A Song of Silk and Shadows
By Fakeminsk
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Synopsis:
The old king is dead. As the great houses of Sangriferia manoeuvre to claim the Garland Crown, the fate of the realm rests on the slender shoulders of Aubriella Malveil, a young lady of the Crimson Court already burdened by secrets of her own.
Chapter One
One: The Old King’s Death
News of the old king’s death spread swiftly across Sangriferia.
In the gambling dens and weather-battered taverns of Fishtown, rough men cashed in bets on the monarch’s demise. In the halls of Houses great and small, lords plotted and prepared for war. The so-called barbarian kings of the Northern Reaches summoned councillors to their wind-swept longhouses to decide whether the death of this weak monarch was an opportunity to exploit. And in the glimmering darkness of the candlelit Obsidian Halls, the veiled virgins of the Twilight Lady began the sonorous week-long dirge that would carry the dead king to the afterlife.
But it was to the capitol that the news spread fastest, where the fashionable ladies of the Crimson Court stood, as still and sculpted as ornate columns in the opulent chambers of power. Only a year ago—but no, not even a year, not so long as that—fashion had followed the example of Princess Elowen and her unbridled spirit: long hair fell freely and the most daring women abandoned dresses and skirts in favour of clothes in the style of the princess’s riding breeches and masculine tunics. But with her tragic and scandalous death—the inevitable outcome of a father’s inability to restrain his daughter, some whispered—the liberated fashion died, as did the deviant habit of women in trousers.
Her mother, the young Queen Kalia favoured dresses, in the style of her homeland across the Stardrop Seas, elegant and free flowing, flattering to her boyish figure, tight in the waist but fluttering and shimmering like butterfly wings as she flew and danced through the many-chambered quarters of the capitol. Briefly, following her daughter’s death, the parties became ever more lavish and vibrant and wild, the desperate reaching for life that follows death. But it was in her ever-more tightly braided hair and the ever-darkening clothes she wore that her grief expressed itself, the wasting grief that eventually consumed her a short six months later.
With both Princess and Queen gone, who to dictate the female fashions of Sanguinna, the capitol, the so-called Castle of Blood sprawled across the high, flat expanse of Blood’s Rest overlooking the sea and city below? Strong-willed, striking yet distant, it was the Lady Teneira of House Malveil who took charge. During the funeral of the Queen, some doubt remained as to whose influence would reign supreme, as the ladies of the great houses vied, subtly yet fiercely, for dominance, through the cunning cut of a veil, the design of a dress, the drop and colour and texture of a skirt or daring flash of a patterned stocking.
All doubts were firmly dispelled at the Festival of the Sisters the following week. Teneira’s main rival, the Lady Timora, had yet to show her face following her debasement that evening.
Gone, then, the ruinous liberty of the Princess’s masculine attire. Some say her preference in footwear endured, in the form of delicately heeled shoes and boots, no longer designed for locking into stirrups but rather for showcasing the skilful sway of a woman’s slow walk.
(Or perhaps, some said, always men, for hooking a woman’s thighs around her lovers’ torso, for the aristocratic sluts of the Court to grip as they knelt, arms behind their back, and serviced their men.)
Gone too those loose and flowing dresses of the Queen, so well suited to wild dances and rushed walks along gardens and courtyards and gleeful chases through sun-dappled meadows. Instead, it was the memory of her grief that endured. The tight weave of her hair and the dark, heavy fabrics she wore at the end: both inspired the fierce constriction of the fashion that followed. Under Lady Teneira’s knowing smirk and baleful eyes, crushingly restrictive dresses once again seized women in their silken grasp, restricting them to the shallowest breaths and mincing gait as they hobbled in their towering shoes. Weighed down by jewellery, the heavy dangling earrings and gilt chain belts, decorated most meticulously with cosmetics, breathless in the tight grip of corsetry, the ladies of the Crimson Court became like finely sculpted figurines, poised, positioned and painted, shaped into the exquisite form that the Lady Teneira presented so naturally.
And so when the news of the old King’s death reach Lady Aubriella, it was not shock and horror alone that left her breathless.
“My lady?” Her handmaiden, the always attentive Maya, held Aubriella by the elbow. Her eyes sparkled with mirth. As a servant, she was dressed far less severely, and moved with enviable freedom. With her simple grey tunic and mousy-brown hair, she all but disappeared into the background when not directly addressed.
Together, they withdrew to one of the secluded alcoves of the Whispering Gallery. The curved walls were carved with reliefs of the great figures of the past: Talgart Atrebar, the Brave, who drove off the heathen barbarians who once skulked along the shores of the Aelgis river that now ran beneath the capitol; Aelasandra Lannorin, the Pure, whose divine visions brought the Seven Sisters; Alaric McAlasdair, the Ravenshield who seized the North. Above them all, Sangrifiera, the Sister of Sacrifice whose death brought peace, the lost Goddess after whom the Kingdom and capital city took its name.
In passing the great carved and painted history of the kingdom’s founding, Lady Aubriella’s hand, as always, reached out to brush the figure of the Ravenshield. Glittering nails, long and shaped, lingered over the bearded, fierce figure of Alaric. She felt the carved detail of the hero’s strong features beneath her graceful touch, the wide jaw and clenched muscles. He raised his massive axe, Kral, in defiance against the massed enemy hordes of the North.
Aubriella sighed, and then grimaced, her painted lips forming a worried pout. The Whispering Gallery was named for the way sound travelled along the curved walls, and people at opposite ends of the expansive chamber could hear each other’s voice. The sound of her complaint was undignified; ladies didn’t sigh, unless with pleasure; or complain, unless with desire. It wouldn’t do for other courtiers to hear.
Fortunately, the main vaulting chamber was largely empty, though the many alcoves were not. The Whispering Gallery was also named for courtiers’ tendency to use its many private nooks—from which sound most certainly did not travel—to whisper and plot in private. More nobles fell to whispered plans formed in the alcoves of the Gallery in a single year, it was said, than in a century of open combat.
With her handmaiden guiding her by the elbow, she retreated towards the nearest alcove. Aubriella glided rather than walked, her many months of training and punishment smoothing—reshaping—her stride into one that was slow and sinuous. The tightness of her dress, coiled in shimmering swaths of fabric down to her calves without vent or slit, allowed only the daintiest of steps. Every move appeared affected and deliberate, somehow both coquettish and demure. A lady, at least under current fashion, never rushed, even if she wanted to.
Fortunately, the nearest retreat was empty, quiet and dark, one of many quiet recesses that lined the central gallery. Along this side of the Whispering Gallery—the women’s side—ten archways led to small chapels dedicated to either one of the Sisters, or to the Twilight Lady in one of her three incarnations. The other side of the Gallery was for the men and therefore dedicated to the Old Gods, or the New. So it was that Aubriella took refuge under the auspices of the Sister of Submission, Untera.
Even there, in quiet and seclusion, she knew better than to give in to the grief and anger and fear that threatened to overwhelm her. As a lady it was a duty—an honour, even—to beautify the halls of the Crimson Court. As a woman she must always present her best self; as a girl, to know her place and obey; and as the youngest and only unmarried child of House Malveil she carried the reputation of her adopted family on her slender shoulders.
Such unworthy shoulders, she was often reminded; a shame to the family; a clumsy, inelegant fool, a stupid girl, weak and soft, and so very stubborn and slow in learning the finer skills of feminine aristocracy.
“My lady?”
And there was Maya, of course. Without her handmaiden, Aubriella knew she would be lost. Maya, so quick to spot any infractions; Maya, so eager to report her failings to House Mistress Castigen. Maya, who delighted in dressing her Lady, in pulling corset lacing savagely tight and then slowly and sensuously sliding stockings up her slender legs before attaching them tautly to the dangling tabs. But also, Maya who deftly deflected the most inappropriate insinuations (or outright lewdness, or aggressive advances) of privileged men and young courtiers, who guided her unfailingly through the labyrinthian back passages of the ancient palace, and who helped the inexperienced Aubriella manoeuvre the intrigues of court.
“I need—” To breathe, Aubriella wanted to say, to take in great gasps of air; but bound tightly in her corset this was impossible. To sit, to relieve the agony of burning calves and instep, but though the alcove was generously lined with padded seats, this too was impossible. A lady—especially one under Castigen’s tutelage—did not sit. Rather the opposite: it was an indicator of dignity and class, of aristocratic demeanour, to bear the challenge to its extremity. The greatest ladies were those who wore their corset the tightest, who walked with confidence in the most precarious of shoes. They did not sit—or kneel, or lie—unless at the bequest of their better, or a man or in the privacy of their own chambers.
Yet she felt the all-too familiar panic seize her, one brought on by both the constriction of her clothing and by the restrictions of her position. Aubriella’s hands fluttered at her side. She felt she might faint. A sudden, insane desire seized her—a need gripping her with all the unyielding insistence of the corset around her waist: to rip off these clothes, tear away the restrictive garments, kick off the shoes and scream, howl and rage through the whispering halls. I never agreed to this, she wanted to say, this wasn’t part of the deal.
An impossibility, of course: the corset was locked, the shoes’ lacing too intricate and unreachable in her current dress, the bodice tightly tied off behind her back. There was no escape, from either the fashions of Court or her role as a Lady. And the price to pay for such—insanity, for such disobedience—the punishment: Aubriella shuddered.
She shuddered and so she reached for the Litany of Submission. It was inscribed in heavy gilt letting over the silvered oval mirror mounted on the wall of the alcove. Untera, Sister of Submission: this was her chapel, and she invited its occupants to gaze upon themselves and yield. Even without the written reminder, Aubriella knew the litany well. It had been drilled into her as part of her training prior to joining the court.
“With downcast eyes, demure under your dominion,” she began, and the words felt heavy and her tongue thick despite months of practice. She’d little to do with the Sisters before joining House Malveil – at most, a prudent prayer to the Sister of Slaughter in passing. But never the other sisters. “I surrender to you.”
In the mirror, Aubriella saw herself and even after all these months she marvelled at what she had become. Another sparkling jewel for the Garland Crown, the embodiment of social etiquette and feminine decorum, beautiful and alluring; a flirtatious, vapid tease; a pretty, painted face; a frivolous, weak, useless girl. Her fingers curled into tight fists at her side, the long, sharp nails digging into the soft skin, and with fists clenched Aubriella squeezed her eyes shut and fought back tears.
“The litany, my lady.” Maya’s came from far away. “In submission,” the handmaiden began. “I find strength.”
“In submission, I find strength,” Aubriella repeated.
“In obedience—”
“Freedom,” she finished.
Down the ash-slurry cobblestones of Sooton Road, where artisans and craftsmen hammered and carved and wrought their wares, Aubriella knew what men thought of aristocratic women. A woman of court was a decorated vase for every flower with a prickly thorn, said the potters. A pot for every brush, to the painters; a bin for every nail to the carpenters. Along the high-walled barracks of The Walk, soldiers joked of scabbards oiled for every blade: dagger or rapier, broadsword or bastard.
“My weakness is my strength,” Aubriella continued, and with speaking her tongue loosened and the words flowed more freely. “Through surrender, I assert my true nature; my nature is manifest in the truths of the gentle grace that guides me to my place.”
The words were taught to every girl from their earliest years. From the expansive fields of the southern reaches, where warm winds and gentle rains coaxed rich golden harvests from the land to the storm-battered port cities and fishing villages nestled in the rocky crags of the West, girls—but especially those of noble heritage or aristocratic aspirations—were taught from an early age their place. Only in the wild North, where both men and women remained too proud and fierce to submit did women spurn the Sister’s words.
Aubriella continued the litany. Maya nodded in approval and remained silent as her mistress continued the recitation on her own, finishing and repeating the words with growing confidence. Her gentle murmur filled the small space with the melody of her lilting voice. With each repetition she felt her earlier panic subside. The words quashed her thoughts and fears.
Orlando, she thought. My King. This wasn’t—your protection—I can’t—like soap bubbles over a bath, her fears rose and popped and faded. Only the mantra remained, the litany, and as her fear and resentment subsided it was replaced by a desire—the terrible wanting—need, even—to submit, to surrender; to achieve the promised strength that might finally bring the peace and tranquillity for which she desperately yearned.
And for the first time since taking on the role of adopted daughter, she felt the first brush of newfound calm sweep over her, like one walking slowly through the trailing wisps of a morning fog. Surrender, yield, submit and obey – words once difficult now dripped like honey from her lips and she felt a pleasant tingle deep in her belly, a spreading warmth beneath the steel boning and metal clasps and straps and buckles and lace and ribbons that contained her. Docile, passive and meek; submission and compliance: Aubriella completed the litany a fourth and final time and closed her eyes and sighed.
A presence moved within the Chapel. The presence entered her, settled within her: it brought a comforting stillness.
A deep breath, and Aubriella gazed upon herself in the mirror.
She was beautiful.
Her eyes were a loamy, deep hazel, flecked with green as vibrant as the fertile hills of her homeland after the snows thawed and the rivers ran gorged with meltwaters. Large and expressive in the dimness of the room, there was something—haunted, in those eyes, anger or sadness yet lurked behind her new-found composure. Many had commented on those eyes in recent months, mostly men, holding her hand and speaking of her beauty with great earnestness, of the jewels buried in the rich earth of her gaze, of gardens veiled behind the thickness of fluttering lashes.
And they were right to do so, she realised: her eyes were beautiful and deep and deserving of praise. Especially considering the effort she made to highlight them, the effort of taming her heavy brows, the recently acquired skills with cosmetics, the feathering of browns and greens on the eyelids, the touch of bronze, the careful line of the pencil along the lids—Aubriella felt for the first-time genuine pride in her newfound artistry.
The same for her lips, full and skilfully painted in the dark reds popular in court, a rich velvety burgundy that contrasted with the natural paleness of her skin. Her nose, thin with a little upturn. High cheekbones and a wide forehead. A narrow, weak chin; she smiled, wryly.
But it was her namesake, the lush and luxurious reddish-brown hair that cascaded over her shoulder and down her back, that demanded
attention. Jealousy, from other women of the Court, especially those forced to rely on the nob-thatcher—the wig-maker—to fill out their threadbare scalp to meet the demands of fashion. In a court following Lady Teneira’s preference for the tight coils of elaborately woven braids, Aubriella enjoyed the freedom to wear her hair loose and full.
She watched her reflection pull long nails through thick tresses below the glittering hair net adorning her scalp and understood why. She’d cursed her hair and the effort needed to maintain it, the hundred daily strokes to subdue it, and the constant distraction of it tickling her cheeks and neck, the way it fell across her eyes, the demand for her constant attention. But in a Court filled with fiercely tamed and rigid women, her hair burst free like wildfire. Every unconscious poke, prod and sweep back of her hair drew the admiring gaze of men—and the ire of women.
Long, heavy, dangling earrings reached nearly to her shoulders and though she once found the weight nearly unbearable, they now felt comfortable, the tug at her lobes a constant reminder of her place. The large, square-cut emeralds twirled slowly, surrounded by clusters of tiny, sparkling diamonds, all set in gold burnished to a bright gleam. Around her neck, a heavy pendant decorated with another gleaming stone, a conspicuous display of wealth nestled between her breasts.
Her breasts. For so long now she’d blushed with shame and embarrassment at their size, at how swiftly they’d grown and then the way corsetry and other female trickery exhibited the fullness of her cleavage. But beyond the shame she suddenly found—pride, pleasure even, in her curves. Why deny the reality of what she saw? Her tits were gorgeous and—she bit her lip and flushed—they felt good, when touched. She felt her nipples tighten, her hand drifting upwards, the gentle warmth in her belly slowly creeping along her neck; and the reality of her femininity—the reality that men gazed upon her tits with lust and desired her and that their heavy, strong hands—to submit to that touch—could bring—what harm in yielding, after so many months of resisting…?
A warning throb below stilled her hand.
“I suppose,” Maya mused, her voice cutting through Aubriella’s distraction. “With the old king dead, there won’t be any further objection to your marriage.”
Aubriella shook her head. Submission to her fate, acceptance of the sacrifice she’d made those many months ago, yes, maybe; but this—to marry—a man!—of Lord Edmund Malveil’s choosing….?
“Surely Lord Malveil has greater concerns than the marriage prospects of an insignificant girl,” Aubriella whispered. “The King is dead.” And then stopped, and swallowed, and felt an almost overwhelming grief seize her by the throat. The King was dead. King Orlando—dead. Her King; her friend, once.
Maya shrugged. “Dead, and every house lord, minor and major with pretentions for the Garland Crown will be plotting their little plots and to what end? The throne is Edmund’s. Has been for years.”
“The support of the East rises and falls with the sun.” Aubriella repeated the well-known proverb. “And the Western houses won’t abide a king with daughters tied to southern thrones.”
“And what of the North?” Her smirk was unbefitting a servant. “Where does the North’s loyalty lie?”
“With the stone and the snow,” she answered, softly and to herself. “With wind and wyrd.” Then, because a lady didn’t say such things, she answered louder, “The McAlasdairs won’t stand for it. Angus can’t accept Malveil’s claim. The minor houses would rebel.”
“Lord McAlasdair, lady,” Maya corrected. “Earl of the North. Remember your place.”
Aubriella clenched her hands tightly together to stop their fluttering and nodded.
“My Lady Aubriella?” A voice, at the entrance to the chapel; a male presence standing just outside the threshold, a servant shadowed by the lights of the Whispering Gallery. “Lord Malveil requests your presence.”
She knew the request was anything but. She dismissed the servant with a graceful nod of the head and took a moment to compose herself. The peace she felt following her recital of the litany remained incomplete. For the first time, she felt able to suppress certain instincts and accept her place as a young girl, her role as a lady, and her position within House Malveil. But her anxiety over the future remained, as well as grief over the death of the king.
Aubriella turned to leave. Her reflection flashed in a second mirror placed opposite the first. Her image multiplied and cast itself backwards into an infinity of echoed selves. And it seemed that across the many versions of herself she glimpsed some that reminded her of who she used to be—and many, who she might yet be: an adornment to a great man’s arm; a decorative addition to a House; the demure bride; the servile wife; even the tired and devoted mother. Her breath caught in her throat. Yet she also glimpsed other selves—few and hard to discern among the many—that somehow exuded a greater strength—reminding her of a past best forgotten—and in reflection the inscribed words of the litany appeared changed, though blurred. But it was nothing more than a trick of flickering candles and darkness and when she paused and looked again, she saw nothing more than a dim and ordinary reflection.
“Not yet,” Maya murmured at her side.
Aubriella looked at her quizzically.
“The Sisters are slow to reveal themselves,” Maya added, as though it explained anything.
Aubriella looked to her handmaiden, and back to the mirror, and felt a sudden gulf between them, as though teetering at the edge of a chasm she’d hardly known existed. Swallowing against her fear, Aubriella nodded and with Maya at her side began the long, torturous walk to her Lord’s chambers.
Two: The Axe of the North
“Leave us.”
With a wave of his hand, Edmund Malveil, Earl of the South, Lord of House Malveil, dismissed the servants and sycophants, courtiers and councillors, lords and ladies that littered his hall. The guards were last leave, hesitating at the door.
“Leave!” he shouted. “Do you think I have anything to fear from—her?”
The pudgy finger indicated Lady Aubriella, standing with hands clasped before her and eyes demurely downcast. She stood at the bottom of the wide stone risers leading to her Lord’s seat. She could not have mounted the stairs to stand level with him even had she wanted or dared to, the tightness of her dress and the precariousness of her shoes making each step an exquisite challenge.
House Malveil’s halls at the capitol were lavish with conspicuous wealth accumulated over three generations of royal favour. Rich tapestries covered the walls, elaborate depictions of the House’s glorious past. Gold glistened in the dancing light from a dozen heavy braziers, and the bright fire burned in the jewels adorning Edmund’s crown, sceptre and rings. Crown and sceptre lay piled on a table near Edmund’s throne, discarded and ignored on a heap of fur-lined cloaks and richly embroidered clothing.
In contrast to the rich opulence, the Lord of House Malveil slouched in his heavy seat, a corpulent, slovenly man, unshaven and dishevelled, dressed in the full trapping of wealth worn with absolute disregard. Once, he’d been regarded as a handsome man, a powerful man: tall, strong and fearsome, with dark eyes and a perpetual smirk. A tapestry triptych portrayed him at the front of the King’s armies at the Battle of Trath Hill, steeped in blood and slaughter; carving a path through his enemy; and the final encounter with Lady Jahara, single-handedly defeating the heretical acolyte and fallen mother—a tale as fanciful as it was glorious, securing his house’s dominance for another generation.
But those days were far behind him. Now, Edmund drew a sharp contrast with the surrounding fashionable trappings. His sister, the Lady Teneira Malveil, dictated the fashions of Court and the decorations of his hall, but she exerted little influence over him and he often seemed to derive a perverse, almost childish pleasure in ignoring her efforts at cultivating style and sophistication.
Above all else, he exuded boredom—a dangerous, cunning ennui that found diversion in games played for their own sake. He exerted
power because power existed to be exerted; for no greater reason than that.
They were alone now. Earl Edmund Malveil slouched chin in palm and drummed the armrest with his fingers. Heavy rings glinted with the rhythmic movement. He stared down at the demure girl, his adopted daughter Aubriella, who remained standing with eyes fixed on the floor. Her handmaiden also remained. It never occurred to him to dismiss the servant; she was ubiquitous at her mistress’s side, and he almost instantly forgot her presence.
He’d once diverted himself and taken pleasure in watching Aubriella’s gradual acquiescence to her role, her struggle and shame, the slow but inexorably erosion of her former stubbornness and submersion under layers of silks and lace, weighed down by jewellery and the constant, grinding minutiae of her life at Court. To see her there so tightly ensconced in femininity should have brought him exquisite joy, but it had been nearly a year now and instead he felt only the first stirrings of the old boredom. Yes; boredom, even though he had planned for and anticipated this very day for the past year. There was little pleasure for Edmund in bringing a plot to fruition, not when its completion meant the utter defeat of his rival. He felt instead a rather strange sort of sadness; a familiar feeling, for this was hardly the first foe he’d destroyed.
“House Mistress Castigan reports you are doing well.” He watched the girl carefully, judging her reaction. “You make a very pretty bauble for the Crimson Court.”
Aubriella bobbed her head. “Lady Castigan is too kind, my lord,” she murmured. She had yet to meet his gaze.
“How so?”
“I remain a clumsy fool,” she said. “A silly and stupid girl.”
Her response sparked his interest. Her previous—antagonism and seething resentment was absent; what had changed?
“True,” he conceded. “And yet I am plagued by courtiers expressing their interest,” he added. “They extol at length your charms and beauty: the sparkle of your eyes and the divine glow of your face and the fiery radiance of your hair. They speak of the sweetness of your breath, the allure of your full lips and the hope of a honeyed kiss.” He barked with laughter. “And your tits; yes, they speak of your full, snowy-white tits and your tight ass and the promise of a wet aristocratic cunt beneath those tight dresses.”
Aubriella remained silent.
“In other words, these men desire marriage, adopted daughter.” Edmund leaned forward, the chair creaking beneath his weight. “What think you of that, hmm? Of marriage?”
Finally, Aubriella raised her eyes. Auburn curls tumbling back over her shoulder. Earrings twirled and between the emerald flare of gemstones, she stared up at her lord and in her eyes burned hatred and fury and shame and fear. But the flush of emotions was quickly suppressed. A flutter of the eyes and her placid calm resumed, but the flash was enough to briefly excite Edmund.
She opened her mouth, closed it, and swallowed nervously. Her hand fluttered at her side before smoothing down the front of her dress. “It is an honour,” she finally said, “One I have never dreamed of.”
“Never?” Edmund sneered. “I’m sure. Well. Think on it now, girl, it’s why we brought you into the family. The men are lining up. They want to fuck you, Aubriella, spread your legs and plant their seed in your belly and secure an alliance with House Malveil.”
He watched her shiver and took some delight in that, as he did in the thought of the girl perched in her towering shoes and bent over some insignificant minor lord’s table with her ass in the air, dress hiked up around her waist and legs spread and trembling in anticipation. Or on her knees, face impaled on the man’s cock, moaning with indignity and need.
“After all, the king is dead, and the vultures are circling. Like—” He paused, as though in remembrance of old words. “Like flies to shit.”
Aubriella’s eyes dropped.
“Isn’t that what you used to say? Hmm?”
Again, she remained silent.
“Answer me!”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Yes, my lord,” he mimicked, in a little girl’s voice.
But what she said next took him surprise. Her tone was gentle—tired and a little sad, but entirely absent of her old anger. “How can you hate me so much?” she asked.
Her question angered him. It angered Edmund because he read in the question an implied power over him, a power he no longer held over her. To be able to provoke hatred, love, or any strong emotion within another was to have power over them, he knew, and he felt the diminishing of his own influence over this girl.
And all the possible answers rushed forward from deep within and filled him with old anger and resentment. He could say: because not long ago, your presence was a constant reminder of what I used to be. Or: because of my dearly departed wife and the whispers that once filled the Court. Or: because your stubbornness and stupidity and blindness would have ruined us all, your love for that fool of a dead king would have destroyed this kingdom and denied me what is rightfully mine.
Or perhaps even: but I don’t hate you and never have; that this is not hate; this is power and the nature of power is to be grasped and used or it is lost. Once, you had this power; you failed to use it; and now you are mine.
But instead, he said, “because you insulted me,” which was also true—the pettiest and therefore most true of his reasons. “Behind my back and to my face. You were so full of yourself, so high and mighty, above us all and looking down at the Court, at courtiers, at the nobility and at men—at men like me.
“You mocked me—openly!—and made a mockery of the games we played, believing yourself better as though there was greater honour in the open blade than the veiled knife. Perhaps you should have paid more attention and learned to play.” He laughed, an ugly sound from the back of his throat. “If you’d played the game better perhaps it would be you, sitting comfortably in this high chair and me in bonds of silk below.” His mockery died on the tongue, the idea of him—in her position—perched and pinioned by fashions of his sister’s choosing an impossibility, a hideous farce. He could never consent to such a fate; not as the fool below had.
“Weak, you called us.” He sneered at the girl. “Soft, you called us.” With elbows on both knees, he leaned forward in his seat, fingers interlaced over the bulge of his belly. He gestured with a single, ring-laden finger. “Who’s soft now, Aubriella?”
“I am,” she whispered.
“Show me.”
Her eyes widened. He saw a terrible dread there, the fear of humiliation, and it briefly excited him. But her fear faded quickly, sinking beneath the same placid calm she’d carried with her into his hall. She stared back at him and he stared back at her and then slowly she raised her hand and brought it to her chest. Her fingers slid within the low neckline of her dress and curled into the softness of the flesh she found there. Under the watchful eyes of her lord, Aubriella pawed at her own breasts.
“What do you feel?” he asked.
“Softness,” she said.
“Whose?”
“Mine.”
“Close your eyes,” he ordered. “And keep at it, girl. I want to hear you.” He allowed himself a moment of pleasure, watching Aubriella grope herself. Her mouth parted and she sagged slightly, a quiet moan escaping her lips.
But the pleasure was fleeting and because her question still annoyed him, Edmund diverted from the script he’d long planned for this encounter. He reached down by the side of his seat. He retrieved an axe where it lay affixed, one of a pair mounted on either side of his throne. Unlike many of the weapons lining the walls of the hall, this one wasn’t ornamental. It was an ugly, brutal thing: a simple wooden shaft with a metal ball, dull iron and pitted at one end. The other end was edged and jagged and hooked. It was a weapon designed to kill rather than decorate.
Edmund hefted the weapon. It was heavy but weighted for throwing. Below, Aubriella continued to pleasure herself at his command. How long, he briefly wondered, would she keep at it? But her debasement already bored him. With a grunt, he tossed the weapon. It fell with a loud clatter at her feet.
The young woman’s eyes flew open.
“Take it,” Edmund ordered.
With some difficulty, Aubriella retrieved the weapon. The precarious height of her shoes and the tightness of her dress made bending or kneeling difficult. Slowly, and with exquisite grace born of incessant training and practice, she reached for the axe. She wiggled within her dress and bent slightly at the knees but mostly from the waist, with her ass high in the air. Heavy breasts hung pendulously, threatening to slip free of their bodice, and jewellery spun and sparkled as her hair cascaded nearly to the stone floor.
Her fingers curled around the shaft. Their delicate paleness and vividly painted nails drew a sharp contrast with the dark wood and cold metal. With just as much care she straightened, and stood, with the axe held loosely in her hand.
Edmund could see the strain in her slender arms and shoulders, yet she carried the weapon with ease and comfort. Weapon in hand, she seemed to visibly relax. Her entire posture changed and despite the cripplingly long and shaped nails that were the fashion of Court, the weapon somehow sat easily in her grip. When she looked up at him, he felt a delicious thrill of danger.
“You thought us weak, once,” he said. His mocking smile was gone.
From behind her veil of auburn hair, glimmering with its decorative net of precious stones, Aubriella considered the axe.
“Who’s weak now?”
She looked up at him. He thought he saw her tremble with the desire she must feel. Edmund watched her judge the distance between them and evaluate the weight of the weapon and her grip tightened slightly and—
With a dull knell against the stone floor, the axe dropped to the floor.
“I am,” she murmured.
“Good girl,” he said, and felt both elated and disappointed. He gestured at the weapon on the floor. “That axe belonged to our great rival,” he added. “It belonged to Duncan McAlasdair, the Axe of the North.” And he shifted his great bulk back into his chair, rubbing at an unshaven cheek with one hand. Edmund sighed. “And what happened to the Axe, I wonder, hmm, girl? Can you tell me that?”
Her gaze dropped once again and she hid behind the lustrous fall of her hair. “He is dead,” she said.
“Dead?” he repeated.
“Yes, my lord.”
“And how did he die?”
“In service to his King,” she answered. “Doing his duty.”
“He died a failure,” Edmund spat. “And a traitor.”
Aubriella flinched but remained silent.
“Castigan’s taught you well, hasn’t she?” Edmund said and laughed, though the girl’s newfound composure continued to annoy him. “Tell me, girl: where’s that celebrated pride and arrogance now, hmm? The stubbornness? The anger?”
Her lips moved in response, too quiet to hear. He leaned forward. “What’s that? Speak up, girl!”
“… my true nature," she murmured at the threshold of his understanding. "My nature is manifest in the truths of the gentle grace that guides me to my place.”
“Enough prattle!” He growled in the back of his throat. He recognized the litany, of course, and had heard its women’s words on their lips often enough. And though her apparent submission made his plans all the easier, there remained something unnerving in Aubriella’s newfound capitulation to her role.
“Undress,” he ordered.
Aubriella started. “My lord?”
“You heard me,” he barked.
This, too, had never been part of his script, the orchestration of his foe’s final debasement. Edmund had seen her naked often, from her initial imprisonment in the dungeons below these very Halls, to the days of her training, blindfolded and broken, in the dimly lit and cloyingly scented back rooms of the pleasure dens of Petal Street.
She gaped at him for a moment, lips forming a very pretty painted ‘O’ of dismay. She looked around for an ally and found only her handmaiden Maya once again at her side. But the handmaiden remained impassive and offered nothing. A slow flush blossomed across her chest and crept up Aubriella’s neck.
“My lord, it is—” She struggled to find the word to adequately express her feeling. “Improper.”
“For a merchant to inspect his wares?” Edmund sneered.
“I am— more than goods to trade.”
“As you are mine,” he answered. “I give you to my friends. You are an unmarried woman; my daughter; you are chattel.”
“But—”
“Do as I say!” he roared, his voice echoing across the chambers. Spittle flew and he heaved himself to his feet, gesturing imperiously at the girl below. The door to the hall flew open; a guard stood at the threshold, sword half-drawn from its scabbard: “OUT!” Edmund thundered, and the door slammed shut once more.
He spun back to Aubriella. “Undress! Or I’ll undress you myself.”
Aubriella, aristocratic lady of the court and his adopted daughter, flushed and trembled with must have been the effort of suppressing her rage and humiliation. And yet she submitted, eyes dropping away from her lord’s mocking, angry glare.
Edmund licked his lips and watched with keen interest. With the handmaiden’s help, off came the long, tight dress, an undertaking of no small effort. But once the laces were untied and the garment loosened and carefully tugged down the girl’s hourglass form, Aubriella was finally able to step free of it and then she stood before her lord in corset and stockings, heels and panties.
She glittered with the reflected light like a brilliant ornament, the multitude embroidered gemstones in her undergarments and hair casting back the light of the braziers. Her cheeks and lips gleamed, and her whole body flushed red with shame as she shivered in her partial nakedness.
He took an unexpectedly fierce pleasure in seeing her diminutive form and womanly curves. He knew little of such things, but the corset seized the girl around the waist like a vice; he could only imagine its discomfort, or the annoyance of suspenders and stockings, the difficulty in affixing them and the distracting tug that must accompany every move. Some part of him wondered how she endured it, the constant grip, the enforced assiduousness of every gesture and step and the incessant petty details that now comprised her life, one so different than before.
Next, the handmaiden loosened the long laces of the shoes that wound up Aubriella's calves to just below the knee. Again, Edmund marvelled at this pulling back of the veil, the revelation of feminine mysteries to which he’d never paid attention—with scorn, of course, and mockery, yet he couldn’t deny a grudging recognition of his rival’s mastery of such foolishness. To even stand in such precarious, fluting things, the tapering heel and high arch and tall platform; not just stand yet alone walk—impossible; yet hidden behind the shifting hems of their dresses, the women of the court manoeuvred in them daily. As did Aubriella, Edmund thought, and smiled.
With great care, Aubriella stepped down from her tall footwear. Then the stockings, which the handmaiden gently rolled down her mistress’s legs.
Maya stopped at that and stood next to Aubriella. Both girls stared at the floor in silence, as though in shared suffering under the oppressive glare of the man standing over them.
“Well?” He licked his lips, swallowed and pointed. “The rest of it!” he demanded.
Maya glanced up, as though ashamed to meet his gaze—or rather, ashamed by his demand rather than by her position. But her voice was clear and cool when she answered. “Lady Castigan has instructed the Lady Aubriella’s corset should not be removed without her express consent.”
“Am I Lord of this House, or she?” he roared. “Remove it!”
“It is locked, my Lord.”
“Then unlock it!” In a rage that took him by surprise, he reached down the other side of his throne. He yanked the second axe, the twin to the one that remained at Aubriella’s feet, free from its mount and brandished it at the girls. “Or must I come down there and slice her free myself?”
With unnerving, impassive confidence, the servant stared back at him before giving a little shrug and returning to her mistress. She retrieved a tiny key from a hidden pocket and with it released a lock that secured the panel over the concealed laces. A few minutes more, and she loosened her mistress’s corset and assisted her in releasing the busk closures. The corset opened and fell away and was carefully laid out on the stone floor over Aubriella’s dress, a colourful swath of embroidered steel and lace.
Aubriella nearly swooned with her release. She took a deep, shuddering breath and caressed her sides. Maya gently moved her arms up over her head and undid and removed the simply cotton shift worn beneath the corset, so that when Aubriella finally straightened and turned back towards her lord, she stood naked but for the final silky scrap of fabric preserving her modesty. Her large, rounded breasts hung free, and the scented oils from her morning bath gave her skin a luminous sheen in the firelight.
One hand drifted to conceal the delicate panties, the other trying in vain to cover her fulsome chest. Again, Edmund marvelled at—and took dark pleasure in—the extent of her transformation, at how her body had moulded itself to the enforced curves of her corsetry and retained that shape even when released from it.
“All of it,” Edmund ordered.
Maya went to draw the panties down but Aubriella looked at her and shook her head. Staring up at the man standing high above her, she slowly slid the underwear down her lithe legs and stepped free, kicking the scrap of silk aside with a flick of her foot.
They stood like that for a moment, a frozen tableau of two young women and the man standing over them.
“And so there it is, finally.” Edmund broke the silence. “The so-called Axe of the North.”
The 'Axe of the North' was tightly wrapped in a filigree prison of finely woven filaments, a steelsilk sleeve as delicate as it was strong, tautly restrained between her smooth thighs and tied back between her ass cheeks to a thin gold chain encircling her narrowed waist. Within the sheath, Edmund could she Aubriella’s cock, impressive in girth and length, semi-engorged with denial and humiliation, but painfully constrained. Castigan has explained to Edmund that the web and spiral of wire-thin threads promised pain rather than pleasure should its contents swell too large. The final humiliation was an intricate lacing of decorative bows and pretty decorations adorning the masculine organ.
"So tell me, girl—” Edmund stopped and laughed, though with little humour. “Enough of this. So tell me—Duncan—once Earl of the North, the Lord McAlasdair and sovereign of all that house’s territories and holdings; yes, do tell me, so-called Axe of the North—my soft and weak adopted daughter—what shall I do with you?”
Standing naked but for the cage around her penis, Edmund’s emasculated foe remained silent. Edmund walked towards her—towards him; it pleased him to think of Duncan, now, this foe, his conquered enemy; there was greater pleasure to be derived from flaunting his victory over the man than some insignificant girl.
“How do I marry off a girl with—that—between her thighs?" he mused as he descended the stone steps separating them. He still held the axe in his hand, and its flat edge bumped against his thigh. “What man is going to want to marry a girl with more meat between her legs than he, hmm? What do I do with you?”
Duncan continued to watch him in silence and in shame. He hugged his naked frame with slender arms and dropped his eyes to the floor. He hid behind the fall of auburn hair.
“Perhaps I could sell you to one of the pleasure palaces of Petal Street,” Edmund said. “A girl of your beauty would fetch a good price. They’d find a use for your defect, I imagine.”
Duncan gasped, looking up with eyes wide in horror. Edmund saw in those eyes the memory of the time spent in those soft-cushioned rooms. Lady Castigan’s training and punishment early into Duncan’s transformation had done a lot to break the man’s initial resistance. Edmund recollected his own visit with great pleasure, the sight of his rival kneeling before him, blindfolding, tightly bound, tits on display, mouth open and inviting….
Duncan’s arms drew tighter around his slight frame in fear. “No—you swore an oath!”
“Still, seems a waste,” Edmund continued, ignoring her. “And I suppose Castigan would be furious. Though angering that bitch and reminding her of her place could be reason enough…?” He pretended to seriously contemplate the idea and forced a grin at his enemy’s fear.
Finally, he shook his head as though dismissing the idea. “Nevertheless,” he continued. “No. I am sure there are better uses for you. Marriage seems most prudent. It is why we needed another daughter, after all.” Though a year distant, Edmund still felt a certain—regret—at the loss, at the necessary sacrifice of a valuable pawn. “Following your failure to safeguard the original, hmm, Duncan?”
It amused him to see that the shame and regret of his supposed failure still haunted his defeated rival.
“It was—”
“Your duty,” Edmund chided. He descended the final step and stood before Duncan. He towered over the other—man—now: free of those ridiculous shoes, and with his once formidable height and build melted away, Duncan’s diminutive form barely reached Edmund’s shoulders. The larger man took Duncan’s chin between his thick fingers and forced those beautiful eyes up to meet his. He gazed into those deep, green and earth-brown eyes behind their full, feminine lashes, framed in precisely painted colours, and sought the tightly bound, furiously raving man that he knew must lurk behind the doe-like placidity. “And failing in one oath,” he added, and brushed the back of his beefy hand across his cheek, “You accepted another.”
“But not this,” Duncan whispered. “Never—"
“And so to marriage,” he continued, “as must any dutiful daughter.” From cheek to neck: he shifted his grip and held Duncan firmly by the neck and forced her head this way and that, as though inspecting for damages. “But then, to whom, hmm?
“After all, I imagine there are more than a few Lords, both lesser and great, who would love nothing more than to have the great Duncan McAlasdair as their subservient bride?” Edmund’s smile was cold and calculating, as his thick fingers roughly pushed through Duncan’s tresses. The earrings he wore, and the pendant; they were familiar to him, though he couldn’t recall why. Relics of the household, he suspected, heirlooms of the past. Castigan would have chosen them for reasons beyond him, some petty veiled code, the irrelevant language of female fashion. “As their personal plaything, hmm, don’t you think?
“Would you enjoy that, Duncan? A lifetime of mincing about in dresses servicing the needs of an Ancaster or a Mallas or a Pollox? Imagine the pleasure Lord Allan Togruk would take in your debasement? The joy that old, fat sadist would derive from your suffering? What would he have you do, I wonder? Can you imagine what he would make you wear, the bindings, the torture, the humiliation?”
“You swore an oath,” Duncan whispered.
Edmund’s touch slid down the slender form, caressing sloping shoulders and skin as smooth as that of any expensive Petal Street prostitute. He relished the way Duncan trembled beneath his touch. “As did you,” he said, and grabbed the man’s breasts. His grip was rough, and he pinched the nipple and enjoyed the way his victim whimpered. “An oath, hmm? Before the Old Gods and the New, in the full knowledge of everything that entailed.”
“Not—” Edmund twisted the nipple between his fingers, and Duncan gasped in pain, knees buckling, and moaned and swayed and squeezed his eyes shut as though to escape his predicament. “This; I never—”
“Thought it would lead to this?” Suddenly bored, Edmund shoved the man away. Duncan stumbled and fell the ground and clapped his small hands to his large breasts. “No, I don’t imagine you did. You were never much of a thinker, were you, hmm? Good with an axe; not so good with a brain.”
Shaking his head in mock disappointment, Edmund turned his back on his former enemy. “And yet, as much pleasure as it might bring me to know of your girlish suffering under some minor ally, it still seems a waste of a valuable resources. You should thank me, really: as Aubriella, you don’t need much a brain. You are, after all, a very pretty girl.
“The promise of marriage to the right family could help secure their support for the Throne,” he mused, as though this decision hadn’t been made a year ago. He turned to face Duncan, who remained crumpled to the floor with a look of resignation on his pretty face.
“But as I said—who would marry you when you have—that?” He pointed at the place between Duncan’s smooth thighs. “Hmm? Not with that; no.”
Beautiful eyes widened with realisation. “Please, no,” Duncan moaned. “Not again,” he said, and trembled with must have been remembered pain.
“But your transformation is so nearly complete, Duncan.” Edmund smiled. “Removing that final vestige of the past is doing you a favour! The pain should be mercifully brief—there’s so little that remains, after all.”
Duncan whimpered. “But it’s all I have left, all that remains of—”
Edmund sneered. “Of—what?”
Duncan stared up at him. Vivid, fertile eyes, deep and rich and yet, Edmund realised, unchanged from his previous life—longer lashes and cosmetics and naturally wider expressions may give those eyes their feminine expression, but they had always been beautiful.
Duncan sagged, shoulders slumping.
“Of—nothing.”
Edmund smile was a thin line of triumph. “Precisely. And so must it be. A sweet, tight, wet nothing between those thighs. And as for marriage—”
And here he paused for dramatic effect. His smile grew, and he felt a wicked thrill of anticipation race through him. This was his moment: the moment in which the North fell, the McAlasdairs crumbled, and the throne became his.
“I can think of no better marriage than to Angus McAlasdair, Earl of the North and sovereign of its lands.”
His moment of triumph did not go as intended.
One second, Duncan was on the floor, an utterly defeated enemy, soft and weak and pathetic, a mewling helpless, naked girl entirely at his mercy. And the next—
Duncan was behind him. A sharp blow to the back of Edmund’s legs dropped him. His knees hit the stone floor and he gasped with pain. He flailed out with his arm—still holding the axe—there was a sharp, sudden pain at the elbow—then numbness—and the weapon dropped.
It was in Duncan’s hand before it hit the ground; but then, it had always been his, Edmund remembered, the weapon had always belonged to the Axe of the North.
One sharp blade was at his neck. Edmund tensed as Duncan pressed up against him. He felt the knee in his lower back and the pillowy softness of naked breasts pushing into the thick meat of his shoulder. He felt the cold metal sleeve poking into his thigh, and a sharp prick at his crotch: the second axe was there, the barbed hooked end digging into his scrotum.
He had forgotten: forgotten what it meant to be the Axe of the North, the almost supernatural speed with which the greatest warriors of those brutal lands carried themselves. It had been too long—he had come to believe the jealous lies of Court and the casual dismissal of the stories that trickled south. Edmund had suppressed his own memories of battles long ago alongside his once friend and brother—then rival—now daughter—the way Duncan moved, the elegant dance of carnage as he flitted among his enemies and the heavy hewing of the axe, the spout of blood, the cries of agony, and his exultant songs of slaughter. One man in a generation earned the title Duncan bore; and he had never passed it on to a successor.
It had been a mistake to strip his foe of clothing, Edmund realised, a foolish indulgence to give in to his desire to see Duncan humbled and naked. Released from the tight dress that limited his stride, the corset that constricted and the shoes that crippled, the Axe once again danced and promised vengeance.
“Perhaps you’d like to join me, Edmund,” Duncan purred. “In having a wet slit of your own?”
And it excited him, the female nakedness pressed up against him; it excited him, the edge at his neck, the blade at his cock. This close, the scent of bath oils and floral perfumes wounds its floral tendrils around him and Edmund grew hard and his breathing laboured.
But he dared not move. Erotic or not, Edmund had no intention of dying and knew Duncan would not hesitate to cut his throat if he called out or struggled. Olds Gods and New, but the man had reason enough to cut him down.
But for his oath, of course.
“Just like old times, hmm, Duncan?”
Duncan’s breath was hot on his cheek. “We were brothers, Edmund,” Duncan hissed. Even in anger and betrayal, his voice remained lilting and melodic. Auburn tresses tickled Edmund’s cheeks as his enemy spoke. “At Trath.” Edmund felt his gaze drawn towards the tapestry, the triptych of his glory at the Battle, guided by the gentle insistence of the blades at neck and groin. “Why don’t you tell me, you fat fucking slug, what you see there.”
“Glory,” Edmund answered without hesitation.
“Lies,” Duncan spat. “That battle was won by me.” His grip on Edmund tightened, the blades drawing closer; a bead of blood blossomed like a flowering bud and trickled down his neck. “Then, like now, by my sacrifice.”
Edmund chuckled, though he felt only disgust at the memories Duncan provoked. “You were always quick to give yourself over to—a cause.”
“For the good of the people,” Duncan said. “Out of loyalty to the King.”
Edmund laughed, a grim sound. “Serve your king, then. For I will be King, soon; the Garland Crown will be mine and House Malveil will rule for generations.”
Silence, then. “You would marry me to my own brother and provoke the fury and disgust of the Gods,” Duncan said, and his little girl’s voice was appalled.
“I would marry you to your brother and forge an alliance between our families that will bring unity to the kingdom and peace to the land for generations.”
“The people would not stand for a union steeped in sin.”
“What sin? The people know only Aubriella, adopted daughter of House Malveil.”
“The House Lords of the North would rebel.”
“The House Lords of the North will abide by your brother’s decision when your own sacred rituals reveal that Aubriella is a true daughter of the North, and that fine, worthy Northern blood flows through her veins.”
Edmund felt no hesitation in Duncan, no weakening, and the threatening blades did not waver. Yet he also felt his foe’s laboured breathing and confusion.
“The Gods would destroy us. The taint of incest would be the undoing of the House.”
At that, Edmund did laugh—a genuine laugh—at Duncan’s foolish adherence to old ways. “Still a fool, hmm, Duncan?” he said. “And such arrogance! The Gods have greater concerns than a man fucking and planting his seed in his own transformed brother. The Gods do not care, Duncan.”
“Those of the North do.”
Idiotic Northern exceptionalism, Edmund thought, and realised he was once again growing bored—bored despite the threat of death, bored by this pointless discussion with his foe. “So be it, then. Throw the kingdom into chaos. Provoke a war between the Earls of the Compass. Destroy everything your beloved King Orlando built and—kill me.” Edmund grimaced. “But for the love of the Gods, enough of your idiotic prattle.”
A long pause, and he felt Duncan’s grip tighten around him and for a terrifyingly exciting moment, Edmund thought he might actually do it: kill him; and he felt the cold pangs of genuine fear for the first time in years.
Duncan girl’s voice was loud in his ear. “Even after everything you’ve done to me, taken from me—that small and weak and naked, I still beat you. I have you at my mercy; can gut you like a fish, slit your fat slug belly from scrotum to throat and let the filth spill out onto the floor.” Both blades pushed into the soft, fat, yielding flesh beneath and in that moment Edmund realised—he’s going to kill me; I’m going to die; and his innards clenched with fear and—
“Your oath, my lady.” The girl stood before him: Maya, the handmaiden, with her attention fixed on Duncan.
“Yes,” Edmund repeated, voice high and shrill. “Your oath!”
“Not to you, you stupid man!” Maya said, and her voice rang like a bell in his ears, and when she turned on him her eyes flared and his blood ran cold. Then her focus returned to Duncan, and she spoke gently. “To Untera,” she said. “To the Sister.”
“Listen to her, Duncan!” Edmund pleaded.
A long pause, a heavy weight before Duncan withdrew the axes from neck and groin. He gave a sniff. “You’ve shat yourself, Eddy.”
Edmund groaned and heaved himself to his knees and clapped a hand to his neck and felt the blood there. And before him he saw—Aubriella, his daughter; not Duncan, his foe; even as she trembled and fell back and her eyes widened at the realisation of what she’d just done, and what she’d just given up.
With a final, primal scream, she spun and flung first one axe, and the next, at his throne. With a dull thud, both weapons embedded themselves deep within the thick wood, directly where Edmund’s head would rest when sitting.
And then with a final shudder, the girl stood meek and submissive before him once more, eyes downcast. “My name is Aubriella,” she said.
To be continued…
Author’s Notes:
This was a semi-commissioned piece off of my Patreon. Before returning to writing the next chapter of Constant in All Other Things, I wanted to try my hand at writing a shorter piece of fiction. A patron had an idea for something they wanted to see developed further. The patron provided a number of characters (Duncan, Edmund, Angus), some ideas regarding the setting and plot—and I took it from there and ran with it. I hadn’t anticipated writing Fantasy, but this has been great fun to write. I hope you enjoy reading it!
I suppose it’s a failure in terms of being a “short” piece of fiction. I’m over halfway done the next part already, so the overall piece is currently sitting at just under 16k words, and I anticipate the whole thing’ll be about double that so… not really a short story. Short story adjacent. An almost-novella.
Even worse, I can imagine spinning this out into a much more robust, better-developed story, hitting 80k-100k with it, easily. The worldbuilding has been a bit slap-dash as I’ve rushed along, and there’s a real allure to going back, thinking it through and fleshing it out properly. Same with the characters; it’d be fun to give them a little bit more room to breathe, build up some backstory, and so on.
So—a failure as an attempt to write a short story, but hopefully you enjoy it as a longer piece. Let me know in the comments or in a review what you thought of it and whether you’d like to see more. Is there a market for this kind of thing?
Or, if you’d like to see what’s already available, why not check out the Patreon, join the conversation, and see this and other works in progress?
Finally, credit given where it’s due: I read Orson Scott Card’s Hart’s Hope a few months ago, which I’d read as a teen, largely forgotten and picked up again on a bit of a whim. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect it’s influenced a bit of the worldbuilding—possibly the original seed for the Sisters in this. And I was reading N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season whilst writing this, so that’s probably floating around in there somewhere. Definitely influenced the next chapter, which is written in the second person.
A Song of Silk and Shadows
By Fakeminsk
([email protected])
(patreon.com/fakeminsk)
Synopsis:
The old king is dead. The great houses of Sangriferia manoeuvre to claim the Garland Crown and Aubriella Malveil—once Duncan, Earl of the North, now adopted daughter to his hated rival—faces punishment for lashing out. With marriage and life-long subjugation looming, she is taught a lesson by her mistress, Lady Castigan.
Chapter Two
Three: You, But Not
How did it feel, Duncan?
Castigan knew what she was doing, didn’t she, that cruel bitch, when she had you bound in your first corset and from that point on you always felt its grip at your waist, leaving you always just very slightly breathless, on the edge of fainting, contained and that little bit easier to control. Month by month it grew tighter and did you even notice? As your body moulded itself to its new shape, flesh flowing to fill increasingly feminine dimensions?
The corset Edmund had your loyal handmaiden remove was not the same as the first corset you wore. Frankly, few born and bred women of the court could have worn it.
Lady Castigan could have, of course.
So I suppose it’s no wonder you reacted the way you did once all the feminine trappings she’d carefully wrapped you in over the past year were stripped away. It felt—good—didn’t it, to be free once again, even if naked? Naked and free, though with your dick pulled back between your legs and those great big, beautiful breasts hanging off your chest. Naked, in front of your enemy, in front of the very man who stole everything from you, your House, your authority, your might and manhood.
And you cast her off so easily: threw Aubriella aside the moment you had an axe in your hand and how did it feel—how did it feel?—to do what so few born women ever do? Shuck off—everything—not just the clothes but everything—like a snake slithering free of its old jewelled skin, leaving behind the fragile, too-tight husk—discarding every rule and obligation that restrains her, infuriates her, crushes her into subservience to a man, to filth like Edmund.
But you aren’t a woman, are you Duncan? Oh, there’s definitely some woman in you, now, how could there not be? But you feel the bonds of silk and lace so heavily because they’re still new and alien to you. You’ve only felt their ever-tightening grip for the past year; and what’s a year? Most women of the court were born into bondage, grew up in bondage, and live in bondage. They no longer need a man’s voice and a man’s hand guiding them anymore, because that man is always with them. Father, brother, husband, son, lover: always there in their head, watching them; they hear him, always. They don’t feel those bonds of silk and lace as you do because they’ve always worn them, because it’s part of who they are. Perhaps one day, you too will grow so fond of your pretty fetters that you no longer notice them.
But for now, you feel it. You feel the corset anew and the soft lace welt at your thighs and the straps tugging across your skin. You feel the heat, the burning yearning that has nowhere to go but inwards, waves of agonising bliss with every pinch of your breasts or slap of the ass or slobbering kiss. Perhaps most of all you feel the soft silk wound around feet and legs, wrists and arms, that hold you as tightly as any rope or chain. Tighter, in some ways. Not that they’re needed, of course. But if only you could see yourself right now, Duncan, as you kneel, tits out, bound and blindfolded, a decorated centrepiece for the table. It truly is a sight.
What else could you expect? This outcome was inevitable. The best possible outcome, considering; what better could you have hoped for, leaving Earl Edmund Malveil, your lord and father, standing humiliated in his own shit?
And so: Duncan, you have willing subsumed yourself into Aubriella once more. This time, in the full understanding of what it must entail: your final transformation; your eventual marriage; that inevitable moment in which you must spread your legs and receive a man’s seed—your brother’s seed—in your belly. Motherhood, even; surely you thought that far ahead. As you kneel there in suffering, these inevitabilities torment you and your mind curls around each painful possibility like a wounded animal coiled around a wound.
And to think you could have avoided it all, simply by doing what has always come so naturally to you: killing your enemy.
Why didn’t you do it, Duncan, once Earl of the Compass, Axe of the North?
You had your enemy at your mercy and a blade at his throat, at his manhood, ready to carve the fat and filth from his living carcass. The desire for revenge burned. In some inchoate form you felt the past year churn within you, a violent maelstrom of suffered humiliation. The kaleidoscope of indignities forced upon your flesh fuelled your rage, and your rage made you strong, as it always has, made you fast—you revelled, didn’t you, in that moment of manifest power in which weapon and body moved as one and your whirled across the stone floor of Edmund’s halls.
Did you relive the slaughters of the past in that moment? The Battle of Trath Hill, or perhaps your many campaigns against the barbarians of the North: you rode those memories of blood and carnage like a wave bringing your enemy to his knees.
Imagine if Edmund had followed Castigan’s instructions and left you corseted, pinioned in your dress, perched on those shoes! What would have done then, Duncan?
Nothing, of course.
But then, what did your little display of martial prowess actually achieve? Also nothing. And to listen to Edmund, that’s what you’ll receive, soon: your own nothing, a void between your legs.
It’s not a “nothing”, of course. Such idiocy. What you still perceive as a nothingness can be a cradle of life—a source of such pleasure as you’ve never known—yet you would dismiss it as a hollowness in need of filling. This is fear, Duncan—a male fear of nothing—and fear makes you stupid.
‘You shat yourself, Eddy.” A good line to be sure. I’m sure it felt good saying it. Witty, maybe. And a pleasure, humiliating Edmund like that, passing some of your own shame back to him. And seeing the fear in his eyes—yes, the fear; you took pleasure in his fear. Before, Edmund thought you soft and weak, an utterly defeated foe. Now he knows you remain a threat and the touch of your blade at his neck must stay with him always.
Not so great with a brain, Edmund said. He wasn’t wrong. Being totally at the mercy of an enemy is one thing; being at the mercy of an enemy who fears you—well. At some level you must’ve realised what would follow. That little tantrum, throwing those axes at his seat: were you raging against what was to come, or in protest at the life you willingly surrendered?
In some ways you really are as tightly bound as any born woman, aren’t you Duncan, by your own intractable masculine delusion of self-importance, your Northern stubbornness, your honour, your oaths. Though now you’re bound in a very different way, a very tangible and physical way, of course. No need to speak in the abstract, in metaphors when you’ve got—well, everything’s Lady Castigan’s done to you following yesterday’s performance.
‘My name is Aubriella,’ you said. A reassertion of the identity they’d forced onto you this past year, indicating your willing submission to Edmund’s plans. But you didn’t speak truly. Not yet, anyway. There’s still too much of the warrior, the Earl of the North, of the man in you; too much of Duncan. After all, when he first stripped you naked it was Aubriella he took away, because she wasn’t you, not yet, despite everything they’d done and those superficial trappings peeled away so easily.
Oh, she’s part of you; how could she not be after a year under Castigan’s delicate tutelage? After a year dressed as her, talking as her, living as her in the shadowed halls of the Crimson Court. The torture of your transformation indelibly branded something female into you, beyond the breasts and curves and long hair; and the training that followed – there is no shame in losing some part of the man you once were following a week in a Petal Street brothel.
Yet all it took was an instant with a weapon in hand and all the old violent instincts returned.
No wonder then that Edmund was filled with rage, standing there with blood welling between fingers clutched to his neck, reeking of his own faeces. You humiliated him in his own seat of power. His fury threatened to overwhelm his reason. He staggered towards you with fists raised. Instinctively, he knew you remained the same threat as moments before. Everyone knows the stories steeped in blood that surround the Axe of the North: more than just a title, a weapon incarnated in flesh.
But he saw only Aubriella. He heard only her soft voice, and the rage and anger transferred from you—a man he dared not strike—to her—a woman who ought to know her place—who’d dared humiliate him. Such audacity could not go unpunished.
His meaty fist bearing its many heavy rings knocked you to the floor. You tasted blood. You went to rise; his fist took you again and again and—again. You dropped back to the floor with your nose streaming snot and blood and you breathed out bubbles and breathed in grit and dirt from the stone beneath your palms. Then he kicked you. More than once. You squeezed your eyes shut as pain exploded in your side. Something cracked or popped. You wheezed and wrapped yourself around the pain—but you did not cry out. Then he grabbed you by that luxurious mane of hair and hauled you to your feet and his fingers curled around your neck….
In his rage, Edmund would have strangled Aubriella to death or pummelled her to a bloody pulp. You would not have been the first girl, young and beautiful and dead, carried out of his hall.
But then, you aren’t just any pretty girl, are you? Even for Edmund, guards dragging the battered corpse of his own adopted daughter out of his hall would be scandalous. Especially one under the tutelage—which is the same as the protection—of Lady Castigan. All his pretty plans wrapped up in your marriage balanced against the bile of his anger: pride versus ambition. Fortunately for you—though it is a strange sort of fortune to be fair—Edmund has always been a very ambitious man.
You submitted to his fists and kicks. You neither cowered nor begged for mercy; nor did you lash out in self-defence. You could have still killed him, even then, naked and unarmed as you were, unmanned. But you didn’t, believing yourself ready to die at Edmund’s feet rather than be the catalyst for the chaos that must follow his death. This was yet another sacrifice, and how very noble of you, Duncan, how honourable of you to take the beating with barely a whimper.
You felt—manly—even with your tits flopping about as he shook your slight frame. Edmund squeezed his fingers tighter around your neck. Your hazel eyes met his without flinching. Even then you believed yourself stronger than him and in that moment he believed it as well.
You felt somewhat less manly afterwards, tied up and suffering in festive darkness. Now your mind whimpers and you wished you’d done differently. Regret undermined the nobility of your sacrifice. You regretted the fatalism that made you passive.
It was Maya who saved you, Maya the handmaiden who intervened with the brute clutching you by the throat.
“My lord,” she murmured and her quiet voice cut through the man’s rage.
“Go way, girl.” But he hesitated.
“She is Castigan’s,” she said. “Hers to train and hers to punish.”
Edmund scowled, but the brief pause cut like a sliver of bright light through the darkness of his anger and humiliation clouding his mind. Like you, he imagined the chaos that must follow the fulfilment of his rage. With your death, the collapse of any possible alliance with the North; without the North, the support of the West fades; and only a fool places their trust in the East. And there was also his vow, of course, sacred and stained with blood, made before the old king himself, an oath made to the oldest Gods in the oldest ways. Not that Edmund cared much for oaths and vows and blood, nor concerned himself much for the old ways and old powers. New Gods walked the Earth now and his faith was with them.
Still, there was no value in unnecessary risk.
So Edmund flung you to the ground. You hit the ground face first, tits squashed flat and bruised by the impact, skin scraping against the floor, and forehead cracking against the stone. He retreated. His rage dissipated, replaced almost instantly by a sullen lassitude and a return of the old boredom. He dropped heavily onto the stone steps below his throne.
“Take her,” he grunted, gesturing with one hand. His head hung heavily between his knees. “Get some clothes on the bitch and get her out of my sight.”
You were half-senseless from the beating and strangling. Exhaustion and pain overtook you. You did not struggle as your humble handmaiden lifted and dressed you. She took a simple shift and pinned it around your slender frame, and wrapped you in a heavy, fur-lined cloak. Supporting your walk, she led you out of Edmund’s hall. You clutched your side where Edmund’s boot had taken you, certain of a broken rib, possibly more. One eye was already swelled shut and the dimly lit passages a blur as you limped along with Maya. The speed of your progress was an irony not entirely lost on you, even then: battered and bruised, you still moved faster than when healthy and fully ensconced in Aubriella’s skirts and shoes.
The torturous walk to safety that night would forever remain dream-like. The handmaiden took you along unfamiliar ways, dimly-lit halls filled with dust and cobwebs. You met no one on the long walk that night. Occasionally she whispered and a door would open, or with a hidden touch of some concealed panel cause a passage to reveal itself. Traveling along these secret and shadowed ways, you glimpsed unfamiliar places deep within the labyrinthian depths of the ancient capitol. But then, the castle was an old one; much of it far older than the men who made it their home and seat of power.
You saw much that confused you that night. An ornate stone statue in a wide circular room depicting a trio of cloaked and veiled women, lit from above by a brilliant shaft of white light. Their arms were raised high in supplication, water flowing from eyes, hands and mouth into the deep pool at their feet. A vaulting, torch-lined chamber, lined with racks of glittering weapons spaced between cold and empty barrack beds. A small square room in which dozens of candles flickered and danced around a twisting metal pedestal holding a singular tome, thick as your hand is long, barred shut and chained to its base. A body-length mirror set in a wide decorative wooden frame carved with intricate details: the glass was clouded yet it seemed you glimpsed—yourself? as a man? as a woman?—within its surface as your handmaiden pulled you hurriedly past.
These sights and others made their impression upon you as you limped these silent and secret paths. You stumbled often, breath burning ever hotter in your chest but at your handmaiden’s urging you kept placing one foot before the other. Her whispering voice sustained you, rhythmic, insistent, drawing you along.
(Now, as you squirm in your bondage, you still hear that same whispering voice and recall those half-remembered glimpses of forgotten places.)
At last, you emerged into a small earth-and-stone walled chamber, the floor covered in old straw smelling powerfully of damp. A cellar; a second strong pair of hands supported you as you stumbled up a pair of creaking wooden stairs.
Darkness took you, briefly. You blinked and when you woke found yourself sprawled naked—but for the sheath pinning your cock back between your legs, of course—in a comfortable chair in a warm room lit by a dancing fire.
Two figures stood by the fire, their silhouette casting long, flickering shadows in your direction.
The first, short and whip-thin, gleamed in a sleek dress made of strips of leather so thin as to be nearly transparent. The leather was stained black and oiled and polished until it shone like a wet veil of shadows stretched taut across her form. Woven into a spiral sheath accentuating the dramatic curves induced by fierce corseting, she projected a threatening energy, like a coiled whip the moment before it snaps. Her skin was very pale and very smooth, and a faint webwork of purpled veins reached up her neck and across the top of her long, narrow hands. Each slender finger was tipped in talon-like nails, long, painted and shaped; and her raven hair, streaked with grey, was wound in a single, heavy braid reaching nearly to her knees, the winding leather thong binding it tightly decorated with bright metal spikes.
Whereas the woman projected a compact, restrained energy, a terrifying robustness wrapped in leather and silk, the man suggested an almost comical frailty. He seemed impossibly tall and thin, as though his spine must snap under his own weight. His scalp was dotted with stray patches of white fuzz and brown age spots. Long, skeletal fingers of one hand lay lightly in the palm of the other, fingers heavy with chunky jewelled rings, and the nail of each index finger as long, shaped and painted as the woman’s. His eyes perched atop a hawkish nose over sunken cheeks; they were sunken, sockets bruised and very dark under eyebrows so thin and pale as to be nearly invisible. He wore a simple rough robe, the cowl thrown back, and his head inclined towards the woman as he listened intently to her whispered words.
Lady Castigan; and her presence snapped you to full wakefulness. Your instinctive fear would’ve been reserved entirely for her had it not been for the other figure: Master Tobrik, Flesh-shaper of House Melveil. You knew, better than most, that his weak and frail appearance belied a terrible capacity for pain.
Instantly aware of your waking, both turned towards you.
“Aubriella,” Lady Castigan said, her voice sharp.
“Lady,” you began, and instincts honed over the past year drove you to leap to your feet—or at least try before gasping in pain and collapsing back into the chair.
“Foolish girl,” she tutted, flowing towards you. Even in pain you marvelled at the ease and grace with which she moved, feeling—surely not envy?—at her approach. Beneath the long tight sheath, her feet were doubtlessly invisibly perched in shoes well beyond your ability to wear and navigate, yet she moved with a mannered sultriness that somehow bordered on the terrifying. More than anything, she made you think of the spider’s graceful glide along its web approaching trapped prey.
“I—” You swallowed as your voice failed you, but then you often found yourself voiceless around her. Strong emotion gripped you, and it took you a moment to realise you felt—ashamed, like a child who has disappointed its mother, as though you had somehow failed her. You blinked against a totally unexpected feeling of tears.
She pressed a solitary finger to your lips. “Quiet.” Her voice was a soft purr curling around your shame as she pursed thin lips painted blood red. Her fingers coiled around your chin, the edge of long fingernails sharp again the tender skin of your cheeks. You shivered at her touch, so gentle yet poignant, in both fear and with yearning, and despite everything—exhaustion and pain and shame—you felt your cock stir in its prison, and nearly whimpered with lust and the anticipation of pain.
Almost tenderly, she moved your head to one side, then the other, examining the damage to your face. “Disappointing.” The edge of her eyes creased, the corner of her lips turned very slightly downwards, and your bowels ran cold. “I taught you better than this, Aubriella.”
“He—hit me,” you protested weakly.
“You provoked him.” Her fingers tightened around your chin and you winced in pain.
“He stripped me—”
“You enticed him.” She shook her head slightly, and the shadow of her braid lashed the far wall. “Too strongly.” Her hand closed around your chin again, palm against your neck, and she shoved your head back into the chair, dismissively. “Though the foolish man should have known better.”
Injustice and outrage warred with your fear of this woman. “Edmund…”
“Lord Malveil to you!” Lady Castigan snapped, and her hand whipped out and caught you across the face. Already bruised and sore, pain flared anew and you saw stars and tasted blood once more. “Remember your place, Aubriella.” She towered over you now, a dark silhouette against the crimson flames behind. “I will not be embarrassed by—some silly, stupid little girl—by you; you will not waste a year of my time and effort. Did my training mean nothing to you?” One long, curved fingernail held you beneath the chin and the slightest press there raised your eyes to hers. “You are no good to anyone—to me—if you are dead; my gifts are not for the foolish who would see themselves killed.”
You spoke around the taste of blood. “I am… sorry, my lady,” you said, and you meant it, you truly did it, looking up at her with swelling anguish.
“Yes, you are,” she said, and now her lips curved upwards in the slightest hint of a chilling smile. “And yes, you will be, Aubriella.”
You couldn’t help yourself; you trembled with fear. “Please, my Lady, it wasn’t my fault.”
“Yes, it was,” she said. “In a world of men, women are always at fault. I would have expected you more than anyone to understand this.” Sounding mildly disappointed, she stepped away from you, gliding back towards the fire. “Really, Aubriella. I had thought us beyond the need for punishment.”
You went to protest, remembered yourself, and fighting back tears answered, “Yes, my Lady.”
She paused by the fire. Looking at you over her shoulder, she stood like a statue of polished ebony cast against the leaping flames. Her voice—softened is perhaps too strong a word; she remained coldly disappointed in you, underscored by an unexpectedly passionate warmth. “The Sister visited her blessing on you,” she said. “Yet you squandered it. You will learn to submit, as all women must.” She sighed. “A moment of freedom, and what did you do with it?”
“I—” Throat dry, you swallowed. “I forgot myself, my lady.”
Her smile is heard than seen. “Indeed,” she said. “But whom did you forget: Aubriella or Duncan?”
You had no response to this, especially as Master Tobrik shuffled forward at this point. You flinched back in your seat. Ostensibly, this skeletal man—this monster—is a doctor, appointed by the College to House Malveil; you knew him only as a harbinger of pain, as the Flesh-shaper that stripped your strength away, visited agony upon you and moulded you into your current shape.
So when he reached out for you with his bony hand, you recoiled into the chair with an intake of breath.
“Sit still, girl,” Lady Castigan snapped.
A deep breath, and you stilled yourself, though you couldn’t suppress a final shudder as the horrible man’s fingers caressed your cheek.
“Yes. Yes, you remember the pain, yes?” His voice was whispery and wheezy as his fingers slid over the damage he found: the black-and-yellow bruises, the split skin, the swelling. His touch was dry and cool. “Pain for beauty, yes?” He grinned, a too-familiar rictus smile that stabbed fear into your belly. The pads of his fingers swept across your nose. “Broken.” He sounds disappointed, even slightly cross. “A waste. Really, Aubriella, after all my hard work, yes? My artistry? You must take better care of yourself.”
You swallowed against bitter indignation and swore—not for the first time—that some day Master Tobrik would come to know your own artistry: the art of violence synonymous with the Axe of the North.
“Stand, girl,” he ordered, fingers curled into your shoulders. With eyes on Lady Castigan standing by the fire and observing in silence, you stood. His touch swept across your body and you shivered as he paddled your breasts, your sides and buttocks and finally, with a groan and creak, knelt and examined you thighs, calves and feet. You flushed with indignation at this man’s exploration of your body but under your mistress’s baleful gaze, submitted to his study.
Finally, with a sigh and another creak and groan, he stood. “Sit,” he said. Still watching your mistress, you lowered yourself into the seat, back straight, chest out, primly sitting as you’ve been taught despite the pain burning in your side.
Master Tobrik nodded in approval. “Such damage to my work,” he said, speaking over his shoulder to Lady Castigan. “Her nose is broken. Contusion across her face. Broken ribs. Two, yes? And punctured lung. Possible concussion.” His eyes glitter deep in their sockets as he looks over you, briefly touching each damaged feature. He signalled his displeasure with a click of the tongue.
“She’s lucky to be alive,” Lady Castigan said. “Can you fix her—quickly? I need her whole; to punish and to prepare, as per Lord Malveil’s orders.” Though you quailed silently at the thought of punishment, you also wondered at the disdain that dripped from her voice as she spoke Edmund’s name. “Time is of the essence.”
“Fix, yes?” His smile chilled you. “Quickly, yes?” Deft fingers danced across the rings adorning his finger before stopping at the middle finger: the ring was a thick band of white gold topped by a multi-faceted ruby. A twist and the heavy gem flipped back and from beneath poured a thin stream of yellow-whitish powder that he collected in the palm of his hand. He spat into his palm and rubbed the mixture into a paste and reached for you again.
You flinched, again, in memory of past pains.
“Ah, you remember, do you, little one? Yes?” He shook his head. “Good. But not today.”
And when he touched you this time it was different. First, an intensifying warmth as he held his palm to your cheek. His eyes were open but distant. From somewhere deep in his throat his voice rumbled; a familiar, sonorous rhythm you associate with pain but there is something to its character unlike before—the timbre, deeper—and then, unexpectedly—cooling relief.
The pain faded beneath his palm and then you watched in shock as a bruise formed on the man’s face in the same place as yours had been. The skin purpled and swelled—and broke and bled. He seemed oblivious to the wound as his hand moved to cover your nose and then you heard a sharp crack. The hawkish bridge of Tobrik’s nose collapsed. Your breathing eased.
Master Tobrik neither grunted nor flinched. His hand continued to slide over the damages inflicted by Edmund’s violence. Where his touch travelled, pain numbed, faded and disappeared; exhaustion lifted. He touched your side. He pressed down, harder. You felt your rib, shift; a brief conflagration of pain beneath the skin. Just as you were about to cry out or pull away—a loud crack, and another; this time, he flinched, his side spasming beneath the loose folds of his robes; and he gritted his teeth and his nostrils flared, though only for a moment, before the same placid distant look overtook him.
Bony fingers played with the rings at his fingers once more, opening a particularly chunky, pale green peridot-encrusted band, and added a stone-grey powder to what remained of the salve glistening his palms. Once again, his hands roamed across your body, at first brushing across the surface but then with gentle pressure, eventually kneading your flesh, the warmth of his touch deeply penetrating. Then he was with you again. He smiled, and there was unexpected warmth to his smile. “Better, yes?” His face was battered and bruised, the lip split, the nose crooked, a patchwork of purple and yellow reaching from the left temple across his nose to his wrinkled neck.
“Better than better?” He leaned in very slightly closer. “A gift, yes?” his whispered, for you to hear alone. He stood—soundlessly—and gazed down on you fondly. “But also a punishment.”
You looked up at him in wonder. He stepped away—sagged—and Lady Castigan was there, supporting him. “Easy, Aster,” she murmured, and you’d never heard her sound so—caring; soft, even.
“I’m fine.” He gently pushed her away. “She is yours, yes? Whole. Physically, at least. I have done as you asked. Punish her as you must. I….” He swayed, and with Lady Castigan’s help sank into a chair near the fire. “I will rest. Yes? And heal.”
When Lady Castigan turned to you, her gaze was cold and angry. “He suffers for your stupidity,” she said. “Stand.”
You jumped to your feet. You marvelled at the vigour you felt, the energy. You felt strong and powerful and… rested. Yes, you felt rested in a way you could hardly remember, as though the exhaustion of the past year had been taken from you. Seeing Tobrik in his chair, eyes closed, you supposed it had been. Your wounds, your tiredness, transferred to him.
But there was no time to consider this new version of Master Tobrik: the compassionate healer as opposed to the bringer of pain, the monstrous flesh-shaper. (There would be time to contemplate this later, of course, during your punishment; but by then your view of him had understandably soured once more.) However, for now, Lady Castigan descended on you.
“Move, you stupid girl,” she ordered, ushering you into an antechamber. It was a lady’s closet, well-appointed and decorated with mirrors, cabinets and vanities, nearly overflowing with clothes appropriate for court—and many that were not.
“Prepare her,” she instructed your handmaiden, and so she did. A visit to a chamber pot to void bowels and bladder, and then she bathed you, sloughing away the dirt and dried blood. Your hair was washed and combed and oiled. Your handmaiden’s touch was, as always, challenging: at times roughly utilitarian as she vigorously scrubbed you clean; other times, frustratingly sensual, as she took wicked pleasure in gently stroking and rubbing your breasts and buttocks and thighs with scented oils. It’d been so very long since you’ve enjoyed any release, and your cock strained painfully and you hissed with desire before the silksteel restraints reminded you of the impossibility of relief.
Food came during your preparations: a few light dried fruits, some nuts—you wanted more but knew better than to ask. There was a warming drink that brought a calming numbness. Seren tea: sweet and mildly narcotic, and commonly enough served to women to keep them docile, and again you knew better than to protest. Besides, your body still thrummed with Tobrik’s healing; already you began to feel warm and felt as though you could shake off the effects of the drink at will.
Then your loyal handmaiden brought you back to Lady Castigan. You understood that under your mistress’s instructions you would take on the apparel of Aubriella once more. Layer by layer, you would feel this other self, the female identity forced upon you over the past year, reassert herself.
It was the corset that nearly undid you. You balked as Lady Castigan approached with the hateful undergarment open and unlaced. She saw the fear in your eyes, the resentment.
“You hate it, don’t you?” she asked, holding up the corset. It shimmered in the light, stormy grey and inlaid with metallic thread in a dizzying pattern. Metals clasps at the end of silk strips dangled from its bottom edge, and the metal busk shone. Even unlaced, you could see the alluring curves the hidden boning promised.
You hesitated, unsure how to respond.
“Speak,” she commanded. “Truthfully, always, when speaking to me in private.”
And you nodded, and mouthed ‘yes’ because—it was true, of course, you despised everything the hateful item represented. More than anything, more than the dresses or skirts, shoes or jewellery, the cosmetics, nails, hair… the corset was everything you hated about this forced existence. Tight, restrictive, heavy, strangling, undeniably feminine in the pretty patina of its surface yet beneath that delicate outer layer, relentless in its control. Without it, you were—free; squeezed in its intractable grip, a prisoner to a life you loathed.
“Of course you do,” she said, drawing nearer. Lady Castigan’s own corsetry was visible beneath the nearly transparent, midnight sheen of her dress. She seemed unbothered by her severely narrowed waist. A raised eyebrow invited you to step forward and into the grip of the corset she held open. She pulled it about you, and you felt its cotton grip against your skin. You shivered despite the warmth of the garment. It started at your hips and rose to just beneath your breasts, leaving them uncovered and free. Something inside immediately yearned to break away and flee, for the moment those metals clasps were closed you knew the trap was sprung once again.
Lady Castigan saw the desire in your eyes. She smiled, thin painted lips curling in a mocking smile. “Well, Aubriella?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “Decide, girl. But quickly.”
The moment came, and then it went. You submitted; though you despised and feared the future that lay ahead, you sensed a trap. Strong and vital as you felt, could you really have escaped, then?
No; even then, she was toying with you. Hook met eye; and you were once again secured within that feminine prison. You turned within its grasp and surrendered the laces to her.
“You think of this item as just another form of control wielded against you,” she said, as she began the laborious process of lacing you into the corset. “You hate it for the perceived frivolity of it, a self-inflicted torture by flighty women obsessed with superficialities of fashion and appearance—just another variation on the cosmetics we wear, or the dresses we choose.” You felt her fingers spider along the laces, working from top to middle, bottom to middle. Quickly, inexorably, the corset drew tighter.
“Too much of the man remains in you, Aubriella,” Lady Castigan continued. “But you will learn.” She finished another pass and began anew. The corset felt almost—comfortable—at this stage, more a firm embrace than a squeeze. You felt her pause, and she held you by the waist. Her fingers traced the boning that began to delineate your shape. “Do you know what these bones are made of?”
“Steel,” you answered.
“And before?”
You shrugged.
“Reeds,” she said. “Or actual bone.” She returns to drawing the laces tighter. “I still remember my first corset as a young girl. The boning was made of Orix bone; the ribs were slender, pliable but firm.” Her fingers paused for a moment. “One day I fell. The rib cracked, pierced the inner lining and into my side. I nearly died. Master Tobrik saved my life that day.”
You weren’t sure what to say, and so remained silent. She gave a strong tug and you felt the insistent pressure growing at your own ribs. “The steel boning in your corset comes from Kitari workshops in the West. Much finer steel; far more precise smiths than those of Sangriferia, who favour the horseshoe and the sword than a refined, flattened coil.” Her fingers pause to sweep across the increasingly hourglass shape of your torso. “Coutil from the Yeoten Mills to the east, using the finest cotton imported from across the Stardrop Sea. Silk from the singers of the South. Dyes from—everywhere, Oorla shells from Lake Ab, crush stones from the quarries of the north, extracts from jungle flowers of the west. All brought together here, in Sangriferia, for guild artisans to craft into these gorgeous items you so revile.” Her touch at your flank was sensuously loving as she stroked the surface wrapped around your skin. “Hundreds of hours, Aubriella—more, even; to craft a single corset of this quality.”
Her voice turned derisive, the tone of a teacher speaking to an idiot child. “Yet in your male ignorance, you see only frivolity. A silly contrivance for shallow girls to achieve a desired shape due to an obsession with their looks, yearning for inconsequential approval, slaves to the transient demands of the time.” An angry tug at the lace, and your whole body jerked.
“But where you focus only on the surface, I see within this corset the embodiment of the old King’s dream. Peace, Aubriella, and prosperity. Only in peace, through trade, through the myriad compromises and negotiations and talks Orlando inspired could this—this beautifully crafted artefact—exist for you to wear. Lord Edmund intends to extend that dream, to maintain peace and prosperity—through any means necessary.
“And by wearing this corset, Aubriella, you too embody that dream of peace and control, the old King and the new’s belief in a better way than the constant warring and death that preceded them. The warring and death that most certainly would have followed had the North not compromised with the Centre, I might add.” Her voice was gently mocking, her breath hot on your ear.
“Self-control, girl. Yielding and compromise. Those are your female virtues, now. Do you understand?”
“Yes, milady,” you answered.
Lady Castigan paused. She sighed, perceiving the sullen stubbornness of your acquiescence. “Aubriella, what is the purpose of the boning in your corset?”
“Shape,” you said, and grimaced. “And control. It holds my torso in the desired shape.”
“No!” she said, sharply, and her hand smacked you across the bare bottom. You jerked in surprise. “The fabric shapes you, and the boning supports the fabric. The bones prevent the fabric’s deformation under strain.” She gave another sharp tug at the laces. “Arms above
you head,” she ordered. “Eyes down. Study the surface.”
And even as she drew the corset further—tighter, again, ever tighter—and your shoulders strained with keeping your arms raised—you looked down at the impossible swell of your own bare breasts. Below your jutting tits, pink flesh and protruding nipples, the firm fabric enclosed your torso in a decorative fist. The outer layer was dyed the deep portentous grey of a night sky over northern seas. Embroidered silk threads of silver and gold glimmered and drew the eyes along complex lines that twisted and twined, dancing between ornate sweeps of intricate silk and metallic lace. Tiny gems placed where lines intersected glittered like constellations, and the effect was one of leaves and blossoms in silhouette against darkness, framing the stars of strange and unknown skies.
Endless hours of tedium and harsh instruction had taught you something of needlecraft and cross-stitching, of embroidery and other feminine crafts, of Seren tea dulling the task of keeping girls’ fingers and minds busy and distracted and occupied with trivialities. Sitting by windows under watery midday light, as much an ornament for beautifying the Court as the needlepoint in your lap, your fingers had become nimble and capable and knew something of the skill required to craft what lay beneath your touch. You appreciated the artistry and effort of the embroidery of the corset you now wore, even as you resented its beauty and clutch. A year ago, you were blind to such things.
“Imagine this corset as our world,” Castigan continued. “Our people, our culture and society. Our history and values and beliefs. This fabric,” she said, and stroked your flanks, “is ours, and beyond value. A sleeve we wear, some more tightly than others. Whether conscious of its grip or not, it shapes us, all of us. It is strong, yet easily deformed and torn under too great pressure. And so to protect it from being stretched: boning. Slender, pliable and firm, like the ribs of an Orix, or foreign steel hammered and threaded and shaped into slender rods.” Her hands reached up to your elbow and gently brought them back to your side, and you stifled a groan as your body tried and failed to settle comfortably back into its previous position. “Do you understand?”
She began, again, to tighten.
You shook your head.
“Do men support our world?” You could hear the sneer in her voice. “Pliable? Men would tear the fabric of our society in their self-importance, their need to stand strong, stand tall. Their vaunted “honour” would undo us all. No. They shatter and break when they need to bend and flex; or remain inflexible and force the world to distend and warp to their desires. No, Abriella. Men do not support our world.
“Mothers and daughters, sisters, and girls, Aubriella—girls like you. Women. We are the boning that support the fabric of society. Without us, it warps and deforms, tears and breaks.” A final, sharp tug, and you felt her begin to tie off and tuck away the laces. “We are pliable; we bend as we must. We flex and we remain strong.
“We do not break.”
You felt her cover the laces away, and heard the light click of the cotton panel being locked into place. Your ever loyal handmaiden at your side accepted the key once again and you understood, then, that you might never move freely and unhindered again—that the stifling grip at your waist was likely permanent. You felt light-headed, and the panic of the past year began to resurface.
“A heavy burden; a serious responsibility,” your mistress continued. “Worth a little discomfort, would you not agree?”
And though you do not yet believe or agree with what she said, you know better than to voice discontent. You struggled to speak through the sudden dizziness you felt. “Yes, Lady Castigan.”
You heard her sigh. Her touch at your hips turned you to face her. You remained naked but for the cage at your cock and the corset around your waist, and from her imperiously high-heeled perch she glared down at you. One talon touched you beneath the chin and raised your eyes to meet hers. “So long as you remain under my tutelage,” she said, “you will never be free of this bondage, do you understand?” They are hard, her eyes, like glittering stones set in ice. “I treat you as I would any woman under my care,” she said.
“But I am not a woman,” you answered, hot and uncomfortable in your own skin, the words jumping free unbidden. You immediately winced in anticipation of her displeasure.
Lady Castigan smiled, a predator’s grin, and her thin tongue ran slowly along her upper lip. “No, you are not,” she said. “Not yet.” She circled you slowly as she spoke, her glittering talons trailing along your corseted torso. “But once Master Tobrik has completed your transformation and eradicated the final, useless remnants of the Axe of the North—then perhaps?” Her hand brushed across your trapped penis and your knees went weak. “Or perhaps once you’ve properly born the weight of a man, lay with him between your legs—then, perhaps?” One long nail grazed along the shaft, flicking in and out as it passed over the wire frame. Her deliriously threatening touch nearly made you cum despite the cage, but the contact was torturously fleeting, too brief to allow release.
Next, her sharp nails sensuously raked the firm curve of your buttocks. “Maybe once your husband has planted his seed in your belly and you grow round and heavy with potential and feel the life growing within—then, perhaps?” Her touch swept walked spider-like the length of the corset’s boning and then her fingers curled around your naked breasts and squeezed. Caught between forefinger and thumb, she pinched and then rolled your swollen nipple and you gasped in pain and pleasure. “Or when you hold that child to your heavy dug and feel it draw sustenance from you and finally see the Sisters’ gifts made manifest in flesh—surely, then, you’ll accept you place, your role, your woman-ness?”
A final brutal tug and she released you and you gasped with the release. “Daughter, bride, wife and mother, Duncan,” she said and Lady Castigan stood before you once again and her grin was gone and her eyes burned with solemnity. “Will you submit and be the woman your Lord Edmund demands?”
And because she bid you only speak truth to her when alone (your humble handmaiden’s presence being irrelevant, of course), and though your cheeks burned—with shame, with desire—you shook you head in denial, long auburn curls tickling bare shoulders. “No,” you whispered, and tears nearly dotted your eyes as you accepted the learned, aching hollowness that came from disappointing your mistress. “Never.” You squeezed your eyes shut in anticipation of her reprisal. “I’ll never be what you and Edmund demand.”
You anticipated pain. Instead, her touch was gentle. You opened your eyes and saw a smile flit across Lady Castigan’s lips, an almost—pleased?—look to sharp features before the usual disdainful countenance slid back into place. “Perhaps,” she murmured and leaned close. Something passionate gleamed in her eyes.
“My Aubriella,” she said and then her mouth found yours. Her talons curled around your narrowed waist and held you near as her tongue thrust between your lips and danced with yours. Her breath and scent and presence overwhelmed you as she kissed you, once and deeply, your tits squeezing up against her leather-bound frame, and you felt so small and weak compared to her towering form, her firm painted lips leaving their mark against your soft and full ones—and then she thrust you away with a sneer.
“Sit!” She indicated a simple wooden stool and bid you sit down. Staggering slightly, breathless and confused, you did as she commanded. You went to sit and nearly missed the stool, and with your handmaiden’s gentle hands guiding you, dropped heavily onto the cushioned seat.
You became aware of a strange lethargy overtaking you. There was a tingling in your extremities. You realised that something was wrong and that as Lady Castigan had been speaking a gentle lassitude was overtaking you, and that her kiss somehow amplified it. It was stronger than the mild effects of the Seren tea and you looked up at Lady Castigan, a question forming but found your tongue suddenly thick and unwieldy in your mouth.
“For now, however,” she said, standing over you, “there is the matter of your punishment.”
A heavy dread settled, muted somewhat by the cloying fuzziness filling your head.
“Lord Edmund demands it,” she continued, “for your foolish audacity.” Standing over you, she laid her palm on your bare shoulder. You felt her touch vividly. Even as you began to feel somehow—disconnected—from your own body, trapped in a shell of your own flesh, your skin felt increasingly sensitive. Her grip was gentle yet the pressure penetrated beyond muscle to a hot, secret place deep within. “I require it, for your failure and for the hurt your stupidity forced upon my friend.” She brushed the swell of your breasts with the pad of her fingers and that ember flared and burned brighter deep in your chest.
You felt a moan on your lips and an ache in your balls. “What—” you tried to speak, but your words slurred. “Did—?” You weren’t tired; your body still buzzed with the vital energy following Tobrik’s healing; and you felt increasingly hyper-aware and sensitive to your surrounding—but there was nothing to do with this vigour as your body grew stiff and unresponsive. Trapped and contained, your desire sublimed into heat; your skin felt flushed and a terrible desire—awful because there could be no release—swelled in your belly and your tits and your cock. Your nipples felt like tight, fiery points of light and your lips burned.
Lady Castiagn flicked your nipple and you moaned and shuddered—or would have, if your body allowed it—and instead sound and sensation echoed inside and fed the flame that burned at your core.
“Punishment without purpose serves no one and nothing,” Lady Castigan mused. She passed out of your sight, and you could hear the light footfall of people approaching. “But what punishment for the girl who attacked her father? Forgot her training? Hurt her master?” Despite the gentleness of their touch, you felt the soft grip of female hands lifting you as pleasurable agony.
“What was it you said, Aubriella, to your Lord?” Once again, she stood before you. You heard sounds of preparation and saw glimpses of young girls moving at the edge of vision. “That you were ‘more than goods to trade’?” She shook her head in mock dismay. Though your body remained frozen, your mind did not; did you wonder, then, how Lady Castigan knew the precise words spoken in Edmund’s hall? “Such stupidity,” she continued. “Did I teach you nothing? Of course you are goods for trade, Aubriella. Part of an agreement that was offered and accepted long ago. A gift, to Earl Angus of the North, delivered with a full dowry on promise of an alliance that with maintain peace and prosperity for a generation.”
How you wanted to speak, then. Even as paralysis took you, your jaw clenched and nose flared with the desire to speak. But as one girl began to wind the first swaths of silk around your arms, the whispering touch of the cool fabric clouded your brain with ever-amplifying want. Another girl rolled first one gossamer stocking, then the next, up your legs. You felt the softness of the stockings as a hot wind breathing up your ankle and calf and thigh. The girl clipped them to the dangling corset tabs and the taut straps laying across your skin cut fiery strips that drove you to thrash, wail, struggle or cry—if you could. Trapped within your own skin you did none of these, but each instinct fed the relentless inferno growing inside of you.
“You will learn this lesson and you will learn it well. You are a thing, Aubriella, nothing more. A commodity—a most valuable and beautifully crafted and desirable commodity to be sure—but an object nonetheless.” Lady Castigan’s smile was cold and thin. “As so tonight, you will serve as an object: a decorative piece for the long-planned celebration of the union between the South and the North.” She cradled your chin in her palm, and her touch burned. “Tobrik’s touch may have healed you, but at my request he has also shaped your flesh for tonight: a shell, malleable but firm. A doll, an adornment for my hall, Aubriella—a thing, unmoving and silent.”
Her touch across your flesh trailed fire, even as the servant girls, unseen, continued to prepare you for the evening. Your arms were pulled behind your back and bound together, high and tight. A tall leather collar was affixed to your neck; you felt your feet slide into shoes that held them to an impossible point. How you strained and struggled to move or find your voice, but your every effort simply reverberated inwards, trapped and fuel for the heat that burned you from the inside.
“Fortunately for you, others have—disappointed—me recently. You will join two others deserving of punishment tonight. Your anonymity is assured; you are the daughter of Lord Malveil, after all. But as just another girl, masked, placed and posed, you will serve as—a conversation piece; as decoration; or as furniture, a seat or table or stool or footrest, as needed. Later, perhaps, for our most privileged guests, as warm, wet and welcoming holes for their needs.”
Lady Castigan leaned in closer and spoke for you only. “And through it all you will feel that impossible desire already burning inside of you, growing with every touch, whisper and breath. That is my punishment, Aubriella, for failing me.” Her lips brushed against yours and the inferno grew. “Perhaps, in the end, I will grant you release.” She pulled away and smiled. “Then again, perhaps not.”
She left you then, and the serving girls descended to complete their task. They bound you in silk and lace and ribbons that held you as unbreakably as any chain or rope. A blindfold brought darkness. Subtle and pleasurably painful touches pushed and prodded you into position: kneeling, shoulders back, bared breasts thrust forward. Then strong arms carried you into another room.
At first, silence, though there was a roar of heat, the crackling of large fires somewhere nearby and the softness of a pillow beneath your stockinged, silk-bound knees. You were left there in darkness and silence for some time. And how did it feel, Aubriella—or Duncan, really, for as you sat there your thoughts spiralled in on themselves, twisted and squirmed around the shame and rage you felt at Lady Castigan’s punishment. The heat subsided somewhat in this moment, in the calm before the tempest you knew was brewing beyond your senses.
Then you heard the unmistakable sound of guests arriving for the party. Footsteps, some loud and heavy and others dainty and careful. Voices raised in cheer, in surprise, in mocking pleasure and amazement. The smell of perfumes and leather and the fragrant, spicy tang of the first foods of the evening. The air shifted and swirled and tickled your skin and reignited the coals of passion Lady Castigan and Tobrik had placed inside of you. You grew hot once again. You heard the first approach of steps, voices raised in glee at your predicament, felt the humiliation—felt the first touch of unknown hands against your firm, bare breasts, first a graze, a giggle, a spoken dare and then a firm pinch of the nipple, a squeeze and twist and pull, laughs, scorn, footsteps retreating and in their wake… fear; a terrible, aching horror that rivalled—nearly—the mind-ravening, incandescent craving you had for release. You wanted nothing more than to be left alone yet simultaneously hoped—and would have wept with shame for your desire, if possible—that others would come, and touch, and use you, and possibly bring the relief you knew—rationally—remained beyond the pale.
But you were beyond rationality, straining against your own implacable flesh, when you felt a presence at your side, a breath in your ear. You smelled rich wine and the rich grease of meat on wet lips and scented beard oil.
“Hello, brother,” said Angus McAlasdair, Earl of the North, your brother and husband to be. “Enjoying the party?”
To be continued…
Author's Notes:
Initially a semi-commissioned piece for a patron, Silk and Shadow has grown a bit. It was meant to be a lean ten or twenty thousand and has already surpassed that. On the other hand, I’ve had great fun writing it. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed reading it! In the next chapter, we’ll see how Duncan got himself into this predicament, and learn about his transformation and training. I reckon there’s another three or four chapters to go.
If you’ve enjoyed the story and would like to follow its further development, why not check out my patreon: patreon.com/fakeminsk? You can keep up to date with the other story I’m working on, Constant in All Other Things, and join in the conversation!
All in a Sea of Wonders
Chapter 1
By
Fakeminsk
([email protected] / patreon.com/fakeminsk)
(Author’s notes at the end. Enjoy!)
The heavy glass doors of the Howe Building slid open with a hiss, and Harper Sullivan crossed the threshold on three-inch heels.
Her heart pounded as she took in the expansive lobby, a mix of Victorian grandeur and sleek modernism. The marble floor stretched before her, wet-looking and treacherous. Her heels squeaked with every step, echoing in the cavernous space. She felt exposed. On display.
Harper straightened her spine and lifted her chin, brushing loose blonde waves over her shoulder. Breathe. You've trained for this.
Through the lobby flowed a sea of pinstriped suits and pencil skirts. Harper's white blouse was buttoned too low, her skirt too tight. She tugged at the hem, acutely aware of wandering male gazes and whispered comments. Her chest rose and fell in quick, shallow breaths.
"First day, love?" A balding man in an ill-fitting suit sidled up to her, eyes tracing her figure. "I'm Malcolm. What's your name, darling?"
Harper forced a coy smile, despising the man and herself. "Harper. It's lovely to meet you, Malcolm." The words came out in a breathy, feminine tone she'd practiced for weeks.
"The pleasure is mine." Malcolm's hand brushed her lower back, and she repressed a shudder. "If you need anything, my office is just over there. I'd be happy to give you the guided tour." His smile revealed tobacco-stained teeth.
She stepped away, heart pounding. "Thank you, that's very kind." Her heels wobbled on the marble. "If you'll excuse me, I need to check in. I don't want to be late."
Harper hurried off without waiting for a response, her heels clicking sharply against the marble. Acutely aware of Malcolm's gaze on her backside, instead of the security desk she detoured to the nearest toilet. By the time she reached the ladies' room, she was gasping for breath, one hand braced against the wall.
The room was empty, thankfully, and she stumbled into the nearest stall, fumbling the lock shut behind her. She collapsed onto the closed toilet seat, head in her hands, and struggled not to hyperventilate.
She didn't know how she was going to survive the day, let alone the rest of her life. You can do this, she told herself again, but the words rang hollow.
C'mon Lucas, she told herself. Get your shit together.
And then it was Lucas sat there, not Harper; he and not she hiding from the world. Lucas felt the walls of the stall close in around him, trapping him inside this moment of confusion and panic. He knew he had to keep his calm for the sake of anyone who might overhear or see him, but it seemed impossible when every fibre of his being was shouting out that he was a man, not a woman. His chest heaved as if trying to break free from the confines of his bra, and breaths came quicker than ever before; yet all they did was feed into his rising disquiet.
He was going to have a heart attack, right here on the toilet in this stupid blouse and skirt. The thought was almost funny, in a morbid sort of way. Already exhausted, he rubbed a hand over his face, smearing his carefully applied makeup, and winced.
Get a grip, he told himself sharply. You've had the training for this. You knew it wouldn't be easy. But if you lose it now, on the first damn day, you might as well turn yourself in and save them the trouble of hunting you down.
He inhaled sharply to steady his racing heart, then exhaled slowly. He repeated the process until the rapid thumping had settled into a more manageable pace. 'I can do this,' he thought unconvincingly. His thoughts drifted back to the days spent in preparation. He had been trained to master his body language, to walk and talk like a woman; he'd had lessons on makeup application and the proper way to dress in his new role. His tutors, some of them hard-nosed former spies frighteningly familiar with the art of impersonation, were impressed by his successful transformation. All that was missing was the mindset - something he would find with time, they said.
But Lucas wasn't so sure. How could he possibly fake an entire other persona? It felt like a prison sentence; like he was doomed to live someone else's life for eternity without ever getting a break. Despite the practice and training, it still felt impossible at times; where one anxiety-fuelled moment could undo all of his hard work –and yet, despite all that doubt, here he was doing it anyway.
He found himself turning away from his training and focusing instead on his former life. The sexual conquests, the high-stakes business deals. Years of relentless success, of riding waves of stress and adversity with a laugh: having navigated all that, then surely, he could survive this--something as banal as crossing a lobby, finding his office, sitting at a desk? A menial secretarial role? The fact he was doing it wearing a skirt and heels, with tits and long hair; what of it?
With a sigh, he thought back to the times when he'd had everything neatly laid out in front of him and he suddenly, intensely, yearned for a cigar, a whiskey, a woman's soft lips around his cock--all three at the same time, preferably.
No. Lucas scolded himself firmly. He couldn't even think about that type of life anymore. At least, not now, not here. He was Harper now; she was the only one who stood a chance in this world. If all went according to plan, she'd keep him alive long enough to come out the other end of this humiliating ordeal and reclaim his life.
Allowing himself one final deep breath, he smoothed his short skirt down over his thighs before stepping outside of the stall.
The bathroom was empty and quiet, the fluorescent lights buzzing above. The smell of lemon-scented cleaner hung in the air, sharp and abrasive, but underneath was a softer fragrance of sandalwood and jasmine - his perfume, part of the disguise.
Focusing on the details around him helped steady his nerves. His heartbeat slowed, breath evening out as the panic receded. He could do this. He'd trained for months to become Harper, endured endless lessons on etiquette, style, and deportment to prepare for this role. It was the only way to escape his past.
He straightened, checking his reflection in the row of soft-lit mirrors over marbled sinks. And as he scrutinized his face, a scattering of memories flashed through his mind like fleeting shadows. The taste of champagne on a woman's tongue as they kissed after a successful deal; the sound of Amelia Greyson's cruel laughter ringing in his ears as darkness closed in around him; the sensation of walking on knives as he teetered in high heels for the first time; the soft bristles of a makeup brush sweeping over his cheekbones, transforming him into someone unrecognizable.
Later, he told himself. But the memories remained, torturing and taunting him, as he took a moment to fix his makeup, relying on newly engrained habits forcibly taught and learned in the months leading to this moment. With trembling hands, Lucas picked up a tube of lipstick from Harper's pink leather purse and began to repair the damage from his panic attack in the stall. He traced the curve of his lower lip, still marvelling at the rich, velvety texture of the makeup, then did the same for his upper lip. As he worked, he tried to ignore the way his hand shook, focusing instead on the sensual pleasure of the task--the experience not yet dulled by familiarity, still unnerving, still wrong.
Next, he dabbed at the damage beneath his eyes and across his cheeks where he'd passed his hand, nails digging shallow troughs through the makeup. The cool touch of the applicator against his skin sent a shiver down his spine, reminding him of the countless times he had touched women's faces in moments of intimacy or triumph. How different it felt now, he mused, to be the one receiving such delicate attention, to be the target of such self-care.
Finally, he ran a brush through the golden waves of his hair, feeling the silky strands slip through his fingers like water. The sensation was soothing, almost hypnotic, and for a moment he allowed himself to forget the danger that lurked just beyond the restroom door.
Soon, his makeup was once again flawless, his outfit impeccable, his appearance... appropriate. With an effort, he summoned a bright smile and the lilting, feminine cadence he'd practiced for so long.
It had been months since the procedure, but he still wasn't used to seeing Harper in the mirror. His old body was gone, stripped away by a cocktail of hormones and biomodification that had reshaped his cells into an entirely new form.
They'd warned him the changes would be extreme, but nothing could have prepared him for the reality. He was half a foot shorter, for starters, with delicate bones and a willowy figure that still felt alien under female clothes. His hair had lightened to blonde and grown past his shoulders. Disconcertingly large breasts blossomed from his chest, and his narrowed waist and flared hips weren't just the product of shapewear anymore. And yet, strangest of all was his face - the strong jaw and aquiline nose of his old self had softened into a heart-shaped visage with full lips and wide blue eyes.
Harper was a disguise, but she was also undeniably him--at least for now. There was no going back, at least not until after his day in court. Lucas took another deep breath, gripped the sink for support, and reminded himself this was his only chance at survival. If he wanted to stay alive until his day at court, he needed to bury Lucas Anderson. At least, until Tony Marchetti got his due.
***
The lobby was bustling, even busier than when he arrived, filled with the chatter of conversations and the tap of heels on marble. Harper glided through the crowd, acutely aware of the gazes following her. There were wolves here, men like the Lucas she'd once been - powerful, predatory creatures always on the hunt.
She kept her chin high, refusing to shrink from their attention. Harper was meant to be noticed, to draw eyes and invite stares. It was both armour and camouflage, a distraction from the truth of who she really was.
A hand caught her elbow as she glided towards the security desk, tugging her to a stop. "Well, hello there." The voice was deep, smooth as aged whiskey. "Haven't seen you here before. I'm Mark Danning. And you are...?"
Harper flashed a coy smile, slipping mor easily this time. "Harper Sullivan. I'm new! The new receptionist at Vortex Creative."
Danning's eyes raked over her appreciatively. "Is that so? Well, welcome to the madhouse, Harper Sullivan." He lifted her hand, brushing his lips over her knuckles. "I work on the same floor as you, the corner offices for Stoker Associates. I'm sure we'll be seeing quite a lot of each other."
It took effort not to snatch her hand away. The touch of his mouth brought a curl of disgust, a visceral reminder of all the times Lucas had treated women this way and thought nothing of it. Of all the times he'd taken without care or consequence.
Harper merely laughed, a light, tinkling sound, and slid her hand free. "I look forward to it, Mr. Danning. But I should get to my office. Lots to learn on my first day!"
She left him watching after her, a predatory hunger in his gaze. Harper walked on, hips swaying, and didn't look back. Despite the appearance of confidence, her chest tightened at the approach to the security desk, where two guards in crisp uniforms scrutinized each visitor. Harper fumbled in her purse for ID and stepped forward, hoping the tremors in her hands weren't visible.
The guards barely glanced at her card, touching it to a reader that dutifully beeped and flashed a green light. "Morning, Miss Sullivan. Welcome to Howe's."
"Thank you," she breathed, relieved, and everything clicked back into place. Having passed the first test--the first concrete test of her identity, though every single encounter that morning felt like a test--some tenuous sense of control reasserted itself. She was Harper Sullivan, arriving for her first day as secretary at Vortex Creative. Even the computer database agreed. Why would anyone think otherwise?
As Harper crossed the lobby toward the lifts, she straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin once more. You can do this, she told herself. Just get through today.
Tomorrow, she'd be back, and it might even be easier. By the week after that: no problem. And surely, in a few months.... But for now, she just needed to make it to her desk without falling to pieces. Harper took a deep breath, steadied herself on too-high heels, and walked on.
But painfully aware of the click of Harper's heels echoing with each step, Lucas's couldn't detach himself from the reality of what he was doing--wearing--or the pervasive sense of a thousand male eyes imprinting themselves indelibly on his ass as he walked and left the lobby and entered the adjoining hall. The door swung shut behind him, cutting off the sounds and leaving him alone.
For a moment he simply stood there, eyes closed, breathing hard. The memory of Danning's touch lingered, slimy tendrils that curled through his thoughts. He shuddered, hugging his arms around his middle.
Get a grip. He gave himself a sharp mental shake and opened his eyes, confronted by the wall of mirrored doors of travelling elevators.
Harper stared back at him. Delicate blonde eyebrows, a pert nose and bow-shaped lips, painted in shades of rose. The swell of breasts under a white silk blouse, cinched waist and hips accentuated by a tight black skirt.
His eyes locked onto the legs, shadowed by sheer hose, enticingly curved calves emboldened by heels. He remembered the effort it had taken to learn how to walk in them; balance, poise and posture, hips swaying with an effortless grace with each step. How naturally it all seemed to come to him now; how unconscious to prance and mince and sway under a male gaze! His jaw clenched tightly as anger and hatred roiled in his belly, threatening to spill over in a surge of bile.
But he couldn't deny the results. In this body, hearts beat faster and eyes lingered longer. His graceful figure was a far cry from the masculine heft and powerful presence he'd enjoyed before. He had always been good looking, of course - but his previously rakish charm now stared back at him, twisted into something softer, prettier, and luscious. It felt nearly impossible to -not- flaunt his undeniable female allure.
Lucas tore his eyes away from the reflection, fingers tightening into fists, long nails digging into his palm. He drew in a sharp breath and held it, the memory of Amelia's face swimming before his eyes. Her wicked smile as the anaesthesia took hold and the world faded into black.
He exhaled in a rush, sagging slightly, wincing. How had it come to this? Him, first hiding in the ladies' room like some scared little girl, and now trembling like a co-ed walking past the frat house.
The murder flashed behind his eyes--again--and not for the first time that day--and he flinched. No. He couldn't think about that now. Not here. Lucas shook his head sharply, dragging a hand through his blonde waves to settle over the back of his neck. He had a job to do. A role to play. He couldn't slip up now, not when his freedom--his life--was on the line.
When he finally stepped onto the elevator, Harper's smile was bright and cheeks flushed, the very picture of a flustered new hire. Surely, he told himself, no one would guess at the raging storm inside.
***
The lifts were all glass, offering a dizzying view of The City as Harper rose higher and higher. London spread out below her, a grey labyrinthine patchwork of buildings and streets; the sinuous coil of the river and the tourist-swarmed landmarks and the criss-crossing rail lines. She stared out the window, at the familiar patterns unchanged despite the radical changes in her own life. From here, she could even see her old building, gleaming like an enormous cheese grater at the centre of the city.
She could picture that old life with vivid clarity, imagine the tall, strong man in his designer suit arriving to work, riding a similar lift to his position of authority. To that man, a girl such as her would be an object of desire and conquest, at best; more likely a flighty distraction to ignore and dismiss.
And yet, despite the sharp awareness of her change in position, her heart still filled with wonder and gratitude that she had made it this far. She was still alive, and something about the sight of the sprawling city always raised--not quite joy, not quite awe, but something adjacent to both within.
But as the elevator car jolted to a stop, Harper's excitement melted away and gnawing anxiety returned. She had gotten through the security checkpoint with ease, but now came the real test - starting her new job.
Harper stepped out of the elevator, the click of her heels echoing through the empty hallway. She inhaled deeply and tried to convince her nerves to calm down. She didn't know anyone here, wouldn't know what to do, or how things worked. Confusion and uncertainty washed over her, unchecked by the firm assurance that the job was well below him, a shameful demotion from his previous position.
But then, just as she was about to lose her nerve, a voice broke through the silence. "Harper?" The woman who spoke was tall and willowy, with dark hair, sharp eyes, and an air of easy authority.
Harper's heart skipped a beat as she turned to face the woman. "Yes?" she asked, trying to keep the trepidation out of her voice.
"Hi, I'm Sofia, Sofia Rodriguez." Seeing the uncertainty in the other woman's eyes, she smiled. "They flashed a photo of you at the morning briefing. Knew you were coming." She jerked her thumb back down the corridor. "I was just coming back from the loo and saw you standing there looking lost."
Harper took the proffered hand, feeling a sense of relief wash over her. "Nice to meet you," she said, hoping her voice sounded confident.
Sofia's smile widened as she led Harper down the hall. "Welcome to Vortex Creative. I'm with H.R., and you'll probably end up working more closely with me than you want." She winked. "Nobody likes H.R. but hey, we're the ones who keep the whole ball rolling."
Harper nodded, her heart still pounding from the anxiety. "Thank you, I'm really excited to be here."
Sofia glanced over at her and raised an eyebrow. "Are you okay? You look a little pale."
Harper took a deep breath and shook her head. "It's just nerves. This is my first job out of uni and I'm still getting used to the whole corporate world thing." The lies came easily enough. Along with all the other trainer, she'd been drilled in the details of the life she'd adopted.
Sofia chuckled. "I know the feeling. But don't worry, we're all here to help you out. You'll get the hang of it in no time."
Sofia-from-H.R. led the short walk down a nondescript and silent corridor to the offices of Vortex Creative. A touch of her ID card led her into an open-plan sea of identical grey cubicles. Harper blinked, disoriented, until Sofia, grinning, directed her attention to a hand-written sign taped to one wall: "Harper Sullivan - Assistant to Mr. Edwards."
"See you around," Sofia said, and thanking the woman, Harper hobbled toward the cubicle on trembling legs, her ankles already aching. But as she approached, she froze in her tracks.
A man was standing just inside the cubicle, chatting with the human resources officer there. Tall and broad-shouldered, for a moment there was something familiar to his frame, to the way he stood to fill the space of the cubicle. He turned at the sound of her heels, and for a moment Harper's heart stopped.
The man's eyes were wide and bright as they focused on her, the irises surrounded by tiny flecks of bright grey. His hair was a dark, wild mess of curls, his jaw strong and square, and his cheeks were bristled with a day's worth of stubble. It was with an agonising envy that Harper the man's impeccably tailored black suit, complete with a crisp white shirt, jet-black tie and shiny dress shoes.
Harper felt herself flush as she realized who she was looking at, and panic rose in her chest. He'll recognize me, she thought, and it'll all be over. Her hands flew to her face, checking her hair and makeup, her blouse and skirt; but she already knew it was useless. Eric knew her too well. He'd see right through this fragile disguise, and then—
"You must be the new assistant." Eric held out one large hand, his smile warm and familiar, his voice deep and smooth. "I'm Eric Edwards. Welcome to the team."
Harper stared at him, mute with shock. He didn't recognize her. Her transformation had been too complete, her new face too convincing. She was safe.
She slid her hand into his, acutely aware of how small and delicate it seemed in his grip. The last time their hands had crossed, both men had gripped firmly, asserting their dominance; not so this time; it was painfully clear which of them dominated this encounter. "Harper Sullivan," she said, hearing the breathlessness in her own voice. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Edwards."
"The pleasure's mine." His eyes travelled over her in a way that was not entirely professional. "I must say, you're even lovelier than your photos suggested. This could be an interesting working relationship."
A blush rose to her cheeks, though whether it was Harper or Lucas who was blushing, she couldn't say.
She released his hand, smoothing the front of her blouse in a nervous gesture. "Thank you, sir. I'll do my best as your new assistant."
His smirk deepened as his eyes trailed down her body. "I'm certain you will."
Stepping forward, taking charge, he guided her across the lobby toward a pair of lifts at the far end of the office. His hand rested lightly at the small of her back. She felt acutely aware of his touch, the warmth and strength of his hand seeping through the thin material of her blouse.
"Nervous, are we?" he asked.
"A little," she admitted. "First day, and all that."
"No need to worry. You come highly recommended, and I'm sure we'll get along famously." His hand slid down to cup her hip briefly, a fleeting squeeze that made her breath catch, as he redirected between a row of cubicles. "In fact, I foresee a very productive working relationship."
He led her forward, explaining that Vortex Creative spread across two floors and that his office was upstairs. "Better view," he said, and grinned. "And why walk when you can ride?" The lift arrived with a chime. Eric guided her inside, his hand settling possessively on her waist.
He was flirting with her. Coming on to her. Her, Lucas Anderson, in the body of a woman not even half his age! How had she not made the connection, considered the possibility that "Mr Edwards" might be her former colleague?
They were alone for the short ride. She stared determinedly at the floor indicator, willing her cheeks not to flush. The small enclosure was filled with a heavy silence, and Harper felt her nerves buzzing. She remembered the words of the HR manager over the video call, after confirming the success of the interview. There'd been a moment of hesitation, and then the woman, speaking in a sort of embarrassed rush, added: "you'll be assigned to Mr Edwards. Um – be confident, take control, don't let him push you around."
How hollow those words rang now! Eric was clearly the one in control; she felt it in the contrast between his strong touch and every soft curve of her body, in the straight lines of his suit and the delicate flutter of her skirt--in her unconscious reaction to his words.
In the small space of the lift that seemed to shrink around them, his presence looming larger with each passing second, Eric reached up and brushed a curl from her forehead; his finger lingered there, tracing lightly over the slender bridge of her nose. "You look beautiful like this," he murmured.
Like this? Her heart thudded wildly in her chest. She glanced up at him--up, he seemed so much taller than her now!--through mascara-heavy lashes, searching for some hint of recognition in his eyes; but no, there was nothing there but desire and a possessiveness that made her skin crawl, an intense and predatory focus she'd seen before, but never directed by him in her direction. She felt his gaze raking over her face, down to her breasts, his hand still hovering at her hip.
Stop this flirtation now! she thought, but she felt too flustered, too afraid, too overwhelmed by paralytic shame to do so. She'd known Eric for years, back when they were both blazing a trail at Excelsior shoes--rivals in everything. As a man, it had been her greatest ambition to outshine him; and now he was her superior, and she his assistant – such a reversed position roiled her belly with anger and resentment. Or at least it should have. At that moment, she felt herself captured in his gaze, and something uncomfortable and unfamiliar fluttered in her belly.
When the lift stopped at their floor Eric stepped back, allowing her to exit before him with a mischievous grin that made her cheeks hot. As she stepped out into the corridor, she felt his piercing gaze on her body and an unexpected thrill ran through her as she noticed his eyes paused on her backside. Her blush deepened when he appeared beside her, amused by her reaction.
"Don't forget," he said softly as he passed her. "This is only the beginning."
He steered her out onto the executive floor, and the sight before them was somehow both familiar and somehow overwhelming. The walls were glass, showing off the sleek, modern offices of the executives. Grey cubicles filled the centre of the floor, occupied with people typing away at their computers and chatting quietly in their seats. Once, she dominated this sort of environment, but now she felt tiny and at a loss; but then Eric grabbed her arm gently and guided her through the maze of people.
They arrived at his office, a large corner one with a spectacular view of the cityscape. She was impressed by its elegant simplicity—no pictures hung upon the walls or fancy furniture cluttering up space. Instead, he had what seemed to be necessary only for functioning: a desk, chair, computer, and shelves full of books and binders. It was easy to forget sometimes, she mused, that their rivalry had also been rooted in the man's sheer competence - Eric had always been good at everything he did.
He gestured for her to take a seat opposite him in the two chairs situated there. He watched her carefully as Harper sat down and crossed her legs, the shortness of her skirt briefly exposing the delicately detailed welt of stockings before she tugged her clothing back into place. She blushed and knew he was admiring her curves—the way his eyes kept darting from her face to lower parts – but before she could ponder too deeply on it, he spoke up.
"Here we are," he said. "Welcome to your new kingdom. I'll give you the guided tour, then we can discuss how you'll be assisting me directly. Sound good?"
She nodded, swallowing hard. This was going to be more difficult than she'd imagined. Far more difficult. She'd thought maintaining her cover around strangers would be challenge enough, but Eric's obvious attraction threw a wrench into things she hadn't anticipated.
Standing, she followed him, struggling to match his steady stride with her mincing steps. He thinks I'm interested in him, she thought, as he led her through the office. And he has no idea he's flirting with a man.
Harper took a deep breath, steadying herself. She was hyper-aware of Eric's hand on her waist, proving his possession of the new arrival; of the way her skirt clung to her thighs as she walked; of every glance from the men and women around the office floor. It felt like a spotlight trained on her, judging and assessing.
She faltered after a few steps, overwhelmed by the sensations. What was wrong with her? Why was she reacting this way? She'd trained for this, practiced for months to become Harper Sullivan, and now here she was falling apart on the first day.
Get a grip, she told herself fiercely. You're stronger than this.
She forced herself to move, to put one heeled foot in front of the other. To smile up at Eric and nod as he pointed out different departments. To ignore the way her breasts strained against the cups of her bra with each step, the straps digging into her shoulders, or the strands of stray hair that insisted on fluttering across her forehead.
"And here's H.R.," Eric was saying. Harper saw Sofia, briefly, as she leaned back out of her cubicle, Costa coffee in hand. The woman waved, winked, and disappeared back into her workplace.
Eric waved a woman over and Harper recognized her from the video interview. "This is Samantha, the team's human resources manager," he said.
"Oh lovely," she said, her voice a trill of professionalism. "This must be Harper." She extended her hand and smiled warmly, making it easy for Harper to relax slightly as she returned the gesture. "Welcome aboard! It's a pleasure to meet you in person instead of over a Zoom call." She nodded at Eric. "I'm sure you two will make a great team."
Harper nodded, not trusting herself to say anything without giving away how rattled she felt inside. Eric shot her a reassuring glance and guided her back toward his office.
"There we go — now you know everyone," he said with a small laugh. He gestured at a desk, currently bare though she knew it wouldn't stay so for long. "And here's where I'll bring those pesky reports any time I need them in half an hour or less." He waved at the empty desk. "I'm sure someone from I.T. will be along to sort you out it no time."
"Sure," she replied, trying her best to sound light and breezy. She smiled up at him. "Thanks for the tour."
He grinned back and reached up and tucked a stray curl of hair behind her ear. "My pleasure," he said. She felt a flush run up her cheeks, but thought she detected an amused appreciation from Eric as well. He reached out his hand as if to take hers, then pulled it away abruptly and backed towards the door of his office.
"Come on then," he said. "Best if we get you to work. I'll have one of the other girls get you started." He nodded towards the expanse of glass wall that divided his office from her desk. "And don't forget," he said, and his lips curled in a mischievous grin. "I'll always be able to keep an eye on you."
The innuendo wasn't lost on her, and she gritted his teeth. You can do this, she told herself. Just get through the day.
"It's perfect," she said, pitching her voice high and bright. "Thank you so much for bringing me on, Mr. Edwards. I'm sure I'll learn a lot working under you."
"Yes," he said, "I'm sure you will."
***
Lucas sat down at his desk, crossing his legs and arranging his skirt over his knees. Cool and comfortable earlier in the day, now his legs felt hot under his stockings, and the suspender belt uncomfortable across his waist where it'd rolled down; he'd already had to readjust the tabs twice today in the woman's loo, and he resisted the urge to just peel the damn things off and be rid of them. His heels ached and his toes felt pinched. The underwired bra chafed, and the straps dug into his shoulders. For the umpteenth time that day, he blew an errant strand of hair out of his eyes and suppressed a cry of annoyance. Get through the day, he reminded herself. You can do this.
A young man approached the cubicle, all charm and smarm, and said, "You must be the new girl. Harper, is it?" His gaze slid down to Lucas's chest, and he folded his arms over himself defensively. Inwardly, he suppressed a scream. How many times? he wanted to yell. How many men were going to hit on him today? How much more bullshit and bad pick up lines, lingering stares and uninvited touches?
"Yes," he said, striving for nonchalance. "Harper Sullivan. I'm Mr. Edwards' new assistant."
"Fantastic," the man said. "I'm Mark Johnson. If there's anything I can help you with, don't hesitate to ask." His smile widened. "Anything at all."
For some reason, this time--unlike the previous half-dozen overly-friendly conversations with men in the office--a spike of panic lanced through Lucas. The walls seemed to close in. Sweat broke out across his bare arms; he felt his heart pound in his chest.
He imagined making his excuses, standing up so quickly the chair rolled backwards across the floor, and making a run for it. He could picture it vividly: the cry of surprise, the tottering run across the floor, the tears in the stairwell.
He imagined throwing a punch, and how satisfying it would be to watch Mark fall from the force of his blow. He visualized the shock in Mark's eyes, the sound of surprise as he toppled over the desk, and the cascade of papers and files that would ensue. But Lucas knew it was a pipe dream: with his slim arms and lack of strength, he doubted he would even be able to make contact with Mark’s face, let alone knock him down.
And as for running away, well, he could imagine the hitman waiting for him on the street, if not today then soon: the gunshot in a lonely alley. The shattered skull, spattered blood and brain down a grimy wall. Darkness.
No, he told himself. Stay calm. You agreed to this--sort of--and you don't have any other choice anymore.
Instead, his frustration bubbled out between pink-painted lips in a simple exclamation. "Stop!" Lucas said. Taking a deep breath, he added, more softly, "Please." He forced a smile and said, "Thank you, but I think I'm alright for now."
Mark's grin wavered slightly. "I--."
Lucas sighed. "Listen, I'm sorry if I made you feel uncomfortable just then. Guess the nerves still get the better of me on the first day."
Mark's smile returned easily, and he waved off the girl's apology with a dismissive gesture. "No need to apologize. I remember my first day here - it's perfectly normal to feel a bit overwhelmed. But you'll settle in quickly, I'm sure." He nodded to the growing pile of paperwork strewn across Harper's desk. "Looks like Edwards has already put you to work. If you have any questions, just shout."
"Thank you," Lucas said. "I appreciate the welcome."
"It's alright," he said congenially. "This is a place of business after all, we need to keep it professional, right?" His eyes twinkled in amusement as he added, "But if you ever change your mind...." He shrugged his shoulders and Mark's eyes lingered on him for a moment too long, and Lucas resisted the urge to squirm. He offered another smile instead, hoping to defuse the tension. After a few beats, Mark seemed to catch himself. Or perhaps he saw Eric Edwards watching him through the glass walls of his office, eyes dark and frowning. Either way, he cleared his throat and glanced away, a faint blush staining his cheeks. "Well," he said. "I should let you get on with it."
Lucas watched him go with a mix of relief and trepidation.
It was going to be a long day, week... months, he thought, as he sighed, touched up his lipstick, and returned to his new job.
***
Author’s Notes:
About a year ago, for various reasons, I stepped away from my keyboard and didn’t come back. It wasn’t planned, but I just never quite found the confidence or desire to pick up writing again – oh, I thought about it every day; I just didn’t actually do any writing. Consequently, my main fiction contribution to this website, Constant in All Other Things, languished unfinished, again.
A few things brought me back to writing. I run a Patreon—check it out if you like what I’m doing here—and a patron suggested reading Billy Summers, by Stephen King. I hadn’t read King for various reasons, snobbery among them. I was wrong. It’s a brilliant read. And from there I moved on to King’s On Writing which is equally brilliant. It made me want to write again, even if I don’t agree with everything he has to say about the craft of writing.
The other thing that got me back to the keyboard was messing about with A.I. writing software. I’d tried DungeonAI and Novel AI in the past – I’ve got a pretty poor effort on here that came from that—but generally found them pretty poor. Fun, for sure, but not terribly useful as a writing tool.
This time around, I tried Sudowrite, a newcomer to the game. And—it’s better. Not great, but it does have certain tools I found a lot of fun to play around with, that got me inspired to pick up my pen, so to speak, and write.
Constant is chugging away at a solid pace again, 500 words/day—I’m giving regular updates on the Patreon. And I also decided to try my hand at something else.
The story above, “All in a Sea of Wonders” is a collaborative effort with Sudowrite. I say collaborative, because it’s hard to say where my efforts and the A.I.’s effort separate. The story writing tools built into Sudowrite, the “Story Engine” is both remarkably powerful and remarkable stupid – left to its own devices, it’ll generate a wonderful narrative of meandering nonsense. It has an underlining understanding of narrative structure and the “beats” of fiction, but this is also coupled to an idiot with the memory of a goldfish. Meanwhile, yes, this new story does bear a more than passing resemblence to the initial setup on Constant - when I started messing around with the AI, I just grabbed the first thing that came to mind and decided to play around with familiar exposition. It deviates pretty quickly, though, and Lucas isn't David Saunders.
But guided by a firm hand, the A.I. can alleviate some of the creative strain and generate a lot of the nuts-and-bolts prose that propels a story along. At times, it even makes creative suggestions that are compelling to pursue and develop.
In any case, I wrote the above chapter with A.I assistance. If that kind of thing turns you off, hey, I get it. But if you got this far and couldn’t tell – well, I suppose that because, as the end of the day, what you’re actually reading is still -mine-, because the whole thing was revised, rewritten and reorganized by me. I suspect this’ll be the future for a lo of A.I.-generated content: first draft by A.I., but competent human hands crafting it into something better.
As for great fiction? I think we’re still decades away from A.I. taking that away from human writers.
Finally, if you like this and have a quid to spare, why not chuck it at my Patreon? (patreon.com/fakeminsk) The beginning of the next chapter of this has already been posted there, with more coming next week. One patron asked how I got the A.I. to do what I wanted, and I posted a short tutorial and example. If a couple of more patrons jump onboard, I’m hoping to try a collaborative project with them – patrons brainstorm the ideas, I feed them into the A.I. and tame the output, and revise and rewrite the final version. At the very least, comments are genuinely appreciated - let me know what you think of this thing, good or bad, and whether you think it ought to be continued.
Constant in All Other Things
by Fake Minsk
David Sanders saw something he shouldn’t have and Agent K will do everything she can to keep him alive–-but who can he trust as he sinks deeper into a disguise he never chose, and will he ever find himself again?
Chapter Two: Reluctantly agreeing to Agent K’s plan, David finds himself coddled and squeezed into the identity of Cindy Long. But just what kind of girl is Cindy, he begins to wonder.
Constant in All Other Things
Chapter Two
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent
--Much Ado About Nothing
Now, I haven’t exactly led a sheltered life. I’ve been involved in more than my fair share of violence. There was a lot of weird stuff that went on in my youth. But for all that I still led a fairly sheltered life in some ways. Busy with other stuff, I didn’t clue in to matters of love and sex until relatively late. More specifically, I didn’t figure out that some guys actually prefer other guys until I was sixteen or seventeen. Hey, I’m pretty clued in now when it comes to sex and all that shit. I mean, it’s not like I’ve got trouble finding female company for the weekend, if you know what I mean. But I had a bit of a late start, on account of my screwed-up childhood. So the first time a boy hit on me, well . . . yeah, it took me by surprise.
I’m a good-looking guy. I was a good-looking kid. And I had this job once, at this high-school, around when I was fourteen . . . well, that’s where I met Ken. Ken was a nice kid, a few years older than me, and I knew I could trust him. We worked together well and he helped me get the job done even though he didn’t really understand what was going on. He was a good friend. Stupid, naíve me, I didn’t realize the kid was helping me because he had this huge crush going on. And so, at the end when it was all over, Ken kissed me. He just kind of lunged in and next thing I know, his lips were pressed up against mine, and a second later his tongue was in my throat, and his fingers were digging into my arms, pulling me closer.
Hell, at that point I hadn’t even figured out girls yet. My first kiss--was with a guy. Yeah, I was pissed off. I smacked him in the face and knocked him down and kept hitting him. I hurt him bad, and the punches were only a small part of it.
Fuck. To this day it still pisses me off. I was an idiot. I was young. Ken’s gone now. Last time I saw him was a few years ago, before the disease took him. I think that was the last time I cried. I don’t cry often.
Well, I’m older now. I understand some things a bit better. I eventually figured out that there were other people like Ken out there, and that it wasn’t a big deal. Some guys like guys. Some guys like to wear frilly clothes and lacy underwear. Hell, some guys even want to have their dick sliced up and pushed inside out and try to pretend they’re really a girl. I mean, that’s weird shit. That shit’s wrong. You are what you are. But sometimes, it’s hard to figure exactly what you are and that’s where it all seems to fall apart.
I don’t pretend to understand it. I like girls. I mean, I really do. That moment, when you first slide your cock into a warm pussy, that being together and soft intimacy--God, I love that. I’ve never looked at a guy and thought, “hey, I want me some of that!” The thought of sucking on a man’s dick makes me sick. Girls do that shit, and they do it well. They’ve got the body for it, the soft lips and long hair and curves and all, you know?
But don’t get me wrong. I’m no fucking homophobe. I’ve got no problem admitting when some guy’s good looking. But guys just don’t do it for me, and I can’t imagine why any guy would want that over the softness of a chick. Unless it’s to miss out on the mind games, maybe. Girls are fucked in the head.
So even though I don’t understand it, I guess I can kind of respect it. I’m not one of those freaks quoting Deuteronomy and claiming God’s going to claim divine retribution just because some dude wants to wear a bra. That’s just fucked up. God’s got bigger shit to worry about. But it’s definitely not something I’ve ever wanted or even thought of doing myself.
So when K pushed that folder over to me and I saw a chick’s name there? Yeah, I was more than a little taken aback.
“Uh, K?” I said. “This is a chick’s name.”
K nodded. She didn’t seem apologetic or bashful or anything. About as empathic as a cantaloupe, K is. “Yes, it is.”
I may have been groggy, but I was pretty sure of one thing. “K, I’m not a chick.”
“No, you are not,” she said. “This is an identity created for another person. However, considering your unique situation I believe it to be your best chance to reach safety alive.”
I shook my head. Almost knocked myself out again. “But I don’t want be a chick.”
“Of course not,” she said. I swear, she almost seemed to be smiling. “In a way, this is your own fault. It was you who gave me the idea, when you asked about that dress back at the courthouse.”
“You said that was idiotic.”
“Yes, I did,” K answered. “To throw a dress on you and walk you out of that building would have been foolish. You would have looked like a man in a dress. You would have drawn more attention instead of turning it away. But we have a little time here. Not much, especially considering your injuries.” She gave me a quick look-over. “But I believe with a little work you could be passably made to resemble a woman. At least from a distance.
“You are short,” she said. Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. Bitch. “You are slender and features that are considered beautiful on a man are often also beautiful on a woman. You are somewhat too muscular but that can be concealed with the proper clothing. With effort you could probably even pass as an attractive woman.”
Somehow that reassured me a bit. I mean, if you’re gonna do something this fucked up, you at least want to look good, right?
“Mr Steele doubtlessly has more assassins closing in on your location. We may already be under surveillance. This disguise, unlikely as it may seem, might be enough to at least temporarily throw off any pursuit.” K finished her spiel and watched me expectantly.
It must’ve been the multiple bullet wounds, but for some reason K was making a twisted kind of sense to me. Anyone chasing me would be looking for a guy. A good-looking guy, if I say so myself. My face was probably plastered all over the papers by now. Even if some fucking assassin didn’t see me, all I’d need is some pedestrian moron to point a finger and shout my name and it could all be over. I still had one important argument to make, though.
“But I don’t want to be a chick!”
K sighed. “Yes, Mr Sanders. I understand this. And I assure you, this would only be temporary, until we can relocate you to your new home and identity. But I honestly feel this is your best chance of surviving until then.”
And you know what? I trusted her. I really did. It was a crazy idea, worthy of some silly internet fiction or those crap tabloids--but hell, sometimes the crazy ideas are the best, simply because they’re so fucking crazy. I normally trust my instincts but they were conflicted: on the one hand they told me that this was the absolute bullshit, complete nonsense, impossible and unnecessary; but my instincts also told me to trust K. And fair enough, I was pretty messed up and woozy and all, but I decided to trust K. Even though the idea of hiding behind a skirt felt really, really wrong.
“I . . . trust you, K,” I said. “What do I have to do?”
“Rest, and gather your strength,” she said. “I will gather your disguise together and wake you when we are ready.”
I wasn’t about to argue with her. I’m tough, sure, but part of that’s knowing when to take it easy. I could barely keep my eyes focussed on her as it was. I passed out about five seconds after K stood up and walked out of the room.
I dreamed. You’d think I would’ve dreamed about girly stuff; you know, the fact that when I woke up I’d be wearing a skirt or something like that. Yeah, real nightmare-type stuff. Instead, I had one of those dreams that play like an old scratchy sepia-toned film, flickering like the hazy wings of a hummingbird against the inside of my eyes.
***
I dreamed in surprisingly vivid detail how all this nonsense started. I’m not sure I slept deep enough to properly dream. Like I said, I trust K and all, but it wasn’t exactly a relaxing situation I was in, what with the bullet wounds and assassins and all. I really need to feel comfortable to sleep deeply. That’s the problem with nights out. I mean, I bring chicks home all the time and I love that shit, but unless I really know the girl I’m not likely to trust her; I don’t trust most girls, full stop. That’s why I don’t exactly get much good sleep. Some instincts die hard, I guess. But I’m used to getting by with only a little sleep, anyway. That’s the way I was raised: to get by on as little as possible.
Thomas Smith--Tom--like I said, he’s a good friend of mine. I sailed into NeoPharm on a supped-up CV with a falsified diploma, and landed a job in PR. Within a year I’d impressed the powers that be and took my first step up the corporate ladder. They gave me a secretary. God, she was a sexy bitch, sashaying into the office with these tight little skirts and spiky heels and firing off enough erotic triggers to turn your average office nice guy into a borderline rapist. This girl was totally trying to hook herself onto some rising star--like me--and launch herself into the upper ranks of the company. Seriously. She was so fucking stupid she didn’t even see it wasn’t worth slutting herself out like that. To her credit, she didn’t even try to hide it. She had a mediocre education (still better than mine, I have to admit), ruthless ambition, and a fucking amazing body. Brainless and phoney as hell, though.
Tom loved that chick. Her name was Tammy. I think. What a bitch. But Tom had a thing for her. And so did I at first. I was new to this whole office pool shark thing, and lost my common sense for a bit. Tom was an up-and-comer as well, in a different division. We both fought over this silly cow, and I won, if bringing a girl like Tammy home can really be considered any kind of victory. Tom laughed about it afterwards, me bedding her first. Tammy never really escaped that first rung of the secretarial pool, but by next year both Tom and I were well on our way into management.
And that’s how I met Tom. Remember how I said I was a good judge of character? The moment I met this guy, down at the local bar as we both chatted up Tammy, I knew we were going to be friends. Competition. Respect. And trust. That’s what a good friendship’s built on. Good? We became great friends. And we always remained competitive. Which is why that night, a month or two back. . . well, we ended up somewhere we shouldn’t have been, and saw something I wish we hadn’t.
When Jeremy-fucking-psycho-Steele shot that Italian dude’s head and it exploding like an overripe melon, splattering all over the room, the dream ended. I’d seen worse. Not much, but it wasn’t a first. But Tom didn’t take it too well. And that’s the image that seared itself into the back of my eyes as I awoke: Tom’s mouth, opened wide in a silent scream.
***
K was sitting next to my bed. How long had she been there? She must’ve woken me up when she sat down. I hope I hadn’t cried out or anything in my sleep. That happens sometimes, and it’s really embarrassing when I’ve got chicks over. Girls can whine as much as they like about how they want their men to be sensitive and shit, but at the end of the day what they really wasn’t are guys who are tough and old-school-like. They definitely don’t want pansies that scream or cry in their sleep. But what can I say? Sometimes I get bad dreams.
“Are you ready to begin?” K asked. Like I said, not big on the small talk, this woman.
I felt a hell of a lot better than before. Still a bit hazy, a bit dopey, but the pain was a manageable throb in the background. I could cope. I could function. I wouldn’t want to try and do any advanced calculus or debate a major issue or run a marathon, but my head was on a hell of a lot straighter than before–straight enough for me to have second thought about this crazy scheme. The sunlight wasn’t slanting in through the door anymore. It must’ve been night. It was hard to tell without a clock or window in the room.
I threw my legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. I felt a moment’s wooziness but fought it down. When I stood up I felt ill, like I was going to throw up, but it wasn’t that bad. Truth is I felt sicker at the thought of what was coming up than at any pain I was feeling. How the hell was she going to make me into a passable woman?
“I have something for you that might help.” I thought she was going to hand me another glass of water and some pills. Me, I don’t like to take pills or most medicines, to tell you the truth. I mean, who knows what’s really in those pills people hand you, yeah? Maybe I’m a bit paranoid. Maybe it’s from working at a pharmaceutical company. So even though my legs were a bit wobbly and I was still hurting, I shook my head no. “Nah, it’s okay, K,” I said. “I’m feeling better. The pain’s not so bad.”
“Who said anything about the pain?” She gave a small smile. “I thought a stiff drink might help you get through this,” she said, and handed me a scotch on the rocks.
What a girl. And it was good stuff, too. I wondered if they had a list of my favourite drinks in my file. I wonder if Cindy did as well. Probably. She probably liked stupid girly drinks, pinks things with half-a-dozen fruit juices in it and an umbrella.
“Good,” K said once I’d pounded back the drink, the warmth of the alcohol spreading into my limbs. It settled my nerves a bit. Fuck, but was I ever nervous thinking about what was coming up. I hadn’t felt this nervous in ages. “Follow me.”
She led me into the next room, which made up most of the apartment from the look of it. It wasn’t much, to say the truth. It was really bland. Boring IKEA-looking stuff, chipped and a little dirty, just the bare basics to survive off of. Not even a TV set. That kind of bothered me, since I wanted to see if there’d been a reaction to my testimony yet. I’d basically thrown my life away to see this bastard put away. I wanted some results. For the last five years things had been going really fucking well–a bit boring, yeah, but comfortable. Now I was about to slip a dress on and pretend I was a girl. Jeremy Steele had better get put away for this. I wondered if Tom was going to go through the same bullshit. I wondered if his federal agent was called ‘J’ or ‘L’ or something.
There was a window but I knew better than to hang out at that end of the room. Instead, K went over to a table and grabbed a bag and handed it over to me. “You’ll need this,” she said.
I looked inside. It was one of those cheap plastic toiletry bags. There was a bunch of shower products in there. The bottles were pink and flowery and looked very girly.
“What the hell’s this shit?” I asked.
“It’s all perfectly normal items for a woman to use in the shower,” K answered. Then she fixed me with those serious eyes again, that stare. It finally registered that she had eyes as grey as a northern sea. “Cindy.”
“Easy there,” I said.
But K just shook her head. “The earlier you get used to it, the better. Your name, until we clear you of this mess, is Cindy.”
“Aw, c’mon K, it’s just the two of us in here. Call me Dave. Call me Mr Sanders if you’ve gotta. But a chick’s name? Gimme a break!”
“Your name is Cindy,” she said, and the tone of her voice brooked no argument. “You are twenty years old and female. The earlier you accept this, the better.”
“Oh for Chrissake,” I muttered. “This is ridiculous.”
But there wasn’t any point in arguing with her. And like she said, this shit was only temporary. Until I could get to that hospital, get myself checked out, and then pick up a new identity and get the hell out of Dodge. I felt fine at the moment--mostly--but I knew how deceptive that could be. Just because I could stand didn’t mean there might not be something seriously wrong, especially with that wet spot up on my temple. The sooner I went along with K’s plan, as insane as it was, and got myself checked out, the better.
“Fine,” I said. “But what the hell am I supposed to do with all this?”
She pointed to a room off of this one. “Begin in there,” she said. “Use this first. Read and follow the instructions.” She indicated a pink bottle. “Then use this.” She pulled out a can, also girlishly pink, and a razor.
“What the hell?”
“Shave everywhere: legs, chest, armpits, face. Shave your face twice.”
“K, no one’s going to see me that close up!”
“Why risk detection because of sloppiness? We need your disguise to be as convincing as possible, considering the circumstances.”
“Listen,” I insisted. “You can slap a dress on me and whatever, but there’s no way I’ll pass for a chick up close. Really, what’s the point?”
K just gave me one of those steady, unflinching stares. “I will be the judge of that,” she said, “and you may be surprised.” That was that, really. When I dig my heels in, I’m a pretty stubborn bastard. But with K, I just didn’t seem able to find my footing. Unnerving, that woman, and it wasn’t just the lesbian thing. But for some reason I just didn’t want to argue with her. Probably because I trusted her. I mean, me heading into the bathroom and shaving all over was kind of weird, but she wanted me to do it for my own good, right?
So, following her order to use the rest of the crap in the bag as well, I grudgingly trudged off into the next room. It was another bedroom, a larger one with a double bed, and with a small en-suite bathroom. I stepped into the bathroom and got the shower started. I looked over the first bottle. It was one of those Nair-type things that chicks use, some kind of cream to get the hair off of me.
Well, what the hell was I going to do? Suddenly I was really glad that I’d had that drink. I’m not sure I could’ve done this otherwise. I stepped into the shower and lathered myself up with this shit and waited out the time. It stank a bit and tingled at first and eventually burned uncomfortably. When I rinsed myself off I was amazed at how much of my body hair went with it. But I wasn’t done yet. K wanted me to shave as well so dammit, I was going to shave. I lathered up with a can of girly shaving cream and picked up the razor and went at it.
It was a totally new experience. A strange one, to be honest. I’d never done something like this before. Even lathering up was different. It didn’t exactly smell like my macho Gillette’s, if you know what I mean. There I was surrounded in this flowery cloud, holding this triple-bladed razor with a flat handle; it even sat differently in my hand compared to what I was used to. I had this real moment of hesitation. Under the steaming hot water, what I was about to do seemed really fucking weird. And wrong. I mean, how was this all necessary? But I also thought about what K had said, and that also made sense. And I remembered that I trusted the woman, and with that in mind I brought the razor down to my leg and took the first stroke.
I’d like to think I did a good job. The chest was easy enough. The armpits were another story. Fuck, but I wouldn’t want to do that every week. Talk about gaining respect for the shit women go through to look good. As for the legs: well, the shins were easy enough, but I’ve got to admit reaching those tough spots in the inside of the knee was another matter. After much craning and stretching and blind strokes with the razor I managed to get the job done. After that it was a pretty simple matter to rinse-lather-repeat, though I wasn’t a frequent user of conditioner. The shower gel was a tad more floral than I would’ve liked as well. I smelled like a fucking garden by the time I finished.
I felt strangely chilled when I stepped out of the shower. The towel slid across my skin differently without any hair between me and the fabric. That was really weird. There was a full-body mirror in the bathroom, but fortunately it was all fogged up from the shower. It must’ve taken me nearly thirty minutes to get it all done. I felt just a little water-logged after all that. My head was a bit fuzzy again as well.
But I really didn’t want to see myself at that point. I could see glimpses of my hairless legs and that was enough. There was another bottle in the bag for me to use: some kind of baby-powder-type stuff. So I powdered myself all over, and by the time I was done I felt like a total fucking pansy. I couldn’t believe how smooth my skin felt. If I closed my eyes and felt my thigh I bet I could fool myself into thinking I was stroking up some chick. I passed my palm along my leg and didn’t find any stubble, but just the feeling of my hand sliding smoothly against skin kinda freaked me out.
I finally stepped out of the bathroom. Big surprise, K was waiting for me.
“Cindy, what are you doing? Please try to show a little modesty.”
What the hell was she talking about? I had a towel wrapped around me, a surprisingly soft and fluffy one (pink) considering the state of this crumby apartment.
“You are far more daring that me,” K continued, and she suddenly blushed. It was strange, seeing this strangely human and bashful reaction on a woman like K. “I can see your chest and everything!”
Bloody hell. I was wearing my towel like a man, covering the important bits but not exactly worried about the chest. Sighing, I readjusted the towel to cover my pecs. It still reached to my crotch, but left me feeling like my ass was hanging out. That wasn’t cool.
“Good.” K suddenly sounded all professional again, dropping the shyness. “Begin with the articles on the bed, please.” She stepped out of the room.
I approached the bed with some trepidation. I knew what was coming but that doesn’t mean I was looking forward to it. And sure enough, there on the bed were articles that even in a drunken, blind state you wouldn’t mistake for anything other than feminine.
The panties came first. They were black and small and had lace around the edges. Did she really expect me to wear these? Fuck. There was a bra as well, also lacy and black. Beneath them was a rolled-up lump that revealed itself as a pair of black pantyhose. Wonderful. Especially since they were sexy pantyhose--you know, not the day-to-day shit that most secretaries and women in the workforce wear, those really plain and heavy beige ones; these were so sheer they were nearly invisible and tinted black and had a lacy, embroidered top. Last time I’d seen clothes like this was nearly two months ago, before I saw any kind of murder or anything. It’d been after a night out at a club.
Alice had been hot and willing and easily impressed by my slick clothes and good job and easy money. Fuck, girls usually are. God, I love girls, how they fall for the cheesiest lines, how soft they feel in your arm and the way they like to cuddle up. Don’t get me wrong, though. I also respect women–well, some women, that is. Thing is, I’ve known enough women who can seriously kick my ass to not respect them. Like this one woman I know, Sakura. And Katherine. Fucking Katherine. . . .
I’ll tell you about her another time.
But man, can chicks ever be stupid when they want to be. I’ve never understood that, how they can just throw logic and reason and self-respect to the side, just to be with some guy--to be with me. I’m not putting myself down or anything. I’m a damn fine catch. It’s just that there are far more important things to worry about than assholes like me. Yeah, stuff like psychotic billionaire CEOs killing you unless you convincingly pass yourself off as a girl.
But this Alice chick, she really surprised me. ‘Luminous’ is this cool bar not far from the office, trendy without being phoney, even if most of the people who went there were right bastards. Like me, I guess. That’s where I picked up Alice. She was a sexy little thing, but a bit mousy. She almost had that naughty-librarian look going. But when I got her back to mine and peeled off those clothes, fuck, what a surprise! Not only did she have a soft, curvy body squeezed into those otherwise bland clothes of hers, she had the whole semi-fetishwear thing happening, the garters and the whole deal, like something out of a magazine spread. A tiger in bed as well. We went at it for hours. Dumb as bricks but an amazing fuck. Which is a good thing, because she’s the last woman I’ve slept with. Hard to get some when you’re hiding for your life, you know? I hadn’t gone that long without tail since… well, since I was a fucked-up teen. And now look at me.
I sat on the edge of the bed and slipped the panties on first. They were very thin, nearly see-through., and a tight fit. Sexy. I’d love to bring a girl home and unwrap her and find something like this underneath, all damp and ready to peel off. But I probably shouldn’t have been thinking about that, or Alice, because I encountered my first problem right then.
“Hey, K?” I called out. “I’ve, uh, got a problem.”
A few seconds later she was standing there in the doorway.
“I have a problem,” I said, and stared at her expectantly. I pointed down at my crotch. “I don’t seem to fit.”
I’m an average-sized guy and that’s never been a problem for me. I’m no Ron Jeremy with a twelve-inch sausage, and I wouldn’t want to be. I’m big enough to get the job done, and to get it done well. I take it all very seriously. Even if I’m just with some silly cunt I picked up that night, one so dumb she doesn’t even know she’s being used, I think it’s important to show her a good time. There’s no excuse for being lazy in bed. I’m a selfish bastard in real life, but sex is something else. It’s special. Sex is a skill in itself. You’ve got to work at it, and anything I work at, anything worth doing, I like to do well. So it’s important to me for the girl to get there as well, and I use all the tools at my disposal, if you know what I mean.
They say most penises are roughly the same size when erect but vary like mad when flaccid. I don’t know where I read that--probably some fucking Maxim magazine or something. So I look small when relaxed, but when I’m all horned up, it’s bigger than you’d expect. I guess I’m like my dick, then: small when relaxed, but you don’t want to fuck with me when I’m pissed-off. And that was the problem. For whatever the reason, this messed-up situation, the clothes themselves, the feminine scent the flowed off my own body and lingered faintly in the underwear itself--I was reacting. The silky feel of drawing those panties up my cleanly shorn legs turned me on in a way that had me a little concerned. But only a little.
K spared a glance at my crotch. “You don’t fit, you say?”
“Nope.” I really didn’t. I don’t know if it was the thinking about Alice, or just the sight of K, or the fact that I hadn’t been laid in a while--but I can’t deny that I was getting aroused by all this. It couldn’t have been the clothes themselves. That would be weird. Even though they felt strangely titillating as they stretched taut across my groin.
But my disguise wasn’t likely to work with sex inches of cock bursting out the leg hole. “You, ah, think you can help me with this?” I said, and flashed her a winning smile.
“And what do you expect me to do about it?” K stepped into the room and sauntered closer, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t suddenly seem like she was coming on to me. Easy to assume, really, considering I was standing all but naked in some unknown apartment, with a woody standing out at a sharp angle against my body, fiercely escaping the sheer panties I’d pulled on. “I see your surname is well deserved, Miss Long.”
K was now standing right up against me. She was taller than me, especially in her heels. Not that I found that intimidating. More like erotic. This close, a faintly musky scent surrounded her. Who would’ve thought she wore perfume, even if it was a bit mannish? Her breasts rubbed up against my chest, the fabric of her jacket rough against my sensitive, still-glowing skin. She brought her mouth near my ear. Her hair tickled my neck.
“Mmm, this is an unusual problem for a girl, do you not think, Cindy?” she murmured, and her breath was hot on my ear. I nearly jumped when I felt her hand, slightly cold, gently wrap around my shaft. “We can not have this, now can we?”
“I--heh, yeah. . . .”
“Is this turning you on, David?” Her grip tightened around my cock. Her breasts rubbed up against my chest again. What a thing to ask. Was this turning me on? Hell, yeah!
“Does it excite you to wear these clothes?”
What? Fuck no. But then she stepped back and for a moment I thought I saw a glimpse of both disgust and hatred flash across her eyes; and then she gave my cock a quick, hard smack on the tip.
“Ow!” I howled in pain and stumbled back. “Jesus Christ, K, what was that for?”
“What did you think I would do, Miss Long? Give you a hand job? Get down on my knees and suck you off?”
I sucked in some deep breaths, clutching the wall for support. “I was just fuckin’ about!”
“Your dubious charms, Miss Long, are best saved for a more appropriate time.” She reached over to a nightstand by the bed and grabbed a box of tissues. She tossed it over to me, where it bounced off my head before landing at my feet. “Tend to your own needs, Miss Long. In the bathroom, if you don’t mind,” she said as she walked away. “When you are finished please continue dressing.”
I picked up the tissues. Fucking dyke bitch. “You’re not making this any easier for me, you know that?” I yelled after her. You’d think she could take a joke. I didn’t really expect to her to, you know, relieve my pressure. But man, it would’ve been awesome if she had.
She turned about at the door. She let her jacket slip open and undid the top button of her blouse and, slowly sliding her hands along her sides, gave a little wiggle as she leaned forward and flashed me her most generous cleavage. She had awesome tits, from what I could see above the floral lacing of her bra. Then she slowly straightened, turned sharply on her heel, and sashayed out of the room, that tight ass wiggling beneath her skirt with each exaggerated, toe-to-toe step. “I hope that helps you finish, Cindy,” she said over her shoulder.
God, I wasn’t sure if I hated or loved that woman. What a bitch, and I mean that in a good way. Five minutes later I stepped out of the bathroom, drying my hands and still flushed with the pleasure, ready to tackle the task at hand.
The sight of the clothes on the bed brought me back to earth, like a punch to the gut. It really did feel like a hit to the stomach. It was the feeling of doing something wrong. You know, like when you’ve borrowed your parents’ car without permission and you’ve smacked it up and know you’re in big trouble? Kinda like that. I was just wishing I’d had another stiff drink when I saw that K had left one for me by the bed. What a woman. I pounded it back. I was already starting to feel a bit buzzed. Never a good idea to drink on an empty stomach.
I slipped the panties back on. They fit fine this time, once I tucked my cock back. Tight and a bit uncomfortable, riding a tad higher between my ass cheeks than I’d like, but nothing too bad. The pantyhose were another matter. I’d seen enough girls slip them on in the morning around my place, but these seemed really wispy and easy to tear. I rolled them up into a donut and pointed my toes and pulled the stocking up my first leg about halfway, and then did the same with the second foot, and finally stood, found my balance, and pulled the whole thing up over the panties.
Know what? My legs looked damn fine in those pantyhose. Denuded and encased in that sheer, inky fabric, the sharper definition lines of my legs were smoothed and softened and somehow made to look slimmer. The panties beneath made a darker ‘V’ against which my compressed cock made an unbecoming mound. My legs felt warmer than expected. The embroidered control top came up to just beneath my bellybutton and was tight across my buttocks, caressing and shaping. The silkiness as I slid the nylons up my legs had been unnerving; now, passing my hand along those sleek lines I felt a tremor through my stomach. The sensation was just so . . . feminine. I’d stroked many a woman’s thigh beneath her skirt, and I loved the feeling of my palm against her nylon-clad ass. Now it was my ass in nylon, looking way too good for my comfort and smooth beneath my touch.
That’s when K stepped into the room. To her credit, she didn’t laugh though a hint of a smile danced at the corner of her mouth. “How are we doing, Miss Long?”
“I feel like a damn fool, K.”
“You look fine,” she said. She unravelled another silky, black thing in her hand as she approached. “You will need this as well, I am afraid.”
“Great,” I answered. “What the hell is it?”
“A waist cincher.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Sadly, K wasn’t much of a kidder. “What is the first part of a woman that you notice, Mr. Sanders?” she asked, as she had me raise my arms above my head and wrapped the damned thing around me. At least she was calling me by my male name.
“What? I don’t know. Her tits?” I was going to say ‘her eyes’ because, truth be told, it’s a woman’s eyes that do it more for me than anything. I’ve even fucked more than a few fatties, just because they had the most gorgeous, sexy eyes. But wearing panties and nylons, with a waist cincher being wrapped around me, I felt like I had to say something, you know, macho.
She had the damned thing around me. She zipped it up the front and then went behind and I felt her begin to tug on the laces. With each one I felt the thing tighten its grip. “A woman’s shape defines her gender, at least from a distance,” K said. “Even in unisex clothing, or with short hair, or without makeup, or any of the other superficial trappings of femininity, a woman’s hips and waist trigger recognition.” She gave a sharp tug, forcing my breath out.
“Watch it, dammit!”
“Keep those arms up,” K commanded, her voice sharp. I grudgingly kept them above my head as she continued her torture. “You lack curves, Cindy,” she continued. “We can put you in a dress and make you wear a wig and slather on the makeup, but unless you have the shape of a woman, even an unskilled observer will sense there is something wrong.” The waist cincher’s grip continued to tighten, vice-like. “There are a thousand other things that can give you away, of course, but this one is easily enough remedied.”
K stepped away. I lowered my arms and took a hesitant breath. The waist cincher followed the lines of my body like a second skin, starting at my hips and ending at my ribcage. It was black, like everything else K seemed to be picking out, with crimson lines where the fabric drew in. It wasn’t quite as bad as I expected, to be honest. I wasn’t going to pass out like some damsel out of Gone with the Wind. My internal organs didn’t feel like they were being crushed. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel like I could draw in a big breath. I wasn’t about to go ten rounds wearing this thing.
“How do you feel?” K asked, her voice conspicuously lacking in concern.
“Just fucking great,” I answered. I made a sweeping gesture that took in my lower half. “I feel like a goddamn faggot, K.”
She made a small clucking sound of disapproval. “Really, Ms. Long, must you swear so much?”
“I’ll swear as much as I fucking well please!”
She gave me a firm look. “I am afraid, Cindy, that you really will have to watch your tongue. There are numerous linguistic differences in male and female speech patterns in the English language.”
I couldn’t believe this woman. “So, what, you expect me to speak like some friggin’ chick, too?”
“Cindy,” she said. “You are a ‘friggin’ chick,’ so to speak. Please try to remember that. Now wait here for a moment. We still have a lot to do.”
She left me standing there mouth agape. I wish she’d left me there with another Scotch. I wish she’d left me with the heat on, because I felt goose-bumps rising across my arms and chest. I missed my hair. This was all a bit much and had me feeling deeply unsettled. How long did she expect me to wear these damned clothes anyway? I wasn’t going to be this ‘Cindy’ chick for long. No fucking way. No damn way. No friggin’ way. There. That’s as good as K was going to get from me.
When she returned a few minutes later she was carrying a box in her hand. “Sit down on the bed, please,” she asked, as she pulled a small table across the room and set the box down.
“What’s in there?” I asked, making myself comfortable.
“This is your--,” she started, glancing back, and then stopped. “Cindy, really, some modesty please.”
“What now?”
“It is unseemly for a girl to sit with her legs like that.”
I was sitting with my legs spread, of course. My balls were already feeling cramped, squeezed in by the panties and hose. The-waist cincher was keeping me in this unnaturally straight-backed posture. Worse, all this nonsense was getting to me again--I was starting to fly at half-mast, and the growing bulge between my thighs was making this all a bit uncomfortable.
“Fuck this!” I exclaimed, jumping to my feet. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I felt ready to rip this goddamn clothing off and storm out the room. I’d take my chances on my own instead of suffering through more of this nonsense.
“Mr. Sanders, sit down!” K commanded.
I’d never heard her shout before. Steel underscored her voice. She stood with arms on hips and glaring at me with that flinty-grey stare, looking more like an outraged school principal than a secret agent. I don’t like being ordered about, but the authority she exuded held me back from just walking off.
“K, this is ridiculous!” I insisted. “It’s only a temporary disguise, right? I mean, what the hell, are you gonna stop me on every single damn thing I do that isn’t all girly and shit?”
“Yes, Mr. Sanders, I am going to correct you on every little action that is not all ‘girly and shit’. This is your cover identity. Even if it is only a temporary disguise, I expect you to be the best ‘Cindy’ that you can be for the duration of your time as her. I expect you to sit with your legs crossed at the knee. I expect you to wear the very same clothes that Cindy Long, 20 year old female, would wear. I expect you to do all this, Cindy, because I promised that I would make every effort to keep you alive, and I will be damned if your bullshit macho squeamishness is going to get you killed.”
I hadn’t heard her swear before. “You even expect me to speak like a girl?”
“Yes, Miss Long, I expect you to speak in a way appropriate for a woman your age.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” I said, slowly sitting down. “I’ve known lots of girls who weren’t exactly sweet-talkers, you know?” And I didn’t just mean in bed. I’d met some amazing girls over the years. Some of them kicked my ass. Like Sakura. God, I was glad she couldn’t see me in this getup. “They’d put a sailor to shame.”
“But you aren’t a real girl,” K insisted, as if I needed a reminder. “Everything about you is masculine, Mr. Sanders. Very much so. Your mannerisms, your shape, the way you speak, the way you walk, how you approach people and the way you confront a problem. Each and every one of these things can give away your real identity. All it would take is one wrong action, one word that shouts out “I am David Sanders” at the wrong time, and all our efforts will have been wasted. This is not the time to indulge in PC behaviour. Cindy is going to be, I am afraid, through necessity, a bit of a girly-girl.”
The thing is, I already knew all this. I’d done stuff . . . similar to this before, though not as ridiculously out-there as trying to pass myself as a chick. But I wasn’t feeling all that cooperative. I hated sitting there in these fucking clothes–especially in front of this sexy woman, for some reason. She left me feeling extremely self-conscious, something I wasn’t used to.
On top of that, the thought of what I’d have to do and the way I’d have to act while pretending to be this ‘Cindy’ bitch made me sick to my stomach. Combined with the fucking pain in my chest from the bruising and the throb in my side and the headache and everything else--yeah, I was feeling a bit grumpy. But I felt a little bad for taking it out on K.
“Yeah, well, don’t expect me to say ‘aw, poo!’ or nothin’”
Her features softened in a small smile. “No, Cindy, I do not expect you to ever say ‘aw, poo.’ Now, are we ready to continue?”
I gave a grudging nod.
K pulled out a measuring tape and took my size around my chest, right where the waist cincher ended. She nodded with approval, as if she’d already correctly guessed my size. She went to her box and pulled out a couple of bottles and a pair of gloves. “The next part is going to feel a bit strange,” she said, pulling on her gloves. She gave me a slight shove. “Please lie back.”
Hell, normally this would be the start of a good night--some sexy chick pushing me back onto the bed before straddling me. And K did straddle me. Of course, I was wearing women’s underthings, which kinda spoilt the mood for me. And instead of rubbing her ass into my crotch, she used a cotton cloth to start wiping down my chest.
“It’s just alcohol,” she said. “You did a good job in the shower but we have to make sure that you are properly clean.” She did a very thorough job. I was starting to get excited again.
She slowly unscrewed a nondescript white jar bereft of any labelling. When she carefully put the lid aside a strong, pungent smell filled the room. I couldn’t quite place it--something acrid that left an unpleasant chemical taste in the back of my throat. She used a small plastic spatula to lift out a dollop of amber goo from the jar.
“This may sting a little,” she said, and began to smear it across my pecs. At first I wondered what she meant. It was bracingly cold--which did a little to dispel my erection, steadily growing and struggling against its silky confines--but otherwise felt fine. Then it began to tingle. And then--holy motherfuck!--it started to burn, and burn, and burn, God, as if someone was pressing a branding iron into my chest. “Do not move!” K ordered, as she saw my eyes widen in shock. “And most importantly, do not touch your chest!”
“Christ!” I exclaimed through gritted teeth. “What the hell is this stuff?”
“Appropriately enough, a product of your former employers,” she said, working quickly. “An organic bonding agent. Very cutting-edge, very expensive.”
“It . . . hurts!”
“Yes, one of the reasons it will not be approved by the FDA. I suspect the bruising is making the pain worse. Now lie still. The agent needs a few minutes to settle properly.” And with that she lifted herself off of me and stepped out of sight. I couldn’t hear her, either: this shit hurt so much all I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears. That nice drunk feeling from those two Scotches was totally gone, I’m telling you.
A few minutes, she said? Felt a hell of a lot longer. And I’m good at dealing with pain. I lay there on the bed, my toes curling with the pain in their silky sheath, fists gripping tight knots into the bedsheets as I fought back the urge to jump off the bed and rush into the shower and wash this crap off of me. I kept waiting for the pain to ease. Slowly, after what felt like a short eternity, it actually did. That’s when K sat back down on me.
She had two large grey objects, each more than a handful for her. I had to blink the tears out of my eyes. They were breasts. They were grey and dead-looking things, but breasts nonetheless.
“What the--”
“These are your new breasts,” K said.
I guess I’d been expecting something like this. I mean, she seemed set on doing a damn fine job of making a convincing girl out of me. Very professional and thorough, Agent K is. So maybe I shouldn’t have been expecting a pair of rolled-up socks. That’s what a friend of mine used when he dressed up as a cheerleader back at one of the high schools I’d been to. He’d been 6’3 and over two hundred pounds. He made a crap cheerleader. Somehow, I suspected I was going to prove far more convincing than he had.
“They look . . . big.”
Surprisingly, she blushed, and this time it seemed very real and natural. “I . . . my apologies, David. They are. D-cups, I’m afraid.”
A lot of guys I know, they like big tits. Like I said, I like big eyes. Weird, I know, but I’ll always take beautiful eyes over perky tits any day. Don’t get me wrong! I appreciate a fine pair of knockers, too. But they’ve always been a secondary thing for me, coming in after legs and ass. Of course I like a girl to actually have some--none of this mosquito-bite bullshit--but I don’t like ‘em too large, either, bobbling all over the place like fucking udders. Unless they’re fake or young, they’re going to be droopy once you set ‘em free from confinement and that ain’t so sexy to me. A nice firm, perky pair, fun to play with, that’s what I like.
“They’re a bit large, I’ll admit,” K rushed to continue. “Though considering your frame, they should be just about perfect.” As she spoke she brought those grey lumps down to my chest. I had a quick glimpse of them. From the back they were flat and tear-shaped, and covered in a multitude of fine, straight-standing bristles. “It was all I could get my hands on.”
“Yeah, I noticed you had your hands on them.” I was trying for wry, hard to manage with the pain and the apprehension. Surprisingly, she blushed even further.
“I have to keep them in place,” she insisted, “so they bond properly.” I couldn’t quite see what she was doing. The burning in my chest was quickly fading away, leaving a strange numbness across the area. I couldn’t even feel her moving those things around or pressing them down. “The position has to be just right.”
I waggled my eyebrows at her and smiled. “From here, your position looks just about perfect.”
“Please, Mr. Sanders. This is embarrassing enough as it is.”
I wasn’t sure why this was any more embarrassing than any of the other weird shit we’d done today, but it was nice to finally see a human reaction out of her. “Well, how long is this going to take?”
“A few more minutes,” she said. “Until the breastforms fully attach themselves to your chest.”
“Hey, waitasec! All this bonding agent shit and all--these things are gonna come off, right?”
It was her turn to smile. “You sound worried, Miss Long.”
“Fuck off with this ‘Miss Long’ crap! They come off or what?”
“Yes, Cindy, they do. I have a counter-agent that will break down the chemical bonding and release the breastforms. The reverse process if far less painful as well, so no need to worry. Even without the counter-agent the bonding will eventually deteriorate on its own.”
“Well . . . good.”
“And that should just about do it,” she said, and clambered off of me. “Please stand up, Cindy, and let’s see how they settled.”
Feeling was slowly seeping back into my chest, and it felt . . . weird. Really fucking weird. When I sat up I felt this disconcerting weight on my chest that moved with every motion I made. The weight pulled me forward. But what really blew my mind was when I reached up and actually touched my new breasts. I could feel the fucking things! And I don’t mean their shape, either, or their presence in my hand. I could feel my own fingertip brush against the fake skin.
“K, what the fuck?”
“Cindy, language, please.” She took my hand and pulled me to my feet. I was so out of it I just let her lead me away from the bed. “You’re a very lucky girl, you know. These are very cutting edge. Another fine, unreleased product from your former employers. I’m told they’re grown as opposed to made. The bonding agents acts as a medium through which artificial nerve connections are made and sensations passed. If I touch you here,” and as she spoke she gently drew her fingertip across the underside of my breast, sending an uncomfortable shiver down my spine, “you feel it the same as if I had touched your real chest. And the artificial skin is even reactive--look, you can see goosebumps rising.”
This was too much. I felt off-balance. I had mother-fucking tits now, real goddamn breasts! I felt like I needed to sit down. But K wasn’t done with me. She lightly flicked my right nipple.
“Dammit, K, cut that out!” It didn’t hurt; it didn’t particularly feel of anything, to be honest. But I could feel it. I didn’t like the way she was playing with my new chest. Fuck, I didn’t like having a new chest.
“You can see the nipple reacting as well, as the breast finishes bonding.” And damn if she wasn’t right, as under a few more light touches my new nipple began to stand out in a way my real ones never had. Did I say weird? Now it was getting all surreal. I could feel my nipples poking out like that, getting hard--I’d never felt anything like it! The whole experience was leaving me feeling a bit disconnected, you know? The damn things were still grey, though, which looked very weird against my tanned and bruised skin.
“Yeah, well, if you’re done playing with my tits, K, I’ll ask you to keep your hands to yourself.” I pulled away and crossed my arms over my chest. Fuck, it felt weird doing that. They way they moved and flattened beneath my arms, it felt totally real.
“The colour will adapt itself over the next few hours. The seam between the breastform and your natural flesh will also gradually fade over the next twenty-four hours. Before long, they’ll be nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.”
Great. K had me do a few arm stretches to verify how my new breasts moved. When I raised my hands over my head they flattened against my pectorals--or rather, they flattened as much as these massive things could. When I twisted they swung to the side before jiggling back. Most disconcerting of all, when I bent forward I felt them hang down and sway heavily with every move. It’s something I love, that moment when a chick crawls up the bed towards me with her tits hanging down and swaying with each sensuous move of her ass. Now I was that fucking chick, and I was starting to feel nearly feverish.
K tossing me a bra, after all that, seemed anti-climatic. I’d watched enough girls put them on to figure out how to do it myself with only a little fumbling. She certainly didn’t offer to help. It was yet another black, semi-opaque number. 38-D, the tag said. Fucking wonderful. It shoved up my tits on display more than I would’ve liked, though, and only just covered my new, dark areola, and did nothing to keep those fucking nipples from peaking through, insistent little bastards. All of a sudden, I had cleavage. If I’d known that ratting on Jeremy fucking Steele was going to end with me sporting cleavage, I don’t think I would’ve bothered. Fucking asshole. This was his fault. Jail was too good for the bastard.
At least the damned bra relieved some of the weight. I’d only had these things for about ten minutes and they were already starting to feel heavy. All she could get her hands on, my ass. I was starting to think that K was enjoying this far too much.
The next item she passed me took me by surprise. “Jeans?”
“You sound surprised, Cindy.”
I shrugged. The motion left me perturbed, as I could feel my new breasts jiggle with the gesture. Fucking things. I briefly wondered if I’d ever get used to their presence, before realizing that I didn’t ever want to get used to having breasts--I didn’t plan on keeping these puppies for that long. “Yeah, I guess I am. I expected you to stick me in some kind of miniskirt or something.”
“Would you prefer a miniskirt, Cindy?”
“Hell, no!” I exclaimed, grabbing the jeans from her. Soon after I realized she wasn’t letting me off that easy, though. They were jeans, sure, a very dark denim blue, but definitely a pair of girl’s jeans. “K, there’s no friggin’ way these things are gonna fit!”
“They will fit just fine,” she said, again holding back a slight smile. “They may just be a little tighter than you are used to.”
No shit. It took me about a thousand hours to get into those damn things. I finally had to stretch out on the bed with my legs up in the air, hauling with all my might and wiggling and tugging (which, with those damn melons on my chest, was mightily distracting) to pull the goddamn things over my ass and newfound curves. If I hadn’t been squeezed and softened and smoothed out beforehand there’s no way I would’ve gotten them on. When I finally got the button fly done up I was exhausted. I had to admit though, craning my neck to look back at my rear, you’d be hard pressed to mistake me for a guy in these things. The jeans were like a corset for my ass. And damn, I had a fine ass. And there was certainly no sign of a bulge in my crotch now. Frankly, I was a little worried all this was doing my guys some serious damage.
The jeans were skin-tight with a very cute, very girly flowery design along one of the legs that would’ve made me puke, if I wasn’t so damned compressed by all these clothes. That’s when I noticed that the damn jeans were a couple inches too long. I tried pulling them up a bit more, but they would’ve reached my armpits and split my groin in two.
“Dammit K,” I said, once she returned to the room. “I killed myself getting into these, and I’ll be tripping over myself with every step!” If I could even walk, that was, which I was seriously beginning to doubt.
“Not at all,” K said. “They are just perfect to wear with these.” She held up a pair of shoes. Dainty and with heels; and black, of course.
“K? I’m really beginning to hate you,” I said.
Some guys I know, especially a couple of pricks at work, they’re short like I am and they’ve got this real problem with their girl wearing heels. Only thing worse than those idiots, are the fucking bitches who can’t deal with being taller than their man. Me, I couldn’t give a shit. Sometimes it’s nice to have some petite little cutie cradled in my arm, but I’m not about to complain if I’m eye-level with some Amazon’s tits, am I? It’s not height that makes me manly. It’s me that makes me manly. I’m pretty damn secure with myself, and I’ve got little respect indeed for fuckwits who can’t deal with shit like that--or worse yet, don’t even know they’re as insecure as a six-year old who’s just wet themselves on the playground. Me, I’ve never given two shits if a girl wants to wear heels. Damn, but heels are damn sexy, if you ask me, especially when she keeps them on in bed.
Still, watching some silly cute things trotting about in these ridiculous stilettos, barely able to cross the street, it’s hard not to laugh sometimes. Well, I wasn’t laughing now, as K kneeled down and slid the first shoe onto my foot. It fit, too, but then again I’ve always had small feet for a guy. It was just another drop in the torrent of weird sensations bombarding me, as I tentatively put my foot down and felt it settle in an arched position. It wasn’t some stupidly tall kind of shoe, probably only about two inches of heel or so, but hell, it was more than enough for me and athough the heel wasn’t a proper spike it still felt pretty fucking slim to me. My toes peeked out the end and there was a thin strap across the ankle.
“How the hell do you expect me to walk in this getup, K?” I asked
“At first, carefully. You will have a chance to practice your walking before we leave the apartment.”
She handed me a top, which I thankfully pulled on. Somehow, going topless just wasn’t as much fun when I had these tits thrust up in my face. Not that they disappeared once I got that sweater pulled on. The damn thing was soft peach in colour and a lot softer and fluffier than anything I was used to. Snugger and longer in the arms as well and somehow my hands seemed elegant, poking out the sleeve. Worse of all was the ridiculous v-neck that left my cleavage proudly exposed. What the hell’s the point of putting on clothes if all your good are still hanging out?
K reached behind me to attach a necklace with a little pink-tinted clear bauble that settled comfortably between my boobs. When she reached around my neck our tits rubbed together--and yeah, that was another weird feeling to add to the list, but truth be told, by this time I was so fucking out of it that I wasn’t exactly resisting anything she did anymore. I’m telling you, it was all just a bit too much. I didn’t even twitch when she clipped on some dangly earrings, saying something about how “a girl my age should really have had both her ears pierced years ago.” She slipped a couple of jangling bracelets on my left wrist, before stepping back to examine her creation.
“Needs a belt,” she stated, and a moment later I sported this low-riding wide leather belt with a massive ring buckle, hanging off my narrowed waist.
I levelled a dull stare at her. “We fucking--sorry, we damn well done yet?”
K gave a small smile. “Almost,” she said. “Wig, and makeup.”
She left the room to gather the last of her instruments of torture, giving me a moment with myself. When I looked down I felt the earrings tickle my cheek. When I reached up to touch them the shit on my arm chimed. I squirmed at the edge of the bed and I felt slippery inside my jeans and the panties rode up my ass and my heel wobbled beneath me. That massive crevice leading into my shirt tingled with new goosebumps. Slender straps ran over my shoulders. I couldn’t breathe properly. How could this possibly be my best chance of survival? How the hell could I fight in this fucking setup? Or even run? I trusted K and all but . . . this was crazy, insane!
“Are you okay?” K asked, stepping back into the room. Bless her, she was carrying another drink.
I offered a wan smile. “Let’s just get this over with.”
She pulled a chair over and sat across from me and gave me a look that was genuinely sympathetic. “You are not enjoying this, are you?” She handed me my third scotch.
“What was your first clue?” I pounded the drink back and grimaced as it went down. This one was nice and strong. It helped, though only a little.
“Mr. Sanders, if it helps, just try to think of this as getting ready for a Halloween party. Or maybe for a part in some play.”
“K, if you fuck up your lines on stage, nobody shoots you.” I sighed, though not too deeply thanks to the damned waist-cincher. “Listen, I know why we’re doing this but I damn well don’t like it. It feels . . . wrong.” I mulled my thoughts over and barely noticed as she took my hand. The pungent scent of nail polish assaulted the senses but I steadfastly ignored the sight of my nails being painted, one by one.
It felt wrong. The need for it felt wrong. I felt this very, very strongly, despite K’s reassurances, despite the fact that I trusted her. I was taught, long ago, to pay special attention to anything that created such a strong, visceral reaction. Hate, love, loathing, disgust, obsessions--these were emotions to be tempered but never ignored. I didn’t want to think about it, but I had to ask myself: why did I hate this so fucking much?
Strong reaction like that, it’s usually because something important to you is being challenged. I figured out who I was at a very young age. I had to. As I learned more about the world and life in general I just sort of integrated the new stuff into myself, hung the new ideas off of the core self I’d already fashioned, and I stayed me deep down inside. That’s how I was taught. Know thyself. Important lesson and the hardest thing in the fucking world to pull off. But once you know who you are--there’s so much you can do. Hesitation, doubt, all that bullshit fades away; other peoples’ scorn, jealousy, insults are easily ignored. Instant actions become more than just instinct but rather an expression of who you are, done in that place that exists free of uncertainty.
So this painful, gut feeling I was having? There had to be more to it than just bullshit machismo. Fuck, a guy who’s really secure in who he is shouldn’t be bothered at all by this kind of shit. This I believe. I really do. I mean, yeah, I don’t go in for all this girly crap and it’s nothing I’ve wanted to do before, but if it keeps me alive then… yeah, wearing a skirt (or very tight jeans) doesn’t make me any less a man. As long as I believe it, that’s what matters. So something else was going on here. I just couldn’t figure out what. I was too drunk, maybe. My head still felt a bit hazy.
“You seem quiet, Cindy. Is everything okay?” K was finishing off my nails. They weren’t dry yet but were already disconcertingly shiny. It was a clear varnish that gave my nails a glimmering sheen that rippled with faint pink hues in the light.
“Yeah, sure,” I grunted. I didn’t really want to bother K with nonsense thoughts. Instead, I just said the first angry thought that jumped to mind. “Christ, K, how the hell am I going to defend myself, wearing this shit? I’m not sure I can walk in these fu--these damn shoes, let alone do anything else.”
K started doing the makeup thing. I honestly have no idea what she was doing, but she attacked my cheeks and eyes and lips with this and that thing as she talked, occasionally pausing to curtly order me to ‘look that way’ or ‘blink’ or ‘purse your lips.’ She continued explaining as she worked. “Cindy, the whole idea is for you not to have to fight. Do you know how to fight?”
I gave a calculated shrug. I tried to be careful not to disrupt what she was doing. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Could you defeat a professionally trained assassin?”
Another non-committal shrug. “You’ve got the file on me, what do you think?”
“I believe that there is little use in bringing a sword to a gunfight, Cindy,” K answered, as she rubbed some powder across my eyelids. “Mr. Steele’s men have guns, and they know how to use them, and they can shoot from very far away. The best fighter in the world stands little chance against that.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I grudgingly admitted.
“Not that you need to worry about that, Cindy. A girl like you isn’t a fighter. You do not know how to fight because you do not have to. Standing in a crowd, why would anyone want to hurt you, cute and demure as you are?”
Cute. Demure. Girly-girl. I wish I’d had a better look at that folder on Cindy and seen what kind of a girl she was before I’d agreed to become her. I was starting to get worried. I mean, I was really starting to get worried. Even if only for a short time, a few days or a week, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stand being some mincing sissy bitch. Exactly what kind of girl was K trying to turn me into, anyway?
“K, listen, I’ve got to know . . . ow!” I was going to challenge her on her plans for Cindy, but then she started to rip hairs out of my eyebrow and I had to bite down to keep myself from telling her exactly where she could jab those fucking tweezers of hers. Oh, I had a couple of choice locations in mind. When she was done that, she used this wand-type thing to smear this gooey, sweet-tasting shit across my lips and I kind of gave up on talking for a bit. I swear, my whole face felt weird, all gunked up and heavy with makeup. “We are almost done,” she said, and after a few final touch-ups across my face, she had a go at my hair, slicking it down before pulling out a wig.
Cindy was a blonde, of course. Why wasn’t I surprised? “Try to keep any hair from touching your lips,” K suggested, as she brought the whole thing down on my head. Suddenly, I had long flowing locks the colour of sunflowers, and bangs, and hair tickling the nape of my neck, and as that damned woman made her final adjustments I suddenly felt this incredible urge to burst into tears. I didn’t, of course--like I said, I’m no pansy and I haven’t cried in years. I’ll shed tears over a good friend but I’d be fucked if I’ll waste tears on something stupid like this. Hell, I don’t even know why I wanted to cry all of a sudden like that. I just did. The moment passed and I was okay.
Finally, the whole damn ordeal was over and K was helping me to my wobbly feet. She led me across the room over to a full-length mirror set in the corner. Thank fuck she was there to lean on and it was just a few steps away. It didn’t help that I was starting to feel more than just a little drunk. I didn’t want to see myself. I really didn’t. Especially clutching on to K’s arm like that. She was dressed a hell of a lot manlier than I was, and I felt like some silly drunk chick in wobbly heels reliant on her boyfriend to get anywhere. Fuck me, but that was not the kind of chick Cindy was going to be, not if I had any say in the matter.
And then, the moment of truth. K set me in front of that mirror and stepped away, and I had my first good look at Cindy Long.
Cindy, I had to grudgingly admit, was cute, in a blonde-coed sort of way. Truth be told, I felt almost a little disappointed at my first glimpse of Cindy. After all that fucking work and prep and struggling and emotional upheaval, I was expecting something pretty damn amazing. Cindy’s body was pretty hot, I’ll give her that. Her legs were long and coltish, in those low-riding skin-tight jeans with just a glimpse of high heels peeping out from beneath. Jeans like that begged for a glimpse of trimmed midriff but Cindy was feeling a bit shy; her sweater hung past her waist, cinched in by a wide open pleated belt.
Thing is, she was kind of chunky, especially across the shoulders. But with a rack like that, who’d be checking out shoulders? Her breasts stood out firm and round beneath her fuzzy peach sweater and a little crystal bauble glinted and irresistibly drew your attention to that proud cleavage.
What I liked about Cindy, though--what took my breath away, to be honest--what scared me about this girl, were her eyes. She had the most beautiful emerald eyes, somehow wider, the colour more vivid, than I’d ever seen them, and those flecks of grey in contrast made the green all the more vibrant. There was hesitancy in those eyes, a trembling anxiousness--a vulnerability I’d never seen in my eyes before, because I damn well knew that this trim, young girl was somehow me. I reached up with one shaky hand to brush a few stray hairs back behind my ear; bangles clinked and slid down my forearm and my eyes were drawn by those glimmering silvery strips suspended from my ears and I quickly pulled back from such a feminine gesture.
Sure, the illusion fell apart if you looked too closely or knew what to check for. Cindy’s jaw was just a little too strong for a girl, the nose a bit odd, those hands too big, and something that suspiciously resembled an Adam’s apple bobbed into sight when she nervously gulped. There was definitely something mannish about her. But from afar, maybe even from up close, you wouldn’t glance twice--or maybe you would, to check out that tight ass, or that amazing rack. Or those eyes, those fucking enigmatic eyes.
“What the hell,” I said, barely audible. My eyes danced back and forth across my reflection, uncertain where to settled but always drawn back to themselves, to those green depths. “Who the hell am I?” I whispered.
Standing a few feet behind me and to the side, I heard K answer. “You are Cindy Long.”
“Yes, but. . . ,” I swallowed before continuing, “Who . . . who is she, K?”
“Cindy,” Agent K declared, “is everything that David Sanders is not. Cindy is unsure of herself where David is cocky. She is humble when he is arrogant and modest in the face of his pride. David is very strong but Cindy, she is far weaker.” K walked up behind me and rested one hand on my shoulder. She gently smoothed the sweep of my blonde hair back across my neck. “David has always prided himself in his independence,” she all but whispered in my ear. “But Cindy is very dependant on the help and opinions of others. She is coy where David is brash and timid where he is bold and demure where he is daring.” K’s eyes caught my reflected gaze and bore into me. “David was antagonistic and abrasive and selfish.” Her breath was hot on my neck and ear. “But you, you are gracious and gentle and caring.”
“I . . . .”
“This is you, Cindy.”
“I . . . I don’t know if I can . . . .”
“I will train you,” K said, lips curled in a smile that suddenly seemed cruel. Her hands rested on my shoulders as she stood behind and over me. Her eyes glittered like diamonds in the mirror, hard and cold.
To be continued...
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Chapter Three: Girls aren’t just born, David learns, they’re trained, especially in the witness relocation program. And eventually you have to put that training to use, because you can’t stay in the safe house forever.
Constant in All Other Things
Chapter Three
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent
-Much Ado About Nothing
Amanda Lang. God. What an amazing chick. Screw that; woman. Chicks are the silly little things you pick up down at the bar and bring back home and have a night’s fun with and forget about soon after. Amanda was more than that. A hell of a lot more. Sure, she was sexy and all, with the most stunning hazel eyes and this amazing inky mane reaching down to the small of her back, but there was more to her than tits and ass. Amanda was clever. She was smart. She could manipulate people--guys and girls--instinctively in a way that was breathtaking to behold. I’ve known plenty of people like that; dangerous people. And yeah, Amanda was dangerous.
You can bet your left nut that Tom and I had a thing for her. We’d already chased and fought over most of the other available tail in the office. Amanda existed on a whole other level. We were middle-management scum; she lived in the tallest corporate spires. About twelve floors up, actually. She was an executive secretary to the powers that be. It’s not like we wanted her to advance our career or anything. We were both doing fine on our own. But a girl like that, you’d do just about anything, short of backstabbing a friend, to score with.
It took months of working her over. Oh yeah, you could tell that she totally knew what we were doing, too, and she worked us over, and the whole thing was a hell of a lot of fun. You could tell she loved playing Tom and I against each other. God, she was a bitch--and I mean that in a good way.
It all came to a head that night, two months ago. After hours, top floor, and ready for the taking. Thing is, who was going to get there first? Tom or me? The little minx was testing us--who was willing to take the chance, who could figure out how to reach those forbidden executive Olympiad heights despite the after-hours security and risk to our jobs? Yeah, it was just a game, but we both knew the consequences could be pretty fucking serious. I never found out how Tom eventually made his way to that top floor.
Me? Yeah, well, I didn’t cheat per se, but you could say I had access to certain skills Tom didn’t. I got there first. Saw shit I shouldn’t have. Then Tom showed up and fucking Jeremiah Steel gunned down Georgio in a savage shower of blood and gore, and now here I was, flouncing back and forth across some shitty apartment, keenly aware of every little jiggle of these new tits, the sway of hair across the nape of my neck, the flash and tickle of those damned earrings against my cheeks . . . of the whole goddamn feminine package I found myself squeezed into. God, if Amanda could see me now she’s bust that slender gut of hers laughing.
“Keep your legs straight!” K commanded. “Legs together!” Another walk across the room, and she added, “No, no! Point your feet straight!”
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled. Did I say ‘only two inches or so’ before? Those few inches were throwing everything off and were a fucking nightmare to walk in. I knew how to walk, dammit, but these slim heels were wobbly and my ankles kept trying to twist out to compensate.
“And Cindy, relax,” K added. I swear, that bitch was enjoying this far too much. “You look ready to throw a punch.”
I was fucking ready to throw a punch. “Yeah, yeah,” I repeated, turned sharply, mindful of how the heel wavered beneath my foot, took an unsteady step forward and felt my ass wiggle as I walked across the room.
“Better, better,” K encouraged from the side. God, I must’ve look like such a fool, like some prancing nancy, but I couldn’t help but wiggle my ass and thrust my chest out, squeezed into these fucking clothes. This was the second hour of K’s ‘training’ in the art of being Cindy, and I was just about at my limit. My calves burned and my toes were cramped and the makeup still felt heavy and thick on my face and I felt light-headed from the compression around my waist. I was tired and aching and only slightly drunk and none of that was a good thing. Meanwhile, K sat comfortably in the sofa chair in the corner, one leg dangling over the other, cradling a glass of red wine in her hand.
The moment K felt I’d had enough of staring at Cindy in the mirror, she started the training. At first she just wanted me to look at myself, to turn to the side and check my posture. Between the waist-cincher and heels, and those giant weights hanging off my chest, yeah, my fucking posture was a bit different, you know? I wanted to overcompensate for the heels while those massive jugs, even in the bra, made me feel all top-heavy. Once she thought I’d built up a bit of confidence, she brought me out of the bedroom to the main room. More space to walk. Joy.
Back and forth, back and forth. “Heel first!”, “Shorten your stride!”, “Swing your arms for balance!” These were the commands K continued to repeat during that first half-hour of walking. And damn her if she wasn’t right--within half an hour, my walking improved and my confidence grew further. However as my confidence grew my mood darkened. I could just fucking picture myself, walking back and forth in that room: the short mincing stride, my arms swinging girlishly with each step, the sway of my ass, the jiggle of my cleavage--earrings, bangles, hair--fuck, everything pulling and squeezing and jangling with each step. How in chrissake did girls put up with the constant distraction? No way I’d ever get used to all this crap! And worst of all--my cramped ball and, despite the pain, my cock straining against its confines, strangely aroused by all this enforced femininity. After two hours, I felt ready to erupt in my panties. Fuck. Panties.
K didn’t exactly give me many breaks. Even when I was taking a breather, she kept feeding me girly info and vocabulary she said I had to memorize. When she handed me another drink--and the Scotch was gone, damn her black soul to hell!, replaced by glasses of sweet white wine--she made sure I held it correctly, drank from it primly, and taught me how to touch up my lipstick afterwards. I think that’ll always be a vivid image burned into my mind: the first time I pulled that glass away from my mouth and saw the frosty pink imprint of my lips on the rim.
And through it all those damn heels! “Practice makes perfect!” K insisted, so even if I wasn’t specifically practicing walking, I kept the fuckers on. I did everything in those damn shoes. Bitch would’ve locked them on to me if she could have, I’m sure. So when I grabbed a bite to eat--not that I could fit much in my stomach, even though I was starving, constricted as I was--it was in heels that I trotted about the kitchen, making a quick sandwich.
Amazing, how something as simple as making a sandwich becomes a whole new experience when you’re dressed like a chick. Even leaning down to butter my bread I had to keep dragging my eyes away from that massive crevice between my tits. The flash of colour at my fingertips with each motion of my hands--distracting. The tap-tap of that slender heel against the floor--very distracting.
Hell, even hitting the can became another exciting goddamn adventure in femininity. Freeing myself from the bondage that is ultra-tight jeans, pantyhose and panties took longer than expected--I almost pissed myself before I got my cock out. And wouldn’t you fucking know it, but K even checked in to make sure I was doing it like a chick--sitting down and all. I almost lost it then again; I told her to fuck off or I’d storm out of the apartment and take my chances with the hitmen. Sitting there on the crapper, panties and hose around my ankles, ankles twisting out at an awkward angle because of those heels, I couldn’t even see my cock and balls--those bloody tits got in the way. It wasn’t all bad, though. It gave me time to knock another one off, and damn if it wasn’t better than the last one! I don’t think I’d been this horny since I was a teen. Guess I had easy inspiration: I just had to look down. But I didn’t touch myself or anything, you know? Squeezing those tits or fiddling with those new nipples while jerking off . . . that would’ve been fucking weird.
And then, squeezed back into that girly getup, back to walking, back and forth across the room, only now K was quizzing me as I practiced my steps. “Bra!” she’d demand, and I was supposed to answer with my band size, cup size, type, material . . . all that shit. She was a harsh taskmistress, and an intense teacher.
“Top!”
“V-neck. Uh . . . .cashmere and silk,” I turned smoothly, sidestepped, and walked back.
“Stockings?”
Trick question. “I’m not wearing stockings. The pantyhose, though, yeah, they’re control top, uh, almost black, 20 denier.”
“Panties?”
And on she went. I was learning more than I ever wanted about women’s shit. I mean, yeah, you bring girls home and you learn a bit, and I’m a fairly observant guy sometimes, but it’s not like I ever paid attention much. Putting on the bra wasn’t a big deal because I’d taken enough of the fucking things off. But until today I didn’t know, for example, that:
“38D, balconet push-up,” was what I was wearing. I gave the damn things a little adjustment as I walked. Those straps across my shoulders, as slender as they were, were damn annoying.
So, yeah, I knew what lipstick was and all the basic crap, but K was giving me a crash course in feminine terminology as I strolled around the room. Finally it was time for another break, and K gestured for me to sit opposite her. Last time I got it wrong she made me walk for another fifteen minutes. This time, I eased myself gracefully into the chair and casually crossed my legs at the knees--despite the throbbing pain in my groin--and gave a contented sigh. Truth is, I wasn’t feeling very good. My head felt all hazy again.
“You are doing very well, Cindy.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. I sounded abrupt but her praise actually felt kind of nice. I was doing well, dammit. “Listen, K . . . I know why you’re putting me through all this and all, but I’m seriously doubting an assassin’s gonna come up and quiz me about what kind of panties I’m wearing, you know?”
K smiled. “Are you so sure?”
I gave her a disbelieving look. “Oh, c’mon!”
“And what if you were to step into a restroom, Cindy? You take care of business and step up to the mirror to check your makeup. The woman standing next to you, she asks you a question--maybe she asks to borrow some makeup, maybe she compliments you on your top and wants to know where you bought it.”
I hadn’t thought about ever using the chick’s bathroom. Let me tell you, I had pretty mixed feelings about that one. Any chance to see some sexy things in their natural state’s a good one--but what’s the point if your cock’s crammed away in a prison of lace and nylon?
“Yeah, so? It’s not like she’s gonna say ‘are those 20 denier’ and it’s a trick question because they’re really 15 and I say ‘yeah’ and she hauls out a gun and pops a cap in my ass!” Though I have to admit it also hadn’t occurred to me that Jeremiah fucking Steele could have some chick agents chasing after me as well. Hell, it’d just make sense, really--I’m sure the dude had a profile on me, and that profile must’ve highlighted hot babes as a weakness of mine.
K sighed. “Again, of course not. What I am saying is that any hesitancy, and confusion over matters that a girl your age would know instinctively--would have done time and time again every day over several years--will ring false. This is a very sensitive time, Cindy. Until we get you out of the city, anyone . . . anyone, could be an agent in the employ of Mr. Steele.”
I took another sip of wine. It was pretty foul shit, way too sweet for me, though I know chicks dig this kind of crap. “Yeah, but then why are you making Cindy--sorry, me--out to be such a girly-girl? I mean, with these tits and my waist all drawn in like this, you could throw sneakers and a jogging suit on me and I’d probably still pass for a goddamn chick.” Especially with the long hair, which I was continuously brushing away from my eyes and poking back behind me ear. And those fucking eyes. I don’t know what it was. But my eyes, something about them was just so damn feminine--and sexy.
“I mean, does she have to be all ‘icky poo!’ and feminine? Why couldn’t I be a kick-ass girl, you know, a real man-hater or something. Why all this limp-wristed shit?”
K took a moment to collect her thoughts. I looked her over and wondered why I couldn’t be dressed up like her, for fuck’s sake. K was a kick-ass woman, but there was no denying she was a woman, full stop. I didn’t want to be a girl, but if I had to then that’s the kind of woman I wanted to be.
“Mr Sanders,” she started, and as always it was a shock to hear her use my male name. “When you approached us about testifying against Mr. Steel, and asked for witness protection, what did you think it would entail?”
“Not this,” I said dryly, shoving those tits up.
She let my immodesty pass. “What, then?”
“I dunno. A new identity, a new job, and that you’d shuffle me out of town, somewhere far away from the bastard.”
“Yet you knew that nowhere is truly ‘far away’ from Mr Steele. He has corporate branches and subsidiary companies across the world.”
“But bury me in some small town somewhere, the odds of ever bumping into him are slim, yeah? He’s not exactly a local-pub kind of guy.”
“And his employees, Mr. Sanders?”
I shrugged. “Okay, sure, he’s probably got employees living just about everywhere, but it’s not like they’re all going to be keeping an eye out for me. There’s not going to be a corporate e-mail going around saying, ‘reward for David Sanders! Wanted dead or alive!’”
“David,” K said in a most serious tone, “that is precisely what I expect Mr Steele to do. Once his agents lose track of you--and I have every intention of assuring that they do, and that is why your Cindy disguise must be as perfect as possible for its duration--he will rely on the benefits of being one of the largest international employers in the world.
“Think of your own office. If a rumour spread that, should anyone have any leads on the whereabouts of a certain individual, a former employee perhaps, they would be amply rewarded . . . if actually turning him in could net a million dollar reward . . . would your former colleagues do so?”
Those fucking bastards. “In a New York minute.”
“But I am sure you knew all this already, Cindy,” K continued, and the thing is, the damn bitch was right. For all my grumbling and complaining, when I approached the feds--and yeah, it was me who found them after everything went wrong--I knew that witness protection, long shot that it would be, wouldn’t be an easy thing but probably my best shot. “So what were you expecting?”
“A disguise, I guess.”
“An altered image?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“And so are the people chasing after you, Cindy. They know that you will have changed your appearance. Perhaps not so drastically,” and here she smiled slightly, “but nevertheless, other than some basic parameters--height, weight--they are not looking for someone who resembles David Sanders.”
“Then what are they looking for?”
“They are looking for someone who acts like David Sanders,” K answered. “Someone loud and rude. Strong and confident. Someone very manly and capable. They are looking for someone who isn’t you, Cindy.”
I hated her for being right. I hated Cindy, too, at that moment. But it made a twisted kind of sense, I guess. Any kind of psychological profile these guys were carrying, there’d be nothing about me dressing up as a chick, especially one like Cindy. It’s just not the kind of thing I’d ever do. And if one of them did glance my way, even for just a second, and in that second I did something very, well, ‘David’ like . . . well, it’d all be over, wouldn’t it?
I sunk deep into the chair and threw one arm across my eyes. I felt sick to my stomach again. “K, be honest with me. Seriously. The truth. How long am I going to have to be Cindy? It’s not just going to be a day or two, is it?”
Her response was a long time coming. “David, in all honesty, I don’t know. If all goes well--and I pray it does--a week, maybe two. The clinic I will bring you to is very remote and in the countryside. It will give you a little time to rest and heal and, most importantly, disappear. In a few weeks when Mr Steele’s attention has been diverted by more important things--hopefully life-time imprisonment--we can recreate you in a male persona and transfer you somewhere else.”
I released a deep, defeatist sigh. A week, maybe two. Two weeks of this shit! Fuck, maybe even longer. Weeks of getting dressed up in these goddamn clothes. Of walking in heels and practicing how to . . . fuck, how to do everything, all over again, but in a Cindy kind of way.
“K,” I said, and I fought to keep down the despairing tremor creeping into my voice, “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“I have every confidence in your ability to pass yourself as a woman.”
I wasn’t too sure how to take that. “But--I mean, fuck, there’s just so much! Every morning, slipping on pantyhose and putting on makeup and prancing around in heels . . . shaving all over and . . . it’s too much!”
“It sounds like nothing more,” K said, and she smiled wryly, “than what most women go through every day.”
“But I’m not a woman, dammit!” I exclaimed. “And I don’t know how to do any of that shit. It’s not like I snuck into my mom’s room when I was eight and played with her makeup, K. There wasn’t a sister who decided to teach me how to dress sexy and pick up boys. I didn’t grow up with any of this crap. Girls just learn it as they grow up--I didn’t!”
“They learn it through practice, Cindy, just like everything else.” She shrugged, almost apologetically. “By the time the average girl has reached her mid-teens, she’s already spent hundred, if not thousands, of hours practicing in front of the mirror. She’s read magazines on how to do her hair and wear makeup, and looked up internet articles on how to choose the right dress for the prom, and watched TV and picked role-models whom she would most like to be like. And then she copies, and emulates . . . and practices. You have just had a late start.
“Speaking of which . . . .”
With only the slightest of whimpers, I clambered to my high-heeled feet and started to walk.
***
Like I said, the first time I met Tom was over at the local pub, The Snug, just down the road from the office. It was a pretty cool place, as far as these corporate hangouts go, with that real authentic pub feel--low ceilings and dim lighting and a dart board and all--which was impressive, since the place was apparently less than a year old. They had a fine range on tap and a few very expensive, very choice malts behind the bar.
Well, this one Thursday night, just a few weeks after I’d started working at NeoPharm, I went there after working late. I figured I’d grab a pint or four before heading home. Jimmy was working the bar; Jimmy was a right bastard but a hell of a talker. I’d just grabbed my brew and was scanning the busy crowd when I saw Tammy Able. Tammy Able and her long black hair. Good ol’ T&A--the jokes wrote themselves, the poor cow.
Like I said before, Tammy was this total slut working the secretarial pool. I’d already chatted her up a couple of times at work and she’d given me the wet-lip smile and lingering stares in response. Yeah, she walked by my office more often than she had to, wiggling her tight-skirted ass, and any time she brought me stuff she’d lean way over and give me a eyeful of her knockers. Fuck, she was a real looker.
(Only now I’ve got to grudgingly admit, her tits weren’t really anything on mine and damn if my ass wasn’t finer than hers. I’ve got some sympathy though: wearing those sexy fuck-me heels of hers everyday must’ve been murder.)
I kinda feel sad for her now, thinking about it. She never figured out that dressing like a wet dream and acting like a slut wasn’t going to get her anywhere in the company. It was just going to get her used, by pricks like me. And yeah, new to the city, new to this professional life, first couple of weeks at the job, still trying to adjust to being, well, normal--I wasn’t about to set her straight. Fuck, I was only twenty-two. Seems ages ago, now. In a way I guess it is.
She was sitting alone, looking bored and petulant, and she made eye contact with me as she slowly finished off a g-and-t. I mean, fuck, the way she had her lips wrapped around that straw, the way she pulled on it, it was practically an open invitation. I figured, what the fuck? and went and joined her.
“Jimmy? Another drink for the lady,” I said, and sauntered over to the table. “Mind if I sit?” I asked. I didn’t wait for an answer, of course. That’s the worst thing you can do to a chick--give them a chance to think. Doesn’t do ‘em any good. Place like this, girl like Tammy, you just tell them what’s going to happen. It’s what she wants, anyway.
Only problem, I found out a minute later when her date returned from the toilet, was that she wasn’t actually alone.
Normally that’d be an awkward situation, you know? Two guys, one girl, muscling in on a date, all that shit--but somehow it wasn’t. I could see straight away that the guy didn’t really care. Thing I couldn’t suss out straight away was whether it was pure confidence on his part, or dismissive arrogance, or he just really didn’t give a fuck.
“David Sanders,” I introduced myself.
“Thomas Smith,” he answered. We shook hands. He had a strong and challenging grip. You can tell a lot about a man from his handshake. Tom held it for a second longer than normal, and he met my eyes with a hard stare. His eyes were a startling blue, the kind that chicks really dig. He gave a tight smile. “Why don’t you join us?” The nerve of the shit, like I hadn’t already grabbed a seat. “You’re the new guy, right? Over in Davies’ division.”
Like he gave a shit. The only thing he wanted right then was Tammy and that wet little spot between her thighs. So did I. But what both of us wanted, even more than this sad, clueless bitch sitting between us, was to take each other down a notch.
He was a good-looking guy. Big and imposing, too, with the kind of tough, square jaw that had probably taken a punch or two. Played football in college, figured out early enough he wasn’t going to go pro, got educated--but kept in shape. I respected that; too many of those jock assholes turn to fat once the game’s over. They need their discipline enforced from outside; real discipline comes from within, and this guy had it. He dressed smart, oozed confidence; yeah, the fucker was a real contender. Beating him to the lay was going to be sweet.
We drank and chatted and worked the bitch and each other over until the pub kicked us out. Tom went home alone. I went home with Tammy.
***
Training time was over.
“We have to make a move soon,” K told me. “It would be unwise to stay in this place for much longer.” She gave me a look-over, taking her sweet fucking time. I felt like a piece of meat, and damn if I couldn’t help but fidget under her eye, fiddling with a bracelet on my wrist or absently patting back my hair. It was a hell of a lot easier to fidget, dressed as a girl. There was more shit to play with.
She seemed, if not actually pleased, then at least satisfied with what she saw. “How do you feel?” she asked me, and then with added emphasis added, “Cindy?”
“Umm . . . fine?” I tried to answer in character. “I mean, I’m a bit nervous but I’ll be okay.” It’s what K wanted. I was Cindy. Problem is, I still wasn’t sure who this Cindy bitch was, other than being a piece of ass and fluff. I tried to soften my words a bit, but there was no hiding the masculine timbre of my voice. I nervously smoothed down the front of my sweater, the cincher beneath keeping my stomach flat and taut. Beneath that tightness there were major butterflies flapping about, you can well imagine.
“Your wounds?” she asked.
“A little sore,” I admitted. “But I can deal.” It was a damn sight worse than ‘sore’ but I wasn’t lying. I could deal. I really could. All the straps and weight and shit constricting me beneath that fluffy peach sweater wasn’t helping none either. It should’ve been worse, really, but I think I was in a bit of a pleasant, drunken haze.
“You must be exhausted,” K said, and she was right, I was. Not just from the ordeal of getting dressed up and finding out that I’d be living the next few weeks as Cindy. I was genuinely bone tired. I’d been going full-out for a day or two now, except for that brief unconscious period after I’d been shot--and bullet-wound enforced naps aren’t very restful, I can assure you. Talk about a stressful couple of days.
“I want you to take a rest, Cindy. Take a seat and relax. I need some time to prepare for our departure as well. The rest will do you good.”
I wasn’t about to argue with her. K went off to do secret agent-type stuff in the other room. The sofa chair was warm and inviting. I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I thought the boobs and clothes and everything else would distract me and keep me awake. I was wrong.
A gentle push from K woke me up an indeterminate, dreamless period of time later. She knelt next to me and watched me expectantly. “Cindy?” she softly asked. “Are you ready?”
One thing about me, I wake up quickly. I really do; nothing of this moaning and rolling around in bed bullshit. Nothing drives me up the wall like someone who takes an hour of bitching and slamming the snooze button before getting out of bed. That shit really infuriated me. It’s one of the problems with picking up chicks in bars and bringing them home--having to deal with that nonsense in the morning. When the alarm goes--wham!--I’m up and underway. Usually.
“Yeah,” I mumbled. I felt unusually groggy. K handed me a glass of juice, which I eagerly drank down. My mouth felt dry and my tongue thick, as if I had a heavy night’s drinking beneath the belt. In a way, I guess I had. “How long was I out?”
“An hour,” she answered. I focussed on her and noticed she looked . . . different. Still K, but she’d obviously been working herself over during my nap. She looked a little bit softer, somehow, and just a tad older. I’d placed her in her late thirties, and now she looked about a decade older. The years had been kind, though, with just a touch of grey in her hair. She swapped the severe secret agent threads for something that, for want of a better description, screamed ‘soccer mom’.
“What’s with the getup, K?”
She smiled, and even that gesture somehow seemed friendlier, if not downright more caring, than anything I’d seen from her yet. To be honest, it found it more than a little creepy. “I’m hurt, Cindy,” she said, with a slightly patronizing tone. “Don’t you recognize your own mom?”
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“Not at all, Cindy. Now c’mon, chop-chop, we have a big day ahead of us!”
She was clearly insane, but I reluctantly left the comfort of the chair and found my feet, albeit with a few wobbles. I had to focus to walk. I had to focus to do everything, really, as Cindy. “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “So what’s the plan?”
“Well, the first thing you’re going to do,” she said, throwing some things into a purse, “is touch-up your makeup, dear! You look an awful fright!”
An ‘awful fright’ was a bit harsh, but I was looking a bit ragged around the Cindy edges. K handed me a small makeup case. I looked at the assorted tubes and bottles within and groaned. She might as well have handed me instructions to a model airplane written in fucking Chinese. I hesitatingly pulled out a slim, golden tube, and K gave an approving nod.
Ten minutes later, under K’s expert tutelage, I managed to repair the damages of an hour’s sleep. Practice, practice, practice--but fuck, there was just so much to learn!
“Well done, Cindy!” she enthused. “Now just one more thing. Say ‘ah!’”
“Ah?” She took advantage of my opened mouth to jam a long, slender rod down my throat. There was a sudden ‘hiss’ and this very uncomfortable, very cold sensation spread across the back of my throat. “Ack!”
“Don’t talk!” K commanded, the motherly persona suddenly gone. “This is--well, a necessary precaution. It causes a tightening of the soft tissue separating the hard cartilage in the larynx. The extra pressure on the vocal chords will help you speak with a more feminine pitch.”
Clutching at my throat, I felt something decidedly disconcerting going on beneath the skin. What the fuck had this bitch just done to me? I didn’t want to talk like some bimbo--not when this was all over, anyway. I glared at her in disbelief.
“Do not worry, Mr. Sanders,” K said. “The effect is strictly temporary, generally lasting only four or five hours. Yes, another fine unreleased product from your former employer, though surprisingly from a veterinarian subsidiary. Unfortunately, its use is limited--frequent reapplication of the spray has been known to cause permanent damage to the user, one of the reasons why, I’m sure, the product is not available on the open market.”
Permanent damage? What the fuck did she mean, permanent damage?
“If you speak before it finishes bonding with your voice box, Cindy, you could cause yourself serious and permanent injury. It normally takes ten to fifteen minutes.”
I continued to glare at her, and she continued to ignore me.
“Now. When we leave the apartment, Mr. Sanders, we will make our way to a car waiting for us down below. Walk at a normal pace. Talk to me as any daughter would her mother. Act normally. When we enter the car, fiddle with the media player, the radio--typical girl stuff, riding with her parent. Remember, you are only 20; you have just left your teenage years behind you. And most importantly: from the moment we step out that door, you are Cindy. There is no David Sanders. To the rest of the world you must appear like nothing other than Cindy Long. Walk like Cindy, talk like Cindy, act like Cindy. Do you understand?”
I was still furious with her, but nodded. The numbness at the back of my throat was slowly fading. I watched mutely as she collected some final things, though she otherwise seemed content to leave the place in a shambles. On a second glance, I realized that was untrue: the place wasn’t a mess, it looked lived-in. Clever woman, K. She must’ve sorted it out while I was napping. If anyone checked this place out after we left, they’d find a place that looked untidy but homey. There were even some family-type photos on the wall I hadn’t noticed before.
There was a small backpack for me; pink, of course. There was a random selection of clothes and toiletries buried in there, and a book. I pulled it out. ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic.’ Gag. I’d rather have fucking Steele kill me now. K also handed me a purse, a sporty little thing that went well with my outfit, I guess. Rummaging through it I found more makeup stuff, a brush, a couple of bills and coins, a hair scrunchie, a tampon, a few condoms . . . .
My muffled exclamation drew her attention. My expression clearly stated ‘what the fuck?’ as I waved those final two things in her face.
“You are twenty, Cindy. It’s always difficult for a mother to accept, but I’m no fool. My, but you were a bit of a boy-chaser as a teen. And dressing the way you do . . . well! I don’t quite agree of the type of guy you attract, but girls will be girls, I guess.”
With another angry grunt, I waved the tampon at her.
“Better safe than sorry, Cindy. Fortunately it’s not that time of the month, yet.”
No fucking shit. What did she expect me to do with that thing, shove it up my ass? I closed the purse and slipped the damn thing over my shoulders and managed to yank my new hair something awful; that wig was clipped into my hair and hurt if I pulled on it. It must’ve been an expensive wig. It fell naturally and felt like the real thing. Great, another thing to learn how to deal with. Me, I like my hair nice and short. Quick and easy in the morning. And better in a fight.
I was feeling ready. I was getting antsy. Not that I was looking forward to stepping out into public looking as I did. Despite what the mirror showed me, I was still half-convinced there was no way we could pull this off, that someone would stop and stare, that I’d be a goddamn laughingstock in pantyhose.
K checked her watch. “It should be okay to talk again,” she said. The coldness at the back of my throat seemed gone.
“About fu--” I started to say, but squeaked at the sound of my own voice. I found myself clutching my throat again. “What the fuck?” Somehow, it didn’t sound as forceful as it used to, those words. My voice, it suddenly sounded . . . .girly. To my ear, anyway. It wasn’t properly feminine, but nowhere near my usual gruff tones.
“Cindy, please remember--language. Try and soften your voice a bit when you speak. Once we are safe at the clinic, we will begin your vocal coaching. In the meantime . . . try and mimic a girl you know, a girlfriend or something. And whatever you do, do not speak in a falsetto.”
“This better wear off, K.” God, my voice was all husky, like a dame who’d smoked too much. Pattern myself after a girlfriend? I didn’t exactly have one. Longest I’ve ever dated someone was four months . . . it didn’t end well. Actually, it ended very, very badly. Fucking Kate. It’s not something I like to talk about. And most of the other chicks in my life, well, we weren’t together for the conversation, you know?
“It’s Mom, remember?”
“Yeah, fine. Sorry Mom, I’ll do my best.” Shit, I didn’t sound angry, just petulant.
“And don’t worry, dear. Like I said, in six or eight hours you’ll be back to your normal voice.” It was weird, hearing her talk all normal and shit. And calling me dear. Didn’t quite like that, to be honest. As she spoke she gathered her own things. She slipped on a bulky, cheap-looking jacket and shouldered her own purse. It felt a bit like the old days, running with the gangs, getting all suited-up and psyched up before heading into a rumble . . . except in some kind of surreal, feminized version, swapping leather for lace and knives for eyeliner.
Maybe I spoke too soon, though, as I saw K have a quick check over a handgun.
“Mom! I didn’t know you packed heat. All the others girls are going to be so jealous! Can I have one too?”
She didn’t smile. “Do you know what this is?” She didn’t really sound like ‘Mom’ anymore.
It looked like a Glock 18C to me. Even had the extended mag going on. Not exactly the kind of thing I would’ve expected K to carry. I shrugged. “Uh, a gun?”
“Not a laughing matter.” She slipped the weapon into the recesses of her jacket. “And no, you can’t have one, Cindy.” Suddenly she was all smiles and motherly charm again. “So, are we ready?”
And at that moment, I suddenly felt that I really, really wasn’t ready. As much as I’d hated everything that had gone on in this shitty little apartment over the last few hours--at least there’d only been K and me in here. Out there were . . . people. Chicks who knew how to act like chicks and pricks who were going to be staring at my rack and wanting to fuck my ass. And let’s not forget the assassins. No, let’s not forget them. Fucking Steele. If I ever saw the bastard again, I was going to plant two inches of Dolce and Gabbana spike heel into his goddamn scrotum.
I can’t fucking believe I just said that. Two more weeks of this shit and I really would be sounding like a pansy.
“Yeah, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Cindy!”
“Sorry Mom.”
***
My heart pounded so hard in my chest you’d have thought the sound would echo through the whole damn apartment building. But on the outside, though, I looked cool, collected . . . a little self-absorbed, maybe. That’s the kind of chick I figured Cindy was. Girls that look the way I do usually are. She trotted along beside her mom, fiddling with her hair, her other hand unconsciously resting on her purse. Every single thing I did was calculated and thought out, every fucking heel-toe step, every sideways glance at ‘Mom’, even absently picking at a piece of peach-coloured fluff off my sweater.
The hallway was dingy, dark and empty. Scuffed wallpaper curled up at the edges. There was that unique smell of mixed ethnic cooking and stained carpet common to cheap buildings where too many people live in too small a space. A lone baby’s cry rang out, muffled, from the far end and was abruptly cut-off. There was a shout, voices raised in argument. God, I couldn’t wait to get out of here. This wasn’t Cindy’s kind of place at all.
We waited for the elevator. I hadn’t even realized we were on the fifteenth floor. K--sorry, fucking ‘Mom’--checked her purse.
“Gum, dear?”
“Nah,” I said, then figured Cindy was probably the gum-chewing type. She was a blonde, after all. “Yeah, sure. Thanks.”
When the elevator arrived there was a guy on it, carrying a laundry basket full of assorted crap. He had headphones on but you could still hear the music. There was no hiding a weapon in those loose grey joggers and wife-beater. His eyes lazily danced across the two of us before happily settling on my cleavage. The corner of his lips tugged up in a smile.
Butterflies in my stomach? Fucking hell, I had a goddamn flock of seagulls in there now. I felt a warm flush of embarrassment slowly spread up my neck and face. I must’ve been glowing redder than Rudolph’s fucking nose but that jackass sure as hell didn’t notice. He had other things to look at. K didn’t bloody hesitate or nothing; she just stepped on to the elevator. Thing is, right then, stepping into that elevator and following her seemed like the most difficult thing in the world. Yeah, I knew this moment had to happen. There wasn’t much point in getting all dressed up if nobody was ever going to see me. I just wasn’t ready. I wasn’t fucking ready. Another hour or two prancing back and forth in that apartment suddenly seemed like a good idea.
“Coming?” K’s voice, that of the long-suffering parent, snapped me out of it.
“Uh, yeah. Sorry ‘bout that Mom. Having a blonde moment, you know?” I trotted into the elevator and stood next to her. My knees wanted to knock together. I couldn’t believe how nervous I felt. For chrissake, you’d think it was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It wasn’t. It really wasn’t. But to step in front of that teenage prick, who was no doubt checking out that firm, round ass of mine, really did take an effort of Herculean proportions.
The doors slid shut. They were mirrored on the inside, suddenly confronting me with the reflected Cindy. And, yeah, just as I thought: that jackass was scoping the goods.
“Cindy? First floor?” K . . . uh, Mom, was rummaging through her purse for something.
“Uh, yeah.”
I watched the reflected Cindy as she stepped forward with one delicate, high-heeled foot and reached out with her slim arm. Bountiful curves shifted beneath her sweater and she gently pressed one pinkly-glinting fingertip against the first-floor button. “Down we go,” she said in a throaty purr.
“How’re you feeling?” her mother asked.
Cindy gave a soft laugh. “Fine, fine. Just a bit spacey.” With a practiced flick of her head she tossed the long sweep of her blonde hair over one shoulder and smoothed it back with a quick stroke of the hand. Cindy gave a stretch, absently scratching at an itch beneath her right breast, and then took in a deep breath and released a loud, bored sigh. The boy’s eyes stayed glued to every jiggle of her tits like a fly on shit.
Eight floor. Cindy glanced back at the boy behind her and licked her lips. She gave a secretive, wet smile. ‘Hi,’ she silently mouthed to the boy.
His eyes widened in surprise. A bulge popped up in his pants.
“What’s that you’re listening to?” she asked. Those brilliant green eyes lingered for a second down below before drifting up to his face.
The kid’s gaze kept sliding down to her tits. “Uh . . . The Killers,” he said, surreptitiously shifting his laundry basket over his swelling crotch.
“I just love The Killers!” Cindy exclaimed. “Especially their old stuff? Y’know, like that one song, uh . . . .” She gave a few chews on her gum, and then hummed a line. “How’s it go? ‘I’ve got soul but I’m, not a solider . . . .’ Oh, I’m no good . . . you know which one, yeah?”
“All These Things That I’ve Done?” the boy stammered.
“Yeah! That’s it!” Cindy gave a little pout, her pink lips shiny in the dim light of the elevator. “Oh, poo . . . now I’m gonna have that song stuck in my head all day!” She turned back to the front, but her eyes glinted in the mirror, still watching the boy. Her mom looked bored with the whole affair, as if she’d seen it all before. They reached the first floor and the doors opened.
Cindy stepped out, giving a little wave as she went. The boy stayed on the elevator but struggled with himself for a moment, visibly building up courage.
“Hey, waitasec! Hey, my name’s . . . .” he started to say, but the doors closed and cut him off.
“I couldn’t give a fuck,” I growled, walking away.
***
The car was a nondescript grey Honda Civic, the kind you never remember seeing, a weather-beaten 2005 model that showed its age. We didn’t speak a word as we crossed the parking lot. A cool autumnal wind tugged at my hair. Two tall lampposts dropped limpid pools of flickering light. It was only about seven o’clock, but the early-evening dark suddenly felt a lot more threatening than I’d ever remembered.
I focused on crossing the hard asphalt without breaking an ankle. The patter of my heels against the ground rang out unnaturally loud. It’s a good thing we were the only ones in sight; I was fighting down the urge to vomit. Another fucking perv ogling the goods might’ve pushed me over the edge.
It was a relief to finally slide into the car. Getting off my feet was a needed break, even if the seatbelt felt really fucking weird sliding between those giant tits. Pulling the door shut behind me gave a moment’s sense of security--it felt good to be alone again. I struggled to remain in character as Mom tossed our bags in the back and slammed down the trunk. I rummaged through the purse and pulled out a compact as she slid in next to me and slammed her door. Cindy probably checked her makeup a lot and shit like that. I didn’t like the look in my eye; I liked neither the fear I saw there nor the disgust. It took all my willpower to keep my hand from shaking as I applied a quick dab up lipgloss, clicked the compact shut and stowed it back in purse. My left foot started to tremble.
Only once K had us underway, sliding through the darkened streets of a bad neighbourhood, did I start to lose it. The sharp, acrid taste of bile flooded my mouth and I gagged, swallowing it back. There was no hiding the shakes anymore. I took several deep breaths. I sat on my hands. I closed my eyes and leaned back. Fuck. Fuck!
“You are doing well, David.” K’s voice cut through the pounding in my ears.
“I know,” I muttered, and then: “I know, I know, I fucking know!” I screamed, and slammed my fist into the ceiling, again and then again. “Fuck!” The Civic’s roof wobbled from the impact and I left a spot of blood where my knuckle split. One of those fucking bracelets snapped and went spinning off into the back seat.
“Now you are doing less well,” she commented.
I glared at her. “Jesus, K, I can’t do this!”
“You carried yourself remarkably well back in the elevator,” she said. Her eyes danced between the street and my face as she drove. “I must say that I was . . . surprised.”
“Yeah, well, it had to fucking be done, didn’t it? But . . . goddamn it!” I wanted to pound at my own belly, I wanted to reach in there and yank out that damn, queasy feeling churning in there. “Every fucking step! Every goddamn move! Every word, for chrissake! I’ve got to think and plan and worry about every thing I do! The stress is gonna kill me, K!”
She waited as I struggled to calm myself. She took a turn, working us towards the lights of the central city. “There is no need to overdo it, Mr. Sanders,” she finally said. “You could have simply ridden the elevator down in silence.”
“You think I don’t fucking know that, K?” I snapped back. “You think I wanted to flirt with that punk? Yeah, I could’ve just stood there, that little prick was so fixated on my t-and-a he wasn’t gonna give a shit either way. Most girls in an elevator with their mom, that’s what they would’ve done, right?
“But this is cock-tease-fucking-Cindy Long, yeah? She wouldn’t just stand there, would she? I mean, I damn well ride the elevator in silence, but Cindy, she doesn’t. The little bitch probably just likes the sound of her own voice.”
“Is that who you think Cindy is, Mr. Sanders?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! I just know she’s not me, K. I’m creating this bitch from the ground up, aren’t I? And with each new thing that happens, I’m inventing a new part of this girl--of me, and I swear, it’s gotta be one of the toughest things I’ve ever done because, frankly, I don’t like who I’m turning myself into.”
K seemed to digest that for a few moments before responding. “Then why are imaging her in this way, Mr. Sanders?”
“Because,” I answered flatly. “I fully plan to stay alive.”
We rode for another ten or fifteen minutes in silence after that. I slowly got my breathing under control and felt the stress bleed out of me, watching the streetlight glide across the windowpane. I checked the rearview mirror from time to time. I knew this wouldn’t happen again. The fear’s always the worst the first time.
What I hadn’t told K was that I needed to flirt with that little shit in the elevator. I had to do it because it was the last thing that I wanted to do. Stepping into that elevator, I was fucking terrified of that boy. I was afraid of talking to him. I was afraid of the way he looked me over like a piece of meat, and when he popped a boner I almost lost it. I nearly snapped his goddamn neck I was so scared. See, it’s the only way I know how to deal with fear. It’s the way I was trained, I guess. When I was younger, I was scared of so much shit. God, I was pathetic. Sakura, she taught me how to not be afraid. She taught me how to confront my fears, how to overcome them--how to make ‘em a part of me, really. Because if something’s part of you, and you know who you are--well, then you see the fear for what it is.
I’m afraid of dogs. I really am. I’d had a couple bad run-ins when I was a kid with dogs. Really bad run-ins. But now? That fear’s part of me. It’s part of me but I know it’s not all of me; the whole of me is greater than that fear, and so I control it instead of the other way around.
So in that elevator, I knew I had to do the same goddamn thing. It was complicated this time, because I’m still not sure what I was afraid of, exactly. Doesn’t matter. It’s over with. Next time Cindy has to chat to someone, she’ll be fine. I’d already grabbed that particular bull by the horns.
Fuck, that’s the closest I ever want to get to another guy’s horn.
“Was that a chuckle?” K asked.
“Huh? Yeah, I guess so.”
“Are you feeling better?”
“I think I am.” I reached forward and fiddled with the radio. “Hey Mom, you mind if pop on some music?” The Killers, eh? Who would’ve thought? Cindy, she looks like she’s all bubblegum pop but really she’s into her vintage Indy rock scene. Go figure.
“Not at all, Cindy.” She smiled.
When I looked up from finding a funky FM station, the smile was gone. I glanced at the side-view mirror and felt my stomach sink. The fucker was still there.
“We’re being followed,” K stated grimly.
To be continued. . .
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Chapter Four: David discovers that sometimes high heels and makeup just aren’t enough, especially when the enemy draws close. But just who is the real enemy, he begins to wonder.
Constant in All Other Things
Chapter Four
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent
-Much Ado About Nothing
The second longest relationship I ever had lasted three months. Her name was Akiko. She was this way-cool Japanese girl, a professor up at the local university. Less than a year into my new life, into being this corporate climber, this rising young buck, I figured I had to give the real relationship thing a try. I’d been seeing a psychiatrist--yeah, you got a fucking problem with that?--and what she told me was: I had to get over Kate someday. Whether I wanted to or not, whether it was the right thing to do or not, some things are best left behind. It damn well didn’t feel like the right thing, but apparently it was unhealthy to nurse that memory and pain forever.
And Akiko, God, she was brilliant, that kind of blistering intelligence that makes a woman dead sexy. And I’ll be honest: the Japanese thing didn’t hurt either. It was unfair to the poor woman, really. I channelled way too much pent-up emotion about Sakura into that goddamn relationship. No wonder it didn’t work out.
It’s not like I was entirely to blame. I was only twenty-one, trying to figure out who the hell I was now, in the so-called normal world. I was younger than many of her students. There’s no way it could’ve ever worked out. This was before I hit NeoPharm and all, still bouncing between jobs, still looking for the right ladder to climb.
Fuck, though, did she give great head. Sexiest lips I’ve ever dated. But if I had to pick out one thing I took away from that relationship--one thing she really did for me, Akiko--it was a love for reading. Yeah, go figure; girl sucks your cock and you walk away thinking about books. Akiko was an English lit prof. She’d specialized in something or other with a healthy side of a critical theory fashionable and marketable at the time she entered teaching. She told me that with a wry smile. She explained almost everything about herself with a wry smile.
Her true love, though? The really old shit, like Beowulf and Chaucer and Shakespeare. (Though she taught me all that ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ stuff isn’t very old after all.) So yeah, she was well into her literature. You ever have someone softly whisper the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales into your ear whilst riding your cock? It’s sexier than it sounds. Sweet April showers still give me a hard-on to this day.
In any case, you know those long Sundays that just seem to go on for ever? The ones spent lying together in bed, having slow sex and talking about nothing and dozing off and having sex again? Yeah, on one of those days she taught me this really weird saying. It took me a bit to learn the damn thing, with both lips and pussy acting as encouragement and distraction in equal measure.
Akiko swore she lived her life by the saying, though I never quite figured out what she meant by that. There were mysteries to that girl; it’s probably another reason I fell for her so hard. I guess you could say we both had trust issues. Pity it didn’t work out.
“Giet bid daet selast,” I whispered beneath my breath. “Donne mon him sylf ne maeg.” After all these years I still remember it; even my pronunciation was perfect. “Wyrd onwendan.” I watched the headlights trailing us in the rear-view mirror. “Daet he donne wel dolige.” Funny what pops into your head when you’ve got an assassin chasing your panty-clad ass.
K didn’t seem all that perturbed by the pursuit. She didn’t change her speed or make any sudden turns or anything. Her grip stayed relaxed on the wheel as she drove us along the outskirts of the city centre. Her eyes, however, were bright and alert and kept a careful eye on our followers. The asshole behind us was good . . . but not that good. Under the false neon dawn of passing shops and restaurants, the car was easy enough to pick out. Sure, he didn’t ride our bumper but the traffic was light and he cut some of those corners just a little too sharp. After a couple kilometres and a few unnecessary but inconspicuous changes in course, the car was still behind us. It wasn’t just a fluke.
“You going to lose him?” I asked.
“In a Honda Civic?” K answered, cocking an eyebrow. “Besides, I do not believe we need to worry.”
Now it was my turn to raise a finely-plucked eyebrow. “K, we’re being fucking followed by fucking assassins. I’ll be honest: I’m a little worried. What’s there not to be worried about?”
She shrugged. “If the people in that car are indeed agents of Mr. Steele,” she said, “and they truly believed that Mr. Sanders was in this car, they would have driven up beside us a few kilometres back, especially as we passed through one of those quiet residential areas. They would have overtaken us and opened fire on this car until everyone within it was dead.”
I gave a low whistle.
“These are the kind of people we are dealing with, Mr. Sanders. The fact that they haven’t shot at us yet leads me to believe that they are merely following us on suspicion or whim. Hopefully they will soon realize that there is nothing more to this car than a middle-aged woman and her young daughter.”
“Huh.” Could it be this crazy Cindy disguise gig was actually working? Go figure. “So, where we going then?”
Mom flashed me a big smile. “Well, we’re not going to reach the clinic tonight, I’m afraid. You hungry, dear? Let’s grab some munchies and chow down at the motel room. How does that sound?”
“Sounds great, Mom!”
***
We pulled in at a cheap motel on the other side of town at around ten-thirty. The smell of drive-through fast-food drifted up from the back seat. I was getting antsy again, imagining with great pleasure peeling off the goddamn waist-cincher and digging in to some nice, manly burger and fries. I also liked the idea of getting my cock out and letting my balls breathe again. The boys were really starting to feel cramped and sweaty down there.
“Check us in under my name,” K said, handing me a wallet. Her name, I discovered on the drive over, was Wendy Jones. Apparently Daddy Long was either dead or gone and she’d reverted to her maiden name. “Get us one bed, a double.” At my surprised look she continued: “We are mother and daughter and we drive a cheap car. It is just sensible that we share a bed. Just act--normally. We plan to leave early tomorrow.”
“Why do you want me to check us in?” I fought to keep the tremor out of my voice. Checking-in meant talking to someone. Just because I’d mastered that particular fear didn’t mean I was looking for excuses to go out of my way and do the Cindy thing again. “Why the hell can’t you do it?”
“Because,” she answered, pulling her handgun from the recesses of her jacket, “I will be keeping an eye on you . . . just in case.” Keeping the weapon hidden, she smiled. “Besides, you need the practice, dear.” Our pursuers had gotten either bored or cleverer. We hadn’t seen them for the last three-quarters of an hour, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still out there. With a sigh I flipped down the sun shade and checked myself in the vanity mirror.
You’re not looking too shabby, baby, I thought, pursing my mouth and slathering on another layer of lipgloss. The gooey-sweet taste tingled on my lips and set them a-glistening. I touched up my mascara and fluttered my lashes under the weight. I’ve always had slightly effeminate lashes, long with a bit of curl. One girl I dated for a few weeks, she laughed at their length, even balancing a toothpick across them once after a few pints down at the local pub. “Wow, you’d look just great with a little mascara and eyeliner,” she gushed. “I could do wonder with your eyes!” She might’ve been a makeup artist or some goddamn thing; I can’t remember. I told her to fuck off, only half-joking, and we didn’t date for much longer after that.
