The Woman Who Pretended to Love Men

by Anna Ferrara

  I laughed because I was pretty certain I’d never work again; I couldn’t even get myself off the floor and frankly, after what I just heard, I was no longer interested in doing so.

  “We’ll start by getting your baby away from Everquest,” Dr Jones added. “Don’t you want that?”

  A chill ran down my spine as sensations of dread coursed through every pore of my being. I frowned. “Why her?”

  Dr Jones laughed—pretty cheerfully too. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know if you’ll agree to work with me.”

  “On what?”

  “Getting your baby away from Everquest, and other things. I’ll tell you only if you’ll agree to work with me.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “I’ll tell you only if you’ll agree to work with me.”

  “I can’t agree to anything if I don’t know what’s really going on!”

  “In that case, you’ll just have to deal with losing your baby and having done nothing to save her.”

  Blood rushed from my face when she said those words and seemed to pool at the pits of my gut. I started being able to feel and hear every last one of the breaths I took in. “Who are you? Are you even a real gynaecologist?”

  “I’ll tell you only if you’ll agree to work—”

  “I’ll agree only if you can guarantee my daughter’s safety! If I go to jail or die while doing whatever the hell it is you want me to do!”

  Dr Jones chuckled. “You won’t go to jail, my dear. You can’t. You’re legally dead.”

  I couldn’t help but gasp. “What in the world do you mean?”

  “Everquest tried to kill you, remember? I had to make sure it looked like you were still dead.”

  What?

  “Any regrets?”

  My mother. Did my mother think I was dead too? After not having seen me in a whole year? But I was so close to seeing her again! I struggled to get up again but to no avail; I couldn’t lift myself more than twenty centimetres off the ground before running out of strength and crashing back down on the cement floor. “I want to go see my mother first,” I said to Dr Jones’ feet while panting from the exertion. “Please just let me go see my mother.”

  “You can’t, my dear,” she said from above, in what sounded like amusement. “Not if you want to save your daughter. Everquest must never know you’re alive and for that to happen, nobody must ever know you’re alive. Not even your mother. But…”

  But?

  “…if you work with me, not only can I guarantee the kid will always be safe and free, I can also promise the experience will be rewarding in ways you cannot yet imagine.”

  There was something about the way she said those words, in that accent, in that calm, cheery tone, that made it all sound a little... magical. I found myself feeling a little excited about it even though I wasn’t sure if I should be, since I was also feeling great loss and sadness and confusion and physical discomfort at that point. I took a deep breath to steady myself then rolled my eyes up at the ceiling.

  “Fine,” I said when I found myself feeling much calmer. “I’ll work with you. Now tell me everything—who you really are and what the hell it is you really want to achieve here because I sure as hell have never met another person with hobbies or secrets quite like yours.”

  She laughed and got on her feet, moved out from behind her worktable and came to sit next to me with her legs neatly tucked to one side.

  My mouth fell open when I saw her, not in one of those crisp shirts or tight skirts or a lab coat but in—

  —red, strappy, silken lingerie that revealed the outline of her nipples and left the bare skin around her thighs, arms, cleavage and neck exposed.

  I looked away the moment I realised I had gotten a glance up her loosely-fitted skirt too. Red silk underwear lined with black lace. A gush of blood rushed into my cheeks and I suddenly felt no longer as cold or tingly as I had been before.

  She pushed hair away from my face in a way an acquaintance would not, and when I glanced up and found her eyes in mine, staring in a way a mere acquaintance would never do, I felt a jolt in the depths of my heart and a sudden rush of electrical chemicals dashing about my nerves.

  I looked away at once. I knew that look in her eyes and I knew I didn’t know what to do about it. I had only ever seen that look in Milla’s eyes and I never imagined I’d be seeing it on another woman’s in my lifetime, much less so close to my lips.

  “You’re right,” she said, in a way that was starting to sound more seductive than professional. “I’m not a gynaecologist. My name’s not really Jessica Jones, or even Jelica Mendel, as Everquest thinks it is, for that matter.”

  I turned to look at her in surprise but looked away again the moment I realised the sight of her dressed that way, with arms, legs and chest uncovered, looking at me in that way, was making my heart beat way faster than I wanted it to.

  “I joined Everquest ten years before you did. Was a Junior Security Agent like you until I took that test you took and failed. After that, they made me Senior Security Agent.”

  “What?” I couldn’t help but turn back to her again. “You failed and they made you Senior Security Agent?”

  “Yes.” She looked right into my eyes and beamed. “The test doesn’t work the way you think it does, my dear. When you solved the mystery, in the time you did, you got yourself stuck in the role of Security Agent forever. Everquest doesn’t want smart people in high positions. When I failed the next test, I got promoted to... guess what?”

  I had no idea. My boss and Benny never once talked about what I could be in the future, only about what I had to do for them, there and then.

