by Zoe Brown
“Theo fell completely under ‘Julia’s’ spell that evening, and it changed the relationship between the two of us – in both good ways and bad – forever, but he wasn’t the only one. I felt like I was meeting Julia for the first time that evening as well. Once I had the body and the curves and the sex and the long hair and the voice of a woman, I started feeling a freedom to express myself in ways that I would never have dared to imagine before. I could be silly, at last, like I hadn’t been in years! I could be coy, I could be cuddly, I could be kind, I could be sexy, I could be sensual, I could be giggly – holy fuck my first giggle took both Theo and myself completely by surprise, and after it came out of me we both just sort of stared at each other in disbelief and amazement before we burst out laughing. I could be all the expressive, feminine things that I loved so fiercely about women, including intelligent! I mean, this probably sounds dumb to you, but as a poor muscle man running around with a street crew down in one of the Bay Area’s shadier neighborhoods, I had never been expected to ‘be smart,’ either growing up, in school, or as an adult. I knew shit tons about cars, of course, and about my ‘hood,’ but no one ever expected me to be a reader, or a thinker, or a dreamer, or an artist, and I was also so desperate to be seen as a big, macho manly man by the people around me that I never tried to break out of that mold. But Alessandra’s creativity and intelligence had been one of the things I was most attracted to about her after her transformation into a woman, and once I became one myself, I started opening myself up to new ideas, no experiences, new knowledge, and new thoughts myself. I even took up art,” she smirked, self-consciously, blushing a little, inwardly. “Sculpture, with stone and clay. I’m not great, not yet, anyway, and I have to work so much to pay for my pills that I don’t often get a chance to really dedicate myself to it, but still, it gives me the same sort of charge, the joy of working with my hands, that wrenching engines used to, and I feel like I can really express myself with it, like I never could before, when I was a man…”
I smiled at her and sipped my wine, kissing the top of Jade’s head as, in the distance, over to the east, the horizon began to slowly brighten. Jade yawned prettily, and sleepily. “…And that’s… how this street-racing-punk-bad-ass wound up in high heels, panties, skirts, and bras!” she concluded, nuzzling her cheek against my chest.
I frowned slightly at the sudden ending to her story. Although she had explained how she started gender bending, like I’d asked her, there seemed to be some loose ends in what she’d told me so far that she had yet to flesh out. What had happened with her and Theo? Had she ever run into the homophobes and transphobes that had attacked her before, again? Was she still racing with her old crew from the neighborhood? Something about the way she’d hugged the car’s steering wheel earlier that evening and had basically fawned all over the vehicle gave me a sense that, maybe, the answer to that last question was ‘no,’ but she didn’t seem inclined to give me any explanation as to why that might be tonight. That was fine though, I decided. It was getting late – or early, really – and she’d already hinted that some of the aspects of her story weren’t entirely pleasant. If she wasn’t ready to tell me about all of them, I had no need to pry tonight. I could ask some other time, when she was feeling more comfortable and less sleepy.
“Just two questions,” I asked her, still trying to fill in a couple gaps in what I knew about the young lady resting in my arms.
“Shoot,” she sighed, snuggling happily against my chest and closing her eyes. “But then after that, can we get some sleep? Telling that story took a lot out of me.”
“Yes, of course.” I kissed the top of her head and pulled her away from the balcony, guiding her back into the apartment again and up the stairs towards the loft. “Okay, so first – did you sell me your pills because you thought that the old you and me had a lot in common?”
Jade opened her eyes long enough to climb the stairs with me, chuckling. “Well, kinda yes, and kinda no. I mean, you’re a big fancy rich guy, and you have been since before I even knew what girls were, but when you talk about all the big, macho, thrill-seeking guy shit you do, and how cutthroat and vicious your professional life is, and how much you love women but how bored you’ve gotten with sleeping with them—”
“—Present company excepted, of course,” I coughed.
