by Zoe Brown
There. I ‘missed’ her call. Again.
Still felt pretty guilty, though, as I slipped the cellphone back inside my sports jacket. I ought to have called her back. She would have called me back.
I just didn’t know what to say.
“Nope,” I finally answered the bartender, downing one of the two shots she’d placed in front of me.
I’d been lingering at the bar for over a half an hour, ever since the lovely young woman with the dark eyes, vaguely Latin or Mediterranean looks, bouncy breasts in a dark bronze bustier, and pert bottom in a short, short black leather skirt had served me my second drink of the night. She had a radiantly fetching smile that was easily the most attractive thing I’d seen since I walked in, and it drew me in like a mothlight, so I stayed at the bar, rather than drift around the rest of the establishment trying my luck on the single women who were circulating about. I did halfheartedly try to talk the bartender into going home with me that evening, but even making the effort to do that started to feel tiring and meaningless, so mostly I just sat there, roundly disillusioned with my life at that particular moment, and talked at her, instead. Not so much to her, more at her. I just really wanted… someone to hear me out right then. Someone who, unlike Violetta, wasn’t going to be able to force me to confront whatever she’d think was really bothering me. And fuck it, I was at a bar, not a church, and she was a bartender: that’s how that shit worked in the movies, wasn’t it?
Well, the pretty girl behind the bar listened to me ramble for well over an hour, smiling politely whenever we made eye contact and topping off my drink on more than one occasion, but she didn’t really say much back. That was alright with me; I was in more of a confessional mood than a conversational mood that evening, and I carried the dialogue just fine on my own. I vented to her about my work, I complained to her about how boring the endless stream of parties and bars and clubs was getting to be, how empty all the delicious sex was starting to feel, and how I couldn’t even enjoy my usual thrill-seeking pastimes anymore because I just didn’t fucking feel anything about them anymore. There was no thrill in thrill-seeking when you’d done everything a hundred times before, and even the more dangerous and high-risk activities that I enjoyed had long since passed the point where muscle-memory and routine had erased all of the actual thrills. I had run out of adventures. There was nothing new left for me to try.
It was at that point in my… soliloquy that the young woman behind the bar finally turned directly towards me, as if she was taking real note of me for the first time that whole evening. She cocked her head to the side, and smiled this strange, mystifying little smile.
“So, you’re the king of the world; or at least one of the princes, who has, or can do, everything he wants, and you’ve gotten bored with it all?” She lifted a finely arched eyebrow at me questioningly and reached inside the little satchel around her waist for something I couldn’t see. Her tone was slightly teasing, but I didn’t care. I shrugged. She’d summed it up rather nicely.
“Mmmm. It’s that there’s just no actual adventure in it anymore.” I tossed back the rest of my drink and was dully disappointed, but not really surprised, when a half glass of vodka at once didn’t even really burn going down. Even drinking was getting boring these days. “I’ve done everything I’ve ever wanted to do, more times than I can remember anymore.”
“Then why come here tonight?” the young woman arched an eyebrow at me, challengingly, and refilled my glass.
“Some ‘friends’ that I play cards with sometimes, we…” I shrugged, and then laughed, self-deprecatingly. “I don’t… even know, really.” I glanced around the bar at the all of the beautiful women lounging and moving about the Lounge, and then sighed. “Maybe this is just… what I’m expected to do. And I love women, I really do. Love spending time with them, love talking to them, love making love with them. I think women are … beautiful and majestic and wonderful and amazing. When I’m around a beautiful, intelligent, feminine woman,” I tipped my newly-refilled glass at the bartender, who smiled fleetingly in response, “I feel… enchanted. I just want to be with her, and around her, and spend time with her, just listen to her. I just… I don’t know if I can muster up the enthusiasm to charm, entice, entertain, and have even more meaningless sex with yet another woman this evening, and I know that’s what everyone expects.”
“Why’s that, then?” she seemed to be intensely interested in the answer.
“Which part?” I tossed back my drink again, “Why I don’t know if I can muster up the enthusiasm this evening, or why everyone expects it?”
