“I’m not a transgender, Ollie. I don’t feel like a boy.”
“But you said—.”
“I never said I was a transgender. I didn’t say anything close to that.”
I reminded her again that she indeed said that. I heard it with my own ears. “Um, yeah you did.”
Jaq stopped laughing, rested her elbows on her holy jeans, and sighed, her eyes watching Cleo and Leo wrestle in the grass. “My name is Jaq because my mom didn’t want me to have a girl name.”
“Why?”
Jaq didn’t answer my question. Not really. “I dressed like a boy until I was thirteen. Everyone thought I was a boy because she changed it on my birth certificate and nobody questioned it. I wore a crew cut, I wore boy’s clothes, boy’s shoes, and I played with boy’s toys. I even went to the boy’s bathroom.”
My arms stopped paddling and I stared a blank expression, asking the only question I seemed to have. “Why?”
“She wanted boys. Can we go back now? I have to pee.”
As fucked up as things had just gotten, my mind was cracking open a cold beer, celebrating my new found information. Jaq wasn’t a transgender. She was still a girl. Inside and out. “No, no, we can’t go back now. Keep talking. How can you get through thirteen years of life pretending to be a boy?”
“I looked like a boy, dressed like a boy, had a boy name, and nobody cared. That’s how.”
“Why thirteen?”
“I had to go to the emergency room because my appendix ruptured. They make you take off all your clothes when you have surgery,” she added like I needed that bit of information, “I was in too much pain to care.”
I rubbed my eyes, trying to picture that. “You were in foster care since you were six?”
“No, I lived with my mom’s cousin, but she wasn’t really related. Not really. She was my mom’s friend, but they had this God mother agreement thing notarized so they gave me to her. I never liked it there, and her husband didn’t want me there.”
“They knew right? That you were a girl?”
“No, not until I had surgery. They didn’t want me after that. That’s when I went to the home. They tried to fix me, too. Make me not think I was a boy, but I never thought I was a boy. I mean at first I did, but it didn’t take long to figure out that my mother was lying.”
“Your mom told you that you were a boy?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t wonder why you didn’t have the same parts as your friends?”
“No, she told me that she cut it off. She told me it was for my own good, that she didn’t want me to hurt pretty girls.”
I touched my face with my fingers, needing to feel something. Something real, make sure I was still in the same dimension. It suddenly didn’t feel like it. The realization hit me like a ton of bricks, a baseball bat to the chest. “Jaq, what happened to your little brother?”
In a ghostly far away tone, Jaq looked past me and replied. “My mom cut his private parts off. She didn’t want him to hurt pretty girls either.”
“And he died?”
Jaq still looked over my shoulder, her eyes looking past me and not at me. “Yes. He was only three days old. I held his little body still and sang to him. It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring. He went to bed with a lump on his head, and didn’t get up in the morning. My mom put a diaper on him and put him to bed. He didn’t wake up the next morning.”
Once again, I felt immense empathy, my heart feeling all her pain. I never wanted to take something from someone so much in all my life. If I could have taken it away from her, I would have. In a heartbeat. She didn’t deserve this. Any of it. It wasn’t fair. Why her?
Chapter Fifteen
Our day after that was a little off, and I knew Jaq felt it too, but I also felt something else. There was something here and we were so close to reaching it, but neither of us knew how. Any man in their right mind would have turned and run the other way. Not me. It only made me fall for her more. It made me want to envelop her in love, shower her with happiness for the rest of her life.
I read the gruesome details later on in the evening when Jaq went to shower away the dirt we’d played in all day in the flower garden. My hand covered my mouth as I read it. Jaq wasn’t lying, not that I thought she was, but it was still unsettling and hard to swallow. Not only was Jaq’s mother sentenced to life, she was also dead. She hung herself three months after going to prison with the leg of her pants. Jaq didn’t know that. I was sure of that.
My eyes glanced up from the article, which manifested from her story to Jaq, letting Cleo and Leo out the front door and back to my computer. The prison where she had died housed three times more people with serious mental illness than compos mentis. The report showed an image of a long line of females, waiting to be given medication.