Now, looking at Cindy through half-lidded eyes I saw that long-ago girlfriend proven right. I blinked once, languidly, and concentrated on those beautiful emerald depths. This isn’t a big deal, that gaze insisted. You look good. Those horny bastards in there’ll fall over themselves trying to rent you a room. They won’t be checking out your chin or nose or shoulders. You can do this. Cindy can do this.
Cindy Long gave herself a final wink and flipped the shade back up. She pulled a red lollipop from her purse and slid it into her mouth. “I’ll be back in a sec’, ‘kay Mom?” she said. She gracefully stepped out of the car, though the long drive must have left those lithe legs cramped as she tottered momentarily before finding her footing. Finding her balance she strode briskly towards the check-in office, purse swinging in counter-step to her stride. The click of her heels sounded clear across the parking lot. Lights shone behind the curtains of a few rooms, and the muffled sound of a TV turned up too loud reached her ears. Back at the car her mom popped open the trunk and began to pull out their few bags and cases.
Cindy paused at the door to check her reflection, tucking a wayward bang back behind her ear. The blonde-haired girl’s earrings spun and glittered in the glass. The door chimed as she stepped into the office.
The place stank of stale cigarettes and greasy food. Her nose wrinkled as she gingerly stepped around a fat, insolent cat stretched out in front of the door. She seemed a little less confident approaching the counter. The young man behind the counter sat deep in his chair, legs propped up on a banged-up metal cabinet. Attention fixated on an old, flickering flatscreen TV mounted to the wall, he didn’t even acknowledge her presence. With the volume set so high, he probably hadn’t heard her entrance. The colours on the screen bled together and contrasted sharply, rendering the show--some kind of music video--in lurid detail. Cindy bit her lower lip, clearly unsure what to do. Her hand hovered uncertainly over the counter bell before pulling back.
She pulled the lollipop from her mouth. “Um . . . excuse me?” Her soft voice went unheard under the loud blare of the television. Cindy nearly stamped a dainty foot in frustration. “Hello?”
If the man was aware of Cindy, he gave no sign of it. He idly poked at a button on the remote.
After glaring at the back of the man’s head for a moment, Cindy slid the lollipop back into her painted mouth. She leaned up against the counter and rested her chin in the palm of her hands. She watched the man for a little longer and then idly reached out and, with a deft flick of the hand, knocked over an overstuffed stationary basket. Pencils and pens cascaded over the counter and rained down on the man’s head.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed, spinning around in his chair and leaping to his feet.
Cindy gave a long draw on the candy in her mouth, languorously rolling her tongue over the sweet sphere before pulling it out with a wet pop. She eyed the candy indolently for a second before her eyes wandered over to the attendant. Her lips parted in a glossy smile. “Hi!” she said, and the fingers of one hand danced in a cute wave. She seemed completely unaware of the fact that her arms, drawn together at the elbow, pushed up her massive breasts and gave an even better view of the cleavage barely hidden by the low V-neck.
The young man’s eyes went wide. “Uh . . . hi!” His eyes struggled between her tits and face, but if she noticed she seemed unconcerned. “What can I, um, do for you?”
Cindy’s eyes sparkled with merriment as she took in his flustered appearance. The poor thing was hardly older than a boy, his unshaven chin patchy at best and his cheap white polyester t-shirt stained with old food. He made an unconscious attempt to smooth down his hair and met with little success. She made a little moue. “Oh, it’s just so annoying!” she said. The boy jabbed at the volume control on the remote, nearly dropping it in his haste. “My Mom and I,” she said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the car with her lollipop, “we’re driving off into the country but we had some car problems, you know? Now we’re, like, running majorly late? And there’s no way we’ll get there tonight, so we kinda need a room.”
She leaned forward conspiratorially, her breasts crushing up against the counter top, and the boy eagerly moved closer. “I mean, this really sucks. It’s not like I want to head out there in the first place, I’m totally a city girl, you know? And now I’m stuck spending the night with my mom! Ugh.”
He gave a tentative smile. “That sounds, ah, horrible.”
Cindy shrugged. “Yeah, but what’re you gonna do, eh? Moms!” Her tone firmly summed up all the major problems of the world with that one word. “But she’s paying the bills so I guess I shouldn’t complain.” She flashed her mother’s credit card before the boy.
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” The attendant seemed to relax a bit. It was an easy topic to relate with. “My mom’s got me working these weekend shifts or she’ll kick me out, she says. I’ve gotta pay my room and board, can you believe? God, she can be such a bitch sometimes.” He took the card from Cindy, and flushed red as her finger slid along the inside of his palm.
Her smile didn’t change, though, innocent as ever. “Yeah, my mom can be a total ball-breaker too, you know?”
He looked at her curiously. “Ball-breaker?”
“Oh, my brother,” she stammered. “He’s a little younger than me? But totally over-protective? But yeah, Mom pushes him really hard sometimes.” She gave him a little wink. “He’s a nice kid . . . a bit like you.”
“Ah . . . thanks,” he stammered, quickly looking down to hide his growing blush. “We, ah, have a couple of rooms left. What would you like?”
Cindy toyed with her hair. “Well, it’s kinda gross but Mom wants a room with just one double bed. We’re gonna share. Like, ick. I mean, she’s all sweaty in her sleep and she snores! But money’s tight, and she’s paying . . . .” She gave another idle shrug.
“Well, uh. . . .” The boy tapped a couple of buttons on a keyboard. “I’m not really supposed to do this, but maybe I can help you out.” His face burned red as he kept his eyes glued to the computer screen. “It’s getting kinda late and we normally don’t get too many people after eleven. We still have a couple double rooms left. How about I put you in one of those, and charge you for the single?”
Cindy gave a little squeal of glee. “You’d do that?” She even gave a little hop of joy, and the boy was hard-pressed to pull his eyes away from the way her exposed curves quivered afterwards. But then she stopped to think a moment, pressing one pink fingertip to her lip. “But . . . you’re not going to get in trouble, are you?”
He chuckled. “Nah. And it’s not like I love this job or nothing.” When Cindy looked doubtful he made a few more taps on the keyboard. “Listen, what I’ll do is I’ll book you and your mom into room 4--that’s a single room--but I’ll give you the keys for room 12, okay? It’s got two doubles. It’s not like anybody’s going to want it tonight, anyway.”
It only took Cindy a minute to fill in the room form and for the payment to go through on the card. She slid her mother’s card back into her purse and gave the boy a big smile. “You’re really sweet, you know that . . . .” She looked at him inquisitively.
“Ah, Tim.” He stuck his hand out.
“Cindy,” she said, meeting his hesitant but strong handshake with her soft grip. “You’re a nice guy, Tim.” And then, eyes fluttering wide with surprise, she quickly leaned forward and gave him a peck on the cheek. His unshaven skin felt coarse against her lips. “See you!”
He called out to her at the door. “Uh, Cindy? Yeah, listen . . . uh, I mean, you don’t have to or nothin’ . . . I’m done work at midnight. I don’t suppose you’d, like, want to grab a drink with me after work? There’s a bar down the road . . . .”
Cindy gave him a sad look over her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Tim. I . . . can’t.”
Tim looked away. “Nah, I understand. . . .”
“No, it’s . . . ,” she rushed to say. “It’s my mom. We’re leaving early tomorrow, you know? I better not be out late or anything.” She offered a tentative smile. “You understand, yeah? Moms?”
“Yeah, moms,” he said ruefully, and smiled.
“See you around, Tim.”
“Bye Cindy.”
***
My head felt like it was going to explode.
There were all kinds of shit going on in there. I was furious with K for sending me into that office. Some part of me wanted to turn right around and take that fucking kid by the throat and beat the living shit out of him. I know Tim didn’t deserve it. He really didn’t. But I was still pissed off. Then there was a lot of self-loathing and disgust going on as well. Obviously. I hated myself right then; I really did. I mean, God damn it, I’d just kissed a fucking guy! Foremost in my thoughts, though, was Ken.
Remember Ken? Ken was my first kiss. Believe me, that kind of shit can really mess you up when you’re a teen. What with all the other craziness going on at that time, dealing with that kind of nonsense just seemed really unfair. Now I’m thinking that maybe I never really dealt with it at all. Things were so crazy back then it was easy to take things you’d rather not think about and kind of push them off to the side and try to forget. But you never do, I guess. You always remember your first kiss. Mine came from another fucking guy. That was also the last time a guy had kissed me. Until tonight. Only tonight, he hadn’t kissed me; I kissed him.
Or rather, Cindy had.
“Did you get us a room, dear?”
I glared at K as I stormed over to the car. ‘Heel-toe’ and ‘straight feet’ and ‘small steps’ were forgotten in my anger. I was walking like a goddamn linebacker just then. “Yeah. Room fucking 12,” I growled. I grabbed half the bags off the ground before remembering that there was no fucking way Cindy could carry all that shit. “This way, Mom.” I fought to get my voice back under control, to push the anger back, and pretended to struggle with the weight of the luggage I carried. Two trips and we had our bags piled up outside the room. We worked in silence, but I could feel K’s eyes watching me carefully.
I used the key to let us into the room. It took two tries; my hands were shaking. The motel room was like every other cheap-ass room I’d even been forced to spend a night in, with bad carpets and yellowing wallpaper. Some unidentifiable, vaguely unpleasant smell hovered in the air. There were two double-size beds separated by a small cabinet, a bathroom opposite the entrance, and some really bad art over a small table next to a mirror. There wasn’t even a damn television set.
The moment the door clicked shut behind us I started to claw away at Cindy. The sweater nearly ripped as I tore it over my head; I had one heel on and the other went flying across the room when I kicked it off. My chest heaved with the hurry to be free of this feminine prison. I probably would’ve tried to yank those tits off, too, if there’d been a seam to find. I had the goddamn waist-cincher half-unzipped and my jeans unbuttoned at the crotch when K’s voice suddenly cut through my desperate effort.
“David! What the hell are you doing?”
I glared at her from beneath a twisted mess of blonde hair. “This charade is over, K! No more Cindy. No more bloody mincing about in fucking heels!” I struggled with and yanked off the second shoe. “I’ll take my chances with the killers, thank you very much. At least if they get me, I’ll die with some goddamn pride!”
I thought maybe she’d try to talk me down, or get all angry and bossy. Instead, she just watched me thrash about. Slowly her lips started to twitch up at the edges. Her eyes sparkled with the effort of restraint. She couldn’t hold it in anymore: K burst into loud peals of laughter.
“It’s not fucking funny!” I yelled, gesticulating wildly with the dainty shoe still clutched in my right hand. This just sent her into deeper hysterics. I swear the bitch was nearly doubled over, clutching at her side.
“It’s not funny, dammit,” I insisted. I caught a look at myself in the mirror. Brandishing that heel like a wicked weapon, with one tit popping out and that wig hanging over my face like a headbanger’s mop . . . I looked ridiculous. I couldn’t even walk with those jeans down around my knees, and my cock, overjoyed at the loosening of its bonds, strained mightily against its silky restraint. I slowly pulled off my wig and dropped it to the floor. Damn. I did look kind of funny, especially with my face all red with anger and those veins popping out at the temple. Hell, even I couldn’t take myself seriously, especially with all that makeup on.
“Sit, sit!” Still struggling to regain her composure, K gestured to one of the beds before half-stumbling over to our bags. She pulled a bottle out of a side pocket and tossed it to me. “Just . . . relax. Take a deep breath, David. Have a drink.”
I didn’t need a second invitation. I cracked open the bottle--Jack Daniels, God, this woman understood exactly what booze each part of this relocation required--and a moment later she brought over two cheap mugs from the bathroom. She swallowed a chuckle as I grimly poured us each a stiff drink.
“Bottom’s up,” I stated. We clinked out mugs together and pounded the booze back in one. The strong burn of the whisky down my throat was exactly what I needed. JD was a manly drink. I really wanted to feel manly right then. Even as I sat there still wearing panties and hose with tits half-spilling out of a lacy black bra. I poured both K and myself a second. We shot them back without a word, but I was very much aware of her eyes watching me over the rim of her mug.
When I went for a third drink, she gently held back the bottle. “Care to talk about it?” She sounded halfway between Agent K and Mom. I was starting to wonder who the hell she really was.
“Not really. No.” I pulled the bottle from her grip and poured myself another. She held her mug out for a refill. The third shot went down very smoothly. I wanted to get drunk. Check that; I wanted to get fucking drunk. She hadn’t drunk hers, though, watching me curiously. “What?”
K shrugged. “I am just gauging how drunk you have to be before feeling like you have recaptured enough of your masculine pride to tell me what is wrong.” She raised her cup in my honour and drank it back.
I really hated her sometimes. “Fuck you, K.” I refilled our cups.
She looked around the room. “I thought I asked you to get us a single room?”
“Who knew Cindy could be so persuasive?” I sneered bitterly. “The little shit in there thought he’d do us a little favour. I think he liked me. Her.”
“Ah. I see.”
She didn’t. She really didn’t. “Don’t fucking presume to know me, K.” We touched cups and solemnly knocked back our last drink. I screwed the bottle tightly shut and tossed it over onto her bed. The unseen clamp wrapped around my temple slowly began to loosen. I reached back and unhooked the bra as I talked. “You’ve got a profile on me. You’ve done all this research and shit. But you don’t know me. You have no idea what I’m feeling.” Without support those fake breasts bobbled free.
K averted her eyes with only the slightest of smiles. “Then why don’t you tell me?”
I continued to glare at her as I crossed the room in my stocking feet. I grabbed the bag that K packed for me and found a t-shirt. It hugged my curves and didn’t even reach my bellybutton, hanging off the massive orbs it barely restrained. The nipples clearly poked through the thin material, dual punctuation on either side of the emblazoned ‘Hot Stuff’ written in brilliant, sparkly pink. Fucking hell.
Without answering her I stomped into the toilet and slammed the door behind me. I peeled off the jeans and those damn pantyhose and tossed the panties in the corner. My bladder was screaming for relief, as were my balls. After a particularly angry bout of masturbation I cleaned myself off, wrapped myself in a towel and stormed back up to K. She was still sitting where I had left her.
“You have any idea how this is fucking with my head, K?” She watched me from her seat as I stalked back and forth across the room, ranting as I went. In a torrent of angry words I explained what had happened back in the motel office, about Tim and Cindy. She waited patiently for me to finish. When I finally flopped down onto the bed she handed me another drink. I hadn’t even seen her pick up the bottle. I certainly didn’t feel it but suspected I was getting very, very drunk.
“I don’t want to dress up and act like a chick, K!”
“Very few men would want to do what you are doing, David,” K said. Her voice was calm and soothing, motherly once again. “And even fewer could manage it half as well as you have so far. I already told you: you are doing very well. You can do this, Mr Sanders.”
“That’s easy for you to say, K.”
“I realize that.” She hesitated a moment. “Tell me, what was it that made you so angry? Was it the kiss?”
I felt my face redden and glowered at her. “What the fuck do you think? Yeah, that’s damn well part of it. A big part of it.”
“But it was just a little kiss to the cheek, right? How is that a big deal?”
“It’s a big deal to me, okay?”
Her eyes stayed fixated on me for an uncomfortably long time, as if she were processing difficult thoughts. I tried to ignore her by rummaging through the clothes she’d packed for me. There wasn’t a hell of a lot in there, and I was expecting it to all be stupidly girly, but buried away at the bottom I found a pair of jogging pants. I eagerly pulled them on. Despite riding a hell of a lot lower on the hips than anything I’d normally wear, they were blissfully comfortable after wearing those jeans all day. Between the joggers and that ludicrous t-shirt I had something like a yard of toned midriff left exposed.
Finally running out of patience, I turned back to K. “What? What the hell is it?”
“David, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“I thought your damn federal profile covered everything.”
“No, not everything,” K answered.
“Fine then. Ask away.”
“Have you ever kissed another man before?”
I slowly sank down onto the bed. “Yeah,” I admitted. “How’d you know?”
“It was a hunch, based on your reaction.”
I looked at her quizzically. “Really? Why?”
“Tell me, this previous kiss . . . were you young when it happened?”
I nodded, curious where she was going with this. Back when I’d turned twenty and was seeing that psychiatrist? I didn’t even tell the shrink about Ken. Didn’t see much reason to talk about it, to be honest. So I’m really not sure why I told K. It must’ve been the alcohol.
“Yeah. About fourteen. It was my first kiss.”
The fact that it was my first seemed to take her by surprise. “Was it your only kiss with another man?”
“Of course!” I exclaimed. “What do you think I am, some kind of fag?” Hell, I don’t even have any memories of being kissed or hugged by any kind of father figure or uncle or anything. I never really got to know my dad . . . my real dad, anyway. So the stubble on Tim’s face? That was the first time I’d felt anything like that up against my lip or cheek. Creepy stuff, I’m telling you.
She looked annoyed by my response. “I am not suggesting anything, Mr. Sanders. I simply find such a strong reaction to such a small action a little surprising.”
“I kissed a fucking guy, K!”
“It’s common in many cultures for men to show such levels of intimacy.”
“Yeah? Well, not in mine.”
“Did you enjoy kissing that boy?”
The question took me by surprise. I didn’t know whether she meant Ken or Tim. It didn’t matter. The answer would’ve been the same either way: “No!”
“Really?” She eyes me curiously. “I just wonder, David, whether under the stress of the last few days and through the forced role-playing of Cindy, if perhaps you are being forced to confront some aspects of yourself you have long tried to ignore?”
I eyed her warily. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“All the women, Mr. Sanders. The extreme macho posturing. And today, Cindy flirting with the only two males she has met . . . .”
“Just fucking say it, K!”
“Could it be, Mr Sanders, that you are in some kind of denial?”
I stared at her in stunned disbelief. Slowly, my lips twitched into a small smile until finally, I too burst into laughter. “What, you think I’m gay?”
K didn’t seem amused. “I think there is a possibility you have some repressed homosexual tendencies, yes.”
That just sent me off into another burst of laughter. Holy shit, but this woman cracked me up. “You really think I’m. . . .” I couldn’t even say it. And the look on her face was so serious! I stumbled to my feet and spread my arms wide before her and dropped my pants. “Behold! Proof of my manliness!”
“Mr Sanders, please.”
“Nah, check it, watch this. Right now, I’m thinking of . . . you!” I gave her a lascivious grin as my dick rose to attention, strong and proud. I really was thinking of her as well. God, I’d love to see what the real Agent K looks like. In the meantime, the imagination was doing a damn fine job of filling in the gaps. “And now, I’m thinking of . . . that dude in the elevator.” My manhood visibly wilted. I pulled the jogging pants back up and covered up. “I mean, seriously K, you think I’m some homo?”
She didn’t seem much impressed by my display. “I think there is a possibility, yes.”
Releasing a sigh, I flopped down on the bed opposite her. “K, you can believe what you want. I don’t really care. I really don’t. Though if you think a day of dressing up in chicks’ clothing and flouncing about as Cindy is going to turn me to the other side, you really don’t know me at all.
“Hell, how’s this, I’ll even tell you something I’ve never told anyone else: I actually wondered if I might be gay too, when I was a kid. Seriously! The kid I told you about, the one who kissed me when I was a teen? His name was Ken.” I flopped back on the bed, speaking to the ceiling. It was very distracting how, once they stopped wobbling about, those heavy breasts flattened beneath the t-shirt and weighed heavily on my chest. I quickly told her about Ken and about how I beat the crap out of him.
“And after I made up with Ken, there was a part of me . . . I mean, there really was a part of me . . . that wanted to be that way for him. I dunno why. To make up for hurting him? Or maybe because I really, really didn’t want to lose his friendship. I mean, fuck, K--friends, you know? They’re one of the only things really worth fighting for.”
I linked my hands behind my head and released a deep sigh. Why the hell was I telling her any of this? There were only one, maybe two people I’ve ever been this open with before. “But I couldn’t. I really couldn’t. I looked at Ken and, yeah, I felt very protective. I cared for the guy. But he didn’t do anything for me, if you know what I mean. And Ken damn well knew it. If he hadn’t been so honest I probably would’ve been messed in the head for a hell of a lot longer than I was.”
I felt a bit noxious, and it wasn’t the alcohol. I really didn’t like thinking about my past much.
“So, you really want to know why I was so angry, K?”
“Yes. Please,” she answered, in a tone that I couldn’t quite place. I was tempted to sit up and have a look at her face, but I also really wanted to get this off my chest while I was still in a talking mood. It didn’t happen often.
“See, this is the thing. I mean, really, if I was that insecure about my masculinity, K, d’you really think I’d be going around with these fucking things?” I hefted those udders stuck to my chest. “The reason I can pull off the Cindy thing so well is because I know she isn’t me. I don’t enjoy it--hell, I damn well hate it--but Cindy’s like a completely different person. What she does doesn’t really reflect on me, you know?”
“Then why did that kiss make you so angry?” K asked.
I sighed. “Because it made me feel sick, touching my lips to that boy’s cheek. Even after everything I’ve said, it made me sick to my fucking stomach. And it shouldn’t have. It really shouldn’t have. Ten years ago I almost put a friend--hell, he was more than a friend, he was probably my first real friend--in the hospital because he freaked me out. I didn’t understand him . . . although at that time I didn’t really understand myself either.
“But that was over ten years ago! I thought I’d grown since then. I kept in touch with Ken over the years. Him being gay really didn’t matter. Or so I thought. Only now, ten years later I find out I’m still the same pathetic homophobe I was when I was a kid. I thought I’d figured myself out years ago. And now Cindy’s showing me that I haven’t. There’s still somewhere inside of me that’s scared and insecure--a part of me that’s freaked out by something as stupid as a guy kissing another guy.
“So, yes, K, that really pisses me off. I hate myself for being weak. And worse, I’m angry at myself because it feels like I’m betraying the memory of Ken.”
“Memory?” Her voice was surprisingly soft.
“Yeah. Ken died a few years ago. He fought the good fight but the disease finally got him.”
“I’m sorry, David. AIDS?”
“Nah. Cancer. The idiot smoked two packs a day.”
K shook her head. “You were right, Mr Sanders. I don’t know you after all. Come on, the food is getting cold.”
***
Things got a little weird after we ate. The food itself pissed me off. I hadn’t really paid attention at the drive-through window, focusing intently on being the most convincing Cindy I could possibly be. Now I was finding out that K, damn her to hell, had bought ‘healthy’ food for me. God damn those healthy-eating initiatives! I wanted a burger and fries, dammit, not some fucking salad.
Once I’d calmed down, K coerced me back into Cindy-practice mode. She insisted I slip the waist-cincher, heels and wig back on, though she didn’t seem to mind the jogging pants and t-shirt. Thing is, even dressed-down like that I still looked like a flirty coed, back from a game of Ultimate Frisbee or something. K taught me how to clean the makeup off my face, apparently a very important ritual for young women concerned with keeping their skin healthy and smooth.
It was still weird, looking at myself in the mirror and seeing Cindy, though I didn’t feel quite as sick to the stomach anymore. The lack of makeup made a huge difference. My features lost some of their softness, returning to familiar rough edges, and I was almost disappointed to see my eyes fade back to their normal green. The dichotomy between face and body, though, really freaked me out. Those curves just looked way too real.
Halfway through dinner my throat tingled and my voice broke, similar to passing through a second puberty. Fifteen minutes later I sounded like a man again. For the first few minutes my own voice sounded strange to my ears, which was a little disconcerting. It was getting late and exhaustion was catching up to me, but K wasn’t quite done yet. She insisted we squeeze in another hour of training before bed. In a repeat of the time spent at the safe house, K had me prancing back and forth across the room, this time in a pair of tight, calf-high boots with slightly higher heels. I was so tired I was starting to feel hazy again. I couldn’t even muster up a defence against her drill-sergeant ways and numbly did as she asked. She had me incorporating gestures into my walk, and I held my wrist just a little limper than normal, or bit my lower lip with uncertainty, or toyed with my hair . . . she directed and I acted.
The whole thing got pretty damn boring pretty damn fast. I actually found myself thinking about Tim. Poor little shit. He seemed like a nice enough kid. Cindy wasn’t the girl for him. I checked the time and saw that he’d be finishing his shift in another fifteen minutes. Ten to one he was secretly hoping Cindy would change her mind and sneak away from Mom and grab a drink with him. Maybe that wasn’t the only thing he was hoping to grab tonight. I wondered if he’d go home and jerk off thinking about me. Not an entirely pleasing though, I assure you.
Eventually K relented and it was time for bed. I was almost ready to fall over, and it wasn’t because of the heels. When I went to strip that damned cincher off K stopped me. “Training,” she said. “Your body can keep practicing as you sleep, even if your mind can not.” Then she handed me something flimsy and pink. “And wear this to bed, please.”
I clutched the gauzy fabric in my hand. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, K,” I grumbled, and as always she wasn’t. Personally, I like to sleep naked. I usually do. It’s different for girls, apparently. They sure as hell have more to choose from when it comes to nightwear. K had just made my first choice. Cindy, she liked to be naughty. That’s what I would call the stretch lace babydoll (and matching panty, for fuck’s sake) K handed me. The underwire shoved those tits back up in my face and the hem didn’t even clear my ass--and the short slit that went up to my waist showed off even more. The fabric clung to me in a distressingly silky way. Not only did I feel like a total fucking poof wearing that damned thing--I somehow felt more naked than if I hadn’t worn a thing. K’s plain, long t-shirt seemed almost matronly (and far more comfortable) in comparison.
I was too tired to be horny, even at the sight of a partly-naked K. My bits made a noticeable but reasonable bulge in those skimpy panties. With a sigh of relief I crawled under the covers, only mildly put off by the weird slick feeling of my shaved, lingerie-clad body sliding between those stiff, starched sheets. Fuck it. I just wanted sleep.
K turned off the lights. “Goodnight, Cindy.”
“Goodnight, Mom.”
Sweet dreams, right?
The lights had been off for all of five minutes before we heard the urgent, quiet knock at the door. I had been drifting in that heavy-limbed zone between wakefulness and deep sleep; with a jerk I snapped fully awake. I heard K drop quietly to the floor between our beds. There was the very faint click of a safety being disengaged.
“Cindy?” The whispered voice sounded familiar. Tim?
I glanced back at K. “It’s the boy from the office,” I said in a low voice.
She gestured for me to move forward. Her silhouette faded into the shadows.
I padded over to the door. I only hesitated a moment before cracking it open. “Tim?” I whispered in a low, hoarse voice.
“Cindy?” Damn, but I didn’t sound much like the girl from before. I opened the door a little further. Any doubt he had was dispelled at the sight of me. He couldn’t see me well, standing as I was mostly in darkness, but the flutter of the babydoll around my bared legs was enough. I kept one hand over my crotch, though. Nothing ruins a teenage guy’s wet dream like the sight of an unseemly bulge in a girl’s panties, yeah? Fortunately the darkened room kept my face mostly obscured.
Bless the little punk, but he finally managed to drag his eyes away from the sight of those massive jugs resting half-uncovered in their lacy pink cups. “Tim,” I whispered, “I told you I can’t. . . .”
“It’s not that,” he interrupted me, his voice full of urgency. “There’re some cops asking questions about you!”
That certainly caught my attention. Standing behind that door naked but for a pair of fake tits and a flimsy scrap of semi-transparent nylon, I suddenly felt horribly vulnerable. Fuck. Fuck!
“They came in just after my shift. I didn’t see it but they were flashing a picture and badges around and asking about anyone who’d booked in tonight. The late night guy checked the records and told them you were in room 4.” Still standing outside, he glanced to the side. “They’re in there right now.” His eyes found mine, and I was stunned by the genuine concern I saw in there. “Listen, Cindy . . . I don’t know what’s going on. I think you’re in some kind of trouble. And I probably shouldn’t get involved.”
No, you shouldn’t, you stupid little punk. You’ll just get yourself killed.
Tim smiled bashfully, his eyes flashing in the pale light of the outside lamps. “But I also think you’re one of the most amazing girls I’ve ever met,” he said. “And whatever’s going on, I wanted to let you know that.” He glanced to the side again. “Uh oh. I think they’re almost done over there. I better get the hell out of here.” And then, with a final sweet smile, Tim said, “good luck,” and took off.
I closed and locked the door behind him. Shit.
A moment later K leapt into action. “Get away from the door,” she hissed, grabbing a small suitcase from the floor. “Say ‘ah.’” It didn’t occur to me protest as she shoved that fucking rod down my throat again. I was feeling out of it from that ‘most amazing girl I’ve ever met’ comment. Everything went cold and numb again. K then ushered me into the bathroom. “We do not have much time,” she said, starting the shower. The hiss of falling water filled the room. “Get undressed.”
My throat all bunged up with that crazy spray, I couldn’t argue or ask what the hell was going on. I quickly stripped. To my surprise, she stripped down to her bra and panties. “Once they find you missing, they will begin a systematic search of every room in the motel,” she said. “We’re going to give them Cindy. This is it, Mr Sanders. You’ve done it twice now. This is your final test.”
She shoved me into the shower.
***
The first time I had sex I was sixteen. It wasn’t a great experience. It really wasn’t. What it was, that first time, like so many other firsts in my life, was fucked up. A high school bush party, one of those big ones out in some shitty stretch of land on the outskirts of town that some kid’s parents own. All the usual shit was there: bonfires, burning bright under the crisp night sky; kegs and cases of beer; coolers overflowing with ice and girly drinks, and forty-ouncers of the hard stuff; and teenage hormones. Oh yeah, lots of the last thrown into the mix. The air was thick with it. All swirled up and made complicated in that pressure-cooker high school social dynamic kind of way.
I was the new kid in school, a bit of a bad-ass and outsider, but I knew enough of the cool kids to get an invite to a thing like this. Thing is, I wasn’t there for the fun of it. I was there for Muna. Sweet Muna, with soft mocha eyes and skin as smooth as silk. She was dating this guy called Karl, this Aryan fucker, a right proper asshole who fancied himself a bit of a badass as well. And Muna . . . yeah, sweet Muna, she was one of the nastiest pieces of work I’ve ever met. But I had to get to know her better. A lot better.
So I swaggered into that seething pit of teenage alliances and social dramas and walked straight up to the King of the whole shitpile. Karl didn’t much like me. I didn’t much like him either and let him know exactly what I thought. Those other kids, they must’ve thought I was drunk out of my mind. I was cold sober. Karl knew it as well. It didn’t take much to goad him into a fight. The dude was tough; he knew how to fight. I was tougher; I fought harder. And afterwards I had Muna. She knew where the power lay. Some girls figure it out young. God, I hated her. The sight of her made me want to puke.
She was my first. And for some reason, every vagina since I’ve compare to Muna’s. Like the one currently held in my hand.
I stood in a slight state of shock, holding this disembodied pussy in my hands and feeling it slowly warm beneath my touch. I still couldn’t talk but it didn’t make much difference; I couldn’t think of anything to say. The shower had been a quick one. K had clambered in and knelt before me and before I quite knew what was happening she was shaving my crotch bare.
Then she dragged me back to the bedroom and gave me a little shove. I was sitting numbly at the edge of the bed. She was kneeling between my legs. “Do you trust me, Mr Sanders?”
I gave a mute nod, staring blankly at the vagina I held in my hand. I thought it was kind of cute, as far as vaginas go. It had the same rubbery feeling and slightly grey colour that the artificial breasts first had before bonding to my body. After Muna I quickly discovered that every girl’s pussy was a unique creation. I had a sinking feeling that the one in my hand was Cindy’s. Go figure. Cindy’s vagina was cute.
“I’m sorry, David,” K said. I wondered why, turning my attention back to what she was doing. Too late I saw her smear that pungent amber goo across my scrotum, penis and inner thighs.
What the fuck was she doing? I gave a muffled cry of horror as I felt the initial tingling sink into my balls. It probably wasn’t safe for me to talk yet but I couldn’t keep a whispered “oh God please no” from escaping my lips.
K handed me a pillow. “Bite down on this,” she said, eyes filled with sympathy. I glared back at her with hatred and snatched the damn thing from her. “Giet bid daet selast,” I mumbled to myself, mantra like, slowly falling back into the softness of the bed. The tingling in my groin grew warm. “Donne mon him sylf ne maeg,” I whimpered, unbidden tears leaping to my eyes. “Wyrd onwendan.” I shoved as much of that damn pillow as I could into my mouth until I nearly choked on it. There wasn’t time to finish Akiko’s saying. I thought I knew what was coming.
I didn’t. A thousand white-hot needled being slowly pushed into my motherfucking gonads–that’s what it felt like. I howled into the pillow and my entire existence became white, searing pain. I writhed on the bed and bucked against the strong arms that held me down. Tears streamed down my face and inside I silently pleaded and begged for the pain to be done, for the torture to end, for it to be over . . . .
And then it was, and K was down between my legs holding something over the numb spot my groin had become. Drained of strength, I couldn’t have forced her away even if I tried. My breath came in ragged gasps as my sweat-drenched body rapidly cooled. By the time I found the strength to sit up K had already pulled away.
“Are you okay?” she asked in a soft voice.
I blinked away the tears and gave a curt, angry nod.
“I’m sorry, Mr Sanders. I had hoped that it would not be necessary. But we may not have another chance to quite so convincingly throw off our pursuers. Have a look, Cindy.”
I had to strain to see past those tits, but I could just make out a rounded, lightly furry mound where my boys used to be.
Was it safe to talk yet? Somehow that seemed a minor concern compared to my bits down below. “K,” I asked in a weak voice, “are they. . . .”
K hastened to convince me that everything was fine. “Your . . . equipment, is perfectly fine, Mr Sanders. They are merely hidden away behind the prosthetic.”
They certainly didn’t feel fine. In fact, what I could feel down there felt fucking weird and wrong. When those breasts first warmed to my chest I was gradually hit with the very disconcerting awareness of sensations coming from several inches further out from my chest than I was used to. And now . . . I had no idea what I was feeling; my mind couldn’t process it yet. I reached down with one tentative hand but K held me back at the wrist. “No time, Cindy,” she said, with a tight little smile. She pulled several articles of clothing from the suitcase.
“Let’s get you ready for the big show.”
***
The knocking on the door came loud and insistent.
Cindy secured the chain before daring to open the door. “Y . . . yes?” Peeking through the crack she saw a very determined, very official-looking man standing impatiently outside, and an equally serious-looking woman waited behind him. “Can I help you?”
“Federal agents,” the man stated. “Agent Fosters.” His eyes widened in surprise at what he saw. “Uh, miss. We need you to open the door, please.”
Cindy face glowed bright pink despite the cool air wafting in from outside. “It’s, um, not really a good time. . . .” She looked back at the room and down at herself and her blush deepened. From behind her came the sound of water running in the shower. “Please, officer, couldn’t this wait until morning?”
Looking a little embarrassed himself, the man held out his badge. “I’m sorry miss, but I really must insist.”
After glancing at the badge, blinking confusedly at it, she reluctantly unhooked the chain and stepped back. The door swung open and the two officers strode into the room.
Her long, slender legs shimmered in sheer white stockings as she skittishly flounced across the room. Flustered by the unexpected interruption, Cindy tottered unsteadily in four-inch ankle-wrap stilettos, the impossibly thin heel accentuating the smooth, lean curve of her calves. Thin white garters strained tautly across her rounded derriere as she carefully bent down to collect the insubstantial red gown tossed haphazardly across the pushed-together double beds. She fumbled to slip into the garment as the man gazed with open admiration at this vision of young beauty. There was nothing innocent about the sheer merrywidow to which the garters attached, nor in its plunge front over which her bountiful breasts spilled.
She finally managed to pull on the gown, though it did little to cover her. The layers of sheer fabric did little for her modesty; rather, it simply added to the seductive allure of those hidden places. The halter gown left her entire back open and one leg slid sensuously free of the high slit. The gown also did nothing to hide the fact that she wasn’t wearing any panties.
Cindy nervously smoothed down her front with a lightly trembling hand. Her eyes glistened with barely-repressed tears and her lower-lip trembled, much like a young child caught doing something naughty.
The man who had spoken at the door seemed unsure how to start. “Miss . . . uh . . . ?”
“Cindy,” she said, velvety pink lips parting in a timorous smile that disappeared almost immediately. Her face had an almost luminous sheen in the dimly--one could even say romantically--lit room. “Um, Cindy Long.” She nervously crossed her arms beneath her breasts, uncrossed them, and finally tangled her fingers in the mesh fabric of the gown over her veiled muff.
Both the man and the woman seemed to have trouble knowing where to settle their eyes, though an amused smile danced along the female agent’s lips. “The motel office has a Miss Cindy Long registered in room four, along with Wendy Jones. Mother and daughter, apparently.”
Cindy chewed on the corner of her lip. Brilliant green eyes ringed in smouldering hues shone beneath thick, impossibly long lashes. “I knew I shouldn’t have taken it. Oh, I knew it!”
The man looked at her inquisitively.
“The boy at the counter. Tim. He was so cute and shy, and nice, and he offered to put me in this room instead and only charge me for the cheap room, and I didn’t want him to get in trouble but I didn’t think he would, and it’s just this one time, I promise, and . . . .”
“Easy there, Miss Long, please.” He seemed a little distracted by the shimmering dusting across her exposed neck and breast. “And your, ah . . . mother?”
Cindy shook her head. Those long, dangling earrings flashed and danced beneath the sweeping curtain of blonde hair.
“Cindy?”
She nibbled on her lower lip for another moment before answering. “I’m not here with my mom, okay?” Her voice sounded hoarse with petulant frustration and teary embarrassment. “I registered under her name but she’s not here.” She jerked her thumb towards the bathroom. “I’m with . . . him.”
Both visitors slowly took in the room. An open bottle of wine and the two half-finished glasses, one whose rim was ringed with pink lip-prints. Bed sheets half drawn back but slightly ruffled in the middle, as if someone had been laying there in waiting. An unopened condom lying in wait on the nightstand. A messy trail of men’s socks and boxers led into the toilet. Recently lit candles were scatted around the room, the naked flames dancing in the breeze from outside. Sweet, floral perfume wafted from the nervously fidgeting girl standing half-naked before Agent Fosters, even as her nipples tightened and grew erect in the cooling air. The man sighed. He looked aside to his partner, who shrugged.
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Miss,” the man said.
Cindy took a hesitant step forward. “Is there some kind of problem?” she asked, clearly concerned. “Is there any danger?”
He grinned reassuringly and shook his head. “Nothing you have to worry you pretty head about,” he said.
“Really?” Her lips split in a hesitant smile. “That’s a relief.”
The woman spoke for the first time. “While we’re here. . . .” she suggested. By the tone of her voice she didn’t sound in any hurry to leave, which only intensified Cindy’s nervous blush. Her eyes kept slowly sliding over the contours of the young girl’s body before settling over the shadowy area between her pale thighs.
Agent Fosters sighed. “Yeah, sure.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out an 8x10 black-and-white photograph. He approached Cindy and held the image out for her to see. “We’re looking for this individual.”
She carefully examined it, absently chewing on the tip of her hair. “Is she dangerous?”
The man smiled. “Not to us.”
“I’m sure,” Cindy answered. She winked. “You definitely look like you can take care of yourself.”
The door to the toilet cracked open. “Hey, Cindy!” called out a deep, baritone voice. “You comin’ or what?”
“Maybe we’ll just leave you to it,” the man whispered, winking back. “Have fun.”
Beneath her heavy makeup Cindy blushed a hot, fiery red.
The man and woman stepped out of the room. The door locked behind them. Cindy leaned against the shut door, closed her eyes and released an exhausted sigh. When I opened my eyes I steeled myself for what came next.
With deliberate, careful steps I crossed the room. I pulled out one of the cases K had stowed beneath the bed. She’d left it unlocked . . . just in case. When I lifted the lid the weapons inside shone dully in the faint light.
“It is best,” Akiko taught me, “when man cannot himself change fate, that he endure it well.”
The gun settled comfortably in my grip. I slotted in the magazine and disengaged the safety and chambered the first round. Akiko had been a bit of a fatalist. I wasn’t. Maybe that’s why we didn’t last. I’ve put up with a lot over the few days. I’ve endured enough. Sometimes you lay back and put up with the bullshit life throws your way. And sometimes, you tell fate to go fuck itself.
K stepped from the bathroom, her firearm held low but ready. Without hesitation I levelled the gun at her.
She raised one eyebrow inquisitively. “David?”
“Care to explain, Agent K,” I asked, “why the feds are looking for you, not me?
To be continued. . . .
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Chapter Five: It’s time for a little talk, David decides, and some answers. However, Agent K is fond of her secrets and has plans of her own for the disguised man.
Constant in All Other Things
Chapter Five
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent
-Much Ado About Nothing
K eyed me curiously. “Is there a problem, Mr Sanders?”
My aim never wavered. “You tell me, K.”
She stood framed in the light from the bathroom, dressed in functional grey cotton panties and bra. She kept the Glock low. With careful, deliberate steps I slowly circled towards the bed. I couldn’t stand long, not dressed in this goddamn lingerie, perched precariously on impossible heels.
“Would you like me to put up my hands?” K asked.
“I’d like to know what the fuck is going on, is what I’d like.” I settled on the edge of the bed. My head was pounding. Lack of sleep. The stress. Cindy. Tim and that Agent Fosters guy. The booze wasn’t helping. Now K. I felt like I was going to lose it. Not a good time to be holding a firearm. “But you can start by putting the gun down. Slowly!”
K did as ordered, engaging the safety before crouching and leaving the weapon on the floor. She looked up at me inquisitively. “And now?”
“Over there,” I commanded. I gestured with the gun for her to step towards the corner. She moved slowly, eying me cautiously. Fifteen feet between us. The room was only dimly lit by the candles and the light slanting in from the bathroom, and the little that slipped through the curtains from outside. K’s face, shrouded in shadows, revealed nothing. Nevertheless, I felt rather than saw the sudden tensing of her body.
My arm with the gun snapped taut. “Don’t even think about it, K.”
She relaxed and raised her hands to placate me. “Very well.” She backed up against the wall and slid to the floor, shifting to find a comfortable position. Her eyes never left the weapon in my hand. “There. Satisfied?”
I gave a curt nod.
“Are you going to shoot me, Mr Sanders?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Are you capable of shooting me, Mr Sanders?”
I gave a grim chuckle. “Don’t you doubt it for a second, K.” She probably didn’t believe me. I wouldn’t hesitate to prove her wrong. I liked proving people wrong. “So don’t push me.” I pressed the palm of my free hand against my temple. God, my head felt like it was going to explode.
“You don’t look well, Cindy.”
“Don’t call me that,” I growled. “The name’s David.”
She nodded. “Very well, David. David, you don’t look well.”
I gave a bark of laughter. “Yeah, no shit.”
“I thought you trusted me. Why the gun?”
“Yeah, funny that. I’ve been trusting you, K, since I first approached the feds. Remember that? Yeah. And I was impressed, K. I really was. You struck me as very competent. I’m not a big fan of the authorities but you had me thinking differently, see? After all, I know fucking Steele isn’t an easy man to go up against . . . I didn’t think I’d find much help. Helping me had to seem a risky proposition.”
It’d been ages since I’d last held a gun. I gave it an expert little twirl and snapped it back to aim at K. Just like riding a bike. “But not too risky for you, eh, K? You sure stepped up to the plate awfully quick.”
She watched me from the corner impassively. “And your point is, David?”
“I’m here because I had nothing to lose. I’m here because it was the right thing to do. But why are you here, K?”
She didn’t answer me.
“I’m waiting, K.
“Your wait will be a long one.”
“I’ve got the gun.”
She shrugged. “Then shoot me, Mr Sanders.” She stood up, one hand against the wall. “Though I suggest you use a pillow to muffle the shot, unless you want those authorities you so distrust to return.”
“Maybe I do.” I kept the gun trained on her, a little annoyed by her lack of concern. She left the corner and went about blowing out the candles she had quickly spread out to create a faux romantic atmosphere. She kept her distance, though. “Why should you care, anyway?”
“I promised you I would do everything in my power to keep you alive. I have every intention of keeping that promise.”
“Even though I’m pointing a gun at you.”
“Yes.”
“You sure that’s the only reason?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Because, you know, it’s you they’re looking for.”
Holding one of the candles in her hand, she glanced aside at me from the other side of the room. Her eyes glittered coolly over the dancing flame. “So you said.” She blew the candle out. “Is that why you have stopped trusting me?”
The weapon remained trained on her as she moved about the room. K was cleaning. She was actually cleaning up even though I had this goddamn gun.
“Who says I don’t trust you?” I answered with a wry smile. “I’m just wondering why they had a picture of you, K. They were going door to door looking for you. Not David Sanders. Not Cindy Long. You. So, yeah, it kinda got me questioning things. Things like: why the hell are federal agents hunting down one of their own?
“And it’s got me wondering about all this.” My gun made a wide sweep across my lingerie-clad form, these fake tits, that--I didn’t even want to think about it--thing glued to my crotch. “Not exactly standard gear for the witness protection program, I’m thinking. Eh? Cutting edge high-tech kit? How did you put it? ‘Unreleased on the open market?’ So how the hell did you get it, huh?” My free hand roughly grabbed and squeezed one of those jugs through the sheer fabric of the merrywidow. “Even if you could buy it, something like this is gotta be pricey. I’m guessing it’s all a bit outside the normal operating cost of the program.”
K stared at me from across the room for what felt like a long time. The ache in my head was slowly gathering into a single, blistering pain behind my right eye. God, I wanted to get out of these clothes. Those slender straps across my shoulders were distracting me something awful, and the ungodly arch of the shoes was killing me. Yeah, you could say I felt more than a little unsettled, dressed up like some little fuckbunny.
“Do you mind if I sit?” K asked, pulling the chair out from beneath the writing desk.
“Yeah, whatever,” I said, twitching the gun to show consent.
When was the last time I’d held a gun? I wondered. At least five years. A little bit longer. Not since everything went a little crazy after Kate. God. That long ago. Suddenly the five years spent as a corporate minion at NeoPharm seemed surreal, dreamlike, impossible. And now here I was. Sitting at the edge of bed, ensconced in virgin-white nylon and lace, covered and compressed by straps and stretch fabric that caressed every part of my body, over shoulders and thighs, around my back and across my ass. Dressed in lingerie with an ugly grey Steyr settled comfortably in my hand. Fifteen feet away sat K, also half naked, looking utterly unconcerned by the fact there was a firearm pointed at her chest.
My head throbbed so painfully it made the gun tremble in my grip. Shit. There was too much going on. Swarming around in my head. Anger and uncertain thoughts and painful memories. A string of women from my past: Amanda Lang and Akiko Takahashi and Muna Khalid. And God forgive me, Kate. Cindy.
And K. Motherfucking K. The thought that she might have betrayed me was killing me. It really was. I’ve already said I make my mind up about people quickly. No second chances. I’ve been screwed over often enough in the past not to have learned my lesson. That’s why I follow my gut feeling. My instincts usually have a better idea of what’s going on than my head does. God, my head--it felt like it was splitting in two.
My instincts told me that I could trust K, just as they told me that, despite the friendly exterior, there was something slimy and terrible about Agent Fosters. He’d been a decent-looking guy, medium build and probably in his mid-thirties. Slick suit and a winning smile. And yet--my gut told me not to trust the guy, not to fuck with him. He left me feeling . . . scared, and I don’t scare easily.
Then again, I’m not sure I would’ve felt safe around any guy, dressed the way Cindy was. That badge Fosters flashed me looked legit enough, as far as I can tell that kind of thing.
But that picture. K. The feds wanted her. Those weren’t Jeremiah fucking Steele’s hitmen tailing us all day, but rather goddamn federal agents. Which had me thinking very unpleasant thoughts.
What if K was actually working for that bastard Steele?
She watched me from across the room. Her eyes kept dancing away.
“Having trouble looking at me, K? Feeling guilty?”
She gave a polite cough. “Actually, I was hoping you would . . . sit a little more demurely. The view is more than a little distracting.”
Blushing angrily, I crossed my legs at the thigh, hiding that impossible fake vagina nestled between my legs. With a sibilant whisper the gown settled around my waist and left my stocking-clad leg exposed. It was proving remarkably difficult to maintain the aggressive posture, dressed as I was.
“Better?” I demanded.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Then how about some answers?”
K shrugged. “I would have happily answered them at any time, whether you had a gun or not.” She paused for a moment, as if she expected me to lower my firearm. I didn’t.
“You are correct, of course. Prosthetics such as the ones you currently wear are not commonly available to federal agents. Then again, the program is not commonly involved in the process of disguising its participants as members of the opposite sex.”
I snorted. “Yeah, I’m sure.” I gave my right tit a squeeze. “So where the hell did this shit come from, then?”
“The easy answer, Mr Sanders, is that they came from your former employers. An R&D branch of NeoPharm created them less than a year ago, near as we can tell. The project was discontinued once it was discovered that the product was not economically viable. We believe they were originally intended for mastectomy patients, but that the cost of growing the breasts far exceeded what most women could afford to pay for them. Furthermore, the breasts themselves proved unstable.”
“Unstable?” My already high-pitched voice jumped a notch. I suddenly regretted groping the thing so roughly. “They’re not gonna . . . explode, are they?”
K laughed. “No, Mr Sanders. Unstable in that the compound used to form the breast has an unfortunately short lifespan. Though it draws a certain amount of its nutrients directly from your body to remain ‘alive’, it nevertheless begins to wither and die after a few weeks. Much like fruit, actually.”
Holy shit. I really did have melons stuck to my chest.
“But . . . how do they work? I mean, I can feel them, K. When I touch the damn things, I feel it--not down against my real chest, but out here,” I grabbed myself again, though this time gently, “as if they really were a part of me.” Strictly speaking that wasn’t true. The sensation of my own touch was slightly muted, somehow, as if it diffused by distance or a protective layer. The nipples themselves did nothing for me, but then again, my real nipples don’t either.
K shrugged. “I am not a scientist, Mr Sanders. The patents are held by NeoPharm. Some of the boys back in the lab tried to reverse-engineer a sample and best they could come up with, the breasts are grown from some kind of semi-organic compound that intelligently bonds with the patient. You can feel it, Mr Sanders, because technically speaking, they are part of you.”
“Whoa!” I exclaimed. “What the hell do you mean, intelligently?”
“Intelligent, Mr Sanders. Not sentient. Perhaps adaptive would have been a better choice of words.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, K. I’ve seen those movies--you know, the ones where someone gets a heart transplant or something and goes crazy? These tits, they’re not gonna try and take over my brain, are they?”
She smiled. “I believe your brain is as safe from those breasts as any man’s is.”
I didn’t like having those things there. Though she didn’t say it outright, they still sounded like parasites to me. They hung and fed off my body and ultimately gave back absolutely fuck all. “And . . . this thing?” I made a vague gesture meant to take in the vagina clamped down over my cock and balls.
“Similar technology, Mr Sanders, though necessarily somewhat more complicated.”
“It’s going to wither and die, too?”
She nodded.
“It’s not gonna take my dick with it, is it?”
Again she laughed. “No, Mr Sanders. Your male organs are perfectly safe, if somewhat tightly restrained. Your testicles are held back in their natural cavity and your penis is contained in an organic sheath. In fact, the lab believes the device naturally produces a topical anaesthetic which serves to eliminate any pain and minimize, ah, unexpected bulges from arising. However, urination should not be a problem, though of course you will have to sit like any other woman.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
K never kids. So as long as this goddamn thing was stuck to me I was going to be one step closer to Cindy--a huge step, if you ask me, and one I wasn’t too happy about. I love pissing standing up. I mean, I really do. More than anything else I figure that’s what defines a man: the ability to drunkenly write your name in the snow.
“Why the hell would somebody grow fake vaginas, K?” I demanded. “I get the tits. I do. But cutting-edge cunts?”
She winced at my language. I reminded myself to try and tone it down a bit. “I do not know precisely,” she answered. “More women than you know suffer beneath the fist of oppressive regimes, David. Genital mutilation . . . young girl having their clitoris scraped or burnt off . . . and worse.”
I swallowed uncomfortably at the thought. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Most people do not,” K answered. “Such women may have use for such products. Otherwise, the market for such things is obviously rather . . . limited. However. . . .” K hesitated, and then seemed to change her mind.
“C’mon, K. Spill it.”
“You have to understand that these are seized goods,” she said. “Less than a month ago, acting on information supplied by an informant, federal agents raided a medical institute thought to be involved in the distribution of a number of illegal substances.”
“Drugs?” I don’t like drugs. I mean, yeah, I’ve smoked a spliff or two in my life, especially as a teen, popped a couple pills out at the club, but I’d also seen the really nasty side of the trade. I’d lost more than one good friend to that shit.
“Far worse than that,” K answered, and her voice turned unexpectedly grim. “What we found beneath that clinic, David, was . . . evil. I wish I could think of a less melodramatic term, but what we found was beyond anything I have ever seen.”
The way she said it actually sent a small shiver down my spine. Intrigue was overcoming paranoia; the weapon in my hand slowly drooped as I listened to K. “What do you mean?”
Her eyes flashed coldly. “That is none of your business, Mr. Sanders.”
I pointed at my newfound furry patch. “It became my business the moment you attached these goddamn appliances to me, K.”
“Those?” She gave a humourless chuckle. “Those were the least of what we found in the raid.” By this time the gun was resting in my lap, though I hadn’t pulled my finger away from the trigger. Though my interest was captured, she hadn’t exactly renewed my complete trust. “Though we found enough NeoPharm products being put to use to arouse our suspicion.”
“What do you mean?”
“You are not the first man,” K answered, “To be unwillingly fitted with a pair of artificial breasts, Mr Sanders.”
I couldn’t keep myself from glancing down at those firm pale orbs hanging off my chest, barely contained within their lacy cups. Stupid rooky mistake, looking away like that.
K could’ve crossed the room and planted her foot in my face by the time I looked up again. She was certainly good enough. I don’t know why I believed that. It’s not like I’ve seen her action. But there’s a way a person carries themselves, once they’re no longer afraid. That Agent Fosters guy moved in the same way, come to think of it. And so does K. She knew she could take care of herself. Suddenly, even though I had the gun and she was sitting half-naked across the room from me, I had this feeling that I was the one in danger; that if I didn’t ask or answer the right questions bad things might happen.
She didn’t move, though. She seemed content to talk from across the room. “Ultimately, what we found was evidence possibly linking Mr Steele to the site we raided. There were not just NeoPharm products. Other items produced through Steele-owned subsidiaries were on site as well. Not ordinary things. Newly-developed, cutting-edge, unreleased. Very high tech. Illegal. Expensive.”
“What the hell are you talking about? What does this have to do with me?”
“The operation was discovered roughly two months ago.”
The pounding in my head subsided, but only because of a far worse sinking feeling in my stomach. “But that’s around when I. . . .”
“Not around, Mr. Sanders. Precisely. The night of. The very night you saw Mr Steele kill Mr Antazzi, I took part in an attack on a very well-defended medical institute that--”
“But I didn’t hear or see anything about--”
“He believes you did. He believes you can prove his connection to . . . to . . . .” Her voice died, strangled beneath repressed emotion. Her hands briefly shook by her side. When she found her voice again, her tone was bleak. “He will stop at nothing to have you removed, Mr Sanders. I was reluctant to reveal the full extent of the danger you have submitted yourself to, but now there is little choice.”
I cocked my head towards the door. “Agent Fosters? The woman?” Strange, but I’d almost forgotten about the woman.
If her voice was cold before, it was positively glacial now. “The day after the raid,” K told me, “three undercover agents involved in the raid turned up dead. Within a week four more colleagues were killed as well. My partner was killed.”
What do you say to that kind of thing? “I’m sorry.”
“There was an attempt on my life as well.” Her smile was thin and cruel. “Obviously it did not succeed.”
“So you think those two are bad news?”
“I do not know. But I discovered the hard way that the arm of Jeremiah Steele reaches very far and very deep. The very agency you turned to for protection, Mr Sanders, would have likely proved your undoing.”
“Huh.” Damn, but I knew turning to the feds was a bad idea. The authorities always manage to muck things up. I was really starting to regret starting this whole thing, I can tell you. Why the hell couldn’t I have kept my dick to myself? If I hadn’t been chasing after pussy that night, I wouldn’t have one of my own right now.
Though what K had told me really caught my attention. It really did. What the hell did she stumble across beneath that medical facility? I knew I’d gotten mixed up in bad shit when I saw fucking Steele whack that Italian dude, and the other stuff I saw was just downright wrong, but . . . this? How big a shitpile had I landed in?
The funny thing is, you’d think knowing that I’d just stepped into something way over my head would’ve made me feel worse. But I didn’t feel like I was drowning in it at all. Hell, I think the dull throb in my head even started to pull back a bit. Yeah, I was totally fucked . . . but there was also a part of me--a part I’d forcefully buried away and tried to forget--that thrilled at the idea of being swept up in something this big and nasty.
My thoughts were interrupted by a soft knock at the door.
I snapped to attention, Steyr pointed towards the disturbance. I glanced back at K a moment later. Where the hell did that gun in her hand come from? She swiftly padded across the room towards the beds. She nodded once towards the door.
With wobbly steps I approached the door, weapon held at the ready. “Yes?” I called out, and the nervous tremor wasn’t entirely forced.
“Cindy?”
“Tim?” I glanced back at K. She shrugged and faded back into the darkness at the far end of the room. I opened the door as far as the locking chain allowed. “What are you doing here?”
“I . . . just had to check if everything was okay.” I dropped the handgun behind the door. Stupid kid. He stood there in the flat outdoor lights, with such concern etched into his face that I could’ve almost laughed. I think the idiot was actually crushing on me. Not that I could blame him, really. Cindy was pretty hot stuff. At the moment he could only see my face, peeking around the door. I gave him a nice, wet smile and decided he deserved a treat. He’d probably saved my life tonight.
“That’s so sweet,” I said, opening the door.
Whatever answer he had died in his throat. The light from the bathroom caught me from behind, highlighting those feminine curves, cascading through the shimmering fabric draped across my body. I leaned against the doorframe with my arm crossed beneath those silk-clad parasites.
Tim didn’t quite seem to know what to say or do. He looked away, blushing fiercely. Poor kid. “Um . . . those guys, they’re gone now.”
“I know,” I answered.
“You’re not here with your mother, are you?” He sounded angry. I watched the realization slowly work its way across his face, and felt sorry for him. I think he was cluing in that most girls don’t dress up like lingerie models when staying with family.
I gave a sad shake of my head. “No Tim, I’m not.”
When he looked back at me, his angry eyes stayed fixed on my green ones. The kid had some class, I had to admit. He wasn’t staring at those tits or anything; he was actually looking at me. “I can’t believe you played me like that.”
“Tim, I didn’t.” I tried to sound as genuine as possible. “I really didn’t. I meant what I said, you know. You really are a nice guy.”
He snorted bitterly and looked away again. “Yeah, I know.”
I sighed softly. “Tim, that’s not a bad thing.”
“Whatever. Just . . . just make sure you’re out by nine, okay?”
He was about to leave and I should’ve just left it at that. I really should have. But for some reason I called out to him. “No wait, Tim . . . please.”
The boy hesitated. Of course he did. A sexy young woman was calling his name.
“What?”
“Tim. I just wanted to let you know. If I wasn’t already with someone? I totally would’ve had that drink with you.”
“Yeah?” He finally looked back at me, smiling tentatively. “Really?”
“Really,” I said. And then . . . .
With a delicate step I moved up against him. I was taller than him in the heels, though only just. I liked that. There was an unexpected tingle as my breast flattened against his chest. One hand cupped his cheek and ran through his short spiky hair and slowly pulled him towards me. He didn’t resist. I leaned forward. My lips gently found his. The kiss was soft and sweet and just a bit sticky from the lipgloss. I sighed through slightly parted lips. “Thank you,” I purred, and pulled away.
Tim stood there for a moment, eyes unfocused. “Nobody’s gonna believe me when I tell ‘em,” he mumbled. “My first freakin’ kiss and she’s a total babe and nobody’s gonna believe me.”
I forced a giggle. “Good-night, Tim.”
“Uh . . . yeah.”
I closed and locked the door and released a deep breath. The pain in my head eased off. I didn’t feel sick anymore; quite the contrary. The tension through my shoulders slowly bled away. During the brief exchange with Tim I’d made my decision. I looked down at the gun on the floor and reluctantly picked it up.
I heard K stir from the far side of the room. “Do we return to our standoff now, Mr Sanders?”
“Call me Cindy,” I said. I cleared the round from the chamber, engaged the safety and released the clip. With a shrug I gingerly stepped back towards the bed. “Way I see it, K, I’ve got two choices here: I can either trust you, or not trust you. And I’ll be honest. A lot of shit doesn’t add up. You’ve got all this gear and you’ve clearly got back up and there’s all sorts of stuff going on in the background that you haven’t told me about. At the same time you say the feds are looking for you and can’t be trusted and we’re working alone. It’s all a bit overwhelming, although when you get down to it, I’ve also got no reason to believe anything you say to me.”
I held the Steyr out to her. “Like I said, there’s a lot about you that doesn’t add up. But you know what? My gut tells me you’re okay.”
She came up to me and pulled the gun from my hand. Her eyes glinted enigmatically in the half-light.
“Does that mean you trust me again, Cindy?” Her voice was surprisingly soft.
I shrugged and smiled. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
She stepped away and stored the firearm back in the case by the bed. “What did the boy want?”
I absently touched one finger to my lip. “To see if Cindy was okay.”
“Was she?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am.”
***
Katherine Ophelia White. The only woman I have ever loved. I say that, though I’m not convinced that what we had was love at all. I mean, really, who the hell knows what love is anyway? What we had, was six months together. Only six months. And what we had was twisted and wonderful and difficult. I guess you could say that our relationship was . . . complex.
But then, I guess every eighteen-year old thinks their first serious relationship is the most intense and complicated thing in the world. It’s so hard to keep perspective on these things. That was seven years ago. It’s funny, when I think back about it. Not that I do very often. Think about the past, that is. She’s not something I like to think about. I think that’s what makes me sad and angry most of all: that the only person I’ve ever loved is also the only person I’ve ever truly hated. No wonder I went insane there for a bit once we were through.
That’s not true. What makes me really mad, is this: that when I think back and try to picture Kate . . . I can’t. It’s been seven years; God, only seven years. And already she’d fading from my memory, like newspaper used to cover a closed-down shop’s windows, yellowed and bleached by the sun. She was taller than me. Slender and inflexible, strong and healthy, like bamboo. That’s what I remember. Her and me and a bamboo forest.
The wind tore through that tall, rigid bamboo forest and surrounded us with this otherworldly rustling, creaking sound--an old wooden ship caught in a storm. We were hiding. Hiding in the bamboo, panting with exertion, our mutual hatred momentarily forced aside by a mutual enemy. Next thing, we were hungrily kissing, tearing at each others’ clothes, cursing and biting at each other, suddenly turned feral with lust and released tension. We had sex in that vibrant, verdant field of swaying stalks that clawed the greying sky overhead. She cried out in passion and fury as I entered her and she tore my back and her voice was ripped away by the growing storm.
I loved her from that moment on.
But that’s all I remember: bits and pieces, flashes of the whole. Her angry smile flashing; narrowed eyes; slim, nearly boyish hips cocked to one side and her balled up fists. “I’m no good for you, David,” she always used to tell me. “And you’re no good for me. This can’t last.”
She was right. Goddamn her, but she was right.
But man, was the sex ever good! The best: passionate, intense, our entire being poured into that short, ecstatic moment spent together. I’m not sure I really knew Kate, outside of sex. Not the real Kate anyway. Then again, we both spent a lot of our time together lying. We had to. But not during sex; that was always honest. And angry. I’d forgotten how good angry sex can be.
I’m not sure why Kate was running through my head as I returned to my bed. I’ll be honest: I didn’t bother cleaning off the makeup. I didn’t strip out of that damned lingerie or any of the other shit. Hell, I didn’t even unwind those goddamned heels from my calves. I was simply too tired. All I wanted was some sleep, a few good hours of solid, regenerative sleep. Vaguely aware of K puttering around the room, setting everything straight for our departure tomorrow, I collapsed face-down on the bed and closed my eyes.
I couldn’t sleep. Exhausted as I was, I begun to feel . . . odd. Hot, even though I lay half-naked over the sheets. At first I thought I was growing a massive hard on, but I knew that wasn’t possible. Not the way everything was sealed away and anaesthetized down there. The sensation was a phantom response, what I imagine an amputee feels for an arm or leg. Only it didn’t go away. Growing warmth settled between my legs and began to tingle. I squeezed my thighs together to clamp down on the feeling but it didn’t help; it made it worse; I began to feel strangely slick down there. I squirmed over the sheets, wanting to thrust into the bed but knowing it wouldn’t provide any relief.
It was because of Kate. It had to be because of her. The encounter in the bamboo forest all those years ago kept running through my mind. I vividly remembered pushing into her, her strong legs wrapped around my back; but those memories didn’t match up with the sensations my body was sending back to me; I had nothing to thrust with.
“Is everything okay, Cindy?”
K’s voice cut through my fevered confusion. I flipped over on the bed and stared up at her with wide eyes. “What the hell is happening?”
“What do you mean?” A shadow of a smile danced across her face. She knew, the fucking bitch!
“Dammit, K! I feel all . . . weird.”
“Weird? How, weird?”
“You know damn well what I’m talking about!” My skin felt flushed and hot. I fluttered one hand down around my crotch. “This . . . thing. It’s making me feel all . . . tingly.”
“Has Cindy been having naughty thought?”
“No! Well, a little. So what? My bits are all locked away, right? So what the hell’s going on?”
K shook her head, eyes sparkling with amusement. “I think you misunderstood me. Yes, your organs are incapable of responding in the normal way. After all, an erection could severely compromise the prosthetic. However, nothing was done to dampen normal sexual response.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” There was a panicked edge to my voice I wasn’t proud of. I wiggled my hips a bit and squeezed tighter and was shocked to feel actual wetness down there. How the fuck was that possible? God, how I wanted to reach down there with one hand and grab hold of . . . something.
“Here, sit up.” She helped me up and smoothed my hair back over my shoulder. I swear, her touch just made me feel worse, hot flares tracing across my skin. “In a way, I suppose this is my fault.”
“This is all your fault!”
K smiled. “What I mean is that in our haste to attach the prosthetic, there was not enough time to calibrate it properly. I suspect that it is operating at a slightly higher sensitivity than normal.”
“Slightly?” I wanted to squirm at the edge of the bed. “What is this thing doing to me?”
“As far as I understand the device, it is . . . hijacking, I suppose, the signal being sent to your male organs and rerouting them to the prosthetic. The artificial vagina seems designed to react as naturally as possible, and returns the appropriate sensations. It may seem a little . . . touchy, at the moment, but should adjust itself to an appropriate sensitivity with time.” She hesitated for a moment. “Do you trust me?”
I gave a dry, slightly manic laugh. “Yeah, sure, why not?”
She reached down and with a few touches coaxed my thighs apart. I couldn’t watch as she reached between my legs. I couldn’t see . . . but I could damn well feel as one finger gently traced a path through those short curly hairs . . . her fingernail sent a shiver through my spine . . . and then the impossible feeling of actually being penetrated, the tip of her finger quickly dipping into something I couldn’t have. I swear I actually whimpered and had to forcefully keep my legs from clamping down on her hand.
When she pulled her finger back the tip glistened in the dim light. “Amazing,” she said.
“Yeah,” I added weakly. “No shit.”
“Back at the lab, they are not entirely sure how the prosthetic generates the lubricant, though they believe it draws and stores moisture from the body. It is not the real thing, of course, but the approximation is truly remarkable. It seems to secrete in response to sexual stimuli.” She looked at me curiously. “What does it feel like, David?”
I wanted to reach down there myself so bad, to scratch at that place that K had touched . . . but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not with her there. Not even if she wasn’t. That just wasn’t a line I was interested in crossing. But the sense of arousal wasn’t fading away. “It feels . . . it feels really weird, K. Like I’ve got a hard on, but I can’t touch it . . . it’s like some kind of wide-on, and it’s not going away.”
“I see.” She reached into one of those lacy cups and gently held one of my breasts. Her thumb brushed against the nipple and I jumped. What the hell? “The breasts seem to be responding as well.” I hadn’t noticed but it was true--an almost painful stiffening of the breasts, like screws being tightened and focusing the warmth swelling through my chest on that one point. “The nipples are responsive to sexual arousal as well as to changes in temperature.”
“Yeah, that’s just great.” Bloody hell. It seemed an impossible, surreal scene to me, poised on the knife’s edge of that bed, in these clothes, with this sexy older woman fondling my breast. “Do you, ah, mind?”
“I was curious as to what the response would be,” she said, without removing her hand. In fact, her thumb continued to absently flick across the nipple as her eyes curiously wandered across my body. “Your brain is sending very masculine signals down to the prosthetic, and the device returns feminine impulses. How is the information processed by the male brain? Can it properly interpret the sensations? How should your body react?”
“K, I . . . please. . . .”
Her other hand found its way between my legs again. This time my thighs did clamp down, trying to keep her out, but too late. Her palm cupped that feminine mound and seemed to capture and intensify the warmth down there. With her middle finger she slipped into that--dammit, into my--vagina, and my hips jerked involuntarily again. God, I was so fucking wet! “Of course, these devices are merely very convincing replicas. Hardly the real thing. The vagina, for instance, though capable of limited penetration does not extend as deeply as that of a real woman’s.”
She pushed her finger all the way in. Jesus fucking Christ! I nearly collapsed against her, releasing a short, high-pitched squeal. The sensation of something inside of me, it was . . . I don’t know what it was! Understanding of what was happening to me kept sliding away as overwhelming and confusing feelings bombarded my brain.
“Interesting,” she said. “Just deep enough for a finger.”
“K, you gotta-- you hafta. . . ,” I panted.
“Yes, Cindy?” she asked.
“Stop,” I barely managed to say.
She paused in her ministrations with one finger inside of me and her hand gently holding my left breast. “Really? You are a very strong girl, Cindy. I am not restraining you in any way.”
Damn that woman. Yeah, I could’ve thrown her off me easy. K’s clearly a strong girl, but like I’ve said--I’m in good freakin’ shape. I might not look it but I’ve got some serious strength behind me when I need it. Somehow, she seemed to have robbed me of it. That finger in my cunt was like goddamn kryptonite. I was so geared up, so horny from whatever that thing between my legs was doing to me that I didn’t want her to stop touching me. But I did want her to stop, because this felt so wrong. It also felt really, really nice in a very, very strange way.
“K, I . . . I don’t know if I can. . . .”
“Shh, Cindy.” Her left hand spidered up from my breast and gently stroked my neck before softly pressing a finger against my painted lips. “You have wanted this since you first laid eyes on me.”
I think that’s when it finally occurred to me that I was sitting on a bed with a very attractive woman wearing nothing but her bra and panties. Yeah, yeah, forget the fact that I was wearing pretty much the same shit and had tits and the other thing as well. K pushed forward and her mouth crushed up against mine. The sweetness of lipgloss danced on our tongue and I realized it was mine. Still with that finger inside of me, she pushed firmly against my chest and I fell back onto the bed. She followed me down, exploring the inside of my mouth. The thought that I was actually getting it on with K carried me to a new level of arousal . . . I felt my hardness grow . . . no, I felt a confusing swelling . . . I moaned into her kiss and her finger slipped in and out of my redoubled wetness.
“My, Cindy, you are an enthusiastic girl, aren’t you?”
I was already flushed from the experience but found myself growing even hotter with embarrassment, which in turn made me squirm with even more sexual hunger. God, I just . . . I wanted some kind of relief so badly! Our breasts crushed together as she bore down on me. My mouth hungrily sought hers and I began to push against her weight, my hands reaching for her ass, running through her hair, grabbing, aggressive.
“No!” she commanded. Her finger slopped free of my pussy and her other hand released my tit and she grabbed at my wrists. “Be a good girl, now,” she said, forcing my arms back over my head. She straddled me at the waist. I looked up at her, half-blind with passion. Her eyes glittered in the half-light. Her small, tight breasts, still in their bra, loomed over me. Her smile was hard and cold. “Be Cindy.”
What the hell did that mean? Her cotton-covered crotch hovered an inch over mine. I wanted to buck my hips, thrust up and penetrate her; my thighs and ass tensed up and my tits felt even hotter and tighter than before. She stole another kiss from my open, panting mouth. She planted a trail of kisses along my neck down to my breast. Both massive things had already popped free of the merrywidow. Her tongue found a nipple and drew it into her mouth. Her hand stroked my leg, drawing sensuously up the silky length of the stocking before toying with the lacy edge.
Her face pulled away from my chest. Her hair tickled my skin through the nylon as she languidly traced a path towards my groin. Both hands stroked my breasts and then my sides before sliding beneath my ass and roughly squeezing. I watched, stunned, overwhelmed by the conflicting sensations, as this beautiful, sexy woman worked her way down to my crotch. My breathing intensified in anticipation of her sucking me off . . . but I couldn’t . . . she wasn’t going to. . . ?
Her tongue darted out and lapped against a little button down there I’d completely forgotten about.
“Fu--!” I cried out, my whole body jerking at the overwhelming sensation. I think something erupted in my head. There was no mistaking my voice for anything other than a girl’s at that moment. My fists coiled in the sheets and I went momentarily rigid as a board. “Oh . . . God, K . . . .” I felt poised at the edge of some thrilling, dangerous precipice; every nerve inflamed and crying out for relief. I was terrified and enthralled by where she was leading me.
“Did you enjoy that?” she asked, lifting her head from between my legs. Her chin glistened and her grin was animalistic. “Shall I continue?”
I stared at her with open eyes. My whole body quivered with anticipation and what worried me most was that I didn’t even feel ashamed, spread out and desperate before her. I’m not sure I’d ever been this physically turned on before.
“Say it!” she demanded.
“Holy shit . . . yes? Please?” I barely managed to whisper it.
Her smile grew and I was chilled by how cruel she suddenly seemed. “Too bad,” she said, and she pulled away and slid off the bed.
What the fuck? No! “K, you can’t . . . !”
Her face suddenly loomed over me, eyes flashing angrily. “If you ever point a gun at me again, David,” she said, “I will break your arm.” Then she lunged down and stole a final, savage kiss before breaking away.
She returned to her bed. “I advise you to get some sleep,” she said, her voice barely heard through the confused anticipatory haze in which she left me. “We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”
I just lay there in stunned, eroticized silence.
“And Cindy? I strongly suggest you learn to control your urges. Good-night.”
She turned off the lights and went to bed.
By seven o’clock we were on the road again, heading for the Asklepios Clinic.
To be continued. . .
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Chapter Six: The drive to the Asklepios Clinic is a long one. It may be just what David and K, Cindy and her Mom need to work through some issues, share some history and learn a little more about each other.
Constant in All Other Things
Chapter Six
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent
-Much Ado About Nothing
The countryside blurred past. Behind us lay the city. Hours unspooled in near silence as the land outside the window became greener, healthier and wilder. We passed through the occasional town nestled by a river or in some nook or cranny between hills, but only stopped once for gas and food. She handled the transaction; I had little interest in stepping out of the vehicle. We ate in the car.
Mostly I stared unseeingly at the passing landscape, distracted and lost in thought. The ride was comfortable enough. The silence was less so. I couldn’t tell if K was left either angry or awkward after last night’s performance, or was maintaining her role as Wendy Jones, my supposed mother.
What do relatives do on long drives together? It’s not like I had much in the way of personal experience to draw from, you know? What do normal people talk about after a lifetime of conversations and arguments and listless Sunday afternoons? Therefore, other than a few simulated exchanges over inconsequential matters, Cindy and her mother said very little as the car wound its way deeper into the wilderness and higher into the hills.
Cindy mostly fiddled with the media centre, tuning in a new retro-rock station as the signal from the last one died out. She absently read a copy of YM her mother had picked up at the last stop and intently studied the section on makeup and hair. Every now and then she rubbed her bared knee and futilely tugged at the hem of her skirt.
I couldn’t believe that K put me in a skirt this morning. Hell, I couldn’t believe she woke me up at five-fucking-thirty in the morning. I mean, it must’ve been near three by the time my hard-on--or whatever the hell you call it when your cock’s caught beneath some kind of mad female prosthetic device--eased off and I finally drifted to sleep. The bitch didn’t even look tired, but then I imagine she’d had a proper night’s sleep.
Groggy and cranky, I didn’t resist as she stripped me of last night’s lingerie and hustled me into the bathroom. She got the shower started. Another lesson in femininity: it takes a hell of a lot longer to get ready and look pretty in the morning. Especially if you’re really a guy.
My first real shower with breasts and a pussy was a very strange affair, but I was too out of it to appreciate the absurdity of the situation. I won’t deny that a part of me wanted to caress those parasites hanging off of my chest or hold the shower nozzle down to my crotch. Even the thought of it sent a warning tingle to my groin that I knew better than to indulge. The reality, though, was that I was so damn out of it that I just robotically did what was required. K handed me a razor. I lathered up and cleared the pink-tinted foam away with quick, long strokes. It was still a hell of a chore to get at those awkward spots, especially now that those massive tits were hanging off my chest and bobbling about and getting in the damn way every time I bent over.
Out of the shower? Pat dry, again a bit put off by the feel of flesh against flesh without a comforting layer of hair. Then moisturizer, and by the time the task was done I smelled like a goddamn flower garden. I felt silkily smooth and ill at ease in my own skin.
Stepping back into the main room I found clothes laid out on the bed, thoughtfully picked by K for me to struggle into as she showered and readied herself. I ignored the clothes at first. The moment I heard the shower start I dropped to the floor and worked through a quick exercise routine. Like I said, I like to keep in shape. I mean, hell, I’d been working out almost daily for the last decade, yeah? Something becomes that ingrained it’s hard to give it up. Between the bullets and bruising and all the other shit, I hadn’t had a chance to work out for days and it was really starting to get to me. Despite the injuries, my body was itching for some exercise. Most mornings I like to drop out of bed and crank off some push-ups and crunches; it helps to clear the head. Chicks dig that shit too. They love to see a man work out and sweat.
Yeah, but somehow it just wasn’t the same. I stripped naked and dropped to the floor, and goddamn if those blasted tits didn’t hit the floor before I did. They dangled and swayed with each movement, distracting and annoying, and the extra weight was a real pain in the ass--and the back. I managed sixty before giving up, disgusted. Rolling over onto my back, the crunches weren’t as bad, but those boobs were still a smothering weight, flattened out across my chest. I had a real surreal moment then, lying on my back and looking down at my painted toes, across the bodyscape of my tits and smooth, hairless belly leading towards that hint of pussy nestled between my legs. Those hairless legs felt too smooth, too sleek, crossed at the ankle and held up off the floor. I felt a vague sense of disquiet as I began the workout. This wasn’t a point of view I wanted to get familiar with. A quick hundred and I reluctantly, uneasily clambered to my feet to confront the clothes K had picked for the day’s festivities.
She told me afterwards that she’d considered leaving me bare-legged, but thought my legs too masculine, too muscular. Therefore stockings, this time white, semi-sheer stay-ups to soften the strong lines of my calf and shin. Then panties, pink, silky and--K had to teach me this--boy-cut. It was a very strange feeling, tugging those lacy things on and having them pull up against a flat, smooth crotch for the first time. The final indignity was a white corset: not a small waist-cincher thing, but a goddamn full-blown, all-around-boning rib-crushing piece of torture in satin. K was done her shower by this time, slipping into the role of ‘Mom’. Too tired to object, I simply raised my arms as she wrapped the damn thing around my chest and began to tighten the laces. In deference to my wounds and heavy bruising she eased off when I gasped from the hurt, but there was something in the way she savagely jerked and tied off the stays before she returned to the bathroom that left me thinking she took pleasure in my pain.
It was freaky, I tell you, looking down at myself after that. Those sleek, boned lines glimmered in the light and really forced a feminine contour onto my body. Under-wire cups shoved that fake bosom up high, creating positively mountainous cleavage, while down below everything was smooth, with just the slightest hint of vaginal lips beneath the panty’s taut silk.
I had to quickly turn away from the mirror, seeing myself dressed like that. My crotch started to tingle again. God, how was I going to survive if even just seeing myself left me all hot and bothered?
You’d think compared to the corset that a skirt would be easy, but if anything that’s what nearly made me lose it that morning. It was a pleated (sunburst pleat, K informed me) green-checked affair, above the knee and flirty and just a little too school-girlish for my liking.
See, it’s like life’s made of all kinds of lines you draw in the sand, yeah? And those lines, when you reach them you say, “no way.” Some lines, you compromise: “Well, if I’m really drunk,” maybe, or “if she’s, like, fucking hot” or “damn, but a friend’s in trouble.” These last few days, I’d discovered a new excuse: “only if a sonuvabitch psychotic’s after your ass and you’ve got to act like a total girly-girl.”
So, yeah, stepping into that skirt felt like crossing one of those lines, one I never even knew I’d drawn in the sand. It’s one of those things you never really say to yourself. “No way I’m ever gonna wear a goddamn short, pleated skirt, unless . . . .” It’s like, painted-on jeans with a flared leg? Feminine, sure, but guys wear jeans so no problem. But guys don’t wear skirts. Ever. A kilt’s one thing. This was a skirt. Short and sexy and made to hang off of curves--curves I somehow now sported. It’s the kind of thing I loved seeing on flighty little things prancing around the club, offering tantalizing hope of glimpsing her tight ass if she just . . . bent . . . over . . . a little further.
Well, I wouldn’t be bending over for much in this bloody corset, but it was still my pantied ass on display, and tired as hell I still wasn’t very happy about it. But what could I do? I’d already had my masculinity-reaffirming hissy fit last night; K didn’t seem to be talking much to me as it was; and I was too exhausted to argue the point. So I stepped into the little pool of fabric at my feet and slid it up my legs and over those surprisingly flared hips. Without the corset I doubt it would’ve fit. As I zipped up the side it hugged my curves. Turning quickly caused it to flare out and settle in a pleated whisper around my thighs, barely covering the lacy top of the stockings. Up above, the exposed semi-circle of those compressed globes quivered disconcertingly with every breath.
The top was white and form-fitting, a turtleneck sweater with slender sleeves reaching just past the wrist. My arms looked slimmer--more feminine--less muscular--in that damn thing. It seemed almost a shame to hide that prodigious cleavage, but I also thought not having those jugs on display would make for a nice change. Thing is, they made such a tight, high mound, proudly pulling the fabric out between both peaks, that I almost felt more self-conscious than in yesterday’s outfit. Talk about sweater-meat, you know? Tucking the top into the skirt, it drew tight across my stomach and somehow made my waist seem even thinner. At least the high neck eliminated any chance of my Adam’s apple popping out.
Slipping on the same open-toed heels as yesterday, I was confronted with a very strange, very off-putting sense of relief: at least they’re only two inches, I thought, which immediately left me feeling queasy to my stomach. Since when had the height of my heels been a goddamn concern of mine? But after those idiotic fuck-me stilettos of last night, these day shoes were almost . . . comfortable, in a very relative sense. Who knew an inch or two could make such a difference?
With the wig back in place I stepped in front of the mirror to get the full impact.
My face, free of makeup, was incongruous with the overall image. I had a man’s face, a strong chin, a firm jaw line. That’s what I told myself. Because that body reflected in the mirror? All girl. When she reached back to pull her hair into a ponytail, her movements were a bit unsure, a little too forceful, manly perhaps. Her shoulders looked a little too broad. At rest, however . . . God, at rest, I looked like a damn girl. I understood then why K had left me to get ready on my own, why she’d forced a skirt on me this morning. This body reflected back would confront me in the mirror every day for the next few weeks. Somehow, I had to come to terms with Cindy.
Because when I stared into my eyes--free of the colours and powders that made of them something other--I still saw myself, masculine and confident. When my gaze slid across those forced curves, it’s a good thing my own expression was hidden from me. I didn’t want to see those eyes turn feminine and hesitant. I had to find some middle-ground between those extremes, or I’d go crazy before I could drop the disguise.
You know those lines I mentioned? The ones drawn in the sand? Yeah. Over the last few days, I think I’d crossed more of them than I ever thought possible. That’s the thing, I guess: these limits you place on yourself, on who you are and what you’re willing to do--most of them are unconscious. Unconscious, but you know when you’ve crossed one. That sinking feeling in the stomach, the sudden hot flush or stifled breath? Every punch to the gut and momentary unease over the last few days was me getting pulled and dragged into territory I never wanted to visit. And now here I was whether I liked it or not. Cindy Long. Age 20.
***
“How are you doing?” K asked me, and after a short pause she added, “David.”
I released a deep breath--as deep as the corset would allow--scarcely aware of having kept it in. Free of the need to act like Cindy I felt unconscious stress lifting from my shoulders. Yeah, riding in a Honda Civic through these unknown backwaters, the chance of anyone catching me out of character was pretty slim. The thing is I needed the practice, though I hated admitting it nearly as much as I did maintaining the charade.
I shrugged. Truth is, other than the boredom this was probably the most relaxed I’d been in weeks. ‘Relaxed’ is a relative term. I wasn’t in fear for my life at the moment, but on the other hand I wasn’t exactly comfortable, sitting there in that damn corset, legs crossed at the thigh like some pansy and dressed in a skirt that barely seemed to clear my ass. I was feeling a bit sweaty and itchy under all that foundation gear and the whole thing was starting to get stifling. My battered and bruised chest occasionally throbbed in indignant pain. Sitting in heels isn’t as bad as walking in them, but after a few hours I really wanted to stretch my arches out.
“Yeah, fine,” I said. “I guess.” I glanced aside at her. K kept her eyes on the twisting road ahead. The change in appearance was amazing, from the sexy, severe professional of a few days ago to dowdy middle-aged mom. When she dropped character, however, something in the way she moved, in those unflinching slate eyes, dispelled any doubts as to who she was.
“You did well this morning,” she said. “You managed your makeup well.”
She had me do my own makeup this morning, though under her tutelage of course. It took a few tries but I did a pretty good job, I thought. The mascara and eyeliner stuff kind of freaked me out--I didn’t like poking those bloody things so close to my eye. K handled the trickier bits, the expert touches that somehow thinned my nose and softened the jaw line. “Thanks,” I said. I flipped down the sun visor and checked myself over. The face that peered back was frighteningly feminine. Where had those confident eyes of earlier gone? “I guess I should touch it up, huh?” It still felt like a heavy, caked on mask to me, all that makeup and shit smeared across my face. Believe me, painting my face with that crap wasn’t something I was going to miss once this was all over. I reached down for my purse, but a brief touch of her hand on my knee stopped me.
“Your makeup is okay,” K said. She sighed. I was surprised at how tired she sounded. “David . . . listen. Not everything I say is meant as an order, okay? I am not always reminding you of what Cindy needs to do.”
“If you say so,” I answered, but started to touch up my makeup anyway. It’s not like I was going to try anything ambitious in a moving car. That stupid magazine--and holy shit, could there be anything more boring and patronizing than a teen girls’ magazine?--pointed out something about shiny bits on a girl’s face, and I tried fixing it up. God. I was actually ‘powdering my nose’. Bloody hell.
K looked away from the road for a moment to watch me. I ignored her, rummaging through the purse for some lipstick. I’d quickly discovered I preferred gloss to this other crap. Lipstick felt heavier and uncomfortable on my lips, and somehow seemed more ‘adult’, the richer opaque colour more sexual. I figured the earlier I got used to it, the better.
“Are you angry with me, David?” K asked. There was an uncertain tone to her voice that seemed quite out of character.
I looked away from the compact in my hand. The slender black tube hovered at the edge of my lips. Was she slipping back into ‘Mom’-mode? Was she trying to play me somehow? “Nah, why would I be mad?” I said, and returned to painting my lips. I’m pretty sure the magazine said something about blotting and I looked in my purse for a tissue.
“Fine,” K said. She handed me a tissue from her pocket. “Here.” Her tone indicated a return to the nearly unbroken silence of the last few hours.
I pursed my lips and then touched them to the tissue and checked the results. My mouth looked sexier, my lips fuller and smooth. The magazine recommended using lip-liner but I couldn’t remember what kind of look it was for. Odds are I’d just end up jamming the damn thing up my nostril next pothole we hit, anyway. Still, the difference that darker colour made was surprising, drawing my mouth out from the rest of my face. Tilting the mirror I checked around my eyes, the careful brownish-pink blending of eyeshadow across my lids, the mascara and eyeliner that somehow made my eyes look wider and brighter. Then I looked into those greener depths. It can be uncomfortable, staring directly into yourself and seeing what stares back. I lost myself for a moment, only to feel anger well up inside. I shut the compact with an angry snap and almost threw my purse to the floor between my feet.
“Yeah, K, I am fucking angry, okay?” I spun in my seat to face her, and the way the seatbelt drew painfully against my chest only spurred me on. “What the hell did you expect?”
She kept her eyes on the road and answered in a cool voice. “And what did you expect, David, pointing a gun at me?”
“Those asshole federal agents were flashing a picture of you, K! That’s not the kind of shit you want to see, not when you’re dressed up as a goddamn girl and the person responsible is the one they’re looking for. What the hell was I supposed to think?”
“I thought you said you trusted me.”
“I do!” I shouted at her.
“Do you like me, David?”
“What the hell does it matter? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“After you slipped on panties that first time,” she ticked off. “And again last night. That makes twice now that you have tried to ‘get it on’ with me.”
“Me?” I couldn’t believe this bitch! “You were the one finger-fucking me last night, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“I was merely testing the efficiency of the prosthetic.”
“The efficiency of. . . .” I nearly choked. “I call bullshit, K. You wanna know the truth? Yeah, I like you. God knows why, considering what you’ve put me through these last few days. But for whatever reason, you’re okay by me. And if you’re asking me if I think you’re sexy . . . hell yeah! I haven’t had any action in two months, and you’ve got a damn fine body when you’re not being a total bitch about it.”
“That may be the nicest thing a man has said to me in a very long time,” K answered with a thin, wry smile.
I wasn’t quite done, though. “But you know what I think, K? I think you like dressing me up like this. You get a kick out of making me act and dress all girly-like and shit. You ask if I like you? You ask if I’m attracted to you? Hell, K, I think you’re the one who likes me . . . no, fuck that. K, you’ve totally got the hots for Cindy!”
I glared at her, arms crossed beneath those massive parasites lurking in my sweater, waiting for an answer. Her grip tightened and relaxed on the wheel. She was angry; I hadn’t known her for long but I was learning to read her. After carefully weighing her words she answered in a curt, clipped tone without taking her eyes off the road.
“Do I like Cindy?” she said. “Yes, David, I do. In many ways she is far more pleasant company than you.”
I gave a short laugh. “You like your girls silly and weak, is that it K?” Damn, but I’d just known she was a dyke. Had her pegged from the first time we met.
“Do you, David?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes. Not for anything serious.”
“And you are an expert on serious relationships?”
“Yeah, well I’m sure that profile you’ve got on me has an answer. You? Much of an expert?”
“That,” K answered, “is none of your business.”
“Huh. And here I thought we were enjoying an intimate road-trip, getting-to- know-each-other moment.”
She looked aside at me and her eyes glittered enigmatically. “I am not sure you are the kind of man any woman enjoys getting to know.”
That actually hurt. The truth often does. Dyke bitch. “Fuck you, K.”
“You are arrogant, Mr Sanders. You are a crude and aggressive misogynist.”
I blinked. “Yeah, and?”
“That was not a compliment, David.”
“What, you think I don’t know what I am? K, I’m not a nice guy. I’ve done plenty of shit I’m not proud of.” I had to be careful. The temptation was there to say things that shouldn’t be said. Long-distance-drive bonding moment or not, mortal peril and all, some things in my past were staying buried. What was it about K that made me want to confide in her?
“And you know what?” I continued. “Yeah, I treat girls like shit. Know what the best thing is? I don’t feel bad about it. Not at all. If some dumb bitch throws herself at me, who am I not to catch her? I’m not her goddamn therapist. She’s got issues that make her wet her panties at the thought of bad boys, then hey! I’ll be bad. She looking for some gold-digging action? Hell, I’ll drop the coin on her but, yeah, I’m damn well gonna expect some drilling of my own after. I’m not the guy you bring home to the parents, K. I’m just not that guy. Never have been. Never will be.”
I watched K for any kind of reaction, but her thoughts remained veiled. From my end, having said my bit I couldn’t help but look over myself and wonder how inconsistent that kind of diatribe sounded coming from the glistening lips of a guy wearing a pleated skirt and silk panties of his own. Yeah, I’m a really fucking badass, I am. Still, I meant every goddamn word.
“But know what?” I continued. “If you think I treat all women like that, then your profile really hasn’t a fucking clue and you’re a worse judge of character than I thought. Because if I was with a woman like you, K? No way I’d treat her like shit.”
K locked eyes with me. “You are right,” she answered, and turned back to the road. “You would not.”
And I thought that was that. We sank back into silence. It began to stretch out. Somehow it didn’t seem as uncomfortable as before. When she spoke, her voice was quiet and caught me by surprise.
“I do like you, David,” she said, and her smile was so genuine and shy and so quick I nearly missed it. “And yes. I think I do have the hots for Cindy.”
***
K was hardly the first woman to call me a misogynist. They all did. I’m not talking about the silly things I brought home from clubs or the office. Dumb as they were, they usually knew the score and I never led them on. With few exceptions I never promised to call or any of that nonsense. If I did say I was going to call, you could damn well expect your mobile to ring soon, and not after some bullshit two-day wait. I rarely gave my number to a chick, though. No point in waiting for them to make up their mind, you get me?
The girls that lasted a little longer? The relationships--and it’s almost laughable to call them that--that endured a couple of weeks, a month, maybe two at most? Yeah, they didn’t usually end so well. Those girls had several choice words for me, and ‘misogynist’ sure as hell wasn’t one of them. It’s probably the fondest memory I have of Tammy. She revealed a surprisingly creative knack for swearing after I dumped her sad ass.
Akiko, on the other hand, was the one who taught me what the word ‘misogynist’ meant. That was the teacher in her. It was the kind of word she liked to use, being a university professor and all. She was trying to save me from myself and by the end of the relationship she decided the reason I was beyond saving was because I hated both myself and women. Which is crazy because, believe me, I definitely don’t hate women. Akiko, she always looked too deeply into things. I think it’s a danger inherent to studying books and shit.
Amanda called me a misogynist. She thought it was funny. Muna would’ve called me a misogynist had we dated longer. I seem to remember that she had an impressive vocabulary for a sixteen-year old.
I doubt Kate would have. She didn’t think I hated women. She couldn’t have cared less anyway. That’s probably because she hated women too. Actually, she hated everyone, including herself. To this day I still believe she hated and loved me more than anyone.
And Sakura? She thought I hated women too, and knew why, and taught me how to use that hate, how to make it blossom when necessary, how to restrain it when not. Sakura taught me many things and maybe that’s why I was never able to bring myself to hate her, no matter how hard she worked me, how savagely she beat me. What I felt for her was something more than childhood infatuation, something less--or different--than the overwhelming, consuming swell of emotions I experienced with Kate.
Unlike the other women from my past, thinking about Sakura didn’t get me--God!--moist in the crotch. I could still vividly picture her even though it had been several years since we last worked together. A tiny woman of Japanese decent and youthfully indiscernible age, she wasn’t what you would call pretty. But she was sexy, in the same way that power can be sexual. She was attractive, in the way a roadside accident draws attention. Looking at a picture of her you might not think much. In person? The woman had this real . . . presence. Nah, presence doesn’t cover it, not by half. You know that feeling right before a really big, really cool storm? That electric hum in the air and an expectant weight spread across the sky, as the clouds roil above and the wind blows stronger and stronger and the leaves rustle and hiss anxiously in the trees? Yeah, that’s kinda like how I felt around Sakura. Seriously.
To just describe her, the long, straight shiny black hair, her small dark eyes and angular features, captures nothing of whom and what she is. Emotions varied and strong animated her body and she was capable of the most amazing expressions of joy or welcoming or anger--but a few times I had this uneasy sensation that she wore these emotions like a mask, easily discarding and replacing them as necessary. She certainly was capable of revealing nothing when she chose to, turning inscrutable, empty. I never learned to read that woman, not when I dropped out of school to join the gangs and she started to teach me; not when she took me in after I ran away from home; and I understood her least of all when I turned to her after losing Kate. Even then, at the end, I couldn’t bring myself to hate Sakura.
“Hey there, you okay?” asked Mom, gently shaking my shoulder. “You looked a wee bit lost.”
I blinked, snapping back to the present. It was beginning to grow dark outside. A faintly transparent image hung suspended in the window I unseeingly stared through: Cindy, quickly sketched in obscure lines, long hair, empty eyes, wet lips. “Umm, yeah,” I answered softly. “Just . . . thinking.”
“About what, dear?”
My fucked-up past, I wanted to say, but instead I turned, tossing that long mane of golden hair over my shoulder, and gave her a big, shiny smile. “Nothing! Well, nothin’ important, anyway.” Yeah, I learned a thing or two from Sakura about hiding emotions, swapping masks. “Just kinda wondering when we’re gonna get to . . . uh, that place we’re going.”
“The Asklepios Clinic?”
“Yeah! That place. The, umm . . . Ask-a-place. Clinic. Thingy.”
Mom gave a tolerant smile, and pointed at the glove compartment. “Have a look in there, Cindy. I think I kept a flyer or something.”
Shrugging, I reached forward, popped open the compartment, and amidst the jumble of road maps, packs of gum, old CDs, a snub-nosed .45, a couple of flash memory keys for the media centre and crumpled napkins, I found a glossy fold-out leaflet.
“This it?”
She nodded. “Have a look before it gets too dark. You wouldn’t want to strain your eyes, now would you?”
“No Mom,” I mumbled.
The Asklepios Clinic: Cleanliness, Medicine, Healing, the leaflet’s front promised, apparently amidst the sanctity and privacy of nature’s embrace. I had the sinking feeling that K was bringing me to some dumb-ass Goddess-worshiping, Earth Mother-loving, tree-hugging, granola-munching hippy commune, but was surprised by what the publication revealed within. The clinic seemed to be some kind of combination private hospital, recovery centre and sanatorium, thoughtfully nestled away from the bustle and confusion of the big city. Those with either large sums of money or a special recommendation reviewed by a board of trustees were welcome at the Asklepios Clinic, to stay and heal and--I wasn’t sure what they meant by this--change.
The facilities seemed ultra-modern. The centre offered a full range of surgical, medical, psychological and strangely enough (I thought), spiritual services, spread between four distinct collectives: the Hygieia centre, Meditrine clinic, Panacea house and Telesforos retreat. Accommodations varied from communal to very private and the clinic promised that they catered to a wide, yet very selective, range of clients.
The low whistle I released was entirely out of character. “Holy shit, K,” I said, flipping back and forth between the pictures of happy, shiny people clearly enjoying their stay at the clinic. “What the hell are we heading to this place for?”
“You need qualified medical help, Mr Sanders,” K answered. “And you require somewhere private, secure and remote in which to lay low. The Asklepios Clinic was the nearest and best place available.”
“Yeah, but . . . .” I scanned through the leaflet again. “Can we afford this kind of place?”
K chuckled. “No, Mr Sanders, as well-paid as we may both be and even if we had easy access to our accounts, our collective income would scarcely cover a weekend’s stay at the clinic. Fortunately, I have some connections on the admittance board. A few favours owing, you could say.”
“Huh.” I wondered what kind of favours she had owed to her and what she’d done to earn them. There were more than a few favours owed to me out there as well, and I wasn’t exactly proud of some of the shit I’d done to get them. Still, owed favours were damn useful things to have. “But, ah . . . what about Cindy? What would she need with this kind of place?”
K--Mom--gave a loving pat to Cindy’s knee. “Don’t worry, dear,” she said, her voice tinged with sadness. “This is just what you need. A chance to finally get over the past.”
What kind of past, I wondered, could a girl like Cindy possibly have to get over?
***
We made a quick stop at a rustic truck-top on the outskirts of some hick town buried in these mountain woods. K negotiated for some take-out food while I ran to the toilet. We’d been driving for most of the day and I couldn’t keep it in any longer. Let’s just say my first time in a public toilet as a woman wasn’t a great experience and leave it at that. I was damn tempted to give the owner of that fucking place a piece of my mind about the state of his stalls.
We were back on the road within fifteen minute, settling back into a comfortable long-distance quiet. My mind drifted back to the clinic. Now, I knew that Asklepios was the son of Apollo and that he was the Greek god of medicine and healing and that he’d been trained by this Chiron guy. Surprised? I’m no idiot, okay? I’ll admit, though, that the only reason I knew this was because Akiko taught me. She made me read this novel, The Centaur, back when we were dating. It was by some American writer called John Updike or something and I’ve got to say it was pretty damn weird.
See, the thing is, I’m not stupid. Really. That psychiatrist who worked with me when I was transitioning from my messed-up teen years to my corporate-climbing adulthood ran a battery of tests on me. Psych tests are a joke, mostly. Some of them are really odd as well. Mostly they were fucking boring. At the end of the whole thing, she seemed fairly convinced I was--what’s the clinical term?--a bloody genius.
Yeah, well, she was a shit psychiatrist. I’m really not that clever. I’ve just got a good feel for people once I’ve hung out with them long enough, and eventually I was just feeding her what she wanted to hear. Which isn’t to say I’m stupid or anything. Thing is, I’m a quick learner. I really am. That’s why this Cindy thing had me freaked, sure, but not as much as it might have. Deep now, I knew I could do it. I didn’t want to--but could. All this chick stuff I didn’t know? It’s sure as hell nothing I enjoyed or wanted to know, but most of it was stuff I could learn, and quickly to boot. It’s not like slipping on a bra or slapping on makeup’s the same as brushing up on rocket science or something.
It’s one of the ways I survived my job at NeoPharm. When I knew something big was coming up at work, some presentation or board meeting or bullshit like that, I could head home and just totally slip into this state, yeah, and study like mad all night. I’d be tired as hell the next day but could create this total air of competence. But sometimes I’d slip up, rarely at work but more often out in the ‘real world’. I’d say something and the other person would look at me like I was a total freakin’ idiot or something. Being a quick learner is one thing, but you actually need someone to teach you that shit in the first place. Me, I never even finished high school let alone university, no matter what my CV or bloody profile said.
So that’s how I knew who goddamn Asklepios was and can recite bits of Anglo-Saxon poetry and run off by rote stretches of Shakespeare. It’s all Akiko Takahashi. But ask me about a lot of the other shit you’re supposed to pick up in high school--stuff like, I dunno, the quadratic formula and Christopher Columbus and The Catcher in the Rye--and I don’t have a goddamn clue.
So, looking at that pamphlet in the rapidly fading light, I couldn’t really puzzle out much more about the place. If K thought it was a good place to lay low for awhile until Steele’s attention turned elsewhere, then that was good enough for me despite any misgiving I might have. After all, I trusted her. Even if it meant I had to keep dressing and acting like Cindy for a few more miserable weeks. I just had this instinctive dislike for hospitals and psych wards and things like that.
Lost in thought as I was, K’s voice took me by surprise. “Cindy?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Aw, c’mon K. Do we have to?” Maybe I was tired, maybe I was still feeling a little cranky after my visit to the toilet, but I really didn’t feel like being Cindy at that moment. I hadn’t had to deal with or talk to anyone back at the last stop, but I sure as hell noticed the stares from men across the room. Fucking redneck hicks.
She looked my way. Along the edges of that strong unyielding gaze lurked a soft pleading. “Please?”
Her imploring tone was unexpected, yeah? It wasn’t the kind of thing I expected to hear from K. How could I refuse her? I took a deep breath.
“Yeah, Mom?” A subtle but very deliberate change crept over my demeanour, in the way I held myself, rested my hands, crossed my legs and responded to her words. My voice softened. These actions were very far from instinctive. After only two days, every movement was still achingly planned and deliberate. In some ways Cindy still seemed like an unfinished block of marble to me, a statue still waiting to find itself. Every time I sunk myself into this half-formed persona I chipped a piece away here; K added to her past and I carved out a detail there; a boy ogled her and I grudgingly refined another curve. Would this work-in-progress ever be complete? The thought both sickened and, in some strange way, intrigued me. Who would she be, this Cindy?
“No,” she said. “Not Mom.”
“Then who?” I asked, arching a thin eyebrow. In gradual steps I slowly shifted into Cindy: my wrist went just slightly weak and I held my fingers spread a little wider; my legs crossed comfortably at the thigh and I rolled my balance marginally towards my hip as I turned to face her; I absently fidgeted a little less with the feminine accoutrements spread across my body but toyed with my hair more. Was any of this properly feminine, truly Cindy? I was still trying to figure that out.
“Just me,” she said. “But I would rather talk to Cindy than David at this moment.”
Weird, I thought. “O--kay,” I said, creasing my brow in a cute frown. “Why?” I tried to add a lilt to my voice.
“Because sometimes it is easier to relate to another girl than a man,” K said. “And sometimes a friend is easier than a daughter.”
Interesting, though I couldn’t help but wonder whether the friendship extended to David as well as to Cindy. I sort of hoped so. Like I’ve said, friendship’s a rare and precious commodity.
My fingers danced along one of the pleats lining the skirt and I watched the play of my pink-glinting nails before glancing shyly up at K. “Friends?”
She nodded.
“Well, for a friend. . . . “ I gave a quick nod. “What’s up?”
K hesitated for a long moment and finally she said: “What’s your honest opinion of me, Cindy?”
“Honest?”
She nodded.
“Honest honest?”
“Yes, Cindy. Honest honest.”
“You’re, ah . . . just a bit scary, you know?”
The corner of her mouth twitched. “Is that all?”
“Um . . .well, I kinda think you might be a, you know, lesbian? Maybe?”
K mouth quivered with a barely-suppressed grin. “Does that bother you?”
I bit my lower lip and gave a quick, wide-eyed nod.
“How do you think David feels?”
This was getting really fucking weird. “I, ah . . . I don’t think he really cares. But he’s a guy, isn’t he? They really like that stuff, don’t they?” I wrinkled my nose in mild disgust. “Guys are like, just so gross! They all seem to think we’re one slumber party away from, like, lathering each other up in the shower and sharing full-body massages.”
“They do, do they not?” Almost reluctantly, her smile grew. “And you, Cindy? Have you never been at all . . . curious?”
“Ew!” I exclaimed. My hands fluttered in front of me in some kind of vague gesture of warding. “No!”
“Really?”
I blushed prettily beneath my heavy makeup. “Well . . . maybe a little. But only a little!”
K laughed. “You little minx, you! I bet only a little!”
I giggled, though it didn’t come easily. Strangely enough, I found that kind of bubbly, girlish laughter one of the hardest parts of pretending to be Cindy. I just found it really hard to laugh like a girl. It’s something I would have to master, because I figured that she was the kind of girl who laughed easily and honestly. I think I really liked that about Cindy.
At the same time, I felt a real surge of happiness at having made K laugh, and something in my reaction felt uncomfortably feminine. I paused for a moment, nearly breaking character. Making a friend laugh was a good thing, right? So why did it suddenly feel so wrong?
“So you prefer guys, then?”
I slipped straight back into Cindy without missing a beat. “Hell, yeah!” I exclaimed, and then a little less forcefully: “Well, the right guy, anyway.”
She nodded. “But other than the one back in high school,” she said, “you have never had a really long relationship, correct?”
That one back in . . . ? Bloody hell. Another reluctant sliver removed from the block of Cindy. “Uh, no.”
K smiled regretfully. “I almost envy you, then.”
I tilted my head to one side, absently brushing my bangs away from my eyes. “Really? Why?”
“No. It is nothing you need to concern yourself with.” She shook her head. “I should not have brought it up.”
I shrugged. “Why not? It’s just us girls, right?”
She glanced aside at me. “Just us girls?”
“Like a slumber party!” I tried another giggle. “Um, with wheels. And no showers, so I guess I can’t lather you up. Sorry!”
K chuckled. “You promise to keep this between the two of us, Cindy? Girl to girl?”
I’ve always known that girls are fucked in the head and love mind games, but this was bringing it to a whole new level for me. Still, I was curious where she was bringing this. Cindy nodded, those dangly clip-on earring brushing her cheek.
Even with my promise it took some time for her to begin. She kept her eyes forward but I could tell she barely saw the road. I curled my legs up beneath me and shifted into a more comfortable position in my seat. When K finally spoke her voice seemed to come from far away.
“Steven and I dated for nearly three years.” She must have anticipated my surprise. “Yes, a man. To quote a mutual acquaintance, Cindy: Don’t fucking presume to know me.” She smiled to soften her words. “I say we were together for three years but fully the second half of that could hardly be considered a healthy relationship. I am fairly certain he was cheating on me for most of the final year. And I know I was cheating on him. And yes, Cindy . . . I cheated on him with other women.”
Fuckin’ awesome! I knew it!
“Everything was great at first,” she said. “Then again, I suppose they always are. Steven and I should not have been dating in the first place. I was his superior, you see. Obviously workplace relationships are frowned upon in my line of work. At the same time, there is a tendency to look the other way when they invariably happen.”
“He didn’t mind you were his boss?”
K nodded. “I was concerned that he might be. Many men still have difficulty with the idea of a woman in a position of authority, even in this day and age.” She looked aside at me. “Would you not agree?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I answered, allowing some uncertainty to creep into my voice. I figured Cindy wouldn’t have had much experience with insecure pricks. Or rather she probably had, but rarely from a position of power. Cindy, she probably liked her men strong and in control.
“Steven assured me that he did not care. And for several months life was nearly idyllic. It was a very welcome change, I assure you, to come home to someone and to be able to share the difficulties of my work. The world, I discovered, is very couple-orientated. Together, it was like discovering a whole new facet of the city: restaurants, bars, clubs geared towards couples. We went shopping in the market together and once we almost bought a cat.” She smiled wistfully. “The sex was fantastic as well.”
“K!”
“Well, it was.” She smirked, looking aside at me. “Steven was hung like a horse and knew how to use what nature had given him.” She seemed to consider that for a moment. “I was excellent as well, I would like to think.”
“Ew! Moving along, please!”
She chuckled. “In any case, those first six months were wonderful.”
Anything after ‘six months’ was traveling into territory unknown to me. Kate for six months, Akiko for three: combined, my two longest relationships came up far short of what K was describing. Listening to her describe those first six months left me a little jealous. I really was. I wouldn’t swap what I had had with Kate for anything in the world. But a nice, normal relationship? God, how nice would that have been? Friday evenings on the sofa sharing a bottle of red wine, cuddling close as she kicked up her aching feet following a long day at the office--I’d never known that. A night out in a club beneath flashing lights and pounding beats, there for the music and the energy and especially for each other, kissing hungrily on the dance floor and tasting sweat and her hot breath . . . God! Is that what normal people had? I focused on K’s words before I started to tingle again.
“At the same time work became increasingly . . . difficult. Even though we shared the same line of work there were many details of my then-current assignments that I had to keep secret from Steven. Secrets are very destructive to a relationship, Cindy. Believe me.”
Yeah, no shit, I thought morosely, while Cindy offered an affirmative nod.
“The stress of those assignments began to creep into my personal life as well. When I was single I could release that tension in private without fear of hurting anyone. Living with Steven I found myself unsure how to cope with my stress. I couldn’t share it with him and by then we were all but living together and I found it difficult to find the privacy I needed to deal with the pressure.”
“What did you do?” I asked in a quiet voice.
“Nothing,” she said. “I kept it bottled up.”
“What happened?”
K sighed. “I broke down. That night remains very vivid in my mind, Cindy. I remember walking into the apartment and sitting at the edge of the bed. I was still dressed from work and holding my briefcase. My firearm nestled close to my chest beneath my vest and for a brief moment I considered pulling it on myself.”
I stared at her in shock. “You--”
“Only for a moment.” She shook her head. “I would like to think that I am made of sterner stuff that that. But even to contemplate such a thing . . . that moment of weakness was devastating. I collapsed into tears. I do not cry often or easily, Cindy. But at that moment I felt lower than ever before or since.
“It was a very strange moment for me. Even as I crumbled within, I felt almost as if I could observe myself from outside. I saw myself in tears and felt nothing but disgust. I berated myself to no effect. I called myself weak and a coward. A collapse was not something I could afford at that time. If I failed at my job people could die. No, people would die and that was simply intolerable. It was that simple. Yet somehow I failed to response to my own orders, and sat there in tears.”
“K, I’m . . . sorry,” I said. I reached out a tentative, comforting hand and lightly gripped her shoulder. As David the gesture would have seemed inappropriate or effeminate.
She gave my hand a quick squeeze. “Thank you.” She cleared her throat. “Looking back, I suppose it was inevitable. Sometimes I regret that I was not stronger, more capable. However, I also recognize that I had taken on too much, too quickly.” She shrugged. “I like to think I have learned from my mistakes.”
“So what happened with Steven?” I asked.
Her smile was brittle. “When he found me later that night, he had no idea how to deal with my breakdown. In fact, other than a few half-hearted attempts, he did nearly nothing at all. For the first time in two weeks he slept at his own apartment that night.”
“He left you like that?” My shock was genuine, being equal parts Cindy and David. Cindy, I’m sure, empathized with K and was horrified at the thought of being left alone in that state. I felt nothing but disgust for the kind of asshole who could abandon a friend and partner like that. More often than not I’ve left a chick and she’s been in tears. If we’ve met up a half-dozen times and she’s already declaring her love to me and is somehow shocked that I’ve decided to leave . . . that’s her problem, not mine. I feel nothing but scorn for people who invest themselves so quickly into someone they’ve just met.
But it’s a very different matter with someone I really care for. Women like Akiko, Kate--they were more than just lovers. They were friends. Nothing could have pulled me away from them in time of need. Nothing.
K nodded. “Yes, he did. That night was one of the worst of my life. Truthfully I remember very little of it. Certainly I did not eat. Somehow I managed to crawl into bed. I missed work the next day. I cursed myself the whole time but could not bring myself to answer my phone or to leave my bed. That was where Steven found me when he returned to my apartment on the third night.
“I still had not eaten,” she continued. “I was still wearing the same clothes as well. It was a miracle I found enough strength to use the toilet the few times I had to. I was weak and confused and that was the state he found me in.”
“What did he do?”
“He took charge,” K said in a very matter-of-fact way. “With the efficiency of a drill sergeant. He ordered me out of bed and when I ignored him he slapped me.” She stopped my outcry with a raised hand. “He violently pulled me from the bed and forced me into the shower and then he made me eat. At every step he controlled my actions and told me what to do and punished me physically whenever I began to slip back into that passive, mindless state.
“Yes, of course I could have stopped him at any times. He was a strong and well-built man, but nowhere my calibre a fighter. And I hated every slap and punch, every pinch and shake and rough grab that bruised my arm. Yet for some reason I could not bring myself to resist him. He was putting me back together but in the way that he wanted, and the pieces were not fitting together correctly.”
Outside the car the world continued to blur past, barren farmland and the occasional lonely cow glimpsed amidst the thickening woods. The sun was very low and burned brightly orange as it touched the horizon. I saw this as a backdrop to K’s story against which her features, attentive to the road, were highlighted. What she was telling me seemed impossible; I could not reconcile the girl she described with the sexy, strong woman sitting next to me.
“The thing is,” she continued, “because of him I was able to return to work. I survived that first day, and the next, and the week after that. But not on my own. I became completely dependant on him. Even after several months, by which point I felt strong and fit once again. To everyone else at work I was back to my old self. What they did not see was what happened when I returned home.”
She stopped for several minutes. K seemed lost in thought. When I had asked her about her serious relationships earlier that day, I thought I was just swapping some playful banter. The last thing I actually expected was an honest admission of this nature. At the same time part of me remained suspicious. I wasn’t fucking proud of that warning voice in the back of my head, but still couldn’t help but wonder: why the hell is she telling me all this?
“Our relationship had changed in a fundamental way,” K eventually continued. “Though I was still the boss at work, he had definitely become the dominant partner at home. The details I do not feel like sharing. Suffice it to say that for nearly a year I felt constantly humiliated, sickened and debased. Steven had me do and act and speak in ways that I am still ashamed to remember. It almost seemed that the stronger I became in my outside life, the weaker I became at home. Sometimes I wonder if I was able to cope with the tension at work because of that. Certainly the stress that broke me in the first place did not lessen; if anything it grew worse. Yet stripped of all responsibility and control at home, I somehow returned to work every morning strong and capable.”
“That . . . that seems kinda fuck . . . uh, messed up, K.”
She shrugged. “Perhaps it was. The situation could not endure, of course. Steven began to demand more. With me securely beneath his thumb, it increasingly became apparent that he had begun to cheat on me as well. Eventually he made a mistake.”
“What did he do?”
“He made the mistake of allowing our public and private spheres to meet. I became aware of whispers and smirks and jokes that ended when I entered the room. The woman I was at work was forced to confront the woman I had become at home. She was not impressed. I was not impressed. Yet I was still incapable of ending the relationship. His hold was somehow that great over me. I still craved the discipline and control at home despite the near constant disgust it left me feeling. I suppose this was when I began to cheat on him as well. Of the whole experience this is perhaps the part I regret the most. I began to do to others what Steven was doing to me. Though never to the degree I endured, the way I treated the girls I met at that time was deplorable.
“And finally Steven went too far. He used his control over me to try and advance his position at the agency.”
I nodded. “It didn’t work?”
Her smile turned bitter. “No, he got what he wanted, though it wasn’t what he expected. What he never realized, even after all that time, was that the woman he dominated at home was a very different person from the federal agent he knew at work. To her there was little he could do. He requested a field placement for which he was grossly under-qualified. The position seemed simple enough but the competition for the job was fierce and it seemed to offer quick advancement through the ranks. Steven wanted me to push his application through; he wanted the job.”
“You told him to go fuck himself?”
K looked at me. Her eyes were angry and her lips cruel. “No, David. I gave him the job.”
“Why?”
“What Steven was unaware of was that the placement was far more dangerous than he realized. I however was fully informed as to the risks inherent to the job. The agency was subtly looking for a very specific type of individual for a very difficult job and used the competition to veil the true intent of the recruitment process. I knew that for a man of Steven’s skill the assignment was essentially suicide. I warned him to avoid the job. He insisted I give it to him. His attitude at home grew even worse, more forceful, more demanding. Nevertheless, professionally speaking it was my responsibility to ensure only qualified agents were moved forward.”
K took a deep breath. When she spoke her voice was even and her tone, cold. “I gave him the job anyway.
“He was killed within the month.”
***
Yeah, you can imagine that what she’d said preoccupied me for a while, until finally I pushed my rambling thoughts aside for later consideration. I’d been staring blankly through the window long enough for the sky to turn one of those deep blues against which pink-tinted clouds scurried; and then darken and fade into night. Stars lit up and the fingernail-sliver moon slowly rose high and brilliant in the narrow winding gap between the thick trees lining the road on either side. The radio shifted to something jazzy and mellow and we rode through the dark cocooned in trickling piano notes and resonant bass lines. Occasional flares from the side of the road revealed the startled night eyes of unknown wild animals warily watching our passage. When I turned to K she was illuminated by the crimson dashboard glow, her features highlighted in fiery hues.
It occurred to that she must have been exhausted, that she had been driving nearly non-stop for over a day now. “Hey,” I called out in a quiet voice. I was reluctant to disrupt our calm passage through the night. “Hey, K, you okay over there?”
She shrugged, a surprisingly relaxed response. “Yes. Why do you ask?”
“Dunno.” I stretched out my legs, rotating my ankle to ease out the pain of wearing heels all day. Just wearing the blasted things was enough to kill my feet. “It’s just been a long day. Thought you might be tired, is all.”
K glanced my way and offered a wan smile. “Mr Sanders? I am utterly exhausted.”
“You want me to drive?” To be honest, it was a reluctant offer. The gentle light, the music, the passing dark left me lethargic. I felt minutes away from drifting off to sleep.
K shook her head. Her hands remained sure on the wheel. “No need, Mr Sanders. Allow me to welcome you to the Aklepios Clinic.”
At first there was little to see. K gestured for me to use that damnable spray on my throat as we drew close to out destination. My throat tingled and tightened as I scanned the road ahead and I saw faint glittering lights nestled in the depths of the trees on both sides. These lights grew increasingly frequent, until suddenly we left the trees behind and entered a large, cultivated space across which many low-lying building spread. K threaded the car towards a central building, all modern-looking glass and concrete, that was one of the few still lit up from both outside and within this late at night.
Aklepios Reception Centre announced a sign up front. Cleanliness, Medicine, Healing. The building sat atop a low hill and offered a decent view across the entire compound. The place reminded me of a university campus. Cobbled walkways wound away from the building and towards other centres and into the outlying trees, reaching towards those concealed lights; private residences, I assumed. Larger roads worked their way between main buildings and led to three larger edifices at far ends of the Centre. A few bright lights gleamed from within rooms in those far buildings, but otherwise the compound was only softly lit by scattered walkway lampposts. There was an almost eerie silence once K pulled the keys from the ignition and we stepped from the car. Other than the wind and a few solemn crickets, complete quiet reigned.
I glanced across at K. “Cindy mode?”
Mom nodded. “Let’s get you checked in, dear.”
I gave my legs a quick stretch then sat in the passenger seat with the door open. I checked myself in the mirror and touched up my lipstick. Alright man. You can do this. No freaking out this time. Those wide, brilliant green eyes stared back at me and glimmered with playful confidence. With an almost rueful smile Cindy stepped from the car, hoisting her purse over one shoulder.
“Let’s go, Mom!”
To be continued. . .
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Chapter Seven: David and Agent K check in to the Clinic, but the disguised man’s instincts are proven correct: there’s more to the place than meets the eye.
Constant in All Other Things
Chapter Seven
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent
-Much Ado About Nothing
A gentle night wind, laden with the smell of eucalyptus and wild thyme, tugged playfully at her long hair. Zephyrous fingers lifted her skirt and softly stroked the pale skin briefly revealed over the top of snowy-white stockings, and just as quickly withdrew with a sibilant snigger. The skirt settled in a cascade of pleats as Cindy absently brushed a few errant strands from her face back behind one ear. She walked confidently across the pavement towards the brilliantly lit entrance.
The building was a low-built piece of minimalist modernist design, all bleached concrete, odd angles and wide windows that glittered with captured outside light. A clean white walkway of cleverly interlocking stones, lined on either side by carefully trimmed hedges, led to the bright entrance. After the time spent driving through darkness, the effect was harsh and nearly blinding on the eyes of the two women. Cindy’s mom wearily opened the door for her daughter. Dressed in sneakers, jogging pants and a baggy faded T-shirt emblazoned with “Florida: The Sunshine State”, Wendy Jones seemed drab and just a little out of place.
The younger girl smiled gratefully to her mother. Her steps faltered slightly and she slowed her walk as she approached the rough-hewn stone desk at the far side of the room. The staccato sound of her heels clicking against the stone underfoot resonated crisply through the bare hall. The floor was slippery and polished to a brilliant, almost wet-looking sheen. Fine lettering set into the stone counter, lit softly from within in pink, welcomed newcomers to the ‘Aklepios Clinic’ and promised ‘Cleanliness, Medicine, Healing’.
The lights at the far end of the hall were softer and subdued. An unremarkable but attractive young man stood behind the counter. His hair was short and his face clean-shaven, his crisp white shirt tucked into well-fitted grey slacks. He offered a somewhat bland smile at their approach.
“Welcome to the Asklepios clinic,” he said, his eyes slowly looking over Cindy before passing to the mother. “How may I help you?”
Cindy smiled and leaned tiredly against the desk. It came to just above her waist, and the sign below felt warm against her bared thigh. “Hey there,” she said, smiling brightly though her eyes looked tired. “How ya doin’--”her eyes danced across the boy’s chest before settling on a small, gold nameplate pinned to his pocket--“Chris?”
“Very well,” he answered, returning his attention to Cindy. “May I be of assistance?”
She leaned forward slightly, arms crossed beneath her bosom. “We--ll,” she drawled, and grinned, “I think we’re here to check in.” Cindy glanced aside at her mom. “Yeah?”
Wendy nodded. She handed a manila folder tucked under her arm to the young man. “You’ll find all our documents in order,” she said curtly. Cindy was a little surprised by her mother’s abruptness. “My name is Wendy Jones. This is my daughter Cindy Long.”
The boy sat down behind the counter. A moment later they heard the tapping of his fingers dancing across an unseen keyboard. “This will just take a moment, Ms Jones,” he said. “Thank you for having everything so well organized.”
Cindy glanced aside at her mom before returning her attention to the boy. “So Chris,” she asked, and the pink glow from the counter seemed to settle in glistening hues across her lips. “Do you like having things in order?”
“Yes,” the boy answered without looking up.
“Has it been a busy night?”
“No”
She rolled her shoulder forwards, bringing her elbows closer together to accentuate the tight curves beneath her sweater. “You work here all night on your own?” she asked, her voice a suggestive purr. She licked her lips. “It must get awfully lonely.”
“Not really,” the boy answered. His eyes glanced up then dropped back to his work. “I’m sorry Miss Long, but I’ll register you faster without further distractions.”
Wendy chuckled.
Cindy glared at her mom. “What?”
She shook her head, grinning beneath innocent eyes. “Nothing, dear.”
A few minutes passed in silence interrupted only by the sound of typing. Bored, Cindy played with her hair as her gaze swept across the long window-lined room. The contrast between the light within and the dark beyond the windows made it impossible to see outside, though the faint impression of branches could be seen swaying in the wind, clawing and clicking against the glass. Water trickled in some fountain unseen in a room beyond the reception desk. When she stepped away for a quick wander her mother held her back with a soft touch. The boy finally looked up.
“Welcome to the Asklepios Clinic, Ms Long,” he repeated, eyes on Cindy. This time his smile seemed genuinely warm and welcoming. “We have you registered in a private room in the Hygieia Centre. Lisa here,” he continued, gesturing to his side just as a young woman stepped into view, “will show you the way to your room.” Her uniform, a short grey skirt over pale tights, and a white blouse identical to Chris’, was equally crisp and professional.
“If you would follow me?” Lisa’s voice was pleasantly soft and lilting.
Cindy looked to her mom for acquiescence. Wendy nodded and they fell into step behind the young girl.
“I hope you enjoy your stay, Cindy,” the boy called out from behind them.
***
Yeah, I enjoyed the trip to the room, watching the sway of Lisa’s rounded little ass beneath her skirt. I was only a little put off by the fact that my skirt was shorter, my heels taller, and my every step that much more feminine. It’s hard not to lose some of your mojo when your tits are bigger than hers, yeah? I’m sure K, walking a few strides behind, was enjoying her own view of my panty-clad ass swaying with every bloody step. Still, if every chick working in this clinic was as hot as Lisa, it was going to be a long and hard couple of weeks.
Mom grabbed a couple of bags for the night and we clambered onto this swanky little golf-cart-type contraption. It hummed quietly as we drove across the clinic. The drive was smooth and the air cool and refreshing as it breathed across my legs. Low-powered headlights cut a hazy swath ahead of us, briefly illuminating empty benches, small cultivated gardens and darkened buildings. Only once did we glimpse other people, a man and a woman standing close together beneath a tree. Their startled faces loomed palely at us before the path we followed twisted away and left them behind. I thought I saw a guitar in the man’s hands.
I looked up at the sky and was treated to a view unlike any I had seen in far too many years. Multitudinous stars infused the late-night dark with resplendent glory, scintillating in a wavering sparkling stream from horizon to horizon. The small gasp of joy and wonder that escaped my painted lips sounded far too feminine and I didn’t give a fuck. All those years of living in the city, I had forgotten how much I missed the sight of a night sky untainted by the wash of city neon. I realized then how true the old saying really was: you can take the boy out of the country--I guess you can even stick that boy into panties and a bra--but you can never take the country out of the boy.
“That’s Ophiuchus,” Lisa said, pointing to a spread of stars over the horizon. “Our namesake.” I looked where she directed but couldn’t really make out any kind of shape or anything. Constellations have never really been my thing. Anything beyond the Big Dipper and the shiny one that shows the way north, and I’m hopeless. I’ve never been good at making shapes out of a random scattering of dots, yeah? “The legends say that Asklepios’ skill at medicine grew to be so great he could cure even death. Eventually he drew the jealous anger of Zeus, who struck him down with a thunderbolt. Afterwards the thunder-god recognized the importance of the healer to mankind, and granted him immortality as a constellation.”
“Why did Zeus, you know, kill him?” Sitting in the back, I had to lean forward to ask.
“According to legend, the goddess Athena asked him to bring Hippolytus back to life. He did as she asked and this so angered Zeus that he slew Asklepios.”
Mom, sitting next to me, chuckled. “Another version says Zeus was angered by the fact that Asklepios accepted money in exchange for his skills.”
The younger girl shrugged. “Here at the clinic, we prefer the first version.”
“I’m sure you do,” Mom said wryly.
The rest of the trip went by in silence. Before long we approached one of the large buildings at one end of the complex. There were a few windows lit up from within, but otherwise the building was quiet and dark, as were the many smaller structures clustered around it. Lisa brought the cart to a silent stop before a four-storied residence. “Welcome to the Hygieia Centre,” she said. “And the Cos Residence, your home for the duration of your stay.”
She led us through a small lobby and to an elevator that quickly brought us to my new home: Cos 402. Lisa had me rest my hand against a small ebony panel set next to the door before entering. It tingled warmly for a moment and then the lock clicked open.
“The door has been set to your fingerprints,” she said. “It will only open for you.” The door lacked any kind of knob or handle.
Lisa gave a quick and efficient tour of my new home. It was simple but well-furnished, with very modern amenities meeting just about any basic need I could imagine. Small kitchenette, bathroom, bed: check. From a decent-sized sitting room Lisa led us onto a small balcony that looked over a communal courtyard. Pale lights illuminated a quietly gurgling fountain and some benches. Across the way a single room was lit up, but otherwise everyone in Cos seemed asleep. Lisa demonstrated some basic electronics set into the wall and a list of numbers set next to the phone: doctors, help lines, that kind of thing. With a final helpful smile she asked if we had any questions.
“Nah, I think we’re fine.” I smoothed my hair back to one side and smiled. “Thanks for your help, Lisa.”
She nodded. “Enjoy your stay at the Hygieia Centre,” she said. I swear, the little flirt held eye contact with me for a moment longer than was strictly necessary or comfortable, and her smile twitched into something slightly more playful than professional. “Feel free to call me if you need any extra help, Cindy,” she said, and a moment later the girl left the room.
With a weary sigh I collapsed on the sofa. I threw my head back and stared at the ceiling. “Oh, thank God!” I exclaimed. “My feet are killing me.”
K dropped our night bags to the floor. “Congratulations, Mr Sanders,” she said, slumping gratefully into a sofa chair opposite me. “Welcome to safety.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “Really really.”
“Huh,” I grunted. A moment later I chuckled, and then laughed outright, my relief tempered only by exhaustion. “In your fucking face, Jeremiah Steele!” I reached down and unbuckled those damned torture devices that passed for footwear, and sank deeper into the sofa. “Shit, does that ever feel good,” I sighed, shoes dangling from my toes. “I’m never gonna make fun of chicks for wearing these goddamn things again.”
K chucked tiredly. “At least your ordeal has not been a complete waste, then.”
“Yeah.” I sank deeper into the comfort of the soda, not ready to drift off to sleep, enjoying the moment of tranquility. Was I really safe? K seemed to think so. As far as hiding places went, this was a hell of a lot more comfortable than anything I’d expected. It certainly beat the shitholes I hid in for the weeks leading up to the trial.
Except. . . . As I sat there, arms thrown wide across the back of the sofa and absently gazing down at the firm curves that now defined my chest, I just couldn’t bring myself to relax. I’d been running and hiding and tensing at every suspicious sound for the last two months--it was going to take a hell of a lot longer than five minutes for me to calm down. But it was more than that. It was a hell of a lot more than that. If someone had asked me just then to define what was wrong I couldn’t have done it. Something about this place, about the Asklepios Clinic as a whole, left me uneasy. Those two kids, Chris and Lisa, something about their bland pleasantness and neutral good-looks struck me as . . . off, somehow.
I didn’t doubt K’s assurance that this place was somehow safe from the long arm of that bastard Steele. At the same time, I had the feeling that the clinic was dangerous in its own way, a danger somehow separate from the one pursuing me.
It was a gut feeling. It was a crazy, paranoid feeling; obviously I’d been on edge for a little too long. Still, I knew better than to ignore my instincts. I wasn’t about to let down my guard . . . yet.
“So . . . what now?” I asked K.
“Tonight?” she asked. “Or for the future?”
I shrugged. “You pick.”
“For the next few weeks,” K said, “you maintain the illusion of Cindy. Lay low, recuperate, and when Mr Steele’s ire has abated or his attention turned elsewhere, you will be relocated into a new persona and life.”
“A male one, yeah?”
She smiled. “Yes, Mr Sanders. A male one. Though I will be sad to see Cindy go.”
I chuckled. “I’m sure. I might miss her a bit myself.” I gave those tits of mine a little squeeze and shove, adjusting them into a more comfortable position within their cups. “Not gonna miss all this other crap, though. This corset? Yeah, not very comfortable.”
“You have my sympathies,” she said. “However, you will need its assistance a little while longer.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled.
“As for tonight,” she continued, and sighed, “I am afraid that we are not quite finished.”
“Why?”
“Because tonight, Mr Sanders, you have the singular honour of meeting Mr Jonathon Bridges.”
Despite our exhaustion we soon roused ourselves and made a basic effort to settle in. Fifteen minutes after we started there was a short knock at the door. There was no one there when K answered, but she found all our luggage waiting in a compact pile in the hall. I noted that she checked the door without hesitation--no firearm held ready, no standing to the side when she opened the door. Her obvious trust in the place helped ease some of my concerns.
We quickly unpacked. K had brought a hell of a lot more stuff from the safe house than I’d thought. There were a few relaxed outfits for Wendy Jones, but Cindy seemed to have enough crap to ensure she didn’t have to repeat an ensemble during her stay at the Clinic. When I travel I travel light, with a few concessions given to the nature of the trip. I get by on a few pairs of underwear and socks, one short-sleeve and one long-sleeve shirt; one long pair of trousers and some shorts. That’s usually including the clothes on by back. And a toothbrush, of course. Can’t forget that. I could go for weeks with just that, all rolled up small and tight in a backpack.
Cindy, on the other hand, seemed to have brought with her the greater part of a High Street boutique for a three-week stay. Five pairs of shoes --thank God this included a pair of sneakers--a regiment of skirts, a company of tops, a whole battalion of accessories and a goddamn army of lacy underthings; and they all needed putting away. Since they were technically mine, K was happy to watch me work as she relaxed on the side of the bed. I pulled out a ‘modest’-cut bikini.
“Why the hell did you pack this away?” I demanded.
She shrugged. “I thought Cindy might like to take a swim.”
I held up wispy nothing of seductive fabric.
“A peignoir?” I asked
“I am impressed that you know what it is called.”
“In case that Fosters guy comes looking again?”
“Better safe than sorry, Mr Sanders.”
Shaking my head I stowed away the rest of my wardrobe. Cosmetics went in the bathroom, a plethora of tubes and small bottles and jars of various colour and ineffable function. Everything in its place. K liked to be organized. The case with the handguns she stowed beneath the bed, locked. My new home only had one bed, a comfortable-looking double. K had very few clothes of her own with us. The conclusion seemed obvious.
“You’re not going to be staying, are you?” I asked, smoothing a short-cropped top over a hanger.
“No, Mr Sanders, I can not.”
I nodded, my feelings conflicted. In trusting K I’d allowed a certain dependency to form. For most of my life I’ve been in charge of what I do and how I do it--or at least lived within the illusion of being in control, which is pretty much the same thing. In becoming Cindy I had given up a lot of that control and I wasn’t too happy about that. Thing is, I’m not a girl. I don’t know how to be a girl, to act like Cindy and talk and dress like her. K was my teacher in this strange and confusing art and the thought of carrying on without her guidance gripped me with a sudden and embarrassing fear.
Far more difficult to deal with was an entirely unexpected sense of loss and sadness at the thought of her leaving. Sure, less than a day ago I’d been pointing a gun at her, but damn if I hadn’t come to really like K. She was a friend--maybe the only friend I had now that Tom was gone and my previous life lay even further behind me than ever before. True, she preferred Cindy to David. And she was a total bitch and probably borderline psychotic. But for all that--maybe because of that--I felt comfortable around her in a way that I’d never been with a woman before.
Ultimately, though . . . I was looking forward to being on my own again. I truly was. Some habits are hard to break. When you get down to it, I’ve been alone for most of my life. Yeah, there were brief interludes spent in the company of others, but for the most part the great acts of my life have been a one-man play.
And I’m okay with that. I really am. Whenever I’ve spent a lot of time with another person, this need to just . . . escape, to break away and be on my own, has always built up. Even for just a few hours, a day or two sometimes; it’s like I have this need to re-find myself, yeah?
Because I’ve known way too many people--usually chicks, sure, but like that’s a surprise--who just can’t deal with being alone. People like that usually annoy the shit out of me. You know, like the ones who always have another relationship lined up before they finish off the one they’re in? I hate that, the whole swinging through the relationship jungle, still holding on to one vine while clutching desperately at the next. Yeah, that shit’s just sad.
What are they so afraid of? Is it the idea of actually spending a Saturday night alone? Probably, because you know what happens when a person spends too many nights alone? They start looking inside themselves. They look inside and know what? They usually don’t like what they see. People start to figure out what they’re all about, and the thing is . . . most people don’t want to do that. Because nobody wants to find out that there’s a hell of a lot less to them than they thought. Confronting the fact that you’re really a sad little fuck like everyone else is a soul-numbing experience.
And that’s why everyone wants a secret little fetish or vice they can clutch to their bosom. Then they think they’ve got free license to slyly judge others, thinking, “if only you knew my wicked secret.” God. I can totally respect the man who drinks to forget past horrors, but is there anything more pathetic than the alcoholic who drinks because he’s fucking bored?
You better believe that I’ve spent quite a few nights on my own. Especially when I was growing up. And I won’t lie: I discovered that there were a lot of dark and ugly places inside of me. Over time, they’ve just gotten darker and uglier, full of slimy and hateful things. Violent things. For the greater part of a decade I wrestled with what I found within me, tried to control the parts of me that left me capable of doing stuff . . . well, stuff I’m not proud of. Capable of doing the kind of things that brings you to the attention of a woman like Sakura.
I’m not a nice guy. But I’ll be damned if I’ll hide from that truth. Just as K clearly refuses to hide from her hateful things. I can respect that.
Cindy, on the other hand. . . . I had the feeling that she didn’t like being on her own. She was exactly the kind of girl who holds on to the hand of one boy while picking up the phone to call the next. She couldn’t spend time looking within herself, because there was nothing there to explore. Or so I thought.
“You will need this,” K told me, handing me a thin folder.
It was the one she had shown me that very first day after I’d been shot. “Cindy Long. Age 20,” typed in simple, small lettering across the label. Inside was everything there was to know about Cindy. There wasn’t much, just the barest sketch of a small-town girl. A birth certificate. Primary and high school records, a few job listings. Childhood accomplishments and fears, teenage awards and failures.
“She’s got a profile?”
“You have a profile,” K said. “This is you now. For the next few weeks.”
K explained to me that she had other responsibilities that had to be caught up on. She told me that she would return to check up on Cindy when possible. There were some basic instructions she wanted me to follow: places to go, places to avoid in the clinic; days to stay in the room and others when she wanted me out and about and visible. The spray for my throat couldn’t be abused--once a day maximum, and preferably only every second day, unless I wanted to risk permanent damage to my voice box.
Then her watch beeped, and it was time to meet Dr Jonathon Bridges.
K proved almost annoyingly fussy as she had me touch up my Cindy disguise. She had me brush out the wig and take care of my makeup, and once again--under duress, believe me--I slipped on those fucking heels. Meanwhile she swapped Wendy’s soccer-mom clothes for something more professional, slipping back into the outfit of K, secret agent. She seemed strangely nervous and fidgety as she made the finishing touches to both our ‘costumes’--again, I found myself wondering how authentic the cool, severe appearance of my protector truly was. On the other hand, there was no denying the ease with which she pulled a weapon from the gun case, quickly checked and loaded the weapon, and finally slid it beneath her jacket.
The hallway was quiet and softly lit when we left my new room. The elevator brought us to an atrium, and there into an underground passage connecting the residence to the main Hygieia Centre. Both the elevator and the door to the tunnel required the touch of my fingers to a small ebony panel before we could proceed. With each step the click of my heel reverberated and returned to us as we proceeded along the tunnel. Like the rest of Clinic I’d seen so far, the tunnel was immaculately clean and lit in soothing, diffuse lighting. Intermittent alcoves held colourful bursts of potted plants, or pieces of abstract art revealing swirls and blotches against broken backgrounds. The cameras, I noted, were very well hidden.
“It gets quite cold during the winters,” K explained to me in a low voice. “And occasionally the snow gets quite deep. Most of the clinic is connected by underground passageways similar to this one.”
I was dressed as Cindy but apparently it was David she was bringing to meet this Dr Bridges. We didn’t meet anyone on the way, though we did pass through a junction that I assumed indicated the basement of another building above. Finally we stopped at a large glass sliding door with the words ‘Hygieia Centre--S1’ written in large red letters. The room on the other side was dark. When I touched my hand to the panel it released a soft buzz of denial.
“I’m sorry, Cindy,” a pleasant male voice spoke. Obviously pre-recorded, ‘Cindy’ sounded only slightly disjointed from the rest of the sentence. “But the Hygieia Centre is closed. Please return during normal daytime hours. Do you require any other assistance?”
I turned to K. “Do I?”
“No.” She stepped forward and touched the panel. There was a brief pause and then the audible click of a microphone being turned on.
“You’re running late, Katherine.” The voice was deep and spoke in a hurried, clipped pace.
“Well I’m here now, Jon.”
The voice chuckled. “And this is the guy, eh?”
“No, Jon, it’s an escaped transvestite hooker. What do you think?”
“I think this might just about make us even,” the voice answered. The panel dimmed, and a moment late a small access door, previously perfectly hidden within the wall opposite, silently slid open.
I followed K into a medium-sized room. The door closed shut behind us. The floor jerked, and the room revealed itself to be an elevator. That same voice, now tinged with humour, reached us from a speaker hidden somewhere above:
“Welcome to the Asclepieion, Mister Sanders.”
***
I’ve never read ‘Alice in Wonderland’ but that Alice girl, as she tumbled down the rabbit hole, must’ve felt a bit like I did now: apprehensive, slightly overwhelmed and, were she to admit it to herself, just a touch excited. However, I kept my attention on K. She seemed different somehow: a little less sure of herself, or maybe just softer around the edges, relaxed. Was this another disguise?
Doctor Jonathon Bridges waited for us when the elevator shuddered to a stop. He was short--just a little shorter than me in heels--but thickly built with broad features, thick lips, a flat nose and an amazing shock of wildly dishevelled red hair. His arms thrust out of a white lab coat that seemed two sizes too small for him. His fingers were short and stubby but twitched in constant motion, and presently he jabbed his hand at me in greeting.
“David, right? So you’re Katherine’s new project, eh?” he said, giving me a crushingly firm handshake. I met his grip with one of equal strength. His dark eyes glittered with amusement and pleasure. If he was at all put off at seeing me dressed like some sophomore tart, he gave no indication. Instead he stomped away down the passage, making a spastic arm gesture which I could only assume meant we should follow.
“I’m sure you’re all tired.” He spoke over his shoulder as he led the way. The passage showed none of the aesthetic design of the rest of the clinic: these tunnels were bare concrete, the ceiling writhing with exposed cabling and piping that snaked into the darkness ahead, and the walls bulged with electronic boxes and access paneling. “So we’ll make this quick. This is the Asclepieion. Forget all that nonsense upstairs. Cleanliness! Medicine! Ha!
“This is our temple of knowledge and medicine--this is where the real stuff in the Clinic takes place. But you’ve never been here, got it, girlie? Never even heard of it. Yes?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, sure.”
“Good. Next: I don’t care why you’re here. She--,” again his arm jerked, this time in K’s direction--“vouched for you, and that’s good enough for me.”
I glanced aside at her. “Katherine?”
“You can keep calling me K,” she answered coolly.
“And if you like dressing in drag, that’s your business,” he continued. He stopped at a metal door set in the stone wall and quickly punched a code into a keypad. A red light turned green and the door gave a jerk. He pushed it open on creaky hinges.
“Hey waitasec,” I protested. “I don’t like. . . .”
“None of my business,” he repeated, leading us into a small room. “Now strip.”
“Hey . . . what?” The room was lit by a flickering florescent tube overhead. Sickly green paint flaked away in the corners. Every free piece of wall space seemed jammed and cluttered with equipment of all size and shapes, some jostling for room on a variety of tables and stands, others bolted to the wall by heavy steel studs. A medical examination bed sat centrally, and a desk overflowing with paper and charts stood shoved up against the nearest wall. A computer screen flickered to life as the doctor made a few twitchy pokes at the keyboard.
“Strip,” he said without looking back. “As in ‘take your clothes off.’ You speak English, right? It’s time for your check-up. Now this is the thing, David. And that’s the last time I’m going to call you by that name, got it? Not that I expect we’ll meet often. As long as you’re at the Asklepios Clinic, you are Cindy Long. I don’t care how, I don’t care why. But you are Cindy.
“See here?” He pointed at the screen. I had a glimpse of a wire-frame map that I quickly recognized as the route K and I had taken through the Hygieia underground. Some highlighted red dots along the path pulsed slowly. A second window brought up an image of a fingerprint--presumably mine--and next to it a still-frame image of Cindy placing her hand against the panel.
“These are your prints, and the system registered you using them here, here, and here,” he said, tapping each point on the screen. He hit a few keys, and the fingerprint image shifted. “These are your new prints. Every time you touch one of the biometric pads, the system will swap in these records instead of your real ones. If anyone raids the security logs looking for the prints of David Sanders, they’ll find nothing.
“Cindy’s been put up in a nice private room.” His eyes flicked over to K. “She’ll be catered to and taken care of for the duration of her stay, with the same quality of service we extend to all the other rich and sick idiots up there. The Asklepios Clinic will do everything it can to expedite her healing and assist in her departure.” His voice sounded like he was repeating something by rote. “With the usual discretion, of course. Yeah? That’ll do?”
“Yes, Jon, that will do.”
“Good.” His eyes flicked back to me. “What, you’re not naked yet?”
“Easy, Chief,” I said levelly. “Slow down.”
“The name’s Jonathon,” he said. “She can call me Jon. You call me Doctor. Got it?”
“Yeah, sure, doc, whatever you say.”
“Doctor,” he repeated, eyes glittering. “Not Doc.”
“Listen, buddy,” I said. “I’ve had a rough coupla days. I’m wearing a fucking skirt and I’ve got a fake cunt glued over my cock. I’m bloody tired, my feet are killing me, and I’ve just been dragged into what looks like, near as I can tell, some kind of secret underground mad scientist lair, so if you don’t mind I think I’ll skip the goddamn formalities. I’ll call you Scooter if the fucking mood takes me, got it? Especially if you think I’m gonna drop trou just because you tell me to.”
The bastard laughed. “Mad scientist lair! I like that!” His eyes flicked over to K. “You were right, she does have quite the mouth on her, eh?” When he turned back to me his smile was gone. “Listen, I like you. You’ve got spunk. But I want you to be very, very clear on this very important point. This is my facility. You are here at my sufferance.
“If she’s brought you here, dressed like that, it’s because you’re in a lot of trouble. And you better appreciate that she’s cashed in some pretty hefty favours for me to take you in.” I glanced aside at K but her eyes revealed nothing. “This facility is not some kind of lair. We are not mad scientists, nor is our work illegal. But it is secretive and hiding someone like you here puts our work in serious jeopardy. I will not have this facility or the people who work here unnecessarily placed in danger.”
“Someone like me?”
“The kinds of people she brings us,” he said, and jerked a thumb towards K. “Usually have very unpleasant people after them.”
I couldn’t disagree with him there.
“So this is the deal. You do what I say and you don’t ask questions. You act like the best little Cindy you can and stay out of trouble. The clinic can help you with the first; you damn well better take care of the second.
“But most of all,” he said, and jabbed one stubby finger hard in my chest, “you show me the respect I’m due. You understand, girlie?”
Believe me, I had to fight back the sudden temptation to grab that fucker’s finger and show him a thing or two about respect. I’ve got a real problem with authority sometimes. I can deal with people telling me what to do. I honestly can. But lording their power over me? No way.
But I’m not stupid. My employment at NeoPharm would’ve been really bloody short if I hadn’t held back every time some dipshit manager took on airs and told me to do something idiotic. And this Jonathon guy, he wasn’t an idiot. I could tell that in an instant. I didn’t pick up any kind of bad vibe from the guy, but a person would have to walk a very fine line with him. Back down too easily and you’d lose his respect and he’d walk all over you; push too hard and you’d have an enemy you wouldn’t want to cross. Especially here, on his home turf.
I glanced aside at K and she seemed rather amused by the little discussion between the doctor and me. Again I wondered what she’d done to get a guy like this, running a place like this, in her pocket. There was no point in belabouring the point.
“Yeah, I understand,” I said, and hopped up on the bed. I pulled the sweater off over my head, revealing the corseted glories beneath. “So where you wanna start, Scooter?”
He glared at me, but the corner of his mouth twitched with a barely repressed smile. “Just strip, will ya?” he said, and walked away to have a few quiet words with K. I got to work on my clothes. Bloody hell, but escaping from those feminine confines on my own was a chore in itself. Women have a hell of a lot more buckles and straps and hard-to-reach clasps and zippers and buttons to contend with. Fashion was starting to feel like a minor form of bondage to me. At some point the doctor wandered back over, and his impatient mumbling, as I struggled to strip down to my panties, suddenly twisted into an appreciate whistle. His eyes widened as those massive parasites clinging to my chest swung free.
“Hey, they’re not real,” I insisted.
He barely seemed to hear me. “Amazing,” he said, and before I knew it his hands were glued to my chest. He felt for a seam where those things met my flesh and found none. “Remarkable,” he added, hefting one in his hand and finding the weight and feel almost indistinguishable from the real thing. “Responsive?” he queried, flicking a thumb across the nipple.
“Yes, fucking responsive,” I snapped, slapping his hand away. Believe me, I wanted to do a hell of a lot more than just slap the pervert. Ever since those boobs were stuck on to me people seem to feel this incredible need to ogle and play with the goddamn things.
He glanced aside at K. “NeoPharm?”
She nodded. “A recent acquisition.”
“Those bastards,” he said, voice scored with grudging respect. He brought his head eye-level with the breasts and grabbed hold once again, this time kneading and squeezing. “The synthetic simulation is incredible.” I looked over his mess of fiery hair and shot an angry glare at K. She grinned.
“Enjoying yourself?” she asked.
Bridges grunted an affirmative as I grumbled, “No!”
He looked up at me. “You can feel my touch?”
“Yes, I can feel your touch,” I ground out through clenched teeth. His touch was doing nothing for me. K’s tender ministrations the night before had brought those fuck-udders to life in a way that still had me a little apprehensive. The doctor’s touch was rough and rude and embarrassing. He was starting to royally piss me off.
The man shook his head in disbelief as both nipples tightened beneath his gaze. “The response patterning is truly stunning.” He glanced aside at K. “They finally got to Ghulam Khalid, didn’t they?”
She nodded.
“I knew it. Those bastards. The man’s a genius in his field. I wonder what they offered him.” He looked up as I jerked beneath his touch. “You okay?”
“No, I’m not.” A gentle prompt from K urged him to begin the examination proper. He quickly went through the usual routines, poking and prodding away as he maintained a quick and steady stream of verbal diarrhoea. When he went to listen with his stethoscope it took a few not-so-subtle reminders to keep him from returning to another examination of those goddamn breasts of mine.
Obviously we skipped the ‘turn-and-cough’ part of the check-up. Considering how he flipped out over the breasts, no way was I going to let him start prodding away at my synthetic pussy. Finally he focussed on the bruising localised on my right side. Over the last two days the bruising has settled into a nice, purpled blotch, yellowed at the centre and darkening and finally fading towards the edges. With gentle but constant pressure he pressed along my ribs, all of them, eventually reaching my damaged side.
“Does this hurt?” he asked, pressing lightly.
“Uh,” I grunted. “Yeah.”
He moved along and pressed again. I released a low hiss of pain.
Nodding, he had me stand and walk to one side of the room. I wasn’t sure when K had stepped out of the room, but I can’t deny I felt a little self-conscious, padding across a cool concrete floor wearing nothing but a pair of lacy panties, naked breasts bobbing gently with each step, left in the company of some pervert doctor I barely knew. He barely seemed to notice me, though, poking spasmodically at some buttons. Some of the equipment along the wall folded out and extended paneling and a module he assured me was for taking X-rays. A few chest-level clicks later and Bridges checked out the images on his computer.
He nodded at what he saw. “Minor fracture,” he said. “Two ribs. Painful?”
“Only when I take a deep breath. Or lie on my back.”
“Then don’t lie on your back. Especially with that extra weight on your chest. Best you can do is sleep on your side--the hurt side. It might hurt a bit more but it’s safer for your lungs.” He rummaged around in a drawer and pulled out a small, nondescript brown plastic bottle. He flipped them my way and I snatched the bottle from the air. “Painkillers,” he said. “Strong stuff, long-lasting. Take one every eight hours or so. There’s enough there to last your stay.”
I stared at the bottle dubiously. Like I said, I’m not big on drugs. “That’s it?”
He shrugged. “Normally I’d bind your side for the next week, but if you’re going to be wearing that bloody thing,” he said, waving towards the discarded corset, “it’ll do pretty much the same thing.” He shook his head. “I really don’t see why you types like wearing that stuff so much.”
“I told you,” I insisted, “I don’t like. . . .”
“Not my business,” he cut me off. “As for your ribs, all you can do is wait and heal. It should take four, five weeks before everything’s knit up nice and solid again. Now . . . how about you get yourself dressed so we all can get some sleep, eh?”
***
Later that night I sat on the edge of my bed, lost in thought. The peignoir K and I joked about earlier settled in a lavender chiffon sigh over my body. I stared into the full-length mirror across from the bed. With the makeup cleaned away and the wig off, my face again looked incongruous atop my overly-muscular but undoubtedly feminine body. Through the sheer material those breasts were impressively and proudly rounded, sitting high and firm on my chest. The nipples thrust out against the slightly rough fabric and the feeling of those nubs drawing across the material with every movement I made was decidedly unsettling. The matching lavender panty stretched taut across my hips, still defined by the corset K insisted I wear at night.
My hands sat crossed in my lap, resting lightly over that impossible pussy. Every now and again it reminded me of its presence with an occasional twitch, a sensation that felt a bit like an itch that resonated lightly as a warm flush across those breasts. Lost in thought as I was, the sensation was easier to ignore than usual. I held a letter in my hands. It was from K. She must have written it as Doctor Scooter gave me my physical.
K was gone.
She had left about half an hour ago. Cindy and Wendy gave a teary farewell for the benefit of any watching cameras, and then K drove off into the night.
I found the letter as I was getting ready for bed. I’d happily stripped out of the day’s clothes once again and then tiredly spent another thirty minutes in the washroom, washing the makeup from my face and moisturizing and taking care of all the other strange and unfamiliar things girls do before bed. K had taught me well. The wig required a quick brushing and my underwear couldn’t simply be left strewn across the room. I was really growing to hate these goddamn feminine routines. I took some solace in knowing it was only for a few weeks. It was past midnight by the time I popped one of the doctor’s pills and finally pulled the peignoir over my head. I gingerly slipped under the sheets. I found the letter beneath my pillow.
Cindy, she started, in a fine, angular scrawl that marched across the page with almost mechanical precision. Then she crossed out ‘Cindy’ and started again with ‘David’:
David,
I should not be writing this. I trust that you will destroy this letter once you have read it. Any evidence of your true identity could undo us both. However, I am sure my concerns are unnecessary as you have displayed an uncanny ability to immerse yourself in the character of Cindy. Sometimes it is easy to forget that she is only a creation of both our minds. Who will she be when next we meet?
Study the profile in detail. Memorize and destroy it afterwards.
No. This isn’t what I wanted to write about. David, it is true that I have other responsibilities that require my attention, but they are not the only reason for my departure.
I believe that my presence has become a liability in your flight from Mr Steele. I have many enemies of my own. They should not become your enemies and the added pursuit of men like Fosters only places you in greater danger. I hope that by leaving I can draw away such hostilities.
But again, I shy away from what I want to say. Truthfully, you are safer at the Clinic than anywhere else I could bring you, especially in your current guise. No, if I am a danger and liability to you, David, I must accept that it is because I find myself losing the professional distance that my job demands.
You are a thoroughly dislikeable individual, Mr Sanders. Your attitude toward women is deplorable and your constant arrogance and abusive manner and aggressive nature have infuriated me constantly since our very first encounter. And yet despite this. . . .
You confuse me, David. Between you and Cindy I feel unbalanced, unsure of myself in a way I have not been . . . since Steven. You are very much like him in some ways and yet clearly so much more than he ever was. In our drive to the clinic you said that you thought I enjoyed dressing you up as Cindy, that I enjoyed making you act, in your words, ‘all girly-like and shit’.
I still believe that a feminine disguise was your best chance at survival. However, your words struck far closer to the truth than perhaps you know, closer than I realized myself. You saw something within me, David, a dark and ugly place I have tried to ignore for far too long. Through you, I believe I may have begun to exact some form of revenge on Steven, inflicting on you a twisted version of what he did to me. And through Cindy I continued to indulge the same urges I discovered back then as well. In you I discovered a joint potential for revenge? release? wickedness? I could scarcely control.
Perhaps I would have continued in this way had I not discovered, much to my own surprise, that I quite liked Cindy. Even more surprisingly, I developed a respect for you, Mr Sanders . . . a grudging respect, I assure you. In many ways I suspect that you are a far stronger person than am I.
You will be safe at the Asklepios Clinic. Jon is a good man and can be trusted. I will return as soon as possible. Take care, David. Take care, Cindy.
The letter was signed Katherine.
I should have destroyed the letter immediately. Instead I slipped it inside my copy of ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’ and placed it on the bookshelf. Now I sat at the edge of my bed, alone, in a darkened room lit only by a single bedside lamp, staring into a mirror and finding nothing there. Eventually I turned off the light and tried to sleep.
Outside, I thought I could hear the wind blow softly through the empty and silent spaces of the Asklepios Clinic. It was probably just my imagination as I slowly drifted into a dark and dreamless sleep.
To be continued. . .
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Chapter Eight: David settles in to life at the Clinic and perfects his disguise. The clinic promises safety but David’s paranoia leaves him in doubt, even as Cindy makes a new friend.
Constant in All Other Things
Chapter Eight
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent
-Much Ado About Nothing
The bed was warm and comfortable, the room dark and still. Heavy blinds cut off the daylight completely. A wonderful lethargy crept through my body. For an indeterminate period I felt no sense of time or space, just the presence of the duvet as an almost nurturing weight pressing down on my side. Rolling onto my back there was a dull throb in my side, easily ignored; those pain-killers Scooter gave me were strong stuff. As I reluctantly shifted into full wakefulness my mind was bombarded by a deluge of new and bewildering sensations.
This was my second time waking up in bed as Cindy, and my first proper night’s sleep in . . . God, I had no idea. For a moment I felt utterly confused: where the hell was I? What the fuck was I wearing? It seemed absurd, impossible that I was dressed--in lingerie--with these things--and shaved legs; how had this happened? The uncertainty quickly faded. I remembered K and Scooter, Agent Fosters and Jeremiah fucking Steele.
That brief moment of waking clarity shattered beneath the onslaught of foreign and feminine sensations. The weight of breasts on my chest and their soft, sensitive presence beneath the duvet; the silky slipperiness of the nightgown that twisted like a secret between me and the sheets; even the taste of last night’s cleanser and moisturiser, now a faint echo on my lips: all these were strange and new to me.
Strange as it all was, absurd as my situation seemed--was I really dressed as a fucking girl, in hiding from a homicidal maniac?--I couldn’t lie in bed all day whining. After indulging in a deep, fatalistic sigh, I tossed aside the duvet and sat up in bed. Again a distracting flood of sensations--the way those oversized tits swayed and drooped as I sat up; the fall of the nightgown around my shorn legs--but eventually you’ve just got to adapt and ignore, accept and move on. I had a couple weeks of this bullshit ahead of me, and if I kept stopping to contemplate every difference in body and clothing that comes with pretending to be female, I’d go fucking crazy.
As my first day as a single white female began, I realized that without K, I had no idea what to do.
See, I’m a creature of routines. I don’t know why. It’s probably a neurotic reaction to the randomness of my childhood. As a working adult I took to the Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five routine like . . . well, like Cindy to lip gloss at the age of twelve. Wake at six, work out, shit-shower-shave, eat and then the ride to work. Same stop, same time, same route, every morning.
It’s not like I’m the only one doing this or anything. After a while I got to recognize the people on my route, the other ‘regulars’: that guy in the natty suit with the pricey briefcase but gay-looking ponytail and one really long nail on his pinkie; I watched that dude eat a Macintosh apple every single morning for three goddamn years, nibbling his way around the core before tossing it as he stepped off the bus. There was the mousy little girl with startling blue eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses; she had a different novel in her hand every second day and every one of them was some kind of murder mystery. (And yeah, I eventually solved her mystery, if you know what I mean. . . .) Same people, same route, same bloody routine, every day for years. Some people might find that kind of sad. Me, I loved the routine.
Sure, it’s comforting and all, but there’s much more to it than that. So much becomes possible through familiarity. There’s confidence to be found in routine. Even more importantly, there’s the possibility for change--for real change, meaningful change. I wanted to believe that. I really did. I had to, for fuck’s sake, otherwise my whole life would turn out to be a goddamn waste. Day after day, through the repeated actions I had developed for the new adult life I’d been thrust into, I was making myself over into--well, into David Sanders. Someone very different from the person I’d been before.
That’s probably why I’m not a huge fan of change. Whenever one of the people on my route disappeared and never came back, I felt--sad. Seriously. Felt almost like a personal affront, you know?
Therefore, left in my room and unable to go out on account of my voice, I tried to fall back on established routine. Some of the usual routines had to be changed, of course. These weren’t changes I wanted to make, mind you. They were . . . girly routines. Yeah, doing the same thing again and again can lead to a change of who you are, but this wasn’t something I particularly wanted to become. When I stepped out of the shower I patted dry and powdered and moisturised, and knew that I’d be doing the same damn thing every single morning for the rest of my time as Cindy.
Done with the bathroom, I popped one of Scooter’s painkillers and slipped back into that goddamn corset. There was a sharp stab of pain in my side as I slowly zipped the front. The satin pulled tight against my bruise, but the ache quickly faded and the added tension did seem to keep the area secure. With each closing tooth of the zipper I felt the corset create my contours and draw in like a second skin around my torso. I adjusted the breasts more comfortably in their cups and took a tentative, shallow breath. The damn thing was annoying, but to be honest it really wasn’t that uncomfortable. I could breathe, albeit a little more shallowly than normal, and it forced me to move in such a way that minimized the chance of drawing pain from my side.
And it did keep those tits from wobbling all over the fucking place as I dropped to the floor for my morning workout. Push-ups, Sit-ups, tricep-presses and dips, whatever I could do working with what I had in the room. Each move was done with excruciating care to minimize the chance of aggravating my cracked ribs. God, what an incongruous image I must’ve presented: big-titted babe doing push-up in a corset--you don’t see that every day! It was a short routine, under an hour once I got through all the other stuff, but I was sweating and red in the face by the time I finished. It wasn’t that I was out of shape: bloody hell, but I couldn’t breathe properly with that corset wrapped around me.
Finally I couldn’t put off what I’d been dreading most. I faced a new and bewildering dilemma: the challenge of the wardrobe. I stared into the closet for at least ten minutes, at the range of colours and lengths and fabrics and styles spread out before me, and felt nothing but fear and confusion. I had to close the door and walk away. Without K to pick out the day’s outfit I was lost.
I was about to turn to one of the teen girl magazines K had left behind when salvation came from an unexpected source. I thought maybe I could mix and match something similar to what one of those glossy bimbos were wearing, but the phone rang before I could embarrass myself.
First I had to find the damn thing, and then I stared down at it, unsure whether I should answer or not. What the hell, I thought. K assured me that the place was safe. I picked up the receiver. “Cindy,” I said, in a low, breathy voice, barely above a whisper. “Um . . . hello?” Without that spray I didn’t sound much like her.
“Not bad, Girlie,” said the brusque voice on the other end. “But you better learn to do better.”
“Hey, Scooter? Bite me. I’ve had a rough morning.”
There was an annoyed silence. “That’s ‘Doctor Bridges’ to you.”
“Sure,” I said. “What’s up, doc?”
He sighed over the line, but when he spoke his voice sounded cheerful. “Just some good news. You’ll absolutely love this, Cindy. Your type always do.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“Well, I did promise Katherine that we’d take proper care of you. And from what I saw last night, you’re looking a little rough. Seriously. Don’t be talking to anyone under bright lights, because with a face like yours? You’ve got a jaw to make Dick Tracy proud.”
“I like my chin just fine, thank you. So did you call just to bitch about my face? Or do you have something to say?”
The doctor chuckled evilly. “I’ve called to let you know I’ve arranged for a team of the Asklepios Clinic’s very best to, ah . . . take care of you today.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll see. They’ll be there in a few minutes. Slip on a bathrobe and just try to relax. Girls love this stuff.”
“This stuff? Hey--”
“Don’t worry. They’re professional. They’ve dealt with all kinds of patients in the past. They’re very discreet. Oh, and they know you can’t talk so don’t worry. They’ll take care of everything.” The bastard really sounded overjoyed. “Enjoy yourself, Cindy!”
***
That first morning and afternoon was spent buried in the warm folds of a heavy terrycloth robe, sat deep in a chair as a small army of beauticians hovered about. Goddamn Scooter and his ‘professionals’. Damn, but did I owe that bastard one or what? I contemplated a fierce and fitting revenge as those girls poked and prodded and otherwise pampered me nearly to the point of insanity.
“You just sit back and relax, honey,” said the team leader. She was slightly plump but immaculately made-up. “Just let Sheila take care of everything.” Then she handed me a small whiteboard and marker. “I’ve heard about your throat, you poor thing. Well, if you need anything just let us know.”
Of course, once the acrid scent of those damned gel extensions had set and the girl working my hand finished shaping them, I was left ‘mute’--at that stage there was no way I could hold a damn pen with those quarter-inch claws. Left unable to protest, the girls were free to go to town on me. I don’t know if they knew or even suspected that I wasn’t the twenty year old princess they were turning me into. The way they chatted and fussed, I doubt they would’ve cared.
I mean, my robe did fall open at times and they must’ve had a good look at my generous curves. Hell, they probably had a few accidental glimpses of that pussy as well. The contrast between that and my otherwise masculine features must’ve confused them at least a little--yeah? I mean, my hands and feet aren’t huge or anything, but they’re not exactly delicate either. I’m fairly proud of my manly jaw and strong nose. I’m a good-looking guy. K thought some of those looks were androgynous; I’ve never thought so. Maybe my eyes were a bit effeminate, and the makeup did something strange to my cheekbones, but I definitely wasn’t naturally ‘girly’. No fucking way.
I spent most of that day in a daze, lying half-asleep in a chair with my limbs splayed out, fingers dangling into little bowls of liquid, women fluttering about my feet, and someone slowly working through my scalp. I definitely woke up when they started stabbing holes in my ears, but the pain faded quickly once they popped the studs in. Then I woke up again once they started tearing my eyebrows off with little waxy strips. Those damn bitches took far too much pleasure inflicting pain on me, let me tell you!
Once the nails were set I was free to idly flip through a magazine, one girl or another occasionally swooping in to comment on the article before me.
“Oh, that’d look so cute on you!” said Pam, the stylist, and I’d give a mute nod.
“God, look at him?” added Kim, the manicurist. “He’s just so buff.”
I smiled weakly.
When they moved on to the facial I laid back with headphones on, listening to some chilled ambient tunes. They stroked and massaged my face and rubbed lotions into my skin, as others returned their attention to my hands. Listen, I’ll be honest: there was something kind of nice about all the attention, the massages and everything. Especially after the last few hectic weeks, it felt nice to just totally relax. It’s just . . . well hell, it took ages, yeah? And I felt like such a sissy the whole time, my stomach churning with subtle self-loathing and my head simmering with the mildest of headaches. Still, I drifted off and eventually came back to the feeling of a tiny brush lightly stroking my lips.
“We’re almost done, hun,” Sheila said. She approached my face with the intensity of a master craftsman, taking almost random, final strokes at the canvas that my skin had become. Pam made final touched to my hair. They didn’t let me see what I looked like at that point. Oh no. First they bundled me into the outfit their fashion expert selected from my wardrobe. Bra, panties and pantyhose. Waist-cincher, drawn tighter than before, and low-heeled boots. A short denim skirt, tight across my ass and thighs, and a slightly-pink, short-sleeved blouse with a wide, flared collar, left unbuttoned low enough to display an ungodly depth of cleavage. And finally they assaulted me with accessories: a thin leather belt, bangles, necklace, rings . . . they threw so much shit at me so quickly that I was left befuddled, and just numbly went through the process of getting dressed without protest. They helped me with the buttons and zippers. With those new nails I was completely useless. There was a final spritz of perfume that left me in a disorientating, cloying floral mist.
They trundled me before the mirror and watched me with expectant, cheerful possessiveness.
“What do you think?” Sheila asked.
Honestly? My immediate reaction was to feel under-whelmed. It’s not that these girls weren’t good at their job--they definitely knew their craft. But I’d already been through this before, right? The first time is always the worst. Well, almost. That’s true for just about everything. Three days ago K stuck breasts onto me and dressed me up in tight jeans, and then unveiled Cindy to my virgin eyes. After that--other than finding myself sporting a sudden vagina--any further adventures in cross-dressing were bound to feel a little anti-climatic. That first encounter with Cindy had been profoundly unsettling. The realization that I could be made to look like a chick--like an attractive one--had freaked me out. With all the racing around and hiding and shit, I don’t think I’d quite had time to fully understand just how deeply and profoundly the whole experience had shook me.
Which is why, as I slowly drank in this latest incarnation of Cindy, I began to feel . . . ill. That subtle discontent in my stomach blossomed into full-blown sickness; I felt like vomiting. Pain flared across my temple, brief but penetrating. All the wrongness of the last three days, seething and bubbling just beneath the surface but otherwise ignored, came rushing to the fore. Maybe K’s presence had been enough to keep it a bay, but left on my own . . . God, I suddenly realized I was on the verge of losing it, and I wasn’t sure what the hell I’d do to myself . . . or anyone around me. First this morning and now . . . these chicks hovering about, eyes bright and eager, turning me into, fuck, into one of them.
I just stood there staring at Cindy in the mirror, nearly trembling with the effort of restraining my violent disgust. The girls were getting anxious. I watched them in the mirror exchange glances. They needed some kind of response. With one hand I reached up to my new, luxurious mane of hair. It hung impossibly straight down to the small of my back, shimmering brightly. It reminded me of golden wheat swaying in the wind at dawn in the summer--what a thing to remember at a time like this. Glossy pink nails combed through and I couldn’t tell the difference from the real thing.
Sheila’s hand fell softly on my shoulder. “Cindy?”
My smile was wan and sickly but the best I could manage. I hid it with a quick nod of my head, painfully aware of the added weight to the gesture, of the hair that fell across my shoulder and stroked my neck, of the glittering dance of the studs now adorning each earlobe.
The relief that passed through my worried audience was nearly palpable.
“You look wonderful, girl!” Kim said.
I did. I mean, I really did. In fact, the longer I stared at myself in the mirror, the more discomfited I became, the more overwhelmed I felt. True, the shock wasn’t anything as drastic as the first time I saw myself all done up as a chick. Thing is, as good as Agent K was at the whole makeup-and-disguise thing, she wasn’t a master. It wasn’t her profession, not like it was for these girls.
Looking at myself in the mirror after K was done with me, yeah, sure, I looked like a chick but if I looked closely the flaws in the illusion were pretty damn clear. Now, as my eyes danced across my reflection desperately seeking the same easy flaws as before--I couldn’t find them.
That wig had done loads to feminize my features but never looked quite natural on me--this sleek new cascade was all girl, and somehow very Cindy. Cindy wouldn’t wear clip-on earrings, and so now she didn’t: two little studs, glinting in the light, framed her face. That face: sure, she had a square chin--already softened by Sheila’s skill--but who’d notice confronted with those delicately highlighted cheekbones, those soft, wet lips? And those eyes, wide and so very, very green, vividly brought out by the masterwork of blended colours that shimmered across her lids. Certainly the feminine mask revealed to me felt heavy and strange, but the skin I saw was flawless and beautiful.
Those nails transformed her whole hand somehow, made them delicate, the illusion of length making each finger that much more slender. It was more than that: the very way she carried herself was different, every movement softened by the changes wreaked upon her by the beauticians. Soft skin, new colours, new weight, lingering scents: this was the same Cindy I met three days ago, only made feminine to a degree I hadn’t dared consider.
I barely noticed as the girls said farewell, packed up and left. My hand drifted tentatively across Cindy’s body, poking at each new change.
God, I felt like such a fucking pansy. It made me sick. It really did.
***
It’s hard to judge how profound an effect the beauticians had on me. I’m not sure, but after that moment staring at Cindy’s reflection I started to give up. Agreeing to K’s crazy scheme was one thing, but actually discovering I could be made to appear like a girl--a real girl, a hot girl--was really playing havoc on my self esteem, you know? Especially since on one level . . . well, hell yeah, I actually felt some pride in how sexy Cindy looked
So after the girls left I spent an hour sitting numbly at the edge of my bed, shaking slightly, fighting down the urge to throw up. My headache slowly faded. The reflection opposite openly mocked my male ego. Understanding how both K and the Clinic were systematically breaking down my masculine self-image, even knowing that it was for my own good, didn’t make it any less painful. Once I recovered from my small mental breakdown, though, something unexpected happened: with an almost audible ‘click’ something in my head flipped and I figured, ‘fuck it’. I decided that there was no way I was going to spend the next few weeks in a state of constant misery.
With renewed enthusiasm I took to my stocking feet only to remember that I didn’t actually have anything to do. I couldn’t leave room Cos 402 on account of my throat and doctor’s orders. The TV received only a few channels and no news from the outside world--I couldn’t even check up on fucking Steele’s trial. I hate television anyway; it’s just a huge waste of time. Some game consol or another was stashed away and I thought I could pass an hour or two on mindless entertainment . . . but the fifth time I got my ass kicked on Dead or Alive because I missed the goddamn kick-button because of those new nails, I gave up.
I had no choice. Under the threat of extreme boredom and with nothing else to do, I started to perfect the whole feminine act. I began by reading some of the teen magazines and fashion books K had left behind, and very consciously tried to do so in as girly a way as possible, curled up on the sofa with my legs tucked up beneath my ass, unconsciously stroking my hair as I perused the articles. I even read that awful ‘Shopaholic’ book, pausing partway through to look over K’s letter once again. Eventually I drifted into the bathroom and practiced my makeup skills and all that other shit, then reluctantly slipped into some low heels and pranced back and forth for a bit. I kept them on for the rest of the night--I was almost surprised at how quickly the night came, once I got serious about my training--and finally settled in for food and a movie.
I whipped up a quick meal with what I found in the kitchen, and finally kicked back on the sofa with a glass of white wine. I watched the best thing I found in the media selection, some cynical romance by Woody Allen. The whole time I felt acutely aware of the image I must have presented: young blonde on sofa with glass of wine. I absently fidgeted with my hair or bra and lost myself in the movie.
Without realizing it turned one AM, I was yawning, and I’d survived my first day alone as Cindy. A little drunk from two bottles of Chablis, I lifted myself from the sofa and returned to my bedroom. I went through the nightly routine again, cleaning up and slipping back into the corset and brushing my new long hair. Thinking back over my day, I realized that it hadn’t been all that bad. Yeah, a bit freaky at the beginning, and the middle part was kind of emasculating . . . but hell, it beat hiding out in some shithole waiting for some bastard to pop a bullet into the back of my head. That’s probably when I started to relax--to really relax, for the first time in far too long. After fiddling with the media controls set into the headboard of the bed--setting an alarm, adjusting the heat in the room and putting some chilled tunes on a timer--I pulled on that same babydoll I wore my first night as Cindy and slipped into bed. Within a few minutes of hitting bed I was asleep, warm and comfortable and surrounded by music.
***
The next morning it was Cindy who stepped from the building into the fresh brightness outside. She paused at the door and took a deep, invigorating breath. Her eyes closed with the pleasure of the warm sun on her skin and the scent of freshly cut grass riding the air. When she opened her eyes again she smiled a happy, simple smile and trotted a few steps down the cobblestone path.
Sitting atop a small hill, the Cos residence offered an excellent view across the expansive range of the Asklepios Clinic. At night the whole area lay shrouded in darkness broken only intermittently by rare and distant lights. However, by day the clinic revealed its dappled beauty to the young girl.
The two large buildings at opposing ends of the property, sharp-edged jumbles of glass and concrete, reached aggressively for the sky and glittered coldly in drifting shafts of gentle sunlight. Behind her loomed the Hygieia Centre, sitting taller and more elaborate than any nearby buildings. Smaller structures lay scattered across the range of her sight, mostly clustered near main buildings but also reaching hesitatingly into the encroaching forest. More homes, she decided, or maybe shops. Cindy frowned slightly at the thought: she had very little money; but the day was far too beautiful for such concerns and, tossing her hair back and slinging her purse over one shoulder, she began her exploration of her new home. The glint of colour peeking from her open-toed wedge heels, the dance of the sundress against her legs, the light bump of a purse against her hip with every step: Cindy felt gloriously alive and comfortable in her femininity as she enjoyed an early morning stroll beneath blue skies and dawdling clouds.
She found genuine contentment in the freedom to explore at her leisure. For an hour she drifted aimlessly along the twisting and convoluted walking paths. This early in the morning--a glance at the thin, silver timepiece at her wrist confirmed it wasn’t even nine yet--there were few other people about. She saw a couple of joggers pass by, red-faced and earnest; they gave her a double look and a quick automatic wave before continuing on their way. Many of the paths coiled around small, well-tended gardens and parks sporting detailed fountains, artificial ponds and benches for relaxing. Cindy made a mental note of some gorgeous trees perfectly suited for a late-afternoon picnic spent relaxing in verdant shade.
Cindy thought to herself that she would have to come out earlier tomorrow. She wouldn’t even have to talk to anyone. To not take advantage of the natural beauty of this place was unthinkable. In the early morning, just as the sun touched the forested hilltops red, there might still be fog roiling between the buildings blanketing everything in its muting mist. She felt an almost unconscious ache to lose herself, alone, in the natural beauty of her new surroundings.
As the young woman came to the end of her morning stroll she noticed an increasing number of people on the paths, some flitting between buildings on those small, electric carts. She passed a few people and they all seemed content to remain private; they offered polite nods and non-committal smiles but little else.
Cindy became a little anxious. The thought of spending her stay at the clinic alone was genuinely distressing to a girl like her. Spending a day being pampered at home was one thing, but what was the point of getting all dressed up and pretty if there was no one to appreciate it? Despite the squeamish flutter in her stomach she determined to approach the next passer-by to cross her path.
He was a youngish-looking man, maybe in his early-twenties but with a rounded softness to his face that bordered on childish. His clothes were casual but stylish and very expensive and looked a little cool for the slight chill that rode the mid-spring mountain air. With distracted, almost nervous eyes he scanned the far horizons of the clinic as he jogged, and looked set to pass straight by without noticing Cindy.
“Good morning!” she declared happily, stepping in front of the man.
Eyes still focused on the distant bulk of the Meditrine Clinic, he ran straight into the smaller girl. With a startled gasp she tumbled to the ground, the man falling heavily on top of her.
Believe me: I came damn close to killing that stupid kid, right then and there. I really did. It wasn’t the fact that the weirdo slammed into me and knocked me to the ground. Hell, I could even forgive him for falling on top of me. After all, this cutesy girl-disguise is just that: a disguise, and beneath the lace and satin and pink trim I’m still a guy, tough as nails, still a man, not easily shaken. Other than the savage but brief burst of pain in my side, the hardest part of hitting the stone pathway was remembering to fall like Cindy--with a squeal and a useless flailing of limbs. The heels helped keep things authentic.
No, what pissed me off was that once we hit the pavement this idiot kid made no effort to get off of me. Seriously. He just stayed over me, his weight pressing down on me, and for the first time I felt the bizarre sensation of my breasts being crushed against my chest by another body. The boy lifted himself just enough to hold his head over mine. He stared directly into my eyes. His eyes were dull grey and rimmed in red. An unusually sharp scent clung to him, spicy but not unpleasant.
For a horrible, fleeting moment I thought this asshole was going to reach down for a kiss. My makeup was still fresh; wet, glistening lips parted in a slight gasp; and then I realized the boy wasn’t even looking at me. His eyes were unfocused and distant. Slowly they returned to the here and now and gradually became aware of the startled, wide-eyed girl confronting him.
“Hello,” he said. “My name is Larry.”
He didn’t seem all that concerned or even aware that he was lying on top of a smaller girl, crushing her to the ground as he introduced himself. I looked to either side but from my limited perspective didn’t see help approaching. I experienced another first-time foreign sensation: that of long hair, my own, pinned beneath me. Each turn tugged painfully at my scalp.
“I am twenty years old and a student,” he continued conversationally, though his voice was strangely monotone and slightly too loud. “What is your name?”
“Um . . . Cindy?” I answered. Thanks to the spray my voice was back to those unsettlingly breathy and feminine tones.
“Very nice to meet you, Cindy,” he said. “I have never seen you before. Are you new to the Clinic?”
With my hair caught I couldn’t even nod. I really had to fight back the temptation to toss this idiot off of me. The boy wasn’t small and his weight was starting to hurt my side despite Scooter’s painkillers. I could’ve thrown him easy, but I figured there was no was Cindy would have the strength or skill.
“Yes?” I answered, forcing a note of pleading into my voice.
“You should not be here,” he said, in the same toneless voice. “This is a bad place for you.”
No shit, it was a bad place. Last place I wanted to be was pinned beneath some guy, yeah? Especially since, a moment later, I felt it: an insistent push against my thigh, like an overeager pup poking its muzzle into a pocket. Perverted little fucker! I’d never felt anything like it but recognized the sensation immediately. The bastard’s growing hard-on was jabbing into my leg! The thought that only the ridiculous flimsy thinness of the dress I wore and this idiot’s shorts separated his cock from my skin almost made me sick.
Screw the helpless Cindy act, yeah? Frightened surprised twisted into an angry scowl. “You have to get off of me,” I growled, and the spray did nothing to mask my barely repressed rage. “Now.”
Larry didn’t seem to notice. “Of course,” he answered, sounding calmly unconcerned. He took his time doing so but finally clambered to his feet. Gallant gentleman that he was, he didn’t even offer me his hand. Instead, his eyes quickly found the squatting silhouette of the Meditrine Clinic, and without another word or a glance back he took off at a brisk jog in its general direction.
Fortunately, not everyone I met that day tried to slam me to the ground and hump my leg. (Not that I could blame them, really, considering what a sexy little number Cindy is.) I encountered a few more idle wanderers like myself and exchanged passing pleasantries. No real conversations, but it did a lot to boost my confidence. If anyone found something odd about my appearance they kept it to themselves. I certainly kept my own opinions quiet. It finally began to dawn on me that I was in a hospital--albeit a very beautiful, very large and expensive one--and many of the people I met seemed a bit . . . off.
That day was spent at a nice, leisurely pace, methodical but relaxed, as I spiralled out from the Cos Residence and explored the surroundings. I stumbled across a few more residences though none of them were quite as large as my new home. Where Cos struck me as a bit like upper-end student housing, some of the other places sprawled out like small villas.
Everywhere I went the grass was green and the shrubs well-kept. The air was almost cloying at times, laden with the scent of early-blooming flowers and fragrant trees. So clear and blue that it nearly seemed to glow, the unbroken sky stretched across the far limits of the Clinic and set the brilliant green of the earth in sharp contrast. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d ever been anywhere quite as idyllic and beautiful.
And yet--yeah, there’s a ‘but’. In my life it seems like there’s always a ‘but’. Despite the beauty, the soothing breeze and scents and calming silence . . . yeah, it was the silence that did it, I think. It wasn’t the fact that I was decked out like a co-ed tart that had me on edge. It was the unnatural silence of the place.
See, the thing is I’m not much of a city boy. I’m really not, even though I’ve spent my entire adult life in the bustle and clamour of big cities. There’s a lot of shit about urban living that’s good: the chicks, the work, the bars and gigs--the cultural stuff, you know? The energy and that edgy vibe you only find in cities. But for all that, I’m a country boy at heart. Born and raised. Everything changed after Mom moved us to the city. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder how different my life would’ve been had we just stayed in the countryside.
And so, I’ve got these surprisingly strong childhood memories of times spent outdoors. Spent beneath a glittering canopy of stars, or lost in fascinated observation of some tiny, wondrous facet of life and death in nature: a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, or ants swarming a much larger caterpillar in pitched battle.
Like this one time I remember. I must’ve been something like six years old. Really made an impression on me. You ever see a spider capture a fly? You’d be surprised how difficult and rare it is to actually see it happen--nature is quick, ‘red in tooth and claw’, as Akiko used to say.
The way the buzzing abruptly cuts off, the brief struggle against the web giving way to exhaustion; then the savage dash across the lines, eight legs wrapping around the prey, fangs sinking down, a few spasmodic jerks, another . . . and then the final bondage, wrapped in silk that would glitter almost beautifully in morning dew, hiding the hollowed husk within.
I remember because that fly had been harassing me for half-an-hour, buzzing about and mocking my flailing attempts to drive it away as I hiked through the woods out behind my house. And then--silence, followed by capture. As much as the stupid bug had been annoying me . . . yeah, I kinda felt sorry for it. It’s a horrible way to go.
It’s amazing the scenes nature reveals to those--usually the young--who take the time to watch. So I knew a thing or two about being outdoors, and this is the thing: it’s very rarely quiet. The Clinic? For all its cultivated outdoor beauty it was strangely, unnaturally silent. Even if the other clients and patients weren’t the loud and boisterous type, the trees and gardens should have called out with their own fertile voices. Yet as I walked about that first morning I heard very few birds singing; saw only one or two squirrels dash up the side of a tree; and for all the refined greenery I’m not sure I noticed a single gardener or maintenance worker.
By the time noon approached my good mood of the morning was gone beneath a growing apprehension. My feet were killing me as well--for all my practice, I still had a ways to go before mastering heels and this was by far the most ‘real’ walking I’d done in women’s shoes. Who knew cobblestone pathways would make for such harder walking than the thin carpet of the safe-house? (Amazing how long ago that safe-house seemed, a lifetime away from the present.) Far more importantly my stomach started to grumble. A half-hour walk from ‘home’ and with aching feet and growing hunger, I finally decided to step indoors.
The nearest place at hand looked like a coffee shop. It had a large front that revealed a couple of small wooden tables that looked like they’d escaped from an Ikea catalogue. Inside the light was comfortably muted after the brilliance outside. Chilled music played quietly from unobtrusive speakers mounted in the corners and the warm scent of roasted java filled the air. My steps knocked a solid note from the tiled floor as I crossed to the counter.
The young man working behind the till somehow reminded me of Chris, that guy from the reception centre. Sure, this guy was a little taller, his chin a little weaker, but he possessed the same bland good looks and professional demeanour of the other guy. I was so struck--or momentarily put off, I should say--by the resemblance that I stood there at a loss after I caught his attention.
“Welcome to The Bean Being,” he said, smiling pleasantly. “How may I help you?”
***
That coffee house became my home away from home over the next few weeks. On the days when I could escape my room, I invariable swung by the Bean Being to grab a cup of coffee. It became part of my routine. That cup of coffee became a necessary part of settling into the character of Cindy for the day.
The days passed quickly. By early evening I could feel the tingle in my throat that suggested my voice would soon drop back to its masculine levels, and usually made my way home. It was a bit like Cinderella and the midnight bell, though at least I didn’t have some prissy prince chasing after me. This princess didn’t need rescuing, thank you very much. Since that spray was only good for six to eight hours or so, I was kind of forced to spend a lot of time indoors.
Off days, I sat around the apartment and worked out, read and watched movies. I drank a lot. I also waited for the next of Scooter’s torture sessions to take place. These beauty sessions were never quite as intensive as the first day--except for the day the bastard decided I needed a Brazilian wax, the fucker--but remained the focal point of the day. On the days I used the spray I took my time to continue my exploration of the clinic, both above ground and through the underground network of tunnels, and otherwise took advantage of the gorgeous setting. I’ll admit: I was amazed at how quickly I got used to walking in public dressed like a girl. With each visit of the beauticians my confidence grew; the image reflected in the mirror became increasingly convincing.
Which is why, yeah, I started ‘making friends’ at the Clinic. Like I said, most of these people? Mostly I felt disdain for them, especially those living under the umbrella of the Hygieia Centre. But Cindy? Well hell, she’s a much nicer person that I am, and she filled my days with inane conversations with sad and boring people. On the other hand, each and every person I met for a coffee or a short chat in a pleasant, sun-bathed arbour gave me the chance to put into use all the feminine techniques and habits I was practicing at night.
Because my evenings? I spent those in my room practicing to be Cindy, learning who she was, puzzling out her past and perfecting the act. Nah, not ‘the act’. Acting not enough for this kind of subterfuge. To truly convince involves ‘being’ and so, yeah, that’s what I practiced at night: ‘being’ Cindy.
The first week passed. At times I was beyond bored and painfully aware of every single second crawling by. Other times disappeared in a blink. Cindy moments barely registered. Lost in the character, focusing intensely on every gesture, pose, word I spoke and the way I said it--hours could melt away, leaving me exhausted and drained but surprisingly pleased by the end.
Still, I was itching for a little fun, for some excitement, you know? I was going stir-crazy. I was getting bored; really bored. I was drinking way too much and kept getting plagued by these infrequent but absolutely blistering headaches that would strike at the weirdest times. I really think I was starting to go a little crazy. Or maybe it was just the same old crazy, churning away under the unusual pressure of being Cindy--and now bubbling to the surface, worse than ever.
By far the worse symptom was a growing suspicion of my surroundings. I mean, hell, even as David Sanders I was never all that relaxed, you know? I was always a little on edge and more than just a little distrusting. But now? A week into my stay at the Clinic my growing unease developed into full-blown paranoia. Those first few days, focusing entirely on learning the fine art of being Cindy, I’d almost forgotten that I was, in fact, in hiding from the hit-men of a corporate psychopath. But the more I felt that there was something just not quite right about the place, the more convinced I became that somehow Steele’s agents had managed to infiltrate my new home. Believe me, there’s nothing like shamefully pretending to be a girl while living over a secret underground medical facility to heighten that paranoid edge.
That morning I left my room early for a quick jog around the Clinic, bared legs sleek and lithe in the comfortable jogging shorts I’d slipped on after sliding out of bed. This early I didn’t need to worry about meeting anyone. The sun still lurked beneath the horizon, the sky only just beginning to lighten into diffuse indigo. My hair, tied back in a high ponytail with a pink scrunchie, danced in counter-point to my ever step. With minimal makeup and no corset I felt wonderfully free as I raced through the faint mist and early morning chill. Yeah, it was stupid and sloppy but I really needed to just cut loose for a moment. From a distance basic shape and colour would be enough to make me look girlie; it’s only up close that I would’ve been hard-pressed to pull off a convincing Cindy.
I didn’t bump into anyone. Near the end of my jog, as I warmed down from my effort, I had this sudden, intense sensation of being watched. As I stretched out front of the Cos residence I surreptitiously scanned my surroundings. Nothing. Reason told me I was being insane; my instincts told me something was wrong. I trust my instincts.
Back in my room I dressed for the day, marvelling at how second-nature the whole process was becoming. I went for something sexy but sensible that day: a loose, flowing skirt and a light purple blouse with wide, flared collar, over which I pulled on a tight turtleneck sweater. Even with just trainers and small studs in my ears, I looked damn fine.
I spent the day doing the usual things: a coffee at the Being Bean, followed by an hour hanging out in the library followed by lunch with one of the acquaintances Cindy had made, this cool woman called--get this--Crystal Dawn. Seriously. She was a bit flakey and her questions were a bit personal at times, but she was fun to hang out with. There was something weird about her I couldn’t quite place--probably the reason I liked chatting with her. Everyone likes a puzzle.
So, yeah, the day was all fine and good--except that by late afternoon my normal paranoia had blossomed into near lunacy. It took incredible effort to not look over my shoulder as I walked about, and I felt this incredible need to retreat to my room, close all the blinds and huddle in the dark. In a final act of desperation I gave up and went to the Bacchus Bar. I wanted a drink.
I ordered a stiff scotch and pounded it back and got myself a second. I kept half-an-eye on the thin crowd but nothing caught my attention. Except--by my third drink, at which point I remembered that Cindy wasn’t a Scotch drinker and I switched to wine--I was struck by an intense, powerful certainty.
Somebody was watching me again. Somebody was following me
After a forcefully relaxed sip of my wine I pulled a compact from my purse. As I powdered my nose, so to speak, I used the mirror to covertly look over my shoulder. Nothing. More paranoia? As if going out in public dressed like a girl wasn’t enough to leave a bit twitchy. I gestured for the bartender to come over.
“Yes miss?”
Being called miss still brought a wry smile to my lips. “Could you watch my drink?” I asked. “I have to go to the ladies’ room.”
“Sure.”
“Where are they?” The bartended pointed the direction out to me. “At the back of the bar.”
I made my way across the bar at a leisurely stroll, flicking back my mane of hair as I went. A door led to a corridor with the women’s toilet on one side, the men’s opposite and further down, and ended with a shut door marked ‘employees only’; a supply closet, I guessed. I was acting like a right paranoid fool, like a flustered, silly girl. Looking over my shoulder, I not only wasn’t watching where I was going . . . I walked through the wrong door.
I slammed into some guy’s chest. He stumbled back. Too jittery, too on edge, I found my footing faster than Cindy would have and nearly smashed my fist into the stranger’s face. “Watch it!” I snapped.
The man rubbed at his chest, but his eyes twinkled from beneath a mop of blue-black hair peppered with grey. “Whoa there,” he said. He hesitated then added, “little lady. You know where you are, yes?”
I finally noticed the urinals and fought down a rising blush. “Yeah, yeah,” I answered, glancing back into the corridor. There was nobody there, of course. I cursed myself for an idiot.
“In a bit of a rush?”
I took a deep, settling breathe. “Sorry,” I started to say, finally turning to get a proper look at the guy. My voice died in my throat.
“My name’s Harry,” he said. Dark eyes watched me with amused and casual expectancy. Genuinely, almost embarrassingly star-struck, I kind of lost track of the next few minutes. I’m not sure what nonsense I stuttered, but eventually became vaguely aware that he’d just offered to buy me a drink. He opened the door for me and we returned to the bar. When we went our separate ways thirty minutes later, I realized to my own bemusement that I’d just been talked into a date--with a man.
***
Getting ready to meet Harry that first time? Yeah, it bloody well took some doing. I mean, first I had to get myself half-unconscious with booze before I could even start getting ready. Even if it was Harry, I was getting ready for a date--with a guy! How fucked up was that? I kept telling myself that it wasn’t really a date, that I was just meeting up with some guy for a coffee or a few pints. Yeah, ‘some’ guy my cute ass! I mean, it’s not like I could pass up the opportunity, you know? It’s was Harry fucking Longman!
Yeah, that Harry. A little over a year ago the media had been abuzz with speculation as to the poet-slash-rock star’s whereabouts--there were rumours of a cult, of a pilgrimage, of joining a Buddhist monastery; but no one really knew. Apparently he’d gone to the Asklepios Clinic . . . and now Cindy was about to date the single most influential celebrity of David Sander’s young life.
Damn, but Harry Longman was the one and only media-figure I’d ever imagined meeting. I just never imagined I’d be wearing a dress, you know?
The first step in getting ready was getting drunk. After a few shots of Tequila and with a stiff Scotch in hand, I felt boozy and fuzzy enough to confront the next crisis.
What the hell was I going to wear? This wasn’t like getting decked out before meeting up with Tom and hitting the bars on the weekend, you know? I mean, sure, I paid attention to what I put on, how I looked. If a guy wants to get laid, he’s got to show that he’s willing to put in at least a little effort. But there’s no comparison. There really isn’t. Thirty minutes tops to get ready, and that’s including a shower, shave, and a nice, leisurely shit spent leafing through a perpetually unfinished novel.
Cindy, on the other hand, almost suffered a panic attack staring into her closet before her date. What underwear should I wear? Do I go with bland but sturdy body-shaping stuff? Casual and comfortable panties and bra? Something that left me feeling a bit . . . naughty? What kind of shoes? Did they go with that skirt? Was I baring too much cleavage? Hair, makeup--fuck, what a nightmare! And the colours, the textures, prints, the way this fabric clung or that one fell, could this and that work together . . . it was too much, too confusing. I couldn’t decide between an unsubtle and young groupie-slut outfit, or something a bit more enigmatic and intellectual; more importantly, I didn’t have a clue how to achieve either look.
I gave up; I called up Scooter’s army of professionals; bless their hearts, they sorted everything out for me. By the time they finished I felt breathless and constrained by the clothes I wore: the cincher that squeezed my midriff and the heels that hobbled my step; the makeup and hair that required constant attention; the thin straps that seemed to run all across my body, encircling ankles and shoulders, thigh and waist. From head to toe I glittered and glistened, like a fishing lure fluttering through shallow water.
Harry and I met at the Bacchus Bar. He looked almost painfully cool in some beat-up but stylish jeans, relaxed t-shirt and his signature leather jacket, and the casual comfort of his clothes left me almost angrily jealous. Harry, unhindered by his clothes, was liberated to take charge of the action in the date, whereas I was constantly forced to fuss over my appearance. Dating as a woman was proving to be a real pain in the ass.
The date went well. I struggled to keep the star-struck bimbo thing to a minimum but still sat there, flustered and gushing, for most of the night. Harry was charming and patient. The guy had some seriously smooth moves; in the back of my mind I took notes: once back to being a guy I’d definitely put his chat-up techniques to work. Eventually I got over the fact that I was sitting there all dressed like some tart, flushed beneath my makeup, and relaxed. Inane chatting eased into real conversation and his entire demeanour gradually changed, from celebrity character to . . . well, a real person.
By the end of that night the unexpected had happened: I’d made a new friend. We ended the date by picking up a bottle of Rioja and retired outside for some drinking on one of the benches. We parted happy and quite drunk. He gave me a gallant kiss on my hand--it sent an unnerving quiver through my belly--and we made plans to get together again. After he left I stayed there for awhile, trying to sort through some very confused and conflicted thoughts.
I’d had a good night. It was the most fun I’d had in ages. Harry was a fun guy, cool and easy to relax around . . . although of course I could never really relax, constantly reminded by the clothes I wore of the role I was playing. That’s what bothered me the most, I think: that even dressed like some teen tease I still had such a good night.
Something rustled from the bushes.
Booze and distractions be damned; I snapped immediately to attention. My outside posture remained relaxed and feminine. I stayed where I was, reaching out with my senses. Nothing. Had I imagined the noise? Focused on Harry for the last few days, I’d almost been able to forget about my paranoid instincts.
After five minutes of forcefully relaxed waiting I went for a walk. My heels clicked against cobblestone with each step. I felt acutely aware of every sway of my ass beneath my tight skirt, the jiggle of my exposed tits, the swish of my hair. I wasn’t particularly frightened or worried. It was just that the idea that I was being watched forced me once again to confront the reality of what I was doing and of how I was dressed. More than anything else I felt acute embarrassment. I mean, shit, the image I presented: teenage rape-bait, drunk and alone, mincing along at night though a quiet park.
Pushing aside those irrelevant emotions I focused on my surroundings. Not for the first time I wondered if my paranoia stemmed from the simple fact that, as a girl, I’d lost the anonymity that is a fundamental reality of being male. I mean, fuck, I’m a good-looking guy and yeah, I do get checked out by passing chicks. (I’d definitely get checked out more if I was a half-foot taller.) But in general, when David Sanders walks down a street nobody gives a shit. Cindy? With her pert little ass and jiggling D-cups tits? Her height’s perfect, especially in cute prancing heels, and every little motion draws the eyes: critical evaluation from the girls, and the guys? Yeah, they like what they see.
Cindy’s not anonymous. Even in this hospital there’s a lot more attention directed my way than I’m used to. It’s the kind of thing to really feed your paranoia, especially if, you know, you’re not actually a girl and more than just a little embarrassed at the thought that somebody might spot you for what you really are. The Clinic was, just as K and Scooter assured me, completely safe. But for some reason, my gut refused to accept what my brain was telling me.
There was nobody there. There couldn’t be anybody there. It was probably my own neurosis playing with my hearing.
Yeah, that’s why after another ten minutes of walking, I took a narrow side-path between a storage shed and a closed shop, and silently disappeared into a deep thicket.
Kneeling behind some bushes, heels sinking awkwardly into the soft earth and the greenery scratching at my arms, I couldn’t help but question once again what the hell was wrong with me. I crouched and waited. A bug buzzed near, landed on my cleavage and started a casual walk across the vast expanse of my right breast. The night remained quiet, other than the faint hum of light at the edge of the building. From far away I heard the faint roar of a car pulling up to the Clinic, the headlights momentarily cutting a swath across the sky. I continued to wait, unmoving, ignoring the growing cramp in my legs. It wasn’t the first time I’d watched from the shadows, hidden in the trees. It was the first time I’d done it in heels and a skirt.
A shadow detached itself from behind the storage shed. Quietly--though not entirely so--it crept forward, mostly avoiding the faint pool of light from behind. The darkness was enough to conceal its features, though the general shape suggested male. His movements were surprisingly amateurish for a hit man. I remained still, until the figure’s furtive movements brought him close.
I leapt from the foliage. Feminine clothes worn for dating are ill-suited for subterfuge: the shoes threw off my movement and I made more noise than I should have as I closed the distance. The man twisted, raising his arm. I didn’t give him the chance. My right hand jammed him at the shoulder, slid in and pulled him off balance. One foot forward; unsubtle but effective, I threw my weight into him and sent him sprawling over my leg. He slammed into the side of the building face first. I followed close. Snagged a flailing arm and twisted it behind his back. Threw him up against the wall again. Way, way too easy.
“Why are you following me?” I demanded, keeping my voice low. I tried for a harsh and threatening growl and barely managed a husky purr. I was really going to have to lay off that damn spray.
The man didn’t respond. He sagged in my grip. A faint scent reached my nose: slightly spicy, unusual but not unpleasant. I released his arm and spun the man around.
“Larry?”
The boy stared into some empty space that floated a few feet behind and to the left of my shoulder. A thin rivulet of blood trickled from a cut on his forehead. I momentarily toyed with the idea that he’d been somehow contacted by Steele but dismissed the thought. Cindy’s inane conversations over the last week had picked up some juicy gossip about some of the more permanent residents of the Clinic. Larry’d been here for ages. The guy wasn’t dangerous, just a long-term nutter. He was the son of rich and prominent parents who didn’t need the embarrassment of a weirdo son with obsessive tendencies.
The boy’s eyes eventually found me and he smiled an empty, mechanical smile, as if he’d been taught that a smile was the proper response at a time like this. “Hello Cindy,” he said.
I sighed, stepping back from the boy.
“Hi Larry.”
“How are you today, Cindy?”
I glanced about, hoping that nobody had noticed me beating up a patient. “Yeah, just great.” I quickly looked him over. “You okay, kid?”
“That hurt,” he said, still smiling. He eyes remained glued to my face. “I like you, Cindy.”
“I’m sure you do,” I answered, and then smiled myself. An unconscious tension across my shoulders slowly bled away. Wow. My very first stalker. I’d take that over a professional hit-man any day. My paranoia hadn’t been unfounded, just a bit . . . exaggerated. I gave Larry a soft pat on the shoulder and slipped back into Cindy mode. “C’mon, Larry? You want to go home? Let’s get you home, okay?”
I walked the lunatic home, carrying on a stilted but strangely interesting prattle the whole way. He walked quickly, unaware that his long stride forced me to trot to keep up. A week ago there’s no way I could’ve managed it, but the constant practice was paying off. After dropping him off at his residence I gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek and made him promise to stop following me from the shadows. “Next time you want to talk,” I told him, “just come and say ‘hi’, okay?”
He nodded and looked grave. “Be careful Cindy. This is a not a good place.”
Apparently I wasn’t the only paranoid at Asklepios. I promised to be careful and walked home at a leisurely pace. At the threshold to Cos 403 I stopped and leaned heavily against the door. With one finger pressed gently against my soft lips, as if in remembrance of a long ago kiss, I reflected on the night. This existence was crazy. It was emasculating and embarrassing. These clothes: constraining. These shoes: awkward. And the role I played? Flirty and demure, all the soft touches and veiled glances and glossy smiles? Pathetic. But for all that--God, between Harry and beating up on Larry I’d had more fun tonight than in ages. After nearly two weeks of pretending I was amazed at how . . . comfortable, I’d become in the role.
My head erupted with sudden and piercing pain. With a soft gasp I almost collapsed to the floor. Wincing, I steadied myself against the wall. Through bleary eyes I saw my hand against the soft beige, those delicate fingers spread for support, the carefully shaped nails, red vibrant as blood . . . pounding in my head and ears, a sound like pouring sand, deafening. What the hell? What the . . . hell was I doing, shit, I’m a fucking guy! What the hell was I doing, getting all prettied up and mincing about like some goddamn. . . .
With a deep, shuddering breath I settled myself. The throbbing across my temples quickly subsided. These silly headaches were becoming a real pain. With a quick pat I smoothed down my blouse and straightened the skirt. Another breath. Another. I shouldered my purse. A good night’s sleep would sort everything out. A week and a half down; there couldn’t be much longer left. Shaking my head at the bizarre situation I found myself in, I touched my hand to the door and stepped into my apartment.
“Hello Cindy,” said K, waiting for me in the lounge. “We need to talk.”
“Mom!” I squealed when I saw her. She met me in the middle of the room in a properly matriarchal hug.
A few minutes later we were relaxing in the lounge. I poured her a glass of wine and took one for myself and we settled down to talk. We spent a half-hour sparring back and forth across the room, she playing Mom to the hilt, her questions probing and expertly exploring Cindy’s week and a half at the clinic; I countered with the best daughter impression I’d ever managed. Her soccer-mom disguise was perfect and strangely sexy to me. She tried to hide it but I caught the grudging respect, the muted surprise as her eyes drank in the feminine creature sitting opposite her. With K as my foil Cindy was better than ever. K referenced my past and I reposted with a high-school memory. She delicately asked about my treatment here and I took a deep breath, swallowed the sadness and reassured her I felt good, allowing my lower lip to quiver for a moment. Then my voice cracked as the spray wore off, and she smiled despite herself.
“Amazing,” she said, shaking her head. “You have outdone yourself, Mr Sanders.”
I smiled, surprisingly pleased by the sound of her voice and at the way she called me ‘Mr Sanders’. “Thank you,” I answered, and unable to restrain myself, “I think.”
“Has the disguise been hard to maintain?”
“You’re joking, right?” I answered. “Of course it’s been hard. Scooter’s been a big . . . help, whether I wanted it or not.” I smoothed a stray bang back behind my ear, perfectly aware of how feminine the gesture was and how it made my hoop earring dance and catch the light. Hell, under K’s scrutiny I even sat with my back a little straighter, pushing those soft breasts out further and allowing my skirt to hike up a bit more. Yeah, she loved that, even though she tried to hide it. God, I was really surprised by how much I’d missed her. And what the hell was I trying to do, flirt with her?
“Jonathon mentioned that the Clinic has done its best to help you fit in.” The corner of her mouth tugged up in a smile. “I believe he mentioned something about waxing?”
“Yeah,” I grumbled. “I still owe the bastard for that.”
“And what is this I hear about Cindy beginning to date?”
“What? No!” I flushed a hot, fiery red from the exposed top of my breasts to the tip of my pierced ears. “It’s not what you think!”
“Jonathan tells me that one of his high-profile clients has found himself a new girlfriend. A Mr Longman?”
“I’m not his girlfriend!”
“Does he know this?” God, she was such a bitch!
“Listen, I’m just helping the guy, yeah?”
“Helping him how?” K smirked openly.
“The guy’s lonely! And I’m bored--like you wouldn’t believe, K. We’re just hanging out and if this is the only way I can do it then, yeah . . . I’ll play the Cindy he expects!”
“And when it is time for her to leave?”
I bit back a retort. “What do you mean?”
“It may be about time to be rid of Cindy,” K said, and I’m not sure whether the quiet sadness in her voice was playful or genuine.
I leaned forward eagerly. “You mean . . . you’ve found somewhere I can relocate?”
She gave a small nod. “Yes, Mr Sanders. The new identity we have established for you is tentative but promising.”
“Male?”
“Of course,” she said. “Unless dating has revealed to you the joys of feminine life?”
“Yeah, it’s a real thrill,” I answered dryly. “Panties and lipstick, hurray!” I gave my tits a grope. “They’re fun but I’m not going to miss them.” I gave her a little wink. “Are you?”
“I will do my best to hold back the tears,” she answered. “I have already spoken with Scooter and he has approved and scheduled the surgery for the end of next week.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Uh . . . surgery?”
She nodded. “A new life, Mr Sanders. A new face.”
“But--”
“It’s the only way,” she said. Her voice left no room for argument. “Without some changes to your appearance,” she explained, “returning to a masculine existence would be a death sentence. One brief appearance on the wrong security camera, a quick scan by the right piece of recognition software and . . . well, Mr Sanders, your life would suddenly be worth less than those lovely heels you current wear. I’ve told you before: I have no intention of allowing you to kill yourself.
“It’s either cosmetic surgery, David, some minor alterations and a new male identity in a small town . . . or you choose to remain Cindy for the rest of you life.” She didn’t even say it with a wry smile. Was it paranoia again or did I hear a faint undercurrent of hope in her voice?
We spent another half-hour talking, and she quickly sketched out some of the tentative details of my new life, before she had to rush off once again. When it came time to sign the consent form, my hand hesitated only momentarily before consigning Cindy to oblivion.
To be continued. . .
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Chapter Nine: Cindy and Harry’s blossoming friendship consumes David’s final days at the Clinic. But once they've had their final date, will it be time to say farewell to Cindy for good?
Constant in All Other Things
Chapter Nine
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent
-Much Ado About Nothing
The night of my last date with Harry came quickly.
The anticipation of never wearing panties again made the second half of my stay at the Asklepios Clinic nearly unbearable. Totally focused on that approaching day, I found it almost intolerable to continue prancing and practicing and pretending to be Cindy. After all, what was the point? Discovering Larry the Stalker had put my paranoia to rest--obviously Scooter and K were right and the Asklepios Clinic was a safe haven from the long, psychotic arm of Jeremiah Steele. Soon I’d be reinvented as a new man, and everything I’d learned about being Cindy would become a surreal pink-tinged memory.
It was only my continuing ‘dates’ every second night with Harry Longman that gave me any incentive whatsoever to not only continue the Cindy charade, but to continuously improve the role. I wanted to be the best, god-damn-girliest Cindy I could for the guy.
Listen, I know how gay that sounds. Why the hell would any guy want to put himself through this kind of bullshit? The thing is, I wasn’t just playing the star-struck fan . . . Harry really was my hero, ever since I first picked up a guitar back when I was fourteen. The man was a friggin’ guitar god, know what I mean? And he wasn’t some strutting guitar-wanking egomaniac either. It wasn’t just those cool-as-shit solos he effortlessly ripped through when he could be bothered; the man was an even better writer. He saw me through some tough teenage angst, Harry did. And he supplied the only goddamn thing that Kate and I ever agreed on: a song. The dude gave Kate and me ‘our song’, and the memories I attach to that music and those lyrics are more precious than he could possibly imagine. He’d never fully realize how much I owe him.
I also knew the kind of guy Harry was. In some ways we were quite similar, him and I; women liked us, and we treated them like shit. The difference? Harry was suave and rich and an artist. When he crapped all over them they lapped it up like honey.
And finally, I understood on some instinctive level that Harry needed my companionship as much as I needed his. The guy was seriously fucked up--almost as much as I was. He needed me and I owed him; but for me to hang out with him I had to be pretty and vivacious, a high-heeled blonde, a cute piece of ass. Yeah, playing the part was seriously fucking with my head but I’ll say this: I was amazed at how easy it was getting to be. The ease with which I shifted into Cindy was really starting to scare me.
Another week and a handful of innocent get-togethers slid by, and then it was the night before my scheduled surgery. Harry met Cindy for one last date.
They met at the Bacchus Bar as the sun settled behind the forested hills and the Clinic fell into quiet darkness. The older man and his young companion sat in a secluded booth far in the back, watching as the bar slowly grew busy. Glasses clinked and voices raised in conversation joined together in the oldest symphony of all, a familiar backdrop for a final date.
Cindy, feeling more than a little drunk, giggled as the rock star awkwardly reached around her, an arm rubbing up against her breast.
“You’re just trying to cop a feel, you pervert!”
“Show respect for teacher, girl,” Harry growled.
“Yes sir!”
“It’s like this,” he said, pressing down on her fingers. “Then here, and here,” he added, his fingers guiding hers across the frets.
“Like this?” Cindy asked. Her tongue peeked out from between glossy lips as she concentrated on the guitar. She repeated the positions with only a little awkwardness.
“Yeah, not bad.”
She tried again, faster. “Cool! I’ve never been able to get that bit.”
“You learn fast.”
“Thanks!”
“You might want to trim those nails before trying it for real, though. They’ll mess up your chords.”
Cindy stuck her tongue out at him. “But they’re so pretty,” she said, glancing aside at him before turning back to the instrument. “Don’t you like them?” She focused for another moment on the guitar, and then gently laid it aside. Her hands fell limply in her lap. “Um, Harry?” Cindy sounded nervous. “Your . . . arms?”
Harry started as if poked awake. His arms still encircled her. His touch drifted to her waist, fingers lightly grasping just beneath the swell of each breasts. His breath was momentarily hot on her neck as his touch slid up her side before coming to rest on her shoulders. “I’m sorry.”
Cindy scooted a small distance away down the booth. Her eyes dropped shyly away. “No, it’s . . . okay,” she murmured softly. She looked momentarily apprehensive, and then licked her lips and gave a small smile. She darted forward and landed a quick, light kiss on his cheek. His skin was rough and up close, he smelled slightly of old leather and shaving cream; it was a fatherly scent. Her cheek hovered next to his, hesitantly, before she pulled away. Their faces were close and Harry’s eyes glittered darkly, expectantly.
Cindy smiled demurely. “I have to go tinkle,” she whispered, and giggled, and slipped away from the booth.
A minute later Cindy stood in the bathroom of the Bacchus Bar, hands gripping the edges of the smooth porcelain sink tightly. Her knuckles whitened; I gritted my teeth and stared into the mirror, aghast. My head was beginning to hurt again, the pain piercing through my pleasant drunkenness. Why was this so hard? It shouldn’t be so hard. I’d been through this before--with that guy in the elevator, for young Tim, hell, I’d even pranced around in lingerie for that creepy Agent Fosters guy. But tonight was--different.
Of course it was! What the hell had I expected? When a rich, good-looking guy takes a cute young thing out to a bar, he’s got expectations, yeah? Up until tonight Harry had been a real gentleman. In his place I would’ve made third base with Cindy by now, or dumped her ass. But Harry had class. A handful of dates and he’d settled for kisses to the hand, a few intimate hugs, a chaste kiss to the cheek.
But tonight . . . tonight, a much heavier expectancy hovered between us, and there was a part of me that felt compelled to reward him for his efforts. I’m a man; I knew what Harry wanted.
Dark eyes the colour of fallen leaves in late autumn twinkled with amusement in my mind, turned green and I saw myself in the mirror: the painted face and blonde hair and bright eyes wide with surprise and fright. My hands tightened in frustration as I took in: breasts and vagina, bra and panties, stockings and heels, nail extensions and polish, tight clingy clothes and pierced ears, perfume, lipstick, God, so much, and all the invisible gestures and acts that defined Cindy as a girl, that made Cindy--not me.
This wasn’t what I wanted. Hanging with this guy was a dream come true--but I wanted to do it as David, as a man, not as some flustered female groupie. How could I play the girl in a date . . . how could I be the fucking girlfriend? What I wanted was to pound back pints of bitter instead of sipping wine; I should be shooting pool, grinding out power chords and hitting on chicks with Harry--not flattering his ego and toying with my hair and giggling at his goddamn jokes.
My hand slammed against the side of the sink, palm flat, with power that belied my delicate disguise. What I wanted was to smash that mirror with my fist and splinter that reflected image into a thousand pieces. The dull pain in my hand seemed to distract from and relieve the pressure in my temple. No. I couldn’t do this, indulge in this pathetic display of machismo; not now. For one final night I had to accept that David couldn’t be here.
What was the alternative--walking out on Harry? Because I sure as hell didn’t want to; I was having too much fun, even wearing a skirt. I had to admit a very real thrill at cradling one of Longman’s famous guitars in my arms. The one he’d been teaching me with he played on tour way back in ’99. I’d seen the video. That right there almost made the whole bullshit Cindy-scenario worthwhile.
I shook my head, golden tresses falling like a curtain across my face. With a timid gesture I brushed my hair back behind my eyes, suddenly demure and quiet once again. Looking through the thick veil of my lashes I smiled tentatively at the pretty girl I saw in the glass. David couldn’t be here--but Cindy was.
A quick dab of lipgloss, a little mascara and a touch of colour to my cheeks and I felt ready to face the world once again. I went to the bar and bought another round, a nice Shiraz for me and a Cheddar Valley cider for Harry, and laughed as some boy made an ambitious but clumsy pass at me. I was, like, just so out of his league.
Drunk, happy, surrounded by the vibrant bustle of the pub, I threaded my way through the thickening crowd back to the table. Harry was waiting for my return with his arms thrown wide across the bench. He waggled his eyebrows at me and I laughed and sat next to him. Without hesitation he dropped his arm around my shoulder, and whatever discomfort I felt at the weight of man’s arm around me was easily ignored as I sunk back into my pleasant drunken haze. With a practiced stroke of my hand I pulled the shiny length of my hair forward so that it wouldn’t get pinned and let it fall with a silken rustle over my left shoulder. I smoothed it down, fascinated by how real it felt, the slight tug at my scalp, its rich shine and golden hue a soft backdrop to the glitter of those silver bangles and shiny rings. Placing my wine glass on the table--almost knocking it over, resetting it with a soft giggle--I settled back into the crook of Harry’s arm.
“Feel okay?” he asked.
“I do now,” I answered, and sighed.
***
A few more drinks, an indeterminate time later, still sitting in our booth, drunker than before, the crowd larger, busier, the centre of its voice now here, now there, but always loud, forcing the two of us ever closer together as I smiled up at Harry, holding eye contact for a moment longer than was necessary before coyly dropping my gaze down to my drink. The ruby swirl of my glass seemed captured in the deep crimson of my glossy fingertips. I marvelled at how easily I now held the narrow stem of the glass, the feminine click of my nails as I cradled the drink in my palm. I glanced up again through the thick veil of my eyelashes, and blushed to see how intently he was watching me. “The Bean Being? Yeah, I like that place,” Harry continued as we shared our experiences at the Clinic. “I’m surprised I never saw you there.” If his hand occasionally massaged my shoulder or played with my hair--well, I pretended not to notice. I was struggling to pretend to not notice many things by this point: the fact that I was really a guy and my muted nausea at his intimate touch, the appraising and amused eyes of strangers, and where this whole strange game was inevitably heading. The heady mixture of stress, self-disgust and alcohol was playing havoc with my head--I felt an electric tingle through my body, an almost drug-like euphoria that left me feeling capable of doing . . . almost anything, it seemed.
I nodded, struggling to suppress the urge to giggle hysterically at the absurdity and difficulty of carrying on a normal conversation. “Me too. Started going almost every day. I was a bit worried about money? You know, at first? But when I found out I could pay the same way I opened doors--I mean, just a touch of my hand and cha-ching?--it was like, shopping spree!”
Harry’s thumb stroked the side of my smooth, hairless arm. “Do you even have any idea how much they’re charging you?”
I shrugged. “Nope! Don’t care. I’m not footing the bill, so why should I?”
He shook his head. “Put it this way. Even I think the prices here are outrageous.”
“Oh, come on, Harry! You’re a rock star.” I picked up my wine glass and held it up in mock salute. “You’re like . . . rich! Super rich!”
“Exactly,” he said. He playfully ruffled my hair. “Let’s just say you’re lucky you’re cute enough for me to pick up the tab tonight.”
I giggled. “Lucky me!”
A long sip of wine hid my discomfort at his constant touch. Men are very tactile--their hands are everywhere on a date, constantly reminding you of their presence, of their intention. The drunker I got the easier it became to ignore his expert hands across my body--or rather, ignore how they made me feel. I have no doubt that a real girl would’ve been moist in the crotch and all over the guy by now. Unfortunately for Harry, his deft ministrations did nothing good for me. I mean, yeah, sure, he was my hero and all but that wasn’t going to have me batting for the other team, you know?
Turning back to Harry, I noticed that the lull in our conversation had given him a far-away look in his eye, staring off across the bar without really seeing anything. I gave him a little jab with my elbow. “Hey Harry?” I said. “What you thinking about?”
He looked down and smiled. It was a strange smile, small and a little sad and quickly gone. “Right now?” he answered. “I was thinking about things I’ve seen and done, Cindy, place I’ve been, people I’ve met. I’ve had a long, full life. But mostly?” His arm around my shoulder tightened in a warm hug, and his voice took on a forced gaiety. “I was thinking about you.”
“Why?” I asked in a small voice.
His gaze was captivating. Oh, I knew what was going on, where this was heading. The guy was a player, real smooth and all, and he was totally setting me up for the kill. In some bizarre way it was awesome watching this guy at work--even if I was the target. I mean, what a thing tell your friends--if I had any, that is--Harry Longman pulled me in a bar!
“I’ve been living here for almost a year now,” he said. “And it’s been a very long, very boring year, Cindy. I’ve explored as much of this place as I care to, and gotten to know more people than I wish, and . . . I’m bored.” He sighed. “It’s been nearly two years since I’ve written anything: not one line of verse, not a single note of a song.”
“I’m sorry,” I said in a soft voice, and the thing is: I truly was. It wasn’t something I could really relate to; I’m no artist. But I also knew the ache of denying an important part of oneself, of feeling it wither and die.
Again Harry smiled, and his eye sparkled. “Oh, but don’t be, Cindy,” he said, and his arm at my shoulder drifted to my neck, gently massaging my skin between forefinger and thumb. “This last week, since meeting you--I’ve started writing again.”
“That’s wonderful,” I sighed, trying to deny that his touch at my back felt good. How could this be happening?
“It is wonderful,” he said. “You can’t understand how wonderful it is, Cindy. I tried to deny my loss at first, convinced myself it was a short break, that the creative juices needed time to replenish. But the longer I stared at the blank page, every time I picked up a guitar and couldn’t play anything but old songs--I knew, deep down inside, that I was finished. An old dog with no new stories to tell. And oh, how I raged against that truth! Distracting myself with alcohol, with religion, drugs and . . . women,” he said, and his other hand took mine is his
“Like me?” I said. “Girls like me?”
“Not like you,” he denied. “I’ve never met anyone like you, Cindy.”
“Harry,” I whispered.
He turned to face me without releasing me from his encircling arm. His hand gently cupped my chin and tilted my head up towards his. I stared deep into his eyes, dark and lost. Something inside of me tightly bound and buried deep fluttered and struggled and fell away. My hand clenched and trembled at my side.
His lips met mine. Faint stubble rubbed like fine sandpaper against my chin. Again I breathed in his scent--it had the robust character of a fine aged wine. My soft painted lips pushed up against his. His fingers threaded through my hair and gently held me close. My lips parted almost involuntarily . . . only a little but enough: a sigh, and the tip of my tongue darted out, almost hesitantly tasted his lip, pulled back.
“Cindy.” Harry’s voice was almost a tortured groan.
“Yes,” I agreed, my voice soft, our mouths so close each word flowed like a delicate warm wind across the other’s lips.
Harry’s hand fell away from my head, traced the path of my spine through the thinness of my clingy top, slid around my side and rested, for just a moment, atop my breast before almost reluctantly falling away. I pulled away and he fell back in his seat and stared at me.
“Who are you, Cindy?”
My hand rested softly on his knee. I shrugged, amazed at how delicate and feminine I could make the gesture, surprised at how in control I felt. This was seriously wrong; I had just kissed a man on the mouth; part of me felt like a teenager again, lost and confused; but mostly I felt a strangely drunken apathy to what had happened. “I’m just a. . . .” I swallowed nervously, tasting the truth of what I was about to say. “Girl,” I finished, amazed and quietly sickened at how true that statement seemed to have become.
Harry shook his head vehemently. “No. There’s nothing ‘just’ about you, Cindy. You’re unlike any other woman I’ve met.”
I couldn’t deny the truth of that.
“Something about you messes with my head,” he said, one finger tapping at his temple.
“And you with mine.” My hand drifted up to rest against his arm.
“There’s something about you,” he said, and the way his eyes drifted across my body, taking in my breasts, my smooth arms and sleek legs, long hair and earrings, finishing with a lingering appraisal of my eyes, sent an anxious flutter through my belly. “Something different from the other girls I’ve met here. The way you dress and talk--and the way you act--the things you say--there’s a dichotomy in you I don’t understand.
I’m very sensitive to the music of a person’s voice, Cindy, to the rhyme and rhythm of their body and language. And right now I look at the girl sitting across from me, a very pretty girl in very sexy clothes, but there’s something--discordant--in everything she does.”
I tapped one finger against my lip. “There is?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes, like a video in which the singer and the song don’t quite sync up.”
“We’re in a hospital,” I reminded him. “We’re all a little . . . broken, I guess.”
“Are you?” he asked. “Are you damaged goods?” The way he said it, with a hint of a smile on his weathered face, but with sorrowful eyes that seemed genuinely concerned at the prospect that the young girl sitting across from him could be in pain, nearly made me regret that I couldn’t be what he thought I was. I realized then that I had to get away from Harry. Suddenly I felt that I was losing control of the evening and became afraid of where it might end.
“Maybe a little,” I answered. “No more than you, I’m sure.”
“But I’m very damaged, Cindy,” he said. “More than you know.”
With my head tilted one side, I smiled at him: it was a small but warm gesture, bordering on intimate. I wondered at what game he was playing. My hands drifted to rest, fingers splayed, against his chest. “Tell me, then.”
He stared at me for a long moment. His mouth opened as if he was about speak, but then he quickly looked away. He tried to hide the brief appearance of grief and rage that twisted his features, and when he faced me again he seemed fine. “I exaggerate,” he said, and grinned, a tentative and sheepish expression that despite its falseness looked surprisingly boyish on his weathered face. “I’m fine--really. In such pretty company? How could I not be?”
“Are you, Harry?” I gazed at him levelly. “Are you okay?”
“I am tonight.” His strong arms gathered me close, back into his comfortable embrace. My head rested against his shoulder and I sighed contentedly. “You have no idea how glad I am that you were here these last few weeks.”
“Me too,” I said.
“You want to get out of here?”
I momentarily tensed in his arm. Back in the city, hitting the bars with Tom, hunting women: I knew how the game worked. Get a girl to this point? Sit with her, buy a few drinks, cuddle close and get that kiss? We both knew where this road ended. Ask her to leave the bar with you--there was only one place left to go. Unless I broke away; this was my chance . . . I forcefully relaxed back onto his embrace.
I couldn’t leave him at this point. Harry was trying to tell me something, had been trying all week to reach a point where he felt comfortable enough with Cindy to share something private and important with her. To abandon him now would be unforgivable; it would be a betrayal of a friend.
I gave a mute nod and collected my purse. I stumbled a bit as I stood, steadied by Harry’s strong arm on my elbow. I wasn’t that drunk--I really wasn’t--it was the shoes, the pointy toe pinching painfully, the heel taller and slimmer than I was comfortable in. Fuck, what the hell was I doing?
We threaded our way through the bustling crowd and left the Bacchus Bar. The night air was bracing and cleared my head a little. A small shiver passed through my body. An outfit that seemed sensible enough this afternoon left me exposed to the chill wind that breathed over us.
“Cold?” Harry asked. Hell, in a second he’d be offering me his jacket.
I smiled up at him and shook my head. “I’m fine,” I said, though I felt anything but. I suddenly felt half-naked and ashamed of what I was wearing. Get it together, I told myself. You’ve been at this for weeks now. Just a little longer.
“Would you like to head to my--”
“How about a short walk?” I linked my arm through his. “It’s a beautiful night.”
Harry took a long, quiet moment to stare up at the sky. For a moment he seemed to drink in his surroundings, the muted sounds of the bar behind us, the scintillating spread of stars overhead and the cute young thing hanging off his arm. His eyes were distant and a faint, wistful smile tugged at his lips. Presently he returned and his gaze dropped down to mine. God, I felt an uncomfortable tugging inside at the way he looked at me--his look was so sad, so clearly yearning for something unattainable--that it nearly left me breathless.
“It is, isn’t it? It really is a beautiful night,” he said. “Come with me; I want to show you something.”
We walked in silence, both lost in our own thoughts. I leaned heavily on him, gaining a sudden insight as to why some girls wore shoes they could barely walk in. It didn’t take me long to figure out where he was bringing me, and a secret smile crept onto my face. The old dog. Some people really do love routine. I remembered my first night at the Clinic, under a sky much like this one, racing towards my new home in an electric cart, K sitting ahead of me. For a brief moment the headlight had revealed a private scene: a man with a guitar and his cute late-night conquest.
He brought me to a pleasant, leafy arbour, sheltered against the wind. It was about fifteen minutes distant and we walked in silence. Drinking in the gorgeous night-time beauty, the silence so profound and deep, I struggled to simply enjoy the walk. The pain in my head and his hand on my ass didn’t help. I felt poised on a knife’s edge, on a stiletto’s point between debilitating disgust and drunken, slightly mad delight; masculine embarrassment contrasted with these learned feminine motions; and I focussed on the simple, single truth that Harry needed my help. Without that constant reminder I’m sure something would have snapped.
We sat beneath a large tree, leaning back against the trunk, staring up at the sky through the rustling leaves. Harry’s arm was around my waist and again I leaned my head against his shoulder. He told me a story. I barely took note of the details, lost in the mellifluous rumble of his voice. Three weeks ago, with that other girl, did he tell the same story? As he talked his hand gently and unconsciously stroked my side, a few times daring to drift as high as the soft under curve of my breast. He probably copped a feel or two. I wouldn’t have felt it if he had. The prosthetics were all but dead weight now.
As his story ended we dropped back into silence. He was struggling to tell me something and I was content to allow him to get there in his own time. Once again I confronted the role I played. My mind kept sliding away from the thought. Tomorrow Cindy was going to disappear and I’d sink into the new--male--life K had carved out for me. It was a certainty that I’d never see Harry again. And yeah, I felt the all-too familiar pang at the loss of another good friend, but it also made tonight’s embarrassment easier to bear.
“I’m not sure why I brought you here, Cindy.” Lost in my own thoughts, his voice almost took me by surprise. His words were tainted with sadness. I didn’t want to see the look on his face.
“Why is that?” My voice was soft, encouraging.
“You’re not the first girl I’ve brought here, you know. To this tree, at night.”
I smiled. “I’m sure.”
“It’s pathetic,” he said. “Nothing ever happens. They’re taken in by the fame and--”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I interrupted. “I certainly was.”
He shook his head. “No you weren’t.” His eyes watched me searchingly. “You’re not here for the rock star. You’re not here for the poet. What I can’t figure out--what I like about you, Cindy--is that I have no idea why you’re here, right here, right now, with me. What is it you want?”
