Her Roommate
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

He was really no threat to our relationship. I suppose it says something about my insecurity that I thought he might be. I have heard it said that there are reachers and settlers in every relationship. A guy like me reaches high, and a girl like Miranda is willing to drop a rung or two to go out with me. That’s how I felt anyway.

It seemed to me that her relationship with her roommate Dustin, was way too close. It was like the romcom where you know they are going to get together eventually. A guy like me was just getting in the way, temporarily. It was like, at some time in the near future, in some romantic moment, they would both realize that they loved one another, and I would be left out in the cold. You know the character in that romcom – the third wheel – sad; forgettable.

A romcom, not a drama. If it was a drama, I would have killed the guy. Make it look like an accident. Miranda would be sad. I would be the comforting boyfriend. We would have shitloads of sex. Then what? Well it’s not a drama. I am not going to kill anybody.

I just wanted to neutralize him. De-sex him. Can that be done? Sure, it can. There are drugs. You can get them over the internet. Dustin made a big smoothie every morning and he thickened it with stuff he kept in a jar. I just needed to lace that stuff in the jar with the drugs.

Some people may think that makes me some special kind of low life. But some women make a man crazy. Miranda was that type of woman. She was everything to me. I was nothing to her. There comes a time when a guy like me says to himself: “I could settle for less of a woman, if she loved me, or if she needed me”.

But I was still chasing Miranda hard, and going around to her place, and watching the changes in Dustin.

It was clear that he had no idea what was going on. The first thing that happened was that he started to go soft. I mean his muscles started to lose strength and he started to develop softness under the skin. He started to increase his time at the gym, but nothing was working for him. He spoke to me about it.

I suggested that he put some more protein in those morning smoothies. Or better still have two smoothies per day. It was getting on towards winter and I said: “We all get flabby over winter. It’s nature’s insulation against the cold. It’s no big deal.”

I could see that he was hiding the flabby chest. I would love to have seen them grow, but he was hiding them.

Then I saw that his beard growth had slowed. I made some remark about it. A friendly comment about not being a fan of facial hair anyway. He told me that he was worried about “facial baldness”. I just told him that it must be a deficiency in biotin or Vitamin H. I suggested dietary sources or supplements. He was grateful for the advice.

When I came back a week or so later while dropping Miranda off at their apartment, he said that the vitamin H had pushed his hair growth through the roof, but not on his face.

“You’ve got great hair, man,” I told him. “It suits you worn longer.”

After Christmas he started to get emotional. Miranda mentioned it first. She suggested that maybe I should take him out for a few beers? Maybe we could have a talk, man to man? Maybe help him get his head right?

Of course, I agreed. I would do anything for her. I took him out and I ordered us a couple of beers, and he opened up to me.

“I feel like I am turning into a girl,” he said. “I’ve got little tits growing on my chest. I mean, I have taped them as flat as I can, but they are there. And you know about the beard. I haven’t shaved for weeks, some of it is falling out. But look at the hair on my head. I keep some product in it to slick it back because after I wash it, it looks like a girl’s hair. And I have no strength anymore. And I cry when I watch a sad movie. Hell, I cry when I watch a happy movie. I think I am going to cry now.”

It was supposed to be a man hug, but when he got up close I could feel those tits he was talking about pushing against me, and he didn’t smell like a guy. His skin seemed so soft under his shirt. I almost felt like planting a little kiss on his smooth neck.

“Maybe just run with it for a bit,” I suggested. “Girly is a dirty word in these modern times. Binary is over, right? Be who you are?”

“I don’t want this. I don’t want people to think that I want this,” he said.

I told him that Miranda and I were with him, and I suggested to Miranda that we take him out to a bar where he could express himself as gender neutral. At first, she refused to believe that he could be any such thing, but I said that he was having some hormone problems.

“It’s not only women who have problems with hormones, you know.” That was bullshit, but she believed me. It seemed like everything was working. Dustin was no longer a threat.

I told Dustin that he should wash his hair and wear something sexless – stop hiding. We were going out together to somewhere across town where nobody knew us. He needed to relax, and just take things as they came.

I have to say it – when he stepped out of his room I was shocked. I mean he was just wearing skinny jeans and a loose top, but you could see the little titties through it, and his hair shone like silk. Even with no makeup, he looked like a girl.

It was not just me who thought that. We went to that bar and everybody thought Dustin was a girl. Like, everybody. And he was OK with it, or rather he was OK that he was not hiding something. We all had a good time. We all had a little too much to drink.

We got a cab back to their apartment, and I was looking forward to staying the night with Miranda.

“You snore when you’re drunk,” Miranda said to me. “Stay of you like but you’re on the couch.”

Dustin suggested a nightcap. He and I got to talking about women, or rather the differences between men and women.

“You can’t rely on women,” he said. “They are different people at different times of the month. Hell, they’re different people at different times of the day. You never know where you stand. Something that was fine yesterday is the biggest crime in history today.”

I was agreeing with everything he said. I thought things were going well between Miranda and me, but there I was on the couch with him talking shit instead of screwing in the bedroom down the hall. That is women for you.

“I’m going to bed,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to sleep on the couch. That’s just Miranda being a bitch.”

I am going to say that I don’t know what happened at that point, not exactly anyway. I am just going to say that I woke up in the morning in bed with Dustin. In his bed, which was quite big. But he was sort of lying on me, or very close, with his smooth soft arm over my chest. He must have used girl’s shampoo because his hair smelled great.

I don’t want you to think that we had sex or anything like that. Not that night. We were both drunk when we got into bed. We were both heterosexual when we went to bed that night. Heterosexual men – at least I was. We woke up as something different – or he did.

But before he woke up, I was just lying there thinking. I was wondering if the hormones had made his smell like a woman. You know what I mean – pheromones. Those are the chemicals that let off a scent to attract males to females. Do female hormones trigger female pheromones out of a guy?

What I could not escape is that whatever was going on in his body it was my doing. I just wanted to turn him off Miranda. I did not want to turn him on to me.

It was hard to imagine any circumstance where I could be physically attracted to him. That would mean that I was gay. The drugs were affecting him, not me. To not be gay meant that he had somehow ceased to be a guy.

“I’m sorry,” he said as he stirred and realized where he lay. He tried to roll away, but I stopped him. I put my arm around him. I had become so much stronger than he was now. I needed to reassure him that however strange our present circumstance might appear, it was not wrong. No, I needed to reassure her, not him.

“I don’t want you to think that I’m queer,” she said.

“You’re not,” I said. “Somehow, you have become a woman.”

“What?” She pushed herself up and looked at me. Somehow the morning light caught her face and made her tousled hair into a halo. She looked wonderful. “What are you saying?”

“Last night you told me that you thought that you were turning into a girl,” I said. “Well, I think that you have. We would not be lying together like this if you weren’t a woman, I can assure you of that. Don’t be afraid. Welcome it. I can help you.”

“Would you?” she said.

To answer that question, I kissed her. I would never have done that if I had not told her the truth.

So, what happened next? This is a romcom, not a tragedy. It starts out with the guy being with the wrong girl – the bitchy one – the one who thinks she is too good for him. He meets the girl from the wrong side of the tracks, or the plain girl, or in my case, the girl with the deformity. They fall in love. It turns out that she is not wrong for him, she is not as plain as you might think, she is not so deformed that a little surgery cannot fix her.

I wanted to de-sex a potential rival and I ended re-sexing that person.

And like all romcoms it ends with another kiss.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2019