“Hey, did you know there’s a package out here?”
I closed out of everything on my computer and went to the front door. “Oh, I bet it came while we were out back in your garden. It’s the table and chairs for the back porch.”
“I thought we were painting it first.”
“We are. We’ll do that this weekend. I’ll go rent a pressure washer tomorrow. Do you want to go to the dock and grill some burgers?”
“Yeah, sure. What’s this box?”
I smiled, my hands sliding into my trail shorts. “Open it. It’s for you.”
Jaq frowned and stepped past me with the box, her clean lavender scent lingering behind. “Why?”
“Because I wanted to get you something. Just open it.”
Jaq leaned against the arm of the sofa and opened the small box. “A necklace? You bought me a necklace?”
“Yes, you don’t have any jewelry. All pretty girls need jewelry.”
Jaq held the thin chain between her fingers, her tone lost and dangling like the necklace. “I’m not a pretty girl.”
I knelt in front of her, causing a flinched reaction and took her hands. “You’re a very pretty girl and you shouldn’t be ashamed of that.”
“Bad things happen to pretty girls. Why the compass? I don’t get it.”
“It’s a reminder for you to know that as long as you’re with me, you can’t ever be lost.”
“Because you’ll find me?”
I smiled, my thumbs brushing the backs of her delicate hands. “No, because I already found you. I’m never losing you.”
“Promise?”
“I swear on my life.”
I didn’t care what hang-ups she came with, I didn’t care about the fucked up things her mother had instilled in her, and I didn’t care what anyone thought. I was in love. With Jaq. I knew it, she knew it, and the whole world could know it. There was no way she was ever going to be lost. I wouldn’t let her.
“I do feel things, Ollie. Like girl things.”
I hoped she was trying to say what I thought she trying to say, but I wanted to be sure. I had to ask. What do you mean, Jaq?”
“With you. You make me feel things.”
“What kind of things?”
Her eyes looked up from the compass and our hands, a hint of orneriness in her eyes. “Seriously? You know. Like last night.”
Yeah, I was way off. In my mind we had just made it up to bat, not even close to first base. Had my mind just gone to the gutter or was I reading her totally wrong? Again, I asked, “Last night?”
“Oh, my God. You’re so ignorant. What you were doing when I walked out? I feel things like that, too. With you.”
I was caught way off guard. This played out in my mind completely different than this. This wasn’t the shy Jaq telling me she liked me. Not one word formed in my hazy mind.
“Maybe you can try to touch me. You know, later when we go to bed.”
Well fuck…
“Alright.”
Really? Alright? I could have been a lexicographer without trying, yet I couldn’t think of one fitting word. Not one. Alright? Ugh.
“Okay, I’m going to
play with the kittens.”
“Alright.”
I stood, watching her walk away, debating my intelligence. She made me a hot mess. Not just for a minute, but for the entire night. How the hell was I supposed to think about anything else? Analyzing took on a whole new meaning to me. Maybe she meant something else. I mean, we hadn’t even kissed. Surely she didn’t mean that. Did she?
Jaq played with her plethora of animals on the dock while I watched and cooked, my mind in a million places. Well one, but it wouldn’t stop. I just wanted the moon to appear, the time to move ahead so I could—. “Jaq, watch out,” I called, my thoughts interrupted a second too late.
She stepped backwards, playing tug of war with a rope and Cleo. Her foot rolled on a tennis ball and she went backwards, right into the lake, taking Cleo with her. Knowing she had no idea how to swim, I dove in after her, my flip-flops flying off as I leaped.
“Whoa, I’ve got you. You’re fine.”
Jaq climbed my body like a spider monkey, her arms and legs wrapping around me, gasping for air. With one long reach, I grabbed the edge of the dock, noticing my hand up the back of her shirt covering her lower back. That’s about the time the amnesia kicked in again, a strange attack that took my words, my rationality, and my thoughts. Moving my hand up her back, I pulled her closer and lightly kissed her lips, a soft, quick peck.
