Saint, p.1
Saint, page 1
Copyright © Rae Anderson. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner or by any means without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Skinner Publishing Co, 2024
Cover art by Skinner Publishing Co, 2024
Contents
Saint
Victoria
Saint
Victoria
Victoria
Saint
Victoria
Saint
Victoria
Saint
Victoria
Victoria
Saint
Victoria
Saint
Victoria
Saint
Victoria
Saint
Victoria
Saint
Victoria
Saint
This story occurs ten years prior to Supreme and Sadie’s romance.
Please be advised that this book contains profanity, explicit sex, and violence.
If this is not something of interest to you, check out some of my other books.
Saint
Unremitting, my toes curled in the size twelve Jordan 5s that laced my feet. Through continuous extension and flexion, the motion didn’t cease bringing me comfort as I sat in the office of one Dr. Raine Gibson. She held a notepad between her thumb and forefingers, though she deprived the pad of ink, refusing to write a single note.
“Has anyone ever suggested that you may be neurodivergent?”
I was raised by a man who taught me the importance of words, the power they wielded, and the significance of prefixes and suffixes. As I aged, I amassed respect for my upbringing and the expedient conditioning it housed. Words weren’t intonated unless there was intent behind them. They weren’t uttered unless there was clear meaning attached to that intent.
So when I heard neuro, I instantly connected it to my mind, how my thoughts were processed, and my nervous system. Divergent, different, conflicting, deviating—all synonyms to suggest, in a polite way, that my head was unlike the greater population that surrounded me.
Unsanctioned, my lips released a sigh, and my toes began the frequent curling and straightening they always did to settle me.
Growing up, my mother always said my nerves were worse than a pregnant woman past forty weeks carrying twins. It was a running tease about the way I responded to stimuli back when shit like this hadn’t been scientifically defined as a thing. Back then, there weren’t any heavy feelings about specific terminology. There weren’t fucking pronouns. There weren’t hissy fits thrown over names that didn’t exist because neurodivergence wasn’t a… whatever the fuck it is.
“Nah. I haven’t,” I countered Dr. Gibson. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, toying ignorant, though I’d already broken the word down for my understanding.
Across from me, she sat on a sofa similar to the one I was in. Hers was a third of the size I was situated in. The lofty couch was much too oversized for her office, but I relaxed in it regardless. Maybe that was the point. People crossed her threshold in search of something. Comfort was required in order to locate it. The couch I sat on was comfortable as hell.
Though mildly disinterested in the conversation, I was still curious to know what the VA-appointed psychiatrist had to say. It was through my benefits that I connected with Dr. Gibson. Not directly. The VA provided shrinks for veterans, but the care for mental health was sub-par at best.
Often, the VA didn’t treat preexisting mental health conditions. It immediately disqualified you from being eligible for care. Yet another fuck you from the government for all we did in our line of duty.
I found Dr. Gibson through a recommendation from one of those sub-par doctors. She was highly recommended, and for good reason. Dr. Gibson was excellent, and the quality of her care was felt in my pockets, too.
“So, your brain operates differently from a neurotypical or average person. You see the world differently. This isn’t a medical diagnosis, but it serves as a descriptor for some of the things you may or may not have experienced. Am I… scratching the surface of what you may have experienced?”
Big toes, pinky toes, all of them furled.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” I breezed, locating several pieces of lint on my pants and proceeding to line them up in a single file on my thigh.
I knew exactly what she meant. My response had been wary. Guarded and watchful, I was. The instinct was shared with every soul that crossed my path. With psychiatrists, I’d learned they only rationalized what you furnished freely. An inch yielded a mile. If depth was what she sought, she would work for it.
“Tell me about your childhood. How were you as a child growing up?”
Hmm. As she adjusted the conversation, I wondered if she had seen through my deflection.
“I’m the second eldest of four. Pretty happy as a child. Healthy two-parent Black home.”
“Did you notice any differences between you and your siblings growing up?”
“Of course, Doc,” I smirked. “I’d be remiss not to emphasize that we’re all different,” I clipped.
“Mr. Miller,” audibly, she sighed. The patience I’d mentally lauded her for was depleting. “It’s your dime we’re on. We can spend this engaging in a circular conversation, but it will only benefit one of us once your time is up.”
Okay.
So she had seen through my deflection.
“Loud noises, physical touch, crowded spaces… It all… messed with me,” I caved.
“In what way?”
“I had to counter it with something. A distraction,” I explained, dusting the neat line of lint off my pants.
“What was your distraction?”
Dr. Gibson was right in the pocket, and she knew it as she pressed forward relentlessly in her pursuit of whatever category she sought to lump me into.
“I used to… bang my head.”
The memory was vivid. One I’d sought to entomb amongst several unpleasant ones from my upbringing. I banged my dome so frequently that my father bought me a helmet.
