Repayment in Kind
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

I might have been called a sex addict, at that time. I simply could not get enough. And worse still, I was fussy. They had to be beautiful.

I used to think that I did not have to pay for it. I could charm beautiful women to bed. I may not be the best-looking guy (although my big blue eyes do help) and I am certainly not a big guy, but what really charms women is money. You have to flash it around to get their attention and spend some to keep that. So, I suppose you do pay in the end.

You realize how important money is when you don’t have it anymore – when you last credit card stops working. That is like having your dick cut off. You can stay on Tinder and meet her, but where are you going to take her? How can you get her drunk enough to do your mischief? With no money you might as well be nutless.

But even penniless, living in my cousin’s garage and with my job under threat as I could not easily get to it, I still needed sex with a beautiful woman.

I had borrowed from everybody at work, including rifling the petty cash tin. That, and being late, meant that I was going to be fired eventually, and in the meantime all my friends at work hated me. They would hate me even more when I lost my job and disappeared. My cousin too, was close to being finished with me because I owed him so much.

So, what did I do? Here is the proof of sex addiction: I walked into the best whorehouse in town, selected the prettiest escort and fucked her brains out. I was dressed nicely, and I was cool as I can be. So, no pay up front – just see the madam on the way out.

“Sorry,” I said to her. “I don’t have nickel.” I didn’t even try to use an invalid card and then make promises. I basically admitted to her that I had a problem, and no way to deal with it.

When you have nothing, there is nothing you can do. She called in her boss, a greasy little pimp called Alphonse, and he called in the muscle. I have to say that I was terrified. Alphonse could see it. I told him that I didn’t like pain but if it was coming, I had no choice but to take it.

“If I drown in my own blood in your back alley, I would like to think that I would die happy having enjoyed your girl so much, but the truth of it is that I am addicted.” That is what I said, or something like it. He just looked at me blankly.

The brute beside him was ready to beat me to pulp, but he stopped him with a wave of his hand.

“We are all so happy that you had such a wonderful time, but that girl had to work for your pleasure,” he said. “She made herself look good for you and then she let you inside her body. That is real work. You owe her. You owe us. You need to work off the debt. Come to think of it, you need to do some real work. And at the same time, that may provide a cure for what ails you.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I was ready for a beating. Things were looking up.

“What can I do?” I asked. How long would I be sweeping floors in this joint, but how much sex would I be able to get for myself on the side?

“I have a few transgirls on my team. You can join them.”

I have to say that my first thought was: ‘Transgirls. Yeah, I’m not fussy. I could fuck them’. That was just the way I thought. Just about fucking, never about being fucked. But then I realized that was exactly what he was talking about. I held up my hand. Not that. He was glaring at me, and so was his pet gorilla. There was no way out of this.

“Let’s not escalate this to a serious crime,” I suggested, trying to reason my way out of this. But he was having none of it. Before I knew the big guy was on me, and a syringe was plunged into my upper arm. The room immediately started to spin, and I was out of it.

The last thing I can remember was Alphonse saying: “We accept payment in kind”.

Maybe I was not completely unconscious. I remember walking, just putting one foot in front of the other. I can remember an airline stewardess leaning over and asking me: “Are you alright?” and somebody squeezing my hand until she walked away. I remember my hand being held like that. I remember being led, walking as if in a trance. An airplane, a taxi?

I remembered the tropical smells – frangipani and coconut. And then hospital smells – blood and disinfectant.

And then pain. Searing pain, as if my guts had been pulled out through my groin. My groin! I suddenly realized that I had been mutilated, even before I reached my hand down there. When I did, it was with a prayer that it could not possibly be true.

I was lying in a hospital bed, with a window. There was a palm tree outside, but it was not such a pleasant place. The paint was blistered with moisture underneath, and in some places had flaked away completely. The humidity was heavy, despite the closed windows and air-conditioning. The bed was old – perhaps a cast off from a proper hospital. It was clear that I was in the third world. Somehow, they had smuggled me out of the States to some foreign shithole.

As if to confirm that, an Asian nurse entered the room. She was small and plain-looking but smiling.

“You happy now?” she asked. “You very lucky girl. When bandage off, you see, very pretty.”

I realized that there were bandages on my face too, and pain under them. It had hardly registered given the extreme pain lower down, but I was hurting all over.

I tried to speak. But that hurt too.

“No talk,” the nurse said, still smiling. “You have pretty voice too. But no talk now. Bad for …” She touched her throat. English was a struggle for her, but she did not seem to care.