Either it calmed her nerves or I totally knocked her off her feet. Her stiff body relaxed, deciding she wasn’t about to drown, and her eyes looked deep into mine. “Do it again.”
I didn’t need to ask questions that time. My fingers moved higher, to the back of her neck and I kissed her again, feeling her lips the way I had in my fantasies. They were just as soft, her kiss tender and innocent like I knew it would be. Like I had imagined a million times. It was all I could do not to shove my tongue down her throat, but not wanting to scare her, I abstained. However, I did taste her lips with my tongue, and she let me.
“I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” she whispered, her words touching my lips, her eyes fluttering, her body fighting emotions she didn’t understand.
“I ask myself the same question every day, only I’m the one who wonders what I did to deserve you. I’m the lucky one here.”
Her lips smiled on mine, and I fought hard not to devour her the way I wanted to, her lips, her throat, her chest. I wanted her. All of her, but this was Jaq. She needed to be led, not devoured.
“Well, that’s one way to get you in the lake.”
“I hate it. Let’s get out.”
I led her to the new ladder on the side of the dock, and watched her climb out, her wet jeans, sliding down her hips. My eyes landed right on her ass and the small slit, peeking out of her waistline, but my mind was still blank. Everything I had learned in my twenty-seven years of studies, gone. The plentiful money spent for student loans, all for nothing. The thousands of books I had read, all forgotten. Everything in my brain was replaced with euphoric endorphins, Jaq induced bliss.
“Thanks for saving my life again,” she teased shyly, her hand squeezing water from her shirt from a twisted knot at the hem and her eyes down.
All I could do was stare. She was breathtaking and didn’t even know it. That was the beauty in it. Jaq didn’t flaunt it because she couldn’t. She didn’t see it. That body. Holy smoking kinetic theory. Her jeans fell off her hips, exposing her midsection, her wet shirt clung to her breasts, divulging two hard beads, and the reluctance in the way she fought unfamiliar feelings took my breath away.
“You’re fucking beautiful.”
That was a little more than she could handle, but it was true. “Stop. Don’t do that, Ollie. I hate it. You know that.”
“I can’t help it.”
“I’m going to shower again. I smell like tuna.”
I smiled, made a joke, and let her off the hook. “There’s no tuna in the lake.”
She smiled a crooked grin and blue out a puff of air, her eyes expressing a sex appeal that I hadn’t noticed before. “Come on, family.”
I watched her walk away, two puppies, four kittens, and a Mama Quinn close behind.
It was all I could do not to jerk off during my own quick shower. I was a hot mess and had no idea why.
Jaq surprised me again, causing ridiculous thoughts and notions to flood my mind. Dirty things. She emerged wearing a pair of the jean shorts I had bought for her and one of the shirts that fit her. Really fit her. Although I couldn’t keep my eyes off her, I never said anything, not like I wanted to. Baby steps. This was Jaq. One of a kind, and I found myself reminding me of that over and over. She couldn’t handle someone telling her she was smoking hot, sexy. Not even me.
I did compliment her though. “You look pretty.”
Her eyes dove to the picnic table and her hands clasped the compass around her neck, but she never said thank you. I wasn’t really looking for that anyway. The nice words were an attempt to make her feel good, not for my ego. She did look pretty, way beyond pretty and I was ecstatic to see her in something besides her boy ripped up boy jeans or gray sweats.
Our evening was strained, but not in a bad way. The anticipation about the next step, where our night would end up, and how far it would go, weighed heavily on both our minds. At least, mine anyway. Jaq paid extra attention to the animals, mostly Cleo and Leo, teaching them to sit for treats with four little kittens crawling all over her. Had it been anyone else, I would have said something smart about Leo listening way better than the sassy little girl, but I didn’t. That line was easily crossed with her, but at least I now understood why.
I flipped our burgers onto the buns, seeing the splash, and speaking at the exact same time Jaq did.