I looked like a damn fool, leaving the house looking like I was going for my first-ever bike ride nearly every day. The preventive measure was intended to protect me, but the helmet didn’t stimulate me as I needed it to. In the way of my desire to connect with a hard surface, it obstructed me from self-soothing.
Imagine.
A babe without a pacifier.
A monk without meditation.
A musician with no instrument.
A writer without a pen.
Anais Nin once said, “When I write, I devour my neurosis.”
With a helmet, I couldn’t devour shit. How was I supposed to settle the split nerves of my dome when my head was adorned with armor?
My parents meant well, but they didn’t understand me.
Robbed of the very thing that settled my neurosis, I turned to violence. My brothers and I fought as toddlers like teenage boys. All because of anger I couldn’t comprehend. All because of a helmet.
When I grew old enough to master removing the helmet, I took it off and returned to head banging. My soothing. The collision of my distressed dome against a hard surface silenced my erratic nerves. The formation of pain radiating from the point of impact outward distracted my senses. It was comforting until it wasn’t. The behavior lasted for as long as I grew tired of injuring myself.
I remember the day I shifted from one stimulative to another. We were on a plane, headed to some beach in my adolescence. The inconspicuous thumping of cargo as it was loaded, the knock of the wheels as they went up, the sound of the engine as it whirred, the rumble as the plane made its descent – it all rattled me. I’d lost my aspiration to collide my head against a firm surface, settling for rubbing it against my mother’s arm and scrunching my toes in my shoes.
The swap of those behaviors didn’t quite scratch my itch. I couldn’t rely on being in my mother’s presence all the time to rub against her, and Ramsay Miller?
Ramsay wasn’t having that shit. Sarah was his woman. He’d be the only one doing the rubbing against her. His words, not mine. In my father’s defense, it was inappropriate. At the tender age of ten years old, it wasn’t suitable for his middle son to be exhibiting such behavior. Unable to place my eccentricity, my family didn’t. According to my mother, I was one of a kind. Following my mother’s lead, my family accepted me as I was.
When we exited the plane that day, I found the beach. It became my new tool for soothing my sensory overload.
“And what did that banging do for you?” Impaling my memories, Dr. Gibson’s gentle voice requested more information.
“It was… quieting,” I shrugged.
Quieting the loudness of touch and the explosion of a whisper. My senses were tuned to a much higher volume than the average person. Dr. Gibson and I had been at this shit for several sessions, all prompted by an idea planted in my head by my older brother, Supreme, to speak to a shrink. All of it was inspired by my desire to understand myself better. I was ready to get to the bottom of it already. It felt like Dr. Gibson knew where she desired to ‘lump’ me, but she was holding back.
“Just tell me what the diagnosis is already.”
She shot me a look, slightly shifting in her seat. Her near-imperceptibl e sigh was noted before she spoke again.
“Have you ever heard of the term autism?”
So… I had an ism.
The fact that there was a name for my uniqueness was hardly surprising. On an episode of House, I vaguely remembered Dr. House stating something along the lines of when you pick a specialist, you pick your ailment.
Not that I saw myself as possessing an ailment. I hadn’t recently become aware of my variance from others. After experiencing it for twenty-eight years, I knew I wasn’t like other kids. I knew the entire alphabet prior to my first birthday. I knew how to identify every letter. I knew how to count to twenty. I had a huge interest in dinosaurs, stating their actual scientific names, and a profound interest in marine biology.
When I turned three, I knew how to read at a six-year-old level. Because of my propensity for knowledge, I started school earlier than my peers. Sporting such a gift, my parents lauded my academic achievements. They thought I was their special gift from God.
My local peers didn’t share such enthusiasm. Settling on the idea that I was strange, they ensured I was aware of their disapproval. Kids could be cruel in that way. As I excelled in academia, I failed at social skills, earning weirdo and freak as nicknames. Ones that my older brother, Supreme, had no qualms about throwing hands over.
His attempts to circumvent bullying with the threat of violence only led to people maintaining a healthy amount of distance from me. It followed that developing relationships wasn’t the easiest task. In fact, for me, it came far and few in between. I didn’t have friends. I didn’t have girlfriends. Being socially awkward made it difficult to form such connections.
It often felt like I’d been sent out into a world where everyone possessed a manual on how to conduct themselves except me. There were rules of communication, eye contact, things one didn’t say to another person, of gaging how to behave–whether it be to smile, show sadness, or laugh, or be emphatic–so many goddamn rules. Deficient of that embedded manual, I was forced to learn by observation and countless mistakes.
I’m not implying I was disadvantaged. I was. Socially disadvantaged. In an economic sense, that was never a problem. Not for my family. It made it easier to disavow the other needs I fell deficient in. Funny how that shit works.
My father was a drug trafficker.
Is…
Is not going to be anymore…
Whatever. He’d set our family up well. Now, at the tail end of that narrative, he was seeking legitimacy. Because of his occupation, financially, I never wanted anything. My parents made sure of that. Emotionally, they tried their best with the knowledge they were equipped with to support me. Mentally? Socially? Well, that was the reason why I was sitting across from Dr. Gibson.