She checked the bandages and gave me a drink through a straw. It was sweet and clearly contained some kind of supplement to keep me going. I realized that I was hungry.

The tension in my body was not helping. I lay back and the pain abated a little. I realized that for the time being, a struggle would not help. I had to face my situation.

Foolishly I had assumed that the best whorehouse in town would not resort to violence to collect payment. I had an idea that the place I visited was the high-class component of a larger prostitution business, but I had no idea how large it was. And you do not get to be big in any vice business without being ruthless.

It seemed that the madam had been true to her threat. I would be working off the debt as a transsexual whore! It seemed clear to me that my genitals were gone. This was her “cure for what ails me”. But I could only see it as the end of my life. I lived for sex, and I did not think that sex without a penis was possible.

As it turns out I was wrong. But in that moment, I was in despair. I found myself crying, and that seemed to confirm to me that I was no longer male. In that brothel back home I had invited them to beat me to death, and lying in that bed as I was, I wished they had. But I had never cried, and now this was who I was – or what I was.

I still thought of myself as a man who had been horribly mutilated. As long as I thought that way I would be depressed. But time changes everything, and healing does too.

I remember when they pulled the packing out. The doctor came in. He spoke no English at all. He watched as enough bloodied rag was pulled from my groin to fill a pillowcase. I then knew that I had a vagina, and it seemed to me that it must be huge, but when he inserted a small plastic rod inside that seemed to fill me. He was careful with his gentle touches, but there was still pain. He took off his surgical gloves and smiled, giving me a thumbs up with both hands.

It seemed to me that he expected me to be overjoyed at this. Perhaps his run-of-the-mill SRS patients would be. I just looked at him blankly, I think.

It was another couple of days before he returned to unveil my breasts. It would have been cruel if they had been basketballs, but luckily, they were modest – about the size I like on a woman – full enough to get your face into, but not suffocating.

The doctor also examined my throat and made some noises for me to imitate. All that emerged were unnatural squeaks. I decided it was best to remain silent.

He removed some bandages from my face so that I could eat solid food. I was able to feel that my chin and nose were now smaller, and my face felt tighter with stitches on the top of my forehead and in front of my ears. My lips were swollen but I hoped that was not permanent. I could not see myself, and I did not want to.

I started to think about suicide. After a while I realized that thinking about it was less about not wanting to live and more about occupying my mind with an objective. I realized that there was little I could do in this room. I would need to be free if I wanted to kill myself. Get better first. Then die.

The pain subsided. The only continuing discomfort was the nurse appearing with larger and larger rods to shove up my insides. I was now eating and toileting myself, sitting down to piss as was now my only means of doing it. I could now walk around the ward, but I found that my calves were tight, forcing me to walk on the balls of my feet for comfort.

Still I did not want to look in the mirror. It seemed to me that as long as I remained oblivious to what they had done to me I could pretend that it never happened. I did not want to even look at my body. As long as the nurse was giving me sponge baths, I did not even have to touch it. Maybe I thought that I could imagine that I still had the male body.

“You walk outside,” the nurse said one morning. She presented me with clothes. There was a sports bra, a pair of panties, a floral dress and a pair of wedge sandals. It seemed laughable. I was going to wave them away, but I did want to go outside.

She had to help me with the bra, but once it was on, I found it surprisingly easy to wear. Women had always told me that they were uncomfortable, but it seemed to me that having dangling breasts was worse. The panties and the dress seemed perfect for the humidity, letting air flow to the parts still healing. The shoes were a revelation – at last my legs seemed to allow me to walk freely.

The nurse led me into the hall, and a bit further down there was a full-length mirror. In it I saw the new me for the first time.

Even with a little swelling in my face I could see that I was beautiful, or soon would be. If I had ever imagined myself as a woman, I would not have believed that I could look this good, and yet it could me in the mirror, somewhere inside that body. And the body was good too – not some bimbo with basketball breasts and a bubble butt – a feminine shape that could never really be hidden, but not an extreme one.

The hair on my head now seemed to cover my entire scalp and sprouted long above the bandage, but the extensions and the makeover would follow in the coming days. It would then be clear to me what they had turned me into: Not just a living fuck doll but an attractive call girl.

As I heard the pimp Alphonse say over the speaker phone when they videoed me after coming out of the salon: “If you are going to spend a packet of money on the surgery the result must be something that will give you a return on the investment.”

“What are you going to do with me now?” I squeaked at his image on the phone. I wanted to sound angry but it just came out like a whine.

“Well, you don’t have a passport, so you will be coming home in a shipping container with a bunch of other girls. Somebody like you can only make good money for me on this side of the world.”