“Fish,” we said in unison.
“Let’s eat. Get down, Cleo,” I ordered, one leg shoving her away with our plates held high.
Jaq grabbed her and Cleo rolled right to her back, taking full advantage of Jaq’s affection. “What? You want your tummy rubbed? Hmm? Is that what you want, silly girl? You go play.”
Leo walked around in a circle and plopped to warm boards, the sun beaming down, one last shot of warmth before it said goodnight. Cleo followed, snuggling up and taking the same deep breath, ready for a puppy nap with her brother. We talked, but not about anything that needed to be said. Those things could wait until I wasn’t about to do things with her. Maybe. I hoped.
“Look, Ollie,” she said through the prettiest smile in the world.
I turned to see two wrinkly puppies with four little kittens nestled close, all sound asleep, Mama Quinn was nowhere in sight. She was out on the prowl, taking full advantage of the free babysitter. My smile wasn’t from the cute baby animals, the rays of the sun they slept under, nor the lake view. It was from her and the things that made her happy. Simple things money couldn’t buy.
The idea to make Cleo and Leo a bed on the porch with the kittens wasn’t even my idea. It was Jaq’s, but I had a pretty good idea why. She didn’t want them in our room, and that made me nervous. Something was about to happen, but I didn’t know what, something that pumped speed through my veins, but not like the adrenaline I was used to. This was different, but scientifically impossible to explain.
I closed the door behind her, locking it with my eyes on her.
She crawled into bed, wearing pink and white striped pants with a plain white shirt. My excitement depleted a little, wondering if she’d changed her mind. What if she did? Was I supposed to wait for her or make a move?
“You’ll probably have to let them in during the night. I bet they don’t sleep out there all night. You’re sure nothing will happen to them?”
I blinked away the commotion going on in my mind, looking to her and then to my ringing phone. “Yes, I’m sure. They’re fine,” I assured her, answering my phone. “Hey, Silas. I’m a little busy. Can I call you in the morning?”
“Busy doing what?”
“Actually, just getting ready for bed.”
“It’s not even
nine o’clock. Why?”
“I’m tired. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“You’re not fucking this chick, are you?”
I ended the conversation before it ever got started. Nothing was going to end this night, definitely not my meddling brother. “Bye, Silas.”
“Wait, Pete wants to make you an offer on your Condo.”
I gave him a chance to give me a number. “What’s the offer.”
“Two-hundred-and-fifty K.”
“I paid that for it two years ago, and I remolded it. Two-seventy and that’s giving him one hell of a deal. I have more than that in the remodel.”
“That’s it. He’s all in at a quarter mil. He doesn’t want a counter. He’ll look for something else. That’s what he said.”
I scratched my head, observing Jaq’s actions, awkwardly staring around the room, moving her arms like she didn’t know what to do with them. “Let me sleep on it. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
My shorts stayed on, too; only because I didn’t know what we were doing, not because I wanted them there. I crawled under the covers and rolled to my side, my hand propping up my head. There was no plan to do anything, no self-talk about what to do or how to do it, I just did it. With my eyes on her stomach area, I slid down the blankets and lifted her shirt.
Her body instantly stiffened, her fingers straightened at her sides, and her breath stuck in her lungs. “Ollie,” she rasped, her tone shaky, uncovering the fear.
“You’re okay, Jaq. Let’s just talk. Don’t worry about what I’m doing, okay?”
“I don’t think I can do this. I changed my mind.”
My hand flattened on her stomach and I did what always worked to calm her down. Only I wasn’t sure if counting Skittles would work the same way as an anxiety attack. “What do you know about sheep?”
Her changed tune almost made me laugh. “What?”
“The feed mill where I stopped to get dogfood the other day had babies. The guy said they were great for clearing brush. They have a reputation for eating vegetation that most other grazing animals wouldn’t touch. I thought we could put them over by the big rocks. I’ve been wanting to clear that off, all those briars. What do you think, should we get a baby lamb to go with the rest of our pet farm?”