Read My Lips (Eminem Fanfic)

21. Numb

Idk what you guys are gonna think about this chapter tbh 😫

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Amari's P.O.V.

Numb is what I feel while sitting in the car across from Marshall after he told me what he's arranged for me.

I don't know exactly what kind of a reaction he was expecting from me, but it's not hard to guess that he did this because he thought it would make me happy.

And I suppose I should be happy.

Happy and grateful to him for giving me an opportunity that was never even an option for me before, simply because I never had any means to even consider the surgery to fix my hearing. Not to mention that it shows me that he really does care for me. I'm not just some conquest to him, he actually does want all the best for me, and I love him for it.

Actually, I love him period.

So yes, I should be happy and I should be grateful to him.

But all I feel on the inside is this strange numbness.

You know like... when you are either so scared or so hurt by something that you have literally reached this limit where you cannot feel anything at all anymore.

This is how it is for me, and I don't even know why.

Now, Marshall is saying something to me, but I can't concentrate on the movement of his mouth enough to make out anything. Like, I can see his lips moving but I can't read them.

Maybe I'm in a state of shock, I don't know.

I smile at him, stretching my lips out, trying to appear normal. When he pulls me out of the car with him, I follow behind him blindly, shuffling my feet automatically, not really thinking much about where I am or where I'm going.

I don't know why I feel like this. I should be so happy right now. Or more like... hopeful at the very least, because as Marshall has said, the doctors have to examine me first. Run tests to determine if that implant thing would even work for me.

I'm not getting the surgery done today right this minute. Hell, I don't even have to actually do it at all of I don't want to.

But the thing is, I SHOULD want to, shouldn't I?

Marshall and I get on the elevator and he's pressing the button for our floor. I lean against the wall and close my eyes for a few seconds.

I feel the beat of my heart thumping in my chest. Forcefully and rapidly. And I'm suddenly finding it hard to breathe.

I'm flashing back to the day I woke up in the hospital all those years ago, only seven years old and faced with the hard reality that both of my parents are now dead and I can no longer hear.

Remembering how freaky it was to live every day in complete silence. It was weird at first and I kept expecting to snap out of it, wake up one day and realize it was all just a nightmare or something.

But human beings can get accustomed to everything and eventually the silence became just as normal to me as breathing.

I've never even considered surgery before to try and be able to fix it. Mostly because as a kid, I was always bounced from a foster home to forster home and none of my foster families cared enough to try and do any research into such a thing, so naturally, I've never even considered it myself back then. And as an adult, well, I never had the means for it, plus, I was already perfectly content living in permanent silence.

And now it's like an explosion, and next thing I know, I'm having a panic attack.

My heart beats even faster in my chest, and I'm hyperventilate and gasping for air, and Marshall is by my side, I have my eyes closed, but I feel his hands on my face, I'm sure he's probably asking me what's wrong and I can't bering myself to say anything, it appears to me that I have all of a sudden forgotten how to talk as well.