“Why do I have to want something?” I asked. “Why can’t I just enjoy being with you?”
“Everybody wants something,” Harry insisted. “_Especially_ you. I’ve never met someone so intensely yearning for something; your whole being thrums with that desire.” His fingertips stroked the length of my exposed leg, and a shiver shot up my spine as surely as if he’d plucked a guitar string. “I doubt you know what it is you want, but it drives you, brought you here--keeps you in my arms even now.
“It’s not sex,” Harry said, his smile only slightly mischievous. “You tremble like a virgin at my every touch. Money? You kept trying to buy rounds and paying for our dates. Popularity? You became embarrassed every single time you spotted people in the bar talking about us. Those are the big three. If you don’t want those--then what?”
“You forgot one thing,” I said, smiling coquettishly (I think) as I tapped him on the temple with one elegant fingernail. “Maybe I am a virgin.” What the hell was I thinking, dropping a line like that?
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said quietly. Smiling, his hand reached up to clasp mine. He held it briefly against his cheek, then closer to his lips, and finally kissed the back of my hand, softly, and again my knuckle. I watched in a kind of horrid fascination as he slowly kissed his way up my forearm.
“Harry,” I protested softly, and went to pull away.
His hand closed tight around my wrist.
“Harry?” I asked, surprised.
“I need to know, Cindy,” he said, and when he looked up I saw such desperate need in those dark and lost eyes that it sent an anxious tremor through my stomach. “No teasing, no flirting; what the hell do you want?”
I stared at him. I felt the wind play across my bared flesh and heard the faint rustle of the leaves overhead. The strong perfume of a nearby garden rode the air and mingled with the taste of wine and strawberry on my lips. His shape was a dark cut-out against the scattered glimmering lights of the hospital behind. My head began to pound again. My heartbeat reverberated loudly in my ears, deafening. I felt hot--burning and flushed; almost dizzy. I swayed back from his grasp and this time he let me go.
“I just wanted to . . . ,” I mumbled, scrambling a few feet away. “To thank you, Harry.”
“Cindy, are you . . . ?”
I stared past him. “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” I said, in another woman’s voice.
***
“You are so going to miss this when I’m gone.”
Her words hurt, though nothing could have made me admit so. We were so good, Katherine and I, at hiding our emotions from each other. In her own way, however, she was honest unlike anyone else I’d ever been with. What she said in passing was as considered and weighed as anything she spoke directly, but this didn’t make it any less true: she knew how I felt about her, and she was telling me that this thing we had--our impossible coming together, these violent passionate meetings--would not endure. Instead I smirked as I lay back on the bed, naked and with arms crossed behind my head. I snorted dismissively. Nineteen years old and certainly not innocent, I remained perhaps a little stupid. In every way that really mattered, she was so far beyond me that it’s painful to try and remember.
The radio murmured in the background. With a rustle and a whisper her dress slipped to the floor and pooled at her feet. A small step and she discarded the night’s costume and stood at the foot of the bed, her athletic body resplendent in dark lingerie. A small lamp in a far corner shed a faint light across the room and caught her in hazy silhouette--as she moved forward it was as if Katherine detached herself from the shadows behind. Her smile was catlike as she snaked up the bed: cold, hungry; and her eyes glittered darkly. The lacy things she wore were inky black, her skin the palest ivory; scars stood out in sharp contracts; I’d never seen a more beautiful woman.
She took me in her mouth and I ran my fingers through her short black hair. My grip tightened and her teeth touched skin and I relaxed and her muffled laugh danced over my cock. After I came I returned the favour until my tongue ached and she thrashed and bucked over me. I pulled her down to the bed and my hands found hers and pinned them back over her head. She struggled and freed her arms and violently flipped me over; I forced myself on top again and thrust forward and entered her. Our lovemaking was aggressive but somehow more sensual than anything I’d known before or since. Her fingers clawed at my back; she bit and cursed me and her eyes flashed with anger and desire and her legs locked behind me and crushed me close. I had never been that close to anyone before. I had never known another person’s body so intimately. My kisses tasted the salt along her cheek and breast and blood at the edge of her mouth.
My own release went unheard beneath the sound of her climax: a wail somewhere between a sob and a howl, a cry of ecstatic abandonment and rage. Katherine always pushed me away after orgasm. There was a raw honesty that flooded through her in the immediate aftermath, and that precious, vulnerable moment she was unwilling or unable to share. This one time--this only time--she held me near. Her arms and legs stayed locked about me and I remained inside of her even as I slowly shrunk. She clung to me with desperation.
“Not yet,” she said, the words catching in her throat. The sweat between our bodies was slick. My hand gently stroked along her smooth leg, played along the top of her stocking, traced the line of a suspender and gently pulled her away until she groaned softly and my softening cock slipped free. I rested my hand, palm flat, against her pussy and felt the heat there. With my other arm I cradled her to me once again, holding her by the back of her neck and massaging the tight, knotted muscles there. The fingers of her hand splayed across my chest, over my heart.
I opened my mouth to speak. I’ll never know what I meant to say. It wouldn’t have made a difference. “Don’t,” she cried, and swallowed my words with a kiss. Her kiss was almost brutal at first, fierce and hungry but then turned soft and lingering. When she pulled away her eyes were wet with tears.
“I love you,” she said, the only time she ever did.
The radio played Harry Longman’s song. As the haunting strains swept over us we descended into lust once again, and for the last time.
***
“Cindy?”
No amount of makeup, no greatness of skill could have concealed the ugliness that distorted my face. Filled with sudden rage I launched myself at Harry. I was on him in a second, slamming him back against the tree. Real fear flared in his eyes as I pressed against him, my hand clutching at his throat, blood-red talons digging into his skin.
Wide eyes stared at me in shock and fear. “Cindy!” Harry croaked. His hand grappled at mine, pulled futilely at my arm but couldn’t dislodge my grip.
“There was a girl,” I said, nearly spitting the words out. “The only thing I’ve ever loved. When I think of her now? I can’t--I can’t remember anymore. Three, four times together, that’s it. And you’re one of those memories, Harry. You’re . . . one of those. One of your fucking songs, the only thing we agreed on, the only thing, God, the one moment Kate and I were together that wasn’t all fucked up and twisted with hate and . . . .” I choked on the swell of emotions in my throat, on my own bile and anger. My hands dropped to his shoulders, pulled him forward, slammed him back against the tree. He winced with the impact. My fingers curled into the meat of his arm and trembled. I felt tears fill my eyes and it made me all the angrier. Where the hell was all this coming from? “But God, it hurts, it fucking hurts to remember, so much, Harry, but it hurts even more not to. . . .”
Our faces were inches apart. He stared at me, no longer with fear but with fascination. My breath came in gasping heaves that almost drowned out his voice. “Who the hell are you?” he whispered.
“I’m . . . Cindy,” I half cried and lunged forward, crushing my open mouth against his.
Harry pulled back in surprise, but only for a moment and then he returned the kiss. His lips parted and my tongue slid into his mouth. I pressed up tight against Harry, almost straddling him, breasts a dull presence between us, my hands clutching at his back, running through his hair. . . . My voice escaped as a muffled moan and I continued to push against him, forcing him back against the tree as my kisses became hungrier, more aggressive. His tongue slid against mine and found my mouth and his stubble rubbed against my chin and I felt his hand slip beneath my skirt and squeeze my nylon-clad ass. Tears streaked down my cheek and those his roving kisses didn’t catch gathered at my chin, hung and glittered momentarily before falling away.
Salt and the sweetness of lip-gloss. Perfume, lilac mingled with night-born eucalyptus and his own masculine muskiness, leather and something spicy. His weathered hand smoothly stroking my thigh, callused fingers sliding through long hair and holding my neck, holding me close. Our frenzied breath loud in my ears, leather rubbing against silk, against bark, the rustling of the leaves beneath us and the wetness of our kisses, his sigh, Cindy’s frantic moan. . . .
“Oh, God. . . .” My mouth trailed kissed across his cheek and I buried my face into his neck and clung to him desperately even as my stomach churned and twisted.
His arms held me tight, his chin pressing into my head, fingers dancing along the strap of my bra as if fretting one of his guitars. His touch swept across my breasts and I felt nothing. The appliance below was dead: nothing. “Cindy. . . .”
Forehead to forehead I landed a kiss on his lips, another, a final soft touch of our lips and I exhaled across his cheek. My eyes opened and found his and held his gaze. I blinked away the tears and smiled tentatively, warmly.
“Katherine,” I whimpered softly.
“What?” Harry said.
The last vestige of memory sank away. I was back at the Clinic, sitting beneath a tree, in Harry Longman’s favourite make-out spot, wearing a skirt, heels, breathing heavily. My eyes widened in horror at what I had just done. I felt hollow and numb.
“Are you okay?” he asked. I noticed he refrained from touching me.
“No,” I answered.
Harry hesitated a moment before speaking. “If I asked you who Katherine was,” he said, “would you tell me?”
“No.”
He nodded. “Would you like me to leave?”
I stared at him, my eyes open and lost, for a long moment before I shook my head no.
We sat down beneath the tree again, though without the intimacy of before. Without his body next to mine I suddenly realized how chilly the night air had become. My bared midriff and short skirt did little to keep me warm, and I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself. Harry watched, sighed, and wordlessly passed me his leather jacket. I accepted it wordlessly.
“I’ve never been able to watch a girl shiver in the cold,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said as I slipped into the jacket.
“I’m not going to see you again after tonight,” he said. “Am I?”
“No, you won’t.”
His hand my hand and gave it a little squeeze. I should have pulled away but instead my fingers curled into his and held tight. “What happened to you?”
“It’s a long story.”
“They always are.”
“You must think I’m crazy,” I asked in a small voice.
He gave a gentle pull with his hand and brought me closer. “We’re all crazy here,” he said.
I nodded mutely.
“You’re crying,” he said.
“Am I?” My fingers came away from my eye damp and smeared with black. “Well . . . fuck.” I rubbed my fingers dry against my skirt. “I thought this mascara was waterproof,” I added, and somehow that seemed the final ignominy of a long and exhausting evening.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
I nodded.
“Anything.”
“Tell me what it was that you wanted from me.”
“Oh, that,” Harry said, waving one hand dismissively. “I’ve been meaning to tell you all week, but it hardly seems important now.” He shrugged. “I’m dying, Cindy.”
***
The next morning, after a few hours of fitful sleep, I dragged myself into the bathroom and showered and took care of necessities and even shaved my legs and pits--one last time. I decided to put extra special effort into getting ready for my meeting with Doctor Scooter.
I went through the process of getting ready in a slightly numb, detached haze. Cindy would be effectively dead by this afternoon. For some reason I felt like sending her off with a proper show of respect. She was a good girl, after all. Maybe I figured that I’d misjudged her. I didn’t want to think about it though. It was easier to lose myself in the morning routine.
From the back of the closet I pulled out an item I’d eyed with trepidation since moving to the Clinic: a pair of four-inch Jimmy Chou black leather stilettos, the same I’d worn that very first night to throw off the pursuit. I’d been wearing heels for three weeks now but I hadn’t dared wear anything that . . . risky, yet. Once I started with that it just seemed right to follow through with all the other things I’d been reluctant to try on: my laciest, skimpiest panties and the matching suspender belt and wispy, silk stockings. I hadn’t worn anything so overtly feminine since that first night K dressed me up in the motel room to throw off the pursuit.
Then I struggled into a tight, just-above-the-knees skirt that hugged my contours like a second skin. It hobbled my stride, forcing small, mincing steps--but with those heels, man, did it ever give me a delightfully sexy ass-swaying wiggle. Hell, there’s no way I could’ve tugged the zipper shut if I hadn’t laced the corset that extra inch tighter. It left me slightly breathless and flushed but for some reason that left me feeling all the more feminine. Finally I slipped into a breast-baring knit top. Why the hell not, I figured. Cindy deserved a proper seeing off. She really did.
I also spent the extra time on the makeup. Took my time shaving and followed up with the concealer and foundation and all the other shit that made of my face a flawless canvas. I blended the eyeshadows and worked the mascara and coloured in my lips and put to use all the practice and knowledge I’d accumulated during my stay at Asklepios. After carefully re-painting my nails I dusted my bared flesh with some shimmering powder and positively glowed by the time I finished. Not bad. Not bad at all. Scooter’s girls would be proud. I’d learned a lot over the last few weeks.
Long dangling earrings jigged across my shoulders as I turned this way and that in the full-length mirror. God, I was hot. It really was a shame Cindy was not long for this world. I’d certainly do her if, you know, that wasn’t me in the mirror. I ran my hands along my curves down to my knees and leaned forward, flashing my cleavage.
“Good-bye, Cindy,” I purred. Beautiful emerald-green eyes glittered enigmatically as I gave her a kiss. My lips left a half-formed pink imprint on the glass. My voice dropped to a whisper. “Just between you and me? I’ll think I’m going to miss you.”
***
An hour later I sat at the edge of a medical bed in an examination room in the Meditrine Clinic. Sterilized stainless steel gleamed under bright florescent lights. Tools and sharp-edged implements glistened from their trays and from behind locked glass. Unlike the soothing designs of the Hygieia Centre--despite all its modernist touches--this place felt like a hospital: a place where people died.
“How you feeling, Girlie?”
“Fine,” I grunted. “Tired.”
Scooter watched me intently as he worked. “Busy last light, I’m sure,” he said. “How are the ribs?”
I shrugged. “Not bad. Hurts a bit when I make a sudden movement.”
“Then don’t make sudden movements,” he said. The tone of his voice clearly added ‘idiot’. “Have you been taking those painkillers? They help?”
Suspicious, the way he asked about those pills. “Yeah.”
With both my shirt and the corset off I shivered in the air-conditioned cool room. Scooter’s fingers probed at my ribs, his gentle touch belied by the size of his hands. He nodded with approval when I didn’t wince in pain. His stethoscope shone coldly as it slid across my chest.
“You seem surprisingly calm,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t I be? There something you’re not telling me?” A tremor crept into my voice and I fought it down. I wanted to have words with this man. Oh, how I wanted discuss certain concerns that I had. Thing is, it’s not a good idea to have a go at the man who’ll be holding a knife to your face later in the day.
“Most people are nervous before surgery.” Scooter said. “That’s normal.” A wide, toothy grin split his face. “But maybe you’re more sad than scared?”
“Sad?”
His hand jerked in the general direction of my discarded clothes. “All that fem stuff. After all, you’ve gotten so good at wearing--”
“You know?” I interrupted. “I think that’s what I’m going to fucking miss most: these pleasant chats of ours. That and the goddamn beauty sessions.”
Scooter laughed. “Any time.”
The sight of the doctor and his mockery filled me with such rage that I had to look away and cast my eye across the room. One door led into a small lavatory; another, of transparent glass, back into his office and waiting room, with its desk and computer, stacks of books and files, and an expensive-looking leather sofa. Behind that closed door sat Cindy’s Mom, legs crossed at the knee, one foot bobbing with impatient anxiety.
“Interesting,” Scooter murmured. I returned my attention to the man and found his hands latched on to my tits, his thumb roughly massaging the small, grey nubs at the tip.
“Hey!”
He flicked curious, dark blue eyes my way. “Nothing? No sensation?”
“No, thank you very much. Keep your hands to yourself, yeah?” I nearly punched his hands away. “It’s been a couple of days since I’ve felt anything from them.”
I watched warily as he brought his face close to my chest. He took a little sniff and then, before I could stop him, his tongue flicked out across a nipple. Nose wrinkling in disgust he turned away and spat.
“Jesus Christ, Scooter!” I shoved him away and crossed my arms across my bare chest. “What the fuck’s your problem?”
“Some discharge, slightly oily, sweet smelling,” he muttered, nodding to himself. “They must be at the very end of their cycle. Another day and the prosthetics would have fallen off on their own.” His eyes flicked down to my crotch. “Down there?”
“Fucking thing fell away this morning.”
He snorted. “Must’ve been a relief.”
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” I agreed, nodding emphatically. “Five minutes later I was in the bathroom with the Victoria Secret’s catalogue. Jacked off like there’s no tomorrow.”
The doctor continued his examination, shaking his head in mild distaste. He tapped my knee, took my blood pressure--he noted that it was a little high--and shone a light in my eye and did the whole doctor thing in silence. I did my best to remain calm throughout as he jotted notes and information about me in the patient chart he carried in hand. When he spoke the seriousness of his voice took me by surprise.
“David?” he asked, and I raised an eyebrow at hearing him use my name. “Listen, all joking aside: do you like this girlie shit?”
I glared at him. “You’re joking, right?”
“Not at all,” he answered, meeting my gaze levelly.
“I hate it! Scooter, I fucking hate all this bullshit.” I gestured angrily towards the corset, the clingy top, clawed at the skirt I was wearing. “I’m a guy, yeah? You have any idea how embarrassing this crap is?”
“So it was all an act, then?”
“Of course it was!”
“Even last night?”
I didn’t answer straight away. When the quiet became uncomfortable I reluctantly asked, “What do you mean?”
“You know damn well what I mean,” Scooter answered. He dragged a small monitor on a wheeled cart over from its corner and tapped at a couple of keys. A little earlier he’d used the same computer to show some of the proposed changes they were going to make to my face. Any other time, watching a doctor manipulate my features on a screen, turning me into--well, someone else--would’ve been just a little freaky. But the face was male, and that’s all that mattered. I felt a desperate need to return to a normal masculine life, no matter what it was.
The screen came alive and displayed a still frame of some video footage. It showed Harry and me, sitting in the Bacchus Bar.
I sighed. “What do you want me to say?”
Scooter tapped on the space bar and cycled through a few short clips: the brief kiss on the lips between Harry and I; my hand on his knees and our close conversation; standing together and leaving the bar, arm in arm. I flushed hot with humiliation at the sight of myself, flirting with another man, sitting with him, cuddling into his embrace, playing the bar bimbo, blonde, pretty, stupid. I had to physically restrain my hand from clutching at the sharp, angry pain that flared through my stomach and head.
Scooter glanced back at me. “You sure you don’t like this stuff . . . Cindy?”
My face burned with fury and shame. “Fuck you, Jonathon.”
“Because you sure seemed to be enjoying yourself.”
I nearly choked on my anger. I jumped off the bed and went to stalk out of the room. I caught Mom--fuck it, K’s--inquisitive glance from the waiting room and couldn’t meet her eyes.
“Why’d you do it?” Scooter called after me.
“Screw you, doc,” I snapped over my shoulder.
His voice reached me just as I went to leave. “What you did, David? It may have saved his life.”
I hesitated at the door. Glancing back I was surprised at the sympathy he displayed. “What do you mean?”
“Harry Longman,” he stated, and then gestured for me to come back. “And drop the theatrics, will you? Come sit down. Where the hell were you going, dressed liked that?”
I glanced down and saw the grey, inflexible mounds still affixed to my bared chest. With a sigh I returned to the examination table. “You’re an asshole,” I muttered.
“So are you,” he said. “Yet here we are, apparently both capable of the occasional good deed.” Scooter released a deep sigh and picked up my clothes and tossed them over to me. I got dressed in silence as he continued to talk. “How did you get Harry to change his mind?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I muttered.
“Mr Longman is dying, David. That’s why he’s at the Asklepios Clinic.”
“Yeah, I know,” I answered, sliding my top on over the corset. “He told me last night.”
“Did he tell you that we’ve been trying to get him into surgery for months now? It’s an experimental procedure--risky, but the only shot he’s got. He’s refused up till now.”
I grudgingly turned my full attention back to Scooter. “No. He didn’t mention it.”
“Funny that. Because this is the thing: time and again he’s said no, not interested. No reason to justify the risk, he said. And then you came along, David. You just breezed into his favourite hangout prancing around in a skirt and a few hours later you’re his best friend. A year he’s been here and you’re the first person he’s connected with. You go out, have a couple of dates . . . and suddenly he changes his mind.”
“Really? Hey, that’s great news.”
“He called you his ‘broken flower’. A new muse. He said that any world that contains such fantastic and strange creatures as you is one worth struggling to stay in.”
Scooter’s words brought a wide grin to my face. Well . . . holy shit. Something good did come of last night. I hoped that Harry pulled through. I really did.
“So how did you do it?”
I shrugged. “He was lonely.”
“He was lonely?” Scooter snorted. “Gee, I wonder how our team of expert psychiatrists could’ve missed that. ‘He was lonely.’ You figured that out all on your own?”
I glared at him. “Yeah, I guess I’m clever that way. The man wasn’t just lonely; he was ready to die. We’re all lonely, Scooter. That’s human. But only a few of us are ready to die because of it.”
“Fine,” Scooter answered, and he sounded reluctantly interested. “Then how’d you know that was his problem?”
I shrugged again. “How the hell should I know? I just knew. It’s the same way that I could tell that you’re an egomaniac jerkwad.” I jerked a finger in K’s direction. “The same way I knew from the moment I met her that she’s a fucking dyke nutcase . . . and that, yeah, I can trust her implicitly.” I did up the final button on the blouse I wore. Interesting. Three weeks ago it took all my concentration to work a button with those claws on my finger. Now I could manage almost unconsciously. Borderline miraculous, that was. “Although in Harry’s case . . . I mean, c’mon, have you even listened to his music? Read his lyrics? It’s all there. The guy’s lonely. He’s lost. He’s . . . bored, hell, I don’t know, looking for something, someone.”
Scooter ran one beefy hand through his thick mess of hair, thinking. “And so let me guess--Cindy was just what he was looking for?”
My laugh was hollow. “Cindy? Hell no. Seriously, you don’t think a guy like Harry scores a girl like Cindy any time he wants? You say the Clinic’s been watching him--tell me Scooter, how many girls just like Cindy has he met and made out with over the last year? How many has he led into the park, or back to his room?
“For a guy like Harry? Girls like Cindy are a dime a dozen and you know what? They do nothing to kill the loneliness. Hell, they make it worse. Waking up in bed next to someone and somehow you feel more disconnected than before? God, it kills, Scooter, it fucking kills and the only thing that makes you feel better is going out again and doing it all over again.” I shook me head, earrings and golden bangs fluttering about my face. “Cindy was the last thing he was looking for.”
Scooted looked at me quizzically. “Then--”
I sighed. “Harry needed . . . hell, whatever it is I’ve been since K brought me here. A pretty girl. A cute groupie to flatter his pride, arm candy who looked good hanging off his arm . . . a flirt who could turn him on and make him feel like a man. It’s what he thinks he needs but it’s not what he wants. What he wants is a friend-- to hang out with, shoot the shit and match him drink for drink. Conversation and, hell, you know--the whole bullshit male-bonding thing . . . something more than a gushing star-struck bimbo.”
“Is that what you are, then?” Scooter asked, intrigued.
I glared at him, my anger and barely concealed sense of betrayal simmering to the fore once again. “It’s what I made myself into,” I said.
“Just like that,” Scooter said. His voice was doubtful.
I frowned. “No, not ‘just like that.’ You have any idea how hard it was, to relax into his arms?” I waved my hand towards the computer monitor, still displaying a frozen image of Harry and Cindy in a relaxed embrace. God, they looked so happy, Harry just a little bemused but so very, very content; and Cindy, her smile so simple, those beautiful eyes firmly set upon her man. “Shit, every touch, every . . . kiss, fuck, it made me sick Scooter, made me want to throw up.”
“So why--”
“Because he’s a friend!” I shouted.
Why the fuck couldn’t people understand? Harry was a friend. I’d just met the man but it’s not time that determines the value of a friendship. I owed the man and I take that kind of responsibility seriously. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for a friend. In a world where love fails and family betrays, friendship is the only thing worth believing in. Real friendship--friends that are constant in all things--trustworthy--and there when you need them; how rare and precious such a thing is! Harry had found his reason to stay in this world--Cindy--and in some twisted way he’d become mine my reason as well.
Even if he didn’t ask for my help, couldn’t ask for it--there’s no way I could’ve let the guy die. And if Cindy was the only one that could get close to him . . . then fuck it, I’d be Cindy for him. I’d . . . .
I kissed him. I . . . kissed a man. A man, for chrissake! I’d been trying to forget about last night. Obsessing about Cindy to kill the doubts, losing myself in routine, keep my mind busy. But some things you should never ignore, can never forget. Phantom sensations lurked at the edge of thought: a man’s hand caressing my ass, a man’s tongue sliding against mine, what the fuck had I done, what had I . . . done?
“David?” Scooter’s voice came from far away. “David!”
I gagged. Bile rose in my throat. That . . . bastard, that selfish weak piece of shit! Saving that man’s ass just to preserve some pathetic memory? Wasted--ruined, tainted. Now when I thought of Kate and that song and that one good memory . . . I’d always remember Harry fucking Longman and his fingers digging through my hair, his cock swelling beneath my hand . . . his smell, leather and age still clinging to me. My palm felt slick and I saw blood there, beading up where my fingers has cut the skin. White knuckles. Red palm--and nails.
Strong hands grabbed my head on both sides and pulled me out of myself. “David!” doctor Jonathon demanded. “What you did--it was good, David, you may have saved his life.”
Grudging respect--I saw it in Scooter’s eyes. The disgust I felt over last night burned away before the almost blinding hatred I felt for the man in front of me now. This was not Harry’s fault; Harry was a friend. But Jonathon Bridges was a man I had trusted, and who had betrayed me, and if I didn’t need him I could have killed him right then and there. I really could have.
“No more,” I nearly growled. “No more . . . Cindy. No more bullshit. Stop this, Jonathon, stop what you’re doing to me.”
“What do you mean?” He face went deliberately blank.
“You think I’m fucking stupid?” I hissed. “Where were they? In the goddamn painkillers? Subliminal conditioning in the music during the beauty sessions? Or was it in my food?”
“David, you’re not. . . .”
“Where were the drugs?” I screamed at him. “These motherfucking headaches, the way I’ve been acting--you don’t think I know when I’m being fucked around, you sonuvabitch?” Over in the waiting room K watched us curiously, but the door blocked the sounds of my protest. “I know who I am! I’m a man, dammit! I’m not Cindy! I don’t-- last night-- I said I trusted you but that didn’t give you the right to--”
A quickly made decision flicked across his eyes. “It was for your own good,” Scooter interrupted, his voice steady, his face unflinching confronted with my anger.
“So you admit--”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “The Asklepios Clinic drugged you, David. Does that make you feel better? Does it alleviate the guilt that you’ve been prancing around like a girl for the last three weeks? Last night was entirely the drugs. Blame it on the drugs, David, blame it on us if it’ll make you feel better.”
My hands trembled at my side, aching from the restraint. “You complete bastard.”
“I told you the first time we met: the Asclepieion is my top concern, David, not you. Your disguise was a good one but not good enough. It wasn’t up to my standards. The experts helped to polish the rough edges but it was the mannerisms that were going to give you away. The Clinic helped with those as well. And it worked. You survived intact and tomorrow you’ll wake up a new man.”
“What did you do to me?” I demanded.
“A mild hypnotic--nothing more, I assure you. The compound was air-born and slipped in through the ventilation. All that reading and practice you did? The drug simply helped your hard work stick. A little positive reinforcement helped subdue your natural guilt over acting like a girl. Your own obsession with Harry Longman carried it that final step.”
“And the headaches?”
He hesitated. “Not an uncommon side-effect. Nothing serious.”
The bastard was lying; I could tell. “You still had no right. . . .”
“I had every right to do what I did,” he stated, and loudly slammed shut the patient chart in his hand. “This is my Clinic! You are here at my sufferance!” His crazy red hair jumped and shook as he accentuated each point by slamming his fist against the side of the bed. “You are alive because of me!”
“And Harry’s alive because of me,” I answered levelly.
Mouth open mid-rant, Scooter stopped. He stared at me for a moment, and then suddenly grinned widely. “This is true,” he said. “Consider us even?”
“Not even close,” I said.
Doctor Jonathon Bridges nodded. “Fair enough,” he said, and shrugged, and I saw how little importance he attached to my forgiveness. “For what it’s worth, the self-conditioning should fade quickly. If you don’t try to act feminine, you won’t. Even drug-reinforced hypnosis is just hypnosis; it can’t make you do anything you’re completely opposed to.
“So make your farewells to Cindy. I’ll make sure everything’s prepped and ready. We’ll be ready to start within the hour.”
The doctor left the room, leaving me along at the edge of the examination table. I stared at my red-tipped fingers, at the sexy stiletto spike and the delicate leather strap that circled my ankle. Long blonde hair fell in a whispering cascade across my shoulders. I licked my lips and tasted the makeup there that made my mouth full and shiny. With every movement I felt the tickle of lace against soft and sensitive skin; suspenders tautened and loosened as I crossed my legs. The feminine gesture came so easily it was frightening.
I wouldn’t miss any of this. I really wouldn’t.
***
With steps that were more than a little precarious, I joined Agent K in the waiting room. Those shoes did an amazing thing for my ass and posture, but left me feeling like I was walking on stilts. What the hell had I been thinking, wearing these fucking things? Damn Scooter and his goddamn drugs. With a well-conditioned movement I crossed my legs and smoothed down the skirt as I sat on the sofa next to K. A faint shimmer woven into the hosiery caught the light as I carefully crossed my legs and delicately folded my hands over my knees. Without the prosthetic these gestures became just a tad dangerous; last thing I wanted was to crush my nads, yeah? I was discovering that it’s a hell of a lot harder to be properly dainty and feminine with cock and balls trapped in silk.
Agent K put aside the magazine she’d been idly leafing through. The motherly façade fell away but a strangely enigmatic smile remained as she turned to me. I briefly wondered whether she had known about Scooter’s actions; grudgingly admitted that I’d probably never know; and that she would have approved even if she knew.
“David,” she stated, as if determining my identity for the conversation. “Nervous?”
“Not really,” I answered. I ran a hand through my long hair and held it up for inspection. “Anxious to get rid of all this nonsense, to be honest.”
The corner of her mouth twitched into a small smile. “Really? By all accounts, Cindy has been quite comfortable these last few weeks.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” I said. “I’ve been saying since day one I hate this shit. A couple of weeks of being pampered ain’t about to change that. I’m a guy, K. I can’t tell you how embarrassing all this crap is. Once you get me settled down, believe me--I’ll never wear a skirt again. Ever.”
“Not even for me?” she asked softly. Her smile grew by the slightest degree, turned just a little playful and maybe--something more? “Would you play Cindy for me?”
God, this woman was a tough nut to crack! I held her gaze searchingly and tried to read her intentions--whether she was joking, serious, desperate or maybe just horny. Her eyes glittered darkly and her thin smile didn’t waver. K’s pose was relaxed and slightly mirrored mine, neither welcoming nor chastising. But that curious half-smile, the suggestion of quiet laughter lurking behind her lips; what the hell was that all about? Self-deprecating, or was she including me in a joke; was I the joke? I opened my mouth to answer; cleared my throat and glanced away.
It’s a good thing my legs were crossed. In a skirt this tight there’s no hiding a boner. Damn this woman! She puts me in panties and drugs me and I ought to hate her but somehow she’s got me more intrigued than any woman I’ve met in years. A snappy comeback: it’s all I wanted at that point but three weeks of playing Cindy seemed to have dulled . . . what? Certain rough edges, some of my cynicism? Or has it stolen my confidence? Scooter’s assurances that the drugs would wear off quickly did little to ease my fears at that point.
K’s hand softly resting over mine startled me back to attention. “Has it really been that bad, being a girl?” she asked, her eyes turning by degrees more serious.
“How the hell do you expect me to answer that?” I answered. “How can I answer that?”
“Tell me you hated it,” she said, her fingers sliding into my palm, pulling my clasped hands apart. She held one up as if examining forensic evidence. My nails caught the light in glimmering rainbow hues. “Tell me you hate having long nails and playing with the beautiful colours and how slender they make your fingers seem and how they force the way you hold your hand.”
What the hell? “I hate it,” I said, even as her soft touch drifted across the back of my hand and sent a delicate shudder up my spine.
“Tell me you hate the smooth skin,” she continued, and her hand slid up my arm, lightly caressing my bared forearm. “The delicate scents that tickle the senses and sensual softness that welcomes every touch; do you hate that as well?”
“I hate it,” I insisted. Her posture was gradually shifting towards me and she leaned closer as her hand reached to my shoulder and trailed a single nail along my bared collarbone and made me shiver.
“This?” Her fingers outlined the bump beneath my top made by the edge of the corset beneath; her fingers traced the contour down my back and tickled the skin beneath the tightly drawn laces. “And this?” Her other hand found my knee and softly kneaded the flesh above through the silky thinness of the stockings. “Do you hate the feel of lace and silk against your skin and how every touch seems magnified against shaven skin and--,” her hand at my back slipped down my side and rested confidently at my tapered waist--,“the tightness, constriction and control, the flushed breathlessness and--”
“More than anything,” I groaned, cutting her off, the pain in my groin growing unbearably. “I hate it.” With one hand on my thigh and the other at my waist, K faced me directly. Her face was close to mine.
“Your makeup is beautiful,” she said. “Your face so very pretty.” She released my thigh to draw one fingernail along my cheekbone. “Those eyes so bright and cheeks--flushed. Your lips fresh and wet and. . . .”
She leaned close. Her lips found mine. She made an appreciative sound and exhaled as she pulled away.
“Soft,” she breathed. K’s smile was more than simply playful but still hinted at amusement. “Do you--”
“Yes. Yes.”
Her eyes held mine. She continued to hold my waist. I felt pressure at my thigh again; it nearly made me jump. Softly but insistently her touch pried my crossed legs apart. Her fingers toyed at the edge of my stockings and danced up one thin garter strap and crept beneath the taut surface of the skirt. With my legs spread my cock sprang free of its lacy prison and tented my skirt. K’s fingers coiled, one by one, around my member and held it firmly as it swelled in her grasp.
“Tell me you hate it. Tell me you hate it all.”
My hands, sitting limply at my side through all this, suddenly returned to life and grabbed her by the side and by the back of the head. My fingers entangled themselves through her hair and held her as tightly as she held my member. Throughout the last two weeks and those intimate moments I shared with Harry last night--through it all my cock stayed limp and cowed. Two months alone, bereft of intimacy, weeks without release of any kind . . . but a single glance from this fucking woman and everything leapt to attention and now--
God, I haven’t wanted a woman this badly since--
“Kiss me, David,” Katherine whispered.
I pushed forward and nearly crushed her against the sofa. I forced my mouth against her as my grip pulled her to me. Our tongues danced and her breasts crushed up against my fake ones. Her grip on my penis never wavered. I kissed her eye, her neck; her breath filled my ear and her other hand stroked my nylon-sheathed leg. My hand slid beneath her sweatshirt and fumbled for her tits. A throaty female moan reached my ears: whose? My thumb flicked her nipple and I bit softly into her flesh.
K smiled a Cheshire-cat grin, wide and hungry. Her eyes shone with delight. She brought her mouth next to my ear and her voice flowed across my skin, searing, a siren’s call that was impossible to ignore.
“Kiss me, Cindy,” she whispered.
She pushed and I collapsed back into the sofa and she followed me down until she straddled me. Her lips found mine and she forced her tongue into my mouth and explored with such passionate exuberance my toes curled in their four-inch perch. I tasted her makeup and my own as well; our perfumes mingled and when she pulled away momentarily her scent clung to me possessively. Blonde tangled with her inky black swirled at the edge of my vision as I sank into my training and into the cushion and an easy lassitude. Both her hands roamed and caressed their way across my body now as her crotch ground against mine. I passively received the kisses she rained upon me. Her rough frottage sent a dull throb through my injured side but also brought me to an eager edge. She paused as she sensed my poised readiness. K’s lips--thin and pale--hovered an inch away from mine--pink, glistening, ready.
“Tell me you hate this,” she said and smiled wickedly
I found her gaze and matched her smile. “I hate you,” I answered.
Something flickered darkly behind those veiled eyes. “I know,” she said, and her mouth found mine for one final, passionate embrace. Our bodies collided and for a brief, intense moment I felt the entirety of this crazy woman pressed against me. I shuddered and released a fierce grunt that was swallowed by her frenzied kisses. I came with an intensity I hadn’t felt in ages. A moment later she pulled away and left me lying on the sofa.
“I like Cindy,” Agent K said, standing over me. Her eyes danced across my body as I basked in the luxurious sensation of one of the strangest but most needed fucks of my life. She smirked at the state she’d left me in. “I think you like her as well.”
I smiled wanly, well aware of the image I presented: the skirt hiked up over my stockings, my top at some time tossed aside leaving the corset beneath exposed, the smeared lipstick, the wetness dripping down my leg, and the tangled sweep of long blonde hair draped over the edge of the sofa; a girl well and happily fucked. From my reclining position I watched her warily. “I don’t get you, K.”
With slow, slightly awkward steps she walked over to Scooter’s desk and brought back a chair, and I wondered if she’d gotten off on our little encounter as well. First finding and then struggling back into my top, I slowly pulled myself together. When she sat across from me her expression was unexpectedly serious. Wordlessly she passed me my purse. I pulled out a few tissues to clean myself up a bit and then started to fix my makeup. It seemed like a wasted effort, considering I’d be heading into surgery soon, but I sensed that K wanted to talk without interruption.
“David, this will be the last time we ever meet.”
I paused in my ministrations and my eyes flicked from the compact over to her--and then back. I gave the slightest of nods and she continued. I’d known this, of course, even as I tried to ignore the fact. Once I was relocated into a new life there’d be no more need for an Agent K in my life.
“David, I . . . like you.” She sounded slightly annoyed by the statement. “The man I met a month ago struck me as an arrogant, misogynistic son-of-a-bitch. He was cocky beyond belief and as condescending as any man I have ever encountered. This had no influence on my decision to disguise him as a girl. You have to believe that. I still believe that it was the best way to ensure your survival at the time. But I can not deny that I took great pleasure in giving you breasts and placing you in panties.”
I snapped the compact shut and put away the lip gloss. My smile was sweet and shiny and didn’t reach my eyes.
“But that same arrogance--that cockiness, despite what you’ve been through. . . .” She looked away and sighed. “You excite me, David, in a way that makes me hate myself. That very arrogance I despise draws me to you even as it makes me want to try and . . . humiliate you and leave you somehow diminished.” She paused as if struck by a sudden thought. “But you know all this,” she added. “Even before the letter I left, you understood all this. I suspect that somehow you understand me far too well, David.
“While I was away from the Clinic my thoughts turned to you often--to both you and Cindy.” She smiled slightly after she said ‘Cindy’. “Strange how they seem two different people to me, though I see both sitting before me now.” She shook her head. “But I know that is not true, and strangely enough that may be what draws me to you the most. At first I thought it was because through you the opportunity existed to take my revenge on a man from my past . . . and then because of the desires I thought long buried that you awakened. Finally I discovered in Cindy not the debased male I expected but rather--,” she smiled weakly, “and I felt. . . .”
The eyes she turned to me were weary and sad. “These games we play, David, and all these self-doubts . . . these ghosts of the past that haunt us. Perhaps it is good thing that we will never meet again. But if we had first met, somehow, in a different place and time . . . I wonder. What would have happened between us, do you think?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, K.”
She continued to look at me searchingly. Ghosts of the past; she had no idea. Finished with my makeup I closed the purse. “You asked me if being a girl has been that bad,” I said.
K nodded.
“It has been,” I said. “Worse, even. I’ve hated it. But I don’t regret it, K. If I could go back and reconsider squealing on Steele, knowing what I’d have to go through . . . I’d do the same goddamn thing all over again.”
“Really? Why?”
“For you,” I answered.
With a hidden sadness of my own I watched her retreat, her expression turning blank. Sometimes it’s easier to give away your own feelings than to have to accept someone else’s. K could grudgingly believe that she felt strongly about someone else, but being cared for in return? No, not that. She couldn’t believe she deserved it. Even as she distanced herself I continued talking. I wasn’t really saying this for her benefit, anyway. Like I’ve said, at the end of the day it’s all about me.
“You’re cool, K. I mean, you’re a total lesbo bitch, yeah, and you’re a ball-busting pain in the neck . . . but damn if that ain’t what I like about you. You say you’re attracted to the stuff in me you hate? And you hate yourself for that? Yeah, well I guess I’m the same, only there’s no guilt in my end. I guess I just like my girls a bit broken.
“So you want to fuck with me out of some twisted need to deal with the past? That’s cool. It’s weird . . . I mean, it’s seriously weird . . . but it sure ain’t boring, K. And, God, have I ever been bored. Which is what it really boils down to in the end, I suppose. The other reason I’d do all this bullshit all over again.”
“Why would that be?” she asked.
“It’s been fun.” Her disbelieving gaze made me smile. “Seriously. K, I honestly don’t think I could’ve lasted at NeoPharm much longer. I was so bored. Holy shit, but I didn’t even know how bored I’d become.
“I mean, sure, I didn’t know it, but another year or two at NeoPharm, being that corporate cock-head I was trying to be? Yeah, I would’ve done something stupid eventually. I’m sure of it. Taken up some dumbass Extreme sport or developed a goddamn drug habit or started picking fights with street gangs in bad bars. Because, wow, that man you first met? That’s not me. God, that’s so not me. The arrogant son-of-a-bitch? Totally not me.”
K looked dubious.
I laughed. “Want to know the truth, K?” I leaned in close and spoke in a loud stage whisper. “I’ve been playing nice!” Sitting back in the sofa, I swept my hair aside so it wouldn’t get pinned beneath my back. “I mean, shit, I help some bastard out and suddenly Scooter thinks I’m a good guy or something? God, you guys don’t have a clue . . . not even you, K. I’ve been playing nice for years and I don’t think I could’ve handled it for much longer.”
When K didn’t interrupt I knew that I’d caught her interest. She was happy to sit back and let me talk. What was it about this woman that made me want to spill my guts? These weeks of stress, the drugs and the craziness of last night and, as Scooter put it, the very reasonable fear of heading into surgery--all of it was bubbling under the surface, simmering beneath my skin, hotter than ever after the heavy petting session with K. I mean, hell, I was sitting there wearing suspenders and a bra, with my own cum drying on the inside of my shaven thigh and pink panties, sitting opposite a woman I might be falling in love with--how fucked up was that? No wonder I wasn’t quite right in the head.
Still, no matter how giddy with booze or lust or worry you might be, there’s some stuff you just never share.
So instead of telling her the whole truth about my past I grappled for a story I read around at Akiko’s one night. “It’s like that story--the one with the scorpion,” I explained. She looked at me strangely and I continued. “You know, the fable?”
K shrugged.
“It’s the one with the--well, some stupid furry critter. Or a frog. Yeah, that’s it, a frog and one day this scorpion walks up and asks for a ride across a river. Now the scorpion’s acting all nice and the frog’s not too clever and so they hop in the water and start swimming across. The scorpion, yeah, it’s come a long way and it really, really wants to cross that river. It’s on a quest, see, headed for some wondrous place or something. So it’s doing its damnest to play nice. And then, half-way across the river the frog feels a sting on its back. As everything goes numb and the frog feels itself dying, it manages to, well, croak: “but why? Now we’re both going to die.” And the scorpion, it just shrugs and answers, “it’s in my nature.”
“There’s a touch of the scorpion in me, K, and I suspect in you as well,” I finished.
She frowned. “Are you trying to suggest that we are both suicidal?”
“No! What I’m saying is that there’s something fundamental to both of us, something bad, and we’re trying to change but what we really need to ask is . . . why? There’s no point. People don’t change. People can’t change, not who they are, who the really are, anyway. New names and faces are one thing, but if I’ve learned anything these last few weeks it’s this: you can force me into a skirt and make me prance around like a giddy cheerleader, you can even drug me so that I’ll play nice, but at the end of the day I’m the same fucked-up prick that I’ve always been and that’s not ever going to change, no matter how hard I or anyone tries.”
K stared at me for a very long time, frowning, and I matched her gaze calmly. Eventually there was a beep from her purse. She retrieved her mobile. Her brow furrowed momentarily as she read a message. “I have to step out for a moment,” she said, and the face she showed me was coolly indifferent. “Jon will be back soon.” Even as she spoke I could see it in her eyes, or rather in how she had difficulty making eye contact with me: she was detaching herself; she was saying her final farewell. Once she stepped through the door I really would never see her again, and I felt an unexpected sadness rise at the thought.
“Good luck, David.”
“K, wait!”
She hesitated at the threshold. I stood and walked over to her. Even in these ridiculous heels I remained shorter than her. There was both apprehension and impatience in her eyes before she glanced away. Taking her hand in mine, I gave it a squeeze. “I’ll miss you.”
For a moment she was with me in the room once again, fully present and her finger tightened briefly in my grasp. “You’re wrong,” she said, fiercely. “People can change!”
K pulled away. She left the room, leaving me alone.
***
Sitting in the chair K has used I could still smell her lingering scent. Thinking of Agent K, and then of Harry Longman and doctor Scooter, I waited to be summoned into surgery. Mostly I thought about Cindy Long and my mind wound itself through the dark recesses of memory and lost itself in confusion. Confusion: less than a day ago I was getting it on with a guy, in some kind of misguided effort to preserve a half-forgotten memory. And then: playing a role somewhere between male and female with an inscrutable woman, a broken and bitter agent I somehow knew I could trust utterly. Beneath all this fluttered the faint memories of the women from my past: Akiko and Muna and Amanda. Their presence fell over the events of the last few weeks like the trembling shadow of anxious moths beneath a pale light at night.
Katherine. Ghosts of the past. Her half-forgotten reality underscored everything in my life. For years I had tried to ignore what had happened between us even as I desperately failed to burn every single moment to memory. Those early days after the courthouse; these weeks at the Asklepios Clinic; last night with Harry and this morning with K: somehow everything happening in the present was bringing back an unwelcome recollection of the past. For years I had tried to live the part of David Sanders, normal human being, all-around-jerk, corporate climber and ladies’ man.
A few weeks as the lady had torn that illusion away. It’s a good thing today was the end. Once I was firmly ensconced in the new persona K had devised for me, I hoped I could trick myself into being a ‘nice guy’ again.
A trick was the best I could hope for. I’d never be a nice guy. But hopefully I could pretend, for the rest of my life if need be. I took some pleasure in knowing that K never got to see the real me. I had Cindy to thank for that. Hopefully the twenty-year old minx could help me be a nicer person in the future.
“Has it really been that bad, being a girl?” K’s voice echoed in my ear, so loud and real I nearly opened my eyes to see if she was standing next to me. How could I answer that question truthfully to a woman I felt impossible feelings for?
Of course it hadn’t been that bad.
It’s amazing what a human being can endure if necessary. The fear of humiliation can be one of the strongest motivators a person will ever encounter; but it’s not the strongest, not by far. Take a real macho man and point a gun at his head and give him the choice between wearing it and a bullet to the brain--yeah, you can bet your ass ninety-nine percent of them will wear the dress. Pain. Hunger . . . especially hunger. Loneliness. These are the fears that motivate people. And even they can be endured. Compared to those--what’re a few weeks in high heels?
The clothes were uncomfortable. Makeup and the fascism of fashion, the style of helplessness, these tottering heels and hobbling skirts and distracting lace and straps that ran all over my body . . . God, it was such bullshit. But it wasn’t worth dying over. Yeah, I couldn’t wait to get away from it all. The thing is, if I was to be completely truthful with myself, I’d have to admit that half my hurry was because. . . .
Goddamn if I hadn’t felt the terrible allure of it all, and that I couldn’t blame on the drugs.
For as long as I could remember my life has been hard and difficult. Always on edge, always on guard, challenging, confrontational, in charge and in your face--yeah, that’s me. A real tough guy. But Cindy . . . she could relax. She could rely on others. She could let her guard down. Shit, but I’d love to relax and everything about her was so delightfully soft, and easy, and happy. I thought of last night with Harry and too much of what happened skirted dangerous close to my own core. Had it been entirely an act, Cindy enjoying Harry’s strong arm across her shoulders, encircling, protecting? That passionate, desperate kiss under the tree and the night sky; if I was brutally honest with myself, had that been all Cindy?
Who the hell was she, really, this Cindy girl?
Cindy didn’t hate herself. I did.
God, did I ever hate myself.
Goodbye, Cindy.
It’s too quiet.
With a start I snapped out of my useless melancholy. The Asklepios Clinic, as a whole, was a quiet place but never this quiet. The normal background bustle of the hospital was missing. Other than the sound of my own breathing and the rhythmic hum of the equipment in the room, I was surrounded by a profound and unsettling silence. Even the faint thrum of ventilation had silenced.
Every instinct shouted that something was seriously wrong. I wasn’t safe here, no matter what K and Scooter thought.
I leapt to my feet, shouldering my purse. The click of my heels rang unnervingly loud as I walked from the room. I cursed the tight skirt that hobbled my stride and forced me to take short mincing steps. I reached out with every sense. The hallway stretched in both directions. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. There was no one else around. My corseted breath roared in my ears as I forced down my anxiety. It was probably nothing, just like when I found Larry chasing after me.
What if Larry had been right and this place wasn’t safe?
Where the hell was Scooter? What was that message K had received?
With hurried steps I rushed down the corridor towards the nearest corner. I had barely left the room before I heard a single, solid footstep behind me. A voice called out.
“David Sanders?”
I turned at the sound of my name.
Stupid, stupid fucking rookie mistake.
“Well, what have we here?” Agent Foster’s stepped around the corner and stood at the far end of the hall. His face split in a grin, cruel and cold. “I think Mr. Steele will be most pleased. . . .”
To be concluded . . .
Constant in All Other Things
Chapter 1
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected] - https://www.patreon.com/fakeminsk)
“Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.”
Much Ado About Nothing
Synopsis:
It may be the right thing to do, but after an assassination attempt leaves him nearly dead, David Saunders is forced to rely on Special Agent Katherine Smith to keep him alive. But how, with one of the most powerful men in the world in pursuit, sworn to your humiliation and destruction?
Zero: Not a Woman (Prologue)
I stand, gun pointed at his head.
The weight of the pistol feels comfortable in my grip. A few weeks ago, I would’ve sworn to having never seen a handgun before--not outside of one of those movies Tom likes and I hate, or in some horrible fever dream. The thought of holding one, let alone firing it, would have left me in terrified hysterics. Now the ugly thing nestles easily in my grip. The feel of the cold metal is once again familiar: its textured grip, the deadly weight.
But then, many new things have become familiar in the past two years: the flash of glossy pink on the painted nails resting at the pistol’s trigger; the sweep of long blonde hair at the edge of vision; the slick taste of lipstick. The precarious balance and high arch of stilettos is comfortable now. I’ve learned to love my breasts, their feel and touch and weight—the way they move and the pretty bra that cups them, and even the feel of a man’s strong hand over them.
But that empty feeling between my legs? Not that . . . that will never be familiar. Now one of the bastards responsible sits tied to a chair, hands behind his back, face bloodied and back bowed. I stand, gun pointed at his head. There is beauty to the simplicity of the image. My slender bared shoulder and outstretched arm, with its delicate silver bracelet that flashes in the flickering half-light of the dirty little room, trembles from the weight of the weapon. It is not indecision that causes the tremble. There is a metre of empty space, and then Tom’s face, bruised eyes squeezed shut in fear. Not for the first time I admire the elegance that reveals itself in the ugliness of violence. After all I’ve endured: finally, revenge.
The moment he opens his eyes I’ll shoot. I want to see the look in my husband’s eyes one last time.
“Oh, God. Please, no, don’t do this.” His voice pleads and I thrill at the power I hold over him. It’s been so long since I’ve felt powerful. The bastard keeps his eyes squeezed shut. “I’m so—it doesn’t—have to be this way. I’m so sorry.”
I don’t answer. The gun begins to feel heavy. In some ways I’m a lot weaker than I used to be.
“Cindy,” he says. “Please.”
“My name is not Cindy,” I hiss.
He takes a deep, shaky breath. “David,” he says.
“Say it again.” I want to shout but my voice catches in my throat and finally escapes hardly louder than a whisper. This has already gone on for too long, and there isn’t much time. The sound of other violence outside the room, of other dramas unfolding, lives ending, retributions being paid or earned, steadily grows. “Open your eyes.”
“David,” he repeats.
“Look at me!”
He opens his eyes. He looks straight into me. His eyes are blue but so clear they seem nearly transparent. They are the most alluring feature of a very attractive man. A woman could easily lose herself in those gentle depths. I did.
“I’m so sorry,” he says.
But I am not a woman. I squeeze the trigger.
Part One: Doing the Right Thing
“You’re doing the right thing,” Agent K said. “Something good.” Her name was Special Agent Katherine Smith, and she was my guardian angel. I’d taken to simply calling her K. It annoyed her, which is why I did it. Tall and slender in a sleek grey suit, she stood by me and her grip on my shoulder was strong as she looked down and straight into me. “Trust me.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one stepping in front of a packed courtroom in front of Jeremiah-fucking-Steele, accusing him of murder. This guy wasn’t some backstreet thug who’d knocked over a liquor store. He was a rich—terribly rich—and powerful—extremely powerful—man, a pharmaceutical magnate and all-around nasty piece of work. The media mill churned out endless rumours that had him involved in all kinds of stuff. Shady stuff, you know?
He was also my boss.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t scare easily. Growing up, I got involved in some pretty heavy shit, the kind of shit you bury deep and do your best to forget about. I’m not particularly proud of my past. I’m not ashamed of it either. But if the people I know now found out the stuff I’ve done? That’d probably be the last of the few friendships I enjoyed.
Now, one of the few unquestionable wisdoms I’d cultivated from my youth—a lesson learned through pain and loss—was knowing who -not- to fuck with. I knew better than to mess with a mean bastard like Jeremiah Steele. Squealing on him was asking for a whole world of pain and retribution. So Agent K reassuring me I was doing the right thing sort of missed the point. I knew full well what I getting myself into and I had my own goddamn reasons for doing so, and it being the “right thing” wasn’t really one of them.
See, I’m a mean bastard myself. I really am; I’m not a nice guy. Now, being an asshole has done me well in my current line of work. It’s a different world than when I was a kid – but not that different. Back then I ran with a gang and did… other shit. Now I’m a director for NeoPharm, I mingle with execs and all that shit and it only takes a peek beneath the surface to see this corporate existence isn’t exactly holding the moral high ground. Sure, there’s the Saville Row suits and Nikke Sekkei offices and the fountains might as well spew Moet for all the conspicuous wealth on display. Even better, there’s always some fine, young piece of ass walking through the office in a tight skirt and heels, ready to cash in a fine meal, a few stiff drinks and the right line of chat for a good fuck. But all that corporate respectability’s nothing more than a thin veneer laid over the self-serving pricks and back-room politics going on, the relentless, empty grabbing at power and wealth, like Chanel sprayed over a pile of dogshit.
Seriously, I thought I was an asshole, but then my old company got bought out by NeoPharm, and our new corporate overlords? They made even me feel good about myself. And yeah, NeoPharm. You buy their products. You’ve got their vaccine inside of you. They saved the world, apparently, and now it’s the boss’s flagship holding company and I swear, sometimes it feels half the world’s a subsidiary of Jeremiah fucking Steele’s corporate empire.
I was starting to look for another job when it all started, this whole, twisted fucked up series of events. If only I’d gotten out faster. I’d taken my time looking for a job. The Earth was still barrelling headlong into self-immolation, plagues and pandemics ran rampant and people were more fucked up than ever by the internet, by drugs, by their own hopeless expectations–but fuck it, the economy was strong and a healthy pay check made me picky. I just didn’t want to work for a scumbag like Steele. Like I said, I’m an asshole but even I’ve got my limits. Some things I just won’t do. I’d like to think I’ve got a, you know, code or something, although that makes it sound far grander than what it is. It’s not like I’ve ever sat down and thought it through or made a book of it. Trust me, I’m not that clever. It’s not the bloody Hagakure or anything like that. I’m no damned samurai. But I know what I think is right, and what I think is wrong.
For instance, I’ll never backstab a friend. Ever. Way I see it, that’s the worst thing a man can do, because a friend--a real friend? One you can trust with your back?--is the most valuable thing you’ll ever have in this world. When you get down to it, there ain’t much I wouldn’t do for a friend. This I’ve learned the hard way, and even if I’ve not got that many, I take care of the ones I’ve got.
And so, yeah, I didn’t need this Agent K telling me I was doing the right thing. I mean, I saw Jeremiah fucking Steels blow some guy’s head off, right there on the top floor of our corporate HQ.
Did I same ‘some guy’? Ha! Georgio Antazzi wasn’t just some guy, any more than Sakura was just some girl I once worked for. And
yeah, I said Antazzi--that guy, the son of Antonio Antazzi, mob boss and underworld psychopath. Georgio: the apple of his father’s eye, the billionaire golden boy, the one who’d gone legal and done good.
Seeing those two together carried all kinds of implications. The video footage off my phone made those implications concrete: underworld connections, the intimidation and murder of corporate rivals, the movement of highly illicit substances across internal and international borders. And then there’s the scintillating dialogue overheard between the two before Georgio became a red smear across the floor; the clip of Steele unloading three bullets into the other man’s head was the stuff of the prosecution’s wet dreams.
So, yeah, chance to take down the bad guy? Especially when that guy’s your boss? Of course I’m going to do it. Even if only half the rumours are true, the guy had it coming. Agent K figures that with my testimony there’ll be enough on Steele to take him down, and hard, especially with all the extra inquiries that’ll be launched into his shady dealings. And if the legal system doesn’t get him, she figures, then the backlash he’ll suffer from his allies and enemies should do him in. Even a man like Steele has to worry about the likes of Antazzi. Agent K seemed to have some kind of personal grudge against that Steele which was fine by me.
Me, I’m not so sure anything I say or show in that courtroom’s going to make much difference. Men like Steele, they get away with murder and theft and worse the way a sexy girl with a pretty smile dodges a speeding ticket.
So why do this?
Two reasons: because I can’t stand the fucker; and because of Tom.
Now, pissing off a guy like Jeremiah Steele can get you worse than killed. I was, in some ways, an ideal candidate for bearing witness against the man. I’m lucky, I guess, that I don’t have any family to worry about. Mom and I aren’t exactly close; or to be more precise, as far as she’s concerned I disappeared or died years ago, and I doubt she cares. I didn’t exactly have a lot of friends, and the few I’d consider close I hadn’t seen in years. More to the point, they can take care of themselves: any dumbass going after them will deserve whatever they get.
And as for me--well, fuck it. I felt strangely ambivalent about walking away from my job, my condo, and the shit I’d accumulated over the past ten years. I’d worked hard to get where I was, and felt some pride in that. Yet at the same time, I felt like I could just walk away from all that shit and not miss it at all.
So, yeah, normally the thought of putting myself forward for something dangerous wouldn’t have me too worried. After all, even though I haven’t had to in years, I knew I could make myself disappear if necessary. It’s one of the few benefits of a messed up childhood: you learn to take care of yourself.
This was different, though. This was Jeremiah Steele.
I’ve rubbed shoulders with the powerful before, with the but nobody in this guy’s league. The dude’s seriously dangerous. Vengeful. Even if only half the rumours are true, you don’t get away from this guy. Unfortunately, rumours are usually only half the real story. In my experience, it’s the really scary stuff that people don’t know about.
Really, my only real concern in all this is Tom. I dragged him into this and if anyone finds out he’s fucked. He’s way out of his league with this shit, and yeah, I feel guilty for dragging him into this. But if I do this thing, hopefully he’ll come out okay and escape Steele’s attention.
“You ready?” K asked.
I took a deep breath. “Yeah.”
Two: Sexy Little Number
It went well. K led me into the dark-panelled room and sat me down, where I waited into the legal folks called on me to speak. The proceedings were running under a media blackout – no cameras, no phones – and security was heavy. I doubt Steele even noticed me as I entered. There was no reason for him to recognize me, another peon in his managerial hierarchy. On the other hand, I definitely recognized him—for all the shadiness of his off-record activities, he maintained an open and curated media personality. He was a tall man, just under two meters, muscular, and distinctively bald. He carried himself with a confidence, an arrogance that made a mockery of the proceedings, as though the procedure of human justice were just a mild inconvenience.
Steele eyed me curiously when I was called to speak. There was something seriously discomforting about the way he watched people – like he was dissecting them, frankly assessing their worth to him, or how he could profit from the breakdown of their component parts. There was something definitely uncomfortable in the way he stared at me, unblinking, during the entirety of my speaking.
Fortunately, I’m a pretty fucking confident guy as well. I described what I saw precisely and succinctly, and it went well. It helps that I’m a good-looking guy. I am—and I don’t mean that in a conceited way. It’s just an unfortunate truth that good-looking people get treated better; everyone knows that. The fact I was easy on the eyes of Steele’s lawyer—that I could openly flirt with her—made driving these nails into Steele’s coffin all the more satisfying.
So yeah, I get listened to and treated well and it’s not fucking fair but there you have it. At 165 cm I’m a touch under average for a guy, but what of it? I couldn’t care less, and if some bitch thinks I’m too short to date then fuck her. It’s her loss.
And I keep myself looking good. I’m not overly invested into the fashion thing but know where to shop and spend good cash to wear nice clothes. Dad was Japanese or something, a businessman of some kind if you believe Mom—which I don’t, and I’ve never met the bastard. But I got my good looks from both of them, I guess. From him, a smooth face; the best I can manage is some rough stubble after a week or so. From her: emerald-green eyes girls seem to love, flecked with grey. From him: the dark, straight hair, kept short and spiked. I look younger than my thirty-five years, and that boyish-charm thing can manage wonders, in the bar, the bedroom or the boardroom.
Another thing that works wonders is the body. I keep myself in good shape. What an understatement!--I keep myself in excellent shape. Some might call it obsessive. I guess some habits die hard. Slender and scrawny as a kid, I wrapped myself in muscle and nobody’s picked on me since. Doesn’t hurt that chicks love the abs of steel. Couple that with money and, yeah, I do pretty damn well at the clubs on a Saturday night; it’s a rare weekend that I sleep alone. The final fact that I’m pretty damn good at persuading people certainly helps as well. I’ve got a knack for understanding what they want to hear.
And so, working that court over was easy. I didn’t lie, of course, but here were certain details I wanted to omit. I had the courtroom hanging on every detail as I explained what I saw while hiding in that executive secretary’s office.
Perhaps I overdid it. I got carried away by my own eloquence. It wasn’t the conversation I overheard, or even the fight or the whole gun-to-head thing that set Jeremiah off. The man in question took my accusations very well. He sat behind his table, powerfully built and bald head gleaming in the camera lights, towering head-and-shoulders over his team of lawyers, and he seemed highly amused by the proceedings. The man could’ve been nervous as hell but hid it well behind this fucking smirk the whole time. I think that’s what got me. That goddamn smirk. I hate arrogance. I really do. It pissed me off so much I added in a few details that I’d intended to hold back.
Steele kind of lost it when I got to those sketchy implications. The wry grin disappeared. His eyes hardened. In the awful silence of the closed courtroom I swear I heard him coldly whisper: “You’re a fucking dead man, Saunders” just before silently launching himself at me. It took half-a-dozen men to hold him back from throttling me. From trying, that is. I don’t throttle easily. The man’s not small, tall and built like a brick shithouse, and the bastard reached the witness stand, bowling his way through the security, before they managed to pull him back. Straining against the men who restrained him only a few feet from me, he locked his eyes with mine and hissed, “I’ll have your goddamn balls on a plate,” before they dragged him back. I wish we’d had at it then and there; I would’ve snapped his fucking neck.
Security rushed me out of the courtroom into a small side room. Agent K was waiting for me.
“We have to get you out of here,” she said.
“Hey, I’m feeling okay,” I said. “Thanks. Nice crowd, good security. I’m feeling pretty good about myself.”
“Please try to focus, Mr Saunders,” K said. “You know what kind of man you are dealing with. If he has threatened to kill you, you can be sure he intends to follow through. Mr Steele is a very vengeful man. More importantly, he can not afford to look weak in front of neither allies nor enemies. Especially considering the nature of your accusations.” She hesitated for a moment. “Were they true?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Every word.”
“You never mentioned it before.”
“Didn’t think it was important,” I said, which was a lie of course. I’d intended to withhold those details to ensure my own personal safety. It was the kind of thing that made for good blackmail.
K sighed. “You embarrassed a very powerful man in front of many very powerful people, Mr. Saunders. Simply testifying was enough to put you in a very precarious position, but now . . . I fear Mr. Steele will stop at nothing to make an example of you. His words were not a threat; it was a death warrant.”
She’s not so good at inspiring confidence, this woman. I nodded. “So what do we do?”
“First? We get you out of here. Then we relocate you, give you a new identity, and make you disappear. And quickly, before Mr. Steels has time to declare open season on you.”
She walked over to a corner of the room and bent down for a large duffel bag. I enjoyed the view as K’s tight skirt strained against the rounded firmness of her ass. The woman’s a real looker, even if she went for a real severe look, what with the past-the-knees skirt and mannish jacket and clunky heels. Tall and slender, she gave an impression of tightly-coiled strength, somehow, and at a glance you knew better than to fuck with her. She was pale, with a long face and thin lips that seemed perpetually set in an expression of mild disdain. Her hair barely reached her shoulders and flipped up slightly at the tips, which somehow softened her look, an unexpectedly feminine touch on a woman who seemed eager to shed the outward trappings of her gender.
“Enjoying the view?” she asked dryly. Sharp eyes, this woman. We’d only met a few times, in arranging for my court appearance and in keeping me safe and hidden before the trial. There’s something very off-putting about her, to be honest. She’d proven a sharp judge of character, and there’s always a sense that she knows more than she’s letting on. The fact that she didn’t respond to my charms didn’t help either. I had this feeling that she didn’t particularly like me. Like I said, a good judge of character. At the same time I honestly felt like I could trust her, which is saying something. I’m not a very trusting person. You could say I’ve got commitment issues.
“So how do I get outta here alive?”
“With this.” She dropped the bag on the table. It looked heavy but she moved it without much effort. She reached in and pulled out a colourful bundle of fabric.
“A dress?” It was a sexy little number, red and tight. “What the fuck, you’re gonna disguise me as a chick?”
She looked at me oddly. “Please, Mr Saunders. That would be idiotic.” She reached deeper into her bag and hauled out a heavy vest--the non-standard issue expensive kind with STL-reinforced Kevlar in it. “I think this would prove more helpful, would you not agree?” she said, handing it to me. “Unless you had your mind set on the dress, of course. I have in here some heels to match.”
“Very funny,” I said. I slipped on the vest, its weight familiar and reassuring.
“There is a car waiting nearby. When I give the signal they will come around the side of the courthouse. We leave by a side entrance. You should be exposed for no longer than thirty seconds. Other agents, dressed similar to you, will leave by alternate exits simultaneously, hopefully confusing anyone keeping watch. Once we reach the car it will carry us to a safe location where we can begin to process your relocation and new identity.”
I nodded.
She handed me a heavy green sweater from her bag. I pulled it on over the vest. It was a bulky Gap thing--nondescript, and it hid the vest. I wondered if they were evacuating Tom as well. He was a tough guy, but he didn’t have my background. I’m sure that I would have been shitting myself if I hadn’t been through some rough times as a kid. I wondered where Tom was right now.
Standing there just before K hauled me out of that room, with a higher-than-normal chance that I was about to get gunned down like some clay pigeon, my most pressing concern was that I’d never see Tom again. K was going on about procedures and I only listened with half an ear. I was thinking about my friend. Somehow I knew the guy would be okay. He’s a good guy. But with this relocation thing, chances are we’d never meet each other again. I hate losing a real friends. It wasn’t the first time, you know? But it still sucks every time.
“Are you ready?”
K was looking at me expectantly. Even in civilian clothes she looked like a fucking federal agent. I took a deep breath. Calmed the jitters in my stomach. Focused. Nodded.
She made the call. Pulled me forward. We walked quickly through the back corridors of the courthouse, our clipped footsteps echoing through the narrow halls. Bland white walls and flickering fluorescent lighting. The hallways were conspicuously empty. Then a solid metal door, red and pitted and cool to the touch. Another deep breath. Instincts long forgotten and supressed began to awaken.
God, I was loving this. I hadn’t felt this alive in years.
We pushed through the door. The first bullet took me in the chest before I managed a single step.
Three: A Nice, Ordinary Past
“Mr. Saunders?”
The voice reached me through layers of pain. The darkness slowly receded. I took a shaky breath. I wasn’t dead, but the pain nearly left me wishing I was. I knew when I looked down my chest would be a Rorschach test of black and blue.
I opened my eyes. K was watching me closely. She didn’t look all that sympathetic, but the moment she saw I was awake she reached out of my line of sight and brought back a glass of water.
“Sit up,” she ordered.
Wonderful bedside manner, a real Nightingale, that K. Agony flared across my chest as I struggled to sit. Just as expected: one massive bruise. My whole chest and upper abdomen was a purple and yellowed mess. K placed some pillows behind my back to prop me up. My vision swam momentarily and my head throbbed with the effort. I reached up and found a sticky spot near my temple.
“These will help,” she said and for a moment, as she handed me the glass of water and two tablets, she actually looked worried. Who knew the frosty secret agent could actually show concern for my well-being? I popped back the pills and knocked back the glass of water.
“You’re tougher than I imagined, Mr. Saunders,” she continued, that moment of sympathy apparently gone. “The assassin was standing right outside the door when you stepped through. He fired two shots that caught you right over your heart. The impact sent you back into the doorway. Your head connected with the edge of the doorframe. A third bullet caught you in the side and the last one in the back, before the assassin was dealt with.”
It was hard to focus on what K was saying. My vision swam for a bit. Four bullets at point-blank range? I owed a pint to the bastard that designed the body armour. No wonder each breath was like sucking on a hot coal.
K handed me another glass of water that I eagerly drained. Breathing deeply helped clear my head a bit, and finally my vision stopped swimming and the buzzing in my ears eased somewhat. There was still a faint worrying hum in the back of my mind, similar to a mild concussion but different somehow.
K pulled up a chair and sat next to me. She looked the same as before: same clothes, minimal makeup, angular features pinched into an expression of severity. Too bad, really: she’d be damn fine if she tried a little harder. I looked around and saw that I was propped up in a dirty single bed in a small, plain room with peeling and yellowed wallpaper. Probably some kind of safe house or something. Still, the question had to be asked. “Where the hell am I?”
“I pulled you into the car and we managed to escape before any more of Mr Steele’s assassins appeared. We took a very indirect route; it is unlikely that we were followed to this location. However, it would be unwise to stay here for any length of time.”
“Yeah, great.” Sunlight beamed in through the open door leading into the room. I must’ve been out for awhile. I gently probed my chest--it felt a bit like tenderized beef. I should’ve hurt more, but those pills of K’s worked fast and seemed to be keeping the pain at bay. The cloudiness in my head wasn’t retreating, though, and that had me a little worried. “K? I’m not feeling so hot.”
K nodded. “I see.” She stared me straight in the eyes. It was a bit eerie, really. When you think about it, people almost never stare you straight in the eyes. It’s a challenge, in a way. Or a sign of intimacy. I’d be damned if I’d look away, but it actually made me a bit nervous, the way she looked at me. She looked hungry. Or angry. “Mr. Saunders, I want you to understand that I will do everything I can do to keep you alive.”
I nodded. I already knew that. Like I said, I’m a good judge of character. I know who my friends are, as few as they are. I know who’s a proper asshole and who’s likely to screw me over and when someone’s a phoney and a liar, usually within a few minutes of meeting someone. And I know who I can trust.
“And Mr. Saunders? I need you to trust me.”
I’m not a trusting person. I’ve been screwed over far too often in the past. But staring K straight in the eyes as I lay battered and bruised in that bed, my head all foggy and buzzing--somehow, it renewed my belief that I could trust her.
“This is just a temporary safe house,” she said. “To call the medical facilities here ‘limited’ would be generous. Those shots you took were at very close range. Even with the vest,” and here she gestured at the discarded armour heaped at the side of the bed, “I am concerned for your well-being, especially with the hit to your side.” The congealed shear thickening liquid had erupted from between the Kevlar sheets and set in brownish blossoms, trapping the bullets.
Staring dumbly at armour, I nodded.
“You may need professional medical assistance. Bringing you to a nearby hospital would place your life at greater risk.”
I nodded again.
K gave me a long look. “I have a proposition for you,” she said.
She’d done a pretty good job of getting me to the hearing alive and out of the courthouse--even considering I’d been shot four times. I mean, this was fucking Jeremiah Steele; I couldn’t help but wonder how many other agents turned down the assignment because they were afraid of the guy. But not K. I wouldn’t say I trusted her implicitly, but even with the whole dyke thing going on she seemed to actually have a clue, compared to most other authority figures I’d met. Besides, who said shit like “I have a proposition for you,” anyway? People just don’t talk that way. But K did. I think I liked her.
“Yeah? What is it?” I tried to sound confident but could hardly stay awake.
“I fear you won’t like it, David.” Her attempt at normal, sympathetic human communication worried me more than anything she could’ve said. Calling me David certainly woke me up a bit. Every communication we’d had, every meeting, she’d called me Mr Saunders. Just like she called that bastard Mr Steele and Tom, Mr. Hunter. So if she was suddenly calling me David, then this had to be bad.
She sighed. She pulled out a thick folder, one of those plain beige ones, with a paperclip holding printouts in place. It seemed so anachronistic I nearly laughed. “This is you,” she said. I looked at the folder and focused and eventually could read my name. David Saunders, age 39. She flipped it open and the top sheet of paper had a picture and a small summary of who I was and where I’d come from. The picture was from my latest ID photo at NeoPharm. I had to strain to read the summary of me. I was pleased looking through my educational and childhood history. Her officious background check hadn’t turned up anything about the gangs. Or the other stuff, Sakura and all that. Just as it ought to be. Just a nice, ordinary past, high school and good grades, a smooth ticket into university and a top degree. A couple years working in bars and clubs and then the IndigoTech startup, and then moving onto the big time, the first rung on the corporate ladder leading to now.
“And this is who I suggest you become.” K hesitated a moment and slid a second folder in front of me. It was much newer and thinner. I flipped it open.
There wasn’t much to read on the cover sheet. Only a name and an age:
Cindy Bellamy. Age 20.
To be continued…
His enemies have caught up to David, leading to a desperate struggle and the end of the first story arc. Is it time to say farewell to Cindy?
Constant in All Other Things
Chapter Ten
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent
-Much Ado About Nothing
“Such a disappointment.”
Agent Fosters approached unhurriedly. His bulk seemed to fill the hallway. At six feet and a bit he towered over me. He filled out his well-cut black suit and it clearly wasn’t with fat. Expensive shoes sounded a deliberate, solid rhythm at his approach. Each step landed with an almost leonine grace that belied his size. Large, wiry hands curled and uncurled into fists at his side. His smile was sardonic and his eyes glittered cruelly as he watched his prey.
“Listen, can we talk about this?” I pleaded as I took an unsteady step back.
There was no negotiating with this guy. I instinctively understood the nature of this man. He wouldn’t kill me out of loyalty to Steele. He wouldn’t do it for the money. He would kill me for pleasure. Three weeks ago I sensed the animal that lurked beneath the façade of civility he presented, but now his true nature showed clearly in every fibre of his being. The best I could hope for was to buy some time--time for K to get her secret agent ass to my rescue, for Scooter to engage whatever security systems Asklepios might have. I wasn’t about to hold my breath, though. If Fosters was as good as I suspected he’d have his bases covered. Back in the hotel room there had been a partner; where was she?
He shook his head slowly, eyes never losing track of me. His smile grew wide and hungry.
I never considered running. It’s what Fosters wanted: the final ecstasy of the chase and the savage joy of the kill. I had a better chance of delaying the inevitable by staying. Feed his appetite but keep him wanting more. It’s not like I would have gotten very far in these clothes anyway. This skirt hobbled me to mincing steps. I could barely walk in these shoes, let alone run. Long hair for him to pull me back with. Jangling accessories to betray my location. A corset that strangled my breath. Everything that Agent K and the Clinic had done to disguise me now served me up to the enemy in a state of learned helplessness.
Backing away with hesitant steps from the larger man, it wasn’t difficult to appear frightened.
“Please. . . .” A final use of the spray this morning kept my voice feminine. “Don’t hurt me.” I pleaded with eyes wide with terror.
The sick bastard loved it, the girlish sob that wavered beneath my voice. “What a disappointment,” he repeated. “They told me you were a real tough guy,” he said. “A bastard. And look at you now: nothing more than a little sissy.” He paused in his approach. Twenty feet away. There was a locked door to my back and the hallway continued to my right. He blocked the only other was in or out, and stood just a few feet from the threshold leading into Scooter’s office.
“I am going to hurt you, David.” The space between us was largely empty: a few framed pictures on the wall, a low sofa behind Fosters with a small table next to it decorated with a vase overflowing with flowers. The flowers were startling bright, beautiful red roses that seemed out of place in their clinical surroundings. They momentarily drew my eye away from Fosters. “I am going to hurt you bad. I am going to break you, then I am going to cut you, and then I am going to watch you bleed.”
Lovely guy, this Fosters. If he was talking it’s because he wasn’t expecting any interruptions. Where the hell was K? “No,” I cried, channelling more of Cindy. My hands fluttered at my side and I clasped them together desperately. “Oh God, please . . . don’t.”
Drinking in my terror, he took a single step forward and eyed me appraisingly. “Beg for you life, little sissy.” His eyes shone eagerly. “Or should I call you Cindy? It does not matter; beg, you little faggot, beg for a quick death.”
“I’m begging you,” I said, nearly sobbing, shaking my head, long blond tresses trembling about my face. “I--”
“On you knees,” he demanded. “Little bitches like you beg on their knees.”
I hesitated only briefly before sinking to the floor, the smooth tiles cool and slippery through my thin stockings. Looking up through the tangled curtain of my hair I repeated my plea. “Please don’t kill me.”
He resumed his leisurely approach. Even fixated on me he kept careful awareness of his surroundings, each step deceptively relaxed. My stomach tightened--to the extent that it could, trapped in the corset’s grip--as he drew close. Ten feet away. I nearly shook with the effort to remain on my knees.
I had to trust to this man’s primal nature. I had to believe when he said he planned to hurt me first. Injuries can heal. Pain can be endured. But if he pulled a gun, which he must surely have--bang--game over. I had no intention of dying, not here, not dressed like this. As long as Fosters was beating on me there was still hope; K might still show; the cavalry might arrive; he might make a mistake.
Fosters stared at me hungrily, and with dismay I watched the delight in his eyes twist and darken. “Disgusting,” he said.
“How did you find me?” I dropped the begging but kept the desperate tone to my voice. It wasn’t entirely faked.
Pride briefly warred with impatience. The disdain never left his eyes as he spoke. “You led us on a good chase,” he grudgingly admitted. “Mr Steele has his agents everywhere, scouring the city for you. My partner was tipped off to the safe house. It seemed an unlikely lead. And I have to admit--when we followed you to that hotel you fooled us completely. Oh, you were convincing, David--very convincing.” The scorn in his voice made me tremble with shame--which he wanted--and fury--which I hid. “Being a girl comes naturally to you.
“The rental car gave you away. That bitch protecting you wiped it clean of prints. But she missed something. A tiny spot of blood on the ceiling. Your blood. Once we knew you were in the car the distance logged by it made tracking you here easy. But were you still in the Clinic? That had to be determined. So I watched. Imagine my surprise when I saw Cindy.” He stepped closer. “Was she a girlfriend? Were you the man in the shower back in the hotel? Oh, imagine my surprise when I finally realized that you were Cindy! A very good effort, David Sanders. You seemed to have found your true calling.”
What gave me away? During what brief moment in which I allowed my feminine character to slip away did this bastard spot me? Or had I only been half as convincing as I’d thought, making an utter fool of myself in an environment so messed up nobody really cared?
“But--how. . . .”
Shaking his head, Fosters loomed over me. “Your efforts to delay the inevitable are pathetic,” he said. “Mr Steele wants a very painful example made of you, David. The security protocols for the building have been overridden and this wing placed in a lockdown. The doors are locked, the windows barred. No one is coming to your rescue.”
With an almost tired sigh he reached down. His fingers coiled roughly through my hair and pulled. I gasped with pain as he hauled me to my feet. “My partner is taking care of your protector.” He yanked my head back. His eyes burned into mine. “And I’ve got all the time in the world to take care of you.”
***
“Don’t worry, child. I’ll take care of you.”
The woman gathered me in her arms. She was only a few inches taller than me but seemed much larger, more powerful than any school councillor or parent. Tears of outrage and frustration dribbled down my cheek and stained the front of her blouse as she held me close. I trembled and she smoothed down my hair and made hushing sounds. “It’ll be okay,” she said, but I was too young and too weak, too angry to listen.
“My name is Sakura,” she said, crouching slightly to look me eye-to-eye. “I’m a teacher.”
Her ‘students’ clustered not far behind with faces revealing varying degrees of anger, guilt and surprise. For the last fifteen minutes they’d been first taunting me, then pushing me around, and finally they’d settled on beating the living shit out of me.
“So tell me,” she asked, after I’d told her my name, “why on earth did you try and steal from a martial arts school?”
In stumbling, half-choked words I explained about the gang, the initiation challenge and how impressed I thought they’d be if I returned with some kind of weapon or a big wad of cash. Somehow it never occurred to me that I could actually get caught; and if I did, well, I could take care of myself. I thought I was tough. I was eleven years old and an idiot.
“But you weren’t strong enough, were you?” Sakura asked, wiping at a spot of blood at the corner of my mouth.
I shook my head angrily.
“You didn’t give up,” she added. “I watched you fight back.”
I glared at her.
She laughed, an airy sound free of mockery. She caught a tear running down my cheek. “These tears, they aren’t of pain, are they? They aren’t of embarrassment.”
I shook my head.
“They’re of anger.” She leaned closer and spoke so softly only I could hear. “You’re very angry, aren’t you? You’d like to strike back at them--at all of them,” she said, and somehow I understood she was referring to people beyond the walls of this small room. “If only you were strong enough.”
There was no need to answer; she understood.
“Would you like me to train you?” Sakura asked.
I nodded.
***
His fist slammed into my face. I staggered back. No stability in those shoes. My ankle wobbled and I hit the wall. A picture frame shattered against the back of my skull. Glass shards rained down about my shoulders. Fosters was on me immediately, another punch catching me in the stomach. Pain flared in my side. I began to crumble, until an uppercut sent me back. My shoulder clipped the wall and I spun into the sofa. I hit the armrest and tumbled forward. His knee dropped onto my back. He hauled my head back by my hair. My scalp burned. I tasted blood. His fingers closed around my throat.
“You pathetic wimp,” he hissed. He dragged me off the sofa. I scrabbled useless at his grip. He lifted me up and slammed me against the wall and held me there. “Did you enjoy dressing like this?” His hand released my throat and grabbed at the prosthetic breasts. “Enjoy being felt up?” His rough squeeze went unfelt, but with a tearing sound and the popping of buttons he ripped the blouse open. Fosters’ eyes narrowed with disgust at the sight of the grey things stuck to my chest, and the corset that contained them. “Sick,” he spat, and violently threw me into the opposite wall.
The wall cracked and dust showed over me as I collapsed to the ground. On trembling hands I lifted myself from the floor. His foot lashed out and caught me across the ribs. I dropped again. With a moan I tried to cover my wounded side, only for his fist to smash me back down.
“Stop!” I cried out.
Ignoring my plea, Fosters roughly lifted me off the ground and effortlessly tossed me away. I crashed into the end table, falling over it onto the sofa once again. The vase shattered beneath my body. Water splashed out and soaked my front. Flowers scattered everywhere. I felt porcelain shards cut my skin as I twisted to stare up at him with terrified eyes. He paused momentarily to drink in my fear, gaze roaming across my form.
Sprawled across the cushions, with the skirt tangled over my stocking tops, with one snapped garter hanging loose and my hair tangled about my face in a dishevelled mess, I presented a helpless, fearful girl. Stray locks caught in my earrings, on my makeup, on the blood that trickled from the corner of my mouth and I hesitatingly pulled them away with a trembling hand. The exposed corset shimmered under hospital lights. A stray rose rested on my chest and contrasted brilliantly with the satin white. It somehow stayed stuck to me as I pulled myself to a sitting position.
“Why should I stop?” Fosters asked, leaning back against the wall. His hands continued to slowly clench and unclench at his side. His relaxed posture was again deceptive. He balanced lightly on the balls of his toes, ready to move. “Will you offer me money? More than Mr Steele has?”
I shook my head. “No, but . . . you don’t have to do this. . . .”
He laughed. “Of course I do not have to do this.” He shrugged. “But I certainly want to.”
“But. . . .” I scrambled for some other way to tempt him, for some way of delaying the inevitable. There was nothing. “I. . . .”
“How about yourself?” he said, leaning forward slightly. “Offer me your body, Cindy.”
“My . . . body?”
“That lovely mouth of yours. That tight bottom. I do not suppose you have a pussy buried away down there? Too bad. Go on, Cindy, suck me off. Maybe if I fuck your ass I will let you go.”
The look of revulsion that crawled across my face couldn’t be hidden. Sick bastard. The inevitable loomed ever closer. “If I . . . if I,” I swallowed nervously. “If I give you a blow job . . . you’ll leave me alone?”
He was on me immediately, his fist lashing out and catching me across the chin. With a strangled cry I fell back onto the sofa. “What do you think I am, some kind of queer?” he demanded, features twisted by rage. “You think I need some shit-stabbing pansy for that?” He lunged forward and grabbed me by the hair again. He dragged me from the couch and ignored my feeble cries as he hauled me across the floor. “I’ll fuck your skull if I want to!” he yelled down. “I’ll rape your cock-sucking corpse!” With a final kick he sent me stumbling into Scooter’s waiting room.
I scrambled away from him on all fours, my ass in the air and spike heels slipping and the carpeting burning my palms and knees, until I ran into the far wall. Twisting, I stared back at Fosters, framed in the door and blocking any escape. He watched me contemplatively and slowly smiled. The quick transitions from psychotic rage to contemplative delight were unnerving. “Perhaps I should give Mr Steele a call,” he said, patting at some inner pocket. “I am sure if he knew of your . . . disguise, he might be tempted to make it a little more permanent. Would you like that, David? I bet you would, to spend the rest of you life as somebody’s bitch, taking it up the ass, sucking cock in some drugged-up haze, a slave to whoever Steele lends you out to?”
“He . . . doesn’t know?”
Jeremiah-fucking-Steele didn’t know . . . he didn’t know! This sick bastard hadn’t called in to report yet. Maybe Steele knew about the Asklepios Clinic, but Cindy remained anonymous. I felt a desperate hope blossom; all my efforts weren’t wasted. “So the sissy thinks he has found a way out, does he?” Fosters shook his head in disbelief as he stepped into the room. “Do you think me so stupid not to recognize your pathetic efforts for what they are?” His voice hovered on a knife’s edge between anger and boredom. “But no phone calls, David. No hope.
“Mr Steele will be most pleased when I tell him of the state in which you were found--how you begged to live--and how painfully you died.” He was warmed up now, ready to begin with the real hurting, with the pain that would end in my death. I couldn’t afford to delay any longer. Rescue wasn’t coming after all; I had to fend for myself.
“Ready to die, bitch?” Fosters stepped closer. His smile grew at the sight of his feminized victim curled up in fear against the wall--wavered--and I saw the first shadow of doubt creep into his eyes.
Up to now he’d been taking it easy, slapping me around like his bitch and holding back his full strength. Even so, my chest should have heaved with fear. I should have been doubled over in agony from the brief but savage beating, clutching at my side, stomach; blood should have been streaming from my face, from a shattered nose or busted lips. Where were the tears, the abject supplications; the sheen of sweat; why hadn’t I even tried to escape?
Hey, I’m a good actor but not that fucking good, yeah?
I picked the rose from my chest, the thorn only reluctantly letting go. I momentarily appreciated its brilliant, vivid beauty. So delicate and fragile; with a sigh I crushed the flower in my palm and it tumbled to the floor. Rising to my feet, an easy flick of the head sent that mane of hair back over my shoulder. I straightened my skirt and a slow smile spread across my face.
“Hey, you know what? I don’t fucking think so.”
The surprise quickly faded from his face. “So the little sissy thinks he can fight back?” His voice dripped with contempt. He reached into his jacket. If he pulled out a gun . . . but no, it was a knife, a sleek, double-edged thing that gleamed coldly. It settled comfortably in his grip. “Taken a few karate classes, have you?” He chuckled grimly. “Do your best, David. Make this interesting. It is time to bleed.”
The fucker was fast, I’ll give him that, faster than I would’ve expected considering his size. He blurred forward, silently, blade stabbing straight for my chest. It wasn’t meant to kill--just to cut, badly, make me bleed and disable my arm. Meeting his charge, I caught his attack at the wrist. The tip of the knife wavered an inch from my chest. For a moment our two bodies pressed towards each other, our momentums clashing. Fosters was bigger, his footing surer; I fell back a step, then another; and then I was back up against the wall.
Fosters’ breath was sure and measured, his eyes gleaming as he pressed forward with all his weight and strength. Now my chest did heave with effort, pulse pounding in my ears as I fought his attack, desperately struggling to suck in air despite the corset. My muscles swelled as I pushed against him. It wasn’t enough; he was stronger than I was, bigger and heavier, better dressed for combat, eager to kill.
The knife drifted closer. The tip touched my right breast, hesitated, and slowly sank into the prosthetic flesh.
“You are going to die, David,” whispered Fosters. The knife sank a fraction of an inch, another, into the prosthetic. Those breasts were all but dead but I still felt the dull throb of that blade sinking into artificial flesh, the pain growing the deeper it penetrated. An acrid stench of rot escaped from the wound. He continued to press down. “Try, you little wimp. Fight!”
I pushed against him, muscles burning, sweat erupting across my body, burning into my eyes. My breath came in burning gasps, made feminine by the spray. I refused to die--like this--squeaking like some bitch in heat!
“Not enough,” he murmured. “You never had a chance. I am a killer, David, born and trained.” His eyes bore into mine, burning with desire, hate, hunger--the animalistic thrill of killing.
And in my eyes--he saw himself reflected, saw the same feral beast stare back, hungry and angry, and his confidence momentarily wavered. “Yeah, know what?” I snarled. “So am I.”
With a final effort the blade sank deeper. Savage, burning pain flared across my chest and seared through my head. . . .
***
. . . and I curled into a tight ball to escape the relentless pounding but it was no use, there was no escape; Sakura’s attacks continued. Her kick found my undefended stomach; when I dropped my hands to cover my torso she punched me across the face. I tried crawling away only for her to seize my leg and twist it so that I thought it would break.
“Stop,” I gasped, begged, barely able to breath. “Please--I can’t. . . .”
I stared up at her as she walked around my prone form, her soft steps silent across the hard wooden floor. She kicked my side, nearly hard enough to fracture a rib. “Get up,” she said. Her face was an expressionless mask.
“I can’t!” I insisted, breathless, defeated.
She crouched by my head. “Get up.” She slapped me, and then punched me in the shoulder. “Get up.”
My eyes burned with sweat but not with tears, even though the sense of betrayal was nearly more than I could bear. I did want to get up--for her, the sense of failure was nearly sickening, but my limbs were dead to me, my lungs burned with exhaustion and the pain was overwhelming. “I. . . .”
Her fingers curled around my throat, cutting off my words, cutting off air. “Get up,” she said and my vision began to swim and dance. I must have blacked out, but somehow a moment later . . . I was standing on unsure, weak legs, only half-conscious--but upright.
Sakura’s expression hadn’t changed. “Fight back,” she said. Her punch to the stomach sent me back to the floor.
It took ages, but somehow standing once again became easier. “Please!” I cried out, blinking back tears.
Another hit, another drop to the floor. “Fight back.”
“Stop,” I gasped, but she didn’t and knocked me back again, and I clambered back to my feet and tried again, “stop!” angrier this time and how could she do this to me, I was her student and she promised to take care of me and what the hell was she trying to do, kill me? “Stop!” I yelled.
“Stop it!” I screamed and only then realized I’d just blocked her punch. A rush of pleasure coursed through me--until her second attack slammed me back into the wall.
I stared up at her in shock. “But--”
“Fight,” she repeated, hitting me again, and just like that--my anger boiled over.
“Bitch!” I screamed, and launched myself at her, a flurry of wild punches and blind kicks and rushes that never came close to touching her as she danced away; but I chased after her, back and forth across the training hall, blood rushing like pouring sand in my ears, vision reduced to a lurid crimson tunnel and my heart pounding furiously in my chest. “I’ll. . . .”
My body gave out. I collapsed to the ground, unconscious, the taste of vomit flooding my mouth.
And indeterminate time later I came to. Sakura knelt beside me. A look of such tenderness filled her face that I felt an impossible swell of love for her. It nearly swept away the newfound hatred that sat, like a jagged, heavy stone, at my core.
“I thought you were going to kill me,” I whispered, incapable of speaking any louder.
“Only if you fail me,” she said, and I desperately sought humour in her words.
“You don’t train the other students like this.”
Sakura smiled. “You’re not like the other students,” she said.
***
Five years of practice and training and pretending were stripped away in a moment. Ever since Kate’s death I’d played nice and voluntarily wrapped myself in chains of civility and good behaviour. The scorpions, the slimy and horrible things that lurked within--five years ago I locked them away under the harshest of bondage and taught myself to forget what I knew existed deep down within.
Those chains and shackles fell away and I released a cry of exultant, savage joy.
I forced the attack to the side. The blade cut deep but sliced lengthwise, slashing through the prosthetic but only nicking the real flesh beneath. The taut skin of the breast split and the innards swelled out like the meat of a sausage. Intense pain flared across my chest and then suddenly cut off. An oily black fluid abruptly sprayed from the ruptured breast and caught Fosters across the face.
He hissed in pain and surprise and briefly dropped his guard. I threw my entire body forward, slamming my shoulder into his chest. He staggered back a step. The knife slashed upwards, blindly, nearly catching me across the shoulder but I used my momentum to slip past the man, hitting the floor, rolling out into a low crouch across from him.
The bastard moved away, nearly doubled over, the knife held between us, his other hand swiping at his face. Black slime from the split breast dribbled and bubbled down my front. Instead of pressing the attack I took advantage of his distraction to grab at the zipper of the corset. I yanked it down and air rushed into my lungs. If only there was time to unlace these crippling stilettos from my feet. . . .
Fosters straightened opposite me. His face and eyes were bright red and teary but promised pain. “You should have run while you had the chance, bitch,” he hissed. The knife rested loosely in his hand.
When I touched one delicate finger to the edge of my mouth it came away with blood. Lipstick, nail polish, blood: all the same brilliant crimson. I wiped my hand clean against the blouse that hung loosely from my frame. Slowly rising from my crouch I couldn’t suppress a grin, thin and cruel, from spreading across my face. The bastard had about seven inches of height on me, fifty pounds, a longer reach and a knife. He probably had a gun as well, though he wouldn’t use it unless absolutely necessarily; Fosters liked to kill with his hands.
Through bleary eyes he watched me warily--but not warily enough. Fosters still had absolute confidence in his ability to take me down at his leisure, and why shouldn’t he? Everything he knew about me suggested I was an easy mark: a twenty-something average Joe with a dull past, a corporate middle-manager who’d just spent the last three weeks prancing around in drag. Too bad for him it was all lies, a pretty little packaging concealing a violent past. Otherwise he’d be taking me a hell of a lot more seriously. He’d be scrambling for that gun. Because after five goddamn years of denying myself utterly this most exquisite pleasure . . . yeah, I was going to enjoy this. I really was.
I was going to tear this motherfucker down. I was going to rend this motherfucker to pieces.
We both moved forward simultaneously. He threw a lazy jab, another, testing me. I leaned back and avoided his fist and when the cross came I blurred forward, slapping his arm away and twisted in, elbow aimed for his head. Momentary surprise flashed in his eyes but he reacted quicker than expected; he dipped beneath my attack and his knife stabbed upwards seeking my armpit. With one knee I knocked his hand aside at the wrist, but my back foot swayed in four-inch heels; I fell back a step and from his low stance his foot thrust out, aiming high. I twisted aside but his kick clipped my hip, staggering me.
I hit the far wall but controlled the impact. He rushed forward, knife ready. The bastard continued to underestimate. I recovered quickly and snapped out a quick, low kick. Knife already extended in attack, the tip of my foot caught his hand and sent the weapon flying. Unfazed, Fosters stormed through the attack, one heavy fist catching me in the side. I grunted as fractured ribs on the mend flared with pain but retaliated with a quick strike of my own, easily blocked. A flurry of up-close blows between us, quick punches and opens hands sliding to wrists, elbows, deflecting each other’s attacks. A frozen moment, both our arms held in check. Between the frame of our interlocked limbs Fosters smiled once again, still feral but different now: his animalistic thrill was underscored by a very human delight in the challenge he’d found and the surety of his victory. There was no special empathy in my understanding: the same manic grin illuminated my face as well.
His head smashed forward seeking the bridge of my nose. Shifting backwards I used my shoulder to lock his and used the energy to throw him into the wall. The impact smashed a hole in the plaster but he twisted quickly, arms raised defensively, to face me. My hair swirled in a golden halo as I lashed out with a massive backhand. It would’ve torn his jaw off had it hit. Continuing to twist he ducked beneath my strike and threw out a quick uppercut. Dropping my elbow I took the hit on the meat of the arm and stretched out, the edge of my open hand seeking his collarbone. Fosters dipped his shoulder and uncoiled like a spring, throwing his whole body forward. He caught me square on and I barely managed to throw his weight aside as we both hit the floor.
I found my feet but the shoes and skirt slowed me. He surged across the room and landed a massive side-thrusting kick square in the chest. Pain erupted through my torso as the other prosthetic exploded; black slime spattered everywhere. I went flying back. The glass door shattered behind me. I tumbled into the examination room. Hitting the floor I slid several feet before lying there, dazed and winded.
Glass crunched underfoot. Fosters stepped into the room. I could almost hear the tight clenching and unclenching of his fists as he approached. The bastard was taking his time. He thought he had me beat. The way things were going, he was right. These fucking clothes were crippling me. I could barely stand or walk, let alone fight. Far worse: it had been too long. I’d lost my edge; my instincts were dulled from disuse. I’d kept the body in shape but the spirit had weakened.
Fosters foot stomped down for my head, a debilitating blow. I twisted my neck aside and my legs found his, sweeping them out from beneath him. Glass lacerated my back and side as I rolled away; glass slivers cut into the palm of my hand as I pushed away and found my feet even as he found his.
The larger man lashed out with another big kick; I slid beneath it and riposted with a quick snap of my own to the groin. It would’ve dropped a lesser foe but he merely grunted and fell back a step. I pressed my advantage, rushing in with a sequence of quick punches. He managed to block a few but slipping within his longer reach I landed a few solid blows to his side. My small frame contradicts the strength I can throw into a punch: Fosters dropped back another step and I felt something give beneath my knuckles.
Showing the pain, he retaliated with an almost desperate swing. I ducked and hammered his abdomen. Fosters threw a hook. I jammed it at the shoulder and pounded his jaw with a rising elbow. Even as he fell back against a table, sending books and papers flying, a surprisingly fast kick scythed out for my head. I danced back out of reach.
Blood trickled slowly from between clenched fingers. Ooze drenched my tattered front, soaking the unzipped corset black and burning the skin beneath. My stockings were in shreds, shaven legs slick with sweat and blood from a dozen minor cuts, framed by snapped suspenders that swayed like dispirited snakes about my thighs. Not ten feet away, Fosters slowly straightened. His face remained burned red, eyes swimming with tears. He lightly touched at the corner of his lip and found blood. He stared at the red spot staining his finger and then his eyes slowly slid over to me.
“No more fucking around,” he growled.
As he indulged in dramatics I took advantage of the brief pause to dig into a hole torn in the side of my skirt. With a loud rip the fabric gave way and I created a thigh-high vent. Renewed confidence flowed through my veins. This douchebag was absolutely correct: no more fucking around. It was time to show this asshole just who the fuck he was dealing with.
I took the offensive. Threw a blistering combination of high and low strikes. He shouldn’t have been able to block. He did. The bastard had been holding back as well. I barely dodged his counter. I whipped out a crescent kick to make a little room. His leg jammed mine and his fist slammed into my abdomen and something nearly ruptured down there. His second punch never landed. I caught the arm and tried for the throw. He reversed; so did I; our arms blurred across each other without finding purchase; a soft spot; my arm slipped through, elbow clipping his face--blood spurted from his nose--and my hand grappled his neck and threw him forward on the recoil. He smashed into the computer cart and hit the ground, the equipment crashing around and atop him.
Fosters tossed the cart aside with a furious yell. He threw the computer at me as he rose. I ducked and charged forward. The screen exploded against the wall behind me in a shower of sparks. My punch fell short; he blocked and landed a quick roundhouse that had my vision swimming and sent me sprawling against the examination bed. An axe kick scythed down and I desperately rolled aside. Catching the edge with his heel, Fosters nearly flipped the heavy, steel-frame bed end-over-end and it crashed heavily to the ground on its side. An opening: the delay left his midriff unguarded. With a wild yell I unloaded the strongest kick I could muster into his sternum.
Disaster: the heel of my base foot wobbled, snapped. Four inches of stiletto heel stabbed into Fosters stomach even as I felt my other ankle pop, dislocate--break. Pain flared up my leg and spine and I couldn’t suppress a despairing cry as I hit the ground heavily. Even drained of its full power my kick sent Fosters tumbling across the room; he crashed into a row of cabinets and amidst a show of glass collapsed to the ground.
Gritting my teeth and crawling through the burning pain, I forced myself to roll over and rise to my feet. I felt like fucking Ralph Macchio facing off against his final opponent in ‘The Karate Kid’. Yeah, just one difference: in ‘The Karate Kid’ that last guy didn’t pull a gun.
Fosters didn’t stand. Suit jacket undone, broken glass settling like dandruff across his broad shoulders, the white shirt beneath stained red; and the shoulder holster empty. Painful clarity descended and I watched in near slow-motion as, from his sprawled position, his arm swung around, the ugly .45 ready in his grip seeking a quick end to the fight. Blood ran in criss-crossing rivulets from his crushed nose, from his split lip and forehead and stained his manic grin an ugly red.
The moment released us. The pistol roared and flared. With desperate strength I threw myself away. Pain exploded in my side as I grabbed the edge of the bed and fell behind the metal frame. A second shot rang out and ricocheted away. Heavy wetness soaked the corset from beneath and dribbled down my leg and fire filled my lungs and my strength rapidly began to flag.
No. No fucking away. I wasn’t going to die. Move. Move, dammit--quick, the bastard was getting up! I focused on the pain--made it the only thing that was real--for a brief moment of utter whiteness I felt it all: the wet throbbing in my side that echoed my pounding pulse; the burning of my lungs with ever breath; the jagged hurt in my ankle; as long as there was pain I was alive. In the centre of that pain I found my instinct. A bullet slammed into the underside of the bed and tore a jagged fist-sized hole and nearly took out my hip but suddenly I was moving again.
I launched myself away from the bed with my good foot. Something exploded behind me. The broken, heelless shoe hit the floor; bone grinded against bone, ligament snapped and my leg gave out but force carried me forward to the counter even as the flooring behind me erupted. I seized the counter edge and pulled myself over. Fosters dashed forward to catch me on the other side but with the sure, strong arms of an acrobat I reversed my momentum and twisted across the surface as if riding parallel bars. I briefly touched my good foot down, tightly coiled beneath me, to the edge of the countertop--and launched myself through the air, arms reaching for my enemy even as he charged towards me.
A final, wild shot lanced out, clipping my shoulder. I slammed into Fosters--my fist broke his jaw--velocity carried us back and we hit the row of equipment behind. Fosters bore the brunt of the impact. The gun went clattering across the room.
We collapsed to the ground and laid nearly side-by-side for an exhausted, dazed moment. Tried to rise--failed. I felt the blood pouring out my side. Not now. One hand grappled for something to hold and found purchase on a bookshelf and I used it to haul myself upright.
Fosters staggered to his feet. He clutched a heavy length of metal snapped away from an equipment frame broken beneath his weight. His moves were far slower than before; so were mine. The metal bar swept in a low arc, aiming for my bloodied side. I threw up the useless weight of my leg; the metal bar slammed into my shin and splintered bone.
I dropped to the ground. Fosters stumbled forward. The metal bar hammered down. I threw up one desperate arm as a shield, the other scrabbling for purchase, for some kind of weapon. The bar hit my arm and glanced off and the entire limb went numb. He raised the weapon again and brought it down again. Another hit and my forearm broke and my other hand closed about something and with a demoniacal howl I jackknifed forward and drove the impromptu weapon into Fosters’ foot.
He roared with pain and the bar dropped to the floor with a loud clang. My hand released the severed four-inch Jimmy Chou spike, now firmly imbedded in the arch of his foot. Before I could pull him down his hands dug into my hair and yanked me to my feet with such ferociousness that my scalp bled and the hair extensions tore and ripped away.
“You fucking,” his fist pulped my nose, “little,” another punch sealed my eye, “sissy!” he screamed, and with a final hit he sent me flying into the far cabinet. My face shattered glass and surgical implements lacerated my arms and hands. A moment later--was it a moment?--I think I blacked out--Fosters charged across the room, metal bar raised high--I couldn’t move, couldn’t breath, couldn’t see--that same lucky hand closed around something--the metal bar connected with the side of my skull even as I pushed forward, my arm flailing out wildly. . . .
Everything went black.
My eyes snapped open. I was lying on my side on the floor across broken fragments of glass and plastic and in a slowly growing puddle of blood. My eyes reluctantly focused on my hand, lying limply open. Across my palm rested a slender metal instrument that gleamed dully in the light. The tip was stained red. A scalpel.
I heard a faint gurgle. Grudgingly, painfully, I slowly shifted towards the sound. Fosters sat slumped against the wall. Both hands clutched at his throat and wild eyes stared in disbelief. Crimson welled from between his fingers and overflowed and ran down his front.
I dragged myself closer. I stared deep into his eyes and with a great sense of fulfilment, watched him die. He pulled one hand from his throat and grappled futilely for me. I caught his arm by the wrist and yanked him forward until our foreheads nearly touched.
“This sissy just kicked your fucking ass,” I whispered.
Fosters glared at me with venomous hatred until his eyed dimmed, and finally closed, and his body crumpled and slid to the ground, dead.
***
“How is he?”
She closed the door behind her. Sakura displayed no anger as she crossed the room but over the last couple of year I’d learned that Sakura only shared her emotions when it suited her. Her footsteps remained effortlessly silent as she walked as well; even at the age of fourteen I understood that there was something very different, very enigmatic about this woman. What I felt for her was something impossible to put in words; not love, precisely . . . awe, maybe, with all the passion and fear that word suggests.
I was afraid of Sakura, but it wasn’t out of fear that I so desperately wanted to please her.
“He’s on his way to the hospital,” she said. “Thomas’ parents are very angry.”
I nodded. I didn’t apologize, for the simple reason that I wasn’t sorry for what I had done and I wouldn’t insult her by lying.
“How did it happen?”
The other students must have already given their account of what happened. I saw no reason to either exaggerate or diminish my responsibility. “We were sparring. The longer we fought the more intensely he came at me. I saw it in his eyes–he wanted to win, he wanted to hit me . . . he wanted to hurt me. He escalated the conflict and tried an advanced technique.” I tried unsuccessfully to keep the disdain from my voice. “That’s when I finished the fight.”
“You shattered both his elbow and his jaw,” Sakura said. “He’s sixteen and he’ll probably never have full use of that arm again. He was our top tournament fighter and he may never return to the martial arts again.”
Her voice remained flat and unreadable; she gave no hint of how she expected me to respond. Unable to think of anything to say, I simply shrugged.
“Do you not feel any remorse for what you did?”
I considered that for a second. “No.”
Sakura cocked her head to one side and watched me curiously. “Did you feel anything, then?”
I hesitated before answering. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
I shrugged again. “Yeah. No. I felt . . . happy? Yeah, maybe just a bit. I mean, he’s such a jerk, yeah? And so full of himself. But he couldn’t even bring himself to go full out, you know? It was just sad, yeah, real sad watching him work up his courage.” My voice grew stronger as I played the fight back through my mind. “I mean, how pathetic is that? He desperately wanted to win but couldn’t bring himself to really try? To try and hurt me? When he finally came at me with that technique, ha, I saw it coming from miles away. . . .” The surprise in his face when I reversed the attack, the shock, the pain that flooded his eyes and escaped his throat in a howl as I snapped his arm . . . yeah, I enjoyed it. But only briefly.
She watched me for another moment and then nodded.
“Are you angry?” I couldn’t hide the tremor in my voice.
“A little,” she said. She opened a small wooden box on her desk and pulled out a bottle and some cotton swabs. She took my hand and started to tend to my knuckles, which I’d split against the sharp edge of my opponent’s jaw.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not for having hurt the boy but for having disappointed Sakura.
“Don’t be.” She shook her head. “I’m not angry at you.”
“Then why?”
She hesitated. “Because you won’t be able to remain a student of this school any longer.”
My breath caught in my throat. “But--”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Even if you can’t stay here you’ll be fine. It was almost time for you to leave anyway. Another few months and you would have asked of your own choice.” Even as she said it I realized that’s he spoke the truth. I had been building myself up towards asking her to leave. “You’ve been talking about trying to find your mother; settling scores with your old gang; even going back to school.”
“I like it here,” I stated.
“And now it’s time to leave,” she said. “I’ll help you with your next step. You might be able to help me as well, actually.”
“I--”
“Do you know why I took you in?” Sakura asked, distracting me from my fear and hurt at the thought of leaving Sakura.
I shook my head.
“That first afternoon over two years ago. You dropped yourself into a fight you could not win. My students found you and hurt you. As I recall, Thomas was the first one to hit you. During that beating you never gave up. You didn’t cry out and you didn’t beg for them to stop. And in your eyes: such anger, such hatred and desire. You wanted to hurt them back. And you have, haven’t you? Over the years. Every single one of those students you’ve had your revenge on, one way or another, whether they know it or not.”
“But--,” I started to protest, and then shut my mouth. Apparently I wasn’t half as clever as I thought I’d been.
“And Thomas was the last one.”
He was, although I hadn’t set out to hurt him today.
“I promised to make you strong and now you are,” she said.
“You have nothing more to teach me?”
She laughed. “I have more to teach you than you can possibly imagine. And I will continue to teach you, when the opportunity exists, for as long as we both live, though no longer from this school. You understood from the beginning that I did not treat you like the other students; that when they left their lessons exhausted and made their ways home that you had merely completed your warm-up. They train to learn discipline, to stay fit, for confidence or to impress their friends and family.
“Why do you train?”
The answer should have been an easy one. For nearly three years now I had trained with this woman; nearly every single day had started with the aches of the previous night and ended with newfound bruises. To undergo such pain and suffering–though truth be told I’d never thought of it as such–there had to be a clear reason. Yet I couldn’t think of one.
“To make you happy,” I replied, the first answer I could settle upon.
A hint of a smile touched her lips, but she shook her head. “No,” she said. “Though I’m flattered. That’s not why. The reason you have trained so hard these last few years, the reason I took you in, is because you have a gift. Some people believe that we’re all blessed with a single gift–with a skill–with a natural talent for one thing in life. One of the greatest tragedies of human existence is that so few of us ever discover what we are truly skilled at, or even worse . . . to know your talent yet be unable to practice it.
“One glance at you and I saw your gift and understood your potential.”
Her words filled me with pride. “Martial arts?”
“Oh my, no,” Sakura said, and shook her head, that suggestion of a smile growing slightly. “No. Your gift is pain: the acceptance of it, the giving of it. You have an instinct for pain, an intuitive understanding of how best to hurt other people.” She held me gently on either side of my head and kissed me softly on my forehead.
“You’re very special,” Sakura told me, her voice as soft as silk. “And you’re mine.”
***
Goddamn ringing. Can’t a dying man have a few moments of peace?
Reluctant eyes slowly opened. The still form of Agent Fosters lay slumped a few feet away. I must have drifted off. Stupid. My feeble efforts to staunch the flow of blood weren’t enough. I’m no doctor but I’ve been seriously hurt before, and I had a sneaking suspicion my wounds were fatal. I’d lost too much blood, absorbed too much pain. Lying in shock I started to feel a dangerous detachment from my body. Sleeping now meant not waking up.
Again with the fucking ringing! What the hell was it? I forced tired eyes open again and my head lolled drunkenly to one side. My battered face made a grotesque red blur reflected in a broken pane of glass. I felt this sudden crazy urge to fix my makeup--fucking Scooter and his conditioning. An involuntary giggle rose to my lips and burbled there wetly. Bubbles in the blood at my mouth--the first bullet must have punctured a lung while tearing a chunk out of my ribcage. God, I was seriously fucked up . . . worse even than when Kate died.
Maybe I’d meet her in Hell. I deserved this; I really did. I hadn’t been able to save her and it occurred to me, as I felt my heart weakly pump the rest of my existence through the gaping hole in my side, that that simple fact had defined my life ever since. A peaceful acceptance of my end settled over me. I wanted to apologize to Katherine, to many people, but this goddamn noise kept interrupting. . . .
The fact that the insistent noise came from Fosters’ corpse finally penetrated my exhausted brain. Bemused, I half-rolled, half-collapsed onto his body. Clumsily, I peeled away his blood-soaked jacket. My hand fumbled between the folds of the stained shirt beneath in search of the continuing noise. Beneath his shirt I discovered an elaborate tattoo inscribed into his chest, a colourful spread and pattern I’d seen once before. Interesting. My hand closed about a vibrating object and emerged with Fosters’ mobile.
“Hello?” I said. My voice sounded strange to my ears: giddily happy from blood loss, distorted by pain, thickened by stiffness; my jaw didn’t seem to be working quite right.
There was a heavy pause on the other end, and then: “Who the fuck is this?”
I’d recognize that voice anywhere. “Mr Steele, I presume,” I said.
There was another lengthy pause. “David Sanders?”
“You betcha, you son of a bitch.”
“And Mr Fosters?”
I glanced down at Fosters. His chin rested against his chest and if it wasn’t for the darkening apron of blood spreading across his front you’d almost think he’d just nodded off. “Agent Fosters can’t make it to the phone right now,” I said. “On account of my having killed him. Can I take a message?” Saying so much in one go sent a sharp stab of pain up the side of my face.
Jeremiah Steele sounded only slightly annoyed. “Very impressive, David. You don’t mind if I call you David, do you Mr Sanders?”
“Yeah, no prob,” I answered. “And I’ll just call you Cocksucker, yeah?”
Barely restrained anger thrummed beneath the surface of his cool, controlled voice. “You’re digging a darker and deeper hole for yourself, David. Your death will be slow and painful.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard.” I chuckled, and coughed, and blood spattered across the mobile. “That’s what Fosters said. Let me check.” I roughly nudged Fosters’ body and yelled, “Hey, fuckface! Was my death slow and painful?” The effort flooded my mouth with more blood and I choked.
“You don’t sound very healthy, David.”
“I’ll live,” I said wetly.
And at that moment I decided that, yeah, I was going to live. I didn’t know how; it was easier said then done. My vision was growing dim and everything seemed to come from very far away. Everything but Steele’s voice; it was the only thing keeping me rooted to the here and now. But as we spoke I felt my earlier peace burn away to be replaced by an all-consuming rage. This man had killed me; not Fosters but this bastard sitting in his comfortable chair far, far away, pushing buttons and placing calls . . . this bastard kills me and gets away with it? No!
“For how long, David? Wherever you hide--I can find. Whoever protects you--I can kill.”
Suddenly, more than anything else I wanted revenge; visceral hate filled me to the brim, with such intensity that I suddenly found myself standing, surging to my feet, leaning heavily against the wall and screaming into the phone: “Try it, you piece of shit, you ass-ramming fuck! I’ll slit the throat of every motherfucking cunt you sent after me! And when I’m done with them I’ll come after you! You hear me, Steele? I’m coming after you! Whatever it takes!”
But the effort was too much; I collapsed to the ground, slumping across Fosters’ body, the cellphone cradled in my hand. Darkness overtook me. From very far away I thought I hear the sound of doors opening, of pounding footsteps approaching and my name being called . . . but I barely heard them over the mocking sound of Steele’s laughter filling my ears. And even that faded until all I could hear was the faint beating of my weakening heart, slowing . . . stopping, and then I knew nothing at all and dropped away into the night.
The end of Constant in All Other Things.
Continues in season two. . . .
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David Sanders saw something he shouldn’t have and Agent K will do everything she can to keep him alive–-but who can he trust as he sinks deeper into a disguise he never chose, and will he ever find himself again? This collects the first ten chapters--the first story arc--into one place. Transitions between chapters have been smoothed out and hopefully it reads as a single novel-length narrative.
Constant in All Other Things
by
Fakeminsk
([email protected])
Season One
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent
-Much Ado About Nothing
I stand with the gun pointed at Tom’s head.
The weight of the pistol feels comfortable in my grip. A few weeks ago I would’ve sworn to having never seen a handgun before outside of a movie or the TV. The thought of holding one, let alone firing it, would have left me in terrified hysterics. Now the ugly thing nestles easily in my grip. I’ve once again grown used to the feel of the cold metal, the weight and the heft of the weapon.
I’ve grown used to a lot of new things in the last two year: the flash of colour on my painted nails curled around the pistol’s grip, the sweep of long blonde hair at the edge of my vision, and the taste of lipstick on my lips. The precarious balance and high arch of 4-inch stilettos is comfortable now. I’ve even gotten used to my breasts, their feel and weight and heft--to the way they move and the pretty bra that cups them.
But that empty feeling between my legs? Not that . . . that I will never get used to. The bastard responsible now sits tied to a chair, face bloodied and back bowed. I stand here with a gun pointed at his head. There is a simple beauty to the image we present. My slender bared shoulder and dainty outstretched arm, with its delicate silver bracelet that flashes in the flickering half-light of the dirty little room, trembles only slightly with indecision. There are a few feet of empty space, and then Tom’s battered face, eyes squeezed shut in terror. Not for the first time I admire the elegance that reveals itself in the ugliness of violence. After all I’ve endured: revenge.
The moment he opens his eyes I’ll shoot. I want to see the look in my friend’s eyes one last time.
“Oh, God. Please . . . don’t do this.” His voice pleads. The bastard keeps his eyes squeezed shut. “I’m so--it doesn’t--I didn’t--it doesn’t have to be this way. I’m so sorry.”
I don’t answer. The gun feels heavy. I’m a lot weaker than I used to be.
“Cindy,” he says. “Please.”
“My name’s not Cindy,” I hiss.
He takes a deep, shaky breath. “David,” he says.
“Say it again.” I want to shout but my voice comes out hardly louder than a whisper. “Open your eyes.”
“David,” he repeats, louder.
“Look at me!”
He opens his eyes. He looks straight into me. His eyes are blue but so clear they seem nearly transparent. They are the most attractive feature of a very attractive man. A woman could easily lose herself in those gentle depths. I did.
“I’m so sorry,” he says.
But I am not a woman. I squeeze the trigger.
***
**
“You did the right thing,” Agent K said. Her grip on my shoulder was strong and she looked straight into me. “Trust me.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. Easy for her to say. She wasn’t the one heading out in front of a courtroom full of people, in front of Jeremiah fucking Steele, and accusing him of murder. This guy wasn’t some backstreet thug who’d knocked over a liquor store. He was one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, a pharmaceutical magnate and all-around nasty guy. Rumours had him involved in all kinds of stuff. Shady stuff, you know?
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t scare easily. Growing up I got involved in some pretty heavy shit, the kind of stuff you don’t tell nobody about. I’m not particularly proud of my past. I’m not ashamed of it either. But if people knew some of the things I’ve done? Yeah, I wouldn’t even have the one or two friends I do.
But for all the harrowing shit I’ve been through over the years, even I know better than to mess with a mean sonuvabitch like Jeremiah Steele. Squealing on him was asking for a whole world of pain and retribution. So Agent K didn’t need to tell me I was doing the right thing. I knew full well what I getting myself into, and I had my own goddamn reasons for doing it.
See, I’m a mean sonuvabitch myself. I really am. I’m not a nice guy. Now, being an asshole has done me really well in the corporate world. It’s where I’ve found myself working over the last few years. It’s a whole different world than when I was a kid, running with gangs and all that shit. But for all that, it’s not all that friendly, this corporate existence of mine. Oh sure, there’s swanky suits and air-conditioned hallways and some mighty fine ass walking through the office, often ready for a quick tumble if you drop ‘em the right line . . . but there’s also a lot of self-serving pricks and political shit going on. I haven’t figured out if I love or hate this new existence yet. I mean, seriously, I thought I was a jerk, but then I started working at NeoPharm and . . . . wow. Some of these guys? They make even me feel good about myself. And yeah, I said NeoPharm. You buy their products. It’s a subsidiary of this-and-that and part of Jeremiah fucking Steele’s corporate empire.
I didn’t know who I was really working for when I got the job, of course. I wouldn’t have taken it if I’d known that scumbag was in charge. Like I said, I’m an asshole . . . but even I’ve got my limits. Some things I just won’t do. I’d like to think I’ve got a, you know, moral code or something, although that makes it sound far grander than what it is. It’s probably more trouble than it’s worth. Truth be told, it’s also a bit shaky, this moral code of mine. It’s not like I’ve ever sat down and thought it through or made a book of it. Trust me, I’m not that clever. It’s not the bloody Hagakure or anything like that. I’m no damned samurai. But I know what I think is right, and what I think is wrong, and always do what I think is right, and avoid what I think is wrong. Always. Well, almost always.
So for instance, I’ll never backstab a friend. Ever. Way I see it, that’s the worst thing a man can do. When you get down to it, there ain’t much I wouldn’t do for a friend. A real friend, that is. It’s not like I’ve got that many friends, you know? You’ve got to watch out for the ones you’ve got.
And so, yeah, I didn’t need this Agent K telling me I was doing the right thing. I mean, I saw Jeremiah fucking Steels blow some guy’s head off, right there on the top floor of where I work.
Did I same ‘some guy’? Ha! Georgio Antazzi wasn’t just some guy, any more than Katherine was that girl I ‘liked’. Fuck. And yeah, I said Antazzi--that guy, the son of the mob boss. The apple of his eye, the High Street golden boy, the one who’d done good. All kinds of implications there, you know? Mob connections, murder, some of the scintillating dialogue overheard between the two before Georgio became a red smear across the floor, and of course, what they were up to before Tom and I stumbled into the room. . . .
Tom? He’s my best friend. I’ve known him for a couple of years now, ever since I started at NeoPharm and dedicated myself to living all, you know, normal-like and shit.
Yeah, Tom was there as well when Steele offed Georgio. He shouldn’t have been, of course. It was my fault. More or less. That’s not true. It was entirely my fault. I hoped I wouldn’t have to explain that as well. It’s not like Tom and I were supposed to be hanging around the top floor, yeah? That’s why he’s also a witness. Between our two testimonies, Agent K figures there’ll be enough on Steele to take him down, and hard, especially with all the extra inquiries that’ll be launched into his shady dealings. If that doesn’t get him, well, the backlash he’ll suffer from his power-mongering allies and enemies should do him in, she figures. K seems to have some kind of personal grudge against that bastard Steele.
So, yeah, chance to take down the bad guy? Of course I’m going to do it. Even if only half the rumours are true, the guy had it coming. It’s the right thing to do. Not heroic, not brave--just the right thing.
Problem is, doing the right thing gets you killed. Pissing off a guy like Jeremiah Steele gets you worse than killed. I’m lucky that way, I guess. I don’t have any family to worry about. The few really good friends I have I haven’t seen in years, and they can take care of themselves. I’ll even pity the dumbass that goes after them. Like I said, I wouldn’t backstab my friends, not even for something this important. I definitely wouldn’t let some stupid moral code--as shaky as it is--put them in danger if I didn’t think they could handle themselves.
As for myself--well, normally I wouldn’t be too worried. I haven’t had to in years but I can make myself disappear if necessary. It’s one of the few benefits of a messed up childhood: you learn to take care of yourself. This is different, though. This is . . . you know, Steele. I’ve rubbed shoulders with the powerful before, but nobody in this guy’s league. The dude’s seriously dangerous. Vengeful. Even if only half the rumours are true, you don’t get away from this guy. Unfortunately, rumours are usually only half the real story. In my experience, it’s the really scary stuff that people don’t know about.
But hell. I’m a man, dammit, and a man’s gotta do--well, you know. This Agent K woman’s promised me some witness protection-style help. I’ve got my doubts, but who knows? Maybe they can hide me somehow really good. Otherwise, I’m a dead man.
“You ready?” K asked.
I took a deep breath and checked myself over in the mirror. “Yeah.”
***
It went well. Of course it went well. I’m a good-looking guy. No, seriously, I am--and I don’t mean that in a conceited way. But hey, good-looking people get treated better, everyone knows that. Ask that sexy chick flaunting it when she steps into a store. Who d’ya think gets better service, her or the little mousy one scurrying along behind her?
It’s not as extreme for guys, but yeah, I get listened to and treated well, and it’s not fucking fair but there you have it. The only thing that works against me is my height. I’m only five-foot-five-and-a-half, though I drop the half because it’s pathetic to hang on to that extra bit of height. So what if I’m a bit short for a guy? I couldn’t care less. Seriously. I don’t. Listen, if some girl thinks I’m too short to date then fuck her. Bitch. It’s her loss.
Otherwise I do well. Better than well, to be honest. I’m not too big into the fashion thing but keep myself looking good, know where to shop and wear nice clothes and I’ve got just a touch of that long-haired bad-boy thing going on, left-over from my teen years, I guess. I keep my face smooth, though truth is the best I can manage is some rough stubble after a week or so--I call that my ‘artistic’ look. Swap the clothes and it’s also my rugged look. I’ve got green eyes girls seem to love, flecked with grey. I look younger than I am, and that boyish-charm thing can manage wonders, sometimes. Even in the corporate boardroom, especially if it’s some chick CEO I’m trying to impress.
Another thing the girls love is the body. I keep myself in shape. Now there’s an understatement! I keep myself in really good shape. Some might call it obsessive. I guess some habits just die hard. Chicks love the abs of steel. Couple that with money and, yeah, I do pretty damn well at the clubs on a Friday night. I’m no millionaire, but I’m better than just well-off. Chicks, they also love everything that a man with cash represents.
It helps that I’m a smooth talker when I’ve got to be. I don’t like doing it too often, because it feels very phoney to me, but it’s a necessary skill when clinching a marketing deal or convincing some girl to come back for the night. So working that court over was easy. I didn’t lie, of course, but there are ways of persuading people of your point of view, especially once you’ve figured out who you’re dealing with. I’m pretty good at that, sussing out what people want and then giving them the details they expect. I had the courtroom hanging on every detail as I explained the how and the why of Tom and my race to the top of the office tower, and what we saw while hiding in that executive secretary’s office.
Perhaps I overdid it. I got carried away by my own eloquence. It wasn’t the conversation I overheard, or even the fight or the whole gun-to-head thing that set Jeremiah off. The man in question took that very well. He sat behind his table, towering head-and-shoulders over his team of lawyers, and seemed highly amused by the proceedings. The man should’ve been nervous as hell but hid it well behind this fucking smirk the whole time. I think that’s what got me. That goddamn smirk. I hate arrogance. I really do. It pissed me off so much I added in some details that, strictly speaking, were true but very much unnecessary.
Steele kind of lost it when I got to those sketchy bits. Hard to make out exactly what he said, what with all the ranting and flying spittle, but I’m pretty sure I heard: “You’re a fucking dead man, Sanders!” and “I’ll have your goddamn balls on a plate!” and more threats of that sort. Shouting in front of everybody, rushing the witness stand . . . it took half-a-dozen men to hold him back from throttling me. Well, from trying, that is. I don’t throttle easily. Saying that--the man’s not small. Over six feet tall and all muscle, the guy reached the witness stand, bowling his way through the security and swearing the whole way, before they managed to pull him back.
They rushed me out of the courtroom into a small side room. Agent K was waiting for me.
“We should get you out of here,” she said. K’s damn sexy--in that severe, short-haired, lesbian kind of way--but not big on small talk.
“Hey, I’m feeling okay,” I said. “Thanks. Nice crowd, good security. So yeah, I’m feeling pretty good about myself.”
“Please try to focus, Mr Sanders,” K said. “You know what kind of man you are dealing with. If he has threatened to kill you, you can be sure he intends to follow through. Mr Steele is a very vengeful man. More importantly, he can not afford to look weak in front of neither his allies nor his enemies. Especially considering the nature of your accusations.” She hesitated for a moment. “Were they true?”
“Yup,” I said. “Every word.”
“Why did you include them?”
“Dunno. The bastard was just pissing me off.”
K sighed. “You embarrassed a very powerful man in front of many very powerful people, Mr. Sanders. Simply testifying was enough to put you in a very precarious position, but now . . . I fear Mr. Steele will stop at nothing to make an example of you. Even if made in the heat of the moment, he has no choice but to stick by his words. That was not just a threat; it was a death warrant.”
She’s not so good at inspiring confidence, this woman. I nodded. “So what do we do?”
“First? We get you out of here. Then we relocate you, give you a new identity, and make you disappear. And quickly, before Mr. Steels has time to declare open season on you.”
“Then let’s get started.”
Without another word she walked over to a corner of the room and bent down for a large duffel bag. I enjoyed the view as K’s tight skirt strained against the rounded firmness of her ass. Hey, like I said, she was a real looker, even if she went in for that real severe look, what with the past-the-knees skirt and mannish jacket and clunky heels. Tall and slender, she gave an impression of tightly-coiled strength, somehow, and at a glance you knew better than to fuck with her. She was pale, with a long face and thin lips that seemed perpetually set in an expression of mild disdain. Her hair barely reached her shoulders but somehow softened her look, an unexpectedly feminine touch on a woman who seemed eager to shed the outward trappings of her gender.
“Enjoying the view?” she asked dryly. Sharp eyes, this woman. We’d only met a few times, in arranging for my court appearance and in keeping me safe and hidden before the trial. There’s something very off-putting about her, to be honest. Like she knows more than she’s letting on. The fact that she didn’t respond to my charms didn’t help either. That’s her name, by the way, as far as I know. K. It has to stand for something but I’ll be damned if I know. I had this feeling that she didn’t particularly like me. At the same time I honestly felt like I could trust her, which is saying something. I’m not a very trusting person. You could say I’ve got commitment issues.
“So how do I get outta here alive?”
“With this.” She dropped the bag on the table. It looked heavy but she moved it without much effort. She zipped it open, reached in, and pulled out. . . .
“A dress?” It was a sexy little number, red and tight. “What the fuck, you’re gonna disguise me as a chick?”
She looked at me oddly. “That would be idiotic.” She reached deeper into her bag and hauled out a heavy vest, the kind with Kevlar in it. “I think this would prove more helpful, would you not agree?” she said, handing it to me. “Unless you had your mind set on the dress, of course. I have some darling heels in here that match.”
“Very funny,” I said. I slipped on the vest, its weight reassuring.
“There is a car waiting nearby. When I give the signal they will come around the side of the courthouse. We leave by a side entrance. You should be exposed for no longer than thirty seconds. Other agents, dressed similar to you, will leave by alternate exits simultaneously, hopefully confusing anyone keeping watch. Once we reach the car it will carry us to a safe location where we can begin to process your relocation and new identity.”
I nodded.
She handed me a heavy green sweater from her bag. I pulled it on over the vest. It was a bulky Gap thing--nondescript, and it hid the vest. I wondered if Tom went through something similar. He was a tough guy, but he didn’t have my . . . background. I’m sure that I would have been shitting myself if I hadn’t been through some rough times as a kid. I wondered where Tom was right now. He was due to appear in court after me. I had no idea how the case against Steele was doing--it’s not easy to get news while in hiding, especially when the trial is behind closed doors. Hopefully fucking Steele wouldn’t be as pissed off with Tom as he was with me. No reason why he should be; Tom didn’t see as much as I did.
Standing there just before K hauled me out of that room, with a higher-than-normal chance that I was about to get gunned down like some clay pigeon, I think what bothered me the most was that I’d probably never see Tom again. K was going on about procedures and I only listened with half an ear. I was thinking about my friend. Somehow I knew the guy was okay. He was a good guy. But with this relocation thing, chances are we’d never meet each other again. Man, I hate losing friends. It wasn’t the first time, you know? But it still sucks every time.
“Are you ready?”
K was looking at me expectantly. Even in civilian clothes she looked like a fucking federal agent, if you ask me. What’s the point of me putting on this shitty sweater if I’m hanging around with someone who just screams “secret agent”? I took a deep breath. Calmed the jitters in my stomach. Focused. Nodded.
She made the call. Pulled me forward. We walked quickly through the back corridors of the courthouse, our footsteps echoing through the narrow halls. Bland white walls and flickering fluorescent lighting. Nondescript faces flowing past. The sudden pungent smell of gasoline. A solid metal door, red and pitted and cool to the touch. Another deep breath and I felt coiled like a spring. Instincts long forgotten and forcefully buried awake began to awaken.
God, I was loving this. I hadn’t felt this alive in years.
We pushed through the door. The first bullet hit before I managed a single step.
***
“Mr. Sanders?”
The voice reached me through layers of pain. The darkness slowly receded. I took a shaky breath. Those vests are great at stopping bullets, but not so great at stopping the bruising. I wasn’t dead, but the way I felt nearly left me wishing I was. I knew when I looked down my chest would be a Rorschach test of black and blue.
I opened my eyes. K was watching me closely. She didn’t look all that sympathetic, but the moment she saw I was awake she reached out of my line of sight and brought back a glass of water.
“Can you sit up?” she asked.
Yeah, wonderful bedside manner, a real Nightingale, that K. Pain flared across my chest as I struggled to sit. Just like I expected: one massive bruise. My whole chest and upper abdomen was a purple and yellowed mess. The bastard who shot me must’ve been close. K placed some pillows behind my back to prop me up. My vision swam momentarily and my head throbbed with the effort. I reached up and found a sticky spot near my temple.
“These will help with the pain,” she said and for a moment, as she handed me the glass of water and two white tablets, she actually looked worried. Who knew the frosty secret agent could actually show concern for my well-being? I popped back the pills and the glass of water.
“You’re tougher than I imagined, Mr. Sanders,” she continued, that moment of sympathy apparently gone. “The assassin was standing right outside the door when you stepped through. He fired two shots that both caught you right over your heart. The impact sent you back into the doorway. Your head connected with the edge of the doorframe. A third bullet caught you in the side and the last one in the back, before the assassin was dealt with.”
It was hard to focus on what K was saying. My vision swam for a bit. I must’ve hit that doorframe pretty damn hard to mess me up like this. Like I said, I’m in good shape and I’m pretty tough. I’ve taken some harsh beatings in the past. Then again, four bullets at point-blank range? I was lucky to be alive. Vests aren’t the best thing in the world from the side. After hitting the door I must’ve spun as I tumbled to the ground, spreading the second double-tap between my side and back. No wonder each breath was like sucking on a hot coal.
K handed me another glass of water that I eagerly drained. Shaking my head and breathing deeply helped clear my head a bit, and finally my vision stopped swimming and the buzzing in my ears eased somewhat. There was still a faint worrying hum in the back of my mind, similar to a mild concussion but a bit different somehow. Mostly I just felt really tired. Funny how four bullets to the midriff can knock the wind out a person.
K pulled up a chair and sat next to me. She looked the same as before: same clothes, minimal makeup, angular features pinched into an expression of severity. Too bad, really: she’d be damn fine if she tried a little harder. I looked around and saw that I was propped up in a dirty single bed in a small, plain room with peeling and yellowed wallpaper. Probably some kind of safe house or something. Still, the question had to be asked. “Where the hell am I?”
“I pulled you into the car and we managed to escape before any more of Mr Steele’s agents could open fire. We took a very indirect route; it is unlikely that we were followed to this location. However, it would be unwise to stay here for any length of time.”
“Yeah, great.” Sunlight beamed in through the open door leading into the room. I must’ve been out for awhile. I gently probed my chest--it felt a bit like tenderized beef. I should’ve hurt more, but those pills of K’s worked fast and seemed to be keeping the pain at bay. The cloudiness in my head wasn’t retreating, though, and that had me a little worried. “K? I’m not feeling so hot.”
This one time at work I got really sick. It was some kind of crazy flu that landed all kinds of people from the office in the hospital. Like, over 40 Celcius temperature kind of sick, with swimming vision and that floating, detached kind of feeling. But I didn’t tell nobody. There was work to do and an important presentation to make to a client, and I got through it. Afterwards I passed out for something like 48 hours straight. When I got back to work I’d earned my first promotion and suddenly had a secretary and all that jazz. She was a real hottie, too. I think that’s when I met Tom, and the whole friendly rivalry thing started.
K nodded. “I see.” She stared me straight in the eyes. It was a bit eerie, really. When you think about it, people almost never stare you straight in the eyes. It’s a challenge, in a way. Or a sign of intimacy. I’d be damned if I’d look away, but it actually made me a bit nervous, the way she looked at me. She looked a little hungry. Or angry. “Mr. Sanders, I want you to understand that I will do everything I can do to keep you alive.”
nodded. I already knew that. Like I said, I’m a good judge of character. Usually. I know who my friends are, as few as they are. I know who’s a proper asshole and who’s likely to screw me over and when someone’s a phoney and a liar, usually within a few minutes of meeting someone. And I know who I can trust.
“And Mr. Sanders? I need you to trust me.”
I’m not a trusting person. Tough childhood. I’ve been screwed over far too often in the past. But staring K straight in the eyes as I lay battered and bruised in that bed, my head all foggy and buzzing--somehow, it renewed my belief that I could trust her.
“This is just a temporary safe house,” she said. “To call the medical facilities here ‘limited’ would be generous. Those shots you took were at very close range. Even with the vest, I’m concerned for your well-being. Especially with the bullet to your side.”
“Yeah, and?”
“You may need professional medical assistance. But I fear that to bring you to a nearby hospital would place your life at greater risk.”
“Yeah, and?”
K gave me a long look. I stared back at her blearily. “I have a proposition for you,” she said.
She’d done a pretty good job of getting me to the hearing alive and out of the courthouse--even considering I’d been shot four times. I mean, this was fucking Jeremiah Steele; I couldn’t help but wonder how many other agents turned down the assignment because they were afraid of the guy. But not K. I wouldn’t say I trusted her implicitly, but even with the whole dyke thing going on she seemed to actually have a clue, compared to most other authority figures I’d met. Besides, who said shit like “I have a proposition for you,” anymore? People just don’t talk that way. But K did. I think I liked her.
“Yeah? What is it?” I tried to sound tough but could hardly stay awake.
“I fear you won’t like it, David.” That’s when I really started to worry--when she called me David. I certainly woke me up a bit. Every communication we’d had, every meeting, she’d called me Mr Sanders. Just like she called that bastard Mr Steele and Tom, Mr. Smith. So if she was suddenly calling me David, then this had to be bad.
She gave a sigh. She pulled out a thick folder, one of those plain beige ones. “This is you,” she said. I looked at the folder and focused and eventually could read my name. David Sanders, age 25. Yeah, that’s me. She flipped it open and the top sheet of paper had a picture and a small summary of who I was and where I’d come from. The picture was from my ID photo at NeoPharm, looking just a bit goofy. I had to strain to read the summary of me, and it looked at lot like a basic CV, just with some extra details. I had to choke down a laugh when I looked through my educational and childhood history. Nothing about the gangs and the other stuff. Which is what I’d been promised, of course. Just a nice, ordinary high school past, complete with passing grades and a smooth ticket into university and a slick degree.
“And this is who I suggest you become.” K hesitated a moment and slid a second folder in front of me. It was much newer and thinner. I flipped it open.
There wasn’t much to read on the cover sheet. Only a name and an age:
Cindy Long. Age 20.
“Uh, K?” I said. “This is a chick’s name.”
K nodded. She didn’t seem apologetic or bashful or anything. About as empathic as a cantaloupe, K is. “Yes, it is.”
I may have been groggy, but I was pretty sure of one thing. “K, I’m not a chick.”
“No, you are not,” she said. “This is an identity created for someone else. However, considering your unique situation I believe it to be your best chance to reach safety alive.”
Now, I haven’t exactly led a sheltered life. I’ve been involved in more than my fair share of violence. There was a lot of weird stuff that went on in my youth. But for all that I still led a fairly sheltered life in some ways. Busy with other stuff, I didn’t clue in to matters of love and sex until relatively late. More specifically, I didn’t figure out that some guys actually prefer other guys until I was sixteen or seventeen. Hey, I’m pretty clued in now when it comes to sex and all that shit. I mean, it’s not like I’ve got trouble finding female company for the weekend, if you know what I mean. But I had a bit of a late start, on account of my screwed-up childhood. So the first time a boy hit on me, well . . . yeah, it took me by surprise.
I’m a good-looking guy. I was a good-looking kid. And I had this job once, at this high-school, around when I was fourteen . . . well, that’s where I met Ken. Ken was a nice kid, a few years older than me, and I knew I could trust him. We worked together well and he helped me get the job done even though he didn’t really understand what was going on. He was a good friend. Stupid, naíve me, I didn’t realize the kid was helping me because he had this huge crush going on. And so, at the end when it was all over, Ken kissed me. He just kind of lunged in and next thing I know, his lips were pressed up against mine, and a second later his tongue was in my throat, and his fingers were digging into my arms, pulling me closer.
Hell, at that point I hadn’t even figured out girls yet. My first kiss--was with a guy. Yeah, I was pissed off. I smacked him in the face and knocked him down and kept hitting him. I hurt him bad, and the punches were only a small part of it.
Fuck. To this day it still pisses me off. I was an idiot. I was young. Ken’s gone now. Last time I saw him was a few years ago, before the disease took him. I think that was the last time I cried. I don’t cry often.
Well, I’m older now. I understand some things a bit better. I eventually figured out that there were other people like Ken out there, and that it wasn’t a big deal. Some guys like guys. Some guys like to wear frilly clothes and lacy underwear. Hell, some guys even want to have their dick sliced up and pushed inside out and try to pretend they’re really a girl. I mean, that’s weird shit. That shit’s wrong. You are what you are. But sometimes, it’s hard to figure exactly what you are and that’s where it all seems to fall apart.
I don’t pretend to understand it. I like girls. I mean, I really do. That moment, when you first slide your cock into a warm pussy, that being together and soft intimacy--God, I love that. I’ve never looked at a guy and thought, “hey, I want me some of that!” The thought of sucking on a man’s dick makes me sick. Girls do that shit, and they do it well. They’ve got the body for it, the soft lips and long hair and curves and all, you know?
But don’t get me wrong. I’m no fucking homophobe. I’ve got no problem admitting when some guy’s good looking. But guys just don’t do it for me, and I can’t imagine why any guy would want that over the softness of a chick. Unless it’s to miss out on the mind games, maybe. Girls are fucked in the head.
So even though I don’t understand it, I guess I can kind of respect it. I’m not one of those freaks quoting Deuteronomy and claiming God’s going to claim divine retribution just because some dude wants to wear a bra. That’s just fucked up. God’s got bigger shit to worry about. But it’s definitely not something I’ve ever wanted or even thought of doing myself.
So when K pushed that folder over to me and I saw a chick’s name there? Yeah, I was more than a little taken aback.
I shook my head. “But I don’t want be a chick,” I said.
“Of course not,” she said. I swear, she almost seemed to be smiling and there was the shadow of something cruel in her expression. “In a way, this is your own fault. It was you who gave me the idea, when you asked about that dress back at the courthouse.”
“You said that was idiotic.”
“Yes, I did,” K answered. “To throw a dress on you and walk you out of that building would have been foolish. You would have looked like a man in a dress. You would have drawn more attention instead of turning it away. But we have a little time here. Not much, especially considering your injuries.” She gave me a quick look-over. “But I believe with a little work you could be passably made to resemble a woman. At least from a distance.
“You are short,” she said. Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. Bitch. “You are slender and features that are considered beautiful on a man are often also beautiful on a woman. You are somewhat too muscular but that can be concealed with the proper clothing. With effort you could probably even pass as an attractive woman.”
Somehow that reassured me a bit. I mean, if you’re gonna do something this fucked up, you at least want to look good, right?
“Mr. Steele doubtlessly has more assassins closing in on your location. We may already be under surveillance. This disguise, unlikely as it may seem, might be enough to at least temporarily throw off any pursuit.” K finished her spiel and watched me expectantly.
It must’ve been the multiple bullet wounds, but for some reason K was making a twisted kind of sense to me. Anyone chasing me would be looking for a guy. A good-looking guy, if I say so myself. My face was probably plastered all over the papers by now. Even if some fucking assassin didn’t see me, all I’d need is some pedestrian moron to point a finger and shout my name and it could all be over. I still had one important argument to make, though.
“But I don’t want to be a chick!”
K sighed. “Yes, Mr Sanders. I understand this. And I assure you, this would only be temporary, until we can relocate you to your new home and identity. But I honestly feel this is your best chance of surviving until then.”
And you know what? I trusted her. I really did. It was a crazy idea, worthy of some silly internet fiction or those crap tabloids--but hell, sometimes the crazy ideas are the best, simply because they’re so fucking crazy. I normally trust my instincts but they were conflicted: on the one hand they told me that this was the absolute bullshit, complete nonsense, impossible and unnecessary; but my instincts also told me to trust K. And fair enough, I was pretty messed up and woozy and all, but I decided to trust K. Even though the idea of hiding behind a skirt felt really, really wrong.
“I . . . trust you, K,” I said. “What do I have to do?”
“Rest, and gather your strength,” she said. “I will gather your disguise together and wake you when we are ready.”
I wasn’t about to argue with her. I’m tough, sure, but part of that’s knowing when to take it easy. I could barely keep my eyes focussed on her as it was. I passed out about five seconds after K stood up and walked out of the room.
I dreamed. You’d think I would’ve dreamed about girly stuff; you know, like the fact that when I woke up I’d be wearing a skirt or something shit like that. Yeah, real nightmare-type stuff. Instead, I had one of those dreams that play like an old scratchy sepia-toned film, flickering like the hazy wings of a hummingbird against the inside of my eyes.
***
I dreamed in surprisingly vivid detail how all this nonsense started. I’m not sure I slept deep enough to properly dream. Like I said, I trust K and all, but it wasn’t exactly a relaxing situation I was in, what with the bullet wounds and assassins and all. I really need to feel comfortable to sleep deeply. That’s the problem with nights out. I mean, I bring chicks home all the time and I love that shit, but unless I really know the girl I’m not likely to trust her; I don’t trust most girls, full stop. That’s why I don’t exactly get much good sleep. Some instincts die hard, I guess. But I’m used to getting by with only a little sleep, anyway. That’s the way I was raised: to get by on as little as possible.
Thomas Smith--Tom--like I said, he’s a good friend of mine. I sailed into NeoPharm on a supped-up CV with a falsified diploma, and landed a job in PR. Within a year I’d impressed the powers that be and took my first step up the corporate ladder. They gave me a secretary. God, she was a sexy bitch, sashaying into the office with these tight little skirts and spiky heels and firing off enough erotic triggers to turn your average office nice guy into a borderline rapist. This girl was totally trying to hook herself onto some rising star--like me--and launch herself into the upper ranks of the company. Seriously. She was so fucking stupid she didn’t even see it wasn’t worth slutting herself out like that. To her credit, she didn’t even try to hide it. She had a mediocre education (still better than mine, I have to admit), ruthless ambition, and a fucking amazing body. Brainless and phoney as hell, though.
Tom loved that chick. Her name was Tammy. I think. What a bitch. But Tom had a thing for her. And so did I at first. I was new to this whole office pool shark thing, and lost my common sense for a bit. Tom was an up-and-comer as well, in a different division. We both fought over this silly cow, and I won, if bringing a girl like Tammy home can really be considered any kind of victory. Tom laughed about it afterwards, me bedding her first. Tammy never really escaped that first rung of the secretarial pool, but by next year both Tom and I were well on our way into management.
And that’s how I met Tom. Remember how I said I was a good judge of character? The moment I met this guy, down at the local bar as we both chatted up Tammy, I knew we were going to be friends. Competition. Respect. And trust. That’s what a good friendship’s built on. Good? We became great friends. And we always remained competitive. Which is why that night, a month or two back. . . well, we ended up somewhere we shouldn’t have been, and saw something I wish we hadn’t.
When Jeremy-fucking-psycho-Steele shot that Italian dude’s head and it exploding like an overripe melon, splattering all over the room, the dream ended. I’d seen worse. Not much, but it wasn’t a first. But Tom didn’t take it too well. And that’s the image that seared itself into the back of my eyes as I awoke: Tom’s mouth, opened wide in a silent scream.
***
K was sitting next to my bed. How long had she been there? She must’ve woken me up when she sat down. I hope I hadn’t cried out or anything in my sleep. That happens sometimes, and it’s really embarrassing when I’ve got chicks over. Girls can whine as much as they like about how they want their men to be sensitive and shit, but at the end of the day what they really wasn’t are guys who are tough and old-school-like. They definitely don’t want pansies that scream or cry in their sleep. But what can I say? Sometimes I get bad dreams.
“Are you ready to begin?” K asked. Like I said, not big on the small talk, this woman.
I felt a hell of a lot better than before. Still a bit hazy, a bit dopey, but the pain was a manageable throb in the background. I could cope. I could function. I wouldn’t want to try and do any advanced calculus or debate a major issue or run a marathon, but my head was on a hell of a lot straighter than before--straight enough for me to have second thought about this crazy scheme. The sunlight wasn’t slanting in through the door anymore. It must’ve been night. It was hard to tell without a clock or window in the room.
I threw my legs over the edge of the bed and sat up. I felt a moment’s wooziness but fought it down. When I stood up I felt ill, like I was going to throw up, but it wasn’t that bad. Truth is I felt sicker at the thought of what was coming up than at any pain I was feeling. How the hell was she going to make me into a passable woman?
“I have something for you that might help.” I thought she was going to hand me another glass of water and some pills. Me, I don’t like to take pills or most medicines, to tell you the truth. I mean, who knows what’s really in those pills people hand you, yeah? Maybe I’m a bit paranoid. Maybe it’s from working at a pharmaceutical company. So even though my legs were a bit wobbly and I was still hurting, I shook my head no. “Nah, it’s okay, K,” I said. “I’m feeling better. The pain’s not so bad.”
“Who said anything about the pain?” She gave a small smile. “I thought a stiff drink might help you get through this,” she said, and handed me a scotch on the rocks.
What a girl. And it was good stuff, too. I wondered if they had a list of my favourite drinks in my file. I wonder if Cindy did as well. Probably. She probably liked stupid girly drinks, pinks things with half-a-dozen fruit juices in it and an umbrella.
“Good,” K said once I’d pounded back the drink, the warmth of the alcohol spreading into my limbs. It settled my nerves a bit. Fuck, but was I ever nervous thinking about what was coming up. I hadn’t felt this nervous in ages. “Follow me.”
She led me into the next room, which made up most of the apartment from the look of it. It wasn’t much, to say the truth. It was really bland. Boring IKEA-looking stuff, chipped and a little dirty, just the bare basics to survive off of. Not even a TV set. That kind of bothered me, since I wanted to see if there’d been a reaction to my testimony yet. I’d basically thrown my life away to see this bastard put away. I wanted some results. For the last five years things had been going really fucking well--a bit boring, yeah, but comfortable. Now I was about to slip a dress on and pretend I was a girl. Jeremy Steele had better get put away for this. I wondered if Tom was going to go through the same bullshit. I wondered if his federal agent was called ‘J’ or ‘L’ or something.
There was a window but I knew better than to hang out at that end of the room. Instead, K went over to a table and grabbed a bag and handed it over to me. “You’ll need this,” she said.
I looked inside. It was one of those cheap plastic toiletry bags. There was a bunch of shower products in there. The bottles were pink and flowery and looked very girly.
“What the hell’s this shit?” I asked.
“It’s all perfectly normal items for a woman to use in the shower,” K answered. Then she fixed me with those serious eyes again, that stare. It finally registered that she had eyes as grey as a northern sea. “Cindy.”
“Easy there,” I said.
But K just shook her head. “The earlier you get used to it, the better. Your name, until we clear you of this mess, is Cindy.”
“Aw, c’mon K, it’s just the two of us in here. Call me Dave. Call me Mr Sanders if you’ve gotta. But a chick’s name? Gimme a break!”
“Your name is Cindy,” she said, and the tone of her voice brooked no argument. “You are twenty years old and female. The earlier you accept this, the better.”
“Oh for Chrissake,” I muttered. “This is ridiculous.”
But there wasn’t any point in arguing with her. And like she said, this shit was only temporary. Until I could get to that hospital, get myself checked out, and then pick up a new identity and get the hell out of Dodge. I felt fine at the moment--mostly--but I knew how deceptive that could be. Just because I could stand didn’t mean there might not be something seriously wrong, especially with that wet spot up on my temple. The sooner I went along with K’s plan, as insane as it was, and got myself checked out, the better.
“Fine,” I said. “But what the hell am I supposed to do with all this?”
She pointed to a room off of this one. “Begin in there,” she said. “Use this first. Read and follow the instructions.” She indicated a pink bottle. “Then use this.” She pulled out a can, also girlishly pink, and a razor.
“What the hell?”
“Shave everywhere: legs, chest, armpits, face. Shave your face twice.”
“K, no one’s going to see me that close up!”
“Why risk detection because of sloppiness? We need your disguise to be as convincing as possible, considering the circumstances.”
“Listen,” I insisted. “You can slap a dress on me and whatever, but there’s no way I’ll pass for a chick up close. Really, what’s the point?”
K just gave me one of those steady, unflinching stares. “I will be the judge of that,” she said, “and you may be surprised.” That was that, really. When I dig my heels in, I’m a pretty stubborn bastard. But with K, I just didn’t seem able to find my footing. Unnerving, that woman, and it wasn’t just the lesbian thing. But for some reason I just didn’t want to argue with her. Probably because I trusted her. I mean, me heading into the bathroom and shaving all over was kind of weird, but she wanted me to do it for my own good, right?
So, following her order to use the rest of the crap in the bag as well, I grudgingly trudged off into the next room. It was another bedroom, a larger one with a double bed, and with a small en-suite bathroom. I stepped into the bathroom and got the shower started. I looked over the first bottle. It was one of those Nair-type things that chicks use, some kind of cream to get the hair off of me.
Well, what the hell was I going to do? Suddenly I was really glad that I’d had that drink. I’m not sure I could’ve done this otherwise. I stepped into the shower and lathered myself up with this shit and waited out the time. It stank a bit and tingled at first and eventually burned uncomfortably. When I rinsed myself off I was amazed at how much of my body hair went with it. But I wasn’t done yet. K wanted me to shave as well so dammit, I was going to shave. I lathered up with a can of girly shaving cream and picked up the razor and went at it.
It was a totally new experience. A strange one, to be honest. I’d never done something like this before. Even lathering up was different. It didn’t exactly smell like my macho Gillette’s, if you know what I mean. There I was surrounded in this flowery cloud, holding this triple-bladed razor with a flat handle; it even sat differently in my hand compared to what I was used to. I had this real moment of hesitation. Under the steaming hot water, what I was about to do seemed really fucking weird. And wrong. I mean, how was this all necessary? But I also thought about what K had said, and that also made sense. And I remembered that I trusted the woman, and with that in mind I brought the razor down to my leg and took the first stroke.
I’d like to think I did a good job. The chest was easy enough. The armpits were another story. Fuck, but I wouldn’t want to do that every week. Talk about gaining respect for the shit women go through to look good. As for the legs: well, the shins were easy enough, but I’ve got to admit reaching those tough spots in the inside of the knee was another matter. After much craning and stretching and blind strokes with the razor I managed to get the job done. After that it was a pretty simple matter to rinse-lather-repeat, though I wasn’t a frequent user of conditioner. The shower gel was a tad more floral than I would’ve liked as well. I smelled like a fucking garden by the time I finished.
I felt strangely chilled when I stepped out of the shower. The towel slid across my skin differently without any hair between me and the fabric. That was really weird. There was a full-body mirror in the bathroom, but fortunately it was all fogged up from the shower. It must’ve taken me nearly thirty minutes to get it all done. I felt just a little water-logged after all that. My head was a bit fuzzy again as well.
But I really didn’t want to see myself at that point. I could see glimpses of my hairless legs and that was enough. There was another bottle in the bag for me to use: some kind of baby-powder-type stuff. So I powdered myself all over, and by the time I was done I felt like a total fucking pansy. I couldn’t believe how smooth my skin felt. If I closed my eyes and felt my thigh I bet I could fool myself into thinking I was stroking up some chick. I passed my palm along my leg and didn’t find any stubble, but just the feeling of my hand sliding smoothly against skin kinda freaked me out.
I finally stepped out of the bathroom. Big surprise, K was waiting for me.
“Cindy, what are you doing? Please try to show a little modesty.”
What the hell was she talking about? I had a towel wrapped around me, a surprisingly soft and fluffy one (pink) considering the state of this crumby apartment.
“You are far more daring that me,” K continued, and she suddenly blushed. It was strange, seeing this strangely human and bashful reaction on a woman like K. “I can see your chest and everything!”
Bloody hell. I was wearing my towel like a man, covering the important bits but not exactly worried about the chest. Sighing, I readjusted the towel to cover my pecs. It still reached to my crotch, but left me feeling like my ass was hanging out. That wasn’t cool.
“Good.” K suddenly sounded all professional again, dropping the shyness. “Begin with the articles on the bed, please.” She stepped out of the room.
I approached the bed with some trepidation. I knew what was coming but that doesn’t mean I was looking forward to it. And sure enough, there on the bed were articles that even in a drunken, blind state you wouldn’t mistake for anything other than feminine.
The panties came first. They were black and small and had lace around the edges. Did she really expect me to wear these? Fuck. There was a bra as well, also lacy and black. Beneath them was a rolled-up lump that revealed itself as a pair of black pantyhose. Wonderful. Especially since they were sexy pantyhose--you know, not the day-to-day shit that most secretaries and women in the workforce wear, those really plain and heavy beige ones; these were so sheer they were nearly invisible and tinted black and had a lacy, embroidered top. Last time I’d seen clothes like this was nearly two months ago, before I saw any kind of murder or anything. It’d been after a night out at a club.
Alice had been hot and willing and easily impressed by my slick clothes and good job and easy money. Fuck, girls usually are. God, I love girls, how they fall for the cheesiest lines, how soft they feel in your arm and the way they like to cuddle up. Don’t get me wrong, though. I also respect women--well, some women, that is. Thing is, I’ve known enough women who can seriously kick my ass to not respect them. Like this one woman I know, Sakura. And Katherine. Fucking Katherine. . . .
I’ll tell you about her another time.
But man, can chicks ever be stupid when they want to be. I’ve never understood that, how they can just throw logic and reason and self-respect to the side, just to be with some guy--to be with me. I’m not putting myself down or anything. I’m a damn fine catch. It’s just that there are far more important things to worry about than assholes like me. Yeah, stuff like psychotic billionaire CEOs killing you unless you convincingly pass yourself off as a girl.
But this Alice chick, she really surprised me. ‘Luminous’ is this cool bar not far from the office, trendy without being phoney, even if most of the people who went there were right bastards. Like me, I guess. That’s where I picked up Alice. She was a sexy little thing, but a bit mousy. She almost had that naughty-librarian look going. But when I got her back to mine and peeled off those clothes, fuck, what a surprise! Not only did she have a soft, curvy body squeezed into those otherwise bland clothes of hers, she had the whole semi-fetishwear thing happening, the garters and the whole deal, like something out of a magazine spread. A tiger in bed as well. We went at it for hours. Dumb as bricks but an amazing fuck. Which is a good thing, because she’s the last woman I’ve slept with. Hard to get some when you’re hiding for your life, you know? I hadn’t gone that long without tail since… well, since I was a fucked-up teen. And now look at me.
I sat on the edge of the bed and slipped the panties on first. They were very thin, nearly see-through., and a tight fit. Sexy. I’d love to bring a girl home and unwrap her and find something like this underneath, all damp and ready to peel off. But I probably shouldn’t have been thinking about that, or Alice, because I encountered my first problem right then.
“Hey, K?” I called out. “I’ve, uh, got a problem.”
A few seconds later she was standing there in the doorway.
“I have a problem,” I said, and stared at her expectantly. I pointed down at my crotch. “I don’t seem to fit.”
I’m an average-sized guy and that’s never been a problem for me. I’m no Ron Jeremy with a twelve-inch sausage, and I wouldn’t want to be. I’m big enough to get the job done, and to get it done well. I take it all very seriously. Even if I’m just with some silly cunt I picked up that night, one so dumb she doesn’t even know she’s being used, I think it’s important to show her a good time. There’s no excuse for being lazy in bed. I’m a selfish bastard in real life, but sex is something else. It’s special. Sex is a skill in itself. You’ve got to work at it, and anything I work at, anything worth doing, I like to do well. So it’s important to me for the girl to get there as well, and I use all the tools at my disposal, if you know what I mean.
They say most penises are roughly the same size when erect but vary like mad when flaccid. I don’t know where I read that--probably some fucking Maxim magazine or something. So I look small when relaxed, but when I’m all horned up, it’s bigger than you’d expect. I guess I’m like my dick, then: small when relaxed, but you don’t want to fuck with me when I’m pissed-off. And that was the problem. For whatever the reason, this messed-up situation, the clothes themselves, the feminine scent the flowed off my own body and lingered faintly in the underwear itself--I was reacting. The silky feel of drawing those panties up my cleanly shorn legs turned me on in a way that had me a little concerned. But only a little.
K spared a glance at my crotch. “You don’t fit, you say?”
“Nope.” I really didn’t. I don’t know if it was the thinking about Alice, or just the sight of K, or the fact that I hadn’t been laid in a while--but I can’t deny that I was getting aroused by all this. It couldn’t have been the clothes themselves. That would be weird. Even though they felt strangely titillating as they stretched taut across my groin.
But my disguise wasn’t likely to work with sex inches of cock bursting out the leg hole. “You, ah, think you can help me with this?” I said, and flashed her a winning smile.
“And what do you expect me to do about it?” K stepped into the room and sauntered closer, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t suddenly seem like she was coming on to me. Easy to assume, really, considering I was standing all but naked in some unknown apartment, with a woody standing out at a sharp angle against my body, fiercely escaping the sheer panties I’d pulled on. “I see your surname is well deserved, Miss Long.”
K was now standing right up against me. She was taller than me, especially in her heels. Not that I found that intimidating. More like erotic. This close, a faintly musky scent surrounded her. Who would’ve thought she wore perfume, even if it was a bit mannish? Her breasts rubbed up against my chest, the fabric of her jacket rough against my sensitive, still-glowing skin. She brought her mouth near my ear. Her hair tickled my neck.
“Mmm, this is an unusual problem for a girl, do you not think, Cindy?” she murmured, and her breath was hot on my ear. I nearly jumped when I felt her hand, slightly cold, gently wrap around my shaft. “We can not have this, now can we?”
“I--heh, yeah. . . .”
“Is this turning you on, David?” Her grip tightened around my cock. Her breasts rubbed up against my chest again. What a thing to ask. Was this turning me on? Hell, yeah!
“Does it excite you to wear these clothes?”
What? Fuck no. But then she stepped back and for a moment I thought I saw a glimpse of both disgust and hatred flash across her eyes; and then she gave my cock a quick, hard smack on the tip.
“Ow!” I howled in pain and stumbled back. “Jesus Christ, K, what was that for?”
“What did you think I would do, Miss Long? Give you a hand job? Get down on my knees and suck you off?”
I sucked in some deep breaths, clutching the wall for support. “I was just fuckin’ about!”
“Your dubious charms, Miss Long, are best saved for a more appropriate time.” She reached over to a nightstand by the bed and grabbed a box of tissues. She tossed it over to me, where it bounced off my head before landing at my feet. “Tend to your own needs, Miss Long. In the bathroom, if you don’t mind,” she said as she walked away. “When you are finished please continue dressing.”
I picked up the tissues. Fucking dyke bitch. “You’re not making this any easier for me, you know that?” I yelled after her. You’d think she could take a joke. I didn’t really expect to her to, you know, relieve my pressure. But man, it would’ve been awesome if she had.
She turned about at the door. She let her jacket slip open and undid the top button of her blouse and, slowly sliding her hands along her sides, gave a little wiggle as she leaned forward and flashed me her most generous cleavage. She had awesome tits, from what I could see above the floral lacing of her bra. Then she slowly straightened, turned sharply on her heel, and sashayed out of the room, that tight ass wiggling beneath her skirt with each exaggerated, toe-to-toe step. “I hope that helps you finish, Cindy,” she said over her shoulder.
God, I wasn’t sure if I hated or loved that woman. What a bitch, and I mean that in a good way. Five minutes later I stepped out of the bathroom, drying my hands and still flushed with the pleasure, ready to tackle the task at hand.
The sight of the clothes on the bed brought me back to earth, like a punch to the gut. It really did feel like a hit to the stomach. It was the feeling of doing something wrong. You know, like when you’ve borrowed your parents’ car without permission and you’ve smacked it up and know you’re in big trouble? Kinda like that. I was just wishing I’d had another stiff drink when I saw that K had left one for me by the bed. What a woman. I pounded it back. I was already starting to feel a bit buzzed. Never a good idea to drink on an empty stomach.
I slipped the panties back on. They fit fine this time, once I tucked my cock back. Tight and a bit uncomfortable, riding a tad higher between my ass cheeks than I’d like, but nothing too bad. The pantyhose were another matter. I’d seen enough girls slip them on in the morning around my place, but these seemed really wispy and easy to tear. I rolled them up into a donut and pointed my toes and pulled the stocking up my first leg about halfway, and then did the same with the second foot, and finally stood, found my balance, and pulled the whole thing up over the panties.
Know what? My legs looked damn fine in those pantyhose. Denuded and encased in that sheer, inky fabric, the sharper definition lines of my legs were smoothed and softened and somehow made to look slimmer. The panties beneath made a darker ‘V’ against which my compressed cock made an unbecoming mound. My legs felt warmer than expected. The embroidered control top came up to just beneath my bellybutton and was tight across my buttocks, caressing and shaping. The silkiness as I slid the nylons up my legs had been unnerving; now, passing my hand along those sleek lines I felt a tremor through my stomach. The sensation was just so . . . feminine. I’d stroked many a woman’s thigh beneath her skirt, and I loved the feeling of my palm against her nylon-clad ass. Now it was my ass in nylon, looking way too good for my comfort and smooth beneath my touch.
That’s when K stepped into the room. To her credit, she didn’t laugh though a hint of a smile danced at the corner of her mouth. “How are we doing, Miss Long?”
“I feel like a damn fool, K.”
“You look fine,” she said. She unravelled another silky, black thing in her hand as she approached. “You will need this as well, I am afraid.”
“Great,” I answered. “What the hell is it?”
“A waist cincher.”
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Sadly, K wasn’t much of a kidder. “What is the first part of a woman that you notice, Mr. Sanders?” she asked, as she had me raise my arms above my head and wrapped the damned thing around me. At least she was calling me by my male name.
“What? I don’t know. Her tits?” I was going to say ‘her eyes’ because, truth be told, it’s a woman’s eyes that do it more for me than anything. I’ve even fucked more than a few fatties, just because they had the most gorgeous, sexy eyes. But wearing panties and nylons, with a waist cincher being wrapped around me, I felt like I had to say something, you know, macho.
She had the damned thing around me. She zipped it up the front and then went behind and I felt her begin to tug on the laces. With each one I felt the thing tighten its grip. “A woman’s shape defines her gender, at least from a distance,” K said. “Even in unisex clothing, or with short hair, or without makeup, or any of the other superficial trappings of femininity, a woman’s hips and waist trigger recognition.” She gave a sharp tug, forcing my breath out.
“Watch it, dammit!”
“Keep those arms up,” K commanded, her voice sharp. I grudgingly kept them above my head as she continued her torture. “You lack curves, Cindy,” she continued. “We can put you in a dress and make you wear a wig and slather on the makeup, but unless you have the shape of a woman, even an unskilled observer will sense there is something wrong.” The waist cincher’s grip continued to tighten, vice-like. “There are a thousand other things that can give you away, of course, but this one is easily enough remedied.”
K stepped away. I lowered my arms and took a hesitant breath. The waist cincher followed the lines of my body like a second skin, starting at my hips and ending at my ribcage. It was black, like everything else K seemed to be picking out, with crimson lines where the fabric drew in. It wasn’t quite as bad as I expected, to be honest. I wasn’t going to pass out like some damsel out of Gone with the Wind. My internal organs didn’t feel like they were being crushed. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel like I could draw in a big breath. I wasn’t about to go ten rounds wearing this thing.
“How do you feel?” K asked, her voice conspicuously lacking in concern.
“Just fucking great,” I answered. I made a sweeping gesture that took in my lower half. “I feel like a goddamn faggot, K.”
She made a small clucking sound of disapproval. “Really, Ms. Long, must you swear so much?”
“I’ll swear as much as I fucking well please!”
She gave me a firm look. “I am afraid, Cindy, that you really will have to watch your tongue. There are numerous linguistic differences in male and female speech patterns in the English language.”
I couldn’t believe this woman. “So, what, you expect me to speak like some friggin’ chick, too?”
“Cindy,” she said. “You are a ‘friggin’ chick,’ so to speak. Please try to remember that. Now wait here for a moment. We still have a lot to do.”
She left me standing there mouth agape. I wish she’d left me there with another Scotch. I wish she’d left me with the heat on, because I felt goose-bumps rising across my arms and chest. I missed my hair. This was all a bit much and had me feeling deeply unsettled. How long did she expect me to wear these damned clothes anyway? I wasn’t going to be this ‘Cindy’ chick for long. No fucking way. No damn way. No friggin’ way. There. That’s as good as K was going to get from me.
When she returned a few minutes later she was carrying a box in her hand. “Sit down on the bed, please,” she asked, as she pulled a small table across the room and set the box down.
“What’s in there?” I asked, making myself comfortable.
“This is your--,” she started, glancing back, and then stopped. “Cindy, really, some modesty please.”
“What now?”
“It is unseemly for a girl to sit with her legs like that.”
I was sitting with my legs spread, of course. My balls were already feeling cramped, squeezed in by the panties and hose. The-waist cincher was keeping me in this unnaturally straight-backed posture. Worse, all this nonsense was getting to me again--I was starting to fly at half-mast, and the growing bulge between my thighs was making this all a bit uncomfortable.
“Fuck this!” I exclaimed, jumping to my feet. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I felt ready to rip this goddamn clothing off and storm out the room. I’d take my chances on my own instead of suffering through more of this nonsense.
“Mr. Sanders, sit down!” K commanded.
I’d never heard her shout before. Steel underscored her voice. She stood with arms on hips and glaring at me with that flinty-grey stare, looking more like an outraged school principal than a secret agent. I don’t like being ordered about, but the authority she exuded held me back from just walking off.
“K, this is ridiculous!” I insisted. “It’s only a temporary disguise, right? I mean, what the hell, are you gonna stop me on every single damn thing I do that isn’t all girly and shit?”
“Yes, Mr. Sanders, I am going to correct you on every little action that is not all ‘girly and shit’. This is your cover identity. Even if it is only a temporary disguise, I expect you to be the best ‘Cindy’ that you can be for the duration of your time as her. I expect you to sit with your legs crossed at the knee. I expect you to wear the very same clothes that Cindy Long, 20 year old female, would wear. I expect you to do all this, Cindy, because I promised that I would make every effort to keep you alive, and I will be damned if your bullshit macho squeamishness is going to get you killed.”
I hadn’t heard her swear before. “You even expect me to speak like a girl?”
“Yes, Miss Long, I expect you to speak in a way appropriate for a woman your age.”
“I don’t even know what that means,” I said, slowly sitting down. “I’ve known lots of girls who weren’t exactly sweet-talkers, you know?” And I didn’t just mean in bed. I’d met some amazing girls over the years. Some of them kicked my ass. Like Sakura. God, I was glad she couldn’t see me in this getup. “They’d put a sailor to shame.”
“But you aren’t a real girl,” K insisted, as if I needed a reminder. “Everything about you is masculine, Mr. Sanders. Very much so. Your mannerisms, your shape, the way you speak, the way you walk, how you approach people and the way you confront a problem. Each and every one of these things can give away your real identity. All it would take is one wrong action, one word that shouts out “I am David Sanders” at the wrong time, and all our efforts will have been wasted. This is not the time to indulge in PC behaviour. Cindy is going to be, I am afraid, through necessity, a bit of a girly-girl.”
The thing is, I already knew all this. I’d done stuff . . . similar to this before, though not as ridiculously out-there as trying to pass myself as a chick. But I wasn’t feeling all that cooperative. I hated sitting there in these fucking clothes--especially in front of this sexy woman, for some reason. She left me feeling extremely self-conscious, something I wasn’t used to.
On top of that, the thought of what I’d have to do and the way I’d have to act while pretending to be this ‘Cindy’ bitch made me sick to my stomach. Combined with the fucking pain in my chest from the bruising and the throb in my side and the headache and everything else--yeah, I was feeling a bit grumpy. But I felt a little bad for taking it out on K.
“Yeah, well, don’t expect me to say ‘aw, poo!’ or nothin’”
Her features softened in a small smile. “No, Cindy, I do not expect you to ever say ‘aw, poo.’ Now, are we ready to continue?”
I gave a grudging nod.
K pulled out a measuring tape and took my size around my chest, right where the waist cincher ended. She nodded with approval, as if she’d already correctly guessed my size. She went to her box and pulled out a couple of bottles and a pair of gloves. “The next part is going to feel a bit strange,” she said, pulling on her gloves. She gave me a slight shove. “Please lie back.”
Hell, normally this would be the start of a good night--some sexy chick pushing me back onto the bed before straddling me. And K did straddle me. Of course, I was wearing women’s underthings, which kinda spoilt the mood for me. And instead of rubbing her ass into my crotch, she used a cotton cloth to start wiping down my chest.
“It’s just alcohol,” she said. “You did a good job in the shower but we have to make sure that you are properly clean.” She did a very thorough job. I was starting to get excited again.
She slowly unscrewed a nondescript white jar bereft of any labelling. When she carefully put the lid aside a strong, pungent smell filled the room. I couldn’t quite place it--something acrid that left an unpleasant chemical taste in the back of my throat. She used a small plastic spatula to lift out a dollop of amber goo from the jar.
“This may sting a little,” she said, and began to smear it across my pecs. At first I wondered what she meant. It was bracingly cold--which did a little to dispel my erection, steadily growing and struggling against its silky confines--but otherwise felt fine. Then it began to tingle. And then--holy motherfuck!--it started to burn, and burn, and burn, God, as if someone was pressing a branding iron into my chest. “Do not move!” K ordered, as she saw my eyes widen in shock. “And most importantly, do not touch your chest!”
“Christ!” I exclaimed through gritted teeth. “What the hell is this stuff?”
“Appropriately enough, a product of your former employers,” she said, working quickly. “An organic bonding agent. Very cutting-edge, very expensive.”
“It . . . hurts!”
“Yes, one of the reasons it will not be approved by the FDA. I suspect the bruising is making the pain worse. Now lie still. The agent needs a few minutes to settle properly.” And with that she lifted herself off of me and stepped out of sight. I couldn’t hear her, either: this shit hurt so much all I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears. That nice drunk feeling from those two Scotches was totally gone, I’m telling you.
A few minutes, she said? Felt a hell of a lot longer. And I’m good at dealing with pain. I lay there on the bed, my toes curling with the pain in their silky sheath, fists gripping tight knots into the bedsheets as I fought back the urge to jump off the bed and rush into the shower and wash this crap off of me. I kept waiting for the pain to ease. Slowly, after what felt like a short eternity, it actually did. That’s when K sat back down on me.
She had two large grey objects, each more than a handful for her. I had to blink the tears out of my eyes. They were breasts. They were grey and dead-looking things, but breasts nonetheless.
“What the--”
“These are your new breasts,” K said.
I guess I’d been expecting something like this. I mean, she seemed set on doing a damn fine job of making a convincing girl out of me. Very professional and thorough, Agent K is. So maybe I shouldn’t have been expecting a pair of rolled-up socks. That’s what a friend of mine used when he dressed up as a cheerleader back at one of the high schools I’d been to. He’d been 6’3 and over two hundred pounds. He made a crap cheerleader. Somehow, I suspected I was going to prove far more convincing than he had.
“They look . . . big.”
Surprisingly, she blushed, and this time it seemed very real and natural. “I . . . my apologies, David. They are. D-cups, I’m afraid.”
A lot of guys I know, they like big tits. Like I said, I like big eyes. Weird, I know, but I’ll always take beautiful eyes over perky tits any day. Don’t get me wrong! I appreciate a fine pair of knockers, too. But they’ve always been a secondary thing for me, coming in after legs and ass. Of course I like a girl to actually have some--none of this mosquito-bite bullshit--but I don’t like ‘em too large, either, bobbling all over the place like fucking udders. Unless they’re fake or young, they’re going to be droopy once you set ‘em free from confinement and that ain’t so sexy to me. A nice firm, perky pair, fun to play with, that’s what I like.
“They’re a bit large, I’ll admit,” K rushed to continue. “Though considering your frame, they should be just about perfect.” As she spoke she brought those grey lumps down to my chest. I had a quick glimpse of them. From the back they were flat and tear-shaped, and covered in a multitude of fine, straight-standing bristles. “It was all I could get my hands on.”
“Yeah, I noticed you had your hands on them.” I was trying for wry, hard to manage with the pain and the apprehension. Surprisingly, she blushed even further.
“I have to keep them in place,” she insisted, “so they bond properly.” I couldn’t quite see what she was doing. The burning in my chest was quickly fading away, leaving a strange numbness across the area. I couldn’t even feel her moving those things around or pressing them down. “The position has to be just right.”
I waggled my eyebrows at her and smiled. “From here, your position looks just about perfect.”
“Please, Mr. Sanders. This is embarrassing enough as it is.”
I wasn’t sure why this was any more embarrassing than any of the other weird shit we’d done today, but it was nice to finally see a human reaction out of her. “Well, how long is this going to take?”
“A few more minutes,” she said. “Until the breastforms fully attach themselves to your chest.”
“Hey, waitasec! All this bonding agent shit and all--these things are gonna come off, right?”
It was her turn to smile. “You sound worried, Miss Long.”
“Fuck off with this ‘Miss Long’ crap! They come off or what?”
“Yes, Cindy, they do. I have a counter-agent that will break down the chemical bonding and release the breastforms. The reverse process if far less painful as well, so no need to worry. Even without the counter-agent the bonding will eventually deteriorate on its own.”
“Well . . . good.”
“And that should just about do it,” she said, and clambered off of me. “Please stand up, Cindy, and let’s see how they settled.”
Feeling was slowly seeping back into my chest, and it felt . . . weird. Really fucking weird. When I sat up I felt this disconcerting weight on my chest that moved with every motion I made. The weight pulled me forward. But what really blew my mind was when I reached up and actually touched my new breasts. I could feel the fucking things! And I don’t mean their shape, either, or their presence in my hand. I could feel my own fingertip brush against the fake skin.
“K, what the fuck?”
“Cindy, language, please.” She took my hand and pulled me to my feet. I was so out of it I just let her lead me away from the bed. “You’re a very lucky girl, you know. These are very cutting edge. Another fine, unreleased product from your former employers. I’m told they’re grown as opposed to made. The bonding agents acts as a medium through which artificial nerve connections are made and sensations passed. If I touch you here,” and as she spoke she gently drew her fingertip across the underside of my breast, sending an uncomfortable shiver down my spine, “you feel it the same as if I had touched your real chest. And the artificial skin is even reactive--look, you can see goosebumps rising.”
This was too much. I felt off-balance. I had mother-fucking tits now, real goddamn breasts! I felt like I needed to sit down. But K wasn’t done with me. She lightly flicked my right nipple.
“Dammit, K, cut that out!” It didn’t hurt; it didn’t particularly feel of anything, to be honest. But I could feel it. I didn’t like the way she was playing with my new chest. Fuck, I didn’t like having a new chest.
“You can see the nipple reacting as well, as the breast finishes bonding.” And damn if she wasn’t right, as under a few more light touches my new nipple began to stand out in a way my real ones never had. Did I say weird? Now it was getting all surreal. I could feel my nipples poking out like that, getting hard--I’d never felt anything like it! The whole experience was leaving me feeling a bit disconnected, you know? The damn things were still grey, though, which looked very weird against my tanned and bruised skin.
“Yeah, well, if you’re done playing with my tits, K, I’ll ask you to keep your hands to yourself.” I pulled away and crossed my arms over my chest. Fuck, it felt weird doing that. They way they moved and flattened beneath my arms, it felt totally real.
“The colour will adapt itself over the next few hours. The seam between the breastform and your natural flesh will also gradually fade over the next twenty-four hours. Before long, they’ll be nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.”
Great. K had me do a few arm stretches to verify how my new breasts moved. When I raised my hands over my head they flattened against my pectorals--or rather, they flattened as much as these massive things could. When I twisted they swung to the side before jiggling back. Most disconcerting of all, when I bent forward I felt them hang down and sway heavily with every move. It’s something I love, that moment when a chick crawls up the bed towards me with her tits hanging down and swaying with each sensuous move of her ass. Now I was that fucking chick, and I was starting to feel nearly feverish.
K tossing me a bra, after all that, seemed anti-climatic. I’d watched enough girls put them on to figure out how to do it myself with only a little fumbling. She certainly didn’t offer to help. It was yet another black, semi-opaque number. 38-D, the tag said. Fucking wonderful. It shoved up my tits on display more than I would’ve liked, though, and only just covered my new, dark areola, and did nothing to keep those fucking nipples from peaking through, insistent little bastards. All of a sudden, I had cleavage. If I’d known that ratting on Jeremy fucking Steele was going to end with me sporting cleavage, I don’t think I would’ve bothered. Fucking asshole. This was his fault. Jail was too good for the bastard.
At least the damned bra relieved some of the weight. I’d only had these things for about ten minutes and they were already starting to feel heavy. All she could get her hands on, my ass. I was starting to think that K was enjoying this far too much.
The next item she passed me took me by surprise. “Jeans?”
“You sound surprised, Cindy.”
I shrugged. The motion left me perturbed, as I could feel my new breasts jiggle with the gesture. Fucking things. I briefly wondered if I’d ever get used to their presence, before realizing that I didn’t ever want to get used to having breasts--I didn’t plan on keeping these puppies for that long. “Yeah, I guess I am. I expected you to stick me in some kind of miniskirt or something.”
“Would you prefer a miniskirt, Cindy?”
“Hell, no!” I exclaimed, grabbing the jeans from her. Soon after I realized she wasn’t letting me off that easy, though. They were jeans, sure, a very dark denim blue, but definitely a pair of girl’s jeans. “K, there’s no friggin’ way these things are gonna fit!”
“They will fit just fine,” she said, again holding back a slight smile. “They may just be a little tighter than you are used to.”
No shit. It took me about a thousand hours to get into those damn things. I finally had to stretch out on the bed with my legs up in the air, hauling with all my might and wiggling and tugging (which, with those damn melons on my chest, was mightily distracting) to pull the goddamn things over my ass and newfound curves. If I hadn’t been squeezed and softened and smoothed out beforehand there’s no way I would’ve gotten them on. When I finally got the button fly done up I was exhausted. I had to admit though, craning my neck to look back at my rear, you’d be hard pressed to mistake me for a guy in these things. The jeans were like a corset for my ass. And damn, I had a fine ass. And there was certainly no sign of a bulge in my crotch now. Frankly, I was a little worried all this was doing my guys some serious damage.
The jeans were skin-tight with a very cute, very girly flowery design along one of the legs that would’ve made me puke, if I wasn’t so damned compressed by all these clothes. That’s when I noticed that the damn jeans were a couple inches too long. I tried pulling them up a bit more, but they would’ve reached my armpits and split my groin in two.
“Dammit K,” I said, once she returned to the room. “I killed myself getting into these, and I’ll be tripping over myself with every step!” If I could even walk, that was, which I was seriously beginning to doubt.
“Not at all,” K said. “They are just perfect to wear with these.” She held up a pair of shoes. Dainty and with heels; and black, of course.
“K? I’m really beginning to hate you,” I said.
Some guys I know, especially a couple of pricks at work, they’re short like I am and they’ve got this real problem with their girl wearing heels. Only thing worse than those idiots, are the fucking bitches who can’t deal with being taller than their man. Me, I couldn’t give a shit. Sometimes it’s nice to have some petite little cutie cradled in my arm, but I’m not about to complain if I’m eye-level with some Amazon’s tits, am I? It’s not height that makes me manly. It’s me that makes me manly. I’m pretty damn secure with myself, and I’ve got little respect indeed for fuckwits who can’t deal with shit like that--or worse yet, don’t even know they’re as insecure as a six-year old who’s just wet themselves on the playground. Me, I’ve never given two shits if a girl wants to wear heels. Damn, but heels are damn sexy, if you ask me, especially when she keeps them on in bed.
Still, watching some silly cute things trotting about in these ridiculous stilettos, barely able to cross the street, it’s hard not to laugh sometimes. Well, I wasn’t laughing now, as K kneeled down and slid the first shoe onto my foot. It fit, too, but then again I’ve always had small feet for a guy. It was just another drop in the torrent of weird sensations bombarding me, as I tentatively put my foot down and felt it settle in an arched position. It wasn’t some stupidly tall kind of shoe, probably only about two inches of heel or so, but hell, it was more than enough for me and athough the heel wasn’t a proper spike it still felt pretty fucking slim to me. My toes peeked out the end and there was a thin strap across the ankle.
“How the hell do you expect me to walk in this getup, K?” I asked
“At first, carefully. You will have a chance to practice your walking before we leave the apartment.”
She handed me a top, which I thankfully pulled on. Somehow, going topless just wasn’t as much fun when I had these tits thrust up in my face. Not that they disappeared once I got that sweater pulled on. The damn thing was soft peach in colour and a lot softer and fluffier than anything I was used to. Snugger and longer in the arms as well and somehow my hands seemed elegant, poking out the sleeve. Worse of all was the ridiculous v-neck that left my cleavage proudly exposed. What the hell’s the point of putting on clothes if all your good are still hanging out?
K reached behind me to attach a necklace with a little pink-tinted clear bauble that settled comfortably between my boobs. When she reached around my neck our tits rubbed together--and yeah, that was another weird feeling to add to the list, but truth be told, by this time I was so fucking out of it that I wasn’t exactly resisting anything she did anymore. I’m telling you, it was all just a bit too much. I didn’t even twitch when she clipped on some dangly earrings, saying something about how “a girl my age should really have had both her ears pierced years ago.” She slipped a couple of jangling bracelets on my left wrist, before stepping back to examine her creation.
“Needs a belt,” she stated, and a moment later I sported this low-riding wide leather belt with a massive ring buckle, hanging off my narrowed waist.
I levelled a dull stare at her. “We fucking--sorry, we damn well done yet?”
K gave a small smile. “Almost,” she said. “Wig, and makeup.”
She left the room to gather the last of her instruments of torture, giving me a moment with myself. When I looked down I felt the earrings tickle my cheek. When I reached up to touch them the shit on my arm chimed. I squirmed at the edge of the bed and I felt slippery inside my jeans and the panties rode up my ass and my heel wobbled beneath me. That massive crevice leading into my shirt tingled with new goosebumps. Slender straps ran over my shoulders. I couldn’t breathe properly. How could this possibly be my best chance of survival? How the hell could I fight in this fucking setup? Or even run? I trusted K and all but . . . this was crazy, insane!
“Are you okay?” K asked, stepping back into the room. Bless her, she was carrying another drink.
I offered a wan smile. “Let’s just get this over with.”
She pulled a chair over and sat across from me and gave me a look that was genuinely sympathetic. “You are not enjoying this, are you?” She handed me my third scotch.
“What was your first clue?” I pounded the drink back and grimaced as it went down. This one was nice and strong. It helped, though only a little.
“Mr. Sanders, if it helps, just try to think of this as getting ready for a Halloween party. Or maybe for a part in some play.”
“K, if you fuck up your lines on stage, nobody shoots you.” I sighed, though not too deeply thanks to the damned waist-cincher. “Listen, I know why we’re doing this but I damn well don’t like it. It feels . . . wrong.” I mulled my thoughts over and barely noticed as she took my hand. The pungent scent of nail polish assaulted the senses but I steadfastly ignored the sight of my nails being painted, one by one.
It felt wrong. The need for it felt wrong. I felt this very, very strongly, despite K’s reassurances, despite the fact that I trusted her. I was taught, long ago, to pay special attention to anything that created such a strong, visceral reaction. Hate, love, loathing, disgust, obsessions--these were emotions to be tempered but never ignored. I didn’t want to think about it, but I had to ask myself: why did I hate this so fucking much?
Strong reaction like that, it’s usually because something important to you is being challenged. I figured out who I was at a very young age. I had to. As I learned more about the world and life in general I just sort of integrated the new stuff into myself, hung the new ideas off of the core self I’d already fashioned, and I stayed me deep down inside. That’s how I was taught. Know thyself. Important lesson and the hardest thing in the fucking world to pull off. But once you know who you are--there’s so much you can do. Hesitation, doubt, all that bullshit fades away; other peoples’ scorn, jealousy, insults are easily ignored. Instant actions become more than just instinct but rather an expression of who you are, done in that place that exists free of uncertainty.
So this painful, gut feeling I was having? There had to be more to it than just bullshit machismo. Fuck, a guy who’s really secure in who he is shouldn’t be bothered at all by this kind of shit. This I believe. I really do. I mean, yeah, I don’t go in for all this girly crap and it’s nothing I’ve wanted to do before, but if it keeps me alive then… yeah, wearing a skirt (or very tight jeans) doesn’t make me any less a man. As long as I believe it, that’s what matters. So something else was going on here. I just couldn’t figure out what. I was too drunk, maybe. My head still felt a bit hazy.
“You seem quiet, Cindy. Is everything okay?” K was finishing off my nails. They weren’t dry yet but were already disconcertingly shiny. It was a clear varnish that gave my nails a glimmering sheen that rippled with faint pink hues in the light.
“Yeah, sure,” I grunted. I didn’t really want to bother K with nonsense thoughts. Instead, I just said the first angry thought that jumped to mind. “Christ, K, how the hell am I going to defend myself, wearing this shit? I’m not sure I can walk in these fu--these damn shoes, let alone do anything else.”
K started doing the makeup thing. I honestly have no idea what she was doing, but she attacked my cheeks and eyes and lips with this and that thing as she talked, occasionally pausing to curtly order me to ‘look that way’ or ‘blink’ or ‘purse your lips.’ She continued explaining as she worked. “Cindy, the whole idea is for you not to have to fight. Do you know how to fight?”
I gave a calculated shrug. I tried to be careful not to disrupt what she was doing. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Could you defeat a professionally trained assassin?”
Another non-committal shrug. “You’ve got the file on me, what do you think?”
“I believe that there is little use in bringing a sword to a gunfight, Cindy,” K answered, as she rubbed some powder across my eyelids. “Mr Steele’s men have guns, and they know how to use them, and they can shoot from very far away. The best fighter in the world stands little chance against that.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I grudgingly admitted.
“Not that you need to worry about that, Cindy. A girl like you isn’t a fighter. You do not know how to fight because you do not have to. Standing in a crowd, why would anyone want to hurt you, cute and demure as you are?”
Cute. Demure. Girly-girl. I wish I’d had a better look at that folder on Cindy and seen what kind of a girl she was before I’d agreed to become her. I was starting to get worried. I mean, I was really starting to get worried. Even if only for a short time, a few days or a week, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stand being some mincing sissy bitch. Exactly what kind of girl was K trying to turn me into, anyway?
“K, listen, I’ve got to know . . . ow!” I was going to challenge her on her plans for Cindy, but then she started to rip hairs out of my eyebrow and I had to bite down to keep myself from telling her exactly where she could jab those fucking tweezers of hers. Oh, I had a couple of choice locations in mind. When she was done that, she used this wand-type thing to smear this gooey, sweet-tasting shit across my lips and I kind of gave up on talking for a bit. I swear, my whole face felt weird, all gunked up and heavy with makeup. “We are almost done,” she said, and after a few final touch-ups across my face, she had a go at my hair, slicking it down before pulling out a wig.
Cindy was a blonde, of course. Why wasn’t I surprised? “Try to keep any hair from touching your lips,” K suggested, as she brought the whole thing down on my head. Suddenly, I had long flowing locks the colour of sunflowers, and bangs, and hair tickling the nape of my neck, and as that damned woman made her final adjustments I suddenly felt this incredible urge to burst into tears. I didn’t, of course--like I said, I’m no pansy and I haven’t cried in years. I’ll shed tears over a good friend but I’d be fucked if I’ll waste tears on something stupid like this. Hell, I don’t even know why I wanted to cry all of a sudden like that. I just did. The moment passed and I was okay.
Finally, the whole damn ordeal was over and K was helping me to my wobbly feet. She led me across the room over to a full-length mirror set in the corner. Thank fuck she was there to lean on and it was just a few steps away. It didn’t help that I was starting to feel more than just a little drunk. I didn’t want to see myself. I really didn’t. Especially clutching on to K’s arm like that. She was dressed a hell of a lot manlier than I was, and I felt like some silly drunk chick in wobbly heels reliant on her boyfriend to get anywhere. Fuck me, but that was not the kind of chick Cindy was going to be, not if I had any say in the matter.
And then, the moment of truth. K set me in front of that mirror and stepped away, and I had my first good look at Cindy Long.
Cindy, I had to grudgingly admit, was cute, in a blonde-coed sort of way. Truth be told, I felt almost a little disappointed at my first glimpse of Cindy. After all that fucking work and prep and struggling and emotional upheaval, I was expecting something pretty damn amazing. Cindy’s body was pretty hot, I’ll give her that. Her legs were long and coltish, in those low-riding skin-tight jeans with just a glimpse of high heels peeping out from beneath. Jeans like that begged for a glimpse of trimmed midriff but Cindy was feeling a bit shy; her sweater hung past her waist, cinched in by a wide open pleated belt.
Thing is, she was kind of chunky, especially across the shoulders. But with a rack like that, who’d be checking out shoulders? Her breasts stood out firm and round beneath her fuzzy peach sweater and a little crystal bauble glinted and irresistibly drew your attention to that proud cleavage.
What I liked about Cindy, though--what took my breath away, to be honest--what scared me about this girl, were her eyes. She had the most beautiful emerald eyes, somehow wider, the colour more vivid, than I’d ever seen them, and those flecks of grey in contrast made the green all the more vibrant. There was hesitancy in those eyes, a trembling anxiousness--a vulnerability I’d never seen in my eyes before, because I damn well knew that this trim, young girl was somehow me. I reached up with one shaky hand to brush a few stray hairs back behind my ear; bangles clinked and slid down my forearm and my eyes were drawn by those glimmering silvery strips suspended from my ears and I quickly pulled back from such a feminine gesture.
Sure, the illusion fell apart if you looked too closely or knew what to check for. Cindy’s jaw was just a little too strong for a girl, the nose a bit odd, those hands too big, and something that suspiciously resembled an Adam’s apple bobbed into sight when she nervously gulped. There was definitely something mannish about her. But from afar, maybe even from up close, you wouldn’t glance twice--or maybe you would, to check out that tight ass, or that amazing rack. Or those eyes, those fucking enigmatic eyes.
“What the hell,” I said, barely audible. My eyes danced back and forth across my reflection, uncertain where to settled but always drawn back to themselves, to those green depths. “Who the hell am I?” I whispered.
Standing a few feet behind me and to the side, I heard K answer. “You are Cindy Long.”
“Yes, but. . . ,” I swallowed before continuing, “Who . . . who is she, K?”
“Cindy,” Agent K declared, “is everything that David Sanders is not. Cindy is unsure of herself where David is cocky. She is humble when he is arrogant and modest in the face of his pride. David is very strong but Cindy, she is far weaker.” K walked up behind me and rested one hand on my shoulder. She gently smoothed the sweep of my blonde hair back across my neck. “David has always prided himself in his independence,” she all but whispered in my ear. “But Cindy is very dependant on the help and opinions of others. She is coy where David is brash and timid where he is bold and demure where he is daring.” K’s eyes caught my reflected gaze and bore into me. “David was antagonistic and abrasive and selfish.” Her breath was hot on my neck and ear. “But you, you are gracious and gentle and caring.”
“I . . . .”
“This is you, Cindy.”
“I . . . I don’t know if I can . . . .”
“I will train you,” K said, lips curled in a smile that suddenly seemed cruel. Her hands rested on my shoulders as she stood behind and over me. Her eyes glittered like diamonds in the mirror, hard and cold.
***
Amanda Lang. God. What an amazing chick. Screw that; woman. Chicks are the silly little things you pick up down at the bar and bring back home and have a night’s fun with and forget about soon after. Amanda was more than that. A hell of a lot more. Sure, she was sexy and all, with the most stunning hazel eyes and this amazing inky mane reaching down to the small of her back, but there was more to her than tits and ass. Amanda was clever. She was smart. She could manipulate people--guys and girls--instinctively in a way that was breathtaking to behold. I’ve known plenty of people like that; dangerous people. And yeah, Amanda was dangerous.
You can bet your left nut that Tom and I had a thing for her. We’d already chased and fought over most of the other available tail in the office. Amanda existed on a whole other level. We were middle-management scum; she lived in the tallest corporate spires. About twelve floors up, actually. She was an executive secretary to the powers that be. It’s not like we wanted her to advance our career or anything. We were both doing fine on our own. But a girl like that, you’d do just about anything, short of backstabbing a friend, to score with.
It took months of working her over. Oh yeah, you could tell that she totally knew what we were doing, too, and she worked us over, and the whole thing was a hell of a lot of fun. You could tell she loved playing Tom and I against each other. God, she was a bitch--and I mean that in a good way.
It all came to a head that night, two months ago. After hours, top floor, and ready for the taking. Thing is, who was going to get there first? Tom or me? The little minx was testing us--who was willing to take the chance, who could figure out how to reach those forbidden executive Olympiad heights despite the after-hours security and risk to our jobs? Yeah, it was just a game, but we both knew the consequences could be pretty fucking serious. I never found out how Tom eventually made his way to that top floor.
Me? Yeah, well, I didn’t cheat per se, but you could say I had access to certain skills Tom didn’t. I got there first. Saw shit I shouldn’t have. Then Tom showed up and fucking Jeremiah Steel gunned down Georgio in a savage shower of blood and gore, and now here I was, flouncing back and forth across some shitty apartment, keenly aware of every little jiggle of these new tits, the sway of hair across the nape of my neck, the flash and tickle of those damned earrings against my cheeks . . . of the whole goddamn feminine package I found myself squeezed into. God, if Amanda could see me now she’s bust that slender gut of hers laughing.
“Keep your legs straight!” K commanded. “Legs together!” Another walk across the room, and she added, “No, no! Point your feet straight!”
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled. Did I say ‘only two inches or so’ before? Those few inches were throwing everything off and were a fucking nightmare to walk in. I knew how to walk, dammit, but these slim heels were wobbly and my ankles kept trying to twist out to compensate.
“And Cindy, relax,” K added. I swear, that bitch was enjoying this far too much. “You look ready to throw a punch.”
I was fucking ready to throw a punch. “Yeah, yeah,” I repeated, turned sharply, mindful of how the heel wavered beneath my foot, took an unsteady step forward and felt my ass wiggle as I walked across the room.
“Better, better,” K encouraged from the side. God, I must’ve look like such a fool, like some prancing nancy, but I couldn’t help but wiggle my ass and thrust my chest out, squeezed into these fucking clothes. This was the second hour of K’s ‘training’ in the art of being Cindy, and I was just about at my limit. My calves burned and my toes were cramped and the makeup still felt heavy and thick on my face and I felt light-headed from the compression around my waist. I was tired and aching and only slightly drunk and none of that was a good thing. Meanwhile, K sat comfortably in the sofa chair in the corner, one leg dangling over the other, cradling a glass of red wine in her hand.
The moment K felt I’d had enough of staring at Cindy in the mirror, she started the training. At first she just wanted me to look at myself, to turn to the side and check my posture. Between the waist-cincher and heels, and those giant weights hanging off my chest, yeah, my fucking posture was a bit different, you know? I wanted to overcompensate for the heels while those massive jugs, even in the bra, made me feel all top-heavy. Once she thought I’d built up a bit of confidence, she brought me out of the bedroom to the main room. More space to walk. Joy.
Back and forth, back and forth. “Heel first!”, “Shorten your stride!”, “Swing your arms for balance!” These were the commands K continued to repeat during that first half-hour of walking. And damn her if she wasn’t right--within half an hour, my walking improved and my confidence grew further. However as my confidence grew my mood darkened. I could just fucking picture myself, walking back and forth in that room: the short mincing stride, my arms swinging girlishly with each step, the sway of my ass, the jiggle of my cleavage--earrings, bangles, hair--fuck, everything pulling and squeezing and jangling with each step. How in chrissake did girls put up with the constant distraction? No way I’d ever get used to all this crap! And worst of all--my cramped ball and, despite the pain, my cock straining against its confines, strangely aroused by all this enforced femininity. After two hours, I felt ready to erupt in my panties. Fuck. Panties.
K didn’t exactly give me many breaks. Even when I was taking a breather, she kept feeding me girly info and vocabulary she said I had to memorize. When she handed me another drink--and the Scotch was gone, damn her black soul to hell!, replaced by glasses of sweet white wine--she made sure I held it correctly, drank from it primly, and taught me how to touch up my lipstick afterwards. I think that’ll always be a vivid image burned into my mind: the first time I pulled that glass away from my mouth and saw the frosty pink imprint of my lips on the rim.
And through it all those damn heels! “Practice makes perfect!” K insisted, so even if I wasn’t specifically practicing walking, I kept the fuckers on. I did everything in those damn shoes. Bitch would’ve locked them on to me if she could have, I’m sure. So when I grabbed a bite to eat--not that I could fit much in my stomach, even though I was starving, constricted as I was--it was in heels that I trotted about the kitchen, making a quick sandwich.
Amazing, how something as simple as making a sandwich becomes a whole new experience when you’re dressed like a chick. Even leaning down to butter my bread I had to keep dragging my eyes away from that massive crevice between my tits. The flash of colour at my fingertips with each motion of my hands--distracting. The tap-tap of that slender heel against the floor--very distracting.
Hell, even hitting the can became another exciting goddamn adventure in femininity. Freeing myself from the bondage that is ultra-tight jeans, pantyhose and panties took longer than expected--I almost pissed myself before I got my cock out. And wouldn’t you fucking know it, but K even checked in to make sure I was doing it like a chick--sitting down and all. I almost lost it then again; I told her to fuck off or I’d storm out of the apartment and take my chances with the hitmen. Sitting there on the crapper, panties and hose around my ankles, ankles twisting out at an awkward angle because of those heels, I couldn’t even see my cock and balls--those bloody tits got in the way. It wasn’t all bad, though. It gave me time to knock another one off, and damn if it wasn’t better than the last one! I don’t think I’d been this horny since I was a teen. Guess I had easy inspiration: I just had to look down. But I didn’t touch myself or anything, you know? Squeezing those tits or fiddling with those new nipples while jerking off . . . that would’ve been fucking weird.
And then, squeezed back into that girly getup, back to walking, back and forth across the room, only now K was quizzing me as I practiced my steps. “Bra!” she’d demand, and I was supposed to answer with my band size, cup size, type, material . . . all that shit. She was a harsh taskmistress, and an intense teacher.
“Top!”
“V-neck. Uh . . . .cashmere and silk,” I turned smoothly, sidestepped, and walked back.
“Stockings?”
Trick question. “I’m not wearing stockings. The pantyhose, though, yeah, they’re control top, uh, almost black, 20 denier.”
“Panties?”
And on she went. I was learning more than I ever wanted about women’s shit. I mean, yeah, you bring girls home and you learn a bit, and I’m a fairly observant guy sometimes, but it’s not like I ever paid attention much. Putting on the bra wasn’t a big deal because I’d taken enough of the fucking things off. But until today I didn’t know, for example, that:
“38D, balconet push-up,” was what I was wearing. I gave the damn things a little adjustment as I walked. Those straps across my shoulders, as slender as they were, were damn annoying.
So, yeah, I knew what lipstick was and all the basic crap, but K was giving me a crash course in feminine terminology as I strolled around the room. Finally it was time for another break, and K gestured for me to sit opposite her. Last time I got it wrong she made me walk for another fifteen minutes. This time, I eased myself gracefully into the chair and casually crossed my legs at the knees--despite the throbbing pain in my groin--and gave a contented sigh. Truth is, I wasn’t feeling very good. My head felt all hazy again.
“You are doing very well, Cindy.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. I sounded abrupt but her praise actually felt kind of nice. I was doing well, dammit. “Listen, K . . . I know why you’re putting me through all this and all, but I’m seriously doubting an assassin’s gonna come up and quiz me about what kind of panties I’m wearing, you know?”
K smiled. “Are you so sure?”
I gave her a disbelieving look. “Oh, c’mon!”
“And what if you were to step into a restroom, Cindy? You take care of business and step up to the mirror to check your makeup. The woman standing next to you, she asks you a question--maybe she asks to borrow some makeup, maybe she compliments you on your top and wants to know where you bought it.”
I hadn’t thought about ever using the chick’s bathroom. Let me tell you, I had pretty mixed feelings about that one. Any chance to see some sexy things in their natural state’s a good one--but what’s the point if your cock’s crammed away in a prison of lace and nylon?
“Yeah, so? It’s not like she’s gonna say ‘are those 20 denier’ and it’s a trick question because they’re really 15 and I say ‘yeah’ and she hauls out a gun and pops a cap in my ass!” Though I have to admit it also hadn’t occurred to me that Jeremiah fucking Steele could have some chick agents chasing after me as well. Hell, it’d just make sense, really--I’m sure the dude had a profile on me, and that profile must’ve highlighted hot babes as a weakness of mine.
K sighed. “Again, of course not. What I am saying is that any hesitancy, and confusion over matters that a girl your age would know instinctively--would have done time and time again every day over several years--will ring false. This is a very sensitive time, Cindy. Until we get you out of the city, anyone . . . anyone, could be an agent in the employ of Mr. Steele.”
I took another sip of wine. It was pretty foul shit, way too sweet for me, though I know chicks dig this kind of crap. “Yeah, but then why are you making Cindy--sorry, me--out to be such a girly-girl? I mean, with these tits and my waist all drawn in like this, you could throw sneakers and a jogging suit on me and I’d probably still pass for a goddamn chick.” Especially with the long hair, which I was continuously brushing away from my eyes and poking back behind me ear. And those fucking eyes. I don’t know what it was. But my eyes, something about them was just so damn feminine--and sexy.
“I mean, does she have to be all ‘icky poo!’ and feminine? Why couldn’t I be a kick-ass girl, you know, a real man-hater or something. Why all this limp-wristed shit?”
K took a moment to collect her thoughts. I looked her over and wondered why I couldn’t be dressed up like her, for fuck’s sake. K was a kick-ass woman, but there was no denying she was a woman, full stop. I didn’t want to be a girl, but if I had to then that’s the kind of woman I wanted to be.
“Mr Sanders,” she started, and as always it was a shock to hear her use my male name. “When you approached us about testifying against Mr. Steel, and asked for witness protection, what did you think it would entail?”
“Not this,” I said dryly, shoving those tits up.
She let my immodesty pass. “What, then?”
“I dunno. A new identity, a new job, and that you’d shuffle me out of town, somewhere far away from the bastard.”
“Yet you knew that nowhere is truly ‘far away’ from Mr Steele. He has corporate branches and subsidiary companies across the world.”
“But bury me in some small town somewhere, the odds of ever bumping into him are slim, yeah? He’s not exactly a local-pub kind of guy.”
“And his employees, Mr. Sanders?”
I shrugged. “Okay, sure, he’s probably got employees living just about everywhere, but it’s not like they’re all going to be keeping an eye out for me. There’s not going to be a corporate e-mail going around saying, ‘reward for David Sanders! Wanted dead or alive!’”
“David,” K said in a most serious tone, “that is precisely what I expect Mr Steele to do. Once his agents lose track of you--and I have every intention of assuring that they do, and that is why your Cindy disguise must be as perfect as possible for its duration--he will rely on the benefits of being one of the largest international employers in the world.
“Think of your own office. If a rumour spread that, should anyone have any leads on the whereabouts of a certain individual, a former employee perhaps, they would be amply rewarded . . . if actually turning him in could net a million dollar reward . . . would your former colleagues do so?”
Those fucking bastards. “In a New York minute.”
“But I am sure you knew all this already, Cindy,” K continued, and the thing is, the damn bitch was right. For all my grumbling and complaining, when I approached the feds--and yeah, it was me who found them after everything went wrong--I knew that witness protection, long shot that it would be, wouldn’t be an easy thing but probably my best shot. “So what were you expecting?”
“A disguise, I guess.”
“An altered image?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“And so are the people chasing after you, Cindy. They know that you will have changed your appearance. Perhaps not so drastically,” and here she smiled slightly, “but nevertheless, other than some basic parameters--height, weight--they are not looking for someone who resembles David Sanders.”
“Then what are they looking for?”
“They are looking for someone who acts like David Sanders,” K answered. “Someone loud and rude. Strong and confident. Someone very manly and capable. They are looking for someone who isn’t you, Cindy.”
I hated her for being right. I hated Cindy, too, at that moment. But it made a twisted kind of sense, I guess. Any kind of psychological profile these guys were carrying, there’d be nothing about me dressing up as a chick, especially one like Cindy. It’s just not the kind of thing I’d ever do. And if one of them did glance my way, even for just a second, and in that second I did something very, well, ‘David’ like . . . well, it’d all be over, wouldn’t it?
I sunk deep into the chair and threw one arm across my eyes. I felt sick to my stomach again. “K, be honest with me. Seriously. The truth. How long am I going to have to be Cindy? It’s not just going to be a day or two, is it?”
Her response was a long time coming. “David, in all honesty, I don’t know. If all goes well--and I pray it does--a week, maybe two. The clinic I will bring you to is very remote and in the countryside. It will give you a little time to rest and heal and, most importantly, disappear. In a few weeks when Mr Steele’s attention has been diverted by more important things--hopefully life-time imprisonment--we can recreate you in a male persona and transfer you somewhere else.”
I released a deep, defeatist sigh. A week, maybe two. Two weeks of this shit! Fuck, maybe even longer. Weeks of getting dressed up in these goddamn clothes. Of walking in heels and practicing how to . . . fuck, how to do everything, all over again, but in a Cindy kind of way.
“K,” I said, and I fought to keep down the despairing tremor creeping into my voice, “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“I have every confidence in your ability to pass yourself as a woman.”
I wasn’t too sure how to take that. “But--I mean, fuck, there’s just so much! Every morning, slipping on pantyhose and putting on makeup and prancing around in heels . . . shaving all over and . . . it’s too much!”
“It sounds like nothing more,” K said, and she smiled wryly, “than what most women go through every day.”
“But I’m not a woman, dammit!” I exclaimed. “And I don’t know how to do any of that shit. It’s not like I snuck into my mom’s room when I was eight and played with her makeup, K. There wasn’t a sister who decided to teach me how to dress sexy and pick up boys. I didn’t grow up with any of this crap. Girls just learn it as they grow up--I didn’t!”
“They learn it through practice, Cindy, just like everything else.” She shrugged, almost apologetically. “By the time the average girl has reached her mid-teens, she’s already spent hundred, if not thousands, of hours practicing in front of the mirror. She’s read magazines on how to do her hair and wear makeup, and looked up internet articles on how to choose the right dress for the prom, and watched TV and picked role-models whom she would most like to be like. And then she copies, and emulates . . . and practices. You have just had a late start.
“Speaking of which . . . .”
With only the slightest of whimpers, I clambered to my high-heeled feet and started to walk.
***
Like I said, the first time I met Tom was over at the local pub, The Snug, just down the road from the office. It was a pretty cool place, as far as these corporate hangouts go, with that real authentic pub feel--low ceilings and dim lighting and a dart board and all--which was impressive, since the place was apparently less than a year old. They had a fine range on tap and a few very expensive, very choice malts behind the bar.
Well, this one Thursday night, just a few weeks after I’d started working at NeoPharm, I went there after working late. I figured I’d grab a pint or four before heading home. Jimmy was working the bar; Jimmy was a right bastard but a hell of a talker. I’d just grabbed my brew and was scanning the busy crowd when I saw Tammy Able. Tammy Able and her long black hair. Good ol’ T&A--the jokes wrote themselves, the poor cow.
Like I said before, Tammy was this total slut working the secretarial pool. I’d already chatted her up a couple of times at work and she’d given me the wet-lip smile and lingering stares in response. Yeah, she walked by my office more often than she had to, wiggling her tight-skirted ass, and any time she brought me stuff she’d lean way over and give me a eyeful of her knockers. Fuck, she was a real looker.
(Only now I’ve got to grudgingly admit, her tits weren’t really anything on mine and damn if my ass wasn’t finer than hers. I’ve got some sympathy though: wearing those sexy fuck-me heels of hers everyday must’ve been murder.)
I kinda feel sad for her now, thinking about it. She never figured out that dressing like a wet dream and acting like a slut wasn’t going to get her anywhere in the company. It was just going to get her used, by pricks like me. And yeah, new to the city, new to this professional life, first couple of weeks at the job, still trying to adjust to being, well, normal--I wasn’t about to set her straight. Fuck, I was only twenty-two. Seems ages ago, now. In a way I guess it is.
She was sitting alone, looking bored and petulant, and she made eye contact with me as she slowly finished off a g-and-t. I mean, fuck, the way she had her lips wrapped around that straw, the way she pulled on it, it was practically an open invitation. I figured, what the fuck? and went and joined her.
“Jimmy? Another drink for the lady,” I said, and sauntered over to the table. “Mind if I sit?” I asked. I didn’t wait for an answer, of course. That’s the worst thing you can do to a chick--give them a chance to think. Doesn’t do ‘em any good. Place like this, girl like Tammy, you just tell them what’s going to happen. It’s what she wants, anyway.
Only problem, I found out a minute later when her date returned from the toilet, was that she wasn’t actually alone.
Normally that’d be an awkward situation, you know? Two guys, one girl, muscling in on a date, all that shit--but somehow it wasn’t. I could see straight away that the guy didn’t really care. Thing I couldn’t suss out straight away was whether it was pure confidence on his part, or dismissive arrogance, or he just really didn’t give a fuck.
“David Sanders,” I introduced myself.
“Thomas Smith,” he answered. We shook hands. He had a strong and challenging grip. You can tell a lot about a man from his handshake. Tom held it for a second longer than normal, and he met my eyes with a hard stare. His eyes were a startling blue, the kind that chicks really dig. He gave a tight smile. “Why don’t you join us?” The nerve of the shit, like I hadn’t already grabbed a seat. “You’re the new guy, right? Over in Davies’ division.”
Like he gave a shit. The only thing he wanted right then was Tammy and that wet little spot between her thighs. So did I. But what both of us wanted, even more than this sad, clueless bitch sitting between us, was to take each other down a notch.
He was a good-looking guy. Big and imposing, too, with the kind of tough, square jaw that had probably taken a punch or two. Played football in college, figured out early enough he wasn’t going to go pro, got educated--but kept in shape. I respected that; too many of those jock assholes turn to fat once the game’s over. They need their discipline enforced from outside; real discipline comes from within, and this guy had it. He dressed smart, oozed confidence; yeah, the fucker was a real contender. Beating him to the lay was going to be sweet.
We drank and chatted and worked the bitch and each other over until the pub kicked us out. Tom went home alone. I went home with Tammy.
***
Training time was over.
“We have to make a move soon,” K told me. “It would be unwise to stay in this place for much longer.” She gave me a look-over, taking her sweet fucking time. I felt like a piece of meat, and damn if I couldn’t help but fidget under her eye, fiddling with a bracelet on my wrist or absently patting back my hair. It was a hell of a lot easier to fidget, dressed as a girl. There was more shit to play with.
She seemed, if not actually pleased, then at least satisfied with what she saw. “How do you feel?” she asked me, and then with added emphasis added, “Cindy?”
“Umm . . . fine?” I tried to answer in character. “I mean, I’m a bit nervous but I’ll be okay.” It’s what K wanted. I was Cindy. Problem is, I still wasn’t sure who this Cindy bitch was, other than being a piece of ass and fluff. I tried to soften my words a bit, but there was no hiding the masculine timbre of my voice. I nervously smoothed down the front of my sweater, the cincher beneath keeping my stomach flat and taut. Beneath that tightness there were major butterflies flapping about, you can well imagine.
“Your wounds?” she asked.
“A little sore,” I admitted. “But I can deal.” It was a damn sight worse than ‘sore’ but I wasn’t lying. I could deal. I really could. All the straps and weight and shit constricting me beneath that fluffy peach sweater wasn’t helping none either. It should’ve been worse, really, but I think I was in a bit of a pleasant, drunken haze.
“You must be exhausted,” K said, and she was right, I was. Not just from the ordeal of getting dressed up and finding out that I’d be living the next few weeks as Cindy. I was genuinely bone tired. I’d been going full-out for a day or two now, except for that brief unconscious period after I’d been shot--and bullet-wound enforced naps aren’t very restful, I can assure you. Talk about a stressful couple of days.
“I want you to take a rest, Cindy. Take a seat and relax. I need some time to prepare for our departure as well. The rest will do you good.”
I wasn’t about to argue with her. K went off to do secret agent-type stuff in the other room. The sofa chair was warm and inviting. I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I thought the boobs and clothes and everything else would distract me and keep me awake. I was wrong.
A gentle push from K woke me up an indeterminate, dreamless period of time later. She knelt next to me and watched me expectantly. “Cindy?” she softly asked. “Are you ready?”
One thing about me, I wake up quickly. I really do; nothing of this moaning and rolling around in bed bullshit. Nothing drives me up the wall like someone who takes an hour of bitching and slamming the snooze button before getting out of bed. That shit really infuriated me. It’s one of the problems with picking up chicks in bars and bringing them home--having to deal with that nonsense in the morning. When the alarm goes--wham!--I’m up and underway. Usually.
“Yeah,” I mumbled. I felt unusually groggy. K handed me a glass of juice, which I eagerly drank down. My mouth felt dry and my tongue thick, as if I had a heavy night’s drinking beneath the belt. In a way, I guess I had. “How long was I out?”
“An hour,” she answered. I focussed on her and noticed she looked . . . different. Still K, but she’d obviously been working herself over during my nap. She looked a little bit softer, somehow, and just a tad older. I’d placed her in her late thirties, and now she looked about a decade older. The years had been kind, though, with just a touch of grey in her hair. She swapped the severe secret agent threads for something that, for want of a better description, screamed ‘soccer mom’.
“What’s with the getup, K?”
She smiled, and even that gesture somehow seemed friendlier, if not downright more caring, than anything I’d seen from her yet. To be honest, it found it more than a little creepy. “I’m hurt, Cindy,” she said, with a slightly patronizing tone. “Don’t you recognize your own mom?”
“You have got to be kidding me.”
“Not at all, Cindy. Now c’mon, chop-chop, we have a big day ahead of us!”
She was clearly insane, but I reluctantly left the comfort of the chair and found my feet, albeit with a few wobbles. I had to focus to walk. I had to focus to do everything, really, as Cindy. “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “So what’s the plan?”
“Well, the first thing you’re going to do,” she said, throwing some things into a purse, “is touch-up your makeup, dear! You look an awful fright!”
An ‘awful fright’ was a bit harsh, but I was looking a bit ragged around the Cindy edges. K handed me a small makeup case. I looked at the assorted tubes and bottles within and groaned. She might as well have handed me instructions to a model airplane written in fucking Chinese. I hesitatingly pulled out a slim, golden tube, and K gave an approving nod.
Ten minutes later, under K’s expert tutelage, I managed to repair the damages of an hour’s sleep. Practice, practice, practice--but fuck, there was just so much to learn!
“Well done, Cindy!” she enthused. “Now just one more thing. Say ‘ah!’”
“Ah?” She took advantage of my opened mouth to jam a long, slender rod down my throat. There was a sudden ‘hiss’ and this very uncomfortable, very cold sensation spread across the back of my throat. “Ack!”
“Don’t talk!” K commanded, the motherly persona suddenly gone. “This is--well, a necessary precaution. It causes a tightening of the soft tissue separating the hard cartilage in the larynx. The extra pressure on the vocal chords will help you speak with a more feminine pitch.”
Clutching at my throat, I felt something decidedly disconcerting going on beneath the skin. What the fuck had this bitch just done to me? I didn’t want to talk like some bimbo--not when this was all over, anyway. I glared at her in disbelief.
“Do not worry, Mr. Sanders,” K said. “The effect is strictly temporary, generally lasting only four or five hours. Yes, another fine unreleased product from your former employer, though surprisingly from a veterinarian subsidiary. Unfortunately, its use is limited--frequent reapplication of the spray has been known to cause permanent damage to the user, one of the reasons why, I’m sure, the product is not available on the open market.”
Permanent damage? What the fuck did she mean, permanent damage?
“If you speak before it finishes bonding with your voice box, Cindy, you could cause yourself serious and permanent injury. It normally takes ten to fifteen minutes.”
I continued to glare at her, and she continued to ignore me.
“Now. When we leave the apartment, Mr. Sanders, we will make our way to a car waiting for us down below. Walk at a normal pace. Talk to me as any daughter would her mother. Act normally. When we enter the car, fiddle with the media player, the radio--typical girl stuff, riding with her parent. Remember, you are only 20; you have just left your teenage years behind you.
And most importantly: from the moment we step out that door, you are Cindy. There is no David Sanders. To the rest of the world you must appear like nothing other than Cindy Long. Walk like Cindy, talk like Cindy, act like Cindy. Do you understand?”
I was still furious with her, but nodded. The numbness at the back of my throat was slowly fading. I watched mutely as she collected some final things, though she otherwise seemed content to leave the place in a shambles. On a second glance, I realized that was untrue: the place wasn’t a mess, it looked lived-in. Clever woman, K. She must’ve sorted it out while I was napping. If anyone checked this place out after we left, they’d find a place that looked untidy but homey. There were even some family-type photos on the wall I hadn’t noticed before.
There was a small backpack for me; pink, of course. There was a random selection of clothes and toiletries buried in there, and a book. I pulled it out. ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic.’ Gag. I’d rather have fucking Steele kill me now. K also handed me a purse, a sporty little thing that went well with my outfit, I guess. Rummaging through it I found more makeup stuff, a brush, a couple of bills and coins, a hair scrunchie, a tampon, a few condoms . . . .
My muffled exclamation drew her attention. My expression clearly stated ‘what the fuck?’ as I waved those final two things in her face.
“You are twenty, Cindy. It’s always difficult for a mother to accept, but I’m no fool. My, but you were a bit of a boy-chaser as a teen. And dressing the way you do . . . well! I don’t quite agree of the type of guy you attract, but girls will be girls, I guess.”
With another angry grunt, I waved the tampon at her.
“Better safe than sorry, Cindy. Fortunately it’s not that time of the month, yet.”
No fucking shit. What did she expect me to do with that thing, shove it up my ass? I closed the purse and slipped the damn thing over my shoulders and managed to yank my new hair something awful; that wig was clipped into my hair and hurt if I pulled on it. It must’ve been an expensive wig. It fell naturally and felt like the real thing. Great, another thing to learn how to deal with. Me, I like my hair nice and short. Quick and easy in the morning. And better in a fight.
I was feeling ready. I was getting antsy. Not that I was looking forward to stepping out into public looking as I did. Despite what the mirror showed me, I was still half-convinced there was no way we could pull this off, that someone would stop and stare, that I’d be a goddamn laughingstock in pantyhose.
K checked her watch. “It should be okay to talk again,” she said. The coldness at the back of my throat seemed gone.
“About fu--” I started to say, but squeaked at the sound of my own voice. I found myself clutching my throat again. “What the fuck?” Somehow, it didn’t sound as forceful as it used to, those words. My voice, it suddenly sounded . . . .girly. To my ear, anyway. It wasn’t properly feminine, but nowhere near my usual gruff tones.
“Cindy, please remember--language. Try and soften your voice a bit when you speak. Once we are safe at the clinic, we will begin your vocal coaching. In the meantime . . . try and mimic a girl you know, a girlfriend or something. And whatever you do, do not speak in a falsetto.”
“This better wear off, K.” God, my voice was all husky, like a dame who’d smoked too much. Pattern myself after a girlfriend? I didn’t exactly have one. Longest I’ve ever dated someone was four months . . . it didn’t end well. Actually, it ended very, very badly. Fucking Kate. It’s not something I like to talk about. And most of the other chicks in my life, well, we weren’t together for the conversation, you know?
“It’s Mom, remember?”
“Yeah, fine. Sorry Mom, I’ll do my best.” Shit, I didn’t sound angry, just petulant.
“And don’t worry, dear. Like I said, in six or eight hours you’ll be back to your normal voice.” It was weird, hearing her talk all normal and shit. And calling me dear. Didn’t quite like that, to be honest. As she spoke she gathered her own things. She slipped on a bulky, cheap-looking jacket and shouldered her own purse. It felt a bit like the old days, running with the gangs, getting all suited-up and psyched up before heading into a rumble . . . except in some kind of surreal, feminized version, swapping leather for lace and knives for eyeliner.
Maybe I spoke too soon, though, as I saw K have a quick check over a handgun.
“Mom! I didn’t know you packed heat. All the others girls are going to be so jealous! Can I have one too?”
She didn’t smile. “Do you know what this is?” She didn’t really sound like ‘Mom’ anymore.
It looked like a Glock 18C to me. Even had the extended mag going on. Not exactly the kind of thing I would’ve expected K to carry. I shrugged. “Uh, a gun?”
“Not a laughing matter.” She slipped the weapon into the recesses of her jacket. “And no, you can’t have one, Cindy.” Suddenly she was all smiles and motherly charm again. “So, are we ready?”
And at that moment, I suddenly felt that I really, really wasn’t ready. As much as I’d hated everything that had gone on in this shitty little apartment over the last few hours--at least there’d only been K and me in here. Out there were . . . people. Chicks who knew how to act like chicks and pricks who were going to be staring at my rack and wanting to fuck my ass. And let’s not forget the assassins. No, let’s not forget them. Fucking Steele. If I ever saw the bastard again, I was going to plant two inches of Dolce and Gabbana spike heel into his goddamn scrotum.
I can’t fucking believe I just said that. Two more weeks of this shit and I really would be sounding like a pansy.
“Yeah, let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Cindy!”
“Sorry Mom.”
***
My heart pounded so hard in my chest you’d have thought the sound would echo through the whole damn apartment building. But on the outside, though, I looked cool, collected . . . a little self-absorbed, maybe. That’s the kind of chick I figured Cindy was. Girls that look the way I do usually are. She trotted along beside her mom, fiddling with her hair, her other hand unconsciously resting on her purse. Every single thing I did was calculated and thought out, every fucking heel-toe step, every sideways glance at ‘Mom’, even absently picking at a piece of peach-coloured fluff off my sweater.
The hallway was dingy, dark and empty. Scuffed wallpaper curled up at the edges. There was that unique smell of mixed ethnic cooking and stained carpet common to cheap buildings where too many people live in too small a space. A lone baby’s cry rang out, muffled, from the far end and was abruptly cut-off. There was a shout, voices raised in argument. God, I couldn’t wait to get out of here. This wasn’t Cindy’s kind of place at all.
We waited for the elevator. I hadn’t even realized we were on the fifteenth floor. K--sorry, fucking ‘Mom’--checked her purse.
“Gum, dear?”
“Nah,” I said, then figured Cindy was probably the gum-chewing type. She was a blonde, after all. “Yeah, sure. Thanks.”
When the elevator arrived there was a guy on it, carrying a laundry basket full of assorted crap. He had headphones on but you could still hear the music. There was no hiding a weapon in those loose grey joggers and wife-beater. His eyes lazily danced across the two of us before happily settling on my cleavage. The corner of his lips tugged up in a smile.
Butterflies in my stomach? Fucking hell, I had a goddamn flock of seagulls in there now. I felt a warm flush of embarrassment slowly spread up my neck and face. I must’ve been glowing redder than Rudolph’s fucking nose but that jackass sure as hell didn’t notice. He had other things to look at. K didn’t bloody hesitate or nothing; she just stepped on to the elevator. Thing is, right then, stepping into that elevator and following her seemed like the most difficult thing in the world. Yeah, I knew this moment had to happen. There wasn’t much point in getting all dressed up if nobody was ever going to see me. I just wasn’t ready. I wasn’t fucking ready. Another hour or two prancing back and forth in that apartment suddenly seemed like a good idea.
“Coming?” K’s voice, that of the long-suffering parent, snapped me out of it.
“Uh, yeah. Sorry ‘bout that Mom. Having a blonde moment, you know?” I trotted into the elevator and stood next to her. My knees wanted to knock together. I couldn’t believe how nervous I felt. For chrissake, you’d think it was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It wasn’t. It really wasn’t. But to step in front of that teenage prick, who was no doubt checking out that firm, round ass of mine, really did take an effort of Herculean proportions.
The doors slid shut. They were mirrored on the inside, suddenly confronting me with the reflected Cindy. And, yeah, just as I thought: that jackass was scoping the goods.
“Cindy? First floor?” K . . . uh, Mom, was rummaging through her purse for something.
“Uh, yeah.”
I watched the reflected Cindy as she stepped forward with one delicate, high-heeled foot and reached out with her slim arm. Bountiful curves shifted beneath her sweater and she gently pressed one pinkly-glinting fingertip against the first-floor button. “Down we go,” she said in a throaty purr.
“How’re you feeling?” her mother asked.
Cindy gave a soft laugh. “Fine, fine. Just a bit spacey.” With a practiced flick of her head she tossed the long sweep of her blonde hair over one shoulder and smoothed it back with a quick stroke of the hand. Cindy gave a stretch, absently scratching at an itch beneath her right breast, and then took in a deep breath and released a loud, bored sigh. The boy’s eyes stayed glued to every jiggle of her tits like a fly on shit.
Eight floor. Cindy glanced back at the boy behind her and licked her lips. She gave a secretive, wet smile. ‘Hi,’ she silently mouthed to the boy.
His eyes widened in surprise. A bulge popped up in his pants.
“What’s that you’re listening to?” she asked. Those brilliant green eyes lingered for a second down below before drifting up to his face.
The kid’s gaze kept sliding down to her tits. “Uh . . . The Killers,” he said, surreptitiously shifting his laundry basket over his swelling crotch.
“I just love The Killers!” Cindy exclaimed. “Especially their old stuff? Y’know, like that one song, uh . . . .” She gave a few chews on her gum, and then hummed a line. “How’s it go? ‘I’ve got soul but I’m, not a solider . . . .’ Oh, I’m no good . . . you know which one, yeah?”
“All These Things That I’ve Done?” the boy stammered.
“Yeah! That’s it!” Cindy gave a little pout, her pink lips shiny in the dim light of the elevator. “Oh, poo . . . now I’m gonna have that song stuck in my head all day!” She turned back to the front, but her eyes glinted in the mirror, still watching the boy. Her mom looked bored with the whole affair, as if she’d seen it all before. They reached the first floor and the doors opened.
Cindy stepped out, giving a little wave as she went. The boy stayed on the elevator but struggled with himself for a moment, visibly building up courage.
“Hey, waitasec! Hey, my name’s . . . .” he started to say, but the doors closed and cut him off.
“I couldn’t give a fuck,” I growled, walking away.
***
The car was a nondescript grey Honda Civic, the kind you never remember seeing, a weather-beaten 2005 model that showed its age. We didn’t speak a word as we crossed the parking lot. A cool autumnal wind tugged at my hair. Two tall lampposts dropped limpid pools of flickering light. It was only about seven o’clock, but the early-evening dark suddenly felt a lot more threatening than I’d ever remembered.
I focused on crossing the hard asphalt without breaking an ankle. The patter of my heels against the ground rang out unnaturally loud. It’s a good thing we were the only ones in sight; I was fighting down the urge to vomit. Another fucking perv ogling the goods might’ve pushed me over the edge.