I was now out of the hospital and I was walking around dressed as a woman, surrounded by other women, including others like me who were once men, although I was the only white one. Some were there by choice, and others from outside Thailand were not. But we all faced the problem of having no travel documents and an outrageous story to tell if we could hope for rescue.

Still, I felt that I needed to do something. I am a survivor. I had been through the despair of losing my masculinity and I was now acquiring a new self-confidence based mainly on my appearance. The strange thing is that if they had made me into some bimbo caricature of a woman I probably would have had no option but to walk into that shipping container, but as a real looking woman I felt that I could break free.

I knew that I looked awkward, but there were enough real women (in for beauty surgery) and long terms trans-girls, to help me with learning how to carry myself appropriately. There was time to get things right and then to wait for the moment to break free.

I had nothing except the clothes I stood up in, so when the chance came, I was able to take it. But I found that I was in a small city away from the main centres, so it was a challenge to be able to sneak aboard a train and put some distance between me and the hospital.

I was able to find my way to the US Embassy in Bangkok. I gave them a false name (female) and said that I had lost my travel documents. That got me an interview in front of a consular official, in a private interview room in the consulate.

“My name is Gordon James, on the staff here,” he said. He was young – only a little older than me – and quite handsome. And I recognized the look on his face. I had only looked as I did for a month but by now, I knew the look of lust.

“Look, I know you are going to find this difficult to believe, but I am not really a woman. I am a man and I was abducted weeks ago and brought here and forcibly changed into this!”

The look on his face is hard to describe. Or rather the many looks: Surprise, horror, curiosity, and then back to lust again.

“That’s an incredible story,” he said. “But a serious matter. Let me take you details. We need to prove that you are a US citizen and then we can offer you help. Where are you staying at the moment?”

“I have no money. I have just got here. They may be looking for me. They have invested a lot of money on me and they want to put me to work as a prostitute. I am not a prostitute.”

I realized that I was crying. I knew that it was the hormones or the lack of balls, or whatever. It was not something that I did as a man. No I was not that. I was sobbing. I was helpless.

And Gordon was a man confronted by a distraught woman. He reached out and took my hand, and said: “The Embassy really needs to verify that you are American, but maybe I can help you, personally. It is late and I am almost finished for the day. You can wait outside and then … you can come with me.”

And so I did.

You can judge me if you like, but I am a survivor and I did what I had to do to survive. But survivors also have luck, and as it turned out, I had lucked out.

Gordon James’ father had been a big donor to the president’s election campaign. He got the posting as ambassador to Paris and he also got diplomatic postings for his two sons in locations of their choice. Gordon chose Bangkok.

“It is such an exotic place,” he explained. “And to be honest, I was always fascinated by the whole ladyboy thing. And then you walked into my life.”

To be honest, my Gordon is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. The Embassy knows it and had him on easy duties and not dealing with Thai officialdom. So he was an outsider at work and would rather spend time with me. But he was rich – very rich. He drew a salary from the State Department and an allowance from his father.

And he was good in bed. After my surgery I was appalled at the thought that I might be penetrated by a man, even after the pain in my artificial vagina had stopped and I first felt pleasure from the dilation tool. But it seemed inevitable. As a man who took full advantage I could not imagine being on the receiving end, but from the very first time with Gordon, I liked it.

He was tender, when I told him what I was, down there. He was gentle and the air-conditioning was off and the window open. The room was hot and humid that night, and somehow the sweat and tropical scents were just magical. I had my first female orgasm. Then I realized that I was addicted to sex all over again.

Gordon paid for everything. If those who had done this to me were looking for me, I don’t think they would have recognized me. They would be looking for a built-to-order trans prostitute, not the sophisticated “wife” of an American Consular Official.

Gordon arranged for the change of name and sex on my birth certificate and a new passport. Then I went to Paris to meet his parents and then to my new home, with Gordon.

I am a patron for a charity assisting sex workers now. It seems only right. They are always being exploited by people like the person I was. I never had to pay in kind by working the streets as my tormentors may have wanted, but payment was due.

But someone did pay in the end, as they should have. I often think about it and maybe even wish I had been there, when Alphonse woke up in the hospital in Thailand and reached down to feel for the pain in his groin.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2021

Author’s Note
This is a reworking of a draft story by my friend Julie titled either “The Business Trip” or “Holly” from which I was invited to make my own story. I tried not to read her story in detail, so that I would not follow her prose – I was only interested in the key idea: The man who cannot pay for services rendered to him having to provide those services, and ending up in Thailand post SRS.