Chapter 26
ASH
Rational thought finally broke through when I recognized Jace. Then, came the mortification. I don’t understand why I shut down like that. Why can’t I have normal panic attacks? Why does this feral thing inside my brain take over when I’m overwhelmed like that?
The doctor Dad took me to as a teenager called it stress induced dissociative episodes once the neurologist confirmed I wasn’t having absence seizures.
The cooling water tells me that I have spent too long in the shower, so I turn the water off and grab my towel from the hook on the back of the door.
Memories are pushing through and making me feel much less feminine than I did when I started today, so I wrap the towel around my waist and head into the bedroom in search of shorts and a t-shirt.
I’m not even going to bother with underwear right now because I can feel myself slipping back and forth with the way my brain is going a mile a minute.
“Up for a vent session?” Jace asks through the door after knocking. “I hid some tiramisu from the kid earlier.”
For the first time since my car failed to start, a memory comes through that makes me smile.
Years ago, I got to be the one to introduce Jace and Jackson to tiramisu for the first time.
It was also the first time any of us saw Jace deny his big brother anything.
My Biker Bear physically lifted his brother over his shoulder, carried him to the basement of the manor, and locked him in the theater room before coming back to the kitchen to devour the rest of the pan.
He’s not mine, though.
The smile slips from my face as I open the door to follow Jace back to the main living area of the trailer. On the coffee table in front of the sectional, he has set up two mugs of coffee and a giant square of cake. Sharing a dessert… oh, fuck it.
I want to pretend, just for one more night.
“I want to ask you something,” he stammers out when I sit in front of my mug featuring a unicorn wearing a tie and a tiara. “But you can talk first if you want to. I’ll always listen to you no matter what. You… matter to me… a whole fucking lot, Ash.”
After a sip of coffee, it’s obvious that I owe him an explanation… a full one for a change.
“Remember how I told you my mom is one of those Pride moms that goes all out for the parades and stuff?”
His nod is careful as he takes the seat on the other side of the corner of the sectional, our knees barely touching.
“She was honestly the best mom a trans girl could ever have in her teenage years.”
“But you’re not trans,” he interrupts before shoving a bite of dessert into his mouth. The corners of my lips lift slightly at his lack of restraint when it comes to tiramisu before I continue.
“But I’m not trans,” I agree. “I started having the dissociative episodes when I was sixteen. Dad took me to the doctor behind my mother’s back because she insisted it was hormonal and normal for a teenage girl.”
I shove a forkful of the cake in his mouth when he tries to interrupt on my behalf again. He narrows his eyes at me but chews instead of trying to talk.
“The doctor ran tests and even sent me to a neurologist because he was concerned it could be absence seizures. It wasn’t. Then he sent me to a psychiatrist to determine if I was schizophrenic. I’m not.”
Jace’s shoulders relax a bit, and the smile on my face comes a bit easier even though I know what I have to say is not a happy memory. It also is one that I haven’t shared with anyone else before.
“I was diagnosed with stress induced disassociation and given anxiety medication. For a few weeks, everything was better with the pills. I could think. I could reason things out… and that became a bigger problem. Because that was when I figured out my mother was planning to force me into physically transitioning.”
It figures that the only thing that could make Jace Franklin – I guess Whitetower, really – put down tiramisu is my fucked up mother.
“The anxiety medication lifted the panic enough to see that she had been emotionally manipulating me to be more feminine than I felt. She was tying her love for me to how well I passed as a girl in my mind. So every time I felt more masc than femme, it was triggering the disassociation. And she knew it. Every time I had an episode, she would blame it on hormones to try and convince me and Dad to start me on HRT.”
“That’s…” he takes a swig of coffee before continuing his thought. “I thought my mom was a piece of shit, but damn. At least she just neglected me. Fuck, Ash. Your mom’s a bitch.”
Chuckling, I pick up my own mug and take a sip. “Yeah. Yeah, she is.”
Jace listens attentively while I tell him all about how my mother turned her entire life into curating the image as the perfect public face of a mother to a trans girl in southern Georgia.
He sneers when I mention all of the town hall and school board meetings where she was loud and disruptive, demanding I get access to the girls’ locker room and bathrooms; demanding that I be allowed on the girls’ sports teams. She never even cared that I didn’t play any sports and that the teachers let me use the bathroom in the teachers’ lounge.
She thrived on the attention while I did my best to separate myself from it.
“When I got accepted to Wrenshaw University, I begged Dad to let me come up here. Mom didn’t agree, obviously.
Those four years let me meet Justice, who introduced me to Eli, and brought you into my life.
So when I graduated and Mom tried to get me to come home and work for my uncle’s factory, I had enough of an anchor to not get swept away. ”