It was a relief to finally slide into the car. Getting off my feet was a needed break, even if the seatbelt felt really fucking weird sliding between those giant tits. Pulling the door shut behind me gave a moment’s sense of security--it felt good to be alone again. I struggled to remain in character as Mom tossed our bags in the back and slammed down the trunk. I rummaged through the purse and pulled out a compact as she slid in next to me and slammed her door. Cindy probably checked her makeup a lot and shit like that. I didn’t like the look in my eye; I liked neither the fear I saw there nor the disgust. It took all my willpower to keep my hand from shaking as I applied a quick dab up lipgloss, clicked the compact shut and stowed it back in purse. My left foot started to tremble.
Only once K had us underway, sliding through the darkened streets of a bad neighbourhood, did I start to lose it. The sharp, acrid taste of bile flooded my mouth and I gagged, swallowing it back. There was no hiding the shakes anymore. I took several deep breaths. I sat on my hands. I closed my eyes and leaned back. Fuck. Fuck!
“You are doing well, David.” K’s voice cut through the pounding in my ears.
“I know,” I muttered, and then: “I know, I know, I fucking know!” I screamed, and slammed my fist into the ceiling, again and then again. “Fuck!” The Civic’s roof wobbled from the impact and I left a spot of blood where my knuckle split. One of those fucking bracelets snapped and went spinning off into the back seat.
“Now you are doing less well,” she commented.
I glared at her. “Jesus, K, I can’t do this!”
“You carried yourself remarkably well back in the elevator,” she said. Her eyes danced between the street and my face as she drove. “I must say that I was . . . surprised.”
“Yeah, well, it had to fucking be done, didn’t it? But . . . goddamn it!” I wanted to pound at my own belly, I wanted to reach in there and yank out that damn, queasy feeling churning in there. “Every fucking step! Every goddamn move! Every word, for chrissake! I’ve got to think and plan and worry about every thing I do! The stress is gonna kill me, K!”
She waited as I struggled to calm myself. She took a turn, working us towards the lights of the central city. “There is no need to overdo it, Mr. Sanders,” she finally said. “You could have simply ridden the elevator down in silence.”
“You think I don’t fucking know that, K?” I snapped back. “You think I wanted to flirt with that punk? Yeah, I could’ve just stood there, that little prick was so fixated on my t-and-a he wasn’t gonna give a shit either way. Most girls in an elevator with their mom, that’s what they would’ve done, right?
“But this is cock-tease-fucking-Cindy Long, yeah? She wouldn’t just stand there, would she? I mean, I damn well ride the elevator in silence, but Cindy, she doesn’t. The little bitch probably just likes the sound of her own voice.”
“Is that who you think Cindy is, Mr. Sanders?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! I just know she’s not me, K. I’m creating this bitch from the ground up, aren’t I? And with each new thing that happens, I’m inventing a new part of this girl--of me, and I swear, it’s gotta be one of the toughest things I’ve ever done because, frankly, I don’t like who I’m turning myself into.”
K seemed to digest that for a few moments before responding. “Then why are imaging her in this way, Mr. Sanders?”
“Because,” I answered flatly. “I fully plan to stay alive.”
We rode for another ten or fifteen minutes in silence after that. I slowly got my breathing under control and felt the stress bleed out of me, watching the streetlight glide across the windowpane. I checked the rearview mirror from time to time. I knew this wouldn’t happen again. The fear’s always the worst the first time.
What I hadn’t told K was that I needed to flirt with that little shit in the elevator. I had to do it because it was the last thing that I wanted to do. Stepping into that elevator, I was fucking terrified of that boy. I was afraid of talking to him. I was afraid of the way he looked me over like a piece of meat, and when he popped a boner I almost lost it. I nearly snapped his goddamn neck I was so scared. See, it’s the only way I know how to deal with fear. It’s the way I was trained, I guess. When I was younger, I was scared of so much shit. God, I was pathetic. Sakura, she taught me how to not be afraid. She taught me how to confront my fears, how to overcome them--how to make ‘em a part of me, really. Because if something’s part of you, and you know who you are--well, then you see the fear for what it is.
I’m afraid of dogs. I really am. I’d had a couple bad run-ins when I was a kid with dogs. Really bad run-ins. But now? That fear’s part of me. It’s part of me but I know it’s not all of me; the whole of me is greater than that fear, and so I control it instead of the other way around.
So in that elevator, I knew I had to do the same goddamn thing. It was complicated this time, because I’m still not sure what I was afraid of, exactly. Doesn’t matter. It’s over with. Next time Cindy has to chat to someone, she’ll be fine. I’d already grabbed that particular bull by the horns.
Fuck, that’s the closest I ever want to get to another guy’s horn.
“Was that a chuckle?” K asked.
“Huh? Yeah, I guess so.”
“Are you feeling better?”
“I think I am.” I reached forward and fiddled with the radio. “Hey Mom, you mind if pop on some music?” The Killers, eh? Who would’ve thought? Cindy, she looks like she’s all bubblegum pop but really she’s into her vintage Indy rock scene. Go figure.
“Not at all, Cindy.” She smiled.
When I looked up from finding a funky FM station, the smile was gone. I glanced at the side-view mirror and felt my stomach sink. The fucker was still there.
“We’re being followed,” K stated grimly.
***
The second longest relationship I ever had lasted three months. Her name was Akiko. She was this way-cool Japanese girl, a professor up at the local university. Less than a year into my new life, into being this corporate climber, this rising young buck, I figured I had to give the real relationship thing a try. I’d been seeing a psychiatrist--yeah, you got a fucking problem with that?--and what she told me was: I had to get over Kate someday. Whether I wanted to or not, whether it was the right thing to do or not, some things are best left behind. It damn well didn’t feel like the right thing, but apparently it was unhealthy to nurse that memory and pain forever.
And Akiko, God, she was brilliant, that kind of blistering intelligence that makes a woman dead sexy. And I’ll be honest: the Japanese thing didn’t hurt either. It was unfair to the poor woman, really. I channelled way too much pent-up emotion about Sakura into that goddamn relationship. No wonder it didn’t work out.
It’s not like I was entirely to blame. I was only twenty-one, trying to figure out who the hell I was now, in the so-called normal world. I was younger than many of her students. There’s no way it could’ve ever worked out. This was before I hit NeoPharm and all, still bouncing between jobs, still looking for the right ladder to climb.
Fuck, though, did she give great head. Sexiest lips I’ve ever dated. But if I had to pick out one thing I took away from that relationship--one thing she really did for me, Akiko--it was a love for reading. Yeah, go figure; girl sucks your cock and you walk away thinking about books. Akiko was an English lit prof. She’d specialized in something or other with a healthy side of a critical theory fashionable and marketable at the time she entered teaching. She told me that with a wry smile. She explained almost everything about herself with a wry smile.
Her true love, though? The really old shit, like Beowulf and Chaucer and Shakespeare. (Though she taught me all that ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ stuff isn’t very old after all.) So yeah, she was well into her literature. You ever have someone softly whisper the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales into your ear whilst riding your cock? It’s sexier than it sounds. Sweet April showers still give me a hard-on to this day.
In any case, you know those long Sundays that just seem to go on for ever? The ones spent lying together in bed, having slow sex and talking about nothing and dozing off and having sex again? Yeah, on one of those days she taught me this really weird saying. It took me a bit to learn the damn thing, with both lips and pussy acting as encouragement and distraction in equal measure.
Akiko swore she lived her life by the saying, though I never quite figured out what she meant by that. There were mysteries to that girl; it’s probably another reason I fell for her so hard. I guess you could say we both had trust issues. Pity it didn’t work out.
“Giet bid daet selast,” I whispered beneath my breath. “Donne mon him sylf ne maeg.” After all these years I still remember it; even my pronunciation was perfect. “Wyrd onwendan.” I watched the headlights trailing us in the rear-view mirror. “Daet he donne wel dolige.” Funny what pops into your head when you’ve got an assassin chasing your panty-clad ass.
K didn’t seem all that perturbed by the pursuit. She didn’t change her speed or make any sudden turns or anything. Her grip stayed relaxed on the wheel as she drove us along the outskirts of the city centre. Her eyes, however, were bright and alert and kept a careful eye on our followers. The asshole behind us was good . . . but not that good. Under the false neon dawn of passing shops and restaurants, the car was easy enough to pick out. Sure, he didn’t ride our bumper but the traffic was light and he cut some of those corners just a little too sharp. After a couple kilometres and a few unnecessary but inconspicuous changes in course, the car was still behind us. It wasn’t just a fluke.
“You going to lose him?” I asked.
“In a Honda Civic?” K answered, cocking an eyebrow. “Besides, I do not believe we need to worry.”
Now it was my turn to raise a finely-plucked eyebrow. “K, we’re being fucking followed by fucking assassins. I’ll be honest: I’m a little worried. What’s there not to be worried about?”
She shrugged. “If the people in that car are indeed agents of Mr. Steele,” she said, “and they truly believed that Mr. Sanders was in this car, they would have driven up beside us a few kilometres back, especially as we passed through one of those quiet residential areas. They would have overtaken us and opened fire on this car until everyone within it was dead.”
I gave a low whistle.
“These are the kind of people we are dealing with, Mr. Sanders. The fact that they haven’t shot at us yet leads me to believe that they are merely following us on suspicion or whim. Hopefully they will soon realize that there is nothing more to this car than a middle-aged woman and her young daughter.”
“Huh.” Could it be this crazy Cindy disguise gig was actually working? Go figure. “So, where we going then?”
Mom flashed me a big smile. “Well, we’re not going to reach the clinic tonight, I’m afraid. You hungry, dear? Let’s grab some munchies and chow down at the motel room. How does that sound?”
“Sounds great, Mom!”
***
We pulled in at a cheap motel on the other side of town at around ten-thirty. The smell of drive-through fast-food drifted up from the back seat. I was getting antsy again, imagining with great pleasure peeling off the goddamn waist-cincher and digging in to some nice, manly burger and fries. I also liked the idea of getting my cock out and letting my balls breathe again. The boys were really starting to feel cramped and sweaty down there.
“Check us in under my name,” K said, handing me a wallet. Her name, I discovered on the drive over, was Wendy Jones. Apparently Daddy Long was either dead or gone and she’d reverted to her maiden name. “Get us one bed, a double.” At my surprised look she continued: “We are mother and daughter and we drive a cheap car. It is just sensible that we share a bed. Just act--normally. We plan to leave early tomorrow.”
“Why do you want me to check us in?” I fought to keep the tremor out of my voice. Checking-in meant talking to someone. Just because I’d mastered that particular fear didn’t mean I was looking for excuses to go out of my way and do the Cindy thing again. “Why the hell can’t you do it?”
“Because,” she answered, pulling her handgun from the recesses of her jacket, “I will be keeping an eye on you . . . just in case.” Keeping the weapon hidden, she smiled. “Besides, you need the practice, dear.” Our pursuers had gotten either bored or cleverer. We hadn’t seen them for the last three-quarters of an hour, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still out there. With a sigh I flipped down the sun shade and checked myself in the vanity mirror.
You’re not looking too shabby, baby, I thought, pursing my mouth and slathering on another layer of lipgloss. The gooey-sweet taste tingled on my lips and set them a-glistening. I touched up my mascara and fluttered my lashes under the weight. I’ve always had slightly effeminate lashes, long with a bit of curl. One girl I dated for a few weeks, she laughed at their length, even balancing a toothpick across them once after a few pints down at the local pub. “Wow, you’d look just great with a little mascara and eyeliner,” she gushed. “I could do wonder with your eyes!” She might’ve been a makeup artist or some goddamn thing; I can’t remember. I told her to fuck off, only half-joking, and we didn’t date for much longer after that.
Now, looking at Cindy through half-lidded eyes I saw that long-ago girlfriend proven right. I blinked once, languidly, and concentrated on those beautiful emerald depths. This isn’t a big deal, that gaze insisted. You look good. Those horny bastards in there’ll fall over themselves trying to rent you a room. They won’t be checking out your chin or nose or shoulders. You can do this. Cindy can do this.
Cindy Long gave herself a final wink and flipped the shade back up. She pulled a red lollipop from her purse and slid it into her mouth. “I’ll be back in a sec’, ‘kay Mom?” she said. She gracefully stepped out of the car, though the long drive must have left those lithe legs cramped as she tottered momentarily before finding her footing. Finding her balance she strode briskly towards the check-in office, purse swinging in counter-step to her stride. The click of her heels sounded clear across the parking lot. Lights shone behind the curtains of a few rooms, and the muffled sound of a TV turned up too loud reached her ears. Back at the car her mom popped open the trunk and began to pull out their few bags and cases.
Cindy paused at the door to check her reflection, tucking a wayward bang back behind her ear. The blonde-haired girl’s earrings spun and glittered in the glass. The door chimed as she stepped into the office.
The place stank of stale cigarettes and greasy food. Her nose wrinkled as she gingerly stepped around a fat, insolent cat stretched out in front of the door. She seemed a little less confident approaching the counter. The young man behind the counter sat deep in his chair, legs propped up on a banged-up metal cabinet. Attention fixated on an old, flickering flatscreen TV mounted to the wall, he didn’t even acknowledge her presence. With the volume set so high, he probably hadn’t heard her entrance. The colours on the screen bled together and contrasted sharply, rendering the show--some kind of music video--in lurid detail. Cindy bit her lower lip, clearly unsure what to do. Her hand hovered uncertainly over the counter bell before pulling back.
She pulled the lollipop from her mouth. “Um . . . excuse me?” Her soft voice went unheard under the loud blare of the television. Cindy nearly stamped a dainty foot in frustration. “Hello?”
If the man was aware of Cindy, he gave no sign of it. He idly poked at a button on the remote.
After glaring at the back of the man’s head for a moment, Cindy slid the lollipop back into her painted mouth. She leaned up against the counter and rested her chin in the palm of her hands. She watched the man for a little longer and then idly reached out and, with a deft flick of the hand, knocked over an overstuffed stationary basket. Pencils and pens cascaded over the counter and rained down on the man’s head.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed, spinning around in his chair and leaping to his feet.
Cindy gave a long draw on the candy in her mouth, languorously rolling her tongue over the sweet sphere before pulling it out with a wet pop. She eyed the candy indolently for a second before her eyes wandered over to the attendant. Her lips parted in a glossy smile. “Hi!” she said, and the fingers of one hand danced in a cute wave. She seemed completely unaware of the fact that her arms, drawn together at the elbow, pushed up her massive breasts and gave an even better view of the cleavage barely hidden by the low V-neck.
The young man’s eyes went wide. “Uh . . . hi!” His eyes struggled between her tits and face, but if she noticed she seemed unconcerned. “What can I, um, do for you?”
Cindy’s eyes sparkled with merriment as she took in his flustered appearance. The poor thing was hardly older than a boy, his unshaven chin patchy at best and his cheap white polyester t-shirt stained with old food. He made an unconscious attempt to smooth down his hair and met with little success. She made a little moue. “Oh, it’s just so annoying!” she said. The boy jabbed at the volume control on the remote, nearly dropping it in his haste. “My Mom and I,” she said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the car with her lollipop, “we’re driving off into the country but we had some car problems, you know? Now we’re, like, running majorly late? And there’s no way we’ll get there tonight, so we kinda need a room.”
She leaned forward conspiratorially, her breasts crushing up against the counter top, and the boy eagerly moved closer. “I mean, this really sucks. It’s not like I want to head out there in the first place, I’m totally a city girl, you know? And now I’m stuck spending the night with my mom! Ugh.”
He gave a tentative smile. “That sounds, ah, horrible.”
Cindy shrugged. “Yeah, but what’re you gonna do, eh? Moms!” Her tone firmly summed up all the major problems of the world with that one word. “But she’s paying the bills so I guess I shouldn’t complain.” She flashed her mother’s credit card before the boy.
“Yeah, I know what you mean.” The attendant seemed to relax a bit. It was an easy topic to relate with. “My mom’s got me working these weekend shifts or she’ll kick me out, she says. I’ve gotta pay my room and board, can you believe? God, she can be such a bitch sometimes.” He took the card from Cindy, and flushed red as her finger slid along the inside of his palm.
Her smile didn’t change, though, innocent as ever. “Yeah, my mom can be a total ball-breaker too, you know?”
He looked at her curiously. “Ball-breaker?”
“Oh, my brother,” she stammered. “He’s a little younger than me? But totally over-protective? But yeah, Mom pushes him really hard sometimes.” She gave him a little wink. “He’s a nice kid . . . a bit like you.”
“Ah . . . thanks,” he stammered, quickly looking down to hide his growing blush. “We, ah, have a couple of rooms left. What would you like?”
Cindy toyed with her hair. “Well, it’s kinda gross but Mom wants a room with just one double bed. We’re gonna share. Like, ick. I mean, she’s all sweaty in her sleep and she snores! But money’s tight, and she’s paying . . . .” She gave another idle shrug.
“Well, uh. . . .” The boy tapped a couple of buttons on a keyboard. “I’m not really supposed to do this, but maybe I can help you out.” His face burned red as he kept his eyes glued to the computer screen. “It’s getting kinda late and we normally don’t get too many people after eleven. We still have a couple double rooms left. How about I put you in one of those, and charge you for the single?”
Cindy gave a little squeal of glee. “You’d do that?” She even gave a little hop of joy, and the boy was hard-pressed to pull his eyes away from the way her exposed curves quivered afterwards. But then she stopped to think a moment, pressing one pink fingertip to her lip. “But . . . you’re not going to get in trouble, are you?”
He chuckled. “Nah. And it’s not like I love this job or nothing.” When Cindy looked doubtful he made a few more taps on the keyboard. “Listen, what I’ll do is I’ll book you and your mom into room 4--that’s a single room--but I’ll give you the keys for room 12, okay? It’s got two doubles. It’s not like anybody’s going to want it tonight, anyway.”
It only took Cindy a minute to fill in the room form and for the payment to go through on the card. She slid her mother’s card back into her purse and gave the boy a big smile. “You’re really sweet, you know that . . . .” She looked at him inquisitively.
“Ah, Tim.” He stuck his hand out.
“Cindy,” she said, meeting his hesitant but strong handshake with her soft grip. “You’re a nice guy, Tim.” And then, eyes fluttering wide with surprise, she quickly leaned forward and gave him a peck on the cheek. His unshaven skin felt coarse against her lips. “See you!”
He called out to her at the door. “Uh, Cindy? Yeah, listen . . . uh, I mean, you don’t have to or nothin’ . . . I’m done work at midnight. I don’t suppose you’d, like, want to grab a drink with me after work? There’s a bar down the road . . . .”
Cindy gave him a sad look over her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Tim. I . . . can’t.”
Tim looked away. “Nah, I understand. . . .”
“No, it’s . . . ,” she rushed to say. “It’s my mom. We’re leaving early tomorrow, you know? I better not be out late or anything.” She offered a tentative smile. “You understand, yeah? Moms?”
“Yeah, moms,” he said ruefully, and smiled.
“See you around, Tim.”
“Bye Cindy.”
***
My head felt like it was going to explode.
There were all kinds of shit going on in there. I was furious with K for sending me into that office. Some part of me wanted to turn right around and take that fucking kid by the throat and beat the living shit out of him. I know Tim didn’t deserve it. He really didn’t. But I was still pissed off. Then there was a lot of self-loathing and disgust going on as well. Obviously. I hated myself right then; I really did. I mean, God damn it, I’d just kissed a fucking guy! Foremost in my thoughts, though, was Ken.
Remember Ken? Ken was my first kiss. Believe me, that kind of shit can really mess you up when you’re a teen. What with all the other craziness going on at that time, dealing with that kind of nonsense just seemed really unfair. Now I’m thinking that maybe I never really dealt with it at all. Things were so crazy back then it was easy to take things you’d rather not think about and kind of push them off to the side and try to forget. But you never do, I guess. You always remember your first kiss. Mine came from another fucking guy. That was also the last time a guy had kissed me. Until tonight. Only tonight, he hadn’t kissed me; I kissed him.
Or rather, Cindy had.
“Did you get us a room, dear?”
I glared at K as I stormed over to the car. ‘Heel-toe’ and ‘straight feet’ and ‘small steps’ were forgotten in my anger. I was walking like a goddamn linebacker just then. “Yeah. Room fucking 12,” I growled. I grabbed half the bags off the ground before remembering that there was no fucking way Cindy could carry all that shit. “This way, Mom.” I fought to get my voice back under control, to push the anger back, and pretended to struggle with the weight of the luggage I carried. Two trips and we had our bags piled up outside the room. We worked in silence, but I could feel K’s eyes watching me carefully.
I used the key to let us into the room. It took two tries; my hands were shaking. The motel room was like every other cheap-ass room I’d even been forced to spend a night in, with bad carpets and yellowing wallpaper. Some unidentifiable, vaguely unpleasant smell hovered in the air. There were two double-size beds separated by a small cabinet, a bathroom opposite the entrance, and some really bad art over a small table next to a mirror. There wasn’t even a damn television set.
The moment the door clicked shut behind us I started to claw away at Cindy. The sweater nearly ripped as I tore it over my head; I had one heel on and the other went flying across the room when I kicked it off. My chest heaved with the hurry to be free of this feminine prison. I probably would’ve tried to yank those tits off, too, if there’d been a seam to find. I had the goddamn waist-cincher half-unzipped and my jeans unbuttoned at the crotch when K’s voice suddenly cut through my desperate effort.
“David! What the hell are you doing?”
I glared at her from beneath a twisted mess of blonde hair. “This charade is over, K! No more Cindy. No more bloody mincing about in fucking heels!” I struggled with and yanked off the second shoe. “I’ll take my chances with the killers, thank you very much. At least if they get me, I’ll die with some goddamn pride!”
I thought maybe she’d try to talk me down, or get all angry and bossy. Instead, she just watched me thrash about. Slowly her lips started to twitch up at the edges. Her eyes sparkled with the effort of restraint. She couldn’t hold it in anymore: K burst into loud peals of laughter.
“It’s not fucking funny!” I yelled, gesticulating wildly with the dainty shoe still clutched in my right hand. This just sent her into deeper hysterics. I swear the bitch was nearly doubled over, clutching at her side.
“It’s not funny, dammit,” I insisted. I caught a look at myself in the mirror. Brandishing that heel like a wicked weapon, with one tit popping out and that wig hanging over my face like a headbanger’s mop . . . I looked ridiculous. I couldn’t even walk with those jeans down around my knees, and my cock, overjoyed at the loosening of its bonds, strained mightily against its silky restraint. I slowly pulled off my wig and dropped it to the floor. Damn. I did look kind of funny, especially with my face all red with anger and those veins popping out at the temple. Hell, even I couldn’t take myself seriously, especially with all that makeup on.
“Sit, sit!” Still struggling to regain her composure, K gestured to one of the beds before half-stumbling over to our bags. She pulled a bottle out of a side pocket and tossed it to me. “Just . . . relax. Take a deep breath, David. Have a drink.”
I didn’t need a second invitation. I cracked open the bottle--Jack Daniels, God, this woman understood exactly what booze each part of this relocation required--and a moment later she brought over two cheap mugs from the bathroom. She swallowed a chuckle as I grimly poured us each a stiff drink.
“Bottom’s up,” I stated. We clinked out mugs together and pounded the booze back in one. The strong burn of the whisky down my throat was exactly what I needed. JD was a manly drink. I really wanted to feel manly right then. Even as I sat there still wearing panties and hose with tits half-spilling out of a lacy black bra. I poured both K and myself a second. We shot them back without a word, but I was very much aware of her eyes watching me over the rim of her mug.
When I went for a third drink, she gently held back the bottle. “Care to talk about it?” She sounded halfway between Agent K and Mom. I was starting to wonder who the hell she really was.
“Not really. No.” I pulled the bottle from her grip and poured myself another. She held her mug out for a refill. The third shot went down very smoothly. I wanted to get drunk. Check that; I wanted to get fucking drunk. She hadn’t drunk hers, though, watching me curiously. “What?”
K shrugged. “I am just gauging how drunk you have to be before feeling like you have recaptured enough of your masculine pride to tell me what is wrong.” She raised her cup in my honour and drank it back.
I really hated her sometimes. “Fuck you, K.” I refilled our cups.
She looked around the room. “I thought I asked you to get us a single room?”
“Who knew Cindy could be so persuasive?” I sneered bitterly. “The little shit in there thought he’d do us a little favour. I think he liked me. Her.”
“Ah. I see.”
She didn’t. She really didn’t. “Don’t fucking presume to know me, K.” We touched cups and solemnly knocked back our last drink. I screwed the bottle tightly shut and tossed it over onto her bed. The unseen clamp wrapped around my temple slowly began to loosen. I reached back and unhooked the bra as I talked. “You’ve got a profile on me. You’ve done all this research and shit. But you don’t know me. You have no idea what I’m feeling.” Without support those fake breasts bobbled free.
K averted her eyes with only the slightest of smiles. “Then why don’t you tell me?”
I continued to glare at her as I crossed the room in my stocking feet. I grabbed the bag that K packed for me and found a t-shirt. It hugged my curves and didn’t even reach my bellybutton, hanging off the massive orbs it barely restrained. The nipples clearly poked through the thin material, dual punctuation on either side of the emblazoned ‘Hot Stuff’ written in brilliant, sparkly pink. Fucking hell.
Without answering her I stomped into the toilet and slammed the door behind me. I peeled off the jeans and those damn pantyhose and tossed the panties in the corner. My bladder was screaming for relief, as were my balls. After a particularly angry bout of masturbation I cleaned myself off, wrapped myself in a towel and stormed back up to K. She was still sitting where I had left her.
“You have any idea how this is fucking with my head, K?” She watched me from her seat as I stalked back and forth across the room, ranting as I went. In a torrent of angry words I explained what had happened back in the motel office, about Tim and Cindy. She waited patiently for me to finish. When I finally flopped down onto the bed she handed me another drink. I hadn’t even seen her pick up the bottle. I certainly didn’t feel it but suspected I was getting very, very drunk.
“I don’t want to dress up and act like a chick, K!”
“Very few men would want to do what you are doing, David,” K said. Her voice was calm and soothing, motherly once again. “And even fewer could manage it half as well as you have so far. I already told you: you are doing very well. You can do this, Mr Sanders.”
“That’s easy for you to say, K.”
“I realize that.” She hesitated a moment. “Tell me, what was it that made you so angry? Was it the kiss?”
I felt my face redden and glowered at her. “What the fuck do you think? Yeah, that’s damn well part of it. A big part of it.”
“But it was just a little kiss to the cheek, right? How is that a big deal?”
“It’s a big deal to me, okay?”
Her eyes stayed fixated on me for an uncomfortably long time, as if she were processing difficult thoughts. I tried to ignore her by rummaging through the clothes she’d packed for me. There wasn’t a hell of a lot in there, and I was expecting it to all be stupidly girly, but buried away at the bottom I found a pair of jogging pants. I eagerly pulled them on. Despite riding a hell of a lot lower on the hips than anything I’d normally wear, they were blissfully comfortable after wearing those jeans all day. Between the joggers and that ludicrous t-shirt I had something like a yard of toned midriff left exposed.
Finally running out of patience, I turned back to K. “What? What the hell is it?”
“David, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“I thought your damn federal profile covered everything.”
“No, not everything,” K answered.
“Fine then. Ask away.”
“Have you ever kissed another man before?”
I slowly sank down onto the bed. “Yeah,” I admitted. “How’d you know?”
“It was a hunch, based on your reaction.”
I looked at her quizzically. “Really? Why?”
“Tell me, this previous kiss . . . were you young when it happened?”
I nodded, curious where she was going with this. Back when I’d turned twenty and was seeing that psychiatrist? I didn’t even tell the shrink about Ken. Didn’t see much reason to talk about it, to be honest. So I’m really not sure why I told K. It must’ve been the alcohol.
“Yeah. About fourteen. It was my first kiss.”
The fact that it was my first seemed to take her by surprise. “Was it your only kiss with another man?”
“Of course!” I exclaimed. “What do you think I am, some kind of fag?” Hell, I don’t even have any memories of being kissed or hugged by any kind of father figure or uncle or anything. I never really got to know my dad . . . my real dad, anyway. So the stubble on Tim’s face? That was the first time I’d felt anything like that up against my lip or cheek. Creepy stuff, I’m telling you.
She looked annoyed by my response. “I am not suggesting anything, Mr. Sanders. I simply find such a strong reaction to such a small action a little surprising.”
“I kissed a fucking guy, K!”
“It’s common in many cultures for men to show such levels of intimacy.”
“Yeah? Well, not in mine.”
“Did you enjoy kissing that boy?”
The question took me by surprise. I didn’t know whether she meant Ken or Tim. It didn’t matter. The answer would’ve been the same either way: “No!”
“Really?” She eyes me curiously. “I just wonder, David, whether under the stress of the last few days and through the forced role-playing of Cindy, if perhaps you are being forced to confront some aspects of yourself you have long tried to ignore?”
I eyed her warily. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“All the women, Mr. Sanders. The extreme macho posturing. And today, Cindy flirting with the only two males she has met . . . .”
“Just fucking say it, K!”
“Could it be, Mr Sanders, that you are in some kind of denial?”
I stared at her in stunned disbelief. Slowly, my lips twitched into a small smile until finally, I too burst into laughter. “What, you think I’m gay?”
K didn’t seem amused. “I think there is a possibility you have some repressed homosexual tendencies, yes.”
That just sent me off into another burst of laughter. Holy shit, but this woman cracked me up. “You really think I’m. . . .” I couldn’t even say it. And the look on her face was so serious! I stumbled to my feet and spread my arms wide before her and dropped my pants. “Behold! Proof of my manliness!”
“Mr Sanders, please.”
“Nah, check it, watch this. Right now, I’m thinking of . . . you!” I gave her a lascivious grin as my dick rose to attention, strong and proud. I really was thinking of her as well. God, I’d love to see what the real Agent K looks like. In the meantime, the imagination was doing a damn fine job of filling in the gaps. “And now, I’m thinking of . . . that dude in the elevator.” My manhood visibly wilted. I pulled the jogging pants back up and covered up. “I mean, seriously K, you think I’m some homo?”
She didn’t seem much impressed by my display. “I think there is a possibility, yes.”
Releasing a sigh, I flopped down on the bed opposite her. “K, you can believe what you want. I don’t really care. I really don’t. Though if you think a day of dressing up in chicks’ clothing and flouncing about as Cindy is going to turn me to the other side, you really don’t know me at all.
“Hell, how’s this, I’ll even tell you something I’ve never told anyone else: I actually wondered if I might be gay too, when I was a kid. Seriously! The kid I told you about, the one who kissed me when I was a teen? His name was Ken.” I flopped back on the bed, speaking to the ceiling. It was very distracting how, once they stopped wobbling about, those heavy breasts flattened beneath the t-shirt and weighed heavily on my chest. I quickly told her about Ken and about how I beat the crap out of him.
“And after I made up with Ken, there was a part of me . . . I mean, there really was a part of me . . . that wanted to be that way for him. I dunno why. To make up for hurting him? Or maybe because I really, really didn’t want to lose his friendship. I mean, fuck, K--friends, you know? They’re one of the only things really worth fighting for.”
I linked my hands behind my head and released a deep sigh. Why the hell was I telling her any of this? There were only one, maybe two people I’ve ever been this open with before. “But I couldn’t. I really couldn’t. I looked at Ken and, yeah, I felt very protective. I cared for the guy. But he didn’t do anything for me, if you know what I mean. And Ken damn well knew it. If he hadn’t been so honest I probably would’ve been messed in the head for a hell of a lot longer than I was.”
I felt a bit noxious, and it wasn’t the alcohol. I really didn’t like thinking about my past much.
“So, you really want to know why I was so angry, K?”
“Yes. Please,” she answered, in a tone that I couldn’t quite place. I was tempted to sit up and have a look at her face, but I also really wanted to get this off my chest while I was still in a talking mood. It didn’t happen often.
“See, this is the thing. I mean, really, if I was that insecure about my masculinity, K, d’you really think I’d be going around with these fucking things?” I hefted those udders stuck to my chest. “The reason I can pull off the Cindy thing so well is because I know she isn’t me. I don’t enjoy it--hell, I damn well hate it--but Cindy’s like a completely different person. What she does doesn’t really reflect on me, you know?”
“Then why did that kiss make you so angry?” K asked.
I sighed. “Because it made me feel sick, touching my lips to that boy’s cheek. Even after everything I’ve said, it made me sick to my fucking stomach. And it shouldn’t have. It really shouldn’t have. Ten years ago I almost put a friend--hell, he was more than a friend, he was probably my first real friend--in the hospital because he freaked me out. I didn’t understand him . . . although at that time I didn’t really understand myself either.
“But that was over ten years ago! I thought I’d grown since then. I kept in touch with Ken over the years. Him being gay really didn’t matter. Or so I thought. Only now, ten years later I find out I’m still the same pathetic homophobe I was when I was a kid. I thought I’d figured myself out years ago. And now Cindy’s showing me that I haven’t. There’s still somewhere inside of me that’s scared and insecure--a part of me that’s freaked out by something as stupid as a guy kissing another guy.
“So, yes, K, that really pisses me off. I hate myself for being weak. And worse, I’m angry at myself because it feels like I’m betraying the memory of Ken.”
“Memory?” Her voice was surprisingly soft.
“Yeah. Ken died a few years ago. He fought the good fight but the disease finally got him.”
“I’m sorry, David. AIDS?”
“Nah. Cancer. The idiot smoked two packs a day.”
K shook her head. “You were right, Mr Sanders. I don’t know you after all. Come on, the food is getting cold.”
***
Things got a little weird after we ate. The food itself pissed me off. I hadn’t really paid attention at the drive-through window, focusing intently on being the most convincing Cindy I could possibly be. Now I was finding out that K, damn her to hell, had bought ‘healthy’ food for me. God damn those healthy-eating initiatives! I wanted a burger and fries, dammit, not some fucking salad.
Once I’d calmed down, K coerced me back into Cindy-practice mode. She insisted I slip the waist-cincher, heels and wig back on, though she didn’t seem to mind the jogging pants and t-shirt. Thing is, even dressed-down like that I still looked like a flirty coed, back from a game of Ultimate Frisbee or something. K taught me how to clean the makeup off my face, apparently a very important ritual for young women concerned with keeping their skin healthy and smooth.
It was still weird, looking at myself in the mirror and seeing Cindy, though I didn’t feel quite as sick to the stomach anymore. The lack of makeup made a huge difference. My features lost some of their softness, returning to familiar rough edges, and I was almost disappointed to see my eyes fade back to their normal green. The dichotomy between face and body, though, really freaked me out. Those curves just looked way too real.
Halfway through dinner my throat tingled and my voice broke, similar to passing through a second puberty. Fifteen minutes later I sounded like a man again. For the first few minutes my own voice sounded strange to my ears, which was a little disconcerting. It was getting late and exhaustion was catching up to me, but K wasn’t quite done yet. She insisted we squeeze in another hour of training before bed. In a repeat of the time spent at the safe house, K had me prancing back and forth across the room, this time in a pair of tight, calf-high boots with slightly higher heels. I was so tired I was starting to feel hazy again. I couldn’t even muster up a defence against her drill-sergeant ways and numbly did as she asked. She had me incorporating gestures into my walk, and I held my wrist just a little limper than normal, or bit my lower lip with uncertainty, or toyed with my hair . . . she directed and I acted.
The whole thing got pretty damn boring pretty damn fast. I actually found myself thinking about Tim. Poor little shit. He seemed like a nice enough kid. Cindy wasn’t the girl for him. I checked the time and saw that he’d be finishing his shift in another fifteen minutes. Ten to one he was secretly hoping Cindy would change her mind and sneak away from Mom and grab a drink with him. Maybe that wasn’t the only thing he was hoping to grab tonight. I wondered if he’d go home and jerk off thinking about me. Not an entirely pleasing though, I assure you.
Eventually K relented and it was time for bed. I was almost ready to fall over, and it wasn’t because of the heels. When I went to strip that damned cincher off K stopped me. “Training,” she said. “Your body can keep practicing as you sleep, even if your mind can not.” Then she handed me something flimsy and pink. “And wear this to bed, please.”
I clutched the gauzy fabric in my hand. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, K,” I grumbled, and as always she wasn’t. Personally, I like to sleep naked. I usually do. It’s different for girls, apparently. They sure as hell have more to choose from when it comes to nightwear. K had just made my first choice. Cindy, she liked to be naughty. That’s what I would call the stretch lace babydoll (and matching panty, for fuck’s sake) K handed me. The underwire shoved those tits back up in my face and the hem didn’t even clear my ass--and the short slit that went up to my waist showed off even more. The fabric clung to me in a distressingly silky way. Not only did I feel like a total fucking poof wearing that damned thing--I somehow felt more naked than if I hadn’t worn a thing. K’s plain, long t-shirt seemed almost matronly (and far more comfortable) in comparison.
I was too tired to be horny, even at the sight of a partly-naked K. My bits made a noticeable but reasonable bulge in those skimpy panties. With a sigh of relief I crawled under the covers, only mildly put off by the weird slick feeling of my shaved, lingerie-clad body sliding between those stiff, starched sheets. Fuck it. I just wanted sleep.
K turned off the lights. “Goodnight, Cindy.”
“Goodnight, Mom.”
Sweet dreams, right?
The lights had been off for all of five minutes before we heard the urgent, quiet knock at the door. I had been drifting in that heavy-limbed zone between wakefulness and deep sleep; with a jerk I snapped fully awake. I heard K drop quietly to the floor between our beds. There was the very faint click of a safety being disengaged.
“Cindy?” The whispered voice sounded familiar. Tim?
I glanced back at K. “It’s the boy from the office,” I said in a low voice.
She gestured for me to move forward. Her silhouette faded into the shadows.
I padded over to the door. I only hesitated a moment before cracking it open. “Tim?” I whispered in a low, hoarse voice.
“Cindy?” Damn, but I didn’t sound much like the girl from before. I opened the door a little further. Any doubt he had was dispelled at the sight of me. He couldn’t see me well, standing as I was mostly in darkness, but the flutter of the babydoll around my bared legs was enough. I kept one hand over my crotch, though. Nothing ruins a teenage guy’s wet dream like the sight of an unseemly bulge in a girl’s panties, yeah? Fortunately the darkened room kept my face mostly obscured.
Bless the little punk, but he finally managed to drag his eyes away from the sight of those massive jugs resting half-uncovered in their lacy pink cups. “Tim,” I whispered, “I told you I can’t. . . .”
“It’s not that,” he interrupted me, his voice full of urgency. “There’re some cops asking questions about you!”
That certainly caught my attention. Standing behind that door naked but for a pair of fake tits and a flimsy scrap of semi-transparent nylon, I suddenly felt horribly vulnerable. Fuck. Fuck!
“They came in just after my shift. I didn’t see it but they were flashing a picture and badges around and asking about anyone who’d booked in tonight. The late night guy checked the records and told them you were in room 4.” Still standing outside, he glanced to the side. “They’re in there right now.” His eyes found mine, and I was stunned by the genuine concern I saw in there. “Listen, Cindy . . . I don’t know what’s going on. I think you’re in some kind of trouble. And I probably shouldn’t get involved.”
No, you shouldn’t, you stupid little punk. You’ll just get yourself killed.
Tim smiled bashfully, his eyes flashing in the pale light of the outside lamps. “But I also think you’re one of the most amazing girls I’ve ever met,” he said. “And whatever’s going on, I wanted to let you know that.” He glanced to the side again. “Uh oh. I think they’re almost done over there. I better get the hell out of here.” And then, with a final sweet smile, Tim said, “good luck,” and took off.
I closed and locked the door behind him. Shit.
A moment later K leapt into action. “Get away from the door,” she hissed, grabbing a small suitcase from the floor. “Say ‘ah.’” It didn’t occur to me protest as she shoved that fucking rod down my throat again. I was feeling out of it from that ‘most amazing girl I’ve ever met’ comment. Everything went cold and numb again. K then ushered me into the bathroom. “We do not have much time,” she said, starting the shower. The hiss of falling water filled the room. “Get undressed.”
My throat all bunged up with that crazy spray, I couldn’t argue or ask what the hell was going on. I quickly stripped. To my surprise, she stripped down to her bra and panties. “Once they find you missing, they will begin a systematic search of every room in the motel,” she said. “We’re going to give them Cindy. This is it, Mr Sanders. You’ve done it twice now. This is your final test.”
She shoved me into the shower.
***
The first time I had sex I was sixteen. It wasn’t a great experience. It really wasn’t. What it was, that first time, like so many other firsts in my life, was fucked up. A high school bush party, one of those big ones out in some shitty stretch of land on the outskirts of town that some kid’s parents own. All the usual shit was there: bonfires, burning bright under the crisp night sky; kegs and cases of beer; coolers overflowing with ice and girly drinks, and forty-ouncers of the hard stuff; and teenage hormones. Oh yeah, lots of the last thrown into the mix. The air was thick with it. All swirled up and made complicated in that pressure-cooker high school social dynamic kind of way.
I was the new kid in school, a bit of a bad-ass and outsider, but I knew enough of the cool kids to get an invite to a thing like this. Thing is, I wasn’t there for the fun of it. I was there for Muna. Sweet Muna, with soft mocha eyes and skin as smooth as silk. She was dating this guy called Karl, this Aryan fucker, a right proper asshole who fancied himself a bit of a badass as well. And Muna . . . yeah, sweet Muna, she was one of the nastiest pieces of work I’ve ever met. But I had to get to know her better. A lot better.
So I swaggered into that seething pit of teenage alliances and social dramas and walked straight up to the King of the whole shitpile. Karl didn’t much like me. I didn’t much like him either and let him know exactly what I thought. Those other kids, they must’ve thought I was drunk out of my mind. I was cold sober. Karl knew it as well. It didn’t take much to goad him into a fight. The dude was tough; he knew how to fight. I was tougher; I fought harder. And afterwards I had Muna. She knew where the power lay. Some girls figure it out young. God, I hated her. The sight of her made me want to puke.
She was my first. And for some reason, every vagina since I’ve compare to Muna’s. Like the one currently held in my hand.
I stood in a slight state of shock, holding this disembodied pussy in my hands and feeling it slowly warm beneath my touch. I still couldn’t talk but it didn’t make much difference; I couldn’t think of anything to say. The shower had been a quick one. K had clambered in and knelt before me and before I quite knew what was happening she was shaving my crotch bare.
Then she dragged me back to the bedroom and gave me a little shove. I was sitting numbly at the edge of the bed. She was kneeling between my legs. “Do you trust me, Mr Sanders?”
I gave a mute nod, staring blankly at the vagina I held in my hand. I thought it was kind of cute, as far as vaginas go. It had the same rubbery feeling and slightly grey colour that the artificial breasts first had before bonding to my body. After Muna I quickly discovered that every girl’s pussy was a unique creation. I had a sinking feeling that the one in my hand was Cindy’s. Go figure. Cindy’s vagina was cute.
“I’m sorry, David,” K said. I wondered why, turning my attention back to what she was doing. Too late I saw her smear that pungent amber goo across my scrotum, penis and inner thighs.
What the fuck was she doing? I gave a muffled cry of horror as I felt the initial tingling sink into my balls. It probably wasn’t safe for me to talk yet but I couldn’t keep a whispered “oh God please no” from escaping my lips.
K handed me a pillow. “Bite down on this,” she said, eyes filled with sympathy. I glared back at her with hatred and snatched the damn thing from her. “Giet bid daet selast,” I mumbled to myself, mantra like, slowly falling back into the softness of the bed. The tingling in my groin grew warm. “Donne mon him sylf ne maeg,” I whimpered, unbidden tears leaping to my eyes. “Wyrd onwendan.” I shoved as much of that damn pillow as I could into my mouth until I nearly choked on it. There wasn’t time to finish Akiko’s saying. I thought I knew what was coming.
I didn’t. A thousand white-hot needled being slowly pushed into my motherfucking gonads--that’s what it felt like. I howled into the pillow and my entire existence became white, searing pain. I writhed on the bed and bucked against the strong arms that held me down. Tears streamed down my face and inside I silently pleaded and begged for the pain to be done, for the torture to end, for it to be over . . . .
And then it was, and K was down between my legs holding something over the numb spot my groin had become. Drained of strength, I couldn’t have forced her away even if I tried. My breath came in ragged gasps as my sweat-drenched body rapidly cooled. By the time I found the strength to sit up K had already pulled away.
“Are you okay?” she asked in a soft voice.
I blinked away the tears and gave a curt, angry nod.
“I’m sorry, Mr Sanders. I had hoped that it would not be necessary. But we may not have another chance to quite so convincingly throw off our pursuers. Have a look, Cindy.”
I had to strain to see past those tits, but I could just make out a rounded, lightly furry mound where my boys used to be.
Was it safe to talk yet? Somehow that seemed a minor concern compared to my bits down below. “K,” I asked in a weak voice, “are they. . . .”
K hastened to convince me that everything was fine. “Your . . . equipment, is perfectly fine, Mr Sanders. They are merely hidden away behind the prosthetic.”
They certainly didn’t feel fine. In fact, what I could feel down there felt fucking weird and wrong. When those breasts first warmed to my chest I was gradually hit with the very disconcerting awareness of sensations coming from several inches further out from my chest than I was used to. And now . . . I had no idea what I was feeling; my mind couldn’t process it yet. I reached down with one tentative hand but K held me back at the wrist. “No time, Cindy,” she said, with a tight little smile. She pulled several articles of clothing from the suitcase.
“Let’s get you ready for the big show.”
***
The knocking on the door came loud and insistent.
Cindy secured the chain before daring to open the door. “Y . . . yes?” Peeking through the crack she saw a very determined, very official-looking man standing impatiently outside, and an equally serious-looking woman waited behind him. “Can I help you?”
“Federal agents,” the man stated. “Agent Fosters.” His eyes widened in surprise at what he saw. “Uh, miss. We need you to open the door, please.”
Cindy face glowed bright pink despite the cool air wafting in from outside. “It’s, um, not really a good time. . . .” She looked back at the room and down at herself and her blush deepened. From behind her came the sound of water running in the shower. “Please, officer, couldn’t this wait until morning?”
Looking a little embarrassed himself, the man held out his badge. “I’m sorry miss, but I really must insist.”
After glancing at the badge, blinking confusedly at it, she reluctantly unhooked the chain and stepped back. The door swung open and the two officers strode into the room.
Her long, slender legs shimmered in sheer white stockings as she skittishly flounced across the room. Flustered by the unexpected interruption, Cindy tottered unsteadily in four-inch ankle-wrap stilettos, the impossibly thin heel accentuating the smooth, lean curve of her calves. Thin white garters strained tautly across her rounded derriere as she carefully bent down to collect the insubstantial red gown tossed haphazardly across the pushed-together double beds. She fumbled to slip into the garment as the man gazed with open admiration at this vision of young beauty. There was nothing innocent about the sheer merrywidow to which the garters attached, nor in its plunge front over which her bountiful breasts spilled.
She finally managed to pull on the gown, though it did little to cover her. The layers of sheer fabric did little for her modesty; rather, it simply added to the seductive allure of those hidden places. The halter gown left her entire back open and one leg slid sensuously free of the high slit. The gown also did nothing to hide the fact that she wasn’t wearing any panties.
Cindy nervously smoothed down her front with a lightly trembling hand. Her eyes glistened with barely-repressed tears and her lower-lip trembled, much like a young child caught doing something naughty.
The man who had spoken at the door seemed unsure how to start. “Miss . . . uh . . . ?”
“Cindy,” she said, velvety pink lips parting in a timorous smile that disappeared almost immediately. Her face had an almost luminous sheen in the dimly--one could even say romantically--lit room. “Um, Cindy Long.” She nervously crossed her arms beneath her breasts, uncrossed them, and finally tangled her fingers in the mesh fabric of the gown over her veiled muff.
Both the man and the woman seemed to have trouble knowing where to settle their eyes, though an amused smile danced along the female agent’s lips. “The motel office has a Miss Cindy Long registered in room four, along with Wendy Jones. Mother and daughter, apparently.”
Cindy chewed on the corner of her lip. Brilliant green eyes ringed in smouldering hues shone beneath thick, impossibly long lashes. “I knew I shouldn’t have taken it. Oh, I knew it!”
The man looked at her inquisitively.
“The boy at the counter. Tim. He was so cute and shy, and nice, and he offered to put me in this room instead and only charge me for the cheap room, and I didn’t want him to get in trouble but I didn’t think he would, and it’s just this one time, I promise, and . . . .”
“Easy there, Miss Long, please.” He seemed a little distracted by the shimmering dusting across her exposed neck and breast. “And your, ah . . . mother?”
Cindy shook her head. Those long, dangling earrings flashed and danced beneath the sweeping curtain of blonde hair.
“Cindy?”
She nibbled on her lower lip for another moment before answering. “I’m not here with my mom, okay?” Her voice sounded hoarse with petulant frustration and teary embarrassment. “I registered under her name but she’s not here.” She jerked her thumb towards the bathroom. “I’m with . . . him.”
Both visitors slowly took in the room. An open bottle of wine and the two half-finished glasses, one whose rim was ringed with pink lip-prints. Bed sheets half drawn back but slightly ruffled in the middle, as if someone had been laying there in waiting. An unopened condom lying in wait on the nightstand. A messy trail of men’s socks and boxers led into the toilet. Recently lit candles were scatted around the room, the naked flames dancing in the breeze from outside. Sweet, floral perfume wafted from the nervously fidgeting girl standing half-naked before Agent Fosters, even as her nipples tightened and grew erect in the cooling air. The man sighed. He looked aside to his partner, who shrugged.
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Miss,” the man said.
Cindy took a hesitant step forward. “Is there some kind of problem?” she asked, clearly concerned. “Is there any danger?”
He grinned reassuringly and shook his head. “Nothing you have to worry you pretty head about,” he said.
“Really?” Her lips split in a hesitant smile. “That’s a relief.”
The woman spoke for the first time. “While we’re here. . . .” she suggested. By the tone of her voice she didn’t sound in any hurry to leave, which only intensified Cindy’s nervous blush. Her eyes kept slowly sliding over the contours of the young girl’s body before settling over the shadowy area between her pale thighs.
Agent Fosters sighed. “Yeah, sure.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out an 8x10 black-and-white photograph. He approached Cindy and held the image out for her to see. “We’re looking for this individual.”
She carefully examined it, absently chewing on the tip of her hair. “Is she dangerous?”
The man smiled. “Not to us.”
“I’m sure,” Cindy answered. She winked. “You definitely look like you can take care of yourself.”
The door to the toilet cracked open. “Hey, Cindy!” called out a deep, baritone voice. “You comin’ or what?”
“Maybe we’ll just leave you to it,” the man whispered, winking back. “Have fun.”
Beneath her heavy makeup Cindy blushed a hot, fiery red.
The man and woman stepped out of the room. The door locked behind them. Cindy leaned against the shut door, closed her eyes and released an exhausted sigh. When I opened my eyes I steeled myself for what came next.
With deliberate, careful steps I crossed the room. I pulled out one of the cases K had stowed beneath the bed. She’d left it unlocked . . . just in case. When I lifted the lid the weapons inside shone dully in the faint light.
“It is best,” Akiko taught me, “when man cannot himself change fate, that he endure it well.”
The gun settled comfortably in my grip. I slotted in the magazine and disengaged the safety and chambered the first round. Akiko had been a bit of a fatalist. I wasn’t. Maybe that’s why we didn’t last. I’ve put up with a lot over the few days. I’ve endured enough. Sometimes you lay back and put up with the bullshit life throws your way. And sometimes, you tell fate to go fuck itself.
K stepped from the bathroom, her firearm held low but ready. Without hesitation I levelled the gun at her.
She raised one eyebrow inquisitively. “David?”
“Care to explain, Agent K,” I asked, “why the feds are looking for you, not me?
K eyed me curiously. “Is there a problem, Mr Sanders?”
My aim never wavered. “You tell me, K.”
She stood framed in the light from the bathroom, dressed in functional grey cotton panties and bra. She kept the Glock low. With careful, deliberate steps I slowly circled towards the bed. I couldn’t stand long, not dressed in this goddamn lingerie, perched precariously on impossible heels.
“Would you like me to put up my hands?” K asked.
“I’d like to know what the fuck is going on, is what I’d like.” I settled on the edge of the bed. My head was pounding. Lack of sleep. The stress. Cindy. Tim and that Agent Fosters guy. The booze wasn’t helping. Now K. I felt like I was going to lose it. Not a good time to be holding a firearm. “But you can start by putting the gun down. Slowly!”
K did as ordered, engaging the safety before crouching and leaving the weapon on the floor. She looked up at me inquisitively. “And now?”
“Over there,” I commanded. I gestured with the gun for her to step towards the corner. She moved slowly, eying me cautiously. Fifteen feet between us. The room was only dimly lit by the candles and the light slanting in from the bathroom, and the little that slipped through the curtains from outside. K’s face, shrouded in shadows, revealed nothing. Nevertheless, I felt rather than saw the sudden tensing of her body.
My arm with the gun snapped taut. “Don’t even think about it, K.”
She relaxed and raised her hands to placate me. “Very well.” She backed up against the wall and slid to the floor, shifting to find a comfortable position. Her eyes never left the weapon in my hand. “There. Satisfied?”
I gave a curt nod.
“Are you going to shoot me, Mr Sanders?”
“That’s up to you.”
“Are you capable of shooting me, Mr Sanders?”
I gave a grim chuckle. “Don’t you doubt it for a second, K.” She probably didn’t believe me. I wouldn’t hesitate to prove her wrong. I liked proving people wrong. “So don’t push me.” I pressed the palm of my free hand against my temple. God, my head felt like it was going to explode.
“You don’t look well, Cindy.”
“Don’t call me that,” I growled. “The name’s David.”
She nodded. “Very well, David. David, you don’t look well.”
I gave a bark of laughter. “Yeah, no shit.”
“I thought you trusted me. Why the gun?”
“Yeah, funny that. I’ve been trusting you, K, since I first approached the feds. Remember that? Yeah. And I was impressed, K. I really was. You struck me as very competent. I’m not a big fan of the authorities but you had me thinking differently, see? After all, I know fucking Steele isn’t an easy man to go up against . . . I didn’t think I’d find much help. Helping me had to seem a risky proposition.”
It’d been ages since I’d last held a gun. I gave it an expert little twirl and snapped it back to aim at K. Just like riding a bike. “But not too risky for you, eh, K? You sure stepped up to the plate awfully quick.”
She watched me from the corner impassively. “And your point is, David?”
“I’m here because I had nothing to lose. I’m here because it was the right thing to do. But why are you here, K?”
She didn’t answer me.
“I’m waiting, K.”
“Your wait will be a long one.”
“I’ve got the gun.”
She shrugged. “Then shoot me, Mr Sanders.” She stood up, one hand against the wall. “Though I suggest you use a pillow to muffle the shot, unless you want those authorities you so distrust to return.”
“Maybe I do.” I kept the gun trained on her, a little annoyed by her lack of concern. She left the corner and went about blowing out the candles she had quickly spread out to create a faux romantic atmosphere. She kept her distance, though. “Why should you care, anyway?”
“I promised you I would do everything in my power to keep you alive. I have every intention of keeping that promise.”
“Even though I’m pointing a gun at you.”
“Yes.”
“You sure that’s the only reason?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Because, you know, it’s you they’re looking for.”
Holding one of the candles in her hand, she glanced aside at me from the other side of the room. Her eyes glittered coolly over the dancing flame. “So you said.” She blew the candle out. “Is that why you have stopped trusting me?”
The weapon remained trained on her as she moved about the room. K was cleaning. She was actually cleaning up even though I had this goddamn gun.
“Who says I don’t trust you?” I answered with a wry smile. “I’m just wondering why they had a picture of you, K. They were going door to door looking for you. Not David Sanders. Not Cindy Long. You. So, yeah, it kinda got me questioning things. Things like: why the hell are federal agents hunting down one of their own?
“And it’s got me wondering about all this.” My gun made a wide sweep across my lingerie-clad form, these fake tits, that--I didn’t even want to think about it--thing glued to my crotch. “Not exactly standard gear for the witness protection program, I’m thinking. Eh? Cutting edge high-tech kit? How did you put it? ‘Unreleased on the open market?’ So how the hell did you get it, huh?” My free hand roughly grabbed and squeezed one of those jugs through the sheer fabric of the merrywidow. “Even if you could buy it, something like this is gotta be pricey. I’m guessing it’s all a bit outside the normal operating cost of the program.”
K stared at me from across the room for what felt like a long time. The ache in my head was slowly gathering into a single, blistering pain behind my right eye. God, I wanted to get out of these clothes. Those slender straps across my shoulders were distracting me something awful, and the ungodly arch of the shoes was killing me. Yeah, you could say I felt more than a little unsettled, dressed up like some little fuckbunny.
“Do you mind if I sit?” K asked, pulling the chair out from beneath the writing desk.
“Yeah, whatever,” I said, twitching the gun to show consent.
When was the last time I’d held a gun? I wondered. At least five years. A little bit longer. Not since everything went a little crazy after Kate. God. That long ago. Suddenly the five years spent as a corporate minion at NeoPharm seemed surreal, dreamlike, impossible. And now here I was. Sitting at the edge of bed, ensconced in virgin-white nylon and lace, covered and compressed by straps and stretch fabric that caressed every part of my body, over shoulders and thighs, around my back and across my ass. Dressed in lingerie with an ugly grey Steyr settled comfortably in my hand. Fifteen feet away sat K, also half naked, looking utterly unconcerned by the fact there was a firearm pointed at her chest.
My head throbbed so painfully it made the gun tremble in my grip. Shit. There was too much going on. Swarming around in my head. Anger and uncertain thoughts and painful memories. A string of women from my past: Amanda Lang and Akiko Takahashi and Muna Khalid. And God forgive me, Kate. Cindy.
And K. Motherfucking K. The thought that she might have betrayed me was killing me. It really was. I’ve already said I make my mind up about people quickly. No second chances. I’ve been screwed over often enough in the past not to have learned my lesson. That’s why I follow my gut feeling. My instincts usually have a better idea of what’s going on than my head does. God, my head--it felt like it was splitting in two.
My instincts told me that I could trust K, just as they told me that, despite the friendly exterior, there was something slimy and terrible about Agent Fosters. He’d been a decent-looking guy, medium build and probably in his mid-thirties. Slick suit and a winning smile. And yet--my gut told me not to trust the guy, not to fuck with him. He left me feeling . . . scared, and I don’t scare easily.
Then again, I’m not sure I would’ve felt safe around any guy, dressed the way Cindy was. That badge Fosters flashed me looked legit enough, as far as I can tell that kind of thing.
But that picture. K. The feds wanted her. Those weren’t Jeremiah fucking Steele’s hitmen tailing us all day, but rather goddamn federal agents. Which had me thinking very unpleasant thoughts.
What if K was actually working for that bastard Steele?
She watched me from across the room. Her eyes kept dancing away.
“Having trouble looking at me, K? Feeling guilty?”
She gave a polite cough. “Actually, I was hoping you would . . . sit a little more demurely. The view is more than a little distracting.”
Blushing angrily, I crossed my legs at the thigh, hiding that impossible fake vagina nestled between my legs. With a sibilant whisper the gown settled around my waist and left my stocking-clad leg exposed. It was proving remarkably difficult to maintain the aggressive posture, dressed as I was.
“Better?” I demanded.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Then how about some answers?”
K shrugged. “I would have happily answered them at any time, whether you had a gun or not.” She paused for a moment, as if she expected me to lower my firearm. I didn’t.
“You are correct, of course. Prosthetics such as the ones you currently wear are not commonly available to federal agents. Then again, the program is not commonly involved in the process of disguising its participants as members of the opposite sex.”
I snorted. “Yeah, I’m sure.” I gave my right tit a squeeze. “So where the hell did this shit come from, then?”
“The easy answer, Mr Sanders, is that they came from your former employers. An R&D branch of NeoPharm created them less than a year ago, near as we can tell. The project was discontinued once it was discovered that the product was not economically viable. We believe they were originally intended for mastectomy patients, but that the cost of growing the breasts far exceeded what most women could afford to pay for them. Furthermore, the breasts themselves proved unstable.”
“Unstable?” My already high-pitched voice jumped a notch. I suddenly regretted groping the thing so roughly. “They’re not gonna . . . explode, are they?”
K laughed. “No, Mr Sanders. Unstable in that the compound used to form the breast has an unfortunately short lifespan. Though it draws a certain amount of its nutrients directly from your body to remain ‘alive’, it nevertheless begins to wither and die after a few weeks. Much like fruit, actually.”
Holy shit. I really did have melons stuck to my chest.
“But . . . how do they work? I mean, I can feel them, K. When I touch the damn things, I feel it--not down against my real chest, but out here,” I grabbed myself again, though this time gently, “as if they really were a part of me.” Strictly speaking that wasn’t true. The sensation of my own touch was slightly muted, somehow, as if it diffused by distance or a protective layer. The nipples themselves did nothing for me, but then again, my real nipples don’t either.
K shrugged. “I am not a scientist, Mr Sanders. The patents are held by NeoPharm. Some of the boys back in the lab tried to reverse-engineer a sample and best they could come up with, the breasts are grown from some kind of semi-organic compound that intelligently bonds with the patient. You can feel it, Mr Sanders, because technically speaking, they are part of you.”
“Whoa!” I exclaimed. “What the hell do you mean, intelligently?”
“Intelligent, Mr Sanders. Not sentient. Perhaps adaptive would have been a better choice of words.”
“I don’t like the sound of that, K. I’ve seen those movies--you know, the ones where someone gets a heart transplant or something and goes crazy? These tits, they’re not gonna try and take over my brain, are they?”
She smiled. “I believe your brain is as safe from those breasts as any man’s is.”
I didn’t like having those things there. Though she didn’t say it outright, they still sounded like parasites to me. They hung and fed off my body and ultimately gave back absolutely fuck all. “And . . . this thing?” I made a vague gesture meant to take in the vagina clamped down over my cock and balls.
“Similar technology, Mr Sanders, though necessarily somewhat more complicated.”
“It’s going to wither and die, too?”
She nodded.
“It’s not gonna take my dick with it, is it?”
Again she laughed. “No, Mr Sanders. Your male organs are perfectly safe, if somewhat tightly restrained. Your testicles are held back in their natural cavity and your penis is contained in an organic sheath. In fact, the lab believes the device naturally produces a topical anaesthetic which serves to eliminate any pain and minimize, ah, unexpected bulges from arising. However, urination should not be a problem, though of course you will have to sit like any other woman.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
K never kids. So as long as this goddamn thing was stuck to me I was going to be one step closer to Cindy--a huge step, if you ask me, and one I wasn’t too happy about. I love pissing standing up. I mean, I really do. More than anything else I figure that’s what defines a man: the ability to drunkenly write your name in the snow.
“Why the hell would somebody grow fake vaginas, K?” I demanded. “I get the tits. I do. But cutting-edge cunts?”
She winced at my language. I reminded myself to try and tone it down a bit. “I do not know precisely,” she answered. “More women than you know suffer beneath the fist of oppressive regimes, David. Genital mutilation . . . young girl having their clitoris scraped or burnt off . . . and worse.”
I swallowed uncomfortably at the thought. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Most people do not,” K answered. “Such women may have use for such products. Otherwise, the market for such things is obviously rather . . . limited. However. . . .” K hesitated, and then seemed to change her mind.
“C’mon, K. Spill it.”
“You have to understand that these are seized goods,” she said. “Less than a month ago, acting on information supplied by an informant, federal agents raided a medical institute thought to be involved in the distribution of a number of illegal substances.”
“Drugs?” I don’t like drugs. I mean, yeah, I’ve smoked a spliff or two in my life, especially as a teen, popped a couple pills out at the club, but I’d also seen the really nasty side of the trade. I’d lost more than one good friend to that shit.
“Far worse than that,” K answered, and her voice turned unexpectedly grim. “What we found beneath that clinic, David, was . . . evil. I wish I could think of a less melodramatic term, but what we found was beyond anything I have ever seen.”
The way she said it actually sent a small shiver down my spine. Intrigue was overcoming paranoia; the weapon in my hand slowly drooped as I listened to K. “What do you mean?”
Her eyes flashed coldly. “That is none of your business, Mr. Sanders.”
I pointed at my newfound furry patch. “It became my business the moment you attached these goddamn appliances to me, K.”
“Those?” She gave a humourless chuckle. “Those were the least of what we found in the raid.” By this time the gun was resting in my lap, though I hadn’t pulled my finger away from the trigger. Though my interest was captured, she hadn’t exactly renewed my complete trust. “Though we found enough NeoPharm products being put to use to arouse our suspicion.”
“What do you mean?”
“You are not the first man,” K answered, “To be unwillingly fitted with a pair of artificial breasts, Mr Sanders.”
I couldn’t keep myself from glancing down at those firm pale orbs hanging off my chest, barely contained within their lacy cups. Stupid rooky mistake, looking away like that.
K could’ve crossed the room and planted her foot in my face by the time I looked up again. She was certainly good enough. I don’t know why I believed that. It’s not like I’ve seen her action. But there’s a way a person carries themselves, once they’re no longer afraid. That Agent Fosters guy moved in the same way, come to think of it. And so does K. She knew she could take care of herself. Suddenly, even though I had the gun and she was sitting half-naked across the room from me, I had this feeling that I was the one in danger; that if I didn’t ask or answer the right questions bad things might happen.
She didn’t move, though. She seemed content to talk from across the room. “Ultimately, what we found was evidence possibly linking Mr Steele to the site we raided. There were not just NeoPharm products. Other items produced through Steele-owned subsidiaries were on site as well. Not ordinary things. Newly-developed, cutting-edge, unreleased. Very high tech. Illegal. Expensive.”
“What the hell are you talking about? What does this have to do with me?”
“The operation was discovered roughly two months ago.”
The pounding in my head subsided, but only because of a far worse sinking feeling in my stomach. “But that’s around when I. . . .”
“Not around, Mr. Sanders. Precisely. The night of. The very night you saw Mr Steele kill Mr Antazzi, I took part in an attack on a very well-defended medical institute that--”
“But I didn’t hear or see anything about--”
“He believes you did. He believes you can prove his connection to . . . to . . . .” Her voice died, strangled beneath repressed emotion. Her hands briefly shook by her side. When she found her voice again, her tone was bleak. “He will stop at nothing to have you removed, Mr Sanders. I was reluctant to reveal the full extent of the danger you have submitted yourself to, but now there is little choice.”
I cocked my head towards the door. “Agent Fosters? The woman?” Strange, but I’d almost forgotten about the woman.
If her voice was cold before, it was positively glacial now. “The day after the raid,” K told me, “three undercover agents involved in the raid turned up dead. Within a week four more colleagues were killed as well. My partner was killed.”
What do you say to that kind of thing? “I’m sorry.”
“There was an attempt on my life as well.” Her smile was thin and cruel. “Obviously it did not succeed.”
“So you think those two are bad news?”
“I do not know. But I discovered the hard way that the arm of Jeremiah Steele reaches very far and very deep. The very agency you turned to for protection, Mr Sanders, would have likely proved your undoing.”
“Huh.” Damn, but I knew turning to the feds was a bad idea. The authorities always manage to muck things up. I was really starting to regret starting this whole thing, I can tell you. Why the hell couldn’t I have kept my dick to myself? If I hadn’t been chasing after pussy that night, I wouldn’t have one of my own right now.
Though what K had told me really caught my attention. It really did. What the hell did she stumble across beneath that medical facility? I knew I’d gotten mixed up in bad shit when I saw fucking Steele whack that Italian dude, and the other stuff I saw was just downright wrong, but . . . this? How big a shitpile had I landed in?
The funny thing is, you’d think knowing that I’d just stepped into something way over my head would’ve made me feel worse. But I didn’t feel like I was drowning in it at all. Hell, I think the dull throb in my head even started to pull back a bit. Yeah, I was totally fucked . . . but there was also a part of me--a part I’d forcefully buried away and tried to forget--that thrilled at the idea of being swept up in something this big and nasty.
My thoughts were interrupted by a soft knock at the door.
I snapped to attention, Steyr pointed towards the disturbance. I glanced back at K a moment later. Where the hell did that gun in her hand come from? She swiftly padded across the room towards the beds. She nodded once towards the door.
With wobbly steps I approached the door, weapon held at the ready. “Yes?” I called out, and the nervous tremor wasn’t entirely forced.
“Cindy?”
“Tim?” I glanced back at K. She shrugged and faded back into the darkness at the far end of the room. I opened the door as far as the locking chain allowed. “What are you doing here?”
“I . . . just had to check if everything was okay.” I dropped the handgun behind the door. Stupid kid. He stood there in the flat outdoor lights, with such concern etched into his face that I could’ve almost laughed. I think the idiot was actually crushing on me. Not that I could blame him, really. Cindy was pretty hot stuff. At the moment he could only see my face, peeking around the door. I gave him a nice, wet smile and decided he deserved a treat. He’d probably saved my life tonight.
“That’s so sweet,” I said, opening the door.
Whatever answer he had died in his throat. The light from the bathroom caught me from behind, highlighting those feminine curves, cascading through the shimmering fabric draped across my body. I leaned against the doorframe with my arm crossed beneath those silk-clad parasites.
Tim didn’t quite seem to know what to say or do. He looked away, blushing fiercely. Poor kid. “Um . . . those guys, they’re gone now.”
“I know,” I answered.
“You’re not here with your mother, are you?” He sounded angry. I watched the realization slowly work its way across his face, and felt sorry for him. I think he was cluing in that most girls don’t dress up like lingerie models when staying with family.
I gave a sad shake of my head. “No Tim, I’m not.”
When he looked back at me, his angry eyes stayed fixed on my green ones. The kid had some class, I had to admit. He wasn’t staring at those tits or anything; he was actually looking at me. “I can’t believe you played me like that.”
“Tim, I didn’t.” I tried to sound as genuine as possible. “I really didn’t. I meant what I said, you know. You really are a nice guy.”
He snorted bitterly and looked away again. “Yeah, I know.”
I sighed softly. “Tim, that’s not a bad thing.”
“Whatever. Just . . . just make sure you’re out by nine, okay?”
He was about to leave and I should’ve just left it at that. I really should have. But for some reason I called out to him. “No wait, Tim . . . please.”
The boy hesitated. Of course he did. A sexy young woman was calling his name.
“What?”
“Tim. I just wanted to let you know. If I wasn’t already with someone? I totally would’ve had that drink with you.”
“Yeah?” He finally looked back at me, smiling tentatively. “Really?”
“Really,” I said. And then . . . .
With a delicate step I moved up against him. I was taller than him in the heels, though only just. I liked that. There was an unexpected tingle as my breast flattened against his chest. One hand cupped his cheek and ran through his short spiky hair and slowly pulled him towards me. He didn’t resist. I leaned forward. My lips gently found his. The kiss was soft and sweet and just a bit sticky from the lipgloss. I sighed through slightly parted lips. “Thank you,” I purred, and pulled away.
Tim stood there for a moment, eyes unfocused. “Nobody’s gonna believe me when I tell ‘em,” he mumbled. “My first freakin’ kiss and she’s a total babe and nobody’s gonna believe me.”
I forced a giggle. “Good-night, Tim.”
“Uh . . . yeah.”
I closed and locked the door and released a deep breath. The pain in my head eased off. I didn’t feel sick anymore; quite the contrary. The tension through my shoulders slowly bled away. During the brief exchange with Tim I’d made my decision. I looked down at the gun on the floor and reluctantly picked it up.
I heard K stir from the far side of the room. “Do we return to our standoff now, Mr Sanders?”
“Call me Cindy,” I said. I cleared the round from the chamber, engaged the safety and released the clip. With a shrug I gingerly stepped back towards the bed. “Way I see it, K, I’ve got two choices here: I can either trust you, or not trust you. And I’ll be honest. A lot of shit doesn’t add up. You’ve got all this gear and you’ve clearly got back up and there’s all sorts of stuff going on in the background that you haven’t told me about. At the same time you say the feds are looking for you and can’t be trusted and we’re working alone. It’s all a bit overwhelming, although when you get down to it, I’ve also got no reason to believe anything you say to me.”
I held the Steyr out to her. “Like I said, there’s a lot about you that doesn’t add up. But you know what? My gut tells me you’re okay.”
She came up to me and pulled the gun from my hand. Her eyes glinted enigmatically in the half-light.
“Does that mean you trust me again, Cindy?” Her voice was surprisingly soft.
I shrugged and smiled. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
She stepped away and stored the firearm back in the case by the bed. “What did the boy want?”
I absently touched one finger to my lip. “To see if Cindy was okay.”
“Was she?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess I am.”
***
Katherine Ophelia White. The only woman I have ever loved. I say that, though I’m not convinced that what we had was love at all. I mean, really, who the hell knows what love is anyway? What we had, was six months together. Only six months. And what we had was twisted and wonderful and difficult. I guess you could say that our relationship was . . . complex.
But then, I guess every eighteen-year old thinks their first serious relationship is the most intense and complicated thing in the world. It’s so hard to keep perspective on these things. That was seven years ago. It’s funny, when I think back about it. Not that I do very often. Think about the past, that is. She’s not something I like to think about. I think that’s what makes me sad and angry most of all: that the only person I’ve ever loved is also the only person I’ve ever truly hated. No wonder I went insane there for a bit once we were through.
That’s not true. What makes me really mad, is this: that when I think back and try to picture Kate . . . I can’t. It’s been seven years; God, only seven years. And already she’d fading from my memory, like newspaper used to cover a closed-down shop’s windows, yellowed and bleached by the sun. She was taller than me. Slender and inflexible, strong and healthy, like bamboo. That’s what I remember. Her and me and a bamboo forest.
The wind tore through that tall, rigid bamboo forest and surrounded us with this otherworldly rustling, creaking sound--an old wooden ship caught in a storm. We were hiding. Hiding in the bamboo, panting with exertion, our mutual hatred momentarily forced aside by a mutual enemy. Next thing, we were hungrily kissing, tearing at each others’ clothes, cursing and biting at each other, suddenly turned feral with lust and released tension. We had sex in that vibrant, verdant field of swaying stalks that clawed the greying sky overhead. She cried out in passion and fury as I entered her and she tore my back and her voice was ripped away by the growing storm.
I loved her from that moment on.
But that’s all I remember: bits and pieces, flashes of the whole. Her angry smile flashing; narrowed eyes; slim, nearly boyish hips cocked to one side and her balled up fists. “I’m no good for you, David,” she always used to tell me. “And you’re no good for me. This can’t last.”
She was right. Goddamn her, but she was right.
But man, was the sex ever good! The best: passionate, intense, our entire being poured into that short, ecstatic moment spent together. I’m not sure I really knew Kate, outside of sex. Not the real Kate anyway. Then again, we both spent a lot of our time together lying. We had to. But not during sex; that was always honest. And angry. I’d forgotten how good angry sex can be.
I’m not sure why Kate was running through my head as I returned to my bed. I’ll be honest: I didn’t bother cleaning off the makeup. I didn’t strip out of that damned lingerie or any of the other shit. Hell, I didn’t even unwind those goddamned heels from my calves. I was simply too tired. All I wanted was some sleep, a few good hours of solid, regenerative sleep. Vaguely aware of K puttering around the room, setting everything straight for our departure tomorrow, I collapsed face-down on the bed and closed my eyes.
I couldn’t sleep. Exhausted as I was, I begun to feel . . . odd. Hot, even though I lay half-naked over the sheets. At first I thought I was growing a massive hard on, but I knew that wasn’t possible. Not the way everything was sealed away and anaesthetized down there. The sensation was a phantom response, what I imagine an amputee feels for an arm or leg. Only it didn’t go away. Growing warmth settled between my legs and began to tingle. I squeezed my thighs together to clamp down on the feeling but it didn’t help; it made it worse; I began to feel strangely slick down there. I squirmed over the sheets, wanting to thrust into the bed but knowing it wouldn’t provide any relief.
It was because of Kate. It had to be because of her. The encounter in the bamboo forest all those years ago kept running through my mind. I vividly remembered pushing into her, her strong legs wrapped around my back; but those memories didn’t match up with the sensations my body was sending back to me; I had nothing to thrust with.
“Is everything okay, Cindy?”
K’s voice cut through my fevered confusion. I flipped over on the bed and stared up at her with wide eyes. “What the hell is happening?”
“What do you mean?” A shadow of a smile danced across her face. She knew, the fucking bitch!
“Dammit, K! I feel all . . . weird.”
“Weird? How, weird?”
“You know damn well what I’m talking about!” My skin felt flushed and hot. I fluttered one hand down around my crotch. “This . . . thing. It’s making me feel all . . . tingly.”
“Has Cindy been having naughty thought?”
“No! Well, a little. So what? My bits are all locked away, right? So what the hell’s going on?”
K shook her head, eyes sparkling with amusement. “I think you misunderstood me. Yes, your organs are incapable of responding in the normal way. After all, an erection could severely compromise the prosthetic. However, nothing was done to dampen normal sexual response.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” There was a panicked edge to my voice I wasn’t proud of. I wiggled my hips a bit and squeezed tighter and was shocked to feel actual wetness down there. How the fuck was that possible? God, how I wanted to reach down there with one hand and grab hold of . . . something.
“Here, sit up.” She helped me up and smoothed my hair back over my shoulder. I swear, her touch just made me feel worse, hot flares tracing across my skin. “In a way, I suppose this is my fault.”
“This is all your fault!”
K smiled. “What I mean is that in our haste to attach the prosthetic, there was not enough time to calibrate it properly. I suspect that it is operating at a slightly higher sensitivity than normal.”
“Slightly?” I wanted to squirm at the edge of the bed. “What is this thing doing to me?”
“As far as I understand the device, it is . . . hijacking, I suppose, the signal being sent to your male organs and rerouting them to the prosthetic. The artificial vagina seems designed to react as naturally as possible, and returns the appropriate sensations. It may seem a little . . . touchy, at the moment, but should adjust itself to an appropriate sensitivity with time.” She hesitated for a moment. “Do you trust me?”
I gave a dry, slightly manic laugh. “Yeah, sure, why not?”
She reached down and with a few touches coaxed my thighs apart. I couldn’t watch as she reached between my legs. I couldn’t see . . . but I could damn well feel as one finger gently traced a path through those short curly hairs . . . her fingernail sent a shiver through my spine . . . and then the impossible feeling of actually being penetrated, the tip of her finger quickly dipping into something I couldn’t have. I swear I actually whimpered and had to forcefully keep my legs from clamping down on her hand.
When she pulled her finger back the tip glistened in the dim light. “Amazing,” she said.
“Yeah,” I added weakly. “No shit.”
“Back at the lab, they are not entirely sure how the prosthetic generates the lubricant, though they believe it draws and stores moisture from the body. It is not the real thing, of course, but the approximation is truly remarkable. It seems to secrete in response to sexual stimuli.” She looked at me curiously. “What does it feel like, David?”
I wanted to reach down there myself so bad, to scratch at that place that K had touched . . . but couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not with her there. Not even if she wasn’t. That just wasn’t a line I was interested in crossing. But the sense of arousal wasn’t fading away. “It feels . . . it feels really weird, K. Like I’ve got a hard on, but I can’t touch it . . . it’s like some kind of wide-on, and it’s not going away.”
“I see.” She reached into one of those lacy cups and gently held one of my breasts. Her thumb brushed against the nipple and I jumped. What the hell? “The breasts seem to be responding as well.” I hadn’t noticed but it was true--an almost painful stiffening of the breasts, like screws being tightened and focusing the warmth swelling through my chest on that one point. “The nipples are responsive to sexual arousal as well as to changes in temperature.”
“Yeah, that’s just great.” Bloody hell. It seemed an impossible, surreal scene to me, poised on the knife’s edge of that bed, in these clothes, with this sexy older woman fondling my breast. “Do you, ah, mind?”
“I was curious as to what the response would be,” she said, without removing her hand. In fact, her thumb continued to absently flick across the nipple as her eyes curiously wandered across my body. “Your brain is sending very masculine signals down to the prosthetic, and the device returns feminine impulses. How is the information processed by the male brain? Can it properly interpret the sensations? How should your body react?”
“K, I . . . please. . . .”
Her other hand found its way between my legs again. This time my thighs did clamp down, trying to keep her out, but too late. Her palm cupped that feminine mound and seemed to capture and intensify the warmth down there. With her middle finger she slipped into that--dammit, into my--vagina, and my hips jerked involuntarily again. God, I was so fucking wet! “Of course, these devices are merely very convincing replicas. Hardly the real thing. The vagina, for instance, though capable of limited penetration does not extend as deeply as that of a real woman’s.”
She pushed her finger all the way in. Jesus fucking Christ! I nearly collapsed against her, releasing a short, high-pitched squeal. The sensation of something inside of me, it was . . . I don’t know what it was! Understanding of what was happening to me kept sliding away as overwhelming and confusing feelings bombarded my brain.
“Interesting,” she said. “Just deep enough for a finger.”
“K, you gotta-- you hafta. . . ,” I panted.
“Yes, Cindy?” she asked.
“Stop,” I barely managed to say.
She paused in her ministrations with one finger inside of me and her hand gently holding my left breast. “Really? You are a very strong girl, Cindy. I am not restraining you in any way.”
Damn that woman. Yeah, I could’ve thrown her off me easy. K’s clearly a strong girl, but like I’ve said--I’m in good freakin’ shape. I might not look it but I’ve got some serious strength behind me when I need it. Somehow, she seemed to have robbed me of it. That finger in my cunt was like goddamn kryptonite. I was so geared up, so horny from whatever that thing between my legs was doing to me that I didn’t want her to stop touching me. But I did want her to stop, because this felt so wrong. It also felt really, really nice in a very, very strange way.
“K, I . . . I don’t know if I can. . . .”
“Shh, Cindy.” Her left hand spidered up from my breast and gently stroked my neck before softly pressing a finger against my painted lips. “You have wanted this since you first laid eyes on me.”
I think that’s when it finally occurred to me that I was sitting on a bed with a very attractive woman wearing nothing but her bra and panties. Yeah, yeah, forget the fact that I was wearing pretty much the same shit and had tits and the other thing as well. K pushed forward and her mouth crushed up against mine. The sweetness of lipgloss danced on our tongue and I realized it was mine. Still with that finger inside of me, she pushed firmly against my chest and I fell back onto the bed. She followed me down, exploring the inside of my mouth. The thought that I was actually getting it on with K carried me to a new level of arousal . . . I felt my hardness grow . . . no, I felt a confusing swelling . . . I moaned into her kiss and her finger slipped in and out of my redoubled wetness.
“My, Cindy, you are an enthusiastic girl, aren’t you?”
I was already flushed from the experience but found myself growing even hotter with embarrassment, which in turn made me squirm with even more sexual hunger. God, I just . . . I wanted some kind of relief so badly! Our breasts crushed together as she bore down on me. My mouth hungrily sought hers and I began to push against her weight, my hands reaching for her ass, running through her hair, grabbing, aggressive.
“No!” she commanded. Her finger slopped free of my pussy and her other hand released my tit and she grabbed at my wrists. “Be a good girl, now,” she said, forcing my arms back over my head. She straddled me at the waist. I looked up at her, half-blind with passion. Her eyes glittered in the half-light. Her small, tight breasts, still in their bra, loomed over me. Her smile was hard and cold. “Be Cindy.”
What the hell did that mean? Her cotton-covered crotch hovered an inch over mine. I wanted to buck my hips, thrust up and penetrate her; my thighs and ass tensed up and my tits felt even hotter and tighter than before. She stole another kiss from my open, panting mouth. She planted a trail of kisses along my neck down to my breast. Both massive things had already popped free of the merrywidow. Her tongue found a nipple and drew it into her mouth. Her hand stroked my leg, drawing sensuously up the silky length of the stocking before toying with the lacy edge.
Her face pulled away from my chest. Her hair tickled my skin through the nylon as she languidly traced a path towards my groin. Both hands stroked my breasts and then my sides before sliding beneath my ass and roughly squeezing. I watched, stunned, overwhelmed by the conflicting sensations, as this beautiful, sexy woman worked her way down to my crotch. My breathing intensified in anticipation of her sucking me off . . . but I couldn’t . . . she wasn’t going to. . . ?
Her tongue darted out and lapped against a little button down there I’d completely forgotten about.
“Fu--!” I cried out, my whole body jerking at the overwhelming sensation. I think something erupted in my head. There was no mistaking my voice for anything other than a girl’s at that moment. My fists coiled in the sheets and I went momentarily rigid as a board. “Oh . . . God, K . . . .” I felt poised at the edge of some thrilling, dangerous precipice; every nerve inflamed and crying out for relief. I was terrified and enthralled by where she was leading me.
“Did you enjoy that?” she asked, lifting her head from between my legs. Her chin glistened and her grin was animalistic. “Shall I continue?”
I stared at her with open eyes. My whole body quivered with anticipation and what worried me most was that I didn’t even feel ashamed, spread out and desperate before her. I’m not sure I’d ever been this physically turned on before.
“Say it!” she demanded.
“Holy shit . . . yes? Please?” I barely managed to whisper it.
Her smile grew and I was chilled by how cruel she suddenly seemed. “Too bad,” she said, and she pulled away and slid off the bed.
What the fuck? No! “K, you can’t . . . !”
Her face suddenly loomed over me, eyes flashing angrily. “If you ever point a gun at me again, David,” she said, “I will break your arm.” Then she lunged down and stole a final, savage kiss before breaking away.
She returned to her bed. “I advise you to get some sleep,” she said, her voice barely heard through the confused anticipatory haze in which she left me. “We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”
I just lay there in stunned, eroticized silence.
“And Cindy? I strongly suggest you learn to control your urges. Good-night.”
She turned off the lights and went to bed.
***
The bitch woke me up at five-fucking-thirty in the morning. I mean, it must’ve been near three by the time my hard-on--or whatever the hell you call it when your cock’s caught beneath some kind of mad female prosthetic device--eased off and I finally drifted to sleep. K didn’t even look tired, but then I imagine she’d had a proper night’s sleep.
Groggy and cranky, I didn’t resist as she stripped me of last night’s lingerie and hustled me into the bathroom. She got the shower started. Another lesson in femininity: it takes a hell of a lot longer to get ready and look pretty in the morning. Especially if you’re really a guy.
My first real shower with breasts and a pussy was a very strange affair, but I was too out of it to appreciate the absurdity of the situation. I won’t deny that a part of me wanted to caress those parasites hanging off of my chest or hold the shower nozzle down to my crotch. Even the thought of it sent a warning tingle to my groin that I knew better than to indulge. The reality, though, was that I was so damn out of it that I just robotically did what was required. K handed me a razor. I lathered up and cleared the pink-tinted foam away with quick, long strokes. It was still a hell of a chore to get at those awkward spots, especially now that those massive tits were hanging off my chest and bobbling about and getting in the damn way every time I bent over.
Out of the shower? Pat dry, again a bit put off by the feel of flesh against flesh without a comforting layer of hair. Then moisturizer, and by the time the task was done I smelled like a goddamn flower garden. I felt silkily smooth and ill at ease in my own skin.
Stepping back into the main room I found clothes laid out on the bed, thoughtfully picked by K for me to struggle into as she showered and readied herself. I ignored the clothes at first. The moment I heard the shower start I dropped to the floor and worked through a quick exercise routine. Like I said, I like to keep in shape. I mean, hell, I’d been working out almost daily for the last decade, yeah? Something becomes that ingrained it’s hard to give it up. Between the bullets and bruising and all the other shit, I hadn’t had a chance to work out for days and it was really starting to get to me. Despite the injuries, my body was itching for some exercise. Most mornings I like to drop out of bed and crank off some push-ups and crunches; it helps to clear the head. Chicks dig that shit too. They love to see a man work out and sweat.
Yeah, but somehow it just wasn’t the same. I stripped naked and dropped to the floor, and goddamn if those blasted tits didn’t hit the floor before I did. They dangled and swayed with each movement, distracting and annoying, and the extra weight was a real pain in the ass--and the back. I managed sixty before giving up, disgusted. Rolling over onto my back, the crunches weren’t as bad, but those boobs were still a smothering weight, flattened out across my chest. I had a real surreal moment then, lying on my back and looking down at my painted toes, across the bodyscape of my tits and smooth, hairless belly leading towards that hint of pussy nestled between my legs. Those hairless legs felt too smooth, too sleek, crossed at the ankle and held up off the floor. I felt a vague sense of disquiet as I began the workout. This wasn’t a point of view I wanted to get familiar with. A quick hundred and I reluctantly, uneasily clambered to my feet to confront the clothes K had picked for the day’s festivities.
She told me afterwards that she’d considered leaving me bare-legged, but thought my legs too masculine, too muscular. Therefore stockings, this time white, semi-sheer stay-ups to soften the strong lines of my calf and shin. Then panties, pink, silky and--K had to teach me this--boy-cut. It was a very strange feeling, tugging those lacy things on and having them pull up against a flat, smooth crotch for the first time. The final indignity was a white corset: not a small waist-cincher thing, but a goddamn full-blown, all-around-boning rib-crushing piece of torture in satin. K was done her shower by this time, slipping into the role of ‘Mom’. Too tired to object, I simply raised my arms as she wrapped the damn thing around my chest and began to tighten the laces. In deference to my wounds and heavy bruising she eased off when I gasped from the hurt, but there was something in the way she savagely jerked and tied off the stays before she returned to the bathroom that left me thinking she took pleasure in my pain.
It was freaky, I tell you, looking down at myself after that. Those sleek, boned lines glimmered in the light and really forced a feminine contour onto my body. Under-wire cups shoved that fake bosom up high, creating positively mountainous cleavage, while down below everything was smooth, with just the slightest hint of vaginal lips beneath the panty’s taut silk.
I had to quickly turn away from the mirror, seeing myself dressed like that. My crotch started to tingle again. God, how was I going to survive if even just seeing myself left me all hot and bothered?
You’d think compared to the corset that a skirt would be easy, but if anything that’s what nearly made me lose it that morning. It was a pleated (sunburst pleat, K informed me) green-checked affair, above the knee and flirty and just a little too school-girlish for my liking.
See, it’s like life’s made of all kinds of lines you draw in the sand, yeah? And those lines, when you reach them you say, “no way.” Some lines, you compromise: “Well, if I’m really drunk,” maybe, or “if she’s, like, fucking hot” or “damn, but a friend’s in trouble.” These last few days, I’d discovered a new excuse: “only if a sonuvabitch psychotic’s after your ass and you’ve got to act like a total girly-girl.”
So, yeah, stepping into that skirt felt like crossing one of those lines, one I never even knew I’d drawn in the sand. It’s one of those things you never really say to yourself. “No way I’m ever gonna wear a goddamn short, pleated skirt, unless . . . .” It’s like, painted-on jeans with a flared leg? Feminine, sure, but guys wear jeans so no problem. But guys don’t wear skirts. Ever. A kilt’s one thing. This was a skirt. Short and sexy and made to hang off of curves--curves I somehow now sported. It’s the kind of thing I loved seeing on flighty little things prancing around the club, offering tantalizing hope of glimpsing her tight ass if she just . . . bent . . . over . . . a little further.
Well, I wouldn’t be bending over for much in this bloody corset, but it was still my pantied ass on display, and tired as hell I still wasn’t very happy about it. But what could I do? I’d already had my masculinity-reaffirming hissy fit last night; K didn’t seem to be talking much to me as it was; and I was too exhausted to argue the point. So I stepped into the little pool of fabric at my feet and slid it up my legs and over those surprisingly flared hips. Without the corset I doubt it would’ve fit. As I zipped up the side it hugged my curves. Turning quickly caused it to flare out and settle in a pleated whisper around my thighs, barely covering the lacy top of the stockings. Up above, the exposed semi-circle of those compressed globes quivered disconcertingly with every breath.
The top was white and form-fitting, a turtleneck sweater with slender sleeves reaching just past the wrist. My arms looked slimmer--more feminine--less muscular--in that damn thing. It seemed almost a shame to hide that prodigious cleavage, but I also thought not having those jugs on display would make for a nice change. Thing is, they made such a tight, high mound, proudly pulling the fabric out between both peaks, that I almost felt more self-conscious than in yesterday’s outfit. Talk about sweater-meat, you know? Tucking the top into the skirt, it drew tight across my stomach and somehow made my waist seem even thinner. At least the high neck eliminated any chance of my Adam’s apple popping out.
Slipping on the same open-toed heels as yesterday, I was confronted with a very strange, very off-putting sense of relief: at least they’re only two inches, I thought, which immediately left me feeling queasy to my stomach. Since when had the height of my heels been a goddamn concern of mine? But after those idiotic fuck-me stilettos of last night, these day shoes were almost . . . comfortable, in a very relative sense. Who knew an inch or two could make such a difference?
With the wig back in place I stepped in front of the mirror to get the full impact.
My face, free of makeup, was incongruous with the overall image. I had a man’s face, a strong chin, a firm jaw line. That’s what I told myself. Because that body reflected in the mirror? All girl. When she reached back to pull her hair into a ponytail, her movements were a bit unsure, a little too forceful, manly perhaps. Her shoulders looked a little too broad. At rest, however . . . God, at rest, I looked like a damn girl. I understood then why K had left me to get ready on my own, why she’d forced a skirt on me this morning. This body reflected back would confront me in the mirror every day for the next few weeks. Somehow, I had to come to terms with Cindy.
Because when I stared into my eyes--free of the colours and powders that made of them something other--I still saw myself, masculine and confident. When my gaze slid across those forced curves, it’s a good thing my own expression was hidden from me. I didn’t want to see those eyes turn feminine and hesitant. I had to find some middle-ground between those extremes, or I’d go crazy before I could drop the disguise.
You know those lines I mentioned? The ones drawn in the sand? Yeah. Over the last few days, I think I’d crossed more of them than I ever thought possible. That’s the thing, I guess: these limits you place on yourself, on who you are and what you’re willing to do--most of them are unconscious. Unconscious, but you know when you’ve crossed one. That sinking feeling in the stomach, the sudden hot flush or stifled breath? Every punch to the gut and momentary unease over the last few days was me getting pulled and dragged into territory I never wanted to visit. And now here I was whether I liked it or not. Cindy Long. Age 20.
***
The countryside blurred past. Behind us lay the city. Hours unspooled in near silence as the land outside the window became greener, healthier and wilder. We passed through the occasional town nestled by a river or in some nook or cranny between hills, but only stopped once for gas and food. She handled the transaction; I had little interest in stepping out of the vehicle. We ate in the car.
Mostly I stared unseeingly at the passing landscape, distracted and lost in thought. The ride was comfortable enough. The silence was less so. I couldn’t tell if K was left either angry or awkward after last night’s performance, or was maintaining her role as Wendy Jones, my supposed mother.
What do relatives do on long drives together? It’s not like I had much in the way of personal experience to draw from, you know? What do normal people talk about after a lifetime of conversations and arguments and listless Sunday afternoons? Therefore, other than a few simulated exchanges over inconsequential matters, Cindy and her mother said very little as the car wound its way deeper into the wilderness and higher into the hills.
Cindy mostly fiddled with the media centre, tuning in a new retro-rock station as the signal from the last one died out. She absently read a copy of YM her mother had picked up at the last stop and intently studied the section on makeup and hair. Every now and then she rubbed her bared knee and futilely tugged at the hem of her skirt.
“How are you doing?” K asked, and after a short pause she added, “David.”
I released a deep breath--as deep as the corset would allow--scarcely aware of having kept it in. Free of the need to act like Cindy I felt unconscious stress lifting from my shoulders. Yeah, riding in a Honda Civic through these unknown backwaters, the chance of anyone catching me out of character was pretty slim. The thing is I needed the practice, though I hated admitting it nearly as much as I did maintaining the charade.
I shrugged. Truth is, other than the boredom this was probably the most relaxed I’d been in weeks. ‘Relaxed’ is a relative term. I wasn’t in fear for my life at the moment, but on the other hand I wasn’t exactly comfortable, sitting there in that damn corset, legs crossed at the thigh like some pansy and dressed in a skirt that barely seemed to clear my ass. I was feeling a bit sweaty and itchy under all that foundation gear and the whole thing was starting to get stifling. My battered and bruised chest occasionally throbbed in indignant pain. Sitting in heels isn’t as bad as walking in them, but after a few hours I really wanted to stretch my arches out.
“Yeah, fine,” I said. “I guess.” I glanced aside at her. K kept her eyes on the twisting road ahead. The change in appearance was amazing, from the sexy, severe professional of a few days ago to dowdy middle-aged mom. When she dropped character, however, something in the way she moved, in those unflinching slate eyes, dispelled any doubts as to who she was.
“You did well this morning,” she said. “You managed your makeup well.”
She had me do my own makeup this morning, though under her tutelage of course. It took a few tries but I did a pretty good job, I thought. The mascara and eyeliner stuff kind of freaked me out--I didn’t like poking those bloody things so close to my eye. K handled the trickier bits, the expert touches that somehow thinned my nose and softened the jaw line. “Thanks,” I said. I flipped down the sun visor and checked myself over. The face that peered back was frighteningly feminine. Where had those confident eyes of earlier gone? “I guess I should touch it up, huh?” It still felt like a heavy, caked on mask to me, all that makeup and shit smeared across my face. Believe me, painting my face with that crap wasn’t something I was going to miss once this was all over. I reached down for my purse, but a brief touch of her hand on my knee stopped me.
“Your makeup is okay,” K said. She sighed. I was surprised at how tired she sounded. “David . . . listen. Not everything I say is meant as an order, okay? I am not always reminding you of what Cindy needs to do.”
“If you say so,” I answered, but started to touch up my makeup anyway. It’s not like I was going to try anything ambitious in a moving car. That stupid magazine--and holy shit, could there be anything more boring and patronizing than a teen girls’ magazine?--pointed out something about shiny bits on a girl’s face, and I tried fixing it up. God. I was actually ‘powdering my nose’. Bloody hell.
K looked away from the road for a moment to watch me. I ignored her, rummaging through the purse for some lipstick. I’d quickly discovered I preferred gloss to this other crap. Lipstick felt heavier and uncomfortable on my lips, and somehow seemed more ‘adult’, the richer opaque colour more sexual. I figured the earlier I got used to it, the better.
“Are you angry with me, David?” K asked. There was an uncertain tone to her voice that seemed quite out of character.
I looked away from the compact in my hand. The slender black tube hovered at the edge of my lips. Was she slipping back into ‘Mom’-mode? Was she trying to play me somehow? “Nah, why would I be mad?” I said, and returned to painting my lips. I’m pretty sure the magazine said something about blotting and I looked in my purse for a tissue.
“Fine,” K said. She handed me a tissue from her pocket. “Here.” Her tone indicated a return to the nearly unbroken silence of the last few hours.
I pursed my lips and then touched them to the tissue and checked the results. My mouth looked sexier, my lips fuller and smooth. The magazine recommended using lip-liner but I couldn’t remember what kind of look it was for. Odds are I’d just end up jamming the damn thing up my nostril next pothole we hit, anyway. Still, the difference that darker colour made was surprising, drawing my mouth out from the rest of my face. Tilting the mirror I checked around my eyes, the careful brownish-pink blending of eyeshadow across my lids, the mascara and eyeliner that somehow made my eyes look wider and brighter. Then I looked into those greener depths. It can be uncomfortable, staring directly into yourself and seeing what stares back. I lost myself for a moment, only to feel anger well up inside. I shut the compact with an angry snap and almost threw my purse to the floor between my feet.
“Yeah, K, I am fucking angry, okay?” I spun in my seat to face her, and the way the seatbelt drew painfully against my chest only spurred me on. “What the hell did you expect?”
She kept her eyes on the road and answered in a cool voice. “And what did you expect, David, pointing a gun at me?”
“Those asshole federal agents were flashing a picture of you, K! That’s not the kind of shit you want to see, not when you’re dressed up as a goddamn girl and the person responsible is the one they’re looking for. What the hell was I supposed to think?”
“I thought you said you trusted me.”
“I do!” I shouted at her.
“Do you like me, David?”
“What the hell does it matter? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“After you slipped on panties that first time,” she ticked off. “And again last night. That makes twice now that you have tried to ‘get it on’ with me.”
“Me?” I couldn’t believe this bitch! “You were the one finger-fucking me last night, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“I was merely testing the efficiency of the prosthetic.”
“The efficiency of. . . .” I nearly choked. “I call bullshit, K. You wanna know the truth? Yeah, I like you. God knows why, considering what you’ve put me through these last few days. But for whatever reason, you’re okay by me. And if you’re asking me if I think you’re sexy . . . hell yeah! I haven’t had any action in two months, and you’ve got a damn fine body when you’re not being a total bitch about it.”
“That may be the nicest thing a man has said to me in a very long time,” K answered with a thin, wry smile.
I wasn’t quite done, though. “But you know what I think, K? I think you like dressing me up like this. You get a kick out of making me act and dress all girly-like and shit. You ask if I like you? You ask if I’m attracted to you? Hell, K, I think you’re the one who likes me . . . no, fuck that. K, you’ve totally got the hots for Cindy!”
I glared at her, arms crossed beneath those massive parasites lurking in my sweater, waiting for an answer. Her grip tightened and relaxed on the wheel. She was angry; I hadn’t known her for long but I was learning to read her. After carefully weighing her words she answered in a curt, clipped tone without taking her eyes off the road.
“Do I like Cindy?” she said. “Yes, David, I do. In many ways she is far more pleasant company than you.”
I gave a short laugh. “You like your girls silly and weak, is that it K?” Damn, but I’d just known she was a dyke. Had her pegged from the first time we met.
“Do you, David?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes. Not for anything serious.”
“And you are an expert on serious relationships?”
“Yeah, well I’m sure that profile you’ve got on me has an answer. You? Much of an expert?”
“That,” K answered, “is none of your business.”
“Huh. And here I thought we were enjoying an intimate road-trip, getting-to- know-each-other moment.”
She looked aside at me and her eyes glittered enigmatically. “I am not sure you are the kind of man any woman enjoys getting to know.”
That actually hurt. The truth often does. Dyke bitch. “Fuck you, K.”
“You are arrogant, Mr Sanders. You are a crude and aggressive misogynist.”
I blinked. “Yeah, and?”
“That was not a compliment, David.”
“What, you think I don’t know what I am? K, I’m not a nice guy. I’ve done plenty of shit I’m not proud of.” I had to be careful. The temptation was there to say things that shouldn’t be said. Long-distance-drive bonding moment or not, mortal peril and all, some things in my past were staying buried. What was it about K that made me want to confide in her?
“And you know what?” I continued. “Yeah, I treat girls like shit. Know what the best thing is? I don’t feel bad about it. Not at all. If some dumb bitch throws herself at me, who am I not to catch her? I’m not her goddamn therapist. She’s got issues that make her wet her panties at the thought of bad boys, then hey! I’ll be bad. She looking for some gold-digging action? Hell, I’ll drop the coin on her but, yeah, I’m damn well gonna expect some drilling of my own after. I’m not the guy you bring home to the parents, K. I’m just not that guy. Never have been. Never will be.”
I watched K for any kind of reaction, but her thoughts remained veiled. From my end, having said my bit I couldn’t help but look over myself and wonder how inconsistent that kind of diatribe sounded coming from the glistening lips of a guy wearing a pleated skirt and silk panties of his own. Yeah, I’m a really fucking badass, I am. Still, I meant every goddamn word.
“But know what?” I continued. “If you think I treat all women like that, then your profile really hasn’t a fucking clue and you’re a worse judge of character than I thought. Because if I was with a woman like you, K? No way I’d treat her like shit.”
K locked eyes with me. “You are right,” she answered, and turned back to the road. “You would not.”
And I thought that was that. We sank back into silence. It began to stretch out. Somehow it didn’t seem as uncomfortable as before. When she spoke, her voice was quiet and caught me by surprise.
“I do like you, David,” she said, and her smile was so genuine and shy and so quick I nearly missed it. “And yes. I think I do have the hots for Cindy.”
***
K was hardly the first woman to call me a misogynist. They all did. I’m not talking about the silly things I brought home from clubs or the office. Dumb as they were, they usually knew the score and I never led them on. With few exceptions I never promised to call or any of that nonsense. If I did say I was going to call, you could damn well expect your mobile to ring soon, and not after some bullshit two-day wait. I rarely gave my number to a chick, though. No point in waiting for them to make up their mind, you get me?
The girls that lasted a little longer? The relationships--and it’s almost laughable to call them that--that endured a couple of weeks, a month, maybe two at most? Yeah, they didn’t usually end so well. Those girls had several choice words for me, and ‘misogynist’ sure as hell wasn’t one of them. It’s probably the fondest memory I have of Tammy. She revealed a surprisingly creative knack for swearing after I dumped her sad ass.
Akiko, on the other hand, was the one who taught me what the word ‘misogynist’ meant. That was the teacher in her. It was the kind of word she liked to use, being a university professor and all. She was trying to save me from myself and by the end of the relationship she decided the reason I was beyond saving was because I hated both myself and women. Which is crazy because, believe me, I definitely don’t hate women. Akiko, she always looked too deeply into things. I think it’s a danger inherent to studying books and shit.
Amanda called me a misogynist. She thought it was funny. Muna would’ve called me a misogynist had we dated longer. I seem to remember that she had an impressive vocabulary for a sixteen-year old.
I doubt Kate would have. She didn’t think I hated women. She couldn’t have cared less anyway. That’s probably because she hated women too. Actually, she hated everyone, including herself. To this day I still believe she hated and loved me more than anyone.
And Sakura? She thought I hated women too, and knew why, and taught me how to use that hate, how to make it blossom when necessary, how to restrain it when not. Sakura taught me many things and maybe that’s why I was never able to bring myself to hate her, no matter how hard she worked me, how savagely she beat me. What I felt for her was something more than childhood infatuation, something less--or different--than the overwhelming, consuming swell of emotions I experienced with Kate.
Unlike the other women from my past, thinking about Sakura didn’t get me--God!--moist in the crotch. I could still vividly picture her even though it had been several years since we last worked together. A tiny woman of Japanese decent and youthfully indiscernible age, she wasn’t what you would call pretty. But she was sexy, in the same way that power can be sexual. She was attractive, in the way a roadside accident draws attention. Looking at a picture of her you might not think much. In person? The woman had this real . . . presence. Nah, presence doesn’t cover it, not by half. You know that feeling right before a really big, really cool storm? That electric hum in the air and an expectant weight spread across the sky, as the clouds roil above and the wind blows stronger and stronger and the leaves rustle and hiss anxiously in the trees? Yeah, that’s kinda like how I felt around Sakura. Seriously.
To just describe her, the long, straight shiny black hair, her small dark eyes and angular features, captures nothing of whom and what she is. Emotions varied and strong animated her body and she was capable of the most amazing expressions of joy or welcoming or anger--but a few times I had this uneasy sensation that she wore these emotions like a mask, easily discarding and replacing them as necessary. She certainly was capable of revealing nothing when she chose to, turning inscrutable, empty. I never learned to read that woman, not when I dropped out of school to join the gangs and she started to teach me; not when she took me in after I ran away from home; and I understood her least of all when I turned to her after losing Kate. Even then, at the end, I couldn’t bring myself to hate Sakura.
“Hey there, you okay?” asked Mom, gently shaking my shoulder. “You looked a wee bit lost.”
I blinked, snapping back to the present. It was beginning to grow dark outside. A faintly transparent image hung suspended in the window I unseeingly stared through: Cindy, quickly sketched in obscure lines, long hair, empty eyes, wet lips. “Umm, yeah,” I answered softly. “Just . . . thinking.”
“About what, dear?”
My fucked-up past, I wanted to say, but instead I turned, tossing that long mane of golden hair over my shoulder, and gave her a big, shiny smile. “Nothing! Well, nothin’ important, anyway.” Yeah, I learned a thing or two from Sakura about hiding emotions, swapping masks. “Just kinda wondering when we’re gonna get to . . . uh, that place we’re going.”
“The Asklepios Clinic?”
“Yeah! That place. The, umm . . . Ask-a-place. Clinic. Thingy.”
Mom gave a tolerant smile, and pointed at the glove compartment. “Have a look in there, Cindy. I think I kept a flyer or something.”
Shrugging, I reached forward, popped open the compartment, and amidst the jumble of road maps, packs of gum, old CDs, a snub-nosed .45, a couple of flash memory keys for the media centre and crumpled napkins, I found a glossy fold-out leaflet.
“This it?”
She nodded. “Have a look before it gets too dark. You wouldn’t want to strain your eyes, now would you?”
“No Mom,” I mumbled.
The Asklepios Clinic: Cleanliness, Medicine, Healing, the leaflet’s front promised, apparently amidst the sanctity and privacy of nature’s embrace. I had the sinking feeling that K was bringing me to some dumb-ass Goddess-worshiping, Earth Mother-loving, tree-hugging, granola-munching hippy commune, but was surprised by what the publication revealed within. The clinic seemed to be some kind of combination private hospital, recovery centre and sanatorium, thoughtfully nestled away from the bustle and confusion of the big city. Those with either large sums of money or a special recommendation reviewed by a board of trustees were welcome at the Asklepios Clinic, to stay and heal and--I wasn’t sure what they meant by this--change.
The facilities seemed ultra-modern. The centre offered a full range of surgical, medical, psychological and strangely enough (I thought), spiritual services, spread between four distinct collectives: the Hygieia centre, Meditrine clinic, Panacea house and Telesforos retreat. Accommodations varied from communal to very private and the clinic promised that they catered to a wide, yet very selective, range of clients.
The low whistle I released was entirely out of character. “Holy shit, K,” I said, flipping back and forth between the pictures of happy, shiny people clearly enjoying their stay at the clinic. “What the hell are we heading to this place for?”
“You need qualified medical help, Mr Sanders,” K answered. “And you require somewhere private, secure and remote in which to lay low. The Asklepios Clinic was the nearest and best place available.”
“Yeah, but . . . .” I scanned through the leaflet again. “Can we afford this kind of place?”
K chuckled. “No, Mr Sanders, as well-paid as we may both be and even if we had easy access to our accounts, our collective income would scarcely cover a weekend’s stay at the clinic. Fortunately, I have some connections on the admittance board. A few favours owing, you could say.”
“Huh.” I wondered what kind of favours she had owed to her and what she’d done to earn them. There were more than a few favours owed to me out there as well, and I wasn’t exactly proud of some of the shit I’d done to get them. Still, owed favours were damn useful things to have. “But, ah . . . what about Cindy? What would she need with this kind of place?”
K--Mom--gave a loving pat to Cindy’s knee. “Don’t worry, dear,” she said, her voice tinged with sadness. “This is just what you need. A chance to finally get over the past.”
What kind of past, I wondered, could a girl like Cindy possibly have to get over?
***
We made a quick stop at a rustic truck-top on the outskirts of some hick town buried in these mountain woods. K negotiated for some take-out food while I ran to the toilet. We’d been driving for most of the day and I couldn’t keep it in any longer. Let’s just say my first time in a public toilet as a woman wasn’t a great experience and leave it at that. I was damn tempted to give the owner of that fucking place a piece of my mind about the state of his stalls.
We were back on the road within fifteen minute, settling back into a comfortable long-distance quiet. My mind drifted back to the clinic. Now, I knew that Asklepios was the son of Apollo and that he was the Greek god of medicine and healing and that he’d been trained by this Chiron guy. Surprised? I’m no idiot, okay? I’ll admit, though, that the only reason I knew this was because Akiko taught me. She made me read this novel, The Centaur, back when we were dating. It was by some American writer called John Updike or something and I’ve got to say it was pretty damn weird.
See, the thing is, I’m not stupid. Really. That psychiatrist who worked with me when I was transitioning from my messed-up teen years to my corporate-climbing adulthood ran a battery of tests on me. Psych tests are a joke, mostly. Some of them are really odd as well. Mostly they were fucking boring. At the end of the whole thing, she seemed fairly convinced I was--what’s the clinical term?--a bloody genius.
Yeah, well, she was a shit psychiatrist. I’m really not that clever. I’ve just got a good feel for people once I’ve hung out with them long enough, and eventually I was just feeding her what she wanted to hear. Which isn’t to say I’m stupid or anything. Thing is, I’m a quick learner. I really am. That’s why this Cindy thing had me freaked, sure, but not as much as it might have. Deep now, I knew I could do it. I didn’t want to--but could. All this chick stuff I didn’t know? It’s sure as hell nothing I enjoyed or wanted to know, but most of it was stuff I could learn, and quickly to boot. It’s not like slipping on a bra or slapping on makeup’s the same as brushing up on rocket science or something.
It’s one of the ways I survived my job at NeoPharm. When I knew something big was coming up at work, some presentation or board meeting or bullshit like that, I could head home and just totally slip into this state, yeah, and study like mad all night. I’d be tired as hell the next day but could create this total air of competence. But sometimes I’d slip up, rarely at work but more often out in the ‘real world’. I’d say something and the other person would look at me like I was a total freakin’ idiot or something. Being a quick learner is one thing, but you actually need someone to teach you that shit in the first place. Me, I never even finished high school let alone university, no matter what my CV or bloody profile said.
So that’s how I knew who goddamn Asklepios was and can recite bits of Anglo-Saxon poetry and run off by rote stretches of Shakespeare. It’s all Akiko Takahashi. But ask me about a lot of the other shit you’re supposed to pick up in high school--stuff like, I dunno, the quadratic formula and Christopher Columbus and The Catcher in the Rye--and I don’t have a goddamn clue.
So, looking at that pamphlet in the rapidly fading light, I couldn’t really puzzle out much more about the place. If K thought it was a good place to lay low for awhile until Steele’s attention turned elsewhere, then that was good enough for me despite any misgiving I might have. After all, I trusted her. Even if it meant I had to keep dressing and acting like Cindy for a few more miserable weeks. I just had this instinctive dislike for hospitals and psych wards and things like that.
Lost in thought as I was, K’s voice took me by surprise. “Cindy?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Aw, c’mon K. Do we have to?” Maybe I was tired, maybe I was still feeling a little cranky after my visit to the toilet, but I really didn’t feel like being Cindy at that moment. I hadn’t had to deal with or talk to anyone back at the last stop, but I sure as hell noticed the stares from men across the room. Fucking redneck hicks.
She looked my way. Along the edges of that strong unyielding gaze lurked a soft pleading. “Please?”
Her imploring tone was unexpected, yeah? It wasn’t the kind of thing I expected to hear from K. How could I refuse her? I took a deep breath.
“Yeah, Mom?” A subtle but very deliberate change crept over my demeanour, in the way I held myself, rested my hands, crossed my legs and responded to her words. My voice softened. These actions were very far from instinctive. After only two days, every movement was still achingly planned and deliberate. In some ways Cindy still seemed like an unfinished block of marble to me, a statue still waiting to find itself. Every time I sunk myself into this half-formed persona I chipped a piece away here; K added to her past and I carved out a detail there; a boy ogled her and I grudgingly refined another curve. Would this work-in-progress ever be complete? The thought both sickened and, in some strange way, intrigued me. Who would she be, this Cindy?
“No,” she said. “Not Mom.”
“Then who?” I asked, arching a thin eyebrow. In gradual steps I slowly shifted into Cindy: my wrist went just slightly weak and I held my fingers spread a little wider; my legs crossed comfortably at the thigh and I rolled my balance marginally towards my hip as I turned to face her; I absently fidgeted a little less with the feminine accoutrements spread across my body but toyed with my hair more. Was any of this properly feminine, truly Cindy? I was still trying to figure that out.
“Just me,” she said. “But I would rather talk to Cindy than David at this moment.”
Weird, I thought. “O--kay,” I said, creasing my brow in a cute frown. “Why?” I tried to add a lilt to my voice.
“Because sometimes it is easier to relate to another girl than a man,” K said. “And sometimes a friend is easier than a daughter.”
Interesting, though I couldn’t help but wonder whether the friendship extended to David as well as to Cindy. I sort of hoped so. Like I’ve said, friendship’s a rare and precious commodity.
My fingers danced along one of the pleats lining the skirt and I watched the play of my pink-glinting nails before glancing shyly up at K. “Friends?”
She nodded.
“Well, for a friend. . . . “ I gave a quick nod. “What’s up?”
K hesitated for a long moment and finally she said: “What’s your honest opinion of me, Cindy?”
“Honest?”
She nodded.
“Honest honest?”
“Yes, Cindy. Honest honest.”
“You’re, ah . . . just a bit scary, you know?”
The corner of her mouth twitched. “Is that all?”
“Um . . .well, I kinda think you might be a, you know, lesbian? Maybe?”
K mouth quivered with a barely-suppressed grin. “Does that bother you?”
I bit my lower lip and gave a quick, wide-eyed nod.
“How do you think David feels?”
This was getting really fucking weird. “I, ah . . . I don’t think he really cares. But he’s a guy, isn’t he? They really like that stuff, don’t they?” I wrinkled my nose in mild disgust. “Guys are like, just so gross! They all seem to think we’re one slumber party away from, like, lathering each other up in the shower and sharing full-body massages.”
“They do, do they not?” Almost reluctantly, her smile grew. “And you, Cindy? Have you never been at all . . . curious?”
“Ew!” I exclaimed. My hands fluttered in front of me in some kind of vague gesture of warding. “No!”
“Really?”
I blushed prettily beneath my heavy makeup. “Well . . . maybe a little. But only a little!”
K laughed. “You little minx, you! I bet only a little!”
I giggled, though it didn’t come easily. Strangely enough, I found that kind of bubbly, girlish laughter one of the hardest parts of pretending to be Cindy. I just found it really hard to laugh like a girl. It’s something I would have to master, because I figured that she was the kind of girl who laughed easily and honestly. I think I really liked that about Cindy.
At the same time, I felt a real surge of happiness at having made K laugh, and something in my reaction felt uncomfortably feminine. I paused for a moment, nearly breaking character. Making a friend laugh was a good thing, right? So why did it suddenly feel so wrong?
“So you prefer guys, then?”
I slipped straight back into Cindy without missing a beat. “Hell, yeah!” I exclaimed, and then a little less forcefully: “Well, the right guy, anyway.”
She nodded. “But other than the one back in high school,” she said, “you have never had a really long relationship, correct?”
That one back in . . . ? Bloody hell. Another reluctant sliver removed from the block of Cindy. “Uh, no.”
K smiled regretfully. “I almost envy you, then.”
I tilted my head to one side, absently brushing my bangs away from my eyes. “Really? Why?”
“No. It is nothing you need to concern yourself with.” She shook her head. “I should not have brought it up.”
I shrugged. “Why not? It’s just us girls, right?”
She glanced aside at me. “Just us girls?”
“Like a slumber party!” I tried another giggle. “Um, with wheels. And no showers, so I guess I can’t lather you up. Sorry!”
K chuckled. “You promise to keep this between the two of us, Cindy? Girl to girl?”
I’ve always known that girls are fucked in the head and love mind games, but this was bringing it to a whole new level for me. Still, I was curious where she was bringing this. Cindy nodded, those dangly clip-on earring brushing her cheek.
Even with my promise it took some time for her to begin. She kept her eyes forward but I could tell she barely saw the road. I curled my legs up beneath me and shifted into a more comfortable position in my seat. When K finally spoke her voice seemed to come from far away.
“Steven and I dated for nearly three years.” She must have anticipated my surprise. “Yes, a man. To quote a mutual acquaintance, Cindy: Don’t fucking presume to know me.” She smiled to soften her words. “I say we were together for three years but fully the second half of that could hardly be considered a healthy relationship. I am fairly certain he was cheating on me for most of the final year. And I know I was cheating on him. And yes, Cindy . . . I cheated on him with other women.”
Fuckin’ awesome! I knew it!
“Everything was great at first,” she said. “Then again, I suppose they always are. Steven and I should not have been dating in the first place. I was his superior, you see. Obviously workplace relationships are frowned upon in my line of work. At the same time, there is a tendency to look the other way when they invariably happen.”
“He didn’t mind you were his boss?”
K nodded. “I was concerned that he might be. Many men still have difficulty with the idea of a woman in a position of authority, even in this day and age.” She looked aside at me. “Would you not agree?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I answered, allowing some uncertainty to creep into my voice. I figured Cindy wouldn’t have had much experience with insecure pricks. Or rather she probably had, but rarely from a position of power. Cindy, she probably liked her men strong and in control.
“Steven assured me that he did not care. And for several months life was nearly idyllic. It was a very welcome change, I assure you, to come home to someone and to be able to share the difficulties of my work. The world, I discovered, is very couple-orientated. Together, it was like discovering a whole new facet of the city: restaurants, bars, clubs geared towards couples. We went shopping in the market together and once we almost bought a cat.” She smiled wistfully. “The sex was fantastic as well.”
“K!”
“Well, it was.” She smirked, looking aside at me. “Steven was hung like a horse and knew how to use what nature had given him.” She seemed to consider that for a moment. “I was excellent as well, I would like to think.”
“Ew! Moving along, please!”
She chuckled. “In any case, those first six months were wonderful.”
Anything after ‘six months’ was traveling into territory unknown to me. Kate for six months, Akiko for three: combined, my two longest relationships came up far short of what K was describing. Listening to her describe those first six months left me a little jealous. I really was. I wouldn’t swap what I had had with Kate for anything in the world. But a nice, normal relationship? God, how nice would that have been? Friday evenings on the sofa sharing a bottle of red wine, cuddling close as she kicked up her aching feet following a long day at the office--I’d never known that. A night out in a club beneath flashing lights and pounding beats, there for the music and the energy and especially for each other, kissing hungrily on the dance floor and tasting sweat and her hot breath . . . God! Is that what normal people had? I focused on K’s words before I started to tingle again.
“At the same time work became increasingly . . . difficult. Even though we shared the same line of work there were many details of my then-current assignments that I had to keep secret from Steven. Secrets are very destructive to a relationship, Cindy. Believe me.”
Yeah, no shit, I thought morosely, while Cindy offered an affirmative nod.
“The stress of those assignments began to creep into my personal life as well. When I was single I could release that tension in private without fear of hurting anyone. Living with Steven I found myself unsure how to cope with my stress. I couldn’t share it with him and by then we were all but living together and I found it difficult to find the privacy I needed to deal with the pressure.”
“What did you do?” I asked in a quiet voice.
“Nothing,” she said. “I kept it bottled up.”
“What happened?”
K sighed. “I broke down. That night remains very vivid in my mind, Cindy. I remember walking into the apartment and sitting at the edge of the bed. I was still dressed from work and holding my briefcase. My firearm nestled close to my chest beneath my vest and for a brief moment I considered pulling it on myself.”
I stared at her in shock. “You--”
“Only for a moment.” She shook her head. “I would like to think that I am made of sterner stuff that that. But even to contemplate such a thing . . . that moment of weakness was devastating. I collapsed into tears. I do not cry often or easily, Cindy. But at that moment I felt lower than ever before or since.
“It was a very strange moment for me. Even as I crumbled within, I felt almost as if I could observe myself from outside. I saw myself in tears and felt nothing but disgust. I berated myself to no effect. I called myself weak and a coward. A collapse was not something I could afford at that time. If I failed at my job people could die. No, people would die and that was simply intolerable. It was that simple. Yet somehow I failed to response to my own orders, and sat there in tears.”
“K, I’m . . . sorry,” I said. I reached out a tentative, comforting hand and lightly gripped her shoulder. As David the gesture would have seemed inappropriate or effeminate.
She gave my hand a quick squeeze. “Thank you.” She cleared her throat. “Looking back, I suppose it was inevitable. Sometimes I regret that I was not stronger, more capable. However, I also recognize that I had taken on too much, too quickly.” She shrugged. “I like to think I have learned from my mistakes.”
“So what happened with Steven?” I asked.
Her smile was brittle. “When he found me later that night, he had no idea how to deal with my breakdown. In fact, other than a few half-hearted attempts, he did nearly nothing at all. For the first time in two weeks he slept at his own apartment that night.”
“He left you like that?” My shock was genuine, being equal parts Cindy and David. Cindy, I’m sure, empathized with K and was horrified at the thought of being left alone in that state. I felt nothing but disgust for the kind of asshole who could abandon a friend and partner like that. More often than not I’ve left a chick and she’s been in tears. If we’ve met up a half-dozen times and she’s already declaring her love to me and is somehow shocked that I’ve decided to leave . . . that’s her problem, not mine. I feel nothing but scorn for people who invest themselves so quickly into someone they’ve just met.
But it’s a very different matter with someone I really care for. Women like Akiko, Kate--they were more than just lovers. They were friends. Nothing could have pulled me away from them in time of need. Nothing.
K nodded. “Yes, he did. That night was one of the worst of my life. Truthfully I remember very little of it. Certainly I did not eat. Somehow I managed to crawl into bed. I missed work the next day. I cursed myself the whole time but could not bring myself to answer my phone or to leave my bed. That was where Steven found me when he returned to my apartment on the third night.
“I still had not eaten,” she continued. “I was still wearing the same clothes as well. It was a miracle I found enough strength to use the toilet the few times I had to. I was weak and confused and that was the state he found me in.”
“What did he do?”
“He took charge,” K said in a very matter-of-fact way. “With the efficiency of a drill sergeant. He ordered me out of bed and when I ignored him he slapped me.” She stopped my outcry with a raised hand. “He violently pulled me from the bed and forced me into the shower and then he made me eat. At every step he controlled my actions and told me what to do and punished me physically whenever I began to slip back into that passive, mindless state.
“Yes, of course I could have stopped him at any times. He was a strong and well-built man, but nowhere my calibre a fighter. And I hated every slap and punch, every pinch and shake and rough grab that bruised my arm. Yet for some reason I could not bring myself to resist him. He was putting me back together but in the way that he wanted, and the pieces were not fitting together correctly.”
Outside the car the world continued to blur past, barren farmland and the occasional lonely cow glimpsed amidst the thickening woods. The sun was very low and burned brightly orange as it touched the horizon. I saw this as a backdrop to K’s story against which her features, attentive to the road, were highlighted. What she was telling me seemed impossible; I could not reconcile the girl she described with the sexy, strong woman sitting next to me.
“The thing is,” she continued, “because of him I was able to return to work. I survived that first day, and the next, and the week after that. But not on my own. I became completely dependant on him. Even after several months, by which point I felt strong and fit once again. To everyone else at work I was back to my old self. What they did not see was what happened when I returned home.”
She stopped for several minutes. K seemed lost in thought. When I had asked her about her serious relationships earlier that day, I thought I was just swapping some playful banter. The last thing I actually expected was an honest admission of this nature. At the same time part of me remained suspicious. I wasn’t fucking proud of that warning voice in the back of my head, but still couldn’t help but wonder: why the hell is she telling me all this?
“Our relationship had changed in a fundamental way,” K eventually continued. “Though I was still the boss at work, he had definitely become the dominant partner at home. The details I do not feel like sharing. Suffice it to say that for nearly a year I felt constantly humiliated, sickened and debased. Steven had me do and act and speak in ways that I am still ashamed to remember. It almost seemed that the stronger I became in my outside life, the weaker I became at home. Sometimes I wonder if I was able to cope with the tension at work because of that. Certainly the stress that broke me in the first place did not lessen; if anything it grew worse. Yet stripped of all responsibility and control at home, I somehow returned to work every morning strong and capable.”
“That . . . that seems kinda fuck . . . uh, messed up, K.”
She shrugged. “Perhaps it was. The situation could not endure, of course. Steven began to demand more. With me securely beneath his thumb, it increasingly became apparent that he had begun to cheat on me as well. Eventually he made a mistake.”
“What did he do?”
“He made the mistake of allowing our public and private spheres to meet. I became aware of whispers and smirks and jokes that ended when I entered the room. The woman I was at work was forced to confront the woman I had become at home. She was not impressed. I was not impressed. Yet I was still incapable of ending the relationship. His hold was somehow that great over me. I still craved the discipline and control at home despite the near constant disgust it left me feeling. I suppose this was when I began to cheat on him as well. Of the whole experience this is perhaps the part I regret the most. I began to do to others what Steven was doing to me. Though never to the degree I endured, the way I treated the girls I met at that time was deplorable.
“And finally Steven went too far. He used his control over me to try and advance his position at the agency.”
I nodded. “It didn’t work?”
Her smile turned bitter. “No, he got what he wanted, though it wasn’t what he expected. What he never realized, even after all that time, was that the woman he dominated at home was a very different person from the federal agent he knew at work. To her there was little he could do. He requested a field placement for which he was grossly under-qualified. The position seemed simple enough but the competition for the job was fierce and it seemed to offer quick advancement through the ranks. Steven wanted me to push his application through; he wanted the job.”
“You told him to go fuck himself?”
K looked at me. Her eyes were angry and her lips cruel. “No, David. I gave him the job.”
“Why?”
“What Steven was unaware of was that the placement was far more dangerous than he realized. I however was fully informed as to the risks inherent to the job. The agency was subtly looking for a very specific type of individual for a very difficult job and used the competition to veil the true intent of the recruitment process. I knew that for a man of Steven’s skill the assignment was essentially suicide. I warned him to avoid the job. He insisted I give it to him. His attitude at home grew even worse, more forceful, more demanding. Nevertheless, professionally speaking it was my responsibility to ensure only qualified agents were moved forward.”
K took a deep breath. When she spoke her voice was even and her tone, cold. “I gave him the job anyway.
“He was killed within the month.”
***
Yeah, you can imagine that what she’d said preoccupied me for a while, until finally I pushed my rambling thoughts aside for later consideration. I’d been staring blankly through the window long enough for the sky to turn one of those deep blues against which pink-tinted clouds scurried; and then darken and fade into night. Stars lit up and the fingernail-sliver moon slowly rose high and brilliant in the narrow winding gap between the thick trees lining the road on either side. The radio shifted to something jazzy and mellow and we rode through the dark cocooned in trickling piano notes and resonant bass lines. Occasional flares from the side of the road revealed the startled night eyes of unknown wild animals warily watching our passage. When I turned to K she was illuminated by the crimson dashboard glow, her features highlighted in fiery hues.
It occurred to that she must have been exhausted, that she had been driving nearly non-stop for over a day now. “Hey,” I called out in a quiet voice. I was reluctant to disrupt our calm passage through the night. “Hey, K, you okay over there?”
She shrugged, a surprisingly relaxed response. “Yes. Why do you ask?”
“Dunno.” I stretched out my legs, rotating my ankle to ease out the pain of wearing heels all day. Just wearing the blasted things was enough to kill my feet. “It’s just been a long day. Thought you might be tired, is all.”
K glanced my way and offered a wan smile. “Mr Sanders? I am utterly exhausted.”
“You want me to drive?” To be honest, it was a reluctant offer. The gentle light, the music, the passing dark left me lethargic. I felt minutes away from drifting off to sleep.
K shook her head. Her hands remained sure on the wheel. “No need, Mr Sanders. Allow me to welcome you to the Aklepios Clinic.”
At first there was little to see. K gestured for me to use that damnable spray on my throat as we drew close to out destination. My throat tingled and tightened as I scanned the road ahead and I saw faint glittering lights nestled in the depths of the trees on both sides. These lights grew increasingly frequent, until suddenly we left the trees behind and entered a large, cultivated space across which many low-lying building spread. K threaded the car towards a central building, all modern-looking glass and concrete, that was one of the few still lit up from both outside and within this late at night.
Aklepios Reception Centre announced a sign up front. Cleanliness, Medicine, Healing. The building sat atop a low hill and offered a decent view across the entire compound. The place reminded me of a university campus. Cobbled walkways wound away from the building and towards other centres and into the outlying trees, reaching towards those concealed lights; private residences, I assumed. Larger roads worked their way between main buildings and led to three larger edifices at far ends of the Centre. A few bright lights gleamed from within rooms in those far buildings, but otherwise the compound was only softly lit by scattered walkway lampposts. There was an almost eerie silence once K pulled the keys from the ignition and we stepped from the car. Other than the wind and a few solemn crickets, complete quiet reigned.
I glanced across at K. “Cindy mode?”
Mom nodded. “Let’s get you checked in, dear.”
I gave my legs a quick stretch then sat in the passenger seat with the door open. I checked myself in the mirror and touched up my lipstick. Alright man. You can do this. No freaking out this time. Those wide, brilliant green eyes stared back at me and glimmered with playful confidence. With an almost rueful smile Cindy stepped from the car, hoisting her purse over one shoulder.
A gentle night wind, laden with the smell of eucalyptus and wild thyme, tugged playfully at her long hair. Zephyrous fingers lifted her skirt and softly stroked the pale skin briefly revealed over the top of snowy-white stockings, and just as quickly withdrew with a sibilant snigger. The skirt settled in a cascade of pleats as Cindy absently brushed a few errant strands from her face back behind one ear. She walked confidently across the pavement towards the brilliantly lit entrance.
The building was a low-built piece of minimalist modernist design, all bleached concrete, odd angles and wide windows that glittered with captured outside light. A clean white walkway of cleverly interlocking stones, lined on either side by carefully trimmed hedges, led to the bright entrance. After the time spent driving through darkness, the effect was harsh and nearly blinding on the eyes of the two women. Cindy’s mom wearily opened the door for her daughter. Dressed in sneakers, jogging pants and a baggy faded T-shirt emblazoned with “Florida: The Sunshine State”, Wendy Jones seemed drab and just a little out of place.
The younger girl smiled gratefully to her mother. Her steps faltered slightly and she slowed her walk as she approached the rough-hewn stone desk at the far side of the room. The staccato sound of her heels clicking against the stone underfoot resonated crisply through the bare hall. The floor was slippery and polished to a brilliant, almost wet-looking sheen. Fine lettering set into the stone counter, lit softly from within in pink, welcomed newcomers to the ‘Aklepios Clinic’ and promised ‘Cleanliness, Medicine, Healing’.
The lights at the far end of the hall were softer and subdued. An unremarkable but attractive young man stood behind the counter. His hair was short and his face clean-shaven, his crisp white shirt tucked into well-fitted grey slacks. He offered a somewhat bland smile at their approach.
“Welcome to the Asklepios clinic,” he said, his eyes slowly looking over Cindy before passing to the mother. “How may I help you?”
Cindy smiled and leaned tiredly against the desk. It came to just above her waist, and the sign below felt warm against her bared thigh. “Hey there,” she said, smiling brightly though her eyes looked tired. “How ya doin’--”her eyes danced across the boy’s chest before settling on a small, gold nameplate pinned to his pocket--“Chris?”
“Very well,” he answered, returning his attention to Cindy. “May I be of assistance?”
She leaned forward slightly, arms crossed beneath her bosom. “We--ll,” she drawled, and grinned, “I think we’re here to check in.” Cindy glanced aside at her mom. “Yeah?”
Wendy nodded. She handed a manila folder tucked under her arm to the young man. “You’ll find all our documents in order,” she said curtly. Cindy was a little surprised by her mother’s abruptness. “My name is Wendy Jones. This is my daughter Cindy Long.”
The boy sat down behind the counter. A moment later they heard the tapping of his fingers dancing across an unseen keyboard. “This will just take a moment, Ms Jones,” he said. “Thank you for having everything so well organized.”
Cindy glanced aside at her mom before returning her attention to the boy. “So Chris,” she asked, and the pink glow from the counter seemed to settle in glistening hues across her lips. “Do you like having things in order?”
“Yes,” the boy answered without looking up.
“Has it been a busy night?”
“No”
She rolled her shoulder forwards, bringing her elbows closer together to accentuate the tight curves beneath her sweater. “You work here all night on your own?” she asked, her voice a suggestive purr. She licked her lips. “It must get awfully lonely.”
“Not really,” the boy answered. His eyes glanced up then dropped back to his work. “I’m sorry Miss Long, but I’ll register you faster without further distractions.”
Wendy chuckled.
Cindy glared at her mom. “What?”
She shook her head, grinning beneath innocent eyes. “Nothing, dear.”
A few minutes passed in silence interrupted only by the sound of typing. Bored, Cindy played with her hair as her gaze swept across the long window-lined room. The contrast between the light within and the dark beyond the windows made it impossible to see outside, though the faint impression of branches could be seen swaying in the wind, clawing and clicking against the glass. Water trickled in some fountain unseen in a room beyond the reception desk. When she stepped away for a quick wander her mother held her back with a soft touch. The boy finally looked up.
“Welcome to the Asklepios Clinic, Ms Long,” he repeated, eyes on Cindy. This time his smile seemed genuinely warm and welcoming. “We have you registered in a private room in the Hygieia Centre. Lisa here,” he continued, gesturing to his side just as a young woman stepped into view, “will show you the way to your room.” Her uniform, a short grey skirt over pale tights, and a white blouse identical to Chris’, was equally crisp and professional.
“If you would follow me?” Lisa’s voice was pleasantly soft and lilting.
Cindy looked to her mom for acquiescence. Wendy nodded and they fell into step behind the young girl.
“I hope you enjoy your stay, Cindy,” the boy called out from behind them.
***
Yeah, I enjoyed the trip to the room, watching the sway of Lisa’s rounded little ass beneath her skirt. I was only a little put off by the fact that my skirt was shorter, my heels taller, and my every step that much more feminine. It’s hard not to lose some of your mojo when your tits are bigger than hers, yeah? I’m sure K, walking a few strides behind, was enjoying her own view of my panty-clad ass swaying with every bloody step. Still, if every chick working in this clinic was as hot as Lisa, it was going to be a long and hard couple of weeks.
Mom grabbed a couple of bags for the night and we clambered onto this swanky little golf-cart-type contraption. It hummed quietly as we drove across the clinic. The drive was smooth and the air cool and refreshing as it breathed across my legs. Low-powered headlights cut a hazy swath ahead of us, briefly illuminating empty benches, small cultivated gardens and darkened buildings. Only once did we glimpse other people, a man and a woman standing close together beneath a tree. Their startled faces loomed palely at us before the path we followed twisted away and left them behind. I thought I saw a guitar in the man’s hands.
I looked up at the sky and was treated to a view unlike any I had seen in far too many years. Multitudinous stars infused the late-night dark with resplendent glory, scintillating in a wavering sparkling stream from horizon to horizon. The small gasp of joy and wonder that escaped my painted lips sounded far too feminine and I didn’t give a fuck. All those years of living in the city, I had forgotten how much I missed the sight of a night sky untainted by the wash of city neon. I realized then how true the old saying really was: you can take the boy out of the country--I guess you can even stick that boy into panties and a bra--but you can never take the country out of the boy.
“That’s Ophiuchus,” Lisa said, pointing to a spread of stars over the horizon. “Our namesake.” I looked where she directed but couldn’t really make out any kind of shape or anything. Constellations have never really been my thing. Anything beyond the Big Dipper and the shiny one that shows the way north, and I’m hopeless. I’ve never been good at making shapes out of a random scattering of dots, yeah? “The legends say that Asklepios’ skill at medicine grew to be so great he could cure even death. Eventually he drew the jealous anger of Zeus, who struck him down with a thunderbolt. Afterwards the thunder-god recognized the importance of the healer to mankind, and granted him immortality as a constellation.”
“Why did Zeus, you know, kill him?” Sitting in the back, I had to lean forward to ask.
“According to legend, the goddess Athena asked him to bring Hippolytus back to life. He did as she asked and this so angered Zeus that he slew Asklepios.”
Mom, sitting next to me, chuckled. “Another version says Zeus was angered by the fact that Asklepios accepted money in exchange for his skills.”
The younger girl shrugged. “Here at the clinic, we prefer the first version.”
“I’m sure you do,” Mom said wryly.
The rest of the trip went by in silence. Before long we approached one of the large buildings at one end of the complex. There were a few windows lit up from within, but otherwise the building was quiet and dark, as were the many smaller structures clustered around it. Lisa brought the cart to a silent stop before a four-storied residence. “Welcome to the Hygieia Centre,” she said. “And the Cos Residence, your home for the duration of your stay.”
She led us through a small lobby and to an elevator that quickly brought us to my new home: Cos 402. Lisa had me rest my hand against a small ebony panel set next to the door before entering. It tingled warmly for a moment and then the lock clicked open.
“The door has been set to your fingerprints,” she said. “It will only open for you.” The door lacked any kind of knob or handle.
Lisa gave a quick and efficient tour of my new home. It was simple but well-furnished, with very modern amenities meeting just about any basic need I could imagine. Small kitchenette, bathroom, bed: check. From a decent-sized sitting room Lisa led us onto a small balcony that looked over a communal courtyard. Pale lights illuminated a quietly gurgling fountain and some benches. Across the way a single room was lit up, but otherwise everyone in Cos seemed asleep. Lisa demonstrated some basic electronics set into the wall and a list of numbers set next to the phone: doctors, help lines, that kind of thing. With a final helpful smile she asked if we had any questions.
“Nah, I think we’re fine.” I smoothed my hair back to one side and smiled. “Thanks for your help, Lisa.”
She nodded. “Enjoy your stay at the Hygieia Centre,” she said. I swear, the little flirt held eye contact with me for a moment longer than was strictly necessary or comfortable, and her smile twitched into something slightly more playful than professional. “Feel free to call me if you need any extra help, Cindy,” she said, and a moment later the girl left the room.
With a weary sigh I collapsed on the sofa. I threw my head back and stared at the ceiling. “Oh, thank God!” I exclaimed. “My feet are killing me.”
K dropped our night bags to the floor. “Congratulations, Mr Sanders,” she said, slumping gratefully into a sofa chair opposite me. “Welcome to safety.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “Really really.”
“Huh,” I grunted. A moment later I chuckled, and then laughed outright, my relief tempered only by exhaustion. “In your fucking face, Jeremiah Steele!” I reached down and unbuckled those damned torture devices that passed for footwear, and sank deeper into the sofa. “Shit, does that ever feel good,” I sighed, shoes dangling from my toes. “I’m never gonna make fun of chicks for wearing these goddamn things again.”
K chucked tiredly. “At least your ordeal has not been a complete waste, then.”
“Yeah.” I sank deeper into the comfort of the soda, not ready to drift off to sleep, enjoying the moment of tranquility. Was I really safe? K seemed to think so. As far as hiding places went, this was a hell of a lot more comfortable than anything I’d expected. It certainly beat the shitholes I hid in for the weeks leading up to the trial.
Except. . . . As I sat there, arms thrown wide across the back of the sofa and absently gazing down at the firm curves that now defined my chest, I just couldn’t bring myself to relax. I’d been running and hiding and tensing at every suspicious sound for the last two months--it was going to take a hell of a lot longer than five minutes for me to calm down. But it was more than that. It was a hell of a lot more than that. If someone had asked me just then to define what was wrong I couldn’t have done it. Something about this place, about the Asklepios Clinic as a whole, left me uneasy. Those two kids, Chris and Lisa, something about their bland pleasantness and neutral good-looks struck me as . . . off, somehow.
I didn’t doubt K’s assurance that this place was somehow safe from the long arm of that bastard Steele. At the same time, I had the feeling that the clinic was dangerous in its own way, a danger somehow separate from the one pursuing me.
It was a gut feeling. It was a crazy, paranoid feeling; obviously I’d been on edge for a little too long. Still, I knew better than to ignore my instincts. I wasn’t about to let down my guard . . . yet.
“So . . . what now?” I asked K.
“Tonight?” she asked. “Or for the future?”
I shrugged. “You pick.”
“For the next few weeks,” K said, “you maintain the illusion of Cindy. Lay low, recuperate, and when Mr Steele’s ire has abated or his attention turned elsewhere, you will be relocated into a new persona and life.”
“A male one, yeah?”
She smiled. “Yes, Mr Sanders. A male one. Though I will be sad to see Cindy go.”
I chuckled. “I’m sure. I might miss her a bit myself.” I gave those tits of mine a little squeeze and shove, adjusting them into a more comfortable position within their cups. “Not gonna miss all this other crap, though. This corset? Yeah, not very comfortable.”
“You have my sympathies,” she said. “However, you will need its assistance a little while longer.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled.
“As for tonight,” she continued, and sighed, “I am afraid that we are not quite finished.”
“Why?”
“Because tonight, Mr Sanders, you have the singular honour of meeting Mr Jonathon Bridges.”
Despite our exhaustion we soon roused ourselves and made a basic effort to settle in. Fifteen minutes after we started there was a short knock at the door. There was no one there when K answered, but she found all our luggage waiting in a compact pile in the hall. I noted that she checked the door without hesitation--no firearm held ready, no standing to the side when she opened the door. Her obvious trust in the place helped ease some of my concerns.
We quickly unpacked. K had brought a hell of a lot more stuff from the safe house than I’d thought. There were a few relaxed outfits for Wendy Jones, but Cindy seemed to have enough crap to ensure she didn’t have to repeat an ensemble during her stay at the Clinic. When I travel I travel light, with a few concessions given to the nature of the trip. I get by on a few pairs of underwear and socks, one short-sleeve and one long-sleeve shirt; one long pair of trousers and some shorts. That’s usually including the clothes on by back. And a toothbrush, of course. Can’t forget that. I could go for weeks with just that, all rolled up small and tight in a backpack.
Cindy, on the other hand, seemed to have brought with her the greater part of a High Street boutique for a three-week stay. Five pairs of shoes --thank God this included a pair of sneakers--a regiment of skirts, a company of tops, a whole battalion of accessories and a goddamn army of lacy underthings; and they all needed putting away. Since they were technically mine, K was happy to watch me work as she relaxed on the side of the bed. I pulled out a ‘modest’-cut bikini.
“Why the hell did you pack this away?” I demanded.
She shrugged. “I thought Cindy might like to take a swim.”
I held up wispy nothing of seductive fabric.
“A peignoir?” I asked
“I am impressed that you know what it is called.”
“In case that Fosters guy comes looking again?”
“Better safe than sorry, Mr Sanders.”
Shaking my head I stowed away the rest of my wardrobe. Cosmetics went in the bathroom, a plethora of tubes and small bottles and jars of various colour and ineffable function. Everything in its place. K liked to be organized. The case with the handguns she stowed beneath the bed, locked. My new home only had one bed, a comfortable-looking double. K had very few clothes of her own with us. The conclusion seemed obvious.
“You’re not going to be staying, are you?” I asked, smoothing a short-cropped top over a hanger.
“No, Mr Sanders, I can not.”
I nodded, my feelings conflicted. In trusting K I’d allowed a certain dependency to form. For most of my life I’ve been in charge of what I do and how I do it--or at least lived within the illusion of being in control, which is pretty much the same thing. In becoming Cindy I had given up a lot of that control and I wasn’t too happy about that. Thing is, I’m not a girl. I don’t know how to be a girl, to act like Cindy and talk and dress like her. K was my teacher in this strange and confusing art and the thought of carrying on without her guidance gripped me with a sudden and embarrassing fear.
Far more difficult to deal with was an entirely unexpected sense of loss and sadness at the thought of her leaving. Sure, less than a day ago I’d been pointing a gun at her, but damn if I hadn’t come to really like K. She was a friend--maybe the only friend I had now that Tom was gone and my previous life lay even further behind me than ever before. True, she preferred Cindy to David. And she was a total bitch and probably borderline psychotic. But for all that--maybe because of that--I felt comfortable around her in a way that I’d never been with a woman before.
Ultimately, though . . . I was looking forward to being on my own again. I truly was. Some habits are hard to break. When you get down to it, I’ve been alone for most of my life. Yeah, there were brief interludes spent in the company of others, but for the most part the great acts of my life have been a one-man play.
And I’m okay with that. I really am. Whenever I’ve spent a lot of time with another person, this need to just . . . escape, to break away and be on my own, has always built up. Even for just a few hours, a day or two sometimes; it’s like I have this need to re-find myself, yeah?
Because I’ve known way too many people--usually chicks, sure, but like that’s a surprise--who just can’t deal with being alone. People like that usually annoy the shit out of me. You know, like the ones who always have another relationship lined up before they finish off the one they’re in? I hate that, the whole swinging through the relationship jungle, still holding on to one vine while clutching desperately at the next. Yeah, that shit’s just sad.
What are they so afraid of? Is it the idea of actually spending a Saturday night alone? Probably, because you know what happens when a person spends too many nights alone? They start looking inside themselves. They look inside and know what? They usually don’t like what they see. People start to figure out what they’re all about, and the thing is . . . most people don’t want to do that. Because nobody wants to find out that there’s a hell of a lot less to them than they thought. Confronting the fact that you’re really a sad little fuck like everyone else is a soul-numbing experience.
And that’s why everyone wants a secret little fetish or vice they can clutch to their bosom. Then they think they’ve got free license to slyly judge others, thinking, “if only you knew my wicked secret.” God. I can totally respect the man who drinks to forget past horrors, but is there anything more pathetic than the alcoholic who drinks because he’s fucking bored?
You better believe that I’ve spent quite a few nights on my own. Especially when I was growing up. And I won’t lie: I discovered that there were a lot of dark and ugly places inside of me. Over time, they’ve just gotten darker and uglier, full of slimy and hateful things. Violent things. For the greater part of a decade I wrestled with what I found within me, tried to control the parts of me that left me capable of doing stuff . . . well, stuff I’m not proud of. Capable of doing the kind of things that brings you to the attention of a woman like Sakura.
I’m not a nice guy. But I’ll be damned if I’ll hide from that truth. Just as K clearly refuses to hide from her hateful things. I can respect that.
Cindy, on the other hand. . . . I had the feeling that she didn’t like being on her own. She was exactly the kind of girl who holds on to the hand of one boy while picking up the phone to call the next. She couldn’t spend time looking within herself, because there was nothing there to explore. Or so I thought.
“You will need this,” K told me, handing me a thin folder.
It was the one she had shown me that very first day after I’d been shot. “Cindy Long. Age 20,” typed in simple, small lettering across the label. Inside was everything there was to know about Cindy. There wasn’t much, just the barest sketch of a small-town girl. A birth certificate. Primary and high school records, a few job listings. Childhood accomplishments and fears, teenage awards and failures.
“She’s got a profile?”
“You have a profile,” K said. “This is you now. For the next few weeks.”
K explained to me that she had other responsibilities that had to be caught up on. She told me that she would return to check up on Cindy when possible. There were some basic instructions she wanted me to follow: places to go, places to avoid in the clinic; days to stay in the room and others when she wanted me out and about and visible. The spray for my throat couldn’t be abused--once a day maximum, and preferably only every second day, unless I wanted to risk permanent damage to my voice box.
Then her watch beeped, and it was time to meet Dr Jonathon Bridges.
K proved almost annoyingly fussy as she had me touch up my Cindy disguise. She had me brush out the wig and take care of my makeup, and once again--under duress, believe me--I slipped on those fucking heels. Meanwhile she swapped Wendy’s soccer-mom clothes for something more professional, slipping back into the outfit of K, secret agent. She seemed strangely nervous and fidgety as she made the finishing touches to both our ‘costumes’--again, I found myself wondering how authentic the cool, severe appearance of my protector truly was. On the other hand, there was no denying the ease with which she pulled a weapon from the gun case, quickly checked and loaded the weapon, and finally slid it beneath her jacket.
The hallway was quiet and softly lit when we left my new room. The elevator brought us to an atrium, and there into an underground passage connecting the residence to the main Hygieia Centre. Both the elevator and the door to the tunnel required the touch of my fingers to a small ebony panel before we could proceed. With each step the click of my heel reverberated and returned to us as we proceeded along the tunnel. Like the rest of Clinic I’d seen so far, the tunnel was immaculately clean and lit in soothing, diffuse lighting. Intermittent alcoves held colourful bursts of potted plants, or pieces of abstract art revealing swirls and blotches against broken backgrounds. The cameras, I noted, were very well hidden.
“It gets quite cold during the winters,” K explained to me in a low voice. “And occasionally the snow gets quite deep. Most of the clinic is connected by underground passageways similar to this one.”
I was dressed as Cindy but apparently it was David she was bringing to meet this Dr Bridges. We didn’t meet anyone on the way, though we did pass through a junction that I assumed indicated the basement of another building above. Finally we stopped at a large glass sliding door with the words ‘Hygieia Centre--S1’ written in large red letters. The room on the other side was dark. When I touched my hand to the panel it released a soft buzz of denial.
“I’m sorry, Cindy,” a pleasant male voice spoke. Obviously pre-recorded, ‘Cindy’ sounded only slightly disjointed from the rest of the sentence. “But the Hygieia Centre is closed. Please return during normal daytime hours. Do you require any other assistance?”
I turned to K. “Do I?”
“No.” She stepped forward and touched the panel. There was a brief pause and then the audible click of a microphone being turned on.
“You’re running late, Katherine.” The voice was deep and spoke in a hurried, clipped pace.
“Well I’m here now, Jon.”
The voice chuckled. “And this is the guy, eh?”
“No, Jon, it’s an escaped transvestite hooker. What do you think?”
“I think this might just about make us even,” the voice answered. The panel dimmed, and a moment late a small access door, previously perfectly hidden within the wall opposite, silently slid open.
I followed K into a medium-sized room. The door closed shut behind us. The floor jerked, and the room revealed itself to be an elevator. That same voice, now tinged with humour, reached us from a speaker hidden somewhere above:
“Welcome to the Asclepieion, Mister Sanders.”
***
I’ve never read ‘Alice in Wonderland’ but that Alice girl, as she tumbled down the rabbit hole, must’ve felt a bit like I did now: apprehensive, slightly overwhelmed and, were she to admit it to herself, just a touch excited. However, I kept my attention on K. She seemed different somehow: a little less sure of herself, or maybe just softer around the edges, relaxed. Was this another disguise?
Doctor Jonathon Bridges waited for us when the elevator shuddered to a stop. He was short--just a little shorter than me in heels--but thickly built with broad features, thick lips, a flat nose and an amazing shock of wildly dishevelled red hair. His arms thrust out of a white lab coat that seemed two sizes too small for him. His fingers were short and stubby but twitched in constant motion, and presently he jabbed his hand at me in greeting.
“David, right? So you’re Katherine’s new project, eh?” he said, giving me a crushingly firm handshake. I met his grip with one of equal strength. His dark eyes glittered with amusement and pleasure. If he was at all put off at seeing me dressed like some sophomore tart, he gave no indication. Instead he stomped away down the passage, making a spastic arm gesture which I could only assume meant we should follow.
“I’m sure you’re all tired.” He spoke over his shoulder as he led the way. The passage showed none of the aesthetic design of the rest of the clinic: these tunnels were bare concrete, the ceiling writhing with exposed cabling and piping that snaked into the darkness ahead, and the walls bulged with electronic boxes and access paneling. “So we’ll make this quick. This is the Asclepieion. Forget all that nonsense upstairs. Cleanliness! Medicine! Ha!
“This is our temple of knowledge and medicine--this is where the real stuff in the Clinic takes place. But you’ve never been here, got it, girlie? Never even heard of it. Yes?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, sure.”
“Good. Next: I don’t care why you’re here. She--,” again his arm jerked, this time in K’s direction--“vouched for you, and that’s good enough for me.”
I glanced aside at her. “Katherine?”
“You can keep calling me K,” she answered coolly.
“And if you like dressing in drag, that’s your business,” he continued. He stopped at a metal door set in the stone wall and quickly punched a code into a keypad. A red light turned green and the door gave a jerk. He pushed it open on creaky hinges.
“Hey waitasec,” I protested. “I don’t like. . . .”
“None of my business,” he repeated, leading us into a small room. “Now strip.”
“Hey . . . what?” The room was lit by a flickering florescent tube overhead. Sickly green paint flaked away in the corners. Every free piece of wall space seemed jammed and cluttered with equipment of all size and shapes, some jostling for room on a variety of tables and stands, others bolted to the wall by heavy steel studs. A medical examination bed sat centrally, and a desk overflowing with paper and charts stood shoved up against the nearest wall. A computer screen flickered to life as the doctor made a few twitchy pokes at the keyboard.
“Strip,” he said without looking back. “As in ‘take your clothes off.’ You speak English, right? It’s time for your check-up. Now this is the thing, David. And that’s the last time I’m going to call you by that name, got it? Not that I expect we’ll meet often. As long as you’re at the Asklepios Clinic, you are Cindy Long. I don’t care how, I don’t care why. But you are Cindy.
“See here?” He pointed at the screen. I had a glimpse of a wire-frame map that I quickly recognized as the route K and I had taken through the Hygieia underground. Some highlighted red dots along the path pulsed slowly. A second window brought up an image of a fingerprint--presumably mine--and next to it a still-frame image of Cindy placing her hand against the panel.
“These are your prints, and the system registered you using them here, here, and here,” he said, tapping each point on the screen. He hit a few keys, and the fingerprint image shifted. “These are your new prints. Every time you touch one of the biometric pads, the system will swap in these records instead of your real ones. If anyone raids the security logs looking for the prints of David Sanders, they’ll find nothing.
“Cindy’s been put up in a nice private room.” His eyes flicked over to K. “She’ll be catered to and taken care of for the duration of her stay, with the same quality of service we extend to all the other rich and sick idiots up there. The Asklepios Clinic will do everything it can to expedite her healing and assist in her departure.” His voice sounded like he was repeating something by rote. “With the usual discretion, of course. Yeah? That’ll do?”
“Yes, Jon, that will do.”
“Good.” His eyes flicked back to me. “What, you’re not naked yet?”
“Easy, Chief,” I said levelly. “Slow down.”
“The name’s Jonathon,” he said. “She can call me Jon. You call me Doctor. Got it?”
“Yeah, sure, doc, whatever you say.”
“Doctor,” he repeated, eyes glittering. “Not Doc.”
“Listen, buddy,” I said. “I’ve had a rough coupla days. I’m wearing a fucking skirt and I’ve got a fake cunt glued over my cock. I’m bloody tired, my feet are killing me, and I’ve just been dragged into what looks like, near as I can tell, some kind of secret underground mad scientist lair, so if you don’t mind I think I’ll skip the goddamn formalities. I’ll call you Scooter if the fucking mood takes me, got it? Especially if you think I’m gonna drop trou just because you tell me to.”
The bastard laughed. “Mad scientist lair! I like that!” His eyes flicked over to K. “You were right, she does have quite the mouth on her, eh?” When he turned back to me his smile was gone. “Listen, I like you. You’ve got spunk. But I want you to be very, very clear on this very important point. This is my facility. You are here at my sufferance.
“If she’s brought you here, dressed like that, it’s because you’re in a lot of trouble. And you better appreciate that she’s cashed in some pretty hefty favours for me to take you in.” I glanced aside at K but her eyes revealed nothing. “This facility is not some kind of lair. We are not mad scientists, nor is our work illegal. But it is secretive and hiding someone like you here puts our work in serious jeopardy. I will not have this facility or the people who work here unnecessarily placed in danger.”
“Someone like me?”
“The kinds of people she brings us,” he said, and jerked a thumb towards K. “Usually have very unpleasant people after them.”
I couldn’t disagree with him there.
“So this is the deal. You do what I say and you don’t ask questions. You act like the best little Cindy you can and stay out of trouble. The clinic can help you with the first; you damn well better take care of the second.
“But most of all,” he said, and jabbed one stubby finger hard in my chest, “you show me the respect I’m due. You understand, girlie?”
Believe me, I had to fight back the sudden temptation to grab that fucker’s finger and show him a thing or two about respect. I’ve got a real problem with authority sometimes. I can deal with people telling me what to do. I honestly can. But lording their power over me? No way.
But I’m not stupid. My employment at NeoPharm would’ve been really bloody short if I hadn’t held back every time some dipshit manager took on airs and told me to do something idiotic. And this Jonathon guy, he wasn’t an idiot. I could tell that in an instant. I didn’t pick up any kind of bad vibe from the guy, but a person would have to walk a very fine line with him. Back down too easily and you’d lose his respect and he’d walk all over you; push too hard and you’d have an enemy you wouldn’t want to cross. Especially here, on his home turf.
I glanced aside at K and she seemed rather amused by the little discussion between the doctor and me. Again I wondered what she’d done to get a guy like this, running a place like this, in her pocket. There was no point in belabouring the point.
“Yeah, I understand,” I said, and hopped up on the bed. I pulled the sweater off over my head, revealing the corseted glories beneath. “So where you wanna start, Scooter?”
He glared at me, but the corner of his mouth twitched with a barely repressed smile. “Just strip, will ya?” he said, and walked away to have a few quiet words with K. I got to work on my clothes. Bloody hell, but escaping from those feminine confines on my own was a chore in itself. Women have a hell of a lot more buckles and straps and hard-to-reach clasps and zippers and buttons to contend with. Fashion was starting to feel like a minor form of bondage to me. At some point the doctor wandered back over, and his impatient mumbling, as I struggled to strip down to my panties, suddenly twisted into an appreciate whistle. His eyes widened as those massive parasites clinging to my chest swung free.
“Hey, they’re not real,” I insisted.
He barely seemed to hear me. “Amazing,” he said, and before I knew it his hands were glued to my chest. He felt for a seam where those things met my flesh and found none. “Remarkable,” he added, hefting one in his hand and finding the weight and feel almost indistinguishable from the real thing. “Responsive?” he queried, flicking a thumb across the nipple.
“Yes, fucking responsive,” I snapped, slapping his hand away. Believe me, I wanted to do a hell of a lot more than just slap the pervert. Ever since those boobs were stuck on to me people seem to feel this incredible need to ogle and play with the goddamn things.
He glanced aside at K. “NeoPharm?”
She nodded. “A recent acquisition.”
“Those bastards,” he said, voice scored with grudging respect. He brought his head eye-level with the breasts and grabbed hold once again, this time kneading and squeezing. “The synthetic simulation is incredible.” I looked over his mess of fiery hair and shot an angry glare at K. She grinned.
“Enjoying yourself?” she asked.
Bridges grunted an affirmative as I grumbled, “No!”
He looked up at me. “You can feel my touch?”
“Yes, I can feel your touch,” I ground out through clenched teeth. His touch was doing nothing for me. K’s tender ministrations the night before had brought those fuck-udders to life in a way that still had me a little apprehensive. The doctor’s touch was rough and rude and embarrassing. He was starting to royally piss me off.
The man shook his head in disbelief as both nipples tightened beneath his gaze. “The response patterning is truly stunning.” He glanced aside at K. “They finally got to Ghulam Khalid, didn’t they?”
She nodded.
“I knew it. Those bastards. The man’s a genius in his field. I wonder what they offered him.” He looked up as I jerked beneath his touch. “You okay?”
“No, I’m not.” A gentle prompt from K urged him to begin the examination proper. He quickly went through the usual routines, poking and prodding away as he maintained a quick and steady stream of verbal diarrhoea. When he went to listen with his stethoscope it took a few not-so-subtle reminders to keep him from returning to another examination of those goddamn breasts of mine.
Obviously we skipped the ‘turn-and-cough’ part of the check-up. Considering how he flipped out over the breasts, no way was I going to let him start prodding away at my synthetic pussy. Finally he focussed on the bruising localised on my right side. Over the last two days the bruising has settled into a nice, purpled blotch, yellowed at the centre and darkening and finally fading towards the edges. With gentle but constant pressure he pressed along my ribs, all of them, eventually reaching my damaged side.
“Does this hurt?” he asked, pressing lightly.
“Uh,” I grunted. “Yeah.”
He moved along and pressed again. I released a low hiss of pain.
Nodding, he had me stand and walk to one side of the room. I wasn’t sure when K had stepped out of the room, but I can’t deny I felt a little self-conscious, padding across a cool concrete floor wearing nothing but a pair of lacy panties, naked breasts bobbing gently with each step, left in the company of some pervert doctor I barely knew. He barely seemed to notice me, though, poking spasmodically at some buttons. Some of the equipment along the wall folded out and extended paneling and a module he assured me was for taking X-rays. A few chest-level clicks later and Bridges checked out the images on his computer.
He nodded at what he saw. “Minor fracture,” he said. “Two ribs. Painful?”
“Only when I take a deep breath. Or lie on my back.”
“Then don’t lie on your back. Especially with that extra weight on your chest. Best you can do is sleep on your side--the hurt side. It might hurt a bit more but it’s safer for your lungs.” He rummaged around in a drawer and pulled out a small, nondescript brown plastic bottle. He flipped them my way and I snatched the bottle from the air. “Painkillers,” he said. “Strong stuff, long-lasting. Take one every eight hours or so. There’s enough there to last your stay.”
I stared at the bottle dubiously. Like I said, I’m not big on drugs. “That’s it?”
He shrugged. “Normally I’d bind your side for the next week, but if you’re going to be wearing that bloody thing,” he said, waving towards the discarded corset, “it’ll do pretty much the same thing.” He shook his head. “I really don’t see why you types like wearing that stuff so much.”
“I told you,” I insisted, “I don’t like. . . .”
“Not my business,” he cut me off. “As for your ribs, all you can do is wait and heal. It should take four, five weeks before everything’s knit up nice and solid again. Now . . . how about you get yourself dressed so we all can get some sleep, eh?”
***
Later that night I sat on the edge of my bed, lost in thought. The peignoir K and I joked about earlier settled in a lavender chiffon sigh over my body. I stared into the full-length mirror across from the bed. With the makeup cleaned away and the wig off, my face again looked incongruous atop my overly-muscular but undoubtedly feminine body. Through the sheer material those breasts were impressively and proudly rounded, sitting high and firm on my chest. The nipples thrust out against the slightly rough fabric and the feeling of those nubs drawing across the material with every movement I made was decidedly unsettling. The matching lavender panty stretched taut across my hips, still defined by the corset K insisted I wear at night.
My hands sat crossed in my lap, resting lightly over that impossible pussy. Every now and again it reminded me of its presence with an occasional twitch, a sensation that felt a bit like an itch that resonated lightly as a warm flush across those breasts. Lost in thought as I was, the sensation was easier to ignore than usual. I held a letter in my hands. It was from K. She must have written it as Doctor Scooter gave me my physical.
K was gone.
She had left about half an hour ago. Cindy and Wendy gave a teary farewell for the benefit of any watching cameras, and then K drove off into the night.
I found the letter as I was getting ready for bed. I’d happily stripped out of the day’s clothes once again and then tiredly spent another thirty minutes in the washroom, washing the makeup from my face and moisturizing and taking care of all the other strange and unfamiliar things girls do before bed. K had taught me well. The wig required a quick brushing and my underwear couldn’t simply be left strewn across the room. I was really growing to hate these goddamn feminine routines. I took some solace in knowing it was only for a few weeks. It was past midnight by the time I popped one of the doctor’s pills and finally pulled the peignoir over my head. I gingerly slipped under the sheets. I found the letter beneath my pillow.
Cindy, she started, in a fine, angular scrawl that marched across the page with almost mechanical precision. Then she crossed out ‘Cindy’ and started again with ‘David’:
David,
I should not be writing this. I trust that you will destroy this letter once you have read it. Any evidence of your true identity could undo us both. However, I am sure my concerns are unnecessary as you have displayed an uncanny ability to immerse yourself in the character of Cindy. Sometimes it is easy to forget that she is only a creation of both our minds. Who will she be when next we meet?
Study the profile in detail. Memorize and destroy it afterwards.
No. This isn’t what I wanted to write about. David, it is true that I have other responsibilities that require my attention, but they are not the only reason for my departure.
I believe that my presence has become a liability in your flight from Mr Steele. I have many enemies of my own. They should not become your enemies and the added pursuit of men like Fosters only places you in greater danger. I hope that by leaving I can draw away such hostilities.
But again, I shy away from what I want to say. Truthfully, you are safer at the Clinic than anywhere else I could bring you, especially in your current guise. No, if I am a danger and liability to you, David, I must accept that it is because I find myself losing the professional distance that my job demands.
You are a thoroughly dislikeable individual, Mr Sanders. Your attitude toward women is deplorable and your constant arrogance and abusive manner and aggressive nature have infuriated me constantly since our very first encounter. And yet despite this. . . .
You confuse me, David. Between you and Cindy I feel unbalanced, unsure of myself in a way I have not been . . . since Steven. You are very much like him in some ways and yet clearly so much more than he ever was. In our drive to the clinic you said that you thought I enjoyed dressing you up as Cindy, that I enjoyed making you act, in your words, ‘all girly-like and shit’.
I still believe that a feminine disguise was your best chance at survival. However, your words struck far closer to the truth than perhaps you know, closer than I realized myself. You saw something within me, David, a dark and ugly place I have tried to ignore for far too long. Through you, I believe I may have begun to exact some form of revenge on Steven, inflicting on you a twisted version of what he did to me. And through Cindy I continued to indulge the same urges I discovered back then as well. In you I discovered a joint potential for revenge? release? wickedness? I could scarcely control.
Perhaps I would have continued in this way had I not discovered, much to my own surprise, that I quite liked Cindy. Even more surprisingly, I developed a respect for you, Mr Sanders . . . a grudging respect, I assure you. In many ways I suspect that you are a far stronger person than am I.
You will be safe at the Asklepios Clinic. Jon is a good man and can be trusted. I will return as soon as possible. Take care, David. Take care, Cindy.
The letter was signed Katherine.
I should have destroyed the letter immediately. Instead I slipped it inside my copy of ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’ and placed it on the bookshelf. Now I sat at the edge of my bed, alone, in a darkened room lit only by a single bedside lamp, staring into a mirror and finding nothing there. Eventually I turned off the light and tried to sleep.
Outside, I thought I could hear the wind blow softly through the empty and silent spaces of the Asklepios Clinic. It was probably just my imagination as I slowly drifted into a dark and dreamless sleep.
***
I awoke the next morning to a bed that was warm and comfortable, the room dark and still. Heavy blinds cut off the daylight completely. A wonderful lethargy crept through my body. For an indeterminate period I felt no sense of time or space, just the presence of the duvet as an almost nurturing weight pressing down on my side. Rolling onto my back there was a dull throb in my side, easily ignored; those pain-killers Scooter gave me were strong stuff. But as I reluctantly shifted into full wakefulness my mind was bombarded by a deluge of new and bewildering sensations.
This was my second time waking up in bed as Cindy, and my first proper night’s sleep in . . . God, I had no idea. For a moment I felt utterly confused: where the hell was I? What the fuck was I wearing? It seemed absurd, impossible that I was dressed--in lingerie--with these things--and shaved legs; how had this happened? The uncertainty quickly faded. I remembered K and Scooter, Agent Fosters and Jeremiah fucking Steele.
That brief moment of waking clarity shattered beneath the onslaught of foreign and feminine sensations. The weight of breasts on my chest and their soft, sensitive presence beneath the duvet; the silky slipperiness of the nightgown that twisted like a secret between me and the sheets; even the taste of last night’s cleanser and moisturiser, now a faint echo on my lips: all these were strange and new to me.
Strange as it all was, absurd as my situation seemed--was I really dressed as a fucking girl, in hiding from a homicidal maniac?--I couldn’t lie in bed all day whining. After indulging in a deep, fatalistic sigh, I tossed aside the duvet and sat up in bed. Again a distracting flood of sensations--the way those oversized tits swayed and drooped as I sat up; the fall of the nightgown around my shorn legs--but eventually you’ve just got to adapt and ignore, accept and move on. I had a couple weeks of this bullshit ahead of me, and if I kept stopping to contemplate every difference in body and clothing that comes with pretending to be female, I’d go fucking crazy.
As my first day as a single white female began, I realized that without K, I had no idea what to do.
See, I’m a creature of routines. I don’t know why. It’s probably a neurotic reaction to the randomness of my childhood. As a working adult I took to the Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five routine like . . . well, like Cindy to lip gloss at the age of twelve. Wake at six, work out, shit-shower-shave, eat and then the ride to work. Same stop, same time, same route, every morning.
It’s not like I’m the only one doing this or anything. After a while I got to recognize the people on my route, the other ‘regulars’: that guy in the natty suit with the pricey briefcase but gay-looking ponytail and one really long nail on his pinkie; I watched that dude eat a Macintosh apple every single morning for three goddamn years, nibbling his way around the core before tossing it as he stepped off the bus. There was the mousy little girl with startling blue eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses; she had a different novel in her hand every second day and every one of them was some kind of murder mystery. (And yeah, I eventually solved her mystery, if you know what I mean. . . .) Same people, same route, same bloody routine, every day for years. Some people might find that kind of sad. Me, I loved the routine.
Sure, it’s comforting and all, but there’s much more to it than that. So much becomes possible through familiarity. There’s confidence to be found in routine. Even more importantly, there’s the possibility for change--for real change, meaningful change. I wanted to believe that. I really did. I had to, for fuck’s sake, otherwise my whole life would turn out to be a goddamn waste. Day after day, through the repeated actions I had developed for the new adult life I’d been thrust into, I was making myself over into--well, into David Sanders. Someone very different from the person I’d been before.
That’s probably why I’m not a huge fan of change. Whenever one of the people on my route disappeared and never came back, I felt--sad. Seriously. Felt almost like a personal affront, you know?
Therefore, left in my room and unable to go out on account of my voice, I tried to fall back on established routine. Some of the usual routines had to be changed, of course. These weren’t changes I wanted to make, mind you. They were . . . girly routines. Yeah, doing the same thing again and again can lead to a change of who you are, but this wasn’t something I particularly wanted to become. When I stepped out of the shower I patted dry and powdered and moisturised, and knew that I’d be doing the same damn thing every single morning for the rest of my time as Cindy.
Done with the bathroom, I popped one of Scooter’s painkillers and slipped back into that goddamn corset. There was a sharp stab of pain in my side as I slowly zipped the front. The satin pulled tight against my bruise, but the ache quickly faded and the added tension did seem to keep the area secure. With each closing tooth of the zipper I felt the corset create my contours and draw in like a second skin around my torso. I adjusted the breasts more comfortably in their cups and took a tentative, shallow breath. The damn thing was annoying, but to be honest it really wasn’t that uncomfortable. I could breathe, albeit a little more shallowly than normal, and it forced me to move in such a way that minimized the chance of drawing pain from my side.
And it did keep those tits from wobbling all over the fucking place as I dropped to the floor for my morning workout. Push-ups, Sit-ups, tricep-presses and dips, whatever I could do working with what I had in the room. Each move was done with excruciating care to minimize the chance of aggravating my cracked ribs. God, what an incongruous image I must’ve presented: big-titted babe doing push-up in a corset--you don’t see that every day! It was a short routine, under an hour once I got through all the other stuff, but I was sweating and red in the face by the time I finished. It wasn’t that I was out of shape: bloody hell, but I couldn’t breathe properly with that corset wrapped around me.
Finally I couldn’t put off what I’d been dreading most. I faced a new and bewildering dilemma: the challenge of the wardrobe. I stared into the closet for at least ten minutes, at the range of colours and lengths and fabrics and styles spread out before me, and felt nothing but fear and confusion. I had to close the door and walk away. Without K to pick out the day’s outfit I was lost.
I was about to turn to one of the teen girl magazines K had left behind when salvation came from an unexpected source. I thought maybe I could mix and match something similar to what one of those glossy bimbos were wearing, but the phone rang before I could embarrass myself.
First I had to find the damn thing, and then I stared down at it, unsure whether I should answer or not. What the hell, I thought. K assured me that the place was safe. I picked up the receiver. “Cindy,” I said, in a low, breathy voice, barely above a whisper. “Um . . . hello?” Without that spray I didn’t sound much like her.
“Not bad, Girlie,” said the brusque voice on the other end. “But you better learn to do better.”
“Hey, Scooter? Bite me. I’ve had a rough morning.”
There was an annoyed silence. “That’s ‘Doctor Bridges’ to you.”
“Sure,” I said. “What’s up, doc?”
He sighed over the line, but when he spoke his voice sounded cheerful. “Just some good news. You’ll absolutely love this, Cindy. Your type always do.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“Well, I did promise Katherine that we’d take proper care of you. And from what I saw last night, you’re looking a little rough. Seriously. Don’t be talking to anyone under bright lights, because with a face like yours? You’ve got a jaw to make Dick Tracy proud.”
“I like my chin just fine, thank you. So did you call just to bitch about my face? Or do you have something to say?”
The doctor chuckled evilly. “I’ve called to let you know I’ve arranged for a team of the Asklepios Clinic’s very best to, ah . . . take care of you today.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll see. They’ll be there in a few minutes. Slip on a bathrobe and just try to relax. Girls love this stuff.”
“This stuff? Hey--”
“Don’t worry. They’re professional. They’ve dealt with all kinds of patients in the past. They’re very discreet. Oh, and they know you can’t talk so don’t worry. They’ll take care of everything.” The bastard really sounded overjoyed. “Enjoy yourself, Cindy!”
***
That first morning and afternoon was spent buried in the warm folds of a heavy terrycloth robe, sat deep in a chair as a small army of beauticians hovered about. Goddamn Scooter and his ‘professionals’. Damn, but did I owe that bastard one or what? I contemplated a fierce and fitting revenge as those girls poked and prodded and otherwise pampered me nearly to the point of insanity.
“You just sit back and relax, honey,” said the team leader. She was slightly plump but immaculately made-up. “Just let Sheila take care of everything.” Then she handed me a small whiteboard and marker. “I’ve heard about your throat, you poor thing. Well, if you need anything just let us know.”
Of course, once the acrid scent of those damned gel extensions had set and the girl working my hand finished shaping them, I was left ‘mute’--at that stage there was no way I could hold a damn pen with those quarter-inch claws. Left unable to protest, the girls were free to go to town on me. I don’t know if they knew or even suspected that I wasn’t the twenty year old princess they were turning me into. The way they chatted and fussed, I doubt they would’ve cared.
I mean, my robe did fall open at times and they must’ve had a good look at my generous curves. Hell, they probably had a few accidental glimpses of that pussy as well. The contrast between that and my otherwise masculine features must’ve confused them at least a little--yeah? I mean, my hands and feet aren’t huge or anything, but they’re not exactly delicate either. I’m fairly proud of my manly jaw and strong nose. I’m a good-looking guy. K thought some of those looks were androgynous; I’ve never thought so. Maybe my eyes were a bit effeminate, and the makeup did something strange to my cheekbones, but I definitely wasn’t naturally ‘girly’. No fucking way.
I spent most of that day in a daze, lying half-asleep in a chair with my limbs splayed out, fingers dangling into little bowls of liquid, women fluttering about my feet, and someone slowly working through my scalp. I definitely woke up when they started stabbing holes in my ears, but the pain faded quickly once they popped the studs in. Then I woke up again once they started tearing my eyebrows off with little waxy strips. Those damn bitches took far too much pleasure inflicting pain on me, let me tell you!
Once the nails were set I was free to idly flip through a magazine, one girl or another occasionally swooping in to comment on the article before me.
“Oh, that’d look so cute on you!” said Pam, the stylist, and I’d give a mute nod.
“God, look at him?” added Kim, the manicurist. “He’s just so buff.”
I smiled weakly.
When they moved on to the facial I laid back with headphones on, listening to some chilled ambient tunes. They stroked and massaged my face and rubbed lotions into my skin, as others returned their attention to my hands. Listen, I’ll be honest: there was something kind of nice about all the attention, the massages and everything. Especially after the last few hectic weeks, it felt nice to just totally relax. It’s just . . . well hell, it took ages, yeah? And I felt like such a sissy the whole time, my stomach churning with subtle self-loathing and my head simmering with the mildest of headaches. Still, I drifted off and eventually came back to the feeling of a tiny brush lightly stroking my lips.
“We’re almost done, hun,” Sheila said. She approached my face with the intensity of a master craftsman, taking almost random, final strokes at the canvas that my skin had become. Pam made final touched to my hair. They didn’t let me see what I looked like at that point. Oh no. First they bundled me into the outfit their fashion expert selected from my wardrobe. Bra, panties and pantyhose. Waist-cincher, drawn tighter than before, and low-heeled boots. A short denim skirt, tight across my ass and thighs, and a slightly-pink, short-sleeved blouse with a wide, flared collar, left unbuttoned low enough to display an ungodly depth of cleavage. And finally they assaulted me with accessories: a thin leather belt, bangles, necklace, rings . . . they threw so much shit at me so quickly that I was left befuddled, and just numbly went through the process of getting dressed without protest. They helped me with the buttons and zippers. With those new nails I was completely useless. There was a final spritz of perfume that left me in a disorientating, cloying floral mist.
They trundled me before the mirror and watched me with expectant, cheerful possessiveness.
“What do you think?” Sheila asked.
Honestly? My immediate reaction was to feel under-whelmed. It’s not that these girls weren’t good at their job--they definitely knew their craft. But I’d already been through this before, right? The first time is always the worst. Well, almost. That’s true for just about everything. Three days ago K stuck breasts onto me and dressed me up in tight jeans, and then unveiled Cindy to my virgin eyes. After that--other than finding myself sporting a sudden vagina--any further adventures in cross-dressing were bound to feel a little anti-climatic. That first encounter with Cindy had been profoundly unsettling. The realization that I could be made to look like a chick--like an attractive one--had freaked me out. With all the racing around and hiding and shit, I don’t think I’d quite had time to fully understand just how deeply and profoundly the whole experience had shook me.
Which is why, as I slowly drank in this latest incarnation of Cindy, I began to feel . . . ill. That subtle discontent in my stomach blossomed into full-blown sickness; I felt like vomiting. Pain flared across my temple, brief but penetrating. All the wrongness of the last three days, seething and bubbling just beneath the surface but otherwise ignored, came rushing to the fore. Maybe K’s presence had been enough to keep it a bay, but left on my own . . . God, I suddenly realized I was on the verge of losing it, and I wasn’t sure what the hell I’d do to myself . . . or anyone around me. First this morning and now . . . these chicks hovering about, eyes bright and eager, turning me into, fuck, into one of them.
I just stood there staring at Cindy in the mirror, nearly trembling with the effort of restraining my violent disgust. The girls were getting anxious. I watched them in the mirror exchange glances. They needed some kind of response. With one hand I reached up to my new, luxurious mane of hair. It hung impossibly straight down to the small of my back, shimmering brightly. It reminded me of golden wheat swaying in the wind at dawn in the summer--what a thing to remember at a time like this. Glossy pink nails combed through and I couldn’t tell the difference from the real thing.
Sheila’s hand fell softly on my shoulder. “Cindy?”
My smile was wan and sickly but the best I could manage. I hid it with a quick nod of my head, painfully aware of the added weight to the gesture, of the hair that fell across my shoulder and stroked my neck, of the glittering dance of the studs now adorning each earlobe.
The relief that passed through my worried audience was nearly palpable.
“You look wonderful, girl!” Kim said.
I did. I mean, I really did. In fact, the longer I stared at myself in the mirror, the more discomfited I became, the more overwhelmed I felt. True, the shock wasn’t anything as drastic as the first time I saw myself all done up as a chick. Thing is, as good as Agent K was at the whole makeup-and-disguise thing, she wasn’t a master. It wasn’t her profession, not like it was for these girls.
Looking at myself in the mirror after K was done with me, yeah, sure, I looked like a chick but if I looked closely the flaws in the illusion were pretty damn clear. Now, as my eyes danced across my reflection desperately seeking the same easy flaws as before--I couldn’t find them.
That wig had done loads to feminize my features but never looked quite natural on me--this sleek new cascade was all girl, and somehow very Cindy. Cindy wouldn’t wear clip-on earrings, and so now she didn’t: two little studs, glinting in the light, framed her face. That face: sure, she had a square chin--already softened by Sheila’s skill--but who’d notice confronted with those delicately highlighted cheekbones, those soft, wet lips? And those eyes, wide and so very, very green, vividly brought out by the masterwork of blended colours that shimmered across her lids. Certainly the feminine mask revealed to me felt heavy and strange, but the skin I saw was flawless and beautiful.
Those nails transformed her whole hand somehow, made them delicate, the illusion of length making each finger that much more slender. It was more than that: the very way she carried herself was different, every movement softened by the changes wreaked upon her by the beauticians. Soft skin, new colours, new weight, lingering scents: this was the same Cindy I met three days ago, only made feminine to a degree I hadn’t dared consider.
I barely noticed as the girls said farewell, packed up and left. My hand drifted tentatively across Cindy’s body, poking at each new change.
God, I felt like such a fucking pansy. It made me sick. It really did.
***
It’s hard to judge how profound an effect the beauticians had on me. I’m not sure, but after that moment staring at Cindy’s reflection I started to give up. Agreeing to K’s crazy scheme was one thing, but actually discovering I could be made to appear like a girl--a real girl, a hot girl--was really playing havoc on my self esteem, you know? Especially since on one level . . . well, hell yeah, I actually felt some pride in how sexy Cindy looked
So after the girls left I spent an hour sitting numbly at the edge of my bed, shaking slightly, fighting down the urge to throw up. My headache slowly faded. The reflection opposite openly mocked my male ego. Understanding how both K and the Clinic were systematically breaking down my masculine self-image, even knowing that it was for my own good, didn’t make it any less painful. Once I recovered from my small mental breakdown, though, something unexpected happened: with an almost audible ‘click’ something in my head flipped and I figured, ‘fuck it’. I decided that there was no way I was going to spend the next few weeks in a state of constant misery.
With renewed enthusiasm I took to my stocking feet only to remember that I didn’t actually have anything to do. I couldn’t leave room Cos 402 on account of my throat and doctor’s orders. The TV received only a few channels and no news from the outside world--I couldn’t even check up on fucking Steele’s trial. I hate television anyway; it’s just a huge waste of time. Some game consol or another was stashed away and I thought I could pass an hour or two on mindless entertainment . . . but the fifth time I got my ass kicked on Dead or Alive because I missed the goddamn kick-button because of those new nails, I gave up.
I had no choice. Under the threat of extreme boredom and with nothing else to do, I started to perfect the whole feminine act. I began by reading some of the teen magazines and fashion books K had left behind, and very consciously tried to do so in as girly a way as possible, curled up on the sofa with my legs tucked up beneath my ass, unconsciously stroking my hair as I perused the articles. I even read that awful ‘Shopaholic’ book, pausing partway through to look over K’s letter once again. Eventually I drifted into the bathroom and practiced my makeup skills and all that other shit, then reluctantly slipped into some low heels and pranced back and forth for a bit. I kept them on for the rest of the night--I was almost surprised at how quickly the night came, once I got serious about my training--and finally settled in for food and a movie.
I whipped up a quick meal with what I found in the kitchen, and finally kicked back on the sofa with a glass of white wine. I watched the best thing I found in the media selection, some cynical romance by Woody Allen. The whole time I felt acutely aware of the image I must have presented: young blonde on sofa with glass of wine. I absently fidgeted with my hair or bra and lost myself in the movie.
Without realizing it turned one AM, I was yawning, and I’d survived my first day alone as Cindy. A little drunk from two bottles of Chablis, I lifted myself from the sofa and returned to my bedroom. I went through the nightly routine again, cleaning up and slipping back into the corset and brushing my new long hair. Thinking back over my day, I realized that it hadn’t been all that bad. Yeah, a bit freaky at the beginning, and the middle part was kind of emasculating . . . but hell, it beat hiding out in some shithole waiting for some bastard to pop a bullet into the back of my head. That’s probably when I started to relax--to really relax, for the first time in far too long. After fiddling with the media controls set into the headboard of the bed--setting an alarm, adjusting the heat in the room and putting some chilled tunes on a timer--I pulled on that same babydoll I wore my first night as Cindy and slipped into bed. Within a few minutes of hitting bed I was asleep, warm and comfortable and surrounded by music.
***
The next morning it was Cindy who stepped from the building into the fresh brightness outside. She paused at the door and took a deep, invigorating breath. Her eyes closed with the pleasure of the warm sun on her skin and the scent of freshly cut grass riding the air. When she opened her eyes again she smiled a happy, simple smile and trotted a few steps down the cobblestone path.
Sitting atop a small hill, the Cos residence offered an excellent view across the expansive range of the Asklepios Clinic. At night the whole area lay shrouded in darkness broken only intermittently by rare and distant lights. However, by day the clinic revealed its dappled beauty to the young girl.
The two large buildings at opposing ends of the property, sharp-edged jumbles of glass and concrete, reached aggressively for the sky and glittered coldly in drifting shafts of gentle sunlight. Behind her loomed the Hygieia Centre, sitting taller and more elaborate than any nearby buildings. Smaller structures lay scattered across the range of her sight, mostly clustered near main buildings but also reaching hesitatingly into the encroaching forest. More homes, she decided, or maybe shops. Cindy frowned slightly at the thought: she had very little money; but the day was far too beautiful for such concerns and, tossing her hair back and slinging her purse over one shoulder, she began her exploration of her new home. The glint of colour peeking from her open-toed wedge heels, the dance of the sundress against her legs, the light bump of a purse against her hip with every step: Cindy felt gloriously alive and comfortable in her femininity as she enjoyed an early morning stroll beneath blue skies and dawdling clouds.
She found genuine contentment in the freedom to explore at her leisure. For an hour she drifted aimlessly along the twisting and convoluted walking paths. This early in the morning--a glance at the thin, silver timepiece at her wrist confirmed it wasn’t even nine yet--there were few other people about. She saw a couple of joggers pass by, red-faced and earnest; they gave her a double look and a quick automatic wave before continuing on their way. Many of the paths coiled around small, well-tended gardens and parks sporting detailed fountains, artificial ponds and benches for relaxing. Cindy made a mental note of some gorgeous trees perfectly suited for a late-afternoon picnic spent relaxing in verdant shade.
Cindy thought to herself that she would have to come out earlier tomorrow. She wouldn’t even have to talk to anyone. To not take advantage of the natural beauty of this place was unthinkable. In the early morning, just as the sun touched the forested hilltops red, there might still be fog roiling between the buildings blanketing everything in its muting mist. She felt an almost unconscious ache to lose herself, alone, in the natural beauty of her new surroundings.
As the young woman came to the end of her morning stroll she noticed an increasing number of people on the paths, some flitting between buildings on those small, electric carts. She passed a few people and they all seemed content to remain private; they offered polite nods and non-committal smiles but little else.
Cindy became a little anxious. The thought of spending her stay at the clinic alone was genuinely distressing to a girl like her. Spending a day being pampered at home was one thing, but what was the point of getting all dressed up and pretty if there was no one to appreciate it? Despite the squeamish flutter in her stomach she determined to approach the next passer-by to cross her path.
He was a youngish-looking man, maybe in his early-twenties but with a rounded softness to his face that bordered on childish. His clothes were casual but stylish and very expensive and looked a little cool for the slight chill that rode the mid-spring mountain air. With distracted, almost nervous eyes he scanned the far horizons of the clinic as he jogged, and looked set to pass straight by without noticing Cindy.
“Good morning!” she declared happily, stepping in front of the man.
Eyes still focused on the distant bulk of the Meditrine Clinic, he ran straight into the smaller girl. With a startled gasp she tumbled to the ground, the man falling heavily on top of her.
Believe me: I came damn close to killing that stupid kid, right then and there. I really did. It wasn’t the fact that the weirdo slammed into me and knocked me to the ground. Hell, I could even forgive him for falling on top of me. After all, this cutesy girl-disguise is just that: a disguise, and beneath the lace and satin and pink trim I’m still a guy, tough as nails, still a man, not easily shaken. Other than the savage but brief burst of pain in my side, the hardest part of hitting the stone pathway was remembering to fall like Cindy--with a squeal and a useless flailing of limbs. The heels helped keep things authentic.
No, what pissed me off was that once we hit the pavement this idiot kid made no effort to get off of me. Seriously. He just stayed over me, his weight pressing down on me, and for the first time I felt the bizarre sensation of my breasts being crushed against my chest by another body. The boy lifted himself just enough to hold his head over mine. He stared directly into my eyes. His eyes were dull grey and rimmed in red. An unusually sharp scent clung to him, spicy but not unpleasant.
For a horrible, fleeting moment I thought this asshole was going to reach down for a kiss. My makeup was still fresh; wet, glistening lips parted in a slight gasp; and then I realized the boy wasn’t even looking at me. His eyes were unfocused and distant. Slowly they returned to the here and now and gradually became aware of the startled, wide-eyed girl confronting him.
“Hello,” he said. “My name is Larry.”
He didn’t seem all that concerned or even aware that he was lying on top of a smaller girl, crushing her to the ground as he introduced himself. I looked to either side but from my limited perspective didn’t see help approaching. I experienced another first-time foreign sensation: that of long hair, my own, pinned beneath me. Each turn tugged painfully at my scalp.
“I am twenty years old and a student,” he continued conversationally, though his voice was strangely monotone and slightly too loud. “What is your name?”
“Um . . . Cindy?” I answered. Thanks to the spray my voice was back to those unsettlingly breathy and feminine tones.
“Very nice to meet you, Cindy,” he said. “I have never seen you before. Are you new to the Clinic?”
With my hair caught I couldn’t even nod. I really had to fight back the temptation to toss this idiot off of me. The boy wasn’t small and his weight was starting to hurt my side despite Scooter’s painkillers. I could’ve thrown him easy, but I figured there was no was Cindy would have the strength or skill.
“Yes?” I answered, forcing a note of pleading into my voice.
“You should not be here,” he said, in the same toneless voice. “This is a bad place for you.”
No shit, it was a bad place. Last place I wanted to be was pinned beneath some guy, yeah? Especially since, a moment later, I felt it: an insistent push against my thigh, like an overeager pup poking its muzzle into a pocket. Perverted little fucker! I’d never felt anything like it but recognized the sensation immediately. The bastard’s growing hard-on was jabbing into my leg! The thought that only the ridiculous flimsy thinness of the dress I wore and this idiot’s shorts separated his cock from my skin almost made me sick.
Screw the helpless Cindy act, yeah? Frightened surprised twisted into an angry scowl. “You have to get off of me,” I growled, and the spray did nothing to mask my barely repressed rage. “Now.”
Larry didn’t seem to notice. “Of course,” he answered, sounding calmly unconcerned. He took his time doing so but finally clambered to his feet. Gallant gentleman that he was, he didn’t even offer me his hand. Instead, his eyes quickly found the squatting silhouette of the Meditrine Clinic, and without another word or a glance back he took off at a brisk jog in its general direction.
Fortunately, not everyone I met that day tried to slam me to the ground and hump my leg. (Not that I could blame them, really, considering what a sexy little number Cindy is.) I encountered a few more idle wanderers like myself and exchanged passing pleasantries. No real conversations, but it did a lot to boost my confidence. If anyone found something odd about my appearance they kept it to themselves. I certainly kept my own opinions quiet. It finally began to dawn on me that I was in a hospital--albeit a very beautiful, very large and expensive one--and many of the people I met seemed a bit . . . off.
That day was spent at a nice, leisurely pace, methodical but relaxed, as I spiralled out from the Cos Residence and explored the surroundings. I stumbled across a few more residences though none of them were quite as large as my new home. Where Cos struck me as a bit like upper-end student housing, some of the other places sprawled out like small villas.
Everywhere I went the grass was green and the shrubs well-kept. The air was almost cloying at times, laden with the scent of early-blooming flowers and fragrant trees. So clear and blue that it nearly seemed to glow, the unbroken sky stretched across the far limits of the Clinic and set the brilliant green of the earth in sharp contrast. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d ever been anywhere quite as idyllic and beautiful.
And yet--yeah, there’s a ‘but’. In my life it seems like there’s always a ‘but’. Despite the beauty, the soothing breeze and scents and calming silence . . . yeah, it was the silence that did it, I think. It wasn’t the fact that I was decked out like a co-ed tart that had me on edge. It was the unnatural silence of the place.
See, the thing is I’m not much of a city boy. I’m really not, even though I’ve spent my entire adult life in the bustle and clamour of big cities. There’s a lot of shit about urban living that’s good: the chicks, the work, the bars and gigs--the cultural stuff, you know? The energy and that edgy vibe you only find in cities. But for all that, I’m a country boy at heart. Born and raised. Everything changed after Mom moved us to the city. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder how different my life would’ve been had we just stayed in the countryside.
And so, I’ve got these surprisingly strong childhood memories of times spent outdoors. Spent beneath a glittering canopy of stars, or lost in fascinated observation of some tiny, wondrous facet of life and death in nature: a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, or ants swarming a much larger caterpillar in pitched battle.
Like this one time I remember. I must’ve been something like six years old. Really made an impression on me. You ever see a spider capture a fly? You’d be surprised how difficult and rare it is to actually see it happen--nature is quick, ‘red in tooth and claw’, as Akiko used to say.
The way the buzzing abruptly cuts off, the brief struggle against the web giving way to exhaustion; then the savage dash across the lines, eight legs wrapping around the prey, fangs sinking down, a few spasmodic jerks, another . . . and then the final bondage, wrapped in silk that would glitter almost beautifully in morning dew, hiding the hollowed husk within.
I remember because that fly had been harassing me for half-an-hour, buzzing about and mocking my flailing attempts to drive it away as I hiked through the woods out behind my house. And then--silence, followed by capture. As much as the stupid bug had been annoying me . . . yeah, I kinda felt sorry for it. It’s a horrible way to go.
It’s amazing the scenes nature reveals to those--usually the young--who take the time to watch. So I knew a thing or two about being outdoors, and this is the thing: it’s very rarely quiet. The Clinic? For all its cultivated outdoor beauty it was strangely, unnaturally silent. Even if the other clients and patients weren’t the loud and boisterous type, the trees and gardens should have called out with their own fertile voices. Yet as I walked about that first morning I heard very few birds singing; saw only one or two squirrels dash up the side of a tree; and for all the refined greenery I’m not sure I noticed a single gardener or maintenance worker.
By the time noon approached my good mood of the morning was gone beneath a growing apprehension. My feet were killing me as well--for all my practice, I still had a ways to go before mastering heels and this was by far the most ‘real’ walking I’d done in women’s shoes. Who knew cobblestone pathways would make for such harder walking than the thin carpet of the safe-house? (Amazing how long ago that safe-house seemed, a lifetime away from the present.) Far more importantly my stomach started to grumble. A half-hour walk from ‘home’ and with aching feet and growing hunger, I finally decided to step indoors.
The nearest place at hand looked like a coffee shop. It had a large front that revealed a couple of small wooden tables that looked like they’d escaped from an Ikea catalogue. Inside the light was comfortably muted after the brilliance outside. Chilled music played quietly from unobtrusive speakers mounted in the corners and the warm scent of roasted java filled the air. My steps knocked a solid note from the tiled floor as I crossed to the counter.
The young man working behind the till somehow reminded me of Chris, that guy from the reception centre. Sure, this guy was a little taller, his chin a little weaker, but he possessed the same bland good looks and professional demeanour of the other guy. I was so struck--or momentarily put off, I should say--by the resemblance that I stood there at a loss after I caught his attention.
“Welcome to The Bean Being,” he said, smiling pleasantly. “How may I help you?”
***
That coffee house became my home away from home over the next few weeks. On the days when I could escape my room, I invariable swung by the Bean Being to grab a cup of coffee. It became part of my routine. That cup of coffee became a necessary part of settling into the character of Cindy for the day.
The days passed quickly. By early evening I could feel the tingle in my throat that suggested my voice would soon drop back to its masculine levels, and usually made my way home. It was a bit like Cinderella and the midnight bell, though at least I didn’t have some prissy prince chasing after me. This princess didn’t need rescuing, thank you very much. Since that spray was only good for six to eight hours or so, I was kind of forced to spend a lot of time indoors.
Off days, I sat around the apartment and worked out, read and watched movies. I drank a lot. I also waited for the next of Scooter’s torture sessions to take place. These beauty sessions were never quite as intensive as the first day--except for the day the bastard decided I needed a Brazilian wax, the fucker--but remained the focal point of the day. On the days I used the spray I took my time to continue my exploration of the clinic, both above ground and through the underground network of tunnels, and otherwise took advantage of the gorgeous setting. I’ll admit: I was amazed at how quickly I got used to walking in public dressed like a girl. With each visit of the beauticians my confidence grew; the image reflected in the mirror became increasingly convincing.
Which is why, yeah, I started ‘making friends’ at the Clinic. Like I said, most of these people? Mostly I felt disdain for them, especially those living under the umbrella of the Hygieia Centre. But Cindy? Well hell, she’s a much nicer person that I am, and she filled my days with inane conversations with sad and boring people. On the other hand, each and every person I met for a coffee or a short chat in a pleasant, sun-bathed arbour gave me the chance to put into use all the feminine techniques and habits I was practicing at night.
Because my evenings? I spent those in my room practicing to be Cindy, learning who she was, puzzling out her past and perfecting the act. Nah, not ‘the act’. Acting not enough for this kind of subterfuge. To truly convince involves ‘being’ and so, yeah, that’s what I practiced at night: ‘being’ Cindy.
The first week passed. At times I was beyond bored and painfully aware of every single second crawling by. Other times disappeared in a blink. Cindy moments barely registered. Lost in the character, focusing intensely on every gesture, pose, word I spoke and the way I said it--hours could melt away, leaving me exhausted and drained but surprisingly pleased by the end.
Still, I was itching for a little fun, for some excitement, you know? I was going stir-crazy. I was getting bored; really bored. I was drinking way too much and kept getting plagued by these infrequent but absolutely blistering headaches that would strike at the weirdest times. I really think I was starting to go a little crazy. Or maybe it was just the same old crazy, churning away under the unusual pressure of being Cindy--and now bubbling to the surface, worse than ever.
By far the worse symptom was a growing suspicion of my surroundings. I mean, hell, even as David Sanders I was never all that relaxed, you know? I was always a little on edge and more than just a little distrusting. But now? A week into my stay at the Clinic my growing unease developed into full-blown paranoia. Those first few days, focusing entirely on learning the fine art of being Cindy, I’d almost forgotten that I was, in fact, in hiding from the hit-men of a corporate psychopath. But the more I felt that there was something just not quite right about the place, the more convinced I became that somehow Steele’s agents had managed to infiltrate my new home. Believe me, there’s nothing like shamefully pretending to be a girl while living over a secret underground medical facility to heighten that paranoid edge.
That morning I left my room early for a quick jog around the Clinic, bared legs sleek and lithe in the comfortable jogging shorts I’d slipped on after sliding out of bed. This early I didn’t need to worry about meeting anyone. The sun still lurked beneath the horizon, the sky only just beginning to lighten into diffuse indigo. My hair, tied back in a high ponytail with a pink scrunchie, danced in counter-point to my ever step. With minimal makeup and no corset I felt wonderfully free as I raced through the faint mist and early morning chill. Yeah, it was stupid and sloppy but I really needed to just cut loose for a moment. From a distance basic shape and colour would be enough to make me look girlie; it’s only up close that I would’ve been hard-pressed to pull off a convincing Cindy.
I didn’t bump into anyone. Near the end of my jog, as I warmed down from my effort, I had this sudden, intense sensation of being watched. As I stretched out front of the Cos residence I surreptitiously scanned my surroundings. Nothing. Reason told me I was being insane; my instincts told me something was wrong. I trust my instincts.
Back in my room I dressed for the day, marvelling at how second-nature the whole process was becoming. I went for something sexy but sensible that day: a loose, flowing skirt and a light purple blouse with wide, flared collar, over which I pulled on a tight turtleneck sweater. Even with just trainers and small studs in my ears, I looked damn fine.
I spent the day doing the usual things: a coffee at the Being Bean, followed by an hour hanging out in the library followed by lunch with one of the acquaintances Cindy had made, this cool woman called--get this--Crystal Dawn. Seriously. She was a bit flakey and her questions were a bit personal at times, but she was fun to hang out with. There was something weird about her I couldn’t quite place--probably the reason I liked chatting with her. Everyone likes a puzzle.
So, yeah, the day was all fine and good--except that by late afternoon my normal paranoia had blossomed into near lunacy. It took incredible effort to not look over my shoulder as I walked about, and I felt this incredible need to retreat to my room, close all the blinds and huddle in the dark. In a final act of desperation I gave up and went to the Bacchus Bar. I wanted a drink.
I ordered a stiff scotch and pounded it back and got myself a second. I kept half-an-eye on the thin crowd but nothing caught my attention. Except--by my third drink, at which point I remembered that Cindy wasn’t a Scotch drinker and I switched to wine--I was struck by an intense, powerful certainty.
Somebody was watching me again. Somebody was following me
After a forcefully relaxed sip of my wine I pulled a compact from my purse. As I powdered my nose, so to speak, I used the mirror to covertly look over my shoulder. Nothing. More paranoia? As if going out in public dressed like a girl wasn’t enough to leave a bit twitchy. I gestured for the bartender to come over.
“Yes miss?”
Being called miss still brought a wry smile to my lips. “Could you watch my drink?” I asked. “I have to go to the ladies’ room.”
“Sure.”
“Where are they?” The bartended pointed the direction out to me. “At the back of the bar.”
I made my way across the bar at a leisurely stroll, flicking back my mane of hair as I went. A door led to a corridor with the women’s toilet on one side, the men’s opposite and further down, and ended with a shut door marked ‘employees only’; a supply closet, I guessed. I was acting like a right paranoid fool, like a flustered, silly girl. Looking over my shoulder, I not only wasn’t watching where I was going . . . I walked through the wrong door.
I slammed into some guy’s chest. He stumbled back. Too jittery, too on edge, I found my footing faster than Cindy would have and nearly smashed my fist into the stranger’s face. “Watch it!” I snapped.
The man rubbed at his chest, but his eyes twinkled from beneath a mop of blue-black hair peppered with grey. “Whoa there,” he said. He hesitated then added, “little lady. You know where you are, yes?”
I finally noticed the urinals and fought down a rising blush. “Yeah, yeah,” I answered, glancing back into the corridor. There was nobody there, of course. I cursed myself for an idiot.
“In a bit of a rush?”
I took a deep, settling breathe. “Sorry,” I started to say, finally turning to get a proper look at the guy. My voice died in my throat.
“My name’s Harry,” he said. Dark eyes watched me with amused and casual expectancy. Genuinely, almost embarrassingly star-struck, I kind of lost track of the next few minutes. I’m not sure what nonsense I stuttered, but eventually became vaguely aware that he’d just offered to buy me a drink. He opened the door for me and we returned to the bar. When we went our separate ways thirty minutes later, I realized to my own bemusement that I’d just been talked into a date--with a man.
***
Getting ready to meet Harry that first time? Yeah, it bloody well took some doing. I mean, first I had to get myself half-unconscious with booze before I could even start getting ready. Even if it was Harry, I was getting ready for a date--with a guy! How fucked up was that? I kept telling myself that it wasn’t really a date, that I was just meeting up with some guy for a coffee or a few pints. Yeah, ‘some’ guy my cute ass! I mean, it’s not like I could pass up the opportunity, you know? It’s was Harry fucking Longman!
Yeah, that Harry. A little over a year ago the media had been abuzz with speculation as to the poet-slash-rock star’s whereabouts--there were rumours of a cult, of a pilgrimage, of joining a Buddhist monastery; but no one really knew. Apparently he’d gone to the Asklepios Clinic . . . and now Cindy was about to date the single most influential celebrity of David Sander’s young life.
Damn, but Harry Longman was the one and only media-figure I’d ever imagined meeting. I just never imagined I’d be wearing a dress, you know?
The first step in getting ready was getting drunk. After a few shots of Tequila and with a stiff Scotch in hand, I felt boozy and fuzzy enough to confront the next crisis.
What the hell was I going to wear? This wasn’t like getting decked out before meeting up with Tom and hitting the bars on the weekend, you know? I mean, sure, I paid attention to what I put on, how I looked. If a guy wants to get laid, he’s got to show that he’s willing to put in at least a little effort. But there’s no comparison. There really isn’t. Thirty minutes tops to get ready, and that’s including a shower, shave, and a nice, leisurely shit spent leafing through a perpetually unfinished novel.
Cindy, on the other hand, almost suffered a panic attack staring into her closet before her date. What underwear should I wear? Do I go with bland but sturdy body-shaping stuff? Casual and comfortable panties and bra? Something that left me feeling a bit . . . naughty? What kind of shoes? Did they go with that skirt? Was I baring too much cleavage? Hair, makeup--fuck, what a nightmare! And the colours, the textures, prints, the way this fabric clung or that one fell, could this and that work together . . . it was too much, too confusing. I couldn’t decide between an unsubtle and young groupie-slut outfit, or something a bit more enigmatic and intellectual; more importantly, I didn’t have a clue how to achieve either look.
I gave up; I called up Scooter’s army of professionals; bless their hearts, they sorted everything out for me. By the time they finished I felt breathless and constrained by the clothes I wore: the cincher that squeezed my midriff and the heels that hobbled my step; the makeup and hair that required constant attention; the thin straps that seemed to run all across my body, encircling ankles and shoulders, thigh and waist. From head to toe I glittered and glistened, like a fishing lure fluttering through shallow water.
Harry and I met at the Bacchus Bar. He looked almost painfully cool in some beat-up but stylish jeans, relaxed t-shirt and his signature leather jacket, and the casual comfort of his clothes left me almost angrily jealous. Harry, unhindered by his clothes, was liberated to take charge of the action in the date, whereas I was constantly forced to fuss over my appearance. Dating as a woman was proving to be a real pain in the ass.
The date went well. I struggled to keep the star-struck bimbo thing to a minimum but still sat there, flustered and gushing, for most of the night. Harry was charming and patient. The guy had some seriously smooth moves; in the back of my mind I took notes: once back to being a guy I’d definitely put his chat-up techniques to work. Eventually I got over the fact that I was sitting there all dressed like some tart, flushed beneath my makeup, and relaxed. Inane chatting eased into real conversation and his entire demeanour gradually changed, from celebrity character to . . . well, a real person.
By the end of that night the unexpected had happened: I’d made a new friend. We ended the date by picking up a bottle of Rioja and retired outside for some drinking on one of the benches. We parted happy and quite drunk. He gave me a gallant kiss on my hand--it sent an unnerving quiver through my belly--and we made plans to get together again. After he left I stayed there for awhile, trying to sort through some very confused and conflicted thoughts.
I’d had a good night. It was the most fun I’d had in ages. Harry was a fun guy, cool and easy to relax around . . . although of course I could never really relax, constantly reminded by the clothes I wore of the role I was playing. That’s what bothered me the most, I think: that even dressed like some teen tease I still had such a good night.
Something rustled from the bushes.
Booze and distractions be damned; I snapped immediately to attention. My outside posture remained relaxed and feminine. I stayed where I was, reaching out with my senses. Nothing. Had I imagined the noise? Focused on Harry for the last few days, I’d almost been able to forget about my paranoid instincts.
After five minutes of forcefully relaxed waiting I went for a walk. My heels clicked against cobblestone with each step. I felt acutely aware of every sway of my ass beneath my tight skirt, the jiggle of my exposed tits, the swish of my hair. I wasn’t particularly frightened or worried. It was just that the idea that I was being watched forced me once again to confront the reality of what I was doing and of how I was dressed. More than anything else I felt acute embarrassment. I mean, shit, the image I presented: teenage rape-bait, drunk and alone, mincing along at night though a quiet park.
Pushing aside those irrelevant emotions I focused on my surroundings. Not for the first time I wondered if my paranoia stemmed from the simple fact that, as a girl, I’d lost the anonymity that is a fundamental reality of being male. I mean, fuck, I’m a good-looking guy and yeah, I do get checked out by passing chicks. (I’d definitely get checked out more if I was a half-foot taller.) But in general, when David Sanders walks down a street nobody gives a shit. Cindy? With her pert little ass and jiggling D-cups tits? Her height’s perfect, especially in cute prancing heels, and every little motion draws the eyes: critical evaluation from the girls, and the guys? Yeah, they like what they see.
Cindy’s not anonymous. Even in this hospital there’s a lot more attention directed my way than I’m used to. It’s the kind of thing to really feed your paranoia, especially if, you know, you’re not actually a girl and more than just a little embarrassed at the thought that somebody might spot you for what you really are. The Clinic was, just as K and Scooter assured me, completely safe. But for some reason, my gut refused to accept what my brain was telling me.
There was nobody there. There couldn’t be anybody there. It was probably my own neurosis playing with my hearing.
Yeah, that’s why after another ten minutes of walking, I took a narrow side-path between a storage shed and a closed shop, and silently disappeared into a deep thicket.
Kneeling behind some bushes, heels sinking awkwardly into the soft earth and the greenery scratching at my arms, I couldn’t help but question once again what the hell was wrong with me. I crouched and waited. A bug buzzed near, landed on my cleavage and started a casual walk across the vast expanse of my right breast. The night remained quiet, other than the faint hum of light at the edge of the building. From far away I heard the faint roar of a car pulling up to the Clinic, the headlights momentarily cutting a swath across the sky. I continued to wait, unmoving, ignoring the growing cramp in my legs. It wasn’t the first time I’d watched from the shadows, hidden in the trees. It was the first time I’d done it in heels and a skirt.
A shadow detached itself from behind the storage shed. Quietly--though not entirely so--it crept forward, mostly avoiding the faint pool of light from behind. The darkness was enough to conceal its features, though the general shape suggested male. His movements were surprisingly amateurish for a hit man. I remained still, until the figure’s furtive movements brought him close.
I leapt from the foliage. Feminine clothes worn for dating are ill-suited for subterfuge: the shoes threw off my movement and I made more noise than I should have as I closed the distance. The man twisted, raising his arm. I didn’t give him the chance. My right hand jammed him at the shoulder, slid in and pulled him off balance. One foot forward; unsubtle but effective, I threw my weight into him and sent him sprawling over my leg. He slammed into the side of the building face first. I followed close. Snagged a flailing arm and twisted it behind his back. Threw him up against the wall again. Way, way too easy.
“Why are you following me?” I demanded, keeping my voice low. I tried for a harsh and threatening growl and barely managed a husky purr. I was really going to have to lay off that damn spray.
The man didn’t respond. He sagged in my grip. A faint scent reached my nose: slightly spicy, unusual but not unpleasant. I released his arm and spun the man around.
“Larry?”
The boy stared into some empty space that floated a few feet behind and to the left of my shoulder. A thin rivulet of blood trickled from a cut on his forehead. I momentarily toyed with the idea that he’d been somehow contacted by Steele but dismissed the thought. Cindy’s inane conversations over the last week had picked up some juicy gossip about some of the more permanent residents of the Clinic. Larry’d been here for ages. The guy wasn’t dangerous, just a long-term nutter. He was the son of rich and prominent parents who didn’t need the embarrassment of a weirdo son with obsessive tendencies.
The boy’s eyes eventually found me and he smiled an empty, mechanical smile, as if he’d been taught that a smile was the proper response at a time like this. “Hello Cindy,” he said.
I sighed, stepping back from the boy.
“Hi Larry.”
“How are you today, Cindy?”
I glanced about, hoping that nobody had noticed me beating up a patient. “Yeah, just great.” I quickly looked him over. “You okay, kid?”
“That hurt,” he said, still smiling. He eyes remained glued to my face. “I like you, Cindy.”
“I’m sure you do,” I answered, and then smiled myself. An unconscious tension across my shoulders slowly bled away. Wow. My very first stalker. I’d take that over a professional hit-man any day. My paranoia hadn’t been unfounded, just a bit . . . exaggerated. I gave Larry a soft pat on the shoulder and slipped back into Cindy mode. “C’mon, Larry? You want to go home? Let’s get you home, okay?”
I walked the lunatic home, carrying on a stilted but strangely interesting prattle the whole way. He walked quickly, unaware that his long stride forced me to trot to keep up. A week ago there’s no way I could’ve managed it, but the constant practice was paying off. After dropping him off at his residence I gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek and made him promise to stop following me from the shadows. “Next time you want to talk,” I told him, “just come and say ‘hi’, okay?”
He nodded and looked grave. “Be careful Cindy. This is a not a good place.”
Apparently I wasn’t the only paranoid at Asklepios. I promised to be careful and walked home at a leisurely pace. At the threshold to Cos 403 I stopped and leaned heavily against the door. With one finger pressed gently against my soft lips, as if in remembrance of a long ago kiss, I reflected on the night. This existence was crazy. It was emasculating and embarrassing. These clothes: constraining. These shoes: awkward. And the role I played? Flirty and demure, all the soft touches and veiled glances and glossy smiles? Pathetic. But for all that--God, between Harry and beating up on Larry I’d had more fun tonight than in ages. After nearly two weeks of pretending I was amazed at how . . . comfortable, I’d become in the role.
My head erupted with sudden and piercing pain. With a soft gasp I almost collapsed to the floor. Wincing, I steadied myself against the wall. Through bleary eyes I saw my hand against the soft beige, those delicate fingers spread for support, the carefully shaped nails, red vibrant as blood . . . pounding in my head and ears, a sound like pouring sand, deafening. What the hell? What the . . . hell was I doing, shit, I’m a fucking guy! What the hell was I doing, getting all prettied up and mincing about like some goddamn. . . .
With a deep, shuddering breath I settled myself. The throbbing across my temples quickly subsided. These silly headaches were becoming a real pain. With a quick pat I smoothed down my blouse and straightened the skirt. Another breath. Another. I shouldered my purse. A good night’s sleep would sort everything out. A week and a half down; there couldn’t be much longer left. Shaking my head at the bizarre situation I found myself in, I touched my hand to the door and stepped into my apartment.
“Hello Cindy,” said K, waiting for me in the lounge. “We need to talk.”
“Mom!” I squealed when I saw her. She met me in the middle of the room in a properly matriarchal hug.
A few minutes later we were relaxing in the lounge. I poured her a glass of wine and took one for myself and we settled down to talk. We spent a half-hour sparring back and forth across the room, she playing Mom to the hilt, her questions probing and expertly exploring Cindy’s week and a half at the clinic; I countered with the best daughter impression I’d ever managed. Her soccer-mom disguise was perfect and strangely sexy to me. She tried to hide it but I caught the grudging respect, the muted surprise as her eyes drank in the feminine creature sitting opposite her. With K as my foil Cindy was better than ever. K referenced my past and I reposted with a high-school memory. She delicately asked about my treatment here and I took a deep breath, swallowed the sadness and reassured her I felt good, allowing my lower lip to quiver for a moment. Then my voice cracked as the spray wore off, and she smiled despite herself.
“Amazing,” she said, shaking her head. “You have outdone yourself, Mr Sanders.”
I smiled, surprisingly pleased by the sound of her voice and at the way she called me ‘Mr Sanders’. “Thank you,” I answered, and unable to restrain myself, “I think.”
“Has the disguise been hard to maintain?”
“You’re joking, right?” I answered. “Of course it’s been hard. Scooter’s been a big . . . help, whether I wanted it or not.” I smoothed a stray bang back behind my ear, perfectly aware of how feminine the gesture was and how it made my hoop earring dance and catch the light. Hell, under K’s scrutiny I even sat with my back a little straighter, pushing those soft breasts out further and allowing my skirt to hike up a bit more. Yeah, she loved that, even though she tried to hide it. God, I was really surprised by how much I’d missed her. And what the hell was I trying to do, flirt with her?
“Jonathon mentioned that the Clinic has done its best to help you fit in.” The corner of her mouth tugged up in a smile. “I believe he mentioned something about waxing?”
“Yeah,” I grumbled. “I still owe the bastard for that.”
“And what is this I hear about Cindy beginning to date?”
“What? No!” I flushed a hot, fiery red from the exposed top of my breasts to the tip of my pierced ears. “It’s not what you think!”
“Jonathan tells me that one of his high-profile clients has found himself a new girlfriend. A Mr Longman?”
“I’m not his girlfriend!”
“Does he know this?” God, she was such a bitch!
“Listen, I’m just helping the guy, yeah?”
“Helping him how?” K smirked openly.
“The guy’s lonely! And I’m bored--like you wouldn’t believe, K. We’re just hanging out and if this is the only way I can do it then, yeah . . . I’ll play the Cindy he expects!”
“And when it is time for her to leave?”
I bit back a retort. “What do you mean?”
“It may be about time to be rid of Cindy,” K said, and I’m not sure whether the quiet sadness in her voice was playful or genuine.
I leaned forward eagerly. “You mean . . . you’ve found somewhere I can relocate?”
She gave a small nod. “Yes, Mr Sanders. The new identity we have established for you is tentative but promising.”
“Male?”
“Of course,” she said. “Unless dating has revealed to you the joys of feminine life?”
“Yeah, it’s a real thrill,” I answered dryly. “Panties and lipstick, hurray!” I gave my tits a grope. “They’re fun but I’m not going to miss them.” I gave her a little wink. “Are you?”
“I will do my best to hold back the tears,” she answered. “I have already spoken with Scooter and he has approved and scheduled the surgery for the end of next week.”
My heart skipped a beat. “Uh . . . surgery?”
She nodded. “A new life, Mr Sanders. A new face.”
“But--”
“It’s the only way,” she said. Her voice left no room for argument. “Without some changes to your appearance,” she explained, “returning to a masculine existence would be a death sentence. One brief appearance on the wrong security camera, a quick scan by the right piece of recognition software and . . . well, Mr Sanders, your life would suddenly be worth less than those lovely heels you current wear. I’ve told you before: I have no intention of allowing you to kill yourself.
“It’s either cosmetic surgery, David, some minor alterations and a new male identity in a small town . . . or you choose to remain Cindy for the rest of you life.” She didn’t even say it with a wry smile. Was it paranoia again or did I hear a faint undercurrent of hope in her voice?
We spent another half-hour talking, and she quickly sketched out some of the tentative details of my new life, before she had to rush off once again. When it came time to sign the consent form, my hand hesitated only momentarily before consigning Cindy to oblivion.
***
The night of my last date with Harry came quickly.
The anticipation of never wearing panties again made the second half of my stay at the Asklepios Clinic nearly unbearable. Totally focused on that approaching day, I found it almost intolerable to continue prancing and practicing and pretending to be Cindy. After all, what was the point? Discovering Larry the Stalker had put my paranoia to rest--obviously Scooter and K were right and the Asklepios Clinic was a safe haven from the long, psychotic arm of Jeremiah Steele. Soon I’d be reinvented as a new man, and everything I’d learned about being Cindy would become a surreal pink-tinged memory.
It was only my continuing ‘dates’ every second night with Harry Longman that gave me any incentive whatsoever to not only continue the Cindy charade, but to continuously improve the role. I wanted to be the best, god-damn-girliest Cindy I could for the guy.
Listen, I know how gay that sounds. Why the hell would any guy want to put himself through this kind of bullshit? The thing is, I wasn’t just playing the star-struck fan . . . Harry really was my hero, ever since I first picked up a guitar back when I was fourteen. The man was a friggin’ guitar god, know what I mean? And he wasn’t some strutting guitar-wanking egomaniac either. It wasn’t just those cool-as-shit solos he effortlessly ripped through when he could be bothered; the man was an even better writer. He saw me through some tough teenage angst, Harry did. And he supplied the only goddamn thing that Kate and I ever agreed on: a song. The dude gave Kate and me ‘our song’, and the memories I attach to that music and those lyrics are more precious than he could possibly imagine. He’d never fully realize how much I owe him.
I also knew the kind of guy Harry was. In some ways we were quite similar, him and I; women liked us, and we treated them like shit. The difference? Harry was suave and rich and an artist. When he crapped all over them they lapped it up like honey.
And finally, I understood on some instinctive level that Harry needed my companionship as much as I needed his. The guy was seriously fucked up--almost as much as I was. He needed me and I owed him; but for me to hang out with him I had to be pretty and vivacious, a high-heeled blonde, a cute piece of ass. Yeah, playing the part was seriously fucking with my head but I’ll say this: I was amazed at how easy it was getting to be. The ease with which I shifted into Cindy was really starting to scare me.
Another week and a handful of innocent get-togethers slid by, and then it was the night before my scheduled surgery. Harry met Cindy for one last date.
They met at the Bacchus Bar as the sun settled behind the forested hills and the Clinic fell into quiet darkness. The older man and his young companion sat in a secluded booth far in the back, watching as the bar slowly grew busy. Glasses clinked and voices raised in conversation joined together in the oldest symphony of all, a familiar backdrop for a final date.
Cindy, feeling more than a little drunk, giggled as the rock star awkwardly reached around her, an arm rubbing up against her breast.
“You’re just trying to cop a feel, you pervert!”
“Show respect for teacher, girl,” Harry growled.
“Yes sir!”
“It’s like this,” he said, pressing down on her fingers. “Then here, and here,” he added, his fingers guiding hers across the frets.
“Like this?” Cindy asked. Her tongue peeked out from between glossy lips as she concentrated on the guitar. She repeated the positions with only a little awkwardness.
“Yeah, not bad.”
She tried again, faster. “Cool! I’ve never been able to get that bit.”
“You learn fast.”
“Thanks!”
“You might want to trim those nails before trying it for real, though. They’ll mess up your chords.”
Cindy stuck her tongue out at him. “But they’re so pretty,” she said, glancing aside at him before turning back to the instrument. “Don’t you like them?” She focused for another moment on the guitar, and then gently laid it aside. Her hands fell limply in her lap. “Um, Harry?” Cindy sounded nervous. “Your . . . arms?”
Harry started as if poked awake. His arms still encircled her. His touch drifted to her waist, fingers lightly grasping just beneath the swell of each breasts. His breath was momentarily hot on her neck as his touch slid up her side before coming to rest on her shoulders. “I’m sorry.”
Cindy scooted a small distance away down the booth. Her eyes dropped shyly away. “No, it’s . . . okay,” she murmured softly. She looked momentarily apprehensive, and then licked her lips and gave a small smile. She darted forward and landed a quick, light kiss on his cheek. His skin was rough and up close, he smelled slightly of old leather and shaving cream; it was a fatherly scent. Her cheek hovered next to his, hesitantly, before she pulled away. Their faces were close and Harry’s eyes glittered darkly, expectantly.
Cindy smiled demurely. “I have to go tinkle,” she whispered, and giggled, and slipped away from the booth.
A minute later Cindy stood in the bathroom of the Bacchus Bar, hands gripping the edges of the smooth porcelain sink tightly. Her knuckles whitened; I gritted my teeth and stared into the mirror, aghast. My head was beginning to hurt again, the pain piercing through my pleasant drunkenness. Why was this so hard? It shouldn’t be so hard. I’d been through this before--with that guy in the elevator, for young Tim, hell, I’d even pranced around in lingerie for that creepy Agent Fosters guy. But tonight was--different.
Of course it was! What the hell had I expected? When a rich, good-looking guy takes a cute young thing out to a bar, he’s got expectations, yeah? Up until tonight Harry had been a real gentleman. In his place I would’ve made third base with Cindy by now, or dumped her ass. But Harry had class. A handful of dates and he’d settled for kisses to the hand, a few intimate hugs, a chaste kiss to the cheek.
But tonight . . . tonight, a much heavier expectancy hovered between us, and there was a part of me that felt compelled to reward him for his efforts. I’m a man; I knew what Harry wanted.
Dark eyes the colour of fallen leaves in late autumn twinkled with amusement in my mind, turned green and I saw myself in the mirror: the painted face and blonde hair and bright eyes wide with surprise and fright. My hands tightened in frustration as I took in: breasts and vagina, bra and panties, stockings and heels, nail extensions and polish, tight clingy clothes and pierced ears, perfume, lipstick, God, so much, and all the invisible gestures and acts that defined Cindy as a girl, that made Cindy--not me.
This wasn’t what I wanted. Hanging with this guy was a dream come true--but I wanted to do it as David, as a man, not as some flustered female groupie. How could I play the girl in a date . . . how could I be the fucking girlfriend? What I wanted was to pound back pints of bitter instead of sipping wine; I should be shooting pool, grinding out power chords and hitting on chicks with Harry--not flattering his ego and toying with my hair and giggling at his goddamn jokes.
My hand slammed against the side of the sink, palm flat, with power that belied my delicate disguise. What I wanted was to smash that mirror with my fist and splinter that reflected image into a thousand pieces. The dull pain in my hand seemed to distract from and relieve the pressure in my temple. No. I couldn’t do this, indulge in this pathetic display of machismo; not now. For one final night I had to accept that David couldn’t be here.
What was the alternative--walking out on Harry? Because I sure as hell didn’t want to; I was having too much fun, even wearing a skirt. I had to admit a very real thrill at cradling one of Longman’s famous guitars in my arms. The one he’d been teaching me with he played on tour way back in ’99. I’d seen the video. That right there almost made the whole bullshit Cindy-scenario worthwhile.
I shook my head, golden tresses falling like a curtain across my face. With a timid gesture I brushed my hair back behind my eyes, suddenly demure and quiet once again. Looking through the thick veil of my lashes I smiled tentatively at the pretty girl I saw in the glass. David couldn’t be here--but Cindy was.
A quick dab of lipgloss, a little mascara and a touch of colour to my cheeks and I felt ready to face the world once again. I went to the bar and bought another round, a nice Shiraz for me and a Cheddar Valley cider for Harry, and laughed as some boy made an ambitious but clumsy pass at me. I was, like, just so out of his league.
Drunk, happy, surrounded by the vibrant bustle of the pub, I threaded my way through the thickening crowd back to the table. Harry was waiting for my return with his arms thrown wide across the bench. He waggled his eyebrows at me and I laughed and sat next to him. Without hesitation he dropped his arm around my shoulder, and whatever discomfort I felt at the weight of man’s arm around me was easily ignored as I sunk back into my pleasant drunken haze. With a practiced stroke of my hand I pulled the shiny length of my hair forward so that it wouldn’t get pinned and let it fall with a silken rustle over my left shoulder. I smoothed it down, fascinated by how real it felt, the slight tug at my scalp, its rich shine and golden hue a soft backdrop to the glitter of those silver bangles and shiny rings. Placing my wine glass on the table--almost knocking it over, resetting it with a soft giggle--I settled back into the crook of Harry’s arm.
“Feel okay?” he asked.
“I do now,” I answered, and sighed.
***
A few more drinks, an indeterminate time later, still sitting in our booth, drunker than before, the crowd larger, busier, the centre of its voice now here, now there, but always loud, forcing the two of us ever closer together as I smiled up at Harry, holding eye contact for a moment longer than was necessary before coyly dropping my gaze down to my drink. The ruby swirl of my glass seemed captured in the deep crimson of my glossy fingertips. I marvelled at how easily I now held the narrow stem of the glass, the feminine click of my nails as I cradled the drink in my palm. I glanced up again through the thick veil of my eyelashes, and blushed to see how intently he was watching me. “The Bean Being? Yeah, I like that place,” Harry continued as we shared our experiences at the Clinic. “I’m surprised I never saw you there.” If his hand occasionally massaged my shoulder or played with my hair--well, I pretended not to notice. I was struggling to pretend to not notice many things by this point: the fact that I was really a guy and my muted nausea at his intimate touch, the appraising and amused eyes of strangers, and where this whole strange game was inevitably heading. The heady mixture of stress, self-disgust and alcohol was playing havoc with my head--I felt an electric tingle through my body, an almost drug-like euphoria that left me feeling capable of doing . . . almost anything, it seemed.
I nodded, struggling to suppress the urge to giggle hysterically at the absurdity and difficulty of carrying on a normal conversation. “Me too. Started going almost every day. I was a bit worried about money? You know, at first? But when I found out I could pay the same way I opened doors--I mean, just a touch of my hand and cha-ching?--it was like, shopping spree!”
Harry’s thumb stroked the side of my smooth, hairless arm. “Do you even have any idea how much they’re charging you?”
I shrugged. “Nope! Don’t care. I’m not footing the bill, so why should I?”
He shook his head. “Put it this way. Even I think the prices here are outrageous.”
“Oh, come on, Harry! You’re a rock star.” I picked up my wine glass and held it up in mock salute. “You’re like . . . rich! Super rich!”
“Exactly,” he said. He playfully ruffled my hair. “Let’s just say you’re lucky you’re cute enough for me to pick up the tab tonight.”
I giggled. “Lucky me!”
A long sip of wine hid my discomfort at his constant touch. Men are very tactile--their hands are everywhere on a date, constantly reminding you of their presence, of their intention. The drunker I got the easier it became to ignore his expert hands across my body--or rather, ignore how they made me feel. I have no doubt that a real girl would’ve been moist in the crotch and all over the guy by now. Unfortunately for Harry, his deft ministrations did nothing good for me. I mean, yeah, sure, he was my hero and all but that wasn’t going to have me batting for the other team, you know?
Turning back to Harry, I noticed that the lull in our conversation had given him a far-away look in his eye, staring off across the bar without really seeing anything. I gave him a little jab with my elbow. “Hey Harry?” I said. “What you thinking about?”
He looked down and smiled. It was a strange smile, small and a little sad and quickly gone. “Right now?” he answered. “I was thinking about things I’ve seen and done, Cindy, place I’ve been, people I’ve met. I’ve had a long, full life. But mostly?” His arm around my shoulder tightened in a warm hug, and his voice took on a forced gaiety. “I was thinking about you.”
“Why?” I asked in a small voice.
His gaze was captivating. Oh, I knew what was going on, where this was heading. The guy was a player, real smooth and all, and he was totally setting me up for the kill. In some bizarre way it was awesome watching this guy at work--even if I was the target. I mean, what a thing tell your friends--if I had any, that is--Harry Longman pulled me in a bar!
