Taking the Leap

Chapter 26

There's still an advisory warning for sensitive content in this chapter, as it continues in from the last one. Mentions of abuse will occur.

~Xander~

"It doesn't happen that often, just a few times a year. I'll be okay." I was trying to get Dr.Andoh to listen to me.

Dr. Andoh was paging through his notes. "The first time you visited me was three years ago. Where you explained you had feelings of helplessness and isolation within your relationship. You didn't say were being abused but you only ever wore long sleeve turtle necks even though it was summer. You seemed like you were in pain. You stopped coming after three sessions, we tried to contact you but that's when we realized you left a fake number and address." he looked up from his notes, eyes boring into me. "We're all vampires here, Xander. You have to understand that we value privacy. You can be honest here, I certainly won't judge you."

Dr. Adrien Andoh was one of the best psychiatrist therapists in the vampire world based not too far outside of Huntington city. He was also one of the first openly trans men in the vampire world, not to mention he was black and gay like me. But opening up to people wasn't easy, even if they were more like me than not.

I filled him in in short, quiet sentences about how Corey and I had broken up, about a year after I'd had my third and last session with him. "I don't know what happened. One day I was taking it, and the next day, it was too much. He liked French toast on Mondays, but I'd gotten the wrong brand of eggs over the weekend. He could apparently taste the difference." My heart squeezed in my chest at the memory. "So, I went to get the right eggs from the grocery store and I just— never went back. He called, texted, showed up at my apartment, but I just told him I couldn't be his punching bag or his blow up doll and I blocked his number. He didn't bother me a lot after that." I didn't talk about how he'd dumped whatever I left at his place on the curb of my apartment building like everything was trash. Or, the threatening and meticulous handwritten letters he sent to me via snail mail. Especially not the fact that every week for a year he would send me terrible letters in his beautiful handwriting. Some of them would be sweet, talking about how he missed me, missed my body. And then others wouldn't be so sweet and he would meticulously list everything that was wrong with me and how I wasted two years of his life.

I didn't even know why I had read them, it was like he had some strange hold over me. I still had all the letters at home, sitting untouched in my storage room.

But, Dr. Andoh was still talking, "You should be proud of yourself for getting out of an abusive situation in a safe and healthy way. You left your abuser and were able to get away. That's what I'm hearing here, Xander. You don't need to sound so ashamed." His voice was warm, and paternal. It just made me feel worse.

"Everything is going wrong." I blurted our, "I keep thinking that I'm awful and ugly. I never used to have thoughts like this. I used to be normal. I try to write music to cheer me up but everything sounds like the soundtrack of a funeral. Achilles' family treats him differently after he came out and I just feel like it's all my fault. And my chest just feels so heavy all the time." I sighed, feeling like I was going to start crying again. All I did was cry.

"Do you really feel like your partner's family are mistreating him because of you?"

"Well," I paused. "They're not really into him dating a man."

"So, it's not something in your control. It's not really about you, it's more about their intolerance. This isn't your fault either. I don't think they'd like any man he was dating. But, how often you blame yourself is concerning. Did your last partner frequently blame you for things?"