  “Agent, my dear.” She laughed like it were a joke. “You were my first assignment. I was told to assess you as you took your test, and when you passed, I was told we had to get C39’s baby away from you because a client had intel you were planning to kill her the moment she got born.”

  “What! I never would have—”

  “I know, my dear. Trust me, I know. I’ve been watching you…” She put her hand on my cheek—it was hot like a piece of freshly roasted meat against my skin—and caressed it with the tenderness of a lover so I found myself looking away as quickly as I could again. “They lied to me just as they lied to you.”

  I took a deep breath, gathered all the energy I had and pulled my cheek, and upper body, away from her toasty hand. “And yet you managed to find out the truth? Without them knowing? You’re not just an agent, are you? There’s something else behind all this. Some other story you haven’t told me.”

  The next time I looked at her, she was smiling, gazing into my eyes and pushing one side of her long black hair behind her ears in a manner that could definitely be read as suggestive. “You really are quite good at what you do, you know that?” she said, suddenly softly. Her dark eyes skipped across my cheek, lips and chest and made my heart race so much I had to gather all of my strength again to get my upper body even further away from her. Milla was all I wanted, for God’s sake! Milla was the one I wanted to spend the rest of my life with! Milla was the one I had a child with!

  A twinge of hurt appeared in her eyes soon after. She took in a long, deep, disappointed breath and shifted herself a little further away from me. “My name’s Helen,” she said, in a tone that was way more hostile than it was seductive. “I once had a female friend I… loved. Very much.”

  “But?”

  Her eyes jumped into mine at once. “But, the people who started Everquest took her from me.”

  I turned my eyes on the stain underneath my cheek right away for nervous chemicals were starting to run across every inch of my skin. “Why?”

  “Fleur…”

  She didn’t go on. I eventually turned my eyes back towards her and soon found I could no longer look away.

  About the Author

  Anna Ferrara is a mostly-closeted lipstick lesbian who has been living with her equally closeted lipst
ick lesbian partner under the guise of mere friendship for years. In 2017, she decided to try out self-expression for a change and published her first lesbian romance novel, Snow White and Her Queen. Doing so felt so cathartic, she wrote and published another novel, The Woman Who Made Me Feel Strange, in the same year. The Woman Who Pretended She Loved Men is her third lesbian romance novel and the second in her Those Strange Women series. You can find out more about her life and work at annaferrarabooks.com.

  If you enjoyed this book and would like to express your support for the author, please do leave her a review on Goodreads.

  Other Books by Anna Ferrara

  The Woman Who Made Me Feel Strange

  (Those Strange Women #1)

  A psychological mystery full of clues hidden in plain sight. Can you figure out what’s really happening to the lesbian protagonist before the novel ends?

  In 2030, Lane Thompson, a ‘nobody’, sat on the edge of a rooftop in New York and smoked a cigarette. Moments after, her body was found on the concrete fifty floors below, broken and soaking in blood.

  Three years later, Lane wakes up at the Wonderdrug Psychiatric Centre, fully recovered. Her doctor doesn’t allow her to leave because she doesn’t remember wanting to kill herself and she doesn’t even mind because she thinks living at the Centre for free is way better than struggling financially on the outside.

  Her plan to stay on forever is thwarted by Paul, a woman and fellow patient, who manipulates her into leaving. Paul insists the Centre is not what it pretends to be and drags Lane through the underbelly of New York as she tries to prove that they are so much more than mere ‘nobodies’.

  What Lane soon discovers about herself and the woman she last loved dearly—movie star, Arden Villeneuve—makes her question everything she thought was true.

  Problem is, how do you find out what’s really going on when you can’t trust anything anybody says?

  The Woman Who Tried To Be Normal

  (Those Strange Women #3)

  In 1975, Helen Mendel married a widower and aircraft engineer, moved into his suburb in Los Angeles, 375 miles away from Area 51, and got herself merrily settled into a life of domestic bliss with nothing but her husband's pleasure on her mind.

  Ethel Ashlock, wife of her husband's colleague, a depressed alcoholic addicted to Valium with unfulfilled dreams of becoming a pilot, hates her on sight. She thinks Helen's just another boring, brain-washed housewife and doesn’t make any effort to hide how much she detests her.

  She doesn't realise Helen is not as commonplace as she appears; that she has synaesthesia—the ability to see sounds, hear images and taste feelings—and a past she's not telling anyone, not even her husband, about.

  Things change when Helen, having tolerated enough of Ethel's persistent hostility, lifts her veil of pretence. Ethel soon finds herself blackmailed, frightened, and also... irresistibly intrigued by her new neighbour.

  She becomes obsessed with getting Helen to like her and soon discovers they have more in common than she previously thought. Neither of them believe their husbands are truly aircraft engineers, for one, and neither of them believe Helen’s husband’s former wife, Violet, actually killed herself in the year before…

  Together, the two women work to uncover the truth about Violet’s sudden death, until they discover the truth, not out there, but closer than either of them ever thought possible…

  About the Those Strange Women series

  Those Strange Women is a series of six books about the lives of six ‘unusual’ women over nine decades. Amidst changing attitudes towards women and homosexuality, the women grow, adapt and find their own ways of existing in a world in which they don’t quite belong. A few of them learn to love but most learn to hate; a few of them fail to thrive but most survive and develop a taste for revenge.