“I’ve been living here for almost a year now,” he said. “And it’s been a very long, very boring year, Cindy. I’ve explored as much of this place as I care to, and gotten to know more people than I wish, and . . . I’m bored.” He sighed. “It’s been nearly two years since I’ve written anything: not one line of verse, not a single note of a song.”
“I’m sorry,” I said in a soft voice, and the thing is: I truly was. It wasn’t something I could really relate to; I’m no artist. But I also knew the ache of denying an important part of oneself, of feeling it wither and die.
Again Harry smiled, and his eye sparkled. “Oh, but don’t be, Cindy,” he said, and his arm at my shoulder drifted to my neck, gently massaging my skin between forefinger and thumb. “This last week, since meeting you--I’ve started writing again.”
“That’s wonderful,” I sighed, trying to deny that his touch at my back felt good. How could this be happening?
“It is wonderful,” he said. “You can’t understand how wonderful it is, Cindy. I tried to deny my loss at first, convinced myself it was a short break, that the creative juices needed time to replenish. But the longer I stared at the blank page, every time I picked up a guitar and couldn’t play anything but old songs--I knew, deep down inside, that I was finished. An old dog with no new stories to tell. And oh, how I raged against that truth! Distracting myself with alcohol, with religion, drugs and . . . women,” he said, and his other hand took mine is his
“Like me?” I said. “Girls like me?”
“Not like you,” he denied. “I’ve never met anyone like you, Cindy.”
“Harry,” I whispered.
He turned to face me without releasing me from his encircling arm. His hand gently cupped my chin and tilted my head up towards his. I stared deep into his eyes, dark and lost. Something inside of me tightly bound and buried deep fluttered and struggled and fell away. My hand clenched and trembled at my side.
His lips met mine. Faint stubble rubbed like fine sandpaper against my chin. Again I breathed in his scent--it had the robust character of a fine aged wine. My soft painted lips pushed up against his. His fingers threaded through my hair and gently held me close. My lips parted almost involuntarily . . . only a little but enough: a sigh, and the tip of my tongue darted out, almost hesitantly tasted his lip, pulled back.
“Cindy.” Harry’s voice was almost a tortured groan.
“Yes,” I agreed, my voice soft, our mouths so close each word flowed like a delicate warm wind across the other’s lips.
Harry’s hand fell away from my head, traced the path of my spine through the thinness of my clingy top, slid around my side and rested, for just a moment, atop my breast before almost reluctantly falling away. I pulled away and he fell back in his seat and stared at me.
“Who are you, Cindy?”
My hand rested softly on his knee. I shrugged, amazed at how delicate and feminine I could make the gesture, surprised at how in control I felt. This was seriously wrong; I had just kissed a man on the mouth; part of me felt like a teenager again, lost and confused; but mostly I felt a strangely drunken apathy to what had happened. “I’m just a. . . .” I swallowed nervously, tasting the truth of what I was about to say. “Girl,” I finished, amazed and quietly sickened at how true that statement seemed to have become.
Harry shook his head vehemently. “No. There’s nothing ‘just’ about you, Cindy. You’re unlike any other woman I’ve met.”
I couldn’t deny the truth of that.
“Something about you messes with my head,” he said, one finger tapping at his temple.
“And you with mine.” My hand drifted up to rest against his arm.
“There’s something about you,” he said, and the way his eyes drifted across my body, taking in my breasts, my smooth arms and sleek legs, long hair and earrings, finishing with a lingering appraisal of my eyes, sent an anxious flutter through my belly. “Something different from the other girls I’ve met here. The way you dress and talk--and the way you act--the things you say--there’s a dichotomy in you I don’t understand.
I’m very sensitive to the music of a person’s voice, Cindy, to the rhyme and rhythm of their body and language. And right now I look at the girl sitting across from me, a very pretty girl in very sexy clothes, but there’s something--discordant--in everything she does.”
I tapped one finger against my lip. “There is?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes, like a video in which the singer and the song don’t quite sync up.”
“We’re in a hospital,” I reminded him. “We’re all a little . . . broken, I guess.”
“Are you?” he asked. “Are you damaged goods?” The way he said it, with a hint of a smile on his weathered face, but with sorrowful eyes that seemed genuinely concerned at the prospect that the young girl sitting across from him could be in pain, nearly made me regret that I couldn’t be what he thought I was. I realized then that I had to get away from Harry. Suddenly I felt that I was losing control of the evening and became afraid of where it might end.
“Maybe a little,” I answered. “No more than you, I’m sure.”
“But I’m very damaged, Cindy,” he said. “More than you know.”
With my head tilted one side, I smiled at him: it was a small but warm gesture, bordering on intimate. I wondered at what game he was playing. My hands drifted to rest, fingers splayed, against his chest. “Tell me, then.”
He stared at me for a long moment. His mouth opened as if he was about speak, but then he quickly looked away. He tried to hide the brief appearance of grief and rage that twisted his features, and when he faced me again he seemed fine. “I exaggerate,” he said, and grinned, a tentative and sheepish expression that despite its falseness looked surprisingly boyish on his weathered face. “I’m fine--really. In such pretty company? How could I not be?”
“Are you, Harry?” I gazed at him levelly. “Are you okay?”
“I am tonight.” His strong arms gathered me close, back into his comfortable embrace. My head rested against his shoulder and I sighed contentedly. “You have no idea how glad I am that you were here these last few weeks.”
“Me too,” I said.
“You want to get out of here?”
I momentarily tensed in his arm. Back in the city, hitting the bars with Tom, hunting women: I knew how the game worked. Get a girl to this point? Sit with her, buy a few drinks, cuddle close and get that kiss? We both knew where this road ended. Ask her to leave the bar with you--there was only one place left to go. Unless I broke away; this was my chance . . . I forcefully relaxed back onto his embrace.
I couldn’t leave him at this point. Harry was trying to tell me something, had been trying all week to reach a point where he felt comfortable enough with Cindy to share something private and important with her. To abandon him now would be unforgivable; it would be a betrayal of a friend.
I gave a mute nod and collected my purse. I stumbled a bit as I stood, steadied by Harry’s strong arm on my elbow. I wasn’t that drunk--I really wasn’t--it was the shoes, the pointy toe pinching painfully, the heel taller and slimmer than I was comfortable in. Fuck, what the hell was I doing?
We threaded our way through the bustling crowd and left the Bacchus Bar. The night air was bracing and cleared my head a little. A small shiver passed through my body. An outfit that seemed sensible enough this afternoon left me exposed to the chill wind that breathed over us.
“Cold?” Harry asked. Hell, in a second he’d be offering me his jacket.
I smiled up at him and shook my head. “I’m fine,” I said, though I felt anything but. I suddenly felt half-naked and ashamed of what I was wearing. Get it together, I told myself. You’ve been at this for weeks now. Just a little longer.
“Would you like to head to my--”
“How about a short walk?” I linked my arm through his. “It’s a beautiful night.”
Harry took a long, quiet moment to stare up at the sky. For a moment he seemed to drink in his surroundings, the muted sounds of the bar behind us, the scintillating spread of stars overhead and the cute young thing hanging off his arm. His eyes were distant and a faint, wistful smile tugged at his lips. Presently he returned and his gaze dropped down to mine. God, I felt an uncomfortable tugging inside at the way he looked at me--his look was so sad, so clearly yearning for something unattainable--that it nearly left me breathless.
“It is, isn’t it? It really is a beautiful night,” he said. “Come with me; I want to show you something.”
We walked in silence, both lost in our own thoughts. I leaned heavily on him, gaining a sudden insight as to why some girls wore shoes they could barely walk in. It didn’t take me long to figure out where he was bringing me, and a secret smile crept onto my face. The old dog. Some people really do love routine. I remembered my first night at the Clinic, under a sky much like this one, racing towards my new home in an electric cart, K sitting ahead of me. For a brief moment the headlight had revealed a private scene: a man with a guitar and his cute late-night conquest.
He brought me to a pleasant, leafy arbour, sheltered against the wind. It was about fifteen minutes distant and we walked in silence. Drinking in the gorgeous night-time beauty, the silence so profound and deep, I struggled to simply enjoy the walk. The pain in my head and his hand on my ass didn’t help. I felt poised on a knife’s edge, on a stiletto’s point between debilitating disgust and drunken, slightly mad delight; masculine embarrassment contrasted with these learned feminine motions; and I focussed on the simple, single truth that Harry needed my help. Without that constant reminder I’m sure something would have snapped.
We sat beneath a large tree, leaning back against the trunk, staring up at the sky through the rustling leaves. Harry’s arm was around my waist and again I leaned my head against his shoulder. He told me a story. I barely took note of the details, lost in the mellifluous rumble of his voice. Three weeks ago, with that other girl, did he tell the same story? As he talked his hand gently and unconsciously stroked my side, a few times daring to drift as high as the soft under curve of my breast. He probably copped a feel or two. I wouldn’t have felt it if he had. The prosthetics were all but dead weight now.
As his story ended we dropped back into silence. He was struggling to tell me something and I was content to allow him to get there in his own time. Once again I confronted the role I played. My mind kept sliding away from the thought. Tomorrow Cindy was going to disappear and I’d sink into the new--male--life K had carved out for me. It was a certainty that I’d never see Harry again. And yeah, I felt the all-too familiar pang at the loss of another good friend, but it also made tonight’s embarrassment easier to bear.
“I’m not sure why I brought you here, Cindy.” Lost in my own thoughts, his voice almost took me by surprise. His words were tainted with sadness. I didn’t want to see the look on his face.
“Why is that?” My voice was soft, encouraging.
“You’re not the first girl I’ve brought here, you know. To this tree, at night.”
I smiled. “I’m sure.”
“It’s pathetic,” he said. “Nothing ever happens. They’re taken in by the fame and--”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I interrupted. “I certainly was.”
He shook his head. “No you weren’t.” His eyes watched me searchingly. “You’re not here for the rock star. You’re not here for the poet. What I can’t figure out--what I like about you, Cindy--is that I have no idea why you’re here, right here, right now, with me. What is it you want?”
“Why do I have to want something?” I asked. “Why can’t I just enjoy being with you?”
“Everybody wants something,” Harry insisted. “_Especially_ you. I’ve never met someone so intensely yearning for something; your whole being thrums with that desire.” His fingertips stroked the length of my exposed leg, and a shiver shot up my spine as surely as if he’d plucked a guitar string. “I doubt you know what it is you want, but it drives you, brought you here--keeps you in my arms even now.
“It’s not sex,” Harry said, his smile only slightly mischievous. “You tremble like a virgin at my every touch. Money? You kept trying to buy rounds and paying for our dates. Popularity? You became embarrassed every single time you spotted people in the bar talking about us. Those are the big three. If you don’t want those--then what?”
“You forgot one thing,” I said, smiling coquettishly (I think) as I tapped him on the temple with one elegant fingernail. “Maybe I am a virgin.” What the hell was I thinking, dropping a line like that?
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said quietly. Smiling, his hand reached up to clasp mine. He held it briefly against his cheek, then closer to his lips, and finally kissed the back of my hand, softly, and again my knuckle. I watched in a kind of horrid fascination as he slowly kissed his way up my forearm.
“Harry,” I protested softly, and went to pull away.
His hand closed tight around my wrist.
“Harry?” I asked, surprised.
“I need to know, Cindy,” he said, and when he looked up I saw such desperate need in those dark and lost eyes that it sent an anxious tremor through my stomach. “No teasing, no flirting; what the hell do you want?”
I stared at him. I felt the wind play across my bared flesh and heard the faint rustle of the leaves overhead. The strong perfume of a nearby garden rode the air and mingled with the taste of wine and strawberry on my lips. His shape was a dark cut-out against the scattered glimmering lights of the hospital behind. My head began to pound again. My heartbeat reverberated loudly in my ears, deafening. I felt hot--burning and flushed; almost dizzy. I swayed back from his grasp and this time he let me go.
“I just wanted to . . . ,” I mumbled, scrambling a few feet away. “To thank you, Harry.”
“Cindy, are you . . . ?”
I stared past him. “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” I said, in another woman’s voice.
***
“You are so going to miss this when I’m gone.”
Her words hurt, though nothing could have made me admit so. We were so good, Katherine and I, at hiding our emotions from each other. In her own way, however, she was honest unlike anyone else I’d ever been with. What she said in passing was as considered and weighed as anything she spoke directly, but this didn’t make it any less true: she knew how I felt about her, and she was telling me that this thing we had--our impossible coming together, these violent passionate meetings--would not endure. Instead I smirked as I lay back on the bed, naked and with arms crossed behind my head. I snorted dismissively. Nineteen years old and certainly not innocent, I remained perhaps a little stupid. In every way that really mattered, she was so far beyond me that it’s painful to try and remember.
The radio murmured in the background. With a rustle and a whisper her dress slipped to the floor and pooled at her feet. A small step and she discarded the night’s costume and stood at the foot of the bed, her athletic body resplendent in dark lingerie. A small lamp in a far corner shed a faint light across the room and caught her in hazy silhouette--as she moved forward it was as if Katherine detached herself from the shadows behind. Her smile was catlike as she snaked up the bed: cold, hungry; and her eyes glittered darkly. The lacy things she wore were inky black, her skin the palest ivory; scars stood out in sharp contracts; I’d never seen a more beautiful woman.
She took me in her mouth and I ran my fingers through her short black hair. My grip tightened and her teeth touched skin and I relaxed and her muffled laugh danced over my cock. After I came I returned the favour until my tongue ached and she thrashed and bucked over me. I pulled her down to the bed and my hands found hers and pinned them back over her head. She struggled and freed her arms and violently flipped me over; I forced myself on top again and thrust forward and entered her. Our lovemaking was aggressive but somehow more sensual than anything I’d known before or since. Her fingers clawed at my back; she bit and cursed me and her eyes flashed with anger and desire and her legs locked behind me and crushed me close. I had never been that close to anyone before. I had never known another person’s body so intimately. My kisses tasted the salt along her cheek and breast and blood at the edge of her mouth.
My own release went unheard beneath the sound of her climax: a wail somewhere between a sob and a howl, a cry of ecstatic abandonment and rage. Katherine always pushed me away after orgasm. There was a raw honesty that flooded through her in the immediate aftermath, and that precious, vulnerable moment she was unwilling or unable to share. This one time--this only time--she held me near. Her arms and legs stayed locked about me and I remained inside of her even as I slowly shrunk. She clung to me with desperation.
“Not yet,” she said, the words catching in her throat. The sweat between our bodies was slick. My hand gently stroked along her smooth leg, played along the top of her stocking, traced the line of a suspender and gently pulled her away until she groaned softly and my softening cock slipped free. I rested my hand, palm flat, against her pussy and felt the heat there. With my other arm I cradled her to me once again, holding her by the back of her neck and massaging the tight, knotted muscles there. The fingers of her hand splayed across my chest, over my heart.
I opened my mouth to speak. I’ll never know what I meant to say. It wouldn’t have made a difference. “Don’t,” she cried, and swallowed my words with a kiss. Her kiss was almost brutal at first, fierce and hungry but then turned soft and lingering. When she pulled away her eyes were wet with tears.
“I love you,” she said, the only time she ever did.
The radio played Harry Longman’s song. As the haunting strains swept over us we descended into lust once again, and for the last time.
***
“Cindy?”
No amount of makeup, no greatness of skill could have concealed the ugliness that distorted my face. Filled with sudden rage I launched myself at Harry. I was on him in a second, slamming him back against the tree. Real fear flared in his eyes as I pressed against him, my hand clutching at his throat, blood-red talons digging into his skin.
Wide eyes stared at me in shock and fear. “Cindy!” Harry croaked. His hand grappled at mine, pulled futilely at my arm but couldn’t dislodge my grip.
“There was a girl,” I said, nearly spitting the words out. “The only thing I’ve ever loved. When I think of her now? I can’t--I can’t remember anymore. Three, four times together, that’s it. And you’re one of those memories, Harry. You’re . . . one of those. One of your fucking songs, the only thing we agreed on, the only thing, God, the one moment Kate and I were together that wasn’t all fucked up and twisted with hate and . . . .” I choked on the swell of emotions in my throat, on my own bile and anger. My hands dropped to his shoulders, pulled him forward, slammed him back against the tree. He winced with the impact. My fingers curled into the meat of his arm and trembled. I felt tears fill my eyes and it made me all the angrier. Where the hell was all this coming from? “But God, it hurts, it fucking hurts to remember, so much, Harry, but it hurts even more not to. . . .”
Our faces were inches apart. He stared at me, no longer with fear but with fascination. My breath came in gasping heaves that almost drowned out his voice. “Who the hell are you?” he whispered.
“I’m . . . Cindy,” I half cried and lunged forward, crushing my open mouth against his.
Harry pulled back in surprise, but only for a moment and then he returned the kiss. His lips parted and my tongue slid into his mouth. I pressed up tight against Harry, almost straddling him, breasts a dull presence between us, my hands clutching at his back, running through his hair. . . . My voice escaped as a muffled moan and I continued to push against him, forcing him back against the tree as my kisses became hungrier, more aggressive. His tongue slid against mine and found my mouth and his stubble rubbed against my chin and I felt his hand slip beneath my skirt and squeeze my nylon-clad ass. Tears streaked down my cheek and those his roving kisses didn’t catch gathered at my chin, hung and glittered momentarily before falling away.
Salt and the sweetness of lip-gloss. Perfume, lilac mingled with night-born eucalyptus and his own masculine muskiness, leather and something spicy. His weathered hand smoothly stroking my thigh, callused fingers sliding through long hair and holding my neck, holding me close. Our frenzied breath loud in my ears, leather rubbing against silk, against bark, the rustling of the leaves beneath us and the wetness of our kisses, his sigh, Cindy’s frantic moan. . . .
“Oh, God. . . .” My mouth trailed kissed across his cheek and I buried my face into his neck and clung to him desperately even as my stomach churned and twisted.
His arms held me tight, his chin pressing into my head, fingers dancing along the strap of my bra as if fretting one of his guitars. His touch swept across my breasts and I felt nothing. The appliance below was dead: nothing. “Cindy. . . .”
Forehead to forehead I landed a kiss on his lips, another, a final soft touch of our lips and I exhaled across his cheek. My eyes opened and found his and held his gaze. I blinked away the tears and smiled tentatively, warmly.
“Katherine,” I whimpered softly.
“What?” Harry said.
The last vestige of memory sank away. I was back at the Clinic, sitting beneath a tree, in Harry Longman’s favourite make-out spot, wearing a skirt, heels, breathing heavily. My eyes widened in horror at what I had just done. I felt hollow and numb.
“Are you okay?” he asked. I noticed he refrained from touching me.
“No,” I answered.
Harry hesitated a moment before speaking. “If I asked you who Katherine was,” he said, “would you tell me?”
“No.”
He nodded. “Would you like me to leave?”
I stared at him, my eyes open and lost, for a long moment before I shook my head no.
We sat down beneath the tree again, though without the intimacy of before. Without his body next to mine I suddenly realized how chilly the night air had become. My bared midriff and short skirt did little to keep me warm, and I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself. Harry watched, sighed, and wordlessly passed me his leather jacket. I accepted it wordlessly.
“I’ve never been able to watch a girl shiver in the cold,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said as I slipped into the jacket.
“I’m not going to see you again after tonight,” he said. “Am I?”
“No, you won’t.”
His hand my hand and gave it a little squeeze. I should have pulled away but instead my fingers curled into his and held tight. “What happened to you?”
“It’s a long story.”
“They always are.”
“You must think I’m crazy,” I asked in a small voice.
He gave a gentle pull with his hand and brought me closer. “We’re all crazy here,” he said.
I nodded mutely.
“You’re crying,” he said.
“Am I?” My fingers came away from my eye damp and smeared with black. “Well . . . fuck.” I rubbed my fingers dry against my skirt. “I thought this mascara was waterproof,” I added, and somehow that seemed the final ignominy of a long and exhausting evening.
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
I nodded.
“Anything.”
“Tell me what it was that you wanted from me.”
“Oh, that,” Harry said, waving one hand dismissively. “I’ve been meaning to tell you all week, but it hardly seems important now.” He shrugged. “I’m dying, Cindy.”
***
The next morning, after a few hours of fitful sleep, I dragged myself into the bathroom and showered and took care of necessities and even shaved my legs and pits--one last time. I decided to put extra special effort into getting ready for my meeting with Doctor Scooter.
I went through the process of getting ready in a slightly numb, detached haze. Cindy would be effectively dead by this afternoon. For some reason I felt like sending her off with a proper show of respect. She was a good girl, after all. Maybe I figured that I’d misjudged her. I didn’t want to think about it though. It was easier to lose myself in the morning routine.
From the back of the closet I pulled out an item I’d eyed with trepidation since moving to the Clinic: a pair of four-inch Jimmy Chou black leather stilettos, the same I’d worn that very first night to throw off the pursuit. I’d been wearing heels for three weeks now but I hadn’t dared wear anything that . . . risky, yet. Once I started with that it just seemed right to follow through with all the other things I’d been reluctant to try on: my laciest, skimpiest panties and the matching suspender belt and wispy, silk stockings. I hadn’t worn anything so overtly feminine since that first night K dressed me up in the motel room to throw off the pursuit.
Then I struggled into a tight, just-above-the-knees skirt that hugged my contours like a second skin. It hobbled my stride, forcing small, mincing steps--but with those heels, man, did it ever give me a delightfully sexy ass-swaying wiggle. Hell, there’s no way I could’ve tugged the zipper shut if I hadn’t laced the corset that extra inch tighter. It left me slightly breathless and flushed but for some reason that left me feeling all the more feminine. Finally I slipped into a tight blouse, leaving the top breast-baring buttons undone. Why the hell not, I figured. Cindy deserved a proper seeing off. She really did.
I also spent the extra time on the makeup. Took my time shaving and followed up with the concealer and foundation and all the other shit that made of my face a flawless canvas. I blended the eyeshadows and worked the mascara and coloured in my lips and put to use all the practice and knowledge I’d accumulated during my stay at Asklepios. After carefully re-painting my nails I dusted my bared flesh with some shimmering powder and positively glowed by the time I finished. Not bad. Not bad at all. Scooter’s girls would be proud. I’d learned a lot over the last few weeks.
Long dangling earrings jigged across my shoulders as I turned this way and that in the full-length mirror. God, I was hot. It really was a shame Cindy was not long for this world. I’d certainly do her if, you know, that wasn’t me in the mirror. I ran my hands along my curves down to my knees and leaned forward, flashing my cleavage.
“Good-bye, Cindy,” I purred. Beautiful emerald-green eyes glittered enigmatically as I gave her a kiss. My lips left a half-formed pink imprint on the glass. My voice dropped to a whisper. “Just between you and me? I’ll think I’m going to miss you.”
***
An hour later I sat at the edge of a medical bed in Scooter’s examination room in the Meditrine Clinic. Sterilized stainless steel gleamed under bright florescent lights. Tools and sharp-edged implements glistened from their trays and from behind locked glass. Similar to the man’s underground surgical room, this one was crammed from wall-to-wall with books and charts, and hi-tech equipment, but here it was all kept clean and orderly. A long counter cut off the far end of the room.
Unlike the soothing designs of the Hygieia Centre--despite all its modernist touches--this place felt like a hospital: a place where people died.
“How you feeling, Girlie?” the doctor asked, perched on a high stool.
“Fine,” I grunted. “Tired.”
Scooter watched me intently as he worked. “Busy last light, I’m sure,” he said. “How are the ribs?”
I shrugged. “Not bad. Hurts a bit when I make a sudden movement.”
“Then don’t make sudden movements,” he said. The tone of his voice clearly added ‘idiot’. “Have you been taking those painkillers? They help?”
Suspicious, the way he asked about those pills. “Yeah.”
With both my shirt and the corset off I shivered in the air-conditioned cool room. Scooter’s fingers probed at my ribs, his gentle touch belied by the size of his hands. He nodded with approval when I didn’t wince in pain. His stethoscope shone coldly as it slid across my chest.
“You seem surprisingly calm,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t I be? There something you’re not telling me?” A tremor crept into my voice and I fought it down. I wanted to have words with this man. Oh, how I wanted discuss certain concerns that I had. Thing is, it’s not a good idea to have a go at the man who’ll be holding a knife to your face later in the day.
“Most people are nervous before surgery.” Scooter said. “That’s normal.” A wide, toothy grin split his face. “But maybe you’re more sad than scared?”
“Sad?”
His hand jerked in the general direction of my discarded clothes. “All that fem stuff. After all, you’ve gotten so good at wearing--”
“You know?” I interrupted. “I think that’s what I’m going to fucking miss most: these pleasant chats of ours. That and the goddamn beauty sessions.”
Scooter laughed. “Any time.”
The sight of the doctor and his mockery filled me with such rage that I had to look away and cast my eye across the room. One door led into a small lavatory; another, of transparent glass, back into his office and waiting room, with its desk and computer, stacks of books and files, and an expensive-looking leather sofa. Behind that closed door sat Cindy’s Mom, legs crossed at the knee, one foot bobbing with impatient anxiety.
“Interesting,” Scooter murmured. I returned my attention to the man and found his hands latched on to my tits, his thumb roughly massaging the small, grey nubs at the tip.
“Hey!”
He flicked curious, dark blue eyes my way. “Nothing? No sensation?”
“No, thank you very much. Keep your hands to yourself, yeah?” I nearly punched his hands away. “It’s been a couple of days since I’ve felt anything from them.”
I watched warily as he brought his face close to my chest. He took a little sniff and then, before I could stop him, his tongue flicked out across a nipple. Nose wrinkling in disgust he turned away and spat.
“Jesus Christ, Scooter!” I shoved him away and crossed my arms across my bare chest. “What the fuck’s your problem?”
“Some discharge, slightly oily, sweet smelling,” he muttered, nodding to himself as he walked over to the counter. He washed his hands clean before turning back to me. “They must be at the very end of their cycle. Another day and the prosthetics would have fallen off on their own.” His eyes flicked down to my crotch. “Down there?”
“Fucking thing fell away this morning.”
He snorted. “Must’ve been a relief.”
“Like you wouldn’t believe,” I agreed, nodding emphatically. “Five minutes later I was in the bathroom with the Victoria Secret’s catalogue. Jacked off like there’s no tomorrow.”
The doctor returned to his examination, shaking his head in mild distaste. He tapped my knee, took my blood pressure--he noted that it was a little high--and shone a light in my eye and did the whole doctor thing in silence. I did my best to remain calm throughout as he jotted notes and information about me in the patient chart he carried in hand. When he spoke the seriousness of his voice took me by surprise.
“David?” he asked, and I raised an eyebrow at hearing him use my name. “Listen, all joking aside: do you like this girlie shit?”
I glared at him. “You’re joking, right?”
“Not at all,” he answered, meeting my gaze levelly.
“I hate it! Scooter, I fucking hate all this bullshit.” I gestured angrily towards the corset, the clingy top, clawed at the skirt I was wearing. “I’m a guy, yeah? You have any idea how embarrassing this crap is?”
“So it was all an act, then?”
“Of course it was!”
“Even last night?”
I didn’t answer straight away. When the quiet became uncomfortable I reluctantly asked, “What do you mean?”
“You know damn well what I mean,” Scooter answered. He dragged a small monitor on a wheeled cart over from its corner and tapped at a couple of keys. A little earlier he’d used the same computer to show some of the proposed changes they were going to make to my face. Any other time, watching a doctor manipulate my features on a screen, turning me into--well, someone else--would’ve been just a little freaky. But the face was male, and that’s all that mattered. I felt a desperate need to return to a normal masculine life, no matter what it was.
The screen came alive and displayed a still frame of some video footage. It showed Harry and me, sitting in the Bacchus Bar.
I sighed. “What do you want me to say?”
Scooter tapped on the space bar and cycled through a few short clips: the brief kiss on the lips between Harry and I; my hand on his knees and our close conversation; standing together and leaving the bar, arm in arm. I flushed hot with humiliation at the sight of myself, flirting with another man, sitting with him, cuddling into his embrace, playing the bar bimbo, blonde, pretty, stupid. I had to physically restrain my hand from clutching at the sharp, angry pain that flared through my stomach and head.
Scooter glanced back at me. “You sure you don’t like this stuff . . . Cindy?”
My face burned with fury and shame. “Fuck you, Jonathon.”
“Because you sure seemed to be enjoying yourself.”
I nearly choked on my anger. I jumped off the bed and went to stalk out of the room. I caught Mom--fuck it, K’s--inquisitive glance from the waiting room and couldn’t meet her eyes.
“Why’d you do it?” Scooter called after me.
“Screw you, doc,” I snapped over my shoulder.
His voice reached me just as I went to leave. “What you did, David? It may have saved his life.”
I hesitated at the door. Glancing back I was surprised at the sympathy he displayed. “What do you mean?”
“Harry Longman,” he stated, and then gestured for me to come back. “And drop the theatrics, will you? Come sit down. Where the hell were you going, dressed liked that?”
I glanced down and saw the grey, inflexible mounds still affixed to my bared chest. With a sigh I returned to the examination table. “You’re an asshole,” I muttered.
“So are you,” he said. “Yet here we are, apparently both capable of the occasional good deed.” Scooter released a deep sigh and picked up my clothes and tossed them over to me. I got dressed in silence as he continued to talk. “How did you get Harry to change his mind?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I muttered.
“Mr Longman is dying, David. That’s why he’s at the Asklepios Clinic.”
“Yeah, I know,” I answered, sliding my top on over the corset. “He told me last night.”
“Did he tell you that we’ve been trying to get him into surgery for months now? It’s an experimental procedure--risky, but the only shot he’s got. He’s refused up till now.”
I grudgingly turned my full attention back to Scooter. “No. He didn’t mention it.”
“Funny that. Because this is the thing: time and again he’s said no, not interested. No reason to justify the risk, he said. And then you came along, David. You just breezed into his favourite hangout prancing around in a skirt and a few hours later you’re his best friend. A year he’s been here and you’re the first person he’s connected with. You go out, have a couple of dates . . . and suddenly he changes his mind.”
“Really? Hey, that’s great news.”
“He called you his ‘broken flower’. A new muse. He said that any world that contains such fantastic and strange creatures as you is one worth struggling to stay in.”
Scooter’s words brought a wide grin to my face. Well . . . holy shit. Something good did come of last night. I hoped that Harry pulled through. I really did.
“So how did you do it?”
I shrugged. “He was lonely.”
“He was lonely?” Scooter snorted. “Gee, I wonder how our team of expert psychiatrists could’ve missed that. ‘He was lonely.’ You figured that out all on your own?”
I glared at him. “Yeah, I guess I’m clever that way. The man wasn’t just lonely; he was ready to die. We’re all lonely, Scooter. That’s human. But only a few of us are ready to die because of it.”
“Fine,” Scooter answered, and he sounded reluctantly interested. “Then how’d you know that was his problem?”
I shrugged again. “How the hell should I know? I just knew. It’s the same way that I could tell that you’re an egomaniac jerkwad.” I jerked a finger in K’s direction. “The same way I knew from the moment I met her that she’s a fucking dyke nutcase . . . and that, yeah, I can trust her implicitly.” I did up the final button on the blouse I wore. Interesting. Three weeks ago it took all my concentration to work a button with those claws on my finger. Now I could manage almost unconsciously. Borderline miraculous, that was. “Although in Harry’s case . . . I mean, c’mon, have you even listened to his music? Read his lyrics? It’s all there. The guy’s lonely. He’s lost. He’s . . . bored, hell, I don’t know, looking for something, someone.”
Scooter ran one beefy hand through his thick mess of hair, thinking. “And so let me guess--Cindy was just what he was looking for?”
My laugh was hollow. “Cindy? Hell no. Seriously, you don’t think a guy like Harry scores a girl like Cindy any time he wants? You say the Clinic’s been watching him--tell me Scooter, how many girls just like Cindy has he met and made out with over the last year? How many has he led into the park, or back to his room?
“For a guy like Harry? Girls like Cindy are a dime a dozen and you know what? They do nothing to kill the loneliness. Hell, they make it worse. Waking up in bed next to someone and somehow you feel more disconnected than before? God, it kills, Scooter, it fucking kills and the only thing that makes you feel better is going out again and doing it all over again.” I shook me head, earrings and golden bangs fluttering about my face. “Cindy was the last thing he was looking for.”
Scooted looked at me quizzically. “Then--”
I sighed. “Harry needed . . . hell, whatever it is I’ve been since K brought me here. A pretty girl. A cute groupie to flatter his pride, arm candy who looked good hanging off his arm . . . a flirt who could turn him on and make him feel like a man. It’s what he thinks he needs but it’s not what he wants. What he wants is a friend-- to hang out with, shoot the shit and match him drink for drink. Conversation and, hell, you know--the whole bullshit male-bonding thing . . . something more than a gushing star-struck bimbo.”
“Is that what you are, then?” Scooter asked, intrigued.
I glared at him, my anger and barely concealed sense of betrayal simmering to the fore once again. “It’s what I made myself into,” I said.
“Just like that,” Scooter said. His voice was doubtful.
I frowned. “No, not ‘just like that.’ You have any idea how hard it was, to relax into his arms?” I waved my hand towards the computer monitor, still displaying a frozen image of Harry and Cindy in a relaxed embrace. God, they looked so happy, Harry just a little bemused but so very, very content; and Cindy, her smile so simple, those beautiful eyes firmly set upon her man. “Shit, every touch, every . . . kiss, fuck, it made me sick Scooter, made me want to throw up.”
“So why--”
“Because he’s a friend!” I shouted.
Why the fuck couldn’t people understand? Harry was a friend. I’d just met the man but it’s not time that determines the value of a friendship. I owed the man and I take that kind of responsibility seriously. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for a friend. In a world where love fails and family betrays, friendship is the only thing worth believing in. Real friendship--friends that are constant in all things--trustworthy--and there when you need them; how rare and precious such a thing is! Harry had found his reason to stay in this world--Cindy--and in some twisted way he’d become mine my reason as well.
Even if he didn’t ask for my help, couldn’t ask for it--there’s no way I could’ve let the guy die. And if Cindy was the only one that could get close to him . . . then fuck it, I’d be Cindy for him. I’d . . . .
I kissed him. I . . . kissed a man. A man, for chrissake! I’d been trying to forget about last night. Obsessing about Cindy to kill the doubts, losing myself in routine, keep my mind busy. But some things you should never ignore, can never forget. Phantom sensations lurked at the edge of thought: a man’s hand caressing my ass, a man’s tongue sliding against mine, what the fuck had I done, what had I . . . done?
“David?” Scooter’s voice came from far away. “David!”
I gagged. Bile rose in my throat. That . . . bastard, that selfish weak piece of shit! Saving that man’s ass just to preserve some pathetic memory? Wasted--ruined, tainted. Now when I thought of Kate and that song and that one good memory . . . I’d always remember Harry fucking Longman and his fingers digging through my hair, his cock swelling beneath my hand . . . his smell, leather and age still clinging to me. My palm felt slick and I saw blood there, beading up where my fingers has cut the skin. White knuckles. Red palm--and nails.
Strong hands grabbed my head on both sides and pulled me out of myself. “David!” doctor Jonathon demanded. “What you did--it was good, David, you may have saved his life.”
Grudging respect--I saw it in Scooter’s eyes. The disgust I felt over last night burned away before the almost blinding hatred I felt for the man in front of me now. This was not Harry’s fault; Harry was a friend. But Jonathon Bridges was a man I had trusted, and who had betrayed me, and if I didn’t need him I could have killed him right then and there. I really could have.
“No more,” I nearly growled. “No more . . . Cindy. No more bullshit. Stop this, Jonathon, stop what you’re doing to me.”
“What do you mean?” He face went deliberately blank.
“You think I’m fucking stupid?” I hissed. “Where were they? In the goddamn painkillers? Subliminal conditioning in the music during the beauty sessions? Or was it in my food?”
“David, you’re not. . . .”
“Where were the drugs?” I screamed at him. “These motherfucking headaches, the way I’ve been acting--you don’t think I know when I’m being fucked around, you son-of-a-bitch?” Over in the waiting room K watched us curiously, but the heavy glass door blocked the sounds of my ranting. “I know who I am! I’m a man, dammit! I’m not Cindy! I don’t-- last night-- I said I trusted you but that didn’t give you the right to--”
A quickly made decision flicked across his eyes. “It was for your own good,” Scooter interrupted, his voice steady, his face unflinching confronted with my anger.
“So you admit--”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “The Asklepios Clinic drugged you, David. Does that make you feel better? Does it alleviate the guilt that you’ve been prancing around like a girl for the last three weeks? Last night was entirely the drugs. Blame it on the drugs, David, blame it all on us if it’ll make you feel better.”
My hands trembled at my side, aching from the restraint. “You bastard.”
“I told you the first time we met: the Asclepieion is my top concern, David, not you. Your disguise was a good one but not good enough. It wasn’t up to my standards. The experts helped to polish the rough edges but it was the mannerisms that were going to give you away. The Clinic helped with those as well. And it worked. You survived intact and tomorrow you’ll wake up a new man.”
“What did you do to me?” I demanded.
“A mild hypnotic--nothing more. The compound was air-born and slipped in through the ventilation at night. All that reading and practice you did? The drug simply helped your hard work stick. A little positive reinforcement helped subdue your natural guilt over acting like a girl. Your own obsession with Harry Longman carried it that final step.”
“And the headaches?”
He hesitated. “Not an uncommon side-effect. Nothing serious.”
The bastard was lying; I could tell. “You still had no right. . . .”
“I had every right to do what I did,” he stated, and loudly slammed shut the patient chart in his hand. “This is my Clinic! You are here at my sufferance!” His crazy red hair jumped and shook as he accentuated each point by slamming his fist against the solid metal bedframe. “You are alive because of me!”
“And Harry’s alive because of me,” I answered levelly.
Mouth open mid-rant, Scooter stopped. He stared at me for a moment, and then suddenly grinned widely. “This is true,” he said. “Consider us even?”
“Not even close,” I said.
Doctor Jonathon Bridges nodded. “Fair enough,” he said, and shrugged, and I saw how little importance he attached to my forgiveness. “For what it’s worth, the self-conditioning should fade quickly. If you don’t try to act feminine, you won’t, though some of the learned behaviours might slip through unconsciously. Things like brushing back your hair; and even that will fade quickly in the absence of continued reinforcement. Even drug-induced hypnosis is just hypnosis; it can’t make you do anything you’re very opposed to.
“So make your farewells to Cindy. I’ll make sure everything’s prepped and ready. We’ll be ready to start within the hour.”
The doctor left the room, leaving me along at the edge of the examination table. I stared at my red-tipped fingers, at the sexy stiletto spike and the delicate leather strap that wound its way up my ankle and calf. Long blonde hair fell in a whispering cascade across my shoulders. I licked my lips and tasted the makeup there that made my mouth full and shiny. With every movement I felt the tickle of lace against soft and sensitive skin; suspenders tautened and loosened as I crossed my legs. The feminine gesture came so easily it was frightening.
I wouldn’t miss any of this. I really wouldn’t.
***
With steps that were more than a little precarious, I joined Agent K in the waiting room. Those shoes did an amazing thing for my ass and posture, but left me feeling like I was walking on stilts. What the hell had I been thinking, wearing these fucking things? Damn Scooter and his goddamn drugs. With a well-conditioned movement I crossed my legs and smoothed down the skirt as I sat on the sofa next to K. The Clinic’s mind-games exposed, I found myself terribly aware of how unnatural these gestures were, and how easily they came. A faint shimmer woven into the hosiery caught the light as I carefully crossed my legs and delicately folded my hands over my knees. Without the prosthetic these gestures became just a tad dangerous; last thing I wanted was to crush my nads, yeah? I was discovering that it’s a hell of a lot harder to be properly dainty and feminine with cock and balls trapped in silk.
Agent K put aside the magazine she’d been idly leafing through. The motherly façade fell away but a strangely enigmatic smile remained as she turned to me. I briefly wondered whether she had known about Scooter’s actions; grudgingly admitted that I’d probably never know; and that she would have approved even if she knew.
“David,” she stated, as if determining my identity for the conversation. “Nervous?”
“Not really,” I answered. I ran a hand through my long hair and held it up for inspection. “Anxious to get rid of all this nonsense, to be honest.”
The corner of her mouth twitched into a small smile. “Really? By all accounts, Cindy has been quite comfortable these last few weeks.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear,” I said. “I’ve been saying since day one I hate this shit. A couple of weeks of being pampered ain’t about to change that. I’m a guy, K. I can’t tell you how embarrassing all this crap is. Once you get me settled down, believe me--I’ll never wear a skirt again. Ever.”
“Not even for me?” she asked softly. Her smile grew by the slightest degree, turned just a little playful and maybe--something more? “Would you play Cindy for me?”
God, this woman was a tough nut to crack! I held her gaze searchingly and tried to read her intentions--whether she was joking, serious, desperate or maybe just horny. Her eyes glittered darkly and her thin smile didn’t waver. K’s pose was relaxed and slightly mirrored mine, neither welcoming nor chastising. But that curious half-smile, the suggestion of quiet laughter lurking behind her lips; what the hell was that all about? Self-deprecating, or was she including me in a joke; was I the joke? I opened my mouth to answer; cleared my throat and glanced away.
It’s a good thing my legs were crossed. In a skirt this tight there’s no hiding a boner. Damn this woman! She puts me in panties and drugs me and I ought to hate her but somehow she’s got me more intrigued than any woman I’ve met in years. A snappy comeback: it’s all I wanted at that point but three weeks of playing Cindy seemed to have dulled . . . what? Certain rough edges, some of my cynicism? Or has it stolen my confidence? Scooter’s assurances that the drugs would wear off quickly did little to ease my fears at that point.
K’s hand softly resting over mine startled me back to attention. “Has it really been that bad, being a girl?” she asked, her eyes turning by degrees more serious.
“How the hell do you expect me to answer that?” I answered. “How can I answer that?”
“Tell me you hated it,” she said, her fingers sliding into my palm, pulling my clasped hands apart. She held one up as if examining forensic evidence. My nails caught the light in glimmering rainbow hues. “Tell me you hate having long nails and playing with the beautiful colours and how slender they make your fingers seem and how they force the way you hold your hand.”
What the hell? “I hate it,” I said, even as her soft touch drifted across the back of my hand and sent a delicate shudder up my spine.
“Tell me you hate the smooth skin,” she continued, and her hand slid up my arm, lightly caressing my bared forearm. “The delicate scents that tickle the senses and sensual softness that welcomes every touch; do you hate that as well?”
“I hate it,” I insisted. Her posture was gradually shifting towards me and she leaned closer as her hand reached to my shoulder and trailed a single nail along my bared collarbone and made me shiver.
“This?” Her fingers outlined the bump beneath my top made by the edge of the corset beneath; her fingers traced the contour down my back and tickled the skin beneath the tightly drawn laces. “And this?” Her other hand found my knee and softly kneaded the flesh above through the silky thinness of the stockings. “Do you hate the feel of lace and silk against your skin and how every touch seems magnified against shaven skin and--,” her hand at my back slipped down my side and rested confidently at my tapered waist--,“the tightness, constriction and control, the flushed breathlessness and--”
“More than anything,” I groaned, cutting her off, the pain in my groin growing unbearably. “I hate it.” With one hand on my thigh and the other at my waist, K faced me directly. Her face was close to mine.
“Your makeup is beautiful,” she said. “Your face so very pretty.” She released my thigh to draw one fingernail along my cheekbone. “Those eyes so bright and cheeks--flushed. Your lips fresh and wet and. . . .”
She leaned close. Her lips found mine. She made an appreciative sound and exhaled as she pulled away.
“Soft,” she breathed. K’s smile was more than simply playful but still hinted at amusement. “Do you--”
“Yes. Yes.”
Her eyes held mine. She continued to hold my waist. I felt pressure at my thigh again; it nearly made me jump. Softly but insistently her touch pried my crossed legs apart. Her fingers toyed at the edge of my stockings and danced up one thin garter strap and crept beneath the taut surface of the skirt. With my legs spread my cock sprang free of its lacy prison and tented my skirt. K’s fingers coiled, one by one, around my member and held it firmly as it swelled in her grasp.
“Tell me you hate it. Tell me you hate it all.”
My hands, sitting limply at my side through all this, suddenly returned to life and grabbed her by the side and by the back of the head. My fingers entangled themselves through her hair and held her as tightly as she held my member. Throughout the last two weeks and those intimate moments I shared with Harry last night--through it all my cock stayed limp and cowed. Two months alone, bereft of intimacy, weeks without release of any kind . . . but a single glance from this fucking woman and everything leapt to attention and now--
God, I haven’t wanted a woman this badly since--
“Kiss me, David,” Katherine whispered.
I pushed forward and nearly crushed her against the sofa. I forced my mouth against her as my grip pulled her to me. Our tongues danced and her breasts crushed up against my fake ones. Her grip on my penis never wavered. I kissed her eye, her neck; her breath filled my ear and her other hand stroked my nylon-sheathed leg. My hand slid beneath her sweatshirt and fumbled for her tits. A throaty female moan reached my ears: whose? My thumb flicked her nipple and I bit softly into her flesh.
K smiled a Cheshire-cat grin, wide and hungry. Her eyes shone with delight. She brought her mouth next to my ear and her voice flowed across my skin, searing, a siren’s call that was impossible to ignore.
“Kiss me, Cindy,” she whispered.
She pushed and I collapsed back into the sofa and she followed me down until she straddled me. Her lips found mine and she forced her tongue into my mouth and explored with such passionate exuberance my toes curled in their four-inch perch. I tasted her makeup and my own as well; our perfumes mingled and when she pulled away momentarily her scent clung to me possessively. Blonde tangled with her inky black swirled at the edge of my vision as I sank into my training and into the cushion and an easy lassitude. Both her hands roamed and caressed their way across my body now as her crotch ground against mine. I passively received the kisses she rained upon me. Her rough frottage sent a dull throb through my injured side but also brought me to an eager edge. She paused as she sensed my poised readiness. K’s lips--thin and pale--hovered an inch away from mine--pink, glistening, ready.
“Tell me you hate this,” she said and smiled wickedly
I found her gaze and matched her smile. “I hate you,” I answered.
Something flickered darkly behind those veiled eyes. “I know,” she said, and her mouth found mine for one final, passionate embrace. Our bodies collided and for a brief, intense moment I felt the entirety of this crazy woman pressed against me. I shuddered and released a fierce grunt that was swallowed by her frenzied kisses. I came with an intensity I hadn’t felt in ages. A moment later she pulled away and left me lying on the sofa.
“I like Cindy,” Agent K said, standing over me. Her eyes danced across my body as I basked in the luxurious sensation of one of the strangest but most needed fucks of my life. She smirked at the state she’d left me in. “I think you like her as well.”
I smiled wanly, well aware of the image I presented: the skirt hiked up over my stockings, my top at some time tossed aside leaving the corset beneath exposed, the smeared lipstick, the wetness dripping down my leg, and the tangled sweep of long blonde hair draped over the edge of the sofa; a girl well and happily fucked. From my reclining position I watched her warily. “I don’t get you, K.”
With slow, slightly awkward steps she walked over to Scooter’s desk and brought back a chair, and I wondered if she’d gotten off on our little encounter as well. First finding and then struggling back into my top, I slowly pulled myself together. When she sat across from me her expression was unexpectedly serious. Wordlessly she passed me my purse. I pulled out a few tissues to clean myself up a bit and then started to fix my makeup. It seemed like a wasted effort, considering I’d be heading into surgery soon, but I sensed that K wanted to talk without interruption.
“David, this will be the last time we ever meet.”
I paused in my ministrations and my eyes flicked from the compact over to her--and then back. I gave the slightest of nods and she continued. I’d known this, of course, even as I tried to ignore the fact. Once I was relocated into a new life there’d be no more need for an Agent K in my life.
“David, I . . . like you.” She sounded slightly annoyed by the statement. “The man I met a month ago struck me as an arrogant, misogynistic son-of-a-bitch. He was cocky beyond belief and as condescending as any man I have ever encountered. This had no influence on my decision to disguise him as a girl. You have to believe that. I still believe that it was the best way to ensure your survival at the time. But I can not deny that I took great pleasure in giving you breasts and placing you in panties.”
I snapped the compact shut and put away the lip gloss. My smile was sweet and shiny and didn’t reach my eyes.
“But that same arrogance--that cockiness, despite what you’ve been through. . . .” She looked away and sighed. “You excite me, David, in a way that makes me hate myself. That very arrogance I despise draws me to you even as it makes me want to try and . . . humiliate you and leave you somehow diminished.” She paused as if struck by a sudden thought. “But you know all this,” she added. “Even before the letter I left, you understood all this. I suspect that somehow you understand me far too well, David.
“While I was away from the Clinic my thoughts turned to you often--to both you and Cindy.” She smiled slightly after she said ‘Cindy’. “Strange how they seem two different people to me, though I see both sitting before me now.” She shook her head. “But I know that is not true, and strangely enough that may be what draws me to you the most. At first I thought it was because through you the opportunity existed to take my revenge on a man from my past . . . and then because of the desires I thought long buried that you awakened. Finally I discovered in Cindy not the debased male I expected but rather--,” she smiled weakly, “and I felt. . . .”
The eyes she turned to me were weary and sad. “These games we play, David, and all these self-doubts . . . these ghosts of the past that haunt us. Perhaps it is good thing that we will never meet again. But if we had first met, somehow, in a different place and time . . . I wonder. What would have happened between us, do you think?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, K.”
She continued to look at me searchingly. Ghosts of the past; she had no idea. Finished with my makeup I closed the purse. “You asked me if being a girl has been that bad,” I said.
K nodded.
“It has been,” I said. “Worse, even. I’ve hated it. But I don’t regret it, K. If I could go back and reconsider squealing on Steele, knowing what I’d have to go through . . . I’d do the same goddamn thing all over again.”
“Really? Why?”
“For you,” I answered.
With a hidden sadness of my own I watched her retreat, her expression turning blank. Sometimes it’s easier to give away your own feelings than to have to accept someone else’s. K could grudgingly believe that she felt strongly about someone else, but being cared for in return? No, not that. She couldn’t believe she deserved it. Even as she distanced herself I continued talking. I wasn’t really saying this for her benefit, anyway. Like I’ve said, at the end of the day it’s all about me.
“You’re cool, K. I mean, you’re a total lesbo bitch, yeah, and you’re a ball-busting pain in the neck . . . but damn if that ain’t what I like about you. You say you’re attracted to the stuff in me you hate? And you hate yourself for that? Yeah, well I guess I’m the same, only there’s no guilt in my end. I guess I just like my girls a bit broken.
“So you want to fuck with me out of some twisted need to deal with the past? That’s cool. It’s weird . . . I mean, it’s seriously weird . . . but it sure ain’t boring, K. And, God, have I ever been bored. Which is what it really boils down to in the end, I suppose. The other reason I’d do all this bullshit all over again.”
“Why would that be?” she asked.
“It’s been fun.” Her disbelieving gaze made me smile. “Seriously. K, I honestly don’t think I could’ve lasted at NeoPharm much longer. I was so bored. Holy shit, but I didn’t even know how bored I’d become.
“I mean, sure, I didn’t know it, but another year or two at NeoPharm, being that corporate cock-head I was trying to be? Yeah, I would’ve done something stupid eventually. I’m sure of it. Taken up some dumbass Extreme sport or developed a goddamn drug habit or started picking fights with street gangs in bad bars. Because, wow, that man you first met? That’s not me. God, that’s so not me. The arrogant son-of-a-bitch? Totally not me.”
K looked dubious.
I laughed. “Want to know the truth, K?” I leaned in close and spoke in a loud stage whisper. “I’ve been playing nice!” Sitting back in the sofa, I swept my hair aside so it wouldn’t get pinned beneath my back. “I mean, shit, I help some bastard out and suddenly Scooter thinks I’m a good guy or something? God, you guys don’t have a clue . . . not even you, K. I’ve been playing nice for years and I don’t think I could’ve handled it for much longer.”
When K didn’t interrupt I knew that I’d caught her interest. She was happy to sit back and let me talk. What was it about this woman that made me want to spill my guts? These weeks of stress, the drugs and the craziness of last night and, as Scooter put it, the very reasonable fear of heading into surgery--all of it was bubbling under the surface, simmering beneath my skin, hotter than ever after the heavy petting session with K. I mean, hell, I was sitting there wearing suspenders and a bra, with my own cum drying on the inside of my shaven thigh and pink panties, sitting opposite a woman I might be falling in love with--how fucked up was that? No wonder I wasn’t quite right in the head.
Still, no matter how giddy with booze or lust or worry you might be, there’s some stuff you just never share.
So instead of telling her the whole truth about my past I grappled for a story I read around at Akiko’s one night. “It’s like that story--the one with the scorpion,” I explained. She looked at me strangely and I continued. “You know, the fable?”
K shrugged.
“It’s the one with the--well, some stupid furry critter. Or a frog. Yeah, that’s it, a frog and one day this scorpion walks up and asks for a ride across a river. Now the scorpion’s acting all nice and the frog’s not too clever and so they hop in the water and start swimming across. The scorpion, yeah, it’s come a long way and it really, really wants to cross that river. It’s on a quest, see, headed for some wondrous place or something. So it’s doing its damnest to play nice. And then, half-way across the river the frog feels a sting on its back. As everything goes numb and the frog feels itself dying, it manages to, well, croak: “but why? Now we’re both going to die.” And the scorpion, it just shrugs and answers, “it’s in my nature.”
“There’s a touch of the scorpion in me, K, and I suspect in you as well,” I finished.
She frowned. “Are you trying to suggest that we are both suicidal?”
“No! No, of course not. What I’m saying is that there’s something fundamental to both of us, something bad, and we’re trying to change but what we really need to ask is . . . why do we bother? There’s no point. People don’t change. People can’t change, not who they are, who the really are, anyway. New names and faces are one thing, but if I’ve learned anything these last few weeks it’s this: you can force me into a skirt and make me prance around like a giddy cheerleader, you can even drug me so that I’ll play nice, but at the end of the day I’m the same fucked-up prick that I’ve always been and that’s not ever going to change, no matter how hard I or anyone tries.”
K stared at me for a very long time, frowning, and I matched her gaze calmly. Eventually there was a beep from her purse. She retrieved her mobile. Her brow furrowed momentarily as she read a message. “I have to step out for a moment,” she said, and the face she showed me was coolly indifferent. “Jon will be back soon.” Even as she spoke I could see it in her eyes, or rather in how she had difficulty making eye contact with me: she was detaching herself; she was saying her final farewell. Once she stepped through the door I really would never see her again, and I felt an unexpected sadness rise at the thought.
“Good luck, David.”
“K, wait!”
She hesitated at the threshold. I stood and walked over to her. Even in these ridiculous heels I remained shorter than her. There was both apprehension and impatience in her eyes before she glanced away. Taking her hand in mine, I gave it a squeeze. “I’ll miss you.”
For a moment she was with me in the room once again, fully present and her finger tightened briefly in my grasp. “You’re wrong,” she said, fiercely. “People can change!”
K pulled away. She left the room, leaving me alone.
***
Sitting in the chair K has used I could still smell her lingering scent. Thinking of Agent K, and then of Harry Longman and doctor Scooter, I waited to be summoned into surgery. Mostly I thought about Cindy Long and my mind wound itself through the dark recesses of memory and lost itself in confusion. Confusion: less than a day ago I was getting it on with a guy, in some kind of misguided effort to preserve a half-forgotten memory. And then: playing a role somewhere between male and female with an inscrutable woman, a broken and bitter agent I somehow knew I could trust utterly. Beneath all this fluttered the faint memories of the women from my past: Akiko and Muna and Amanda. Their presence fell over the events of the last few weeks like the trembling shadow of anxious moths beneath a pale light at night.
Katherine. Ghosts of the past. Her half-forgotten reality underscored everything in my life. For years I had tried to ignore what had happened between us even as I desperately failed to burn every single moment to memory. Those early days after the courthouse; these weeks at the Asklepios Clinic; last night with Harry and this morning with K: somehow everything happening in the present was bringing back an unwelcome recollection of the past. For years I had tried to live the part of David Sanders, normal human being, all-around-jerk, corporate climber and ladies’ man.
A few weeks as the lady had torn that illusion away. It’s a good thing today was the end. Once I was firmly ensconced in the new persona K had devised for me, I hoped I could trick myself into being a ‘nice guy’ again.
A trick was the best I could hope for. I’d never be a nice guy. But hopefully I could pretend, for the rest of my life if need be. I took some pleasure in knowing that K never got to see the real me. I had Cindy to thank for that. Hopefully the twenty-year old minx could help me be a nicer person in the future.
“Has it really been that bad, being a girl?” K’s voice echoed in my ear, so loud and real I nearly opened my eyes to see if she was standing next to me. How could I answer that question truthfully to a woman I felt impossible feelings for?
Of course it hadn’t been that bad.
It’s amazing what a human being can endure if necessary. The fear of humiliation can be one of the strongest motivators a person will ever encounter; but it’s not the strongest, not by far. Take a real macho man and point a gun at his head and give him the choice between wearing it and a bullet to the brain--yeah, you can bet your ass ninety-nine percent of them will wear the dress. Pain. Hunger . . . especially hunger. Loneliness. These are the fears that motivate people. And even they can be endured. Compared to those--what’re a few weeks in high heels?
The clothes were uncomfortable. Makeup and the fascism of fashion, the style of helplessness, these tottering heels and hobbling skirts and distracting lace and straps that ran all over my body . . . God, it was such bullshit. But it wasn’t worth dying over. Yeah, I couldn’t wait to get away from it all. The thing is, if I was to be completely truthful with myself, I’d have to admit that half my hurry was because. . . .
Goddamn if I hadn’t felt the terrible allure of it all, and that I couldn’t blame on the drugs.
For as long as I could remember my life has been hard and difficult. Always on edge, always on guard, challenging, confrontational, in charge and in your face--yeah, that’s me. A real tough guy. But Cindy . . . she could relax. She could rely on others. She could let her guard down. Shit, but I’d love to relax and everything about her was so delightfully soft, and easy, and happy. I thought of last night with Harry and too much of what happened skirted dangerous close to my own core. Had it been entirely an act, Cindy enjoying Harry’s strong arm across her shoulders, encircling, protecting? That passionate, desperate kiss under the tree and the night sky; if I was brutally honest with myself, had that been all Cindy?
Who the hell was she, really, this Cindy girl?
Cindy didn’t hate herself. I did.
God, did I ever hate myself.
Goodbye, Cindy.
It’s too quiet.
With a start I snapped out of my useless melancholy. The Asklepios Clinic, as a whole, was a quiet place but never this quiet. The normal background bustle of the hospital was missing. Other than the sound of my own breathing and the rhythmic hum of the equipment in the room, I was surrounded by a profound and unsettling silence. Even the faint thrum of ventilation had silenced.
Every instinct shouted that something was seriously wrong. I wasn’t safe here, no matter what K and Scooter thought.
I leapt to my feet, shouldering my purse. The click of my heels rang unnervingly loud as I walked from the room. I cursed the tight skirt that hobbled my stride and forced me to take short mincing steps. I reached out with every sense. The hallway stretched in both directions. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. There was no one else around. My corseted breath roared in my ears as I forced down my anxiety. It was probably nothing, just like when I found Larry chasing after me.
What if Larry had been right and this place wasn’t safe?
Where the hell was Scooter? What was that message K had received?
With hurried steps I rushed down the corridor towards the nearest corner. I had barely left the room before I heard a single, solid footstep behind me. A voice called out.
“David Sanders?”
I turned at the sound of my name.
Stupid, stupid fucking rookie mistake.
“Hello, Mr Sanders.” Agent Foster’s stepped around the corner and stood at the far end of the hall. His face split in a thin, pleased smile. “Mr. Steele sends his greetings.”
He approached unhurriedly. His bulk seemed to fill the hallway. At six feet and a bit he towered over me. He filled out his well-cut black suit and it clearly wasn’t with fat. Expensive shoes sounded a deliberate, solid rhythm at his approach. Each step landed with an almost leonine grace that belied his size. Large, wiry hands curled and uncurled into fists at his side. His smile was sardonic and his eyes glittered cruelly as he watched his prey.
“Listen, can we talk about this?” I pleaded as I took an unsteady step back.
There was no negotiating with this guy. I instinctively understood the nature of this man. He wouldn’t kill me out of loyalty to Steele. He wouldn’t do it for the money. He would kill me for pleasure. Three weeks ago I sensed the animal that lurked beneath the façade of civility he presented, but now his true nature showed clearly in every fibre of his being. The best I could hope for was to buy some time--time for K to get her secret agent ass to my rescue, for Scooter to engage whatever security systems Asklepios might have. I wasn’t about to hold my breath, though. If Fosters was as good as I suspected he’d have his bases covered. Back in the hotel room there had been a partner; where was she?
He shook his head slowly, eyes never losing track of me. His smile grew wide and hungry.
I never considered running. It’s what Fosters wanted: the final ecstasy of the chase and the savage joy of the kill. I had a better chance of delaying the inevitable by staying. Feed his appetite but keep him wanting more. It’s not like I would have gotten very far in these clothes anyway. This skirt hobbled me to mincing steps. I could barely walk in these shoes, let alone run. Long hair for him to pull me back with. Jangling accessories to betray my location. A corset that strangled my breath. Everything that Agent K and the Clinic had done to disguise me now served me up to the enemy in a state of learned helplessness.
Backing away with hesitant steps from the larger man, it wasn’t difficult to appear frightened.
“Please. . . .” A final use of the spray this morning kept my voice feminine. “Don’t hurt me.” I pleaded with eyes wide with terror.
The sick bastard loved it, the girlish sob that wavered beneath my voice. “What a disappointment,” he said. “They told me you were a real tough guy,” he said. “A bastard. And look at you now: nothing more than a little sissy.” He paused in his approach. Twenty feet away. There was a locked door to my back and the hallway continued to my right. He blocked the only other was in or out, and stood just a few feet from the threshold leading into Scooter’s office.
“I am going to hurt you, David.” The space between us was largely empty: a few framed pictures on the wall, a low sofa behind Fosters with a small table next to it decorated with a vase overflowing with flowers. The flowers were startling bright, beautiful red roses that seemed out of place in their clinical surroundings. They momentarily drew my eye away from Fosters. “I am going to hurt you bad. I am going to break you, then I am going to cut you, and then I am going to watch you bleed.”
Lovely guy, this Fosters. If he was talking it’s because he wasn’t expecting any interruptions. Where the hell was K? “No,” I cried, channelling more of Cindy. My hands fluttered at my side and I clasped them together desperately. “Oh God, please . . . don’t.”
Drinking in my terror, he took a single step forward and eyed me appraisingly. “Beg for you life, little sissy.” His eyes shone eagerly. “Or should I call you Cindy? It does not matter; beg, you little faggot, beg for a quick death.”
“I’m begging you,” I said, nearly sobbing, shaking my head, long blond tresses trembling about my face. “I--”
“On you knees,” he demanded. “Little bitches like you beg on their knees.”
I hesitated only briefly before sinking to the floor, the smooth tiles cool and slippery through my thin stockings. Looking up through the tangled curtain of my hair I repeated my plea. “Please don’t kill me.”
He resumed his leisurely approach. Even fixated on me he kept careful awareness of his surroundings, each step deceptively relaxed. My stomach tightened--to the extent that it could, trapped in the corset’s grip--as he drew close. Ten feet away. I nearly shook with the effort to remain on my knees.
I had to trust to this man’s primal nature. I had to believe when he said he planned to hurt me first. Injuries can heal. Pain can be endured. But if he pulled a gun, which he must surely have--bang--game over. I had no intention of dying, not here, not dressed like this. As long as Fosters was beating on me there was still hope; K might still show; the cavalry might arrive; he might make a mistake.
Fosters stared at me hungrily, and with dismay I watched the delight in his eyes twist and darken. “Disgusting,” he said.
“How did you find me?” I dropped the begging but kept the desperate tone to my voice. It wasn’t entirely faked.
Pride briefly warred with impatience. The disdain never left his eyes as he spoke. “You led us on a good chase,” he grudgingly admitted. “Mr Steele has his agents everywhere, scouring the city for you. My partner was tipped off to the safe house. It seemed an unlikely lead. And I have to admit--when we followed you to that hotel you fooled us completely. Oh, you were convincing, David--very convincing.” The scorn in his voice made me tremble with shame--which he wanted--and fury--which I hid. “Being a girl comes naturally to you.
“The rental car gave you away. That bitch protecting you wiped it clean of prints. But she missed something. A tiny spot of blood on the ceiling. Your blood. Once we knew you were in the car the distance logged by it made tracking you here easy. But were you still in the Clinic? That had to be determined. So I watched. Imagine my surprise when I saw Cindy.” He stepped closer. “Was she a girlfriend? Were you the man in the shower back in the hotel? Oh, imagine my surprise when I finally realized that you were Cindy! A very good effort, David Sanders. You seemed to have found your true calling.”
What gave me away? During what brief moment in which I allowed my feminine character to slip away did this bastard spot me? Or had I only been half as convincing as I’d thought, making an utter fool of myself in an environment so messed up nobody really cared?
“But--how. . . .”
Shaking his head, Fosters loomed over me. “Your efforts to delay the inevitable are pathetic,” he said. “Mr Steele wants a very painful example made of you, David. The security protocols for the building have been overridden and this wing placed in a lockdown. The doors are locked, the windows barred. No one is coming to your rescue.”
With an almost tired sigh he reached down. His fingers coiled roughly through my hair and pulled. I gasped with pain as he hauled me to my feet. “My partner is taking care of your protector.” He yanked my head back. His eyes burned into mine. “And I’ve got all the time in the world to take care of you.”
***
“Don’t worry, child. I’ll take care of you.”
The woman gathered me in her arms. She was only a few inches taller than me but seemed much larger, more powerful than any school councillor or parent. Tears of outrage and frustration dribbled down my cheek and stained the front of her blouse as she held me close. I trembled and she smoothed down my hair and made hushing sounds. “It’ll be okay,” she said, but I was too young and too weak, too angry to listen.
“My name is Sakura,” she said, crouching slightly to look me eye-to-eye. “I’m a teacher.”
Her ‘students’ clustered not far behind with faces revealing varying degrees of anger, guilt and surprise. For the last fifteen minutes they’d been first taunting me, then pushing me around, and finally they’d settled on beating the living shit out of me.
“So tell me,” she asked, after I’d told her my name, “why on earth did you try and steal from a martial arts school?”
In stumbling, half-choked words I explained about the gang, the initiation challenge and how impressed I thought they’d be if I returned with some kind of weapon or a big wad of cash. Somehow it never occurred to me that I could actually get caught; and if I did, well, I could take care of myself. I thought I was tough. I was eleven years old and an idiot.
“But you weren’t strong enough, were you?” Sakura asked, wiping at a spot of blood at the corner of my mouth.
I shook my head angrily.
“You didn’t give up,” she added. “I watched you fight back.”
I glared at her.
She laughed, an airy sound free of mockery. She caught a tear running down my cheek. “These tears, they aren’t of pain, are they? They aren’t of embarrassment.”
I shook my head.
“They’re of anger.” She leaned closer and spoke so softly only I could hear. “You’re very angry, aren’t you? You’d like to strike back at them--at all of them,” she said, and somehow I understood she was referring to people beyond the walls of this small room. “If only you were strong enough.”
There was no need to answer; she understood.
“Would you like me to train you?” Sakura asked.
I nodded.
***
His fist slammed into my face. I staggered back. No stability in those shoes. My ankle wobbled and I hit the wall. A picture frame shattered against the back of my skull. Glass shards rained down about my shoulders. Fosters was on me immediately, another punch catching me in the stomach. Pain flared in my side. I began to crumble, until an uppercut sent me back. My shoulder clipped the wall and I spun into the sofa. I hit the armrest and tumbled forward. His knee dropped onto my back. He hauled my head back by my hair. My scalp burned. I tasted blood. His fingers closed around my throat.
“You pathetic wimp,” he hissed. He dragged me off the sofa. I scrabbled useless at his grip. He lifted me up and slammed me against the wall and held me there. “Did you enjoy dressing like this?” His hand released my throat and grabbed at the prosthetic breasts. “Enjoy being felt up?” His rough squeeze went unfelt, but with a tearing sound and the popping of buttons he ripped the blouse open. Fosters’ eyes narrowed with disgust at the sight of the grey things stuck to my chest, and the corset that contained them. “Sick,” he spat, and violently threw me into the opposite wall.
The wall cracked and dust showed over me as I collapsed to the ground. On trembling hands I lifted myself from the floor. His foot lashed out and caught me across the ribs. I dropped again. With a moan I tried to cover my wounded side, only for his fist to smash me back down.
“Stop!” I cried out.
Ignoring my plea, Fosters roughly lifted me off the ground and effortlessly tossed me away. I crashed into the end table, falling over it onto the sofa once again. The vase shattered beneath my body. Water splashed out and soaked my front. Flowers scattered everywhere. I felt porcelain shards cut my skin as I twisted to stare up at him with terrified eyes. He paused momentarily to drink in my fear, gaze roaming across my form.
Sprawled across the cushions, with the skirt tangled over my stocking tops, with one snapped garter hanging loose and my hair tangled about my face in a dishevelled mess, I presented a helpless, fearful girl. Stray locks caught in my earrings, on my makeup, on the blood that trickled from the corner of my mouth and I hesitatingly pulled them away with a trembling hand. The exposed corset shimmered under hospital lights. A stray rose rested on my chest and contrasted brilliantly with the satin white. It somehow stayed stuck to me as I pulled myself to a sitting position.
“Why should I stop?” Fosters asked, leaning back against the wall. His hands continued to slowly clench and unclench at his side. His relaxed posture was again deceptive. He balanced lightly on the balls of his toes, ready to move. “Will you offer me money? More than Mr Steele has?”
I shook my head. “No, but . . . you don’t have to do this. . . .”
He laughed. “Of course I do not have to do this.” He shrugged. “But I certainly want to.”
“But. . . .” I scrambled for some other way to tempt him, for some way of delaying the inevitable. There was nothing. “I. . . .”
“How about yourself?” he said, leaning forward slightly. “Offer me your body, Cindy.”
“My . . . body?”
“That lovely mouth of yours. That tight bottom. I do not suppose you have a pussy buried away down there? Too bad. Go on, Cindy, suck me off. Maybe if I fuck your ass I will let you go.”
The look of revulsion that crawled across my face couldn’t be hidden. Sick bastard. The inevitable loomed ever closer. “If I . . . if I,” I swallowed nervously. “If I give you a blow job . . . you’ll leave me alone?”
He was on me immediately, his fist lashing out and catching me across the chin. With a strangled cry I fell back onto the sofa. “What do you think I am, some kind of queer?” he demanded, features twisted by rage. “You think I need some shit-stabbing pansy for that?” He lunged forward and grabbed me by the hair again. He dragged me from the couch and ignored my feeble cries as he hauled me across the floor. “I’ll fuck your skull if I want to!” he yelled down. “I’ll rape your cock-sucking corpse!” With a final kick he sent me stumbling into Scooter’s waiting room.
I scrambled away from him on all fours, my ass in the air and spike heels slipping and the carpeting burning my palms and knees, until I ran into the far wall. Twisting, I stared back at Fosters, framed in the door and blocking any escape. He watched me contemplatively and slowly smiled. The quick transitions from psychotic rage to contemplative delight were unnerving. “Perhaps I should give Mr Steele a call,” he said, patting at some inner pocket. “I am sure if he knew of your . . . disguise, he might be tempted to make it a little more permanent. Would you like that, David? I bet you would, to spend the rest of you life as somebody’s bitch, taking it up the ass, sucking cock in some drugged-up haze, a slave to whoever Steele lends you out to?”
“He . . . doesn’t know?”
Jeremiah-fucking-Steele didn’t know . . . he didn’t know! This sick bastard hadn’t called in to report yet. Maybe Steele knew about the Asklepios Clinic, but Cindy remained anonymous. I felt a desperate hope blossom; all my efforts weren’t wasted. “So the sissy thinks he has found a way out, does he?” Fosters shook his head in disbelief as he stepped into the room. “Do you think me so stupid not to recognize your pathetic efforts for what they are?” His voice hovered on a knife’s edge between anger and boredom. “But no phone calls, David. No hope.
“Mr Steele will be most pleased when I tell him of the state in which you were found--how you begged to live--and how painfully you died.” He was warmed up now, ready to begin with the real hurting, with the pain that would end in my death. I couldn’t afford to delay any longer. Rescue wasn’t coming after all; I had to fend for myself.
“Ready to die, bitch?” Fosters stepped closer. His smile grew at the sight of his feminized victim curled up in fear against the wall--wavered--and I saw the first shadow of doubt creep into his eyes.
Up to now he’d been taking it easy, slapping me around like his bitch and holding back his full strength. Even so, my chest should have heaved with fear. I should have been doubled over in agony from the brief but savage beating, clutching at my side, stomach; blood should have been streaming from my face, from a shattered nose or busted lips. Where were the tears, the abject supplications; the sheen of sweat; why hadn’t I even tried to escape?
Hey, I’m a good actor but not that fucking good, yeah?
I picked the rose from my chest, the thorn only reluctantly letting go. I momentarily appreciated its brilliant, vivid beauty. So delicate and fragile; with a sigh I crushed the flower in my palm and it tumbled to the floor. Rising to my feet, an easy flick of the head sent that mane of hair back over my shoulder. I straightened my skirt and a slow smile spread across my face.
“Hey, you know what? I don’t fucking think so.”
The surprise quickly faded from his face. “So the little sissy thinks he can fight back?” His voice dripped with contempt. He reached into his jacket. If he pulled out a gun . . . but no, it was a knife, a sleek, double-edged thing that gleamed coldly. It settled comfortably in his grip. “Taken a few karate classes, have you?” He chuckled grimly. “Do your best, David. Make this interesting. It is time to bleed.”
The fucker was fast, I’ll give him that, faster than I would’ve expected considering his size. He blurred forward, silently, blade stabbing straight for my chest. It wasn’t meant to kill--just to cut, badly, make me bleed and disable my arm. Meeting his charge, I caught his attack at the wrist. The tip of the knife wavered an inch from my chest. For a moment our two bodies pressed towards each other, our momentums clashing. Fosters was bigger, his footing surer; I fell back a step, then another; and then I was back up against the wall.
Fosters’ breath was sure and measured, his eyes gleaming as he pressed forward with all his weight and strength. Now my chest did heave with effort, pulse pounding in my ears as I fought his attack, desperately struggling to suck in air despite the corset. My muscles swelled as I pushed against him. It wasn’t enough; he was stronger than I was, bigger and heavier, better dressed for combat, eager to kill.
The knife drifted closer. The tip touched my right breast, hesitated, and slowly sank into the prosthetic flesh.
“You are going to die, David,” whispered Fosters. The knife sank a fraction of an inch, another, into the prosthetic. Those breasts were all but dead but I still felt the dull throb of that blade sinking into artificial flesh, the pain growing the deeper it penetrated. An acrid stench of rot escaped from the wound. He continued to press down. “Try, you little wimp. Fight!”
I pushed against him, muscles burning, sweat erupting across my body, burning into my eyes. My breath came in burning gasps, made feminine by the spray. I refused to die--like this--squeaking like some bitch in heat!
“Not enough,” he murmured. “You never had a chance. I am a killer, David, born and trained.” His eyes bore into mine, burning with desire, hate, hunger--the animalistic thrill of killing.
And in my eyes--he saw himself reflected, saw the same feral beast stare back, hungry and angry, and his confidence momentarily wavered. “Yeah, know what?” I snarled. “So am I.”
With a final effort the blade sank deeper. Savage, burning pain flared across my chest and seared through my head. . . .
***
. . . and I curled into a tight ball to escape the relentless pounding but it was no use, there was no escape; Sakura’s attacks continued. Her kick found my undefended stomach; when I dropped my hands to cover my torso she punched me across the face. I tried crawling away only for her to seize my leg and twist it so that I thought it would break.
“Stop,” I gasped, begged, barely able to breath. “Please--I can’t. . . .”
I stared up at her as she walked around my prone form, her soft steps silent across the hard wooden floor. She kicked my side, nearly hard enough to fracture a rib. “Get up,” she said. Her face was an expressionless mask.
“I can’t!” I insisted, breathless, defeated.
She crouched by my head. “Get up.” She slapped me, and then punched me in the shoulder. “Get up.”
My eyes burned with sweat but not with tears, even though the sense of betrayal was nearly more than I could bear. I did want to get up--for her, the sense of failure was nearly sickening, but my limbs were dead to me, my lungs burned with exhaustion and the pain was overwhelming. “I. . . .”
Her fingers curled around my throat, cutting off my words, cutting off air. “Get up,” she said and my vision began to swim and dance. I must have blacked out, but somehow a moment later . . . I was standing on unsure, weak legs, only half-conscious--but upright.
Sakura’s expression hadn’t changed. “Fight back,” she said. Her punch to the stomach sent me back to the floor.
It took ages, but somehow standing once again became easier. “Please!” I cried out, blinking back tears.
Another hit, another drop to the floor. “Fight back.”
“Stop,” I gasped, but she didn’t and knocked me back again, and I clambered back to my feet and tried again, “stop!” angrier this time and how could she do this to me, I was her student and she promised to take care of me and what the hell was she trying to do, kill me? “Stop!” I yelled.
“Stop it!” I screamed and only then realized I’d just blocked her punch. A rush of pleasure coursed through me--until her second attack slammed me back into the wall.
I stared up at her in shock. “But--”
“Fight,” she repeated, hitting me again, and just like that--my anger boiled over.
“Bitch!” I screamed, and launched myself at her, a flurry of wild punches and blind kicks and rushes that never came close to touching her as she danced away; but I chased after her, back and forth across the training hall, blood rushing like pouring sand in my ears, vision reduced to a lurid crimson tunnel and my heart pounding furiously in my chest. “I’ll. . . .”
My body gave out. I collapsed to the ground, unconscious, the taste of vomit flooding my mouth.
And indeterminate time later I came to. Sakura knelt beside me. A look of such tenderness filled her face that I felt an impossible swell of love for her. It nearly swept away the newfound hatred that sat, like a jagged, heavy stone, at my core.
“I thought you were going to kill me,” I whispered, incapable of speaking any louder.
“Only if you fail me,” she said, and I desperately sought humour in her words.
“You don’t train the other students like this.”
Sakura smiled. “You’re not like the other students,” she said.
***
Five years of practice and training and pretending were stripped away in a moment. Ever since Kate’s death I’d played nice and voluntarily wrapped myself in chains of civility and good behaviour. The scorpions, the slimy and horrible things that lurked within--five years ago I locked them away under the harshest of bondage and taught myself to forget what I knew existed deep down within.
Those chains and shackles fell away and I released a cry of exultant, savage joy.
I forced the attack to the side. The blade cut deep but sliced lengthwise, slashing through the prosthetic but only nicking the real flesh beneath. The taut skin of the breast split and the innards swelled out like the meat of a sausage. Intense pain flared across my chest and then suddenly cut off. An oily black fluid abruptly sprayed from the ruptured breast and caught Fosters across the face.
He hissed in pain and surprise and briefly dropped his guard. I threw my entire body forward, slamming my shoulder into his chest. He staggered back a step. The knife slashed upwards, blindly, nearly catching me across the shoulder but I used my momentum to slip past the man, hitting the floor, rolling out into a low crouch across from him.
The bastard moved away, nearly doubled over, the knife held between us, his other hand swiping at his face. Black slime from the split breast dribbled and bubbled down my front. Instead of pressing the attack I took advantage of his distraction to grab at the zipper of the corset. I yanked it down and air rushed into my lungs. If only there was time to unlace these crippling stilettos from my feet. . . .
Fosters straightened opposite me. His face and eyes were bright red and teary but promised pain. “You should have run while you had the chance, bitch,” he hissed. The knife rested loosely in his hand.
When I touched one delicate finger to the edge of my mouth it came away with blood. Lipstick, nail polish, blood: all the same brilliant crimson. I wiped my hand clean against the blouse that hung loosely from my frame. Slowly rising from my crouch I couldn’t suppress a grin, thin and cruel, from spreading across my face. The bastard had about seven inches of height on me, fifty pounds, a longer reach and a knife. He probably had a gun as well, though he wouldn’t use it unless absolutely necessarily; Fosters liked to kill with his hands.
Through bleary eyes he watched me warily--but not warily enough. Fosters still had absolute confidence in his ability to take me down at his leisure, and why shouldn’t he? Everything he knew about me suggested I was an easy mark: a twenty-something average Joe with a dull past, a corporate middle-manager who’d just spent the last three weeks prancing around in drag. Too bad for him it was all lies, a pretty little packaging concealing a violent past. Otherwise he’d be taking me a hell of a lot more seriously. He’d be scrambling for that gun. Because after five goddamn years of denying myself utterly this most exquisite pleasure . . . yeah, I was going to enjoy this. I really was.
I was going to tear this motherfucker down. I was going to rend this motherfucker to pieces.
We both moved forward simultaneously. He threw a lazy jab, another, testing me. I leaned back and avoided his fist and when the cross came I blurred forward, slapping his arm away and twisted in, elbow aimed for his head. Momentary surprise flashed in his eyes but he reacted quicker than expected; he dipped beneath my attack and his knife stabbed upwards seeking my armpit. With one knee I knocked his hand aside at the wrist, but my back foot swayed in four-inch heels; I fell back a step and from his low stance his foot thrust out, aiming high. I twisted aside but his kick clipped my hip, staggering me.
I hit the far wall but controlled the impact. He rushed forward, knife ready. The bastard continued to underestimate. I recovered quickly and snapped out a quick, low kick. Knife already extended in attack, the tip of my foot caught his hand and sent the weapon flying. Unfazed, Fosters stormed through the attack, one heavy fist catching me in the side. I grunted as fractured ribs on the mend flared with pain but retaliated with a quick strike of my own, easily blocked. A flurry of up-close blows between us, quick punches and opens hands sliding to wrists, elbows, deflecting each other’s attacks. A frozen moment, both our arms held in check. Between the frame of our interlocked limbs Fosters smiled once again, still feral but different now: his animalistic thrill was underscored by a very human delight in the challenge he’d found and the surety of his victory. There was no special empathy in my understanding: the same manic grin illuminated my face as well.
His head smashed forward seeking the bridge of my nose. Shifting backwards I used my shoulder to lock his and used the energy to throw him into the wall. The impact smashed a hole in the plaster but he twisted quickly, arms raised defensively, to face me. My hair swirled in a golden halo as I lashed out with a massive backhand. It would’ve torn his jaw off had it hit. Continuing to twist he ducked beneath my strike and threw out a quick uppercut. Dropping my elbow I took the hit on the meat of the arm and stretched out, the edge of my open hand seeking his collarbone. Fosters dipped his shoulder and uncoiled like a spring, throwing his whole body forward. He caught me square on and I barely managed to throw his weight aside as we both hit the floor.
I found my feet but the shoes and skirt slowed me. He surged across the room and landed a massive side-thrusting kick square in the chest. Pain erupted through my torso as the other prosthetic exploded; black slime spattered everywhere. I went flying back. The glass door shattered behind me. I tumbled into the examination room. Hitting the floor I slid several feet before lying there, dazed and winded.
Glass crunched underfoot. Fosters stepped into the room. I could almost hear the tight clenching and unclenching of his fists as he approached. The bastard was taking his time. He thought he had me beat. The way things were going, he was right. These fucking clothes were crippling me. I could barely stand or walk, let alone fight. Far worse: it had been too long. I’d lost my edge; my instincts were dulled from disuse. I’d kept the body in shape but the spirit had weakened.
Fosters foot stomped down for my head, a debilitating blow. I twisted my neck aside and my legs found his, sweeping them out from beneath him. Glass lacerated my back and side as I rolled away; glass slivers cut into the palm of my hand as I pushed away and found my feet even as he found his.
The larger man lashed out with another big kick; I slid beneath it and riposted with a quick snap of my own to the groin. It would’ve dropped a lesser foe but he merely grunted and fell back a step. I pressed my advantage, rushing in with a sequence of quick punches. He managed to block a few but slipping within his longer reach I landed a few solid blows to his side. My small frame contradicts the strength I can throw into a punch: Fosters dropped back another step and I felt something give beneath my knuckles.
Showing the pain, he retaliated with an almost desperate swing. I ducked and hammered his abdomen. Fosters threw a hook. I jammed it at the shoulder and pounded his jaw with a rising elbow. Even as he fell back against a table, sending books and papers flying, a surprisingly fast kick scythed out for my head. I danced back out of reach.
Blood trickled slowly from between clenched fingers. Ooze drenched my tattered front, soaking the unzipped corset black and burning the skin beneath. My stockings were in shreds, shaven legs slick with sweat and blood from a dozen minor cuts, framed by snapped suspenders that swayed like dispirited snakes about my thighs. Not ten feet away, Fosters slowly straightened. His face remained burned red, eyes swimming with tears. He lightly touched at the corner of his lip and found blood. He stared at the red spot staining his finger and then his eyes slowly slid over to me.
“No more fucking around,” he growled.
As he indulged in dramatics I took advantage of the brief pause to dig into a hole torn in the side of my skirt. With a loud rip the fabric gave way and I created a thigh-high vent. Renewed confidence flowed through my veins. This douchebag was absolutely correct: no more fucking around. It was time to show this asshole just who the fuck he was dealing with.
I took the offensive. Threw a blistering combination of high and low strikes. He shouldn’t have been able to block. He did. The bastard had been holding back as well. I barely dodged his counter. I whipped out a crescent kick to make a little room. His leg jammed mine and his fist slammed into my abdomen and something nearly ruptured down there. His second punch never landed. I caught the arm and tried for the throw. He reversed; so did I; our arms blurred across each other without finding purchase; a soft spot; my arm slipped through, elbow clipping his face--blood spurted from his nose--and my hand grappled his neck and threw him forward on the recoil. He smashed into the computer cart and hit the ground, the equipment crashing around and atop him.
Fosters tossed the cart aside with a furious yell. He threw the computer at me as he rose. I ducked and charged forward. The screen exploded against the wall behind me in a shower of sparks. My punch fell short; he blocked and landed a quick roundhouse that had my vision swimming and sent me sprawling against the examination bed. An axe kick scythed down and I desperately rolled aside. Catching the edge with his heel, Fosters nearly flipped the heavy, steel-frame bed end-over-end and it crashed heavily to the ground on its side. An opening: the delay left his midriff unguarded. With a wild yell I unloaded the strongest kick I could muster into his sternum.
Disaster: the heel of my base foot wobbled, snapped. Four inches of stiletto heel stabbed into Fosters stomach even as I felt my other ankle pop, dislocate--break. Pain flared up my leg and spine and I couldn’t suppress a despairing cry as I hit the ground heavily. Even drained of its full power my kick sent Fosters tumbling across the room; he crashed into a row of cabinets and amidst a show of glass collapsed to the ground.
Gritting my teeth and crawling through the burning pain, I forced myself to roll over and rise to my feet. I felt like fucking Ralph Macchio facing off against his final opponent in ‘The Karate Kid’. Yeah, just one difference: in ‘The Karate Kid’ that last guy didn’t pull a gun.
Fosters didn’t stand. Suit jacket undone, broken glass settling like dandruff across his broad shoulders, the white shirt beneath stained red; and the shoulder holster empty. Painful clarity descended and I watched in near slow-motion as, from his sprawled position, his arm swung around, the ugly .45 ready in his grip seeking a quick end to the fight. Blood ran in criss-crossing rivulets from his crushed nose, from his split lip and forehead and stained his manic grin an ugly red.
The moment released us. The pistol roared and flared. With desperate strength I threw myself away. Pain exploded in my side as I grabbed the edge of the bed and fell behind the metal frame. A second shot rang out and ricocheted away. Heavy wetness soaked the corset from beneath and dribbled down my leg and fire filled my lungs and my strength rapidly began to flag.
No. No fucking away. I wasn’t going to die. Move. Move, dammit--quick, the bastard was getting up! I focused on the pain--made it the only thing that was real--for a brief moment of utter whiteness I felt it all: the wet throbbing in my side that echoed my pounding pulse; the burning of my lungs with ever breath; the jagged hurt in my ankle; as long as there was pain I was alive. In the centre of that pain I found my instinct. A bullet slammed into the underside of the bed and tore a jagged fist-sized hole and nearly took out my hip but suddenly I was moving again.
I launched myself away from the bed with my good foot. Something exploded behind me. The broken, heelless shoe hit the floor; bone grinded against bone, ligament snapped and my leg gave out but force carried me forward to the counter even as the flooring behind me erupted. I seized the counter edge and pulled myself over. Fosters dashed forward to catch me on the other side but with the sure, strong arms of an acrobat I reversed my momentum and twisted across the surface as if riding parallel bars. I briefly touched my good foot down, tightly coiled beneath me, to the edge of the countertop--and launched myself through the air, arms reaching for my enemy even as he charged towards me.
A final, wild shot lanced out, clipping my shoulder. I slammed into Fosters--my fist broke his jaw--velocity carried us back and we hit the row of equipment behind. Fosters bore the brunt of the impact. The gun went clattering across the room.
We collapsed to the ground and laid nearly side-by-side for an exhausted, dazed moment. Tried to rise--failed. I felt the blood pouring out my side. Not now. One hand grappled for something to hold and found purchase on a bookshelf and I used it to haul myself upright.
Fosters staggered to his feet. He clutched a heavy length of metal snapped away from an equipment frame broken beneath his weight. His moves were far slower than before; so were mine. The metal bar swept in a low arc, aiming for my bloodied side. I threw up the useless weight of my leg; the metal bar slammed into my shin and splintered bone.
I dropped to the ground. Fosters stumbled forward. The metal bar hammered down. I threw up one desperate arm as a shield, the other scrabbling for purchase, for some kind of weapon. The bar hit my arm and glanced off and the entire limb went numb. He raised the weapon again and brought it down again. Another hit and my forearm broke and my other hand closed about something and with a demoniacal howl I jackknifed forward and drove the impromptu weapon into Fosters’ foot.
He roared with pain and the bar dropped to the floor with a loud clang. My hand released the severed four-inch Jimmy Chou spike, now firmly imbedded in the arch of his foot. Before I could pull him down his hands dug into my hair and yanked me to my feet with such ferociousness that my scalp bled and the hair extensions tore and ripped away.
“You fucking,” his fist pulped my nose, “little,” another punch sealed my eye, “sissy!” he screamed, and with a final hit he sent me flying into the far cabinet. My face shattered glass and surgical implements lacerated my arms and hands. A moment later--was it a moment?--I think I blacked out--Fosters charged across the room, metal bar raised high--I couldn’t move, couldn’t breath, couldn’t see--that same lucky hand closed around something--the metal bar connected with the side of my skull even as I pushed forward, my arm flailing out wildly. . . .
Everything went black.
My eyes snapped open. I was lying on my side on the floor across broken fragments of glass and plastic and in a slowly growing puddle of blood. My eyes reluctantly focused on my hand, lying limply open. Across my palm rested a slender metal instrument that gleamed dully in the light. The tip was stained red. A scalpel.
I heard a faint gurgle. Grudgingly, painfully, I slowly shifted towards the sound. Fosters sat slumped against the wall. Both hands clutched at his throat and wild eyes stared in disbelief. Crimson welled from between his fingers and overflowed and ran down his front.
I dragged myself closer. I stared deep into his eyes and with a great sense of fulfilment, watched him die. He pulled one hand from his throat and grappled futilely for me. I caught his arm by the wrist and yanked him forward until our foreheads nearly touched.
“This sissy just kicked your fucking ass,” I whispered.
Fosters glared at me with venomous hatred until his eyed dimmed, and finally closed, and his body crumpled and slid to the ground, dead.
***
“How is he?”
She closed the door behind her. Sakura displayed no anger as she crossed the room but over the last couple of year I’d learned that Sakura only shared her emotions when it suited her. Her footsteps remained effortlessly silent as she walked as well; even at the age of fourteen I understood that there was something very different, very enigmatic about this woman. What I felt for her was something impossible to put in words; not love, precisely . . . awe, maybe, with all the passion and fear that word suggests.
I was afraid of Sakura, but it wasn’t out of fear that I so desperately wanted to please her.
“He’s on his way to the hospital,” she said. “Thomas’ parents are very angry.”
I nodded. I didn’t apologize, for the simple reason that I wasn’t sorry for what I had done and I wouldn’t insult her by lying.
“How did it happen?”
The other students must have already given their account of what happened. I saw no reason to either exaggerate or diminish my responsibility. “We were sparring. The longer we fought the more intensely he came at me. I saw it in his eyes–he wanted to win, he wanted to hit me . . . he wanted to hurt me. He escalated the conflict and tried an advanced technique.” I tried unsuccessfully to keep the disdain from my voice. “That’s when I finished the fight.”
“You shattered both his elbow and his jaw,” Sakura said. “He’s sixteen and he’ll probably never have full use of that arm again. He was our top tournament fighter and he may never return to the martial arts again.”
Her voice remained flat and unreadable; she gave no hint of how she expected me to respond. Unable to think of anything to say, I simply shrugged.
“Do you not feel any remorse for what you did?”
I considered that for a second. “No.”
Sakura cocked her head to one side and watched me curiously. “Did you feel anything, then?”
I hesitated before answering. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
I shrugged again. “Yeah. No. I felt . . . happy? Yeah, maybe just a bit. I mean, he’s such a jerk, yeah? And so full of himself. But he couldn’t even bring himself to go full out, you know? It was just sad, yeah, real sad watching him work up his courage.” My voice grew stronger as I played the fight back through my mind. “I mean, how pathetic is that? He desperately wanted to win but couldn’t bring himself to really try? To try and hurt me? When he finally came at me with that technique, ha, I saw it coming from miles away. . . .” The surprise in his face when I reversed the attack, the shock, the pain that flooded his eyes and escaped his throat in a howl as I snapped his arm . . . yeah, I enjoyed it. But only briefly.
She watched me for another moment and then nodded.
“Are you angry?” I couldn’t hide the tremor in my voice.
“A little,” she said. She opened a small wooden box on her desk and pulled out a bottle and some cotton swabs. She took my hand and started to tend to my knuckles, which I’d split against the sharp edge of my opponent’s jaw.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not for having hurt the boy but for having disappointed Sakura.
“Don’t be.” She shook her head. “I’m not angry at you.”
“Then why?”
She hesitated. “Because you won’t be able to remain a student of this school any longer.”
My breath caught in my throat. “But--”
She waved her hand dismissively. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Even if you can’t stay here you’ll be fine. It was almost time for you to leave anyway. Another few months and you would have asked of your own choice.” Even as she said it I realized that’s he spoke the truth. I had been building myself up towards asking her to leave. “You’ve been talking about trying to find your mother; settling scores with your old gang; even going back to school.”
“I like it here,” I stated.
“And now it’s time to leave,” she said. “I’ll help you with your next step. You might be able to help me as well, actually.”
“I--”
“Do you know why I took you in?” Sakura asked, distracting me from my fear and hurt at the thought of leaving Sakura.
I shook my head.
“That first afternoon over two years ago. You dropped yourself into a fight you could not win. My students found you and hurt you. As I recall, Thomas was the first one to hit you. During that beating you never gave up. You didn’t cry out and you didn’t beg for them to stop. And in your eyes: such anger, such hatred and desire. You wanted to hurt them back. And you have, haven’t you? Over the years. Every single one of those students you’ve had your revenge on, one way or another, whether they know it or not.”
“But--,” I started to protest, and then shut my mouth. Apparently I wasn’t half as clever as I thought I’d been.
“And Thomas was the last one.”
He was, although I hadn’t set out to hurt him today.
“I promised to make you strong and now you are,” she said.
“You have nothing more to teach me?”
She laughed. “I have more to teach you than you can possibly imagine. And I will continue to teach you, when the opportunity exists, for as long as we both live, though no longer from this school. You understood from the beginning that I did not treat you like the other students; that when they left their lessons exhausted and made their ways home that you had merely completed your warm-up. They train to learn discipline, to stay fit, for confidence or to impress their friends and family.
“Why do you train?”
The answer should have been an easy one. For nearly three years now I had trained with this woman; nearly every single day had started with the aches of the previous night and ended with newfound bruises. To undergo such pain and suffering–though truth be told I’d never thought of it as such–there had to be a clear reason. Yet I couldn’t think of one.
“To make you happy,” I replied, the first answer I could settle upon.
A hint of a smile touched her lips, but she shook her head. “No,” she said. “Though I’m flattered. That’s not why. The reason you have trained so hard these last few years, the reason I took you in, is because you have a gift. Some people believe that we’re all blessed with a single gift–with a skill–with a natural talent for one thing in life. One of the greatest tragedies of human existence is that so few of us ever discover what we are truly skilled at, or even worse . . . to know your talent yet be unable to practice it.
“One glance at you and I saw your gift and understood your potential.”
Her words filled me with pride. “Martial arts?”
“Oh my, no,” Sakura said, and shook her head, that suggestion of a smile growing slightly. “No. Your gift is pain: the acceptance of it, the giving of it. You have an instinct for pain, an intuitive understanding of how best to hurt other people.” She held me gently on either side of my head and kissed me softly on my forehead.
“You’re very special,” Sakura told me, her voice as soft as silk. “And you’re mine.”
***
Goddamn ringing. Can’t a dying man have a few moments of peace?
Reluctant eyes slowly opened. The still form of Agent Fosters lay slumped a few feet away. I must have drifted off. Stupid. My feeble efforts to staunch the flow of blood weren’t enough. I’m no doctor but I’ve been seriously hurt before, and I had a sneaking suspicion my wounds were fatal. I’d lost too much blood, absorbed too much pain. Lying in shock I started to feel a dangerous detachment from my body. Sleeping now meant not waking up.
Again with the fucking ringing! What the hell was it? I forced tired eyes open again and my head lolled drunkenly to one side. My battered face made a grotesque red blur reflected in a broken pane of glass. I felt this sudden crazy urge to fix my makeup--fucking Scooter and his conditioning. An involuntary giggle rose to my lips and burbled there wetly. Bubbles in the blood at my mouth--the first bullet must have punctured a lung while tearing a chunk out of my ribcage. God, I was seriously fucked up . . . worse even than when Kate died.
Maybe I’d meet her in Hell. I deserved this; I really did. I hadn’t been able to save her and it occurred to me, as I felt my heart weakly pump the rest of my existence through the gaping hole in my side, that that simple fact had defined my life ever since. A peaceful acceptance of my end settled over me. I wanted to apologize to Katherine, to many people, but this goddamn noise kept interrupting. . . .
The fact that the insistent noise came from Fosters’ corpse finally penetrated my exhausted brain. Bemused, I half-rolled, half-collapsed onto his body. Clumsily, I peeled away his blood-soaked jacket. My hand fumbled between the folds of the stained shirt beneath in search of the continuing noise. Beneath his shirt I discovered an elaborate tattoo inscribed into his chest, a colourful spread and pattern I’d seen once before. Interesting. My hand closed about a vibrating object and emerged with Fosters’ mobile.
“Hello?” I said. My voice sounded strange to my ears: giddily happy from blood loss, distorted by pain, thickened by stiffness; my jaw didn’t seem to be working quite right.
There was a heavy pause on the other end, and then: “Who the fuck is this?”
I’d recognize that voice anywhere. “Mr Steele, I presume,” I said.
There was another lengthy pause. “David Sanders?”
“You betcha, you son of a bitch.”
“And Mr Fosters?”
I glanced down at Fosters. His chin rested against his chest and if it wasn’t for the darkening apron of blood spreading across his front you’d almost think he’d just nodded off. “Agent Fosters can’t make it to the phone right now,” I said. “On account of my having killed him. Can I take a message?” Saying so much in one go sent a sharp stab of pain up the side of my face.
Jeremiah Steele sounded only slightly annoyed. “Very impressive, David. You don’t mind if I call you David, do you Mr Sanders?”
“Yeah, no prob,” I answered. “And I’ll just call you Cocksucker, yeah?”
Barely restrained anger thrummed beneath the surface of his cool, controlled voice. “You’re digging a darker and deeper hole for yourself, David. Your death will be slow and painful.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard.” I chuckled, and coughed, and blood spattered across the mobile. “That’s what Fosters said. Let me check.” I roughly nudged Fosters’ body and yelled, “Hey, fuckface! Was my death slow and painful?” The effort flooded my mouth with more blood and I choked.
“You don’t sound very healthy, David.”
“I’ll live,” I said wetly.
And at that moment I decided that, yeah, I was going to live. I didn’t know how; it was easier said then done. My vision was growing dim and everything seemed to come from very far away. Everything but Steele’s voice; it was the only thing keeping me rooted to the here and now. But as we spoke I felt my earlier peace burn away to be replaced by an all-consuming rage. This man had killed me; not Fosters but this bastard sitting in his comfortable chair far, far away, pushing buttons and placing calls . . . this bastard kills me and gets away with it? No!
“For how long, David? Wherever you hide--I can find. Whoever protects you--I can kill.”
Suddenly, more than anything else I wanted revenge; visceral hate filled me to the brim, with such intensity that I suddenly found myself standing, surging to my feet, leaning heavily against the wall and screaming into the phone: “Try it, you piece of shit, you ass-ramming fuck! I’ll slit the throat of every motherfucking cunt you sent after me! And when I’m done with them I’ll come after you! You hear me, Steele? I’m coming after you! Whatever it takes!”
But the effort was too much; I collapsed to the ground, slumping across Fosters’ body, the cellphone cradled in my hand. Darkness overtook me. From very far away I thought I hear the sound of doors opening, of pounding footsteps approaching and my name being called . . . but I barely heard them over the mocking sound of Steele’s laughter filling my ears. And even that faded until all I could hear was the faint beating of my weakening heart, slowing . . . stopping, and then I knew nothing at all and dropped away into the night.
***
The End of Constant in All Other Things, Season One.
To be continued. . .
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Constant in All Other Things - Interlude I: The prognosis is grim for David. Lying on the operating table he loses himself in the past. But even should he survive, K’s plans for him may prove a living nightmare.
Constant in All Other Things
Interlude I
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent
-Much Ado About Nothing
From her position behind the one-way glass overlooking the octagonal operating theatre, she stared down at the body. The harsh florescent light did nothing to soften or hide the brutal condition of the patient. Surgeons fluttered about the bed like anxious parents. The few places across the patient’s body uncovered by bandaging or twisted tubing revealed lacerated flesh.
She saw the man’s approach in the window, and shifting slightly refocused on the faint image of herself caught in the glass. In her eyes she saw an uncertainty she despised, one she thought overcome long ago. She chased away the doubt before the man noticed.
He came up and embraced her, his strong arms circling her waist. “Come back to bed, Katherine.” His voice was soft but his hold insistent, resting casually beneath the swell of her naked breasts.
Agent K’s hands drifted up to rest lightly against his. “Just give me a moment,” she said, her fingers gently stroking his forearms, winding through the thick red hair there. She couldn’t repress a small smile. “Scooter.”
His scowl showed little rancour. “Don’t you dare start that too.”
Her smile faded as she continued to watch the still form of David Sanders through the faint outline of reflected intimacy. Jonathon was nearly a half-foot shorter than she was; the unkempt mess of his beard scratched her skin as he nuzzled a sensitive spot between her shoulder blades. He knew her so well: Jonathon with his heavy hands and thick fingers that played so gently with her secret places, that found and traced without hesitation her many hidden scars and badly-healed wounds.
She sighed deeply. The sight of David’s form, splayed out on the operating table, stung her deeply; deeper than she would have thought possible. There had been so much blood when she found him. He hadn’t been breathing; his heart had stopped.
“Are you having second thoughts?”
“No,” she answered, and then again more confidently. “No, I’m not.”
She continued to look down at David’s unmoving form. Despite the enforced persona of ‘Cindy’, she had always sensed the tightly restrained energy and aggression that seethed just beneath the surface of her charge. The absurd confidence, obnoxious misogyny and incessant cursing: so much about David infuriated and attracted her in equal measure. She wouldn’t deny the angry pleasure she took in forcing such a masculine presence into skirts and makeup, nor the vicious joy of watching him prance in heels and subsume himself into a character as feminine and flighty as Cindy.
Yet she also thrilled at the vitality he contained, transformed but never reduced even when disguised. From their very first encounter she felt the possibility of violence that lurked behind those carefully controlled eyes. Cindy tempered but never dispelled the rawness that defined the man; and Katherine could not deny that the unconscious threat and challenge drew her like the proverbial moth.
To see David--Cindy--now laid out unmoving down below, his life all but shattered, body broken: it felt like a heavy grip wrapped around her heart, unyielding and slowly squeezing; breathing suddenly felt difficult. I failed him, she thought. I promised to keep him safe and I couldn’t. Agent K felt the shadow of past failures fall over her. The disguise hadn’t been enough. The Clinic failed to safeguard her charge. My own efforts, she thought--not enough.
The arms around her waist tightened their amorous grip. “Don’t do this to yourself,” Jonathon said.
Katherine shook her head slowly. “I’m not,” she insisted. Her mind raced through the new possibilities ahead of her. She wasn’t beat yet; not by a long shot. A moment later she added: “Am I doing the wrong thing?”
“Judging ethical issues isn’t really my thing,” Scooter answered. “You know that. You put a patient in front of me and I do my job; give me a test subject and I’m not going to ask too many questions about where it came from.
“But I’ll say this: you’re playing a dangerous game, Kate. That was nearly you on the table.” His hand delicately traced fresh stitching along her side. “And you watched the same security footage that I did, right? You saw what I saw? Answer me this: where the hell does some middle-management paper-pusher learn to fight like that?” His hand briefly left their idle repose over her stomach to gesture at the form below.
She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She hesitated and added, “There’s too much about him we don’t know.”
“You’re putting yourself between Jeremiah Steele and this guy, Kate. You’re already on thin ice with your own agency. And you’re playing me, of course,” he added, “and the entire Clinic to your own ends.” His heavy hand patted her pussy comfortingly with easy intimacy before resting lightly on her hip.
She chuckled, lightly rubbing her ass into the erection she felt growing behind. “You make me sound like an evil mastermind.”
“Evil?” Jonathon said, and shook his head. “You’re not evil, Katherine. But you’re not so good either, you’re not a nice person. What you have planned for this man? Some might call it cruel.”
“Some might say he deserves it.”
She felt Scooter’s shrug. “Maybe. He certainly won’t like it; if he was conscious he would never have agreed.”
“Yet it’s necessary,” K insisted.
“He’ll hate you.”
Her reply came a little too quickly. “I know.” She took a deep breath. “But I can’t see any other way.”
“That’s why I avoid thinking about the ethics of a situation; I hire professionals for that.” His hand traced a gentle line across her thigh and danced up her spine. “It might all prove academic anyway. Everything depends on Sanders simply surviving.”
Agent K sighed. “What are his chances?”
“Based purely on the physical damage he’s soaked up? Slim. That gaping hole in his side and the blood loss are the worst of it, but coupled with the chemical burn across his chest, the broken limbs. . . ,” he softly tapped out each listed injury against her skin, “multiple lacerations, head trauma and the cocktail of drugs we’ve been pumping into him over the last three weeks?” The doctor shrugged. “He should already be dead.
“But he’s not--and that’s worth a lot. I don’t think I’ve ever had a stronger patient on my operating table. He’s in peak physical condition and he had the good fortune of getting hurt in one of the best medical facilities in the world. Those people working below are among the top of their field. The bastard’s tough. My gut feeling is that if he survives the night . . . he’ll be in the clear.”
She nodded. “And then--”
“Then things get interesting.” His voice thrilled with barely suppressed anticipation.
“Now who’s the evil mastermind, Frankenstein?
“It’s my job. And I’m damn good at it.” He gave her a final squeeze before pulling away. “Come back to bed, Kate. Let’s play doctor--I’ll even be the nurse this time. I know you like that kinky stuff.”
She laughed. “I’ll be along in a second. Just give me a moment, okay?”
The doctor stepped away. Katherine continued to stare down at the body below and steeled herself for what was to come. I’m sorry David, she thought. I know you’ll never forgive me for this. Then she remembered the security footage, and the ecstatic look that gleamed in the battered man’s face as he watched the assassin die. But maybe you’ll understand, she thought.
“After all,” she whispered to herself, and her eyes shone bright and cold, “no one rejoices more in revenge than woman.”
***
Sickly yellow light seeped into the far corners of the dirty little backroom, flickering as the bared light bulb swayed as the end of its frayed cable. A shoddy table stood next to a rusty, steel-frame bed. An old round clock ticked persistently, its shadow stretching and twisting as the light above danced. The clock sat on the table next to a worn, dog-eared book. Tattered wallpaper peeled and curled from the walls; bugs crawled from cracks between the floorboards. The place reeked of sweat and mould and tobacco. There was no window and two doors on opposing walls provided the only escape from the room.
The mattress was filthy and stained.
David stood unmoving in the centre of the room. He blinked in the dim light, slowly coming to his senses. He felt strangely numb, though the hint of terrible pain throbbed in the background.
No,” he whispered. “Not here.”
His voice faded into the dusty air. He heard the deep thrum of distant music rising through the floor. Fingers curled into a tight fist. He thumped it against his thigh, and again, but the pain provided no distraction; the hand stayed clenched at his side and trembled. The creak of hinges; David spun to face the door behind him. The door swung open silently onto impenetrable darkness; a slash across a canvas; a chill wind breathed into the room and swirled about bared legs.
A gasp; a cry and moan: unable to stop himself David turned back to the bed. A woman was splayed across it now. She was beautiful--far too much so for such a room--but her beauty was tainted. The ivory basque she wore should have gleamed whitely but seemed tarnished and made dim by the same miasma that drenched the room. Her stockings were torn and the skin beneath was red and raw. Dark and heavy makeup, smudged and cracked, did more to conceal her natural beauty than enhance it. One leg hung over the edge of the bed and her arms lay limply at her side. She seemed unconscious or insensate but for her eyes--which were open and blazed with anger and passion.
“Kate?” David said.
(Voices that lurked behind the heavy but far-away thrum of music:
“Hey, did he just say something?”
“Don’t be stupid. The patient’s under.”)
This was where it happened.
There was nothing he could have done about her death. It took David a long time to accept this. A year of grudging therapy began the process, but only once he settled into his new adult life did he come to terms with the loss. The pain never disappeared but did fade to an almost comforting numbness. The guilt was another matter: he used it as he was taught. Following Kate’s death Sakura no longer had any use for him--a tool once it has become brittle can no longer be trusted--but her lessons remained. Guilt fuelled his rapid ascent in the corporate world; it underscored many of his sexual conquests. Like his fears he made it a part of himself and gradually it dwindled until it became nothing more than a comforting numbness, nearly forgotten.
The nightmares stayed. He woke often in a cold sweat at three in the morning, causing him to cry out in the night and if he had company for the night, frighten whatever girl lay next to him. Company did nothing to keep the dreams at bay. Sometimes the bad dreams came so incessantly and intensely they seemed to haunt him even after he awoke. Then he sat by the window of his penthouse condo looking out at the city gleaming below, drinking and trembling steadily until the sun rose
But one nightmare recurred stronger though more infrequently than the rest. Once escaping its grip he never returned to bed. He recognized the room. I’m dreaming, he though to himself. Yet the nightmare had never before haunted him with such clarity. His surroundings and the steady creep of sensations and emotions felt incredibly lucid.
he musty taste on his tongue, the urge to wipe his hands clean against his short pleated skirt, the palpable scorn that flowed hotly from the girl on the bed--his senses felt fully engaged even as he recognized that he must be dreaming.
With growing dread he turned to the open door behind him. There he saw Agent Fosters. Blood flowed freely from a thin slit along his throat, a crimson smile as terrible as the man’s grin above. Fosters stood framed in the door, the darkness behind roiling thickly. The assassin’s muscles bulged and strained against his suit. Dark eyes flicked over to David. The man sneered and dismissed him and returned his attention to the girl lying across the bed.
Fosters grin grew with lust. Blood dribbled from between his teeth and from his nose and down his chin. He stepped ponderously into the room, eyes locked on Kate’s indolent form.
“Stay away from her!” David yelled, throwing himself towards the man. His footing was unsure, almost as if he were unused to running in heels. His wobbly steps slowed him, draining the strength from his charge. With an almost idle swipe Fosters sent him flying back into the wall.
David fell to his knees. Pain flared in his side. He clutched his ribs and they felt wet and slick, but his eyes never left Fosters’ back as the man approached the girl on the bed. He towered over her; he towered over them both, and his large, meaty hands, fingers curved like hooks, reached down for Katherine.
“Don’t touch her!” he howled, struggling to his feet, reaching for her. “Kate!”
Fosters began to methodically tear the woman apart. Gore flowed freely across the floor.
David’s own hands, stained red, curled around the man’s throat.
“No!” he screamed, tightening his grip, and then Fosters screamed as well, “Get him off of me!” and suddenly the room was gone, disappearing in a florescent flare, white light, antiseptic slap, and he was sitting up on a table surrounded by men and women in white coats, spattered in red, staring at him with wide eyes over face masks, and everyone began to cry out at once:
“Holy shit, he’s awake!”
“Quick, pin him down!”
“Robert, fuck, Robert, put him out, put him out!”
“Don’t you touch her!” David cried, flailing out against his opponents, struggling against the hands that sought to restrain him. A suddenly stabbing pain in the thigh, and he glanced back to see the needle jutting out of his leg, and a moment later he felt his body grow cold and numb beneath him.
“Kate,” he whispered, and fell back into darkness.
***
“His blood work is fascinating,” Jonathon said, flipping through the chart.
Hiding a small smile, Agent K asked, “How so?” Taking a sip of coffee she found it too hot and returned it to the table. She curled her long legs up beneath her, unmindful of how her robe drooped open and revealed her naked breasts. She was beginning to feel a little guilty at her own indolence, but knew all too well how precious these rare moments of intimacy and relaxation were. At times like these--if she ignored the gun that lay between the bowl of sugar cubes and the plate of croissants--she could almost imagine what a normal life must feel like.
He didn’t look up from his papers. “When did you start Sanders’ conditioning?”
Katherine grimaced behind her food. “The moment he woke up in the safe-house. I slipped him a pill along with a painkiller.”
“Standard dose of Sadexsin?”
“Double.”
“A bit heavy-handed, don’t you think?”
She shrugged. “He was just waking up and in pain, he was groggy and disoriented. I was unlikely to have his mind as receptive to an implant again, especially without him noticing. I needed his full cooperation to ensure his survival, and his profile suggested he’d be very unlikely to go along with my plan.”
Scooter smiled, glancing over the edge of his chart. “What, dress up as a girl? Go figure. So what did you suggest? That he’d always secretly wanted to wear skirts and makeup?”
She snorted. “Please. I planted the simple suggestion that he trust me. I reinforced the suggestion throughout our travels; I needed his implicit trust and cooperation if I was going to get him to Asklepios alive.”
The doctor nodded. “Interesting. And on the trip here?
“I slipped him mild hypnotics whenever possible, similar to what you continued with here--small doses in his drinks and whenever he began to lose control, to reinforce the trust and learned behaviour.”
“I see,” he said, glancing again at his papers. “Very interesting.”
Agent K sighed. “Will you please stop saying?”
Scooter chuckled. “Sorry. It’s just that I’ve never seen anything quite like this.” He placed the chart down on the table and faced her fully. Unlike her, he was dressed in simple scrubs that again seemed too small for him, though his hair remained as unkempt as ever. Normally an irritable man, he was at his happiest when confronted with a new medical anomaly. Usually Katherine found the energy that infused his every action when puzzling through an enigma charming, but today it was beginning to grate.
“You know how some people react strangely to common drugs? One out of a hundred thousands, say, who gets prescribed Valium and instead of relaxing act as if they’ve just had a double espresso?”
Katherine nodded slowly. “I think.” She picked up her coffee again and found it ready to drink.
“Well, the blood work on Sanders just came in and it’s pretty damn amazing. Between what you gave him and what the Clinic did, the man should’ve been riding a permanent buzz. We’re talking a potent cocktail of anti-depressants, relaxants, hypnotics--the whole thing; with some carefully balanced painkillers and stimulants since we didn’t want him acting like a zombie or aware that he was being manipulated.” He paused and scratched at his beard. “Obviously we didn’t get that quite right.
“It made anaesthetizing him for surgery a real nightmare. A real nightmare, as you know: the bastard woke up halfway through.” Scooter shook his head admiringly. “It’s a good thing we’d already closed up his side, but he almost killed himself right there.”
“Is he still stable?”
Scooter nodded. “Yes. But this is the thing. Robert’s our anesthesiologist and he’s very, very good at his job: I’ve never seen him fail to put someone under before, and keep him there at just the right level.” Scooter gestured animatedly at his chart. “But not Sanders! We checked him out . . . his blood’s swamped with an absurdly high concentration of naturally occurring antitoxins. The chemicals we expected to find in there were almost entirely missing or otherwise neutralized. Even concentration levels in adipose tissue are far below what we expected.”
“So what are you saying?” Agent K asked. “That’s he’s immune to drugs?”
“Of course not,” Jonathon answered. “No one is. But he’s definitely resistant. Call it strength of will, call it receptor insensitivity in the prefrontal cortex to--”
“Or stubbornness,” she interrupted, smiling.
“Whatever,” he continued, frowning briefly. “The point of all this is simply that I’m not convinced that our efforts had much effect on him over the last three weeks. We tried to shape him into our own Cindy, but what we saw was mostly his own design. We had some influence to be sure, but minimal at best.”
“No,” Agent K insisted, shaking her head. Her cup trembled in her hand and she carefully returned it to the table. “That’s impossible. I’m telling you: he trusted me completely. He even told me so. The suggestion held.”
“And I’m telling you,” the doctor answered. “That if David trusted you, it’s because he chose to of his own free will.”
***
She sat next to the patient in the bed and held his hand. She felt a little sick--of the selfishness of what she was doing and the weakness it displayed to Jonathon; but mostly for the insidious falseness of it. David probably wouldn’t even remember the conversation, she thought. But he might--and she felt sure that was key to what was to come.
The machines clustered around his limp form beeped and breathed quietly, insisting that their charge was alive, in stable albeit serious condition. His heart thumped with a strong and steady beat. She marvelled at the strength of this man; seeing David left so weak she easily imagined Cindy lying there in his stead. If all goes well, Agent K thought, it may very well be Cindy lying there soon.
She nodded once to Jonathon, who made an unseen gesture to the lone young woman standing by the bed. She injected a clear substance into David’s IV before stepping a discrete distance away.
It only took a few moments before David began to stir in the bed.
“You won’t have much time,” Jonathon said, speaking in a low voice. “He’ll be disoriented and in a lot of pain. Keeping him conscious for too long could kill him.”
She nodded absently, barely listening to the doctor. All her attention was focused on the man before her. Her grip around his hand tightened.
His eyes fluttered, opened--drifted shut--and snapped wide open. He stared wildly around, his eyes swirling in their orbs, confused and panicked. A moment later a loud, muffled moan escaped from around the tube down his throat.
“David,” she said, and then again, louder and insistent. “David, listen to me!”
His good arm strained against his restraint. His hand tightened painfully around hers. She pulled her hand free and stood over him. She gripped either side of his head and forced him to look at her. “David!”
His eyes snapped to hers and calmed momentarily with recognition. She saw the agony in every clenched and tense line of his face. He released another loud mewling, his nostrils flared with pain.
“Heart rate’s rising,” said the female doctor.
“Can you hear me?” Agent K asked.
David tried to nod, his head moving weakly.
“Do you still trust me?” She felt sick to her stomach even saying it.
He nodded again, though this time weaker than before.
“You were hurt, David,” she said, speaking quickly. “When we found you, you were all but dead. Your heart had stopped. The doctors saved you but you are still in very bad shape. We can’t risk moving you.
“But your position has been compromised, David. We have to assume Steele knows where you are.”
She saw the strain of concentration in his eyes, the growing pain and the weakness following closely behind.
“I have a plan,” she said. “One that might just keep you alive.”
“Doctor Bridges,” the female doctor interrupted. “We have to put him back under. He’s becoming critical.”
“Not yet!” Katherine snapped. She looked back at David and saw she was losing him. He didn’t understand. She had to make him understand.
“Revenge, David.”
His eyes immediately refocused on her.
“Yes, David.” Even as she spoke she felt the thrill of anger course through her, and her grip on either side of David’s head tightened. She brought her mouth close and whispered hoarsely into his ear. “Revenge. Revenge on that bastard Steele for doing this to you. For stealing your life.
“Revenge, no matter what the cost--is that what you want, David? I can promise it to you. I just need you to trust me and to do as I say. We need Cindy for a little while longer. Do this, and we’ll all get what we want, what we deserve.”
She pulled away and released his head. She took a deep breath and continued in a loud, insistent voice: “Do I have your permission to do what’s necessary?”
Agent K saw the confusion in David’s eyes, but behind burned the fury and hate she had counted on. He nodded, once.
“Let him sleep,” she said to Jonathon. He nodded to the other doctor, and a moment later David was once again in deep unconsciousness. The machines abandoned their erratic noised and gradually returned to their rhythmic beeping.
“Did you get what you wanted?” Jonathon asked.
“Yes,” she answered, her lips curling in a thin, bitter smile.
***
“Just so we are clear, I am completely opposed to this. I think what you plan to do is morally reprehensible, ethically wrong and almost certainly doomed to failure.”
Crystal Dawn was a tall woman in her late 40s, tastefully if conservatively dressed. A pair of pearl earrings and a loose, retro-90s curly perm, streaked with grey, framed her face. She had a strong chin offset by a thin nose and high cheekbones, minimally made-up with subtle touches of colour. Her long, glossy nails clicked rhythmically against the table top, expressing her annoyance at the meeting. “If you hadn’t convinced me that this was the only way of keeping this man alive, Jon, I’d have you before the board of directors in a minute. This David’s a neurotic, screwed-up jerk, but anyone who can get through to Harry Longman deserves a second chance in my book.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you’re even marginally involved in this insane plot.”
“Yes, yes, Carl, your objections are well noted,” Scooter answered, a slight grin nearly hid within the bushy mass of his beard.
Despite the experiences of the past few weeks, Agent K found it difficult to believe that the Asklepios head psychiatrist sitting opposite her used to be a man. It wasn’t that she was overtly feminine; just the opposite, in fact, as the doctor seemed to avoid the most obvious trappings of female fashion in favour of an almost masculine suit, matched with a pair of stylish but subdued low heels. She was attractive though not exactly pretty. Rather, it was that she exuded such confidence in herself that it seemed impossible that she had ever been anyone other than the poised mature woman she presented. Blistering intelligence lurking behind thin-framed glasses coolly observed both Agent K and Jonathon. Despite her irritation at the psychiatrist’s objections, Katherine found herself warming to the woman.
“I really don’t know why I let you get away with calling me that,” Crystal said, pursing her lips in feigned annoyance. “No one else does.”
“No once else can beat you at chess. I told you I’d stop once you finally win,” Scooted said, shrugging. He turned to Katherine. “Nearly thirty years and she still can’t beat me two out of three.”
“This weekend,” she said, smiling. “I’ve got you on the ropes.”
Agent K had been reluctant to bring anyone else in on her plan, but Scooter had insisted that Crystal would prove invaluable. The problem lay in convincing her to help.
“Listen,” the psychiatrist said, once they turned back to subject at hand. “You can’t just expect to throw a skirt on this guy and have him play the role you want. This David, sure, he’s very good . . . unusually convincing considering it’s all an act, especially considering it’s an unwilling one. But that’s all it is, and all it’ll ever be. An act, and that’s not enough for what you want.”
Agent K leaned forward. “That’s why we need your help,” she said. “We need to . . . change him. Change his mind.” She thought of her own past. “We need to break him and put him back together in a new shape; the same ingredients, just a different end product.”
Crystal’s eyes narrowed. She turned to Scooter. “Do you hear this? You’re kidding, right?” She turned back to Katherine. “He’s not a damn omelette, he’s not a bloody Rubik’s Cube! The human mind is an incredibly complex construct; you can’t just change it at a whim! What you’re talking about would destroy this man--probably still wouldn’t achieve what you want--and would most certainly leave him useless to you.”
Agent K leaned forward. “Why? He certainly did a good job these past three weeks. The reports I’ve read, the video footage I’ve watched: he played an almost perfect Cindy!” Even with only a minimal influence from the drugs, she thought.
“Good? Sure,” Crystal admitted. “But don’t fool yourself, he was far from perfect, and he’ll have to pass as a hundred-percent female for what you want. Like I said, it was all an act, a role David expected to soon drop. Now you want something far more long-term, and stuck in this female parody of a construct, this Cindy--something so counter to his natural inclinations--he’ll rebel, he’ll lash out, especially if confronted with something he’d never willingly do.”
“Or he’ll break,” Agent K suggested. “And couldn’t we then. . . .”
“You’re not listening!” Crystal said loudly, slapping her hand against the table. She removed her glasses and pinched her nose, taking a deep calming breath before continuing. “My encounters with David were few and informal--he didn’t know I worked for Asklepios, after all--but I was immediately struck by his intense masculinity--and I use the term in the most stereotyped way possible. The reports I’ve read and the footage I’ve studied has simply reinforced this certainty. If there was a sliding scale for gender, he’d be at the far end of it. It’s precisely because he’s so confident in his masculinity that he’s been capable of pretending he’s the exact opposite.
“But what you want to do to him--what you’ve already begun to do--will directly challenge this core identity of his. You can’t just pound his psyche with drugs, twist his body into a new shape and create a new person. You’ll either kill him or the conditioning will fail and you’ll be left with a very angry, very dangerous and deranged man.”
The psychiatrist shuffled through some papers and withdrew a number of photos. They weren’t entirely flattering to their subject, revealing Cindy at moments when the façade had dropped: staring openly at a passing female patient; masturbating on the toilet; sprawled in a most un-lady like fashion across his sofa. Agent K was particularly annoyed to find a picture of her entwined with David in the final moments before the assassin’s attack.
“David’s sexuality is at the core of his being,” Crystal continued, one slender finger gesturing at the photos. “Heterosexuality isn’t a choice, and from what I’ve seen the man’s a raving heterosexual. Chasing after women is a natural instinct for him. Those afternoons we spent sitting together he continuously checked out the female patients passing by--when he wasn’t unconsciously hitting on me, that is.” Crystal smiled slightly at the memory. “You’re not going to get this guy to start liking men, not by frying his brain with psychotropic drugs.”
Katherine looked aside at Jonathon, who sat at the table smiling. “I’m glad you find this amusing, Jon. I thought you said she could help us.”
“I can.” Crystal’s nails tapped out a brief rhythm as she thought. “The end result will be the same, but the approach will be different. Difficult and subtle and it will take a very long time. We’re talking months--years!--instead of days and weeks.”
Her fingers stilled their motion. “And it’s very capable of going horribly wrong at any time. Furthermore, the whole thing will prove horribly cruel to this man. For the duration of the program, David would likely be in a state of psychological torment--humiliated and shamed. These are not emotions one easily comes to terms with and he would be forced to live with them constantly. At the same time, the shame would be accentuated by the belief that he’d chosen to this path.
“Because this is absolutely essential: he has to believe at every step of the way that he’s making the choice of his own free will.” Crystal leaned forward, fixing her eyes on Katherine. “No. He can’t believe; the choice has to be his. Given the choice between living as Cindy and returning to a male life, he must freely choose to remain female.”
“But you said that was impossible,” Jonathon said, seeming grudgingly intrigued.
“Not impossible, just very, very difficult. What we have to do is control the preconditions so that choosing to remain Cindy is more in-line with his character than in opposition to it. We have to manipulate the essential character traits of David--his masculinity, his sexuality--to our own end. Once he’s firmly committed to the life of Cindy we use those same traits to subvert themselves and what we’re left with is--this caricature of femininity--this silly girl you’ve created--who remains at a fundamental level the David we know.”
Crystal hesitated, lips drawing tight in a displeased frown. “Or rather, I should say the David we think we know.”
Smiling slightly, K nodded. “In the short time I’ve know him, he’s proven to be a man of many surprises.”
“And that’s a problem,” Crystal said. “For this to work, we need to know precisely what we’re working with.” She pulled several more papers from her file and spread them out before her audience. “I’ve met with David and I’ve watched the security footage. You’ve both shared what you know about him,” she spoke to Jonathon but her eyes flicked aside to K, “and your experiences and impressions. I’ve got reports written up by members of staff concerning Cindy as well, as well as the original agency profile. And I’ll say this: it doesn’t add up. Both the man he is and the woman he’s portrayed are at odd with the history I’ve been given.
“The more we know about the man, about his history, his experiences, about his dreams--the better we can control him.”
She quickly outlined a basic plan and time plan, emphasising the importance of the physical changes already underway. “We’ve created an illusion here,” she said, “and we’re trying to make it a reality. We have to keep him off-balance; his own reflection, his every sense has to disassociate him from the life he’s known.”
When Crystal Dawn left Katherine released a deep sigh of relief, surprised to find how edgy the transgendered psychologist had left her. Used to feeling in control of a situation, Crystal’s inner strength had kept the agent off-balance. She had very little time to wonder why before Jonathon’s referred to his own file.
“The time we have to work with makes things difficult--and interesting, especially considering the shape David’s in.” His eyes gleamed at the prospect. “The man was technically dead when we found him--we’ve already had to dip into some of the experimental stuff we’ve been working on just to keep him alive--and if there’s any hope of seeing the result we want in the time we have, he’ll have to play guinea pig a little longer.”
Agent K took a deep breath, fighting to suppress a growing unease in her stomach. “Are these techniques dangerous?”
“Yes,” Jonathon answered bluntly. “But look at it this way, Katherine: he’s lucky to be alive as it is. And you know how effective some of this new technology can be--you’ve seen the end results before, you’ve brought the means to us, our experts have reverse-engineered what they can . . . and now you’ve brought me an ideal subject. Besides, we’ll be testing some of the riskier techniques on our other test subject before trying them on David.”
She nodded slowly, almost unwillingly. “And do you think . . . is it possible . . . to create a realistic Cindy out of him?”
A wide grin split the doctor’s face. “Oh yes, most certainly. It won’t be easy but that’s what makes it so interesting. The normal route of hormones and cosmetic surgery simply won’t do, especially if you want him ready within the month. Hormones take ages, especially past the teen years--although we’ll work with them, of course. Basic surgery can achieve miracles but isn’t perfect and often requires follow-ups, something we have to avoid.
“Normally we could redistribute body fat to create those curves you want, except that he’s got a body fat percentage of something like eight percent--he’s all muscle. So we tackle that first. Destroy his muscle mass and drop his weight. Then we pump him up again and help the fat go where we want it. A little sculpting of the underlying bone structure and some heavy facial work and he’ll have as angelic a face as any twenty-year old princess you’ve ever seen. He’s already lost a rib on one side; we’ll even things out and give him a waistline a supermodel would envy.”
“And this is all reversible?” Agent K asked. “He has to believe he can go back to being David.”
The doctor shrugged. “More or less. He’ll never look like he used to--but that was pretty much a given after getting his face smashed in by that assassin. But yes, we can change him back. He’ll probably be a bit wimpy-looking but definitely male. After all, that’s the other thing making this so hard: we’re not chopping off any important bits.”
She smiled. “Bits? Feeling a bit squeamish?”
“I’m a doctor,” Jonathon said. “But yes, the thought of a penis and a scalpel in close proximity to each other sends a shiver up my spine. Fortunately for David we’re going to take great care to avoid even chemically castrating him . . . it’ll be tricky finding the balance, but we’ll make sure his girl bits get soft while making it so his boy bits can still get hard.
“Well, there’s no point in delaying any longer. I’ll assemble a team and they’ll start on David tonight.” He took a final look at his chart, checking through his notes and the proposed changes. “A final question, though.”
“Yes?”
Jonathon grinned. “You sure you want to keep him a ‘D’ cup?”
Her smile was only slightly forced. “Definitely.”
Once he left the room her smile quickly faded. She sat alone for several long minutes, lost in thought. She reluctantly pulled a cell phone from within her jacket and stared at it. She thought of David and the brief time they had shared together. ‘Psychological torment’, the psychiatrist had said. ‘Wimpy-looking’, Jonathon had said--assuming David ever returned to a male life in the first place.
Does David deserve this? she wondered. Does Cindy?
She keyed the quick dial on the phone and waited patiently until the other end picked up.
“Yeah?” The man’s voice was, just as last time, brusque and impatient.
“Mr Steele?” Agent K said. “It’s begun, just as promised.”
***
He stood in the middle of the room and felt afraid.
David at first couldn’t place the source of his fear. The room was small and dingy and smelled terrible, but surely he’d seen worse places before? The pale light swaying overhead cast its feeble greenish fingers creeping into the far corners, revealing discarded rubbish and dead insects gathered in small shivering piles. A steel-frame bed with its stained mattress was pushed up against one dirty wall, and next to it a rickety nightstand held an old clock and a dog-eared book. The clock ticked unnaturally loudly, filling the room despite the deep thrumming of a far-away bass line that rose through the wooden floor.
Panic bubbled up and he took a shaky breath that did nothing to calm him. He felt small, somehow, small and vulnerable. David wished he’d worn something heavier than the flimsy sundress that barely cleared his knees. The fabric fluttered despite the stillness of the air and tickled his thigh. He nervously held the skirt down by clasping both hands together and holding them before him as if in supplication.
He heard a creak from behind and spun to face the single door. It yawned wide onto swirling darkness.
“Not again,” he whispered, taking a step away from the portal.
A low moan from behind forced him to turn back towards the bed. Agent K lay sprawled across the dirty mattress. She wore her jogging pants and coffee-stained t-shirt, again resembling a slightly-frazzled soccer mom.
“Such a disappointment,” slurred the voice from behind. David spun back to face Fosters, once again framed in the door. His feet rang a steady and loud rhythm as he approached, each step in counterpoint to the ticking of the clock. “Beg for your life, little sissy.”
“Stay away!” David cried out, backing away. The slender heel of his pump caught in a crack in the floor. Pain flared across his ankle as he twisted it and fell to the floor with a gasp. “No!”
“I’m going to hurt you bad,” he said, muscles bulging from his stained white undershirt. “I’m going to break you and burn you and make you bleed.”
“No,” rang out a loud voice. “You’re not.”
David cried out and tried to crawl away as Agent K blurred past, launching herself towards the assassin. The fight was brief; with an easy swipe of his arm Fosters sent the woman flying into the wall, where she crumpled to the floor and remained unmoving. A moment later he loomed over the terrified man. Fosters fist reared back--punched down. . . .
Everything seemed to slow down as the man rained blow after blow upon his victim. He worked methodically, and David felt pain flare across his body, first here, then there, and once it faded that area was left numb and dead. The physical punishment seemed to last ages. He tried to call out but found he lacked a voice, even when it felt as if his legs were being ripped from his body, even when Fosters’ fist pulped his nose and shattered his jaw. The final pain he felt throbbed for a long time across his chest before finally fading away as well. His eyes swelled shut and everything went dark and he drifted in an almost peaceful dark silence.
Soft, caring hands stroked his arm. His mother’s hands, David thought. “You’ll be okay, David,” she said. She cradled him close and he finally descended into a deep, dreamless sleep.
***
He found himself rising through darkness into consciousness. A hand gently stroked his arm.
“Wake up, Cindy,” a voice called to him. “Cindy, wake up.”
David’s eyes snapped open.
Continues in Constant in All Other Things–Season Two
Author Notes:
Drug name “Sadexsin” courtesy of the Drug Name Generator at www.wordlab.com.
No one rejoices more in revenge than woman,” quote by Decimus Junius Juvenal.
With a pharmaceutical magnate’s assassins hunting for him, David’s survival depends on living the life of Cindy for longer than expected. Can David suppress his macho instincts and play the feminine role long enough to escape the plot against him--even as the past begins to catch up to him? Welcome to season two of Constant in All Other Things!
Chapter One: David awakens to discover that all is not well. The Clinic may have saved his life in the aftermath of the assassin’s attack . . . but at what cost?
Author Notes follow at the end.
Constant in All Other Things 2
Chapter One
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
--check out tradingpostinn.blogspot.com--
“Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.”
Much Ado About Nothing
Previously on Constant in All Other Things:
Both David Sanders, tough-guy womanizer, and his best friend Tom Smith see their boss, shady pharmaceutical magnate Jeremiah Steele, kill the son of a known mob boss. David decides to turn to the authorities and testifies in court. A failed assassination attempt forces the woman assigned to protect him, Agent K, to relocate to a safe house. There she convinces David that his best chance of survival is to disguise himself as a woman. David reluctantly does so and adopts the identity of Cindy Long. They flee to the Asklepios Clinic, a secluded medical facility that promises safety; on the way they shake off their pursuer, turncoat agent Fosters. David and K bond on the road trip, though he wonders at times where her loyalties really lie; and they share details of their past.
At the clinic David settles into the roll of Cindy and several weeks pass. She helps another patient, Harry Longman, an aging rock star David idolized as a teen, and soon after K returns ready to relocate David into a new, male life. Just as he prepares to abandon Cindy forever, Agent Fosters catches up with him. David reveals that his past contains its own violent secrets and the two fight. He survives the struggle but is left critically injured.
***
My eyes snapped open.
Jagged peaks and swirled plains between, chaotic stucco whorls: an unfamiliar white landscape met my eyes. I blinked, and again, and slowly the view resolved into a ceiling. I was lying on a strange bed in an unknown room. I took a deep breath, held it and then quietly released and wondered: Where the hell was I?
A sudden instinct to lash out--blindly, wildly--without even knowing why seized hold. Inexplicable fear surged through every fibre of my being. Unaware of my surroundings I still felt an incredible desire to flee, to escape . . . what? Something was horribly wrong. I tried to sit up and my body flopped back to the bed and something dazedly felt horribly wrong. My arm strained against some kind of binding and I blinked numbly at the sight of my wrist fettered to a bedpost by leather restraints.
What the fu--what was going on? And my wrist, that hand that squirmed uselessly in its bondage . . . wasn’t right. My arm looked too small somehow. Dainty. Colour flashed from my fingertips--pink and glossy. Cindy liked pink, didn’t she? That’s right: Cindy. I was Cindy; or at least I was pretending to be. Stupid fucking plan. Didn’t keep me safe from Steele or from Fosters, did it?
But I was still alive.
“Easy, Cindy,” a voice called to me. “Everything is okay.” Soft, motherly.
My head whipped around to the other side, abandoning the disconcerting view of my hand. Hair fell across my eyes and I tried to brush it back and grunted in anger and frustration as the restraints held me back. Agent K sat next to my bed. Momentarily, something that looked suspiciously like concern or regret haunted her face; but the moment my eyes found her, the usual neutral expression--the one that perpetually bordered on vague annoyance--settled into place.
“Wh--?” I tried to speak but it came out a hoarse croak.
“Slowly,” K told me, leaning forward. “Try to avoid talking. You have been through quite an ordeal.” There was a surreal moment of dejavu as she hovered at my side. Only slowly coming to my sense, I watched numbly as she emptied a syringe into an IV snaking to my arm. Soon after a sharp, metallic flooded my mouth.
“What is--?” A little better this time. Less froglike croak and more drunken slur.
“A relaxant,” Agent K reassured me. “Nothing more. There is a lot to explain, Cindy. Most of it you are not going to want to hear.” As she spoke she began to undo the restraints holding me to the bed. As she freed my wrist I went to raise my arm but found it leaden and useless. In fact, I very quickly became pleasantly numb.
“These were only to ensure that you did yourself no harm as you recovered,” she said, releasing my other wrist, and my hand flopped limply to the mattress. I felt strangely content. All kinds of fears and misgivings danced at the periphery, but they were shadowy and indistinct, far away and easy to ignore. I knew it was whatever drug K had just pumped into me but couldn’t care less. I was perfectly happy to lie in that bed for just a little longer as she fussed about. There was the faintest sting as she pulled the IV from my arm, distant and easily ignored.
K pulled me into a sitting position in the bed, placing a pillow behind my back. From far away came the slightest of worries: she’s a strong woman, the voice suggested, but she shouldn’t be able to move you that easily. She pulled her chair to the far end of the bed and sat facing me, looking very strict and serious in a dark suit. Her legs crossed at the knee, severe in heavy dark hose emerging from a slim knee-length skirt. This wasn’t a soccer-mom taking care of her daughter, nor was it the Katherine the doctor knew. It wasn’t even the beautiful, broken woman I had mixed and confused feelings for. This was K the secret agent, and something in the way her eyes glittered darkly as they slid across my body briefly pierced through my content fog and sent a hot stab of fear up my spine. Her gaze was hungry, I thought, and cold, but almost unwilling so; and behind it all I imagined lurked a hidden sadness. Never had a felt so vulnerable and exposed before her.
Passively, my eyes wandered across what I could see of my own form. I didn’t move my head--that would have taken too much effort--but looking towards K saw one foot peeking out from beneath cheerfully coloured bed sheets. It was my foot but I felt only vaguely aware of it, couldn’t move it; the shiny pink toenails were nearly mesmerizing.
“Cindy,” K said. “Try to focus on my voice, Cindy.”
With some effort I abandoned my toe in favour of what she was saying.
“How do you feel, Cindy?”
“Don--,” I tried to speak, but my tongue felt thick and stubborn. I carefully swallowed and tried again. “Don’t. Call me that.”
One edge of her mouth twisted upwards in a tight-lipped smile. “You had better get used to the sound of your own name,” Agent K said. “You will have to continue using it for some time.”
It’s a testament to the strength of her drugs that I didn’t leap out of that bed right then and there. Nor did I feel an immediate panic, though fear certainly leapt closer at her words. An angry throb behind my right eye--that’s all I felt as she continued.
“You have been unconscious for nearly two months now, Cindy. Two months! But in that time, nothing less than a miracle has taken place. A miracle, Cindy. When we found you on the floor of the clinic you were all but dead. Your heart had stopped. Your injuries were . . . they were terrible . . . I thought you were dead, David.”
Both her countenance and voice briefly wavered.
“Cindy. It was my fault. I accept this. The disguise and the Clinic were not enough, I misjudged Steele’s determination to find you and the skill of his agents; I should not have left you alone. My failure almost cost you your life.” She shook her head, her hand drifting unconsciously to her side. “It nearly cost me mine as well.”
Flinty steel scored her voice as she continued. “But I will not fail again. You will live, Cindy, no matter what the cost. However, the situation is worse now than before your convalescence. Steele is closer than ever to finding you.”
Agent K sighed. “I spoke to him, Cindy, on the phone we found clutched in your hand. Briefly, but in that time I glimpsed the depth of this man’s obsession with you. It borders on madness, I think, and he will stop at nothing to find you.
“You gave your location away. He knew where to find you and your body was broken. It was a miracle you survived one attack,”--and I heard the curiosity in her voice, the unasked question as to how I defended myself against a professional assassin--“but with arms and legs broken, a punctured lung, shattered ribs and a concussion? You were defenceless. You needed months of bed rest to heal, possibly a year or more of physiotherapy to regain full mobility. In the meantime Steele would be searching for you.”
At its own sullen pace and despite the relaxant K had administered, my brain was slowly waking up. Slowly I became aware of my surroundings, of the details of the bed I lay on and the walls around me. Light peaking through peach curtains, the faint sound of birds chirping, the cries of children playing outside: somebody’s bedroom, cheerfully, somewhat femininely decorated. Another safe house?
K continued to speak and I tried to focus on her words again. Where was she going with all this? “The Clinic is small, Cindy: under two hundred patients with minimal turnover; and nearly as many staff. Steele has already shown his determination and ability to hack into the Clinic’s network and bypass their security system, to directly infiltrate the institute with his own men. He has the time and the resources; patient names, staff listings, stock orders--Steele may have all of these. Meanwhile, we could not risk moving you. You had to remain at the Clinic and heal. And by the time you could be moved--Steele could have a small army of his people following the movements of everyone coming and going from Asklepios.”
Her shoulders slumped and for a moment she looked exhausted. She hung her head, pinching at the bridge of her nose. When she looked up, her eyes fixed me with an almost angry glare. “What choice did I have, Cindy? By the time we could move you--the movement of an unlisted male patient would not have gone unnoticed.
“So I made a choice. Cindy was already a patient at the Clinic. She had been there nearly a month already with a file reaching even further back. Steele was still looking for a man. But Cindy . . . is female, and if Steele’s agents came looking I thought it best to give them precisely that: a woman. Someone who could not be the man they were looking for.”
The slow, angry throb behind my eye? At her words it became a savage lancing pain that made my eyes water. The pain quickly subsided to a hot presence in the back of my head, like an itch in the brain I could not reach. I wanted to cry out, protest what she was saying--but barely managed a low moan. Strong emotions were hard to maintain in my state, slipping through my grasp like a chilling mist.
Perhaps she mistook my pain for sadness, thought my watering eyes were tears. “Cindy--Cindy! I am sorry,” she continued, her voice insistent. “This is for your own protection.”
I forced my head to loll forward. Saw the bed sheets pulled up to my waist. My arms lying limply, thin and dainty, and the painted fingernails that shimmered in the sunlight. Skin tinted a pearly blue by the gauzy babydoll, and the twin mounds that pushed out, rounded and firm, against the flimsy fabric. And beneath the covers, below my waist . . . my God, she couldn’t have. . . !
“Cindy!” she said, loudly. “Yes, the changes you see are far more than the simple prosthetics and makeup of before.” She was speaking faster now, forcefully carrying me along with her words. “Those breasts you see are real. Your waist is smaller and your hips are wider. No one would doubt you are a woman now, Cindy.
“But this remains nothing more than a disguise! A very real and convincing one, but nevertheless only external trappings, a cover for your masculinity--and therefore temporary.” Her hand gestured towards my crotch. “You remain completely male where it counts. The surgical changes, everything else . . . is reversible, Cindy. We originally planned on three weeks. The plan has changed. Circumstances have changed. Now we must plan on three months, or even longer if necessary.
“You are being watched. Not constantly, of course, but frequently and in secret. And of this you can be certain: any suspicious behaviour, anything that suggests that the young woman I see before me is really a twenty-five year old man, will be reported back to Steele. And were he to discover you identity?” She shook her head. “I shudder to think what he would do to you, Cindy, especially if he found you in your current state.”
I wanted to reply; fuck, did I ever want to say something, move, protest--but all I managed was a useless flopping of my arm and an angry twitch of the foot.
Agent K stood, pulling the chair out of my line of sight. She continued to speak even as she disappeared from view. “You may not agree with the choice I made. To be blunt: I do not care.” She reappeared at my side, leaning over me, her features coldly impassive. “I told you from the very beginning that I would keep you alive no matter what the cost. Making you into Cindy seemed the best way at the time, and now there is no choice but to stick to that plan. Steele’s resources are not infinite--eventually he will have to turn his attention elsewhere, confront his other enemies. Then, when it is safe--we can finally put Cindy to rest.”
She walked slowly alongside the bed, her hand tracing the length of my body through the thin sheets that covered me. I felt her touch and my lower body tingled slightly, though movement still felt monumentally difficult. Standing once again at the foot of the bed, she took a long, lingering look at me. There was something final in the way she gazed at me, as if she were burning the sight before her into memory.
“This is your new life Cindy,” she said. “This is your new home. Perhaps not the relocation you expected--but if you live it honestly, genuinely--if you do everything you can to truly become Cindy Long--you will be safe; and once you are safe was can finally return you to a male life. I will be in contact when necessary, but once again my presence is a liability. If it becomes necessary to contact you I will do so through indirect means.”
She hesitated, and added: “In all likelihood, we will not meet again until this is over,” she said. Her mouth opened as if to add something, reconsidered; she turned away and walked out of sight. I heard a door open.
“Katherine!” I called out, my voice hoarse and weak.
Her rhythmic steps faltered. There was a long pause. I knew she hadn’t left the room yet, that she hovered uncertainly at the threshold. “Yes?” she asked, her voice weary.
“I trusted you,” I said.
I waited for an answer that didn’t come. When I finally gathered the strength to shift my head, it was only to glimpse her rapidly retreating back, the sound of her steps fading into the darkness beyond the door. From far away, it seemed, another door shut, and I was alone.
***
I saw my first tranny a couple of years ago.
We’d just finished off a big project at NeoPharm, back when I was at the low end of the corporate ladder and just starting my ascent. We’re talking many late nights here, eighty-hour weeks, lots of stress and staffroom dramas. When it was all over, euphoria swept through the whole team. This was especially true for a few of us who, like Tom and I, were looking at promotions afterwards. It was also this one guy’s 25th birthday, Barry, so when we all decided to celebrate he had a big say in where we went.
“Let’s try something different,” Barry said. He was one of the cleverest people on my team, with a real knack for thinking “outside the box” and for “shifting paradigms”, as these bastards like to say. There were staffroom rumours that he had one hell of a secret social life as well. Personally I’d always taken him for a pillow-biter, but so what? As long as he didn’t try that shit with me, we were cool; and if I caught him ogling my ass once or twice, well . . . whatever. I’m a good-looking guy, you know? There was an undercurrent of arrogance to everything he did, but grating as it could be at times I wasn’t going to hate him for it. It’s not like I’m all that humble myself. He was damn good at his job and made us all look good, and that was enough for me. “I know this club downtown, it’s very exclusive.”
So Barry set it up and there were about twenty of us, a real mixed bunch of guys and girls all dressed up real snazzy, who showed up downtown that evening. We walked up to the entrance of ‘The Pink Room’ and yeah . . . we knew we were up for a different kind of night. The woman who met us at the door was stunningly beautiful, perfectly made-up and shimmering in a crimson evening gown that clung to her every curve. Those clothes were almost enough to distract everyone from the fact that she wasn’t exactly a ‘she’, if you know what I mean. I wasn’t fooled . . . but it was a close call, let me tell you. That dude was unnervingly foxy.
I’d never seen a transvestite before--that I knew of, anyway--let alone been to that kind of club. Not exactly my kind of thing. Like I said before, I’d had a strange childhood and it kind of stunted my social development a bit. Even though I’d been first kissed by a boy at the age of fourteen, I still didn’t really figure out what the whole ‘gay’ thing was until much later. And now this shit? It never occurred to me that some guys might prefer to wear women’s clothing. I just didn’t understand it. The thought of some guy reaming another is disgusting, but apparently you’re just born that way and that’s that. Some people are born beautiful, some are dumb as rock . . . some guys are born with a predilection for cock. If that’s the way it is I couldn’t see a reason to make a big deal out of it.
But clothes? It didn’t seem to me that you could be born wanting to wear a skirt and heels, so I couldn’t see what the whole point was. I couldn’t help but eyeball these scrawny dudes flittering about in sexy waitress outfits as we settled in, and wonder what the hell it was all about. Then I saw Barry at the other end of the table noticing me noticing these cross-dressers, and he gave me this knowing smirk and wink, and that left me all kinds of annoyed.
As the cabaret show that night started up, I watched in amazement and confusion. All the girls on stage were guys--and damn if they weren’t really good at what they did. There were coarse and rude bits, sure, but the dancing was spot on and the routines imaginative. It made for an entertaining night. The booze continued to flow like water. Some of those guys were damn fine lookers as well, curvy in the all right places, wiggling and prancing about confidently in their clicking, breakneck heels, and that was kind of weird to consider. The kicker came with the climax of the show: out came Barry himself, vamping as Marilyn Munroe, singing a breathy ‘Happy Birthday’ to himself.
As the night wound down my colleagues drifted home or off to the next nightspot, and I eventually found myself slumped in a chair next to Barry. He’d switched into something more appropriate--a pleated tartan skirt, a tight silvery halter top, real chic clubgirl stuff--that left him looking really androgynous like, and it was just the two of us from our group left as the club started to wind down for the night. I was completely off my face and there was still no mistaking Barry for a real girl--but damn if he wasn’t looking better by the pint.
“You were right,” I said, clinking my glass to his. “This was different.”
“Have a good night?” He smiled, his painted lips glistening in the dim light. Connecting this girl with the guy who wrote PR shit for our website was messing with my head.
“It wasn’t what I expected,” I answered.
“I bet,” he said. There was a faint glimmer of worry in his eyes, heightened by shimmering eyeshadow. “Listen, David . . . this isn’t going to make things weird for us at work, is it?”
I frowned. “Why would it?” I answered, and meant it. “I already figured you for a queer.”
His eyes narrowed in annoyance. “I’m not homosexual.”
“Sure you’re not.” I smiled. “You just like to wear women’s clothing.”
“That’s right.”
I waited for the punch line but none came. Barry watched me with a curious half-smile. “But--”
“Let’s just say it has more to do with identity than with sexuality.”
“Huh?”
“You should try it,” he said. “You’d pass easily.”
I nearly coughed up my beer. “Excuse me?”
Barry shrugged. “The height’s right. You’re way too muscular but I’m betting you’re small-boned.” He made small gestures taking in my arms, my face. “You’ve got beautiful features. Your cheekbones are killer, and those eyes! You’re gorgeous, David--”
“Whoa. Easy there, buddy. Not interested.”
He sighed. “I’m not coming on to you. I told you I’m not gay. I’m not even bi. I’ve got a girlfriend. . . .” His smile grew and turned wicked. “Actually, I’ve got quite a few. You’d be surprised how many girls find this kind of thing sexy. I probably get more action than you do.”
I laughed. “I doubt it.”
“Do you?” Amusement danced in his eyes. “Tell you what. I’m just getting started. Hang out with me tonight. There’s more out there than cheesy pick-up bars, David, it’s not all bankers and lawyers and corporate bullshit climbers.” I’d suspected for a while but knew right then what Barry really thought of me. That arrogance he carried at work stemmed from disdain. I was one of many in the grey army of working stiffs; he thought I was boring, a hollow shell of a man lost to the corporate lifestyle. His secret life gave him depth and meaning he knew I lacked. His attitude made me smile.
“Follow me and I’ll show you a side of the city you never imagined existed,” he said, and grinned. “And who knows? I might just get you into a skirt yet.”
Well, Barry proved absolutely right about one thing that night: I am small-boned. But he never got me into a skirt. Agent K would be the first to manage that. After she left, control of my body returned faster than the return of my senses. It’s the only way to explain how I was eventually able to slowly sit up on the bed, lethargically throwing my feet over the edge and pulling myself upright, without immediately collapsing again in terror.
Because what I felt and saw as I sat up? There was enough there to send me gibbering back into unconsciousness. The breasts were the most immediate: the way gravity tugged at them, the insistent weight and counter-sway to my every movement. I mean, sure, I’d had those appliances attached for three weeks before fucking Fosters battered the damn things off my body . . . but now I knew just how far removed those prosthetics were from the real thing.
The real thing? How the hell could I have real breasts? I slowly raised my hand to cup them, controlling the limb from miles away, but the colour that flashed at the tip captured my attention and I brought them before my face, slowly turning my palm and wiggling my fingers before my eyes. I could barely recognize my own hand. How could these refined digits be mine, these polished, shaped nails? My eyes drifted past a diminutive wrist up thin arms and finally to small shoulders, before falling back once again to that healthy bosom.
I watched in fascination as those breasts lifted and fell with every breath, faster, and suddenly blood was pounding in my ears and my chest was heaving and I was sucking in vast gulps of air and from very far away I realized I was starting to hyperventilate; and then I wasn’t so far away anymore and. . . .
What did they do to me?
Surging to my feet I staggered into the centre of the room. The room tilted and swayed crazily around me. A flash of light--a mirror--I stumbled unsteadily towards it and gripped the wall to keep from collapsing. My legs shook uncontrollably as I stared blindly into the full-length mirror. Shaking my head brought momentary clarity. I saw myself in fragments, my eyes dancing wildly across the form revealed to me:
Soft, sloping shoulder, their slenderness accentuated by the delicate strap of the babydoll that whispered against my thigh with every movement. Small, slightly upturned nose and the full lips beneath, glistening and soft. The dark, round circle of areolas. The nubs that pushed out rudely from their center. My penis, hanging ashamedly behind its silky blue veil. Blonde-brown hair that fell across my eye and flicked across my cheek. Narrow and weak chin--cute--but not mine. Sleek and lean, smooth hairless calves that nearly gleamed, bereft of hard lines of either muscle or definition. Again those tits, high and firm on the chest, rounded and large--too large--on a narrowed frame.
My legs went weak, wobbled and gave out beneath me. I fell to the floor. The room started to spin. The reflection . . . that girl in the mirror . . . wasn’t me; I couldn’t find myself in my own reflection and this had to be some kind of dream, a nightmare, hallucination, this kind of shit doesn’t happen it real life. . . .
With desperate strength I lunged forward and gripped the mirror by both sides. This wasn’t going to beat me. I was stronger than this . . . this plot, this whatever it was, being inflicted on me. From where I lay on the floor I forced myself to stare into that mirror and find myself. The eyes gave it to me. Those were my eyes--eyelashes longer, eyebrows all but plucked away into a delicate arch--but still mine, green eyes flecked with grey. They were softer and more innocent looking than before, somehow wider and more expressive; but in their depths I saw those familiar hints of pain and loss.
“Deep breath,” I muttered, staring into myself. “Release.” Those massive breasts tugged at my chest as I leaned forward, pulling me down. Every gulp of air I sucked down roared in my ears and I began to feel faint. “Breathe!” I hissed between clenched teeth, my hands gripping the mirror’s edge so tightly the glass vibrated. Hair tickled my bared neck. “Don’t lose it.” Green, with grey flecks. My eyes; not my face but those were my eyes; this is me. This is me staring into the mirror.
I am David Sanders.
I eventually pulled away, remaining on the floor. The girl in the mirror followed every movement. I wanted to turn away but refused to do so. I had to confront her, see who she was--not in broken fragments but as a whole, as a fully cast person--not just as a reflection but as my reflection.
The girl in the mirror was both the Cindy I knew and a complete stranger. There’d always been a lot of David lurking beneath Cindy’s heavy foundation and clever makeup and bodyshaping undergarments. Now when I looked in the mirror I saw more of Cindy and very little of David. The alteration was subtle but profound: this new Cindy showed none of the rough edges or strong features that she had before. Her chin was small, the nose delicate. My once thin lips were full and held a playful, slight curve that seemed to naturally rest in a half-smile. There was an overall youthfulness--even childishness--to her face that wiped away any and every masculine trace. Her light brown hair was shorter than the previous wig but long enough to brush her shoulders, with a slight upward curl at the tips. Small, well-formed ears peeked out, each one glittering with a trio of golden studs. Light makeup, apparently K’s final motherly gift, gently accentuated her natural beauty.
Her face had a deeply unsettling effect on me, but the body nearly unmade me. Slowly, studiously--a façade that barely hid the hollowness I felt--I studied the shape unveiled before me and felt the room begin to tilt and roll vertiginously at the realization of just how much they had stolen from me.
Those . . . bastards, those god-forsaken mother-fucking bastards! How could this be . . . me? Two months. Only two months to undo a decade of discipline and excruciatingly hard work . . . countless hours of running and weights, workouts in the gym and training in the dojo . . . stripped away. How? Flimsy lingerie accentuated how once strong arms were now slender and smooth, hard pectorals melted away beneath soft breasts, legs turned lithe rather than powerful. My stomach remained taut, but no longer held the masculine definition of before. Where once I needed the heavy boning of a corset to create curves, this new shape held them naturally.
I was weak. Everything about this girl was soft and weak and defenceless. Staring aghast at my new reflection provided a sudden glimpse of what could’ve been. Take away the breasts, the tapered waist and rolling hips and there was the hint of a young boy, a scrawny runt who never met Sakura, never became a real man, a wimp who never learned to kill.
Too much. Where I should have found a battered and scarred male stood a supple young woman, healthy and whole, beautiful, innocent. This woman--this girl--was me? This girl with a face I scarcely recognized? This impossible body, powerless, delicate even: a victim.
Too much: I fell away from myself, frantically clutching the floor, stability, my world spinning away, tits swaying obscenely as I shakily struggled to rise on all fours. My torso heaved, and again, and I gagged as an empty stomach tried to expel the terrible fear that squeezed and poisoned my gut. Bile spattered the carpet and the edge of the mirror, yellowish green.
Rolling away and with eyes squeezed shut I curled into a tight ball, legs pulled to my chest. I buried my face into my knees. My thoughts were incoherent, racing wildly. Something terrifying and powerful broke lose within and I felt a shuddering sob rise up through my ribs. My eyes grew wet. I stuffed the edge of my hand into my mouth and bit down nearly hard enough to break skin, stifling the howl that threatened to tear loose. I wasn’t going to cry. Not for this. I was a man and stronger than this. Deep breaths. Force down the fear. Take control. Remember Sakura. Focus.
How long I squatted like that, half-naked in a strange bedroom, shaking and lost, repeating snippets of lessons like a mantra, I couldn’t tell you. As much as I tried to detach myself from my own body, from the physicality of this new femininity, reality would not be denied. I felt hyperaware of every twitch and shiver of my smoother skin, how pulling the babydoll at my waist tugged at my shoulders; and the press of my knees against those soft pillows on my chest. Every shift of new proportions nearly destroyed me. The overwhelming rush of emotions threatened to tear my mind apart.
Betrayal: I trusted K! I had trusted her and she had used that trust to twist my body into this caricature of revenge on an old, dead lover. I had trusted her and thought her a friend and . . . dammit, I had trusted that bitch!
Loss: everything I had built up and tried to be these past five years, gone in a scant few weeks, wasted and thrown away for nothing--my life, my strength, my friends. Every effort to leave behind a violent childhood undone as I slept.
Fear: nearly mind-numbing, at what I had become, the kind of life this body forced me into, the seeming permanency of it all.
Gradually my trembling subsided and the mental torrent quieted down, leaving in its wake a single, distinct thought pure and strong. It grounded me to the present. Gave me the strength to slowly uncurl and stand on weak legs and find myself in the mirror a final time. The woman in the glass was small and soft and weak, but her eyes blazed like newly tempered steel.
I would be revenged on them all.
***
I lost myself in the sounds of my new home. I sat at the edge of my bed, staring unseeingly at the floor and my mind absently followed the aural ebb and flow. The earlier cry of children playing faded as the light from the open window drifted slowly across the carpeted floor, turned red and crept up the far wall. There came the sound of a lawn being mowed and from far away the sound of a dog barking. The occasional car passed. With the dark came a new set of bird cries and anxious chirping, but as the light finally faded and the room grew dim, those sounds left as well. I thought I heard the sound of a man’s voice raised in anger, a woman’s retaliatory shout, the cry of a baby--all muffled, coming through the wall. Eventually I sat in silence and in darkness.
My stomach grumbled.
With a sigh I rose from the bed and stood half-blind in the middle of the room. I couldn’t just sit here anymore. I’d go crazy. I’d been there before--after Katherine died--I retreated into myself and when I returned was no longer quite right anymore. It took a long time to recover from that. The trick was to keep moving. Do things to keep the mind distracted from what was going on, too busy to notice how fucked up things really were. Routine: that was the key.
Agent K said this was my new home; fine. The first thing to do then was to explore. A light breeze tickled my bared shoulders and raised goose bumps across my cleavage. I sighed. No, the first order of the day was to get out of this goddamn scrap of lace and into something sensible.
A cheap lamp next to the bed gave some light to see by. There wasn’t much to the room. The bed was a double, the sheets a cheery yellow, the bedspread fluffy and pale grey, decorated with vivid slashes of red. There was a stuffed pink-and-white bear on the bed--can you fucking believe it? A full-length mirror, short bookcase haphazardly stacked with paperbacks, and a solid but battered dresser finished off the room and left it crowded, but comfortably so, cozy instead of cramped, the bright colours and soft touches adding a warm, feminine dimension. It was most definitely a girl’s room; it was, I realized with a small shiver, now my room.
A quick search through the dresser and closet uncovered a large but not excessive selection of shoes and clothes. Some I recognized from my wardrobe at the Clinic. To my surprise the clothes weren’t outrageously feminine, though some very girly things skulked among the sensible clothes.
The babydoll pooled around my feet with a silky whisper and I kicked the damn thing into the back of the closet. Slipping into a pair of loose grey jogging pants and a baggy sweatshirt, I tried to ignore the pendulous swaying of my boobs that accompanied the act of getting dressed. At the back of my mind lurked the unnerving realization that I wouldn’t be going around without a bra very often, and believe me--that wasn’t something I wanted to deal with at the moment. I shoved that thought firmly out of mind.
Still, I couldn’t avoid a reflected glimpse of myself as I stepped away from the closet: cute, tiny girl snuggling into the comfort of oversized casual clothes. Christ, but I looked like a sexy schoolgirl, slouching around her dorm room on a lazy Sunday afternoon. There were far too many things I could not avoid, each clambering for attention as I haltingly stepping into this new life: the renewed difficulty of doing anything with long nails, the enhanced sensuousness of every inch of freshly shorn flesh, and the ridiculous incongruity of my cock intermittently slapping my sleek thigh. I gripped the doorframe and took a deep, steadying breath and forced my doubts and fears away. Bare feet padded softly on the thin carpet as I stepped out of Cindy bedroom and explored my new home.
A cursory first walkthrough damn well didn’t take very long, I can damn well assure you of that. Compared to my old condo this place was a cardboard box. A quick glimpse out a window revealed that I now lived in a high rise, probably about a dozen floors up. I didn’t recognize any of the buildings scattered across the night sky cityscape, but what I saw suggested a small city rather than a sprawling metropolis. I briefly wondered where I now lived, whether I was in the same city--if I was even in the same country. As every breath and move reminded me of the reality of my form, no longer did anything seem impossible.
Bathroom, kitchen, spare room and lounge: this was my new world, bordered by thin walls and cheap flooring, and filled with used or inexpensive furniture. In a daze I fell back on sofa. Tall vertical blinds, peach-coloured but greying at the edges, swayed with the wind reluctantly admitted by the open patio doors behind. A narrow balconette looked out across the city. A short coffee table filled the empty space between the sofa and an old battered plasma screen TV hung on the wall opposite. A small 9x11 picture frame, bright red and plastic, grudgingly caught my attention. I leaned over and picked it up.
The girl in the picture stood on one leg, the other thrown up in an impromptu barefoot kick. A female friend standing near did the same. They were laughing and tossing their hair in the wind, arms wrapped around each other’s waist. Sunlight glittered in their happy eyes. Both were wearing bikinis and behind them brilliantly blue surf rolled up the beach.
The first girl, the one wearing a yellow string bikini with her healthy bosom nearly overflowing their cups, was me. This happy young thing, prancing half-naked on some sun-kissed foreign beach . . . was me. Me! My grip tightened on the frame until the frame creaked and I placed it back on its stand. It fell over with a clatter and fell to the floor face up. The happy eyes of Cindy followed me as I looked away.
Suddenly, homey touches all over the apartment drew my eyes: the photo collage hanging on the wall, the framed pictures along the hall or perched on shelves or stand all over the place: friends on girls’ night out, girls at a high school prom, elegant gown, beach parties, basement get-togethers, drunken laughter, all caught on film, proudly and happily displayed and in nearly all of them Cindy’s grinning face, smiling, made-up, pulling a silly look, in this one gazing serious into the camera, in that one. . . .
Kissing a boy, her arms around his neck, his arms at her waist.
I closed my eyes against a sudden bout of dizziness. Photo manipulation. If I looked closely maybe I’d find tell-tale touches of digital trickery. Maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe K was that good, or maybe I’d been in some drugged-up half-pickled state as they played dress-up with me and captured these shots; maybe there’d once been a real Cindy and they’d made me look like her and. . . .
The urge to vomit again was nearly overwhelming and I took several more deep breaths to settle down once again. When I opened my eyes I finally noticed the bottle of white wine on the coffee table, waiting with a single glass and an opener. The bottle was wrapped with a bow and had a note attached. I picked up the bottle--painfully aware of how much heavier it seemed--and read the note.
“Good luck Cindy!” it said, in a strong but sloppy handwriting. “From everyone at the Clinic, may this help with a speedy recovery.” Beneath it was signed, “Your friend, Scooter.”
I began to shake once again as I sat there in this sorry excuse of a room, in this poorly decorated prison. I very slowly reached for the bottle opener. The old-fashioned screw opener made getting even that fucking cork out a more difficult struggle than it should’ve been, bringing a brief burn to my arm, but eventually I dropped back into the sofa, cradling a glass of Chablis in my well-manicured hand. Gazing into the amber drink I released one of the deepest groans of my life.
God, I needed this drink. At the same time, how could I trust it to not be drugged? Of course, if Scooter wanted to get at me there were hundreds of ways to do it that I couldn’t avoid: in the air again, through the water supply, while I was sleeping, in my food . . . the bastards could be watching me right now. There could be a camera in the TV opposite, watching my every movement, or in the light fixtures or behind the mirror or. . . . You enjoying yourselves, you fucks? Getting your goddamn pervert thrills ogling all this T&A you’ve given me?
I knocked back the glass in a single long draught. Fuck you, Scooter, I thought. Fuck all of you. I poured myself another glass and settled deeper into the sofa, legs spread comfortably. The wine spread comforting warmth through my stomach, which helped settle me somewhat.
What if K was telling the truth? What if, as absurd as it seemed, she genuinely thought this was my best chance at survival? In her sick little mind, twisting my body into this humiliating prison might actually seem justified; she might honestly believe she was doing this for my own good. The thought wasn’t very appealing, because it meant that outside these walls and beyond that door, Steele’s assassins still lurked. More men like Fosters might still be hunting me. . . .
Yeah, like K said: being caught by Steele while I looked like this? I’d rather die.
If she was lying though . . . yeah, that’s thought wasn’t very goddamn appealing either. Because that meant one of two things: either she was totally insane and acting out some twisted revenge against me and somehow had the full backing of the Clinic; or she was working for Steele.
I had to put the wine glass down. If that was true . . . God, I should’ve killed the bitch when I had the chance, back at the hotel after we first met Fosters. I could’ve just walked away then and there. Called in a few favours from some old friends and taken my chances. Instead I’d trusted her. No; I’d done more than just trust her. I’d fallen for the cunt. Fallen hard and actually thought she was a friend. God, how could I’ve been so stupid? How many times? How many times would I be betrayed before I learned that you couldn’t trust anyone in this fucked up world?
But Fosters had been looking for her. He told me his partner--that other agent shadowing him, the woman--was taking care of K even as he beat the shit out of me. Hovering over me this morning, she favoured her side, a barely healed injury . . . if she was working for Steele, why would his assassins try to kill her?
I poured myself another glass of wine. Puzzling this through wasn’t going to get me anywhere at the moment. Right now, I had to take it one thing--one day--minute by minute--at the time. Survive the immediate; if I wasn’t crazy within the hour I’d tackle the next one, and hopefully I wouldn’t have front dived off the balcony to the concrete waiting below by then.
I nearly snorted wine out my nose at the thought. Yeah, right! As if I’d ever give these bastards the satisfaction of my suicide. Goddamn butchers and psychos. They’d find me a far harder nut to crack than that. Another large gulp of wine and I snorted again, and then nearly laughed out loud. I stifled the release by clamping my mouth shut but too late. Wine dribbled out my mouth and down my chin. I squeaked and suddenly collapsed into giggles. The sound was bubbly and feminine--my throat, my voice--and suddenly that seemed outrageously funny as well and I laughed out loud. Everywhere I looked presented something that sparked off another peal of giggles and laughs. The absurdity of it all. This home. This body. My life.
I laughed until my sides hurt. Hugging myself tightly, arms crossed beneath tits that jiggled with every chuckle, I laughed until I was blinded with tears. I laughed as the tears coursed down my cheeks and spotted my sweater and my voice grew hoarse. My voice caught in my throat and twisted and what emerged was a moan, and suddenly instead of laughter I was wracked with great sobs that tore violently through the entirety of my body. I sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. My howl of outrage and helplessness resonated through the room. The empty glass shattered across the far wall. I grabbed the bottle and drowned my girlish weeping by sculling what remained of the wine. The empty bottle dropped from my hand with a dull thud. I couldn’t stop crying.
This absolutely pathetic weakness overwhelming me pushed me into further feminine snivelling. I could picture myself, my scrawny frame flung across the sofa, clutching at the fabric desperately, bosom heaving with every sob, every cry, shirt wet with tears, weak mewling catching in my throat with each gasp of breath, exhaustion overtaking me: how maudlin. How pathetic. How weak.
As I slowly dropped into a dark and dreamless sleep a single thought haunted my thoughts: maybe they’d given me the body I deserve.
***
Continues in Chapter 02
This is the second revision of chapter one. A few thousand words of new stuff, and streamlined some earlier bits and caught a few mistakes. Still not content with the chapter over all but may have to accept it as is and move forward. The ending probably needs a tweak: I'm fairly sure it slides into melodrama, which is never all that cool.
It's still a work in progress I guess, and feedback and comments are still always appreciated!
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Chapter Two: Finding his body twisted into Cindy’s diminutive form is almost enough to destroy David, but he’s made of sterner stuff and grudgingly begins to live her life. His enemies are still afoot, however, forcing several difficult decisions.
Constant in All Other Things 2
Chapter Two
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
“Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.”
Much Ado About Nothing
All of a hundred pounds and I couldn’t fucking do it.
First in my triceps then quickly up through both shoulders, the burn settled in my chest behind the pendulous weight of those breasts. Flattened against the cheap bedroom carpeting, both boobs offered a free inch or two of cushioning. The ache quickly intensified and swelled. My arms began to tremble. The pain in my wrist became acute. Pushing and straining, I slowly lifted a scant three inches off the ground; my strength suddenly evaporated and I dropped back to the floor.
Not even one goddamn push-up! Not one! I couldn’t even lift high enough to clear these goddamn tits from the floor. I used to pump off an easy hundred every morning before work and now I couldn’t manage one. But what could I expect? I massaged the soreness and felt how slender and frail my arm was, delicate and bereft of muscle.
A moment later debilitating pain flared through my skull and the room briefly tilted and wobbled. I blinked against what I hoped was sweat but was probably tears. Goddamn! Up close I could see every detail of the carpeting, the dirt and dust lost within the winded fabric and the yellow-green stain still by the mirror. I saw the polished perfection of my long nails and how they contrasted with the floor. I curled those dainty fingers into a fist and pounded the floor in frustration and winced in pain. Rolling onto my back, I squeezed my eyes shut and shook with mute rage. The room spun once or twice more around my prone form before slowing to a halt.
Scooter was right. Damn the bastard, but he was right.
I pressed my fists to my eyes. I’d done all my crying last night, but in its wake there remained a sense of utter defeat. I’d worked out almost every morning for over the last ten years and those assholes had stolen that from me. It felt like something indefinable but precious had been ripped out of my life, as if I’d suddenly lost the ability to see the colour green or could never hear a guitar solo again. I knew then with awful certainty that even if I escaped this trap that I could never return to a life even remotely similar to the one I had known. So much of who David was had been wrapped up in his physicality, in his strength--and that was now gone.
“Fuck!” I yelled to the ceiling, and even my anger sounded shrill and weak.
The killer headache wasn’t making life any easier. In the list of lifelong worst hangover, this baby was partying in the top five. No wonder I’d broken to pieces last night. Those glasses of wine had slammed into a stomach empty for the last two months. Cindy wasn’t quite the drinker I used to be. I’d really had a go at it last night, though. After the wine there was a vague memory of staggering into the kitchen and finding a six-pack of Bud in there. So no surprise I’d gotten hammered, what with the girl looking to weigh maybe half of what I’d been. Yeah, I hadn’t been all that tall or bulky, but I’d carried a lot of muscle weight. Well, bless their black hearts but the Clinic stripped all that away and left behind nothing but these useless curves.
“Just--live this life,” he said. “Give up on the man you used to be. Be Cindy.” Yeah, that’s what Scooter told me. The bastard. Easy for him to say; he wasn’t the one sporting the D-cups.
I’d woken this morning to a blistering headache. Brilliant sunlight slashed through the blinds and pierced my drunken haze. Lying face down on the sofa, my crusted eyes blinked reluctantly as slowly woke up. The heat has been sweltering. My chest hurt. Without thinking I’d sat dazedly up and violently stripped off the sweatshirt, tossing it across the room. My boobs bobbled free, and you can damn well bet they quickly reminded me of the where, what and who of my new life. And feeling as I did, all hungover and shit? Yeah, it was all too much to deal with: I promptly leaned over the edge of the sofa and puked my liquid guts out.
Falling back onto the couch I clung desperately to the armrest until the room settled and the urge to heave subsided. As bad as being dragged kicking and screaming into this new life was, believe me, at that moment the hangover felt worse. God. I was desperate for water but the thought of crawling to the kitchen--finding a glass--twisting the taps--filling the glass--raising it to my lips--drinking; the whole process seemed a task of Herculean proportions. No goddamn way I was leaving that sofa. No matter how angry my bladder got. Another hour--screw that, two months--of sleep, yeah, that’s what I needed. Covering my head with my arms I tried to burry deeper into the cushions, in search of soothing darkness.
“Wake up Cindy!”
The loud booming voice jerked me into painful, wincing wakefulness. I blearily looked around, wondering what the hell I’d just heard. The plasma screen had turned itself on. Rendered in hi-def flat-screen precision, the smiling, bearded face of Scooter looked down at me.
“In the living room, Cindy! Hurry up!” the doctor insisted. “My message begins in thirty seconds.”
Clawing my way into a sitting position, my head clutched between both hands, I glared at the screen. Scooter seemed content to count aloud his thirty seconds, glancing at something off-screen. Each number reverberated within my skull like a pinball.
“I’ll assume you’re in the room now,” Scooter said, the voice dropping to a reasonable (though still painful) volume. “This message is pre-recorded and deleting itself from memory as it plays. So listen closely, because you’ll only get to hear this once and it’s very important that you do.” Even in my groggy state I noticed that the doctor looked the worse for wear, his face drawn and pale. His eyes looked tired and his normally spastic gesturing seemed half-hearted.
On the screen, the doctor took a deep breath before beginning. “Katherine didn’t want me to do this but when it comes to medical matters I won’t have anyone telling me how to do my job. As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, you’ve gone through a few changes.” He smiled weakly. “It’s been six weeks since we found you on the floor of my office and we’re about to move you to Telesforos for a few more weeks of rest and recovery. After that Katherine will move you to your new home in the city, you’ll wake up and you’ll probably freak out. If you haven’t already I’m sure you’re thinking about putting your fist through this screen.
“Well . . . don’t bother. There’s no point. You’re not quite as strong as you used to be. You’d hurt your hand and waste the manicurist’s hard work.”
The manicurist’s hard work dug painfully into my palm as my hands involuntarily clenched. If I could move without falling over I’d have happily tossed that screen off the balcony.
Scooter absently scratched at his beard, considering how to proceed. “You should be thrilled, Girlie! This kind of thing is like a dream come true for. . . .” He faltered. “Listen, Girlie, it’s. . . .” Again he hesitated and finally shook his head. “David. For what it’s worth: I’m sorry.”
With my elbows propped up on my knees, my naked breasts hung heavily between both arms. His apology wasn’t worth the fucking breathe it took to say it.
“I know this is not something you ever wanted. Katherine believes you need to be fully immersed in your new role as soon as possible--but I won’t insult you by calling you Girlie, or Cindy, or anything but by your name. David, you have every reason to hate us, to despise Katherine and me and the Clinic. So go right ahead: hate us.” He shrugged on screen and then leaned in closer. “But just keep one thing in mind as you do.
“She kept you alive, David. A class IV haemorrhage is a nasty thing. That’s half of the five litres of blood running through those pretty little arteries of yours spreading across the floor. She was covered in blood. Most of it was yours but she was injured as well; she’d been shot. Through the stomach and out the side. She’s lucky it missed any organs; so are you. Because when she found you she ignored her own wound and knelt down in your blood and kept you alive. She jabbed a syringe of peptide sealant into your side and manually pumped your heart and gave you air until I showed up, and if she hadn’t there probably wouldn’t have been a whole lot left to save. My staff had to physically drag her away so that I could administer the ephedrine; she broke one of the nurse’s noses. The moment you started to breathe on your own Katherine passed out and. . . .” His voice trailed off and he sighed.
“But maybe I’m wasting my breath here. Have a look for yourself.”
The screen blinked and threw up grainy security footage. A figure lay slumped next to another. Glass and broken furniture and other debris was scattered around them. A dark pool of red slowly spread across the floor. The image zoomed in on one of the figures, the one wearing a tattered skirt: me. God, I looked terrible. Pale. One of my arms was twisted at an impossible angle. So was one of my legs. My skin glittered from the myriad glass splinters lacerating my flesh, each one a fountainhead of red. My face was a mess: badly cut, bruised and broken.
A woman came running into the frame. She nearly slipped and fell in the blood. She was looking beat-up herself, clutching at her side, bleeding freely from a cut to her face. She found her footing. Tore open drawer after drawer until she found what she wanted. Knelt down next to my body on the screen. Despair threatened her features but raw determination kept it at bay. She reached for my limp form, syringe in hand.
“Hate Katherine if you want,” Scooter repeated, his voice-over grim. “But don’t ever question that everything she has done since meeting you has been with your long-term survival in mind. She saved your life. And mark my words: she probably will again.”
I wanted to shout at the screen, to rant and rave. How could these, I wanted to yell, and heft those bloated mammaries for him to see . . . how could these help keep me alive? The swell of emotion made me wince with pain.
The screen blinked back to the doctor as he continued with a shrug. “I’m sure you don’t see it the same way. Personally, and as I’ve said before: I don’t care. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass if you hate me or not, forgive me or not; but I do care about Katherine a great deal. You might think you know her in some small way but you don’t. I’ve known her for over twenty years and I don’t pretend to fully understand her. But I do know there’s no one I’d rather have as an ally against someone as dangerous as Jeremiah Steele, because I’ve never known anyone with a hatred as pure and clear as the one Katherine carries for that man.”
“So keep that in mind before you swear revenge, David. We caught your fight with Steele’s assassin on the Clinic’s security cameras. You’ve obviously got secrets of your own, David. You’re clearly a dangerous . . . man.” You can damn well bet I noticed the slight hesitation at ‘man’, the nervous scratching at his chin. “Think long and hard before you waste any time chasing after Katherine, or me, or anyone at the Clinic. Your real enemy is Steele: never forget that.”
The doctor turned again off screen. He made a slashing motion across his neck. “Yeah, stop it there,” he muttered. “This isn’t what I wanted. Last thing the guy needs is a bloody lecture.” The screen turned momentarily black. When the image returned the doctor looked a little more relaxed, wearing fresh clothes, through still with visible signs of exhaustion entrenched in his face. He was sitting in an office I didn’t recognize, wood-panelled and warm-looking. He glanced aside before looking back to the camera and smiling.
“You still with us, David? Good. Because now I’m going to show you what we’ve done to you, and this part you’ve really got to pay attention to because if you don’t . . . well, it could kill you.”
His hands jerked before his face dismissively. “Sorry for the dramatics. But your body’s been through a hell of an ordeal. As I record this you’re lying in a bed in the Telesforos retreat, recovering. Your body seems to be settling nicely as the last of the surgery heals and the chemicals are purged from your body. The nurses have no idea you’re anything other than what you seem: a young girl recovering from a serious operation. I think the female nurses have taken a bit of a liking to you. Last I heard they were prettying you up in preparation for your release.”
So is that what I was now? A goddamn living doll to play with, to dress up nice and give a manicure to? My hand slipped up to my ear and fingered the earrings there: two in the lobe and another at the top.
“And let me just say, David,” the doctor continued on screen. “I am beyond pleased at how well you’ve turned out. Real pioneering work, to be honest. Experimental processes, real cutting-edge techniques, all for your benefit.” Despite the doctor’s obvious fatigue his eyes glowed with excitement. “You can’t imagine the kind of money people would pay for what you’ve just been given. These procedures are--priceless, to be honest. It may be years before we can even reproduce them.” He shrugged, dismissing such minor concerns. “I’m sure you’ve noticed by now the obvious alterations to your body. I hope you also appreciate the remarkable recovery you’ve made from your injuries.”
Damn him to hell, but he was right, of course. I knew all too well the lingering ache of serious injury and the time it took to heal. In the days when I used to help Sakura I got hurt on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes I got hurt pretty bad. Fortunately, she had these nasty-smelling poultices that used to help, esoteric herbal mixes she made herself that burned something awful as they absorbed into the skin. They quickly numbed the pain and seemed to work miracles on bruised flesh.
Once--only once, until the fight with Fosters--I even got the living shit kicked out of me. I got hurt so bad I can’t even remember the whole fight. Not that I’d want to. After that fight, some of my injuries took a full year to heal. Hell, I guess some of them never healed properly at all. And so, sitting with a skull-splitting headache on Cindy’s sofa, I clearly remembered the fight with Fosters and fully appreciated how lucky I’d been. The swing of the heavy metal bar and the crunch of bone as he shattered my leg. My arm. My face. Those kinds of injuries left scars and took a very long time to recover. Beneath these sweat pants I knew my skin to be smooth and whole. I felt weak and a little shaky but otherwise fine. I normally healed quickly, yeah? But nobody heals this quickly.
Scooter leaned forward eagerly and launched into a technical explanation of what they’d done to me. I’ll be honest. Science was never my thing--like I said, I never even finished high school, yeah? I only followed a little of what he said, picking up some key bits and important-sounding words. Regenerative medicine, he said, and then went on about stem cells and fibroblasts, and all manner of protein names that ended with a dash and a letter, and growth hormones, and he seemed very excited by whatever he was talking about.
“But the adult human body works far too slowly,” Scooter added, seeming mildly annoyed by the failings of human anatomy. So the doctor and his lunatic scientists decided that regressing the body to an earlier state of rapid growth was the trick. By tricking the body into a pre-adolescent state they hoped to accelerate metabolic processes and growth--or something like that. It might as well have been Voodoo for all I understood. They’d been playing with various compounds for years, he told me, trying to find ways to rapidly heal athletic injuries or critical burns in minimal time. No more soccer players missing a season with a busted knee, they thought, maybe even a solution to the shortage of transplant organs and the downside of a lifetime of immunosuppressants. Don’t ask me why they thought that. Like I said, I didn’t understand half the shit he was saying.
The bit I did understand is that for years they couldn’t quite get it to work right--until K slipped them some seized goods from her raid on Steele’s illegal medical facility. Apparently my old employer, NeoPharm, was working on some pretty cutting edge stuff themselves, and it wasn’t all prosthetic boobs and vaginas. A little reverse engineering later and they had a working formula.
“So we dropped you into a chemically-induced coma and gave you a shot of our latest batch,” Scooted said. With a boosted metabolism and a host of impossible chemicals rushing through my blood, muscle and flesh and bone quickly began to knit themselves together. However, they quickly realized that their new miracle drug wouldn’t find much demand on an open market. It wasn’t the ridiculously prohibitive cost, Scooter said. For some reason they couldn’t pin down, the biochemical agent they’d created had one major flaw: the pseudo-puberty it brought on was inevitably a female one. Male athletes coming through the process would heal quickly, sure, but they’d grow breasts along the way and come out looking not just younger, but far more feminine than when they went in.
That wasn’t a problem in my case, of course. And they couldn’t leave well enough alone, could they? No, they introduced some kind of nasty virus that forced a rapid cachexia (Scooter called it), and what muscle mass wasn’t atrophied in those initial weeks was devoured by my enhanced metabolism and rapid regeneration. Once I’d dropped to a near skeletal weight they started feeding me a careful balance of protein, fat and carbs to fuel the next transformation. There was also the flood of hormones they pumped into me. “It was incredible,” Scooter enthused. “The injections greatly enhanced your second puberty. Some processes were already locked off after your male puberty--you weren’t going to get a second growth spurt--but you quickly demonstrated an accelerated development of secondary sexual characteristics typical of an adolescent girl. Breasts grew--quickly. Your pelvis widened. The fat tissue you began to develop distributed itself in a typical female pattern. You even developed a bad case of acne for about a week.”
And while my healing process was all sped up, why not finish off some cosmetic necessities? A few weeks into my coma the Clinic’s best plastic surgeons came in and got to work. Some attacked my skull: a little shaving of the underlying bone structures here, some narrowing there--and suddenly that manly jaw of mine was a thing of the past. But as Scooter described the alterations to my face his verbal torrent slowed. Looking slightly guilty--a first since he had started--his eyes looked out from the screen and he spoke as if carefully weighing his words.
“Your face, David, proved especially difficult. For some reason, your accelerated healing was having a limited effect above the neck. The cosmetic damages were severe. The glass had shredded the skin and muscle. Your nose was--pulped. Your jaw broken and right cheekbone shattered. Furthermore, the procedures we could use to feminize your features, like collagen implants to your lips--require frequent updating or seem obviously artificial.” He paused. “David, feel the skin over your right temple.”
By this point I was in a state of profound shock. Even the hangover seemed to have momentarily receded as I numbly reached up beneath my hair and touched my temple. There was a rounded surface of mottled skin about the size of a dime, slightly harder than the surrounding tissue. A scar.
The doctor sighed. “That scar is the only one you’ll find across your entire body. The easiest way to repair the damage to your face and ensure a realistic female appearance was, in effect, to borrow one. We had a donor: the female agent that tried to kill Katherine. We performed a face transplant, David. The underlying bone structure is yours, the overlying soft tissue--mouth and nose and so forth--was the assassin’s; and what emerged is . . . Cindy.” He added, almost as an afterthought, “The scar is from the bullet where Katherine shot her dead.”
I stared aghast as Scooter continues the litany of horrors committed against my person. His voice continued over video footage of my unconscious form several weeks into the process. Massive bruising covered every inch of my body, but beneath the discoloration the skin seemed whole. Breasts were already budding beneath my enlarged nipples. Briefly I saw a glimpse of my face pre-transplant, skin peeled back and muscle exposed; if I hadn’t been so deeply in shock I would’ve puked again. His every word began to feel like a band tightening around my chest until I could hardly breathe. Every injury I had suffered proved an excuse to make another alteration to my shape.
Floating ribs torn away by Foster’s bullet? Even out the damage and ensure the ribs grow back in an appropriately feminine way. Fractured jaw? Slim it down! My shattered nose was reset in a daintier shape. Burned and lacerated skin regrew with the youthful elasticity and glow of a sixteen year-old girl. Subdermal implants kept the flow of female hormones constant--and kept my tits growing, until they reached a perfect firm B-cup--apparently as big as they were going to get on their own the ‘natural’ way--enhanced by the best implants money can’t buy: a cellulose scaffolding on which stem cells grew another two cup sizes indistinguishable from the real thing. A little mucking about in my throat and Cindy’s happy, airy tones became my new voice, and while in there, why not shave down that nasty Adam’s apple? Even the things they couldn’t change--the size of my hands and feet, already thinner than average for a guy--seemed more feminine as nails grew out and the skin turned smooth and pale.
I was clutching at my chest by this point, gasping for breath, struggling to remain conscious, until the last item on his list left me cold. “Finally,” he said, and suddenly seemed to find it difficult to look at the camera, “as I’m sure you know, men generally have a greater leg-to-torso ratio than women. With your leg already broken, it seemed only sensible to, ah, carve out an inch or so before resetting the leg. You’ll find you’re just a tad . . . um, shorter than before.” He glanced guiltily towards the camera and muttered, “Uh, yes. Sorry David.”
It felt like the whole world fell away. The hangover, that fucking bastard’s voice, this shitty apartment and any sense of self went spiralling away and left me detached and adrift. My height. Not content with stripping away my strength they decided to cut my legs out from under me--literally. I’d always been short for a guy. Five foot five. And a half. What was I now? Maybe five-four? Short--even for a girl. Short and weak and small--except for these tits. Enormous on a frame this small. A light tap against that swollen flesh. Another, reluctantly drawing me back into the world. I thought I’d finished with the crying last night. Apparently there was a little left. The tears returned, a steady silent dribble down my cheeks, catching at the tip of my delicate jaw--falling on my bared breasts.
I don’t know how much of Scooter’s message I missed, but I caught the end of it through blurry eyes. “So finally, David,” he said. He sounded as if he were hurrying, anxious to finish. “You can expect some residual effects from everything you’ve been through. Your hair might grow a little faster than normal for a while. The hormones might play havoc on your emotions until you balance out a bit. We’re honestly not sure but it seems very likely that forcing an adult male brain and body through a female puberty might cause a few other unexpected consequences. And most importantly: David, all these feminizing agents in your blood will, at the very least, chemically castrate you and atrophy your testicles; at worst they could lead to a whole host of serious, potentially fatal, medical conditions.”
Yeah, even as fucked up as I was feeling at that moment you can damn well believe that his words caught my attention. At this moment my cock and balls were the only thing connecting me to the man I used to be. From where I was sitting, with this slim waist and heavy tits and shorter legs, my crotch was the only thing left of David.
“You’ll find in your new bathroom’s medical cabinet several prescriptions for drugs essential to your continued wellbeing. It is absolutely essential that you take those pills as directed. Those implants are producing a hefty quantity of oestrogen and other female sex hormones typical of a ‘girl’ your age, while blocking normal testosterone production. The pills will keep your testicles from withering and your penis from shrinking. Some of them will help neutralize any residual effects of your regeneration. You’ll also find some powerful relaxants in there, in case the initial emotional swings prove too difficult to deal with.”
He gave a final sigh. “Listen, David,” he said, and the face I saw through watery eyes held guilt, pride and respect in equal measure. “This is a hell of a lot to drop on you. I can’t imagine what you’re feeling right now. And I know it’s impossible to believe that this is all in your best interest. But I honestly do believe Katherine is right in this: Cindy is your best chance at survival. Not David--but Cindy.
“So don’t fight it . . . Cindy. Just . . . live this life. You won’t believe me but almost everything we’ve done to you can be reversed to at least some degree. You can be a man again someday. In the meantime: be Cindy. It’s not like you have much choice. You can try to rebuild your muscles but as long as you’re swimming in hormones you’ll find it tough going. Just give up on David. Give up on the man you used to be and become the girl you see in the mirror. Katherine’s given you a fine, simple life--try to enjoy it in the months to come and it’ll be over before you know it.”
He turned away from the screen but paused. “Oh, I almost forgot,” he said, glancing back. “Just thought you might like to know. Your friend, Harry Longman? His operation was a complete success. Last I heard he was flirting with the nurses and preparing to head back to the studio.” Scooter smiled before turning away. “He was also asking after his ‘broken flower’. That’s you, right?”
The screen went blank.
I sat there trapped in this tiny body with this dead woman’s face. I wasn’t crying anymore. That had been nothing more than a brief release. I truly had finished with crying. It felt as if I had nothing left to lose, no further to sink. All that remained was a numb chill the pervaded every inch of my being. I slowly rose to my feet. Shuffled back into the bedroom. Dropped to my knees and then laid flat on the floor--as flat as I could, with those breasts flattening beneath me.
You’re wrong, I thought. I’m not Cindy and this isn’t my life. I can make myself strong again. At some deeper level I felt the certainty of failure. Desperate to prove them wrong, desperate to deny my very body and the life determined by it, I pushed against the floor with all the strength I could muster.
All of a hundred pounds and I couldn’t fucking do it.
***
The next few weeks were a little hazy.
Within the medicine cabinet I found, as Scooter promised, a pharmacy of little brown bottles with white childproof tops and a rainbow of pills. Pink circles, green ovals, brown oblongs: my own fucking stash of narcotic Lucky Charm delights, each with their own direction for use--this one every morning after food, that one twice a day for the next three months, another to be used freely as needed. Sifting through the cluster of bottles, it didn’t take me long to find the antidepressants and the diazepam. I’m sure there was enough there to last several months. Not after I got through with that shit, though. We’re not talking a suicide attempt or anything like that--listen; I’m not suicidal. Stupidest thing in the world, knocking yourself off. Can’t revenge yourself against nobody if you’re dead.
But at the moment I couldn’t quite deal with the thought of being me. At the moment, I didn’t even know what that meant anymore. Whatever aversion I had to mind-numbing drugs faded beneath a steady stream of little yellow pills and larger red ones that kept reality far enough at bay for me to no longer care. The days shuffled past like a disgruntled teen on her way to school, self-absorbed and full of sullen mutters.
Even in my dopey stupor a routine of sorts emerged. I started every day lying spread eagle on my bed, staring up at the ceiling. The morning sun would dance across the far wall and crawl its way down to the floor like a living being, luminous and vibrant; it had little time for me. One day it rained and without the light I felt an unimaginable sense of loss that almost had me in tears--if I’d had tears left to waste.
Eventually I would drift over to the balcony and stare out across the city. I spent hours there. From my high place the wind caressed my skin and ruffled my hair. The day it rained the falling water felt cool and slick against my bare shoulders and naked breasts. Evenings I might spend sprawled on the sofa, staring at the blank and broken television, lost in tracing the fine spread of cracks from afar. Can’t quite remember when I broke the damn thing. I must have hurled the empty wine bottle at it some night, bringing a brief, warming flush of pleasure as the screen cracked and the glass shattered.
By three in the morning I’d be standing behind the patio doors, half-closed against the night-time chill, watching the far-off glitter and shimmer of the city. Intermittent sounds of life would reach my ears. I watched the city through the patio door glass. If I shifted slightly against the dark the city faded into the background and my distant study would refocus on the ghostly image of myself captured in midair. Soon after I’d stumble back towards my bed and lie there staring at the ceiling until the sun returned and the light appeared, beginning anew its journey down my wall. . . .
Thanks for everything, K, Scooter, you bastards. What had they promised? A “fine simple life”? There wasn’t anything fucking fine or simple about this goddamn new life of mine. Not that I felt anything that fierce during those last weeks. I didn’t feel much of anything really, no peaks, no valleys, just a gentle rolling plain of faded whites and muted emotions, and that’s how I wanted it. The occasional hunger pang or sudden weakness registered as a minor concern, easily ignored, as I floated about the apartment.
The sexiest of girls starts looking pretty rank after a couple of weeks of this kind of life, and believe me: I was letting myself go something awful. It’s not like I could be bothered to pull on a top, you know, not after I tossed it aside that first morning. Couldn’t be bothered to change out of those sweatpants either. I’d wander into the toilet for a piss but considering how little I ate and drank, that didn’t happen often. By my second night as Cindy I’d polished off all the booze in the apartment--puked my guts up a few more times--passed out on the kitchen floor--left the fridge door open and spoiled most of my food--and lived off of unheated cans of soup and dried cereal and whatever crackers and other crap I could find buried in the cupboards.
Then one night I was sitting in the lounge, thin arms thrown wide across the back of the sofa and staring vacantly at the ceiling, when I heard her voice.
“You’re looking good,” she said. Her heels clicked on the floor as she approached. She took a seat opposite me at the table, and her every motion was graceful and alluring. I would have happily stared at her for hours, mesmerized by the reflected fire of the candlelight in her eyes, the way her dress fell and slid in shimmering lines across her body. The fact that we were possible enemies and the potential for violence in her every movement simply made her all the more attractive. She seemed elegant and almost ethereal and at ease with her beauty, whereas I felt uncomfortable in my dress shirt and tie, an earth-bound clod wearing a too-tight collar.
Leaning back in my seat, I smiled and shrugged. “So do you. I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
She glanced down momentarily before meeting my eyes. The gesture seemed surprisingly demure and at odds with what little I knew of this woman. The thought was enough to bring a wry smile to my lips. I didn’t know anything about her--not even her name. But I knew enough. I knew I loved her. Ever since we fought, and hid together, and hungrily fell into each others’ arms and fucked in the bushes, biting each others’ flesh to silence our cries as men with guns walked by and the bamboo swayed in the wind overhead and creaked and rustled. . . . From that first moment in which we met I knew I loved this woman.
“You intrigued me,” she said. “How could I not come?”
“The woman I work for is the enemy of the people you work for,” I said. “Doesn’t that make us enemies?”
She shrugged. “Maybe,” she said, and her earrings shivered and glinted in the dim light, shiny lures dancing beneath the water’s surface. “But not tonight. It’s never as simple as one side against another, good guys against bad guys.”
“What if . . . you know? They caught us together?”
“Then I’d have to kill you,” she answered. Her ruby lips glinted as she smiled.
The waiter poured our wine. I was underage; she wasn’t. We raised our glasses and toasted each other. The wine was a dark red but her painted fingernails cradling the glass were redder, darker. She drank deeply and sighed as I hid my dislike at the adult taste of the wine. “I don’t even know your name,” I said.
“Katherine,” she said. “Katherine Ophelia White.”
I jerked awake with a sharp intake of breath.
A dream. Or a memory, all but forgotten. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference, not when it comes to Kate. My first ‘date’ with Katherine, the first of many furtive encounters and secret liaisons, of fights and violent sex and desperately precious moments spent clinging fiercely to each other. Six months later she was dead. It was my fault. It was my fault. I hadn’t been fast or skilled enough to save her. I wasn’t strong enough to protect her.
Clutching my throbbing head I staggered to my feet. Midday sun flooded the room. Christ. Like I wanted to deal with this shit right now. Obviously it’d been too long since I’d popped a pill or something, if reality was insisting on reasserting itself. As far as I was concerned, reality could go fuck itself. I needed a drink. Was I at that point where I could start in on the cough syrup and vanilla extract yet?
Halfway to the medicine cabinet a knocking rang clear and loud from the front door.
Who knows why I went to the door? Sleep-deprived, drugged-up, messed in the head and still feeling the phantom touch of old dreams and a dead lover, I stumbled over to the door of the apartment. I clipped the wall once or twice and knocked down a picture frame and made a bit of a racket. The knock came again, loud and insistent.
“Who--?” My voice was hoarse from disuse, my throat dry. I swallowed and tried again. “Who is it?” My heart pounded a rapid, almost deafening beat, though I didn’t know why.
“I have a delivery for a Miss Long,” a female voice called back through the door. “It needs to be signed for.”
“Just. . . .” Just what? Fuck off? Leave me alone? I wasn’t in any state to be talking to people. I was dirty, drugged . . . female. Yet I didn’t fear being seen. Unlike the first time I dressed up as Cindy and stepped out of that safe house so very long ago (or so it seemed), at the moment I felt a surprising calm at the thought of being seen as a girl. It might’ve been the pills. More likely, it was because I knew Scooter’s butchers had done their job well. If I couldn’t recognize myself, how could a complete stranger? Rather than fear, a sudden inexplicable yearning to connect with another human being arose in me. After days of silence, crawling lights and the far-off sounds of traffic, I felt a powerful need to see another human. “Just one minute!”
I hurriedly stumbled to my bedroom and pulled on the first thing I found, a t-shirt that felt too tight as it hugged my curves and left my midriff exposed. Taking a deep breath, I opened the door.
I’ll give the delivery girl credit: she was a goddamn pro, that’s for sure. She was quite cute, with her little brown cap and pixyish hairdo with purple and pink streaks. Her nose wrinkled at the stench that flowed from my apartment, and she couldn’t quite suppress the flash of disdain or disgust that crossed her eyes as she looked down at me, but she neither flinched nor commented on my appearance. Still, that human presence and appraising look suddenly, forcefully brought me back to myself and I felt acutely and ashamedly aware of my appearance.
I looked like shit.
An awkward silence followed and I imagined what I looked like through this woman’s eyes. The piss and vomit stained sweatpants, the smeared food encrusted over the jiggling exposed top of those tits--yeah, real sexy. My hair lay slickly against my scalp and bloodshot eyes stared anxiously from a pale face. I looked like I goddamn strung-out crack whore or something. It’s a good thing those pants were baggy and the pills murder to the libido, killing off any suspicious bulge down below, because the last thing I needed was the neighbour gossiping about the transvestite hooker in apartment--I had to check the door--1607. Looking at myself I felt intense embarrassment, and for once it had nothing to do with this body in which I found myself trapped. I could barely meet the girl’s impatient gaze.
How the hell could I have allowed myself to come to this? This wasn’t life, existing--barely--on painkillers, detached from the world around me; might as well throw myself from the balcony instead. Life was pain; Katherine taught me that a lifetime ago, and I silently thanked her for the reminder.
“Miss Cindy Long?”
“Uh . . . yeah. Yes. That’s me.” Those were the first real words I’d spoken aloud in nearly two weeks, other than some vaguely crazed mumbling to myself. My first words and they were weak and timorous. The sound of that voice, the softer tones and higher register--this girl’s voice that rang false in my ears--was now mine. Cindy’s voice. And the next words that tumbled reluctantly from my lips took me by surprise: “I’m Cindy Long.”
I made a vain attempt at brushing back my hair and rubbing some of the filth from my face. “Sorry about. . . .”
“If you’ll just sign, please?” Her voice was brusque and I couldn’t blame her. I wouldn’t want to talk to me either.
Taking the delivery I signed ‘Cindy’ instead of ‘David’, which in my detached state I felt quite proud of. Even signed with a lighter hand and dotted the ‘i’ with a heart and everything. The woman handed over an envelope and quickly left. I stood there for a moment, blinking and confused, and slowly looked down at the letter.
Cindy Long, it said, and an address. My address, my new home; I am Cindy Long.
With heavy steps I trudged towards the bathroom, dropping the letter next to the broken picture frame along the way. I needed a shower. Sweatpants slid past jutting hips and pooled on the floor as I stepped free of them. The bathroom was small, crowded and brightly coloured. I pulled back the plastic shower curtain. Stepped gingerly onto cool porcelain. Slid shut the curtain and twisted the knob.
Cold water slammed into me. I gasped through the shock as the shower clawed at the stench and filth and tore through the fog I’d been wrapped in these last two weeks. Staring up into that bitterly chill cascade, for a moment each droplet seemed suspended, catching the diffuse ivory of the curtain and the emerald of the shower tiles in a kaleidoscope of green and white. Blinking, and then shivering violently, I stood unmoving as the water broke against my lithe frame.
As the fog lifted my thoughts gradually cleared. Sudden ideas, thoughts, fragments of sentences flashed through my head and with them came a rush of emotions, feelings thrust aside for the last two weeks as I trembled and my teeth chattered and God, shit, what have they done to me, how could she, I’ll fucking kill them! Giet bid daet selast . . . if Akiko could see me now--or Sakura--kick my ass for letting this happen--they were so fucking sexy, these girls from the past; I wonder where they all are now . . . Daet he donne wel dolige. These things done to me, I can not change. But such things can be endured. To endure such things well is important. Survive until such a time as I can get back to being a guy. Put Cindy to rest and then kill off all the other fuckers responsible for this humiliation, for this frail and fragile body. . . .
I sagged against the wall and released a shuddering breath. Shit. Easier said then done, yeah? My mind shied away from the thought of way lay ahead, from the idea of actually living this life prescribed to me. A diet of feminizing pills, a menu of lingerie and makeup, a feast of tight clothes and high heels; how long could this last? I turned over, pressing my forehead against the smooth expanse of tiles. The water continued to pound and shatter against my back and neck, the icy chill penetrating deeply. The cold forcefully reconnected me to my body, to the physical presence of those nipples tightening almost painfully into hard nubs, to the heavy weight hanging from my chest as the water coursed through my cleavage, and the relentless crawl of goosebumps across my skin. . . .
“Shit,” I muttered. Water ran in cold rivulets down my cheek and along my jaw, dripped from the tip of my nose. My fingers curled into a tight, trembling fist at my side. I wanted to pound that wall. Shatter those tiles. I raised my fist. Clenched and unclenched it. Those fingers--the same size they’d always been--seemed much daintier now. Weaker. What would punching the wall accomplish? With something akin to a groan I uncurled my hand and firmly pressed my palm flat against the smooth tiling and slowly slid to the floor. My polished nails, chipped and dulled after two weeks of neglect, glistened wetly, adding a pink hue to the wash of green and ivory.
My breathing slowed, relaxed. Anger and pain released: with conscious effort I eased into a renewed control of myself. Eventually I clambered to my feet. By this time I was nearly numb from the cold, shivering uncontrollably, teeth chattering. A twist of the dial made the water nearly scalding and filled the air with steam. The heat bordered on painful, but pain was good, far better than unfeeling numbness. I reached for the shower gel and started to wash. The water carried the suds and filth and stench away and I watched them circle the drain and disappear.
Cindy’s shower was small and a little cramped, but the water was hot and the pressure good, and I relaxed a little. I’ve always done a lot of thinking in the bathroom, you know? There’s no better seat than a toilet for some good, serious reading. And a long, hot shower: the natural birthplace of philosophy if you ask me, and the wellspring of a thousand brilliant ideas that never get written down. So no surprise that, as the heat spread through limb and body and my skin flushed a brilliant pink, my brain, like a bear emerging from hibernation, shaking off the slow dreams of long sleep, slowly emerged from dormancy into a state of profound calm but startling wakefulness.
“I’m Cindy Long.” I repeated those words from earlier, turning into the shower and speaking through the fall of water. The sibilance start of this name, the flick of the tongue and the glottal twitch of the throat that ended it: unfamiliar but not uncomfortable as it rolled off the tongue. A rose by any other name, Akiko once taught me, and as Cindy’s perfumed wash permeated the air those words took on new poignancy. Surrounded in the floral aroma that would leave its taint across my flesh, this body announced Cindy to every sense: this soft skin that felt like Cindy, these soft words sounding so female, this gentle scent that was all girl and these curves and hair and gentle features that displayed her to the world.
I was Cindy Long, and my every sense insisted that she was a prison from which I could not escape on my own. The question was not whether I should live this life; I had no choice. The question was whether I could. Pretending to be Cindy for three weeks at the Clinic was one thing, and even that had almost driven me crazy. But to actually live her life, to not just act but actually be female for . . . how long, months, a year? That was a one-way road to hell, a goddamn superhighway paved with perverse intentions that ended in insanity. Yet what choice did I have?
My mind methodically worked through the possibilities: perhaps K was lying and Steele thought me dead; this was all some twisted plot on her part, aided by Scooter and the Clinic. But why? These things done to me must have cost a fortune, but to what end? Even if K was completely insane and obsessed with some bizarre revenge against me, Scooter didn’t seem the kind of guy to indulge her mania, not at the risk to his beloved Clinic. Unless, of course, he thought turning me into Cindy was a convenient way of disposing of me. Then why bother keeping me alive? As sick as these things those bastards had done to me were, they were right about one thing: they’d saved my life, the fuckers. They could’ve left me to bleed on the hospital floor. Any debt I owed them had been paid in full by Cindy, but their efforts meant at least one thing: they didn’t want me dead.
Which meant that maybe K wasn’t lying about Steele. Maybe the sonofabitch was still out there hunting for me. If that was the case, then living as Cindy for a while longer made a twisted, awful sense. Shorter, lighter, smaller, curves and softness squeezed into this tight little package: there was no way that psycho’s assassins could recognize me as David Sanders.
I hefted the weight of one breast in my hand and let it drop back before starting to soap up both tits. Yeah, definitely no way they’d recognize me unless I did something really stupid--like walk out that door and straight to the cops, demanding help. As if they’d believe me. And even if they did, I’d be right back where I started months ago, only with a smaller, weaker body. I could turn to some of my old friends, call in those favours from when I worked for Sakura--but I couldn’t let them see me like this. They weren’t the subtle kind of help I needed right now, anyway: not so much good at hiding things as they were at laying down grievous retribution.
And finally, and maybe most importantly, without the help of the Clinic there was no way I was getting a male body back. The changes were too extensive. Even if I cut my hair, trimmed my nails and had these tits chopped off, I’d still have hips that a man shouldn’t, Cindy’s voice and this impossible face, a dead assassin’s mask lying over what remained of David beneath.
I took all the anger and frustration and doubt and rolled it up into a tight little ball and swallowed it down. Here in the shower I could allow all those distraction to rise to the surface. I could work them through and then . . . let them wash away. With fragile calm, I reached for the shaving cream and began to lather up my legs and armpits. Stuck in the life, I resolved to be the best goddamn Cindy that I could be--for now.
Having finally made that decision, everything else suddenly seemed a hell of a lot easier. People like to think that the biggest changes in life arrives hand-in-hand with monumental events or are marked by grand displays, loud exposition and brilliant words. They’re not. A man gets shot but lives, a woman loses her baby, an explosion wipes out someone’s family and they seize that moment and declare: _now_ I’m different! But they’re not. Within a month or two they’re the same miserable bastard they were before, all the more miserable for their inability to change. Because those radical changes, the fundamental shifts in a person’s life and the way they see the world? They’re just as likely--far more likely, even--to happen during the most mundane of times, over a pint of beer at the pub, while riding a bus they’ve ridden a thousand times before; during a quiet, reflective moment in the shower.
And so an hour later, cleaned, scrubbed, moisturised, smooth and soft, smelling nice, lightly made-up and oh so fresh and pretty, in nondescript bra and panties, dressed in jeans and a bulky sweater and comfortable runners, heart pounding in my chest, terrified, ecstatic, carrying a small purse and repeating a comforting mantra beneath my breath--I finally felt ready to face the world outside my apartment. I primped and fussed and stared at myself in the mirror. A pretty young girl stared back, a stranger with familiar eyes. At that moment I knew--despite the humiliation, the anger and frustration--that I could do this.
Besides, I suddenly realized that I was absolutely starving. Two weeks without proper food or drink . . . hell, I’d probably dropped even more weight since the Clinic released me. I needed to grab some food, pronto. Hell, a little booze might be nice as well.
On the way to the door I picked up the letter I’d signed for. Putting those long nails to use I slit the envelope open. A letter from Cindy’s bank--new ATM cards issued in my name. I peeled the debit card from the paper and held it awkwardly between my fingers. I couldn’t suppress a small smile. A bank card and a bank account: what better, more tangible proof could there be that I was now and truly Cindy Long?
***
Two weeks later, cradling the oversized mug in my hands, the heat slowly penetrating into my hands as the coffee warmed me from within, I stared deep into my dark beverage and found no new revelation there. Looking up I’d still be Cindy: a small, young girl sitting primly at the edge of an oversized sofa-chair, knees pressed together, eyes demurely downcast and only rarely casting shy glances across the busy Starbucks. The too-short skirt would still be riding too high up my thigh, and my trim little tummy would still be bared by the too-tight t-shirt I’d tugged on this morning. Everything about Cindy was ‘too’-something: too small, too cute, too weak. And too bad, because this was now my life and it felt like these past few weeks had been a constant struggle to avoid going too crazy.
I didn’t look up; I continued to stare into my coffee; I couldn’t look up. I felt the hot flush blossom in my chest and slowly creep up my neck before setting my face afire, a deep red glow burning beneath the morning’s light makeup. It’s not like I wanted to examine the floor in all its scuffed and spotted glory or anything, believe me. It’s just that ever since I’d started the daily regimen of medication, these sudden intense waves of emotion would occasionally wash over me, tidal swells as powerful as any lunar tug, insistent, immersive and impossible to ignore. A person could drown in these sudden emotions, bouts of paranoia as persuasive as any I’d ever known, humbling fear that could wring a stomach as tightly as a dirty washcloth--and embarrassment, unrelenting, pervasive, turning legs to jelly and leaving me desperate for longer bangs, hair long enough to hide behind, a veil for eyes incapable of meeting any other in fear of bursting into tears.
The creak of worn leather and a settling of weight. “You mind if I sit here?” A man’s voice. Of course it was a man’s voice. All week strange men had been sitting next to me, opening doors, striking up unwanted conversations--trying to touch me, hold my hand, stroke my back, pet my arm--the goddamn bastards. Normally they could be easily deterred with a cold smile or an empty word. Sometimes I even indulged in a quick chat, making sure to never quite make eye contact, lick my lips, brush back my hair or accidentally touch his arm. I knew damn well the staggering power of such small gestures. It’s like signing a goddamn marriage contract for some of these sad fucks; it’s like a declaration that you’re soulmates--or at least willing to spread your legs for a few free drinks and an expensive meal.
I gave a quick nod, still unable to look up or speak, still caught in the grip of my sourceless embarrassment. My face burned so hotly, the coffee felt cool as it touched my painted lips. This sense of shame, this humiliation was nothing new. Every morning I woke up and looked in the mirror and as I shook off the dreary remains of last night’s bad dreams the humiliation of being Cindy settled over me, a familiar, heavy woollen blanket draped across my narrow shoulders, smothering, scratchy--a constant, irritating presence. There was no escaping this shame. Countless acts throughout my day reminded me of what I’d become. Every click of my shaped nails as I carefully cradled a glass in my hand; the frequent glances into a compact to check my makeup; the constant flicking of hair from my eyes; the delicate tickle of dangling earrings against my cheek; as the wind caressed the inside of a bared knee; each bump of a purse against my hip; the click of heels--everything; every fucking thing I did reminded me of my new life and every fucking time I felt ashamed of what I was becoming.
But I could deal with this. It could be endured. What choice did I have?
“Hey, are you okay?” I wanted to scream at this nosey jackass and tell him to leave me the fuck alone--but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that. A young girl like Cindy doesn’t yell at guys in coffee shops. She doesn’t shy away from daily flirtations. She’s comfortable with the come-ons because she’s known the semi-unwanted advances of men both young and old her whole life, just like any other attractive young girl. Sure, the constant attention might annoy her sometimes, but not as much as the thought of that dreaded day the wandering eyes of the opposite sex begins to drift elsewhere.
More importantly, of course, there’s another kind of attention no girl wants to attract: that of the psychotic professional assassin, one of which, I felt fairly sure, had been following me this last week.
The embarrassment gently eased its grip, enough for me to raise my head and brush the hair back from my eyes. I tried for a wan smile. He had clear blue eyes. They were filled with concern, though not so much that they forgot the all-too-familiar wander down my cleavage, with a quick detour across my bared midriff. He smiled back. Shit: contact. Now he’d think I was flirting with him--and probably call me a prick-tease when I shot him down.
“Rough morning?” he asked. He folded the day’s newspaper away as he turned his full attention to me. I took a quick, settling breath. These emotional surges were so powerful they nearly sent me whimpering to the nearest dark, silent place, somewhere I could hide and forget. Fortunately they were usually short-lived. I could ride them out. Confront them face on. Let the waves of emotion break against a cool and collected centre and methodically think the problem away. Anger and fear--these I could deal with. Only the embarrassment was crippling; it was the worst and had to run its course, sometimes lasting for an hour or longer. I couldn’t just will it away because it hit too close to home.
I nodded. “Yes,” I murmured. “My boyfriend and I had a fight this morning.”
“Oh. I see,” he answered, his eyes already turning glassy. Only two weeks and I’d already learned why a pretty girl drops her current relationship status into a conversation as early as possible. The man’s concern evaporated almost instantly and his smile became forced. “Sorry to hear that.”
“It’s really annoying, you know?” I continued, leaning forward. “I mean, Max--that’s my boyfriend, yeah?--he’s like, such a nice guy? And really considerate, too, and I don’t just mean with flowers and stuff, if you know what I mean. He’s got the most amazing touch.” I fluttered my eyes as if in dreamy recollection. “But then sometimes, he’s just such a jerk, you know?”
“Uh . . . sure.” The guy was rapidly developing a deer-in-headlight look.
“Of course you do, you’re a man, right? So I mean, what’s it all about? It’s like, for example, last night we’re having a great time and all, and then suddenly he’s trying to, you know, stick it up my bum, and I’m all like ‘what the hell are you doing down there?’ and he’s like ‘I slipped’ with this stupid smile on his face, and I’m not stupid enough to fall for that one, believe me, and it’s like he tries this almost every night even though I tell him I’m not that kind of girl, and when he tried again this morning we had a fight and I. . . .” I stopped as if at a sudden thought. “Oh my, you don’t even know my name, do you?” I extended my fingers, wrist limp, for a handshake. “My name’s Cindy!”
“I’m, ah . . . John,” he said, looking vaguely horrified.
“So then tell me, John: why is it that guys keep trying to stick their thingy up my ass?”
Well, John didn’t have much an answer for that, and quickly excused himself. Hiding a smile, a strange mix of triumph, horror and shame churning in my stomach, I returned to my profound contemplation of the cup in my hand.
The first week had passed quickly, a blur of terrifying, brief ventures out into the city followed by long hours at ‘home’--and that shitty little apartment was gradually beginning to feel like a home, even if not quite mine--spent exploring every crook and cranny of the place. It’s not like the place was very big, but it’s amazing how much stuff gets crammed away under sinks and in the back of closets, beneath a bed or behind a bookshelf. Whether K set the whole thing up herself or had help--she must’ve had help--I couldn’t help but feel a grudging admiration for their attention to detail.
It wasn’t just the digitally manipulated photos in the albums or on the walls, the ones displaying my new face, the ones that came together to form a fragmented narrative of a life I couldn’t remember. It was the small details that impressed. The battered and faded high-school diary I found buried in a drawer, with its weepy poems and names underlined in gel pens or angrily crossed out. The half-used bar of soap, newly opened bottle of nail polish, the empty tubes of Cindy’s favourite lip gloss and the waiting box of tampons. Errant coins in the sofa, a scratched disk in the bedside alarm clock, the scuffed stiletto with a broken heel. All these minor details came together to create another story, a story of Cindy told through favourite and forgotten things.
Padding around the apartment some nights I felt that I could almost understand this strange girl I’d become. Lying back on the sofa, staring out blindly at the glimmering city, I could almost immerse myself in her life. Sometimes she almost seemed real.
But she wasn’t. Buried in the back of the bedroom closet, beneath an empty shoe box and behind the clothes hamper, I found something no real girl would own: my very own fake vagina. In a sealed medical container, floating in a viscous preservative fluid, I found a grey lump of fleshy material I recognized as one of the prosthetics K had forced on me so long ago. (Was it that long ago? For me it felt like only a few weeks, even though several months had passed. I’d only gone one day with that damn thing off before those bastards got me on the operating table.) A small jar contained the amber goo needed to bond the fucking thing to me. A small stick-it note on the inside, written in K’s small, jagged lettering, quickly explained: “new and improved model, for emergency use only.”
Emergency use--what the hell was that supposed to mean? I clearly remembered the agony of that thing clamping on to my crotch. Nothing could get me to slap that thing back on . . . nothing! I was living Cindy’s life, yeah? But it’s not like anyone was going to be getting into her--into my!--goddamn panties, thank you very much.
My coffee was empty. The frosted pink lip-prints that stained the mug’s rim mocked me. Suppressing a sigh I pulled a small mirror from my purse and set about fixing my lips. I knew damn well how devastating sexy something as simple as putting on makeup could be, those slender fingers holding a thin lipgloss, the way it extended the length of each finger and made them seem more delicate, the subtle and slow slide of shiny colour across slightly parted lips. . . .
Hiding a grimace of pain I uncrossed my legs. Sexy thoughts were bad. A hard-on was bad. It hurt, especially with your nob tucked between your legs . . . and when you’ve just spent the whole shitty morning sitting on the poor thing. Every so often there’d be that sharp jab of pain, or a dull throb, or an almost crippling ache, to remind me just how ridiculous my disguise really was.
I put the mirror and makeup back into my purse. I’d also spent the last two weeks in an intense study of the feminine arts, long lonely nights spent sitting at a table with an array of strange and foreboding products before me. I’d hate to think how many hours were wasted staring into a mirror, putting on makeup, wiping it off, leafing through one of Cindy’s many magazines or books on the subject and starting over. Back at the Clinic I’d done much the same but it had all been different then--annoying but a bit of a laugh, something to keep me busy for a couple of weeks spent in hiding. A perverse joke, a furtive step into a forbidden world, naughty but short-lived.
But now? I wasn’t hiding anymore. I was living, and somehow this practice had become a part of my long-term survival. These skills were an essential part of this new life and it was almost scary how easy, almost instinctive, they were becoming. They were, I was beginning to realize, the few skills that Cindy actually possessed. After all, I wasn’t David Sanders anymore, with his expensive condo and his own corner office on the ninth floor, with a secretary and a string of nightly conquests and a membership to the best gym in town.
Now I was Cindy Long, young and pretty, certainly, but also a high-school dropout. I was unemployed with limited funds in the bank. I was alone in a big city, with a driver’s license but no car, a home full of pictures but no friends, no family, already growing bored of the daily Starbucks coffee routine, of the chick lit books on the shelf and girlie magazines, sickened by the closet full of clothes I hated to wear, and these D-cup tits constantly on display, the exposed half-moon flesh over my close-fitting top jiggling with every movement slowly, now flushing a bright red and the heat crawling up my neck. . . .
Guess I wasn’t going to escape the coffee shop just yet. These mood swings were going to drive me insane.
***
A heavy wind, laden with the promise of rain, swept down the busy street carrying the dust and detritus of the city. Overhead, churning clouds bled over drab buildings that clawed the sky, tainting everything grey. A delivery bike wove between traffic, honking angrily as it left blue-black fumes in its wake. With a wheezy sigh a bus stopped before the coffee shop, brakes screeching loudly, and disgorged its passengers. Those people flowed past, breaking on either side of me, their blank faces casting angry glares and appreciative glances my way as they rushed to work, suits and ties, skirts and heels, briefcases and purses, take-out coffee and cell phones in hand. They all seemed so very busy and purposeful as I stood there bemused, only just remembering to drop my hands before the insistent wind lifted my skirt up and revealed more than just pale thighs.
Shaking away empty thoughts, I stirred into motion. Not yet ten in the morning and I was heading home. I envied these strangers with a purpose, with a morning destination more exciting than a Starbucks. Confronted with all these people, with the vibrant flow of life, the groans and wheezes of the city, I felt--adrift. The urban current could carry me away if I relaxed into it. But where would I end up, this pretty piece of fluff, this delicate ornament cut loose from the world?
I stifled a laugh as I walked. If only Akiko could hear me now--(So long as she couldn’t see me. Anything but that)--when the hell did I become so melodramatic? Besides, cute little things like Cindy don’t drift into strange neighbourhoods. Not if they know what’s good for them. Good way to get hurt--or worse. Yeah, sure, I still knew how to defend myself and all, but with these puny arms? Let’s just say I wouldn’t be looking to pick any more fights these days.
My steps carried me down the street, past windows looking onto offices, through greasy clouds wafting out of restaurants finishing off the breakfast rush, the acrid scent of hairdressers and the warm breath of a dry cleaner. The rapid clip of my kitten heels against the pitted pavement made an almost familiar sound. Already! How long before these distractions no longer registered, before these reminders of femininity became habitual and forgotten? The thought terrified even as it seemed a welcome relief from the constant agitation.
That first time two weeks ago outside the apartment nearly did me in. I only survived twenty minutes, just long enough to snag a bottle of cheap wine and instant noodles from the nearest shop before fear sent me scuttling back to the safety of my unwanted new home. Much better to spend hours scouring the floors and picking up the crap I’d left all over, cleaning the living room and kitchen and airing out the funk of two weeks of pills and dazed sweating and stale vomit.
I’d quickly realized just how sheltered the Clinic had been. Surrounded by crazies, rich weirdos and dopey convalescents, who’d notice one more pseudo-transvestite with issues? But the city was different. Intense. So many eyes, so many voices. People, all ready to point their finger. Ready to accuse, ready to expose me. Or perhaps worse . . . ready to accept me for what I seemed--a girl--and treat me accordingly, to objectify, to leer and ogle. . . .
Asklepios offered beauticians to perfect my disguise, teachers to help me pass, security and protection; the city provided none of these.
I turned a corner at a small grocers and left the main strip behind. The roar of traffic dropped away quickly. There was still the occasional pedestrian headed in the opposite direction but quieter now, their faces more relaxed, an occasional smile sneaking through. A few minutes up the street there was a park where I liked to sit and read. It was a small verdant oasis set surprisingly close to the urban bustle, but if I sat on the right bench the rustling trees hid the overarching towers of concrete and glittering glass.
The wood bench felt cool and rough on my ass through a thin skirt, sending a brief shudder up my spine. Sitting there, I had to admit that these legs of mine were sexy as hell. If I was stuck with the damn things, why the hell shouldn’t I show them off? But these goddamn skirts were fucking inconvenient. I had to cross my legs high up my thigh or risk every passing pervert glimpsing my panties, but believe you me, sitting like this was murder on my balls. Like I had any choice, you know? It was just another painful ignominy forced on me by Scooter and Agent K.
Humiliating, yeah, and painful too, but this is the thing: as annoying as living this life was, there was a part of me that was . . . enjoying it. Fuck that. Enjoying is too strong. Intrigued? Not by Cindy, no, and not by the bullshit necessity of pretending to be a goddamn chick, or of these feminine mysteries slowly being revealed; no, not by any of that. It was the challenge. Starting over. Exploring the city. The study, the practice, the constant risk of discovery . . . and yeah, the subtle thrill of not being discovered, of fooling everyone and feeling all these dumbass pricks following me with their eyes and knowing I’d tricked them, that I was just so goddamn good at what I do that they were swelling in their pants thinking about a guy in a skirt who could’ve once kicked their ass.
God, I’m a twisted little fuck, aren’t I? Because more than anything else it was the danger--the thrill of it, the eager thrum of nerves--that somehow made this almost worthwhile. Not counting that first week on the run with Agent K, I hadn’t felt this awake since . . . God, since I used to help Sakura out. Five years of being David Sanders nearly knocked me into a coma and now I felt powerfully alive. Yeah, that thrill reached me all warped and wrong, made grotesque like the reflection of a Carnival mirror . . . but fuck it, at least I wasn’t bored. This twisted, soft body through which every sensation and emotion touched me made damn sure of that. Looking back I could see how numb I’d become, playing the part of the ordinary corporate dick.
A little sunshine peaked through the clouds overhead, warming me slightly. Gleaming lancets of light splashed off the artificial pond. I tried reading my book--a shitty romance so saccharine it should’ve carried a warning for diabetics--but couldn’t focus on the words. The park made for a nice place to read but I rarely concentrated well. It’s not just that the books and magazines available from home were painfully boring--no, not just that at all. Rather, there were so many other distractions. The park itself, the hint of flowers and grass and sand that tickled the nose beneath my own girl scents. Joggers in the distance, blonde ponytails bobbing in counterpoint to each step, shirt darkening with sweat between their tits, such sexy young girls--and the sharp pain in my crotch: birds chirping as they danced the sky; the woof of a dog chasing a ball. The crunch of passing footsteps and, glancing up, a stranger.
A young man walked by, well-dressed, listening to music on his way to work, with clear blue eyes that pulled away from my cleavage as we made contact. He smiled and I instinctively smiled back and he walked on with a lighter step. Jackass. Yeah, the thought that I’d brightened that punk’s morning brought me very little satisfaction. A little boost, the smile of a pretty girl: maybe he’d have the confidence to hit on a secretary today, bend that bitch over his desk and fuck her over their lunch break, her feet scrabbling for purchase in too-tall heels as he slammed into her from behind, skirt up around her waist and hair falling across her face. . . .
God, I hadn’t fucked a secretary in ages. I shifted awkwardly in my seat, uncrossed and re-crossed my legs, surreptitiously adjusting my boys best I could as they strained against their lacy confinement. So, yeah: plenty of distractions in the park, but nothing compared to the reality of simply being me. Sometimes, for entire minutes at a time, maybe even a half-hour, I could lose myself in an unexpectedly interesting paragraph or in following a pedestrian walk by in the distance, but eventually, always, the tightening of a nipple under a cool breeze, a bead of sweat down my cleavage--the splash of polished colour against paper as I thumbed the page, or my own girl-scent, brought me back to Cindy.
My eyes peeked over the top of the page. A few pebbly dirt paths wound between the trees, dotted with benches on either side. I scanned the faces of the other lonely bastards sentenced to reading newspapers and feeding pigeons on a weekday morning. Already many of them were familiar; these new routines of mine obviously overlapped theirs. There’d been a few grudging, tentative exchanges of ‘hello’ but little more. This kind of place and this time of day, people could be fiercely protective of their own space and thoughts. Besides, they were all a hell of a lot older than me and seemed unsure what to do with this pretty girl in their company.
That early joy of exploring brought me here early last week, and I’d been coming back ever since. I had a new life to create for myself but in many ways found myself falling back on old routines. I still woke up as quickly and early as I’ve always done. The morning workout was replaced by things better suited to Cindy: I swapped sit-ups for cleansing and moisturising and push-ups for hair-care and styling, and you can damn well believe I felt the shame of giving up my manly habits for these things better suited for a pretty young thing like Cindy. There was so much of it: longer showers, the shaving, plucking, cleansing and moisturising, and then makeup, of course. God, the makeup took ages; how do girls put up with this shit every morning? Different cleansers, moisturizer, concealer, foundation, mascara, eyeshadow, pencil, lipstick, another pencil, gloss, blush . . . fucking hell! The whole process couldn’t finish without the tiny click of a dozen little bottle, tubes and vials being opened and shut.