Back when I was younger, seeing a psychologist, psychiatrist – hell, any -ist was often taboo for Black families. Now, as a grown man and army veteran, the taboo of bettering my health didn’t concern me. Anyone with a problem with me seeking professional guidance didn’t concern me. If what I’d been experiencing all my life had a name, I was eager to know despite my age.
An unrestrained chuckle manifested from the depths of my throat, causing Dr. Gibson to pique a perfectly arched brow. I wonder if she knew that if she continued waxing away at those hairs, they’d eventually stop growing back. One day, she’d be fifty with no more eyebrows. Imagining her face void of them caused me to grimace. What a shame, too. Dr. Gibson was fine as hell.
A conversation furnished by those thoughts would have taken place back in the day before I understood that certain things weren’t socially acceptable to say aloud. I’d go into depth about the significance of eyebrows and their impact on physical appearance before divulging their actual purpose. Now, far better equipped in allistic engagement, I wouldn’t dare have a conversation like that.
My, how far I’ve come.
There was a host of shit I used to do that wasn’t socially acceptable. Wholly aware of that, I tried to transform into the perfect puzzle piece. I tried to fit in with the conundrum of society. I tried to fake my interest in conversations about sports and shit that I could care less about.
Dr. Gibson called it masking. A thing autistic people did to fit in –altering our behavior, words, inflection, et cetera. Masking didn’t always work in my favor. There was a perpetual scale weighing in my head the positives and negatives of being embraced by my peers versus simply embracing myself.
I chose the latter, accepting that it would lead me down a lonely path. My brothers and my baby sister were all the damn friends I needed. Honestly, they grated my nerves enough to where I often wondered why I needed friends. The concern weighed much heavier on my mother than on me. I wasn’t concerned about friends at all. I was more concerned with the effect of acidification on the ocean.
Hyperintelligent, socially awkward, special rules for engagement with the world around me… Shit. The world denied me an embrace me for my differences, so instead of trying to become someone I wasn’t, I mastered how to mask as required. I faked it through high school, basic training, through two tours in Iraq... Whatever was required to ensure my survival, I did it.
As an outsider, I accepted the notion that I didn’t belong to the world around me. I’d learned from my past experiences. Through observation, I created a manual of my own on how to navigate life. My guidebook was slightly different from the one everyone else received earlier on – ingrained in them. I didn’t have that luxury. I had autism.
“Autism is an umbrella term referring to a range of neurodevelopmental disorders that affect how one might socialize, learn, or interact with others. There is no one type, and it is often referred to as a spectrum of conditions ranging from mild to, for lack of a better term, severe.
“Being autistic doesn’t mean you have a disease that needs to be treated. This diagnosis serves to assist you in better understanding yourself. In understanding Saint, you’ll find and develop ways to cope with the demands of society,” Dr. Gibson explained.
“It sounds like you may also experience sensory processing disorder. I can assist you with that by recommending an occupational therapist and perhaps a low dose of–”
“Nah. I’m good on all that.”
I’d lost count of the number of times I’d fucked up in the social world, attempting to pick up on cues and rules to integrate myself into society. It was challenging and often embarrassing. Now, the confirmation that there was nothing wrong with my belief that I was indeed different from others was wholly freeing.
“What does coping look like, Doc?”
The dialogue between us had gone from dull to intriguing. Fully invested now, I shifted, sitting up in my seat. The adjustment made her hike one of those perfect brows to the sun.
“It can look like something different based on what your needs are. For some, it may be getting community support. For others, it can mean going to therapy. For a select group, it may be getting medication to treat anxiety or depression.
“Each individual with autism may have a distinct set of strengths and challenges. No two are the same. I’m of the notion that you may be erring toward what used to be called Asperger’s syndrome. This is distinguished from other types of autism by strong intellectual ability and verbal language skills.
“You mentioned banging your head to soothe yourself. In clinical terms, we call that stimming or stimulating. Does any of this sound right to you, Saint?”
My phone drew my attention away from the woman sitting before me. Not bothering to issue a response, I observed a text message from my brother.
Chicken came home to roost.
Supreme
Returning my attention to Dr. Gibson, I tucked my phone away. “Unfortunately, our time is up, Doc.”
Ignoring the bewildered look on her face or the way she scurried to check her watch, which I already knew read 10:01, I stood, announcing my departure. I had a bird to cook.
Victoria
“Good morning, Ms. Jacob.”
“Hey, Tori.”
“Morning, Tori.”
The members of my staff offered endless salutations as I floated the halls of the building. They were often met with a curt nod. If I acknowledged everyone, I’d be depleted before I reached my desk.
Armed with a cup of the finest coffee blend from I Hate Mondays and my portfolio in hand, I journeyed to my destination, ignoring several greetings until Marquis approached.