“—Of course…” Jade sighed, smiled drowsily up at me, and then poked me in the side with one finger. “Let’s just say it sounds kinda similar to old, angry, too-macho-for-words, gotta-out-macho-the-other-guys, pre-vagina me. Like… maybe you’re a little bit insecure and a little bit overcompensating for something because… being a macho man isn’t really what you really want?” She scrunched up her face and gave me an apologetic look. “Sorry! I know that’s not what you really want to hear.”
I shook my head and forced a dismissive smile onto my face. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault that you read me wrong. I may not be interested in taking Werewoman myself,” I lied, through my teeth, “but I can see why you might have thought there were similarities between our backstories. Alright, second question, what are you doing tomorrow?”
“Um, well, I guess I don’t really have any plans. I kinda keep my weekends open. I go home with people a lot, and sometimes, if I really like one of the people I’ve hooked up with, I hang about an extra night or two, and we go out on dates, we wander around the city together, we fuck constantly, and… yeah, that’s about it,” she flashed me a hungry smile. “Why, you trying to book me for the rest of the weekend?”
“Definitely,” I fired back at her, smiling as well. “But, I actually think I have one more question before bed.” Something else had just occurred to me, something that I was suddenly intensely curious about. She didn’t have to tell me the rest of her life story this night, but as my fantasies about trying out life as a woman myself once in a while began to grow more and more extensive inside my mind, I felt like I needed to ask one more thing – I mean, even if I wasn’t ever going to try and experiment with the drug myself, it would still be good to know some things about people who did use it.
Jade yawned again, stretching her arms above her head as she kneeled her way onto the bed and pouting in playful protest. “Mmmmm… you said ‘two’ questions.”
I laughed. “I know, I’m sorry. Last one though, promise.”
“Ohhhhhh, fine…” The pretty girl curled up on top of my bed, piling a pair of pillows behind her head and patting the empty space next to her invitingly. “You’re lucky you’re such a dreamy hunk of sex-on-a-stick, you know.”
I slipped into the bed beside the dark-haired beauty, dimming the lights throughout the apartment with the push of a button on the top of my bedside console. Jade gave a low, sleepy-sounding “Ooooohhhh, that’s cool,” as she snuggled back against me. “Final question?”
“I’ll make it quick,” I promised her. I took a deep breath and licked my lips. “Are you a woman all the time, now?”
“Mmmmm…” the curvy goddess beside me buried her head in her pillows, seemingly reluctant to answer. After a minute though, she mumbled a quiet “…No.”
“Can I ask why not? You seem much happier this way.” I asked her, gently, wrapping my arms around her and pulling her close against my chest. She purred in pleasure as my powerful male body enfolded her slight, delicate, girlish one. It took her a moment to answer, though.
“…another night, Ashton.” She whispered, quietly, closing her eyes and tucking her head under my chin. “I’m not ready to talk about that, just yet.”
“Alright.” I smiled a soft smile down at the beautiful young woman – not that young, I reminded myself with a touch of my own sleepiness, closing my eyes and breathing deeply as I relaxed into my mattress – and let the question go, for now. She’d answered it enough, anyway. She wasn’t a woman all the time, not even now, not even years after she’d started becoming one. That meant that it was totally possible for someone to dabble in experimenting and fooling around as a
woman, without it completely taking over their life and changing them into someone else, right?
Of course it does, I decided, letting the seductive hold of sleep creep over me and drag my consciousness down towards slumber land, Even if Jade’s gone mostly full-time girl now, and even if Brianna would happily fuck a stranger every night if it meant she got to be a girl all the time, there’s no reason to assume that anything like that would happen to me. Not that I… have any intention… of trying it out… for myself, or anything…
Chapter Twelve
Timestamp: Sunday, Twelfth of August, 2018. Forty-Seven days ago.