And then I had to get dressed. I set myself a strict time limit on picking out clothes, or I’d lose an easy hour agonizing--procrastinating--over what to wear. Believe me, I took no pleasure in my mornings.
Hardest part of the day in some ways, this getting dressed bullshit. Two weeks of intense research, yeah, but trying to think like a sexy twenty-year old still didn’t come easy. And then I had to overcome that queasy stomach flop as I reached for the day’s panties; and then threading my arms into a bra, long fingernails still fumbling with tiny catches behind my back, and then figuring out how to strap my cock and balls back without crushing the poor bastards, choosing between bare legs or stockings, flats or heels, hating either possibility and myself for being in this position--and then finally that moment of revelation before the mirror as I lost myself in morbid contemplation of the cute sexy thing before me. And every day, that sense of fascination--of sick awe--seemed less intense and faded faster, replaced by a subtle joy at the sight of my own beauty. . . .
Then out the door; and all being said, once I’d swapped muscle for prettiness, it probably only took me a half-hour longer to get ready in the morning than it used to as a guy.
Not, of course, that I had anywhere to get to in a hurry. A slow walk downtown, trying a different route every morning. An indulgent hour spent over coffee; one sugar and a touch of cream now where I used to prefer it black. I’d read the newspaper if someone left one behind, catching up on all the usual news: more violence in the Middle East, some new superbug, a second young girl found slaughtered in the city park, a fucking cat caught up a tree. I wasn’t a big fan of newspapers, you know? It’s like, my life’s been more interesting than most of what’s written in there, and you know what? Once you’ve seen a certain side of the world and been through some tough shit--really harrowing shit, you know?--you can’t help but find the day-to-day stuff pretty shallow. Add to that the absurdity of my current life and, yeah, the papers didn’t hold that much appeal. What did I care if another goddamn ice cap melted when I was wearing a mini-skirt and mascara, in hiding from professional assassins?
I figured that Cindy probably wouldn’t be all that keen on the papers either… well, other than the fashion section and all that shit, of course, and maybe entertainment. I’d never noticed how much of a newspaper--especially the weekend ones, with all their colourful inserts and extra sections--were totally geared to women. We’re talking page after glossy page of advertisements for makeup, fashion advice, sexy women to emulate and shoes most girls couldn’t walk in. But while Cindy might find that shit fascinating--and by necessity I had to learn to like it to, just to learn what was up-to-date for a twenty year old chick--mostly I was looking for some kind of coverage of Steele’s trial.
Nothing.
Otherwise I’d fall back on whatever book or magazine I’d shoved into my purse (goddamn fucking Steele, I had a _purse_!), or I’d sit back and people-watch through the window. Mostly I people-watched, and pondered, and weathered the occasional bout of stormy emotion. Then a little more walking, some exploring, and I’d spend another hour in the park. Some days I followed that by hanging out at the mall, window shopping and feel the buzz of the crowd, eavesdropping on conversations; other days I wandered lonely backstreets and quiet parks, or hid in my apartment. A few nerve-wracking nights I ate out in quiet restaurants. And as much as I really, really wanted to hit a bar or, better yet, a really good pub . . . yeah, I wasn’t up for that. Not yet. Not even close.
Amazing, though, how easy it is to go through an entire day without speaking to anybody, without really talking, if you know what I mean, conversation beyond “paper or plastic, miss?” Even a pretty young girl like Cindy can end up alone, surrounded by the multitudinous crowds of the city.
This was a goddamn waste of time. My mind was dancing around deeper truths I didn’t want to confront. Better off to just head home and do fuck all there. Ten o’clock, yeah? I wondered it was still too early to hit the booze.
A sudden shiver. Something was wrong. A slow look over the edge of my book. That paranoid tingle at the base of the spine: I was being watched. Not in the usual way, the way that girls like Cindy are constantly being watched. One of the faces scattered across the park did not belong there. Unfamiliar, or more likely glimpsed earlier but somewhere else, too often caught at the edge of the background.
I was being followed.
The immediate rush of fear would’ve dropped me to the grass--if I’d not already been sitting. I felt my legs go weak and quivery--but only for an instant. As quickly as the fear came I pushed it aside. I’d been expecting this.
For the past week there’d been that itch between my shoulder blades, that hint of someone unknown on the periphery. He or she was good, but fuck it, so was I. Sakura had taught me a thing or two about being followed--and about following. Besides, K had warned me that Steele would be watching. Not that I could trust anything that bitch told me, of course. This could just be a fluke, a perfectly ordinary stalker with a thing for young girls in the park. It could even be someone K or Scooter had sent. Two weeks of puzzling it over and I still hadn’t figured out their game.
Goddamn the bastard, though, it really could be another of Jeremiah fucking Steele’s assassins. He’d already forced me into this girl’s life but the asshole wasn’t satisfied; he was still hunting for the one that got away. That jerkwad must be getting pretty damn desperate if he was having twenty-year old chicks followed--but that didn’t mean I was in any less danger. Crippled by clothes I’d barely held my own against Agent Fosters. Crippled by my very body, what chance would I have?
On the other hand . . . shit, but this was the first opportunity I’d been given to figure out what the hell was going on. I’d be damned if I’d let it slip away. This hidden bastard following me around might have some of the answers I was looking for. Time to go get them.
I read for another ten minutes, barely seeing the words on the page. Put the book away in my purse. Pulled out a small mirror and spent another five minutes fixing my face, poking my hair into position, freshening up my makeup and fixing that natural glow and feminine shine. I stood, brushing down my short skirt, and stretched my arms wide, breasts straining against their confines. A long, leisurely look across the park, basking in the intermittent sun and cool wind, and I set off, walking back into the city.
Hands thrust into a long beige coat, wearing sunglasses, loitering on a bench half concealed behind a tree with a newspaper in hand: I briefly caught the guy reflected in my compact before leaving my seat. Couldn’t pick out many details but I’d recognize him easily now. When the path turned and I casually looked back towards the bench he was gone. Following from a cautious distance, I’m sure. Good.
My skin fairly tingled as my heart pounded, senses stretching out--feeling fully aware and alive. God, I loved this, even as fear pulsed just beneath my eager anticipation. I left the park and took the long route through the outskirts of the city centre. Narrow homes and cramped apartment buildings competed with convenience shops and small markets for space, and I walked a twisting--but not suspiciously so--path around corners and past small shops. Window shopping allowed the rare glimpse of my purser, ghostly snapshots caught reflected in glass before he stepped back behind a corner.
The clothes on the other side of the window were sexy but classy, a flirty party dress with a wide belt and fluttery skirt in bronze and golden colours, next to a shimmery, form-fitting gown in deep crimson hues. I had a momentary thought: how would I look in that?--and my legs turned weak again.
What the fuck was I doing? I suddenly felt acutely conscious of my appearance. The short denim skirt that hugged my ass and barely reached mid-thigh, this tight t-shirt over a thin halter top that bared my belly-button and hugged these tits: for the first time since beginning this charade I suddenly felt vulnerable, hyperaware of my clothes, this ridiculous makeup and accessories that screamed for attention instead of turning it away; what if this went wrong? If this guy suddenly suspected something and caught up with me--with me so short, and tiny and weak, dressed like some teen princess . . . what the hell would I do? Something stifling blossomed in my chest and a hot flush spread across the exposed curve of my tits and crawled its way up my neck and my face blazed a fiery red as I struggled to breath, to catch my breath, leaning heavily against the glass, nails clicking against the smooth surface, shining pink in the bright sunlight. . . .
No--no, fuck this! This burgeoning panic, it was the hormones, the drugs Scooter fed me, evanescent bubbles in my bloodstream that led to hysteria. In the comforts of a coffee house or my own home, fine, fine, I’d play the stupid little girl and give in to my panic; but not here. Not here! I was stronger than this, stronger than this fucker following me, than the drugs and chemicals and plots levelled against me. I took a long, shuddering breath. Focused on the lessons of another life, remembered the man I’d once been and would be again. Rage was stronger than shame; and the thrill of the game overcame the fear.
They weren’t going to beat me that easily.
As I stepped onto one of the busier streets, merging with the light flow of pedestrians, in a twisted kind of way I even began to enjoy myself. Strolling along, still glancing into shops, I easily overcame the urge to tug down the hem of my skirt or to hunch forward in a vain attempt to hide my tits. Instead, I walked proudly--nearly strutted, swaying with each clicking step, smiling brightly and even winking at one wide-eyed guy walking in the opposite way--fuck, I even tossed my hair at one rude whistle that followed my passing.
Because, goddamn if I suddenly didn’t realize what all this bullshit really was. This was a game. Yeah, a game with the highest of stake--my life!--but still nothing more than a stupid, perverse sport, a match between me and the rest of the goddamn world. This jackass following me, was he good enough to keep up? Did I have the skills to turn the tables on the bastard? And Cindy--the crux of the whole damn thing--yeah, she was nothing more than an elaborate role-play. Could I trick everyone into believing that a tough-guy asshole like me could pass as a sweet ‘lil girl, all sugar and spice and lingerie so nice?
You bet your ass I can. Because when I get in on a game--when I’m serious--I play to win. Always. I’d wiggle my ass and mince about and keep my lips nice and moist, just to make this bastard following me cream his pants with desire; and then give hi the slip and take him from behind and slit his fucking throat before he knew what hit him.
Turning another corner, I passed a dirty, rubbish-strewn cramped alley next to an even dirtier-looking bar. I’d absently noticed it as a place to avoid on a walk earlier this week. The windows were blackened and the ratty posters pasted to the wall half-hidden under scrawled graffiti. The place seemed seedy and dingy and based on an advert stuck to the window I was fairly sure it was a strip bar. But the door was ajar and I’d led my follower on enough of a chase.
I gave him a moment to see me hovering out front of the bar. A sudden fresh burst of fear caused me to hesitate--and then I stepped through the door.
***
Strip clubs aren’t exactly my kind of place, but they’ll always have a soft spot in my heart. About two years ago I’d gone to the one near work for some corporate schmoozing and by the end of the night I’d picked up one of the strippers. She was this big-titted slut called Candi. That wasn’t a stage name or anything (and what kind of twisted parents name their kid ‘Candi’, with a cutesy ‘i’ and everything?) and I’ll be honest: I didn’t exactly date her for the conversation. Although saying that, she was gritty in a way I really liked. She was genuine and real and she knew a thing or two about what life was really like and how crap it could be, compared to the shallow whininess, the phoniness and bullshit of the bitches in my workplace romances.
Candi wasn’t one of those clever university chicks stripping for tuition. She wasn’t doing it because it was empowering, or to make some feminist point, or because she was some freaky exhibitionist. She was a high-school dropout with a drug habit and head full of issues. She had a killer body and an okay face, and she figured out early what she was best at. Step-daddy beat her once too often and so when she was sixteen she ran away to the big city. She scrounged enough cash together to get some quality work done on her boobs, and as long as the looks lasted, she probably took as much satisfaction from her job as David Sanders had from his.
She’d known exactly what she wanted that night and damn if she hadn’t been one of the nastiest, sexiest fucks I’ve ever had. I dropped a lot of cash on that date, and it was some of the best I’ve ever spent. Squeezed into a clingy dress, she cut quite the inappropriate figure at that fancy restaurant I took her to, and damn how I loved the scandalous stares she drew. She slipped under the table before the waiter even had time to take our drinks order. The way she deep-throated me as I struggled to order the Bordeaux, my fingers digging furrows into the tabletop as her head bobbing up and down my shaft, her moans and slurps going nearly unheard beneath the gently falling strains of the restaurant piano player--God, that kind of shit you never forget.
But that was a lifetime ago. Stepping into a strip club these days, management would be throwing me up on stage before they offered me a seat and a beer. Those memories of Candi flared across my mind as I slipped through the door. I shoved them aside.
Squalid and dark, the entrance stank of stale cigarette smoke and spilled beer. Momentary silence enveloped me, a stark contrast to the constant din of the city. Stopping for a moment to catch my breath, eyes blinking and adjusting to the dim light, I felt my heart pounding in my chest. My pursuer wouldn’t follow me into the club, not if he wanted to remain anonymous. He’d have to wait outside for me to emerge.
(If, on the other hand, he was looking to catch me--I’d just given him the perfect opportunity away from the crowds of the street. Pretty girl steps into nasty bar and never comes out; would anybody notice? I’d just be another page two column in tomorrow’s newspaper, girl number three found dead in the park with a slit throat.)
I padded across the entrance and as I approached a swinging door opposite, a faint thrumming of music reached my ears. Treble and midrange joined the beat as I pushed through into a large dimly lit room with a bar at one end and a low stage at the other. The stage was empty but complete with mandatory pole and mirrored backing. A scattering of tables filled the hall. The chairs along jerk-off row were lifted off the floor and turned upside down on the edge of the stage. A large, industrial-size wet-vac sat unattended in the middle of the room. Coloured lights drifted idly across the stage, flashing to the beat of the music turned low. The lights scattered against a mirrored ball and danced lazily around the room.
Passing through the room, I tried to keep as silent as was possible in kitten heels. Women’s clothes aren’t exactly designed for practicality, let alone for subterfuge, you know? Even with the music, the click of those hard-soled shoes and narrow heels sounded absurdly loud in my ears. I’m pretty damn good at being quiet when I want to, but everything about Cindy was designed to draw attention, not turn it away. Keeping low, I wove between tables and made my way for a door near the stage. The “Staff Only” hopefully meant it might lead to a back room, and then onto a rear exit from the bar.
“I don’t give a fuck how fucking big his fucking glands are! We’re already short a girl for tonight, we’re not opening short a bouncer too!”
A short, podgy man came storming into the room from a door near the bar. He was well-dressed and wouldn’t have looked out of place with that morning crowd streaming past the coffee shop, but his face flushed red with rage left him dangerous- and sleazy-looking. “You tell Alex to get his fucking ass down here, you hear me?” he continued, nostrils flaring with anger. His face glistened with sweat as he stomped past. “I won’t have my girls endangered because that pussy’s got a bad cold.” He jabbed at his phone as he stalked across the room and shoved it into his pocket. “Now where the fuck’s the cleaner gone to,” he muttered, headed for the swinging door.
He shouldn’t have seen me. It was bad luck--nothing more. A sudden shift of the lights above cascaded off of one of my earrings and sent out a brief flare. The man glanced absently my way as he walked. I held my breath. He stopped walking and did a quick double-take.
“Who the fuck are you?” he demanded, spotting my crouched form. “What the fuck are you doing in my bar?” He reversed directions towards me.
Shit. I pretended to fiddle with my shoe before standing straight. I flashed a nervous smile. “Um, hi?” I quickly scanned the area for something I could clobber this bastard with if things turned nasty.
He came close enough to see me clearly. I shifted uncomfortably under his gaze. His eyes scanned me up and down slowly and his scowl quickly melted into a smile. His face lost its red flush, and with the anger gone he seemed almost friendly, a beardless Santa Claus in a Hugo Boss suit. Saying that, despite the surprisingly disarming smile there was a hardness to his eyes that he couldn’t hide. It made him intimidating--especially standing this close, with his heft and height that left me feeling so small.
“You must be the girl the agency was sending over,” he said.
Jesus Christ! Five minutes in a strip club and some sleazeball manager was offering me a job. “Um, yes?” I squeaked out, thrusting those D-cups out a little more proudly. His frankly appraising gaze made me want to squirm like you wouldn’t believe. A slow burn started in my stomach, although I had to admit that in some ways the man’s look seemed less sexual than most of the creeps ogling me on the street. This guy was appraising the merchandise, not looking to score.
“My name’s Frank,” he said, thrusting out his hand.
“Hi, I’m. . . .” With a sinking feeling in my belly, I gave the first answer that came to mind. “I’m Candi!” I said, swallowing a deep sigh. His hand, slightly clammy, ignored my limply extended fingers and seized me by the wrist.
“Sorry about earlier,” he said. His grip slid past my arm and found my waist with far too easy familiarity. Giving me a light tap on the ass that made me jump, he effortlessly led me towards the stage. I nearly planted my elbow in the bastard’s temple, but narrowly suppressed the urge.
“No problem,” I answered through gritted teeth.
“Just having some staffing issues. Nothing for you to worry about. After all, my loss is your gain, right?”
“Yup!” I answered, and forced a giggle. “It’s like, I’m new to town and when the call came I was, like, just so happy, because I’m desperate for work and. . . .”
“Of course you are, babe,” Frank said. “You have any working clothes with you?”
I blinked at him in confusion.
He sighed. “For the audition?”
What, the bastard expected me to jump on stage? Yeah, in your fucking dreams, Frank. I shook my head, earrings dancing against my cheek.
“Um, I just moved here and. . . .” My hand fluttered to my lips. “Oh no! The agency, they didn’t tell me and . . . oh, I’m so stupid! I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, I’ll just rush home and. . . .” Okay, yeah, I was laying it on a bit thick but at the moment I just wanted to get the hell out of there. There was a professional assassin waiting for me outside, but believe me, I’d rather go mano-a-mano with one of Steele’s hired killers than get up on that stage and prance around like this guy’s wet dream.
“Easy, Candi, easy,” Frank said, giving my ass a ‘comforting’ squeeze that nearly resulted with my knee in his crotch. He led me towards the Staff Only door. “You can borrow some shit from the changing room, okay?”
We passed through the door into a dark hallway. The slow burn in my stomach redoubled at the sudden realization that I was alone with this strange man in the back of a disreputable club. No one knew I was here, other than the bastard following me outside. My fear was irrational; this guy didn’t get to run his club by assaulting every girl that walked through his door. At least not on the first day of work, anyway. Besides, I knew I could take him despite my lack of strength. It wouldn’t be pretty, but especially with surprise on my side I’d kick this jerk’s ass. Reason did nothing to dispel the anxiety.
With a final pat on the ass he pushed me through a door. “You get yourself prettied up, Candi, and I’ll see you on stage in five.” Again that charming smile, but he spoke with unnerving authority, the kind the suggested something bad might happen if I kept him waiting.
I smiled over my shoulder at him. “Okay!” I answered, trying to look grateful and hoping the dark hid my disgust at this man’s touch. “And Frank? Thanks for the chance.”
“No problem, babe. You hurry up now.” He pulled out his phone. “I’ll set up some tunes and wait by the stage.”
The door shut with a solid click. I gave Frank a minute to clear out of the hallway and scanned the room. Last time I’d been back stage in a strip club had been with Candi. I’d fucked her up against the bare concrete wall behind a rack of cheap fake furs and silver lame stoles. Five minutes flat, rough and intense and rude, and she’d fucking loved it, nearly gnawing a chunk out of my shoulder as she stifled her moans. Then she’d quickly changed and slipped back into the bar to work the tables, and you bet your ass I’d loved the idea of her belly being still warm and sweaty from my efforts as she rubbed her ass up against those sad pervs in the bar. She’d left me to find my own way out, of course, and I’d had to quickly sneak away before the bouncers caught me and embarrassed themselves trying to kick my ass.
I stepped up to the mirror over the makeup counter. The startled-looking girl in the mirror’s green eyes were wide with surprise at the situation she found herself in. Arching my back slightly, I watched as she thrust her chest out and the disarmingly shy smile that contrasted her pose. But looking closer, anger smouldered beneath those soft features, and her eyes were far harder than Frank could ever imagine.
The fucking things is this, though: as my eyes danced across the room, taking in the row of ridiculous shoes, those towering spikes and inches of platform, and the scattered collection of sparkly vials and shimmering clothes, I couldn’t help but briefly imagine myself out on that goddamn stage, shaking my ass and twirling around that pole.
With tits like mine, God, and this fit little body and those years of working out, the grace and dance-like motions that accompanied all my training--goddamn, but I’d make one hell of a stripper. Better than Candi had been, even--other than one important bit, of course, and the stirring of my cock beneath my denim skirt (and the tucked-away pain that came with it) snapped me from my reverie.
Fucking hell. It seemed just yesterday I’d been rising through the corporate ranks, with my own office and secretary, wearing tailored suits, screwing sexy girls I’d picked up in painfully fashionable and over-priced bars . . . how the hell did I end up here, backstage in some grotty little strip bar, half-imagining myself twirling around a pole for the entertainment of a bunch of sweaty, sad men? I gave my head a shake. Goddamn hormones, stupid pills playing with my head; focus.
I poked my head out the door. Empty. Silent. Stepping lightly into the hallway, I walked quickly away from the main room. The door closed behind me with a faint click. I passed a storage closet, staff toilet, turned a corner and . . . perfect: a back exit.
Pushing the bar, I gently opened the door an inch. Blinking in the sudden light, I peaked into a short recess off the main back alley. It reeked of piss and refuse. Flies crawled across the taut skin of garbage bags bulging from a large bin pressed up against the brick wall. The wind breathed down the narrow passage, stirring up dirt--died down--returned stronger than before accompanied by the whistling of cables overhead.
I flicked the lock open so that I could come back this way if I had to. The door closed shut behind me. I quickly crossed over to the back alley. The brick felt rough beneath my palm as I hugged the wall and looked around the corner.
The alley led about thirty metres back to the main street that the bar opened on to. He stood there waiting patiently at the corner. My pursuer. About six feet tall and slender, with shaggy blond hair and good clothes, a strong chin and angular nose. A large dumpster and scattered cardboard boxes and strewn rubbish lay between the two of us. An open vent breathed out greasy warm air and the wind’s presence sounded a low howl as it swept down the alley.
Easy. I crouched down and picked up a discarded beer bottle. I slid the bottle into my purse and gave it a solid whack against the ground. It broke with a muffled crack. My delicate fingers curled lightly around the neck of the bottle and pulled it out and held it up before my eyes. The bottom half lay in shattered fragments in the bottom of my purse, and the jagged edges glistened wetly with leftover beer. A few silent steps to the dumpster, a slow creep along its edge--and then the final rush; even if he heard me it’d be too late. I imagined thrusting the broken bottle into his neck, the gush of blood and gurgled surprise, and smiled. David: 2, Steele: 0, you fucking bastard.
I slipped out of my hard-soled shoes and delicately rested my full weight down on my bare feet. Carefully, mindful of broken glass, I slid into the alley, shuffling forward, weight resting on the edges of my feet, the bottle held loosely in my grip, using the dumpster and boxes for cover. I moved swiftly forward, staying close to the wall, the wind flowing over me and carrying away every sound, my girlish scent, tossing my hair up in a blonde halo around my face and cool against feverishly hot flesh. I reached the back of the large metal container. My nose wrinkled at the stench as I crept closer.
A momentary oasis of unnaturally intense silence. I could hear every sound my follower made, the slight scuff against the ground as he shifted his weight, his exhalation of breath and the rustling of his long coat. My hand tightened its grip on the bottle. A final exhilarating moment; tightly coiled, I slithered to the edge of my concealment and tensed for the attack.
“Hey. It’s Jeff.”
The man’s voice caused me to pull back.
“Yeah, reporting in.” He paused for a moment. “Tell me about it. Shitty day. Think it’s gonna rain. Feels like a big storm coming in.”
He kept his voice quiet as he spoke, and his eyes kept a careful watch on the entrance. A few times he glance up the alley but gave no sign of spotting me.
“You ready? Yeah,” my follower said. “Subject: Cindy Long. Female, age 20. Subject left her apartment at 8:11 am and. . . .” For the next several minutes he gave, at a rapid, clipped pace, a complete litany of my day’s progress. I was a little put off to realize that he’d been following me for longer than I’d known; those damn hormone flashes were playing havoc with my senses. I should’ve picked up on him the moment I left my apartment.
“10:48: subject steps into Satori and . . . .” He stopped for a moment. “Yeah, Satori. It’s a strip club. Strange name, I know. You should see this place, absolute dive. Bit out of character for this girl if you ask me, but she’s definitely got the bod for it.”
Damn straight I’ve got the body for it, you fucking jackass. My grip tightened on the bottle. As soon as he got off the phone he’d find this body was good for more than just stripping and dancing.
“That’s it. She stepped in 15 minutes ago and I’m waiting for her to come out again. Maybe she’s applying for a job or something, how the hell should I know? I haven’t seen her do any other work and she’s got to make cash somehow.” He nodded a few time. “Yeah. My recommendation? This is a fucking waste of time. Why the hell does Steele want this girl followed anyway?”
I flushed hot, then shivered as a chill danced down my spine. There was the confirmation I needed: Steele was still behind all this bullshit. Guilt flashed through me at having doubted Agent K--but only momentarily. The constant weight of these massive tits nestled in their lacy cups didn’t leave much room for any emotion but anger at the thought of that bitch, you know?
“No, I’m not questioning the boss’s orders. You think I’ve got a death wish? But what the hell do you want me to say, Dan? This chick’s life is boring. She wanders around the city and drinks coffee and spends most of her day in her apartment getting drunk.” He paused. “Yeah, she’s been buying loads of booze. Nah, I don’t think she’s got any friends.”
And you know, hearing this bastard judge my life like that--so flippantly, so dismissively--fuck, it actually hurt, you know? Stupid thing to be feeling, crouched as I was, coiled and ready to spring forward; but the stark truth of what he’d said hit me so hard I almost had to blink away tears.
The fucker listened for a bit, grunting a confirmation at the occasional unheard question. Finally he shrugged. “Well, no,” he said, his voice grudging. “But her profile says she’s just come out of a round of therapy and surgery, right? Of course she’s going to be acting a bit . . . yeah. Yes.” He sighed. “No, she hasn’t exactly been acting as expected. Her behaviour doesn’t match her profile, but her recent--
“She’s been aloof. You can quote me: ‘moments of extreme sociability that seem almost forced, followed by long stretches of alienation and introspection.’ No. No. Yes, from this profile you sent over I expected a ditzy blonde or something, a real flirt, but . . . hey, don’t get me wrong, she’s hot and dresses real sexy but . . . hell yes! I’d do her, but there’s something about this girl that’s a bit off . . . I don’t know, something in her body language or something. Like I said--she just left a clinic, right?”
My muscles were beginning to ache. I wanted to stretch out but didn’t dare move. This guy--Jeff--even in his conversation his senses clearly remained alert, mindful of the entrance to the club and any movement in the alley. A few times he had to cup his phone to be heard as the wind whistled through and I nearly missed what he was saying. I was counting on that wind to conceal my presence when I moved.
“Alright, fine. It’s Steele’s money. She’s acting odd. I’ll continue the surveillance.” With that he clicked his phone shut and slid it back in his pocket.
And that was my moment: his brief distraction as he ended the conversation. A short window in which I could rush forward and that’d be that, throat ripped wide open, dead before he hit the ground, his hand still in his goddamn pocket, blood spreading in a slow, dark pool around his unmoving body. . . .
Only I didn’t. Instead I backed away, quietly, back into the bar, and left the broken bottle standing behind the dumpster in the alley.
***
Later that night, after a long shower and several stiff shots of whisky, I sat on my sofa and stared out at the glimmering city lights. Dressed in a fluffy robe with my smooth legs curled up beneath me, I slowly clenched and unclenched my hand and found that I couldn’t dispel the phantom presence of the cool, pitted glass in my palm, the invisible weight of a broken beer bottle.
That asshole--what was his name, Jeff?--would never know how close he came to dying today.
Instead I’d made my way back through the bar. Given Frank some bullshit excuse, a tearful apology about how I couldn’t get up on that stage, how I thought I could but I couldn’t, I wasn’t that kind of girl. . . . Really melodrama, you know? And he’d been surprisingly understanding, which was a good thing because I’d still been in a fighting mood, tense and ready to kick the guy in the nuts if he gave me any hassle. Instead he gave me his card, told me to call if I ever changed my mind. Yeah, don’t hold your breath, Frank.
I should’ve killed him. Jeff. My shadow. I would’ve enjoyed it. Another chance to strike back at Steele, at this goddamn maniac screwing up my life. My hand clenched tight again and I felt my anger bubble up within as a physical presence, a stifling weight that left me flushed and hot. Somehow I’d find the bastard. Make him pay. Steele was the one that I wanted to make bleed--not some anonymous stalker-for-hire. But killing Jeff would’ve given me away.
Better to maintain the illusion. Fool him, fool them all. They had a profile. How, from where? Probably from the Clinic--K said something about Steele’s men hacking into their network. So they knew what Cindy was like. And as long as I acted differently that what they expected, as long as I wasn’t the twenty year-old chick they expected. . . .
They’d be watching.
I’d play their fucking game. I’d be the girliest fucking girl they’d ever seen. I’d dress pretty and live this shitty life they’d forced on me and no one would ever suspect that behind this painted smile and innocent wide eyes, someone--something--else entirely lurked. Eventually my followers would wander off. I’d be free. They all seemed to have these goddamn profiles, psychological evaluations, character sketches, written outlines of who I was. David Sanders. Cindy Long.
They didn’t have a fucking clue.
I’d be watching. And waiting. And when their attention wandered elsewhere I’d be the one following. This was their game but I was damn well going to make it mine.
With sudden resolve I surged to my feet and stalked to the middle of the room. I dropped to me knee and stretched out across the floor. I rested both hand, palms flat against the floor, on either side of my chest. A deep breathe, another . . . and I pushed.
First in my triceps, then both shoulders, and finally my chest: the burn, and then the ache. My arms trembled. I pushed and strained and slowly lifted off the floor. . . .
I held it for five seconds--five eternal, agonizing, magnificent seconds--arms fully extended, wobbling and weak, eyes watering with the effort; and then my strength suddenly evaporated and I dropped back to the floor.
A full hundred pounds--and fuckin’ A! I could do at least one!
And tomorrow, I’d do two. . . .
***
Continues in Chapter 03
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Constant in All Other Things 2
Chapter Three
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
“Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.”
Much Ado About Nothing
One black pump and then the next swung free from the taxi and found pavement. The young woman lifted from the car, finding her balance with confidence despite the pencil-thin, three-inch heels. She tugged her skirt into place, the tight fabric hugging slender legs, dark and sleek in stockings, to just above the knee. She paid the driver, flashing the chatty man a thankful smile, and turned her eyes upwards.
Office towers formed an imposing box of glittering glass and cold concrete looming against a grey sky. A harsh wind blew, pulling at her clothes. She nervously smoothed down invisible wrinkles in her skirt, tugged at her blouse and passed a quick hand through her hair–a futile action as the wind returned and pulled it nearly horizontal, a wheat-blonde wave that swirled about her head.
Eight in the morning and people already thronged the plaza, briefly clumping together at small kiosks selling coffee and food before breaking off and streaming into the buildings. They walked purposefully past as she stood momentarily bemused. She gave her head a little shake before joining the flow. Her stride was kept short by her slim skirt. She kept her purse close at her side. A forced smile to her carefully painted lips didn’t quite hide the fact that she visibly struggled to control the nervousness of a young woman’s first day at a new job. The click of her shoes against the whitewashed cobblestone went unheard among the many other women headed in the same direction.
Taking a deep breath, she stepped into the building.
Her shoulder banged painfully against the heavy glass door. It failed to budge from her weak push. She cursed something distinctly unladylike under her breath and struggled briefly with the door but found little purchase in her heels.
“Need a little help?”
She swallowed her frustration and looked up past the arm that reached across her. “Um . . . yes,” she murmured, smiling hesitantly at the taller man who easily pushed the door open for her. “Thank you,” she added, her gaze dropping demurely away as she stepped into the building.
“Hey, no problem,” the man said, following her through, hesitating briefly and then moving away towards the elevators. She glanced back. So did he. He was young and well-dressed. Clear blue eyes danced away from her ass and the man grinned apologetically at being caught out. A small smile and a farewell flutter of her hand, and she strode purposefully towards the reception desk. Her steps sounded louder against the marbled flooring but again, so did the clicking heels of the other well-dressed women crossing the lobby.
“Yes?” The large man behind the large desk, after a brief study of her breasts, turned his full attention to the girl. “Can I help you?”
“Hi!” she said, and smiled. “My name is Cindy . . . Cindy Long? I’m here for the interview!”
***
Same old shit, different story.
How long ago was it? Seven years . . . no, eight. My life, as I knew it then, came crashing down. The woman I loved was taken from me. She was killed. I had tried to stop the man responsible. I failed. The woman I worked for wanted nothing more to do with me. And what little sanity I had left was hanging by a thread. No family. No friends. I barely even existed. Hell, I didn’t want to. So when I regained the use of my legs and Sakura told me to leave, that’s what I did; and I disappeared into the streets.
It’s not a part of my life I think much about.
Months of sleeping in doorways and cold nights and eating scraps took their toll. I met a few cool, fucked-up people and many nasty, fucked-up people, and the only thing we shared in common was that we’d been discarded by a world that didn’t need us anymore. I had it better than most their first couple of weeks on the street. I was already tough as fuck, but beardless, young-looking and slender, I must’ve seemed an easy mark. First time some older goddamn perv pawed at me in my sleep, I snapped his arm and battered the bastard half to death. Word got out quick not to screw with me.
Malnutrition sapped my health and size but sure as hell didn’t make me weak, even after I picked up a cough that rattled somewhere deep in my chest. Something inside turned hard and bitter and unyielding. I rarely begged, the smouldering anger in which I wrapped myself driving most charity away. Some kids gave me food to help keep the crueller predators away, but I wandered a lot and wasn’t very reliable. I learned to smoke to keep the cold away, and to drink--but not to forget. I didn’t want to forget. And when the hunger became too much I stole what I needed. I ate other people’s garbage, shoplifted when I had to, and yeah, mugged a few people when things got really bad. I did all kinds of nasty shit to get by. I’ve never felt sorry about any of it.
One morning I woke up and a year had passed me by and it was suddenly time to get off my ass and sort out my life. I didn’t have a hell of a lot going for me: twenty years old and a bad drinking habit, worse scars, and a burning hatred for the world. No education, nothing to my name and nowhere to stay.
Compared to what I’d already lost, though, none of that seemed important. Katherine’s death hadn’t killed me. She’d been gone a year and the pain was there, but instead of a hollow numbness it now felt hot and jagged. It felt–alive. I was alive. If I could survive losing her, survive . . . everything that had happened--then fuck, I wasn’t going to let anything else get in my way. I was young. I was tough. I was still good-looking beneath the filth. There were people who owed me favours, and I knew a few places where I could pick up a little cash. It wasn’t much.
First thing I needed was a job.
So I swallowed my pride and called in a favour. An ‘acquaintance’ hooked me up with something easy, washing dishes at one of his diners, a real greasy-spoon that fronted for some other shit he did. The work was the kind of repetitive job I needed to keep me sane as my meagre income kept me fed and under a roof. A few weeks and I started to look and feel better and picked up some new clothes. I started waiting tables and made some good tips, especially from the girls. Managed the place on quiet weeknights and the guy I knew brought me to a club he owned and suddenly I was a bouncer on the weekend. I started working out again and started to fill out. I enjoyed the job–as much as I could enjoy anything back then–and though I never went looking for trouble it didn’t take much to convince me to throw some asshole out on his ass. The waitresses love that, and they loved me to, even though they quickly sussed that I wasn’t exactly boyfriend material.
And from there–well, then I was working bar on Fridays, and before long managing the place, too. I wasn’t really alive, not in the way the people around me seemed to be. Everything I did was purely mechanical. I didn’t go out, didn’t speak much and didn’t make many friends. I spent my free time alone, working out and thinking empty, circular thoughts, reliving memories best forgotten.
God, I hated them back then, all those happy people: the loving couples sitting by candlelight in the restaurant, drinking wine and talking quietly, the girl’s hand resting softly in his . . . the friends who flooded the club and danced with abandon and touched each other and sweated and cried out to the music . . . and I worked behind the bar mixing their drinks.
Could things have gone on like that?
Where would I be now if they had?
I certainly wouldn’t be sitting behind this desk two weeks into a new job, wearing a pleated skirt that kept creeping up my goddamn thigh.
“Cindy, can you get me John Weber on the line, please?” called Jack from his office.
“Straight away, Mr Peterson.” I made a show of rustling through the papers on my desk and flipping through stick-it notes, hunting for the contact sheet, and then punched in the number I’d memorized my first day on the job. The phone rang. “Hi Alison,” I said once she picked up. “How’re you doing? Cool. Yeah, me too. Listen, can you put me through to Mr Weber? It’s for Mr Peterson.” I covered the receiver with my hand. “He’s on the line, Mr Peterson.”
“Thanks Cindy,” he called back, then hesitated and smiled. “Good work.” He closed his door as he took the call.
Melissa, the junior secretary--office assistant--at the desk opposite gave an encouraging thumb up. I smiled gratefully. Another job well done. Gosh, I’m good. Swallowing momentary disgust, I turned back to the stack of data entry before me.
The offices of Volumnia International were on the fifteenth floor of the Jacobs Building in the city centre. V.I. served as an in-house market-research firm for the parent corporation. We--I can’t believe I’m already thinking of myself as part of this place--work closely with our sister company one floor up. They focus on marketing and advertising. A number of out-of-house and international customers rounded out the company portfolio.
V.I. was young and energetic and so fucking cool it hurt. The junior staff worked freely in the open-concept office space--affectionately nicknamed ‘The Lounge’--docking their laptops where they chose, emancipated from the creativity-crushing limitations of the cubicle or even their own desk. There was a pool table and an archaic Ms. Pac-man coin-op arcade game and a few other distractions haphazardly scattered across the room, an almost ironic water cooler in the centre and a palm tree in one corner, complete with sandbox and hammock. A giant dry-erase whiteboard on one wall was covered in witty haiku, scraps of random poetry and the occasional aphorism. The place reeked of ‘synergy’ and ‘thinking outside the box’, though nobody would ever be gauche enough as to actual use those words.
They were all between twenty-three and thirty-three, attractive or at least quirky in some way, with university degrees in sociology or anthropology or literature and other useless shit; they all seemed to speak a second or third language. They were so out of touch with reality it was laughable, but they sure could talk and look pretty. These kids were full of enthusiasm, of arrogant cynicism, of themselves; and I was half-torn between grudging jealously and the urge to slap them all across the face and give them a solid shake. Cindy, however… well, hell, the high school dropout from the backwater town of River Valley was just in awe of her new job and the people she worked for. This was a whole new world for her, invigorating and intimidating.
The ‘research assistants’ and ‘project managers’ and the like worked the Lounge, and ringed around the open space middle- and senior-management enjoyed traditional offices that looked out at the other glistening office towers and the city sprawling into the distance. And me… hell, I wasn’t even a bloody secretary. I was a goddamn ‘junior office helper’, a step-up from a high-school student on a work-study program. Yeah, it was only for a three months probationary period, but gosh, if I worked really hard and kissed the right ass, then maybe, just maybe, someday I could be a real office girl, too. . . .
“You okay there, Cindy?”
I looked up at Sarah. She was the P.A. to Lucy Jones, the office manager, and nominally in charge of my training. Once an hour or so she swung by to make sure I hadn’t screwed anything up too badly. She spoke in the patronizing and slightly impatient tone of someone left in charge of a precocious but useless child. Damn if I didn’t like her despite the attitude, though. She leaned over me to check my work and her blouse hung loosely. She had gorgeous tits, large and lightly freckled nestled in a tight black bustier with lacy cups.
“Cindy?”
“I’m sorry.” My face felt a little hot. “I was just admiring your, uh . . . necklace. It’s so pretty!” It wasn’t, but she wore it well. “Where did you find it?”
“Laos,” she answered curtly. “Now pay attention. You’ve made a couple of mistakes here, here, and here.” She touched the screen with one expertly manicured finger, pointing out the two mistakes I’d purposefully made and one I hadn’t.
“Oh . . . oh gosh, I’m sorry Ms Jenkins!” I reached for the mouse and the keyboard and my flustered motions knocked over a pencil holder and nearly deleted the file. “Shit!” I stared up at Sarah with wide eyes. “Um. Sorry.”
She sighed. “Cindy, please try to relax around me. You’re doing fine.” She laid a comforting hand on my shoulder and it may have just been wishful thinking but her touch seemed just a tad firmer than professionalism called for. I felt a painful stirring beneath my skirt and smiled through a grimace. “Just . . . try a little harder to focus, okay? Double check the data after you’ve entered each page.”
I glanced at her hand, past her chunky bangle and up her slender arm to her face. Her eyes were a dark hazel behind thin, red-framed glasses with narrow square lenses. Meticulously applied makeup in subdued grey and silver tones gave her a dark, almost hypnotic gaze. Taking a mental note of how she’d done her eyes, I smiled. “I will, Ms Jenkins,” I said, and nodded. “It’s just that it’s all so new . . . there’s so much to remember.”
She allowed a small smile to sneak through. “It’s only your second week, Cindy. Give it time. You’ll be whizzing through this before you know it.” A faint fragrance with hints of vanilla lingered after she stepped away.
“Thanks, Ms Jenkins.”
I watched the sway of her ass as she returned to her office. The under-rigging gave her a slim, sexy figure; damn, but she was a tight little package for a woman just the other side of forty. I’d love to take her out, and take her home, and peel away those layers of clothes and reward the effort she still put into her looks. . . .
Melissa gave me another thumbs up and a shiny smile, which I dutifully returned.
My supportive colleague, on the other hand, I didn’t like. Nasty piece of work, Melissa. Beneath the façade of workplace friendliness and cheerleader-level enthusiasm lurked a committed backstabber. She had an eye on the competition and she didn’t like what she saw. Only a couple of years older than my supposed age, she must’ve been shitting bricks that I’d leapfrog her on the company ladder. Poor, stupid cow; she didn’t see how short the ladder really was. Sure, she was sexy, though in an obvious, young and blonde kind of way. Grapevine had it she’d already had it on with Hassan, one of the junior researchers, but moved on to Phil up in marketing, which was a waste of her time because he had eyes on. . . .
With a sigh I turned back to my work.
How the hell was I supposed to think straight with all this useless crap running through my head? The gossip in this place was ridiculous, and playing the young secretary I had to stifle my complete disinterest and now knew far more about these people than I ever wanted. No wonder errors were slipping through! Fuck it, my concentration was shot . . . and I needed a bathroom stall to adjust myself. These long nails slowed my work and these tits still distracted me, and the constant dull ache from my crotch was almost unbearable at times, but Cindy’s work wasn’t exactly all that difficult, you know? I could get her day’s worth of work done in a few hours--once I put my ditzy blonde head to it, that is, which wasn’t always easy. Distractions abounded.
My eyes drifted away from the monitor and across the Lounge. Nicola was kicking Derek’s ass at a game of pool; Christina, Lin and . . . I think his name’s Douglas? were having a chat by the water cooler, and Surinder stopped on his way to the kitchen to stop and watch Katerina puzzle her way through a sonnet on the white board, and . . . shit, doesn’t anybody actually work around this goddamn place? Suddenly I felt a desperate need to be alone, a hungry longing for the solitary life of the past few weeks. Who the hell were all these people? I didn’t want to know them, hang out with them . . . I definitely didn’t want to work for these kids, scurrying after them, transferring their calls, fetching their bloody copies, filing their paperwork and carrying drinks into meetings.
How the hell was I going to survive the weeks and months to come? To this constant scrutiny, and the humiliation of doing this drudgework and looking up at these . . . kids, infants that not long ago I would’ve been telling what to do, telling off . . . at most, meeting as equals! This place wasn’t NeoPharm . . . but it wasn’t that far off, it felt familiar and that familiarity made it all the more galling.
One of the senior directors comes to work at ten every morning. When Michael Connor arrives, I watch him pass with barely concealed jealousy and unreasoned dislike. I envy him his height and size, his short hair, his tailored suit, the hefty, expensive watch at his wrist, the comfortable shoes, his confident and easy stride, the deference he receives and the automatic respect he expects. That should’ve been me. That used to be me. Instead I trot after him every morning in my dainty heels and bring him his mail and a coffee, black and pass him the newspaper. Every morning I stand in the doorway of his office as this upcoming executive settles into his seat, and every morning I’m confronted with the image of the young girl faintly reflected over him in the expansive window opposite. And every morning I use the opportunity to touch up my image in the window and I smile at the man and somehow grow more familiar and at ease with these ridiculous, flirty little gestures; what the hell was I becoming?
I caught Melissa’s attention. “Hey Mel? I’ve gotta, you know, freshen up? You mind covering?”
She made a big deal of finishing off some work she was doing before looking up. “Oh, of course!” she said, smiling. “You know how to transfer your calls over?”
Bitch. I chewed on my lip for a moment. “I think so,” I said, and redirected my calls to her desk. I grabbed my purse from beneath the desk and slipped my feet back into those godforsaken heels, feeling the all-too familiar pinch at the toes, and felt her eyes scrutinizing me as I stepped from the office.
The toilets were on the other side of the floor, past frosted glass doors and heavy wooden ones that led into the other offices that shared the space with V.I.. I walked quickly, suddenly aware of a burgeoning panic swelling inside--a pressure on my brain--a wild desire to scream or throw myself against a wall or to hurt someone badly.
“Hi Cindy!” Shit. The chirpy voice demanded my attention. I stared unseeingly for a long moment at the woman standing before me, then shook my head and snapped out of it. Fuck, what was her name again? She’s that receptionist from up the hall . . . Katie! I forced a smile to my lips. “Katie?”
She looked at me oddly. Goddamn, what’d I do wrong this time? The silence drew out awkwardly. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Yes, of course!” I nodded. “Why do you ask?”
“You just look a little . . . tense, is all.” She shrugged, a delicate motion of her shoulders. She was a cute little thing--shorter than me, even--in her late twenties with short bobbed hair and dark, almost severe clothes. How she walked around all day in such tall heels I couldn’t imagine. We’d had a long chat in the bathroom two days ago, something about . . . crap, what was it? “Rough day at work?”
I shrugged-- felt acutely aware of how inelegant and unfeminine my gesture seemed compared to hers--and froze mid-motion. God, she was going to think I was having a spastic meltdown or something. Maybe I was. “I guess,” I said. Something flicked behind her eyes but I couldn’t read her, some secret female code still unknown to me. I had to get away before I clawed out her eyes or screamed in her face. “I’m sorry,” I nearly blurted, and pushed past her towards the bathroom. “I’ve . . . really got to go.”
Her eyes followed me down the hall. Sudden it came to me, and I paused and looked back. “Mark!” I exclaimed, and she started at the sound of my voice. Her six-month old son; he’d been colicky and restless at night. “How’s the little guy doing?”
Katie smiled. “Better,” she said, and turned away.
It’s a good thing I didn’t bump into anyone else in the hallway. Fighting back a hysterical laugh--or was it a sob?--I reached the women’s toilet--another urge to break into giggles--my steps clicking loudly on the ceramic tiles--a desperate effort to not see myself in the mirror--why the hell are their so many mirrors in the girls’ room?--didn’t want to see myself--the slender legs and long shiny hair and--I flung myself into a stall and collapsed onto the seat and buried my face in my hands.
I drew a long shuddering breath. A quiet whimper escaped my lips, not the howl of frustration I wanted but the only release available to me. My fists clenched, nails digging into my palm painfully . . . and then relaxed. Another breath. A deep sigh.
Up went the skirt and down the panties, a little trick discovered my first visit to a public toilet. My cock sprang free, drawing out a hiss of pain at the sudden release, and bobbed angrily once or twice, still half-aroused from earlier. Only a little over a month since I’d woken up in Cindy’s bedroom and found myself like this, and yeah, the whole thing was still pretty damn unsettling. When I looked down--when I craned my neck to see past those tits they’d given me--and saw those pale white thighs, the sharp contrast where the frilled band of the stockings caressed my leg, the slender length of my legs and the panties pooled around my ankles; and my half-erect cock sticking up. . . . Yeah. Unsettling didn’t quite cover it.
And somehow--and it’s not something I wanted to think about too much--the whole thing was pretty damned erotic. If I wasn’t so concerned about getting caught I might’ve jacked off right then and there. It’d been months since I’d had a proper fuck and sometimes it felt like was walking around in a state of semi-perpetual arousal.
Ten minutes, every day: a solitary moment huddled away in the woman’s bathroom in which I determinedly reassembled a happy, girlish Cindy to present to the world. I’d known that settling into this life would be difficult . . . but God, not like this! The constant gnawing doubt, the fear of getting caught, the shame, the act . . . the palpable anger I struggled constantly to veil behind a smile and wide eyes and a flick of long hair. Pretending to be this young girl hadn’t been so hard before, not in those brief encounters while on the run, not at the Clinic, not even hanging around with Harry Longman.
Somehow it’d been easier then, the bubbly joy and flirty touches, when I’d just been playing the part. Flirty without consequence. With a square jaw and heavy shoulders and thick arms, I’d needed an inch of makeup and all that constrictive shit beneath my clothes to pass as a girl, and somehow tightly restrained by everything I’d felt freer to slip into the role of Cindy. But now, here in the city, in the shops and on the street, at the grocery store and on the bus and at work--especially at work--the expectations, the assumptions of how a young woman should act, and those agonizingly painful moments when somehow I did or said the wrong thing without ever quite knowing what; it was killing me. I’d meticulously studied the clothes and practiced the makeup and spent hours walking in the shoes, but I wasn’t a girl, didn’t think like one and didn’t want to be one--and it showed. Goddamn, but it still showed, and I was left wondering how much further I’d have to take this bloody charade.
It’s like Steele’s man Jeff said a few weeks back in that dirty back-alley: I’m “off”. And I wasn’t yet sure how to get myself “on”.
With a sigh I tucked myself away, drew the panties up tight and pulled my skirt into place. Standing, I took a moment to reset the silicon strips on the thigh highs, drawing the stockings taut. After a quick adjustment of the underwire supporting my tits and some tugging and shifting to get the bra comfortable--or as comfortable as the damn thing ever got–and taking a moment to massage the dimpled flesh, I felt just about ready to face the office again. A final deep breath and I smoothed down my clothes and stepped back into the real world.
The girl that confronted me in the mirror standing opposite . . . she was a real cutie though; I’ll give Scooter and his team of butchers that. They did good work. She perched almost-comfortably in a pair of almost-sensible red slingback peep-toed heels. Slender legs sheathed in patterned grey stockings disappeared beneath a pleated, tartan skirt that finished several inches above her knee. A wide belt of shiny red plastic with an oversized black buckle cinched her narrow waist in tight and accentuated her curves. A fitted white button-up shirt with wide lapels and short sleeves hugged her figure, undiminished by the thin black sweater with the scoop neck she wore over it. The fine gold necklace hanging from her fluted neck with its small bauble glinted as it lay nestled in the thin, deep line of visible cleavage, matched by the dainty silver and gold strips that danced and jigged at her ears and the bangles at her wrist. Slender neck, sloping shoulders, and thick blonde hair that tumbled in a carefully messy fall to her shoulders–yeah, this girl was cute, a real babe, one part innocent schoolgirl, one part naughty-librarian. Fuck me, that was . . . me; it still took me by surprise sometimes.
I stepped up to the mirror. With every step I once again felt acutely aware of the swish of the skirt against my legs, the gentle shifting of tits within their lacy cups, and the way long hair tickled skin. Each step--the click of those heels, the feminine gait that came all too easily now--and the way I held my hands, the looseness at the wrist and how those long nails changed everything; placing my purse on the counter and zipping it open and pulling out my makeup, I began to fall back into these feminine sensations and the character I playing.
I looked into the mirror. With every soft pass of a brush across lip, eye and cheek, I sank a little deeper into the image before me. As a guy there’d never had much call for staring at my reflection. For shaving, yeah, but I’d never had a heavy beard and only used to shave every third day or so. A quick glance in the mirror before work, maybe before meeting a girl . . . once, twice a day maybe. But as a girl--hell, I carried a little mirror with me everywhere I went, and it felt sometimes as if every free moment was spent staring into the cursed thing. Passing my reflection on the wall was a chance to check my hair or make sure my clothes were hanging right, and I touched up my face constantly throughout the day.
I hated that fucking mirror. Not from the neck down--I mean, hell, if I was going to be playing this part for a while, then yeah . . . I might as well be sexy, you know? I hated how weak I’d become but couldn’t deny a little thrill at every glimpse of smooth skin and those devastating curves. But my face . . . yeah. My face. That was something else. Cindy’s face. It sure as hell wasn’t mine. Leaning closer to the mirror, pulling out my makeup case, I couldn’t recognize the girl who stared back. There was a youthful glow to the girl’s skin, a little post-adolescent chubbiness to her cheeks that added to her cuteness--but it wasn’t my skin. Only the eyes were familiar. I wore another person’s skin: an assassin’s face, a dead woman’s mask. I had the scar to prove it, a mottled ring of flesh the size of a nickel just over my temple.
Talk about fucking with your head, you know? It’s a wonder I wasn’t insane. Yet.
Shoving such thoughts aside, I checked myself over in the mirror a final time and shoved the tubes and vials that now made up my life back into the purse. I smiled, and it no longer felt forced. “Lookin’ awesome!” I said, my voice high and bubbly in the empty room. “You go, girl!”
I hurried back to the office. “Feel better?” Melissa asked on my return.
“Much!” I answered, quickly settling back behind my desk. The phone rang. My fingernails stood out as shimmering pink slashes against the black receiver.
“Good morning,” I answered cheerfully. “Volumina International, Cindy speaking. How may I help you?”
***
The day flew by; five o’clock Friday: time to head home.
Save files, clean up the desk, switch the phone over to the answering service and log out of the computer. I gave myself a quick look-over and touch-up in the mirror, and packed up my purse and started to shove some of the documents I wanted to bring home with me that night into a larger shoulder bag. Melissa was already on her way out the door, barely pausing to give me a half-assed wave as she left. She was on her way to meet up with some friends at a nearby bar, the one where the up-coming young bucks trawled for easy lays. She’d made it pretty damn obvious she was headed for a night out, talking just loud enough on her cell phone that I couldn’t help but overhear. She’d also made it pretty damn obvious--without being really obvious, if you know what I mean--that I wasn’t invited.
The day’s work had been quickly and easily finished off--which impressed Sarah, giving me an unexpected flush of pleasure--but mostly it was the subtle intricacies of just being Cindy that kept me occupied all day. They didn’t expect much of me, but Sarah had me rotating through various low-level positions throughout the week. From working with Mr Peterson she switched me to the reception desk, taking over for a girl heading off to lunch and then home for some emergency or another. The calls came in constantly, as did a steady string of visitors. For the rest of the day I was the face of V.I., and Sarah made it clear that V.I.’s face was not only professional and welcoming, but also pretty and just a little flirty.
“The company’s young, we’re hip, we’re fun to be with,” she told me. “And so are you.”
And so I did my best to make my makeup just a little more striking, and with every phone call I purred into the phone and with every visitor I leaned forward and welcomed them with a glistening smile. Inside I cringed at the role forced on me, and as another set of male eyes clung to my cleavage before finding my face, part of me resisted the urge to throttle the bastard. But another part of me . . . well, somehow, part of me found the whole thing fucking hilarious. If these idiot postmen knew what was slung back beneath this skirt, if these visiting corporate jackasses knew what I really thought of their cocky words and flashy suits, but . . . no.
The women were harder to deal with. It must’ve been an industry thing: it seemed that the women who stepped through our door were all exceptionally sexy. God, it took every inch of willpower I had to not stare at their tits and ass as they stepped up to my desk. Even harder to deal with was the look of barely hidden scorn some of them levelled my way, the shrivelling looks as they judged my cup-size and hair-colour, my clothes and my age and dismissed me as stupid, irrelevant. I swallowed down equal measures of shame and anger at the thought of how, not long ago, these same bitches would’ve been clamouring for my attention, for my affirmation. These sluts, in their tight suits and arrogant condescension should’ve been hanging off my every word, and I swear, I would’ve put them in their goddamn place but quick. . . .
“Hey, Cindy.” Dan leaned against the desk. I looked up as he grabbed a complimentary mint from the bowl and idly popped it in his mouth--and nearly choked, forcing me to stifle an open laugh. Every day since Wednesday he’d found some excuse to pass by my desk. Hell, it’s not like he was the only one. At least he tried to think up an excuse before hanging around for a bit, starting up halting conversations before blurting out some task for me and fleeing back to his desk. It would’ve been cute in a pathetic kind of way if it didn’t keep dropping more menial and humiliating work on my skirted lap. I wanted to hate the guy and on some level I did, but recognizing my anger stemmed largely from jealousy and the stifling weight of my circumstances I restrained any urge to lash out in the only ways left me--bitchy nastiness, cold shoulders, cock-tease turndowns--and kept a pleasant smile to my face. It’s not like he was a bad guy or anything.
More importantly, Cindy was flattered by the attention--intrigued, even, and impressed--and more than a little attracted to this boy. If I wasn’t playing the girl in this little encounter I would’ve been tempted to drag him down to the pub myself. There was something ingratiating about the kid that made me want to take him under my wings. He had a quick smile and a touch of hesitant cockiness to his eyes I liked. He was slim without being wimpy, well-dressed without being effeminate, and only a few inches taller than I’d used to be. The guy clearly kept active and in shape despite the busy job; I respected that.
“Hi Dan!” I gave him a wide smile. His eyes lit up at my unexpectedly warm reception. I’d been playing it a bit distant the last two weeks, but maybe it was the long day’s work, a month’s exhaustion, or something less definable, but I felt like having a simple chat with someone--I needed to have a real conversation with someone, no matter how brief. Besides, he made me laugh: a year out of university and somehow Dan was still awkward around the girls. “Working hard?”
“Hardly workin’,” he answered.
He winced; I stifled a groan; and suddenly we both laughed. “I’m just heading home,” I said, standing. “Walk me out?”
We left the office together, chatting as we went. He told me about the project he was working on, an out-of-house research bit on jeans aimed at a teenaged girl market. I listened attentively and deftly deflected personal questions back to him and by the time the elevator hit the ground floor he was assuring me he could hook me up with a free pair of low-riding jeans.
“Oh yeah, it’s no problem!” he said. “We always get extra samples to show off to the research groups, and somebody always snags them. You’d look dead sexy in them.” He hesitated in mid-step and gave a forced cough. “Uh, I mean--”
I giggled, lightly touching him on the arm. “That’s sweet, Dan. I’d love a pair.” We passed through the lobby; I hung back and he pushed the heavy glass door open for me.
It had rained briefly but heavily during the day and the plaza was grey and damp from the storm, giving rise to the not-unpleasant scent of wet grass and pavement. We crossed the slick cobblestone plaza quickly, just another pair among the hundreds streaming away from the buildings that loomed overhead. I had to trot quickly to keep up with Dan, his stable shoes and long stride making his pace hard to match. I felt myself blushing furiously with embarrassment at the effort to just stay a humiliating step or two behind him, my heels wobbling precariously on the slick stones, torn between concentrating on my footing and listening to his words, my handbag bouncing from the crook of my arm against my hip, free hand fighting to keep gusting winds from lifting my skirt, struggling with the weight of my shoulder bag. . . .
How the hell did these women, walking quickly and assuredly across the same surface, manage to look so composed and at ease? I felt like a sheaf of papers bound together with a loose thread: a frayed string or strong wind away from flying apart in every direction, an inelegant accident about to happen. Shit--how, again, was all _this_ supposed to deflect attention from me?
I was about to ask Dan--to my shame--to slow down or if I could take his arm for balance--Christ, even worse!--when he stopped and looked at me expectantly.
“Sorry,” I said, nearly panting.
“Oh,” he said, almost dejected. “It’s nothing, just. . . .”
“No, I didn’t hear you.” I forced a smile, catching my breath. “Go on. . . .”
“Well, I was just wondering if you’d like to, you know, maybe grab a drink? At that new place, Noir, a few blocks over?” He seemed to rush to add more. “It’s just that I’m meeting a, uh, friend there later tonight and didn’t want to wait on my own . . . ?”
Looking up at him through heavy eyelashes and a veil of wind-tousled hair, biting lightly down on a fingertip, I hoped to project coquettish uncertainty to cover up the very real confusion I felt at that moment. On the one hand: it’d been a brutally long day. The work itself had very little to do with it, but two weeks of playing Cindy in public had left me mentally and emotionally exhausted. The last thing I wanted was to drag it out a couple more hours, playing innocent small girl in the big city for this guy. My feet hurt. My back ached. My panties were riding up my ass and pinching something awful. I really, really wanted to go home, crack open a bottle of wine and sleep through the whole weekend.
At the same time . . . well, shit. I was dying for a drink. A real drink, not some shit from the dodgy guy at the corner store who turned his eye at a lack of ID. I hadn’t been out on a Friday night in . . . ages, and Dan was the first colleague to ask me to join him after work, and I knew damn well how important those first invites were. Those kids working The Lounge kept erratic hours and tended to hang out together; management did the same, only occasionally mingling with the creative-types; and as for the secretarial staff . . . well, Melisa could go fuck herself. I still couldn’t bring myself to hit a bar on my own, not as a girl. They probably wouldn’t serve me anyway, what with my fictional twenty-first still being a month away. And here was this guy, watching me hopefully, probably ready to buy all my drinks for the night. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? When a guy buys a girl drinks . . . yeah, he’s after something more than just pleasant company. He sure as hell wasn’t inviting blonde-little-me along for intellectual stimulation.
I knew this kid’s game, probably better than he did. He was trying to lay an early claim on the new piece of tail in the office. But then I looked at him again and thought I saw something familiar in his eyes, loneliness or tiredness that mirrored my own, and all he wanted was a pretty face to sit with him, because it’s always better to drink with someone than alone, and always better to sit with someone beautiful if you can. Maybe the guy wasn’t ready to head home yet, to an empty apartment, shit food and a broken tv. . . .
Maybe the guy just wanted a goddamn drink.
His eyes flicked away while I made up my mind, following the movement of a leggy blonde with hair down to her ass. I followed his appreciative gaze and shared his joy in watching something beautiful pass by. I felt a stirring beneath my skirt watching her walk and felt an unexpected kinship to this kid--and a pang of regret knowing that we’d never relate on that level. This kid could’ve become a new friend, another Tom; but not dressed as I was; never like this. He was a young guy and I was--a girl. And that made a simple friendship impossible.
With that in mind I was about to turn him down when the decision was suddenly taken out of my hands.
He stood across the plaza, leaning idly against the wood-paneled side of a coffee kiosk, newspaper in hand. The length of his long coat swayed heavily around his legs. He’d been absent for nearly a week now. A strong wind tore across the plaza. Loose papers swirled and danced between us and people braced against the sudden gust, men pulling their jackets tight, women’s hands falling to their skirts. My hair flew into my face, momentarily blinding me. When I could see again the man was gone.
Jeff was back.
A thrill ran down my spine and with it the absolute certainty that I should’ve killed him when I had the chance, back in that dirty alley behind the strip joint. My fingers itched to curl around an imaginary broken bottle as I considered how too much had been committed into staying alive, into these initial steps towards my revenge, to lose it all now.
The wind died down and I flashed a wide smile at Dan. “You know what? I’d _love_ a drink.”
“Really?”
“C’mon!” I flitted past him, tugging at his sleeve. “But you’re buying!”
Noir was a swanky place, newly opened and packed with a young and energetic crowd. A DJ buried somewhere near the back spun out edgy tunes that were just cleverly mixed and just old enough to be cool again, as we threaded our way to the bar. The lighting was dim, coloured lamps in cleverly concealed nooks and behind transparent panels in the floor casting soft ambient glows bleeding across the walls. Alcoves with sofas and private booths provided intimate comfort away from the open space of scattered stools and tables out front of the bar. This place was shiny and modern and glistened: in the detailing, on the lips of women and their sleek legs in the subtle light. . . .
This place felt eerily familiar.
I fought down a sudden bout of vertigo that bordered on panic. Dan picked up on my sudden reluctance and, his hand finding mine, pushed through to the bar. Busy as this place was with the after-work crowd, nobody was going to check for ID. Dan ordered our drinks. We were lucky to find a seat at a small round table in a corner. The chairs were contraptions of polished twining bronze and silver. As I clambered into the tall seat I thought that they looked like they’d been stolen from a goddamn museum of modern art. Fucking things; they weren’t designed for a short girl in a pleated skirt. Dan, damn him, looked comfortable with his legs spread comfortably apart for support. I, on the other hand, perched precariously at the edge, one heel hooked into the chair legs, thighs tightly crossed, knees together.
Sitting balanced like that forced me to keep my back straight--pushed my breasts out--God, it wouldn’t take long to be a real strain on my back--and I felt acutely aware of those D-cups thrusting out for all, and especially Dan, to see. It seemed like every woman who walked by threw an appraising glance my way . . . and the men ogled . . . and it suddenly clicked why this place felt so uncomfortable to me.
Maybe it’s because I worked in a bar myself so soon after I’d escaped the streets. I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I’d developed both a soft spot for overworked bartenders, and an unreasoning dislike for places like this. The painfully cool furniture, shiny people, and carefully designed atmosphere: the whole thing just felt so damnably fake. Don’t get me wrong: I like a good drink or three. But give me a choice and I’ll always head for the pub. Give me my back to the wall at a sturdy wood table with a couple other guys and a steady supply of pints, and I’m about as happy as a fly on shit. Give me a couple of lonely old bastards slung over the bar staring into their glasses; give me a dozen different beers on tap, a low ceiling and dark walls, and a few smart, classy chicks for eye candy drinking wine at a table across from mine; that’s where I like to be.
Places like Noir weren’t for drinking; I went to get laid. Since waking up as Cindy I hadn’t stepped foot anywhere like this and it was freaking me out more than just a little. I mean, everything I do reminds me of how things have changed, and that I’m playing the girl now, but I swear nothing brought it crashing home like stepping into this goddamn upscale meat-market. For a moment there, stepping through the door I’d slipped back into old habits. An appraising eye sliding across the crowd, picking out the couples, the groups and the singles, separating the wheat from the chaff. Back in the day, there weren’t too many nights that I left alone. I knew this place and I recognized the game; but the game had changed and so had my place in it.
I clutched at the drink handed to me as does a drowning man his life preserver, and found to my annoyance that Dan had bought me a white wine. Jesus, I was getting sick of this sweet shit. I eyed his Stella with envy.
Coming here with him was a really bad idea. It’s not like all I had to do was come to terms with what I looked like and the sudden pressure to ‘relax’ in this goddamn bar. No. I also had to listen to Dan, and pretend to be interested in what he had to say while trying to find a balance between friendly and flirty, and maintain the illusion of my youthful innocence; and the whole time I was trying to keep an inconspicuous eye on the bar and pick Jeff out of the throng; while also trying to come off as anything other than the uncomfortable feminized male hiding in plain view that I was . . . and I swear, it was killing me and the only thing keeping me stable was the drink in my hand. It wasn’t nearly strong enough. I felt a sudden burgeoning of the panic from this morning and quickly clamped down on it: not here. _This_ was why I always headed home straight after work. I wasn’t strong enough--yet--to endure nights in public. How much longer could I maintain this Cindy charade?
Dan picked up on my distress. “Hey, you okay there?” he asked, and his hand surreptitiously snaked across the table to lay over mine.
“I’m just a little tired,” I answered, briefly holding his hand and giving it a light squeeze, before smiling wanly and slipping free. “But thanks.”
“That’s what I always say,” he answered. His smile twisted a little, sardonic. “People must think I’m an insomniac, the way I’m always tired.”
I chuckled and suddenly realized that it was a totally natural reaction--not something forced--but a genuine release. It felt good. “Tell me about it.”
He took a long pull on his beer and wiped the froth from his lips. “Fucking job.”
I nodded. “Stupid job.”
“Fuck it!”
“Yeah!” And my sip of wine turned into a gulp, and then another, and suddenly the glass was empty, the chilled wine pleasantly transforming into belly-calming warmth.
“Nice,” Dan said. He grinned. “Another?”
Dan went off to the bar to get another round of drinks, clearly determined to get me drunk–which was good, because I suddenly felt very determined to get drunk. While he was away I cast a wandering eye across the women around me, standing at the bar or sitting at tables or delicately threading their way through the crowd. So many sexy young things--like me--and I felt a sudden uncomfortable kinship with them that had me squirming in my seat.
There was a girl at a table near mine. She was cute, and young, probably in her mid-twenties. As I watched, some guy joined her. He was clearly an older man and was coming straight from work, his suit well-tailored and the cufflinks that flashed at his wrist expensive. The way she was dressed, she definitely hadn’t come straight from work. Delicately highlighted cheeks glittered in the dim light and her red lips shimmered almost as brightly as her clingy sequined top. She crossed and uncrossed her bared arms and played idly with a silver bracelet, twisting and sliding it up and down her forearm.
Was she bored with her date? Were they colleagues or friends or something more? Was she with him for his money, or because she was attracted to the power money can represent, or because the man was a fucking God in bed? Maybe he was a nice guy. I didn’t think he was a nice guy. His hairline was receding and there was something in his expression, an arrogant curl to his lip or the way he straddled his seat that made me dislike him. But the body language between them was fascinating. Every toss of hair, sideways glance and flip of her wrist . . . the way she drew his attention back with a light touch when he glanced away towards another woman, or the way she pulled back when he leaned forward . . . in the give and take of their conversation, in the battle of words and gestures between them, were they meeting as equals? Was she in control?
And suddenly I realized that I was empathizing with the girl, that I was imagining myself in _her_ position, and it freaked me out. When she stood to go to the bathroom, the guy looked in my direction. We made eye contact. He had grey eyes. They weren’t friendly or shy and held my gaze unswervingly. He smiled knowingly and I felt myself blush and quickly looked away.
The brief exchange left me hot despite the fact that my clothes suddenly seemed to barely cover me at all. I tugged at my skirt, wishing for something longer, for a proper pair of slacks, and the situation--me sitting in this all too familiar setting but in such changed circumstance--twisted into a bizarrely surreal moment for me, an uncomfortable one.
Fortunately Dan returned just then with more booze. This time he’d ordered me a large. Another long drink helped calm my nerves.
Bemused, he watched me gulp the wine. “You still seem a little . . . tense,” he said.
“Stressed,” I answered.
“The job?”
“Yeah, sure . . . .” I shrugged. “It’s sometimes, like, I wonder if I should even be here, you know? Whether I can handle all this. It’s just so new.” I forced myself to put my glass down, watching the play of light in the surface of the pale wine. “And I wonder why Sarah hired me?”
Dan nodded unconsciously in agreement. “Yeah, you seem a little. . . ,” I could see him choosing his words tactfully. “Inexperienced for the job.” I don’t know how the word leaked out (although I suspected Melissa, that bitch), but it became common knowledge around the office within a day of my start that I was a twenty-year-old high-school dropout. Were rumours already circulating of my stunning ‘oral performance’ at the interview? Cindy probably would’ve been mortified but in a way I was quite glad. It saved me from acting through those tedious moments of shyly admitting the truth, the forced blushes and tentative smiles and pleading looks for reassurance.
“I know.” I shrugged and smiled weakly. “I guess she saw something she liked.”
It didn’t matter how much she liked me or not. Walking into that interview I knew the job was mine. It’s a good thing too, because I almost shat a brick stepping into her office. Fortunately I kept the panic under control and sweated my way through the interview. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t easy coping with the clothes, let alone the terror of being caught out, or of being surrounded by so many people for the first time since becoming Cindy. Stepping out of the taxi into that huge crowd of people two weeks ago nearly gave me a heart attack. The appreciative eyes and cheeky smile of that bloody kid who opened those goddamn heavy doors for me almost sent me gibbering back to the safety of my home. Until I found my stride, that is, a little sass and a sexy wiggle that turned the whole thing into a game and carried me through that first meeting with Sarah.
The whole thing was a charade. Sarah must’ve known. Maybe she was even in on it, though after two weeks I really didn’t think so. There were other people being interviewed, a couple of women and one guy, and I’m sure they all out-classed Cindy’s scanty resume. They were older and professionally dressed and carried themselves with a mature air that I, as Cindy, simply couldn’t exude. It didn’t matter.
The moment I decided to play this game, to be Cindy and ride this out to the brutal, inevitable end, getting a job became a top priority. My inherited bank account was haemorrhaging like a gangland shooting in the ER. It damned well wasn’t going to hang on much longer. With my qualifications--high-school dropout, knockout body--I knew there were limits to what I could hope for. Waitress. Cleaner. Retail work, if I was lucky. Hell, I was even considering Frank’s goddamn strip joint, I was so desperate for a little cash. I spent a few days walking about town looking for jobs, and hours in the coffee shop poring over the papers, but I never quite built up the courage to apply anywhere. And then out of the blue it arrived: the letter.
It was an acceptance letter for a job interview I’d never applied for. There was never any doubt in my mind about accepting the job. The thing had obviously been set up--by K or by Steele, or someone else? It didn’t really matter. It was at best a way of testing me, at worst a trap; it was also the first hint that whatever the twisted game I’d been dropped into, someone was making their next move. Now it was my turn and I’d bend this to my own advantage. Somehow. When I’d finally accepted that I was going to have to play this part--no, to be this part--it wasn’t just as a means to stay alive.
Survival alone is never enough. Katherine taught me that. I survived her death, and the streets, and rebuilt myself into David Sanders. Now that life was over; so fucking be it. Now I had this job . . . and it was the first step on a long road that would end with my hands, delicate and manicured though they may be, tight around Steele’s mother-fucking throat.
“No doubt,” Dan said, and paused a second. “I know I do.”
I blushed, and it wasn’t entirely forced. I opened my mouth to answer, turned away, and covered my embarrassment with a sip of wine. The frosted pink imprint on the rim suddenly fascinated me. The whole time he grinned at my discomfort. “Thank you,” I finally managed.
“That’s so cute,” he said. “You really are new to the city, aren’t you?’
I gave a little moue. “Is it that obvious?”
“A little.” He laughed, noticing my mock frown. “Not that much. Really! You’re just a bit . . . different, than most of the other girls around here.”
A faint smile. “Am I?”
Dan nodded. “It’s nothing that major, it’s just . . . .” He shrugged. “It’s hard to pin down. Just something in the way you carry yourself. And dress. The way you drink.” He waved his half-full pint at my empty wine glass. “You’re just different from most of the girls I know.”
“I’m sorry,” I answered, in a quiet voice, and with lowered eyes.
His hand found mine again. “Don’t be,” he said. “I like different.”
I held his gaze for a few long seconds. He had brilliant blue eyes. They reminded me of David’s. Shyly, I finally looked away, and only drew my hand back a moment after that. “Thank you.”
We talked for a little longer, mostly inconsequential stuff concerning the office as he finished off his glass. With a smile and looseness to his step he went off for the third round of drinks. This time he asked what I wanted. I ordered a Guinness. It was the manliest stuff I could think of short of switching to scotch.
While I waited I did a little damage control on my makeup. It was a miracle the stuff wasn’t running in streaks down my face, the way I felt I must be sweating. My mirror allowed for another secretive check for Jeff. No sign of him but I knew my stalker was lurking somewhere. I had to find the bastard--had to know where he was--had to make sure he was here, getting all of this. He needed to be watching. I _needed_ him to be watching.
Thinking about a single set of eyes of eyes on me was in some ways a lot easier to deal with than acknowledging the many more I knew were constantly, lazily, hungrily checking me out. It’s not like I wasn’t used a certain amount of attention as David, but that felt very different. Wearing a suit, looking expensive and confident and strong, the surreptitious, shy or occasional brazenly lustful looks from women used to just feed my ego. Now those similar--but so very different!--stares from men left me feeling anything from nervously self-conscious to sickened and self-loathing, and if maybe somewhere deep inside I felt a sexy little thrill I did my best to bury it and forget. It was again a relief when Dan finally returned with our drinks, so that I could stop mindlessly fidgeting with my makeup or plucking at my skirt. For some reason his presence was making the awful experience of being in this bar more bearable.
“A beer for the lady,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Not what I would’ve expected you to order.”
I raised the glass in toast. “Too manly a drink?”
He laughed. “Hey, I wouldn’t drink that stuff.”
I shrugged and took a sip. “It’s an acquired taste.” It certainly was, and one Cindy obviously hadn’t managed yet. Struggling to fight back a grimace, I delicately dabbed at the foam that flecked my lip and chin. It never used to taste this . . . earthy, did it?
“Do all the girls drink beer where you’re from?”
My turn to laugh. “Of course!”
“And are they all as pretty as you?”
I winked at him. “Not even close.”
“And here I was about to book the next train to. . . .” He smiled and waved his hand in the air. “To wherever you’re from.”
“River Valley,” I answered, without missing a beat. “No train, though. You’d have to catch the bus.”
“River Valley? Sounds. . . .”
“Dull?” I smiled, a little wistfully. “Maybe.” I absently traced the rim of glass with a nail as I spoke. Strange how perfectly shaped that nail was, and how the barely-pink varnish caught the light. Just like the wine. These small things, they still caught me out when I least expected them. “But it wasn’t that bad of a place growing up. I guess.”
“I was going to say, ‘pretty’.”
“It is.”
“What’s it like? Tell me about it.”
“Well,” I started. “It’s in this valley, and . . . it has a river.”
“Wow,” he said, grinning. “It’s almost like I’m there.”
I gave him a mock glare. “It gets better.”
“So tell me, then,” he said, settling back into his seat.
And so I did. I told him about River Valley and about growing up there, about the cottages by the lakeside at the deepest point in the valley, and how beautifully the sun glimmered off the water during those long summer evenings, and how I loved to walk along the river with the grass tickling my bare legs and the wind breathing through a light summer dress. I told him about John Wilson’s, the beat-up bar on the edge of town where the fights always seemed to happen, and how a boyfriend back in high school got a tooth knocked out there. There was the Point, where the kids all used to hang out in their beat-up cars, stretching out across hoods and watching the clouds drift across the sky during the day, and the expanse of stars at night. Supposedly, more girls lost their virginity there than anywhere else in town. Somehow I even ended up telling Dan, as we polished off our third drink, about my first kiss, at thirteen, playing spin-the-bottle with kids older than me and how I ended up in the closet with Billy Cox--most definitely not my top choice for first kiss--and how he ended up molesting my nose with his tongue in the dark. And the fact that nothing I said was actually true made any difference, made it any less real, because I was acutely aware that every lie I spoke became reality the moment the words left my lips and created more of this young woman I was becoming . . . that I was turning myself into.
And the thing was: I was loving it. I really was. There I was perched on that ridiculous stool, leaning forward just enough to show off some of that fantastic cleavage, and gently flirting with this young guy with sparkling eyes who seemed to hang off my every word, lying, spinning out a fine old yarn about an imaginary girl’s past; and I was having the most fun I’d had in . . . well, since hanging out with Harry Longman, I guess, getting drunk at the Clinic. Of course, it wasn’t all lies, or at least they contained those small seeds of the truth in there, somewhere, that all the best lies had. Much like Cindy, I’d grown up in the countryside before running away to the city. There’d been a small river--barely a stream, really--running through the clustered and ramshackle buildings, and I’d enjoyed walking barefoot through the grass. And the sky . . . God, in my memory the night sky back home was dusted with an impossibility of stars that seemed to light up the firmament with an argent glow broken only by the brief flare of falling stars. Those fucking stars, they’re the only damned thing I miss from my childhood.
“Sounds beautiful,” Dan said, his chin resting over interlaced fingers. “Much better than growing up in this shithole of a city.”
I shrugged. “Guess I’ve forgotten the bad stuff over time.”
He laughed. “Aren’t you twenty?”
I blushed. “Sometimes I feel like I’m thirty.”
Dan winked. “You certainly don’t look it.”
With my cheeks again burning a deep red, I found myself forced to look away and suddenly realized that it wasn’t just my cheeks that burned, but that I felt flushed all over and quite drunk. This of course reminded me that I’d just knocked back two glasses of a wine and a pint of beer. My bladder felt like it was about to burst. With an apologetic smile I excused myself from the table and awkwardly clambered down from my perch.
Finally, those two weeks of heavy drinking alone in my apartment every night paid off. Despite the heels I found my feet with only a slight wobble, and cocooned in pleasant drunkenness worked my way to the bathroom through the crowd, picking up speed as I realized that I suddenly really, really had to go. Until I reached the door, and the line-up, and the half-dozen other girls waiting their turn.
“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath.
The girl ahead of me, a brown-haired girl with thick-framed glasses who seemed to tower over me, glanced back and smiled bitterly. “Tell me about it.”
She did a double-take, looking at me once again. As she did so, I felt a momentary jolt of recognition. It seemed as though I should know this girl, even though that was pretty much impossible. Did she work in the same office building? Perhaps I’d passed her in the woman’s toilet and checked her out, something I had a bad habit of doing. In my semi-drunken state I struggled only briefly to remember her before dismissing the concern. She seemed to experience a brief moment of recognition as well, but that was even more implausible.
Instead, we shared a brief moment of quiet, shared pain. I wondered if it was worse for her, whether my hidden cock, held back as it was, eased some of the pain of an over-full bladder. Some guy breezed by, stumbling into the wall before disappearing into the men’s bathroom, and I felt impotent rage at the freedom he so unwittingly enjoyed.
“Fucker.” The girl ahead of me glared at the man’s retreating back.
“Tell me about it.”
“Sometimes, I really, really hate men.” Her voice, flecked with British intonations, made it sound a well-timed joke.
I choked back a laugh as the girls’ queue crawled forward. How long did it take to piss? It occurred to me that an accident just then might not just be embarrassing as hell, but potentially deadly, especially if spotted by the wrong person. Damn: Jeff. I hadn’t thought of that bastard in too long; somehow I’d almost forgotten about him. Fuck. Did he get a sick thrill out of watching me wait, dancing from toe-to-toe, in the toilet line-up? At least the nervous tightening of my stomach at the thought of my stalker distracted me from other pressing pains. I survived the rest of the wait, keeping a less that subtle wary eye on the crowds back in the bar, exchanging the occasional platitude with the brunette ahead of me. Finally it was my turn. With a clattering of heels I rushed into the first open stall and slammed the door shut, locking it firmly.
I hoped the desperate release of urine didn’t sound too loudly as a relieved sigh escaped my lips. Note to self in the endless litany of female comportment: when in a busy bar, always head to the bathroom at least ten minutes before you’ve actually got to go. Sitting on the shitter–now a pisser, I suppose--I took a long moment to compose myself. Away from Dan I felt briefly shamed at my actions. This conversation with its sideway glances and fluttering touches . . . I mean, fuck. The sexual tension was there, and building. It couldn’t go anywhere, of course. The poor boy’d be going home alone, cursing me for a cock-tease and . . . what, probably drunkenly jerking off to the thought of my tits and lips before bed tonight. What did he expect? A kiss? At least a kiss. More, probably. David would’ve expected more.
Goddamn. Couldn’t I enjoy a simple night out? Didn’t I deserve an easy night? I took a deep breath. Tucked my cock away once again. Swept the frustration aside and sank myself into happy thoughts. “Lookin’ awesome,” I whispered to myself, voice lost in the bustle of the busy bathroom room. “Go.” I forced myself to stand.
A few touch-ups at that feeding-trough of a mirror, jostling for space among the preening, primping women, and I returned to the bar.
“Cindy!” Dan was standing, two fresh pints of Guinness in hand, by one of the softly-lit alcoves with the low-slung sofas. He grinned and waved, spilling beer in the process. “Over here.”
With a laugh, a light step and a happy smile on those plumped, painted lips, I joined him in the privacy of a booth.
***
A deep breath.
Mud between toes, branches scratch bare ankles and the sound of waves lapping the shore. Heady scent of wet soil, night air, a musky perfume of ripened nature. A wind rushes past; heart pounding; taste of blood? Running: towards or away something forgotten? So long ago, quickening childhood memories along the dark snake curves of a moonlit river. Tears maybe, for the path is blurred and shadowed. I trip. Falling. Skinned knee. Crying—deep howls of pain far beyond that of childhood bruises.
My God: can this weakness be mine? Pathetic.
These memories, are they real? Are they even mine? For a moment, these fleeting remembrances seem like truth, the smell and taste of it all—but they might be as nothing more than an illusionary belief in a photograph taken by someone else and kept as one’s own experience. I’m drunk. The room is spinning and dipping, and this vertiginous centrifuge throws my memories in together with those of Cindy.
Another deep breath. Dan’s scent. Again.
The groan of bamboo. A shiver of wind through branches.
Smell of oak. Musk and the thick, moist ground bunching between fingers as, crouching in a ditch behind trees, the falling rain fell in a steady patter against leaves. My breath came in short, shallow gasps, steaming in the cold air. She knelt nearby, her eyes wide and wild, grin feral. Half-naked, our bodies were caked and streaked with mud, and the long parallel gouges across my back burned with wonderful intensity. Her breasts hung heavily. They glowed red where I’d bit and grappled and threw her face-first to the ground. Her ass rising to meet my thrust. Muffled cry, ecstatic, furious and violent. Rising and falling together in the mud and afterwards, as the steadily falling water slowly washed us clean and I was left intoxicated, she drew close and said,
“Again?”
With lips puckered for comic effect into an airy kiss, I pressed closed to Dan. He held his phone at arm’s length, ready for another shot. And his scent, the cologne he wore—did he slap this on for me when he went for a piss?--subtle but up close intense in its masculinity, dragged me back into the ditch and the bamboo forest and left me . . . dazed. How else to explain what happened next?
Dan turned towards me in anticipation. We were . . . so close, my eyes wide. Lips slightly parted and breath caught in my throat. The moment hung heavily between us as I wrestled with my own past, caught between memories and lies and an event I felt powerless to prevent. He leaned towards me. His lips pressed up against mine. God, that scent--it overwhelmed me. Heavy eyelids drifted shut. My mouth parted involuntarily. His fingers curled into the flesh of my upper arm. At his touch I released a soft moan that faintly echoed the past, lost in half-forgotten passions; our tongues met, danced and retreated; he pulled away. The fleeting sensation endured all too briefly, and I savoured the forgotten kiss until it faded. I slowly opened my eyes.
Grinning, Dan showed me the photo.
The young girl seemed all too compliant. She was all too pretty, and too real. Reality came crashing back. The sofa, the alcove, the cocktail--my fifth? sixth? drink of the night--his hand had been on my knee for the last hour. What time is it? His thumb kept stroking my leg, sliding smoothly across those stockings. Drunk, I hadn’t pulled away. His touch played with the lacy edging that tickled my thigh. We talked. About . . . nothing, really. He told me about himself. I listened, and laughed. Fluttered eyelids, licked my lips. He went for another drink. The rest of the bar felt distant as I waited. I felt hot and felt ashamedly pleased that my skimpy outfit offered at least some cooling from the stifling bar air. Without Dan around all sorts of insecurities came crowding in. What was I doing here—too many people! A few wild looks about, suddenly remembering Jeff. A giggle; I could imagine what he was seeing; would he jack off when he got home, thinking of me? Then Dan was back. A drunken cheer! A text message—he had a look—cleared it—flipped the phone over and with a grin, pulled me closer for a photo. His arm was heavy across my shoulders, reminding me of another man months ago, and the strength there drew me close too easily. Cheek-to-cheek we smiled into the camera, and I breathed in, and. . . .
The memory of his touch on my arm still seared the skin and I felt painfully aroused.
For a moment rage and denial, disgust and hatred, longing and sadness coursed through me, filtered through the blurry lens of beer and wine and liquor, in a paralyzing swell of overwhelming emotion. I struggled to cope with the conflicting and alluring sensations this boy had awakened within me. That kiss—a kiss; God, it’d been so long since I’d felt a kiss, closeness of any kind to someone. A few confused moments with Harry; angry, complicated grapples with K a lifetime ago… was that all? It wasn’t enough, it wasn’t fucking enough for anyone. It was a rare week indeed in which David Sanders did not get laid . . . and yeah, Cindy Long damn well hadn’t had—and wasn’t going to see any--action since waking up over a month ago. Jerking off was beginning to wear thin.
Through the booze I felt honest—couldn’t lie to myself—I felt a sudden profound sense of not only loneliness, but also of disappointment. A lifetime of aloneness should strengthen a person to solitude, right? How fucking hard had my childhood been? Abandoned by everyone I knew—the only woman I’d ever loved torn away—a year devoured by the streets—years of meaningless relationships—even best friends taken away over time—and most recently . . . fuck, a life erased and the most painful of isolations forced upon me, trapped not just by circumstances but by my very body; surely all that should’ve made me immune to this—this goddamn aching loneliness?
But if I was truly, brutally honest with myself . . . God, I craved another kiss, and the sense of a lingering human touch on my arm.
It was the booze. And the pills. And the hormones, and whatever those bastards at the Clinic left in my head, and in my blood. Exhaustion and weeks of playing the role forced onto me. Everything I’d done, hadn’t it been to lose myself in this role? And so I had. Even if only briefly. If it felt so. . . God, whatever it felt like, it was too much to deal with right now; well, that was just proof that Cindy was all the more real. That was a good thing, right, what I wanted, what I needed?
No. What I needed was . . . was a good, solid fuck: to bend some bitch over an office desk, to smack her ass, to shove my cock so far down her throat she gagged on it, to—fuck! Fuck!
Instead, as I slowly found my breath and untangled myself from the complex web of emotions that bound me after that single kiss, I realized that the odds of me getting it on with any damned woman was pretty fucking slim. It wasn’t fair. This loneliness . . . God, this soul-numbing, pathetic, crushing aloneness . . . it wasn’t going away. Not any time soon. Not as long as I was Cindy. Maybe not ever.
And then I felt it—no, not now!—hot and heavy—tears, and a sob that threatened to tear me apart.
Dan was watching me. His grin faded. Momentary hurt, then fleeting annoyance, and then finally a sweetly concerned look crossed his face: “Hey, you okay?”
I tried to nod but couldn’t.
“Hey, listen, I’m sorry, I. . . .”
Fleetingly, I felt sorry for him being stuck with such a basket case of a bitch of a date this night. But I also realized why he was being so nice. What he really wanted: me. And the thought of actually getting picked up by a colleague--and what would be expected--God, his hands roaming all over me, groping, kneading, his tongue pressing into my mouth, and his cock, fuck, yeah, I knew where he wanted to shove that thing, I wanted the same thing, a girl on her knees with his fingers twining through my hair, controlling, and the thought made my skin crawl and my stomach twist painfully.
“I thought. . . .”
With a wave of my hand I cut him off. “It’s not--”
Suddenly caught between these extremes, I didn’t know whether to cry or to throw up. I squeezed my eyes shut against the tears, but then the room seemed to spin and lurch to the side. I opened my eyes and swallowed an unpleasant-tasting burp. I wanted to tell him that everything was okay and that I wasn’t angry but all that came out was a slurred, “s’nice,” and a sickly grin. “Feel . . . sick.”
He smiled wanly. “I have that effect on girls.”
“B’back!” I managed, clamping a hand over my mouth before fleeing to the toilet.
It was a small miracle that there wasn’t a queue. Once again I found myself rushing for a stall. Even as I reached the toilet, though, I knew I wasn’t going to be sick. The moment had passed nearly as quickly as it came. Any memory of the scent of the bamboo forest and of that overwhelming masculine assault on my senses was dispelled by the onslaught of antiseptic cleanser, stale perfume, musty undergarments, piss and shit.
Instead, I found myself sitting on the can, face in hands, breathing deeply and struggling to control myself. My stomach twisted and turned like a small animal caught in the jaws of a steel trap.
I’d just kissed a man. Another man. And this time, it wasn’t a game. I wasn’t wearing a costume, I wasn’t playing pretend, I wasn’t sitting with some rock star I’d idolized since my teenaged years. I was Cindy. Cindy: the pretty young girl working in the offices of Volumina International. New. Innocent. Fresh meat.
And these feelings . . . the way my body reacted . . . I could feel my cock’s desperate yearning, the hot throb of pain made manageable only by the numbing shield of drunkenness. Dan’s touch still burned my arm, my thigh, and I felt . . . something new and pleasant in places where I’d never felt pleasure before, and. . . .
Finally, it came: first, a loud, terrible, drunken sob, embarrassing and complete, that wracked my entire body. Then briefly: tears and a complete collapse into these emotions that so easily and often overtook me these days. And then the vomit. With a final twist my stomach lurched and I launched the night’s food and drink into the porcelain throne.
It didn’t take very long. I threw up three more times, two heavy, spattering sprays and the the last one more of a chunky burp, and almost immediately felt… ‘better’, if still very far away from ‘fine’. A few more heavy, shuddering breaths and I regained enough composure to wipe my eyes clear with the back of my hand and sit back on my haunches. My hand was streaked with black mascara. Tiny splinters of silver eyeshadow sparkled there. The blonde tips of my hair were wet with sick and my throat burned.
There was a knock on the stall door. “You okay in there?”
My faintly mewled response was barely audible. Knowing my breakdown had probably been overheard by half the girls in this fucking bar nearly sent me tumbling into another crying jag. My humiliation felt complete; could it get worse than this? After a few seconds during which I struggled but failed to raise my voice above a pathetic squeak to tell the person outside the stall to go away, the door opened.
It was the woman from before, the strangely familiar, tall one from the line for the toilet. She repeated that moment of puzzled recognition in her eyes, quickly replaced by a look of mixed amusement and disgust. “Fuck me,” she said, not unkindly, “just look at you.” Her nose wrinkled in distaste at the smell as she reached down to help. “All better?”
I gave her a thumbs up.
With her help, I found my unsteady feet and she led me to the sink and counter to survey the damage. God, I looked like shit. Bloodshot eyes stared from a pasty face. Under harsh florescent lights I looked half-dead, and my mascara ran in heavy, black streaks down my face. I couldn’t go back out there looking like this!
What the hell would Dan think?
Why the fuck should I care what Dan thinks?
“Poor thing,” the girl said.
I gave a tentative poke at the thing in the mirror. I turned lost, pleading eyes to the woman. “Help?”
Her smile, though a touch condescending, seemed friendly enough. “You were sitting with that guy, right, off in the corner, the one with the suit and trainers?” She squinted with the effort of remembering. “Dan?” Not understanding how she knew his name, but not quite trusting myself to speak yet, I nodded weakly. “I’ll get your bag. Tell him you’ll be a few minutes. Help you put yourself back together.”
And off she went before I could even ask her name, leaving me propped up by the counter, wobbly in heels, to the uncomfortable contemplation of the girl in the mirror. What a pathetic specimen. What the hell led me to this? It suddenly seemed as though I could barely remember the man I once was, as though his name had been wiped from my memory, as though he never existed. Through burry eyes I certainly couldn’t see any trace of him in the delicate, useless girl in the mirror. Crazy, fleeting thoughts stormed across my drunken, fevered mind. David was an illusion. I’d always been Cindy and was going mad and dreamed up this lunatic belief that I’d once been a guy to deal with a painful past. Or maybe all those years of hardship were the illusion. I’d always been soft, pathetic. Becoming Cindy was inevitable. I’d wanted it. Needed it. The freedom of weakness and of dependency.
I squeezed my eyes shut and suddenly found something else lurking beneath all the angst and fear and burgeoning madness. It proved irresistible: when I opened my eyes and once again beheld the silly girl in the mirror, her panda-bear eyes and snotty nose, her sloppy grin and smeared lipstick, and the ridiculous, sexy clothes she—that I—wore, an irrepressible laugh bubbled to the surface. Collapsing against the counter in a fit of giggles, all the horrible shame and loneliness simply drained away. When I finally dared to look myself in the mirror again, my red-faced, teary-eyed expression set me off in another round of breath-stealing laughter.
It was to this near-manic scene that my helper returned.
“You seem better,” she said, handing me my purse.
I grinned at her through tears of laughter. “Oh, fuck yeah.”
My mood must have been infectious. “Crazy night?”
My head wobbled in a drunken nod. “God yes,” I said, fumbling around in my bag for something to repair my face with. I stared blankly at the mascara in my hand. The idea that this little tube of black gunk could somehow repair my appearance and set things straight seemed ludicrous. Turning helpless eyes to the girl, I uttered another feeble, “help?”
She laughed. “You’re really out of it, huh?”
Her grip was surprisingly strong, but her touch gentle. She pulled out some wet-wipes I didn’t even know I had in my bag and went to work. There was something strangely compelling about submitting to this woman’s touch as she quickly went about repairing my makeup. With enviably confident strokes she took on the task of cleaning up the worst of the damage. I submitted to her instructions easily as she wiped away my streaked and ruined makeup, undoing in a few moments my hour-long painstaking efforts from earlier this evening.
She rooted deeper into the bag, pulled out a tube, and smeared a little gunk beneath my eye, spreading it with her thumb. “Let’s conceal some of these blotches, shall we?” She held my chin in her other hand, steading my face as she worked.
In between all the intense work, I managed to slur out a question. “You know Dan?”
She chuckled as she flicked open another tube. “Yeah. I’ve seen you around before, too.”
“You have?”
“Yup.” She didn’t sound half as drunk as I did, and I envied her self-control at the moment. “I’m with the marketing and advertising people... you know, a floor up from V.I.?”
I raised and lowered a shoulder.
“Well, you’re new.” She laughed. “Word gets around.”
What kind of word, I wondered, and how far around? After tonight, was I the new office cock-tease? The secretarial slut? The bubble of manic happiness burst; instead, a horrible sinking feeling dragged my already weak stomach down to around my delicately heeled feet. I sagged, slightly, and the woman paused to grab me by the shoulder. “Hey, steady there,” she said. “You with me?”
My thin smile was waxen and unpersuasive.
“We’re almost done here,” she said. “Just a touch-up around the eyes; think you can manage your lipstick?”
I gave a weak thumbs up.
“We’ll get you back out there. You can say bye to Dan. I’ll bundle you into a taxi. You’ll be better in the morning.”
She was wrong, of course. I’d still be Cindy in the morning: I’d still have this weak, rail-thin body; I’d still have tits. I’d still be trapped in this unwanted existence living somebody else’s life, a female life, stared at and ogled, looked down at and patronised, swaddled in skirts and lost in lingerie, powerless—
“Don’t you fucking dare,” the woman fixing my face growled. “I’m not doing this so you can go and fuck up my repair work with another cry!” Her firm grip on my chin pulled me forcefully out of my introspection.
“Why are you doing this?”
She shrugged and threw her hair back with a flick of her head, unconsciously reaching back to tuck errant strands of her long black hair behind her left ear. “Because we’ve all been there, honey.” Her eyes went momentarily distant. “Young, lost and fucked up because of some guy.” She focused on me again. “Now shut up and stop distracting me. You don’t want to lose an eye.”
With deft, precise strokes, she started her final repairs. A little pencil work along the eyebrow, a little colour along the eye lid. Had I not been so bedraggled, drunk and exhausted, there could’ve been something almost seductive about her soft but firm touch, the gentle strokes across the sensitive skin of cheek and eye. I felt suddenly acutely aware of her closeness. I sighed, suddenly exhausted, and leaned slightly closer. She reached for my hand, and the mascara I still held there. And her eyes stared intensely into mine as our fingertips met. And there was suddenly something more to her look: curiosity, but also confusion. Her dark, hazel eyes widened slightly with something akin to recognition. There was a heavy pause, a sense of sudden isolation amongst the bustle of the woman’s toilet, as we stared into each other.
“Um.” Her hand left mind to tuck her hair back behind her left ear again, the gesture achingly familiar. “I think we’re done here.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled, and then the word, a name, suddenly tumbled out. “Jules.” I giggled and reached up, gently stroking the back of my fingers across her cheek. “My little Caesar.”
“What did you call me?” she whispered. She flinched back from my touch and grabbed me by the wrist. She pulled me close and held me firm.
“Hey,” I exclaimed, staring dumbly at her hand. “Ow!”
But her grip didn’t relax. She stared intensely at me in disbelief.
“David?” she said.
***
[Author's Notes, 01/22: Uh... an edit and an update after a ten-year delay? If anyone's still reading... I've picked this up again, currently working on Chapter 4, and edits on earlier chapters.]
Constant in All Other Things 2, Chapter Four
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
“Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.”
Much Ado About Nothing
Synopsis:
Despite David's best efforts at hiding as Cindy, his disguise has been found out by a jilted ex-girlfriend, leaving him scrambling to convince her to keep his secret. If only he'd ended thing better with her ten years ago....
What has gone before:
David Sanders saw something he shouldn't have: his boss, pharmaceutical magnate Jeremiah Steele, murdering an underworld rival. Placed in protection, an assassination attempt forces David into the disguise of Cindy, a pretty, young girl. Left on his own, living a life he never chose and despises, but promised an eventual escape back to masculinity, the new Cindy struggles through several months and experiences of feminine existence... until a drunken encounter with an ex-girlfriend throws his life into peril once again.
***
Alone, a girl walks through the bustling crowd. Friday night, and some strange impulse drives her off the bus several stops early. Storefronts gleam in the night, luminescent auras seeping lurid glows across pavement. The air is warm but cooling with the encroaching darkness, and most are dressed, like her, for the day’s earlier heat. She hesitates outside a restaurant. She sees herself in the glass, a ghost of a girl—slim, blonde hair, short skirt—trapped, suspended in reflection in the window; outside, gazing in. The comforting clink of cutlery, murmur of conversation, and of music envelopes her as a trio of patrons leave the restaurant, cut off abruptly as the door closes.
A couple: young man, broad-chested in a white shirt, tie loose and cuffs rolled back, gesticulates with a fork, a piece of meat impaled on its tines. Opposite, a woman listens with a hint of a smile. Her eyes sparkle as she raises a glass to glossy lips. The man mirrors her, reaching for his wine. The woman’s gaze dances away, down but then flitting aside, looking outside, and there notices the girl watching through the reflection in the window. They make eye contact. The woman raises an inquisitive eyebrow. The girl outside feels a suddenly, nearly overwhelming yearning; heart pounding, she scurries away.
Pools of intermittent light dropping from streetlamps see her home as she walks the several remaining kilometers, alone, back to her empty apartment.
***
The young woman—more of a girl, really—a pretty little thing, sat alone at a small indoor table in a secluded corner of a fashionable boutique café. On this blisteringly hot and bright Sunday morning, she consciously projected a look of youthful femininity: dainty, open-toed, high-heeled sandals sparkled at the ankle strap; white stockings, patterned with flower blossoms, disappeared beneath a short skirt in burnt orange, high-waisted and tight, cinched in by a row of heavy buttons. Her makeup was glossy, bright and youthful. Her top, black and sheer, form-fitting and buttoned at the back and ruffled at the shoulders, hinted at the bra beneath and emphasised her curves but left her slim arms bare, with a pair of delicate bangles glinting at the wrist. Twin, curved strips of silver twirled like DNA strands at her ears. Her lips, shiny and pink, glimmered in the subdued light of the café. A narrow, pink hairband decorated with tiny bows pinned back her long blonde hair.
The girl sighed impatiently.
She sat as far away as possible from the large windows at the front of the café. Her attention switched frequently between her phone on the table and her image in one of the many small, round mirrors that decorated the café walls. Her reflection seemed to her as delicately wrought and precisely painted as the mirror’s filigree frame of intertwining metal threads. She smiled, weakly, nervously tucking an errant strand of blonde hair back behind her ear, and tried again—better, she seemed to think, giving a satisfied little nod.
A small porcelain cup of cooling green tea sat on the table. A faint semi-circle, rose-tinted, stained the edge of the cup where she’d taken a sip. She turned the cup so the lipstick smudge faced towards the empty seat opposite. Squirming slightly, she crossed her legs at the knee, sitting straight, chest out, head turned slightly to one side to present what she hoped came across as a particularly feminine profile for anyone—a specific someone—walking through the door. Poised, but not prim; composed, and calm. But she couldn’t maintain the posture for long, and slouched, and flicked a glance at her phone and once again at the mirror and wondered, For fuck’s sake, Julia, where are you?
The waiting was killing me. Hours! Hours I’d spent preparing for this, searching for just the right outfit, crafting the right look for this meeting with Julia. Hour spent online, brushing up on makeup and fashion tutorials, trying to decide just what the “right look” could possibly be for meeting an ex-girlfriend who’d discovered the man that dumped her a decade ago was now a young woman—more of a girl, really—a pretty little thing she’d found curled up and puking in the toilet of a nightclub last Friday night.
I hadn’t even noticed the text from her until late Saturday afternoon. I’d no memory of getting home. The last I remembered, clearly—far too clearly—was kissing Dan on the mouth. It was pretty sporadic after that, until waking up in bra and panties in my bed late Saturday morning with a howling headache and a case of the shakes, my clothes in a pile on the floor. There’d been plenty of remorse in the early hungover hours of Saturday morning, vivid and lurid flashes of indistinct memory as I huddled under bedsheets, hiding from the painfully bright daylight: the bright contrast of painted nails against the sharp crisp whiteness of a man’s work shirt, my hand, his chest; the intense scent of bamboo and earth as he leaned close; our lips, meeting, parting; his tongue, and mine…
But I was beyond feeling sick at the thought of kissing him. Too much drink, not enough food. Mixing medication, mixing booze. Stress and exhaustion. Fuck it! It was in the past. I’d been enjoying myself until that point. Sort of. After weeks of social isolation, getting back out into the public had felt—good. Necessary.
Most of Saturday was spent lurking in darkness in Cindy’s little apartment, hiding from sunshine and the world and nursing the worst hangover I could remember suffering in years. It was at least noon before the shakes subsided and I could even sip water or contemplate nibbling at some leftovers surviving in the fridge. Eventually I thought to check my phone. And after scrolling and studiously ignoring a pair of texts from Dan, the message:
Meet me at Café Sporus. 11am Sunday. Let’s talk about D. Little Caesar.
The words were without meaning when I first read them. Shrugging, I’d tossed the phone aside and lurched towards the shower, eager to wash away last night’s filth and the lingering phantom of Dan’s touch. And the moment the first cold spray slapped my naked body I gasped as another memory from the night before came crashing back.
The stall. Throwing up. Pungent sting of vomit. A woman, helping – somehow familiar. Taking control – fixing my makeup – putting me back together to get me home with some semblance of dignity intact. And then a name, tumbling from the distant recess of memory…
Julia.
She’d said my name: David.
How the fuck had she recognized me?
And if her, who else?
***
I take the front and Tom takes the rear.
She’s on all fours on the bed, tartan skirt up around the waist, stockings rolled down to her shiny black heels, tangled around the ankles. Her bra is tossed aside and her tits out. Her soft flesh ripples with each wet smack as Tom rhythmically thrusts into her. She moans; Julia’s moan is muffled around my cock and feels wonderful. She looks up at me pleadingly and I deliberately ignore her. Across the pale expanse of her back, Tom grins and briefly releases his grip on her waist. She’s still impaled on his thrusting cock as he gives me both thumbs up. I return the grin.
It’s ten years ago and it’s the last time I saw Julia.
We’re all young and stupid and very, very drunk. It’s been my first year of real work, my first year after getting off the street, calling in some favours and picking up the fake name and the credentials needed to make my start in the “real” world. This night is the culmination of months of hard work on a contract, my first real professional success, and it’s turned into a night on the town, one that started earlier as a quiet, intimate dinner between Julia and me. At this point we’ve been dating for—what, two month, maybe three? And I know it’s time to end things, that she’s getting seriously invested into me and that I’m just not looking for something serious. And I’m thinking—David’s thinking, the fucked-up me of ten years ago is thinking—why not end it with a bang?
Despite the passage of a decade, the memory of that night remains clear. I hadn’t thought of Julia specifically in ages but I remember the event with absolute clarity, spit-roasting the girl with Tom, high-fiving him over her bare ass as we skewered her on our dicks before groaning and grunting and spewing our load deep into her. I remember the night with more than a little pride and maybe a little guilt.
I mean, she knew what was coming. I’d been working on her for days, building her up to this. By the time we reached the elevator, I think she wanted it as much as we did. And that’s where it started, before we’d left the ground floor, with my hand gently stroking her inner thigh and kissing the nape of her neck and then a moment later Tom holding her hand and kissing her gently on the lips. Before we reached his floor, I was fingering her pussy and he was groping her tits under the blouse and she was panting like a bitch in heat. We were a tangle of limbs as Tom fumbled with the keys and we all but fell through the door into his home. We paused long enough for each of us to swiftly tidy up in the bathroom, catch our breath and enjoy a stiff drink and some heavy petting on the sofa before I picked Julia up and carried her into Tom’s bedroom.
So it was all consensual and a fucking load of fun. But I guess to this day I still carry some regret that I didn’t handle the aftermath better. I left her in Tom’s bed and walked out into the late night and walked for hours until I found my way home a little before dawn, passing through some questionable parts of the city, searching and hoping, I think, for a fight, for some idiot to try and mug me or something. Instead, when I got home, I sat and drank and stared out the window until the sun rose and then I picked up my phone and dumped Julia, by text, and made it clear that I never wanted to see her again and that I was disgusted by what she’d done.
To this day I can’t really explain why I did it. Thinking back on that final night together now, I remember a moment in our threesome with startling clarity. I gaze down at her. She looks up and our eyes meet. Her eyes are wide, and her lips full, a brilliant crimson O pursed around the tip of my penis, until a thrust from Tom pushes her forward and plunges me deeper into her mouth. Her voice, a vibration humming up the length of my cock, feels amazing. I smile lovingly down at her. And my emotions at that moment are genuine. I do love her, or at least feel as strongly about her as I have anyone in the past year. I admire her willingness to do this for us, to submit to Tom and me; I’m in awe of both the strength and confidence it must have taken to put aside her misgiving and fear and follow both of us back to Tom’s apartment.
But any feelings I had for her were a betrayal to the woman I had lost a year ago. The ghost of Sephy rose even as I came, and maybe that explained the twisting bitterness and hatred I felt for Julia afterwards.
I remembered Julia as a strong-willed woman, passionate and ambitious, and yet she’d nevertheless yielded so compliantly, so easily to us. Having fought my whole life for—everything, then and now, I’m mystified, the me of ten years ago and of now, by her total surrender. Awe and respect so quickly turn to scorn and spite: how could anyone ever give themselves over so totally to someone? How did she embrace her own vulnerability so completely?
Wearing stockings and heels and with ample tits of my own, I wriggled at the edge of my seat at the uncomfortable kinship I suddenly felt with the girl of that memory. I squirmed with shame, at the contrast between the manliness I’d embodied then and the girlhood I now lived. From distraction, the consequence of wearing the most feminine underwear I could find: a pretty, long-length bra; thigh-highs and a thong—all white and pink—deliberately chosen as a constant reminder of the role I had to convincingly play today. And finally, unsurprisingly, I squirmed with pain as erotic memories reminded me that underneath all these frills and lace there lurked a penis, straining against its confines, tucked and taped away to maintain the illusion that was Cindy.
That illusion had to be absolutely, totally convincing today. My life depended on it.
Had Julia told anyone about me? Probably not. At least, not yet. What little, discreet research I’d managed online suggested my testimony against Jeremiah Steele hadn’t gone public. My disappearance from the job at NeoPharm might’ve been unusual, but people left their jobs all the time these days. Julia had the day after I dumped her – she just quit and disappeared, just as I had after witnessing the murder. She had no reason to report her discovery of my identity to anyone.
On the other hand, she didn’t need a reason to blab about Friday night’s debacle. A mocking word to a friend, overheard by the wrong person, or microphone; an errant dropping of my name online, picked up by some clever AI scurrying back to Steele with even a hint of my disguise – and I was fucked. Probably literally considering what those maniacs at the Clinic had done to me. The fact I was still alive was probably evidence enough she hadn’t done anything stupid yet. I had to make sure it stayed that way. Had to convince Julia to keep my secret, no matter the cost and by whatever means necessary. Because if Cindy’s words couldn’t convince her, then David’s violence sure as hell would.
I’d sacrificed too much already to fucking lose now. My fingers curled into a tight fist and the prick of longer nails digging into my palm proved a fitting reminder of what was at stake. Whatever sick plot I found myself emmeshed within, I had the navigate some way through it, come out the other side and take my revenge on all the sick bastards who’d ripped my life away and left me …
“Cindy,” I whispered softly under my breath.
***
I’d rehearsed the script the night before and on the bus ride into town this morning.
“Please, call me Cindy Bellamy,” I’d say. “Thanks for last night,” I’d add. “I’m Cindy,” I’d insist. On that final point, Julia had to be completely convinced. Preparing Saturday night and this morning, I considered deeply what, exactly, I needed her to believe; and what image would best support the lie. At first I’d considered dressing a touch more masculine, a subtle reminder of the man Julia had dated. Then I tried going the full opposite, an explosion of full-on femininity that bordered on drag queen exuberance. Eventually I scaled it back to something more suitable, a carefully crafted performance of Cindy’s girlishness—of a life chosen, not forced, but simmering with concealed doubts and concerns.
Because I couldn’t trust her with the truth. At least, not the full truth. I didn’t know this woman, this ten-years older Julia; and I wouldn’t have trusted the one I knew, let alone this stranger. She had more than a little reason to be upset with me, I had to admit, and though ten years is a long time, I understood all too well how some grudges can linger and fester. If she was still angry, would it be enough to turn me in for a price on my head?
No. At least, I didn’t think so. But I couldn’t risk it.
And of course, more than anything she’d probably want to know how or why her boyfriend of ten years ago had, rather than keep pace with her in age, instead shed a few years and, yeah, his gender along the way. My plan, galling as it might be, was to convince her that this was by choice, that I’d made the decision to live as a woman – that I was a woman, and always had been, though I’d been in denial about it for some time. I just needed to convince her to respect the new me – to not mention David or bring up my old existence – to just let me live this new life I’d willingly crafted for myself and keep my secret.
I stood as she entered the café and waited bashfully by the table. Julia was dressed for comfort in loose-fitting harem pants and flats, a plain, camo-green cotton t-shirt clinging to her with sweat from being outside in the heat. She pulled off her sunglasses and tucked back her long, black hair with a flick of the head and quick stroke of the left hand, and I found myself smiling at the remembered, familiar gesture. I envied not only her comfortable clothes but also the unconscious confidence she exuded as she strode purposefully towards me. I’d been too drunk on Friday night to really notice, but Julia seemed to have embraced her thirties with conviction. She looked good. Like, really good.
Smiling openly, I extended one hand gracefully to greet her. “Hi! Please, call me—”
“Sit down and shut the fuck up,” she said, cutting me off.
Stunned, I dropped into my seat as Julia, with surprising intensity, took the chair opposite.
“You don’t get to talk. This is my moment, not—” and here, she waved her hand in a vague gesture taking in my appearance, “…yours, whatever this is.”
“But—”
“Shut it.” Her voice was firm and controlled. She leaned close. “You have no idea how many times I’ve rehearsed this.” She swallowed, and I could see the tightness in the ropes of her neck. “With my therapist. In my head. To the mirror. How many times I’ve dreamed of confronting you. How many times I’ve written down what I wanted to say.”
She took a deep breath.
“You hurt me,” Julia said. She said it softly, momentarily uncertain, as though she didn’t quite believe this thing she had dreamed of so often was actually happening. “You hurt me,” she repeated, her voice growing in confidence. “Ten years ago. I was in love with you.” Her hand briefly reached out towards me, as though to pull me close, but instead fell to the table and gripped its edge tightly. “I loved you and you threw that away, threw me away after you used me, like skin peeled from a fucking piece of fruit. When I woke up in another man’s bed and read that you’d dumped me – by phone, you cowardly, insensitive prick! – it destroyed me. Do you understand? You fucking broke me!”
I licked my lips nervously and went to speak, though I had no idea what to say, and hesitated at the slick taste of lip gloss.
“No!” She banged the table with her first, and my cup clattered noisily. “Still my turn!”
I nodded.
“It took me years – years! – to get over that night. I gave up my job, friends, my goddamn life to get away from the memory of you and start over. And I hated myself for it!” She took a deep breath, and when she continued her voice was low again, controlled and firm. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to hate yourself so thoroughly you want to die?”
Yes, I wanted to say. I do.
“For years I hated myself for letting you talk me into that night with… with, what’s his name?” She sighed with frustration. “Whatever. Your friend. I fucking gaslighted myself, saying it was my fault, that I should’ve been stronger and just said no. Or I told myself it wasn’t a bit deal, it was just a threesome, I must’ve wanted it, right?
“But it wasn’t my fault. It was yours.
“And I didn’t want it; you did.
“But I did it anyway, because I loved you.” She stared at me, at the girl sat opposite and her eyes widened slightly with disbelief. “I loved… you, so deeply and totally that the thought of losing you drove me half-insane and so I convinced myself to go along with it and what happened…? You dumped me anyway. You dumped me and told me it was my fault, that I was disgusting, and you never wanted to see me again.”
For a moment, the soft lighting at the back of café sparkled at the corner of her eyes. She glanced away angrily, and then back, and her gaze was clear and hard. “And I fucking believed you. It was my fault and I was disgusting, and I hated myself so thoroughly I wanted to die, and the thought of never seeing you again left a hole inside of me, a pain so deep inside of me I wanted to disappear into it.”
Julia took another deep breath. “You have no idea what that kind of pain feels like,” she said.
I wanted to laugh; I needed to speak. The desire bubbled up from somewhere deep inside. But taking a deep breath and feeling the tight constriction of the bra, I kept silent.
“Something you want to say?” she spat.
I shook my head, earrings jouncing against my cheeks.
“It took me years to recover,” she continued. “And therapy. And drugs. And at first I hated myself for that too – for being so weak, for needing help, for letting the pain sink such deep roots into me, as though it was a choice, something I wanted or did to myself.
“But you did that to me: you.”
She fell silent, sinking deeper into her seat, staring at me over steepled fingers. Storm clouds gathered at her brow. A waiter, a sharply-dressed young man closer to Cindy’s age than Julia’s, took the moment to surreptitiously slide up to our table. “Uh… ladies?” he said, voice low and deferential, directing his attention ever so slightly more towards her than me, “Can I get you anything?”
Julia started. “Ladies?”
“Miss?”
Her lip curled in a sardonic smile. “Whatever. Yeah. I’ll have whatever … whatever they’re having,” she said, waving her hand at me.
We waited for the waiter to return. Julia seemed momentarily content to sit, silently appraising me in silence. Meanwhile, I tried to regain some of my composure, reaching for that place from which I could convincingly perform as Cindy. A twisted laugh, short and sharp, lurked somewhere dark and deep within, at the absurdity of this scene and the pain we echoed. I hadn’t expected this, not this… anger, this bitterness and pain, not after ten years; and Julia’s rant had left me scrambling for some way to claim control of the situation.
The waiter returned, deposited Julia’s drink, and silently withdrew.
She quietly picked it up and took a long sip. “Good choice,” she murmured, sounding a little surprised. She then sighed and put the cup down. “So… this,” Julia said, and waved her hand at me. “What’s the fuck’s all this, then?”
She sounded exhausted, and for the first time I noticed that she looked tired, too. She must’ve had a sleepless night, maybe rehearsing what she wanted to say, as I had. Her makeup was light, and I could appreciate that she’d made some small effort to conceal the dark under her eyes, and the hint of wrinkles that had started to worm their way into the thirty-something flesh of her cheeks. My makeup was considerably heavier, but there were no signs of aging, no flaws to hide… no trace of errant masculinity. I fairly glowed with feminine youthful vigour. What must she think, how must she feel, looking at her boyfriend of ten years ago and seeing twenty-year old Cindy, a girl even younger than the man I’d been then?
“Please,” I started. “Call me… -” but my voice trailed off, and died, and I swallowed heavily over an unexpected lump in my throat. I held up a finger to signal I needed a moment.
The previous script wasn’t going to cut it. I could see that she yearned for something from me: an apology, mostly, for some recognition of what I’d done to her and remorse for the pain caused over all those years. Every tense, angry line of her body made clear that she wanted me to say: I’m sorry. I’m sorry for hurting you. I was wrong.
That is what she wanted. But beneath that I detected a darker, more primal desire: an unrealized need far more potent than the want for some apology. In the stormy embrace of her gaze, in the way her eyes drank deeply of the image of her feminised former lover, I saw, restrained but not entirely supressed, an almost feral hunger.
She wanted me to say sorry and disappear from her life again, past trauma resolved. But what she needed was to consume me, utterly, to gorge herself in an attempt to fill that void of pain and loneliness left by my departure ten years. She needed – me.
And that desperate a need? I could work with that.
“It’s good seeing you again, Julia,” I started, tentatively.
She laughed. “Is it? Really?”
“It is.” I offered a gentle smile. “I haven’t, you know, really seen anyone from… before.” Truer words were rarely spoken, and I would’ve happily kept it that way. It’s not like I went out of my way to catch up with ex-girlfriends; that sort of encounter is awkward enough at the best of times and this… this wasn’t the best of times.
This was a bad time to be confronting Julia. It’d been two months—two whole fucking months of dresses and skirts, of taping my cock back and shoving my balls up inside, of makeup and heels and wearing a bra and simperingly soft conversations and smiling, smiling, smiling so much I wanted to scream sometimes. I hated it, ever goddamn minute of it, but if I was brutely honest with myself it was also getting easier.
It’s like, I couldn’t go around all day fucking freaking out because I had tits, right? At some point I sort of stopped noticing them, just as the stockings, or earrings, or makeup faded into the background—well, for short periods of time, anyway, until jabbed by an underwire or because the goddam bra strap kept slipping off my shoulder or, most likely, I caught some dude staring at me. Sometimes I could go for, like, an entire hour without really thinking about the misery of my existence, just absently floating along with Cindy as she went about her day, silently observing her from the outside. The darkest hours were usually the alone hours, after work or on weekends, when the comfort of being out of the public eye was made agonising by the freedom to see myself for what I’d become. It was so much easier, in some ways and perversely so, during the busy hours of a workday, caught up in the bustle of work. Bound tightly into routine, there was some relief from the anxiety of simply existing as something I wasn’t. Through repetition, the unfamiliar habits of this unwanted life were becoming… normal; part of me; and therefore familiar and easy, if no less hateful and embarrassing.
But meeting someone who knew me as the man I was less than a year ago brought that all crashing down. Under Julia’s probing gaze, I found myself acutely and painful aware of how far I’d fallen, and keenly felt every feminine trait I’d taken on as part of this disguise. Makeup that had faded to an invisible, weightless mask once again felt heavy and thick; longer fingernails become ungainly; and I felt myself doubting every motion. The familiar once again became foreign, and the performance teetered back towards pantomime.
“You look good,” I said, and took a calming sip of lukewarm tea.
“And you look…,” I could see her reaching for an appropriate word, “different.”
“I imagine it’s a bit of a surprise.”
“You could say that.” Something akin to a smiled twisted her face, trapped between wryness and bitterness. “Let’s just say it’s not quite how I pictured this moment.”
“What did you expect?”
She flicked her hair back, smoothed it down over the left shoulder. “I don’t know. That you’d gone fat, maybe? Or balding? That the past tens years had worn you down to a place where you could look at me and think – damn, I wish I’d done thing differently.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Instead, fucking hell, David, look at you.”
“Cindy,” I said. “My name is Cindy Bellamy.”
“Whatever.” She shook her head. “Jesus, what’re the girls going to think when I tell them?”
“Please,” I said, allowing a note of pleading to enter my voice. “I’d really prefer it if you didn’t tell anyone.”
“And why the fuck, David,” she said, all but spitting out the name, “should I care what you ‘prefer’?” She said the last in a mincing, little-girl voice.
I winced. “Please, Julia,” I said pleadingly. “It’s not nice.”
“Nice?” She stared at me. “You want me to be nice?”
I nodded.
“And were you being nice when you manipulated me into that threesome ten years ago? Was it nice to string me along like that and drop me in your friend’s bed when you were done with me?” She leaned in close. “You used me like a fucking toy; you fucked me and dumped your load in me and then you left me. So, yeah, maybe deadnaming you isn’t particularly ‘nice’. Maybe bringing up the past isn’t ‘nice’. But tell me, please, why the fuck should I be ‘nice’ to someone who destroyed years of my life?”
Very deliberately, I meticulously pushed the sweep of my long, blonde hair back over the left shoulder, and tucked an errant strand behind my ear. “You’re not the only one who’s suffered, you know,” I said softly, and swept one hand across my body. “Do you think this was easy?”
She stared at me for a long, quiet moment. Her hands clenched, knuckles whitening, then relaxed and she released a heavy breath. Somewhat unnerved by her reaction, I looked away and towards the front of the café and blinked at the dazzling bright afternoon sun. Part of me suddenly wished I could trust her with the truth, yearned to share my secret with her – with somebody, anybody. The desire bubbled up within, inexorably growing, like an illness needing to be expelled: this isn’t me! I desperately wanted to shout. I don’t want this! Trembling briefly overtook my hand, and I dug my nails into my palm, and wished for something more painful, like a fork to jab into my thigh, to bring me back to myself.
But when I looked back to her, something akin to momentary doubt or confusion swept across her face, and she sat back and studied me, really looked at me, and under her appraising eye I nervously fidgeted.
“Goddamit,” she muttered under her breath. “This isn’t what I wanted.” She took a deep breath. “This isn’t good. I can’t afford another fucking relapse.” She was turning inwards, and in the way she shifted in her seat signaled she was about to leave, about to storm out. I couldn’t let that happen, not yet, not with so much unresolved.
“Julia,” I called out.
“What?” she snapped, almost distractedly.
“I’m sorry.”
She went rigid, momentarily – staring at me – and for a moment Julia seemed as though she might cry; and then instead she all but collapsed into the depths of her chair.
“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to hear that,” she said.
I reached out tentatively, furtively, reaching for her hand with mine. “I mean it,” I said. There was something surreal in the appearance of my hand, slender fingers and carefully manicured fingernails, painted a rosy pink, resting over hers. Julia’s nails were unpainted, maybe even slightly gnawed—I’d forgotten she used to chew her fingernails, and apparently still did.
“No,” she said, withdrawing her hand.
“But I…”
“No!” She cut me off. “Why the fuck would I want an apology from some… some, fucking caricature of a girl? I don’t want -your- apology; I want -his-!”
Around us, the café buzzed with activity. Patrons had been steadily flowing in throughout our talk: young couples, sat at small tables; individuals in smart business attire striding in and out with coffee in takeaway cups; a gaggle of schoolgirls, cutting class; a man, sat alone and incongruously dressed in tweed, reading a newspaper, apparently an anachronistic specialty of Café Sporus. Our booth, distant from the entrance, remained secluded and our conversation remained private, though we’d attracted a number of curious glances, many of them young and male.
“I’m not a caricature,” I said. It took some effort – though less than expected – to summon the promise of tears to my eyes. “This is who I am.”
She eyed me suspiciously. “A girl.”
I nodded. “I’m Cindy,” I said. “And I wanted to thank you for Friday night.”
Julia couldn’t suppress a tiny smile. “You were a mess.”
“I know, right?” I gave a small, self-deprecating laugh. “It kind of snuck up on me. It still catches me by surprise sometimes, how… small I am now. A lightweight.”
“Yeah. I noticed.”
“Yes, you did,” I said, and she picked up on the shift in tone. “How?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did you… you know… know?” I leaned in closer, and all but whispered conspiratorially. “How did you recognize David?”
She laughed. “It’s really bothering you, isn’t it?”
I nodded. And it was. Not for the reasons she probably thought. But I needed to know where I’d gone so disastrously wrong. This… disguise, this girlish frame those Asklepios butchers had hacked from my masculine corpse, was so far removed from the person I’d been that it just didn’t seem possible that someone could recognize me. Especially once you layered in all the work I’d poured into this… this costume, the endless hours of practice: voice and speech, walk and posture, the clothes, the makeup and hair, perfecting Cindy’s behaviour…. How had she seen through my disguise? Because if she could do it, then one of Steele’s fucking agents would damn well be able to do the same.
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve worked really hard to, to be….”
“Girly?”
I frowned. “Me. And I thought this—” and I passed my hands over my curves, “and this—” as I gestured at my face, hair and makeup, “and all of it was, you know… pretty convincing?”
She gave a little smile. “Oh, it’s very convincing,” she said. “And there’s no way I would’ve guessed. So, Friday night, after I bumped into you waiting in line for the toilet, there was… something.” She tapped the table with one finger, thinking. “I couldn’t say what it was. Maybe the way you said something, a gesture. I dunno. I’d had a few drinks as well. But it just seemed familiar, somehow, but I couldn’t place it.
“And I’ll admit I kept an eye on you from then on, although I couldn’t really say why. My colleagues were pretty fucking boring, for one. Caleb kept going on about the new dataset and…” She trailing off, and drummed her fingers on the table. “Mostly I was curious; believe it or not, there’s been a bit of talk on my floor about the new girl at V.I.”
I smiled weakly. Inside, my stomach twisted. “Really?”
“Yeah.” She laughed. “Fresh meat, right?” Seeing my expression, she cocked her head to one side. “I mean, you must’ve realised the guys are all eyeing you up, right?”
I shook my head.
“Really? ‘Cus you wouldn’t have done the same?” she added.
I nodded mutely. In all likelihood, I would’ve had Cindy in the sack by now.
“Anyway, when I saw you rush to the toilet I figured you could use some help. And you did, and then some. But what I wasn’t expecting was for you to suddenly call me by that fucking stupid nickname.”
I shook me head. “I… don’t remember,” I said, and genuinely didn’t. “I was pretty drunk on Friday.”
“No shit,” she said. “Surprising, really. You used to really be able to pack it away.”
Sighing sadly, I said, “Not anymore, not like I used to. I think it’s a hormone thing or something.”
Julia paused momentarily, as though processing that, and then shaking her head she continued. “So you called me Little Caesar. Remember that? Like, a week after we’d started dating, we were at this pub quiz and you were terrible at it, like at every category, general knowledge, movies, even the easy stuff, you didn’t know shit. And so you just started drinking, and got really obnoxiously drunk. And then a question came up, I can’t remember, maybe something about crossing the Rubicon, and I shouted out ‘Caesar’ and you looked at me with this stupid drunk grin and shouted ‘Julius!’ at me. You seemed really pleased with yourself, and I laughed, because it was good seeing you finally enjoying yourself. But then you just wouldn’t let it go. You started calling me “my Little Caesar’, especially when you saw how much it pissed me off.”
I stared blankly at her. I had no memory of calling her that on Friday. I barely remembered calling her that ten years ago.
“I’m… sorry?”
“Whatever.” She sighed. “Anyway, when you said it, your name just kind of popped out of my mouth in response. I mean, I didn’t for a second think it was really you.” She frowned. “I mean, how could I? Everything about you is totally different. Like, even your skin tone’s paler, your hair’s gone blonde… you’ve got tits, right? But then at the same time… I don’t know. Maybe at some gut level I suspected something, like you were his sister? Or maybe there was something about the way you said the name—the way you looked at me—your eyes?” She leaned closer, staring intently at me. “Maybe that was it. Under all that makeup, there’s still something of the old you in the eye.”
I self-consciously traced the side of my face with one finger, suddenly intensely aware of my own skin, the heaviness of mascara on lashes and the carefully applied eyeliner and colours accentuating those features.
“You recognized me because of my eyes?”
“Yup, that.” She grinned. “Well, that and the fact you then put your hand over my mouth and then said really, really loudly, ‘Shush! Don’t tell anyone, it’sh’a secret!’ Then you leaned in really, really close and whispered ‘I’m David!’” She gave a burst of laughter. “Total fucking meltdown.”
“I did not.”
“I shit you not.”
“So I just told you.”
“Yup.” She took a sip of tea. “Then you passed out.”
At which point, she went on to explain, she pretty much escorted me out of the bar, telling the guys from work that she’d get me home. Apparently, Dan had offered but Julia insisted and bundled me into an auto-taxi and rode home with me, finding my keys and getting us into the apartment. Which brought her to a final point of evidence.
“Of course, the final proof was when I stripped you for bed. You can imagine what I found hidden away in those ooh-la-la panties of yours.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did.” Her grin was positively cat-like. “Everything else about you might’ve changed, but you can bet I recognized that cock of yours.
“Anyway, I left you in your bed, had a little look around your place, and went home.”
At that point I should’ve been all over her, for violating my privacy, for stripping me naked. And I was angry. But the anger was directed entirely inwards. Putting aside the objectively disconcerting fact she thought she could identify my penis a decade on from last seeing it, or that she’d let herself into my home and stripped me naked; I couldn’t believe I’d just… told her who I was. I’d drunk myself to the point of stupidity, to absolute, incoherent idiocy—and left myself totally vulnerable.
I’d fucked up; I’d fucked up huge, and I couldn’t remember any of it.
And I couldn’t even really blame her for any of it. In some ways, she’d probably saved me from a possibly far worse outcome. Ultimately, the fault was my own and I had to own it. But how was I going to make sure this kind of thing didn’t happen again?
I sat in silence, and Julia seemed quite pleased with herself, slowly slipping her drink with a self-satisfied smile, her eyes flashing with pleasure over the rim of the cup. She clearly enjoyed my discomfort and dismay at having been found out. She had something over me, now: a secret she knew I’d rather keep buried, though not for the reasons she thought.
“Listen,” I said. “I’d like to start fresh. I’d like to thank you for looking out for me on Friday. But mostly, I’d like to… I don’t know; maybe get to know you again.” I gave her what I hoped came across as hopefully, pleading eyes. “Please?” And I stuck my hand out to shake on it.
She eyed it for a second, took my hand in hers, and gave it a firm handshake. And then she laughed, and it sounded genuine. Shaking her head, she seemed to visibly relax. She took a deep drink from her tea and sighed contentedly. “And so, now your name really is …?”
“Cindy,” I said firmly. “Please.”
“That’s short for Cynthia, right?”
I shook my head. “No. Well, yes, it can be, but not mine. My Cindy’s short for Lucinda – you know, like “Lucy”? As in “light”? But yeah, please, just call me Cindy.”
“Cindy.” She paused, as though testing the feel of the name on her tongue, and once again drank me in, absorbing the fastidiously arranged details of my female self. “You look…,” she started.
“Pretty?” I interrupted.
She laughed. “Yeah, sure. Like a fucking doll.”
I winced. “Ouch.”
She shrugged. “I mean, look at you. You’re dressed like what a thirty-year old man thinks a twenty-year old girl dresses, or like something copied off a glossy website. How long did it take you to get ready this morning?”
“A while.”
“Yeah, I bet.” I preened slightly under her gaze. “And… you enjoy it?”
“What, the getting ready?” I shrugged and lied. “Yes. No. Oh, I dunno. Some of it?”
“Like what?”
I raised an eyebrow. “Like what—what?”
Julia shrugged. “I mean… like, what’s so enjoyable about femininity? Because I really just don’t get it. Don’t get me wrong,” she said, raising one hand to forestall any comment. “I’m totally happy with the way I am. Well, mostly. But I’ve been a woman all my life, and you know what? There’s just so. Much. Bullshit, to deal with, every fucking day.
“And then I see guys, and how easy they’ve got it, and I think, we might be able to send a woman off to Mars, but when she gets back here on Earth? We’re still going to treat her like shit. Half a dozen waves of feminism, and we’re probably further back than we were a couple decades ago. We still earn less money than men for the same job. We’re still getting smacked around at home and murdered in parks. We’re still held to hypocritical standards of beauty and dress and behaviour and... and…” She took a deep breath. “And it’s exhausting, sometimes, just so very fucking tiring. So… yeah. Frankly, I can’t see why anyone, given a choice, would give up the joy of male advantage to deal with this crap.”
Confronted by her passionate words, I thought a very long time before answering. “Shoes,” I said.
She groaned.
“No, seriously—I love the shoes.”
“Oh, c’mon, give me a break. You’d give up all the benefits of the brotherhood for a fucking pair of heels?”
Stretching out my legs from beneath the table, I modelled my fine, slim legs for her, sleek in their ivory stockings, and the open-toed, slingback sandals that arched my feet into their delicate pose. “They look good?” I asked.
“Sure. Whatever.”
“No,” I said, “not whatever. This is serious. How tall do you reckon these shoes are?”
She shrugged, looking utterly uninterested “How the hell should I know?”
“Seven centimeters. It’s about the highest I can comfortably manage for a day. I can go higher, but not for very long, at least not yet. I’m sill practicing.”
“Good for you. But why? High heels are bullshit. Just more crap girls have to deal with, more impossible standards. Okay, fine, you’re a girl; doesn’t mean you have to wear heels. Or makeup, or skirts.”
“Sure. And that’s easy for you to say, because you are a girl, have been seen and accepted as one your whole life. No one’s going to question that.”
“Cindy,” she said, shaking her head. “Nobody’s going to question you, either. You look… totally convincing.”
“Maybe.” Under my makeup I felt suddenly hot, flushing crimson at her words. “But I don’t always feel that way. I still feel like a fraud; I’ve felt like a fraud most of life, playing a part, pretending to be someone I’m not.” And I had to pause for a moment, swallowing uncomfortably at how closely my impromptu words hewed to the truth. “And now I’m Cindy, I’m a girl and the thing is, wearing heels and yes, makeup and a skirt, well, it convinces me just as much as anyone watching that this is who I really am.”
She considered that for a moment. “Fine. But you love them? They’re bloody instruments of torture!”
I shrugged. “C’mon, they’re not that bad. Especially as I’m getting used to them. I don’t know if I’ll ever manage the really high one, but even those, maybe someday, right? Because—I’ll be honest here—I like the bump in height. Do you remember, back in the day, how you didn’t like wearing heels because you’d be taller than me?
“I was always short, and you know… that can really suck for a guy. You talk about double standards, right? Well, it’s fine for a girl to be short. Desirable, even? But for a man, somehow it makes him less of a man, right? It’s a stupid fucking power thing. And it used to piss me off. You have any idea how many bitches won’t even date a guy if they’re too short? It’s literally in our language, we ‘look down’ on someone we don’t respect and that kind of thing is worse for a guy.
“So… yeah, I guess there’s this kick out of making myself a bit taller, you know, strutting around with a bit of confidence.”
She still seemed bemused. “So, wearing heels makes you feel more… manly?”
I laughed. “I hadn’t really thought of it that way.” I considered for a second, especially since—yes; in a weird way, I guess Julia’s point was true. I fucking hated Cindy’s footwear, these ‘implements of torture’ as Julia so aptly described them; but at the same time, by wearing them I reclaimed some of those precious centimeters the Asklepios surgeons had cruelly chopped away from me. With more practice and higher heels, I’d even surpass my old height.
“But no, obviously,” I continued. “And I can’t say I understand it, but… well, wearing them, on the one hand, yeah, it fills me with confidence, it’s just such a feminine thing to be able to do, right? These shoes are like the epitome of girly. And then, at the same time, well… I get what you’re saying, right, these things, they’re stupid. I could barely stand in the things at first! And even this pair,” I added, gesturing at my shoes, “I can walk in them all day, but I wouldn’t want to have to run in them. I still wobble if I’m not careful. I can’t tell you how often I’ve nearly twisted my ankle in the past few months.
“But shoes like this, you know, the delicate heel, the way it forces me to take smaller steps, even the way they’re impractical… I guess that’s how it makes me feel, wearing them: delicate, small. Vulnerable.”
Julia raised an eyebrow. “And that’s a good thing?”
I gave an enthusiastic nod. “God, yes!”
“For fuck’s sake,” Julia said, and her voice was a potent mixture of scorn and frustration, “you sound like some stone age misogynist’s wet dream.”
“I’m not,” I said softly. “You said being a woman was exhausting. Fine. But so’s being a guy, Julia. I always felt as though I had to be strong, had to fill the room, had to be… be, I don’t know, invulnerable. And it was exhausting. So. Fucking. Exhausting.” I pointed at my shoe. “And now? Now I get to be like these things: pretty and delicate, and you know what? You’re right, sometimes it’s not easy. And yes, it can be exhausting.
“But it’s wonderful to finally step back and let somebody else fill the room, you know. Someone else can step up and be strong. And so maybe I’m tired, and sometimes even terrified, but I’m also… happy.” And I smiled for her as convincingly as possible, shyly, lowering my eyes demurely, whilst inside I died a little.
We sat like that for a few minutes, in silence, finishing our teas. Café Sporus continued to bubble and froth with life. The schoolgirls were gone; so were the corporate minions, replaced by nearly identical replacements in dark suits and ties, power dresses and pantsuits. Only anachronistic Mr Tweed remained, slouched behind his broadsheet newspaper, through which he seemed to be making steady and methodical progress.
“So you’re trans, then, right?” Julia said, and my attention snapped back to the table.
“I’m Cindy,” I said.
“And when did you…?”
“A few months ago,” I said. “That is, that’s when I made a total break from the past, moved here and got a job and started living openly, full time, self-identified under a new name. But if what you’re really asking is when was Cindy ‘born’, well…” I waved my hand in an indeterminate gesture taking in me, her, the café and the world around us. “I guess I’ve always been Cindy. I just didn’t, or couldn’t, admit it to myself.”
And God, it wasn’t easy, feeding this steady stream of bullshit to Julia. She’d caught me out a few times, but this part I’d rehearsed for, a fine line about a burgeoning awareness of my real self, a female identity denied for most of my life. Hours of surreptitious online research had given me the broad strokes of my own story, cobbled together from genuinely moving stories of admission and revelation, of denial and coming out and heart-rending struggles. But I felt… uncomfortable, telling her this story; squeamish, becoming in her eyes this trans-woman Cindy Bellamy, only just recently escaped from the masculine shell of David Sanders she’s presented for all these years. Telling this story, I felt strangely embarrassed and acutely aware of the clothes I wore, both outer- and under. Seeing myself through her eyes and feeling her frank appraisal of this feminine distortion of the man I’d been was like torture.
“It’s hard to wrap my head around,” she said. “Like you said earlier, you were always so… manly, you know? Like always working out, muscles, all that stuff. And so confident, so domineering.”
“Domineering?” I answered, genuinely bemused by her comment. “I was… over-compensating, I guess. Took me years to figure that out. But I guess you could say I wore all that muscle like a suit of armour. It was protection. Against anyone seeing the real me; against… me, seeing the real me.” Which was a half-truth, I guess. It was a shell; it was protection and years of honing my body had served me well in the past against very real and very physical threats. And even after I’d left that life behind, well, I continued to do well by being in good shape. Being strong was just part of who I was, the working out an almost instinctive routine of daily life, familiar and comforting despite the pain and effort.
Yeah, it was a massive investment of time and energy, but it always paid out dividends: in the girls I took home most weekends, mostly, but also in the simple, mundane benefits of being fit and strong. And in so many ways it made me fucking furious that being Cindy required an equal investment of time and energy, squandered daily on ephemeral beauty, on developing vain proficiencies in hair and makeup and walking in heels. What was the fucking point when a stiff wind could knock me over now, and I needed help to open a heavy goddamn door? The benefits of an hour at the gym were tangible and functional and meaningful; but where was the advantage in spending an hour meticulously painting my face when I was just going to wipe the shit away a few hours later. So much of Cindy’s time seemed consumed by the frivolous demands of simply keeping up appearances, distracting me from more meaningful accomplishments.
She shook her head. “Now look at you.”
I extended one slender arm, turning it this way and that for her, the bangles at my wrist glinting and chiming. “I know, right?”
“I could take you in an arm wrestle, no problem,” she said.
“I’d rather not.”
She laughed. “I bet. Could you, I dunno, stand up for me? Give me a little twirl?”
“Sure.” I pushed back from the table and found my feet. My skirt flared out a little as I spun delicately on tiptoe, risking a tantalising peek of stocking tops. I gave a little bow and sat down again.
Julia shook her head in disbelief. “It’s not possible,” she said.
“Yet here I am.”
“No,” she insisted. “We used to be the same height,” she said, holding up a finger. “I remember that clearly. Like you said, I didn’t like wearing heels with you because you didn’t like me being taller than you. But now you’re the one in heels and I’m taller than you?”
I winced. “That’s not…”
“Two,” she cut me off. “We’re both in our thirties; you’ve got a year and a bit on me. Or should have. But you look younger now than you did ten years ago.”
“It’s makeup…?” I suggested.
“It’s not makeup,” she retorted. “For fuck’s sake.”
“Good genes?”
She grimaced. “Cut the bullshit. Listen: you’re not the first trans girl I’ve known, alright? And as beautiful and wonderful as some of them have been, none of them shrunk by a half dozen centimetres and shed ten years when they transitioned. None of them magically transformed into their idealised twenty-year old fantasy girl self, no matter how much they might’ve wanted it.
“So maybe this is who you are, and who’ve you’ve always wanted to be – but it just. Isn’t. Possible.” She punctuated each word with her finger, pointing it aggressively at me.
“Yet here I am,” I insisted.
She nodded. “And I want you tell me where you came from.”
“Tell you what,” I answered. “I’m starving. Let’s grab a bite to eat somewhere that serves something stronger than tea. I’ll tell you over lunch.”
***
I started with the story of the wedding dress.
So, I’m seven years old and with my mother. We’re out shopping. I can vaguely remember feeling… excited? or maybe simply wanted? being out with her instead of dumped on a baby-sitter or an irritated friend, or just left at home on my own. She’s with a friend, that friend is getting married soon, and they’re shopping for a dress. And I can remember – how to put it? – this tiny, tight knot in my stomach as we step into this store, with its ivory-clad mannequins, and racks of white dresses, all glittering and shimmering in the bright summer rays of the late afternoon sun. In my memory, the whole room is bathed in a ruddy, warm glow in which seasonal charmeuse and ivory brocade cascades off the slender figures in the window. Swathes of gauzy tulle traps the light of the setting sun in its delicately sheer weave. Embroidered pearls and sequins glitter in the vividly coloured bridesmaids’ dresses. And it feels wrong, being a boy in that place, this intensely female space, like sneaking into the girls’ bathroom at school. It’s a land of lace and veils, but to my prepubescent self it feels as though a mask is pulled from his eyes for the first time. I stand, speechless, as my mom and her friend bustle into the shop and shove me to one side, out of the way.
And I remember wandering, stupefied, among those mystifying clothes, crawling and hiding under the skirts of the larger dresses, or threading between those hanging on the racks and losing myself in the sensation of foreign fabrics softly sliding against my arms and face. For an indefinite time, I explore this garden of taffeta femininity. Emerging from this forest of satin and silk, I see my mom’s friend step out of the changing room wearing her first choice of dresses.
And it’s strange, so very strange that for all the vividness of the memory, the dress itself remains vague and indistinct. There is a powerful impression of ivory, a corona of petticoated pearlescence and effervescent fabric that seemed to draw in and hold the light, and she is made nearly incandescent by her clothes. I stare, utterly enraptured, and a single, absolute certainty burns itself into my young consciousness.
I want to wear that wedding dress.
“That really happened?” Julia interrupted.
I nodded, spearing a morsel of delicately flavoured soy chicken. She’s brought us to a trendy restaurant-slash-bar a short cab ride away from the café. It’s definitely out of Cindy’s price range. Julia chose the seat, and so we’re sat uncomfortably close to the large windows at the front of the restaurant. A steady trickle of people flowed past outside, some pausing and unnervingly glancing in at the patrons. The heavy, tinted windows absorb much of the brutal afternoon heat, but increasingly I’m regretting my choice of clothing: the heavy skirt and fancy underwear might keep me feeling all girly for the encounter, but I could feel what might be boob sweat pooling in my bra, and those damned stockings kept threatening to slip down to my ankles. It felt like my face was going to slide off, and meanwhile Julia seemed totally unfazed by the filtered glare of the sun, perfectly comfortable in her loose and breathable clothing.
And I couldn’t help but gaze enviously at her steak and potatoes, and at the way she wolfed it down with obvious relish. She’s got a frothy pint of beer to wash it back, something craft and local. Meanwhile, I’ve got a plate of fake meat with a small salad and a glass of white wine. Still, as painful and humiliating as the whole act was to maintain, the charade appeared to be working. My ex-girlfriend was buying the lie that her former boyfriend had always been, deep down inside, this prissy and dainty girl….
“And that’s when you knew,” she said.
I swallowed, washing down the chicken with a sip of wine. “Yup.”
“But it was just a dress,” she said, sounding doubtful. “Couldn’t you have just, I don’t know, dressed up in your mom’s clothes when she was at work or something? Like, how did you know you weren’t just a cross-dresser, or just curious or something? We grew up at the height of gender fluidity, right?”
I laughed – an inadvertently genuine one, not one of Cindy softer, controlled giggles. “Where I grew up? Like fuck I could’ve swished around in a dress. I’d’ve been killed.”
Her eyes widened, and she stared at me wordlessly.
“What?” I asked, suddenly self-conscious. “Is it my makeup?” I reached for the phone to check.
She shook her head. “No. No, you look…” She trailed off, and then: “Jesus Christ, you sounded just like… -him-, the way you said that.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It slips out sometimes. I’m working on it but… you know.” I shrugged. “It’s hard.”
“No,” she said, and she shook her head. “I don’t know. Tell me.”
With a little nod, and a lighter voice, I resumed. “But no, that dress changed everything.” So I told her another story, and the whole time I was watching her closely, trying to read her response, trying to bring her to the place, emotionally and mentally, I needed her to be. My story picked up a year later, and how afterwards I shared my secret with a young girl I knew from school called Amelia, a friend who took pity on the small, scrawny, half-foreign kid who so often sat on his own in the playground. How she took me home after school one day, and let me try on one of her party dresses—a frothy, bright red thing—and looked at me sadly, and said: no.
It isn’t right, she said. Boys don’t wear dresses.
And I realised that she was right: boys don’t wear dresses. But wearing that dress that afternoon felt so right and comfortable; it was the most comfortable and right I’d felt my whole life. I knew then that even if boys didn’t wear dresses, that I most certainly would. And by that logic, the only thing that made sense was that for me to be able to wear a dress, that I had to be a girl. Once I was a girl both inside and out, no one would question my right to wear a dress, be it for a party or wedding.
By this time Julia was polishing off the last of her plate. I watched enviously as she speared the final morsel of red meat disappeared between her lips. She knocked back the last of her beer and signaled for the waiter. “And thus Cindy was born,” she said.
“More like killed,” I said, and brought the half-fictional story of my childhood to an end. I told her how Amelia, a few days later, after we had a minor falling out over… something—who knew what trivialities eight-year olds fight about—well, the girl went and told some of the bigger boys in our grade about my love of dresses. She even had a picture on her phone; she hadn’t told me she’d taken in. Cue the age-old story: they called me a sissy and a faggot, they pushed me around, they made my life hell until I snapped and tried to fight back, and then they absolutely destroyed me and I ended up in hospital. It was there during recovery that I learned the best possible thing to do was to leave Cindy behind in that antiseptic palace. I buried her deep, so deeply I nearly forgot about her, and made damn sure nobody was ever able to hurt me like that again.
Julia expression was unexpectedly stony and withdrawn as I wrapped up my story. I couldn’t quite read what she was thinking behind veiled eyes, but when she finally spoke she sounded genuine. “Da…. Cindy. Christ, I’m… sorry, I had no idea.”
I shrugged. “Why would you? I’ve never been one to talk about the past.” Which was the truest thing I’d said that afternoon. “To be honest, the worst thing were the hospital bills.”
The whole story danced flirtingly with the truth, filtered through the fictional pink lens of Cindy’s past but hewing close enough to actual events so that I could remember the story for the future. The conviction of delivery doubtlessly would’ve suffered without its foundation of honesty. My mother did bring me to a bridal shop when I was seven. I may or may not have wandered around a bit before growing bored; I certainly didn’t remember any transcendental revelation beyond the fact her friend looked like too much meat stuffed into a too-tight sausage casing.
And there really had been an Amelia, a seemingly friendly girl who’d taken pity on the lonely, scrawny, half-foreign kid who sat alone in the playground, and she brought me home one day. She showed off her party dress to me, excited about her coming birthday party. I’d been excited as well and held her hand and tried to kiss her. A few days later, when she told me I wasn’t invited to her party anymore because her parents didn’t want me there, I got upset. Then she told some of the other boys that I’d kissed her. They beat the shit out of me and put me in hospital, but I was already a mean little bastard by then, and I brought one of them with me.
And that’s where Sakura found me.
Which, it seems, ultimately led to me sitting here, squirming and sweating, in a skirt. So thanks a fucking lot, Amelia.
“So,” I tentatively asked, in the brief pause as the waiter took away our plates, making room for some desert.
“Yes?” Julia answered distractedly, scanning the drinks menu. “I shouldn’t,” she muttered to herself. “Gotta work tomorrow. Then again: fuck it,” she decided, and when the waiter returned, she ordered desert for both of us, and a Macallan for herself. “Make it a double.”
“I can trust you, right?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“On what you’re trusting me with.” She leaned back, arms crossed, again impassive.
“My life,” I said, sweeping my hair back over the shoulder with a flick of the head and smoothing it down with my left hand, avoiding her gaze. “Please,” I continued, softly, “These past few months, they’ve been… difficult. Like, really difficult, learning to live this new life. I’ve always known this is who I was meant to be…”—and I had to stop here for a moment, to swallow a momentary pang of disgust— “but actually being me, it’s… hard sometimes.
“But I’m getting there!” And here I looked up, locking eyes with her. “I’m learning. Every day I’m a little bit more me, and little bit less… who I was. And then to suddenly meet someone who looks at me and has these memories of who I was, I feel like it knocks me right back to where I started.
“And then if others knew….” I shook my head. “I think it would destroy me.”
Julia stayed silent as the waiter returned, with two thin slices of cheesecake, her whiskey and another small glass of wine for me. She picked up the tumbler and inhaled deeply, and sighed, as she swirled the glass and its golden contents.
“Maybe so,” she answered evenly. “But you still haven’t explained why I should give a fuck.”
“But—”
“No,” she interrupted. She suddenly surged forward in her seat, leaning over the table, her face close to mine, and she spoke in a cold whisper. “Fuck you, David. Or Cindy. I don’t give a shit who you think you are. And I don’t care how hard your life is. Why should I?
“You say your life’s difficult. Welcome to the party, girl. Yeah, life’s tough being a woman. And you’ve been one for what, two months, and you’re already complaining? Thirty years of living it up with the patriarchy, and now after a couple of months of guys staring at your tits, you’re already complaining?
“That’s not—”
“Fucking deal with it. Like, sure, it sucked that you had a rough childhood. It sucked you didn’t get to wear all those pretty dresses you wanted to wear. And yeah, I get it, maybe that made you into the twisted pile of toxic masculinity bullshit I fell in love with ten years ago. I get it.
“But the fact remains: you hurt me. You wrecked years of my life, years I’ll never get back, and I don’t fucking care what happened to you that made you into such a colossal prick. And maybe you can sit there, all dolled up sexy, and sure, it’s a new you, but it’s still you, you who hurt me, so sorry, Cindy, if I’m not particularly inclined to forgive and forget tonight.” There was an almost chilling intensity to her delivery, a clipped, rapid monotone; was this, at least in part one of the speeches she’d practiced over the years? Were we just performing rehearsed scripts tonight, engaged in a melee of prepared dialogue and practiced emotions?
“So again: why should I give a fuck what you want?” Her eyes blazed and her cheeks were flushed, and there was something wonderfully sexy in her anger and her closeness that suddenly had me sitting uncomfortably.
Just as suddenly as she’d moved in, she sat back, and was all smiles again. Very deliberately, she sliced off a piece of her cheesecake and stabbed it with her fork. She took a bite. “Mmm,” she sighed, momentarily closing her eyes. “So good.” Gesticulating with her fork, pointing the tip at me, she added, “You really should try it.”
Carefully maintaining Cindy’s façade—her mouth a little ‘o’ of surprise and horror, eyes widening and near tears—and with a slight tremble to my hand, I reached for my glass and took a desperate sip of wine. As though unable to meet her hungry gaze, I looked aside and outside. There was a young man there, silhouetted against the setting sun, watching us through the window and my reflection in it. Our eyes met; he grinned and made an obscene gesture; and laughing, walked away.
“I… I need the toilet,” I whispered, standing up, smoothing down my skirt, reaching for my clutch, fumbling as the strap got tangled in the chair, the very image of feminine distress.
“Yeah, whatever.” Julia waved one hand dismissively. “Take your time. I’m in no rush.”
***
Clattering heels pursued me into the women’s washroom, where I locked myself into a stall and sank exhausted onto the toilet. Skirt up, panties down; cautious release of cock and balls; a deep sigh of relief. Making the decision to leave my bits free, I trusted secrecy to the tightness of the underwear and the heaviness of the skirt.
The women’s washroom oozed gentle coziness, suffused with gentle lighting from sunken recesses. Soft music tinkled in the background and a faint scent of rosewood drifted on the air. The mirrors were brightly lit and I leaned close and stared at my reflection over the counter, as I had so often these past few months. An attractive young woman stared back, though truth be told, the strain of the past few hours was beginning to show, in her makeup, around her eyes. She smiled tentatively. Her smile widened into a grin, into a grimace; a sudden, mad impulse to laugh, to scream, to smash the mirror and howl shuddered through me with an intensity that left me panting.
Deep breath. Instead, I reached for makeup. Dabbing gently, I started cleaning away the afternoon’s sweat with blotting paper. Leaning in close to the mirror, glittering emerald stared back. “Under all that makeup, there’s still something of the old you in the eye,” she’d said, and if so, memory-me, that old-I, watched mockingly as I fumbled for a little pot of cream blush.
And I can’t believe this is happening, dotting and blending spots of colour into my cheeks, that Julia’s resentment runs so deeply, what the fuck is wrong with that woman? Yeah, sure, I’d ended thing poorly. And she was right: dumping her the way I did was cowardly, weak, wrong; unmanly. Wrong, but for fuck’s sake, it’s hardly like she was the only one who suffered. A year on from her death, the memory of Sephy was still too fierce, the guilt and the pain and the loss, all twisted and mixed in with the sense of betrayal and resentment and fury at the way I’d been dumped on the streets for a year, a whole goddamn year lost to hard pavement, indifferent cruelty, and callous anonymity that nearly annihilated me. Even now, with a determinedly steadied hand, smoothing out the fine lines where concealer had gathered under the eyes, I struggled to suppress the residual rage that remained a decade later.
I never promised her anything! We were together for what, a few months? Three fucking month. I never told her I loved her. I never asked her to move in with me or offered to marry her. We went out to nice restaurants, I paid for good food and drink, and then we fucked. It was fun. For a couple of months!—and then it was over. It was over and she must realise that, for all the time and energy she’d poured into practicing furious, empty speeches over the years—that I had barely thought of her at all.
Eyes were tricky: a touch of shadow in the crease to bring some colour back and I left it at that. What, exactly, had she fallen in love with, anyways? What, exactly, had I offered her then that was so fucking special? A deeply damaged soul in need of repair? An up-and-coming corporate star? Had she seen potential, a gemstone in the rough in want of polishing before mounting, displaying, possessing?
I suppressed a laugh. No. Picking up some powder, quickly and lightly setting my face, I knew it was so much simpler that that. Julia, twenty-two years old Julia: fresh and young in her first real job out of university; innocent and bright, ambitious and hungry; but also… just a girl.
Just a fucking girl, truly on her own for the first time in her life. And that girl of ten years ago had succumbed to the same primitive, instinctive need that filled so many others, that they secretly yearn for: to lose themselves wholly to a man, a real man, to his dominance and strength, confidence and will. And as fucked up as I was, I’d given her all that, and more. And maybe Julia looked back on that with regret, with anger and spite; maybe she hated me, or her younger self, or both; but I’d been everything she wanted back then. And I’d bet what little pride I had remaining that she still loved me, still yearned for me, because at some level she probably could not admit to she still craved to give herself over, utterly and completely, to someone once again.
A touch of lipstick, a darker shade than before, crimson that bordered on purple like a fresh bruise, and the job was done. I stared at my reflection and an attractive young woman stared back, her face fixed, confidence returned. She posed in the mirror, swept her long hair back, made a little kissy face and grinned.
Fucking hell. It was time to bring this performance to an end.
***
I returned to the table to find Julia, a little red in the face, silhouetted in the rosy-hued fading light streaming in from outside, polishing off the last of both the cheesecakes and her whiskey. Sliding into my seat, tugging my skirt down, and facing her, I opened my mouth to speak. “Listen--” but she cut me off.
“So,” she said, and grinned wickedly. “You like cock now?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Like, I know you’ve still got yours, but then things were getting pretty hot and heavy with that guy from the office on Friday night, so I was wondering: you into guys now?”
“Jesus. Julia!”
“Oh, don’t be such a fucking prude.” She shrugged, gesturing for the waiter. “You certainly weren’t before.”
“I’m not a prude.”
“Then spill, girl. You’ve given up oysters for sausage?”
I frowned. “No,” I admitted, reaching for my warming glass of wine. I stared at it for a moment, giving it a little swirl and watching as it sparkled in the ruby light of the setting sun. Fuck it. I knocked it back in one and grimaced. “But even if I had,” I continued. “It’s not something I’d want to talk, is it?”
She laughed. “Like I care?” The waiter sidled up to our table at that moment, and she ordered another double. She raised her eye at me questioningly.
“Yeah,” I sighed, “why not?” and ordered another.
Julia watched the waiter leave and looked askance at me, before leaning in conspiratorially. “So that doesn’t do anything for you?” She nodded towards the waiter. He was a young man, probably about Cindy’s age: white button-down shirt, fitted black trousers, trailing end of tattoos slithering out from under his sleeve cuffs and lurking at his collar. I hadn’t noticed anything else about him, generally a sign he’d been efficient and skilled at his job. “I mean, he’s got a pretty tight ass, right?”
I looked more carefully, trying to see it from her perspective. Tall, slim, dark-skinned; short, spikey hair, hint of muscle beneath his shirt. Like, maybe? If the waiter’d been a girl, yeah, I would’ve paid more attention; and if that’d been a female ass, I’d probably be a bit more into it. She’d be wearing tighter trousers, for one, with maybe a hint of thong threading those cheeks. Crossing my legs tightly under the table, I turned my attention back to Julia. “Sure. I mean—”
“So you are into guys!”
“I don’t know!” I lied. “It’s all new to me, alright?”
“So what was that on Friday, then?”
I groaned. “I was drunk.”
“And loving his tongue down your throat?”
“Please, Jules…”
Julia was still eyeing the waiter, who still seemed blissfully unaware of our scrutiny. He was chatting to an older woman behind the counter. “He’s got nice hands,” she said. “You had strong hands, remember? I like that in a man. Can you imagine him touching you? Firmly, by the shoulder? Sliding down your side, gently? From behind, cupping your breasts….”
Inadvertently, I shivered. And as she continued, she leaned in closer, crossing the distance between us and I could smell the whiskey on her breath as her voice shifted in timber, deepening. Julia sounded eager as she whispered in my ear. “Imagine him behind you. One hand on your boob, the other softly stroking, fingers caressing their way down, across your skin…” Together, heads nearly touching, blonde and black hair pooling at the edge of the table, we followed his movements as he walked nonchalantly to the back of the restaurant. Our gaze followed him, but as Julia continued mine slide further back, to the far end of the restaurant. “He touches your belly. His fingers press into you. He pulls you back, your tummy tightening under his touch, and his breath is hot on your skin, his cock pressing into your ass.”
“Stop,” I breathed.
“Imagine him kneading your tit, thumb on nipple, on your thigh, and his tongue…”
“Stop it!” I hissed, and without looking back my hand snaked out and grabbed hers. “For fuck’s sake, Julia.” I squeezed, hard. “Stop!”
“Hey, ouch! You’re hurting me.”
“Then fucking listen. You see that man?”
“The waiter?”
“No! Past him, back of the restaurant. Don’t stare. See him? Now, sit back – look at me.”
She followed instructions with a bemused look on her face. She gave her hand a little shake. “What the fuck, Cindy, what’s gotten into you?” Her eyes began to slide towards the back of the restaurant.
“Keep your eyes on me, you stupid bitch!”
Her eyes widened. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me,” I said. And as I spoke, I shifted for her eyes and ears only: the timber of my voice, the way I held myself in the seat; Cindy fell away momentarily and for the first time in weeks, I spoke as myself. “Now listen. That man back there. Did you recognize him?”
“What? No, why would I?”
“Back at Café Sporus. Did you see the man with the newspaper?”
“Why are you—”
I cut her off. “Shut the fuck up and answer the question, Little Caesar. Did you see the man with the newspaper?”
She hesitated for a moment. I could see in her eyes as she thought back, through a slight haze of whiskey and conversation. “Yes,” she said.
“What was he wearing?”
“How the fuck should I…,” she started then trailed off. “Tweed suit?”
“And the man at the back of the restaurant—don’t look!—what’s he wearing?”
“I…” Julia’s eyes widened. “Tweed suit?”
“Yeah,” I growled, calmly reaching for my wine. “Got it in one.”
“But that doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “It’s just a coincidence.”
Raising the wine glass to my lips, looking at her over the rim, I slowly shook my head. I knocked the wine back in a single gulp. “No,” I said. “It’s not.”
“Cindy,” she said, leaning closer. “What’s going on?”
“David,” I said, and grabbing her hand I squeezed it hard. She winced; I took some small pleasure in her pain. “My name is David,” I said. “And I’m being followed. We’ve got to get out of here.”
She stared at me blankly for a moment, the nodded.
To her credit, Julia played along beautifully as we escaped the restaurant. We finished our drinks quickly—but not too quickly—and she ordered a cab, which duly arrived as she settled the bill. Laughing, chatting, tossing back our hair as we slid handbags over shoulders, we left the restaurant and slid into the waiting car.
“What the fuck—” she started the moment the door shut, but I cut her off with a look and pointed at the sign on the back of the seat: all rides were audio and video recorded for the safety of the customer and the company. Driverless, the vehicle acknowledged and confirmed our presence, and hummed into the early evening, winding its way to Julia’s apartment.
“Not the day I expected,” Julia muttered.
I laughed. “No kidding.”
“Here. This is for you.” She passed a slip of paper, a number scrawled across its back. I raised an eyebrow. “The waiter’s number,” she said, and despite the tension her eyes sparkled with mirth. “Guess he noticed us checking out his ass.”
We lapsed into silence. I stared out the window, a tight knot in my belly. Outside, the city suburbs slid by, awash in artificial dawn as shop fronts and restaurants, bars and shops spilled their light onto the pavement. Swiftly, we wound our way towards the centre, ever-taller cathedrals of cement and glass clawing the night sky. The moment felt inexplicably familiar—sat in the back of a cab, next to Julia—slipping into the night—though the sleek legs emerging from the short skirt, crossed at the thigh, and the painted fingers clutching tightly at the knee, and the shoes sparkling in the dark, all belonged to the wrong person. And yet despite the incongruity, this moment raised a ghost of shared memory.
We paused at a junction, traffic light momentarily painting us red, headlights strobing from turning cars. A pedestrian, crossing, glancing in would see two attractive women, possibly girlfriends, sat close in the rear of the car.
“Hey, you remember?” she suddenly started, snapping me out of my reverie as the car slid forward.
“The gig?”
She nodded.
“Why’d you suddenly think of that?”
“Dunno.” She shrugged. “Back of a car, it’s a hot night… one of us is wearing a skirt.” She chuckled. “You were remembering too, weren’t you?”
“Harry,” I said, feeling a sudden pang.
She laughed. “Yeah, you loved that old guy, didn’t you? Wasn’t really my thing.” She paused in recollection. “Was a pretty awesome gig, though. Guy knew how to put on a show.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Longman was pretty awesome.”
Sensitive to our words, the car started up some music, not so loudly as to interfere with conversation. It was the classic title track from his second album: Beautiful Losers. The opening melancholy chords filled the space between us.
“Didn’t he…?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “First encore.”
We sat there like that for a moment sharing the music and the memory, and I felt the space—short centimetres, long years—separating us. A crazy impulse to reach out nearly overcame me, to hold her hand or pull her closer. It was the music and the day’s drinking and the darkness outside the car, and I knew she felt it too. Almost too quietly to hear, I heard her whisper: “I didn’t rehearse for this.”
Her words triggered an assault of—not guilt, exactly, but still something like a physical cramp in the belly—discomfort and doubt. Julia didn’t deserve this. Whatever anger and bitterness she felt over me was her own, and she’d clearly worked hard over the years to move on from our past. I could just jump out of the car and disappear. She might reveal my identity; she might not; either way, she’d probably be fine. But if I went home with her now and saw this through, I’d be binding her to me once again. It wasn’t fair to her.
On the other hand, waking up alone with tits and an identity I never chose wasn’t exactly fair, either. Losing my job, my income, my home; losing my self, my sex, my privilege—in exchange for… what, exactly? I glanced down at the paper in my hand, sighed and slipped it into my handbag.
The song ended, surging though the crunchier second half, the intense, short guitar solo that underpinned the lyrics of loss and yearning; and then something else started, somehow recognizable but still unknown. It was definitely more contemporary—dirty beats, layered synth underscored by harsh guitar that briefly surfaced from the aural wash—maybe a sample from Longman?—but then the vocals kicked in, the woman’s ethereal tones ordering the crafted cacophony.
“Turn it up,” Julia commanded, and the car dutifully obeyed.
“What’s this?”
She looked genuinely surprised. “Really? It’s been on constant play like… everywhere. Huge.”
“I’ve been a bit distracted lately.”
“Cindy,” she said. “That’s her name—well, like you, I guess. Spelled differently, though: ‘sin’ in the religious way; capital D – I at the end. SinDi. She just popped up a month ago; major push by the label, we’re doing a bit of work with them, but this track’s just really grabbed the zeitgeist. To be honest, at first I thought she was just another pop starlet of the moment, you know—you should fucking see her! Sexy little thing—but seems she might have traction.”
The song’s appeal was clear: catchy hooks, but with depth; crafted rather than processed. I could already imagine the bass-heavy remix pounding away at a club or relaxing to it in the dark with an acoustic version at home. You could dance to it; you could fuck to it. I liked it instantly, even if the girl’s voice was a little breathy for my taste.
“Song’s called ‘Broken Flowers’,” Julia said, and lapsed into silence as I listened to the opening lyrics:
You’ll miss me when I’m gone
She said
There was a girl
She said
Lip gloss and lilacs
And the moon.
The song was just beginning to open up, the lyrics pulling back as the layered soundscape started to assert itself—and then it faded and disappeared, leaving me wanting more.
“We’re here,” Julia announced.
The cab turned down a short cul-de-sac, leafy and affluent, past a row of terraced houses, and then disgorged us at the base of a turn-of-the-century building, a towering slab of glittering glass, sharp-angled porches and red-brown brick. The car purred off into the night. Drinking in the details of her home, I followed Julia as she led me past the concierge—the bastard’s eyes on our asses as we walked past—and into the elevator. I could sense her assessing me as we surged upwards, feel her growing desire to demand answers. We stopped at the twelfth floor, a few floors shy of the top penthouse. The hallway was silent, brightly-lit, and smelled sharply clean, with only two doors at opposing ends. She led me to the one on the left, tapped the lock and led me into her home.
The door had barely clicked shut before she spun on me, eyes flashing. “What the fuck!” she shouted. “What’s going on—”
Anticipating her outburst, I clapped my hand over her mouth. “Quiet.”
Her eyes glared at me over my fingers.
“Speakers.” I indicated towards one I could see. “Smart appliances.”
Her eyes widened slightly with understanding. A few taps on her phone, and she nodded. “Off.”
“Good,” I breathed, sagging with relief. Heels clicked on the hardwood entrance as I looked around. “Nice place you’ve got here.”
“You’re going to tell me what the hell is going on here – David.”
“Yeah, sure.” I waved her off and sank into the nearest seat, a long sofa in slate grey, lamps responding to my movement and lighting the way into her home. I fumbled with delicate straps and tossed my shoes aside and gave a deep sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God,” I said, stretching out aching arches. “Goddam implements of torture.”
“I thought you loved them.”
“I hate them,” I growled. “And these,” I added, slipping off the bracelets decorating my wrists, unclasping the bauble at my throat.
She watched me quietly, and I ignored her. Julia had a nice place: large, open plan, very contemporary, taking up half the floor. Large windows, blinds pulled aside, granted a view towards both the city centre and opposite, the sprawl of suburban streets stretching towards the horizon. It was darker now; the commercial monoliths cut dark silhouettes in the distance, washed from below in garish street-level glows, glittering along their edges and tops with safety lights. Her furniture looked new and sleek. What I could see appeared startlingly clean. Aside from some token decorations that spoke of the girl remembered from a decade ago, the place felt strangely impersonal, like a show room for a new block of condos. There was a dull comfort and familiarity to her home, like a hotel room you’ve visited a hundred times before in any number of cities. The odd blandness of the place went some way towards tempering the stab of jealousy I felt at the contrast between Julia’s slick accommodations and Cindy’s tiny apartment.
Julia padded into the kitchen, the lights softly rising at her entrance. She pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge and two glasses from a shelf. “You lied to me,” she stated, returning, dropping into the far end of the sofa. She passed me a glass.
“Yup.”
“How much?”
“Almost all of it.” She twisted the bottle open and I held out the glass and she poured a generous serving of Riesling. She kicked off her shoes, legs curling beneath her. In contrast, I sat with my legs spread as wide as the skirt would allow. It felt good to spread out. “Like, 90% of it.” I considered a moment. “Maybe 80%.” The day’s emotional exertion suddenly caught up with me. Given a moment’s peace, I could so easily close my eyes and fall asleep here, like this. Instead, I stared blankly at her ceiling, waiting.
She frowned. “You’re not trans.”
“Ha! No.”
“Makeup?”
“Hate that shit.”
“And that story about the little girl and the bullies and…”
“Ah. That one’s true.” I took a drink of wine, a long one, relishing the crisp coolness of it. Julia served quality stuff. “Except for the bit about the dress.”
Julia took a sip of wine, then carefully placed her glass down on a coaster on the coffee table by the sofa. I could see her struggling; her hand clenched and unclenched and the tension was clear in the tendons of her arm. She struggled to keep her voice neutral. “Then what the hell is going on, David?”
And here it was: my leap of faith.
“Witness protection,” I answered.
“Witness--?”
“Protection.” I took a deep breath. “I saw something I shouldn’t have, and instead of keeping my mouth shut like a sensible person, I told the cops. They kept me in hiding until calling me as a witness.” I took another long drink of wine, nearly finishing it, putting the glass down next to hers, mine holding the reddish half-moon lip mark on the rim while hers didn’t. “Afterwards, it became very clear, very quickly, that my life was in danger.”
Julia raised an eyebrow. “Death threats?”
“I wish,” I answered drily, and told her in minimal details about the attempt on my life outside the courtroom: two bullets, one jacket, and bruises and broken ribs.
Her mouth dropped open in horror. “No way.”
“Yeah.” I pointed to where the bullets hit. “Here and here. Scary shit. And so my handler—that’s the agent appointed to keep me alive—she decided to smuggle me away to somewhere safe to recover. In a dress.”
“No!”
I smiled ruefully. “Yes. Well, sort of. Tight jeans, stuffed bra, heels and makeup, wig. Enough to fool anyone from a distance while she escorted me.” The events all seemed a lifetime ago. After all, these events belonged to the story of David Sanders – not Cindy Bellamy. But telling the story brought it back vividly, those bizarre, synthetic breasts K stuck onto my chest at the start; the impossible bio-engineered pussy that came later; and K herself, stern and sexy and twisted. The short, intense time we spent together. The drive and the hotel room. The Clinic.
“But it didn’t work. There was a man chasing me. He found me. He broke my arm,” and I held out the injured limb, delicate and smooth, bare to the shoulder, for Julia to see. “Here, with an iron bar.” I gestured without touching at my face. “Smashing in my nose and jaw. He tossed me through a glass door, he cut me, he shattered my leg. And then he shot me in the side. I think he tore a hole in my lung; I don’t really remember. There was a hell of a lot of blood.”
Julia looked a little ashen, shaken as her mouth hung open. She turned away, silently grabbing the bottle and refilling our glasses and passed one back to me. I took it gratefully and drank deeply.
I hadn’t really reflected on my near assassination since recovering from the attempt, nor had the opportunity to share the experience with anyone. Doing so brought a flurry of conflicting emotion: mostly, and most vividly, I remembered the sheer joy of the fight, of cutting loose after so many years of playing nicely according to the mundane rules of David’s life. Even hampered by ridiculous clothing, matched against an opponent enjoying every possible advantage… I’d held my own; gave as good as I got; and yeah, I should’ve died then and there but I took the fucking bastard with me. The vivid slash across the neck; the gurgle and crimson froth; eyes wide with the realisation of his own death: there was a savage satisfaction to it all.
But he’d killed me. At least, I should’ve died. It would’ve saved me the living death, the slow, painful humiliation of inhabiting Cindy’s life. But for the unlikely intervention of the Asklepios Clinic’s freaking Frankenstein science, that would’ve been the end of the story of David Sanders: ten years the corporate stooge; what was the fucking point? And I probably should be shaken, deeply traumatised by the experience of brutality and pain and the reality of my near death. It was the stuff of nightmares.
But I already had my own nightmares and they weren’t so easily displaced. It wasn’t my first brush with death. And other than a visceral thrill at the memory of violence, I couldn’t summon up anything greater than apathy at the thought of David’s demise. It was almost as though he’d hardly existed to begin with.
Julia was watching me carefully, studying the play of emotions across my face. She was clearly carefully considering what to say next.
“You’re lying again,” she said.
“Nope.” I shook my head, blonde tresses falling about my face. With a flick of the neck, I sent my hair back over my left shoulder, and smoothed it down with a quick stroke the hand. “This part is true. They got me. I was a goner.”
“But…”
“You said it was impossible for me to look this way.” I smiled wryly. “Maybe you’re right. But everybody knows there’s some pretty crazy shit out there these days. Like, there’s a goddam factory on the Moon, right? We’ve got people half-way to Mars. There was all that medical voodoo shit they did when the last pandemic hit a few years ago. So, yeah, I got to experience some of that stuff up-close, I guess. They dunked me into some kind of tank, a bleeding wreck of a corpse; and I came out like this.”
“A girl!”
“A disguise,” I insisted. “Remember that scandal last year, at the Olympics, the gene doping one? It’s like that, I think, something like that but instead of expressing all those genes for strength and endurance and whatever, they went for—this.” I cupped the soft flesh of my chest. “Tits and soft skin and long hair and… all the rest.” I could feel the anger creeping into my voice, the frustration and sense of betrayal, the intense humiliation.
“And this all happened a few months ago?”
“More like six, going back to the very start. The tank was about four months ago.”
She shook her head. “But it’s not possible. If what you say is true: shot, cut, broken, bleeding out. Nobody heals that quickly, not even with crazy voodoo science.”
“Like I said before: here I am.”
“Show me,” she said.
I raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“I want to see,” Julia answered. “Stand up. Strip. Show me.”
“Didn’t you see enough on Friday?”
But she hadn’t, and so I did. In the dim lighting of Julia’s living room, I stood there, carefully undoing the heavy buttons until I could wiggle free of the skirt. The wine, on top of the day’s earlier drinking, rushed to my head and I fumbled with the buttons and my longer nails again felt ungainly. The skirt pooled at my feet, revealing smooth, shaven thighs over lacy stocking tops. With some awkwardness, I reached for the buttons running up my back, and shimmied out of my shirt, and in doing so found myself standing in nothing but my underwear—pink push-up bra, bulging thong, white thigh-high stocking—and earrings and makeup, in front of my ex-girlfriend, and I trembled very slightly despite the warmth, a deep flush slowly crawling up my chest and throat.
Julia circled me, drinking in every detail of my femininity, and I saw in her gaze the same ravenous hunger, the insatiable desire, that I sensed earlier in the day. Clearly, it was all she could do to refrain from reaching out and touching me, and stroking the smooth, whole skin. I felt acutely aware, for the first time, how she was larger than me now, taller as I stood there barefooted; and uneasiness fluttered across my belly.
“No scars, nothing,” she said.
“I know. Crazy, right?”
“But you were… shot?”
“Right fucking here,” I said, and took her hand. She jerked slightly at my touch but allowed me to bring her to a place over my ribs halfway between hip and armpit. Her touch lingered there, hot, uncertain, but then she tentatively pressed at the spot. “Does it hurt?”
“Not at all.” I giggled, involuntarily. “It tickles a little, actually.”
Her hand slowly traced a path down my side, towards my waist. She was standing directly in front of me now, our foreheads nearly touching. “There isn’t a mark on you.”
“Nope.”
Her fingertips hovered at the edge of my abdomen, at the waistband of my panties. “You used to have a birthmark here.”
“Gone.”
With gentle prodding, she urged me to turn. Her touch explored my shoulder, my back, a finger traced down my spine. “You had scars here,” she said, “and here, and here.” She punctuated each with a touch.
“All gone.”
She stood so close I could feel the heat from her body. Her hand briefly, tantalisingly brushed across my ass, bared and supple, split by the thong wedged between both cheeks. I felt her presence, her touch, with painful intensity, and trembled with arousal. There was a faint smell to her—a miasma of memory—that carried with it recollections of intimate times together.
“Unbelievable,” she whispered.
I took her hand in mine again, turned to face her. “You should check this out,” I said, and brought her hand to my breast.
She pulled her hand away.
“Hey, it’s fine,” I said, bringing her back.
Her breath tickled my collarbone and sent an errant strand of hair dancing. Her hand rested tenderly, almost nervously, over my boob, the gauzy fabric of the bra a flimsy barrier between her touch and my flesh. At her nervous touch the flush felt earlier, the embarrassed heat crawling up my neck into my face, now rolled downwards, hotter than before, intensifying as it flowed into and filled those tits. There was a sudden urgent need for someone—for her—to grab my boobs. Almost incoherent images of Julia, grabbing, fondling, sucking flesh and nipple flared across my eyes.
The immediate reaction to her touch—a weakness in the knees—ache in my balls—a sudden tightness at the centre of each breast—surprised, unsettled me with its intensity. What I now felt was disconcertingly different from my own rough handling, the drunken groping of infrequent lonely nighttime masturbations over the previous months. Julia’s touch brought sensations that differed in magnitude from those experienced with the fake tits of before. Dan hadn’t quite reached second base, last Friday… would it have felt like this if he had?
And the realisation that this was the first intimate contact I’d made with anyone for months flared through me. Her hands were the first to touch these fucking udders other than mine. Her shy touches were waking in me a desperate yearning that threatened to overwhelm any control.
How much of my torment did she even notice? Did the corner of her mouth twitch into a hint of a wicked smile? Eyes downcast, she watched her own hand as it grabbed more firmly. She felt their weight in her hand. “How big are you?” she asked, gently kneading.
“B cups,” I gasped.
“Amazing,” she said, and looked up. Her eyes found mine. “You’re… beautiful,” she breathed.
A shudder coursed through the entirety of my body at her words, her touch, and at the force of her look. We were so close I could feel the warmth flowing from her, smell the day’s heat in her hair. And then suddenly, my lips found hers. My mouth crushed against hers and I groaned into Julia, leaning fully into the kiss, arms rising to encircle her, to pull her closer. Fleetingly, I felt the softness of our lips’ meeting, mine slick with lipstick and gloss, a hint of berries and a taste of wine, and she seemed to collapse into me…
“No,” she cried. The hand at my breast shifted: her fingers abruptly pinched the nipple and twisted, painfully. I cried out in surprised pain. She shoved me away, fiercely, and I stumbled, tangled in the clothes at my ankles. Julia lurched back, eyes shadowed and glittering like obsidian. She passed the back of her hand across her mouth, wiping away the tacky hint of gloss left there.
“Fuck!” I instinctively crossed my arms over my chest, seething at the ignominiously throbbing of my nipple.
“No!” She was breathing heavily, flushed and her whole body quivered like a plucked, taut string. “You don’t get to kiss me,” she said. “You don’t get to touch me.”
“I—”
Her hand lashed out with surprising speed. Even had I wanted, drunk and discombobulated, off kilter and distracted, arms crossed, there was no way I could have blocked or dodged. Her slap took me fully across the face. I reeled back, face smarting, eyes watering.
A moment later, she had me up against the wall. Taller, bigger, stronger, she grabbed my wrists and held them above my head with one hand. Her body pinned me to wall. Her other hand found my tit again, squeezed, finger and thumb pinching the wounded nipple through the thin fabric, twisting once more. Redoubled pain erupted under her grip, hot and intense and I struggled briefly against her grip. Without releasing my wrists, she slammed me back once more against the wall, and her hand released my aching boob and snaked up between us and latched around my throat.
And I could’ve thrown her to the ground, broken free, easily. She wasn’t a fighter. A little bigger and stronger, sure, but a subtle shift of weight, a twist from the waist and she’d go down. I could’ve headbutted her in the face and smashed in her nose; kneed her in the crotch; reversed her sloppy hold and popped her shoulder out of its joint or snapped her elbow. This bitch wasn’t a fighter, but I submitted passively to assault. I was curious; I’d anticipated something like this; and truth be told, the roughness and hell, even the pain was sort of exciting as her fingers curled around my neck.
“You…,” she breathed. “You goddam, fucking bastard.” Her mouth was right up against my ear. “I hate you. I hate you so much.” She bit down, once, into the cartilage above the earring. I inhaled sharply from the pain. Spinning me around, she dragged me sideways towards the window.
“Look at you.” My reflection mocked me as she held me before the framed night, a feminine image caught between the light inside and the outside darkness. “So small, so weak,” she murmured. “So pretty.” She released my wrists, and I felt her fumble at my back and then yank the bra down my arms. My tits popped free, momentarily, before she seized both roughly, shoving them upwards, displaying them rudely in reflection.
“Did you want these?”
“No,” I whispered.
Her hand snaked into my hair, fingers curling deeply into my mane, grabbing a fistful, and then pulling harshly. I gasped. “Did you want this?”
“No.”
“You make such a pretty girl, David. Is this what you wanted?”
“No!”
Next I knew, she had me pressed up against the window. My tits flattened against the cool glass. God, what must this look like from outside? Then she spun me back around. “Good,” she hissed. And the kiss that followed was fierce and angry and passionate, her tongue forcing its way in, and her hands were on my ass, squeezing, then groping at my chest again, or grabbing a fistful of hair, or at my neck, and then back at my ass.
And she would pull me forward into her and then shove me back, bared ass smacking rudely up against the cool windowpane. And my cock strained against its confines, and my balls ached for release, and I groaned as she attacked me in her anger and passion. All those months of stifled, frustrated desire swelled up and it was all I could do to restrain myself from throwing this bitch face down across the back of her sofa and show her just how manly I remained, how a disguise of tits and ass and long hair didn’t make me any less a man.
But I didn’t. Instead, I dropped my arms limply at my side. Behind the blonde curtain of hair I hid my face, and when she next kissed me, savagely, I let her. Her breath was hot and angry on my face, my neck, my shoulder; she bit; her entire body coiled around me as she straddled my leg, thrusting against me, sliding back, pushing again, riding my thigh. Her thumb pulled at my lip, smearing lipstick, forced its way into my mouth. She buried her face into my hair and her thighs suddenly clenched tightly, painfully around mine one more time.
Julia shuddered, and with a long, rapturous moan she came.
She held me there, pinned against the glass, panting heavily. Her touch lingered, briefly, lightly stroking, as though trying to trace a forgotten pattern within my flesh. Then she withdrew, and Julia appeared momentarily stricken and aghast; but the haunted look quickly disappeared.
“Not a word!” Julia glared and stalked towards me, now a predatory gleam to her dark eyes. There was a wet patch at the crotch in the thin fabric of her trousers. Her fingers hooked the waistband of my panties and tugged.
“Easy!” I complained.
“Get those fucking things off,” she said, and her fingers curled around my throbbing, erect cock.
I hastened to do as she ordered, kicking them away, but as I went to roll down the stockings she slapped my hand away. “No, keep those,” she said. “You look cute in them.” She gave my member a little tug, leading me towards what I presumed was her bedroom. But such was the turmoil of emotions I felt in the instance—raging desire, profound shame, weakness, surprise, drunkenness and anger, a seething, toxic slurry roiling in my belly —that my legs gave way and I stumbled, pitching forward.
Julia caught me and I fell into her. We sank to the floor together, her arms suddenly wrapped around me, strong, confident. And it felt unexpectedly good being held by her: I felt suddenly both small and protected, delicate and precious, in the comforting folds of her arms. Confused and sickened by this weakness, I furiously suppressed a sudden desire to tear up and sob. There wasn’t time to even consider where this surge of feminine emotion originated as Julia’s boobs pressed up against mine though her thin shirt. Our hair pooled together, black and blonde. “Jules…” I gasped.
She pawed at my painfully erect cock once more. “I’ve wanted this thing inside of me since I saw it last Friday,” she whispered into my ear. Her grip on the shaft tightened, thumb sliding across the smooth lip of the helmet. “You want it too, don’t you?”
Breathing heavily, I nodded.
“Then fuck me, David, like you used to,” she said.
***
Laying in the tangled mess of bedsheet in the dark, Julia’s languid body curling into mine, I marvelled at how great sex felt after months of deprivation. A man trapped on a desert island for months, denied proper food, rediscovers the glorious riot of flavours denied for so long. Deafened, then with hearing restored, a woman realises a taste for music previously absent, relishing in the purity of tones and the crystalline cadence of sound. How could sex be any different? My body still thrummed with the intensity of it, the release, the fullness of giving and receiving pleasure. And though I’d admit to being a little out of practice, I more than made up for it with effort, keeping up with Julia’s voracious appetite. Damn those doctors for what they did to me, but an unexpected benefit of this whole-body reboot was that I could fuck like a twenty-year old again.
Luxuriating in post-coital contentment, I stared up at the ceiling, listening to the quiet sound of her breathing and the distant murmur of the late-night city. I felt both exhausted and exhilarated. I lost count of how many times she’d panted, moaned, juddered and cried out in orgasm. I’d managed a hat-trick of my own, pacing myself according to the brief breaks she’d allowed: here, a few minutes for a piss and to scrub my face clean; there, a glass of water; we’d kept it going into the early hours of the next day. The sliding door to her bedroom patio stood ajar—we’d fucked out there too, her moans drifting into the dark—and now the breeze caressed my legs still in stockings; she’d insisted I keep them on all night. Goose pimples rose and fell across my thighs; nipples tightened in the cool air. A crescent moon, its sliver of brightness hidden behind gauzy shreds of cloud, extended pale ivory tendrils into the room.
And then, perhaps as a consequence of the quiet and calm and the woman resting in the crook of my arm, I remembered a girl called Molly.
***
One night the street, curled up in a doorway shivering through the long hours of cold loneliness. The next night a stained mattress in a tiny room over a nightclub. One more and now a soft bed, the faint scent of perfume, cheap framed poster of sunflowers and a girl, gently snoring through to morning.
How did it happen, this transition? I can’t remember. I purposely forgot what it was that drove me to cash in the favour that got me off the streets, only that one day I made the decision to bring that period of my life to an end. There was a year of living death, of hollowed existence drifting through empty days, of cold and bitterness and hunger and anger and sadness; though everything, actions and emotions, events and thoughts, seemed muted and distant. Time, obliterated. Then suddenly a morning in which I walked up to one of Tahir’s nightclubs and asked for help.
The guy owed me from a thing a few years back, and the only problem was convincing the staff to let me talk to him. He took one look at me, nose and thin moustache wrinkling with disgust, and led me to the showers. Brutally hot water hammered my emaciated body, carving rivulets through the thick dirt and caked grime. The water ran brown and I stood there insensate, watching the past year slough off and circle the drain, until he cut the heating and the icy spray shocked me back to life. He had fresh clothes for me: jeans, a t-shirt, underwear still wrapped in packaging, clear socks. Food and a place to hole up until I found my feet.
I’d wondered at the time whether he knew what happened to me, about Persephone’s murder and my failure to prevent it. I didn’t ask; it didn’t do to pry. Tahir wasn’t one for extended conversation anyway. Tall and taciturn, with an odd predilection for velvet suits, once presentable he invited me to sit with him.
“You have come to me,” he said, over steepled fingers, long and precise. “You have given me a problem to solve.” He frowned. “I do not like this problem.”
I shrugged. At the time, asking for anything beyond a shower and a free meal seemed presumptuous. I’d saved his life, once; now, he offered the same in return.
“Your problem,” he continued, “is your past…,” and here, he called me by a name I no longer use. “For one so young, you have a very troubled past. Many skeletons. Much darkness.” He shook his head. “And of course, a woman we both know.” He opened his hands, revealing a single, pink petal.
“Sakura.”
“But perhaps,” Tahir continued, “There is a solution to our problem.” And he slid a large, thick envelope across the table to me.
I opened the envelope, shaking out its contents. There was a flutter of documents, a brief shower of hard plastic, a key. I picked up one of the cards. It was a drivers’ license, with an unfamiliar name: David Sanders.
“This man,” Tahir said, “this David, he does not have a troubled past. He is a young man with a fine past. He is a young man with a bright future. A fine future, with much potential.”
The offer was clear. Tahir would set me up with a new identity. He’d put me up for a year in a little apartment above one of his clubs, and in return I’d work for him, first as a bouncer, then as a bartender, possibly even as a manager. Afterwards I’d be free to go; David Sanders would be free to step away from the ruins of another man’s past.
“But you must agree,” he said, gently drumming the table with his fingers. “To say farewell to that past. Your past, it remains far away, yes? Like a foreign country. It is no longer yours to visit.” The implications were clear: if I accepted his offer, the person I’d once been was effectively dead—gone—twenty-two years of my life written off as a bad debt and forgotten. What family I had: gone. Friends: gone. Sakura, Persephone…
An easy choice to make.
That first night, head swirling at how quickly everything had changed, I sat at the bar in borrowed clothes, drink untouched, feeling absolutely lost, watching as the first patrons arrived. Nominally, I was there to learn something about the job but really it was just to experience normal—ha!—society again after so long out of it. And this girl came up to the bar, ordered a drink, and after a pause turned to me.
“Hey there.” The girl seemed impossibly pretty, dark-skinned and curvy with a beautiful smile, her outfit glittering with a thousand sequins and I wondered why she’d speak to somebody like me. “Haven’t seen you here before.”
At a loss as to how to react, I tried copying her. My smile felt like an ill-fitting mask dragged over unwilling features. Opening my mouth to speak, nothing came out. Annoyance flashed across her face, but also disappointment; she began to turn away; and it seemed as though the mask I wore was no different from the one she wore, too. Sadness simmered beneath the surface, loneliness and hurt, an echo of my own. And though it seemed the hardest thing in the world, I answered her.
“Hi,” I said.
She smiled. “I’m Molly.”
Later, laying in her soft bed, her plump, beautiful body warm and comforting lying next to mine, I bid farewell to my old life. Maybe he was still out there somewhere, cold and alone, sleeping rough, his existence coiled around an emptiness, a loss and a mistake that could never be fixed. He could stay there, that sad, broken boy. I looked down at the girl nestled up to me, the source of my newfound solace. David, I swore, would never be alone again.
She stirred in my arms. “Hey there,” she murmured, eyes still closed.
“Hey.”
The girl spread one hand flat across my pectoral, and she nestled deeper into the crook of my arm, sighing. With her other hand, she patted my cock once as though congratulating an eager puppy. “That was fun.”
“Yeah.”
“You never even told me your name.”
“David,” I told her. “My name’s….”
***
“David. Mmm,” Julia purred, her hand sleepily sliding its way back to my breast. “I like this,” she said, squeezing the soft flesh.
“I noticed.”
“And this.” Her knee gently prodded my exhausted and semi-flaccid penis.
I grunted.
“We’re going to have so much fun together,” she mumbled.
I smiled, and lightly danced my fingers down her side.
“I’ll help you,” she said.
“Help me?”
“Teach you.”
“Teach… what?” My fingers hesitate at her thigh.
“To be a girl,” she said, and she stirred against me, turning onto her side and opening her eyes. “To be my girl.”
“Jules…,” I started, a warning tone entering my voice.
“Oh, I just love you like this,” she continued. “Small and soft. Submissive. So much better than the arrogant prick you used to be.”
I went to pull away from her, but her hand at my breast, her leg over mine, restrained me. “And you, hating every minute of it! It’s more, so much more and better than I could have possibly hoped for. The man who fucked me and ruined me and left me—trapped! Living a life he despises, living as a girl, experiencing everything he’s looked down at and derided his whole life.” Speaking like this, she slowly slid on top of me, her whole body pressing down on me, breast to breast, her hands seeking mine, fingers interlacing, holding me down.
“You’ll be my little doll for me, won’t you, David, wearing what I choose for you; my little puppet, mincing and prancing when I pull your strings? I’ll pick the prettiest outfits for you, David, the sexiest clothes, and show you off at all kinds of fun places.”
I tried to push her off but she had me pinned to the bed. “Fuck you, Jules, I’m not going to—”
But she cut me off with a deep and passionate kiss, stifling my protest. Then she kissed my cheek, lightly licked the edge of my ear, and whispered: “But of course you will,” she said. “Or I’ll tell your secret.”
Going limp beneath her, I hissed, “you wouldn’t.”
Kissing lightly down the neck, across my collarbone: “Wouldn’t I?”
“I’ll be killed. You’re not a killer.”
She paused, and when she spoke her voice quavered with momentary weakness. “No, I’m not,” she said. “Even after what you’ve done to me, I don’t wish you dead.” Then she resumed her tender ministrations, small wet kisses and darting tongue, as she worked her way towards my tits, her whole body sliding down my length. “I’d much rather have you like this,” she said. Her tongue flicked across my erect nipple; my whole body tensed; I released a sharp intake of breath. “You could enjoy it too.”
“I hate this,” I snarled, or tried, voice inadvertently squeaking as her tongue flitted out again. Throughout our night of frantic screwing, she’d largely abandoned her early fixation on my tits, other than the occasional, almost haphazard grope. Now, she was awakening sensations in my breasts that were new and, because unfamiliar, distinctly uncomfortable; on the threshold of painful, despite this new tenderness; and yet somehow also intensely pleasurable.
Pleasure this feminine, I didn’t want to indulge; but shit, it felt so good, like something hot and fluttery cocooning in my belly, working its way free.
“Good,” she said, her breath hot against my skin as she slowly circled the nipple with the tip of her tongue. “And here’s the thing, David. I’m still angry with you. I want to hurt you the way you hurt me.
“And you’re right: I probably wouldn’t give away your secret. Purposefully. But in anger? Or when I’m drunk and bitter? What then? I can’t promise I wouldn’t… slip, wouldn’t forget, just for a moment.” Her hand spidered up my side, her thumb flicking across my other nipple; and my whole body twitched in response. “Like you did on Friday.”
Intended as an angry grunt, the sound that escape my parted lips was a moan: softly sighed, distinctly feminine, intensely embarrassing; and in hearing myself, it suddenly seemed as though I could see myself, or rather Cindy, imagine her pinned beneath this larger, supple woman playing with her tits. A switch flicked: the cocoon split; heat blossomed; and warm pleasure suddenly coursed through me as I submitted to Julia’s touch.
“Don’t you think,” she said, “It’d be better if you kept an eye on me?” and her lips gently closed around the nipple, and softly suckled, her tongue still indolently circling; her other hand picked and plucked and pulled at the other nipple; and my whole body quivered, back arching. I was instantly hard, again. Her mouth was at my teat; one hand at the other breast; and the other curled around my shaft and slowly began to pump.
“Julia….” I bit back an unmanly whimper, squirming beneath her.
“Will you be my Cindy?”
“I—”
Her hand slowed, even as I ached for release. “We could have so much fun together,” she said. “Imagine going out together, dressed up all sexy, high heels and tight dresses.” She slowly resumed stroking, and continued the nipple play, and darted down for quick, sharp kisses between words. “We could drive the boys crazy, couldn’t we, tease them all night long? And each time we touched, knees beneath the table, a finger caressing a bare shoulder, and in the toilet fixing each other’s makeup, we’d know, wouldn’t we, we’d know what’s waiting for us when we walk away from those pricks?”
And again she slowed, stopped, bringing me painfully close to climax, but this time to rise up over me, her wet pussy hovering over my throbbing member. And in the moonlit darkness of the room I could make out Julia’s hungry, fierce grin, her eyes sparkling in the ivory glow. “We come home and fuck,” she said, and she grabbed my tits and clenched tightly as she impaled herself on my cock.
I gasped, and she cried out in exultant pleasure.
And as she rode me, she told me what we could do together, how she’d take care of me, teach me to be the best Cindy possible, her Cindy, a girl nobody could ever possibly recognize as that wicked, nasty, piece-of-shit man from her past. I’d be hers, she’d be in charge, but she’d keep me safe and protect me. She’d check in on me at work, take me out for dinner, watch me blush as the boys hit on me, watch me squirm, watch me blush, and smile as I was forced to play the part of the girl I’d once have fucked. Another notch on the bedpost, used and discarded, but this time, this time, oh this time I was the fluff, the flirt, the little bitch, her bitch, her slut, and—
If we hadn’t woken up the neighbours earlier, she must’ve gotten them this time. Gasping and grunting her filth into my ear, her whole body went rigid as her voice rose through its bitter hiss into a triumphant yowl, eyes rolling back into her head as she rode my cock to climax.
She collapsed onto me, gasping for breath, utterly spent. A few minutes later her breathing eased, softened – and Julia fell asleep, snoring slightly. I sighed, still skewering her sopping wet cunt, ignominiously pinned to the bed beneath her weight. My erection wilted and after a half-hearted effort to shift her, I gave up and resigned myself to an uncomfortable night.
I grinned.
Goddam stupid fucking cunt bitch. Enjoy your little games, Julia. Have fun with the fantasy. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Everything had gone—more or less—as I’d expected. The man in the café, and the one at the restaurant: two different men, of course, but it was a stroke of luck they’d been wearing something passably similar. It’d been enough to convince Julia of danger, trick her into bringing me home. And once we’d crossed the threshold into her apartment, sex had been an inevitability.
And yeah, she’d been a bit more… dominant, than I liked but fuck me if I hadn’t needed it. She wanted me; God damn, she wanted me so badly! There was a fierceness and purity to her desire that bordered on the manic, but it paired up perfectly with my own needs.
Reflecting back over the past few days—or week, or months—I could now recognize how loneliness gnawed at me. Admitting this was more difficult than expected. But it was true, and it was affecting me in odd ways. Stepping off the bus early to walk kilometers home, indulging a fleeting experience of being part of a human crowd. Staring through windows, imagining myself sat at the tables within. Even working late, arriving early, simply to be around others—even if being around others reminded me, intensely, of the role I was forced to play and the severe humiliation of my appearance and performance.
I’d kissed Dan—another man!—willingly!—and in my drunkenness might’ve gone even further out of a desperate yearning for physical contact. I’d followed him to the bar that night out of need of companionship, for the sounds and lights of the city, for a beer and a chat, out of a profound desire for society, in a desperate bid to recapture, even if from the female perspective, the simple pleasure of going out on a Friday night. I’d long considered myself above such petty needs. But as days rolled over into weeks into months, trapped in Cindy’s diminutive body and life, it became clear these needs couldn’t be ignored. Cindy was a social creature; apparently, so was I.
I’d lied to myself for too long. Looking back over the years I could see that scorning other people’s company had always driven me to find solace in the arms of whatever slut—bitch—woman—of whatever Molly I could find for the night.
Six months since this whole goddamn ordeal has started, six months without physical intimacy, without social contact—without a good, solid fuck. No wonder I’d slipped up so badly last Friday. No surprise, really, that I’d let slip my secret and told Julia who I was. At some level, I must’ve been desperate to share, to reach out to someone; to maybe find an ally. Frankly, it was a miracle I hadn’t snapped earlier. And if something didn’t change, I’d mess up again, probably worst than before, and end up dead.
Julia’s face was buried between my tits, her quiet snores a secret whispered across the hills and valley of my chest. Our hair mingled in a dappled wave across the pillows. I needed her just as badly as she wanted me. She’d keep my head clear, keep me focused as I figured my way out of this pantomime. I believed her promise to teach me, and as galling as it was, having someone to share the burden of pretending to be Cindy would be… helpful; good, even. Having someone with which I could drop the façade, even if only briefly and be myself—be David—would make it that much easier to hold on to what remained of my masculinity.
So I’d let her play out her little revenge fantasy for a couple of months. I’d fuck her on demand, prance around in the pretty dresses she bought for me, and when the time finally came—well, goodbye and fuck you, Little Caesar, I’m dumping your ass once again. Get yourself back into therapy, you crazy bitch.
After all, a few more months and I’d be done with Cindy, right?
To be continued…
***
Author’s Notes:
What to say after a thirteen-year gap between chapters? I only hope that some of those who enjoyed it in the past, and waited patiently, are able to pick it up again. After posting chapter 3 there were significant changes in my life that led to me abandoning the story. Well, not just
the story. I didn't really write anything for the next decade, aside from a brief period in which I started to revise the whole thing, from the beginning onwards; made some progress; and then dropped it again. And then a few months ago I suddenly found not only the urge but the
willpower to write again and started on Chapter 4. I hope it still matches the original style of writing and lives up to expectations. I enjoyed writing again and am already making good progress on the next chapter.
Of course, comments and feedback are always appreciated, whether positive or critical. I can’t overstate how much it means to know people are actually reading this stuff—otherwise, why write it?
A few changes of note:
•David's dead ex-lover, referenced in a number of flashbacks throughout the story, is now called Sephy.
•Julia, prominent in this chapter, was mentioned in earlier chapters under the name Tammy.
•In earlier chapters, David was written as a man in his twenties. He's picked up a few years in the redraft and is now in his mid-thirties, to leave more breathing room for backstory.
Once I've reached the end of the "season", I'll be going back and reposting the revisions to earlier chapters and hopefully bringing a little more coherence to the whole novel-length text. There are ten chapters planned for season two, and once complete I'll publish it as a single document again.
Finally: when I started this in 2006, it never occurred to me to monetise something like this; now, it seems common. Constant will always be free (if a little... slow, in getting published), but if you enjoy and want more: leave a comment! And if you really like it, why not show it at patreon.com/fakeminsk.
Constant in All Other Things 2
Chapter Five
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
“Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.”
Much Ado About Nothing
Synopsis:
David Sanders, after months of suffering the life-in-disguise forced on him of young, pretty Cindy Bellamy, finally sees a glimmer of hope: a car, waiting to transport him to the Asklepios clinic where he hopes to return to masculinity. But recent past and current travels collapse into each other as he approaches his destination.
What has gone before:
David Sanders saw something he shouldn't have: his boss, pharmaceutical magnate Jeremiah Steele, murdering an underworld rival. Placed in protection, an assassination attempt forces David into the disguise of Cindy, a pretty, young girl. For months he suffers the ignominy of living the life chosen for him, until his real identity is discovered by Julia, a jilted ex-girlfriend. She relished in the revenge exacted on her feminised former lover as David endures in hopes of future release from his humiliating circumstances.
***
The car waited for me as I left for work that morning.
Sleek but understated, slate gray, unmarked with tinted windows, the car gave an attention-drawing beep as I exited the apartment building. The windscreen flashed my name and destination; my phone pinged in confirmation. The door unlocked and opened smoothly at my touch and closed silently after I sat, swung, and slid into the back seat. With a barely audible whir the car set off, a discrete side panel indicating the hours and kilometers remaining for the journey.
Dressed for a workday that was clearly not going to happen, I settled in uncomfortably for the duration of the ride. The car was all but silent as it hummed through the suburban streets, last night’s lurid artificial glows dispelled by harsh morning glare. Driverless, left to my thoughts, I gazed with tired eyes as the buildings and shops, industrial parks and commercial districts scrolled past, thinned out, turned into scattered suburban stretches of detached homes, towering apartment blocks, and cookie-cutter residential strips.
The indicator ticked down, counting me inexorably closer to the Asklepios Clinic.
Could this be it?
God, how I wanted this to be, for this to be the final morning of waking up in Cindy’s shitty little apartment, showering in her dingy, cramped shower, putting on my face in the cracked mirror hanging over the molded plastic sink. No more body-balancing pills with breakfast; no more slipping into panties and bra—complimented this morning by sheer black stockings and suspender belt, Julia’s orders of the day—and tight pencil skirt and blouse. No more heels. No more fucking about with long hair. No more performance: the unending expectations of behaviour and appearance placed on a young and pretty girl in a professional environment, the forced smiles, perky conversations, pleasantness and pleasantries.
No more Julia. And no more Dan.
Could I allow myself the luxury of hope? To give in to the fervent desire that this car trip was a one-way journey with the intent of stripping away this exhausting female disguise? God, how I ached to return to some semblance of my previous life. At this stage I’d take just about anything – fuck it! Leave me short and scrawny, looking like some weedy and weak teenager: I’ll take it! Carve off these tits, filter out these hormones, and just let me be a fucking man again.
Because if this visit wasn’t the end—if the Clinic was just checking up on my health, as the notification that popped up in my calendar this morning suggested—if nothing happened—if I came back in a few days, still Cindy, still living her life…
Groaning out loud, I sank deeper into the seat, deeper into lethargy and despair. Sealed against the outside world, the deep silence of travel soon became oppressive and so, after indulging in a dramatic sigh, I called out to the car. “Hey, how about some music?” A gentle chime confirmed compliance. I’d intended to request some Longman, but instead called out, “Play Sin-DI.” A moment later the opening track began, volume low, a soothing flow of delicate chimes and electronic notes: an impressionist painting of digital keyboards in a Japanese tearoom. Soon, ominous cellos and muted industrial grind began to swell and tear at the comforting aural arrangement, escalating into cacophony that abruptly cut into the first vocal track. I’d been listening to her a lot, and the more I listened the more I liked it. Despite her carefully curated media persona—neo-Goth sensuality, crazy makeup and nails, skin-tight outfits and tits and seductive glares, oozing forbidden passion—the actual music mostly reminded me of Longman’s late experimental stuff.
Hadn’t heard anything about the guy since waking up Cindy. A cursory look online presented all sort of theories from the aging fanbase: away on sabbatical, at a meditative retreat, secretly inspiring troops in a battlefield abroad, working anonymously in the background of the music industry; dead. Last I’d seen him was at the Clinic: moonlight, cool spring air, rustling leaves. Shivering, drawing closer. Embracing. A kiss.
Outside the car, urban remnants gave way to countryside, clusters of browning trees and fields of dried out crops replacing broken, decaying apartment blocks and abandoned shops, the corroded steel and concrete skeletal detritus of another dead town. The window was darkened against the day’s glare and outside curiosity, but I saw myself—saw Cindy—clearly: her made-up face, lipstick and eyeliner and blusher, colours for a young woman’s working day. One finger gently touched her lip and remembered the insistent press, the probing tongue, fingers curling into the flesh of her arm, the stubble that pricked the cheek—the memory of his lips.
Goddammit.
In reflection I then saw myself from a month ago, a reminder of that first morning after Julia’s. Then, too, I’d been dressed for work, a mix of yesterday’s and Julia’s clothes, riding the bus into work and staring blankly over the unfamiliar route. Also tired—yet rejuvenated—mind and body still simmering from the night’s fucking.
A month ago I’d stared into my reflection, searching within exhausted and anxious eyes for a glimpse of myself, for the hint of David, trapped and furious, lurking behind curled, mascara-heavy lashes; and then, as now, found only barely-repressed anger and frustration at the life forced upon him.
***
Waking after a few hours of fitful dozing into Cindy’s daily routine, abbreviated due to hangover: dropping to the floor next to the bed, silently cursing through alternating sets of push-ups and crunches. Shit, shower, shave: armpits and legs, carving tracks through sweet-smelling foam with Julia’s flat-handled razor, leaving smooth skin in its wake. Struggling to remain upright in her expansive shower, fighting fatigue and daily despair, arms braced against the ceramic-tiled wall, hair a heavy hanging cascade as near-scalding water sluiced away the sex and sweat of the night’s passion. Stinging flares as heat discovered bites and bruises across the pert flesh of my tits, especially around puffy nipples still tender from Julia’s abuses.
In the dim light of early morning, within the momentary tranquility and privacy of ablution, I began to doubt yesterday’s choices.
I hadn’t felt this intensely aware of my enforced femininity since the initial awakening several months ago. Not so much Julia’s words and threats as her familiarity with the man I’d been served to highlight how much I’d changed, how much I’d lost and sacrificed. The sense of the profound alienness of my own body had faded over the months—unnervingly so—but now it felt as though everything that had slowly drifted into normality came crashing back as weird and absurd. Under pounding water, I felt those physical differences: the pull of long, wet hair; water coursing over the curves of breasts and hips; plumper thighs and rounded rump; even the droplets that hung suspended in longer lashes and fuller lips. My awareness of these features felt, now, as though I was seeing them from outside myself, imagining how I looked from an external perspective: Julia’s.
These tits, pert and proud, B-cup handfuls of fatty tissue and useless milk ducks topped by coin-sized areola and prominent nipples, a sharp contrast with the hard and sculpted chest of my masculine past. These slim arms, smooth and supple, weak and thin, so easily restrained compared to my previous masculine strength. A decade ago I’d cradled Julia in bed and she’d rested so easily in my embrace, head on chest, loving the power and control implicit in those arms that held her close, protective, vigilant. Those same arms had once dominated her, gripped her by the shoulders and pinned her to the bed as we rutted like animals before collapsing in joyous exhaustion.
And now?
Julia had taken drunken pleasure in highlighting each and every one of my now-diminished features last night, with gentle, stroking touches; coy words and mocking insults, surreptitious licks and kisses and sharp bites; at times with painful yanks and sudden smack.
And it was galling and frustrating and insulting and excruciating and….
I’d fucking loved it.
Our sex was fantastic: Julia’s appetite voracious and vigorous, my own stamina remarkable. I’ve read somewhere that men peak sexually in their late teens, women in their mid-thirties. If so, then perhaps we’d fucked in a way only a psychologically damaged, revenge-fuelled thirty-five-year-old woman could, paired up with an artificially youthened man rocking the body of a twenty-year-old girl: which is to say, passionately, skillfully, repeatedly and exuberantly.
There’d even been fleeting moments during the night, when drunk on wine and sex it felt as I’d reclaimed some lost part of myself, uncovered a precious nugget of masculinity buried these past months under strata of straps and satin and lace. Lucid flashes when I could forget my own jiggling tits and shapely curves and lose myself in snapshots of Julia on her back, moaning in ecstasy, bent double with her legs over my shoulders, me burrowing deep into her, digging deeper, excavating each precious gasp and grunt and earthy demand that I fuck her, fuck her harder, yes, yes, like that, God, oh God, yes….
I came, wearily and I was back under scalding water. Semen and soap swirled down the drain. One hand on my cock, the other massaging water-slick tits. Jesus Christ, what was wrong with me? Like, sure, I’d been pretty much jerking off daily since waking up in this body, but the encounter with Julia felt as thought it had awakened a whole new level of sensuality—and pleasure; it felt as though something fundamental had shifted in my relationship with my body… with this body, I mean. I flicked a protuberant nipple and shivered. Until last night, I hadn’t really played with Cindy’s tit—I hadn’t really dared to. Now, I wondered what I’d been missing out on.
Groaning, I savagely twisted the water over to cold. Pushed back but not quite defeated by an barrage of icy spears, arousal and exhaustion and hangover retreated and remained at bay. I endured the assault for as long as possible, delaying the inevitable.
Today was Monday and Cindy had to work.
Trudging back into the bedroom, I balefully observed that Julia hadn’t stirred. The first rays of summer sunshine were creeping over the horizon, flooding the room with a russet glow. There wasn’t time to head home, change and head to work, so I was going to have to make do with what I already had. Yesterday’s stay-ups were a lost cause, stained and crusted as they were. The skirt and top were just about acceptable for work – I could swap the shoes over once I reached the office but despaired at the thought of mincing my way into the office in heels of that height. Sighing, I resigned myself to the fact I’d be strapping myself back into yesterday’s push-up bra and have tits riding underwire in my face all fucking day. But I drew the line at the panties – they were a sodden, stretched mess, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that scrap of silk threading my ass, let alone the need to tape my cock back. I’d have to borrow a pair of Julia’s panties, hopefully a pair of tights to hold back any bulge.
And that’s when it hit me, really: how the fuck had it come to this? Wearing an ex-girlfriend’s panties, silently slipping into a bra in the near-dark, sitting half-naked at her mirror to put on makeup. Exhausted, mentally rebelling against the idea of dragging myself—of dragging Cindy—into work today, knowing how she’d appear to others, the half-smiles, the smirks and knowing glances behind her back.
Six months ago, I’d witnessed one of the most powerful men in the world murder his rival. An hour before that, I’d been fucking his executive secretary hard against the expansive windows looking down on the distant glittering city sprawl. And now, somehow, I was the fucking secretary.
The sense of absolute emasculation was nearly crushing.
I rolled my shoulder. Shifted my boobs in their lacy cups into a more comfortable position. Sighed, and steeled myself and repeated the daily mantra: Fuck it, just get through this, another day. Looking into the mirror—but not too closely, not into the eyes, studiously avoiding my own gaze, avoiding judgment—I reached for makeup.
Moments later, I swore. “Dammit, Julia,” I hissed under my breath. Tiny vanity drawers clapped open and shut as I clawed through her assortment of vials, tubes and jars. “Where d’you keep the fucking mascara?”
“I could watch this all day,” a tired, amused voice called out from behind. From the bed, and with an infuriatingly pleased smile dancing across tired lips, she watched my attempt at reassembling my face from the wreckage of last night.
“It’s… that one,” she said, waving an idle hand, and then wincing as I banged another drawer open. “Chrissake, David, just… chill.”
“Fuck you, miss work-from-home.”
“That’s Miss Director of Progress to you, thank you very much. Rank hath its perks, bitch.” She paused, as if in thought. “What’s your title again? Secretary?”
I paused in my efforts to glare at her over my shoulder. “Administrative assistant.”
She smiled. “So… secretary.”
Flipped her the finger, I turned my back on her and focused on the pallid face in the mirror. Offering up a curt prayer to the god of cosmetics in thanks for concealer, I popped open the tiny bottle. With swift strokes I began erasing the tell-tale signs of the night’s hedonism, wiping out the rash-like redness across my cheeks, blueish patches below the eyes: the evidence of several bottles of wine and hours of pounding each other like beasts in heat. Fucking hell, I looked rough; and I struggled to suppress a momentary smile.
“What were you before?” she called out. In the mirror, Julia began to slide out of bed. “Manager of something or other?”
“Assistant Director,” I muttered. “Global Brand.”
“For Neopharm?”
“Yeah,” I answered.
She gave a little whistle, half-sarcastic, half-real. “Top job.” I watched as she stood, stretched, tossing long ebony hair back, tits flattening in an all-too familiar way as she reached for the ceiling. Tired, humiliated and angry, I nevertheless felt a yearning to reach out to her, to take her back to bed. I might hate the bitch, but she was fucking gorgeous.
“Now look at you,” she continued, padding towards me. “How the mighty have fallen.”
I slammed the tube of concealer down with a bang, resumed my repairs.
“Sitting in panties and bra, putting on your face. Slipping into a cute dress, scurrying to your little desk. Sitting pretty, low-income wage-slave, really drawing on that university education, aren’t you?”
“Back the fuck off, Jules.”
She sauntered closer, grinning. “Or what?”
I opened my mouth, said nothing, closed it.
“Exactly,” she said, reaching past me. “So just shut it, okay?” She crouched to my level, and with one hand gently cupped my chin. “You’re pretty good at this,” she said, and there was something grudgingly admiring in her tone. “You’ve only been doing this for a couple of months?”
“I’m a quick learner.”
“A natural, you mean.”
“Fuck you.”
“Shh,” she whispered, putting one finger to my lips, then bringing a lip pencil to bear. “Let me.” With luxurious strokes she began to draw in my lips, contouring carefully but confidently. “Something a little more daring for a Monday morning.” And there was something undeniably erotic about the attention, her breath on my cheek, the closeness and care with which she painted my mouth. An echo of last night’s submissiveness, that sensation of preciousness and being cared for, welled up; so did my cock, tenting Julia’s borrowed panties.
She noticed, smiled, tapped the tip with the pencil. “Easy there,” she said, “I like that pair.” Her touch was delicate and caring. “Enjoying this?” she added, knowing I couldn’t answer as she dabbed a touch more colour to my lips. “Surely you can admit some benefits of girlhood.”
I waited till she pulled the pencil back. “No.”
“Shame. You could really enjoy it if you let yourself. Being a girl can be a lot of fun.” She reached for a lipstick, adding, “though I’d prefer you suffer, of course.” She reconsidered, took another. “Crimson Eclipse,” she said, twisting the slender metal bullet. And yeah, if I allowed myself, I’d admit that it did feel good as Julia slowly, sensually slid the slick stuff across my lips. It felt a little creamy, lighter on the lips than the cheap stuff I wore, and if I wasn’t so goddam bone-tired, so sick-to-the-soul exhausted after months of hiding—or rather, living—this disguise, then yeah, maybe, just maybe I could’ve taken some perverse enjoyment out of the whole situation, the dressing up and role play and the deviant pleasure of it all. That is if my goddamned life didn’t depend on playing a part I despised.
A gentle nudge turned me towards the mirror. Her efforts had transformed the face I saw there: a glossy, darker red shimmering like a veil of early night stars glimmering behind the light of a setting sun, a vivid contrast to the paleness of Cindy’s skin.
“Jesus, Jules, everyone’ll be staring at my lips all day.”
“I know,” she giggled. “That’s the point, right?” She tapped me lightly on the nose a final time with the closed lipstick. “Just imagine what the guys’ll be imaging you could do with those lips”
I groaned.
“Let’s get you dressed,” she said.
Which she did, starting with sheer tights with a obvious sheen to help keep Cindy’s secret tucked away—“And don’t you dare tear them,” Julia insisted—but yesterday’s skirt and top; she clearly liked the idea of my heading into work a little rumpled, my appearance hinting at late night indiscretion and debauchery under the veneer of makeup. There was no escaping the heels. Nor Julia’s final effort at embarrassing me: brushing my hair out and setting it into a high ponytail dangling down between my shoulders. The final look was somewhere between sexy secretary and naughty schoolgirl. I hated it; Julia loved it; and she was very good at getting her way.
***
The car hummed with sudden acceleration and looking outside again I saw we were merging onto the highway. Hugging the ramp, the car smoothly joined the rapid flow of traffic. It wasn’t clear where the car was bringing me: away from the city, obviously, but clearly not to the main Asklepios Clinic which was, as far as I knew, halfway across the country. Presumably we were heading to one of the smaller Asklepios campuses or retreats. There were a half-dozen of these dotted around the country: secluded, gated realms of therapy and research where the rich recovered their health and sanity, and hid for as long as they could afford from the real world.
The morning sun outside was only growing stronger, and I felt the heat against the tinted window. The view outside was pretty boring, seemingly endless stretches of agricultural industrialisation glinting in the harsh light, a webwork of towering blocks of concrete and steel clawing the sky, interconnected, automated and layered, growing the fruit and vegetables, fungus and fake meat required to feed the inexorable maw of the urban centres.
Drumming my fingertips against the window brought a series of clicks against the glass, another gift of Julia’s: matching nail extensions in the current style, one of last weekend’s “girls’ day out” activities.
With humiliating predictability, Julia’s influence over my life only grew greater after that first morning. She took not only pleasure, but a strange responsibility, in dressing me after I spent the night. Not that I stayed over at hers every night, of course. In fact, after that initial effort at humiliating me she completely withdrew—ignored my few texts, and I didn’t bump into her at work. I checked in at her office a few floors up and discovered she’d taken a few days holiday. I wondered, briefly, if she’d changed her mind and decided against tormenting me; and couldn’t decide whether I was disappointed or not.
But no: by Thursday morning I’d received her first instruction, and several more followed in the days that followed. Initially, she dictated small details of Cindy’s fashion: a text message in the morning picking a colour of lipstick, or a certain skirt she knew hung in my closet. When I stayed the night, she took particular pleasure in choosing and styling my hair for the day—a long, tight braid one day; once and most embarrassingly, twin pigtails for a Friday.
By the second week, items of clothing began arriving at my home, bought online by Julia and delivered to home or indiscreetly at work: the occasional racy underthing, like the suspender belt and stockings I currently wore, but also smaller gifts: a delicate pair of earrings, or a particularly vivid colour of nail varnish, or a tight, midriff-baring t-shirt, pink and cute, with stylised design of an indolent cat she’d spotted one evening after work.
I was her doll, and Julia delighted in playing with me.
And you know, had she stopped at dressing me up it may have been bearable. It was, in a weird and twisted kind of way, fun spending time with her. Yes, she was a bitch; and half-mad with bitterness and hunger for revenge; and clearly twisted up inside with guilt and remorse over her own vindictiveness; and dominating; and spiteful; and… a hell of a lot of fun, probably because she was such an absolute train-wreck of a human being.
She was also gorgeous—which made being with her so much easier and the more time spent with her, the more I came to appreciate her beauty—and exciting, especially in bed and far more than she’d been a decade ago. She was meticulous and attentive, showing remarkable patience in teaching me all the finer points of female artistry that I really didn’t want to know. Under her tutelage, I’d probably learned more about hair, makeup, nail and fashion in the past month than I’d mastered since the start of this insane charade, despite the fact she didn’t seem all that bothered in applying those same skills to herself.
And she’d gotten surprisingly good—disconcertingly so, especially in such a short time—at manipulating me, at knowing how far to push and when to back down. I may have bristled under her grip, but also found comfort in her careful control, in finally sharing my agonies with another human being. And she, in return, came to understand the precariousness of her own dominance. Push me too far, too hard, and I’d refuse and the illusion that bound us would dissipate. For example, her threat to call the cops or hand me over to—someone, it was always a bit vague—didn’t hold up to scrutiny. Hell, I was probably more likely to give myself away than she was, in drunkenness or anger.
The real threat, a month into this weird and renewed relationship, unsaid but understood, was either of us just walking away. These past few weeks with her had been, in their own way, a hell of a lot better than the earlier months spent entirely alone, every night and weekend, stewing in my own impotent anger and loneliness. There was a strange symbiosis between us: I gained a coach and a confidant, someone to guide me through the intricacies of my role and share my agonies of frustration and anger. We both got to have sex, lots of it.
She gained… what? A sense of satisfaction in revenge? Excitement and passion and a new pet project to occupy her time? Even after a month together it remained unclear to me what exactly Julia expected to get from me—after all, the current situation couldn’t last forever, right?
And so. If she’d stopped at playing dress up, with occasional bouts of humiliation or mockery—yeah, everything would’ve probably been fine. I could’ve played her games and waited out the time until the Clinic gave me back my life.
But she didn’t stop there.
I’m not doing this, I wrote, fingernails clicking and glinting as I tapped at my phone.
You are doing this, she responded, complete with winking smiley face.
I can’t do this.
Of course you can, Julia retorted. You’ve already been out with him.
That wasn’t a fucking date! That was drinks after work.
You kissed him.
He kissed -me-.
You owe him.
“I don’t owe him shit!” I hissed under my breath.
Besides, the jackass was running nearly an hour late. Who keeps a girl a sexy as Cindy waiting for a whole hour?
A month on from that disastrous Friday night out for after-work drinks, and here I was again: in public on a Saturday night, dressed up and on display, a sexy young girl perched at the bar of Chez Lucien, Dan’s choice of venue, Julia’s plotting, the next inevitable step in her efforts to extract revenge from my ongoing humiliation.
Which is how I found myself squeezed and poured into a classic little black dress: sequined, plunging sweetheart neckline, sleeveless and tight, fitted over nipped-in curves to midthigh, finished with sheer seamed stockings. Paired with the tallest heels I could just about navigate for the evening, Cindy cut a fine figure at the bar. She glimmered in the soft romantic lighting—an effect of Julia’s generous application of some kind of shimmery body butter a few hours ago—in a most alluring way.
Consequently, she also cradled her large gin with unbecoming desperation. Glaring into the balloon-shaped glass, the drink’s cherry glow captured the bar’s light in a tumble of ice and tonic. I studiously avoided the surreptitious, appraising glances of passing men, suppressing my own tremulous anxiety fluttering deep in my taut belly. But my own reflection in the glass behind the bar mocked me. Heavy hoop earrings, smoky eyes, dark lipstick, darker thoughts: fuck you, Julia.
No: fuck me, because of -course- that’s what Dan’ll be thinking about all night. He’d be staring at my lips, deep ruby shine that hinted at flushed passion, and imagine them wetly bobbing up and down his engorged cock. He’d wonder what I was wearing under this dress, the sexy under-things Julia’d strapped me into earlier, the lace and straps twining around my lithe form that helped me squeeze into this nothing of a dress, a naughty gift awaiting unwrapping. Or he’d be eying up those padded curves pushing out my front, hands aching to reach out, firm, strong hands kneading, gripping, thumb and finger stroking through lacy cups. Or the smoky shimmer of stocking-clad legs, hand on knee, silky and soft, then thigh, tracing the lacy trim, sliding over suspender tabs and embroidered welt, following straps ever higher, reaching….
I took a deep, desperate gulp of gin to hide the sudden flush blossoming beneath bold makeup. The drink only partially cut through rekindled heat. Eyes closed, shakily breathing, focusing on the sensation of ice and cool glass and the whisper of purified air across my too-bared flesh, I grimaced and fought through the agonising intensity of arousal.
Hooking up with Julia had triggered something unexpected. I’d have thought that the release of months of pent-up sexual frustration would’ve been a blessed release: four months now – over four-fucking-months! living as Cindy, the longest I’d gone without getting laid since escaping the streets. David had enjoyed all-but-weekly one-night stands, the occasional bouts of longer relationships, a constant flow of mostly meaningless sex. Cindy—fortunately—not so much. But now, with Julia, we were fucking at least once, twice a week; but instead of bringing any kind of relief I just found myself hornier than ever, my thoughts constantly ensnared, twisting and writhing within flashes of nearly overwhelming desire.
What the hell was wrong with me?
Worse, arousal brought discomforting sensations where I didn’t want them: in tightening nipples, blooming warmth, timorous tingling flowering in breasts suddenly eager to be held. At times my whole body felt… tight and tense, taut like a guitar string waiting to be plucked; other times, almost tremblingly weak, hot and anxious, as though ready to fall into strong arms. And it took real willpower to push through those moments, deep breathing and focus, even to just keep my own hands under control. It was bad enough at home, where I could indulge my need; out and about was harder, with public eyes burning me under their attentive gaze; at work this was pure torture.
I constantly doubted myself, felt distracted and uncertain. At times, it was like being lost in an agonising haze, and emerging I’d find myself somewhere unexpected; in conversation, I’d zone out, overwhelmed by need and genuinely appear the pretty ditz so many took Cindy to be. Once or twice I’d even had to hide, locking myself into a bathroom stall until the surge of passion passed.
This… couldn’t happen; I couldn’t meet Dan—any man—like this, trembling like gossamer petals in a summer breeze. I opened my eyes and looked at the remainder of my drink and judged I could knock it back in one and get the hell out of here. A pity I’d have to clear my own bill—I hadn’t even checked the prices, counting on Dan to pick up the tab, and judging by appearances Cindy really couldn’t afford this kind of place—but Julia be damned: date night with Dan was a whole level of bullshit too far.
Time to get the hell out of Chez Lucien. I gulped the gin and reached down from the tall stool—frustratingly designed for an average man’s height—to find my footing. Uncertain in fashionably too-tall shoes Julia’d insisted on buying me to wear tonight, I wobbled momentarily, gripping the counter to steady myself—and felt a sudden hand on my shoulder, strong and sure.
“Easy there,” rumbled a masculine voice at my side.
Rolling my eyes, I turned to tell the guy to fuck off, thank you very much, and get his damned hands off of me; saw the speaker; and froze, locking up in momentary fear.
Last time I’d seen this guy was months ago.
He’d been at a distance, as I crouched behind a dumpster in an alley behind a strip joint. I’d lightly cradled a broken beer bottle in my hand. Either he’d been elsewhere these intervening months or—far more likely—had done a better job of keeping himself hidden as he spied on me. Jeff: that was his name. My stalker, some dickhead Steele had stuck on Cindy’s ass to keep an eye on her, in the unlikely event she somehow revealed some link back to David Sanders. I’d nearly killed him back then, eager to twist the jagged edge of the bottle into his neck and watch the blood spurt free.
But I hadn’t and now here he was.
The man grinned, towering over me. At a glance I’d give him an easy 185cm, slender and smartly dressed. I envied the comfort and manoeuverability of his clothes: black trousers and fitted, sharp white shirt, hinting at firm muscles beneath. Dirty blond hair pulled back in a short ponytail, heavy watch, a solitary ring on his right hand, plain and silver. Hazel eyes sparkled with mirth but there was an aura of threat to him, a subtle tension in the way he stood and to his jaw that suggested a quickness to anger and action. A redness to his eyes, the unshaven two-day’s stubble, contrasted with his otherwise crisp appearance.
