Unconventional Love

“No! Mother, you cannot do this to me! You mustn’t!”

Screaming and crying at the top of his lungs, fourteen-year-old Ashley Purdy was dragged from the common room of what soon wouldn’t be his home. Because they were poorer than either of his parents wanted to admit, they’d made what he considered a deal with the Devil. His freedom was being stripped away, his life as he knew it going down the drain, and he was pretty sure he’d be beaten and abused.

A new family had moved to the small town in central Eastern Tennessee from which he hailed, Rascal Flatts. No one in town knew that he existed, having been told that he’d died from scarlet fever when he was four to hide what his parents considered the shameful truth. Now that they’d made this deal, clearly they’d told someone of his existence, though he was absolutely certain they’d failed to mention what his gender truly was. If they bothered introducing him to guests, they claimed him as their daughter Ashley, rather than their son, and for as long as he could remember, he’d always felt ashamed of his preferences because of that behavior.

He was being sent away to this new family, not as a servant or slave, but as something he considered far worse: a bride. Because he’d refused to dress and act like a man, more or less, since he was about three or four, his parents treated him like a beloved daughter in front of others, but locked him away when it was just the three of them. They’d been terribly ashamed of him and his choices, and Ashley’d been forced to listen to his father’s pleasured moans for years as they tried for another son. His mother merely accepted such things as her wifely duty, seeing as it was the mid-nineteenth century, and never complained. The only thing they bemoaned was that they were getting older and still hadn’t produced a suitable heir.

Once locked in his room upstairs once again, the young boy curled up in a corner as far from his door as he could manage and cried. His long, raven locks fell over his face, which he’d covered with his hands, keeping him from seeing the world and it from seeing him. His skirts surrounded him in a pool of crude fabric, considering that they were all but burlap sacks, and he took comfort in them. It wasn’t long before he heard the sound of a carriage out front, and he struggled to get himself together so that he was presentable for his new groom.

Notes