The rest of the day . . . passed. Left to myself again, after a couple of hours of lassitude I decided to get proactive. I was on the rollercoaster until the end of the ride, but that didn’t mean I had to be passive about it and one thing I could at least attempt to do was regain control of my fantasies. Pursuant to that, since my tastes seemed to steer towards muscled-up sweaty guys with broad shoulders and chests, I sat back on my bed and dipped into my movie memories to pull up Troy on my laptop. That big Hollywood epic from a few years ago starring one of film’s leading males as a buffed-up Achilles.

  Blond and rugged, he looked a lot more like Brian than Papa, and I could ignore the sub-plot around Paris and Helen and the fact that the whole story revolved around a senseless war caused by their love to just marinate in carnal enjoyment of Achilles’ heroic physique. And voice. God, but some voices just did it for me now, which was very weird. Voices had never been an especially strong sexual trigger for me before, but after watching the movie I was able to, hand in my panties and fingers up inside me, come hard imagining myself brought to pleasure on his big hand.

  No Papa-centric wet dreams tonight.

  Which led to the need for cleanup, and a second resolution; I was going to conquer my hydrophobia today. Or at least put a dent in it.

  After some research, I’d concluded that my hydrophobia wasn’t on the extreme end of the scale; pictures of deep bodies of water didn’t make my chest tighten and heart race. And thinking back on the party, I hadn’t flipped into full-blown panic attack until I’d seen a couple of kids go under—even play at trying to drown each other.

  Which meant it might be fixable without professional therapy. And I had strong incentive; I’d really loved a good long soak, especially after workouts. They were practically a meditation form, and now, stripped off, I found myself staring at my tub. The tub, sitting on the tiled floor to snuggly fill the space to the right of the sink, mocked me.

  Carl and Mom had put serious thought into the ensuite bath of what they’d intended to be a guest bedroom. To make best use of the long and narrow space, they’d given it an outward-opening door like a closet’s and had set the deep and narrow tub along the “back” wall with the toilet on the same wall in the corner at its right. The bowl-style sink and cabinet shared the left wall with the other end of the tub, separated from it by a single pane of glass to keep splash from the shower off it. And they’d spent a little extra money in the remodel to install a dual showerhead system, one a detachable handheld showerhead I’d found very handy, the other an overhead rainfall showerhead, the kind with a hundred and twenty nozzles pointed straight down that with adjustable pressure gave you a gentle rain or heavy waterfall experience. With my smaller size now, the tub was long enough for me to completely stretch out but I’d always only stood in it and showered. Now, the rainfall shower on and waiting for me, I didn’t want to step beneath the rain knowing what I planned.

  My heart raced, my breathing had gone short, and struck by a sudden thought, I stepped out of the tub and back into my bedroom to grab my cellphone and text Mom. Just in case she was still worried enough to be uncovered and “listening” to my emotional state.

  My cell chimed a few seconds later. Putting it down with a smile, I took a deep breath and climbed back into the tub and under the shower, letting the gentle rainfall sooth me as I washed off. Taking my time, practicing mindful breathing to help my heart slow, after a final rinse, I sat in the tub still under the spray.

  Breathe. Just breathe.

  After minutes of doing only that, I reached up and switched the flow to the tub spigot. And closed the drain. Eye fixed on my goal, an imagined mark halfway up the side of the tub, I counted up, odd numbers, still breathing slow. I can do this.

  Minutes passed, the thundering flow matching my pulse, until the water level hit the mark and with a lunge I closed the tap. And just sat in the water folded upright, gripping my shins and taking shuddering breaths. With the tub half full, sitting up the water didn’t even reach my ribs. For me to drown I’d have to lie down, knees poking above the water, to get my head under. I was safe.

  And telling myself that helped. Eventually. Finally, the water cooling, I leaned forward and turned the tap again, this time for only hot water to reheat the bath as it deepened. I was awake, I was fully aware, for me to drown would require an act of suicide. And I kept telling myself that—awake, aware—as the tub filled to its proper level and I closed the tap.

  Final step. Relax. The band around my chest felt looser as my body couldn’t help but respond to the warmth seeping into every muscle. Sitting in steaming water and not dying, that was calming. Finally, I stretched out and leaned back, putting my head on the contoured porcelain where it was supposed to rest. Take that, water! I’m stronger than you. Everything up to my neck submerged, I’d done it.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I stayed in for half an hour, refreshing the hot water twice. It was such a small thing, really, but after two months I almost cried at the simple luxury of a soak. I’d have stayed in until I was deeply pruned but it was getting on to dinnertime, so I finally got out and dried and dressed. Sweats and t-shirt, socks, my hair back in its new tail for practice.

  Mom met me at the foot of the stairs and hugged me.

  “What’s this for?”

  “I felt your triumph, sweetheart. I’m so proud of you!”

  “Don’t think I’m up to swimming, yet, but I’ll take the win.”

  She laughed. “You will absolutely take the win.”