He had every advantage: height, reach, weight and strength; clothes, stable shoes, no earrings or bracelet or necklaces to catch or tear. Even so: if I acted now, poised as I was and when he didn’t expect it as I gingerly stepped down from the stool, I could take him. Pivot and knee to the groin. Spike heel thrust down into his instep; smash the glass into his face; grab a bottle from the bar and crack his skull, at the temple, and fulfill the promise of blood made months ago by thrusting the shattered edge of glass into his exposed flesh.
No.
Instead, I licked my lips; and Cindy smiled.
“Surely a pretty girl like you,” he said, and with a strong hand helped me back onto the stool, “isn’t sitting alone?”
“I’m not alone,” Cindy chirped, and she tossed long, blonde hair back over the left shoulder, smoothing it down with her free hand.
“Really?” he said. He made a show of looking around, behind the bar, behind him. “Could’ve fooled me.”
Cindy giggled. “No, silly.” She tapped her phone. “I’m waiting for someone.”
He sank into the stool next to her, signalled for the bartender. “Friend? Is she as cute as you?”
“Nice try,” she answered. “Boyfriend. He’s running late.”
“You must be kidding.” He ordered a beer. “What kind of guy keep a girl like you waiting?”
“I know, right?” She tapped her glass with one nail, and the hollow sound of the empty glass rang clear. “But he’s a nice guy, so….” She trailed off and shrugged.
“Nice?” The man scoffed. “Girls don’t need someone nice; they need a guy who’s strong.” He grinned. “Like me.”
Cindy made a little moue of disapproval. “Hey, nice is good.”
“Sure,” he answered. “Wanna bet I can guess the name of this ‘nice guy’?”
“Bet?” she said. “Sure. Three chances.”
He grinned. “What’s my prize if I get it?”
Cindy tapped her glass again with a nail. “You can buy me a drink.”
“I like it. And if I lose?”
“You lose all this,” she said, sticking out her chest, rolling her bare shoulders, and tossed her hair. “And you go away, of course.” But she smiled, taking away the possible sting of her words.
The man nodded, suddenly mock serious as he performed deep thinking. He took a sip of beer and stared upwards for a long moment. Then he lowered his gaze, and locked eyes with Cindy.
“David,” he said.
For several seconds—though it felt longer—too long—we stared at each other, the silence heavy between us, his smile twisting into a smirk at the corner his lips. His eyes narrowed the tiniest fraction. We were in this moment, alone in the bustling restaurant, and I saw then, clearly, past the charming surface to what lay beneath. What did he find in return, beneath my careful, glossy veneer?
I languorously passed the tip of my tongue over my lips and smiled brightly.
“David?” I said and laughed. “Daves are, like, forty-year old car mechanics. Not my type.”
His expression didn’t change; he maintained a strange look between mirth and mockery; sudden tightness built across his neck and shoulders, and it seemed as though he were about to lash out. I supressed a wince, half-expecting a slap across the face I felt powerless to prevent. But then the tension drained away, and his face relaxed into an easy smile.
“Okay then,” he said, without breaking eye contact. “Thomas.”
I gave a little sigh. “That’s a good name. I had a friend called Thomas, once,” I said, wistfully. “He was cute.” And then, staring back at him: “But no, not really boyfriend material.”
He shrugged. He seemed to hesitate, as if suddenly unsure, and then spoke quickly. “Jeff,” he said.
I supressed my surprise at him using his real name. “Hmm, Jeff.” I rolled it around my mouth, contemplatively. “Jeff,” I said, drawing out the fricatives. “Bearded guy in his thirties doing the weather report.” I wrinkled my nose. “Grows his own vegetables. No thanks.”
He made of show of appearing wounded, holding his hand over his heart. “Ouch.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Your name’s Jeff.”
“You’re better at this than I am.”
“Well, Jeff,” I said. “It’s been fun but…”
“Let me buy you a drink.” He waved at my empty glass on the counter. “Even if I lost. Anything you want. A prize for beating me at my own game.”
“But…”
“My pleasure,” he interrupted, and waved at the bartender. “A drink for the pretty lady.”
“Listen, I don’t think….”
“Then don’t,” he snapped. He held up one finger and shushed me—I flushed with livid outrage and frustration—and then his hand was on my forearm, fingers gently gripping my flesh as the anger drained from him. “Please,” he said, “don’t overthink this. There’s nothing wrong with a drink and chat while you’re waiting, right?”
And I saw in his eyes, then, such yearning, such desperate sadness and loneliness, that my protest caught in my throat. Stifling the instinct to snatch back my arm, I stared back at him in genuine surprise. “Jeff—”
“Sorry, hey, sorry I’m late, I—”
And then Dan was standing there, red-faced and mouth open as he looked at me, at me and Jeff, and surely, he noted the hand resting over my arm. And it occurred to me, suddenly, that I could play both guys off of each other, that I suddenly held a position of bizarre power and that with a coy glance, a soft touch, the right words I could have both these men at each other’s throats. It was an insane, fleeting impulse—Dan wouldn’t stand a chance—and then the situation flipped: if I didn’t act, the situation could so easily devolve into something nasty, with me somehow to blame, especially as Jeff made no move to pull back his hand from where is rested far too casually, staring back evenly at my so-called ‘boyfriend’.
So I acted. I flung myself from the stool into Dan’s arms, releasing a little squeal of joy. “You’re here!” Surprised, he nevertheless caught me—and I kissed him on the mouth, deeply, arms wrapping around his neck. As he stumbled and spun me about, I looked over his shoulders at Jeff, who’s brow darkened and a look of anguish passed across his features. He grabbed his beer and walked away.
At which point, of course, I became aware of Dan’s tongue eagerly exploring my mouth, one hand on my bare shoulder, the other intimately comfortable around my waist. I pulled away, looking down at the floor in a way that I hoped appeared bashful, hiding the shudder of revulsion that tore through me.
He took my hand. “Hey, what was that for?”
“Just happy to see you,” I answered, and he led me to our table.
***
The car woke me from my reveries with a gentle chime. Apparently, we were stopping to recharge its batteries. With a subtle clunk the doors unlocked. Did I want to step out and stretch my legs, grab a snack, take a piss? Yes. But did I also want to avoid human contact, dressed as I was, safe and isolated in the womb of the car? Also yes.
Sighing, I checked myself in the screen and added a dab of lip gloss and opened the door. The heat hit like a wave, as did the full glare of the sun. Goddam Julia for today’s work outfit, suspender belt and stockings, charcoal pencil skirt to the knees, fitted blouse over long-line bra. At least my hair was up off my neck in a high ponytail, but I’d still be drowning in boob sweat and sagging stockings by the time the car finished charging.
I felt distinctly out of place in this rural shithole, the charging station little more than a concrete and asphalt platform with a bank of EV points and a singular petrol pump that probably saw more use around here than all the other eco-alternatives combined. A narrow bank of yellowing trees lined the road, offering some slight shelter from the sun, and away from the road stretched a desiccated field of browning crops withering under rusting spraying towers that probably hadn’t seen a drop of water in the past decade. Other than the hum of cicada and passings cars, it was unnervingly quiet. There was also a small shop and restaurant, with a pair of cars parked at the side.
Sweat beaded along neck and welts and band; makeup wouldn’t survive long out here. The car chimed at me: the rear gently slid open and revealed a small travel bag, and inside a change of clothes. Smiling gratefully, I grabbed the bag and headed for the restaurant and its toilets.
Heels rang out incongruously as I crossed the platform. With each step drawing me closer, I pulled back; Cindy rose to the fore; and I experienced one of those moments again, the strange conflation of sensation and detachment in which I stepped away and observed myself—my Cindy—from without.
The delicate arch of the heels and slight pinch at the toes. A tug with each step, six-taut straps a reminder of that terribly feminine scrap of fabric, the suspender belt and its firm presence at her waist. The heat of the sun on hair, cleavage, flashing of bracelets, dangling earrings and nails. Lithe steps, slight wiggle, toss of hair—growing confidence. Nose wrinkling with the acrid bitumen scent of heat baking asphalt spongy.
Cindy took a deep breath and stepped through the door.
The heat followed her through as the door jingled her arrival to the tired looking waitress rubbing down a chipped counter, both looking as though they belonged in the previous century. A pair of half-depleted racks held bags of nuts and other snacks. Somebody had clearly had the foresight to move the chocolate bars into one of the free- standing cooling units, where they sat in an untidy heap surrounded by cans of energy drink and bottles of flavoured water. There was a small grill behind the counter, a chilled display case holding a few cakes and pieces of pie, and a small desk fan hung from the ceiling in the corner futilely pushing against the oppressive heat.
“Come in, darling,” said the waitress. “Grab a seat,” she added, gesturing towards a stool at the counter, “any seat,” and then towards one of the three tables by the windows. There were two other patrons at a table, a young man and woman hunched over their food, talking quietly and intensely to each other, and a younger man at the counter, maybe a teenager, who made no effort to conceal his close study of the newcomer. Cindy shivered as his gaze swept up her legs, lingered over her boobs and finally settled on the wet shine of her lips. He grinned.
“It’s okay,” the waitress continued, “we don’t bite.”
“I might.” The boy grinned and snapped his teeth at Cindy. “Mmm, tasty.”
The waitress slapped him across the back of the head. “Don’t mind this jackass, he’s harmless. Like a puppy.”
The boy growled.
“C’mon honey, you hungry? You look beat.”
And Cindy thought, not yet; they haven’t beaten me yet. Smiling tiredly, she followed the waitress as she led her to a table.
Following the waiter, Dan led me to the table, one of the nice ones near the tree, an actual living tree at the centre of the restaurant, its graceful limbs unfurling towards the glass dome ceiling and glimmering with coiling fairy lights. The place was busy, an intimate and well-dressed Saturday night crowd, swelling with a gentle murmur of polite conversation, men in dress shirts and women—like me—in fashionably precise femininity: short dresses, tall heels, and makeup, the flash of jewelry and nails accompanying the tinkle of cutlery on plates and glasses chiming in cheer.
And Dan pulled back my chair for me, he’s such a fucking gentleman, and I slid in with a practiced motion, smoothing down my dress and he pushed my chair back. I’m trapped now in this date, this forced evening performance. I could’ve brushed him off, he was an hour late and if it hadn’t been for that goddamn stalker, I’d have escaped and that would’ve probably been it for Dan, I could’ve dumped him by text on the bus ride home.
Instead, I sat there haunted by the final glimpse of Jeff looking almost pathetically forlorn as Dan swept me up in his arms. There’d been such a look of hungry longing that I immediately thought of Julia, and her rapacious need to humiliate me.
Where was Jeff now? Still here, probably, maybe tapped into the restaurant’s security system, assessing and evaluating, watching whether I conformed to his expectations of Cindy-ness. Was he reporting back to his boss that David Sanders remained nowhere in sight?
Time to focus on the date. Truth is, Dan’s an alright guy. A year ago, I would’ve probably had him working on my team, late hours, shown him the ropes, taken him out for a beer. Gotten him drunk, pat on the back, dumped him in a taxi. He’s young, wet behind the ears and full of shit, bit of a dork but yeah… he’s okay. Pretty good shape, too: takes advantage of the company gym, fundraiser marathons, that kind of shit. I respected that.
Doesn’t mean I wanted to date the guy, though, wanted to sit opposite him half-naked in this nothing of a dress Julia chose for me, wrapped in constricting lacy underthings, slathered in makeup. Still, I smiled pleasantly at his bullshit, because that’s what a pretty girl does on a date, right? But something’s a bit off. He’s a little flushed, red in the face and not from running to get here late, and not only from the encounter with Jeff. He’s already had a drink, or three.
And when the waiter arrived to take our drinks, I opened my mouth to order another gin and he put his hand over mine to stop me. “It’s alright, babe, I’ve got this,” he said and ordered a bottle of Moet.
Babe?
And what the fuck’s up with men cutting me off tonight?
He’s never shown this kind of confidence before, bordering on cocky with a dominant streak he’s kept well concealed until now. I’d have applauded him for it – if it weren’t damn well directed at me. Now looking at him closely, I noted the dress shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, and strip of sweat hinting at a tie removed a beer or two ago. There’s a heavy, chunky watch flashing at his wrist, showy and very new. He’s flushed, eyes bright with both eagerness and resentment – and confusion; he doesn’t know what to make of another guy, clearly hitting on me, breakers against which the cresting wave of his excitement just crashed.
I left my hand under his just long enough to show neither offense nor particular interest—hopefully; how the fuck do women evaluate this shit?—before withdrawing to examine the menu. And immediately I’m struck that this place is a hell of a lot more upscale than I’d thought. These prices – there’s no way I could possibly afford this kind of place—I could probably just about manage a starter without flat-lining my credit rating. Eating here I’d literally be in Dan’s debt. Goddammit, but Julia must’ve known that when she pushed me into this date.
“Dan,” I whispered, leaning close. “I can’t afford this!”
He grinned. “Hey, don’t worry, babe. I’ve got it.”
That word again. “But Dan, it’s so expensive ….”
“Hey,” he interrupted, suddenly authoritative. “I’ve got this,” he said, his tone final.
Cindy, slightly abashed, hid her reddening face behind the menu, searching for the cheapest thing she could find. I’m merely bemused by this change in attitude. Two weeks ago, before I’d drunk myself stupid, there’d been something genuinely charming about this guy, in a slightly geeky, trying-too-hard kind of way. This new Dan, splashing cash and taking charge was… unexpected; and annoying, to be honest.
Maybe he picked up on Cindy’s surprise, because he mollified his tone a little. “Hey, honestly,” he continued. “Don’t worry about it. I can afford it. Haven’t you heard?”
I cocked an eyebrow. “Heard what?”
“Promotion, babe!” His grin split into a wide, honest smile. “Your boyfriend’s just made Lead Researcher at Volumina International!”
Boyfriend?
I gaped at him, and he burbled on before I could protest: “I knew it was in the works but didn’t expect anything just yet. But then Fatima handed in her notice last week, and the boss was very happy with the Ariel Jeans contract—and…,” he took a breath. “Are you listening?”
“Of course!” I said and smiled. “But… boyfriend?”
He leaned closer across the table. His hand reached for mine; our fingers touched, and he held them gently, my shaped nails a soft shimmer against his darker skin. “Well… yeah,” he said.
Fortunately, the waiter arrived just then with a pair of elegant flutes in one hand, bottle of Champagne in the other. She popped the bottle and poured the fizz. I chewed my lip, anxiously; and picked up the glass by the slender stem, and they rang out their clear tone of celebration as we cheered.
“To promotions,” I announced.
“No,” he said. “To us.”
When the waiter took our order I tried asking for the cheapest main on the menu, some kind of vegan risotto, but again Dan interrupted. “Chateaubriand,” he ordered, “for the lady and me.”
“Dan….” I tried, meekly, but he ignored me as he ordered starters and sides, and a bottle of red: a Pinot, a poor choice to pair with the steak but I suspected he wasn’t interested in hearing my opinion on this.
“Dan,” I tried again after the waited left. My voice began to betray my annoyance.
“You have to admit,” he continued over me as though I hadn’t spoken. “I’m quite the catch, right? Up-and-coming, right?” His hand, once again finding mine, clasped it more firmly this time. “Don’t you think? You could do a lot worse than a guy like me.”
And the thing was, this heady mix of taking-charge and pathetic openness was… well, there was almost something endearing about it, if it hadn’t been quite so rude. Despite the dress and makeup, heels and lingerie, and the apparent differences in our ages, I felt an almost paternal instinct to take him under my wing, as it were, and show him how’s it done, how to win a woman over without falling back on brute rudeness and boasting. His approach was almost hilarious in its ineptness, and I swallowed a gulp of champagne to hide my smile. The bubbles sparked against my tongue as I considered my response.
I couldn’t laugh at him, though I wanted to.
I could tell him to fuck off: an hour late, ordering for me, interrupting and bragging – those were obvious red flags for most women, right?
But what about Cindy? She was young, inexperienced and to be honest, Dan wasn’t wrong: he was a catch for a girl like me, relatively new to town in a low-paying, dead-end job, on her own with few friends. He was good looking, he had a good income, friends, and professionally heading in the right direction… what was there not to like?
Well, the fact we were both guys, obviously. There were implications to a meal like this. A guy didn’t splash out cash like this, spend the night with a girl the day after his promotion, without certain expectations. Expectations Cindy might eagerly promise but which I would never fulfill.
And of course, there was the possibility that Jeff was still watching from the wings….
I gave his hand a little squeeze and pulled away. “Why don’t you tell me about your job?”
He looked momentarily annoyed but, given the invitation, also eager to talk about his promotion. Which he did—at length: “This is such a big step for me,” he started, “you can’t understand, Cindy, I’ll finally be….” And he launched into it, first about all the amazing things he’d done to get noticed, the hard work and long hours, and then moving on to the big step up in responsibility he’d accepted, leading a team, directing the research, managing the presentations and data analysis, qualitative and quantitative collection; and the opportunities, to work with bigger brands, flying abroad, the adventure and excitement. And at no point did he pause long enough for me to get a word in edgewise, and as my attention drifted I began to wonder: did I ever talk at women like this?
No. At least, I didn’t think so. I’d always been good at reading people, at picking up on what the other person wanted. If I’d been sat opposite Cindy, surely I’d be picking up on her boredom, her frustration, her desire to get a fucking word into the conversation without getting cut off or ignored.
Besides, smiling slightly at the memory of the few women I’d gotten to know beyond a one-night stand—I can’t imagine they’d have let me get away with this kind of bullshit.
“Are you listening?” Dan’s voice intruded, one part angry to one part plaintive.
“Of course,” I said, and smiled tiredly. “It’s just a lot to take in.” His eyes betrayed his annoyance, and so I added, “And I can’t really pretend to understand half of what you’re telling me! It all sounds terrible complicated—and exciting!—but a lot of work.”
Somewhat mollified, he sat back and grinned. “Stepping stones, babe! A couple years leading a team, build up some experience, build up some contacts and then….” He made a gesture with his hands, like a rocket ship taking off, complete with whooshing sound.
“You’ll become an astronaut?”
“No!” He sounded annoyed by my attempt at humour. “I’ll jump ship, go independent, be my own boss! Work half the year as a consultant, spend the other half traveling, or just kicking back, you know, and—”
Thank God the starters arrived at that point, steaming hot shitake mushroom stuffed with real cheese and real garlic, and some delicate filo pastries oozing something that smelled amazing. With food in his mouth Dan couldn’t talk, and there was a moment of blessed respite.
I picked tentatively at the food. It looked… amazing, but I found myself without much appetite. Part of it was down to the clothes I wore, the tight constriction of lingerie and the ongoing discomfort of sitting on my tucked away nuts all night. And part of it was residual anxiety: was Jeff still out there, watching this car-crash of a date?
And finally – dear God, how I just wanted to get away from this guy.
Which is why, with his mouth full of mushroom and garlic, I took the opportunity to stand up. “Back in a sec,” I told him, and fled to the ladies’ room.
Cindy stepped out of the restaurant’s grimy little toilet feeling remarkably refreshed. She swapped stifling work-clothes for the contents of the bag: simple white bra and panties, and a sleeveless summer dress, light and loose and short, peach with vertical pinstripes and leaving long legs bare to a pair of open-toed wedge sandals. Still hot but far more comfortable, she smiled easily as she pranced back to her table.
“Look at you,” the waitress said, coming over with Cindy’s order. “You’re a sight for sore eyes. We could use a little more colour around here.”
“Maybe try cleaning the place, then?” called the boy from the counter. He was now engrossed in his phone—Cindy suspected he may have snapped a sneaky photo of her as she took her seat.
The waitress ignored him. “What’s your name, honey?” the waitress asked, sliding food and drink onto the table, a soy chicken sandwich as hearty as the side salad looked sad, and a frothy, pink milkshake.
“Cindy.”
“Name’s Doreen,” she answered.
Cindy smiled pleasantly at her. “Nice to meet you, Doreen.” And she meant it—there was something genuinely heroic about the woman, in all her dowdy glory, tired and grey but somehow upbeat and resilient. Her uniform was drab and worn, the apron stained, but her nails flashed a brilliant teal and her carefully coifed hair and meticulous makeup suggested a valiant battle against middle-aged fade. Like a soldier in dress uniform mired in the mud and filth of a trench, she rose by virtue of effort alone above her squalid surroundings.
“You should try the lemon meringue, it’s divine,” Doreen said.
Cindy gestured at the sandwich. “After all this?”
“You won’t regret it.” The waitress slapped her thigh as though to highlight the difference between them. “Skinny thing like you?”
“You’re too kind,” Cindy answered. “It’s the magic of vertical stripes.”
Doreen snorted as she returned to the counter.
Taking a dainty bite of her sandwich, Cindy glanced around the restaurant. The boy kept glancing furtively her way, and she made a point of catching his eye, leaning languidly forward and pursed her wet lips around the milkshake straw, slowly drawing on the sweet drink. He blushed, suddenly uncomfortable, and turned away.
Hiding a little smile, she took a moment to tap out a quick message to her friends, first Julia and then Dan, informing her that she’d be away for a few days. Then her gaze lazily danced across the room as she continued to eat.
The two other patrons, sitting a table away from Cindy, continued their secretive conversation hunched over some scribbled pages and cups of iced coffee. The man gesticulated often; the woman shushed him; there seemed to be tension between them. He grabbed her wrist; she tried to pull away; her voice rose then went quiet. Noticing Cindy’s attention, the man glared and she quickly looked away.
A screen over the counter drew her attention as it flicked through current affairs, volume off but with subtitles. Images flashed by in their daily deluge of depressing updates: high-altitude video of a rainforest burning thousands of kilometers away, jumping to drone footage of an armed conflict even further abroad, sickly green gas roiling across shattered streets and hollowed-out buildings. Cutting to: a short update on captain Zhao and her team, a crisis a hundred million kilometers out and halfway to Mars, spitting oxygen from a pinprick hole and trailing sparkling diamonds into the infinite dark.
Then back to Earth, an update on the heat wave, the nation painted in varying shades of crimson, a heat map the colour of blood and rust. Comic attempts at escaping overheating: tubs full of ice, a party in a walk-in freezer, cute dogs swimming in a pool. Segue to more serious local news: images of violence, police breaking up a candlelight vigil, zooming in on a middle-aged woman thrown to the ground, heavy knee of authority in her back, and her eyes were wide in terror at her arrest, another futile feminist protest against the latest rollback of rights.
Sighing, suddenly uncomfortable, Cindy started to drift just as the news flipped over to the next story: growing concerns over the next variant, vaccine-resistant and a year overdue, poised to sweep across the country after having already peaked overseas with tens of thousands dead. A Neopharm talking head calmly asserted their researchers had it in hand, then stepped aside and handed over to…
Jeremiah Steele.
Cindy watched, appetite suddenly gone, as the familiar figure took the media briefing. He looked—good, unchanged by the events of the previous six months. He stood—confidently, behind a solid mahogany podium diminished by his nearly two-meter height. Strong hands gripped the stand as he spoke, steely eyes severe as he assured listeners that NeoPharm was ready, that the same corporate drive and genius that saw the world through the previous crisis would lead the way once again. In his tailored suit, shaven scalp gleaming under the media’s glare, unflinching before a barrage of questions, he appeared a man—powerful, dominant, muscular—in charge, the epitome of alpha masculinity.
And the cute girl watching trembled, slender fingers curling into the pleated folds of her pretty dress, manicured and painted nails biting into her soft skin. She looked at the impressive man on the screen and she wished....
This date is over.
I tapped at my phone, manicured nails clicking at the screen. Locked away in the privacy of a stall, I allowed cock and balls to hang free and breathe for a few minutes as I made it clear to Julia that I was done.
Her response came nearly immediately: FFS, what is it now?
He’s been promoted! I typed furiously. This place is expensive!
So?
He’ll be expecting something after.
You don’t know that.
I know men.
Julia replied with a laughing emoji. Fine. So give him what he wants.
Very funny.
I’m being serious.
My fingers hovered over the screen for a moment. What did she expect me to do, exactly? WTF, I typed. I’m not gay.
Neither am I, came the answer. People are talking.
People—what people? Work colleagues—her friends—family? And it occurred to me that we’d been spending a lot of time together, that Cindy and Julia were in each others company often and that, yeah, people might start questioning what exactly was going on between the older woman two floors up and the pretty new girl in the office. And her concern was understandable, I suppose. Tolerance for that kind of thing wasn’t what it’d been a decade or two ago.
I hesitated before answering. I’m not into guys, I tapped.
Is Cindy? Julia answered.
To which I could only reply—
“What the fuck?”
The man in the corner sudden surged out of his seat. Lanky and wiry, in faded jeans and a threadbare t-shirt, thrusting his seat aside as his face flushed red with anger, and Cindy, taken aback, wondered what was wrong. The man held aloft the remains of his burger, gesturing at Doreen behind the counter. “You tryin’ to poison me, bitch?”
His companion, a younger woman barely out of her teens, if even that, reached out placatingly to him. “No, Mal, please,” she said, standing. She was pretty enough, with pixyish hair and vividly bright makeup, but rail thin in fishnet tights under cut-off shorts and a baggy t-shirt from which her limbs jutted awkwardly. She placed one hand on the man’s arm, gently, like one would for an angry child; and her voice was soft and gentle, too.
He brushed off the girl’s hand. He threw the food to the floor. “I ain’t paying for this shit!” He glared at the waitress, daring her to contradict him.
Doreen gazed back at him levelly. She sighed and seemed more tired than frightened by the man. “Ain’t nothing wrong with that food I made you,” she said.
“You calling me a liar?” He took a step towards the counter.
“I’m telling you I’m not paid enough to give a shit what you think,” she said. “But there’s a half-dozen cameras around this joint, and they’ve been watching you since you rolled in.”
Glaring at her, he took another step forward. “I ain’t payin’,” he said through gritted teeth.
“I’ll pay,” Cindy said. The words just sort of popped out, and for a moment she seemed wide-eyed and surprised by her intervention. No one answered, so she said it again, louder: “I’ll pay.”
The man glared at her across the room. “Mind your own fucking business, bitch.”
She raised her hands as though to ward off his hostility. “Please,” she said softly, “I’m just trying to help.”
“You think I need your help?” he barked across the room at her. “Huh? Think you’re better than me?”
Cindy shook her head, felt her long hair fall like silent curtains between her and the man, and suddenly felt acutely aware of the difference between them – the appearance of her clothes, the fine cut and quality fabric, her immaculate makeup and the rich glitter of her minimal jewelry.
But now the man’s attention was focused on her, and she squirmed under his appraising gaze. He seemed to like what he saw, and grinned unpleasantly, and Cindy took a nervous step backwards.
“Mal,” the young girl said, reaching out to man. “We should get out of here.”
He ignored her, taking a first step towards Cindy.
“Mal—” the girl tried again, following him.
“Shut up!” And this time he spun and the back of his hand caught the young girl across the chin. Her head snapped back. She twisted and fell across the table. Drinks and plates and cutlery spilled everywhere with a loud clatter, and the table flipped over as she collapsed to the floor.
Doreen shouted something at the boy, and he sat there frozen, and the man screamed obscenities and she reached for her phone and he surged across the restaurant and then suddenly had Doreen by the neck and still the boy wasn’t doing anything. The man hissed threats through clenched teeth. Doreen gurgled and her hands scrabbled futilely at the man’s grip. He reared back; his punch took the waitress in the stomach and her face—already so grey and tired—blanched and her eyes went wide and she sagged and crumpled to the floor.
The door jangled as the boy ran away.
The man called Mal turned and faced Cindy. “Should’ve minded your own business, cunt.” He stalked forward, jabbing a finger her. “Should’ve kept that slut mouth of yours shut.”
And Cindy, wide-eyed with hands held out with fingers spread as though to ward off his approach, whispered, “Please—"
“… please?”
I’d returned to an annoyed ‘boyfriend’ bemoaning the length of time women spend in the toilet and now the starters were cold. He’d drank most of the champagne and was looking a little flushed. We were in that awkward interlude between starter and main, and his inexplicable resentment had stalled the conversation. Taking Dan’s hand and holding it between mine, I smiled, a little pleadingly, and leaned closer. The soft light glimmered enticingly, I hoped, in the gloss of touched-up lips. “Just listen, okay?”
He visibly drooped. “I’ve been a pain tonight, haven’t I? I’m sorry, I am, it’s just…”
“Dan….”
“It’s been a weird week, you know, a stressful one? First Fatima leaving, then the promotion, and—”
“Dan.”
“And I don’t even know if I’m ready for this step up, it’s a lot of responsibility. And I know I was late tonight, and I’m sorry about that, but there’s a reason, see—”
“Dan.”
“And….”
“Shut the fuck up!”
His eyes widened, he opened his mouth to protest—caught the look I was giving him—finally!—and shut it. Dropping Cindy’s sweetness to the side, I gave him a hard glare. “For the love of God, will you just—stop? When a girl wants to talk, let her talk.”
He waited a moment, then nodded.
“Good– just… chill. You’re trying way too hard, man. Like, way, way too hard. I’m here with you, okay? You asked me out and I said yes. You don’t need to impress me with fancy steak and drink. And I don’t need you to take charge, yeah? I like you, you’re a nice guy, but for Chrissake, let a girl get a word in edgewise? Let her order her own food, let her order her own drink.” I gave his hand a gentle squeeze and pulled away, fingernail trailing a path across his palm.
Hiding a sudden grimace behind the flute and sparkle of a final sip of champagne, I resented the need to go so gently with this guy, and the uncomfortable flutter in my belly at the physical contact, the flirtatious tracing of a long fingernail lingering. Dan sat silently for a moment, dark eyes contemplative. Resentment and frustration seemed to war with regret across his features: he drew back his hand, fingers curling into fists, but his face seemed suddenly sad.
“I was going to cancel tonight, you know,” he suddenly said. “It’s why I was late.”
“You probably should have,” I said.
“I’d made other plans,” he said. “Last minute.”
“Sure. You were celebrating your promotion.”
He nodded.
“With friends,” I guessed. “But you’d already booked this place and asked me out last week.”
“Yeah.” His lips curled in a sardonic smile. “Some friends.”
“What happened?”
“They bailed,” he said. “We were a couple of pints in, and Hasan got a call from his fiancée, so off he went; and Derek followed soon after, of course.”
“Just Hasan and Derek? No girls?”
He grimaced, then nodded. Would a real girl have been jealous? Offended? Maybe. Cindy should’ve been hurt but I got where he was coming from: unexpected promotion, cause to celebrate—why spend the night with a girl you barely know, even a pretty one, when already in the company of good friends?
“And were you going to let me know the date was off after the second or third beer?”
He had the good grace to look at least a little ashamed. “I’m sorry.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“I had a feeling those guys were going to bail.” He shrugged. “And well, you’d already said yes and—”
“You wanted to get laid.” I interrupted. “You’d gotten a promotion and the other girls weren’t having it, and you thought, hey, I deserve to celebrate, I worked hard for this thing, right, I deserve a reward, and that Cindy girl, she looks pretty easy and frankly, I’m doing her a favour, a fine catch like me, right?”
He gaped at me for a moment, recovered, frowned. “I never said you look easy.”
“That’s hardly a denial.” I tossed the last of the filo pastries at him. “Jesus Dan, relax; I’m not angry.”
“You’re not?”
“Look at this place,” I said, with a sweeping gesture taking in the restaurant and our table. “And this food’s amazing. What’s not to like? Sitting here with you, champagne, shitake mushrooms, steak? It sure as hell beats sitting alone at home, you know?” I smiled. “Even if the company so far has been a bit shit.”
“Hey!”
“Just—stop trying so hard. Here, let me clear the air a bit. Let me make it easy for you. You are not fucking me tonight.” Maybe the bubbly had gone to my head a bit—it came out a touch louder than I’d intended. “Yeah? I want to be absolutely clear on that point. You’ve got zero chance of getting into my panties tonight, got it?”
He went a little red, but before he could respond the waiter arrived. “Chateaubriand,” she announced, with the good grace to not comment on a conversation she’d clearly overheard. Instead, she slid the steak in between us, a fine slab of real meat, red and juicy and sliced for serving. She dotted small bowls of sides around the table. It all looked amazing; it smelled amazing; putting up with Dan’s crap was totally worth it for a meal like this.
There’s no way Cindy could afford a meal like this on her budget. And sure, Julia had dragged me out for some excellent meals, but she always insisted on controlling what I ate: steak for her, salad for me, that kind of shit. Grudgingly, I had to admit that there were definite advantages to being young, attractive and female. Hell, if I didn’t exploit them, I might never enjoy quality food and drink again.
The wine followed, and we sat in silence as she withdrew the cork and poured out a sample.
“Sir?” she asked, passing the taster to Dan.
With all the finesse of a man out of his depths, he gulped it down and shrugged. She poured out two glasses and left—flashing me a wry smile and quick wink as she passed.
He speared a slice of beef for himself and grabbed some potatoes and greens and silently attacked his meal. Shrugging, I followed suit, and was about to take my first bite when Dan put down his cutlery with a clatter and leaning closer, blurted, “Girls like guys who take charge!”
“Sure,” I answered, fork poised at the edge of my lips, succulent meat impaled on its tines. “Some do.” I waved the morsel at him. “Some people like their steak rare, some blue, some”—I gave an exaggerated shudder—“well done.” Taking the fork into my mouth, I wrapped my lips around the steak and crunched down and moaned at the release of flavours. “Oh, dear God that’s good,” I said, eyes fluttering with pleasure.
I swallowed and speared a potato shiny with butter, spotted with chives. I waved the fork at him again. “And sometime, they don’t even want steak. They want a potato.”
His eyes danced from the steak to the potato, to my eyes, and the hint of a smile curved his lips. “You’ve lost me,” he admitted. “Your metaphor sucks.”
“Sometimes, a girl knows exactly what she wants,” I said, reaching for the wine. “And sometimes, she doesn’t have a fucking clue and wants you to decide. Either way, she knows what she doesn’t want.
“Your job,” I added, raising my glass in mock cheer, “is to figure out what mood she’s in.”
Dan took another bite. “Why not just tell me?”
I gave a little laugh. “Where’s the fun in that?” I answered and took a drink of the wine. It was good and paired better with the steak than I would’ve expected.
“Doesn’t seem fair to me.”
“Maybe.” My fingers drummed out a staccato beat on the table as I worked through my response. “Is it fair I get paid less at work?” I swept my hand along face and flank, taking in the efforts of the evening: makeup and hair, earrings and under rigging, the whole agonising and humiliating costume that helped convince the world I was a girl. Could I be blamed if my voice took on a bit of a frustrated edge? “Or that I’m expected to put all this on for you?” My hand swept across the room. “Or that at least one of the women in this room is statistically likely to go home tonight and get the shit kicked out of her by her partner?”
Dan winced. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know.” I shrugged. “But what the hell does ‘fair’ even mean when we’re playing different games?”
He went to answer, seemed to think better of it, and hid his doubt behind some wine. Mirroring him, I also took another deep drink, and in the brief lull my eyes slid across the room, taking in all the other couples, the murmur of conversation, and the intricate dance of their interactions. Increasingly I found myself paying attention to the women—identifying with them—taking pleasure in their appearance, sure, but also taking note, still learning from their gestures, glances, the small signals they gave their partners and each other. Assessing them, evaluating, studying.
That woman there: tall and slim in an enviably elegant long dress, brilliantly white and backless, slit to the thigh, legs crossed at the knee beneath the drape of fabric, hand delicately held to her slim throat as she laughed, a precise fall of notes like a tinkling chord on a piano; but with eyes that flared like a freshly struck match, and when the man sat opposite turned to call the waiter she grimaced and her fingers curled into a small, tight fist around the chain at her neck.
Or the woman sat in the corner, early thirties, navy skirt suit and fitted blouse, both feminine and serious, subdued makeup but chunky jewelry, hair set in soft waves that offset the sharpness of her attire – sitting with impeccable poise opposite a man in jeans and faded t-shirt, slovenly, belly threatening to overpower his belt, unshaven, laughing, relaxed and happy. His humour seemed forced, quickly cut off as the woman began to shake with silent tears, tiny glimmers rolling down her cheek as she maintained both posture and presence.
Or that girl—Cindy’s age—in bold colours and tight, short clothes—sat opposite a man a decade older—listening intently like a dog to its master as he spoke, dangling earring sparkling like Christmas ornaments as she nodded to the cadence of his emphatic gesticulation… how she rolled her eyes and sighed when he stood to go to the toilet, and she gazed longingly at the exit as she waited for his return.
What did the women here see when they looked at me?
Jesus. I had to get back to being a man, and soon.
“If you weren’t here with me tonight,” Dan intruded on my observation. “Where would you be?”
Fucking Julia, probably. “At home. Alone.” Also possible. “Handwashing underwear and stockings.” Sadly, also true. “Maybe watching something with a glass of wine.” Or a bottle, followed by jerking off. “What about you?”
“A lot more drunk,” he said, gazing into his wine glass.
“Why’d your friends ditch you?”
Exhaling loudly, he hacked at the shared steak and served himself another portion. “Because, Cindy,” he said, and sounded tired, “friendship is constant in all other things, save in affairs of love.”
“In the office,” I corrected him, somewhat to my own surprise. The words just sort of came unbidden.
“Excuse me?” he said.
“You got it wrong,” I said. “Which one is it? Love’s Labour’s Lost? Much Ado? One of those, right? It’s ‘in the office and affairs of love’.”
“You know I did my degree in English Lit, right?” he said. He sounded annoyed. “With a focus on Shakespearian adaptations for my Masters dissertation.”
“And I’m just a silly bimbo with a high school education,” I answered. “Great tits and blonde hair, right?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, I don’t need a fucking degree to know a little Shakespeare,” I snapped. “I’ve got a good memory.”
I’d also dated a professor of Literature, years ago, though Dan didn’t need to know that. Akiko, beautiful, sexy Akiko, who used to prep her lectures naked in bed, reading out samples of text to me where they etched themselves indelibly into memory, forever mixing the poetry of language with the sensual image of her skin, her hot breath whispering in my ear, soft kisses down my hard chest, and her lips ….
“Look it up,” I gasped, and as he reached for his phone I refilled my glass with iced water and gulped it down, hiding my sudden, painful arousal.
A minute later he grunted. “Huh, you’re right.”
“Though she be but little,” I said, huskily. “She is fierce.”
He looked at me then—really looked at me for the first time, it felt, this whole “date”. It was as though the previous hour he’d been imagining being elsewhere, with someone else; but suddenly, I’d become worthy of his attention. He smiled; his eyes sparkled like dew at sunrise and he reached across the table for my hand. Grudgingly, I extended mine in return and his thumb traced gentle circles across the back of my hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, and for the first time sounded like he meant it.
“It’s… okay.” His hand, softly stroking mine, brought something unexpected, catalysed by those earlier thoughts of Akiko, of days in bed together indolently making love amidst the prose and poetry of her profession. The memory of her touch mingled with the current reality of Dan’s. Confusion triggered a powerful yearning, an aching arousal that echoed the one I’d felt earlier this evening, reaching even further back to the ghost of another’s touch and the promises of something more.
Trembling at the gentle sensation of his fingers, his touch trailing lines of fire as he caressed my skin, my eyes closed and I imagined myself falling into—his?—somebody’s arms, being held close, and—my lips suddenly felt warm; a hot flush crawled up through my belly, tendrils uncoiling through chest and neck; and I felt—
Angry; suddenly, so fucking angry and resentful, to find myself trembling and timorous as a schoolgirl blushing with guilt and desire she couldn’t acknowledge let alone understand. And I felt—
Scared, by this rising tide threatening not only my self-control but my very sense of self. And I felt—
Disgusted, by this man’s touch and by Cindy’s feverish response. And I—
Wanted to escape; wanted to submit. Wanted… release.
And release came, though not as expected. I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep shuddering breath. I struggled against the crash of powerful conflicting emotions, but the struggle was brief: I lost, and sank beneath the waves.
“Hey, hey you okay?”
I shook my head in a silent, desperate ‘no’ as the first, shameful tears began to dribble down my cheeks. I snatched my hand away, hid them beneath the table; clutched at my legs, and dug those long fingernails, Julia’s gift, into the fleshy softness of my thighs, hoping the pain might bring some sense of control.
And then he was kneeling next to me.
“I’m….” A shuddering breath, a struggle to stifle a sob. “Sorry.”
“No, I am, I’ve been a jerk,” he said, his hand was on my bare shoulder, and I gasped at his touch. With his other hand he gently stroked my hair, like one would soothe a pet, then cupped my chin. “I’m sorry.” He wiped away a tear with the back of a finger.
Eyes squeezed shut, I could sense his closeness, feel his heat, red berries and steak, sandlewood and smoke, and the gentlest of prods tilting my head towards him. My lips parted in a sigh, an exhalation of need.
“Please—”
“Please,” she begged,
Trembling with—anticipation?—Cindy backed away, hands still outstretched against the approaching threat. The man, Mal, stalked closer. “Don’t….”
“Excuse me?” The man paused and he trembled too, with barely restrained rage. “Excuse me?”
“You don’t,” she tried, her mouth dry. “You can just leave, I won’t tell anyone, please….”
The man grabbed a plate and hurled it against the wall where it shattered with a loud crash. “Shut the fuck up!” the man yelled. “I am so fucking tired of bitches like you telling me what to do.” He swept a chair out of the way and stormed towards her and there was suddenly nowhere for Cindy to retreat, the man loomed up in front of her and her voice caught in her throat as she found herself backed up against the wall.
Up close, she saw the stubble and the redness in his eyes, the unhealthy pallor to his skin and she breathed in his stink, foul-breath of bad teeth and unwashed body. What she’d taken for lean toughness at a distance closer resembled emaciation—beneath the stubble his cheekbones stood in sharp relief, and his eyes were sunken. But he had the strength of anger or desperation as he focused his rage on the young girl.
Cindy shook her head in desperation. “I’m not—”
His slap took her across the cheek, a jarring blow that spun her head backwards. And then the man was up against her, his body pressing her up against the wall, his stinking breath hot against her neck. She felt fear—genuine fear and sick rise in her throat—as she felt the man’s erection through his trousers, prodding her, stabbing for her, as his hand reached for her neck and he buried his face into her hair and breathed deeply.
“Fucking cunt,” he grunted, “You want this.”
“No,” she whispered.
But any further words were silenced as he forced himself onto her, as she—
—was guided upwards with a gentle touch to meet his kiss, and our lips met, parted, and I moaned into him, his tongue briefly dancing with mine before he pulled back, and I followed him, wanting, desperate for more, lost in a moment of arousal and confused memory until the euphoric daze passed. I opened my eyes and saw Dan’s face, still so close to mine, now smiling.
And just like that, the emotional maelstrom of a minute ago drained away and left me cold and in control once more. Intellectually, I was left feeling disgusted and shamed; I’d just kissed another guy, willingly; I wasn’t gay; and I couldn’t even be angry with him because situation reversed, I’d have done the same thing, probably.
But I didn’t feel any of it. Mostly, I was left incredibly tired, tired and hollowed out by the ebb and flow of emotions and by the very thought of maintaining the charade of Cindy any longer.
He continued to hold my hand, delicately, as though I might break, the other drifting downwards, brushing cheek, bare shoulder, and lingering at my knee. “Cindy, I’m—"
“If you say you’re sorry one more time,” I stated flatly. “I’ll punch you in the nose.”
Shaking his head, he returned to his seat. He took a sip of wine and hesitated before asking, “Why did you cry?”
And I wanted to tell him, you’re not the only one who’s had a hard week. And I wanted to say, do you have any idea how exhausting it is to not being taken seriously? And I wanted him to somehow understand the humiliation I endured every minute of every day, the shame of a man wrapped in lingerie and hiding in skirts and under makeup, crying and craven, smiling and simpering, afraid and so very, very angry, always angry.
But how could I explain to him the frustration of having people look at me and see nothing but this young girl, this pretty, uneducated girl, and think this is all there is to me: all glossy surface, these clothes, this hair, this makeup. Circumstances forced me to take an excruciating degree of interest in my appearance, and that very interest meant others believed I had nothing interesting to say.
Instead, I sighed and reached for my fork, eying the remainders of a steak for which I no longer felt hunger.
“You want to know why I cried, want to know what’s wrong?” I sighed. “I’m tired, Dan, that’s what’s wrong.” And nearly added: and I’m sick and tired of being dismissed as irrelevant just because I’m pretty, because I’m wearing a skirt or I’ve put on lip gloss. Far more urgently, I wanted to cry out: I’m a man, for fuck’s sake! This isn’t me, this is not who I am!
He nodded. “You said the same thing last time, on Friday.”
“Because it’s true.”
“Sounds a bit like a stock answer to me, to be honest.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“I mean, I get being tired. I really do. But I’m asking what’s wrong, and… that’s all you’ve got?” He spread his hands wide, as though to show he had nothing to offer. “We’re all tired. I can’t help with that.”
“I didn’t ask for you help.”
“But I’m offering it,” he said. “Is this one of those moments where I’m supposed to take charge?”
“Fine,” I said. “You want to know the truth, Dan? You’ve treated me like shit all night,” I started, ticking each point off on a finger. “You were an hour late because you had ‘better’ people to be with, you order my drink, you order my food, you cut me off and talk over me, you complain like a little bitch when I take a break in the toilet—did you ever think maybe I just needed a little space for five minutes?—and then suddenly because I know a couple lines of fucking Shakespeare, I’m worth your time?”
I shook my head. “Screw you, Dan.”
And then something entirely remarkable and unexpected happened: Dan stayed quiet, watching me contemplatively over steepled fingers. He nodded, once, but didn’t say anything.
Perhaps because of the unexpected silence, perhaps because there was finally a space in which I could be heard, I felt compelled to continue, and it was a relief—a goddamn relief—to get this shit off my shoulders. And yeah, I could share all this with Julia, but she took active pleasure in my misery and what I needed right now, what I really needed, was a sympathetic ear. The fact the ear belonged to a guy—a guy I’d just kissed—and I could still feel the memory of his touch on my lips—well, I forced that to one side.
“Frankly, it’s a goddam miracle I’m still here. You’ve thrown up enough red flags to flatten a half-dozen china shops. But here I am! I’ve stuck it out because, frankly – what choice do I have? Can you imagine what people’ll say if I show up on work on Monday having bailed?”
He nodded. “You think I’ll say something about you.”
“How should I know? Maybe. Guys can be real pricks sometimes, and how am I supposed to know what kind of guy you are? So far, the signs aren’t great. So better to suffer through it, right?
“But you don’t understand, Dan—you can’t understand—how exhausting it is to have something to say, to have something important to add to the conversation, and all the other person does is stare at your tits.” My painted fingernail gleamed in the restaurant’s lights as I pointed at him. “How long did it take you to get ready tonight? Twenty minutes: shit, shower and shave, right? You threw on a shirt, a tie—got rid of the tie after a few drinks—and out the door?
“Any idea how long it took me tonight?”
He shook his head.
“Two hours, Dan. Two fucking hours. Showering and shaving takes a hell of a lot longer when you’re a girl. Moisturiser and body cream. Makeup. Hair – dear God, you have no idea how long it takes to tame all this,” I said, raking fingers through fastidiously straightened hair. “And finally strapping myself into all this”—I swept one hand across my torso—“outer and under, and just having to accept that I’m going to be uncomfortable for the whole night, squeezed and pinched and restricted, just so I can look… acceptable, live up to expectations that also mean I’ll just be ignored because anyone who wastes two hours of their life on their looks must just be a frivolous bit of fluff, right?
“So—you asked. What’s wrong? I’m a girl: that’s what wrong, and I’m tired, and I’m angry and frustrated and it all just boiled over for a moment in tears, okay?”
He nodded again, silently.
“I’m done, Dan,” I instructed. “Please, speak.”
He grinned, ever so slightly. “Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice?”
“I’d actually quite like to hear your voice now,” I answered, reaching for my glass of wine. “I’d like to know what you’re thinking,”
“I’m thinking: to thine own self be true.”
“Still with the Shakespeare?” I sighed. “And what is that even supposed to mean?”
“It means….” He hesitated. “I don’t know, actually. Be true to yourself. Live your good life? Something like that. Always seemed like pretty impossible advice to give—like, can we ever really know ourselves? The line seems predicated on an idealised conception of self, a sort of Platonic self by which to align ourselves. But then, in the play the only person who’s probably “true” to himself is Claudius, and he’s the villain, a murderer, a likely adulterer and acknowledge hypocrite, so maybe not the best role model, right? So…” he trailed off, and blushed. “Er, sorry.”
I smiled, and it was maybe the most genuine expression I’d made that night. “No, please,” I said, “Continue.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to bore you.”
“Because I’m blonde?”
“Because everyone gets the same glassy-eyed stare when I start to ramble on about Shakespeare,” he said. “Not just the pretty girls.”
“Well, this pretty girl isn’t bored. Yet. And I’m just about able to follow along, so long as you don’t use too many big words.”
“I didn’t—”
Ammunition was running low but I found a stray slice of citrus-glazed carrot and tossed it him. “Jesus, relax. I’m just kidding,” I said. “And tell me more about being true to myself.”
He took an uncharacteristic moment to think before speaking. “So, it’s not something I’ve really thought through before,” he started. “But first, it’s worth noting the line comes after a bunch of platitudes. Typical, tedious advice from a dad to his son. And the line’s potentially deeply ironic, since the guy saying it is hardly true to himself and so, as he says, it follows he’s false to others.” He paused, lost in thought for a moment, tapping the table with is finger.
“However. Maybe more than any of Willy’s other plays, Hamlet’s a play about acting, right?”
“Willy?”
He shrugged. “I’ve spent so much of my life studying the guy, I feel I’ve earned first-name privileges.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “Go on.”
“So everybody’s playing a part: anointed king, devoted daughter, loving mother. And the men in the play, especially, they each give different perspectives on how you might play the same part: that of duty-bound son, of vengeance-seeker. Laertes, Fortinbras, Hamlet, even Pyrrhus in the actor’s speech—they’ve all lost a father to murder. They’re all seeking revenge. But only one, in doing so, seems “true” to himself: Fortinbras, “strong-in-arm”, who swoops in at the end, gives a tidy little speech and win the play.
“But Hamlet—we see him try to be that guy, to be the dutiful, murdering son avenging his father’s murder. He creates in his head this concept, this image of who he should be, compares himself to idealised models but he just can’t be “true” to that conception of self, because it’s not who he is. And it’s not that he’s procrastinating or timid—he’s pretty quick to blindly stab people through curtains, or board pirate ships—but he’s a privileged aristocratic intellectual, a university student, a moralistic Christian disdainful of medieval ritual and responsibilities.
“And so he attempts to play the part he’s been forced to take on, but it’s never “true”, never really who he’s meant to be.”
I stared into the bottom of my glass. “And doing so gets him killed, doesn’t it?”
He signaled for the waiter. “Well… no, I don’t think so.”
“I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure Hamlet dies at the end of his tragedy.”
“Yes,” he said. “But maybe it’s because he -was- true to himself, in the end.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s only after his little detour to England, and after he’s seen a thousand good men on the march to die on a worthless hill—that is, when he’s finally confronted the full absurdity of human existence—that he’s finally able to be true to himself. He stops fighting, stops doubting, and simply is.
“If it’s God’s will that his enemy lives: so be it. Equally, if it’s God’s will that he should be the divine tool of judgment… that’s fine, too. All that matters—all that a man can do—is act when the times comes; everything else is without meaning. Thus, “the readiness is all”: and maybe it follows, then, that it’s only by being true to himself that a man can truly be ready when called to act.”
He lapsed into silence as the waiter approached. I barely noticed, unexpectedly struck by his words.
“Hey, you still with me?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t buy it.”
He shrugged. “Fair enough. To be honest, I was mostly talking out my ass, there.”
“No, no, that’s not…” I shook my head. “Everything you said, it sounds good, it sounds like something some five hundred year-dead white guy might write; but that’s not how it works. I mean, how can you be true to yourself if your ‘self’ changes? Are you the same person you were ten years ago? Last year? This morning?” I gestured at myself, at hair and boobs, little back dress and tear-wrecked makeup. “What if this, all this, is a lie?”
Dan smiled. “Then I don’t want to know the truth.”
I sighed. “I’m being serious, here.”
“Well, Hamlet would say it’s all falsehood, anyways. ‘God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another,’ with makeup, right?”
“But it’s not fair!” I insisted. “Why should slapping some shit on my face make me less of a ‘true’ person?”
“Hey, the guy’s a misogynist with mommy issues. Besides, it’s just words, just a knavish piece of work?” He spread his hands wide on the table, placatingly. “We that have free souls, it touches us not,’ right?”
I stared at him, frustrated, feeling as though something important, something profound, lay just beyond my grasp—a glimpse of some truth underlying the absurdity of being Cindy sitting here opposite this idiot boy—an idiot boy who, I had to grudgingly admit, was proving a touch more interesting than I’d anticipated, though perhaps polishing off the bottle of wine had helped a little with that.
But what was the point of all this talk if it was just… words, words, words?
Releasing an exasperated puff of breath, I crossed my arms and glared off to the side in a performance of feminine annoyance.
“Are you honest?” he asked.
I turned back to him. “Excuse me?”
He grinned. “You’re certainly fair,” he continued. “And there’s definitely a touch of Ophelia to you.”
I frowned; prettily, I hoped. “Crazy?”
His smile widened. “More tragically doomed.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“And loyal.”
“Er, yeah,” I answered. “Not sure I’m as dutiful a daughter as she was to… um… Poldark? Paul? Her dad, what’s his name, I forget.”
“Polonius?” Dan raised his glass in mock salute. “To a wretched, rash, intruding fool.”
“Didn’t he die, too?”
Dan nodded. “True; but he did have some pretty pithy lines: ‘the apparel oft proclaims the man.’” He gestured at me with his largely empty glass. “Or woman.”
I grimaced, drained my drink, and stood slightly unsteadily from behind the table. “So what does this apparel proclaim, then?
He took a long, appreciative look, his eyes slowly scanning up across my body, lingering in the expected places, before settling back in his seat contemplatively. His made an idle gesture with his hand: “turn around,” he commanded. His unexpectedly authoritative tone sparked a little thrill, a troubled pleasure that sent me into a silent, slow twirl, deftly spinning in my heels. Finishing with a mock curtsey, and settling back in my seat, I awaited his judgment.
“Beautiful,” he said, and the intensity of his gaze and the unabashed honesty in his voice made me want to squirm, though whether with delight or disgust I could not tell. “And stunning.”
“You flatter,” I said, fluttering a hand to cool myself. “My makeup’s ruined, my face puffy from crying.”
“No,” he said, looking almost comically serious. “I don’t. You look—gorgeous, Cindy, and I’m sorry—please don’t punch me in the nose!—but I am sorry I didn’t show my appreciation when I arrived, and I was a fool to keep you waiting.”
“Thank you,” I said, and unexpectedly it genuinely felt good hearing him say that. “Apology accepted.”
The waiter approached at that point; he went to order but then hesitated. He turned to me.
“More wine?”
“I really shouldn’t.”
“The lady doth protest too much.”
Maybe so, but I remembered what happened last time. I was far enough into drink to want more, but still sober enough to know it was probably a bad idea to continue. On the other hand—I was finally enjoying myself, unwinding from the stress of the week and free from Julia’s oppressive control.
I mean, sure, if he’d asked thirty minutes ago I would’ve refused, easily, but I was actually beginning to enjoy myself, now that Dan was being less of a prick. His apology meant more to be than it should have. He was an affable enough guy to hang around with, and yeah, there was something quite fun about having someone pick up the tab for the night. While it also made me distinctly uncomfortable, I couldn’t deny that I enjoyed the attention, the appreciation of my looks and the effort I’d put into them. Yes, I resented having to play the part of Cindy, of a girl—of this kind of girl—but I’d always enjoyed the benefits of good looks, and if was stuck being a woman, then why not a sexy one?
Besides, it was a Saturday night, and still early.
“Go on,” I said. “Fuck it. Another bottle.”
“What would you like?”
And smiling, I answered: “you choose.”
I disappeared to the toilet to fix my makeup while he ordered and returned to another bottle of red and some beautifully presented crème brulé. We talked, recapturing the ease of a month ago, and damn if I didn’t enjoy myself. I found myself finally able to relax, for the first time that evening, and just slip under the surface of Cindy. She took over, acting on automatic, listening attentively, nodding along, smiling, reaching out, fleeting little touches leading after another glass of wine to held hands. We fed each other our final spoonful of dessert, and our chairs crept closer together around the table.
And if he dominated the conversation, why should that be a bad thing? He did try, asked a few questions, mostly easily deflected, though I was forced to make up a few details about the past, including playing understudy Katherine in a high school production of Taming of the Shrew.
Which Dan followed by telling me about a production of Romeo and Juliet he played in a few years back—“just Sampson, just minor roles”—his last year of university. “It wasn’t very good,” he conceded. “Totally up its own ass, and so caught up with being ‘subversive’ and ‘controversial’ it forgot to actually be, you know… good.” He grimaced. “They did it in a so-called ‘authentic’ style.” Noticing my blank stare, he continued, “you know, with an all-male cast? Women weren’t allowed on stage in Shakespeare’s day,” he said. “So all the parts were performed by men. All those great lovers from the plays—your Juliets and Cleopatras and Titanias—all squeaking, crossdressing boys.” He gave a little gag. “All those classic, romantic kisses? Two guys.”
I hesitated before replying. “Not a fan of two men kissing?”
“No,” he stated flatly.
“What happened to ‘to thine own self be true?’”
Dan shook his head. “That’s different,” he said. “Homosexuality is…,” he hesitated. “It isn’t an idealised self, it’s a deviance from the norm.” He frowned slightly. “Doesn’t it bother you?”
“Maybe not the way it used to?” Treading carefully, I tried to articulate inchoate feelings. “I guess my idea of what’s the ‘norm’ has changed since I’ve moved here.”
He laughed. “Yeah, the city can do that, country girl.”
“And you feel the same way about men in women’s clothing?”
“Kind of, yeah,” he admitted. “Like, sure, you be you, right? What do I care what somebody else does? But sumptuary laws existed in Willy’s days for a reason, and the fact we’ve sort of brought them back says something about today. Workplace dress codes and prescribed fashions are back, and polling suggests it’s all very popular, right?
“Besides, I’ll be honest: I don’t get it. Why would a guy want to wear a bra?” He grinned. “Weren’t you complaining how much of a pain all this stuff is?”
“Sure, but it can also be a lot of fun,” I lied. “And a way to express identity and mood. Besides, like you said, ‘gorgeous’ – who doesn’t want to look beautiful?”
“Yeah, but that means something different for you than for me, right?” Even half-drunk, he couldn’t help himself, one finger tapping his chin in contemplation. “Given there’s no objective standard of beauty, I mean, it’s all societally prescribed. If I wore what you’re wearing, I wouldn’t look beautiful, I’d look ridiculous. Even worse, I’d look weak.”
I flushed under my makeup with a flash of anger. “I’m weak?”
“Of course not!” he grinned, reaching out and gently stroking my bared, slender shoulder. “But—you know what I mean! What you’re wearing, it’s designed to emphasise feminine attributes, and…” he waggled his eyebrows lasciviously, “your attributes are most certainly feminine.”
I punched him in the shoulder. “Pervert.”
He puffed out his chest. “But I’m a man! And a man should be….?”
I waited. “Yes?”
He deflated. “I was hoping you’d tell me.”
I laughed. “Idiot.”
Grinning sheepishly, he shook his head. “Idiot, maybe. But you know what I’m getting at. It’s not like it was twenty years ago. My parents keep going on about how liberal it all was at the turn of the century, so open, so free… so confused. Messed up pronouns and transgendered celebrities and nobody had a clue what to wear anymore or who they were.” Dan took a drink, stared into his glass for a moment, and shrugged. “I dunno if it’s better these days, but at least people have a clearer idea of what they’re supposed to be.
“Men are men.” He tapped his chest. “Women are women.” His hand, still lingering on my shoulder, gave a gentle squeeze. “I should be strong, ambitious, and work hard.”
Shifting slightly, I withdrew from beneath his touch. “And what am I supposed to be?”
“Exactly what you are,” he answered.
I hid my blush behind a deep drink of wine.
And so the evening went: we chatted, flirted, laughed and drink wine. We finished off the bottle and I found myself wanting another, warmly fuzzy and happy despite the uncomfortable constriction of undergarments struggling against a belly full of steak and drink.
Fortunately, this time Dan didn’t ask. He paid the bill, and suddenly I found myself outside, unsteady in heels and drunkenness, with his arm around my waist as we walked down the street, past restaurants and cafes and bars, and I kept expecting him to call for a cab but instead we stopped in front of small block of condos after what felt like far too short a walk.
“Here we are,” he said.
I blinked up at the well-appointed building, glittering windows and small balconies overlooking a small leafy park opposite, green and lush despite the heat. “You live here?”
He nodded. “Fancy coming up for a drink?”
“I….”
He rushed to interrupt. “Hey, no pressure. Listen, I heard you before: I’m not getting laid tonight,” he said, smiling ruefully. “I get it. But I’m having a great night. And I hope you’re having one too now that I’m not being such a dick. And, well…,” he blushed, “I guess I just don’t want the night to end, not yet.”
I smiled at him and laid my hand flat on his chest. “That’s really sweet, Dan. But we both know I should go….”
He looked crestfallen. “So that’s it?”
I nodded.
With a twinkle in his eye, and the hint of a grin, he reached up and cupped my cheek. “Wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?”
Despite dreading what had to come next, I couldn’t suppress a little smile, nor the words that followed. Steeling myself for the inevitable and leaning into his hand, I murmured, “what satisfaction canst thou have to-night?”
His mouth found mine: soft, tentative. Slight rasp of stubble against my cheek. His eyes closed as he leaned in closer, encouraged by my lack of resistance. And this kiss, it was different than those before. Before, I’d been half-blind drunk, drowning in some hormonal haze, or lost in memory. And yeah, sure, I was drunk; still swimming in a sea of feminine influence; and dogged by the past—but I was still in control, still me… whatever that meant tonight.
Everything, tonight: choices, freely made.
One hand slid down my back, cupped my ass, pulled me closer as the other hand found the base of my neck, fingers playing through long hair. Dan was an alright kisser, I had to concede, not one of the greats but better than I’d expected. A little too wet, a little too eager, and there it was, his tongue sliding its way in between my parted lips.
I observed all this coldly, clinically, wishing to detach myself from within the event. Much better to remove myself from the scene and watch from the outside, watch this young man and his pretty girlfriend make out in the pool of light dropping from the lamp above against the backdrop of the night sky.
But I couldn’t subsume myself in Cindy, retreat and play the part, not this time. Trapped in the moment I was forced to experience it all as myself, as a man gamely playing the feminine role in this romance—melting into her partner, soft and compliant—because… because, why?
My eyes fluttered close. His kiss deepened, growing more passionate. Dan pulled me closer. His hands began to roam, along my side, brushing across tits and thigh and shoulder. We twirled as we kissed, slowly and awkwardly in our silly little dance. And it felt so… mechanical, predictable, ridiculous even as I submitted to his touch and tongue and waited for it to end. Opening my eyes, I sought some kind of distraction from this boy’s touch, and saw:
A glimpse of someone standing at the corner of the building opposite, half-hidden in shadows, watching. A man: Jeff’s height and build; I would’ve bet my life on it; in a way I was.
What else could I do?
I gave myself over to the kiss, completely. Drawing closer to Dan, I whimpered into him, fingers gripping his back with toe-curling abandon. I matched his passion and resolved to put on a show convincing enough for that little fucker of a spy to take home to the spank bank.
Until I felt Dan’s cock poking me in the thigh.
Instantly, any sense of detached performance was torn away. Everything became brutally real, and I saw myself then clearly: a man in his thirties trapped in a tiny, tight dress, cowering in makeup and lingerie, pawed at by some younger guy. Weak and shamed. Disgust swelled my throat and I raised my hands to the boy’s chest to push him back and it was all I could do to avoid screaming—
“No!” Cindy shouted, shoving the man with frantic strength.
He stumbled back a step, heel catching on the edge of an overturned chair. Arms pinwheeling, he shouted, “Fucking bitch!” and reached for her. Cindy desperately scrambled away, trying to skirt around a table, keeping it between them.
“What do you want?” Cindy screamed at him.
He stopped, breathing heavily. “For cunts like you to know your place.” Then, with unexpected speed, he grabbed the table and toppled it to the side and jumped forward, grabbing at the young woman. His finger snagged the trailing edge of her billowing dress as she tried to dodge. She found herself suddenly brutally yanked back. With a cry she pulled away, the fabric tore, but pain flared through her scalp as he caught her by the hair.
He hauled her back, slamming her back up against the wall. His hands were suddenly on her, groping breasts, grabbing for her thighs. Cindy screamed. One hand found her throat—controlling, not choking—the other covered her mouth, and he used his full body, pressed up against hers, to trap her against the wall.
“I saw you come in here,” he hissed into her ear as she squirmed beneath his hold. “So fucking classy, like you own the place, think you’re better than us, eh?”
And he punctuated each word by thrusting up against her.
“Slut.”
“Tease.”
His tongue darted out, trailing across her cheek—and she screamed, muffled by his hand; and bit down, hard, into his finger; and he howled in pain, and she twisted free from his hold.
“Bitch!” He caught her arm before she could escape. He hauled her back; grabbed her by the shoulders; shook her once, twice and then threw her forward.
She stumbled, twisting and falling—
Into his arms and he held me close as he came up for air.
His breath was hot on my neck. “Are you sure you don’t want to come up for that drink?” he whispered.
No, I desperately wanted to shout. I don’t! I want—anything but this, because we both know damn well the promise a young woman makes entering a man’s home at night after an expensive date.
And at the same time, I did want that drink, I wanted it intensely, I wanted to drink myself into an oblivion in which shame and disgust, rage and loss simply ceased to be.
I wanted to blink and wake up at some later day without memory of this awful night, without recollection of another man’s touch lingering hotly across my flesh, his lips crushed against mine, his cock—
Most of all, and with such vivid passion that I trembled with the effort of restraint, I wanted to smash Dan’s face in. I wanted to stomp him to the curb and rip him limb from fucking limb and scream into his face: I am a man!
Resting my forehead against his chest, I released a shuddering breath.
“Cindy?”
“One drink,” I murmured.
He took me by the arm—
—and hauled her to her feet, shook and shouted in Cindy’s face, spittle flying.
“On your knees,” he demanded and shoved her away. She staggered, footing unsteady in wedges; pitched forward; her head struck the side of the counter. Pain flared across her temple and dazed, she sank to her knees—
—I sank to my knees—
And I was on my knees with this little black dress unfurled to the waist, tits out bra off, waist cincher and suspenders, hair cascading back, gazing up at the naked man looking down with a grin, with expectation, with lust and craving and his cock was out, thick and dark and swaying in anticipation of my delicate fingers curling around its shaft, my tongue dancing along its length, wet lips, kisses, mouth and throat, wet holes ready to service his needs….
And I was on my knees with this dainty peach sundress in tatters, one tit popped out of its bra, fabric torn to the waist, hair a tangled fall across my eyes as I stared up at the raging man looking down with fury and lust and craving, reaching for his belt buckle as he stalked towards me, grinning in anticipation of wet holes servicing his needs.
My fingers came away from my forehead slick and red with blood where I’d glanced off the counter’s edge. The man stood over me. His face contorted with lust and anger. “You had this coming,” he said. “Bitch,” he spat and reached for me. “You deserve this.”
And I looked up at him and my face split in a wide, fierce grin. “Yes,” I hissed, “I do.” My hand met his at the wrist and grabbed; kicked his legs out from under him; took him down, hard. He hit the ground with a crunch and I was on him before he knew what was happening.
A little later, after I’d had my fun, I made my way over to Doreen, absently wiping my hands clean on my dress, staining it crimson. It was all I could do to keep from whistling a jaunty little turn.
She whimpered at my approach and tried to scramble away. “No, please,” she said.
Smiling pleasantly, I knelt next to her. “Hey, hey, it’s fine,” I insisted. “You okay?”
She shook her head and moaned.
“Listen, earlier, you mentioned security cameras,” I said. “Remember? You told him everything was being recorded. I need to wipe those clean, Doreen.”
“No cameras,” she said, and coughed. “In a shit hole like this?”
I held her gaze. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you, Doreen?”
She shook her head.
I believed her. “You also said something about pie?”
She stared at me as you would a lunatic.
“Would you mind if I took a slice for the road?”
Back in the car, I examined my hands, and mourned the torn and broken acrylic nails Julia had gifted me; she’d be pissed. They stung something terrible now but I’d barely noticed in the moment—curling and uncurling each finger into a tight fist, I sighed with deep satisfaction. I devoured the lemon meringue—Doreen was right, it really was a slice of heaven—and settled, smiling slightly and comfortably and deeply into the seat.
I dozed. A chime woke me, and the car was silent and immobile and it was growing dark outside. Light poured from an expansive building opposite, and the door slid open.
An attendant was immediately at my side. “Welcome to the Asklepios Clinic, Ms Bellamy.” A young woman, very pretty and precise, and professionally attired, greeted me. “If you would follow me, please?”
I was swept along, through reception and out the back, along the edges of a lush garden heavy with the scent of citrus and lavender, buzzing with evening insect sounds, to a small cottage, a private room in a long row of similar looking accommodations.
“Your room, Ms Bellamy,” the pretty young woman stated.
Touching my hand to the door, it chimed and opened.
“Thanks,” I grunted.
Subdued lights activated at my approach, and I passed through the entrance into the living room beyond. It was all very well appointed; a little bland, maybe, but comfortable enough. I tossed my handbag on the sofa and was about to seek out the kitchen when a voice, a voice I hadn’t heard in quite some time, called me back.
“Mr Sanders.”
Katherine—Agent K—sat straight-backed in a chair in the corner, and leveled that look, stern and sexy, which I’d yearned to see for months.
“We need to talk.”
*** to be continued ***
Author’s Notes:
Phew! Well, that chapter took a lot longer than expected. Coming in at just under 20k words, short-and-frequent doesn’t really seem to be my style. Various real-life crises and interruptions consistently interfered with the happy writing routine I’d established for chapter 4, and it became a real slog to maintain any kind of momentum.
Special thanks to those supporting me on Patreon—I honestly don’t know if I’d have completed this without their help and encouragement. It certainly would’ve taken a lot longer otherwise. If you’ve got currency-of-choice to spare, and fancy taking part in the creative process, by all means join us: https://www.patreon.com/fakeminsk. Any and all support appreciated, and there are opportunities to influence the writing of the story, from introducing a favourite band to appearing as a character.
Also, some changes of note. What was previously chapter 5, part 1 has been collapsed into chapter 4. Structurally, it fit there better and essentially details Julia’s entrance into the story and her role in it; and fronting the chapter with the snapshot of the girl walking alone at night hopefully brought a bit more focus on the theme of David’s alienation and loneliness. It also meant that Chapter 5 could focus entirely on the two strands of his trip to the clinic: the memories of the date with Dan, and the encounter in the café, and how both events mirror and collapse into each other. At least I hope so: my aspirations as a writer often outstrip my actual skill!
I’m currently averaging about 500 words/workday, so 2500 a week. Hopefully back in six weeks with the next installment!
And finally: please review or leave a comment! It can’t be overstated how much it means to know somebody is actually reading this stuff.
Constant in All Other Things 2: Chapter Five, Part A
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
“Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.”
Much Ado About Nothing
(Another chapter in under a decade? Well, not quite: half a chapter, trying out shorter but more frequent releases. More detailed author's notes at the end.)
What has gone before
David Sanders saw something he shouldn't have: his boss, pharmaceutical magnate Jeremiah Steele murdered a rival. Placed in protection, an assassination attempt forces him into the disguise of Cindy, a pretty, young girl. Left on his own, living a life he never chose and despises, but promised an eventual escape back to masculinity, the new Cindy struggles through several months of feminine existence... until an unexpected encounter with an ex-girlfriend. Discovering pursuit, they flee together.
***
Alone, a girl walks through the bustling crowd. Friday night, and some strange impulse drives her off the bus several stops early. Storefronts gleam in the night, luminescent auras seeping lurid glows across pavement. The air is warm but cooling with the encroaching darkness, and most are dressed, like her, for the day’s earlier heat. She hesitates outside a restaurant. She sees herself in the glass, a ghost of a girl—slim, blonde hair, short skirt—trapped, suspended in reflection in the window; outside, gazing in. The comforting clink of cutlery, murmur of conversation, and of music envelopes her as a trio of patrons leave the restaurant, cut off abruptly as the door closes.
A couple: young man, broad-chested in a white shirt, tie loosened and cuffs rolled back, gesticulates with a fork, a piece of meat impaled on its tines. Opposite, a woman listens with a hint of a smile. Her eyes sparkle as she raises a glass to glossy lips. The man mirrors her, reaching for his wine. The woman’s gaze dances away, down but then flitting aside, looking outside, and there notices the girl watching through the reflection in the window. They make eye contact. The woman raises an inquisitive eyebrow. The girl outside feels a suddenly, nearly overwhelming yearning; heart pounding, she scurries away.
Pools of intermittent light dropping from streetlamps see her home as she walks the several remaining kilometers, alone, back to her empty apartment.
***
To her credit, Julia played along beautifully as we escaped the restaurant. We finished our drinks quickly—but not too quickly—and she ordered a cab, which duly arrived as she settled the bill. Laughing, chatting, tossing back our hair as we slid handbags over shoulders, we left the restaurant and slid into the waiting car.
“What the fuck—” she started the moment the door shut, but I cut her off with a look and pointed at the sign on the back of the seat: all rides were audio and video recorded for the safety of the customer and the company. Driverless, the vehicle acknowledged and confirmed our presence, and hummed into the early evening, winding its way to Julia’s apartment.
“Not the day I expected,” Julia muttered.
I laughed. “No kidding.”
“Here. This is for you.” She passed a slip of paper, a number scrawled across its back. I raised an eyebrow. “The waiter’s number,” she said, and despite the tension her eyes sparkled with mirth. “Guess he noticed us checking out his ass.”
We lapsed into silence. I stared out the window, a tight knot in my belly. Outside, the city suburbs slid by, awash in artificial dawn as shop fronts and restaurants, bars and shops spilled their light onto the pavement. Swiftly, we wound our way towards the centre, ever-taller cathedrals of cement and glass clawing the night sky. The moment felt inexplicably familiar—sat in the back of a cab, next to Julia—slipping into the night—though the sleek legs emerging from the short skirt, crossed at the thigh, and the painted fingers clutching tightly at the knee, and the shoes sparkling in the dark, all belonged to the wrong person. And yet despite the incongruity, this moment raised a ghost of shared memory.
We paused at a junction, traffic light momentarily painting us red, headlights strobing from turning cars. A pedestrian, crossing, glancing in would see two attractive women, possibly girlfriends, sat close in the rear of the car.
“Hey, you remember?” she suddenly started, snapping me out of my reverie as the car slid forward.
“The gig?”
She nodded.
“Why’d you suddenly think of that?”
“Dunno.” She shrugged. “Back of a car, it’s a hot night… one of us is wearing a skirt.” She chuckled. “You were remembering too, weren’t you?”
“Harry,” I said, feeling a sudden pang.
She laughed. “Yeah, you loved that old guy, didn’t you? Wasn’t really my thing.” She paused in recollection. “Was a pretty awesome gig, though. Guy knew how to put on a show.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Longman was pretty awesome.”
Sensitive to our words, the car started up some music, not so loudly as to interfere with conversation. It was the classic title track from his second album: Beautiful Losers. The opening melancholy chords filled the space between us.
“Didn’t he…?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “First encore.”
We sat there like that for a moment sharing the music and the memory, and I felt the space—short centimetres, long years—separating us. A crazy impulse to reach out nearly overcame me, to hold her hand or pull her closer. It was the music and the day’s drinking and the darkness outside the car, and I knew she felt it too. Almost too quietly to hear, I heard her whisper: “I didn’t rehearse for this.”
Her words triggered an assault of—not guilt, exactly, but still something like a physical cramp in the belly—discomfort and doubt. Julia didn’t deserve this. Whatever anger and bitterness she felt over me was her own, and she’d clearly worked hard over the years to move on from our past. I could just jump out of the car and disappear. She might reveal my identity; she might not; either way, she’d probably be fine. But if I went home with her now and saw this through, I’d be binding her to me once again. It wasn’t fair to her.
On the other hand, waking up alone with tits and an identity I never chose wasn’t exactly fair, either. Losing my job, my income, my home; losing my self, my sex, my privilege—in exchange for… what, exactly? I glanced down at the paper in my hand, sighed and slipped it into my handbag.
The song ended, surging though the crunchier second half, the intense, short guitar solo that underpinned the lyrics of loss and yearning; and then something else started, somehow recognizable but still unknown. It was definitely more contemporary—dirty beats, layered synth underscored by harsh guitar that briefly surfaced from the aural wash—maybe a sample from Longman?—but then the vocals kicked in, the woman’s ethereal tones ordering the crafted cacophony.
“Turn it up,” Julia commanded, and the car dutifully obeyed.
“What’s this?”
She looked genuinely surprised. “Really? It’s been on constant play like… everywhere. Huge.”
“I’ve been a bit distracted lately.”
“Cindy,” she said. “That’s her name—well, like you, I guess. Spelled differently, though: ‘sin’ in the religious way; capital D – I at the end. SinDi. She just popped up a month ago; major push by the label, we’re doing a bit of work with them, but this track’s just really grabbed the zeitgeist. To be honest, at first I thought she was just another pop starlet of the moment, you know—you should fucking see her! Sexy little thing—but seems she might have traction.”
The song’s appeal was clear: catchy hooks, but with depth; crafted rather than processed. I could already imagine the bass-heavy remix pounding away at a club or relaxing to it in the dark with an acoustic version at home. You could dance to it; you could fuck to it. I liked it instantly, even if the girl’s voice was a little breathy for my taste.
“Song’s called ‘Broken Flowers’,” Julia said, and lapsed into silence as I listened to the opening lyrics:
You’ll miss me when I’m gone
She said
There was a girl
She said
Lip gloss and lilacs
And the moon.
The song was just beginning to open up, the lyrics pulling back as the layered soundscape started to assert itself—and then it faded and disappeared, leaving me wanting more.
“We’re here,” Julia announced.
The cab turned down a short cul-de-sac, leafy and affluent, past a row of terraced houses, and then disgorged us at the base of a turn-of-the-century building, a towering slab of glittering glass, sharp-angled porches and red-brown brick. The car purred off into the night. Drinking in the details of her home, I followed Julia as she led me past the concierge—the bastard’s eyes on our asses as we walked past—and into the elevator. I could sense her assessing me as we surged upwards, feel her growing desire to demand answers. We stopped at the twelfth floor, a few floors shy of the top penthouse. The hallway was silent, brightly-lit, and smelled sharply clean, with only two doors at opposing ends. She led me to the one on the left, tapped the lock and led me into her home.
The door had barely clicked shut before she spun on me, eyes flashing. “What the fuck!” she shouted. “What’s going on—”
Anticipating her outburst, I clapped my hand over her mouth. “Quiet.”
Her eyes glared at me over my fingers.
“Speakers.” I indicated towards one I could see. “Smart appliances.”
Her eyes widened slightly with understanding. A few taps on her phone, and she nodded. “Off.”
“Good,” I breathed, sagging with relief. Heels clicked on the hardwood entrance as I looked around. “Nice place you’ve got here.”
“You’re going to tell me what the hell is going on here – David.”
“Yeah, sure.” I waved her off and sank into the nearest seat, a long sofa in slate grey, lamps responding to my movement and lighting the way into her home. I fumbled with delicate straps and tossed my shoes aside and gave a deep sigh of relief. “Oh, thank God,” I said, stretching out aching arches. “Goddam implements of torture.”
“I thought you loved them.”
“I hate them,” I growled. “And these,” I added, slipping off the bracelets decorating my wrists, unclasping the bauble at my throat.
She watched me quietly, and I ignored her. Julia had a nice place: large, open plan, very contemporary, taking up half the floor. Large windows, blinds pulled aside, granted a view towards both the city centre and opposite, the sprawl of suburban streets stretching towards the horizon. It was darker now; the commercial monoliths cut dark silhouettes in the distance, washed from below in garish street-level glows, glittering along their edges and tops with safety lights. Her furniture looked new and sleek. What I could see appeared startlingly clean. Aside from some token decorations that spoke of the girl remembered from a decade ago, the place felt strangely impersonal, like a show room for a new block of condos. There was a dull comfort and familiarity to her home, like a hotel room you’ve visited a hundred times before in any number of cities. The odd blandness of the place went some way towards tempering the stab of jealousy I felt at the contrast between Julia’s slick accommodations and Cindy’s tiny apartment.
Julia padded into the kitchen, the lights softly rising at her entrance. She pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge and two glasses from a shelf. “You lied to me,” she stated, returning, dropping into the far end of the sofa. She passed me a glass.
“Yup.”
“How much?”
“Almost all of it.” She twisted the bottle open and I held out the glass and she poured a generous serving of Riesling. She kicked off her shoes, legs curling beneath her. In contrast, I sat with my legs spread as wide as the skirt would allow. It felt good to spread out. “Like, 90% of it.” I considered a moment. “Maybe 80%.” The day’s emotional exertion suddenly caught up with me. Given a moment’s peace, I could so easily close my eyes and fall asleep here, like this. Instead, I stared blankly at her ceiling, waiting.
She frowned. “You’re not trans.”
“Ha! No.”
“Makeup?”
“Hate that shit.”
“And that story about the little girl and the bullies and…”
“Ah. That one’s true.” I took a drink of wine, a long one, relishing the crisp coolness of it. Julia served quality stuff. “Except for the bit about the dress.”
Julia took a sip of wine, then carefully placed her glass down on a coaster on the coffee table by the sofa. I could see her struggling; her hand clenched and unclenched and the tension was clear in the tendons of her arm. She struggled to keep her voice neutral. “Then what the hell is going on, David?”
And here it was: my leap of faith.
“Witness protection,” I answered.
“Witness--?”
“Protection.” I took a deep breath. “I saw something I shouldn’t have, and instead of keeping my mouth shut like a sensible person, I told the cops. They kept me in hiding until calling me as a witness.” I took another long drink of wine, nearly finishing it, putting the glass down next to hers, mine holding the reddish half-moon lip mark on the rim while hers didn’t. “Afterwards, it became very clear, very quickly, that my life was in danger.”
Julia raised an eyebrow. “Death threats?”
“I wish,” I answered drily, and told her in minimal details about the attempt on my life outside the courtroom: two bullets, one jacket, and bruises and broken ribs.
Her mouth dropped open in horror. “No way.”
“Yeah.” I pointed to where the bullets hit. “Here and here. Scary shit. And so my handler—that’s the agent appointed to keep me alive—she decided to smuggle me away to somewhere safe to recover. In a dress.”
“No!”
I smiled ruefully. “Yes. Well, sort of. Tight jeans, stuffed bra, heels and makeup, wig. Enough to fool anyone from a distance while she escorted me.” The events all seemed a lifetime ago. After all, these events belonged to the story of David Sanders – not Cindy Bellamy. But telling the story brought it back vividly, those bizarre, synthetic breasts K stuck onto my chest at the start; the impossible bio-engineered pussy that came later; and K herself, stern and sexy and twisted. The short, intense time we spent together. The drive and the hotel room. The Clinic.
“But it didn’t work. There was a man chasing me. He found me. He broke my arm,” and I held out the injured limb, delicate and smooth, bare to the shoulder, for Julia to see. “Here, with an iron bar.” I gestured without touching at my face. “Smashing in my nose and jaw. He tossed me through a glass door, he cut me, he shattered my leg. And then he shot me in the side. I think he tore a hole in my lung; I don’t really remember. There was a hell of a lot of blood.”
Julia looked a little ashen, shaken as her mouth hung open. She turned away, silently grabbing the bottle and refilling our glasses and passed one back to me. I took it gratefully and drank deeply.
I hadn’t really reflected on my near assassination since recovering from the attempt, nor had the opportunity to share the experience with anyone. Doing so brought a flurry of conflicting emotion: mostly, and most vividly, I remembered the sheer joy of the fight, of cutting loose after so many years of playing nicely according to the mundane rules of David’s life. Even hampered by ridiculous clothing, matched against an opponent enjoying every possible advantage… I’d held my own; gave as good as I got; and yeah, I should’ve died then and there but I took the fucking bastard with me. The vivid slash across the neck; the gurgle and crimson froth; eyes wide with the realisation of his own death: there was a savage satisfaction to it all.
But he’d killed me. At least, I should’ve died. It would’ve saved me the living death, the slow, painful humiliation of inhabiting Cindy’s life. But for the unlikely intervention of the Asklepios Clinic’s freaking Frankenstein science, that would’ve been the end of the story of David Sanders: ten years the corporate stooge; what was the fucking point? And I probably should be shaken, deeply traumatised by the experience of brutality and pain and the reality of my near death. It was the stuff of nightmares.
But I already had my own nightmares and they weren’t so easily displaced. It wasn’t my first brush with death. And other than a visceral thrill at the memory of violence, I couldn’t summon up anything greater than apathy at the thought of David’s demise. It was almost as though he’d hardly existed to begin with.
Julia was watching me carefully, studying the play of emotions across my face. She was clearly carefully considering what to say next.
“You’re lying again,” she said.
“Nope.” I shook my head, blonde tresses falling about my face. With a flick of the neck, I sent my hair back over my left shoulder, and smoothed it down with a quick stroke the hand. “This part is true. They got me. I was a goner.”
“But…”
“You said it was impossible for me to look this way.” I smiled wryly. “Maybe you’re right. But everybody knows there’s some pretty crazy shit out there these days. Like, there’s a goddam factory on the Moon, right? We’ve got people half-way to Mars. There was all that medical voodoo shit they did when the last pandemic hit a few years ago. So, yeah, I got to experience some of that stuff up-close, I guess. They dunked me into some kind of tank, a bleeding wreck of a corpse; and I came out like this.”
“A girl!”
“A disguise,” I insisted. “Remember that scandal last year, at the Olympics, the gene doping one? It’s like that, I think, something like that but instead of expressing all those genes for strength and endurance and whatever, they went for—this.” I cupped the soft flesh of my chest. “Tits and soft skin and long hair and… all the rest.” I could feel the anger creeping into my voice, the frustration and sense of betrayal, the intense humiliation.
“And this all happened a few months ago?”
“More like six, going back to the very start. The tank was about four months ago.”
She shook her head. “But it’s not possible. If what you say is true: shot, cut, broken, bleeding out. Nobody heals that quickly, not even with crazy voodoo science.”
“Like I said before: here I am.”
“Show me,” she said.
I raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“I want to see,” Julia answered. “Stand up. Strip. Show me.”
“Didn’t you see enough on Friday?”
But she hadn’t, and so I did. In the dim lighting of Julia’s living room, I stood there, carefully undoing the heavy buttons until I could wiggle free of the skirt. The wine, on top of the day’s earlier drinking, rushed to my head and I fumbled with the buttons and my longer nails again felt ungainly. The skirt pooled at my feet, revealing smooth, shaven thighs over lacy stocking tops. With some awkwardness, I reached for the buttons running up my back, and shimmied out of my shirt, and in doing so found myself standing in nothing but my underwear—pink push-up bra, bulging thong, white thigh-high stocking—and earrings and makeup, in front of my ex-girlfriend, and I trembled very slightly despite the warmth, a deep flush slowly crawling up my chest and throat.
Julia circled me, drinking in every detail of my femininity, and I saw in her gaze the same ravenous hunger, the insatiable desire, that I sensed earlier in the day. Clearly, it was all she could do to refrain from reaching out and touching me, and stroking the smooth, whole skin. I felt acutely aware, for the first time, how she was larger than me now, taller as I stood there barefooted; and uneasiness fluttered across my belly.
“No scars, nothing,” she said.
“I know. Crazy, right?”
“But you were… shot?”
“Right fucking here,” I said, and took her hand. She jerked slightly at my touch but allowed me to bring her to a place over my ribs halfway between hip and armpit. Her touch lingered there, hot, uncertain, but then she tentatively pressed at the spot. “Does it hurt?”
“Not at all.” I giggled, involuntarily. “It tickles a little, actually.”
Her hand slowly traced a path down my side, towards my waist. She was standing directly in front of me now, our foreheads nearly touching. “There isn’t a mark on you.”
“Nope.”
Her fingertips hovered at the edge of my abdomen, at the waistband of my panties. “You used to have a birthmark here.”
“Gone.”
With gentle prodding, she urged me to turn. Her touch explored my shoulder, my back, a finger traced down my spine. “You had scars here,” she said, “and here, and here.” She punctuated each with a touch.
“All gone.”
She stood so close I could feel the heat from her body. Her hand briefly, tantalisingly brushed across my ass, bared and supple, split by the thong wedged between both cheeks. I felt her presence, her touch, with painful intensity, and trembled with arousal. There was a faint smell to her—a miasma of memory—that carried with it recollections of intimate times together.
“Unbelievable,” she whispered.
I took her hand in mine again, turned to face her. “You should check this out,” I said, and brought her hand to my breast.
She pulled her hand away.
“Hey, it’s fine,” I said, bringing her back.
Her breath tickled my collarbone and sent an errant strand of hair dancing. Her hand rested tenderly, almost nervously, over my boob, the gauzy fabric of the bra a flimsy barrier between her touch and my flesh. At her nervous touch the flush felt earlier, the embarrassed heat crawling up my neck into my face, now rolled downwards, hotter than before, intensifying as it flowed into and filled those tits. There was a sudden urgent need for someone—for her—to grab my boobs. Almost incoherent images of Julia, grabbing, fondling, sucking flesh and nipple flared across my eyes.
The immediate reaction to her touch—a weakness in the knees—ache in my balls—a sudden tightness at the centre of each breast—surprised, unsettled me with its intensity. What I now felt was disconcertingly different from my own rough handling, the drunken groping of infrequent lonely nighttime masturbations over the previous months. Julia’s touch brought sensations that differed in magnitude from those experienced with the fake tits of before. Dan hadn’t quite reached second base, last Friday… would it have felt like this if he had?
And the realisation that this was the first intimate contact I’d made with anyone for months flared through me. Her hands were the first to touch these fucking udders other than mine. Her shy touches were waking in me a desperate yearning that threatened to overwhelm any control.
How much of my torment did she even notice? Did the corner of her mouth twitch into a hint of a wicked smile? Eyes downcast, she watched her own hand as it grabbed more firmly. She felt their weight in her hand. “How big are you?” she asked, gently kneading.
“B cups,” I gasped.
“I don’t think so,” she said, and looked up. Her eyes found mine. “You’re… beautiful,” she breathed.
A shudder coursed through the entirety of my body at her words, her touch, and at the force of her look. We were so close I could feel the warmth flowing from her, smell the day’s heat in her hair. And then suddenly, my lips found hers. My mouth crushed against hers and I groaned into Julia, leaning fully into the kiss, arms rising to encircle her, to pull her closer. Fleetingly, I felt the softness of our lips’ meeting, mine slick with lipstick and gloss, a hint of berries and a taste of wine, and she seemed to collapse into me…
“No,” she cried. The hand at my breast shifted: her fingers abruptly pinched the nipple and twisted, painfully. I cried out in surprised pain. She shoved me away, fiercely, and I stumbled, tangled in the clothes at my ankles. Julia lurched back, eyes shadowed and glittering like obsidian. She passed the back of her hand across her mouth, wiping away the tacky hint of gloss left there.
“Fuck!” I instinctively crossed my arms over my chest, seething at the ignominiously throbbing of my nipple.
“No!” She was breathing heavily, flushed and her whole body quivered like a plucked, taut string. “You don’t get to kiss me,” she said. “You don’t get to touch me.”
“I—”
Her hand lashed out with surprising speed. Even had I wanted, drunk and discombobulated, off kilter and distracted, arms crossed, there was no way I could have blocked or dodged. Her slap took me fully across the face. I reeled back, face smarting, eyes watering.
A moment later, she had me up against the wall. Taller, bigger, stronger, she grabbed my wrists and held them above my head with one hand. Her body pinned me to wall. Her other hand found my tit again, squeezed, finger and thumb pinching the wounded nipple through the thin fabric, twisting once more. Redoubled pain erupted under her grip, hot and intense and I struggled briefly against her grip. Without releasing my wrists, she slammed me back once more against the wall, and her hand released my aching boob and snaked up between us and latched around my throat.
And I could’ve thrown her to the ground, broken free, easily. She wasn’t a fighter. A little bigger and stronger, sure, but a subtle shift of weight, a twist from the waist and she’d go down. I could’ve headbutted her in the face and smashed in her nose; kneed her in the crotch; reversed her sloppy hold and popped her shoulder out of its joint or snapped her elbow. This bitch wasn’t a fighter, but I submitted passively to assault. I was curious; I’d anticipated something like this; and truth be told, the roughness and hell, even the pain was sort of exciting as her fingers curled around my neck.
“You…,” she breathed. “You goddam, fucking bastard.” Her mouth was right up against my ear. “I hate you. I hate you so much.” She bit down, once, into the cartilage above the earring. I inhaled sharply from the pain. Spinning me around, she dragged me sideways towards the window.
“Look at you.” My reflection mocked me as she held me before the framed night, a feminine image caught between the light inside and the outside darkness. “So small, so weak,” she murmured. “So pretty.” She released my wrists, and I felt her fumble at my back and then yank the bra down my arms. My tits popped free, momentarily, before she seized both roughly, shoving them upwards, displaying them rudely in reflection.
“Did you want these?”
“No,” I whispered.
Her hand snaked into my hair, fingers curling deeply into my mane, grabbing a fistful, and then pulling harshly. I gasped. “Did you want this?”
“No.”
“You make such a pretty girl, David. Is this what you wanted?”
“No!”
Next I knew, she had me pressed up against the window. My tits flattened against the cool glass. God, what must this look like from outside? Then she spun me back around. “Good,” she hissed. And the kiss that followed was fierce and angry and passionate, her tongue forcing its way in, and her hands were on my ass, squeezing, then groping at my chest again, or grabbing a fistful of hair, or at my neck, and then back at my ass.
And she would pull me forward into her and then shove me back, bared ass smacking rudely up against the cool windowpane. And my cock strained against its confines, and my balls ached for release, and I groaned as she attacked me in her anger and passion. All those months of stifled, frustrated desire swelled up and it was all I could do to restrain myself from throwing this bitch face down across the back of her sofa and show her just how manly I remained, how a disguise of tits and ass and long hair didn’t make me any less a man.
But I didn’t. Instead, I dropped my arms limply at my side. Behind the blonde curtain of hair I hid my face, and when she next kissed me, savagely, I let her. Her breath was hot and angry on my face, my neck, my shoulder; she bit; her entire body coiled around me as she straddled my leg, thrusting against me, sliding back, pushing again, riding my thigh. Her thumb pulled at my lip, smearing lipstick, forced its way into my mouth. She buried her face into my hair and her thighs suddenly clenched tightly, painfully around mine one more time.
Julia shuddered, and with a long, rapturous moan she came.
She held me there, pinned against the glass, panting heavily. Her touch lingered, briefly, lightly stroking, as though trying to trace a forgotten pattern within my flesh. Then she withdrew, and Julia appeared momentarily stricken and aghast; but the haunted look quickly disappeared.
“Not a word!” Julia glared and stalked towards me, now a predatory gleam to her dark eyes. There was a wet patch at the crotch in the thin fabric of her trousers. Her fingers hooked the waistband of my panties and tugged.
“Easy!” I complained.
“Get those fucking things off,” she said, and her fingers curled around my throbbing, erect cock.
I hastened to do as she ordered, kicking them away, but as I went to roll down the stockings she slapped my hand away. “No, keep those,” she said. “You look cute in them.” She gave my member a little tug, leading me towards what I presumed was her bedroom. But such was the turmoil of emotions I felt in the instance—raging desire, profound shame, weakness, surprise, drunkenness and anger, a seething, toxic slurry roiling in my belly —that my legs gave way and I stumbled, pitching forward.
Julia caught me and I fell into her. We sank to the floor together, her arms suddenly wrapped around me, strong, confident. And it felt unexpectedly good being held by her: I felt suddenly both small and protected, delicate and precious, in the comforting folds of her arms. Confused and sickened by this weakness, I furiously suppressed a sudden desire to tear up and sob. There wasn’t time to even consider where this surge of feminine emotion originated as Julia’s boobs pressed up against mine though her thin shirt. Our hair pooled together, black and blonde. “Jules…” I gasped.
She pawed at my painfully erect cock once more. “I’ve wanted this thing inside of me since I saw it last Friday,” she whispered into my ear. Her grip on the shaft tightened, thumb sliding across the smooth lip of the helmet. “You want it too, don’t you?”
Breathing heavily, I nodded.
“Then fuck me, David, like you used to,” she said.
***
Laying in the tangled mess of bedsheet in the dark, Julia’s languid body curling into mine, I marvelled at how great sex felt after months of deprivation. A man trapped on a desert island for months, denied proper food, rediscovers the glorious riot of flavours denied for so long. Deafened, then with hearing restored, a woman realises a taste for music previously absent, relishing in the purity of tones and the crystalline cadence of sound. How could sex be any different? My body still thrummed with the intensity of it, the release, the fullness of giving and receiving pleasure. And though I’d admit to being a little out of practice, I more than made up for it with effort, keeping up with Julia’s voracious appetite. Damn those doctors for what they did to me, but an unexpected benefit of this whole-body reboot was that I could fuck like a twenty-year old again.
Luxuriating in post-coital contentment, I stared up at the ceiling, listening to the quiet sound of her breathing and the distant murmur of the late-night city. I felt both exhausted and exhilarated. I lost count of how many times she’d panted, moaned, juddered and cried out in orgasm. I’d managed a hat-trick of my own, pacing myself according to the brief breaks she’d allowed: here, a few minutes for a piss and to scrub my face clean; there, a glass of water; we’d kept it going into the early hours of the next day. The sliding door to her bedroom patio stood ajar—we’d fucked out there too, her moans drifting into the dark—and now the breeze caressed my legs still in stockings; she’d insisted I keep them on all night. Goose pimples rose and fell across my thighs; nipples tightened in the cool air. A crescent moon, its sliver of brightness hidden behind gauzy shreds of cloud, extended pale ivory tendrils into the room.
And then, perhaps as a consequence of the quiet and calm and the woman resting in the crook of my arm, I remembered a girl called Molly.
***
One night the street, curled up in a doorway shivering through the long hours of cold loneliness. The next night a stained mattress in a tiny room over a nightclub. One more and now a soft bed, the faint scent of perfume, cheap framed poster of sunflowers and a girl, gently snoring through to morning.
How did it happen, this transition? I can’t remember. I purposely forgot what it was that drove me to cash in the favour that got me off the streets, only that one day I made the decision to bring that period of my life to an end. There was a year of living death, of hollowed existence drifting through empty days, of cold and bitterness and hunger and anger and sadness; though everything, actions and emotions, events and thoughts, seemed muted and distant. Time, obliterated. Then suddenly a morning in which I walked up to one of Tahir’s nightclubs and asked for help.
The guy owed me from a thing a few years back, and the only problem was convincing the staff to let me talk to him. He took one look at me, nose and thin moustache wrinkling with disgust, and led me to the showers. Brutally hot water hammered my emaciated body, carving rivulets through the thick dirt and caked grime. The water ran brown and I stood there insensate, watching the past year slough off and circle the drain, until he cut the heating and the icy spray shocked me back to life. He had fresh clothes for me: jeans, a t-shirt, underwear still wrapped in packaging, clear socks. Food and a place to hole up until I found my feet.
I’d wondered at the time whether he knew what happened to me, about Persephone’s murder and my failure to prevent it. I didn’t ask; it didn’t do to pry. Tahir wasn’t one for extended conversation anyway. Tall and taciturn, with an odd predilection for velvet suits, once presentable he invited me to sit with him.
“You have come to me,” he said, over steepled fingers, long and precise. “You have given me a problem to solve.” He frowned. “I do not like this problem.”
I shrugged. At the time, asking for anything beyond a shower and a free meal seemed presumptuous. I’d saved his life, once; now, he offered the same in return.
“Your problem,” he continued, “is your past…,” and here, he called me by a name I no longer use. “For one so young, you have a very troubled past. Many skeletons. Much darkness.” He shook his head. “And of course, a woman we both know.” He opened his hands, revealing a single, pink petal.
Sakura.
“But perhaps,” Tahir continued, “There is a solution to our problem.” And he slid a large, thick envelope across the table to me.
I opened the envelope, shaking out its contents. There was a flutter of documents, a brief shower of hard plastic, a key. I picked up one of the cards. It was a drivers’ license, with an unfamiliar name: David Sanders.
“This man,” Tahir said, “this David, he does not have a troubled past. He is a young man with a fine past. He is a young man with a bright future. A fine future, with much potential.”
The offer was clear. Tahir would set me up with a new identity. He’d put me up for a year in a little apartment above one of his clubs, and in return I’d work for him, first as a bouncer, then as a bartender, possibly even as a manager. Afterwards I’d be free to go; David Sanders would be free to step away from the ruins of another man’s past.
“But you must agree,” he said, gently drumming the table with his fingers. “To say farewell to that past. Your past, it remains far away, yes? Like a foreign country. It is no longer yours to visit.” The implications were clear: if I accepted his offer, the person I’d once been was effectively dead—gone—twenty-two years of my life written off as a bad debt and forgotten. What family I had: gone. Friends: gone. Sakura, Persephone…
An easy choice to make.
That first night, head swirling at how quickly everything had changed, I sat at the bar in borrowed clothes, drink untouched, feeling absolutely lost, watching as the first patrons arrived. Nominally, I was there to learn something about the job but really it was just to experience normal—ha!—society again after so long out of it. And this girl came up to the bar, ordered a drink, and after a pause turned to me.
“Hey there.” The girl seemed impossibly pretty, dark-skinned and curvy with a beautiful smile, her outfit glittering with a thousand sequins and I wondered why she’d speak to somebody like me. “Haven’t seen you here before.”
At a loss as to how to react, I tried copying her. My smile felt like an ill-fitting mask dragged over unwilling features. Opening my mouth to speak, nothing came out. Annoyance flashed across her face, but also disappointment; she began to turn away; and it seemed as though the mask I wore was no different from the one she wore, too. Sadness simmered beneath the surface, loneliness and hurt, an echo of my own. And though it seemed the hardest thing in the world, I answered her.
“Hi,” I said.
She smiled. “I’m Molly.”
Later, laying in her soft bed, her plump, beautiful body warm and comforting lying next to mine, I bid farewell to my old life. Maybe he was still out there somewhere, cold and alone, sleeping rough, his existence coiled around an emptiness, a loss and a mistake that could never be fixed. He could stay there, that sad, broken boy. I looked down at the girl nestled up to me, the source of my newfound solace. David, I swore, would never be alone again.
She stirred in my arms. “Hey there,” she murmured, eyes still closed.
“Hey.”
The girl spread one hand flat across my pectoral, and she nestled deeper into the crook of my arm, sighing. With her other hand, she patted my cock once as though congratulating an eager puppy. “That was fun.”
“Yeah.”
“You never even told me your name.”
“David,” I told her. “My name’s….”
“David. Mmm,” Julia purred, her hand sleepily sliding its way back to my breast. “I like this,” she said, squeezing the soft flesh.
“I noticed.”
“And this.” Her knee gently prodded my exhausted and semi-flaccid penis.
I grunted.
“We’re going to have so much fun together,” she mumbled.
I smiled, and lightly danced my fingers down her side.
“I’ll help you,” she said.
“Help me?”
“Teach you.”
“Teach… what?” My fingers hesitate at her thigh.
“To be a girl,” she said, and she stirred against me, turning onto her side and opening her eyes. “To be my girl.”
“Jules…,” I started, a warning tone entering my voice.
“Oh, I just love you like this,” she continued. “Small and soft. Submissive. So much better than the arrogant prick you used to be.”
I went to pull away from her, but her hand at my breast, her leg over mine, restrained me. “And you, hating every minute of it! It’s more, so much more and better than I could have possibly hoped for. The man who fucked me and ruined me and left me—trapped! Living a life he despises, living as a girl, experiencing everything he’s looked down at and derided his whole life.” Speaking like this, she slowly slid on top of me, her whole body pressing down on me, breast to breast, her hands seeking mine, fingers interlacing, holding me down.
“You’ll be my little doll for me, won’t you, David, wearing what I choose for you; my little puppet, mincing and prancing when I pull your strings? I’ll pick the prettiest outfits for you, David, the sexiest clothes, and show you off at all kinds of fun places.”
I tried to push her off but she had me pinned to the bed. “Fuck you, Jules, I’m not going to—”
But she cut me off with a deep and passionate kiss, stifling my protest. Then she kissed my cheek, lightly licked the edge of my ear, and whispered: “But of course you will,” she said. “Or I’ll tell your secret.”
Going limp beneath her, I hissed, “you wouldn’t.”
Kissing lightly down the neck, across my collarbone: “Wouldn’t I?”
“I’ll be killed. You’re not a killer.”
She paused, and when she spoke her voice quavered with momentary weakness. “No, I’m not,” she said. “Even after what you’ve done to me, I don’t wish you dead.” Then she resumed her tender ministrations, small wet kisses and darting tongue, as she worked her way towards my tits, her whole body sliding down my length. “I’d much rather have you like this,” she said. Her tongue flicked across my erect nipple; my whole body tensed; I released a sharp intake of breath. “You could enjoy it too.”
“I hate this,” I snarled, or tried, voice inadvertently squeaking as her tongue flitted out again. Throughout our night of frantic screwing, she’d largely abandoned her early fixation on my tits, other than the occasional, almost haphazard grope. Now, she was awakening sensations in my breasts that were new and, because unfamiliar, distinctly uncomfortable; on the threshold of painful, despite this new tenderness; and yet somehow also intensely pleasurable.
Pleasure this feminine, I didn’t want to indulge; but shit, it felt so good, like something hot and fluttery cocooning in my belly, working its way free.
“Good,” she said, her breath hot against my skin as she slowly circled the nipple with the tip of her tongue. “And here’s the thing, David. I’m still angry with you. I want to hurt you the way you hurt me.
“And you’re right: I probably wouldn’t give away your secret. Purposefully. But in anger? Or when I’m drunk and bitter? What then? I can’t promise I wouldn’t… slip, wouldn’t forget, just for a moment.” Her hand spidered up my side, her thumb flicking across my other nipple; and my whole body twitched in response. “Like you did on Friday.”
Intended as an angry grunt, the sound that escape my parted lips was a moan: softly sighed, distinctly feminine, intensely embarrassing; and in hearing myself, it suddenly seemed as though I could see myself, or rather Cindy, imagine her pinned beneath this larger, supple woman playing with her tits. A switch flicked: the cocoon split; heat blossomed; and warm pleasure suddenly coursed through me as I submitted to Julia’s touch.
“Don’t you think,” she said, “It’d be better if you kept an eye on me?” and her lips gently closed around the nipple, and softly suckled, her tongue still indolently circling; her other hand picked and plucked and pulled at the other nipple; and my whole body quivered, back arching. I was instantly hard, again. Her mouth was at my teat; one hand at the other breast; and the other curled around my shaft and slowly began to pump.
“Julia….” I bit back an unmanly whimper, squirming beneath her.
“Will you be my Cindy?”
“I—”
Her hand slowed, even as I ached for release. “We could have so much fun together,” she said. “Imagine going out together, dressed up all sexy, high heels and tight dresses.” She slowly resumed stroking, and continued the nipple play, and darted down for quick, sharp kisses between words. “We could drive the boys crazy, couldn’t we, tease them all night long? And each time we touched, knees beneath the table, a finger caressing a bare shoulder, and in the toilet fixing each other’s makeup, we’d know, wouldn’t we, we’d know what’s waiting for us when we walk away from those pricks?”
And again she slowed, stopped, bringing me painfully close to climax, but this time to rise up over me, her wet pussy hovering over my throbbing member. And in the moonlit darkness of the room I could make out Julia’s hungry, fierce grin, her eyes sparkling in the ivory glow. “We come home and fuck,” she said, and she grabbed my tits and clenched tightly as she impaled herself on my cock.
I gasped, and she cried out in exultant pleasure.
And as she rode me, she told me what we could do together, how she’d take care of me, teach me to be the best Cindy possible, her Cindy, a girl nobody could ever possibly recognize as that wicked, nasty, piece-of-shit man from her past. I’d be hers, she’d be in charge, but she’d keep me safe and protect me. She’d check in on me at work, take me out for dinner, watch me blush as the boys hit on me, watch me squirm, watch me blush, and smile as I was forced to play the part of the girl I’d once have fucked. Another notch on the bedpost, used and discarded, but this time, this time, oh this time I was the fluff, the flirt, the little bitch, her bitch, her slut, and—
If we hadn’t woken up the neighbours earlier, she must’ve gotten them this time. Gasping and grunting her filth into my ear, her whole body went rigid as her voice rose through its bitter hiss into a triumphant yowl, eyes rolling back into her head as she rode my cock to climax.
She collapsed onto me, gasping for breath, utterly spent. A few minutes later her breathing eased, softened – and Julia fell asleep, snoring slightly. I sighed, still skewering her sopping wet cunt, ignominiously pinned to the bed beneath her weight. My erection wilted and after a half-hearted effort to shift her, I gave up and resigned myself to an uncomfortable night.
I grinned.
Goddam stupid fucking cunt bitch. Enjoy your little games, Julia. Have fun with the fantasy. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Everything had gone—more or less—as I’d expected. The man in the café, and the one at the restaurant: two different men, of course, but it was a stroke of luck they’d been wearing something passably similar. It’d been enough to convince Julia of danger, trick her into bringing me home. And once we’d crossed the threshold into her apartment, sex had been an inevitability.
And yeah, she’d been a bit more… dominant, than I liked but fuck me if I hadn’t needed it. She wanted me; God damn, she wanted me so badly! There was a fierceness and purity to her desire that bordered on the manic, but it paired up perfectly with my own needs.
Reflecting back over the past few days—or week, or months—I could now recognize how loneliness gnawed at me. Admitting this was more difficult than expected. But it was true, and it was affecting me in odd ways. Stepping off the bus early to walk kilometers home, indulging a fleeting experience of being part of a human crowd. Staring through windows, imagining myself sat at the tables within. Even working late, arriving early, simply to be around others—even if being around others reminded me, intensely, of the role I was forced to play and the severe humiliation of my appearance and performance.
I’d kissed Dan—another man!—willingly!—and in my drunkenness might’ve gone even further out of a desperate yearning for physical contact. I’d followed him to the bar that night out of need of companionship, for the sounds and lights of the city, for a beer and a chat, out of a profound desire for society, in a desperate bid to recapture, even if from the female perspective, the simple pleasure of going out on a Friday night. I’d long considered myself above such petty needs. But as days rolled over into weeks into months, trapped in Cindy’s diminutive body and life, it became clear these needs couldn’t be ignored. Cindy was a social creature; apparently, so was I.
I’d lied to myself for too long. Looking back over the years I could see that scorning other people’s company had always driven me to find solace in the arms of whatever slut—bitch—woman—of whatever Molly I could find for the night.
Six months since this whole goddamn ordeal has started, six months without physical intimacy, without social contact—without a good, solid fuck. No wonder I’d slipped up so badly last Friday. No surprise, really, that I’d let slip my secret and told Julia who I was. At some level, I must’ve been desperate to share, to reach out to someone; to maybe find an ally. Frankly, it was a miracle I hadn’t snapped earlier. And if something didn’t change, I’d mess up again, probably worst than before, and end up dead.
Julia’s face was buried between my tits, her quiet snores a secret whispered across the hills and valley of my chest. Our hair mingled in a dappled wave across the pillows. I needed her just as badly as she wanted me. She’d keep my head clear, keep me focused as I figured my way out of this pantomime. I believed her promise to teach me, and as galling as it was, having someone to share the burden of pretending to be Cindy would be… helpful; good, even. Having someone with which I could drop the façade, even if only briefly and be myself—be David—would make it that much easier to hold on to what remained of my masculinity.
So I’d let her play out her little revenge fantasy for a couple of months. I’d fuck her on demand, prance around in the pretty dresses she bought for me, and when the time finally came—well, goodbye and fuck you, Little Caesar, I’m dumping your ass once againn. Get yourself back into therapy, you crazy bitch.
A few more months, and I’d be done with Cindy.
A few more months, with Julia in charge.
How bad could it be…?
To be continued…
Author's Notes:
I hope you enjoyed the chapter! Comments, feedback, reviews all very much desired and appreciated! For those who've (re)read the earlier chapters, some obvious incongruities may jump out - changes both minor and major as I edit the earlier chapters. These include:
Finally, if you've really enjoyed this, and want to support and encourage the writing of the story - you can support me on Patreon: patreon.com/fakeminsk.
Constant in All Other Things 2
Interlude II (1/3)
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
(Patreon: www.patreon.com/fakeminsk)
“Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.”
Much Ado About Nothing
Synopsis:
David Sanders returns to the Asklepios Clinic in the hope of leaving behind Cindy’s life and regaining a male identity. There, both mind and body are assessed by Jonathon “Scooter” Bridges and Crystal Dawn; whilst the enigmatic Agent K has plans of her own.
What has gone before:
David Sanders saw something he shouldn't have: his boss, pharmaceutical magnate Jeremiah Steele, murdered the son of an underworld rival. Placed in witness protection, an assassination attempt forces David into the disguise of Cindy, a younger woman. For months he suffers the ignominy of living a life he despises, his torture both alleviated and acerbated once discovered by Julia, a jilted ex-girlfriend. A trip to the Asklepios Clinic, the research centre responsible for his transformation, triggered both uncomfortable memories and a violent encounter.
Interlude 2, Part One
One: Who Are You, Mr Sanders?
Who are you, Mr Sanders?
This was the question haunting Katherine as she sat and waited in the dark solitude of the small apartment set aside for David Sanders at the Asklepios Clinic. This was the question at the front of her mind as she heard the subtle click of the door. He stepped into the room and tossed his handbag onto the sofa. He hadn’t noticed her yet.
She was about to call out when his movement triggered the lighting of the room. Recessed spotlights bathed him in their soft glow. A sudden surge of emotions whirlpooled through her, an exhilarating sinking of the gut at the sight of the man. Katherine’s breath caught in her throat. The transformed man was pretty—very pretty, in the peach sundress and wedge heels she’d placed in the car for him, fingernails and earring flashing, long hair tousled from the extended drive.
She noted with amusement that the man already had one hand down the back of his dress, unhooking his bra. How… womanish, she thought. She allowed him the dignity of slipping the bra out the front of his dress, and the relieved sigh, before she called out from her seat in the corner: “Mr Saunders.”
His eyes were instantly alert and wary.
“We need to talk.”
He stared back at her for a long moment. Spots of dried blood stood out like a dark constellation across the bodice and skirt of the dress. Slender fingers tucked a twist of stray hair back behind one ear, and he stood and stared at her for a long moment. In the other hand he held the bra. He opened his mouth as though about to speak—but stopped, lips slightly parted, brow furrowed. Then he sagged and shook his head.
“Need a piss,” he grunted, and walked off.
Katherine waited and contemplated the changes in her ward. The past six months had provided a steady stream of photos and videos of Mr Sanders’ ongoing transformation, but the physical reality was something entirely different. She remembered him as she’s last seen him in the flesh, lying on the bed of the new-to-him apartment arranged for him in one of the cheaper outer districts of the city.
His new curves veiled in a pale pink nightie, he’d seemed the very image of a modern Sleeping Beauty. Even his hair, makeup and nails had been freshly and lovingly done by the staff at the Clinic before transporting him unconscious to his new home. He'd been setup to awaken into his new feminine reality. Even then, however, there’d still been a hint—much more than a hint, really—of the man beneath the surface: not just the sizeable bulge in his pink panties, but masculine traces across his body.
But now? The most obvious were the physical changes, subtle but indelible evidence beyond the illusions of makeup and shapewear indicating the process of feminisation had continued. Subtle, but evident: a further softening and rounding of features once hard and sharp, seen in shoulder, chin and hands. Still slender, but now with a definite curve to the hips absent before, an unmanly narrowing of the waist. And there was also a—she hesitated to call it a glow—an undeniable feminine property to his skin and hair, a vibrant sheen that spoke of girlish youth and vigor.
But most intriguing were the changes in behaviour: the hesitation in his response, an apparent nervousness, the unconscious way he brushed back his hair and held his hands, fingers slightly splayed, at his side before turning away.
She heard the toilet flush but it was several minutes more before he returned. When he did, his hair was brushed and gleamed, and his lips glinted with a fresh coat of gloss. Smoothing down his dress, he sat opposite her with knees pressed together and to one side, poised at the edge of the sofa. He unbuckled his shoes and where his dress billowed open Katherine saw the swell of his unrestrained chest. His breasts were larger, too.
Sighing with pleasure, he curled and uncurled his toes, nails glinting pink in the pale light. He glanced up, green eyes glittering through long lashes, and she saw there a spark of humour.
“Like what you see?”
“Yes,” she said.
He scowled. “You fucking bitch.” He straightened and the humour was consumed as the spark flared into anger. “You fucking—you had no right!” He shook his head and swept the hair out of his eyes. “No fucking right to do this to me.”
She cocked her head to one side. “I saved your life.”
“You stole it,” he snarled.
“When I found you, Mr Sanders,” she said, “you were dead. Your heart had stopped. Your injuries were . . . they were terrible.” With the words came the memories. Desperate, rasping breath, her own, and pain and fear, scrabbling into the room, slipping, blood – her own, welling between fingers but then on the floor – so much blood – everywhere and the crushing sense of loss and failure.
“And it was my fault.” She accepted this, now even more than she had accepted it in those initial, frenzied moments in which she scrambled to save his life. The initial attempt to disguise him: not enough. The protection of the Clinic: not enough. She had misjudged Steele’s determination to find him. She had underestimated the skill and resources of his agents. And when she thought back to those days at the Clinic, she could see now that leaving David alone had been her mistake. Blinded by her own arrogance, distracted by emotion and desire, she had failed in her duty. “It nearly cost you your life.” She shook her head, one hand drifting to her side. “It nearly cost me mine as well.”
Flinty steel scored her voice as she continued. “And I swore then that I would not fail again. I determined then that you would live, Mr Saunders, no matter the cost; and that cost would be great, as Steele’s grasp was closer than ever.”
“Cost?” David snorted. “Cost!”
“Yes, cost,” she answered. “You are not the only one who has suffered and lost,” she continued. “You are not the only one who has paid a price these past six months. Cindy—”
“David,” he interrupted.
“I spoke to him, Cindy, on the phone we found clutched in your hand.” The conversation had been brief, intense, and she thought of it daily. So much hinged on those words exchanged with Steele. “Briefly. And I glimpsed the depth of this man’s obsession with you. It borders on madness, I think. And in that moment I understood that Steele’s very obsession to revenge himself against you could be made to work against him.
“But we needed time. And we had very little of that most precious commodity. By speaking to him you confirmed your location. He knew with certainty where to find you and that your body was broken. It was a miracle you survived one attack,”—and again she wondered, how Mr Saunders? Who are you, Mr Sanders?—“but with arms and legs broken, a punctured lung, shattered ribs and a concussion? You were defenceless. You needed months of bedrest to heal, possibly a year or more of physiotherapy to regain full mobility. And in the meantime Steele would be searching for you.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “Fuck you,” he added. “You could’ve John Doe’d me in a hospital in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere and left me to recover.” His voice trembled with barely suppressed rage. “There’s no way turning me into a woman was the best possible option. You could’ve of… tried, something, anything else.” His entire body tensed and for a moment he seemed about to launch himself at her, the angry lines of his form an incongruous contrast to the delicate fall of his dress, the lilt of his voice.
“You could’ve left me to die,” he nearly whispered, and he sagged, suddenly, collapsing back into the sofa. “You didn’t even ask.”
Katherine cocked an eyebrow. “Ask a dead man for permission to save his life? No, Mr Saunders, I did not ask. Instead, I made the necessary arrangements to ensure your survival.”
“Survival?” Hefting the generous swell of his breasts with both hands, he presented their fullness to her as though on a platter. “Look at these thing! You gave me tits – real fucking tits!—and a life to go with them. What, exactly, of David Saunders’ life survived?”
Katherine pursed her lips. “Mr Saunders. The facility was a small one: fewer than a hundred patients with slow turnover; and nearly as many staff. We knew already that Steele had hacked the Clinic’s network and bypassed their security systems, infiltrating the Clinic with his own agents. He has the time and the resources; he now had patient names, staff names, addresses, medical records.
“The only detail working in our favour was that he had no reason to link you to the identity of Cindy Bellamy.
“Meanwhile, we could not risk moving you. You had to remain at the Clinic and heal. And by the time you could be moved—Steele could potentially track the movement of everyone coming and going from Asklepios.”
Pinching at the bridge of her nose, she winced at the memory of the decisions made then, of Jonathon’s offer and the risks involved. Fixing Mr Saunders with an angry look, she continued. “What choice did I have, David? By the time we could move you—the movement of an unlisted male patient would not have gone unnoticed.
“So I made a choice.” A choice rooted in tragedy: the suicide of a young woman, a rare failure by the Clinic to heal and rehabilitate a patient. Cindy Bellamy, already a patient at the Clinic, already a month into her treatment with a digital record reaching even further back, a real world existence with no link to Mr Saunders. A life, tragically cut short – but lost in secrecy—perfect, it turned out, for someone to adopt and continue.
Mr Saunders glared at her, bright green eyes smouldering with anger and hatred. She was struck by the beauty of the man’s face—the prettiness of his emotion—the way the delicate strap of his sundress slipped down his shoulder as he trembled with anger. “Choice? Your choice?” he hissed. “You took everything from me, K. I had… a life! A life, and a pretty damn good life, too, one I worked my ass off to build. You have any idea how hard—a job, K, I had a fucking job, a high-paying one, I was near the top, you know? The bullshit I pit up with to get there! With interns and a free gym and, and… shit. I had my own office, I’d finally scored the corner office! And…”
Red-faced, he sputtered.
“And?”
“And…” He scowled. “I had a home. I was half-way through the goddam mortgage on my condo. And a brand new car. And I had… I had friends. Friends and a favourite bar and—they knew me by name down at the Clocktower.” He jabbed a finger at her. “They knew my name K!”
For a moment his voice turned plaintiff, and he swallowed, and then he was yelling at her once again. “And… shops! I had a thing going with the girl behind the counter at the corner store, her name’s Kayla and…” He pounded one fist into his palm. “Girls! Getting laid every goddamn weekend, K!”
Watching and listening to his rant, Katherine noted how performative it was. She watched this man from whom everything had been taken struggling to find anything he truly cared about. The anger was genuine, but hollow: without any real sadness or loss, only outrage remained.
“And I had fucking muscles!” Slender fingers wrapped around his thin bicep as evidence, and for the first time she noted the tremor of true emotion. “I was… strong. And you—you gave me, what, in return? Tits! Skirts and heels and some shitty little apartment on the edge of town. A job as a, what, a goddamn secretary? And this—somehow—you call this a choice?”
“Yet here you are, Mr Saunders. Alive.”
“No.” He jumped to his feet and stalked up and down the narrow space of the lounge. “That’s not good enough! You could’ve found another way.” He stopped and shouted at the ceiling. “Fuck!”
Resuming his pacing, he continued. “Do you have any idea what it was like, waking up in that apartment on my own? Waking up Cindy, with no idea of how I got there?”
She shook her head.
“I nearly went crazy, K! Nearly. And there I was in a body I didn’t recognize with clothes that weren’t mine and pictures of me I couldn’t remember and then I realised—you’d betrayed me.” He stopped and spun and pointed a finger at her. “This was all you. You wanted this—me—you like it, don’t you, watching me prance around in these dresses like some fucking fairy, putting makeup on my face… degrading myself every fucking day, the shame and humiliation.”
“There is no shame to being female, Mr Saunders, no degradation.”
“But I’m not female!”
Katherine stood. In her low heels and him barefooted, she nearly towered over the feminised man. “You say I take pleasure in seeing you like this?” With the back of one hand, she gently stroked his cheek. She thrilled at the smoothness of the skin and at the way he seemed to unconsciously lean into her touch. “Yes,” she said.
She leaned in and whispered in his ear. “Do you remember, Mr Saunders? You asked me once who Cindy was, and I told you: she is gentle, yes, and dependent? Weaker, at least physically, than you were, and reliant on others. And so very soft.” She held his chin, gently, and felt how he trembled under her touch. “And so, yes, David, I do like this, very much so.”
And her lips found his, in a single, deep kiss, dark and passionate. She tasted his lipstick and felt the suppleness of his lips and wanted to run her fingers through his long hair and slide the other strap down his smooth shoulder and grab him by throat and pull him to her so that they crushed together and she could feel the supple flesh of his chest against hers—Katherine wanted all this and more, much more; but she pulled away.
He stood there, swaying slightly, one finger held to his lip. “You bitch.”
“You are alive, David.” She sighed and sank back into the chair. “Six months, yet you remain alive despite the unfettered attention and determined efforts of one of the richest and most powerful men on the planet to revenge himself against you.
“Do I take pleasure in seeing you like this? Yes, Mr Saunders, because it worked; because there was no other alternative; and because you are alive.
“And so, David– Cindy–I do not offer you an apology.”
He fell back into the sofa opposite, legs splayed as wide as the dress would allow, arms stretched across the back. He stared up at the ceiling. “And so now what?”
“Now?” Her eyes lingered over the slight frame of the man sat opposite. Katherine licked her lips and smiled. “You are booked in for two weeks. Think of it as a holiday. Arrangements have been made with Cindy’s workplace. Relax. Enjoy the hospitality of the Clinic.”
“Two weeks? Julia’s not going to like that. But, yeah, sure.” Still staring at the ceiling, he waved one arm to take in the room. “Whatever. But it’s not like this little face-to-face needed to be here, right? What’d you drag me out here for?”
“Ah. For that, you will have to speak to Jonathon.”
“He’s here?”
“Yes.”
“To undo all of… this?”
“That,” Katherine answered, “is not my decision.”
Two: The Flash of a Knife’s Edge
The next morning, Katherine woke up early. Over time her nightmares of the past had faded; never forgotten, but they only rarely disturbed her sleep. The encounter with Mr Saunders had brought those terrible, vivid dreams back in full force, and her sleep had been haunted by incoherent visions of violence, a bloated body, gaping wounds and blood—so much blood, and the sensation of drowning. She woke up gasping for air.
She washed and dressed, reviewing her agenda for the day. Leaving her spartan staff accommodations at the Clinic, she met the technician in the studio set aside for her by Jonathon. Accepting a coffee and croissant, Katherine settled into her seat at the computer and accessed her documents. The video files from the diner were waiting, per her request.
The footage was clear enough. She forwarded through the tedium of the early day, only slowing once a pretty woman in a tight, professional-looking skirt appeared on the scene. The woman crossed over to the bathroom and emerged soon after in a breezy peach sundress. She sat, ordered food, waited. There was a commotion. The girl flinched, protested, avoided eye contact.
On the screen and seen from the camera’s raised angle, the man named Mal stormed towards the girl. She cringed away from him, her simpering protests only angering the man further. He was ex-military turned mercenary, a hardened survivor of combat and atrocities overseas. When his hand lashed out it hit with precision, taking her across the cheek, snapping her head back.
“Fucking cunt.” The man’s voice sounded tinny and distant as he pinned her to the wall, hands reaching and grabbing, burying his face in her hair and breathing in her scent.
The girl struggled, twisted, shouted “No!” and shoved the man away with surprising and desperate strength.
“Stop.”
The image froze with the man in mid-stumble, arms pinwheeling and foot caught on the leg of an overturned chair.
“Can we zoom in, Ari?”
“Yes, but the quality will fluctuate.” The technician was short and wiry, head half shaved, the rest a coloured and coifed wave, reactive chromatic dye crawling through a rainbow’s spectrum as her head twitched between screen and client in the room’s dim light. Intricately detailed tattoos snaked across neck and brow.
Ari sounded apologetic. “The composite you’re looking at should hold up even in extreme close-up, but the original footage quality isn’t great,” she said. “Only three of the six cameras in the restaurant were working, and the capture quality was low. Well below legal requirements,” she added with a sniff. “The software can boost the image and clean up the noise, and we can extrapolate some of the missing data, but you’ll lose fidelity the closer you get.”
Katherine nodded. “Fine,” she said, swiped back across the screen, rewound seconds to just before the man’s assault and with a few taps and touches closed in on the face of the girl. The image pixelated, processed, cleared; and she examined the face of Cindy Bellamy under duress.
Eyes brilliantly green and freshly made up: done with great care, expertise even, in colours that accentuated the girl’s startling and startled beauty. Up close, each eyelash was delineated in mascara, exaggerating eyes wide with fear under pale, tidy eyebrows, carefully drawn in and threaded into thin arcs. Very good, very fashionable: Katherine nodded her approval and then pulled the image back, brought into focus the highlighted cheekbones and painted lips rounded in an ‘o’ of horror. It was a face captured in an instant of genuine fear. Katherine knew the face, knew it well, had been there for its conception just as she’d been there for the end of its previous life.
She advanced the footage at a deliberate pace, transfixed by the girl’s expression as the man approached, raged, and assaulted her. Intimately familiar with the range of human emotions, with their expression and concealment, Katherine understood the extremes of anger and loss and fear. She’d felt them too deeply herself and recognized their expression in others. And what she saw on the screen before her appeared genuine; impossibly so, it seemed to her, knowing as she did what followed.
With each incremental advance, the slice of frozen time revealed nothing more than a young woman in genuine panic, confronted by an eruption of all-too common masculine violence. Katherine looked for the narrowing, the tightening of expression that belied the girl’s helplessness. It wasn’t there. If she hadn’t known better, she would have accepted the footage at face value.
But she did know better. She knew that beneath the makeup and fear, the long hair and slender arms, the dainty dress and vulnerability, there lay a man, and this man concealed a shocking capacity for violence.
It irritated her profoundly to think back to her first encounter with Mr David Sanders and accept that he had fooled her completely. The smugness, the cockiness with which he’d approached her office had blinded her through annoyance.
“I hear you’re the one to talk to,” he said that day, all but sauntering up to her desk. “About Jeremiah Steele.”
She’d looked up from some paperwork, already in a bad mood. He’d been a stunningly good-looking man, slim but strong, perpetually mocking eyes under short-cropped hair, golden undertones to his skin hinting at some mixed ancestry. Flashing an affable grin and absurd confidence, he approached her desk. Mr Saunders’ chin had been dirty with stubble and his clothes looked slept-in, but the disheveled look only added a certain raffish charm. Katherine had disliked him instantly, intensely. Much to her irritation and only later could she admit her instant and intense dislike was rooted in an instant and intense attraction to the man.
Katherine had resented him then for how she made him feel. Annoyingly, the same feelings resurfaced last night and lingered still.
Back on the screen, the man named Mal recovered, grabbed the girl by the hair, hauled her back. She cried out in pain—then, surely? Katherine rotated through the scene, the details blurring then sharpening as the AI extrapolated and rendered missing data, filling in the gaps in the image. Even now, face distended with pain, she saw only Cindy, nothing but a young woman being brutally yanked by her hair back to her assaulter and the authenticity of the scene was fascinating—because she knew the man was yanking on the tail of a viper—yet equally disturbing. The pain and violence she witnessed was genuine, and she felt an impossible desire to intervene, to rescue this seemingly helpless girl.
The man slammed the girl up against the wall. Her face went white, the breath knocked out of her. Now? No—not yet—not even as the man grabbed her, roughly mauling her breasts. She cried out, her voice a terrified mix of fear and disbelief, and the desperate and high-pitched keen of her distress rang true. He covered her mouth, thrust up against her, and Katherine watched fascinated as the man she knew existed beneath the surface submitted to the assault.
Mal grabbed Cindy and shoved her away and her head collided with the edge of the restaurant countertop. The girl sank to the ground, dazed. Blood flowed freely from her forehead. The man stalked over, hauled her to her feet, threw her back down and now she was on her knees and he towered over her, he reached for his belt buckle, and….
There it was.
Like the flash of a knife’s edge in moonlight, or the bursting of the chrysalis: it was now Sanders on his knees. David not Cindy in the torn dress, face framed in blood, kneeling and looking fiercely upwards, long hair like gilded shutters drawn aside to reveal incandescent, furious joy, a slice of sharp sunlight cutting through parted curtain flooding a darkened room. In every line of the young girl’s—no, not a girl, definitely not a girl but a man’s—frame, the transformation was clear: an anticipatory tenseness, a curl to the lip, the lustful narrowing of eyes.
And the man, the other man, the ex-soldier Mal, had no idea what awaited him as he reached down.
It would have been painful to watch had it not been so richly deserved. It wasn’t a fight, really, more a deliberate, surgical dissection performed with cold pleasure. Rather than the brute force demonstrated in the fight against Agent Fosters, David now moved with precision, with a fleet and sinuous grace as he leverage both surprise and his lighter, smaller frame to his advantage. There was a savage meticulousness as he evaded his victim’s grip and hooked Mal’s knee, twisted and brought the man to the ground, and tore into his target with ruthless efficiency.
Agent K was intimately familiar with every aspect of Mr. Sander’s recorded life. Per standard procedure, after that first meeting Katherine had initiated the usual dig into the man’s past. A superficial pass revealed nothing unusual: a fairly ordinary life and a boring man. He was a successful corporate employee, exploiting male privilege and innate charisma to rapidly rise through the ranks, though both charm and privilege were supported by genuine ability. Even then, however, certain details hadn’t rung quite true. Ruefully, Katherine had to admit she’d ignored her early doubts, blinded by the possibility of having something on Jeremiah Steele.
She’d still been careful, of course—Sanders could’ve been a plant, a distraction, even a trap to call her out—though those early misgivings fell away after the man took two bullets to the chest after his day in court.
No, it was after that, after the drive and the fight and the conversation on the phone with Steele, after the man she’d put under her protection had very nearly bled to death on the Clinic floor, that she began to dig deeper.
She’d pulled every shred of data she could snag with the widest nets available to her, calling in favours and contacts both private and State: birth certificate, school reports, employment records; his every achievement and sanction, success and failure. Medical records, extensive vaccination data, and vast fields of biometric data culled from an adult lifetime of digital existence. Location stamps, favoured travel routes, shopping trends and every use of currency, every purchase, every snack and meal, gym membership, passport records, taxes. Every drink—so many drinks!—from every pub and bar and restaurant and club and dirty little hole in the wall he’d ever visited.
Then she’d unleashed the data sifters, the best semi-autonomous algorithms available to her and got them crawling through the mountains of data that delineated a life. They sniffed out the patterns and the abnormalities that lay outside those patterns; the times and places where other data fields overlapped—the recurring habits and people, places, anything of statistical significance that could explain how an ordinary man with an ordinary past could sink so easily, so thoroughly, into a role so antithetical to his very identity. Or more to the point: how could someone so ordinary, so boring and without experience of violence or war, survive both the attack of a trained assassin and the sexual assault of a decorated, damaged veteran? The answer, she hoped, should arrive later in the week as the AI completed its search through the data.
Meanwhile, in controlled slow motion, the man who presented as a pretty young woman pulled back from her assault on her victim. With a dainty touch, he dabbed at the errant drops now spattered across his face. The blood smeared like grotesque blusher across his cheeks, and his smile and eyes sparked with wild joy. The man, Mal groaned and twisted on the floor in pain. David stood over him and stared for a moment, bemused, where an acrylic nail had ripped away. Then, with something akin to a shrug and with almost casual disdain, the girl picked up a folding chair, collapsed it flat and held it high, ready to slam the edge down into Mal’s face.
Apparently noticing something, he hesitated. Tossing the chair to one side, he knelt next to the wounded man. He spoke, words too quiet for the cameras’ microphones, long hair obscuring the movement of his lips. David stood and walked away from the broken man.
Katherine sat back, let the footage play itself out, and watched as the man in the torn dress stood and stalked towards the collapsed waitress. He walked unsteadily in his wedge heels. There was a brief conversation, after which the young woman seemed to reassert herself. She left the café and returned to the car under the scorching glare of the sun, trotting across the tarmac with an almost ebullient confidence. Cameras switched automatically to provide unbroken coverage, picking up first on the external footage as she strode swiftly across the pavement, then switching to the camera in the car.
She watched the girl in the car for a long time, lips pursed in thought. Cindy sat there unmoving as the vehicle hummed to life, left the station and returned to the main road. She was smiling as she looked out the window. At one point, she examined her hand, the torn knuckles and nail. She made a lazy effort at wiping away a spot of blood on her dress. Eventually, her eyes drifted shut, and she slept.
Katherine allowed the recording to play and quietly watched the resting face of the pretty man. A flutter of darkness at the edge of her vision: exhaustion, but also fragments of a nightmare, ragged shreds of memory. This she thrust aside, and smiled, the slightest curving of razor-thin lips. For the first time she allowed herself to believe, rather than simply hope, that her plan could work.
Leaning forward, Katherine tapped a few keys and shut down the footage from the diner. She switched to a live feed from the Clinic’s security system. Camera after camera, she followed her ward as he made his way from the residential quarter through garden paths and public corridors to the Iaso building. She noted the femininity of his apparel and the appraising glances of passing patients and nodded with silent approval.
Soon, he stood outside the designated therapy room. A subtle hum from his armlet indicated he should enter. There was a moment’s hesitation. He smoothed down his long hair with a nervous gesture and took a moment to check his appearance in a convenient mirror. Katherine watched him take a deep breath and cross the threshold.
Three: Fun Little Secret Society
A small room, greige walls, sparsely decorated and designed to feel unthreatening. Spikey green succulent in a simple pot; paintings of muted colours in textured swaths on the wall; comfortable chairs and a large, heavy table in solid wood. Two women faced each other across the table. The first, very pretty and dressed to accentuate her youth, presented as fashionably vivid in contrast to the subdued room and the other woman opposite. She slouched in her chair, legs crossed at the knees, hugging herself against the chill of the room. Painted fingernails clicked against the chair armrest.
Opposite her, an older woman—in her mid-forties, perhaps—sat poised and professionally attired in a charcoal grey blazer and knee length pencil skirt. A little matronly in appearance, with a strong jaw, heavy eyebrows and pronounced chin, her sternness was softened by the ruffle of her collar, severity offset by flouncy lace trim at her sleeves and the bright colours of her rings and chunky necklace.
Behind heavy-framed glasses, deep-set eyes sparked with perceptive intelligence. She leaned forward. “Before we begin,” the woman started and rattled off the usual patter that this was a safe space, a non-judgmental space in which the patient was free to speak openly and honestly; however, the Clinic nevertheless did record all interactions between therapist and patient. She left out the tracking of patients’ reactions through GSR, heart rate, pupil response, thermal change and a host of other methods. This was a very special client, after all—one with which the Clinic was inclined to tale a few liberties, perhaps, and make the most careful observations. Specialised equipment in the room tracked the patient, and the wristband assigned to all patients at the clinic contributed a steady stream of further data.
The therapist added that her full name was Crystal Carlotta Dawn; that she was a licensed therapist employed by the Asklepios Clinic; the patient’s name was Cindy Bellamy, age twenty; and that this was a follow-up session to their previous meeting six months ago.
The younger woman shook her head in dismay. “Wow, six months already?”
The therapist continued: the session was to evaluate the patient’s wellbeing and to assess how she was coping following her previous treatment at the Asklepios clinic.
“Is this thing part of it?” the girl interrupted, plucking at the thin strip of soft plastic around her wrist. “Like, I get that it gives access around the clinic and pays for food and stuff, but when I went to the gym this morning is also had my heart rate and whatever on it. Is that part of the interview?”
The older woman nodded. “Yes. It allows us to monitor the patients’ vital signs and respond in case of an emergency,” she answered. “And it provides other useful data. Is it comfortable?”
“Yeah.” Cindy crossed her wrists, and the clinic’s pale strip of white plastic made a dull contrast to the colourful bangles decorating the other arm. “Bit bland, though.”
“I’ll be sure to pass that on to our tech department.” Thin lips in pale beige lipstick twitched in a hint of a smile. “So, with all that out of the way—shall we begin?”
“Um… sure? I guess.” The younger girl tapped at the wristband, fingernails clicking against the plastic, then seemed suddenly conscious of her fiddling and stopped. She shrank back into her chair. She seemed smaller, now, and more vulnerable.
“Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”
“I guess not?”
Crystal took a moment to draw a tablet from her briefcase and placed it before her. She took a moment to review some notes written there. The girl opposite fidgeted with her bangles, spinning them around her wrist as she waited in silence.
“How are you feeling today?” Crystal finally asked. She smiled. “Cindy?”
For a moment the young girl seemed taken aback, angry, even, and surprised by the question. Her mouth opened once, closed—she took a deep breath—and shrugged. “Fine, I think,” she said. “A bit tired. It was a long drive yesterday, and it took me awhile to wind down. Didn’t sleep very well, I guess, and I woke up early.”
“I see.” Video capture and biometric data confirmed Cindy was awake at 4am and jogging on a treadmill in the gym at 5. “Why was that?”
“I….” Cindy hesitated. “I don’t know. Yesterday was a stressful day, you know? Or, you know what it’s like, sleeping in a strange room?”
“Bad dreams?” She knew, of course, that Cindy had indeed been plagued by bad dreams last night – again, the collected data suggesting the familiar pattern of recuring nightmares had followed her from her home in the city to Asklepios.
“I don’t know.” The girl played with her dangling earrings, twitching and twirling the glittery strands. “Like, maybe? I can’t remember.”
The older woman nodded, made note of the lie and then hesitated before her next comment. “You look good today, Cindy.”
The compliment seemed to placate some of the girl’s anxiety. “That wasn’t a question?”
“No, I suppose it wasn’t,” she said. She made another note on her tablet, then looked up. “Could you walk me through the steps you followed in selecting your outfit today?”
Cindy’s brow furrowed, her nose wrinkling slightly with apparent confusion. “I don’t follow.”
There was a pause in which Crystal leaned back in her seat and observed the younger woman over steepled fingers. “Last time I saw you, Cindy, was six months ago. Do you remember?”
“Ye—ees? I mean, kind of. It was all a bit informal, right?” She frowned with the effort of recollection, a gesture so cute and disarming it couldn’t possibly be unconscious. “We had a couple of chats. You asked me a bit about my life before, you know…”
“Yes, I remember.”
“No offense, but honestly – I’m drawing a bit of a blank. I kinda thought you were a bit flaky, you know: ‘Crystal’? and ‘Dawn’? I remember thinking, that can’t be her real name, can it? It just seemed, like, a bit new-agey?”
Crystal stifled a laugh. “Fair enough,” she said. “However, from my point of view, those encounters were very meaningful, very memorable. You left a very strong impression.”
“Oh.”
“And so, to return to my request: before leaving your room this morning, you were free to dress any way you wanted. This is the outfit you chose.” Here, she indicated the black mesh top Cindy wore, sheer, tight and sleeveless, over lacy balconette bra shadowed by the dark fabric; and the high-waisted, button-down shorts and wide belt, and ankle boots. “Can you to walk me though the process that led to you wearing this?”
There was a pause before Cindy answered. When she spoke, her voice wavered. “Is there a problem with the way I’m dressed?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Then why?”
“I’m hoping you can explain the thinking, maybe the emotions, behind your choices. Nothing more.” Crystal indicated the girl’s footwear. “For instance, can you explain why you chose to wear heels today?” She leaned a little closer and offered a reassuring smile. “They’re very pretty. Very colourful.”
Cindy expression wavered; something resembling anger smouldered in eyes already smoky with heavy mascara, eyeliner and shadow; but then she smiled with something like relief. Almost as if a switch had been flipped, she slid easily into her answer. “Thanks! I wasn’t sure, you know? But I saw them there in the wardrobe of clothes the Clinic provided – and I mean, like wow, how’d they get my size right for everything?” She rubbed her hands down the length of one long, lithe and smooth leg, the skin luminous with youthful vigor and body shimmer lotion. Cindy danced her fingers along the boots, curling graceful fingers around the chunky heel. Sequins sparkled in the light. “But I don’t know. Like, sure, the flats were tempting but I guess I wanted to feel a little taller today? I like feeling tall. And I saw the boots and went from there?”
A little moue of concentration, pinked pursed lips and wrinkled nose, again, and she shrugged. “I read an article about Sin-DI this morning? And she looked pretty and cool and had shoes kinda like these, and so I tried to copy the look a bit? Maybe?” Cindy stretched out her legs, recrossed as the ankles, faux leather shorts squeaking with the movement. “Is it too much?”
“Not at all.” Crystal for a moment and tapped at the tablet again. “I may have read the same article as you. Was it the one in -Lumen-?”
With a little nod, Cindy answered, “yes, yes that one,” and she seemed relieved to move away from the topic of clothes and dressing. “She talked about some older influences, like… um, Grimes? Hadn’t heard of her. And that Japanese V-pop girl, Haruki, the AI hologram?”
She nodded. “Yes.” A huge fan herself, Crystal couldn’t resist the lure of discussing Haruki, and so indulged in a brief deviation from the intended topic. “Did you know her owners decommissioned her last month?”
“No way! I mean, she was, um, before my time, kinda but still – an icon, right?”
“No longer profitable, apparently.” Crystal sounded a little sad, and angry. “And too expensive to maintain. She’d already expanded into trillions of parameters and exabytes of storage. Last year, I visited the server block in Osaka that used to house her; massive, skyscraper thing. Quite the experience, walking inside, walking through a celebrity’s mind and soul.” She shrugged. “But after the earthquake—even with the distributed backups, they just couldn’t get her right again.”
“Sounds like you’re a fan?”
“I am. Or rather, was.” She shook her head. “But I’m the one that’s supposed to be asking the questions, right?” Crystal laughed. “And of course, Sin-DI mentioned another influence, didn’t she? A friend of yours. Harry Longman.”
The younger girl blushed. “Um. Yeah.”
“Quite the fashion shoot, I thought,” Crystal continued. “There was the one you mentioned; I can see the influence. Any thoughts on the other photos from the -Lumen- article?”
If anything, Cindy turned redder. “They were… um. Interesting.”
-Lumen-: notorious for both its writing and photography. A higher-end Arts and Culture magazine (critics called it a pretentious celebrity gossip glossy for pseudo-intellectuals) its reputation was built on a promise of entirely human-written content—no AI-generated word-porridge—and for launching the careers of a handful of recent media superstars. Constantly mired in a morass of controversy and gleefully flirting the moral outrage of politicians and pundits across the political spectrum, -Lumen- never apologized, retracted or changed tact; and each quarterly publication was one of the literary talking points of the season; or at least has been since its inception a year ago.
True, most of the articles were half-imbedded advertising and shameless promotional pieces for the artist being interviewed; and yes, it often skirted if not outright ran roughshod over generally accepted boundaries of common decency: but getting covered by -Lumen- almost always indicated a media personality worth knowing about.
And everybody already knew about Sin-DI. Yet the newcomer pop star remained enigmatic, alluring, this sudden, sexual and potent new female presence on every screen, every speaker, every tongue. Unsurprisingly, the article dug into her background (mysterious) and inspirations (old and new), her real name (still secret) and her stage name (what did it mean?) and insinuated some tough questions touching on her personal life (who was that young boy last weekend?) and touched lightly on the future (ambitious; very much so).
A few queries raised a frisson of disquiet. Did she write her own music? How could a girl her age craft such elegant and sophisticated and nuanced lyrics? And when did aggressive sensuality tip over into blatant pornography and smut? Was she inspiring young girl to express themselves creatively, or normalising fetishism, emboldening indecent and sexual promiscuous behaviour?
Her responses were—for the most part—ambiguous.
Mostly, though, the article was just a promotional piece for the artist, hinting at her next release, advertising her current tour, and dripping with saccharine statements inspiring girls to chase their dreams.
Then there was the photo shoot. Her vague declarations of feminine empowerment sat awkwardly, deliberately so, juxtaposed with the four-photo spread, the highlight of the piece.
The first image, the influence on the day’s outfit, was relatively tame, at least in comparison to the others: trendy girl dressed for a night out, though skewing uncomfortably towards jail-bait sensuality in its school-girl aesthetics, highlighted by the pigtails and sparkly pink makeup. Glossy lips curved in an open smile, and one hand daintily held a Champagne flute, its edges tinted pink with lipstick. With one leg foot-popping up behind in bubbly joy, she gazed adoringly towards the screen—from which a heavy shadow stretched towards her. Angle and framing gave the shadow a distinctly male caste, made it imposing, threatening; and in doing so positioned the viewer within the male gaze.
“I suppose girls your age are the more likely target audience for this publication than I am,” Crystal continued, and she positioned the tablet on the table between them. She spun it around to show the article to her patient. “I’m curious what you made of the second photo?”
Here, Sin-DI was all ultra-tight under-bust corset and fetish ballet heels; long hair braided, tied and twisted into arm binders held high behind the girl’s back. Sin-DI’s defiant glare, narrowed eyes and flared nostrils were directed towards the camera. Her makeup was glossy, vivid; there was a passing resemblance to Cindy’s. Wet, red lips were stretched wide around bright teeth bared and clenching down on the metal bit distending her mouth. She was collared and harnessed, a leash running back to the figure in the shadows, another heavy, masculine presence holding her bridle. Kneeling and leaning forward, held back by the shadow behind, her naked breasts heaved, nipples pierced and engorged, and every muscle was taut with tension, cords of her neck taut as she yanked at her bondage. Her skin gleamed with sweat and grime, and the fabrics restraining her were all liquid metals, dull cold steel gleaming in the harsh glare of an unseen light.
“Any thoughts?”
Cindy squirmed a little in her seat and didn’t quite make eye contact, blushing again under heavy makeup. “I don’t know. I mean, sure, it’s kinda cool, I guess.” The biometric data collected earlier that day suggested she’d found this specific photo particularly arresting; elevated heart rate and breathing implied at least one, if not more, rounds of masturbation that morning.
“Online discussions,” Crystal mused, “are heated and divided, as you can imagine. Does this suggest the struggles of a successful, powerful young woman against the oppressive, controlling constraints of patriarchy; of is it just more fetishized commodification of submissive femininity under the guise of sexual empowerment, pushing more beauty pornography glamorising the degradation of women in the interest of selling copy?” She tapped the screen and zoomed in on Sin-DI’s face, her fierce glare and bright lips and the bit between her teeth. “How does it make you feel?”
“Uncomfortable,” Cindy answered without hesitation. She stared at the photo. “I don’t know how… she can do that?”
“Do you mean embrace and exploit her sexuality so overtly?” Crystal pulled the image back, showing the full spread of the pop star in bondage. “Or submit and be sexually commodified and exploited for profit?”
Cindy didn’t answer.
“Some critical responses argue the photos problematize contemporary idealisations of womanhood,” she said. “That this is what we want – aggressive femininity, blatant sexuality – but restrained, under male control.” Crystal swiped, brought up the third image. “As is typical with -Lumen-, there’s a sort of narrative arc to the photos. From date night to its conclusion, perhaps, and then….”
“The bridal shot?” Cindy’s voice was quiet.
“Perhaps this is intended to capture the inevitability of the female journey? That this is every girl’s dream, their destination?” Crystal shrugged. “What do you think?”
“She’s… beautiful, in that one.” She tucked a stray blonde bang back and her nose crinkled in awe. “Beautiful and a little scary.”
Ivory and tight, from neck to wrist, a sleek column of silk and lace that flowed over exaggerated curves to pool at the woman’s feet, a shimmering froth of feminine fabric that glittered with a thousand tiny gemstones and flooded across the rough concrete floor. Standing ramrod straight, perched on skyscraper platform heels exposed by a slit in the dress, her poise and posture was that of a storefront mannequin—a posture further enabled by the hint of a metal rod, only just visible behind the fold of her dress and concealed by flowery decorations, running up and… behind her? Or inside of her? Even without, the tightness of the dress and the height of the heels must have made even the smallest of steps impossible.
The bride’s delicate hands presented a bouquet of flowers to the viewer, one half lurid scarlet blossoms, the other a cluster of obsidian petals. The vivid colours made a startling contrast against the desaturated, over-exposed brilliance of the scene. Long and graceful fingers seemed to distend, meld and disappear into the stems of the bouquet, girl-becoming-accessory at the extremities, just as her elevated feet seemed to disappear into lacy froth. Thorned vines from the flowers wrapped and writhed around her wrists like verdant cuffs; the bridal fabrics at her feet wound like laces up to her knees.
A curtain of clinging glimmering weave veiled the bride’s face. Behind the veil, a hint of a smile, of eyes demurely downcast, of tears dampening the delicate fabric.
But then ambiguities: was that a bulge below the waist revealed by the unforgiving tightness of the dress, an unexpected curve rather than cleft to the bride? Were her shoulders just a little too square, and the veiled hint of jaw too strong? And the ubiquitous shadowed figure, still featureless, still threatening, standing behind the bride, with crop and leash in hand, though now unused—did they suddenly seem less masculine than before, with a hint of hip and longer hair to the oppressive silhouette?
Cindy looked at the photo for a long moment. Her fingers were tightly interlaced in her lap. “But, um. Yeah.” She shook her head. “I don’t really know about any of that stuff. I get this is meant to be telling a story, but I guess I don’t get what that story is meant to be.” Cindy sighed. “Like I don’t know if she’s, what did they call her? ‘The herald and vanguard of sixth wave feminism’?”
The young woman shrugged. “I just think she’s kinda cool. I like her music and she sounds smart when she wants to, and she really just seems to be enjoying herself. And some of her lyrics just really connect for me, you know? And the way she presents herself is so brave and challenging?”
Another sigh, and she tapped at the screen with one colourful nail. “But this stuff, I guess it’s not really my thing. Like, I’m sure it’s fun and all? And the photoshoot must be a blast and trying out all the different outfits and the shoes and having a makeup artist and all that. But I couldn’t imagine ever wearing stuff like that.” With a flick of the finger she brought the second photo back, tracing the lines of metal bondage lightly with one finger.
She paused, staring at the tightly bound woman on the screen. “It looks… uncomfortable.” With a shiver, Cindy flicked the photo away. “I don’t think I could ever… do that.”
“Do what, Cindy?”
“Give up control like that.”
“You don’t think she’s in control?”
“How could she be?” Cindy said. “Tied up like that.”
“She rich. She’s powerful. It’s her photoshoot. By all accounts, she’s got complete control over every aspect of her media image and is the primary creative force behind all this—I’m not sure even -Lumen- could coerce her into modelling she didn’t approve of.” Crystal shrugged. “There isn’t a single person involved in the making of this image that she couldn’t have fired and blacklisted and their career ruined. Is that not power? Is that not control?”
“No,” Cindy answered, her voice quiet. “Because once you’re tied down and gagged everything you’ve just said becomes—theoretical. The… woman on the screen here?” Again, she traced Sin-DI’s bondage, the bit between her teeth, the cuffs at her wrists, the taut lines of her neck drawn back and exposed. “This isn’t power. She’s powerless. She’s half-naked, tits out, voiceless. She’s there for the enjoyment of others.”
“Isn’t that a form of power in itself? To be able to provoke, to influence others’ reactions?”
Cindy shook her head.
“And yet,” Crystal said, “you drew on her for your own look.”
Suddenly a little sheepish, Cindy nodded. “Sure, she inspired what I’m wearing today, but I think this is my limit.” Cindy rubbed her hands up and down supple, exposed legs. “It already feels like I’m barely wearing anything.”
“Does that bother you?” Crystal asked, blanking the tablet screen.
Cindy seemed to consider this for a moment. “Maybe?”
“What do you mean?”
“I feel exposed. I feel watched. And that makes me… uncomfortable. These clothes,” and here she plucked at the high neckline of her clingy mesh top, “they’re designed to draw attention, right? Like, the whole point of this thing is to see the bra under it right? You know, just in case people forgot I had tits. And the bra, the underwire, it’s designed to push these puppies up on display.” Cupping her breasts, she gave them a little push upwards. “And because its so goddam cold in here, even my nipples poke through, right?
“And then you can nearly see my ass cheeks in these things,” she continued, tugging at her shorts, “and I’m baring so much skin I’m nearly naked, right?” She gestured at the tablet. “I mean, it’s a slippery slope, right, I’m on the same fashion spectrum that leads to that final photo, you know what I mean?”
The final image, the conclusion of Sin-DI’s photographic narrative, presented the bride after the ceremony. The bride, defrocked and lying resplendent in lingerie on ebony sheets, shimmering ivory basque and stockings and suspender belt, gilt gleaming to every seam, link and edge; and straps, so many straps coiling sensuously across every curve, one part caress in lace to one part bondage in satin.
With a look of coy—apprehension and anticipation?—or satiated yearning?—on parted lips and lidded eyes, Sin-DI held one arm across her chest, and the other, fingers spread, covered and hid her naked genitals. Shot in greyscale, the bride resplendent shone luminous whilst the edges of the frame lay in churning darkness, encroaching, powerful and threatening but in the moment held beyond the pale.
“I think there’s some distinction between post-coital posing in underwear on a bed, and what you’re wearing,” Crystal answered. “But I take your point.”
“I guess I’m just not used to being so… on display, all the time.”
“Not yet?” Crystal suggested.
“Not ever.” She shook her head. “I don’t think I’d ever get used to it.”
“Yet you chose those clothes,” Crystal said. “You chose to display yourself.”
Cindy cocked her head to one side. “Not much of a choice.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that this, all of this—it’s what expected, right?”
“Expected by whom?”
“By…,” Cindy waved her arm to take in the woman opposite, the room—the concealed cameras in the room?—and the world around them. “By everyone!”
“By you?”
Cindy blew a lock of hair out of her face.
“Tell me,” Crystal continued, “You found inspiration in Sin-DI’s style before.” Crystal presented the photo on the tablet of the redolent woman in her bridal lingerie. “Could you imagine wearing something like this?”
Green eyes tracked across the bride’s partial nudity, lingering over slender heels, shimmering stockings, straps and catches and hooks and delicate decorative bows. Cindy grimaced and looked away.
“Cindy?”
“Yeah,” she said, her voice surly. “Yeah, I guess I can.” But then she turned back, eyes flashing with anger. “But not like that.”
Crystal waited.
“Like, okay, fine – yeah, I’ve worn… stuff like that. Heels and the garter belt and all that crap. Julia’s really into it right now. I wore something for Dan….” Cindy trailed off. “But it’s different, okay?”
“How so?”
“Because… it is, okay? It just is.”
“Did you feel comfortable?”
She seemed ready to launch into a retort, stopped, and then shrugged. She gave a little half smile. “Honestly? It’s not that bad. Not as bad as I’d have once thought. Listen. You want the truth? Fine. It’s kinda fun, sometimes. Bras are a pain in the ass, usually, and the really constricting stuff gets annoying pretty quickly, but the underwear’s comfy enough, and I guess I’ve gotten used to flossing my ass with the skimpier panties. Even the garter belt isn’t as much a pain as I thought it’d be. And yeah, it can feels sorta sexy, okay? And that can be nice, too.”
But then she pointed at the photo. “But not like that. Not—displayed, like that, so some guy can get his perv on and jack off to the sight of my tits or something.”
As you did this morning, Crystal thought.
“So you wouldn’t wear something like that for a man.”
Cindy growled with frustration. “Not by choice, no.”
“I see.”
“And definitely not… you know, bridal lingerie.”
“No, I suppose not.” Crystal made a few notes. “Not even for the right person?”
Cindy frowned. “No.”
“I see.” Crystal nodded. “But I’d like to return to this idea of choice. It was that choice that I wanted to explore when we first started.” She indicated her own outfit. “My choice, for instance, feels very different than what you are suggesting.”
“You feel comfortable?” Cindy asked.
Crystal hesitated for a moment, and her eyes unfocused briefly. She smiled, slightly, though she gave an impression of sadness. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”
“Fine,” Cindy said. “But it’s not the same.”
“Why?”
“I don’t have the same freedom to choose as you do.”
“Why not?”
“Well for one thing,” Cindy said. “You’re old.”
“Thanks,” Crystal answered drily.
“But it’s not the same, is it?” Cindy continued. “You’re on that side of the desk, and I’m on this side. You’re the professional and you look it and that’s what’s expected. But I’m….” and here she trailed off into silence.
“Yes,” Crystal urged. “What are you?”
Her jaw clenched; she sneered; then deflated and sagged. “A girl,” she answered. “Just—an ordinary girl.” Her hand fluttered in indistinct circles, fingernails flashing in the light. “And this, all this, I guess, it’s what’s normal and expected of—a girl like me.”
“And what kind of a girl are you?”
“I’m….” A deep breath, an inarticulate groan, and she retreated deeper in the chair, pulling her legs up and hugging them close. “For fuck’s sake, I dunno, doc. I’ll tell you what I’m not. I’m not normal. I feel like a pervert, a freak, most days, like everyone’s looking at me with pitchforks and torches hidden behind their backs. When they smile or laugh, I wonder: do they know? Are they laughing at me?” She blew a frustrated breath out her nose. “Does any of that strike you as normal?”
Crystal gave a small smile. “Normal is a subjective term, Cindy. But what I can tell you is that it’s not uncommon for young women to feel… worried. Uneasy and uncertain. Perhaps not always to the degree you just expressed, but many of my female clients express the fear and anxiety they constantly feel, living in a society that places such a great deal of pressure on women to conform to narrow ideals of femininity.”
At that, Cindy shifted uncomfortably, her fingers fidgeting with the ankle strap of her boot. “But what can I do about it?” she asked, her voice nearly a whine.
Crystal leaned forward. “You can embrace it,” she said. “You can recognize that there is nothing wrong in taking pleasure in who you want or have to be in this moment, independent of who you were in the past or who you may be in the future.”
There was silence, a silence that extended and reached out and filled the room as both women watched each other from either side of the desk. Neither moved; until even the white noise breathing of filtered air drawn through the room felt loud. Finally, with a creak of tight shorts and the gentle song of metal bangles chiming, Cindy uncoiled in her seat, sitting up and leaning forward, and faced her therapist directly.
“It must fucking kill you, yeah?”
Crystal’s face remained impassive, indicating no surprise at the sudden shift in tone. “What do you mean,” she said. “Cindy?”
The younger girl flinched at the sound of her name. Her painted lips curled in a sneer. “I mean, just look at me. These tits. These legs, this hair, my goddamn lips… I’m gorgeous, right, just look at me, a real sexpot? Feminine. So goddamn feminine it hurts, and… I hate it.” Her fist slammed down onto the desk with a dull thud. “I hate it.” And again. “I hate it!” she all but groaned, and this time she surged to her feet, standing and punching directly down into the desk in a jangle of tinging bracelets.
Blood dotted the wooden surface. “I fucking hate it,” she hissed.
“And you sit there and tell me to embrace it, that there’s nothing wrong with it, to be who I want to be but this—” and here Cindy all but hit herself, small fist smacking into her chest. “I’m not a fucking girl! This isn’t who I want to be!”
Cindy leaned over the desk and the impassive woman sitting opposite. “But I bet you’d give anything, wouldn’t you, to have—to fucking be, what I’ve got here, what I’m forced to be. I bet it eats away at you, yeah, just really aches to see me despise this thing you’d give you left fucking nut to have, to be this beautiful, this feminine, this… girly.”
Crystal looked up at the red-faced girl. “I gave up my left nut many years ago,” she answered. “And the right one too.” She waited for a slow count of three, and then asked. “Are you done?”
Cindy let out a deep breath. “Yeah.”
“Please sit down.”
The younger woman did as she was told, looking sheepish.
Crystal gestured at the girl’s hand. “A pity about your hand. I think you broke a nail. Again.” She smiled. “They look—looked—lovely, by the way.”
Cindy stared at her, mouth open but silent. She sighed, and then returned the smile and seemed thankful for the invitation to change subjects. “Thanks. There wasn’t much to do this morning, so I popped into the salon after the gym and breakfast.” She raised her hand and wiggled her fingers. Vivid nails too long to be considered sensible, each painted a different colour, shimmered and sparkled. “They fixed up the broken one and then had a bit of fun, I guess. They’re, ah… a touch longer than I’m used to.” The younger girl raked her nails though her mane of perfectly straight, long blonde hair, sweeping it back over her shoulder. “They also did my hair and makeup. Really went to town on me.”
“Very feminine,” Crystal said. “Very pretty.”
“Yeah.” Once again, the edges of Cindy’s smile strained. She unfolder her legs, sat straight, and splayed her hands on the table. “Pretty.”
“And how does that make you feel?”
Cindy’s eyes narrowed. “Just fucking great, doc.”
“I take it from your tone that this isn’t so.”
“What the fuck are we doing here, Crystal?”
“What do you mean?”
“Am I passing your test?”
“Do you feel as though I’m testing you?”
“Fine, fuck it, whatever.” The girl held one limp-wristed hand to her chest in a performance of joy. “Oh, I just love feeling pretty!”
“Cindy—”
“No, really, I do!” The girl jumped to her feet and sashayed back and forth across the narrow space of the room, talking over her shoulder. “Like, wearing these heels! I love the way they make me feel; taller; more confident; sexy! Like nothing can stop me, you know,” and here she spun on one heel to face the therapist, “and I even like it when I catch people, you know, especially guys, checking me out.
“Like, who can blame, them, right?” Cindy’s glittering fingers swept across her torso, picking out the veiled cleavage on display. “But it’s not like I need their validation, of course? It’s more like, knowing the effort’s being appreciated, it feels good. Like when a girl, I mean another girl, notices my nails or something new I tried with my makeup, and it feel good, inside, a little flutter of happiness.” She paused and bent over the desk between the two. “Feeling feminine, feeling pretty, it’s like being part of a fun little secret society, isn’t it? where the price of entry is that little bit of effort, a touch of makeup and glam, and bam! I’m in.”
Crystal remained silent and waited.
“You want more?” Cindy rolled her eyes. “Fine. Dressed like this, I feel like… like—a sparkling jewel, catching the light, shining and bright on a dark day. Like I’m a sunset, painting night clouds in soft colours at the end of the day. I’m a porcelain doll, delicate and loved because my beauty’s so fragile.”
Crystal grimaced. “Please stop.”
Cindy dropped back into her chair. “You asked.”
“I didn’t ask for greeting card platitudes. I’m asking how it feels for you to be seen as beautiful by others.”
“You want to know? You really want to know how I feel?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because this is how I really fucking feel.” And here, without any wrinkle of the nose or any pretense at cuteness, the young girl slouched back in her chair and glared at the woman opposite over, with her elbows on the armrest and her hands clenched together under the chin. Her knuckles whitened as she spoke, and her voice was firm and strong.
“You ever hear of an iron maiden?”
Bemused, Crystal nodded.
“The medieval torture device, I mean, not that rock band from last century.” Cindy’s smile was tight, and her eyes remained angry. “So these iron maidens, maybe they never really existed. I don’t know, I’m not a goddamn historian. But everybody knows the story, you can find a million examples online. Sin-DI even used one in the video for “Spiral”. I’ve read they’re popular these days, popular with the kind of people who like kinky shit in the bedroom, lots of rich fuckers buying them for their wives or girlfriends.
“So yeah, originally they were a container shaped like a human – like a woman, a maiden – sometimes even decorated and beautiful on the outside, painted with girl’s clothes and a pretty smile. And inside, spikes: hundred of them, and you throw some fucker in there and close the door.
“And so what happens to the poor bastard? If he’s lucky he gets impaled on the spikes and dies quickly when they close the door. But maybe those spikes, they just prick the skin, right, hundred of little knives perforating him, just a little, just enough to make him bleed but not kill him. No, instead, the maiden milks him dry, slowly, steadily weakening the man inside the shell until he gives up.
“Or maybe he just goes fucking insane because he can’t sleep from the constant pain and fear.
“Or he starves to death, slowly and in agony, over a period of weeks.”
And here, the girl in the chair, eyes glittering and pretty lips curled in anger, leaned forward. “So you want to know how it feels when people think I’m beautiful? When you call me pretty and tell me how cute my goddamn nails look? It fucking feels like that.”
Though she remained unemotional, to anyone who knew her it was clear that Crystal was shaken by the answer. Her voice remained calm. “Please explain,” she asked.
With obvious effort, Cindy unclasped her hands, knuckles still white, and deliberately stretched them open on the table. “These pretty nails. This makeup I’m wearing, these clothes, the hair, soft skin, the goddamn tits and, and… everything – it’s fucking torture, like a box as strong and unbreakable as iron, no matter how delicate and painted it is on the outside. And I’ve been thrown into it – you threw me in here, you and everyone here at the Clinic. You threw me in and slammed it shut and locked me in to this shape and tossed me out into the world, but it might as well have been a dungeon because there’s no escape.
“And you did this and never once thought of all those spikes. They pierce me every day, doc, and I’m bleeding, I can feel myself draining away day by day. And every goddam day I think about impaling myself on those spikes, just ending it… but I don’t, I don’t because everyday I hold on to the hope that somebody’ll unlock the door and let me out.
“And so instead I try and stay as still as I can, disappear inside this torture and hope the rest of the world just sees the pretty exterior, so that I survive as long as possible inside this beautiful shell, this girl’s shell, and the less of me there is the easier it becomes, in a way, the spikes don’t hurt so much, you know, and I can fool myself into thinking this is it, right, this is the way, just don’t move, don’t even breathe if you don’t have to—just don’t be and just leave it to the maiden, she’s made of iron, she’s tough enough to get me through this.
“But I’m starving, Crystal, I’m withering away in here, I’m going fucking crazy in here and soon, soon there’s not going to be anything left inside, just a hollowness at the centre of a painted husk, lipstick and old blush painted on a rusted shell.”
Cindy took a deep breath. Tears sparkled at the rim of hers but refused to fall. “So you tell me to just embrace who I am: but what is there left to embrace? You ask me how I feel when you call me pretty? I feel angry, Crystal, so fucking angry it hurts. And tired, tired to death. But the iron maiden, she just keeps on smiling on the outside. And inside? Some poor bastard’s still clinging on to that last sad hope that somebody’ll let him out.”
And Cindy—but it was clearly not Cindy any longer, but David, seething with anger and exhaustion and something entirely darker and more desperate, and he clawed the table with those beautifully manicured nails. “So tell me, Doctor Crystal Dawn: are you gonna fucking let me out?”
And for the first time, the emotional turmoil felt by the older woman seeped through; there was a crack in her demeanour as anger flared in her eyes and briefly, her finger curled around the frame of her tablet, so tightly it momentarily seemed as though the plastic might crack. She visibly counted to five, and relaxed, and uncurled her hand.
“That decision isn’t mine to make, Cindy.”
“Then we’re done here,” the girl answered, and stood. She strode to the door and flung it open but stopped at the threshold. “And the name’s David, for fuck’s sake,” he hurled back at her over his shoulder, and left the room, the door slamming shut behind him.
Katherine cut the feed from the interview room and sat for a moment, gathering her thoughts, giving Crystal some private time to recover. Finalising her own notes, she left her studio from where she’d watched the session. A few minutes later she entered through the same door David had left and sat in the now vacant chair opposite the therapist.
“You okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine.” The therapist’s voice was tired. “You listened?”
“Yes.”
“I think,” Crystal began, and sagged. “I think you better tell me how your talk went with him last night. Because I need to know who this guy is, Katherine. Who is he? Who is David Saunders?”
Four: Crazy Voodoo Sci-Fi Bullshit
With some trepidation but even more unconcealed eagerness, Doctor Jonathon Bridges signaled for his next appointment to be sent through. He considered his office, the sprawl of annotated printouts across his desk and half-finished cups of coffee, the dilapidated sofa and forlorn potted plant in the corner, perpetually declining into ever darker shades of yellow and brown. He should’ve tided up, or at least given the cleaner access to his workspace.
But to what end? He didn’t give a shit about appearances, especially coming face-to-face with the very thing that got him his current job—with the living embodiment of the high-risk gamble he’d taken six months ago.
He’d earned this position. Those risks were going to pay massive dividends for Asklepios – for humanity, he told himself. And his name would be forever attached to the science behind it all. If all went well, glory might be the least of the rewards for his efforts.
The nurse had completed the usual preliminary check-in process: drawn the blood samples, weighed and measured, scanned and imaged the patient and completed the usual tests. Preliminary results suggested the patient was the epitome of health, though the full results, especially the all-important blood tests, would take a few hours to process.
Standing to greet his patient, he wiped his hands down the sides of a rumpled lab coat before burying them into deep pockets where he could hide the perpetual twitch of excited fingers. Jonathan knew he wasn’t a particularly pleasant man. He was arrogant with little patience for stupid people; and he thought, by and large, most people were idiots.
“Hello David,” he said to the young woman entering his office.
The contrast between the two couldn’t have been much sharper. With his lab coat stained with the day’s lunch, hanging loosely over an untucked shirt undone at the neck, Jonathon looked as though he’d slept in his clothes. He had. His tie hung loose, his hair was a wild mess of red and grey, and he had the unhealthy pallor of someone who hadn’t been exposed to sunlight in far too long, bathed in the glow of digital displays and florescent lighting.
David Saunders, lips freshly painted a glossy pink, smiled. He’d obviously touched up during the wait before stepping through the door—the man’s whole feminine deportment gave every indication of having been refreshed before the appointment. From head to toe, brushed hair to chunky heels, the man’s female appearance was immaculately presented.
“Scooter,” David said. “I can’t tell you how goddamn happy I am to see you.”
The doctor suppressed a flash of annoyance at the name. “Scooter?” he grumbled. “Still?”
“You don’t think I’ve earned it?”
Jonathon bit back a retort. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose you have.”
Swallowing back his irritation—or was it guilt? he often struggled to tell them apart—he focused his attention instead on the man standing before him. Does he even realise how much he’s changed? Jonathon wondered, taking in the tell-tale signs of his process’s ongoing effects. Even at a preliminary glance it was obvious how much the man’s feminisation had progressed.
He thought back to the first time they’d met, when David Sanders had been a man in woman’s clothing, cross-dressing as part Katherine’s crazy plan to keep him alive. He’d had cutting-edge prosthetics attached, prototype bio-engineered breasts and genitals salvaged during the raid on the Neopharm black project site; but still just a man in a dress. Katherine had diverted to the Clinic with Steele’s agents on their trail. Much to Jonathon’s lasting shame, those same agents had infiltrated Asklepios’ defences with ease and nearly killed his client.
He took fierce solace in the fact that those responsible for invading his laboratory had paid for their audacity. More importantly, they’d only been after Katherine and David—and not his research. Bad enough to have infiltrated the Clinic, but what if they’d penetrated into the deeper labs, discovered the Tank, stolen his work?
The last time he’d seen David in the flesh, the man was submerged in the Tank, unconscious in a bath of nutrient-rich fluids reshaping his body, dissolving muscle, reshaping body fat, flipping genetic switches, transforming David Saunders even as the process regenerated the fatal damage he’d taken in his fight with Steele’s agent.
“How’s your arm? I trust the nurse was gentle?”
“That bitch’s a fucking vampire,” he growled, the tone discordant with his delicate appearance. He gestured to the cotton swab affixed by
a plaster to his arm. “Think she took enough blood? Thought she was going to drain me dry.”
“The first of many, I’m afraid. We’ll need daily blood tests.”
David grunted.
“How’re you settling in at the Clinic?”
“I nearly attacked K last night,” he said, “and came close to throwing a chair at Crystal.”
“I half expected you to come in here swinging.”
“Hey, the appointment’s not over yet,” David said. “Let’s see how things go first,” and judging by the glint in his eyes, he wasn’t entirely kidding. Jonathon was reminded of the reports he’d reviewed that morning and prior to the appointment: the update on their ‘patient’ downstairs; yesterday’s security footage of the man at the café; Crystal’s feedback from earlier that day. The person standing before him presented as young and female, dainty and slight, with an almost frivolous focus on makeup and fashion—and had killed one man and severely injured another.
He was sharing a room with a killer. He’d killed Steele’s agent that day six months ago, in an office not unlike this one. How quickly could David cross the distance between them? Kill him? Jonathon wasn’t a fighter. Faster than security could arrive. Not that there was any real danger, of course: the slim bracelet they all wore contained a powerful tranquiliser that would knock the largest and angriest of clients unconscious, should the monitoring security AI detect any threat.
Still, the feminised man had good cause to want to hurt him, or worse. Although I did save his life, Jonathon thought, irritated at the man’s ingratitude.
“Mind if I sit?” David said, dropping into a chair. “These heels look great, but they’re a killer after a while. Even after months of practice.”
“If you say so.” But why worry about something as banal as the possibility of violence when confronted by the medical miracle before him? Deep in his pockets, his fingers twitched again with the desire to study his patient.
“I do.” David leaned back in his seat, making a show of examining his manicure, gazing at the doctor over glossy nails. “And by the way, I’ve gotta say, you look like shit.”
Jonathon grunted. He noted the repair to the missing fingernail broken earlier that morning in the meeting with Carl. He noted the lustre to the man’s hair, the softening of his jawline and the curve of breasts and hips. He noted the lines of the man’s bared legs and the tension in the muscle.
“Jesus, Scooter, take a picture, it’ll last longer.” David’s tone was mocking, but Jonathon picked up on the underlying threat.
The doctor nodded. He returned to his side of the desk and sat down. “I imagine, David Saunders, that you’ve got questions.”
“You think?” The man who looked like a young woman leaned forward. “Yeah, there’s plenty I’d like to know.” Pink painted lips twisted in an ugly scowl and his eyes darkened. “Like, what the fuck happened four months ago? I wake up in some shitty little apartment, looking like… like this, alone, and suddenly I’m supposed to live this girl Cindy’s life, yeah, but not just in a sort of pretend kind of way, throw on a skirt and prance around for a couple of days kind of way…. No. I wake up in this girl’s home and I’ve got tits, Scooter, a goddam set of knockers, real ones, and I nearly go bat-shit crazy wondering what the fuck is going on!”
He leaned in close, and Jonathon could see the physical effort it took hold back. “And sure, I appreciated your little video message. Made it clear I wasn’t having some kind of mental breakdown. But it wasn’t enough, Scooter, not even close.”
Jonathon remembered the message he sent, the quickly recorded video offering the bare minimum—against Katherine’s wishes—calculated to convey medical concerns without giving away the realities of the project—and reinforce the illusion of Cindy’s life.
“So, yeah, you might say I’ve got questions. Like what the hell did you do to me so that I look like… this? Or: what were you thinking, for Chrissake, just dumping me in some shithole apartment on the edge of some fucking new city with no goddam clue what was going on?” But then he shook his head, unconsciously tucking a strand of hair back behind one ear. “But no.” He held up a finger. A single scarlet nail flashed under office lights. “No. I’ve only got one. One fucking question, Scooter, but man, it’s a doozy.
“When are you giving me back a male body?”
“That,” Jonathon answered, “is a more complicated question than you know.”
“No, it really isn’t.” Knuckles whitened as David gripped his knees. “Just… do whatever crazy voodoo sci-fi bullshit you did to me last time, okay? Just turn me back into a man.”
Jonathon shook his head. “Listen, girlie, if I tell you it’s complicated—”
Something ugly and dangerous juddered through his patient. “No,” he interrupted, in a low growl only slightly softened by its feminine lilt. “You don’t get to call me that.”
Face reddening, Jonathon bit back a retort, and nodded. “Listen. David. Do you remember our last face-to-face meeting?”
Fascinated, he watched the crinkling of the nose, the pout of concentration on the cute girl’s face that floated over the man beneath. As quickly as the anger had seized David, it dissipated, replaced by a performance of cute girlishness that seemed too natural to be faked. Over the past six months he’d reviewed regular updates on David’s progress, both physical and psychological, and watched segments of the video feed captured from the man’s flat. He’d examined the photos and read the reports and sifted through the data—but there was something qualitatively different in experiencing the reality in person; or rather, the person in reality.
“About six months ago, right? Yeah, kinda, I guess. I had those stupid prosthetics on, right?” and David cupped his breasts, “Those massive tits, they were—what were they?—like, double-D parasites, some kind of plant thing hanging off my chest?”
Jonathon couldn’t help himself; he snapped. “Stupid?” He stood up in a surge of indignation. “Plant things?” he spluttered. “Parasites? Listen, David, those artificial breasts were an absolute miracle! A miracle of bio-engineering, absolute cutting edge of prosthetics technology!”
Without meaning to, he found himself striding across the room, infused with righteous anger at the ignorance of the small-minded and selfish. “They weren’t crafted, or molded, or built – they were grown. Grown!” he nearly shouted. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, shouting at people mired in indifference or ignorance. His hands were out of the pockets now, fingers twitching, drawing circles in the air, punctuating each point with a savage jab at David. In his mind, he saw the whole process, knew the brilliant minds that worked on it, the setbacks and losses and corporate meddling; the espionage and terrible, horrific losses and toll of Project Sporus.
To Jonathon, the artificial breasts were a marvel of synthetic biology, an extraordinary blend of science and nature, of design by artificial intelligence and artifice by people. Instead of being mechanically crafted or molded, they were organically grown. He could see the process, see in his mind’s eye the delicate tendrils sprouting from the fungal medium, intertwining and forming a latticed framework. Pallid little strands growing an intricate structure serving as the foundation for the prosthetic, delicate yet remarkably robust and flexible, and with a little guidance shaped to mimic the aesthetics and functionality of natural breasts.
The bio-fungal growth process was an art form, conceived and developed in the laboratory. Nurtured within those controlled environments, the specialized fungus thrived, guided by precise genetic modifications and carefully calibrated conditions. Then, the final artistry, the miracle: as the fungus matured, it exuded a pliable substance, resembling a supple and elastic flesh. Over time, the substance evolved, thickening and gaining resilience until it achieved a texture similar to that of human tissue – in this case, human breast tissue.
Once the fungal growth reached the desired stage, skilled bio-artisans delicately trimmed and shaped the mass, sculpting it into the final form. Additional layers were added to provide support and enhance the natural feel. Finally—another miracle of engineering—the complex system of biocompatible connectors, the interface with nerves and blood vessels, and receptors that allowed for a genuine sensory experience – creating an uncanny resemblance to their biological counterparts.
He knew the names connected to the project; had met at least half of them at international academic conferences over the years. There were stories, entire arcs of industrial espionage, noble and altruistic pursuits of knowledge and craven betrayals for profit. What better example of the Chinese decades-long dominance in biotech than this—a functioning synthetic flesh innovation arising almost accidentally from climate science-inspired research into alternate food sources?
To dismiss this miracle of technology and human innovation as… stupid, as a… plant thing, a parasite? “Grown!” he repeated. His hands chopped the air as he stalked across the room. “Do you have any idea the work – the genius! – artistry! – innovation! – behind the engineering to create those – those – ‘plant things’?”
“Whatever,” David answered, then looked down at his own veiled breasts and sighed. “At least the fucking things came off.”
Jonathon pushed aside his anger and returned to his side of the desk. “What was it you said? That I ‘look like shit.’ Yes.” He dropped into his chair. “Yes. Yes, I suppose I do. It’s been an interesting six months, David, since you were last with us. A lot has happened. A lot of changes. A lot of progress. And you’re part of it all – not the only part but an important part of what we’re doing here at Asklepios.” He thrust his hands back into his pockets. “A very important part.”
“You’re not listening,” David answered. “I don’t care. I really don’t care what you’re doing here. I don’t care about your progress or changes or how goddamn interesting any of this is.” Planting both heeled feet on the floor, he leaned forward, eyes bright. Again, he tucked a stray bang back behind his ear, mindful to avoid tangling dangling earrings.
“I don’t give a shit.” He pulled a face, suffused with ager and frustration. “All I want is my fucking life back! Give me my goddamn male life back, or—”
Jonathon cut him off. “How’s your finger?”
Nonplussed, David held Jonathon’s gaze for a moment before glancing down at his hand. Nails like jewels glittered in his lap. “Excuse me?”
“Your finger,” he repeated. And then, lacking patience, “Your hand. How is it?”
David held them both in view, fingers splayed. “Fine?”
“You punched a desk this morning? Broke a nail? Yes?”
David raised an eyebrow. “Yeah.”
“Does it hurt?”
The feminised man examined his hand. “No. It’s fine. Listen, Scooter, I don’t….”
“Your head,” the doctor interrupted. “How’s it feel?”
“Fuck sake, Scooter. I’m fine, okay, stop….”
“That man in the diner, he hit you?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, he did.” Jonathon didn’t need to refer to his notes; he’d gone through them thoroughly before the meeting. He rattled through the list: “Slap across the face, here,” and he tapped his own cheek to indicate the location. “Neck, here,” he added, where the man, Mal, had grabbed Cindy by the throat. “Hair and scalp,” where he’d grabbed and yanked her back, “breasts,” where he’d groped her, “bicep, left shoulder, knees.”
Then he tapped the side of his head, near the temple where David had made contact with the sharp edge of the counter. “And here.” The girls in the salon had done a good job that morning. The injury wasn’t visible beneath a thin dusting of makeup and the sweep of David’s hair. Apparently, it hadn’t taken much to conceal the damage, the bruise already fading from an angry yellow and black to a dull blue. “And despite these injuries –you were in the gym this morning, weren’t you? Running?”
David nodded.
“Any pain?”
“Not really.” He thought for a moment. “No.”
“You strike me as someone with a more than passing familiarity with physical injuries, David. Tell me: have you ever recovered so quickly before?”
David shook his head, earrings jouncing and glinting.
“I didn’t think so.” When Jonathon smiled, it was without pleasure. “Did you know that the man in the café was ex-military?”
Jonathon knew, in that moment, that the question was a dangerous one – an unwise one. They knew so little about this man. The unanswered questions about his past, the history than enabled him to survive an encounter with Steele’s agent, or the man in the café: these needed to be asked. But was he the one to do it? Katherine, he conceded, was much better at subtly drawing out a person’s secrets; God knows she’d done it to him. Carl too, despite the psychobabble and annoying empathy, had a knack for earning others’ confidence. Jonathon on the other hand – people didn’t like him. And he was fine with that. But there were times when he wished he was capable of a little more subtlety in conversation.
David hesitated, one finger tapping at his chin, and then he nodded.
“How?” Jonathon asked.
“Tattoo,” he answered. “Back of hand. Saw it after he hit the ground.” He shook his head, seeming a little sad. “Blackfire Phoenix. Poor bastard.”
“The man’s name was Mal—Malcolm DuBois,” Jonathon said. “We ran a search on him after Katherine cleaned up your mess. Survivor of that fucking debacle out East. Real tough guy, but a total mess after—whatever—went down. Professional soldier; mercenary. A man trained to hurt others. And he hurt you, didn’t he, David?”
David nodded.
“Yet the next day, you’re running on a treadmill.”
He stared back at him silently.
“I think, David, you should come with me. There are a few things you need to see.”
Curiosity clearly piqued, David nodded and followed the doctor. Carrying a small briefcase, Jonathon led his patient out of his office and down one of the nondescript hallways, past small offices and windows looking out on the green gardens of the clinic. It was another hot day; bees buzzed languidly among the washed-out colours of flowers and yellowing leaves and the polarised glass struggled to repel the heat.
They stopped at a small elevator, which opened silently at his approach.
David raised a finely shaped eyebrow. Jonathon tapped his wrist. “Subdermal chip,” he said. “Like your armband.” It was a superfluous security measure – even in the short walk from office to elevator, a half-dozen cameras had tracked their movement, facial recognition software and a host of other sensors confirming his ID beyond the additional data from the chip. There wasn’t any need for anything as crude as eye- and finger-print sensors when the security AI could assess their identity every step they took within the clinic.
“Where are we headed?” David asked. He sounded curious, but not nervous; Jonathon noted how he seemed to be quietly taking in every detail, assessing his surrounding with an almost absurd confidence.
“Where the magic happens,” Jonathon answered. “Sub-level 2,” he added, addressing the lift. With an almost imperceptible hum, it shifted into motion, doors closing and pulling both men into the complex infrastructure beneath the Clinic.
“Last time,” Jonathon said as they traveled, “you might remember I brought you to one of our labs. That was a much more… impromptu affair. Six months ago, Katherine brought you to one of our minor experimental sites: an important Hygeia resort for the clients, but a minor research centre for Asklepios.”
David’s eyes were fixed on the row of numbers next to the door. “Weren’t you the lead researcher there or something?”
“Was,” he answered. “My job’s changed somewhat since we first met.”
The lift hummed to a stop, and the doors opened with a quiet chime. Jonathon led the way through a series of pipe-and-wire lined concrete tunnels, broken by the occasional numbered door. He made a mental note as they passed each door, tracking which ones were in use, and nodding with satisfaction at the sight of his research team at work; there was exciting stuff going on down here. But for the purposes of this visit, there was only one thing that David needed to see.
They reached a final door, double reinforced heavy steel doors recessed into the wall.
“Welcome to The Tank,” he announced.
The door opened like a whisper and the scientist led David into the place of Cindy’s birth. Jonathon always felt a sense of deep satisfaction—and enduring wonder—every time he entered the Tank. Not that it was anything particularly exciting to see: a large vaulting chamber of open mesh metal flooring over exposed wiring and tubing. Poured concrete walls and steel girders delineated the room and cooling pipes and a mess of cabling snaked across the room, connecting improvised control boxes and banks of panels and screens and switches. Hastily assembled, growing almost organically to match the ever-increasing needs of running the Tank, the entire chamber was almost comically shambolic in presentation: except for the Tank itself.
Raised on a dais at the centre of the room, with a half-dozen cables dropping from the ceiling or winding across the floor to connect to it, sat a cylinder just under three meters in length and another meter in diameter. Thick glass formed a tight seal within the curving frame of solid grey metal, rugged and with massive bolts along its seams. It was filled with an emerald-green fluid, currently quiescent. Even at rest it churned, dull and sluggish in the cylinder, but in Jonathon’s mind he could see it froth and swirl and glow with alien luminosity as it all but obscured the patient within.
David stood at the threshold, curious but hesitant. They were the only two people in the room, and it annoyed Jonathon that his patient wasn’t more impressed by the sight.
“What am I looking at?” David asked.
“You don’t remember, do you?” Jonathon answered. “You spent two weeks in here, David.” He gestured towards the cylinder. “In there, to be more precise.”
David took a cautious step forward, mindful of the open mesh floor. His boots rang out against the metal. Clearly, the room hadn’t been designed with female visitors wearing fashionable heels in mind. He pointed at the cylinder. “In… there?”
Jonathon nodded, struggling to restrain his eagerness. “Yes, yes– in there.” He rushed to it and ran one hand down the curved glass, with the sort of reverence usually reserved for idols or saints. “In here. This, David, is where…. Well, where David ended and Cindy was born.” Feeling an immense surge of pride and satisfaction, he gestured for David to come closer, finger twitching with excitement. “This, David, is the future. And you, David, are the living embodiment of that future.”
Frowning, David approached, daintily stepping between coiling cables. “What, the future is female?”
Jonathon laughed. “No.” He paused and thought for a moment. “Well, maybe.” He gestured towards a nearby console next to table and a set of cheap plastic chairs. “Probably not. Grab a seat.”
They sat in the shadow of the cylinder under the high arcs of the ceiling disappearing into darkness behind suspended florescent lighting. David sat straight-backed with legs crossed at the ankles opposite the doctor. The transformed man appeared both impatient and apprehensive, as though he already knew he wasn’t going to like what the doctor had to say.
“What did you call it?” Jonathon started. “Crazy voodoo sci-fi bullshit? I’ll concede one of those words: crazy. What we’re doing here is crazy; but it is neither magic nor fiction. What we’re are doing here is nothing less than the achievement of one of humanity’s greatest yearnings since it first looked at the world around it and conceived of Gods to explain that which it could not understand. Do you know what that is, David, what humanity wants more than anything?”
“Shit, Scooter, I don’t know – sex?”
Jonathon scowled. “Immortality!”
David gave a bark of laughter. “Sure. So you’re saying I’m going to live forever?”
The doctor groaned in impatient exasperation. “For fuck’s sake!” he barked. “Take a look at yourself! You sit there, a nearly forty-year old man in the body a woman half that age, and you laugh?” Jonathon took a deep breath but couldn’t keep the anger from his voice. “You sit there the epitome of youthful health and you have the audacity to doubt me?”
David opened his mouth, closed it, and stayed silent.
“Did you even once stop and consider the implications of the changes you’ve undergone? Beyond even the near-miraculous healing of the injuries—injuries that should’ve been fatal—that were, in fact, fatal, thank you very much!—but beyond that, the fact that you appear to be, for all intents and purposes, twenty years younger? Just once, can you think beyond your own petty little life and consider what this means—for others, for the world? Do you have any idea how much people would pay—what they would sacrifice—or do—to be twenty years old again?”
“I didn’t much like being twenty the first time around,” he muttered. “Not so keen on doing it again.”
Jonathon glared at him. “My entire career, I’ve been working on regenerative medicine, David. Low-key, easily marketable treatments, the kind of procedures the Clinic knew it could sell. De-aging skin, erasing wrinkles, easing the aches and pains of ordinary life. Accelerated recovery from surgery.
“The lack of vision was excruciating.” Jonathon shook his head. “Growing and attaching a new ear – we’ve been able to grow ears for a decade. But they just wanted to do it better, faster. At most, colleagues might entertain the idea of regenerating a whole limb. But nothing… exciting.” He shook his head. “Nothing that would fundamentally transform the human condition. Oh sure, they’d entertain wild ideas in theory but in practice the work was always mundane, always marketable.
“The human body is capable of such remarkable recovery, David—but so many species do it better. The hydra, forming a new body when cut in two. The salamander, regenerating limbs and organs. Zebrafish. Flatworms. So why not humans?
“Scooter—”
Jonathon ignored the interruption. “Stem cells. Blastema. Regenerative –yet still woefully limited, organic systems declining and shutting down with ageing. But why senescence? Why do our cells have to stop dividing and die? Must negative traits accumulate and lead to degeneration?” His hands chopped the air with excitement. “So much of life on Earth dodges or delays the deterioration we all suffer: lobsters, trees, clams, sharks – so why not us?”
David shrugged, and with the voice of someone who did not much care, answered, “Because we’re not fucking flatworms?”
“Exactly!” Jonathon exclaimed, leaning closer. “We’re not. Yet we share the same genes with species that long outlive us. All the tools needed for a longer life, for regeneration, locked away, here, inside of us, an immense potential denied because tens of thousands of years ago, it made more evolutionary sense for us to grow old, die, and make room for the young.
“So why settled for simply healing injury when we might regenerate the entirety of the human body itself? And then, why settle for simple regeneration when we might even halt and reverse the damage and decline of even ageing?” He jabbed one finger at David. “But how to unlock that potential? My life’s work, decades of research!”
“That’s all really fucking fascinating, Scooter,” David said, keeping a wary eye on the doctor’s thrusting finger. “But can you please get to the point?”
“We made progress; I made progress; solid if minor, profitable advances that accelerated recovery processes here at Asklepios. But then, nearly two years ago,” Jonathon said, “Katherine led a raid on a NeoPharm black site, an off-the-books laboratory.” His eyes unfocused and his voice grew grave. “Your former employers were engaging in some truly horrific stuff, David. What she found there was… disturbing. Human experimentation. Homeless victims, undocumented workers, the lost and forgotten. Kidnapped, lifted from the streets, migrants and refugees, imprisoned. Then used, subjected to experimental procedures, tests, surgeries.”
He shook his head. “That’s where she recovered the first generation of those fungal prosthetics you tried out six months ago. It’s also where she salvaged the equipment and research that led to all this.” He took the entirety of the chamber in with a sweep of his hand. “It was a pure luck, she told me, some kind of breakdown in the kill system that prevented it from all being destroyed.
“And when she showed it to me, I nearly wept, David, like a child.” There were many things that woke Jonathon up at night, panting and in a cold sweat. This was one of them: knowing, that somewhere out there, there was a genius—or many—a team of researchers working at a level so far ahead of his own native intelligence that it humbled him. For decades the Chinese held dominance in fields of biotechnology and artificial intelligence; Koreans in robotics; and then suddenly, out of nowhere—this entire body of regenerative research, forcibly recovered here, at home.
“They were ahead of us,” he continued, “so far ahead it was as if we’d just discovered fire and they were launching a manned flight to the Moon.”
David held up one feminine arm, turning it this way and that, showing off the soft and graceful lines of the limb. “Looks to me you did alright,” he said.
“We’ve come a long way,” Jonathon said. He felt the long hours, the frantic work, in his bones, those initial exciting days of setting up the salvaged equipment in this makeshift space, hooking it up, writing and modifying the software—deciphering the research, adapting, integrating—and that first, exhilarating, horrifying attempt at firing up the first prototype of the Tank. It’d been a much smaller unit, then. Just large enough for a rat. The rat hadn’t survived the process, its death grotesque.
“Listen, this is all fascinating, Scooter. It really is. But I’ll be honest: I don’t give a shit. I don’t. All of this,” and he waved his arm, bracelets jangling musically in the cavernous space, “all of it, sure, maybe it’ll change humanity. Maybe we’ll all live longer, and better, whether we want to or not. Probably it’ll be the rich who’ll live forever and everyone else just die old, poor and bitter like they always have.”
He shrugged. “I don’t care. All I care about—all I want to know—is how you’re going to make this, and this—” and here, he cupped one tit with one hand, and the other with another, “go away.
“Your crazy voodoo science made me into Cindy. Whatever you want to call it, you transformed me—without consent!—into a twenty year-old girl. But that’s not who I am. And now it’s time to turn me back into a man, Scooter. Throw me back into that goddamn tank of yours, flip whatever Frankenstein switches you need, power that shit up, and turn me back into a guy.”
Jonathon thought for a moment. “Take off your shirt,” he said.
David raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”
“Take off your shirt,” he repeated.
“Jesus, Scooter,” he said. “You are such a perv.” But he did as asked, draping his top over a nearby console and sitting topless in his bra. He shivered, crossing his arms across his chest. “Fuck me, it’s cool down here.”
Jonathon opened his briefcase and pulled his seat closer so that their knees were nearly touching. He took his patient’s blood pressure, listened to his heart, and confirmed the nurse’s earlier readings. Taking one of David’s arms into his hand, he inspected the limb from nail to neck, fingers paddling from the wrist up to the shoulder. Bemused, David watched in silence.
Jonaton withdrew a phlebotomy kit from his case. David raised an eyebrow. “Really?” he asked. “More?”
Prepping a swab with alcohol, he nodded.
David sighed but submitted as the doctor drew several more vials of blood. His fingers remained still as he drew the blood—because he was a professional—but he had to actively suppress the urge to twitch, the rush of excitement as he collected the samples. In his fevered anticipation, the thin crimson vials seemed to glow with the possibility of what they might contain.
Finishing, Jonathon stood and circled the patient. Sweeping long hair aside, he examined David’s throat, the other arm, and chin. He checked the contusion at the temple, nearly invisible under its covering of makeup.
Sitting again, he gestured at the man. “Bra.”
David frowned. “No.”
Jonathon shrugged. He would check the nurse’s report later. “How are you feeling?”
“Uncomfortable.”
“Yes, yes. Physically?”
“Uncomfortable.” David reached for his top. “We done here?”
“Listen—”
“No, you listen,” he said. “You ever wear a pair of shorts like this?” He patted one flank, drawing the doctor’s attention to the pair of high-waisted, faux-leather shorts. “I’m gonna guess ‘no’. They’re tight, Scooter. Really tight. And other than stripping for the nurse an hour ago, I’ve had them on all day. My cock’s strapped so far back I could piss out my ass, and my balls are swimming around somewhere in my belly and I’m fucking exhausted, okay?” He tugged his shirt on over his bra, surreptitiously rearranging his breasts as he did so. “So, yeah, I’m uncomfortable. I’m tired. And frankly, I’m getting angry, here.
“Great, you’ve shown me your little toy and hey, I’m happy for you. Change humanity! Make a difference. Whatever. But I’m getting sick and tired of waiting. Prep that goddam tank, fire up whatever you’ve got to fire up, and make me a man again!”
Taking a deep breath, Scooter tried again. “Don’t you find it odd that your injuries from yesterday’s encounter are almost completed healed?” he said. “Soft tissue damage gone, discoloration gone.” He took David’s hand and indicated the nail broken earlier that day. “Did it sting when you broke it?”
“Honestly?” He shrugged. “I was too angry to notice. Then I popped back into the salon and they gave me something that killed the sting, dissolved the old nail and popped a new one on.”
“It’s already nearly healed, David.”
“What are you trying to say, Scooter?”
Jonathon took a moment to consider how to present this to his patient. Until the blood test results came back, what he was about to say was mostly theory – backed up by his observations and data collected over the past six months, and this encounter. He took a moment to organise his thoughts and consider how to present this to his patient.
He frowned, and then sighed. “I’ll be honest with you—”
“It’d be a nice change.”
“I’ll be honest, David. The Tank,” and here he drew David’s attention to the wonder at the heart of the chamber. “We don’t really understand it. What it does is a miracle, a transformative miracle we barely understand, let alone control. At first, we were running off of the salvage from the raid on Steele’s lab. A broken tank, stolen software, and… the Juice.”
David cocked an eyebrow. “Juice?”
“The fluid that fills the tank,” Jonathon said. “One of the techies called it that, and it stuck,” he added, almost apologetically. “I hate the name. You can imagine the… fun,” and here, he nearly groaned at the implied idiocy of his colleagues, “people had crafting a working acronym out of it. Best they’ve come up with is ‘reJuvenating Ultra-tech Infusion for Cellular Enhancement.” He shook his head in despair. “It’s not even an infusion.”
“Scooter? I don’t care.”
Jonathon frowned. “This fluid, it makes the whole process possible. Hell, it is the process, from a certain point of view. Put the subject in the tank, fill it with fluid, and flick a switch and—”
The Juice. The synthetic medium captured from Steele’s lab. It suffused any biological subject immersed in it, infiltrating at a cellular level and remained quiescent until triggered. In unison with the Tank, it could translate precise instructions at a genetic level, setting a desired template, flipping gene expression and transforming any number of biological processes.
Despite their best efforts at filtering and restoring the little they had, they were running low. Every attempt at synthesising their own version had ended in failure.
“And—magic happens, David,” Jonathon continued. “We tell the body to mend and… cells regenerate, damage heals – even the slow, ordinary damage of normal human aging. And the process can be controlled: adjust the flow of power into the cylinder and the whole process can be directed.
“But we’re clumsy, David, we’re barely able to adjust things without putting the target at risk. It’s like playing the piano with oven gloves on. At the moment, we can only send the crudest of instructions, like hammering those keys with both hands. Regenerate! Rejuvenate! We can send commands but only in the simplest of terms. But we’re learning. One day, we’ll play a person’s genes like a symphony, and create a new kind of music yet unheard by humanity.” Then he smiled ruefully. “But at the moments, our finest adjustments are more like…” he considered for a moment, “I suppose like switching between a sledgehammer and a howitzer for cracking open a nut. Which is to say, crude and heavy-handed.
“Out first attempts were disastrous. Horrifying,” he said, though his voice remained clinical. He could still see the results of those early attempts, the inverted animal carcasses, masses of jutting bones and twisted flesh; the viscous blobs of blood and sinew; warped organs and soups of dissolved tissue and bulbous lumps of tumours. “Trial and error eventually brought some success, and it was only at that point we discovered something… fascinating. But possibly problematic, considering our long-term hopes for the project.
“Every subject that survived the process was female.
“Our first assumption was one of selection error. We must have inadvertently picked female subjects for our experiments. But no; a quick check of our records clarified we hadn’t. Perhaps something riding on the male chromosome interfered with the process? Or maybe that some of the gene expressions in male subjects were problematic? But no: our next male subject survived the process but emerged female.”
Jonathon hurried on, seeing the growing anxiety and anger in David’s face. “Of course, what we discovered soon after was that the subject was only exhibiting female characteristics—at a genetic level, it was still XY male. As are you, David. Subjects’ DNA remains untouched by the process. I assure you that you remain 100% male.”
David scowled at his prominent chest. “I sure don’t feel 100% male,” he growled.
“If your DNA is the script, then this machine lets us create a new production. Think of… you ever go to the theatre, see a play?”
He nodded.
“Take—Romeo and Juliet. Same script, more or less, for the past 500 years. But how many different productions? Medieval, contemporary, sci-fi. Or focused on gender or race, class or politics. A decade ago, it was fashionable to do sex-swapped version, Romeo as a girl.” Jonathon pointed at the feminised man. “That’s you, now. Same ‘David’ script; fashionable production.”
David raked his fingers through his hair and glowered.
“What we discovered,” the scientist continued, “was that the regenerative process invariably flipped genetic switches associated with female secondary sexual characteristics. Breast development. Fat distribution. Estrogen production. The subject went through a forced—female—puberty as part of the process. Our current theory is that…”
“I don’t give a fuck about your theory, doc,” David finally snapped. “And I sure don’t like where this feels like it’s headed.” He held up one slim arm to the lights overhead, as though to see through it, into it. “Am I still filled with this… ‘Juice’?” he asked.
Jonathon hesitated briefly then nodded. “We have to wait on the blood test results to come back,” and he pointed at the recently taken samples. “But yes, based on the data we’ve collected so far, you’re still infused with it.”
“And what does that mean?”
The doctor shrugged. “We don’t know.”
“Listen, doc…,” voice dropping to a dangerous growl, only slightly undermined by its softer feminine lilt.
At which point, Jonathon snapped. “No!” he shouted, surging to his feet. “You listen, you ignorant, ungrateful….” Words failed him and he fumbled for an insult to adequately express his anger and frustration. “Peasant!”
He stalked away from his client, storming towards the Tank on its raised dais. “When I tell you I don’t know,” he called out over his shoulder, “it’s because we don’t have a damn clue how this thing works. We don’t know how it works! We can barely control the damned thing, and even then only in the crudest fashion.” He hopped up onto the raised platform and passed his hand over the cool dark metal of the cylinder. Briefly, he held back the desire to pound on the heavy glass out of frustration; lost the battle; and punched the glass. His fist smarted. The deep green fluid on the other side of the glass continued to slowly swirl, quiet and potent, unaffected by his anger.
Jonathon spun to face his patient, still sitting bemused.
“You shouldn’t even be alive!” Jonathon shouted. “Why are you still alive, David?”
David watched him from across the chamber. “Because you put me into that thing?”
But the doctor shook his head. “No. No! You’re the first, David! The first! The first human test subject to come out of here alive—and whole. The first to wake up stable and healthy. The first to leave and carry on living a normal life.”
David snorted. “I wouldn’t call it normal.”
The doctor hopped down from the platform and stormed towards him, jabbing an accusing finger at his patient. “And why? What makes you so fucking special, David? Why did you come out—” and here, he gestured wildly, taking in the entirety of the man’s transformed frame, “—perfect! when every other subject…” and here he faltered, remembering previous attempts; and especially the one kept locked away nearby, “… didn’t.”
“How the hell should I know, doc?”
“So when I tell you I don’t know,” Jonathon continued, “believe me, this is an even greater frustration for me than it is for you. But I’ll tell you what we think we know. We believe that the instructions sent into the Tank are locked by the residual Juice still within you. A… template, a set of instructions embedded overriding the normal state of affairs and maintaining gene expression, hormone production—everything—to a specific state defined by the initial process.
“And so long as your body remains suffused with the juice, any attempt at physical change—yes, even masculinisation—won’t work. This, right now,” and he grabbed David by the shoulder, “this body, this is its current desired expression. Young. And female. And any attempt at changing that is at best doomed to failure—at worst, likely fatal. We could cut your breasts off and they would regrow. Pump you full of testosterone and your body would shut down receptors and ignore it. This, right now, is what your body wants to be.”
The silence that followed was complete. David fell back into his seat, face hidden behind his hair as he stared at the ground for several long minutes. Finally he looked up and a dangerous determination burned in his eyes.
“I don’t care,” he said. “Put me back in there and throw the switch.”
“You don’t—”
“Yes,” he said. “I do. I understand. And I don’t care. I lived through this once. Maybe I’ll get lucky again. Make me your next human text subject. You said you can send simple commands. So write up something new. A new program, with a simple order: Male. Overwrite the previous template.”
Though at some level tempted, Jonathon shook his head. “It would kill you.”
David shrugged. Walking past the doctor, heels ringing out against the metal flooring, he and stood looking up at the massive bulk of the Tank. “I’d rather die,” David said, and with a sweeping gesture took in the entirety of his feminine form: the glossy long hair, smooth skin, the makeup and clothes, breasts and heels, his narrowed waist and slender limbs. “I’d rather die than live like this.”
Jonathon walked up behind him. “You don’t mean that.”
David didn’t turn, and his face remained hidden, though a shudder passed through his whole body. “I do.”
And Jonathon believed him. Making his mind up on the spot, he gave a curt nod. “Fine,” he said. “But there’s something I need you to see first.”
Five: Bright Red Lips and Long Blonde Hair
Chad Jenkins knew he was living his best life.
Good-looking, tall and healthy, white, male and twenty-five, he enjoyed the freedoms of early adulthood while suffering none of the responsibility. And he had a good job, a real job, one uniquely suited to his personality, he continued to explain to the young woman sat with him at Eros, the British-themed pub a short distance from the main Clinic complex.
Photos of Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street decorated the dark-paneled walls, as did paintings of the old Queen, then King, and current Queen. A life-sized replica of the pub’s namesake, the winged archer atop a bronze fountain, took pride of place near the entrance. Chad lounged in the comfortable red velvet seat of one of the secluded nooks, smiling at his pretty companion.
“Like, a year ago I was a ski instructor, eh? Banff—you know it? Paradise. Skies like you can’t imagine, so blue, and Lake Louise, if you’ve never been you gotta check it out someday. And there I was teaching spoiled rich kids, mid-life crisis dads, recently divorced moms, ski bunnies,” and he grinned at the girl, “and I was loving it but barely getting by, doing some physio on the side, some personal training. Skiing season was so short and even with the machines going non-stop we couldn’t keep the snow on the slopes, right, because of the heat?”
He paused to drink and watched the girl over the rim of his pint. Bright red lips curved in a half-mocking grin, and her nails flashed as she raised a thin flute of bubbly. Small sapphire stones dangled from her ears as she tucked back her hair. She wore a short blue dress that hugged her curves and bared her legs from mid-thigh. “Sounds lovely.”
Smiling, he enjoyed the brief swell of nostalgia. “It was.” And it had been: especially the views, the scarlet flare of distant-crystalline high peaks as the sun set, or the achingly beautiful vista where sky and lake met in an unbroken blue at the base of rocky slopes. But also evenings, the people, night after night of intimate touches in dark rooms, kisses and bodies pressed together, so many women, the occasional man, brought together by transient holiday freedom, lust, rebellion—he never cared, never questioned, just listened. “And that’s when I met Tab.”
“Tab?”
“Tabitha. I was her instructor—at first—but you know…” He shrugged. “We were spending nights together. A week in, on my day off, she’s taking the slope with another instructor and gets injured—nothing too serious, but she’s not exactly happy.” He reached for the pitcher of beer on the table, refilled his glass. “She asks for me. I’m helping with her recovery, you know, some physio to get her skiing again and out of the blue, she offers me a job, here, at Asklepios. Turns out she’s on the board of directors.”
“So you fucked yourself into a sweet job?”
He raised his glass in mock salute. “I’m good at what I do, eh?” he said.
And the girl opposite, she seemed… non-plussed by his response, neither intrigued nor put off. The tag on her arm marked her as a client of the clinic. There were certain protocols to follow when hitting on a client, but his own monitor would’ve warned him off had there been a concern. Quite the opposite: the warm glow at the wrist when he approached her was an invitation, not a warning.
Clients at Asklepios were there because they were fucked up in some way, and Chad was keenly aware that for a heart-aching number of people, he was the last non-medical person they’d even spoken to—kissed—fucked—enjoyed a final intimate moment with.
She eyed her glass for moment. It was nearly empty, the rim reddened with lip-prints. “How about,” she said. “You buy me another drink, and I’ll keep listening to your stories?”
Chad laughed. “How about you tell me your name first?”
“Cindy,” she said. “Cindy Bellamy.” She held up her arm, slender and bare to the shoulder, and gave the bracelet at her wrist a little shake. “I’m a patient at the Clinic.” She looked suspiciously at her glass. “But you probably already figured that out.”
He hesitated for a moment, suddenly uneasy. He studied the girl closely, drinking in her beauty, generous cleavage revealed by the low-cut front of her dress, the brilliant green of her eyes and the pale flesh of her thighs. Her lips shone and curved in a mocking smile he found irresistible. And yet—there was something familiar… Her name, maybe?
Over-thinking had never been his forte. He gestured for a waitress, ordered a bottle of Prosecco on ice. “A name for a drink. Seems fair. More of the same?”
“You know I’m not going to fuck you, right?”
Chad laughed. “If you say so,” he said.
“I’m just here for the free drinks.”
“And the sparkling conversation, eh?”
“Yes,” she said, and smiled, raising her glass in salute. Her eyes sparkled with knowing contempt, and he loved it. He loved the background buzz of the pub, the clink of glasses, indistinct chatter, the smell of beer and the cozy, dark-wood panelling. He loved the fact he was sat opposite a pretty young girl with bright red lips and long blonde hair, and who cared if she only sat with him because he bought her a drink? She was a little bit bitchy, and he liked that; she was honest and that was even better; and she was doubtlessly fucked up in someway, but then weren’t they all?
There was also a haunted looked to her. As he spoke, he often found her drifting away and staring into the middle distance, staring at something that she couldn’t unsee—a trauma, most likely, a loss or injury, as with so many of the patients. Usually, they just wanted him to talk, to fill their minds with anything but the one thing they felt they couldn’t escape.
He wondered what it was for her; what haunted Cindy Bellamy?
Clearly, she wasn’t here to talk and share, at least not yet. But then so many of them weren’t at first. Mostly, he could tell that she didn’t want to be alone.
And Chad thought, maybe I’ll end up in bed with her tonight, or another night—that’s usually how it went—but maybe not, and that was okay, too.
Cindy drained her flute and refilled, struggling a little with the large bottle, pouring a little too quickly and overflowing the glass. With a little ‘eep’ she brought her face down to the glass and sucked up the foam, lips a perfect red ‘o’, eyes glaring up at him through framing bangs as though daring him to laugh.
He laughed anyways and she grinned. They drank, and he told more stories. It was only some time later, in the middle of a good one about skinny dipping in the hotel pool, that he noticed she wasn’t listening. “You’re not holding up your end of the bargain.”
She shook her head. “Sorry.” She stared at the table as she spoke, and her voice was quiet. “I—experienced something today, saw something I wish I hadn’t.” She paused and glanced up at him. “Have you ever been afraid, Chad?”
His pretty companion didn’t wait for an answer. “I mean, truly afraid. Terrified, so deeply that it swallows up your insides, so completely you’re left hollow. I’ve known that kind of fear precisely twice.
“Once, long ago. I lost someone. Because I was afraid—and didn’t act, couldn’t—and the most precious thing I’d ever known was taken from me.” She was staring into the distance now. “I still have nightmares about it.”
Then she looked up at him. “I never thought I’d feel that deeply afraid again.” Very carefully, she put her glass down. Her hands trembled. “I was wrong.”
Six: The Man Who Killed You
Rows of florescent tube lighting suspended from the concrete ceiling illuminated the chamber. Under the sharp glare there were no shadows, nowhere to hide. Within this space deeper beneath the Clinic stood a pair of connected transparent rooms, smaller boxes made of slabs of reinforced transparent polymer, nearly invisible and all but unbreakable. There were no visible joins between the walls. Within one of the two rooms was a small cot and a short toilet, both made of the same plastic-like material, also seamlessly molded out of the polymer surface. Cameras overhead surveyed the room, and several sensors tracked temperature, air quality, and the chamber’s inhabitant.
A faint hum hinted at the presence of air filters recycling and scrubbing the air. The temperature was just slightly too low for comfort—at least for David, dressed as he was, in his chunky heels and tight shorts, bare arms and mesh top.
He shivered, arms wrapped tightly around himself, and stared, eyes wide, the hair standing at the back of his neck. “Why the fuck are you showing me this?” he asked. “What the fuck are you showing me?”
There was a woman in the transparent room. At least, it had the characteristics of a woman: too many of them. The figure writhing on the floor was an exaggerated caricature of a girl, a grotesque eruption of secondary female features. There were glimpses of something supernaturally beautiful, a refined expression of femininity pushed to its extreme: full lips and skin that nearly glowed with vitality, cascades of lustrous raven hair and fulsome curves. But that shape was all but lost beneath fleshy protrusions and bulbous sores sprouting from her curvaceous form. Breasts—but too many—hung heavily from her frame, large, well-shaped, some leaking. Fingernails like talons raked the floor without effect. One hand disappeared between her thighs, clutching at genitals beneath her furious palm.
“Specimen Zero,” Jonathon replied. “The first human specimen to emerge from the tank alive.”
David stared as the woman continued to scrabble at her crotch, feverishly reaching for a climax that eluded her. Her mouth distended in a silent moan as she squirmed on the floor, long hair swirling around her like a dark cloak.
“Why are you—why is she locked away like this?” David took a hesitant step towards the transparent wall that divided him from the woman. Glancing back over his shoulder, he stared at the doctor in disbelief. “You can’t—”
“Yes,” Jonathon answered, his voice cold. “I can.”
As the woman twisted and flailed, David noted with horror a bloated, malformed limb—a third leg, swollen and undersized, emerging from around the hip, boneless and flopping useless even as it twitched and scrabbled against the floor.
“This,” Jonathon said, with haunting clinical detachment, “is both out greatest success and our greatest failure. Clinically dead when placed within the Tank, the patient was the first to emerge fully healed and alive.” He held a tablet in his hands and tapped at a few buttons. “But sadly, not whole.”
The misshapen woman became aware of their presence. She looked up and hate-filled eyes locked on the doctor. With a face at once beautiful and horrific, she bared her teeth and screamed without sound.
“The walls are soundproof,” the doctor noted. “Initially we contained her in far simpler accommodations, but the screaming proved too disturbing.”
David looked at him in disbelief. “This is… wrong,” he said.
“Yes, it is.” The doctor’s voice remained calm though scored with anger and frustration. “This is what happens when mistakes are made, David. You’re very cavalier about things you know nothing about. ‘Put me back in the there,’ ‘I’d rather die.’” The doctor mimicked David’s words in a little-girl’s voice. “But what if going back in the Tank means… that?” He pointed at the figure in the glass box. “That’s what happens when we mess around with a process we barely understand. That could have been you. It still could be.”
David stared at the doctor, then at the imprisoned woman. They made eye contact. Her eyes—beautiful, large hazel eyes beneath thick lashes—widened; her mouth distended in a feral howl; and she launched herself at the wall between them. David flinched back even as she slammed into the transparent polymer. The palms of her hands pounded at the wall, and her many breasts and protuberant growths flattened grossly against the surface. She slammed her head once, twice, a third time against the surface, and with each dull thud she left a dark red splotch.
“She’s angrier than usual today,” the doctor noted. “I better calm her down.” A tap at his tablet, and she almost instantly sagged and went limp. “Gas,” the doctor explained.
The woman slumped to the floor, and as her limbs drooped away from her groin, David saw for the first time the penis, glistening and engorged, suspended between the prisoner’s legs, over an inflamed and dripping vagina.
“Jesus.” David stepped back from the cage. “Christ. Christ. What the—what the fuck is this?”
“Those contusions to the head will be gone within the hour.” A hint of wonder crept into his voice. “The regenerative process never stopped. It’s out of control. Tumours and flesh, limbs and secondary sexual characteristics, hair and nails, the patient is in a constant state of healing and growth. Clusters of cells regress, specialize again – organs grow where they shouldn’t.” He shook his head. “Every week we operate on the patient, slicing away excess flesh and atrophied limbs. She’s… stunningly beautiful, beneath it all. An absolute expression of femininity.
“And she’s strong. Muscular and bone density well beyond normal parameters, at the extremes of human potentiality. She escaped, more than once, and hurt colleagues—but we’ve learned to not underestimate her. She’s a dangerous one.” He walked up to the wall and tapped, like one might at a fish in a tank. “But you’re never going to hurt anyone again, are you?” He turned back to David. “She been a constant source of fascinating data. We’ve been able to try all sorts of procedures on her. We’ve learned a lot from her.”
“You can’t do this,” David said. “You don’t have the right to….”
“Yes, I do.” The doctor’s voice was firm. “And before you get too high on your horse, I should point out that without her… sacrifice, let’s say, you may well have emerged from the Tank in the same state, or worse. We made correction to the process you underwent based on the data collected from her first trip into the tank.
“Besides,” the doctor added. ““She wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you.”
David glared at the doctor. “That’s not funny.”
“No, it isn’t.” Jonathon tapped at his tablet, and suddenly they could hear the patient within her prison. “Here, let me introduce you. Good afternoon, Patient Zero. How are you feeling today?”
Her breathing was low and ragged, an angry hissing intake of breath. “Plea… please. No….”
“Answer the question.”
“Make it stop,” she slurred, shaking her head, her dark shroud of hair falling away from her face. Numbly, David noticed an eye—clouded, unmoving—growing at the base of her neck. “Stop—stop, please….”
“Answer the question.” Jonathon’s finger hovered over the tablet. “You know what happens when you don’t answer the questions.” Though his voice remained clinical and cool, it was clear he was being deliberately malicious, and taking pleasure in his victim’s suffering.
There was a sudden shift in the patient’s posture, and she slowly picked herself up from the ground, sweeping the hair away from her face to look at the doctor. Though her eyes burned with hatred, her smile was suddenly saccharine and sweet, almost beautiful were it not for the cluster of cysts the deformed one side of her mouth and left it drooping. “I’m good today, doctor,” she said, and her voice was clear, soft and lilting, musical even. One hand sought out and fondled a full, pendulous teat hanging from beneath her armpit. “I’ve been good.”
“Have you?” the doctor asked. “Tell me.”
“Yessss…,” she hissed, and pouted. “Good. I’ve been a good girl.”
“Well, then,” the doctor said. “I’d like you to meet someone.”
The patient’s eyes fluttered and flicked between the doctor and David, before locking onto the latter’s feminine frame. “I’ll… Please. Help… me,” she purred. A ripple ran through the patient—lust, or rage, or both—and she spread her hand wide against the wall between them. Long curved nails several centimeters in length scraped for purchase against the polymer surface, and up close, David could see the cluster of pustules and polyps that marred the flesh of her palm.
David glanced at the doctor, and back at the patient, and then back to Jonathon. “I get the message, doctor. Okay? I get it. Going back in the Tank’s a bad idea. I don’t want—that. Fuck. But why—”
“Who are—” she stopped to suck in a dribble of drool escaping the side of her mouth. “You?” The patient took a deep breath, hand leaving the breast and sliding back down to her crotch. She began to rub again, slowly and with a sigh. “Who?”
Smiling wickedly, and clearly taking pleasure in the revelation, the doctor provided the answer. “This is Cindy Bellamy, though perhaps you’re more familiar with her former name.” And the doctor turned to David, and with an expansive gesture completed the introduction.
“David Saunders, I’d like to introduce you to the man who killed you: Mr Adam Fosters—you knew him as Agent Fosters—Steele’s man.”
Author’s Notes:
It took rather longer than expected, but here it is, finally. It was supposed to be a short chapter, a brief interlude offering the reader a glimpse at what was going on from outside of the first-person narrative of the previous chapters, but it sort of grew beyond expectations. At over 70k words in length, it seemed wise to break the chapter into digestible chunks. The second Interlude is complete, and I’ll post the next two parts over the coming weeks, though if you want it faster you can find the rest on my Patreon.
If you enjoyed this, please - leave a comment! It's nice knowing someone's reading this stuff.
I’d just like to give a shout out to those supporting me on Patreon. I think it’s fair to say that this chapter wouldn’t have been completed without their support. I disappeared for months, and they were still there when I came back, and their encouragement got me back into the writing groove. Thank you, all of you, very much. Hopefully the story doesn’t disappoint, nor the time it’s taking me to write it.
Some credit given where it’s due:
--the Iron Maiden rant by David was inspired by a segment in Naomi Wolfe’s “The Beauty Myth”.
--some of the “crazy voodoo sci-fi bullshit” stuff was inspired by The Epigenetics Revolution, by Nessa Carey, and Ageing: A Very Short Introduction, by Nancy Pachana. The Coming Wave, by Mustafa Suleyman, which I’m currently listening to, influenced the edit.
And if you like this – why not pop in and check out the Patreon, join the conversation?
Constant in All Other Things 2: Interlude II (2/3)
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
(www.patreon.com/fakeminsk)
“Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.”
Much Ado About Nothing
Synopsis:
David Sanders returns to the Asklepios Clinic in the hope of leaving behind Cindy’s life and regaining a male identity. As his three minders discuss his fate, David struggles to come to terms with both his male past and feminine present.
What has gone before:
David Sanders saw something he shouldn't have: his boss, pharmaceutical magnate Jeremiah Steele, murdered the son of an underworld rival. Placed in witness protection, an assassination attempt forces David into the disguise of Cindy, a younger woman. For months he suffers the ignominy of living a life he despises, his torture both alleviated and acerbated once discovered by Julia, a jilted ex-girlfriend. A trip to the Asklepios Clinic, the research centre responsible for his transformation, triggered both uncomfortable memories and a violent encounter.
Interlude 2, Part Two: Bargaining and Depression
Scene Seven: “Tough Guy Talk”
“Slut!” Amplified by the speaker, the former agent’s howls resonated within the constrained space of his transparent cage. His screams were matched by the dull thud of Fosters’ fists against the wall. “Sissy faggot cunt!” The transformed assassin screamed, threw himself against the barrier, hammered his head until blood smeared the wall translucent crimson. “Did this—you—kill!” Spit flecked the wall between them.
Jonathon allowed Fosters his moment, curious how David would respond.
David stood there impassively, watching the man who killed him—the man now twisted into a grotesque caricature of femininity and rampant regeneration gone wrong—swear and rave. With insults raining down on him—bitch and bastard and vivid threats of rape and torture—David stood in silence and watched. He turned his back on the display behind him and faced the doctor. He appeared deeply troubled, and a dark and dangerous anger smouldered in his eyes.
“This is wrong,” he said.
Jonathon raised an eyebrow. “He killed you, you know. When Katherine found you, your heart had stopped. He shattered your leg. He’s the reason you’re several centimeters shorter than before.”
“Doesn’t matter,” David said. “We fought. He lost. He should be dead, not… this, this living nightmare.” He jerked one thumb over his shoulder at Fosters, who now stood, wordlessly breathing heavily, one hand still groping incessantly at his crotch.
“Help me,” Fosters whined. “Please…..”
Jonathon cut the feed. Anger bubbled up inside at the ingratitude and moral judgment of this man. “Wrong?” he said, quietly. “Dead?” He stepped closer to his transformed client. “You stupid. Selfish. Idiot.” He jabbed an angry finger at David. “D’you think you were the only person Fosters hurt that day?” He gestured at his prisoner. “This—man, hurt and killed on his way to you, David. His companion did the same.” With angry jabs of the finger, he brought up a secured data file and thrust the tablet at David. “Here – have a look – he’s a real piece of work.”
A life defined by violence, rape and murder. Cruelties abroad and at home; mercenary work, dark government contracts and most recently, private work under Steele’s broad umbrella. The litany of the man’s atrocities made for harrowing reading, and he watched as David’s eyes—such pretty eyes—danced down the list.
“Deserves?” Jonathon pointed at an entry in the litany of horrors attached to Fosters’ name. “There a good one; a personal favourite. Children, David. He killed children. You dare pass morale judgment on me? Yes—a living nightmare,” Jonathon concluded. “His outsides now match the inside.”
David passed the tablet back to him. His former enemy now seemed oblivious to them, writhing once more on the floor in a paroxysm of groping, breasts and cock and pussy and agitated limbs, moaning in denied release. The feminised man watched the assassin for some time before Jonathon gestured for him to follow.
They left the room in silence.
Later, sitting opposite his patient back at his office at the ground level of Asklepios, Jonathon regretted his outburst. He was pleased with the impact the revelation had on David; it had instilled in him a necessary fear regarding his transformation. But he also acknowledges his anger was rooted in guilt—a particularly annoying, pernicious guilt he couldn’t quite shake.
David looked around, tenderly raking hair out of his eyes with nails to which he’d yet to adjust. “Why haven’t I ever heard of any of this?” he asked. “You’ve talked about raids on secret laboratories. Mad science, human victims—you’ve got a war criminal, locked up downstairs?” He grimaced. “Stuff like this makes the news.” But even as he said it, his voice betrayed an all too typical belief in the power of the rich and powerful to do whatever the hell they want and keep it secret. “Something must’ve gotten out?”
Jonathon thrust his hands deep into his pockets. “Why? You’d be surprised how much of our funding comes from governmental sources – Neopharm’s too. Nobody wants this getting into the press. Undocumented workers used for corporate experimentation it’d help fund? It’s a bad look for everybody involved.
“After their site got raided, Neopharm certainly didn’t want news getting out—might hurt their stock value. As for us – for the first time we had something on the competition, and best of all they didn’t know it was us, thanks to Katherine’s involvement. Might’ve been a corporate raid; might’ve been the Chinese, the Nigerians….” He trailed off and shrugged. “And as far as they knew, the research was destroyed in the attack on the lab. They didn’t know we had it. And we had to keep it that way.
“When those agents followed you here, David, I’ll be honest: your survival wasn’t my top concern. Keeping the Tank secret was far more important.”
“Then why are you showing me all this?” David asked. “Aren’t you afraid I’ll go running to Steele? Or the media? Take what I’ve seen here and deliver it to him on a silver platter, try and strike a bargain with him? I’m thinking the bastard would love to know what you’re up to here. I’m thinking the bastard would pay through the nose to know what’s going on in here.”
Jonathon smiled, though it wasn’t a pleasant one. “You and I both know you’d never do that. There’s no bargaining with Steele. The only thing he wants on a platter are your balls.” With a wave of his hand, he indicated the feminised man’s figure, the full breasts and lithe legs and long hair. “And in your current condition? Can you imagine what he’d do to you?”
David scowled.
“As for the press,” Jonathon continued, “what would be the point? Maybe—just maybe—you’d slightly inconvenience Steele, put some pressure on Asklepios. Maybe embarrass somebody powerful in government you’d probably rather not have as an enemy.
“But more to the point—let me ask you, Girlie. You’ve seen that… thing, now, downstairs. Without Asklepios—without my help—are you willing to risk that?”
David stiffened. His grip on the chair tightened. “I don’t take well to threats, Scooter.”
“It’s not a threat,” the doctor said. “It’s fact.”
“It doesn’t roll off your tongue, doc,” David said, sneering. “This tough-guy talk.”
“It’s not—idiot!—just think for a moment. What the hell do you think I want from all this? You’re—a problem. A fascinating and frankly, extreme valuable problem. You’ve gone in the Tank and come out the other side and you’re healthy and—”
“Female.”
“Yes. Fine. But you’re also a concern, David, a risk to everything we’re doing here, especially if you fall into the wrong hands. So in all honestly, if it wasn’t for Katherine, I’d have you in a cage just like that abomination downstairs. A far more pleasant cage, to be sure, especially if you were a good little girl and played along nicely, maybe give you a job as a secretary or receptionist, but I’d have you under observation and available for study 24-7.”
David frowned. “No thank you.”
“Yes, well,” he continued. “It’s not up to me. Katherine, whether you believe it or not, keeps insisting you’ve got human rights, that you deserve a new life after the sacrifice you made of testifying against Steele. That you’ve made a deal, and that deal involved returning to a male life after all this.”
David’s eyes lit up. “Yes,” he said. “Tell me more about that.”
Scene Eight: “I’ve Never Done This Before”
He didn’t come to his scheduled session on the next day, nor the next. So when Crystal heard the tentative knock at her door ten minutes past the start time, she was already deep into some hobby-work and annoyed by the interruption.
“Yes?” she snapped.
The head that peeked around the corner gave a sheepish grin, and green eyes sparkled from between a frame of blonde bangs. “Ah—bad time?”
Crystal took a deep breath. “No. No, please come in.”