  Snow White and Her Queen

  Before there was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there was another story some preferred not to tell.

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?”

  “You, my Queen, are fairest of all,” the Princess had said, unravelling a nightmare of obsession and forbidden desire.

  At an apple orchard in the dead of the night, Queen Katherine runs into her reclusive stepdaughter for the first time in 17 years. Surprised by her ravishing beauty and unconventional boldness, she pursues a friendship, only to find herself inescapably captivated by the Princess’ charm and wanting more.

  “The Princess is a thousand times fairer than me,” she concludes in an inexplainable fever of despair that shocks her servants as much as it does herself.

  But at a time when romance between women is unthinkable, the Queen has to put on all the pretence she can muster to keep her horrible secret from both her powerful husband and the smitten huntsman trying to win her heart.

  To make matters worse, seven peasants and a handsome Prince threaten to snatch the Princess’ affections and take her away from the castle for good.

  The Queen has to decide once and for all what to do about her strange feelings for the Princess, before she misses her chance.

  This intimate retelling of the popular Grimms’ fairy tale will change your understanding of the wicked Queen’s infamous jealousy forever.

  The Woman Who Tried To Be Normal

  (Sample)

  Chapter 1

  6 June 1975, Saturday

  I have synaesthesia. You probably don’t know what that means so I’ll tell you—I see sounds, hear images and taste feelings. What does that feel like? I can’t say. I’m not good with verbal language. But once, when someone asked if it were like a four-dimensional kaleidoscopic musical that never ends, the taste of apple appeared in my mouth. Apple is what I taste when something feels right so my guess is that that might have been a relatively accurate description of it. I can’t say for sure though. And, frankly, I’ve never really tried to.

  People don’t ask about what they don’t know of so by not telling anybody I have synaesthesia, I save myself from a great deal of trouble. Always. When I married Hank Baker in the summer of ‘75, at the church he married and buried his former wife in, every person in attendance thought I was absolutely normal because I said nothing about what I could see, hear and taste. I didn’t even tell Baker. Not one person knew of synaesthesia, much less suspected I had it, and that was perfection. Just how I like it.

  Had I told the guests I could tell the pastor had gotten terribly bored during the sermon because I could see his whole person becoming monotone and indistinct in front of my eyes, they would have thought of me as insolent and mentally disordered. More so if I told them I could also tell they were lying when they said I was lucky to be married to Baker because I could see purple outlines of long ovals appearing over their eyes, mouths, hands and feet whenever they said so.

  I knew what to expect because I had spoken about synaesthesia before, when younger, dumber and much less experienced in the ways of the world, and it had brought me nothing but trouble.

  Early on, I learned, the hard way, that most people—that is ninety-nine point eight nine seven five two percent of people—do not have any clue how to react to a person with synaesthesia. Disbelief is what usually happens first, followed by doubts about the stability of the synaesthete’s brain. Fake concern often follows, then gossip, then jokes, and it always ends with ostracism. Always. In a bad year, talks of ‘treatment’ might even occur. The only way to never end up there is to, as people always say, ‘make a good first impression’. That is, tell people only what they want to hear. Speaking the way people expect you to is the only way you’ll ever get them to let you into their hearts and homes and treat you no differently from the ones they love and care about.

  The only way.

  At the lunch reception after the wedding ceremony, at the garden at the back of Baker’s church, I did just that. I told all the people who came to talk to me, all of whom were friends or family of Baker, that my hobb
ies were knitting, baking, cooking, looking after children and keeping my home clean.

  I did so because I knew, from experience, how easy it is for most people to relate to women who enjoy those things. I knew I would get nods and smiles and hear the soothing sound of flowing water when looking at their faces. If they replied with a ‘me too’ or a ‘you’re exactly like my wife’ or ‘mum’ or ‘grandma’ afterwards, I would see pinkish-orangish clumps of floating dust come out of their mouths along with the sound of their words, and feel each and every one of the bits wafting past my cheeks with gentleness.

  Every one of them wanted me to tell them how Baker and I met and fell in love. They couldn’t understand why a thirty-nine year old woman would fall in love with a man eleven years her senior, I suppose. It was somewhat novel back then. I told them all about it anyway, in great detail, because I knew most people liked people who shared information about themselves readily. Especially when they wore a toothy, pretty smile while sharing too.

  Baker and I met in Florida, I said, where I was from, six months before he proposed. It was my first day of work at the resort he happened to be living at while on holiday alone, and I had run up to him and hugged him tight for five whole minutes, thinking he was an old friend of mine. When I realised my mistake, I told them, I let go. But it was already too late. Baker had already decided he wanted me clinging on to him that way for as long as he lived.