Jade and I spent the rest of the weekend together after that, just as she’d implied towards the end of the evening before. We talked a lot, of course, enjoying one another’s company and the opportunity to get to know one another and tease one another and talk about things one another enjoyed, but the topic of gender-bending didn’t really surface again until Sunday evening. She also didn’t turn back into a guy for the duration of the time that we were together that weekend, either. On Saturday morning, Jade politely asked if she could have five of the pills that she’d sold me previously, enough to keep herself female for the rest of the weekend, and I happily gave them to her. She swallowed them while still in her female form, then gave a little shiver and a moan, and then it was over, and she didn’t mention them again, or gender-bending at all, really, until she off-handedly brought them up on Sunday night. It had seemed a little strange to me, after my previous experience with Brianna, and with Jade herself at the bar on Friday evening, that Jade seemed so disinterested, now, in the possibility of me gender-bending. She never mentioned it, and we occupied ourselves with other activities. We fucked constantly: in the shower, on the sofa, in the bed, on the floor next to the bed (don’t ask), on the kitchen island countertop, in the car on both the outbound and inbound legs of a drive out to the coast for a Saturday afternoon picnic lunch, on the picnic blanket, in the back row of a movie theatre on Sunday afternoon, and then finally, several more times, back in the bed on Sunday night before we each had to return to work the next day.
It was while lying in bed together on Sunday night, cuddled up and gently talking after yet another delightful sexual romp with one another (seriously, the woman had a bottomless appetite for sex; it was incredible) that the concept of gender-bending suddenly seemed to insert itself back into the conversation. I wasn’t sure that Jade meant to bring the idea up for discussion again, but she had off-handedly remarked about how ‘this’ – by which she clearly meant our sexual relationship – had not been exactly what she’d had in mind for me when she’d sold me that baggie of Werewoman to spice up my sex life, either, but that she was absolutely enjoying reaping the benefit of my vicarious gender-bending thrill-seeking. She seemed prepared to skate right on past that thought into something else, but before she could do so, a question that had been growing in the back of my mind over the previous two days unexpectedly slipped out of me while we lay there together, wrapped up in one another’s arms in the warm and comforting embrace of my outlandishly expensive mattress.
“What is life like, as a gender-bending girl? As a Werewoman?” I just blurted it out, probably somewhat because it unexpectedly popped into my head after Jade made her own remark, and probably somewhat because the desire to know had just been growing in me ever since Jade had confirmed for me the reasons why she’d sold me the baggie full of Werewoman in the first place.
“Huh?” Jade asked, somewhat sharply, as if the question caught her off-guard.
“I mean…” I scrunched up my face and licked my lips, frowning as I tried to figure out what I was trying to say. “How is it different from life as a guy? What do you do, on a random, given day as a girl? What did you do after you and Theo hooked up? Did you start dating? What is life like for you now? How often do you transform into a woman, and how often are you a man? Why don’t you live full-time as a woman now? Is it because the drugs are too expensive, or is there something else? Does your family know that you gender-bend?” A dozen questions started pouring out of me all at once. Jade sat up suddenly, staring down at me with a confused, concerned expression on her face, and tucked several loose locks of dark hair behind her ear as she tried to read my expression.
“What?” I asked her, guilelessly, reaching up and playing with the ends of her long, beautiful tresses. I hadn’t imagined that my question might startle or concern her, and I couldn’t comprehend any reason for it to have done so, but as I looked up into her face now, I could definitely read both startlement and concern behind her eyes.
“Why are you asking me this?” Jade asked, with an unexpected intensity that took me by surprise.
“Um,” I cocked my head to the side and blinked up at the girl, who just over forty-eight hours ago had been trying to convince me that I ought to give gender-bending a try. I wondered, had she changed her mind about that? Had she been hoping this weekend that I’d been telling the truth when I claimed that I had no interest in taking Werewoman myself? Was she starting to suspect otherwise now? A fresh surge of defensive frustration forced its way back to the forefront of my mind, and I frowned back at her, my brow furrowing defensively. “I don’t know? I’m curious about you…” I shrugged, “I just had some questions. Some things I’ve been wondering.”