The young woman slipped into the room, barely opening the door wide enough to pass through. The first thing Crystal noted was her perfume, the scent of jasmine and cut grass that followed the girl into the room, the impression of a summer’s day. She was dressed down from their first session and looked far more comfortable in a grey tracksuit and simple top, hair tied back in a ponytail. Her appearance still exuded femininity in the pink piping down the legs, or the soft pastel of her wedge heel sneakers. The slim fit of her shirt emphasised rather than hid the swell of her chest, and hung loosely at the neck, leaving one shoulder or the other bare. Her makeup, though carefully and skillfully applied, remained subdued.
The overall look was quieter than before, a gentler femininity. To Crystal, the expression of girlishness was more powerful for its subtlety. This man, for whom this female impersonation was hateful, a humiliating and painful prison, somehow conveyed this unwanted identity so compellingly, so convincingly, even without overloading on the makeup and tight or revealing clothing.
Watching Cindy—or David; she waited to determine to whom she was speaking—slink into the room, Crystal did feel a stab of… more than annoyance, though far short of active dislike. She felt… frustrated by her patient, she decided. David’s comment last session had been all too accurate. Crystal was jealous of the gift he’d been given, the remarkable transformation that embodied everything she could possibly have once hoped for years ago, and even now yearned for in weaker and more tired moments. If only he could appreciate the miracle he’d been granted: not just (just!) his life, or an extended youth—but the opportunity for an entirely new identity, free from the burdens and limits of whatever past he’d escaped.
The—girl?—slid into the chair opposite, poised and expectant. Crystal continued with the task at hand. Other than the click of needles, the room was silent.
“Knitting?”
Crystal paused mid-stitch. “Obviously.”
“Wouldn’t have thought—”
“Why not?”
Silence resumed, and Crystal completed the row and started the next. She waited. Eventually, her patient sighed and leaned forward. “Listen, I just wanted to—”
“I should think so,” Crystal interrupted.
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Yet you did.” Crystal put her work to one side. “But I accept your apology. You were in pain and by sharing that pain you hoped to alleviate it. You wanted to hurt me. But I am not your enemy here. My role is simply to help.”
“Help?” The smile was lopsided, sarcastic. “Help who? And with what?”
Crystal nodded. “Your mistrust is understandable. But I am here to talk, and to listen. To ask questions and seek answers. To give you an opportunity in a safe space to share your concerns and explore your situation.”
“My… situation?” Her client shook their head in disbelief. “Is that what you call it?” They sighed and sat back. “Fine. But you know what? Let’s do this. God knows I could use the help.” They waved one hand, as though giving permission to begin. “Why don’t you ask me how I’m feeling today?”
“Fine,” Crystal said. “And how are you feeling today?”
“Who are you asking?”
“I’m asking you.”
“No,” they said. “You want to know how I feel? Honestly? I feel… exhausted. And scared. Mostly, I feel so goddamn fed up and tired of all this.”
“I’m sorry, David.”
At the sound of his name, the feminised man sagged. “Thank you,” he said. “Why couldn’t you have started like this last time?”
“I treated you as you presented,” she answered. “You came to me as Cindy; I spoke to you as Cindy.”
“But I’m not Cindy.”
“Maybe not.” She tapped at her tablet, bringing up some images she had prepared for their meeting. “And yet….” She passed the tablet to him, and he swiped through the pictures, an echo of their previous appointment. Cindy, sultry in a little back dress holding hands across the table with a handsome young man in a fancy restaurant. Two nights ago, beautiful in blue with Chad at the pub, red lipstick and glittering earrings; and finally, flirty in a peach sundress, sitting legs crossed at the thigh, gazing into the distance bathed in bright light from outside the diner. “Is this you?”
“That’s Cindy,” he said.
“Is this you?”
He stared at the images for a long time before answered. “No,” he said and then a moment later, “Yes,” he admitted. He fiddled with an earring and tucked an errant bang back behind his ear. “But it’s also… not me.”
Crystal nodded. “Can you explain?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Like, yeah, obviously the girl in those pictures is me, it’s physically me, right? I was there, I remember.” He tapped one long nail at the screen. “The touch of Dan’s hand on mine, the taste of wine.” He flicked to the next photo. “The heat in the diner, the smell of grease, and how nice the dress felt after all those hours in the car wearing the outfit Julia picked out for me.” He frowned, paused and then went to the last photo. “And last night. Yeah, Chad. He’s alright. Talks too much, but sometimes I guess that’s what you want.” He looked up, eyes flashing with anger. “But Christ, don’t I get any privacy?”
Genuinely sorry, Crystal shook her head. “The Clinic is very mindful of all its clients. And the pub is technically on Asklepios property; the Clinic owns it. But perhaps more to the point, you know how valuable you are to Jonathon. And to Katherine.”
“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” he conceded.
Crystal took back the tablet. “So you recognize the young woman in these moments as yourself, then,” she said.
“Fine, yes, I do. But like I said—only physically. That’s me. Or it’s a version of me. But it’s not the real me, it’s… a ‘production’ of me, Jonathon called it, a template applied to the real me. A disguise. It’s the part I’ve been told to play, forced to play.”
She nodded. “Of course. But if you don’t mind, David, I’d like to focus on a few details.” Turning back to the photo of Cindy and Dan in the restaurant, she zoomed in a little to centre the couple in the image. “Before all this started, had you ever held hands with another man in this way?”
He looked startled by the suggestion. “What? Hey—fuck no! Of course not.”
“Had you ever felt any attraction to another man before?”
“No,” he said. Then leaning forward, voice angry, he continued: “I’m not gay.”
“That’s not what I asked, David.”
“For fuck’s sake, this is about the story I told K, isn’t it? Back at the start, on the way to the Clinic, that night in the hotel room? Yeah, fine, my first kiss was with another guy, when I was like twelve years old.” One slender finger tapped at the table as though to emphasis the point, painted nail clicking against the surface. “K took it as evidence that I was really some kind of repressed homosexual or something.” His nose wrinkled in an expression of disgust and disappointment, but when he went to continue—“and you know, thinking about it…” he hesitated and went silent.
Crystal gave him a moment, then prodded. “Yes?”
“It’s just, well… in some ways, when Ken—that’s the boy who kissed me, like, over twenty years ago—I didn’t deal with it well, you know. I beat the living sh… I hurt him, Crystal, really bad. I regretted it then, and I regret it now. And like I told K, what really got to me back then was the anger, the disappointment. Not in Ken but in myself, because really, why did I care so much, it was just a kiss, right? He opened up to me at a time and place where frankly, being gay wasn’t exactly seen as acceptable. He took a real risk. There was real bravery there. And Ken was a good kid, he was a friend when I didn’t have any and I really looked up to him, nearly worshipped the guy.
“I would’ve been that boy for him if I could’ve, I think, but that wasn’t me, I couldn’t make it work and he understood that even if I wasn’t able to.”
Listening to him, Crystal found it all too easy to imagine the young, lonely boy torn between the desperate need to please a friend, the willingness to lie—to themselves, to others—and their innate sense that it was somehow wrong, wrong for him and that living an untruth could only ultimately bring pain to themselves and others.
“And yeah,” David continued, “since then, there’s been other kisses.” He counted each one off on a painted oval nail. “That boy in the hotel. Harry.” He grinned. “And Dan.” The grin floundered. “And after each one I think back to Ken and that first kiss, and I tell myself that I’m no fucking homophobe, that I don’t care if the world’s a cesspit that hates on gays and that I don’t give a crap because I’m a guy, dammit, I’m a man and that’s who I am. And all this shit, the tits and makeup and whatever, it’s superficial, it’s… external to what I really am, to how I feel on the inside.
“Not one of those kisses turned me on, is what I’m saying. It was just—acting. I’m still a guy. And if that’s true, then… why should it matter, right? What’s a kiss? How can a kiss change who I really am?”
Crystal remembered a kiss of her own, not her first but the first that mattered: the kiss that revealed to her who she really was. Julian Cooper, on a late-night train platform huddled under his umbrella in the rain after one too many post-seminar drinks. The closeness. The musky scent muddled with the heat of rain on pavement, and the intensely frightening, frighteningly wonderful sense of his arms around—her—the moment of realisation—and their lips met and she knew, suddenly who she was, the crystallisation of doubt into an unshakeable sense of self. And she thought how a single kiss might not change who you are, but that it certainly could bring to the surface the self that you’ve buried deep for so many years.
“But more and more, it feels like I’m lying to myself,” David said, and as he continued his voice shifted, becoming more… feminine, Crystal thought, though it was difficult to pin down precisely how so or what that even meant. “Because—because I am changing, aren’t I? I mean, look at me.” He grabbed at the tablet and stared at the photos there. “Look at me! A year ago, you’d never have found David Saunders in a tight dress holding hands with another man. But that… that’s me, and how can… that person possibly be a man?
“And I’m looking at these pictures, and I remember being there, but now I’m thinking maybe I wasn’t really in control, you know, and it seems like I’m remembering from the outside, like I was watching somebody else, watching Cindy living those moments.
“And now I’m wondering, maybe Ken knew something all those years ago, saw something all those years ago. And if that’s true then… who am I?” His fingers curled into fists, and he crumpled into himself, into a tight, angry ball, hugging his knees to his chest, and he squeezed his eyes tight against the tears. “Who am I now?”
Crystal considered for a long moment how to respond. Finally, she reached for her knitting and picked it up and continued the next row. The gentle clicking of the needles pushed back the silence of the room.
David opened his eyes. “Really?”
“I’m knitting a scarf. I’m doing it for my nephew,” she said, and held it up for him to see. Nearly a meter in length, it rolled out in bands of different colour: black, brown, blue, green; she’d just started on a new row in orange. A pattern of interweaving lines stretched across its length, uncoiling toward the unfinished end. “I could just have the thing printed, obviously, but it’s the effort that counts, right? Think he’ll like it?”
“How should I know? Listen—”
She held up a hand. “Just watch,” she said, and knitted another row, and then another, continuing with the orange, switching to black when adding to the pattern of coiling lines. It took her a few minutes, and once done she held it up for him to see. “Not bad, right?” she said, feeling more than a little proud.
“Yeah, I guess it’s great? But I don’t see—”
She held up a hand to forestall further protest. From a canvas bag at her feet, she retrieved another colour. Pink, shot through with threads of sparkly silver – to really drive home the point. Switching to the new colour, she quickly added a few more rows. David watched her proceed, clearly bemused.
“What do you think?”
“I think I shared something pretty meaningful? And you’re sitting there knitting?”
She nodded. “A scarf.”
“Sure.”
She continued knitting. “Is it still a scarf?”
He cocked his head to one side. “I don’t follow.”
“I’m adding another row. I’ve changed colour. Is it still the same scarf?”
He nodded.
Stopping, she reached back into the bag and pulled out a hobby knife. Sighing, she extended the blade and brought it to the start of the pattern, to the original stitches she’s knitted and purled. She cut a stitch, and another, and unraveled a strand. Mourning the lost work, she held it up for inspection. “What about now? Still the same scarf?”
“Sure?”
She unravelled a row, cut a few stitches out from the middle, put down the knife and began knitting out another row. “And now?”
“It’s looking a little rough, and I don’t think your nephew’s going to like it as much anymore but yeah, it’s still the same scarf.” He offered a little smile, shaking his head ruefully. “You didn’t have to ruin your work, you know. I get the point.”
“Do you?” She put down the knitting. “Tell me.”
“I’m the scarf?” he said. “And just because you’ve added some new bits at the end or trimmed some bits off the start doesn’t mean it’s stopped being a scarf.” He shook his head. “Sorry, but I’m not convinced.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not the same scarf. It’s now a scarf with holes in it, it’s now a scarf with sparkly pink in it, and maybe that’s not the kind of scarf it was meant to be.”
Crystal nodded and lay the scarf out on the desk between them. It lay in bands of colours across the solid wood desk, one end cut and frayed, the other unfinished, a meter of wool and hours of effort. “It’s not a bad metaphor for a life, though, is it?” she said, fingers poking through the popped stitches at the beginning of her work. “What holes have been punched into your life, David, and what remains unbroken in the pattern of your life, and what have you forgotten?” She traced a line through the length of the scarf, drawing out the single knitted line that led from start to end. “What will new experiences add to your tapestry, and what are you meant to be now?” All of the other lines went nowhere or ended prematurely. “For me, this is the key to the pattern. It runs the whole length of the scarf, an unbroken line from start to end.” She smiled at her patient. “Can you pick out something in your life that runs unbroken from start to end?”
David stared at the scarf, lips puckering a little with thoughts. Crystal was struck, again, at how… pretty, he looked, the smooth skin and wide eyes, lips painted a soft pink and the brilliant green of his eyes. It was easy, at times, to forget she was speaking with an older man, a violent man with a hidden past. The twenty-year old innocence he so easily projected remained compelling and convincing.
“I don’t follow,” he said.
“You could call it an essential property,” she answered. “Unlike a scarf, woven to a pattern, so much of a life happens out of our direct control.” She traced the lines that went nowhere, and her fingertips hovered over errors and damage she found in the weave, the dropped stitches, cuts, gaps and knobbly bumps. “Accidents happen, the unexpected happens, but does it really matter? If you stripped away those experiences, would it change who you really are?” She held up the middle of the scarf, a band in dark brown. “If I’d knitted this in grey instead of brown, would it make a significant difference?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I can’t even remember why I chose the colour.”
“But some events are of such significance, whether trauma or joy, that they prove transformative.” She returned to tracing the lines that danced the length of her effort. “I think something essential would be lost if I left these out,” she said. “If I cut out the middle, or knitted it only half the width, or length, or a different shape. At what point does it become a shawl, or stole, or even just a belt?”
David continued to watch and listen, remaining silent.
“You say you feel as though you’re losing something of yourself, but are these things essential properties, David? Are they the defining aspects of who you are? To me, it sounds as though your encounter with this boy twenty years ago truly matters; it was an experience that formed part of who you are. But this kiss with the boy in the hotel six months ago? Had it not happened, would it have made a difference?”
“I don’t know.” He spoke slowly. “To be honest, I don’t like thinking about the past much.”
“I understand,” she said. “To paraphrase, the past is a nightmare from which many of us are trying to awaken.” And she was careful to tread carefully here. She had a responsibility to dig out as much of this man’s past as she could, but also knew doing so could easily provoke him or break what little trust she had established with him. Better to draw it out surreptitiously rather than through direct questioning. “Would you mind if I focused on a more recent incident?”
He shrugged, one bared, slender shoulder rising and dropping indolently.
She checked her tablet. “Can we talk about Dan?”
David grimaced, a cute wrinkling of the nose. “I don’t know,” he said, and tugged at his neckline, covering up his shoulders. “It’s embarrassing.” He wrapped his arms around his slim frame and shivered. “And humiliating.”
Crystal reassured her patient, and slowly he warmed into a retelling of the night. He told her about Dan, the young man from Volumina International that had flirted with him from his earliest days there. The playful banter leading to an unexpected night out at Noir, a trendy local hotspot. “It wasn’t a date,” he insisted, and at first they spent the night talking, and he enjoyed the human company after weeks alone. And then drinking; too many drinks and ending up on the man’s lap, posing for a picture and—kissing him.
“One second I was looking into the camera, the next I turned my head and…,” he grimaced. “His tongue was down my throat like a rat down a sewer drain.”
Crystal nodded.
“And then I felt his hardon poking me in the ass,” David said.
“How did that make you feel?”
He laughed, though without humour. “I ran to the bathroom,” he said, “cried and threw up.” Which is how he met Julia, this woman from his past who seemed intent to push him into new feminine experiences. She pushed David into agreeing, under duress, to a date a week later with Dan.
Crystal made notes to follow up later: Julia; the intensity of David’s reaction; the suggestion of surging hormones and the subtle influence of other drugs. Meanwhile, David continued his story. Despite his occasional reluctance as he relived moments from the night, he almost seemed… relieved, to talk through the experience.
He spoke of getting ready for the date, showering and shaving, and the peculiar embarrassment he felt at slathering himself in shimmering body lotion that left his body sparkling and luminous. Then he described his shame at squeezing into the straps and lace of lingerie, slithering into a little black dress, the makeup and hair and drinking and chat with the other woman—a shame he admitted was tempered somewhat by the fact that there’d also been something fun, something exciting in the ritual of feminine preparation.
The moment he slid his feet into the arch of towering heels and stood, swaying slightly, and posed and pirouetted for Julia, he admitted to feeling trapped, like the ongoing misery of a tourist stuck in a holiday gone wrong to a foreign destination they can’t escape.
But he also felt a thrill, a delight rooted in pride, and a tingling deep in his belly to rival the nausea, at just how damn sexy he looked—at the hungry gleam he provoked in Julia’s eyes, in his own, a hunger that led her to grab and pin him up against the wall and forced him to repair his lipstick in the mirror several minutes later.
He skimmed over the details of the date itself, arriving early, his date arriving late, drinks and conversation, sharing the meal—and again, how he began to enjoy himself despite the constant frustration of playing a part he abhorred, enjoying the company if not necessarily his role in it. They talked about work; they talked about Shakespeare.
Then tears, arousal and frustration and anger. Another kiss. Again Crystal noted the intensity of his emotional swings. Something to raise with Jonathon, she thought.
The date ended.
“I walked with him to his place,” he said. “I was pretty drunk by this time and knew I should just get the hell out of there. But I was also kind of having fun, and then—I don’t know.” David shook his head. “I let him kiss me.”
“Let him?” Crystal asked.
David blushed. “It was fucking cheesy, but I’ll give the guy credit, he dropped the right line at the right time. I could’ve just walked away but instead I….” He shrugged. “I can’t lie to myself here. It wasn’t the booze and he didn’t force me. I didn’t start it but—I don’t know, it was like rewarding him for a game well played.”
Crystal nodded, impressed though not surprised by his willingness to share despite the discomfort at reliving the night. She knew her client was confronting the possibility that his life as Cindy might last longer than hoped. He’d arrived at the Clinic with clear expectations of returning to manhood: why deal with uncomfortable feminine experiences when he could just move on and try to forget?
But now?
His eyes were unfocussed as he relived that evening, and his hands fluttered in his lap.
“He kissed me and I didn’t pull away. It’s not like I wanted to, you know, kiss another guy… but he deserved it, right? At the end of the night, where he’s paid the bill and made at least some effort to show me a good night out….
“A kiss is the least he’d expect. The very least. Hell, I’d have expected a hell of a lot more from a girl—usually got it, too.”
As always, Crystal stilled her personal reactions to a patient’s words, but something must’ve shown. He frowned and his reply sounded defensive. “Hey, I’ve never forced a girl to do anything she didn’t want. But when a guy picks up the bill for the night with some chick he barely knows, of course he’s got expectations. First couple of dates, you barely know each other, right? You’re not there for the conversation.
“And it’s not like the girl doesn’t know the game. I can’t tell you how many—sexy, vapid, boring little bitches—have done their best to drain my wallet, and you better damn well believe I was happy to play along so long as they drained my balls afterwards.”
“And were you?” Crystal asked, drily. “Happy to drain his balls afterwards?”
David’s eyes darkened. “No,” he said. He stared at the table for some time before continuing. “No,” he repeated. “Even though I knew that’s where this was heading. Which is why I just stood there and let him have his fun. It was—one of the weirdest experiences of my Cindy life, one of the most uncomfortable. For a moment, it was like watching from the outside, and I could see this guy slobbering over this young girl, groping and grabbing her as she stood and rolled her eyes and stared into the distance. But that girl was me, and then I was back inside and living it, and I forced her… myself to respond, to… act, and I was about to break away and leave, when… well, you know.”
Crystal waited, and when he didn’t continue, prompted him. “Yes?”
He shrugged. “Steele’s man. Jeff—or whatever his real name is. The guy who’s been shadowing me since the start. And just like when he approached me at the restaurant bar, I knew I had to maintain the illusion, keep it convincing.
“So with that creep watching I couldn’t just walk away, couldn’t turn Dan down without appearing suspicious, without that goddamn creep possibly following me home, right? And so I agreed. I fucking agreed to go up to Dan’s condo even though I damn well knew what I means when a girl follows a guy up to his place after a night out for ‘just another drink’.”
Making a quiet note—Jeff?—to pursue later, Crystal nodded for David to continue.
The very pretty man opposite her reached into his handbag and rummaged around. He pulled out a little makeup bag. “It’s strange,” he said. “I don’t really want to talk about the next bit.” Crystal waited, and he sighed. “But at the same time, I do, I really do, I guess I’ve wanted to get this off my chest since it happened. I didn’t even tell Jules what happened, you know, though she’s been texting for details, believe me.
“But I’m not used to this crap, this touchy-feely bullshit, talking and sharing feelings so much.” He glared at her, almost accusingly, but then his expression softened into a lopsided grin. “Although you know, maybe it’s helping, just a bit.”
He spun one of the bangles around his wrist, eyes on the flashing sparkles. “But it’s not easy, and… and I’m nervous and it’s weird but recently, I don’t know why, but this shit—” and he pulled a lipstick from the bag and gestured with it, “—the makeup, I dunno, I find it calming.” His smile was a little sad, twisted with self disgust; a wan apology. “I hope you don’t mind.”
She watched as this man, at first with a slight tremble in his hands but then with calm confidence touched up his makeup. He repainted his lips a dark, matte cherry red and applied a coat of mascara and seemed to visibly relax as he continued the little ritual of beauty. “I don’t know why,” he said, glancing up at her from behind his reflected image on his phone. “But it helps.”
Crystal nodded and waited.
“So when Dan took me by the hand and brought me into the building, I didn’t resist,” David said, closing his handbag with a little snap and stowing it at his feet. He sat straight backed in his seat, hands on the table between then, fingers splayed. He affixed her with a penetrating gaze that bordered on unnerving. “I pretended to not see the little wink the concierge gave him on the way in.
“And yeah, he was all over me the moment we stepped into the elevator. He took me around the waist and pulled me close and kissed me and—and I kissed him back. His hand roamed over my tits, grabbed my ass and the other was at the back of my head and we fell back against the elevator wall, he had me pinned there and the whole time I could feel his dick jabbing into me. And I touched it, I stroked him through his trousers and smiled because… because what else could I do? When he went to kiss me again, I pulled back and the door dinged and we fell out into the hallway to his apartment, shushing and giggling like teenagers as he led me to his door. He fumbled with his keys and I laughed and he silenced my laugh with a deep kiss.
“His apartment was… nice, like really nice, very open concept and way beyond what I’d expect a guy his age to have, but then the steak, the wine… it was clear this kid was loaded, or at least his parents were. My reaction confused him, I think. He was obviously used to surprising visitors he brought home, impressing the panties off girl he brought back to his place and… I wasn’t that impressed, I guess, at this watered-down version of what I’d had just six months ago.”
David paused, as though contemplating what he’d lost, before giving a little shake of the head before continuing.
“He poured us drinks, a bottle of white he pulled from a wine fridge, and he dimmed the lights and put on some smooth music, and I almost laughed. But only for a moment, because now that we were in his place I was thinking, how the hell do I get out of here? We clinked glasses and drank. It was a good wine, nice and dry, expensive stuff. I drank it in big, nervous gulps and then he kissed me again, and I tasted the wine on his lips, citrus and white pepper on the tongue.” He gave a dry laugh. “On his tongue.
“When we came up for air he poured me another and we talked for a bit, but it was that awkward kind of empty small talk that fills the space when you know you’re really there for something other than conversation.
“Dan’s arm was back around my waist. He’s been stroking my knee through my stockings but now he held me close. His finger traced my spine, followed the small zipper that sealed me into that dress, danced down my bare shoulders, rested on the curve of my ass. His hand felt heavy, you know, and strong over the thin fabric and the underwear beneath. His thumb traced the edge of my stockings and snapped the garter. ‘Sexy,’ he said.”
David shivered.
“I leaned into him. I had to because in a moment his hand was going to try and go places it couldn’t. I wiggled in closer to Dan, and he kissed my ear, my neck; his tongue trailed along my collarbone. With one hand I still held the empty wineglass, and the other I pressed up against his chest. I remember being startled by how bright, how vivid and colourful my nails seemed against his shirt. How long they seemed, and shaped, the paleness of the pink and the crisp whiteness of his shirt and the contrast with the darkness of his skin. Were those really my fingers? I remember thinking. They seemed so—feminine—set against the masculine flatness of Dan’s chest.
“Dan took my glass, put it down, and I still see them, those two glasses, side by side, the one stained by the pink print of my lips. He took me by the wrist and held my hand to his mouth and kissed my fingers, one by one. And I saw the desire in his eyes, but more, I saw the—satisfaction, the smugness at his victory.
“Then he had me by both wrists, and I felt vulnerable as he kissed my neck again—suddenly aware of his strength, how slim my arms were in his grasp. It only lasted a second, but for that second I felt—afraid? Trapped, as he held me, and there was a hollowness in my belly, even as a half-dozen ways I could take him down flashed past my eyes.
“So I pulled away and he let me go. I asked for more wine, to buy time, to help see me through this; and my free hand brushed against the prick tenting his lap, the one that’d been jabbing me in the belly just a moment before. He smiled. I smile back, and I swear, it was like I could hear a voice in my head, a girl’s voice, giggling and eager for what might come next. With those bubbles of hysteria popping in my head, I smiled back and told him I needed a few minutes, that I needed to freshen up and you know, I almost lost it then, almost cracked at delivering a line I’d heard from the other side so often.
“Thinking about it now, I’m amazed I didn’t snap. I was close to—I don’t know. Losing my shit, collapsing, screaming, hitting him, running from the room—I don’t know. Instead, I walked calmly, ass swaying in heels for his viewing pleasure, into this guy’s bathroom and locked the door, thinking, what the fuck am I doing?
“That’s around when it hit me just how drunk I really was. Everything gets a bit hazy from that point on, impressions, more like snapshots than a video, if you know what I mean. Foggy. I remember staring at myself in the mirror over the sink. Smeared lipstick. Wide eyes and remembering, remembering who I used to be, but disjointed, confused. The giggling in my head came and went. And feeling sick, not like I was going to throw up but something deeper, a nausea deep in my bones. For a moment it felt as though I was about to hyperventilate. But then—
“A switch flipped.” David snapped his fingers. “The panic and fear retreated. Instead of freaking out I slipped off my heels and unzipped and wiggled out of that dress and went for a piss. God, how I just wanted to strip out of everything, I felt bloated and pinched in and overheated and uncomfortable and—fed up. But I gave my balls a few minutes to breathe, let everything hang out as I sat and took a piss. I washed my hands and padded around the small room in my stockinged feet.
“I rummaged around a bit. You can tell a lot about someone from their bathroom. It was classy, very modern, lots of mirrors, glass and exposed brick, recessed lighting. Very chic, bit pretentious for a kid his age. Checked the cabinet and found the usual guy stuff, deodorant and toothpaste and a razor, but also more pills than I would’ve expected, pain killers, anti-depressants—I might’ve popped something, I’m not sure, something to kill the noises in my head, something to bring the calm.
“There was also a single tube of lipstick, hiding behind some hand cream.
“Why was it there? Did he have a girlfriend? Was it left behind by a previous conquest – why’d he keep it? Cherry Whispers: a deep, rich red, mature and matte, seductive.” He smiled. “I’m wearing it now, actually. I looked at it as like it was some kind of message in a bottle, or a dispatch behind enemy lines, woman to… woman.
“I took the lipstick; I don’t know why, but I stole it. I returned to the mirror and touched up my makeup and I felt strangely calm, detached, leaning over the sink in my underwear in some guy’s bathroom, fixing the damages of the night.
“Eventually I found the willpower to slide back into those skyscraper heels and tape my cock back again, extra secure for the finale, right? I didn’t tuck; there was no way I was going to get my balls back up inside, not in that state, but so long as I kept his hands under control, I reckoned it’d be okay. Probably says something about how drunk I was at the time, trusting to blind luck to keep my disguise safe.
“Then it was time to pay the piper, as they say.”
He sighed. Staring blankly into the middle distance, he went silent, and Crystal noted a slight tremble to his lower lip. After a long moment, he gave himself a little hug, and smiling ruefully, continued.
“Something happened, then. I don’t know if I can really explain it, describe it in a way that makes sense. But there was a… moment. As I reached down for the dress, and stepped into it, carefully, I didn’t want to tear the thing with those heels. And I glanced up, and saw myself in a mirror, damn thing nearly took up half the wall.”
He frowned. “It was as though, in that moment, everything stopped, stopped and came into focus. The world froze, and I saw myself, daintily stepping into that tight little dress, half-naked in some guy’s bathroom, half-naked wearing panties and bra, heels and stockings, suspenders and waist-cincher, all those straps, bows, lace, tight fabric and mesh, midnight black and crimson.
“The smells and sounds, feelings, it all washed over me in that moment, a symphony of sensations that held me suspended in the moment. The tight grip around the waist, breath of cool air across the top of my tits, sudden goosepimples, the sound of Dan beyond the door, his sturdy steps in the kitchen and a shift in the music, something—blue, rolling and smooth, piano and bass—and strawberry and rose, lingering from the hand soap, the shimmer of colour at my fingertips. A hint of his cologne, sandalwood and smoke. A tickle of lace. Sensual slickness, the slither of stockings against the tightness of the dress, the stretch of the suspender across my bum; and the taste of my own lips.
“And in that caress of impressions I saw myself and wondered—is that me? And then: how is this me? Those curves and clothes, all that softness, the heavy fullness of breasts in their cups, stepping half in and half out of a woman’s little dress, and makeup: the reflection mocked me in its honesty.”
His nose wrinkled in an expression of confusion or disgust. “It literally took my breath away. As in, I felt light-headed for a moment. The contrast between the lingerie and skin—what you could see of it, anyway—the pale flesh of my thighs, the narrow band between bra and waspie, shoulders, tits; God, suddenly, I wanted this girl in my bathroom, primping for my pleasure, and—”
He shook his head as though in disbelief at the memory.
“But it was me. That girl was—me; and… how was that possible? Six months! Six months to go from… David to—this girl, preening for some prick waiting in the other room.”
He trailed off for a moment.
“So I watched this girl zip herself back into her dress, suck her gut in after all that steak and the reflection jolted me back into the moment. I saw this girl—saw myself—and I was fucking hot, I’d lost track of just how goddamn sexy I was. And something grew inside of me—an anger, frustration, something… dark; I couldn’t name it, but I fairly vibrated with this feeling.
“If this—thing—was going to happen, if I was going to do what came next, then it was going to happen on my terms, I thought. With a final wiggle, a little squeeze of the tits putting them on display, I stalked up to that mirror, wiped my mouth clean and reapplied the forgotten lipstick I’d stolen. I don’t know why, and that moment really stuck in my mind, the image of my face in the mirror, pale, leaning in close, framed by hoop earring and painting in those dark, red lips.
“Then I rode that swell of emotion back to Dan.
“He was waiting, standing next to the sofa, shirt half-unbuttoned, a large glass of white and an open bottle of whiskey and a generous dram in a glass tumbler, waiting on a side table. He drank me in as I left the safety of the bathroom. Did he notice the colour of my lips? I don’t know. He clearly liked what he saw, though. He went to speak but with a single glossy fingertip held to red lips, I silenced him.
“And stalking towards him, ass swaying, the click of heels on hardwood sounded loud in my ears. I felt hot under his devouring eyes. Music whispered and I thrummed with insane confidence—drunk—and with a different kind of desire as I reached him, and my hands slid in under his shirt, nails raking his skin as I explored his body. I’d never touched a man in that way before, never passed palms across hard abs and pecs in that way. Dan was in good shape and I respected that—envied his strength, really—and when I pulled him close it was as though I was trying to reclaim some of the power for myself. I—kissed him, tilting my head, shorter than him even in heels. Hungrily finding his mouth, I wrapped myself around him, threw my arms around his neck and drew him to my chest, burying his face in my cleavage.
“Then I shoved him back, onto the sofa, and straddled him, hovering over his lap and the hardness I knew waited.
“He handed me a glass. The glass was very full. I took it from him with a grin and knocked it back in one, in great big gulps, and then tossed the empty glass aside. Glass shattered. Then I had him again, lips tingling with alcohol, running my fingers through his hair, gripping his shoulders, pinning him to the sofa, rubbing my body, tits up against his chest and….”
He shook his head.
“I don’t have a fucking clue what I was doing at this point. I was a mess. My head was swirling. I’d had some vague idea of—I don’t know. I knew I wanted out of there but didn’t how to make it happen. Puking and begging off drunk and grabbing a cab or slinking away in the morning, maybe; but the urge wasn’t there, I didn’t feel it in my belly, the need to be sick. At least not in that way. Maybe I was still thinking about Jeff waiting and watching outside, buying time. And maybe at some level I saw myself in Dan’s position, had been there with some sexy bitch in my lap and damn well knew what I’d expect at this point, what I deserved, how a girl like Cindy repays her man.
“And the room was whirling and I felt like everything was spinning out of control – out my control, at least—and that swell of emotions, that inchoate anger that started in the bathroom began to spill over. My hands roamed across his chest. My lips found his. I kissed him. I kissed—him, crushed lips against his and my ass grinding his lap. I kissed him and groaned, nails digging into his flesh and he cried out and I didn’t care. If—this—whatever—then I wanted to be in control.
“I stood over him. Tossed my hair and licked my lips, caressed my curves and slid my arms down my side, my thighs – onto his lap and felt Dan’s hard cock, waiting. My hand lingered there. Cindy knew what he wanted – I knew—
“But I hesitated.”
David’s eyes dropped and he avoided eye contact as he continued.
“Dan’s the first guy to touch my tits,” he said.
“It happened so quickly. In my drunkenness I thought I was in charge, but then he had me by the wrists, and his hands seemed so big, so strong; and without any effort at all he pulled me down off those heels and into his lap. His arm’s around my waist and suddenly I felt so… small, weak and breathless under his touch, and the heat that buoyed me until then went cold and scooped out any illusion of control, left me empty under his hand. Confidence evaporated and I went still as his fingers slid up my back and… he found the zipper and—”
He paused.
“I used to love that. You know, with a woman, when she’d turn and lift her hair and expose the back of her neck to me. The sparkle of an earring, the glitter of necklace, and that little patch of bared skin between hair and clothes, open and vulnerable. The trust, maybe? But also that feeling of… of power over her, just a little and the anticipation. And yeah, in the heat of the moment I might tear her out of those clothes but I always preferred to take it slowly, let my finger trail down her spine as I released her, like the satisfaction of slowly peeling fruit before tasting the flesh.
“But as the girl?” He shook his head. “I hate it. I hate that it’s so awkward to reach the zip on my own, especially with these nails. I hate the sense of… openness, of dependency, needing someone like Jules to, to… seal me into my clothes. And that’s what it feels like, being fastened into something; trapped. The tightness. The way it draws in around the forced curves of lingerie, the restriction, the… reminder of how tiny I’ve become, how… delicate.” He chuckled drily. “It was a very tight dress.
“But suddenly the dress was down around my waist and I was missing the little protection it offered. I was in another man’s arms, half naked in my underwear, and I’ve never felt so exposed, so vulnerable, somehow ever more naked than if I’d actually been naked.
“Half naked?” he grumbled. “Like for a second. He gave a quick tug, and next thing I knew the dress was down around my ankles, and as much as I hated the damn thing I suddenly found myself missing it, intensely.
“Then he was holding me, he was kissing me, he had me balanced on his knee with his fingers tracing the boning upwards, whispering in my ear, ‘you’re so fucking sexy,” he said, “so hot,” shit like that, grabbing me as his tongue found mine, and then his hands were on my tits, over the bra, and it felt….”
David covered his face with one hand and groaned. His shoulders shook as he took a long breath but after a moment collected himself enough to continue.
“I don’t think I’d realised until then just how different a man’s touch can be. Julia, she’s really into my tits. To humiliate me, I think, to remind me that I’m not the man I was. She likes to grab and pinch and twist and—it hurts, but dammit, I kinda love it. Nipple shit never did anything for me before but now—I guess there’s just more to play with—and with her—fuck, but it’s hot, it really turns me on when the mood’s right. My tits up against hers, her softness up against mine, and even when she’s at her most brutal her touch is still… somehow, I don’t know… feminine. Even at its most embarrassing, like when she forced me to play with my own knockers, wearing—whatever she picked to remind me I’m her girl—it always leads to me fucking her, burying myself deep in her cunt, and well—”and David grunted with satisfaction—“yeah, whatever she does, at the end of it all I still feel like a man.”
“But this, this was a man touching me. A man with his arms around my waist, holding me close, a man’s scent, a man’s hot breath on my neck, nuzzling at my neck, stubble like sandpaper against my cheek, then biting at my ear; a man, running his fingers through my hair, paddling my shoulders, reaching behind and then –
“He unclasped the bra and it came off.”
David stopped.
Crystal waited.
“I don’t know if I can keep going,” he said.
She nodded. She waited as he reached for a glass of water, took a tiny sip, and very carefully put it back on the table. Then he reached for his handbag. He stared at it blankly for a moment and put it back without opening it. Finally, he sank back into his seat, staring up at the ceiling.
“Would you rather continue another day?” she asked.
There was a long wait before he finally shook his head negative.
“Can you tell me how you felt at that moment?”
He glared at her. “How I felt? With my tits in another man’s hands?”
“Only if you feel up to it,” she said.
Lurched forward, he gripped the table with white-knuckled anger, and leaning over the table went to speak—and then sagged, the emotion draining from him almost instantly. “You want to know the truth?” he said. “It felt—”
He looked pained. “You have to understand. I was drunk. Confused. Angry and afraid. I was all over the fucking place. But at no point in the least bit turned on, not by any of it. The whole time I was all over him, and he was all over me, I was—performing, I guess is the best word. Running off of some kind of instinct rooted in the girls I’d made out with in the past, only flipping it around and playing their part. The whole thing was an act, right?”
He grimaced. “My whole fucking life’s an act.
“But when I felt his hand on my chest it felt… good.” He shuddered. “And so different from Julia’s touch. Stronger, more confident, even though she’s never been one to hold back. Somehow it just felt more—natural; and when he touched me, when his thumb flicked across my nipples, and they went hard—something jolted through me, I gasped and suddenly felt weak in the knees—and next thing I knew I was half laying back on the sofa and he had one hand on my right boob, and he was kissing the other. He licked and twirled around the nipple and then sucked and I moaned like a bitch in heat, and for a moment it felt like my whole body was centered around those two hard, little points, and I was arching my back, throwing my head back, shoving those tits towards him—except it didn’t last because then, yeah, I did get excited, and thank God the tape held, but when I groaned it was in pain, not pleasure, not that fucking Dan could tell the difference.
“But he did stop, thank God, and with his hardon poking me in the belly and his body held over mine, his breath hot on my neck, he whispered into my ear: ‘I want you’.
“With a nod of the head he gestured towards what I assumed was his bedroom. ‘I want you so bad’, he said, ‘I want to take you into that room and spread you wide and fuck you,’ he said. The words didn’t come naturally to him. I could tell; he was trying to talk dirty, play tough—I guess be the guy he thought Cindy wanted.”
David shuddered.
“So what did you say?” Crystal asked.
“Well I damn well didn’t say ‘okay’,” David answered. “His hand was creeping up my thigh as he said it, and things were about to get… bad. But some guy telling me he wanted to spread me like butter did a lot to bring me back to Earth, let me tell you.
“So I placed my hand over his and he stopped reaching for a pussy that wasn’t there. I whispered into his ear. ‘Oh babe,’ I said to him. ‘I’m so sorry. I wish—I want to, I really do. I’m so turned on right now,’ I told him, and I forced my other hand to drift to his cock and he was so hard I thought he might tear a hole through his trousers. I gently rubbed him as I spoke. I gave him a great big kiss, moaning into his mouth as our tongues danced. ‘But I can’t,’ I said when we parted. ‘It’s that time of the month.’”
“His hand retreated as if I’d told him I had the plague, and you know, for a moment there, I felt a little thrill of fear. He had me pinned to the sofa, he was like twice my weight and while I could’ve fought him off, it wouldn’t have been pretty. But the look that flashed across his eyes when I told him… it wasn’t pleasant. For a moment there, I saw anger and frustration, and his grip on my shoulder grew painfully tight.
“But only for a moment. Then he relaxed and next think you know, he’s looking so sad, so pathetic, like a child who just dropped their ice cream cone. I could’ve laughed, you know, if I hasn’t been nearly naked under this guy with my tits hanging out.
“Dan sat back. I sat up. His hand still held mine, rubbing it in small circles over his dick. He was still hard—harder, even, as he looked at me with a little smile.
“’How about…?’ he started, and cupped my chin with his hand, his thumb pressing against my lips.
“And when he pushed his thumb into my mouth, I let him. I whimpered a little as he forced his thumb back and forth, moaned as with the other hand he held my heavy breast in his hand once more and kneaded. ‘God, you’re sexy,’ he said. ‘A sexy little tease, aren’t you?’
David looked pained.
“‘Naughty,’ he said. ‘Naughty clothes,’ he said, and his hand left my tit to trace my lingerie, dancing down the boning nipping in my waist, finding my stocking tops and snapping the straps he found there taut across my thigh. I whined around the thumb still slowly thrusting into my mouth as he continued, ‘for a naughty girl.’ He took his hand from my mouth, then, and kissed me deeply, passionately, and forcefully. ‘And naughty lips,’ he said.
“And then he asked, ‘You’re a naughty girl, aren’t you?’.
“Wide-eyed, I nodded.
“‘Will you do a naughty girl thing for me?’ he asked.”
David grimaced, and with elbows on table clutched his head between his hands. When he looked up at Crystal, his eyes despaired.
“What the fuck could I do?” he said. “What choice did I have? Dan looked at me, all hopeful like, and I gave a little nod. His hand was a heavy weight guiding me, but even more I felt the weight of expectation. I slid off the sofa and sank to my knees.
“I knelt—between his legs. Between a man’s spread legs. Dan gave a happy little sigh and shifted a little, making room for me, leaning back into the sofa. He even reached over to the side table and picked up his tumbler, can you believe it? He sat back and sipped his whiskey as he waited, one hand idly caressing the side of my head, playing with my hair, my ear, as I knelt there between his legs and fumbled for his belt buckle.
“And I knelt there remembering: how many girls have knelt like this between my legs?
“And I knelt there thinking: that should be me with some pretty little bitch on her knees, reaching for my cock.
“And I knelt there wondering: how the hell did I get here, how could this be happening, this couldn’t be happening, I didn’t want to do this, I couldn’t be about to stick some guy’s cock in my mouth, I’m not a cocksucker, not a….”
David trailed off and stared at the table. When he continued, he was unable to meet Crystal’s gaze.
“I undid his trousers, pulled them and his boxers down to his ankles and reached up and touched another man’s penis for the first time in my life. He had hairy legs; that surprised me, and I remember the hair bunching beneath my palm. And then the thing in my hand, twitching under my touch. And saying it now it sounds gross, impossible, like how could I possibly have crossed that line in the sand, right? I’m not gay. I’m not—but there I was with another man’s dick in the palm of my hand. The thing I most clearly remember thinking was, Christ, he probably went for a piss when I was in the bathroom.
“But in the moment—with his hand stroking my head, like a master with a skittish pet—and the room swirling with booze, blurry, I was aware—painfully aware—of kneeling there, in stilettos, in stockings, in sexy underwear—tits out—and the way he gently drew my long hair to one side, over one shoulder, and sighed under my touch…. In the moment, it all just sort of happened. I wasn’t thinking, not really, it was all just stuff happening in disjointed flashes.
“And in one of those flashes, I’m staring at this bastard’s penis up close and it’s….” David gave a dry chuckle. “Well, it was a man’s cock. We both know what a man’s cock looks like. Uncut. It looked like that. And there it was, the closest I’ve been to a dick not my own, though I felt pretty far from the girl’s hand that held it. Like, those slender fingers curled around the shaft, the pretty nails—that couldn’t be my hand, right? And maybe that was the trick, to just… disassociate myself from what was happening. It wasn’t me kneeling between Dan’s legs, but some drunk, half-naked girl eager to please her guy, some girl with pretty fingers and long hair dancing at the edge of her vision, the taste of foreign lipstick at her lips, mouth dry and in her hand—in her hand….
He paused.
“Dan’s smaller than me.” David glanced up and something adjacent to dry humour touched his voice. “Like, I’m trying to pretend I’m not there, but the first thing I notice as I’m eying this guy’s meat up close, this thing I’m holding in my dainty little girl hand is: yeah, sure, not bad but fuck if I’m not bigger; and I feel this surge of, oh I don’t know… pride? For just a moment.
“But it didn’t last for long because even if I’ve got the bigger rod, I’m the one on my knees about to impale my face on this asshole’s prick. And he’s looking down at me, so cocky and comfortable, and I’m looking up at him through bleary, half-lidded eyes heavy with mascara, earrings dancing against my cheeks and I’m feeling tiny, so… lost; and I really, really don’t want to do this thing.
“‘You’re fucking gorgeous,’ he whispered, drinking me in, and I can feel his gaze burning across my body, taking in the full sight, the dark lingerie and lingering over naked tits before settling in anticipation on my red and ready lips. “Thank you,” he added before cupping the back of my head and—guided me in.
“And I went with the gentle pressure, felt the heavy pull of breasts as I leaned forward, felt hot, felt trapped, felt my chest tighten, felt out of breath, breathless, I opened my mouth to draw in air and….”
He stopped.
“And?” Crystal prompted.
“And—I couldn’t do it,” he said. Tears beaded in the corner of his eyes, sparkled and rolled down his cheek, dropping silently to the table between them. “I just couldn’t do it.”
Crystal waited, and he shrugged, almost apologetically.
“That close I could smell his musk, that smell of sweat and balls that’ve been stewing all evening. His nob loomed large before me, bobbing just a bit, a bit purple, shiny with pre-cum. I thought of all the girls that’ve gone down on me and how easy they made it seem. I also remember thinking: no way he’d last long, surely he’ll blow his load straight away. I just had to… give it a little kiss. A lick. Open up and swallow like a good girl. A few swirls of the tongue and he’d be done. It wasn’t me doing this, right? It was Cindy. It wasn’t gay for a girl to blow her date at the end of the night, give him a wet little thank you for a night out…”
“And for fuck’s sake, it’s just a blowjob, right? I’d known girls who’d drop to their knees faster than they’d share a kiss.
“So I could do this. I wanted to do this. Just to prove—”
David sighed.
“Like I said, I was pretty fucked up by this point, and it all just swirled around my mind as I knelt there with Dan’s prick there—right there—centimeters from my lips, those sexy, red lips he’d been fantasising about all night.”
“His hand at my head pushed a little harder, and I—”
He winced, as though at a painful memory. “It was like there was this schism in my head. Pain: this flare of blistering pain, like a lance of light through the brain. And on the one side, I could see Cindy—this pretty, sexy girl looking up at Dan and cooing with pleasure as she held his dick and went down on him. She smiled and opened wide and took his prick into her mouth, dark red lips a crimson ‘o’ around his shaft as she held him there for a moment and swirled her tongue around the head. Then she started to bob up and down his shaft, moaning, her own pleasure blossoming as she fondled her own tits with one hand, pinching and pulling her own nipples as she played with his ball sack with the other, and he groaned and threw his head back and—”
David shuddered. “The whole thing was like a roll of old-school film unspooling, flashes of images flickering against the back of skull. And at the same time, I saw myself—like, myself-myself, male me; but also on my knees, looking ridiculous in stocking and heels and makeup, a mockery of femininity. And there was this swell of… shame and confusion, and… rage, blinding rage and even as I imagined my pretty blonde head bobbing up and down Dan’s dick, overlaid I saw myself grabbing him by the throat, throwing him to the ground and—hurting him.”
He cut off and looked pained.
“I felt suspended between the man I used to be and the girl I could become if I just submitted to this one act. And—I froze. When Dan tried to guide me in, I resisted. I pushed back because if I hadn’t, I don’t know what would’ve happened.
“Sitting back on my heels, I couldn’t meet his look. His hand cupped my chin and lifted my gaze. And I could see he was annoyed and frustrated. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, irritated, and then he saw the way I was trembling and the tears dribbling down my face.
“‘I’ve never done this before,’ I told him, and the sound of my voice—it was pathetic, a little girl’s whine—but they were the truest words I spoke that evening. ‘I’m not ready,’ I said. ‘I want to, but I’m not ready.’”
David went silent. Quiet tears continued to bead along the sharp line of his chin, fall and he rubbed the wet spatters into the table’s surface.
“So what happened?” Crystal asked after some time.
The feminised man wiped the back of one hand across his eyes, smearing his makeup. “Not much. I guess I was pretty lucky. At the end of the day, Dan’s an alright guy. He didn’t try to force anything, even though he was clearly disappointed. He told me it was alright; he apologized; he—said I could spend the night, if I wanted, and he’d call me a cab in the morning. And the whole time he was talking, I still had my fingers wrapped around the base of his penis, even if it wasn’t quite as hard as before.
“Maybe because he was being such a nice guy, I don’t know, and almost without realising it but as he was talking, I started to rub my hand up and down his penis, just a little and not too fast, and the words died in his mouth, and wow, how quickly he got hard again.
“And still looking up at him, still kneeling, still naked, I smiled with a sudden idea. I stopped, just long enough to unclip one of my stockings. I slid it off my leg and then rolled it down over his dick.
“What can I say? I’ve been at the receiving end of too many bad hand jobs and the guy didn’t deserve that.
“So when I started up again, palm sliding smoothly up and down his length with the silky whisper of the stocking, he groaned, and sighed, and hissed, you know, ‘yes’ and ‘oh god,’ and ‘just like that,’ that kind of shit, and I shuffled in a bit closer until I was leaning against his thigh and picked up the pace and for some reason this was so much easier, I was a goddamn pro at jerking off after all these months and this… this was just like that, sort of, at least that’s what I was telling myself and even the sight of my slender fingers and those flashing nails around an erect cock didn’t seem that strange to me, not then, not in the messed up state of mind I was in, it was a bit like watching porn, drunk and late on a Saturday night.
“And so I jacked this guy off until his hands gripped my shoulders and he dug his fingers in and it hurt, and his whole body suddenly jerked, and his cock spasmed in my hand and he shot his load.”
David took a deep breath before adding: “I’d just made another man cum.”
Crystal nodded. “And how did make you feel?”
“Feel?” Red eyed, scowling, David sounded disgusted. “Angry.” Then his eyes slid away. “But also pleased.” He paused then added, “Messed up.” With a wry look, he held up his hand as though reliving the moment. “And gross. I threw the stocking away. Couldn’t picture myself ever wearing them again, not without imagining his spunk burning into my skin.” David’s smile was thin and sardonic. “They were my favourite pair of stockings, too.
“So. Yeah. After he took me by the hand and sat me on the sofa next to him. He held me, gently. To comfort me, I think. We shared a sip of his whisky. He laughed at me—as the drink burned my throat and I coughed—this idiot kid thought he knew his scotch better than me, pretentious little shit.
“Then we cuddled. And it was… nice.” David sounded quietly surprised. “Even though I was still in my underwear and he had most of his clothes on, I curled up on the sofa next to him, finally kicked off those goddamn shoes and he held me close and it felt… good, his arm around me, like really good. I had my head on his shoulder, my hand inside his shirt, feeling the gentle rise of his chest. I listened to the quiet sound of his breathing and it was… peaceful, even if his hand rested possessively on my boob.
“It was weird, but nice-weird. I’ve had plenty of girls cuddle with me like that but I never expected to… you know, be that girl. But by this time I was too drunk, too exhausted, too emotionally worn out to think anything of it.
“I fell asleep like that. When I woke it was the middle of the night. The room was bathed in moonlight and it was quiet, as if the world was holding its breath. Dan snored a little. The bottle of whisky was empty—he must’ve polished it off while holding me.
“And that was that, really. I got dressed, called a cab and went home.”
David collapsed back into his chair and looked utterly spent. It seemed to Crystal that she could see the man trapped under the layers of girlishness, even if only for the moment: tired and drained, vulnerable and frustrated, deflated by the effort of sharing. Long hair fell across his face and his breathing was quiet.
She gave him some time before speaking. “Thank you for sharing. I know it was difficult.”
“Yeah,” he managed. “So… you asked me to talk about Dan. And now we have. Is this what you wanted to hear?”
Crystal nodded.
“So is this where you tell me everything’s fine? That I didn’t do anything wrong?” He slowly drew the bangs away from his eyes. “That there’s no shame in the way Cindy acted?”
“Is that what you want to hear?”
He nodded, slowly, and in that soft movement the illusion of the older man was dispelled, the girl was restored and it suddenly seemed to Crystal that it was Cindy sat opposite, her eyes puffy and red, mascara smeared and lower lip trembling. And against her professional judgment, she spoke the words she had been invited to speak: “Cindy, there’s no shame in anything you did that night,” she said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. And everything is going to be fine, Cindy.” She held the girl’s eyes and repeated those words: “everything is going to be fine.”
The pretty young woman who stared back at her seemed genuinely mollified by those words. She slowly sat up straighter and tucked her hair back behind her ear. Accepting an offered tissue, she dabbed at her eyes. “Thank you,” she said.
“Have you heard from Dan since?”
“Yes,” Cindy answered. “Well, sorta. It was Saturday when I went out with him. Monday, your car picked me up and brought me here. So I haven’t seen him in person. But he’s been messaging me.”
Crystal nodded. “And how have you responded?”
She sighed. “At first I just ghosted him, which I know kinda sucks, but I couldn’t deal. But yesterday I finally answered him. Apologised. Told him I’d had to take some time off work for an emergency. Nothing to do with our date. I think he bought it.”
Knowing she should end it there, Crystal nevertheless felt compelled to ask. “And…?”
A giggle escaped the girl’s pink lips. “Take a look for yourself.” She passed her phone over.
Crystal raised an eyebrow. “Your first dick-pic?”
Wide-eyed, she nodded. “Dan sent it this morning.”
“It’s a…. fine example of manliness,” Crystal noted.
“I think I’m to blame,” Cindy said. “Check out the picture I sent.”
Scrolling back through a flirting exchange of short messages, she soon found Cindy’s photo: her naked tits, pert, full and round in their youthfulness, large areolae and erect nipples. Crystal felt a momentary and most unprofessional swell of… jealousy, instantly quelled, at the sight of the young woman’s perfect breasts.
“I think I’ve got a boyfriend waiting for me if I go back,” Cindy added.
Crystal nodded. She checked the time: she was well past the time for her next appointment. “I’m afraid we need to stop here.”
The young woman stared at her for a long time before standing up. “Yeah,” she said. She paused at the door. “Same time tomorrow?” she asked over her shoulder.
“Yes,” Crystal answered and then impulsively and against the dictates of professionalism, added, “you should grab a drink tonight. You’ve earned it.”
“You fuckin’ think?” Shoulders shook with silent laughter. “Way ahead of you, doc.”
Scene Nine: “Healthy, Safe and Stable”
The three of them met the next week, Crystal, Jonathon and Katherine sitting down together to decide their ward’s fate. Though they’d met frequently in pairs over the previous days, this was their first three-way face-to-face since David’s arrival. The room was intimate and warm, wood-panelled and decorated with expensive paintings, gifts to the Clinic from wealthy, grateful clients: impressionistic, hazy swaths and swirls of light and dark colours, apparently valued in the millions. A bust of the Greek god Asklepios overlooked the chamber from a high mantle. Overall, the room gave an impression of old university stuffiness, of dust and still air, one in which even the walls and heavy oak table were infused with knowledge and aged secrets.
“I hope you both appreciate this,” Jonathon was saying, pouring out some wine, one of several bottles sitting beneath the table. He’d already started before the others arrived and was well into his third glass. “I dug out some of the good stuff.” He held it up to the light. “DeGrave ’33. The vineyard never recovered, but they say the heavy flooding that year really brought out the mineral flavours. You won’t taste one of these again.”
“I gave that to you,” Katherine said flatly. “We seized the case from the Neopharm site.”
“Wasted on those bastards,” Jonathon said.
Crystal sat in silence, staring into the ruby darkness of the drink. There’d been daily encounters with David and Cindy—increasingly, considering them as separate clients seemed appropriate—over the past ten days, often both morning and afternoon sessions.
Day-by-day, Crystal found it fascinating to watch the gradual evolution in her client’s behaviour. Despite his angry outburst at their first meeting, ever since unburdening himself of the night at Dan’s, her client had proven far more… compliant? Or at least willing to talk openly. In their meetings, he seemed far more relaxed—at times, even happy. Much of the anger had drained away, leading into a period of—negotiation, perhaps, in which Crystal might propose an experience, an experiment or opportunity to explore a little more deeply this new Cindy.
Occasionally, he might flat out refuse; but gradually, as the week passed, Crystal found him, if never eager, at least open to new suggestions.
One consequence proved a fascinating parade of evolving fashions. As Cindy, there seemed an almost newfound confidence in how she presented herself. The day after their long session, she arrived in the morning wearing a very cute floral print romper, off the shoulder with delicate frill trim. That evening, a long, fuzzy, light blue sweater and hip-hugging capri pants, cinched in with a wide belt; and another day, a crop top and pleated plaid skirt, baring her toned midriff.
He became a daily fixture at the Clinic salon. Already a familiar figure with the staff there, they took great pleasure in the free pass he gave them—playful experiments with hair, nails and makeup—but also frequent indulgence in their more luxurious services, massages, medi and pedicures, and facials, the best they had to offer.
Overall, Cindy’s presentation remained undeniably feminine, but less aggressively so, and to Crystal’s mind it hinted at the beginning of an exploratory phase, one in which the girl was beginning to search out her own style. It might all be a bit gender-stereotypical, but then what wasn’t these days? More to the point, it somehow seemed more… comfortable and genuine, rooted in a growing sense of self rather than a projection of male fantasy.
Cindy certainly still skewed towards what could only be termed ‘girly’, high heels and bright makeup and vivid colours, especially in the evening, but Crystal took some pleasure in seeing the subtle changes in her. In speaking she seemed calmer, at ease, with fewer bouts of knuckle-whitening anger, crying jags, or moments of shame and doubt. Her voice was more measured and contemplative and the resentment and fury lurking within those eyes had retreated behind precisely applied mascara and delicate eyeshadow.
In these sessions, Cindy opened up a little about her relationship with Julia, her anxiety over the experiences the older woman had forced on her, and still could. Together, they explored Cindy’s developing sensibilities over the role of women, of contemporary femininity, and what was expected of young, pretty girls like her. They talked about fashion, and music, and her work at Volumina International.
They talked about Dan and about Chad.
Other sessions, those more focused on David, gave tantalising glimpses into his past. Wayward comments, the occasional dropped hints—vague intimations of violence, rough living, lost love—enough for Crystal to suspect some traumatic history he was keen to leave buried and behind him.
And today? The last update Crystal received had Cindy tightly cinched into a corset, a look of mild panic to her as they prepped her for the next stage of her photography session.
“Oh, lighten up, Carl,” Jonathon said. “We’re celebrating.”
“Are we?” she answered and struggled to supress the tremor of anger and guilt running through her voice. “And what exactly are we celebrating, Jon?”
“Success!” he said, raising his glass in a mock cheer.
“Success?” Crystal asked. “Do tell.”
“What else would you call it?” He dropped heavily into his chair, some of the wine sloshing over the rim and onto his lab coat. “Shit.” He rubbed at the stain and shrugged. Feeling ebullient as the initial run of testing returned on their special client, a little spilled wine or a sullen colleague wasn’t going to dampen his mood. Everything, it seemed, was going according to plan—better, even, than expected.
The greatest achievements of the week were of course highly confidential—not something to share with his companions. Carl and he might work for the same Clinic, but in very different divisions. The therapist owed him a certain loyalty, but their over-developed sense of professionalism and annoying ethical dogmatism could also get them all into trouble.
And as for Katherine—well, she’d always been a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. The key for as long as he’d known her had always been her unwavering hatred of Steele. So long as their interests aligned, she could be trusted. Beyond that? Impossible to say. Even now she sat at the far end of the table, forcing him to stand to slide the glass of wine to her. Separate from the other two, she watched them both with an inscrutable smile.
No. Best to keep certain details to himself.
“The initial test results on the blood samples confirm what I’d both hoped and predicted: David’s blood shows a greatly reduced levels of the regenerative compound, with mmol/L concentrations halved since our first measurements four months ago.” He ticked each point off, finger by finger. “This reduced level of the Juice is exhibited across a range of samples—blood, soft and hard tissue, and so on—with a similar reduction by half since exiting the Tank. Consequently, enhanced regeneration within the subject continues at a limited and non-hazardous level. Further physiological changes to the subject appear to have slowed as well, though the ongoing transformation over the past several months has been nothing short of spectacular.
“As I’m sure you’ve noticed,” he added, grinning and waggling his eyebrows at Katherine. “He won’t be going around braless anymore. You’ll be pleased, I’m sure, to learn that he’s—how do you say?—blossomed from an initial small-B to a healthy C-cup.”
“Please, Jonathon. Keep it professional.”
“Height reduction seems to have halted at a petite 157 centimeters; his hips have filled out a little. He measured 86-74-81 as of a few days ago, weighing fifty-four kilos. Hair’s nearly down to his ass, facial features have softened; facial hair growth has halted. Even muscle mass and composition have altered towards female-norm, especially in skeletal musculature, exhibiting a shift towards slower-twitch, less dense fibres.”
He smiled, flushed red with pride and wine. “I doubt there’s a person or A.I. recognition software out there that could link our little twenty-year-old Cindy to nearly-forty David Saunders.”
Behind the warm glow of success, however, remained irritating doubt.
Earlier in the week, he’d asked David: what makes you so special? The question continued to vex Jonathon. It annoyed him profoundly that his success with their patient appeared to be rooted in nothing more than pure, dumb luck. This simple truth—and one he avoided raising tonight, one that in more sober moments undermined the doctor’s satisfaction—was that it remained a miracle that David had not only survived the Tank but come out of it healthy and whole. Even accounting for the tweaks made to the process following the initial experiment on Fosters, there’d been no reason to expect David would emerge… intact.
Yet he had. Something—unique—to the man, some fluke of genetics, something buried in his DNA, made him the perfect candidate for the process. Finding him had been a stroke of pure luck, a totally unexpected key to unlocking the process—a discovery on level with the harvesting of HeLa cells nearly a century ago. And just as those immortal cells had transformed medical research around the world, so would Saunders’ cells transform humanity.
Cultures of DaSa cells were maturing under carefully controlled conditions in the laboratory downstairs, had been cultivated there for months, ever since Saunders first left the Tank. Initial testing of carefully calibrated microsamples of Juice tempered with DaSa cell on Fosters had proven somewhat successful, temporarily taming the out-of-control extravagance of the regenerative process; and recent reports on their third and final human test subject remained positive as well.
None of this, of course, needed sharing with the others. Turning to Crystal, he resumed a more serious tone. “He’s emerging from what could be considered a heightened second adolescence and hormone levels are stabilising into those typical for a young woman in her early 20s. As David is a male in his late thirties, this is likely having some impact on his behaviour. Based on some of heightened emotional swings you’ve reported, we may need to consider whether further adjustments are necessary. Overall, however, he appears to be remarkable healthy, safe and stable.”
He turned to Crystal. “Your turn,” he said, and reached for his glass.
Crystal took a moment to compose her thoughts. She updated them on their client, adding a few points of her own, observations related to their client’s recently improved behavior and emotional well-being. “Overall,” she said. “He’s doing surprisingly well. Much of the anger and frustration from the start of the week has been channeled into what appears a form of… bargaining, for want of a better word.”
“What do you mean?” Katherine said.
“On the one hand,” Crystal continued. “David hopes that before he leaves here that he’ll be restored to a male identity. On the other, he dreads that we are setting him up to continue Cindy’s life. In between those two possibilities, David seems to believe he can— negotiate —with us to restore him to maleness. In his mind, this relies on convincing us that he has come to terms with Cindy; that he has learned to embrace his feminine side, as it were.
“Consequently, it is difficult to assess to what extent the behaviours he exhibits are genuine, which is to say, embedded behaviours that have become natural and unconscious; and which are performative, an act to convince us he has… learned his lesson, I believe is how he put it once.”
“I see,” Katherine said. “And what do you think?”
“I think it’s very unlikely the behaviour we’ve seen are entirely a performance put on to fool us. You’ve probably seen for yourself—unconscious little acts, like playing with his hair or checking himself in reflection, seem too natural to be forced.
“Rather, I think his own efforts at presenting the behaviours he believes we want to see have become self-reinforcing, which is to say, in pretending to be the kind of girl David thinks we want Cindy to be, he’s actually, at some level, becoming her.”
“As you planned,” Katherine said.
Crystal frowned and said nothing. When Jonathon first invited her into this conspiracy of three, Katherine convinced her that they were acting in the best interests of a man who needed help in maintaining a disguise. The hyper-masculinity of this man—the arrogance, the history of sexual conquests and misogyny—intrigued her; could she really enable a man like that to successfully pass as a woman… no, as a pretty young girl, vivacious and vibrant, so antithetical to his real self?
The nature of the challenge was undeniable. So, too, the personal appeal. Almost instantly, she identified within herself a desire to… externalize her personal journey towards self-actualisation onto another. From behind the safety of her desk she could explore, maybe even put to rest, pains that plagued her to this day, the gnawing insecurities, remaining doubts, and lurking fears. The temptation to play out her own unresolved issues through David Saunders was intense.
But she also recognized deeper within herself a darker impulse, a terrible desire to strike back at the type of man David Saunders represented. Hyper-masculine, alpha male, aggressively heterosexual—everything she had never been—the type of man who had made her life—her old life—a living nightmare. Let him suffer as she had; feel the agony of living a life in the wrong body; and unwillingly play out her own fantasies and nightmares.
And for these reasons she declined Jonathon’s offer. The potential for abuse—the personal closeness and professional conflict of interest—was too much; she couldn’t guarantee the necessary detachment from the project.
Only when it became a request—when he insisted he needed her on this project—did she agree, out of an abiding sense of obligation to the man.
So she’d worked with them following the attack on the Clinic to devise a strategy designed to keep David safely ensconced in the identity of Cindy Bellamy. She studied the data Katherine provided and created a new life for their client. She picked out the apartment and generated the fragments of a life David had never lived, photographs with his new face, framed memories of a new life. She arranged for the transportation of the real Cindy’s estate to the new home, the few remaining artefacts of a former life. Then there’d been clothes to buy and a job to arrange. Pulling a few strings, Crystal got Cindy hired on as an executive assistant—a secretary—a demotion designed to remind him of his new role over the coming months.
There’d been dozens of minor little details to create and plant, digital fingerprints to disperse and a female presence to maintain, all part of the meticulous crafting of a personality somewhere between the tragic young woman who’d died under the Clinic’s care and the man who was going to inhabit that vacant space.
Then the drugs—psychotropic or otherwise—and synthetic hormones, calculating the perfect balance, minimizing negative side-effects and enhancing the positive, keeping his sex drive boosted and carefully determining the slow-release dosages to keep him both calm and sane, whilst also buttressing his efforts at conforming to feminine rules of comportment.
“Considering the flood of hormones and psychotropics he’s on,” Crystal finished. “It’s a testament to how strongly he identifies as male that he’s able to perform as Cindy so convincingly yet revert to being David with ease. The contrast between the two grows more marked over time. And considering the relatively short length of time we’re looking at here,” Crystal said, voice tinged with disbelief, “there is something genuinely amazing at how quickly he’d adapted. He already presents a host of typically feminine habits as though he’s practiced them his whole life.”
Chuckling drily, she added, “It took me ages to learn to walk with any degree of confidence in heels, and to be honest, he’s already better at it than I am.”
“The test results aren’t in yet,” Jonathon said, “but I believe we’ll find the behavioural changes have worked out as I theorised. My hypothesis is that the slow-release administration of psychotropics has run parallel to the regenerative bolstering of new neural pattern development.”
Deep in his pockets, his fingers twitched with excitement. The implications were immense. Learning was such a slow process, a painful process, reliant on repetition and rest, the gap between expectation and reality, vulnerable to emotional swings, distractions and context. At the same, what was learning but the generation of connections between neurons, the forming of new synapses and encoding of experience into the brain?
Although levels of the Juice across David’s body had halved in the past six months, their scans discovered that this wasn’t true in the hippocampus and in distinct locations across the cortex. There, in those deep structures of grey matter, the compound seemed to be enhancing the patient’s neuroplasticity, boosting the brain’s ability to not only encode new information but migrate it to the cortex and form long-term memories. Higher concentration of the regenerative compound near mirror neurons suggested the boosted learning may even extend to so-called “muscle memory,” considering the aptitude the patient displayed at moving and reacting in new ways—such as learning to walk in heels.
The process had not only regenerated the man’s body but his mind as well. Driven by the threat of discovery, the man’s intense focus on learning to behave as Cindy meant his brain may well have encoded the patterns of her life and in doing so, changed him in unexpectedly profound ways.
The details of all this were another Asklepios innovation he felt no need to share with his companions beyond the bare minimum. “As Carl put it,” he continued, “the man’s adopted a lifetime of desired behavioural habits—feminine ones—in a space of months rather than years, thanks to our efforts here.”
They were already working on developing a short-term, focused version of the process. One of his colleagues, Dr Thelma Makris, had already theorised an ingested, short-lived version disassociated from the Tank, capable of boosting learning and retention, even the formation of memories. He smiled, thinking of the ambitious woman, intelligent and beautiful, and the way her bangs curled, like crimson DNA helixes, and fell across her face as she leaned over his shoulder to traced data points across his screen.
Thelma had already formulated a series of tests. She’d been keen to highlight the potential to cure degenerative conditions of the mind: reverse dementia, eradicate schizophrenia or help hasten the long-term physical rehabilitation of patients. But when his fingers twitched, it was from considering how he might adapt those tests to the prisoner in the basement. What learning could they augment, which behaviours could they encode? What memories could they create?
“All-in-all, I’d say we engineered ‘Cindy’ just about perfectly,” he said. He held up his index finger and waggled it at Crystal. “And if that wasn’t enough, well, finally, the subject’s taken on board every lie I’ve sold him this week. You call it a negotiation, but it’s all one-sided. Whatever bargain he believes he’s struck with us, he’ll behave. He’ll do as he’s told; he has to out of fear of ending up like our specimen downstairs. I told you that showing him Fosters was the key.”
Katherine frowned. “You know I disagreed with you.”
“And you know you were wrong,” he said. He took a long drink of his wine and smacked his lips in pleasure. “Fuck me, but that’s good.”
“I hate it when you get like this,” Crystal said. “Smugness doesn’t become you.”
“It does when I’m right.”
“It’s not right. It’s wrong. Have you considered the cost of what we’re doing here?”
“What we’re doing?” He twisted in his chair to face her. “What the hell do you mean?”
“We’re destroying a man,” Crystal said. “We’re breaking him in two. We’re taking a mentally healthy man—”
Jonathan coughed.
“—a man secure in his sexuality and in his masculinity,” she continued, glaring at him. “An identity rooted in absolute certainty of his heteronormative self and—tearing it in two. From everything I’ve learned of this man, it’s clear that his relationship with women—and specifically, the taking and giving of pleasure with them—is central to his identity.
“And we have removed that from him; made him the woman within that dynamic and forced him into redefining his self through his ability to find pleasure from, and return it, to men—other men.
“He described several times a sense of ‘watching’ from outside himself.” Making air quotes, she frowned. “I told you already that there is widening gulf between his male and female personality. This isn’t merely a gap, but a growing division between the two halves of his self. First there’s a Cindy half, an amalgam of his own deep-rooted misogynistic ideas of how an attractive young woman should act; and his interpretation of the personality forced upon him—she’s a bundle of stereotypical feminine traits reinforced by drugs, hormones and your process, Jonathon.”
He nodded. “Just what the doctor ordered.”
“And then there’s David.”
Katherine leaned forward, clearly intrigued but still with that slight, secret smile. “Yes?”
“This second half,” Crystal continued, shifting her attention to the other woman, “increasingly seems like a distillation of masculine violence and anger. At some unconscious level, he seems to be… isolating these aspects of himself, these essential characteristics, as though protecting some core self from what he might interpret as the corrupting influence of Cindy.” She shook her head. “Without knowing more about his past it’s difficult to precisely identify what parts of himself he’s consolidating; it’s unclear what aspects of himself he values most. But it seems clear he is creating his own shadow to balance out the anima of his lived personality. Both aspects of his selves are being pushed to extremes: ever more stereotypical “masculine” balancing out increasingly “feminine” behaviours, or at least as he perceives them.”
“So what’s the problem?”
Crystal frowned, ignoring the doctor as he poured himself another glass of wine. “Frankly, as I said before, considering the psychotropic drugs we’ve flooded his system with, the bath of hormones you’ve released in him, it’s not just a testament to his strength of will that he’s held on to his male, David self; it’s a miracle his psyche hasn’t already shattered.”
“No, it’s a testament to your good work.” Jonathon interjected. “Listen, you’ve brought him around. A week ago, he crippled a man in that diner so he could reassert his masculinity – that’s what you said, right? And when he first got here, he described living as Cindy as… what was it? Medieval torture? And he told me directly he’d rather die than continue to be a woman.
“And now… he’s what, openly talking about a possible relationship with another man?—yes, Carl, I’ve read the transcripts. Going on about fashion and other frivolous shit? And he’s been playing dress-up all week. Hell, yesterday you two were swapping makeup tips. It sounds to me like, at one level or another, he’s coming around to the idea of being Cindy for longer.”
“Maybe,” Crystal admitted.
“Because you’ve done good work,” he said. “Look, to put it another way—where is he right now?”
Katherine glanced at a tablet sitting to one side at her end of the table. “Tracker places him on Clinic grounds.”
“He’s in the Thalia Building – the photography studios. I convinced him to try out our photography suite,” Crystal said. “One of our ‘therapeutic experiences’. I started to set it up last week, but to be honest I didn’t really expect he’d go for it. I’m a little surprised he agreed—it didn’t take that much convincing.”
“See, that’s what I’m talking about,” Jonathon said.
“I imagine he’ll be finishing up soon.” Crystal checked the time. “He told me—or rather, Cindy did—that she’s got a date tonight.”
Katherine checked her tablet. “With that physiotherapist—Mr Jenkins, is it?”
“They’ve been meeting up pretty much every night.”
“Look, you’ve even got him flirting with another man.” Jonathon grinned and slapped the table. “Like I said… we’ve done good work here. If I thought you’d take the bet, I’d put good money on Cindy dropping to her knees with his dick in her mouth before she leaves, mark my words.”
Scene Ten: “A Little Gift for Your Boyfriend”
As the tightly bound figure twitched and yanked at their restraints, Jasmine Poole considered how she both loved and hated her job in equal measure.
On the one hand, on an almost daily basis she felt an intense and hateful jealousy of the gorgeous fashions and intense situations she designed for others. Such beautiful clothes; such wonderfully weird and exciting and titillating and often erotic experiences—wasted on all these rich fucking bastards that passed through her hands. They never appreciated the artistry, the craft then went into making their fantasies an experiential reality.
Oh, sure, the occasional actor or musician got it. A lifetime of backstage costume changes and posing in front of the camera and performing on stage gave them some small inkling of the effort Jasmine put into her work. But the billionaire portfolio holders, the socialite daughters, energy barons, cocky CEOs and elite aristocrats and spoiled inheritors—fucking bastards, all of them, expecting the world and giving nothing back but complaints and ever more demands.
You’d think elegantly bespoke corsets just grew on the rack, or that they kept stylish dresses, sparkling with a thousand embedded crystals, perfectly sized and fitted, lying around in storage. To say nothing of the props, costumes, and decorations; the preparation and planning; the posing and photography—the incredible effort her team put into their art. 3D printing and on-demand drone delivery only got them so far. The local town worked hard fulfilling their orders, an unlikely commune of skilled artisans delivering clothes, props and setting on demand.
Wasted, Jasmine grumbled, on wealthy, entitled pricks looking for a new experience, some titillation to fill the emptiness of a life already brimming with everything the world could possibly offer them.
Dickheads and bitches.
Except, she admitted, sometimes the effort really was worth it.
Last week, they’d brought to life a terminally ill child’s Disney princess dreams, frothy frocks and a fantasy landscape filled with princes and anthropomorphic animals. Another week, the sci-fi hallucinations of a failed writer—the century-old ray-gun and go-go boots aesthetics a crazy thrill to manifest. She loved her job for those moments; she hated it for the boardroom power fantasies, tropical bikini shots and trite nightclub stripper delusions.
On the other hand, she thought, pulling corset lacing tighter and eliciting a strangled gasp from her client, every now and then something special came along.
“You okay there?” she asked.
The client gurgled around the gag in their mouth, then with a twitch of long blonde hair jerked their head in assent.
Despite the boobs and feminine name, “Cindy” was clearly born biologically male, judging by the generous package tightly taped back in their delicate panties. Unusual, but not surprising. The intimate nature of the work made the fact impossible to hide, and “Cindy” was hardly the first man she’d strapped into lingerie before. Normally there was some indication on the client’s record, but not always—anonymity reinforced by terrifyingly-intense non-disclosure agreements ensured clients experienced their fantasies or therapy at the level of privacy they required or desired.
Football hero to cheerleader, star to starlet, CEO to secretary, husband to housewife, master to maid, groom to bride—and vice versa—and far too many strippers, sluts and college girl skanks—the fantasies started to feel mundane after awhile, like they were a dream factory of misogynistic tropes. At least the so-called ‘therapeutic’ sessions, where the client was apparently learning something, brought a frisson of excitement—there was something delightful in seeing these powerful men (and occasional women) squirm in discomfort as she squeezed them into some tight little outfit and had them act out in ways so contrary to their inclinations.
“Cindy” was something else, though. There was a wonderful discordance to the client—clearly consenting to the process, but equally clearly hating every step of it. The way their eyes widened in fear—in near panic—as Jasmine spoke thrilled her. “I’m going to tighten it a little more,” she said, “and then seal away the lacing and the busk. You’ll be locked in; the locks are one a timer; it’ll be impossible to loosen the laces until we’re done. Understand?”
Cindy moaned, sparkling red lips blanching as they bit down on the gag. As Jasmine explained the D-rings and showed off the arm binders and other gear, they went pale under heavy makeup. They closed their eyes and when opened again there was such fierce determination and anger there that Jasmine found herself flushing hot.
“You’re doing great,” she whispered, leaning in close with one hand resting gently on the narrowed waist. “You’ve got this.”
Afterwards—after stripping away the corset and bondage and wiping away the photography makeup—Jasmine sat with the client. Cindy blew at wisps of steam rising in curls from a herbal tea, a simply cotton gown hanging loosely revealing the twin swell of naked breasts. Jasmine flicked through the raw footage from the first two shoots of the day.
“How is it?”
“Good.” She flicked threw the images. “Like, really good. Great. With a bit of editing we’ll really get these to pop.” She glanced up. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
Cindy shrugged.
Jasmine hesitated. Strictly speaking, she wasn’t really meant to engage with the client like this—keep it professional, keep it cool. Guide them through the process, ease their anxiety when necessary, draw out their best. But there was something about Cindy that invited questions. “Are you enjoying this?”
Grimacing, Cindy glared at the floor for a moment before answering. “Honestly?”
Jasmine nodded.
“Between you, me, and whoever’s listening at the other end of this thing—” and they tapped their armband, “no, not really.”
“The first one was kinda fun,” they continued, passing a hand through long hair, picking out purple and pink streaks. “Even the clothes and makeup. But that last one?” They shivered and drew the gown tighter around their slender frame. “No.”
“You did great.”
“I was fucking terrified.”
“Fear is good,” Jasmine answered. “Brings intensity to the shoot.” And it’s fucking hot, she thought, seeing this—man?—trussed up and tied back, tits jiggling with the struggle against their restraints, eyes wide with fear, breathing heavily—as heavily as the crushing corset would allow—around the bit parting plump lips—every muscle straining in bondage—suffering an extremity of feminine indignity—at least as they understood it.
Jasmine couldn’t help but wonder if she’d maybe lost just a little professional focus in her enjoyment of Cindy’s predicament. She may have laced the corset slightly tighter than necessary and trussed her client up that little bit more savagely than warranted.
Cindy grunted, a decidedly unfeminine sound, and sipped their tea.
“So why are you doing this?”
There was a long pause as the client seemed to consider this. “You know, you’d think while you had me all tied up there that I would’ve had time to think up a good answer, right?” They shook their head. “But—no. I was too busy trying to keep my shit together. And yeah, believe me, I’ve been asking myself the same thing: why the fuck am I putting myself through this?”
Cindy frowned. “Like, I knew what I was getting myself into, but I didn’t ‘know know’, if you get me. I knew what we were aiming for but….” With a vague wave of an arm—a wide gesture that parted her gown again, with one sleave slipping down an appealingly bare shoulder—she took in the expanse of the studio. “Not all this. Didn’t think it through. Didn’t think the corset would be quite so tight.” Cindy glared at her in mock anger. “Or that I’d feel so….”
Their voice trailed off.
“Hey, like I said—you did great.”
“I was scared.” Cindy voice sounded like a little girl’s voice.
“A little fear isn’t uncommon, Cindy.”
Cindy shook their head. “You don’t understand.”
“You can stop. You’ve done two out of four.”
“No,” Cindy said. “That’s why I’m here, right? For the experience?” They spread their hand wide, wiggling fingers and watching the sparkling nails flutter and flash. “To learn something, right? Build up some… girl memories, I guess.”
Jasmine gave a bark of laughter. “You think these are typical girlhood experiences?”
“No, of course not. But—well, also, yes.”
“I’m not going to speak for my entire gender,” Jasmine said, cocking an eyebrow. “But most women I know aren’t into locking corsetry and heavy bondage.”
Cindy grinned sheepishly. “I know. But—how did Crystal explain it?—it sort of made sense before, when she explained it—it’s about the vulnerability, the… fear.” They looked up from their hand and locked eyes with her, gazing directly into with an intensity that Jasmine found unnerving. “Feeling constrained by things out of your control. Restricted in what you can do. Being at somebody else’s mercy, voiceless and completely dependent on them to let you out. Agreeing to something and then the fear that comes when you realize you don’t want it to happen anymore but you don’t know how to make it stop.”
Jasmine flushed and looked away, suddenly annoyed by her own discomfort. For a moment there, she’d felt afraid, as though Cindy was some kind of threat to her own safety. “You always had the option to stop this whenever you wanted.”
“With my hands tied behind my back, and gagged?” Cindy shook their head, slowly. “Listen, I know this is all illusion. And you and your team were good—really fantastic—and got me through this.” Cindy eyes unfocussed. “But there was a moment there, when you cinched me in really tight, and I thought I couldn’t breathe, and had that fucking thing between my lips, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, couldn’t… and….
They sighed. “I felt… afraid. Like I haven’t felt in a very, very long time.”
What are you, like twenty? Jasmine wondered but remained silent. While it wasn’t uncommon for clients to work through some kind of epiphany during or following a session, it rarely happened with her—she rarely got to sit with her subject in this way. And watching Cindy process—something—it seemed suddenly very clear to her that she was sitting, talking and working with a man, with someone who identified as male despite their physical appearance. Something in the way he spoke, the cadence of voice and expression, convinced her that this was a man—a very feminine man—and somehow that made everything all the more exciting and troublesome for her.
She reached out and took his hand in between hers. “Listen, I don’t usually say this but… maybe you should stop. Maybe try again later.”
“No,” he said. “There won’t be a later.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I’m running out of time,” he said. “And—I want to finish this. Damn her for being right, but Crystal knew what she was signing me up for. It’s a fucking weird form of therapy but I’m working through stuff I buried years ago.”
Jasmine smiled, unsuccessfully hiding her pleasure at the idea of strapping this strange man into his next costume. “If you say so.”
He noticed the smile and groaned. “It’s another corset, right?”
“This one’s gorgeous,” she said, eyes sparkling wickedly. “And even tighter.” Her smile grew. “But we’ll save that one for the end. We’re doing the lingerie shoot next.”
He unconsciously drew the gown a little tighter around his lithe frame. “Wonderful.”
“It’ll be fun,” she said. “Besides, you get to keep most of this stuff.”
“Great.”
“Anyone special to wear it for?”
The sudden blush blossoming across the pretty man’s face betrayed the truth. “Yeah, maybe.” He bit at his bottom lip. “I’ve, ah… been seeing this guy for the past week. Wanted to do something special for him tonight.” The blush deepened. “He works here as a physiotherapist.”
“You don’t mean Chad, do you?” She couldn’t suppress the joy from her voice. “Oh my God. That’s… that’s wonderful!”
“You know him?”
“Tell you what, Cindy.” Jasmine grinned. “If you’re a good girl for me for the rest of the shoot, I’ll let you in on a thing or two about Chad.” She tapped a finger on her client’s nose. “And if you’re really good, maybe we’ll sneak in an extra little shoot—something quick, something special—a little gift for your boyfriend….”
Scene Eleven: “Formed by Tragedy and Loss”
“He is strong,” Katherine said.
“Yes, he is.” Crystal glanced up from her uncomfortable study of the table. “He’s remained remarkably secure in his masculine identity despite the trials of the past few months.”
“To what do you attribute this—stubbornness? Willpower?”
“Maybe.” Crystal considered for a moment. “But there’s more to it than that. On the one hand, there is the influence of this woman, this Julia.” She looked askance at Katherine. “Did you make that happen?”
Katherine gave a thin-lipped smile. “Not everything is by my doing, Ms Dawn. The arrival of this woman from Mr Saunders’ past, I am reluctant to admit, appears to have been entirely coincidental. Though I find her intriguing, from the data my team has collected on her.” Her smile grew by the slightest of degrees. “An ordinary woman driven to revenge by the thoughtless cruelties of a man. Yes. Her part in pushing Mr Saunders deeper into his role appears to have been fortuitous.”
“Maybe.” Crystal voice was doubtful. “Yes, she’s had an influence on her ex-boyfriend. And yes, in her desire to humiliate David, she’s pushed him further into femininity, and faster, than he may have done on his own. Reinforced by the accelerated learning of Jonathon’s process, I concede her involvement’s been… helpful.”
“But.”
“But.” Facing Katherine, Crystal sat back in her chair, arms crossed. “Her own… desires? And unresolved issues with their shared past? And apparent need for David also serves to reinforce his masculine identity. Even as she’s dressing him in the most feminine of clothes or subjecting him to new feminine experiences—such as dating that boy from his office—her very need for him ultimately feeds his male ego.
“He spoke with some enthusiasm of their physical relationship. To be blunt: every time he fucks this woman, it brings him back to himself. And not just for the physical pleasure it brings him but for the pleasure he brings her. Sex is one of the foundations of who he is—not just masturbation—but the give and take between man and woman.”
Crystal hesitated. “Had he remained alone, I believe that ultimately the loneliness and his own pleasure principle would have driven him in the role of Cindy into the arms of another man. He would have necessarily relied on his Cindy identity to enable this and in doing so, this feminine aspect of himself may have become ascendant.
“But so long as he’s having sex with this woman, David remains dominant.”
Katherine thought for a moment. “A pity,” she said. “Her role in this has proven… useful. But we may have to arrange for her removal.”
Crystal winced. “Do you have to make that sound so sinister?”
“A new opportunity. A change of jobs or promotion. Nothing more.”
“Or you could, you know…,” Jonathon cut in, “just get rid of his cock.”
“No,” both Katherine and Crystal replied.
“Why not?” He scratched at his beard. “Listen, right now, his body actively wants a vagina, okay? We’ve had to actively intervene to keep his manhood from withering away. He’s no longer at a point where the process will do it on its own, but he’d recover from any surgery we do a hell of a lot faster than if we wait another couple of months. A day’s surgery and we’d be sending him back within the week with a brand new pussy.”
“Jon!” Crystal turned on him. “That’s enough.”
He grinned. “Hey, he goes back to his girlfriend and they have a little strap-on fun and he learns to be a good girl, right? Seems a win-win to me.”
“Don’t be crude,” she said. “This isn’t funny; this is a man’s life. His identity. Yes, he needs to accept his Cindy identity to survive; but it’s the promise of returning to his male self that keeps him going. Take that possibility away from him, and….”
“Yes?”
“For all our talk of his willpower, his stubbornness and desire to survive, there’s also increasing evidence of strain. Not just the mood swings or lashing out. Those were expected.”
“Then what are you concerned about?” Katherine asked.
Crystal hesitated, though only for a moment. “You’ve also been monitoring our sessions?”
“Of course.”
“To be clear, it’s entirely possible that David has been lying to us. As much as Jon wants it to be true, his recent… submission might be an act, even if that act ultimately subverts his own rebelliousness. But there remains something about him—what he says, or how he says it—that just doesn’t sit right.” She pinched at the bridge of her nose in concentration. “It’s difficult to explain. Beyond the bargaining, at times it feels as though he’s… not so much lying as telling me what he thinks I want to hear, filtering his experiences through the lens of my own hopes and expectations.” She looked at Katherine. “Do you know what I mean?”
The other woman gave a slow nod.
“It’s difficult to assess how much of his—anger, frustration, sadness—anything he’s shared is genuine. I can’t quite pinpoint it, but at times it feels as though there’s a… an emptiness underlying so much of what he says, a hollowness at the core of him he seeks to fill through a remarkable empathy that takes on the other person’s expectancies and experiences. And so, his story about following Dan up to his apartment….”
Jonathon reached beneath the table. His glass was empty, and he pulled up another bottle. “I listened to the recording,” he said. “Steamy stuff.” Working the screw into the cork, he grinned lasciviously. “You think he made it up?”
“No,” Crystal said. “At least—not all of it. We know he followed Dan up to his apartment. We know what time he caught a taxi home. But the details of what actually happened—without interrogating the young man, there’s just no way to confirm. And some of the details, they just don’t didn’t feel right. The lipstick in the bathroom. The lap dance. Falling to his knees.”
“What, you think nothing happened? Or he actually blew the boy and lied about it?”
Crystal pulled a face. “No. That part I think was true. I think he genuinely tried and couldn’t do it.”
“Then why doubt the rest?”
“I don’t know, okay?” Her jaw clenched and she counted to five, biting down on a further retort. How to explain that those little details—extraneous touches unnecessary to his story—somehow resonated with her? They were details she appreciated and found disconcertingly exciting. David’s retelling of the night with Dan was remarkably detailed and precise—more narrative than recalled experience—and filled with little touches that resonated uncomfortably with her own predilections.
“I don’t know. But often. something feels off when I speak with him.”
She closed her eyes, briefly, considering. She turned her attention back to Katherine. “Tell me about this Jeff—this agent of Steele’s that he says has been following him since the start.”
Now it was Katherine’s turn to hesitate. With one finger tapping the table, she held back from responding for some time. She took a sip of wine—her first—and returned the glass to the table in precisely the same spot as before.
“I’ve uncovered no evidence of this man,” she said. “No trace of ‘Jeff’. There was no one in the restaurant footage. Only Cindy sitting alone at the bar until her date arrived. There was no one outside the other man’s apartment building that night either.”
Jonathon looked at her. He frowned, even as Crystal nodded.
“Does he exist?” she asked.
“No,” she answered.
“So this… Jeff, this agent of Steele’s; he’s not real?” Jonathon asked.
“It seems unlikely,” Katherine answered. “It is possible that this ‘Jeff’ was able to access the footage from the restaurant and eliminate any trace of his presence. The same with the civic security camera outside the apartment. But he would have had to act swiftly before my people accessed and made their copy of these files. Furthermore, they found no traces of manipulation.
“All possible, of course—but the far more likely explanation is that this man does not exist.”
“So he was lying, then?” Jonathon asked.
“No,” Crystal answered. “I think David genuinely believes this man is pursuing him.”
“But—”
“Consider when he appeared,” Crystal said. “Just as Cindy was about to leave the restaurant, escaping an unwanted romantic encounter. Instead, this hostile presence forced him to remain. Then, when Cindy attempted to leave at the end of the night and thus avoid following her date up to the apartment – an act with only one possible outcome, in David’s mind—this Jeff suddenly appeared again and forced her into that man’s embrace.
“It seems to me that David is projecting this… boogeyman as an incentive to force himself into acts that he can’t consciously commit to; a facilitator for femininity his male ego won’t allow. Jeff manifests an external agency enabling David to submit to the Cindy role he despises but must embrace to survive.”
Jonathon blinked. “So he’s nuts?”
Wincing, Crystal shook her head. “Please, Jon,” she said. “We don’t use that kind of language. And no, he’s not. But equally, he’s not well.” She returned her glass to the table, wine untasted. She stood and stepped away from the table.
“So what’re you saying, then? That deep down inside he actually wanted to fuck that guy?”
“No.” She gritted her teeth. “What he wanted was to survive. But we’ve taught him—trained him, even—to act as though his survival is contingent on successfully passing as Cindy. And Cindy—as I’ve told you—in his mind, seems to be this jumble of his own misogynistic expectations of a pretty young woman, and the characteristics we’ve forced on him. You,” and she pointed a finger at Katherine, “expect Cindy to be soft, compliant and dependant—an inversion of David’s own strength, stubbornness and self-sufficiency.
“Then in his own mind, a woman like Cindy has to be superficial and shallow, sexual and flirty, defining herself through her relationship with men. And you,” and here she pointed at Jon, “have engineered a balance of chemicals and hormones that work to bring out the most stereotypical of behaviours. And all this feeds into his own practice at playing Cindy, reinforcing those behaviours at an unconscious level.” She picked up her glass of wine again and swirled it. “And then there’s the influence of the real Cindy, the ghost of the girl whose life he’s taken on—and she was a bundle of insecurities, too, obsessed with her own appearance and others’ perceptions of her.”
She sounded sad as she finished. “David could’ve been—something else, I think; but this is what we’ve created.” With that, she took a long drink from her wine, half finishing the glass in one go. “That is good,” she admitted ruefully, and sighed.
“No, it’s excellent,” Jonathon said. “And so is what we’re doing here.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not. What we’re doing to him is unethical,” she added. “It’s wrong. I joined this project because you—” and she raised her glass in a mock cheer at Jonathon, who responded with an exaggerated ‘who, me?’ expression—“invited me onboard. You thought I might have some special insight.”
“You’re a woman who spent most of her life pretending to be a man,” he said. “And he’s a man pretending to be a woman. Seemed obvious. More to the point, you’re good at what you do.”
She turned to Katherine. “And you convinced me that this was the best way to keep him alive. You made a compelling argument for helping this man accept this fabricated personality—”
“Cindy wasn’t fabricated,” Katherine interrupted. “She was a real person.”
“And she died because the Clinic failed her.”
“And her death provided a lifeline to this man—”
“A lifeline?” she snapped. “A line leading to what sort of life? Even if he willingly accepts to live as a woman—without needing to summon up violent boogeyman—is this the type of woman he’d choose to be?”
“Nobody gets to choose who they are.”
“I did,” Crystal said, glancing aside at Jonathon.
He smiled, lips stained with wine.
“Then you are fooling yourself,” Katherine answered. “We are who we are due to circumstance. Of life and chance and adaptation. Formed by tragedy and loss. But so very rarely choice.”
Crystal held the gaze of the woman at the far end of the table for as long as she could before flinching and looking away. “What happened to you, Katherine?”
The woman opposite merely returned an enigmatic smile over the rim of her glass of wine.
The table went silent. Katherine waited patiently at her end of the table. Jonathon smacked his lips and tapped a message out on his phone. Crystal stared into her glass again, lost in thought.
“Hey, you look good tonight,” he suddenly said in a low voice, interrupting her musing.
She started and smiled, feeling an unusually happy little flutter within. “Thanks for noticing.”
“Not your usual—”
“I know.” She plucked at the low neckline of her dress, still not entirely comfortable with how much it revealed. “I think Cindy’s rubbing off on me a bit.”
With a wolfish grin, he made a show of looking her over. “I like it.”
“Pervert.”
“Nothing perverted about appreciating a fine pair of—” he started but cut off as his phone dinged. “One sec.”
With him frowning at his phone, Crystal turned back to Katherine. “You convinced me, six months ago, that this approach was the best chance of keeping this man alive. And so I helped. I spoke with him; I developed a conditioning regime to help ease him into the protective personality of Cindy, something aligned with both the girl she’d been and what this man might accept. I worked with the information I had on both David and the Clinic’s files on the girl. And now….”
She sighed. “Why are we still doing this?”
“Actually, I’d quite like to know that as well,” Jonathon interjected, sliding his phone back into his pocket. “I don’t really give a shit, either way. But I’d keep him here if it was up to me. He’s an extremely valuable asset for the Clinic.”
“Locked up downstairs?”
“Under our protection,” he answered.
Katherine leaned forward, and her smile had disappeared. “Because he isn’t safe,” she said. “Here, or anywhere, as a man, as anyone that can be traced back to David. Because even now, Steele searches for him.
“I vowed to keep David alive. And he will live, no matter what.”
“Even if he doesn’t want to?” Jonathon asked. “He might’ve moved on from the death wish of earlier this week, but I’m sure he’d still jump at the chance to be male again.”
“Can he?” Katherine asked.
His fingers stilled in his pockets. “Yes,” he stated with a confidence he didn’t quite feel. “Conventional surgery could restore a masculine appearance to him, albeit he’d be a scrawny specimen. Mastectomy, some cosmetic work to the face, take away the hair—he’d pass. Maybe. Although the behavioural changes aren’t likely to just disappear, either. He’ll still move like a girl, act like a girl until he’d unlearned those new behaviours. It takes time for conditioned behaviours to go extinct, and the latent regenerative process might undermine it further, reestablishing neural links he’s trying to decay.”
He scratched at his beard. “What I’m saying is, he wouldn’t just look like a short, scrawny man—he’d come off as totally effeminate. In theory.” He looked at Katherine, and then Crystal, and shrugged.
“Also, the process has slowed, not stopped. He’d recover quickly from any surgeries, probably, but in doing so his body might begin to lean back into the Cindy template. Hair would grow quickly. Nails as well. He might develop breasts again. The skeletal and muscular changes would remain, possibly even progress further if his physical recovery kicked the regeneration back into high gear.
“Now of course, we could compensate a lot of this through traditional methods, hormones and so on. As I said earlier, we already are to some extent, to keep his cock from shrinking, per your insistence. Just in case it wasn’t clear before, it would’ve been a lot easier to send him out with female genitalia four months ago. His body wants a vagina.”
“And the initial shock would’ve broken him. He might never have recovered,” Crystal said.
“What about putting him back in the Tank?” Katherine asked.
Jonathon’s finger twitched. “It could restore him. In theory. Obviously, we’ve worked hard at minimising the feminising effect of the process. And in theory, we should be able to engineer smaller-scale changes; targeted healing or growth, or tweaks to an existing template that don’t require full immersion in the Tank.”
“In theory?”
“In theory.” In theory, they might compensate for the automatic feminising; in practice, they might bolster it. Experiments run on Fosters suggested the latter. Akslepios was far more advanced with the process than he’d let on with David that afternoon down by the Tank. They were capable of subtle manipulations—Cindy being a fine example of refined adjustments—and learning more every day. But private experiments on Fosters aside, very little research had been completed on the effects of the process on those who’d already undergone it.
Besides, with finite and diminishing quantities of the Juice available, and with little success at synthesising more, Jonathon was reluctant to use it unnecessarily; and he saw no real or immediate need for returning David to his male life.
“I wasn’t lying,” Jonathon continued, “when I told him there was a real risk to going back into the Tank.”
“Fine,” Crystal cut in. “So… what about a far simpler disguise? Breast binders, cut the hair, baggy clothes. Set up a life for him somewhere boring, in the middle of nowhere. He could lie low until he’s clear of… of whatever you’ve filled him with, Jon, and then get whatever surgeries he needs at that point. He’d jump at the idea of—”
“No.” Katherine’s voice was firm, simmering with restrained anger. “We will not waste the effort of the past six months. We will not put him at greater risk. Cindy remains.”
“But why?” Crystal asked. “Yes, we’ve put all this work in, and so has he. But this isn’t some sunken cost fallacy. It worked! He’s alive. And even if he’s ready to carry on as Cindy for another six months—and it’s a big if—surely there’s no need? By this point, Steele must have given up.”
Katherine stared at her. She did not blink, but her eyes narrowed, and Crystal felt a thrill of fear pass through her, goosebumps rising across her forearms as this woman studied her; and Katherine sneered, the slightest curving of the lips and baring of the teeth.
“You do not know what you are talking about,” Katherine said. Her seat creaked as she leaned closer. From the far end of the table she fixed them both with her gaze. “You do not know our enemy, not as I do. You do not understand what he is capable of doing.”
“Yes, maybe, but—”
“He has not given up. He will not give up. He can not give up. Jeremiah Steele is no more capable of ignoring David’s insult than he is capable of forgiveness. The man is driven by a purity of vision—a clarity of purpose—in all he does, but especially in his desire for revenge. David must be found; he must be punished; and David must know at that point that it was Steele that brought him low. To suggest Steele is no longer a threat is to speak from a position of extreme ignorance.”
Jonathon glared at her, scowling with anger. “Mind your tone, Kat.”
She turned and gazed at him and after several long moments he flushed and looked away. “We stay the course,” she continued. “Mr Saunder leaves here as Cindy. He resumes her life until it I have determined it is safe for him to abandon it. And in the meantime, it is in all our interests if he submits even more fully to the female identity we have constructed for him.”
“Our interests?” Crystal asked. “Or yours?”
She turned her steely gaze to the therapist. Crystal cooly returned the other woman’s glare. After several long, uncomfortable moments, during which Jonathon resolutely returned to his glass of wine, Katherine relented. She smiled, and to Crystal it suddenly felt as though she’d passed some kind of test.
“Jonathon is very lucky to have your friendship and loyalty,” she said. She reached into her briefcase and retrieved her tablet. “A moment, if you will.” It only took her another minute as she booted up her device, linked to the screen on the wall, and retrieved a file. She sent it over to the screen.
“Please watch.”
Scene Twelve: “You Saw Nothing”
In frame, two men.
The first, a face intimately familiar to the world having graced countless “Man of the Year” magazine covers, labelled ‘saviour’, ‘genius’, ‘disruptor’, ‘the most powerful man alive’—a strong-jawed, sculpted face, aquiline nose and deep-set, penetrating eyes burning under a famously bald head. He stood tall with utter disregard over the body at his feet, blood pooling across the bare concrete floor. Steele stood shirtless, dark-skinned and broad-chested. His suit trousers were grey and tailored, shoes shiny and black, and at his wrist a heavy watch. With his attention focused off-screen, he seemed oblivious to the arrival of the other man.
That other man was David Saunders. It was difficult to reconcile the man on the screen with Cindy Bellamy. To those watching the sight was a visceral shock, a reminder of how much he had changed. Short, especially juxtaposed with Steele, but compact and wiry, whip-like and ruggedly handsome despite his disheveled appearance. Dark hair tousled and his clothes were stained with grease and grime, shirt haphazardly untucked and trousers torn, but he carried himself with an arrogance that matched that of the man opposite.
“Hey,” David barked. The audio quality was good, as befitted the next-gen mobile that captured the video. The phone had clearly been propped up somewhere to catch the action.
If Steele was surprised by the shout, he concealed it well. He turned slowly and assessed the man opposite. “I know you,” he said, voice deep and smooth as twilight. “David, is it?” He considered for a second. “Yes. David Saunders.”
Hearing his name on Steele’s tongue, more than anything, seemed to surprise David. He scowled. “Yeah,” he said. “We met once.”
“The event at the Delhi office.” Steele nodded once. “Your name’s passed my desk a few times. Rapid riser. Someone to watch for. Potential.” He cocked his head to one side. “Perhaps I should have watched more closely.”
“No shit.” David stepped a little closer. “What’s going on, Jeremiah?” He nodded towards the body at Steele’s feet. Even at a distance, the gruesome details were visible, the blown-out skull and gore mingled with blood.
For the first time, Steele seemed to acknowledge the corpse at his feet. He stared at it for a long moment and when he looked up, something akin to—sadness?—briefly washed across his face. He slowly dropped into a crouch, resting one hand on the body, and he grimaced, brilliant white teeth bared in a rictus grin of rage. But when he looked back up at David, the previous aloofness returned.
“An accident,” he said.
“Some fucking accident.”
“What do you want?” Jeremiah Steele asked.
“You know, that’s a really good question,” David said, stalking closer. His steps were light and swift, cat-like as he closed the distance. “A really fucking good question. What are you offering?”
Jeremiah seemed to consider that for moment, and the first hint of a smile curved his lips. “Nothing,” he said. “The best you can hope for is nothing, Mr Saunders.”
“Yeah.” David sighed. “That’s about what I expected.”
Jeremiah watched with obvious curiosity the approach of the other man. “Why are you here, David?”
“I was fucking your P.A.” David grinned. “Dipped my wick in the corporate vat, so to speak.” He was close now to Jeremiah, almost within touching distance as he looked down at the crouching man. “She’s a real firecracker that one, isn’t she Steele? God, what a bitch.” He said it with pleasure, appreciatively. The camera’s software automatically zoomed in to keep the two in frame. David’s gaze burned with fevered intensity to counter the barely restrained rage simmering behind Steele’s eyes. “Came up for a little fresh air. Heard a noise. Saw—”
Steele’s impassive demeanour wavered. “What did you see?”
“I saw….” David’s grin grew. “I saw what I saw, Jeremiah.”
“You saw nothing,” Jeremiah hissed. For the first time fear brought a tremor to his voice.
There was a sudden sound off screen—unclear, perhaps of something falling over. Maybe a startled cry. Jeremiah twitched towards the noise.
“I saw everything, Steele!”
With a snarl, Steele refocused his attention on the shorter man. “Nothing!” he roared, and suddenly there was a gun in his hand, a compact, nasty-looking thing he yanked out from beneath the body. His arm swung towards David. A shot rang out. David leapt out of frame.
“Mr Saunders!” Jeremiah shouted.
From somewhere off screen, a voice taunted, “You’re a sick fuck, you know that?”
Steele spun towards the voice. Another shot rang out.
Then silence. Jeremiah stood as though frozen and the long silence was broken only by the whistling of wind and from somewhere off screen, the flap of plastic sheeting. Eventually, Steele stirred. He took in a deep, calming breath. Stared down at the corpse at his feet. And then he howled, with the full rage of a powerful man used to getting his way in everything suddenly finding his desires thwarted: “You’re a dead man, Saunders!”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” David whispered, suddenly close to the camera. The video skewed wildly, taking in a wash of walls and ceilings, as a hand closed around the phone, and then ended.
Scene Thirteen: “There is No David Saunders”
“Mr Saunders witnessed Jeremiah Steele murder the son of a powerful and influential rival. From that moment on, Mr Steele has been—how shall we say?—distracted.”
“Is that what we saw?” Jonathon snorted. “Because I didn’t see a murder.”
“He’s on camera standing over a body and he’s got a gun!” Crystal protested.
“Didn’t see him shoot.” He shrugged. “And he only had the gun after he felt threatened by David. Frankly, I imagine his lawyers had a field day with this.”
“Jonathon is correct.” Katherine nodded. “On its own, this footage would be a mere inconvenience to Mr Steele, especially once his team began to obfuscate reality through accusations of deepfake manipulation and industrial slander.”
“So why does he care so much about David? Clearly, he’s used to getting his way. But there wasn’t enough there to draw his ire; not to the extent you’re suggesting.” Crystal pursed her lips in thought. “There’s more, isn’t there?”
“Yes.” Katherine nodded. “David also recorded the shooting itself.” She grimaced. “You do not want to see it. Jeremiah was exceptionally violent in his killing of the other man.”
Crystal considered this. “But there’s more, isn’t there?”
Katherine stared at her for a moment and her lips curved into a slight smile. “Yes.”
“Something we haven’t seen?”
“Yes.”
“What is it?”
“I do not know. Mr Saunders indicated that there is another video he took, prior to the killing. He has yet to share this. He insists that it remains secure, uploaded and stored somewhere safe. Mr Saunders referenced it in the courtroom, in ambiguous terms; but Steele seemed to take his words seriously. Whatever it is that David witnessed beyond the murder so enraged Mr Steele that he resorted to open assassination in an effort to eliminate him.”
“And you have no idea what it is?”
“None.” Katherine tapped at her tablet, rewinding the video to a still frame of Steele, face caught in a contortion of rage. “And of course, even without vague threats Mr Saunders’s testimony in court four months ago has proven very troublesome for him.”
Before answering, Crystal wracked her mind for any memory of the trial. “Has it? Because I haven’t heard of anything.”
“It hit NeoPharm where it hurts most,” Jonathon muttered. “Their stock value.”
“And Asklepios picked up some very lucrative contracts, as I remember.” Katherine smile fell very short of her eyes. “Internal comms suggested shareholders and investors were somewhat spooked by the idea their largest shareholder and CEO might also be a murderer. Though I suspect they were more concerned with the unwanted judiciary attention.”
“What attention?” Crystal said. “Like I said, it felt like it barely registered, barely got the media attention it deserved.”
“Indeed.” Her eyes betrayed an anger her otherwise impassive voice did not. “It seems there was a concerted push to suppress reporting on the proceedings. Originating from—well, from any number of vested interests, I suspect.”
“Why’d he do it?” Jonathon interrupted. Bleary eyed, he eyed Katherine with suspicion. “You’re not telling us the whole story. Why’d David confront Steele like that?” He pointed at the screen. “There was a noise, off screen. Steele was distracted before David showed up. What was it?”
“A friend,” Katherine said, and sighed. “Everything that has happened to Mr Saunders since that moment is because he was trying to protect a friend. David and a work colleague, a Mr Thomas Turner, were engaged in a… friendly competition, that evening.”
Crystal raised an eyebrow. “What kind of competition?”
“To see who could reach Steele’s secretary first. A sexual competition.”
Jonathon chuckled. Crystal shook her head. “These are men in their thirties, right?”
“When I first saw this footage,” Katherine continued, “I thought Mr Saunders was lucky. Very lucky, indeed, to avoid getting shot at that range. Even more lucky to escape the building alive. Now, of course, when I watch it is clear that he anticipated the shot. He knew the gun was beneath the corpse. He was ready for Mr Steele’s attack.” She shook her head in displeasure. “I should have noticed immediately.”
“What happened to her?” Jonathan asked.
Katherine raised an eyebrow. “Who?”
“The secretary.”
Katherine frowned. “She was… promoted. To the position of Steele’s direct personal assistant. Relocated to his immediate entourage.” With clear frustration in her voice, she added, “She hasn’t been seen since.”
Crystal felt a chill run through her.
“The security manager working that evening also suffered an unfortunate heart attack a few days after the incident. Unsurprisingly, it consequently took days to recover the security footage from that evening. The footage revealed nothing of value.”
“So it was for nothing, then?” Crystal shook her head in disbelief. “David sacrificed—his life, his manhood—for… nothing?”
And for the first time, Katherine smiled seemed genuine, eyes lighting up with glee accompanied by a thin-lipped, nearly imperceptible curving of the lips. “Hardly,” she said. “His sacrifice has made a difference. His friend, this Mr Thomas Turner, is alive. And in the weeks both preceding David’s day in court and in the months since, my agency has been… well, if not inundated, then at least at the receiving end of a noticeable increase in reports on Steele’s more nefarious activities. Most of these are anonymous, and some of them are clearly crackpot, but collectively enough of them form a growing pile of evidence with which to attack Steele’s operations. Formal media channels may have been suppressed, but the word nevertheless got out of David’s willingness to stand up and be heard.”
“That’s wonderful,” Crystal said. “But probably cold comfort for David. I think he would’ve hoped for something more tangible, more significant.”
“More tangible?” Katherine’s went silent and for a moment Crystal wondered if something was wrong until she realised the other woman’s shoulders were shaking with silent laughter.
“More tangible than this, Ms Dawn?” She swept her arms wide, taking in the table and its occupants. Jonathon, until now glowering sullenly at the table, started as though startled awake. “Consider the extraordinary efforts of all of us in this endeavour. The financial cost of all this. Your remarkable innovations, Jonathon.” The doctor raised in glass in recognition of his own brilliance. “Your sterling work in supporting Mr Saunders in his role, Ms Dawn. And I assure you my team have met the challenge with equal determination. And for what? To keep one man—”
Jonathon coughed into his wine.
“To keep one witness alive in the face of unsurmountable odds. Steele’s inability to enforce his vendetta reveals his weakness; it is an open invitation for others to exploit this weakness. Mr Saunder’s betrayal—for he sees it as a betrayal, I believe—remains a thorn under the skin, an outrage requiring rectification. David insulted him—to his face—and mocked him in the presence of others; and such flagrant disrespect demands retribution.
“Yet he lives! Six months since Mr Saunders first witnessed this murder, he lives—as a direct consequence of his own remarkable efforts, and our own. Yet these efforts have been matched—surpassed, even!—by Mr Steele’s obsessive hunt for his target. You have only the slightest inkling of the opportunity cost our client’s mere existent exerts upon his enemy, to say nothing of the financial cost. To be blunt: in remaining alive, and by drawing Steele’s attention, David is doing a good thing—a wonderful thing.”
“Yeah, a real hero,” Jonathon said.
“Jesus, Jon, what’s with you tonight?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “But let’s not overdo it here. He’s hardly the second coming of Christ or something. Hell, if anything I’d say he’s probably quite a bad man.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” Katherine interjected. “But we have good reason to suspect Jonathon is correct.”
Jonathon turned to face her. She, too, had yet to touch her drink, and was examining its crimson depths with a frown. “Got something?”
She nodded. “The first report arrived this morning. There is more due, but what we have already makes for fascinating reading.”
“And….?”
With a grimace she turned to Crystal and said, “There is no David Saunders.”
Crystal blinked. “What do you mean?”
“The identity of Mr Saunders is a fabrication. A lie. The algorithm sifted through nearly two decades of data and found the expected patterns, correlations; every indication of an ordinary man leading an ordinary life.” She paused to consider. “A few abnormalities over the past few years worth pursuing. They’ll require feet on the ground, visit to locations he’s visited; but nothing egregious.
“But before those years? Nothing.”
Jonathon raised an eyebrow. “No records?”
“A birth certificate. High school and university graduation records. A driver’s license. A few low resolution scans of physical documents. But beyond that: virtually nothing. No location stamps, no consumer history, no online existence whatsoever. A digital ghost with only the minimum presence required to summon up a liveable identity.”
Jonathon fingers twitched and tapped the table. “So… what does that mean? Someone wiped his childhood record clean for some reason?”
“Possibly,” Katherine answered, “though unlikely. Digital records are notoriously difficult to eliminate so thoroughly. It seems more probable that the man we know as David Saunders previously went by a different name, was a different person for the first twenty or so years of his life. And then, for reasons unknown, he abandoned that identity and began life anew as Mr Saunders. The forgery is skilled, but I suspect the technological limitations of the previous decade limited its digital reach.”
Katherine smiled, turning to Crystal. “In many ways, Cindy Bellamy was—is—a more real person than David. She has a verifiable history, a lived history. Mr Saunders? A dance of light and shadows on the cavern wall.”
Crystal nodded. Katherine’s explanation aligned with suspicions of her own. “So who was he?”
Katherine shook her head. “I do not know.”
“A psychopath,” Jonathon said. “If you ask me. You should’ve seen him. He didn’t flinch. Fosters was howling, swearing, threatening rape, smashing against the wall and David just stood there. Watching.” He took a deep drink of wine, paused, and took another. “Not normal.”
“Police? A soldier, maybe?” Crystal asked.
“Possibly,” Katherine said. “Though he would’ve been young. He has demonstrated some familiarity with weapons. And he recognized the tattoo on the man in the diner.”
“Blackwater Phoenix,” Crystal said. “I’d never heard of it.”
“No reason you should have,” Katherine said. “Five years ago. It was a miliary operation out east, in the Crimean Dominion. Mercenary unit contracted through so many layers of secrecy no one ever really determined who hired them. They raided an R&D site—maybe Chinese, maybe Russian, Indian or American—it was never clear. May even have been corporate independent.”
“I heard it was a manufacturing site,” Jonathan interjected. “Neopharm-type stuff, viral engineering and bio-horrors.”
“Like you keep downstairs?” Crystal snapped.
Jonathon glared back. “I’m not going over this with you again. Fosters gave up the rights owed any individual when he decided to raid my lab and hurt my staff. He was a war criminal before he stepped through our doors, and frankly, he deserves whatever we do to him, and more.”
Crystal’s face flushed red, but she kept silent.
“The few survivors,” Katherine continued, “of Blackwater Phoenix have either been unable or unwilling to clarify what happened there. When hints of this crept onto the internet, you can imagine the field day conspiracy theorists had with it.
“Ultimately, though, the attention died down. Part of that seems to have been active suppression. But the survivors’ own stories never aligned; they themselves never seemed to understand what they were doing there. Most were deeply traumatised. The only general consensus that emerged was that whatever went down there, they averted some kind of major catastrophe.”
She shrugged. “No major government has ever claimed responsibility for the incident, and we may never know. But it seems we all owe a great debt to those who returned, and to those who did not. Like Mal.” She gestured towards Jonathon. “Is he still recovering in the infirmary?”
The doctor nodded. “A screaming nightmare the first few days, but he’s doing better now that he’s cleaned up a bit. Major substance abuser. A few days here has done him a world of good.”
“David’s recognition of the tattoo may be an avenue worth exploring.”
“He couldn’t have been part of it, surely?” Crystal asked. “Five years ago, you said. He was working at Neopharm then.”
“Also, no tattoos,” Jonathon interrupted. “Not when we put him in the Tank.” He hiccupped and felt increasingly irritated by the conversation. They were there to celebrate his—their—success, and he was determined to get drunk, disgustingly so. With some luck he’d end up in bed with someone and he didn’t particularly care with who. “Several old injuries, though. Some hadn’t healed well. He probably lived in constant mild pain before the procedure.”
Katherine raised an eyebrow. “You never mentioned.”
“You never asked,” he said, mimicking her voice, “and I don’t report to you. After we stabilised him, we ran a full set of scans, confirmed his suitability for the process. With Fosters in the Tank and David stabilised, we had a bit of time and wanted to get it right. And afterwards it wasn’t relevant. Those old injuries are gone,” he said proudly. “Totally healed.”
“He jests at scars that never felt a wound,” Crystal said softly.
“Whatever.” Jonathon scowled at her. “Jesus, give it a rest, Carl. We’ve done good work here. You,” and here he waved his glass at Katherine, wine sloshing over the edge of his glass onto the table, “managed to keep the bastard alive against all the odds.” He pointed at Crystal. “You’ve got him ready to accept being Cindy for another six months.” And raising his glass in a flamboyant cheer to himself, he finished, “and I’ve just gone and unlocked the secrets if immortality!” He dropped down in his chair and grinned at the others. “Frankly, I think I’ve outdone you both.”
Crystal stared at Jonathon for a long moment, and the sighed. Asshole, she thought. She liked the man, maybe loved him, in a way, and had even entertained some romantic interest in him, once upon a time. She owed him much, a debt she knew she could never repay.
But damn, he made it hard sometimes. He’d been getting steadily worse over the past year as well. It went beyond the constant deadnaming, the crass comments and belittling tone—she’d come to accept that from him in a way she wouldn’t from anyone else. But since the divorce, the arrogance and rudeness had gotten worse; so had the drinking. The high-stakes gamble with Katherine, the stress of developing the Tank. The strain of monitoring David and keeping so many secrets. And finally the guilt—a guilt she chose to believe they shared—over what they were doing to David and to the patient downstairs.
It also didn’t help that he wasn’t wrong. She found her role in all this distasteful and had serious morale qualms about what they were doing to… David, or whoever he really was. Cindy, then. She wanted to believed Katherine’s insistence that this was the best way to ensure the man’s survival, and if it meant helping him accept this new identity—a replacement for a previous identity that now seemed about as real as a mist of breath on a mirror—then so be it.
“And so,” Katherine resumed, turning to both her companions. “Are we agreed, then? As to what we are telling David tomorrow.”
“Six more months,” Jonathon said.
Crystal frowned. “Why six? Why not three—surely that’s enough? Another six months will mean he’s lived as Cindy for nearly a full year.”
“Yes,” Katherine said. “And? If required, he will remain as Cindy for another year beyond that, and another, and another. The disguise remains until it is safe to discard it.”
Crystal sighed. “But there might not be anything of David left by that point to recover! You insist all this is necessary for saving this man’s life—but what if there’s nothing left of the man at the end of all this?”
Katherine looked at her levelly. “Do you think this is likely?”
Crystal considered for a moment and answered: “I don’t know.” She weighed everything she knew about her patient, his stubbornness and will, and matched it up against their efforts: the biological and psychological changes, the drugs and hormones, conditioning and subtle influences; and simply couldn’t decide. Certainly, the experiences would have a profound and long-lasting impact on the man; but would it destroy him? Katherine’s earlier revelation suggested something traumatic had happened in this man’s past, sufficient to force him to recreate himself in the persona of David Saunders.
Who had he been, before? What happened to him? Without this, she felt as though she were operating in the dark.
“Cindy isn’t real,” Crystal said. “She is a construct, a disguise built on a foundation of Mr Saunder’s own personality. In many ways her characteristics are an inversion of his own; he may simply revert to his ‘authentic’ self once the need for her is gone. Though that ignores the very real difficulties he’ll face: unlearning behavioural habits that will only grow stronger over time, recovering from the physical changes; even the ordinary and mundane challenges of starting all over in a new life.”
Her fingers danced across the table as she spoke, sketching out her thoughts as she spoke. A line down the middle: male and female symbols on either side, the proud shield-and-spear bearer, the vain mirror-holder.
“That’s the best-case scenario. In six months from now you extract him from Cindy’s life and he resumes a male identity, relearning how to ‘be a man’ and eventually moving on from the experiences of the past year. Perhaps he’ll be a kinder man, a gentler man.” Her finger drifted to the male sign, tracing out jagged, angry lines. “Just as likely, his anger and resentment pushes him even further into misogyny and violence.”
Shifting to the female side, she drew out a question mark. “More likely, I think, what will emerge is a synthesis of his David self and his Cindy self. It’s impossible to say what this might be: a very effeminate heterosexual man? A life-long crossdresser? Possibly a gentler and more empathic individual, but also one whose confidence and resolve has been eroded by doubts and anxiety.”
“Worst case?” Katherine asked.
“Suicidal depression? Insanity? Possibly the collapse of his self, a complete giving way to the shell we’ve created for him: the identity-death of David Saunders. Or whoever he really is.”
Her finger finished a crude sketch of Cindy bisected by the line, a stick-woman figure with long hair, triangle body and straight-lined mouth. “I suppose in this scenario, insisting on a return to masculinity would be even worse. Forcing the… female personality that survives his collapse to resume a masculine identity would be torture.”
Katherine considered this in silence for some time. “I believe you give him too little credit, Ms Dawn,” she said. “David is strong; he will endure; and he will survive Steele’s vengeance.”
“It just seems… cruel.” Jonathon, sitting quickly and staring at the table, looked up and met their eyes. He slurred his words as he spoke. “I don’t particularly like the guy, but I can say that when I spoke to him, he clearly thought we’d brought him out here to restore his manhood. He’s hoping to leave here a man. Or at least, to leave here and go somewhere he can live as one. Even after everything I’ve shown him, he’s thinking the regenerative process is winding down. That Steele’s lost interest. That you, Katherine, are going to uphold your part of the deal and let him be a man again. He really expects this. And when we tell him he’s stuck as Cindy for another six months….”
Jonathon drained his glass and belched. “He’s not going to be happy.”
Scene Fourteen: “One of the Good Ones”
Chad said goodnight to his colleagues, paid his part of the bill, and left, grinning sheepishly at their knowing winks and laughing comments as he crossed the pub floor to meet her at the bar.
She looked especially good tonight—very feminine, a real change from the past few nights. Short, pleated white skirt and collared shirt, with a sweater vest, soft pink and figure-hugging. Her legs sparkled in patterned ivory stockings, and she wore lace-up platform heels that were far taller than her usual footwear. Her makeup was similarly pink and sparkly without being overly loud, and her hair was up in a high ponytail, and the blonde tumble now had streaks of purple and pink. The girl gave off major co-ed vibes as she gave him a cute one-handed wave.
The problem, he thought as he joined her, is that I think I’ve fallen for her.
It was a real problem. He deliberately made a point of not keeping a tally of the number of women—and the occasional man—who’d crossed his path during his time at Asklepios: the many nights, like this one, in the pub filled with meaningful chats, drinks both cheerful and sombre, and often, the caresses late into the evening, the final dawns, the last kiss, cuddle or fuck. Often, they went on to resume their ordinary lives beyond the Clinic. But too many of them never did.
Somehow, Cindy was different. They’d met nearly every night since that first at Eros: a few times at a restaurant in the nearby village, but usually here, in the comfort of the wood-panelled snug beneath the portrait of a glowering Churchill, chomping down on his ubiquitous cigar. Not even two weeks, but he’d found himself thinking about her constantly.
They hadn’t even kissed, hadn’t really gotten beyond holding hands. He’d had his hand on her thigh, once, and felt the smoothness of her skin beneath his touch. He’d jerked off more than once thinking of her: moist lips, hot skin, her scent, the promise of full, heavy breasts, the curve of her ass and the tickle of hair, all flaring through his mind before climax.
Spending time with her had often felt like a disorienting ride, a whirlwind of expectations and tone. She’s start flirty, then turn brooding and resentful. Or she’d be all saccharine girly sweetness and shift, abruptly, to crass rudeness, foul language and graphically sexual. She often seemed wiser and wearier than her twenty years. Her mood was all over the place—angry, resentful, sad, joyous, sympathetic, funny and relieved—and yet she never felt… crazy, for want of a better word, but rather as though she was responding to thoughts and surging emotions she barely comprehended and which she had only just started to share with him. He never quite knew where he sat with her and… he found it exhilarating in a way that completely took him by surprise.
Yet her appearance rarely gave any indication to her mood. One night she’d shown up in grey track pants and a baggy sweatshirt that swallowed up her curves, and she’d been all over him, smouldering eyes and flirty, licking her lips and flicking her hair and touching him throughout the night. Another night: the shortest of skirts and tightest of tube tops, with heels taller than her skirt, and she’d spent half the night glaring at him with a fuck-you expression dripping with resentment; only to turn sweet and grateful near the end of the night, hugging him and thanking him for the evening.
And… he loved it.
What he loved most of all, maybe, was the way she’d gradually opened up (as they so often did), moving from the almost-sullen quiet of their first encounter to the lively, convivial chats of recent nights. Early on they’d swapped numbers and starting messaging throughout the day. She’d sent him photos, sometimes getting his opinion on what she was going to wear to the pub that night. She never took his advice.
And day by day, Chad found himself increasingly looking to the evenings, and their time together.
Cindy sighed, a contented sound, as she slid into their booth—their booth. Her lips sparkled as she smiled and she played with a twirl of hair that framed her face, twisting it around her finger. “Fancy meeting you here,” she said.
He raised his pint in salute, and noted hers when she raised it in return. “Going soft?”
“Giving the liver a rest tonight.” She glared at her orange juice, and then formed the cutest little pout. “Doctor’s orders. Sorry.”
Chad grappled for something clever, something light and breezy but came up empty. His usual confidence escaped him. Instead, he grimaced and said nothing.
“Hey, you okay?”
Nodding, he took a deep pull at his beer and then steeling himself, asked, “operation tomorrow, eh?”
“God, I hope so,” she said, and for a moment she became distant, staring into the distance. One of her hands drifted to her side and slowly tracked across curves and clothing. Her lips grew to a slow smile, and he felt her pleasure as a punch to the gut. “I really do.”
“So, I guess this is it, then,” he said. “Final drinks.”
His words brought her back to the table. “Final drinks,” she said, nodding.
“I’m going to miss you,” he blurted out. The words caught him by surprise, and he looked away, flushing with embarrassment. God, what’s wrong with me, he asked himself. A gentle touch on his cheek brought him back around. Cindy was now sitting next to him. He could feel her thigh up against his.
“I’m going to miss you too,” she said. She stared into him, emerald eyes wide and deep and beautiful, and there was something sad and angry there, too. “This week, it’s been difficult. But you—”
“Cindy,” he started, before she silenced him with a kiss.
It took him by surprise, her lips crushing against his, the taste of her lip gloss—cherry—and her perfume, the scent of pale flowers on a hot summer’s day. Her tongue slid into his mouth, danced against his. Instinct brought his hands to her waist—so tiny—and the feeling of lingerie beneath her clothing, boning and fabric; his arm coiled around her waist by instinct and pulled her closer.
He held her close for a long moment. She felt small in his arms. He breathed in the scent of her hair and her breasts pushed into his side, and she trembled slightly in his embrace.
Her hands cradled his face. “I’m sorry, Chad,” she said, pulling away. “I never meant to—”
“You didn’t—”
“It’s not—”
He put his finger to her lips, took a deep breath, and forced a smile. “Let’s start over,” he said.
Staring cross-eyed at his finger on her lips, Cindy smiled. She gave the tip of his finger a quick kiss, grinned, and scooted back opposite him. Sitting there, in the warm half-light of the pub in her white and pink clothes, hair gleaming like burnished gold over her shoulder, eyes and lips and nails shimmering—it suddenly occurred to Chad that he’d never been so immediately and powerfully attracted to a girl. His desire was physical, yes, to judge by the uncomfortable swelling in his pants; but there was something deeper that he struggled to understand.
“You go first,” she said.
Nodding, he scrambled for something to say, still thinking of her scent, her taste, the feeling of her body beneath his touch; his erection hidden beneath the table was very distracting. “Was that a… corset?”
She blushed. “It is.” Her hand fluttered at her side. “It was—my therapist’s idea.”
“To wear a corset?” He gave a lopsided grin. “Jesus, your therapy sessions are way different than mine.”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.” She considered for a moment, then added, “So—umm. Did you know the Clinic has a photography suite?”
He’d used them for a passport photo, once, and dated one of the photographers for a bit; Jasmine: short, quirky and with a fondness for erotic photography he’d initially found fun. She’d taken great pleasure in posing him, dressing him up, taking photos—he still had a few of them.
“Well, my therapist signed me up for a, uh, how to put this—‘fantasy photography session’? To umm, act out certain ideas, externalize some fears—to embrace them, I guess.” Cindy’s face grew steadily redder as she spoke, blushing beneath her makeup, and she couldn’t quite meet his eyes.
He’d heard of this service, of course; it was a popular one. The image at the end was only a small part of the package. After all, for most clients it’d be a lot easier and cheaper to just hire a digital expert exploiting AI photo generation to create an image of them in just about any situation imaginable, in any style.
Rather, it was the experience: of being the bride or groom at a wedding that might never happen; or posing powerfully at the head of the boardroom table as the corporate head, or alternately, sitting demurely to one side, the submissive secretary, and learning from that as well. He’d even taken part in one several months past, an extra in the background—a strange one, all swords and sandals, heroic speeches and buxom princesses.
“It was an interesting afternoon,” she said.
“You’re afraid of corsets?”
She rolled her eyes. “You ever wear one?”
“Yeah, every other weekend.” He laughed. “Of course not. It’s not exactly something men wear, eh?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“Sexy as hell, though,” he added. “What’s it like?”
“What, wearing a corset?”
He nodded.
“Feeling curious?”
He shrugged. “Sure. It’s not something I’m likely to try outside of Halloween, right?”
“Maybe if you play your cards right tonight,” she purred, “I’ll let you slip into mine.”
“Is it tight?”
“Very.”
“Easy to get into?”
“If you do it right.”
He coughed. “We’re still talking about the corset, right?”
She laughed and gave him a little punch in the arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not being very nice tonight, am I? I’m just—nervous, I guess, about tomorrow.”
Chad forced a smile.
“But to answer your question: yes, it’s tight. But not as tight as it could be—like earlier in the day—but the ladies at the studio didn’t overdo it with the lacing before packing me in this outfit and sending me out tonight.” She plucked at the sweater vest in contemplation. “And no, it’s not uncomfortable—well, a lot less than I’d expected, at least when it’s like this. It’s like….” She paused, wrinkling her nose and twirling a bang of hair around her finger. Her fingernails flashed ivory, and Chad felt a hollowness in his belly. “It’s like a firm hug, a constant caress, but one you can’t really get out of. It’s always there. Sitting here, I’m more… here, I guess, feeling this thing wrapped around me. It reminds me to move in certain ways, avoid bending too much.”
Arms akimbo, holding her hands at her waist, she spread her fingers wide, as though trying to touch thumb-to-thumb, index-to-index around her narrowed waist. “And then there’s the little tug from the stockings when I stand, or the feeling of breathlessness when I get a little too excited, climb some stairs or move a bit too quickly. It’s fine so long as I don’t engage in any strenuous activity.” She grinned and fluttered one hand as though to cool herself. “Oh my.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad, actually.”
She smiled and hugged herself. “It feels a bit like I’m wearing a layer of hidden armour, you know, protection against the world.”
Chad laughed. “You’ve never worn armour, have you?”
“You have?”
“Absolutely!” He banged himself on the chest in a display of masculine vigour.
“What? Kevlar body armour? Makrolon face shied?”
“Chainmail hauberk.” He scratched as his chin, remembering a beard he’d long ago shaved off. “Heavy.”
“Bullshit.”
“’tis true,” he said, taking her hand in his, bowing his head. “Milady.” He kissed the back of her hand softly, and when he looked up he was surprised the effect his kiss had on her: she was blushing, lips half-parted with a sigh. “They were filming up at the ski lodge, some kind of period piece, and….”
As he launched into the story, he felt back on comfortable ground, recapturing the special place they’d occupied this past week. The chat and banter, the sharing of stories and the gradual growing confidence, on her part, to also share until it was no longer just him talking most of the time. He was going to miss this. He was going to miss her.
“Was this before or after the thing with the heiress, her butler and the diamond dildo?” Cindy asked.
“The diamond was just the piss-hole,” he said. “The dildo was gold-plated.” He thought a moment. “Before.”
“I see.” She hid a small smile behind her fingers. Her eyes were happy, and for some reason that made him happy, too. “So… what was your point?”
“I had a point?”
She made a strangling sound in the back of her throat. “You’re an idiot, aren’t you?”
“Probably.” He gazed into his pint. “But clever enough to know you’re changing the subject.”
“Am I?”
Her hand was still in his, had been ever since he’d reached across the table to gift her his gallant kiss. She hadn’t pulled back, and her slender fingers and ivory nails were achingly pretty, hinting at purity and innocence, the skin pale and soft, something he felt was delicate and worth protecting, like a silk flower or a terrible secret. Clasping her hand between his, he leaned closer.
“What’re you nervous about tomorrow for?”
“Because….” And here she hesitated, eyes dancing to him and away again, and she stared at the floor as she answered in a quiet voice. “Just because,” she said.
Chad watched her and suppressed the urge to move to her side and hold her. “Did it work?”
“Did what work?”
“The photoshoot. Did you… learn, anything? Face your fears?”
At that, she looked back at him and slowly smiled again. “You know what? Yeah—maybe I did.” She thought for a moment. “I thought she was fucking nuts when she suggested it, but—it wasn’t half bad. Totally professional and really… reassuring? Like, they never made me feel weird or anything.
“Thing is, I’ve always had a thing about control. You know, as though I need to be in control, and there’ve been times in my life where everything’s fallen apart and feels totally shit and the only thing I’ve got remaining that I can have any influence over is—myself. And so long as I can control… well, me, then maybe things aren’t so bad, they haven’t hit rock bottom.
“And I think this left me with a real fear of letting others take charge. Of giving up agency and letting others do things—for me but also to me. And lately—well, I haven’t exactly been, you know, in charge of my own life, and it’s been… hard.
“But today, giving myself over to these people, letting them dress me and pose me, telling me what to do and just going along with the flow, it was… liberating, in a way? Maybe even fun.” She tapped a finger against her pinks lips and smiled. “Sometimes.”
Chad listened and nodded, and her words resonated with the few glimpses into a life she’d shared only reluctantly throughout the week. He didn’t know how much of it was true. He suspected she was a consummate and skilled liar. But he also accepted that she’d likely never share what had really happened in her past—probably couldn’t, even if she trusted him enough—but how he wished he could be there for her when the truth finally emerged.
“If it taught me one thing, it was that I didn’t always have to be in charge, and that something good, exciting even, can come out letting someone else take over. Submitting, letting someone else be dominant.” She nibbled on her lower lip in thought. “Maybe? Because in a weird way, at the same time, I was always in charge; like, I could stop the whole thing anytime I wanted. And there was something fun about being totally in control even when I was, like, totally….” She trailed off and blushed a deep crimson.
“You were totally…?” It was fascinating watching her work through these ideas. Her words rang hollow, as though reciting the lesson she knew she ought to have learned rather than genuine feeling. Behind the blush and embarrassment, he picked up a current of anger and possibly, fear.
“Tied up,” she whispered, eyes sliding away and then back, glaring at him as though daring him to comment.
He raised an eyebrow but stayed quiet.
Reassured, Cindy continued. Her fingers danced from earring to hair, fingertip to corset-induced curves. “And all this was part of it, too. The clothes and hair and makeup, and the posing, it all really pushed me out of my comfort zone.” She gave a dry laugh. “Like, really really far out of my comfort zone. A few times I nearly freaked out, which, by the way, is so much worse when you’re stuck in a corset. But they were so easy-going, so relaxed that they always got me through the moment, and—”
She smiled wickedly. “Wanna see?”
“Yes,” Chad answered. “Yes, I do.”
She slid her phone over to him. He picked it up, aware of her eyes on him. He looked at the first photo, and the next, onto the third one and back again. Shifting uncomfortably in his seat, he hid his response behind a long pull of his pint glass, emptying it and willing his erection to die down again.
“Pretty sexy, huh?” she said.
“Is that….” He coughed. “Was that the Sin-DI photoshoot in -Lumen-?”
“And more.” Cindy grinned. “It was running pretty late by the time they finished the final photos. They cleaned me up, then got me ready for tonight as a little bonus. Told me to just keep the corset on.” Her eyes shimmered with wicked humour as she watched him. “It’s all bridal lingerie under here,” she said, slapping her flank.
He swiped back and forth between the three photos: pre-date Cindy, posing with Champagne flute, pigtails and sparkling smile; Cindy posed in a wedding dress, an ivory hourglass; and post-nuptial Cindy, resplendent in ivory lingerie and heels, on her back in black-and-white photography.
“You’re killing me here,” he said.
She grinned.
He swiped though a few more photos, variations on the originals but from different angles or with stylistic edits. “So—where’s the other one?”
The colour that’d begun to fade from her face returned, brighter than before, up to the tip of her ears. She snatched her phone back. “None of your business, mister.”
He laughed. “I was joking,” he said, but then watching her squirm in her seat, his jaw dropped. “No way. You—”
She looked away.
“Corset, harness, leash…,” he ticked each item off.
“Stop.”
“Cuffs, binders….”
“Please.”
“Bridle and bit?”
Cindy groaned and buried her face in her hands.
“Wow.”
She peaked between her fingers. “You must think I’m some kind of colossal slut or something.”
He cocked an eyebrow and, genuinely curious, asked, “why?”
“Because it’s… kinky and weird and perverted?”
“Hey, I’m firmly in the ‘sexually liberated’ camp on this one. Yeah, it’s exploitative and kinky as hell, and I certainly couldn’t imagine doing something like that. But I reckon it takes some serious balls to do that kind of thing.”
“Exactly!”
“You wanted to prove you’ve got the balls?”
“Sort of,” she said. “Yeah, I guess I kinda did.”
“So can I see the photo?”
“Not on your fucking life.” Then she grinned. “But if you play your cards right tonight, I might just have a special gift for you.”
She disappeared to the toilet after that, and he went to the bar to order another beer and an orange juice. It was getting busy, and the counter was crowded as he waited. A girl next to him tried to catch his eye—pretty and tall, friendly and wearing a nice dress; he’d seen her around before.
But he wasn’t interested. Returning to the booth he saw that Cindy was already back, sitting with a little clutch purse open on the table. She was touching up her makeup, and he watched as she meticulously painted her lips and fixed her mascara, swept a brush across her cheeks. Chad watched and waited, unwilling to interrupt the moment.
Only after she cleared away did he rejoin her in the booth. To his surprise, she slid in next to him in the close space of the snug. Instinct once again brought his arm around her shoulders and then she lay her head against him, and Chad realised he couldn’t do this for much longer. There was a rumbling in his chest and he never wanted her to move and he wanted—more; something he could never have.
Cindy appeared preoccupied, comfortable in his embrace but staring at her Asklepios armlet. She kept tapping at it, lost in thought as he took a silent drink. He waited and eventually she shifted in his arms. Facing him, she looked sad and for a moment it felt as though his heart stopped.
“Chad,” she said. “I just wanted to say—”
“Hey, hey—you don’t—”
“Shut the fuck up,” she interrupted, giving him a punch to the arm. “Let the lady speak.”
“Ouch.” He rubbed at his arm. “You’re no lady.”
She gave a dry laugh. “True. But seriously. Chad.” She curled her legs beneath her bum in the narrow space of the snug and sat back on her haunches, heels jutting to one side. Cindy raised herself to his height. The pleated skirt rode up her thigh and he glimpsed snowy stocking tops, garter tabs and a flash of pale skin.
Then she reached up and held his face between her hands, long fingers tracing the line of his jaw, passing gently over stubble and threading into his hair. She held him and kissed him again, deeply, pressing up against him so that he could feel the corsetry beneath her clothes and the soft crush of her tits against his chest. His hands drifting down her side, over and then under her skirt as he gripped the firm spheres of her ass. He felt her grow tense, and then relax and draw even closer and shudder beneath him, kissing him ever more furiously, almost desperately.
And then—suddenly—“Thank you,” she said, softly, a hot whisper in his ear.
He gazed at her in wonder and before he could speak, she lay a finger over his lips. “You’re one of the good ones, aren’t you?” she said.
“You’re a good man, Chad.” Cindy gazed at him in what felt like admiration. The tiniest of smiles tugged at the corner of her lips. “When I needed you to talk, you talked. When I needed you to listen, you listened. And when I just needed some quiet but couldn’t bear to be alone—you were there. You never pushed too hard, or took advantage, even though—” and here her hand brushed against the all too obvious erection tenting his trousers—“I know you want me.”
Cindy’s finger left his lips to tenderly draw across his cheek, and he leaned into the palm of her hand. “It’s been a tough two weeks, Chad, and… I really don’t know what’s going to happen next. Everything might change tomorrow. Either way, in a day or two, Cindy will be gone.”
He closed his eyes and focused on the touch of her skin against his. He closed his eyes and focused on the sound of her voice.
“Whatever happens, I just wanted to say… thank you, Chad.”
Her touch disappeared. He opened her eyes. She’d shuffled back to her side of the booth. She was watching him, chewing with what seemed like indecision on her bottom lip. One hand rested on her armlet, where she kept tapping the hard plastic with her fingernail.
“So is this goodbye?” Taking a deep breath, and feeling empty inside, he asked, “Is that what you want?”
Cindy stared at him and seemed to come to a decision. That hint of a smile grew to a full smile—by way of something darker, a scowl of frustration or self-loathing she couldn’t quite conceal quickly enough.
“No,” Cindy said. She reached across the table and held his hand. “I’m tired of drinking orange juice and I’m tired of wearing this goddamn corset. I want you to come back to my place, Chad. I want you to undress me, slowly; I want you to peel me out of these clothes.
“And then I want to give you a proper thank you, because you deserve it and because you’d never ever ask for it. I want to suck your cock, Chad and give you the best fucking blowjob of your life.” Her grip tightened painfully around his hand and she fixed him with her gaze in a way that he found intensely arousing. “That’s what I want.
“So, what do you say, Chad? You coming back to mine?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am.”
Scene Fifteen: Bio-engineered Venus on a Half-shell
Katherine left.
With her gone, Jon seemed to deflate and sink into his seat. He was far gone into his wine by this point, sullen and quiet. Leaving him to find his own way home would be best, but in good conscience Crystal knew she couldn’t do that. Instead, she knelt next to the man to whom she owed so much.
“Come on, Jon,” she said. “Let’s get you to bed.”
Bleary eyes fixated on her. The wine had brought out an angry flush in his cheeks and nose, ugly splotches visible under his patchy beard. He hadn’t shaved in days. She hadn’t noticed, preoccupied as she’d been with David. And Cindy. Jon had never been one to care about his appearance, but she hadn’t seen him like this since the divorce.
He grunted and lurched to his feet, still holding an open bottle of DeGrave ‘33. Crystal helped him along, out into the corridor, quiet and dark at this time of night, soft lights rising and falling with their passage. “Fucking Thelma,” he muttered, and “nice…” he slurred, his eyes fixed on her stocking-clad legs. Fortunately, it wasn’t far to his office—the sofa there had served as his bed many times before and would once again.
“Here we go,” she said. “Sleep it off.”
“Fucking mediocrity,” he slurred. “Bitch.”
“Go on,” she said, taking the bottle and holding his wrist to the access panel. The door clicked and unlocked, swinging open silently.
“Melody,” he said.
Crystal sighed. “She’s been in touch?”
“Getting remarried,” he said. “To—” he hiccupped, “Tyrone, that idiot, that pedestrian piece of shit.” A shudder passed through him. “I miss her, Crystal, so much.”
“Oh Jon,” she said. “I’m sorry, I really am.” Impulsively, she leaned down and kissed him, once and lightly, on the cheek.
He looked at her, then, fixating on his wrist, where she still held him, and then up her arm, gaze crawling from shoulder to neckline and the exposed curve of her heavy breasts, the line of her neck, upsweep of hair and finally resting on her lips. Jonathon tried for a charming grin that drunkenness made creepy and lecherous.
“You’re beautiful, you know that?”
She hated that his words brought a little flutter to her stomach.
“You want to come in, Crystal?” he asked, his hand falling heavily on her waist. “Like the other time?”
Crystal smiled, sadly, and shook her head. “That was once. And long ago.” Stepping back, she freed herself of his grip, but reached up and brushed the back of her hand against his cheek. “Sleep it off, Jon.”
She left him with the bottle. Crystal turned and walked away and left him alone.
He stood at the threshold to his office. He picked up the bottle and took a swig. He knew he should head into the room and collapse onto the sofa. Sleep it off, as his friend said. But he knew he wouldn't. He shuddered to think of the incoming hangover, then flushed with indignation. It wasn’t fair. Cindy—David—whatever; they didn’t suffer from hangovers—possibly—another unexpected benefit of the process—the process flushing the brain clean whilst they slept off the effects of booze.
Sleep….
Jonathon stumbled into his office, leaving the door open behind him. He fell into his office chair and woke his computer. Drunken jabs at the keyboard brought up the live feed on his client. The tracker on David’s wrist had him back on Asklepios grounds—back in his accommodations—a quick check confirmed another presence in the room: Chad Jenkins.
Fucking Canadian bastard, Jonathon thought. Jenkins was a bicycle half the Clinic had ridden, and what was he? An idiot, a barely-educated ski instructor; and everybody loved him. Cindy certainly seemed to. And I bet her lips, those full, plump lips, shiny and pink are wrapped around his cock right now. Lips I engineered! He imagined her head bobbing up and down between that idiot’s legs, the long hair falling across his lap, the full, pert breasts—those curves he created—felt the swelling in his pants and thought, mine, all that ought to be mine.
Jonathon lurched back into the corridor, still carrying the half-full bottle of wine. The elevator welcomed him, dinging as it pulled him down into the sub-levels beneath the Clinic. When he entered the chamber, the lights came on at half-strength, the monitoring AI familiar with his habits. He pulled a chair over and collapsed into it.
“Hello, Doctor,” Fosters purred. “I was expecting you.”
Jonathon grunted. He stared at his prisoner. Fosters was at his—no, her—most beautiful, now; only yesterday they’d removed her from the cage and carved away the excess flesh, incinerating the grotesque mass of rampant growth, half-formed limbs and tumorous eruptions. The scars and cuts had already healed over; by tomorrow, the first new growths would begin; but tonight—tonight only—she was….
“Thank you,” she said, voice low and sultry. Turning slowly, she slid her hands down her flanks, slowly tracing the exaggerated curves of femininity as she reached down to her calves, bending over with easy suppleness, perfectly formed ass high in the air. “I feel… mmm, good tonight, doctor.”
He knew it was all a product of the extreme androgen intolerance generated by the first trial of the regenerative process; and that the feminising of the subject had been pushed to even further extremes by the ongoing experiments he’d run on Fosters; and that this gorgeous, lithe creature was really a man, despite the exhibition of hyper-femininity. She was a caricature, a doll—his doll—a devil in the guise of an angel.
But as she stood, one delicate hand cupping her groin, one slender arm across her chest, long raven hair tumbling in midnight waves to mid-thigh, full-lipped, wide-eyed, soft and curvy and grinning wickedly, a bio-engineered Venus on a half-shell—he wanted her. Jonathon desired her with painful intensity, with an ache in his chest that made his breath run short.
“Dance,” he groaned.
“Like last time?”
He nodded. She began to sway and turn, hefting her firm, prodigious tits for him, caressing herself, moaning and calling out to him, always careful to keep her penis hidden and out of his view, even as she slid a finger in and out of her pussy. Jonathon took another pull from the bottle and set it aside and unbuckled his trousers and let them fall to his ankles.
With a sound halfway between a sob and grunt, he pulled out his throbbing, erect cock. Jonathon masturbated, watching his creation mince and prance, twirl and fondle herself.
Fosters smiled, watching him. She licked her lips and waited.
Author’s Notes:
If you’ve enjoyed this – please, leave a review! If you didn’t like it – please, leave a review! It’s nice knowing whether people are still reading the story. And if you really like it, and want early access to works in progress, sneak peaks, and to read the rest of the Interlude early, why not pop over to the patreon (https://www.patreon.com/fakeminsk)?
For those following from the very beginning, I’ve made some tweaks as I’ve come back to the story. Cindy’s surname changed to Bellamy (originally ‘Long’) and David’s age moved upwards into the thirties – this gave room for more backstory. The encounter with Steele was never really fleshed out in the first series, so finally gets some overdue attention. Jonathon “Scooter’s” personality has probably changed the most, but hopefully it makes for a more rounded character. Inconsistencies will all get tidied up when I give the whole story a final edit at some future point.
Constant in All Other Things 2
Interlude II
by
Fakeminsk ([email protected])
“Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.”
Much Ado About Nothing
Synopsis:
David Sanders’ stay at the Asklepios Clinic comes to an end. Will he return to masculinity, or be forced to resume Cindy’s life—that of a young, female secretary—for another six months?
What has gone before:
David Sanders saw something he shouldn't have: his boss, pharmaceutical magnate Jeremiah Steele, murdered the son of an underworld rival. Placed in witness protection, an assassination attempt forces David into the disguise of Cindy, a younger woman. For months he suffers the ignominy of living a life he despises, his torture both alleviated and acerbated once discovered by Julia, a jilted ex-girlfriend. During a return visit to the Asklepios Clinic, he discovers the secret of his transformation; confronts his handlers; explores his feelings; encounters an enemy; and plays dress-up.
Part Three: Acceptance
Scene Twelve: A Colourful Life Beckoned and Winked
On the final day of David Saunders’ manhood, he awoke in an unusually cheerful mood. He was alone. Chad had left several hours earlier. Wisps of the previous night danced hand-in-hand with exhaustion but like any dawn mist faded with the rising sun.
The morning started like most others. First, he stumbled into the bathroom for a piss. Even after several months, the incongruity of holding his cock with finely manicured fingers as he looked past the swell of breasts brought a frisson of discomfort. Passing through the living room back to the bedroom, he ignored the detritus of last night: stockings like emptied husks lying limp and high from the mirror frame; the ivory corset, rigid and unlaced, a clam shell pried open to expose the pearl within; delicate panties, a scrap of satin and lace, hanging from a doorhandle.
Instead, knowing there wouldn’t be time to hit the Clinic’s gym, David dropped to the floor and began the first set of push-ups. The heat of exertion burned away the ghosts of the evening.
Sometime later, he showered. He shaved legs and pits and washed out his mass of blonde curls—for the last time, he thought. Filled with memories of the previous days and of last night, he jerked off into the swirl of foam and water. Had he known it would be his last time bar once he may have made more of the event but tired as he was, it proved a desultory affair, perfunctory and unsatisfying,
Afterwards, lying on his bed and tucking and taping his testicles and cock back, he marvelled how something so odd, so outside of his normal life experiences only a short six months ago had become so mundane. He slid into a snug pair of panties and secured everything in place. This I won’t miss, he thought; nor this, as he strapped himself into a padded push up bra.
Then he dressed. The resentment, frustration and anxiety had faded with time, but this morning he felt especially troubled by the decision as to what to wear. Excessively girly? Something masculine or reflective of his real age; both? What image did he want to present? Comfortable or alluring? He’d quickly learned that for women, the two were often incompatible.
There was a code to female fashion, a syntax and grammar far more complex than the simple language of men. What was normally learned by instinct and unconsciously grown into by most girls in their youth—the unconscious picking up of nuance, slang and idioms—had been for him months of gruelling study. David knew he was barely literate and worried he too often misspoke—that the clothes he wore and the way he wore them broadcast a message he never intended. At what point did heel height shift from “poised” to “prostitute”? Skirt or dress length seemed to fluctuate between “feminine,” and “flirty” so easily. Not enough skin and he might come off as dowdy, boring or cold; too much and suddenly: slut. No makeup? Lazy. Too much? Frivolous, unserious.
As a man, he’d never worried about the message his grey suit, blue shirt, straight tie and loafers delivered as he strode confidently through the corridors of work.
His hand passed over the hanging clothes. So many colours, textures, from the lacy tickle fringing sleeve and collar to the heavy stiffness of boning and shapewear. Unbidden, memories fluttered to mind with touch. Distaste and anger, at the black mesh top he wore his first day here; unexpected fondness for the slinky blue dress; and the peach sundress, cleaned and ironed but still stained, to his eyes, with blood.
His hand paused over a skirt. Rubbing the fabric between thumb and forefinger, he felt the slight prick of heavy wool, the slickness of the inner lining. How his relationship with clothes—with women’s clothing—had changed! Especially in the past month it seemed, under Julia’s tutelage and Crystal’s urgings.
It occurred to him that this might be the last time: the last time slipping on skimpy underwear, rolling stockings up his legs, stepping into a skirt or pulling a tight shirt over the curve of tits. He knew this was unlikely; he hoped, with an intensity that stole his breath, that it was true.
Would he miss any of this?
A moment’s indecision and he pulled the skirt from the closet. The Clinic had done a remarkable job in filling his closet and drawers. Some had been waiting for him on arrival, and more bought or printed on demand per Crystal’s request. Everything fit impeccably, but then who better knew his body, its very dimensions, its deepest secrets? They’d created it, designed the template and engineered the flesh; written a life story into the skin and poured the essence of David Saunders into the vessel that had once been Cindy Bellamy.
With a self-deprecating snarl, he grabbed a colourful shirt and stepped away from the closet. He thought of last night, and the day to come, and shook his head. Enough with the melodramatics, he decided. Get dressed. Don’t be late.
This past week he’d learned to rely on the smart tech built into mirror and wardrobe to build his outfit for the day: the room knew its contents and made suggestions, projecting the illusion of clothes over his reflected frame in the mirror. Equally, the vanity made playful suggestions for makeup and hair, earrings and accessories. A quick search online or query with a fashion bot produced more combinations and possibilities than he could process. If an item was missing, the Clinic could swiftly create and deliver it. It was something he’s never needed in his male life, and well beyond Cindy’s meagre means, but which proved a godsend this past week.
More often than not, when faced with an overwhelming range of options he’d fall back on his male gaze, choosing an ensemble he thought was sexy, picking the illusionary girl he’d most like to ogle, have on his arm, or fuck—and rue that the girl would be him, and that others would doubtless be thinking the same way when they saw him.
This morning, however, he assembled the outfit on his own. He started with the shirt and built from there. Sheer, patterned pantyhose to present slender, shapely legs; black pleated mini skirt, detailed with shiny gold buttons; the horizontally striped t-shirt with a high neckline, three-quarter sleeves and cut out shoulders. Slim headband to hold back his hair, and knee-high boots—a first for him—heeled of course—though nothing too high, chunky with a bit of platform, a modest boost to his height. Pulling up the zip on the boots and feeling the pliable material caress his calves brought another shiver of pleasurable distress as he grudgingly acknowledged enjoying the sensation.
If there was one thing he’d miss when he abandoned the world of femininity, it might be the shoes; not the pinch or strain or discomfort, but the cultural permission—encouragement, even—to fake his height, to grab a few centimeters at the expense of a little stability. Doing the same as a man was an invitation to scorn.
The thought flashed across his mind unbidden, and he quickly suppressed the thought. You won’t miss this, he insisted. Any of it. But then standing in front of the mirror, he turned this way and that and—somewhat to his chagrin but equally to his pleasure—admired the young woman in reflection.
That woman was him; and he looked great.
Ten minutes to brush out his hair and dry it. He enjoyed the golden cascade over his shoulder, the streaks of purple and pink. Another ten minutes for makeup and accessories. He picked out dangly earrings, a pair of colourful bracelets and slid on a few sparkly rings.
Finally, with stomach rumbling he made his way to the Clinic canteen. The weather had turned with predictable swiftness over the past few days, blistering heat giving way to blustery winds and cold. Oranges and reds danced in the foliage, the trees already succumbing to the inevitability of a brief autumn and bitter winter. The first leaves fluttered and flew across the pebbled path, and David grumbled and questioned his choice of clothing and clutched his skirt as the wind’s fingers pulled and plucked at the hem.
It was with some relief he entered the canteen. God, I’m sick of this, he thought, contemplating the intersection of fashion and weather.
And then he thought, I’m sick of this, too: it was impossible to not notice the appraising glances flashed his way by both staff and other clients. The women he assumed were appraising his style, makeup, judging the way he held his hand at his side or tucked back his hair as he entered the room. The men were rating him, tits and ass, legs and lips, scoring him against some arbitrary scoreboard of their own preferences before returning to their food. A few might stare longer: picturing those glossy, full lips up close, the touch of long nails against their skin, or imagine their hands rudely grabbing the fine ass barely concealed by the short skirt, hauling her close, the press of soft breasts up against Chad’s firm body, and….
Flushing red, he scurried to the counter to collect his breakfast.
Whatever, he told himself. He’d been used to appraising and approving glances as a man. He’d been a good-looking man, after all, very much so and took the gaze of others as a given. But it was different as a woman, somehow; especially a young one.
He sat and began devouring his breakfast: eggs and toast, bacon and sausage and hash browns, a meal that belied the size of the girl eating it.
“This seat taken?”
Stifling a groan, David looked up from his breakfast at the woman standing next to the table.
She was young, though a few years older than Cindy. Not much of a looker: ruddy face and beefy arms, mousy hair cropped short, but bright-eyed and tall. The woman was plump and dressed in baggy clothes that hid any hint of curves but looked appealingly comfortable. Her only concession to femininity appeared a swipe of dark lipstick and a simple gold stud in each ear. David felt suddenly vaguely ridiculous, prim and over-dressed, and resented her for it.
“I’m Ivy,” she said, her voice inflected with the precise intonations of expensive foreign education and a vaguely European accent he couldn’t place, maybe Italian or Spanish. I bet you are, he thought, but feeling a slight warmth in his Asklepios bracelet he sighed and answered “Cindy,” and offered a distant smile.
She sat opposite and made a desultory stab at her food: a small bowl of something that looked almost like porridge, a grey-white protein-rich calorie-reduced sludge decorated with slices of apple. “I know it’s for my own good,” she said, “but I hate what this place feeds me.” Her eyes widened at the sight of David’s breakfast. “Not fair,” she moaned.
Shrugging, he cut into an egg and moped up the yolk with a slice of toast.
“I mean look at you.” Ivy waved a spoon at him. “You look fucking gorgeous,” she said. “How do you keep so slim, eating like that?”
“Good genes?”
Ivy grunted. “Not fair.”
He speared a slice of bacon. “Want it?”
Her eyes betrayed wanton desire. “You evil bitch,” she said. “Do I want it? Yeah, I want it.” She snatched the bacon with plump fingers. “Like I want to get out of this place.” She took a bite and flung the remainder back at his plate, then stuck her fingers in her mouth, sucking at dribbles of grease. “Oh God, that’s good.”
Ivy, it turned out as she explained in some detail, was in line to inherit a family fortune, a ridiculous sum of assets and property and investments—conditional on her returning home a “proper young lady,” she spat. “So they sent me here, because I crashed out of the local fat farms and finishing schools. I was an ‘embarrassment,’ they said. I was bringing ‘shame on the family’ with my ‘vile debauchery,’ they said.” She gave a bark of laughter. “It’s like, the first time they’ll turn a blind eye, but after a half-dozen times with a strap on pegging some little princess in latex and suddenly you’re the antichrist or something, you know what I’m saying?”
“You know we’ve just met, right?” David said. “I don’t know you.”
“This thing says you’re okay,” she answered, tapping her Asklepios bracelet. “Not that I trust the bastards that run this place.”
“Yeah. No kidding.”
“But you seem okay,” Ivy said. “Bet they think you’d be a good influence on me.”
“Me?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Well, yeah… I mean, look at you? You’re my parents’ wet dream: slim and beautiful, prim and perfectly dressed and presented. You’re what this place is trying to make me into.”
He couldn’t help himself. David laughed out loud. “I seriously doubt it.”
They chatted over the rest of their breakfast, and he found himself warming to her. He could sympathise with her story of being made to a live a life not of her choosing; her hatred of femininity coaching, lessons on poise and fashion and behaviour, training her to instinctively present a self she’d never wanted to be. “These kinky lunatics had me in a photoshoot, can you believe it? It was totally insane. Heels and a girdle—yes, a fucking girdle, can you believe it?—and spiral bra and polka-dotted housemaker dress, like something out of a century-old postcard! And then a debutant ball, posing for some bullshit coming-out party in a poufy gown.” She snorted. “As if I need coming out.”
“I can sympathise. Been there, done that.”
“Yeah, right.” She made a show of looking him over. “Prissy little princess like you? You’re already perfect. You are the fantasy. What could you possibly act out?”
And because he resented her calling him prissy, but also liked her brash manner, he showed her the picture from the -Lumen- photoshoot, the one he never showed Chad, the photo of corseted bondage.
Ivy’s eyes widened with a satisfying combination of shock and desire. “Careful princess,” she said, “or I’ll have you face down in your eggs bent over this table for a spanking.”
David put his phone away. “You haven’t even drank your coffee yet.”
“True,” Ivy said. “Caffeine first. Spanking second. Then I’ll put you in your place.”
“My place?”
“Or mine, I’m easy.” Ivy grinned; David could see newly kindled intrigue and respect in her. “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?”
“You have no idea,” he said drily.
She sat quietly for a moment, idly digging into her breakfast, before asking around a mouthful of protein-rich mush: “so what’re in here for, then?”
To safeguard me from a sociopath. As a science experiment. Therapy for a therapist. A damaged woman’s revenge. Or maybe: I’m here because I want to live, live long enough so that I can revenge myself against the world.
But since David couldn’t speak his truth, he instead shared Cynthia Bellamy’s truth, or at least what he knew of it from her profile, read those many months ago and explored this past week in conversation with Crystal.
“I tried to kill myself,” he said, poking at the last bit of sausage on his plate. “Repeatedly.” And succeeded, David thought with some sadness. And now you’ve got me living the life you didn’t want.
“Jesus.” Ivy put down her spoon. “Why?”
“They called it body dysmorphia brought on by survivor’s guilt. My parents died, like, in a car crash a couple of years ago. It took me quite a bit of therapy to understand this, but they weren’t very good people, my parents. I was never good enough, you see. They loved me. I guess. In their way. Or rather, they loved a version of me that I never quite matched up to, if that makes sense.”
Ivy grimaced. “Yeah. It does.”
“Anyway. They died. Car crash. And I blamed myself, even though I wasn’t there and being there wouldn’t have made a difference. And all the doubts and fears were amplified after that. I obsessed over my appearance. Tried to become the person my parents wanted me to be. Of course, with them dead the ideal became impossible, their approval unattainable.
“We’d been well off before the crash, and all that money came to me. It’s paying for this place. Before, it paid for… well, everything else. I sought validation in other people’s opinion, men and women, and you can imagine how that went. Eventually, though, makeup and clothes weren’t enough. Turned to surgery, little corrections to flaws that didn’t exist that grew to bigger fixes that always left me feeling worse than before.”
Ivy’s hand reached across the table and took his. “Princess,” she said. “You’re beautiful.”
A sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob escaped. “And yet I still hate this body,” he said. “I hate it so much. I hate the way I look and I hate the way I dress and the way I act.”
And he could see from the bemused look on Ivy’s face that she simply couldn’t understand how someone as pretty as Cindy could hate their own flesh so deeply. Reflected in Ivy’s eyes, David glimpsed the existential horror the real Cynthia Bellamy must have felt, every day, hating what she saw in the mirror but unable to look away. It must have been a self-loathing surpassing even his own.
His bracelet suddenly vibrated and flashed the time. “Oh, look at that. I’ve got to go,” he said.
Ivy let go of his hand. “It was nice meeting you, Princess.”
“Yeah.” He took a deep breath. “Same.”
“You ever want to talk,” she said, and slipped him a card. It was a business card: her full name, contact details: Ivy Burgess, and a local address. “You ever want to catch up again, look me up.”
Thinking it unlikely that he would ever meet her again, he left the canteen. Guided by his bracelet, he quickly found his way through unfamiliar corridors to a place he’d never visited at the Clinic, the infirmary.
The infirmary was a bit of an oddity. In a facility designed for the healing and betterment of the ultra-rich or otherwise fortunate, most medical concerns were dealt with through bespoke services, with privacy during both procedures and convalescence. But not everyone at Asklepios was a client. Accidents were inevitable among the massive staff that worked the site, and those needing recovery time ended up here.
It was still one of the nicer medical facilities he’d visited, David noticed as he stepped through a door, with large open windows and subdued colours. Individual beds were given a generous space, and from the smell of it, the food was a significant step above typical hospital fair.
The long hall was mostly empty this morning as he worked his way past several beds, stepping in and out of shafts of watery sunlight. He noted his reflection in a bedside mirror, the gilt gleam of hair, the flash of red lips, and he stood a little straighter, chest out, as he approached his destination.
The man was sitting up in bed, eating breakfast, watching the news on a retractable screen. Watching him from a distance, David saw footage of the escalating conflict overseas. The report finished on an image of a burned-out husk of a tank before fading to a graphic of a viral cell. A graph showed domestic infection levels rising, the scroll along the bottom of the screen indicating government officials were considering the usual short-circuit lockdowns to break the spread. Talking heads he couldn’t hear argued, their expressions serious.
He doesn’t look that bad, David tried to convince himself as he approached, noting the care the Clinic had taken of his injuries, the healing bruises, bandages and casts. But when the man turned at the echoing sound of heels on the hard infirmary floor, the man winced with pain and his face remained bruised beneath a week’s growth of stubble.
With one lip split, and an eye still reddened by burst vessels, he watched the girl’s curiously and without fear. There was an inquisitiveness to his gaze as he fixed on David’s face.
David saw the flicker of recognition. He braced himself for the man’s inevitable anger, accusations or misogynistic slurs. Instead, he was taken aback as the man’s face split into a giant grin revealing stained and broken teeth.
“Well, Jesus!” he exclaimed. “It’s you!”
“Hello Mal.” David offered a little wave.
“Sit down, sit down!” Mal gestured with an awkward sweep of one arm, the other one broken, immobilised and healing in a cast. David stepped closer and felt the man’s gaze sweep back and forth over him, assessing him—but not in the same way as the men in the canteen. There was a keen appraisal in this man’s eyes rather than simple lust.
“Fuck a duck,” the man said and whistled. “Look at you! You’re a pretty little thing, ain’t ya?” He shook his head in disbelief and winced in pain. “And served me my ass three ways from Wednesday.”
David pulled up a chair, smoothed down the miniskirt and sat next to the bed, straight backed and knees pressed together. On the flickering screen, the news report shifted once again: images from far, far away as a ship continued its long journey to Mars. No longer trailing glittering crystals of ice, the brief update on Zhao and her crew summarised recent events: one dead; damage repaired; the potentiality of human endeavour.
He kept a wary distance from the man but offered a tentative smile. “How are you feeling?”
“I’ve felt worse,” he grunted.
“I suppose I should apologise.”
“Don’t.” Mal scowled. “I deserved it.”
“Still….” David waved his hand vaguely at the battered man. “You look awful.”
“Best I’ve felt in years,” Mal answered. “I needed a serious ass kicking. You have no idea how fucked up I was in here.” He bumped his temple with a fist. “What shit I was on. I was in a dark place, a really dark place; you know, the kinda place so dark it blinds ya to the nightmares but funny thing is, you can always see your nightmares, aye, and remember them, no matter how tightly you squeeze your eyes shut.” He winked at her. “I’m betting y’know what I’m talkin’ about, eh, little girl?”
“Me?” David gave a deliberately languid shrug. “I’m just a pretty little thing.”
He laughed, coughed, and grimaced. “Sure.” With a press of a button at his side, he raised his seat slightly and wincing, turned to face him more directly. Again, the assessing eye, sweeping across his frame but with little attention to tits and ass. Rather, Mal seemed to be searching for something.
“Anyway. You don’t go filling that pretty blonde head of yours with guilt for beating up ol’ Mal. I had it coming, and getting my ass knocked into this place’s the best thing could’ve happened to me. What’s her name, that tough-ass bitch boss woman of yours, Ms Smith?”
David blinked. “You mean Agent K—Katherine?”
“Yeah, tha’s her.” Mal smiled. “Whatta gal, right? Anyway, she’s the one got me in here. Dunno why—not like I could’ve afforded’t otherwise. She didn’t explain none, just passed by to say I was here on her expense and so long as I played nice, I could stay. So I’mma playing nice. Meanwhile, they’ve cleaned me up real good here,” he said. “Cleaner than a poop shoot after a green tea enema at a detox spa.”
That’s when David saw it, the hidden gesture, the subtle curve of the finger and twitch of the hand. David gave the expected counter-sign, with his hand held low by his thigh.
Mal gave a slow nod.
“So what’s your name, pretty girl?”
“Cynthia.” David smoothed back his hair, tucked behind one ear a few strands that had escaped the hairband. “Bellamy. But everybody calls me Cindy.”
“Well, Cindy, I owe y’a favour, and Mal don’t like being in debt.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way to pay me back.”
Mal laughed, so hard he clutched his side and groaned. A machine beeped, the sound somehow anxious. With hurried and heavy steps, a nurse approached, glaring disapprovingly at David as he moved to lower Mal back into a resting position. Crystal may have pulled strings to enable the visit, but David knew he shouldn’t outstay his welcome.
“Sorry,” he said to the nurse.
“You’ve got five minutes,” the nurse answered, brow furrowed with concentration as he checked his patient’s vitals. “He gets tired easily.”
“’Cuz you won’t let me get the fuck outta bed!” Mal shouted.
The nurse fixed him with a steely glare and his patient grumbled and subsided. “Five minutes,” he repeated to David, before retreating.
“Goddamn pissant tyrants!” Mal mumbled under his breath, then gave a little grin and wink. “I jus’ love to wind ‘em up. Best doctors I’ve ever had, and I’ve known a few.”
“I bet you have.” David answered. He knew he shouldn’t and that it was none of his business; and he knew that anything said openly here would be picked up by Katherine and the others; but curiosity and the memories of an old comrade compelled him to ask, in his little girl voice, “after Blackwater?”
Mal eyes darkened and he looked away.
“Sorry,” David said.
“How’s a cute girl like you know about a terrible thing like that?”
“Maybe I’m not as cute as I seem,” David said. “Maybe there’s a lot about me that isn’t as it seems.”
They spoke for a few more minutes. Mal asked about the girl he’d been with at the café—Alia, he said, his ward, a sort of adopted daughter, the child of a friend of his. When David told him he’d hit Alia and thrown her to the ground, his eyes darkened and he withdrew into himself, into a terrible, self-loathing silence that David recognized all too well.
“I’m sorry, Mal.” David said, and for the first time reached out and lay his hand over the other man’s. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
With surprising speed, the man grabbed David’s hand. He held him in an iron grip. Mal yanked David close, out of his chair. David felt the man’s breath on his face and saw the madness still lurking behind Mal’s eyes.
“You better know what the fuck you’re doing, little girl.” Mal’s voice was a low hiss, and David realised the man’s grip was tight around the armband at his wrist—blocking any audio pickup from the device. “It’s a nasty fucking favour you’re calling in.”
David met his glare levelly and after a moment grazed the man’s cheek with a kiss. “I know,” he said. “And thank you.”.
Mal rubbed at the faint imprint of lipstick left behind, grinned and gave a lewd wink in reply.
Leaving the infirmary, David checked the time and saw he still had a half-hour to go before the meeting. He felt at a loss. What to do? There wasn’t time to hit the gym; he wasn’t hungry enough, yet; and as nice as the staff were, he hoped to never visit the salon—any salon—again unless it was to get these damned acrylic nails removed or long hair hacked down to size.
Walking without direction, he checked his phone. Nothing from Julia over the past few days. Her last message warned him something was up at work. Things were super busy, but she looked forward to his return, needed a good, solid fuck and had some darling outfits she couldn’t wait for him to try on. Nothing from Dan, either: the last message was nearly a week ago, a few cheeky exchanges following the dick and boob pics, sexy promises, dirty late-night vulgarities and some saccharine words, then nothing.
Probably caught up at work with his promotion, David thought.
He could visit Chad, maybe?
The thought brought a tingle to his tummy, a pleasant flush that caught him entirely by surprise. A memory of last night flashed across his mind before he could still it: strong male hands at his waist delineating his corseted form before effortlessly twirling him around, reaching for the laces behind; the near ecstasy of the undergarment being loosened, unclasped, and pried away; then the breath of cool air against his skin as he shimmied out of the light cotton tank top. Standing there nearly naked and smiling shyly up at Chad and taking his hand in his….
Fucking hormones, David thought, suddenly hot. Still flushed with these phantom feelings of femininity, he remembered his promise of a final gift to Chad. He brought up the ‘special’ pictures Jasmine took of him, her little reward during the photoshoot for being a ‘good girl’.
He gazed at them for some time, caught somewhere between queasy and a pleasant, tingly warmth. They were gorgeous shots, and he felt proud of how they’d turned out. They were unabashedly sexy, and he felt sickened that it was him in those poses.
His phone bleeped confirmation, and he realised he’d just passed them on to Chad. Blushing, he thrust his phone back into his handbag.
Further wandering brought him to a little nook, one of many dotted around the Clinic, little oases of calm where clients and staff could retreat, relax and reflect. It was unusual to find them unused, but then David was wandering in unfamiliar locations outside of his usual times. This little alcove contained a semi-circular divan set before an expansive curved window looking out over a little garden, Japanese Zen-style of combed pebbles and perfectly placed features constrained within a narrow bamboo enclosure.
He stood there unmoving for a moment, a short-skirted silhouette against the daylight. The silence of solitude beckoned him, with only the muffled sound of his steps intruding in this secluded retreat. He smoothed down his skirt as he sat, and then grimaced, wondering why he bothered with the performance when he was alone. With legs crossed at the thigh, hands resting in his lap, David stared into the garden.
Minimalist features drew his gaze to the lines in the gravel and he followed the pattern as they curved and swirled around larger stones, a few modest shrubs, the tiny pond. In focusing on the simplicity of the arrangement he found himself suddenly mindful of his isolation. An unexpected ache of loneliness seized him. He quelled an instinct to reach for his phone and contact—someone; anyone.
Instead, he took a deep breath. He felt the constriction of the bra at his chest and the slight movement of air against his bare arms and breathed out slowly and again breathed in and again breathed out and felt a welcome calm settle. In his calm he felt hyperaware of his situation and appearance, the gentle grip of boots at his calves and the slight arch to his feet; the tickle of earrings at his cheek and the weight of long hair; the straps over his shoulder and the weight of breasts; the dull ache of his testicles; caress of pantyhose and the annoyance of a rolled waistband cutting across his belly; even the mostly insubstantial presence of makeup on lips, cheek and eyes.
He felt all this and breathed and felt the anger and frustration and breathed and tried to let it go. And not for the first time but louder and more distinct than before, it seemed as though two voices spoke within him:
This is the last day, one said.
You’re fooling yourself, the other answered.
I don’t need you.
I’m not going anywhere.
I can’t take this any longer.
Yes, said the softer voice. We can.
Opening eyes he hadn’t consciously squeezed shut, David followed the maze-like pattern outside to where they converged at the base of a small pear tree. Its leaves danced in the turbulent winds beyond the window and the riot of oranges and yellows contrasted vividly with the placid restraint of the garden. David watched the tree for a moment, the way some of its branches reached upwards as though to escape the confines of the space created for it.
And it seemed to him that he could see his own life branching out before him in the boughs of the tree outside. The arms of the tree seemed to extend from the faint image he reflected in the curved glass. Each split in the tree led to a different branch that dipped and swayed in the wind, winking in the dappled light, grown fruit hanging heavily.
His eyes traced branches on the far side of the tree, the side that curved back into the garden. Sheltered a little from the autumnal blast they held more colour, more leaves and lent their brilliance back to the communal space. He saw in these branches the continuance of Cindy’s life and even as his mind balked at the possibility, for the first time David directly confronted a female future.
His fingernails dug deeply and painfully into his palms as hands curled into clenched fists. He looked down. Such beautiful fingernails, glossy and shaped and softly pink, a testament to the artistry of the Clinic’s salon and his own developing skills. His breathing became laboured and something churned deep within his belly and he looked up.
From the tip of every branch, like a plump and juicy pear, a colourful life beckoned and winked. One pear was a young girl dancing, sequins and sparking heels in the strobing light, and another was a secretary, pencil skirt and fitted top, sitting attentively by the side of the boardroom, and another was coffee shop chic, and another lounged in the brilliant glare of sun and beach, sunglasses and bikini, and another twirled in platforms and tassels around a pole under lurid lights, and another knelt naked, leashed and in bondage and yet another stood demure in bridal ivory, veiled and beautiful. The next melted into the arms of her lover, and another was a girlfriend, always pretty and attentive and taken care off.
And there were other pears beyond those, swaying in the shadows just out of sight, hints of a life he couldn’t quite make out, but always a life that shimmered and glowed so long as youthful vibrancy endured, dancing and partying in defiance of irrelevancy, work days flirting with male colleagues and nights, endless nights filled with daring outfits and even more daring heels, moist lips and eager curves, pressing up against the hardness of men and the constant games of predator and prey until, finally—it ended, with age, with faded beauty, with the once-sought, once-resented gaze of others turned elsewhere.
Other bare branches struck him as more sombre, lonelier paths of frustration and resentment, seeking to reclaim lost authority in a world reluctant to take her seriously no matter how she hard she worked. In this future what she wore or how cleverly or knowledgeably she spoke seemed irrelevant. Pantsuits and power heels, subdued makeup, impassioned speeches, further studies, ignored opportunities, denied pleasures, focus and intense effort, anger, manicured fingers curled into tight fists pounding endlessly against an unbreakable glass wall in a fruitless effort to regain what had once so effortlessly been his.
The far side of the tree reached upwards and outwards and therefore suffered the full brunt of autumnal winds. Buffeted by the weather, this side bore no fruit and the branches were nearly bare. David imagined his lost male life in the twisting branches. He saw surprisingly little. The few branches grew out of the life he’d known six months ago. Dark suits and crisp shirts, heavy shoes and standing bored at the head of a corporate meeting whilst lines jumped and fell on the screen behind him. He saw the long counter of a bar under dim lights and him standing there, with some shallow little bitch at his side drinking at his expense. He saw a man sitting alone in a heavy chair with a tumbler of single malt whisky, staring out over the cold, uncaring, unblinking lights of the city from the high perch of an expensive condo.
He saw no branches beyond that, no fruit to pick; and could not imagine a life beyond the one from which he’d been torn. His gaze flitted between the two sides of the tree, tracing and retracing potentiality. And with each branch he followed he felt a spark that grew to a flame to an inferno within, a rage that suffused his being until he realised that what he really wanted was none of these things, he wanted to tear the tree down, set it afire and burn the whole fucking garden to ash.
The bracelet at his wrist vibrated.
It was only a short walk to the building where he’d been meeting regularly with Crystal over the past two weeks, and he arrived in good time for his appointment. The door was locked, a subtle red light indicating they weren’t yet ready for him. He took a seat and waited. On the other side of that door, he knew, his three… keepers, he supposed, was the correct word; beyond that threshold, Crystal, Jonathon and K would determine his future.
This was the end of Cindy’s story. He plucked nervously at the woolen outer of the skirt, and his other hand tightened around a nylon-covered knee. What purpose could there be in forcing him to live her life any longer? In the moment and fleetingly, he felt his return to masculinity as a physical reality defined by absence: the weight gone from his chest, feet no longer pinched and poised in an arch, his scalp unburdened, a face free of makeup, his frame no longer constrained by restrictive clothing.
I’m leaving here a man, the voice in his head said.
Wanting it doesn’t make it true, the other voice answered.
He checked his armband. The appointment should have started by now. Nervousness bubbled inside of him—what could be taking so long?—and he rummaged around inside his handbag and pulled out a little sparkly case. Gazing into his mobile, he began to touch up his makeup. The soft sweep of the brush at his cheek, the attentive line of a pencil at his eye, and the smooth touch of lipstick brought with it a reflexive calm. He even smiled at his reflection, at the beauty he saw there and enjoyed the simple pleasure and peace brought by preening —until David suddenly felt outside himself, watching this frivolous little princess primping in public, and was seized by disgust.
You’d miss this, the second voice said. You’d miss me.
Would he? Sitting there, he considered what he’d miss from the past six months. Six months! Since that fateful night at the top of the Neopharm tower, he’d gone from—
From what? the second voice whispered, the girl voice.
Director, David thought. Global brand. Top job. Suit and tie, brogues and a heavy watch at my wrist.
That was never you, the voice said.
From being a man, then, he returned. From bending Jeremiah Steele’s personal assistant over her desk and fucking that bitch senseless from behind, gripping her by the tits and burying myself up to the hilt in her tight, wet cunt.
We enjoyed strong hands on our tits last night, didn’t we? the voice murmured, tinkling with laughter.
From being in control, he said. From being in charge.
From being lonely, the girl in his head returned. From chasing anything in a skirt in the hopes of recapturing something you lost long ago.
No! David squeezed his eyes shut.
You’ve never had it so good. With Julia, the voice said. And with Chad, the voice said.
Chad; again, the little flutter in his stomach, a bubble of happiness at the memory of their meetings over the past ten days. And last night, leading him by the hand to his—to her apartment, walking the lamp-lit pebbled paths of the Clinic under the half-moon, shivering a little in the rising wind and cold air until he pulled her closer. Nestling in the crook of his arm as they passed through the many gardens resplendent in their autumn colours. Pausing, under the swaying branches of sheltering trees, an eruption of yellows and reds and feeling a man’s hands at her waist, at her shoulders, behind her neck and gently pulling her into a—kiss.
The wristband vibrated. David stood. He took a deep breath and tweaked his bra into a more comfortable position, tugged at the hem of his skirt, and smoothed down his front. He slid his handbag over his shoulder.
At his approach, the door opened. David stepped over the threshold.
It was an intimately familiar space to him after his many sessions with Crystal Dawn. Crystal was joined by the other two on the far side of the table: Jonathon Bridges, pale and bleary-eyed, lips downturned in a scowl, hands buried deep in the pockets of a stained lab coat; and Agent K, impassive and stern. There were papers and forms, tablets and glasses of water on the table, neatly placed or stacked in front of the women, a jumbled mess in front of Jonathon.
David scanned Crystal’s face—for a hint, for any indication of what was to come, and found her closed to him; it felt like a betrayal.
“Mr Saunders.” Agent K’s voice gave nothing away. “Please sit.”
He sat, knees together, and waited their judgment. With the memory of a kiss still warm on his lips, David felt off-kilter confronted by the three sitting opposite him. Both women were dressed seriously, professionally, barely-there makeup and serious shoes presenting an appearance in marked contrast to his own.
Under their appraising gaze he felt acutely aware of the shortness of his skirt, the gleam of his lips and the slender fit of his boots, and the way the bra thrust out his tits, high and proud on his chest. Cursing his choice of clothes, he supressed the instinct to fuss, to tug at a hem or twist the rings at his fingers. What did his appearance say to them? What did they read in his clothes—what if they decided he wanted to dress this way, enjoyed it even?
“You look good today.” Did K’s lips curve ever so slightly in a smile?
He didn’t answer.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Crystal said.
David shrugged.
Agent K looked to each of her partners; Crystal kept her eyes fixed on David, and Jonathon grunted. The doctor was sullen and silent and to David’s experienced eye, he appeared very, very hungover. Were they drinking last night, celebrating?
“Before we begin,” Crystal continued, “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions?”
His anxiety nearly bubbled over into a nervous giggle; nothing new, then. How many times had Crystal started their sessions this way? The familiarity of her voice did nothing to ease his fear. What questions remained to be asked other than the single question that mattered?
“How are you feeling today?”
David waited, and Crystal’s face softened a little, and with a smile she added, “David?”
Releasing a breath he hadn’t realised he’d kept in, he returned a glossy, expansive smile of his own. “Fine, I think,” he said, the same answer he always gave. “A bit tired.”
“Bad dreams again?”
Hardly, the voice in his head trilled with pleasure. He kept them at bay; and David felt the phantom of fleeting kisses across his bare shoulders, along his neck; the strong hand that pulled him close and the memory of lips and tongue, of breath hot against skin. He felt the pleasure of fingers pressing into yielding tits and ass and the small gasps of pleasure that followed; and his own fingers, fumbling with a belt buckle and tugging trousers down even as he sank to his knees….
“No,” he said.
“You look good today.”
“That wasn’t a question,” he answered, retreating from the memories of last night into reflexive answers that came unbidden, and suddenly he realised they were back where they’d started two weeks ago.
“No, I suppose it wasn’t,” she said. “Could you walk me through the steps you followed in selecting your outfit today?”
Raising an eyebrow, he wondered where she was going with this. “I don’t follow.”
“Before leaving your room this morning, you were free to dress any way you wanted. This is the outfit you chose.” With a wave of the hand, she indicated the short skirt, the slim top, boots and accessories. “Can you to walk me though the process that led to you wearing this?”
Was she testing him, and if so, to what end?
“I started with the skirt,” he said. “Because….”
It was there, one voice in his head finished.
Because it’s short, the girl in his head said. It’s sexy. You like feeling sexy. You liked the way he looked at you last night, in that little pleated skirt, the way his eyes kept checking out your legs, ‘nice ass’, he said, and you liked it when he said that.
“I liked the pattern and the colour,” David said. “I thought I could pair it with these tights and it’d look good. The boots were something new but I figured, you know….”
“Go on,” Crystal said.
“It’s my last day, right?” David said. “At the Clinic, and as…,” he trailed off, waiting, and then spoke to fill the silence. “So I guess I thought, why not? I might never get to try something like this again.” Nervous fingers drummed against his thigh. “The rest just kinda followed naturally, you know, the makeup and everything. Didn’t really think it through, just sort of went with what looked good. Instinct, I guess you could say, it wasn’t really a conscious thing.” He offered up a tentative smile. “How do I look?”
“Very pretty,” Crystal said and though she smiled, to his eyes it seemed strained—a little sad, even. “Very feminine.”
Should’ve worn jeans and a t-shirt and flats, said one voice in despair.
Never, said the other voice, bubbly and pleased. Skirts and dresses, always.
“It is indeed your final day at the Clinic, Mr Saunders.” Before Agent K spoke she glanced aside at Crystal, brow slightly pinched with disapproval. There was tension between the two, David noticed, something unresolved. “I hope you have enjoyed your stay.”
“Sure. I guess.”
K’s smile was thin and failed to reach her eyes. “Had you been paying for your stay you might feel more appreciative.” With a flick of a finger, she sent a file from her tablet to a large screen on the wall. “You have made good use of the sports centre here,” she said. “Daily, it seems, including massages, the weight room, cardio and aerobics sessions….” She touched at the list of activities. “And an impressive calorie intake, Mr Saunders. So much food and drink.” She scrolled further down. “Photo sessions. Clothing. Accommodation.” His every movement, every activity, itemised and tracked. Agent K raised an eyebrow. “You never took advantage of the swimming facilities.”
“Didn’t feel like it,” he said.
Didn’t feel like being on display in a bikini, thank you very much, said one voice.
We’d look great in that teeny red one, burbled the other. Really show off our boobs.
“An expensive stay,” Agent K added.
“I didn’t ask for any of this,” he said. “You brought me here.”
“Indeed. And now, we must determine our next step.”
Finally, he thought.
Dr Jonathon Bridges, silent until now, stirred. When he spoke, his voice was gravelly and grudging. “Uh, yeah,” he grunted. “Guess it’s my turn.”
David faced him. The doctor really did look terrible—more so than usual. His clothes looked slept in and behind his beard his face was waxen and grey. Deep weariness coupled with resentment smoldered in his eyes. The doctor lay his hands on the table, fingers spread wide and still, and he stared at his hands as he spoke as though unable to meet David’s gaze.
“So. The tests.” He paused. “Thank you.” He glanced up at David before dropping his eyes back to the table. “I know there were a lot of them over the past two weeks. Daily blood samples. Scans. Whatever she says—” and he jerked his head in Katherine’s direction— “I consider your bill settled by your contributions. We’ve learned a lot.”
“I’m happy for you,” David answered.
Jonathon looked up and grimaced. “You still don’t get it, do you? This is bigger than you, bigger than any of us. What we’ve done here—it’s going to change the world.” His fingers twitched, once. “You were dead. Dead, David! Lying in a pool of your own blood. Broken. Your heart stopped!” Red spots arose across an already blotchy face in his excitement as he spoke. “And now look at you, sitting there—”
“In a skirt. With tits,” David said.
And aren’t they just wonderful, the voice gushed. You certainly enjoyed them last night.
“Yes—yes!” Jonathon leaned forward. “And even that—can you not see beyond your own fragile ego for just one moment and appreciate the miracle—the genius—the sheer wonder that a nearly forty year old man in such a short time can be so convincingly transformed into—” he waved his hand at David—“into you?”
“Fine. Great,” David said. “I’m a goddam living miracle. So thank you, thank you very, very much for all this. For saving my life. For keeping me safe. For months of mincing about in heels—”
—we look great in them, though, don’t we?—
“and skirts—”
—he loved our legs, he said that, didn’t he?—
“and makeup—”
—and our lips—
He winced and tried to block out the chattering voice. “It’s been an experience, it really has. Okay? I’ll be a better man for it or something. But I’ve done my bit. I did the right thing and snitched on an evil man who did a bad thing. I did the right thing and now you’ve got all your really exciting data.
“So… yay.
“And maybe you think I ought to be more appreciative of the time I’ve spent here,” he continued, turning on Agent K. “Fine. It’s been a great holiday – a break from the life you forced on me. Let’s just ignore the fact you took it all away from me, my condo and my work, my investments and income and everything I’d built up over the past decade, and instead you gave me… what? A shitty little apartment in a shitty neighbourhood, and a shitty job to go with it.”
From director to secretary, grated a voice in his head.
“So a two week break from the hell you dropped me into has been great, really great, and you know, I have enjoyed the food and drink and luxury without having to rely on some guy to foot the bill for me.”
But you didn’t mind when Chad paid, did you? said the girl’s voice. And you didn’t mind paying him back last night.
“And fine, okay, talking through shit has helped, maybe.” He jerked his head at Crystal. “Bringing up shit I’d buried long ago and maybe that’s good, I don’t know, but getting the past few months of my chest—you know, this fucking c-cup pair of joy you’ve given me—fine, sure, it’s been good, great for my mental health or whatever.
“But we’re done here, okay? For months now I’ve done the right thing, the good thing: I’ve been Cindy and kept my head down and… and it’s enough, it’s more than enough, I can’t do this anymore.
“So now it’s your turn. You do the right thing, do the good thing and give me my life back, for fuck’s sake make me a man again!”
He was standing and not sure when he’d found his feet, leaning over the wide table towards the other three, heart pounding in his chest and fingers curled into the hard wood beneath his palms, all but panting with the exertion of both speaking and drowning out the voices crowding his mind.
“Mr Saunders, sit down,” Agent K said.
He glared at her. “Or what?”
The Asklepios armband grew very slightly warm, and emitted a warning beep, the first time it had done so. He stared at the armband for a long moment, assessing his chances. How strong of a dose could such a slender band contain? And of what? How quickly might it affect him? For a moment he seriously considered launching himself across the table, visualised his trajectory and the satisfying impact of foot against bone, and smiled at the thought of his fist connecting with Scooter’s skull.
Do it, whispered a voice in his head. Be a man.
Be good, whispered the other, be a good girl.
He saw, in Jonathon’s eyes, a glimmer of fear and took pleasure in that. He saw, in Crystal’s eyes, disappointment, and it saddened him. But in Agent K’s eyes he saw nothing.
David dropped back into his seat. Crossing legs at the thigh, he tossed back his hair, sneered at Jonathon and waited.
“Um… yes,” he said, and to David’s surprise he saw… something that chased the fear. Excitement, maybe, or even lust—a momentary widening of the eyes and flushing of the cheeks. Jonathon licked his lips and his fingers curled into fists and uncurled to lay flat once more. “Those tests. The blood samples, we’ve taken and tested them daily since your arrival. Checking for the levels of the compound that made all this possible.”
Taking a deep breath, he continued. “What we’ve seen over the past two weeks is a downward trend indicating a reduction in compound levels within your body. This… decay is matched by similar lowering of the compound in other tissues we’ve sampled: soft and hard tissue produce similar results.”
With giddy joy, David clapped his hands and gave a little hoot of relief. “That’s good, right?”
The doctor didn’t immediately answer. He glanced askance at Agent K before returning his gaze to the table. “However, where we expected a linear rate of compound degradation, what we’ve found is that the decline appears to be tapering off. Levels remain well above what we predicted and cellular suffusion remains unexpectedly high.”
Jonathon stopped. David felt a tightening around his chest and momentarily struggled for breath. There was a prickling at the base of his neck and he heard as though from far away a low, delighted giggle.
“What—what does that mean?” he asked.
Finally, the doctor looked up and he grimaced before speaking. “I means we can’t risk using anything connected to the regenerative process here to masculinize you,” Jonathon said. “We can’t even risk traditional surgical methods. Compound levels are just too high. You’ve seen the possible outcome… downstairs. Any changes we made—”
“No—”
“Might kick the regeneration into overdrive—”
“No….”
“Revert back to the original female template—”
“No!”
Yes, crowed a voice in his head. He’s lying, seethed the other, why is he lying? The prickling warmth at the base of his neck spread and unfurled tendrils of heat that coiled around chest and head—he couldn’t breathe—penetrating his skull and his brain burned—he couldn’t breathe!—and the gleeful girl’s laugh was suddenly closer and louder and everywhere.
He felt the doctor’s words like a kick to stomach and he wrapped his arms around himself and curled around the pain, doubling over.
He felt sick. He gagged. Turning to Crystal he saw pity in her eyes, but he didn’t want pity, pity told him she knew what his future held and how difficult—impossible—it would be for him.
“Then leave me like this,” he gasped, turning to K. “I can hide the tits. Cut the hair. Wear baggy clothes. Live as a man, somewhere—you can find me a new life—anywhere. Somewhere; anyone. I don’t care so long as I go back to a male life.”
Her eyes betrayed nothing: no satisfaction in his predicament, nor pity at his pain. Instead, she shook her head, once. “No,” she said, voice level. “I can not simply summon a new life for you out of nowhere, Mr Saunders. Furthermore, Cindy’s sudden disappearance, more than anything, would betray you to Steele. Your presence here is known, a matter of open record.”
“You can’t—”
“Have you not said yourself that you saw this agent of Steele’s, this… Jeff pursuing Cindy recently?”
David rocked in his chair, holding himself tight. He stared at her and the voice said, she’s also lying, why are they lying? Meanwhile, the other voice, dainty and playful—but more than a voice now, a presence growing in strength and stature—laughed with glee and cried out ‘yes’ and wound itself around the other voice—now diminished, despairing, and wild —and their whirling dance filled his head with a noise become a roar that he felt as a physical pressure, a force threatening to crack him open, rupture and spill out as a torrent of bile and rage and despair.
“Please, K,” he pleaded. “Don’t do this to me.”
“Six more months,” she said.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You must,” she said.
“You can,” said Crystal. “You’re strong, David. And so is Cindy.”
“I’m not—”
“But you can be,” she said. “Accept her; be that part of your self.”
“It’s too hard.”
“But it doesn’t have to be.”
“You don’t understand—”
“Look at me, David.” Unexpectedly strong and firm, her voice demanded his attention. “You told me living Cindy’s life was torture. Like an iron maiden whose spikes were bleeding you dry. But the torture is of your making, David, and always has been. Spikes of your own mind.”
“You’re wrong,” he said.
“‘You could be bounded in a nutshell and count yourself a king of infinite space’ – isn’t that how the quote goes?”
Were it not that I have bad dreams, he finished, but said nothing.
“Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so—did I get that right?”
“I’m not—”
“You’re being forced to play a part you hate. Your safety depends on how well you convince others of the role you play.”
David felt the allure of the character: in a court full of enemies, he moved with impunity. Filled with doubt, a disguise of madness allowed him to seek out truth. Sent to his death, he survived. And in survival: vengeance. Vengeance, against no less than a King himself.
But what happens when the disguise stops being an act? What happens when mad in craft becomes mad in essence?
You’re not mad, whispered the lilting voice in his head.
“You say that this performance is torture,” Crystal continued. “That the realities of Cindy’s life feel like spikes driven into your self. But if you take those spikes away, what are you left with?
“Armour. Not just a beautiful shell, David, or a painted husk, but armour, subtle and strong—strong, like you—a shield against the world. You told me that the thing you miss most from your male life is your strength – your muscles—the years of effort and discipline that Jonathon’s process stripped away from you. You derived confidence and conviction in your masculinity from your physical strength. You called it your armour.”
With his arms wrapped defensively around his pain, David was acutely aware of what he’d lost: felt the slender weakness of his limbs, the pliant and supple flesh beneath his folded arms, and knew he was the smallest person in the room. It seemed almost impossible to imagine that bulk now, the simple pleasure of flexing an arm and sensing the restrained power—the firmness of chest and abdomen—the satisfaction of exertion and the joy of manipulating the physical world around him with ease. Only in others could he sense that strength, now, and yearn for the unconscious affirmation it brought them and perhaps share in it by being close to them.
You enjoyed being close to Chad last night, didn’t you? Enjoyed his firmness?.
“But Cindy can be your armour,” Crystal continued. “Her softness, your strength. She can—how to put it?—‘bear the whips and scorns’ of the next six months. Let her absorb the blows. And at the end of all this, when it’s safe to do so, you crack open the armour, step out of it and what’s left? You—the real you—unharmed, untouched by everything that’s happened.”
He shuddered and dropped his eyes and hid behind the fall of his hair.
She seemed to genuinely believe her own words. There was a painful sincerity in what she said and how she said it. Curled in on himself and from behind the safety of blonde curtains streaked with purple and pink, David glanced from Jonathon to Katherine to Crystal and saw no escape from the future they mapped out for him. They were lying. If they chose to do so, he knew they could return him to a male life. They chose not to. Why?
Now, the room itself felt threatening. If he refused: what then?
Unbidden, he felt again the terrible fear experienced in bondage during the photoshoot, arms and legs straining behind his back, harnessed and leashed—and at the far end of that that leash he saw the shadowy figure of Jeremiah Steele.
No; never. David squeezed his eyes shut. Then he recalled the monster downstairs, its fleshy protrusions and misshapen form, locked and sealed away, on display behind transparent walls, and shuddered.
The Clinic was not the ally he had hoped, and it seemed clear to David that Jonathon and Katherine could no longer be trusted—were perhaps even his enemies.
Crystal Dawn?
She seemed honest, hopeful that he would accept her words—she offered an escape, he realised, a way out of this room and this facility. After, in solitude and safety—if such a thing even existed—he could determine what the hell was happening: why these people he once saw as allies had turned against him. Then, he could find a way out of this life.
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth, one voice murmured, muffled and distant but still very much present.
David looked up. “But it’s so hard,” he pleaded, and in rushed the reality of what he was on the cusp of accepting. A torrent of images, projecting the previous months forward into the tedium of daily life to come, crashed down on him. Days and weeks of skirts and dresses and thin blouses and bared shoulders or midriff or arms or thighs; the frivolous indulgence of hair and makeup and nails; the pinch and poise of heels, sacrificing stability in favour of unsteady steps and mincing gait; and everything else, God, daily strapping himself into a bra, rolling stockings up legs, clip of suspenders—and shaving, keeping arms and legs silky and smooth—always on display, Cindy appropriately presented to the world, day after day after….
So easy, said the girl voice in his mind. And fun, we’ve been doing this for ages.
“It’s too much.” The bus ride to work from his cramped apartment into the city: the sweat of passengers, the ogling stares, whispers and whistles and stray hands brushing across tits and ass he had to pretend to not notice. Swapping shoes over, sneakers for stilettos and the daily morning primp in the women’s toilet, then sitting at his desk, pretty and prim, scurrying about for others, delivering coffee, taking notes, quiet. Six more months of being looked down at by women with jealousy or scorn; of being appraised by men, dismissively or in lust; and desperately chasing the approbation of both.
And it wouldn’t be possible, not for six more months, to avoid the advances of others. There would be women, in changing rooms and corridors, offices and in open public spaces, watching and judging and finding him wanting, finding him strange, curious, suspicious. There would be men—men like Dan but also like Chad—and where there were men there was flirting, pick-up lines and innuendo and ‘accidental’ touches as they passed by his desk or crowded in the elevator or sat without invitation as he tried to relax, eat his lunch, take a break, escape the attention of others even if only for five minutes. Flirting would lead to dates, to kisses, to touches and caresses and ultimately to—
Last night: his slender fingers, fingernails vivid in the dim light, reaching into a man’s trousers and curling around a hard cock.
“I can’t do it,” he whispered. “Not for six months.”
Of course we can, echoed the other voice. And for even longer.
He looked up through a veil of hair. “I’ll give myself away.” Months of tucking and taping, of shoving his balls back up inside and concealing his sex, the discomfort and pain, and the terrible fear of being caught. “It’s too hard, I can’t do it, someone will catch me out.”
To which Crystal gave a little smile and said, “we can help with that.”
What came next remained a blur as everything came crashing down on him. A cacophony of noise, a roaring voice and gleeful trill of joy, a rising swell of despair and rage that filled him to the brim. He vaguely remembered a long, drawn-out moan, pain in his chest and being sick. Accusatory voices raised in conflict: “I told you this would happen,” “get the nurse in here,” “it’s too much,” “Jesus, she’s stronger than she looks.” It seemed to him that the room went dark. The voices in his head went silent. At some point he nodded—“six more months”—and gave himself over to the Clinic. A prick in his arm; everything went dark.
And in that darkness, David dreamed.
And it was the old dream, the same dream, the nightmare that had haunted him for years in all its permutations and sick twists. One night of relief cradled in another man’s arms, otherwise night after night it had him thrashing in his bed, lashing out in his sleep, waking and bolting upright, chest heaving, bathed in sweat, grasping for something lost long ago.
It was always the same room. Sickly yellow light seeped into the far corners of the dirty little backroom, flickering as the bared light bulb swayed as the end of its frayed cable. A shoddy table stood next to a rusty, steel-frame bed. An old round clock ticked persistently, its shadow stretching and twisting as the light above danced. The clock sat on the table next to a worn, dog-eared book. Tattered wallpaper peeled and curled from the walls. Bugs crawled from cracks between the floorboards.
The room reeked of sweat and mould and stale booze. There was no window and two doors on opposing walls were the only way in and out. The mattress was filthy and stained. The deep thrum of rhythmic music rose through the floor from the club below.
A gasp; a cry and moan: and she was once again splayed across the filthy mattress, and her beauty made a mockery of the squalor. Beautiful but tainted: the ivory basque should have gleamed but was tarnished and stained, and her stockings were torn and the skin beneath red and raw. Heavy makeup, smudged and cracked, did more to conceal her natural beauty than enhance it. One leg hung over the edge of the bed and her arms lay limply at her side.
She seemed unconscious or perhaps dead—but for her eyes—which were as he remembered them: open and blazing with love and anger.
“Sephy?”
Always, he called to her. Always, she turned to him.
Then the creak of hinges, the door opening onto impenetrable darkness, a slash across a naked canvas.
Who would it be this time? Ever since their fatal fight and especially since visiting the transformed agent beneath the Clinic, Fosters was a frequent guest star, a grinning, raving villain, protean and terrible. Julia, more than once, had featured; Agent K too; and also Jonathon, the doctor sliding through the door, fingers twitching, each nimble digit ending in gleaming scalpel blades. Before that they were often faceless, a shadowy figure whose face collapsed into a vacant, ragged hole. Sometimes, they were only seen from behind, a hulking brute whose frame filled the space as they stalked inexorably across the room.
He blinked, and the figure glided past him, the figure was in the room and he could see them only from behind as they advanced on the bed. Persephone lay there insensate, unmoving and vulnerable.
“No,” he called out, and reached to stop the intruder; or tried to, for suddenly his words were muffled by the slender metal bar drawn tightly across his mouth, and his arms were tied behind his back, and for all his struggle all he managed was to make his pendulous tits shake uselessly. He was back in the bondage from the photoshoot and tied and leashed and gagged as he was, all he could do was quiver and moan and watch.
The figure paused and looked back over its shoulder. Somehow its face remained hidden in darkness, yet from the darkness gleamed its slow smile, sharp-toothed and vicious.
And David felt afraid, a return of the deep, devouring fear he’d felt during the photoshoot, the sense of utter helplessness brought on by being tied so securely and unable to free himself. Vulnerable, weak, stripped of agency: bound and gagged, he’d never felt fear as he had in that moment.
Normally, he tried to prevent what happened next by physically attacking the figure. Always, he failed. This time, he could only watch and squirm as the figure turned back to the helpless woman lying on the mattress. He moaned in fury and despair around the bit that parted his lips. The figure took Sephy by the neck and squeezed.
How many times had he seen the woman he loved killed in his nightmares, and in how many ways?
Suddenly, she was fiercely, brilliantly alive. Now she struggled. She battered his side and arms, her fingernails dug deep into his flesh, flaying it from his frame, and yet as ribbons of blood and gore curled to the floor the figure continued to strangle her. Her legs beat the mattress like a drum and her body writhed upon the bed and her eyes bulged. With a final twitch, she went still.
The figure then turned and advanced. David pulled at his restraints in terror, breathless in the crushing corset, achieving nothing more than to jiggle and sway uselessly. Pulled back by the tightly braid hair laced to his arm restraints, his neck was exposed and vulnerable as the intruder reached for him. In the final moment before its fingers curled around his neck, David saw the nails were like his, beautifully manicured and painted; and the face was his own face, his male face, and the hungry grin twisted into a snarl of betrayed rage.
Darkness; the nightmare faded; he slept.
Many hours later, recovering in his room that evening, he lay alone on his bed in the dark and stared at the ceiling. He knew that he wasn’t really alone. The armband at his wrist continued to monitor and transmit his location and vital signs—any erratic action and he’d be instantly tranquilised. Hidden cameras watched him as well and followed every movement of his naked body. Perverts, he thought, but the hazy remnants of the drugs in his system slowed his thoughts and quenched the fire of his anger.
Robbed of strength, he lay there languidly and felt the tingle at the tips of his body as the anaesthetic slowly faded from his system. It felt as though his entire body was abuzz, a pleasurable but distant humming of the skin as the cool air of the room breathed over him. Fingertip and toes prickled, the tip of his nose, a borderline erotic tightening in every extremity. He felt it most strongly in now-erect nipples, tight little buds demanding touch, and it made him think of Chad.
Too tired and weak from the drugs to suppress remembering any longer, David groaned. He sighed and drew one limp arms across his eyes and gave himself over to the memory of last night.
He took the man by the hand and led him into the apartment. Chad grabbed him from behind—“nice ass,” he said—and an irrepressible giggle escape David as he was spun about and then—kissing, Chad’s roaming hands delineating femininity, fingers tracing every curve and drawing sensuously over shoulders and sides, face and thigh. A sinuous wiggle, and the little pleated skirt slid over his hips and pooled at his feet. With a smooth movement and flick of the arms he sent his top flying across the room. He struck a pose, resplendent in the bridal brilliance of ivory corset and bra and suspender belt and stockings, teetering only slightly in the lace-up heels from the day’s earlier photoshoot.
With an appreciative whistle, Chad drew him closer. With the thumb of both hands touching, the man stretched his fingers wide, a butterfly lattice stretching around David’s narrowed waist, and something thrilled inside at how dainty he felt, small and delightfully powerless beneath this masculine touch. Effortlessly Chad twirled him around and untied the laces at the back and loosened them. The spin and initial rush of air was exhilarating, and again when Chad’s strong fingers unclasped the metal fastening at the busk and the overbust corset opened and fell away. The simple cotton tank top soon joined the corset on the floor.
He stood there, then, in nothing but gilt ivory lingerie glimmering in the dim light, a delicate flower in need of the most tender touch, small and yielding to the man’s robust size and strength. The man’s eyes widened appreciatively at the sight of his breasts, pale teardrops rising towards him. “God, you’re gorgeous,” he said, and something inside David melted at his words and gaze, so that when Chad seized him, David gave himself over to his touch with ease, over to his kisses, over to the passionate hands exploring his tits and ass and to his surprise he felt the first stirrings of his own passion as a dull ache from where his cock and balls remained tucked.
His own reaction confused him deeply. Six months ago, he couldn’t have even contemplated kissing another man. Now, he eagerly invited it, for even as Chad’s hands roamed his body David returned the attention with equal passion. When Chad’s hand kneaded his tits, he leaned into the man’s grasp; when he kissed his neck, David whimpered; and when the man pulled away, he followed him with hungry kisses of his own, almost whining into the man’s open mouth as he demanded more.
And it wasn’t drunkenness or the threat of an enemy that drove him into the man’s arms. Rather, it was the simple realisation that it felt—good; that Chad made him feel good; and that there was no way to stop what he’d started.
More importantly, he didn’t want to. For the first time he wished for his own release, to receive pleasure rather than simply give it. But that hadn’t been the plan for the night, this night was about rewarding the man who had helped him so much during these past two weeks, and in doing so reaffirming his own identity.
As the man’s fingers strayed dangerous close to somewhere they couldn’t go, David realised he couldn’t delay any longer.
He remembered the photographer’s words, Jasmines advice, as he fumbled with the man’s belt. Painted lips curved into a wide smile as he hooked manicured nails into the waistband. The trousers went down and he followed. He knelt before this man, on his knees level with his crotch, sober and committed to what he was doing. Chad looked down at him, standing strong and drinking him in with eyes filled with lust and admiration and with something more powerful, something that made David feel small and wanted.
‘Look at him,’ Jasmine advised. ‘Talk to him. He likes that.”
And so, even as David’s smile felt increasingly strained, he maintained eye contact. “Your eyes on me makes me… mmm, tingle,” he said, and then moaned. “And wet.” He reached his hand into the man’s boxers. “I’m so damn horny right now,” he said, and licked his lips, and touched for only the second time in his life another man’s penis. “I want to feel your cock. In my mouth.” He hesitated then, feeling the hard, hot flesh; but only for a moment before drawing it out. “I want to taste your cum.”
And lying there on the bed in the present, he remembered staring at it, staring at Chad’s cock, willing himself to do this thing. You can do this, he thought. It’s just… a blow job. Women do this all the time. It’s not like it’s a big deal. It’s not gross or perverted or weird, it’s just—a thing women do. And right now, you’re a woman, or at least he thinks you are, and you’ve got to do this, got to prove to yourself how meaningless this act is, that Cindy can thank this guy like a good girl and you can wake up in the morning unchanged, unaffected, and still be—yourself, and go back to being a man and living a man’s life.
But when he licked his lips, it was with nervousness, not eagerness. And the roiling in his belly wasn’t from alcohol because he hadn’t touched a drop all day. Any further words died unspoken on his tongue. Try as he might, he couldn’t bridge the gap—such a small gap, a few easy centimeters—between his wet, pink lips and the man’s cockhead, shiny with pre-cum and bobbing in anticipation.
A hand at his head ran fingers through his long hair—lovingly, urging him to look up rather than down. Chad was smiling at him, eyes still filled with that intimidating deepness that signalled something far more profound than simple lust. A gentle touch at David’s chin refocused his attention upwards.
“You don’t have to do this,” Chad said.
“I want to.”
“Have you ever before?”
David shook his head.
Chad slowly lowered himself to David’s level and squatted back on his haunches. With the back of his hand, he tenderly brushed his cheek, and his fingers cupped his chin and drew him in for a kiss. Eagerly, David fell into the kiss, a reprieve from the act he thought he was ready for but clearly couldn’t yet bring himself to do. And lost in the depth of their embrace, he noticed too late the man’s drifting hands—hands that moved from his shoulders, down his side, slid beneath the waistband of lace panties and tickled their way along his bum and—
Chad’s fingers draw across the taped length of David’s cock and he gasped into the other man’s mouth, around the eager tongue dancing with his own.
Pulling back, fearful fingers curled instinctively into fists—he tottered in his too-tall platform heels—and fell unceremoniously back on his ass, legs splayed wide.
Chad laughed.
Flushed red with anger and embarrassment and fear, David scrambled away from the other man. “It’s not—”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Chad said, standing.
David gaped up at him. “Did you—know?”
Chad reached down and pulled the feminised man to his feet, where he wobbled briefly and held the other man’s arm for support. “I suspected,” he said.
“How?”
“For one, I knew you weren’t really Cindy.” Chad stepped over to the sofa and sat and motioned for David to join him. After a moment’s hesitation he followed, and when Chad took his hand and guided him onto his lap, he settled without protest. Sitting there fully aware of the other man’s hardon pressing into his bum, he felt painfully aware of his appearance in a way he’d never quite experienced before—a deep humiliation rooted in what he wore and what he was doing in the presence of another man who apparently knew him to actually be a man.
Playing at Cindy for Julia was one thing; making out with Dan another; but perching on Chad’s knees in sexy women’s underwear when the guy knew he was also male was something new. Suddenly, it felt—gay—homosexual in a way it hadn’t before. Before he was a girl—albeit a pretend one—pleasuring a man. Now they were two men in the room—admittedly, one in insubstantial lingerie, the other naked from the waist down—and Chad’s hard cock was poking into his thigh, and it made David feel queasy.
“I knew Cindy Bellamy,” Chad said. “She was a client here, remember? Somebody must’ve slipped up, not updated the client database or something, because the Clinic armband invited me in to talk to you the same as it did with her. I got to her know her a little when she was here. Took me a few days to remember; this was half a year ago.”
“Did you sleep with her?” David asked.
“Yes.” Sadness tainted his voice. “There was something very—tragic—about her. Sad and beautiful and so very angry. I’ve only met a few people who clearly hated themselves that deeply.” His gaze burned into David. “But she was such a kind soul, a lovely person, but one who couldn’t see that loveliness in herself. She was so eager to please, to find validation in others.” He shook his head. “I guess she never found it.”
In the present, lying on his bed, David remembered how they talked, if only briefly, about the young woman whose life he’d usurped, even if unwillingly. Chad never asked how he’d come to take her name or her life; presumably, he knew better than to ask such questions of clients of the Clinic. Rather, he simply held him in his arms, on his lap, as his cock slowly shrank. Finally, he gave a single kiss to David’s forehead and easily lifted the smaller man from his lap and positioned him on the sofa.
Grinning, Chad then slid off the sofa cushion to his knees between the feminised man’s legs.
“What are you doing?” David cried out.
“Giving you something you need a hell of a lot more than I do.” With one strong hand holding David’s thigh, he used the other to gently push him back into the sofa. “Just… relax.”
“But—” David struggled to articulate his confusion. “We’re both guys.”
“If you say so,” Chad said, smiling up from between a pair of lithe legs, sleek in ivory stockings, with knees thrust high by the arch of stiletto heels. “But from where I’m at, all I’m seeing is a gorgeous woman lying back with a handsome stud between her legs.” He pulled at the flimsy white panties, down one leg and then the other, and flung them across the room. Dextrous fingers then felt for the tape holding David’s cock and carefully peeled it back, layer by layer. “Wow, you really strapped yourself down, didn’t you?”
“But—”
“Just shut up,” Chad said.
And when he felt the man’s first confident touch on his penis, the first time any man had ever touched him there, David didn’t think he could go through with it. He remained limp and unwilling and he felt a powerful wrongness deep in his belly at the thought of a man touching him so intimately. But then Chad kissed him, every so gently, first on one thigh and then the other and the kiss was almost feminine in its tenderness. His lips were soft and his touch delicate. The hands stroking his skin were soft, flicked at suspenders, skimmed along his sides, and paddled at his boobs, and when those swift, nimble fingers grazed his nipples he moaned—
And in the present, David moaned too—
And in memory, he hissed in pleasurable pain as the man pinched his nipple between forefinger and thumb and chuckled wickedly at David’s reaction. For the reaction was all too visible: under Chad’s skilled ministration, his cock stiffened and rose. Chad firmly gripped the engorged cock and without hesitation took it in his mouth.
The man’s sensual touch threatened to overwhelm David. He felt lips and tongue running up and down his cock, the warmth and the pressure as Chad’s head bobbed up and down his length, and in David’s mind it was all mixed up with the past, with the many girls he’d known, flashes of anonymous, pretty faces, a cavalcade of glistening lips and eager tongues; and at some point the smiling lips that flashed through his mind were his own, carefully painted and shiny and keen to please. And all this became mixed up with the other sensations he submitted to, Chad kneading his tits, fingers digging into fleshy thighs and ass, coming up on occasion to nip at an ear or trail kisses down his abdomen or lick cat-like at a erect nipple.
And in the present, he felt the phantom touch of the previous night, and one hand crept to his breast and found pleasure there, and the other crept lower—
And in memory he felt it too, and the sensations were at first focused around his cock, and he nearly wilted then as he returned to the thought of another man going down on him, the implied homosexuality of it—he wasn’t gay, he was a man—but it felt so good, he hadn’t been on the receiving end of a blow job in ages, it wasn’t Jules’s thing but dear God, it felt great. And there was a woman in the room—yes, oh God, yes, don’t stop—her moans filled the room, her keening cry, her desperate need—and her slut sounds made him ferociously hard again, and so what if that woman’s voice was his own?
His perception shifted, and he felt the feminine presence in the room, he was that woman but then that woman was also pleasuring him, he found his own tits and groping himself and moaned in pleasure—felt the scratch of long nails—a woman’s hand on his woman’s tit—but also the yielding flesh beneath his hand—and then the feminine presence shifted to the eager cock-sucking lips pleasuring him; and the moans he heard were a girl’s moans; they were his own rhythmic exclamations of desire; and he was subsumed within the whirling sensations, the whisper of long hair, the silkiness of stockings beneath his palm; tug of straps and tickle of lace; toes curling in the constraint of heels; but a man’s strong hand pinning him to the sofa; and his hips bucked and he arced his back, pushing his boobs further into whoever’s hand mauled them, and when he finally came it was with a deep, ball-emptying cry, fiercely grabbing the head between his legs with both hands and pulling it closer and burying himself deep, fucking the face that pleasured him and then falling back with a groan, spent and confused.
“Jesus, you’re strong,” Chad said afterwards. He grinned, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “Ouch.”
David drew in a ragged breath.
“I hadn’t planned on swallowing.”
He winced. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Chad grinned. “You should try it sometime. It’s really not so bad, you know, once you get past the taste.”
In post-coital torpor, David slid from the sofa into Dan’s arms. He felt contented in this man’s embrace. He felt a powerful and confusing desire to cuddle, and his fingers played idly with Chad’s chest hairs, curling the coarse hairs around his slender fingertips. Fingertips slid across the man’s strong chest and traced the lines of his abdomen—Chad had kept the athletic physique of his skiing days, and David felt an overwhelming envy that manifested as a profound attraction to the man.
They held that pose for some time, in the silence of the early evening, David in delicate lingerie cradled in the arms of the larger man. They both sat on the floor, together. He knew he should be… disgusted, by all this, and terribly angry. Instead, he felt wonderfully relaxed with Chad’s arms around him, at peace in a way he couldn’t fully comprehend but was loathe to give up.
“I should probably go,” Chad said.
“Don’t,” David said.
He knew what would happen if Chad left, then. David would cast aside the last of the day’s dressing-up, the stockings and the belt and the shoes, and then the guilt would come, the recrimination and self-loathing. He’d shower in blistering hot water and scrub every last vestige of the makeup away and stand in front of the mirror and despise what he saw there. Crawling eventually into bed, he’d toss and turn for hours. Sleep would come—and with it, the inevitable nightmare. No; not tonight.
He noticed only then that the fingers of one hand had come to rest casually on the other man’s penis. Under their gentle presence, he felt it stir and grow once more. “Please. Stay.”
Chad looked at him in silence for a long moment. “You don’t have to….”
“Now you shut up,” he answered, taking the man’s cock into his hand.
His second ever hand job felt very different than his effort two weeks previously with Dan. For one, he was sober. But most importantly he felt—close—an intimacy with this man that confused him. Though the buzz of orgasmic release had largely faded, he still felt wonderfully content, a little detached, as though in the last stages of a pleasant dream.
He took his time in pleasuring Chad. First, he found some hand cream and warmed it in the palm of his hand. Then, they kissed passionately before Chad returned to the sofa and David settled comfortably between his legs on the floor. Sitting with his legs to one side—still laced into those towering shoes—David gazed adoringly up at Chad with wide, green eyes. He smiled as he pumped the other man’s cock, attentive to his every reaction, adapting his speed and rhythm, keeping a firm but gentle grip. “Do you like that?” he cooed, “how’s this?” and he languorously and carefully drew one long fingernail along the man’s ballsack.
With his head thrown back and eyes closed, Chad sighed and seemed lost in the pleasures of the beautiful man stroking his cock. He moved slightly with each upstroke along his shaft.
It didn’t take very long. The intensity of his breathing deepened, and suddenly Chad groaned. He gripped David by the shoulder to steady himself, and David knew that he was near. “You gonna cum for me?” he whispered, and the thought suddenly flashed through his mind—I could do this now—and he imagined, vividly, lowering himself onto the other man’s cock, taking his penis into his mouth and sealing plump lips around the slick shaft and mewing with pleasure as his man came and emptied his seed down his willing throat.
“God—Cindy…. I’m—!”
Chad’s hips thrust, and ready for it, David pointed the cock at his naked chest. It spasmed once, twice: the man’s cum spatted across his tits. It was unexpectedly warm, and a little dribbled into his cleavage.
There’s a man’s jizz on my chest, he thought. On my tits.
David kept his smile and never broke eye contact as Chad slowly returned to himself. He felt some of it on his hand. He looked at his palm and it glistened with cum.
And for the first time in his life, he wondered, I wonder what it tastes like?
Suddenly hot in the face, he reached for a tissue and wiped his hand clean and made a go at sopping up the cooling goo from his chest. “Like that?”
Rather than answer, Chad drew David from the floor into an embrace and buried his face in his hair and shuddered. “Thank you,” he said, and when he drew back his cheeks were wet with tears. “Whoever you are. Cindy”
“Chad—”
He silenced her with another kiss. Afterwards, they withdrew to the bedroom and lay together in silence, the larger man curling around the smaller. David had never shared a bed with another man before, not like this—both naked, intimate and comfortable in each other’s arms—Chad hand resting easily across his boob, and on occasion he felt the man’s dick stir and press into his thigh.
At one point—though he may have dreamed it, as they both faded in and out of shallow sleep—Chad’s arms tightened into a firm embrace. “Don’t make the same mistake she did,” he said, his voice a hot whisper on his neck. “You’re… special, and beautiful and wonderful.”
“But I’m a man,” David insisted.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Chad answered.
They lay like that until early morning, at which point Chad left without a word.
And in the present, David found himself finally strong enough to stand. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and after a moment’s rest struggled to his feet. He turned to the full-sized mirror.
There was no denying what he saw. While not special and wonderful as Chad insisted, the woman in the mirror was certainly beautiful. Cindy was beautiful; and wasn’t he Cindy, now? Framed in flowing coils of golden hair streaked with purple and pink, falling nearly to the pert curve of her ass, the naked body he saw reflected in the dark of the room seemed radiant in its beauty. Her breasts were round and full and sat high on her chest, smooth white skin topped by pink nibs erect in the cool air. Narrow hips led to slender, well-formed legs. Feet and toes were cute, nails painted a glossy pink, the same as her hands, though both hands and feet were a little ungainly, maybe larger than expected on a girl of her stature. Shoulders, too, were a little too square, possibly, considering her willowy frame. Wide, green eyes scanned across her image in reflection, drawn inexorably towards—
The space between her thighs.
The prosthetic vagina the Clinic attached to him several hours ago remained pallid and grey, the colour of a slug’s underbelly. The anonymous nurse who’d assisted in the procedure assured David that over the next twenty-four hours the synthetic flesh would slowly change to match his own skin tone, bio-synthetic chromatophores activating and adapting to perfect the illusion of real skin. The same with sensations and responsiveness; what currently felt heavy and dead and cold, like a wet plaster cast over his crotch, would gradually warm and begin to transmit sensations.
“As close to the real thing as you can get without surgery,” the nurse assured him, and smiled comfortingly as the anaesthetic wore off
and David returned to wakefulness. Asleep for the procedure, he avoided the blistering pain he remembered from the previous prosthetic that Agent K had attached to him. That one had lasted mere weeks, and the hurried application had nearly knocked him out with its sensation of fiery pins and needles thrusting into his groin. No pain, this time. “It should last for several months,” the nurse said. “But we’ll need to have you back in about three and decide then whether to replace it with another or move on to a surgical alternative.
“Best of all,” the nurse continued, “it allows for intercourse. You’ll probably find clitoral stimulation easiest, but the prosthetic allows for a full ten centimeters of penetration.”
Average female depth, the nurse explained, and just under average male length; enough for a finger or penis, so long as you’re both careful and he’s not too generously hung. The angle is slightly off that of a biological female, directing the penetrating object towards the abdomen, and passing close to where your own male genitals are kept—unlikely to be noticed in the heat of the moment.
Holding David’s hand, the nurse seemed mystified that these explanations weren’t particularly reassuring for the patient. “You’re really lucky—this is absolutely cutting edge, the latest in biomechanical prosthetic technology.”
The nurse went on to explain that once the neural interfacing was complete, the outer skin would respond as expected: it would sweat and self-heal and self-lubricate, too, where and when necessary. Within days, the lightest of touches should be perceptible; a breath of air tickling across the synthetic skin would raise goose bumps; and as for a kiss….
The nurse smiled. Sex—and here the nurse couldn’t suppress a little smirk—while maybe not quite as good as the real thing it ought to provide an entirely satisfactory experience. More than satisfactory, the nurse assured him—authentic. A biochemical release system integrated within the prosthetic was designed to release synthetic hormones associated with the general ebb and flow of ordinary life—that is, ordinary life with a vagina, of course, the nurse added—but also with the specific intensity of sexual arousal. You’ll be flooded with happy little chemicals, the nurse said, or sad ones; either way, you’ll feel it here—the nurse tapped the space over David’s heart—and here—and tapped his temple. And as for orgasm—the nurse’s smile grew to a wide grin—well, it ought to be suitably intense.
And you can rest assured, the nurse finished, easing him back in his bed, that your male equipment is perfectly safe and secure beneath it all, the prosthetic secreting a mild anaesthetic keeping everything comfortably numb and quiet.
Quiet and numb.
A buzz at his wrist reminded him it was nearly time to leave.
Standing in front of the wardrobe, he considered what to wear for his farewell and for the long ride home. Nothing, he thought. He didn’t want to wear anything. To pull on panties and a bra was to accept his fate for the next six months. The artificial intelligence within the wardrove must have senses his uncertainty, for it reached out with a tentative beep.
What would you like to wear this evening? it asked, the words scrolling along the top of the mirror.
David stared blankly at it.
What would you like to wear this evening? the wardrobe prompted.
It waited a moment longer before trying a different question: what are you going to do?
I don’t know, David thought.
He knew that somewhere within the associative links of its millions of parameters, the artificial intelligence lurking inside the wardrobe was searching for a way to stimulate its user to action. It had been taught that fashion was one way of expressing identity—and its user had presented a wide range of identities these past two weeks. What did its deep learning algorithms make of him, David wondered, of the shoes and underwear, skirts and dresses and tracksuits he’d worn these past two weeks, the cosmetics and accessories? What narrow category did he neatly slot into; what real-world example did he most conveniently match?
After a moment, the wardrobe rephrased the question once more.
Who would you like to be? the AI asked.
Scene Thirteen: “The Truth about David Saunders”
Who are you, Mr Saunders? With that question lingering at the back of her mind, Katherine Smith watched the taillights of the car disappear into the night. A final red flare as it passed behind some trees, turned a corner, and then it was gone.
The departure of Mr Saunders—or rather, Cindy Bellamy—came as a relief. Her relief was lessened by the thought of the long road that remained ahead. Some small residual guilt, perhaps, also undermined her relief at her ward’s departure. He would be safe for the next six months. It was not the life he desired; but then, in her experience, very few were privileged to live the life they wanted. Mr Saunders would survive: he was strong, he would endure; perhaps he might even learn to enjoy Cindy’s life, though she pitied him for what was to come.
Meanwhile, she had other duties. She had already made her farewells to Jonathon and Crystal. All the remained was to collect her few possessions. A car was waiting to carry her to the nearest airport.
She remained distracted as she cut across the Clinic grounds, passing through falling circles of light that cut pale swaths in the night. The air was cool but oppressive, the earlier winds giving way to an almost unnatural, heavy stillness that hinted at a waiting storm. Too much remained unknown. Most concerning was her ward’s own past. Despite two weeks of sessions with Crystal, they’d learned very little about who Mr Saunders had been before taking on that identity; nor where and when he’d learned to fight with sufficient skill to survive an encounter with hardened mercenaries like Fosters and Mal.
Fosters: the presence of that monstrosity in the underbelly of the Clinic concerned her.
Mal: what whispered conversation had he exchanged with Mr Saunders?
The door to her small apartment at the Clinic opened silently for her. Preoccupied with these thoughts, she felt the presence in her small apartment too late.
She spun towards the figure in the dark corner, thinking – Steele; how, why? And why hadn’t Clinic’s security stopped them?
A woman stepped from the shadows, short and slender like a whip. Her age was indeterminate—she could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty—and of some Asian decent, possibly Japanese. Her long ebony hair, streaked with grey, fell in a tight braid down to her waist.
“Ms Smith,” the woman said, and raised a single hand in a placating motion. “My name is Sakura.”
Katherine, hand already reaching for the weapon concealed in her jacket, arrested the motion. “I have heard of you.”
The woman nodded. “I have been watching you with some interest. You have come into possession of one of my… charges, shall we say.” She stepped closer and in her every motion Katherine saw threat: the promise of violence, restrained. “Shall we talk? It is time you learned the truth about ‘David Saunders’.”
To be continued…
Author’s Notes:
At 72,000 words, the Interlude is nearly as long as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’s 77k word count. I hope its length goes some way to explain how long it took to get it done! Originally planned as a short collection of brief scenes from points of view external to the main character’s, it quickly expanded into… well, what you’re reading. I hope you enjoy it! And please let leave a comment if you do, critical or otherwise. It’s always encouraging to know people are actually reading this stuff.
Once again, I’d like to thank those who’ve supported me on Patreon – I honestly doubt I’d still be at it without their encouragement. (https://www.patreon.com/fakeminsk) Come and join the conversation! Also starting to try my hand at some commissioned work.
Onwards to chapter six! Only five more to go.
Credit given where due:
The “pear tree” scene was inspired by the plum-tree scene from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
The Blackwater Phoenix special ops backstory was inspired by Operation Screaming Fist in William Gibson’s Neuromancer.
I was listening to the audiobook of High Heel (Object Lesson) by Summer Brennan while writing this – an easy recommend, and I’m pretty sure it indirectly influenced a couple of scenes.
I’m not quite sure where the scene with Ivy came from, and she just sort of popped in unexpectedly, but I’m fairly sure she’s inspired by Pam from the Archer animated series.