a Deaf sister, a mother who was a third generation Chicana—a new word to Theo—and an Ashkenazi Jewish dad.

  Theo told Alfonso stories from his own childhood he hadn’t remembered in years, like the time when he was eight and he tried to ride his grandpa’s old cruiser bicycle like a BMX over a pile of construction dirt near his house and ended up with a broken wrist. He laughed as he told the story in an odd pidgin of ASL and Dutch Sign Language. How young he’d been then, and how stupid.

  It suddenly occurred to Theo that it had only been fifteen years ago. Alfonso was—what, forty? Forty-five? In any case, he was at least fifteen years older than Theo. Did twenty-three seem as young and foolish to Alfonso as eight did to Theo?

  “You’re frowning,” Alfonso signed. “Why?”

  Theo answered in English. He’d spoken the language almost every day since he started learning it in school at the age of eight. This was a tricky subject, and he didn’t trust himself to get it right in ASL. “I was just wondering—do I seem as young to you as an eight-year-old would seem to me?”

  Alfonso raised an eyebrow. “How old do you think I am, seventy?”

  Theo laughed. “No. If I had to guess—”

  “I won’t make you. That never goes well. If you guess too old, I’ll be insulted. If you guess too young, I’ll be more flattered than the situation warrants. I’m forty-three.”

  Theo did the math. “So, I’m fifteen years older than I was when I was eight, and you’re twenty years older than me. You must think I’m terribly immature.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. We’re both adults. The learning curve slows way down after adolescence.”

  A mischievous impulse struck Theo. “Ah. So what you’re telling me is that you’re immature for your age?”

  Alfonso smirked. “It certainly feels like that some days.”

  “Oh? How?” Theo swung his foot back and forth under the table. He wanted to give Alfonso’s toes a playful nudge, but resisted the impulse.

  “I don’t know. I’m forty-three and live alone with t
wo cats. Aren’t people like that supposed to be bitter and jaded?”

  “So if one is not jaded, one is immature by default?”

  Alfonso shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t feel as old as I thought I would at this point in my life. When I was your age, I thought forty was old. But I still have days when I feel like my life’s just beginning.” The glimmer returned to Alfonso’s eyes. “You know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I do.” Theo felt that way right now.

  Later, in the middle of dessert—sopapillas and Mexican hot chocolate—Theo realized they hadn’t even talked about linguistics yet. Not really. “I’m sorry. I got so distracted by the food and the...” Theo glanced down at the table. Company would be too forward. Instead, he said, “The conversation.”

  “Nothing to apologize for. I was just as distracted. Guess we’ll just have to get together again. Unless—”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Good. Then we will.”

  Theo stopped avoiding Alfonso in their syntax class. He now sat next to him whenever a seat was free, and funnily enough it wasn’t distracting. Theo felt more engaged in the class than he had before. Instead of being a crush that could flatten Theo, Alfonso was now an anchor that steadied Theo. All that from simply opening himself up to friendship.

  They had dinner again on Tuesday and then on Friday. They worked on their syntax assignments together. They critiqued each other’s papers. They went to the library. They filled in the gaps in each other’s knowledge.

  “How do you say ‘what’ in Dutch Sign Language?” Alfonso asked one afternoon as they finished their desserts at the I Scream Ice Cream parlor.

  Theo, satisfyingly full of coffee-and-salted-caramel ice cream, raised his eyebrows, lifted his index finger, and waggled it back and forth.

  “And ‘where’?”

  Theo raised his eyebrows and held out both hands, fingers spread apart and palms facing upward. He moved them toward each other and then apart.