Leroy Adkins is an underperformer. He barely graduated. He barely got a job, and he hardly socializes in his day-to-day life.
Zachary Turner has been sick for as long as he can remember, and as he grows older the crushing realization that he never...
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Leroy discovered very quickly that Zachary was a terrible texter. His messages were short and blunt, and he answered painfully slowly. Sometimes Leroy would text him on the bus to work and receive a reply sometime in the afternoon. Most of his responses were hours apart, and sometimes some would come through a bit faster. Which for Zach meant after thirty minutes or so.
At first, Leroy thought he was simply shy, but it was definitely more than that from what Leroy could observe. The man hadn't had much of this interaction with anyone else, and it was not far-fetched to assume that he simply didn't know texting etiquette.
There was a much more charitable reason Leroy didn't think about until much later when he remembered something Zachary had told him. A week or so after they started texting, Zachary mentioned that he slept a lot throughout the day and didn't look at the screen much because it hurt his eyes. Reading the text, Leroy then remembered Zachary mentioning how hard it was to get into long-form writing because of his condition.
Zachary simply couldn't look at the screen long enough to type out satisfactory texts that matched Leroy's long-form essays that had only gotten longer since Zach's responses were spaced, and a lot would have happened between the hours.
"Fuck," the younger man said, starting at the text Zach had sent only minutes ago. He felt his head buzz and his chest buzz with something—guilt maybe? Why did he suggest texting in the first place if Zachary could barely look at his phone most days, and why had Zachary accepted without saying anything? Maybe the older man had underestimated the gravity of the issue, or he had just sucked it up wanting to be nice to Leroy.
Leroy felt bad.
He should have known better.
He sighed, staring at his phone for a bit before looking up at the clock just above the flat-screen TV propped by the wall of his bedroom. It was late. The clock read a little past eleven PM, so he couldn't do what he wanted to do. A call would probably startle Zachary, considering the man replied to the text when he's gotten up to take a sip of water.
I'll do it tomorrow. Leroy reminded himself, locking his phone screen before plugging it to charge by the foot of his bed. He went to bed, hoping that working from home the coming Friday wouldn't be much of a headache.
When morning rolled around and his alarm went off at seven, Leroy crawled out of his bed, with a minor headache and aching back.
Yeah, heading to bed that late hadn't been a good idea at all.
He stretched, squinting at the sun's rays making their way past his shutters before getting up and heading to the bathroom.
He lived in a three-bedroom house with a basement with his mother and sister. He had one room, his mother had the other, and the third, which used to be his sister's, had been cleared out to use as a centralized office. His sister lived in the basement with all her craft, hair, and nail equipment. It was a reasonably large space. When given the ultimatum between simply using the room that could pass off as two walk-in closets taped together or the basement when their mum complained about her also using the basement, Fraye chose the basement.