“‘Some things you’ve been wondering?’” Jade frowned some more, almost pouting, and glanced away. “All this weekend?”
A stab of something like guilt hit me then, and I winced, but there wasn’t much I could do to take back what I’d said. “I wasn’t trying to keep it from you. I just… I mean, your life has been pretty fascinating to hear about, you know?”
She sighed, glancing back at me, and then reluctantly snuggled back into the bed alongside me again, looking a little less than blissful now, and with something like resignation creeping into her expression. Her face lightened a bit, though, when she thought of some answers for me.
“Hmmm… what’s it like being a Werewoman?” She took a deep breath and started piecing together some answers for me. “Well, it’s… it’s pretty fucking amazing,” she began. “I get to be a hot girl, which means I get to feel all the sexy, sultry, exciting things that I used to feel around hot, sexy, beautiful girls, only I get to feel them about myself, and it’s a delicious feeling that makes me want to rub my hands all over my body and hug myself and jump up and down with glee and scream with happiness all the time. Plus, everyone looking at me sees a hot girl, and they treat me as one, which feels amazing and really gets my motor running, especially when it’s someone who I feel attracted to doing the looking. And when I’m not feeling all hot and sexy all the time, and it starts feeling more like ‘normal’ to me, I’ve still got the amazing feeling of being able to just be the me that I’ve always wanted to be, to be my real self, instead of pretending to be this big, tough, super-macho asshole all the time so that no one will question my manhood.”
“But if it’s so great,” I pressed her, both honestly curious and a little suspicious that she was holding something back from me, “why aren’t you a woman all the time now? Even at three-thousand dollars a bag for 30 pills, that’s only nine grand a month—”
“Oh my god, rich guy, gag me with a spoon and shut up, please,” Jade shot back, rolling her eyes in annoyance at me. “Do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound right now? ‘Only nine grand a month—??’ Do you have any concept of how much money I make? When was the last time you worked an hourly job?” She cocked her head at me.
“Umm, 1988,” I responded, wincing apologetically. “Sorry, sometimes I get a little out of touch. How much do you make?”
“A little over three grand a month, before tips. At least three grand a month in tips, closer to four if I do really well.” She wrinkled her nose in some disappointment, “I’ve never gotten over eight grand in a month, though. Not enough for a whole month’s worth of Werewoman, even if I didn’t have to eat, or buy gas, or pay rent or anything, and even i
f I was interested in taking it all the time… which,” she took a deep breath and licked her lips, choosing her next words carefully, “for the moment, I am not.”
“What you mean?” I frowned at her, confused again, “You seem so much happier with who you are and the life you get to lead as Jade. Why wouldn’t you want to take it all the time?”
“Because I still have a family, Ashton!” my dark-haired lover vented back at me with a little bit of heat, “I have a mother, and younger siblings, and uncles, and friends from my old crew who know nothing about this version of me. People who can never know. I’m not ready to give those people up yet, even if I could afford to.”
Her mother… I recognized a sensitive subject when I… blundered into one with all the grace of a rhinoceros. Frowning sympathetically, and apologetically, I stroked the top and back of Jade’s head, kissing her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” I apologized verbally. “She still thinks it’s…”
“Perverse?” Jade turned away and sniffed, vibrating with some old frustration and pain. “You could say that.”
A few connections and probabilities began to occur to me. “…does she have something to do with why you and Theo aren’t together anymore?” I asked, as delicately as I could.
Jade frowned at me, raising an eyebrow with some surprise. “How’d you guess?”
I shrugged. “I had parents once, too,” I told her, softly, kissing her shoulder some more. “I recognize parental angst when I hear it, and you left a lot out of the end of your life story the other night when you were telling me about how you wound up…” I traced a hand gently down her back and over the swell of one rounded hip “… like this.”
“Fuck, you weren’t supposed to pick up on that,” the brown-eyed girl growled, faintly, looking displeased.