  *******************************

  Carl broke out the ice cream for dessert to celebrate my accomplishment, and grumbled when he heard I’d switched to Chess Club. “I have a hard enough time matching you now, and here you’re going to get more practice.”

  I threw back my head and laughed, drawing giggles from the little goblin. “I’ll be lucky to find a couple of players who can match me, and the newbies are always horrors. They make the most face-palmingly awful random moves or unknowingly demolish your careful, elegant, strategies.” It was the truth, and having a noob force a drawn out but inevitable grind of an endgame was never fun.

  “Exactly,” he said. “You get used to their chaos-style and it’ll be harder for me to pull out the odd win.”

  “I could always pre-load a couple of fingers of whisky before a game?” I teased. “Half-drunk lowers my game enough to make your game a challenge.”

  “Ooh, burn. Fist bump.”

  Mom just rolled her eyes at us. “I think you should invite Tabitha to Sunday dinner, tomorrow,” she said to me over her spoon. “With Grace coming too, everyone who knows you were David but Aunt Sophie will be at the table. We can ask questions, sympathize . . .”

  “And you can talk to three veteran women about being a girl,” Carl said. “I’ll probably abandon ship with Steph, here.”

  “What,” I groaned. “Like ask them if they get sensitive breasts before their periods?”

  “Hey, watch it missy!” Mom laughed. “First of all, Grace is long past menopause and Tabitha is likely there, too. Second, think of it like the Hadley Upper Sister System but for life coaching, not just school support. And think of the spread of experience! Almost three generations of female experience, there. Grace was a teen in the sixties! Tabitha in the nineties! And me in the late aughts!”

  “Yeah, we’re definitely skipping on that,” Carl said to the goblin. “They’ll spend the evening drinking and comparing the worst of their dating scenes. It’s a conversation not for your innocent ears.”

  She laughed at him.

  ***************************************

  Mom brought Steph along for our nighttime ritual again, dialing her amplification up and down as I held the little goblin in my lap and listened to her happy stream of contented baby-consciousness.

  “We really need to get your noise-canceling headphones well set,” Mom said quietly, between brush strokes. “You’ve already found that you’re hyper-aware of his mind now, his ‘ping’ as Grace calls it. As your mental sensitivity develops, chances are you’ll start to hear him first. It’s not some deep psychic bond between you, it’s just that with your romantic fixation your mental attention is fixed, too. So, if you don’t want to start feeling his emotions and picking up his mentally vocalized thoughts whenever you’re close enough . . .”

  “Get the earphones on and keep them on?”

  “Right,” she chuckled. Your development from here on will be pretty unpredictable, too. You could find yourself in the middle of class or lunch and suddenly be hearing half the school. About that—” Stopping, she reached into a pocket and leaned past me to put a small bottle on my vanity. It looked like a perfume bottle.

  “Put that in your schoolbag,” she said. “For emergencies.”

  “What is it?”

  “Alcohol and some . . . additives. Call it a family recipe. If you find yourself suddenly overwhelmed, everybody in your head, drink it all and call me. I’ll come and pick you up, but that will take a little while. This will blunt your sensitivity enough to make it bearable.”

  I laughed. “And make me half drunk.”

  "Alcohol acts on the brain to dampen and depress thoughts and emotions, that’s its function. The additives just magnify its soporific effect. But I measured it out for your light weight—even on an empty stomach, you’ll be mobile and coherent.”

  “So, the cure for telepathic sensitivity is alcohol?”

  “Yes.” She went back to brushing. “But I’m not raising an alcoholic daughter, so . . .”

  “Practice, practice, practice. Got it. And then I can teach it to Grace?”

  “It won’t be that easy,” she sighed. “To really help Grace you’ll need to work yourself up to being a strong projector, too. If you can’t amplify the signal, she won’t be able to tell the difference. And since she’s already fully sensitive, you’ll have to combine it with the tonic to depress her sensitivity first.”

  “She’ll have to practice half drunk?”

  Mom laughed again, but nodded and explained. The plan, since we couldn’t tell Grace how I’d learned to cover my mind, would be for me to tell her I’d learned that alcohol plus a ‘restricted pharmaceutical’ worked and, experimenting with the dosage, I’d discovered I could mimic its effects. A lie, but it kept the People out of it, protected the Chandler clan.

  It was a good thing our telepathy wasn’t like in the movies; we’d never be able to keep all these secrets.

  “So we’re all set for tomorrow and next Friday?” Mom asked, putting the brush down, and I nodded. Pinky had texted back accepting an invitation to another Sisters Night, and Tabitha had accepted the invitation to Sunday dinner tomorrow—she was bringing the wine.

  “Then let’s all get to bed.” Taking the goblin back, she gave me a hug and kiss and waited while I crawled into bed before moving to the door and turning out the light. “Good night, sweetheart. I love you.”

  “Love you too, Mom.”

  And after all the excitement and drama of the day, despite going to bed with the feeling of slight tenderness in my breasts signaling the arrival of my third period in a few days, I slept like the dead.