“Both. Wait – hold on,” The dark-haired beauty half turned to pour another patron a drink, but after a moment she collected the man’s money and swung back to me again, “Okay, go.”
I shrugged. “I’m Ashton Rhodes.” I saw a flicker of recognition twitch in the girl’s eyes, but she nodded like I should keep going. “I’m internationally known for being a playboy and a lady’s man, a real ‘lover of women.’ I have more lingerie models and glamour models and Hollywood actresses and heiresses on my speed dial than there are…” I tried to think of something that there were a really large number of, “days in the year, or—”
“Speed dial’s not really a thing anymore, and … I don’t know, that’s a pretty large number…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I responded to her first retort first. “Apparently, I’m getting old, and I’m starting to date myself, so sue me. But, um…” I pulled up my phone, tapped a few buttons on the screen, and then dropped it back inside my pocket again. “Out of 833 contacts, 358 of them are women I’ve slept with, have made plans with that fell through… for one reason or another, or whom I have had extensive relationships with.”
The beautiful young woman serving me drinks scoffed at me from behind the bar. “Woah. Dude…” she shook her head and whistled. “That is a not small number.”
I shrugged, “I like women. I like being with women. And usually I like sex with women. It’s just that lately, I …” I shrugged, “I’ve just been feeling like… maybe I’ve had all the new, exciting, thrilling romantic or sexual experiences that I’m going to have. Maybe I need something new, now. Not ‘love,’ I’ve tried that. We never seem to connect on the right wave length, but… well, I love women. That’s where I am.”
“And the other part?”
“Oh, right.” I sighed again and ran a hand through my silver hair. “Like I said, I’m Ashton Rhodes. When I was twenty-nine years old I slept with a different model, actress, or other beautiful woman every weekend for sixteen straight months. I didn’t plan that – I just went places, I had money, I had looks, I had charm, I would smile and flirt and laugh, they would smile and flirt and laugh back, and if at any point someone actually turned me down, there was always another girl at another table somewhere else who would say yes. I enjoyed it a lot. It made me feel like I was… charming, handsome, masculine. So, I kept doing it. And now… people expect it of me. I don’t get papparazi’d, really, but every once in a while, I run into a society journo or a gossip columnist and they inevitably ask ‘who I’m shacking up with’ the coming weekend, or ‘who I’m bringing to this big event,’ or whatever. I mean, I’m sure Heffner had me beat by like, miles, but… I like women. It just worked out this way.”
The girl behind the bar looked appraisingly at my drooping, lifeless expression for another minute, then licked her lips and seemed to come to some kind of decision.
“Slip me two grand and I’ll give you the answer to all of your problems,” she told me lowly, so that none of the other people moving around the bar could hear.
I glanced up at the girl’s face in some confusion, but though her smile remained, her eyes had focused to a sharp intensity. She knew I had the money – she’d seen me pulling hundred dollar bills out of my wallet all night long; there were plenty more where the first few had come from. Without further hesitation, I got the money out and laid it out on the counter beside my empty glass.
She refilled my drink again and swept the money off the bar, tucking it neatly away inside of the satchel at her waist, then handed me back my drink. In the palm of her hand, I felt a small plastic baggie filled with pills, which she dropped into my palm before pushing the drink into my hand. I glanced casually down the bar afterwards, just to make sure no one else was witnessing the seemingly-illicit transaction, but I needn’t have worried. No one cared about what the depressed-looking silver fox down at the end of the bar was doing. I closed my hand around the glass and set it back atop the bar in front of me, then discreetly dropped my hand towards my waist, catching just a glimpse of the pink pills (each one stamped with an imprint that combined the ancient Greek astrological symbols for male and female) inside the baggie before I stuffed them into my pants pocket.
It had just been a glimpse, but I knew from previous encounters with knock-off TCE peddlers in the clubs what I’d just been handed.
Werewoman.
The hot and sexy young woman behind the bar had just sold me a baggie filled with gender-bending pills.
✽✽✽
Along with most of the rest of the world, I first became aware of the existence of gender-swapping TCE pills when stories of the unexpected side effects of GENTECH’s ‘Aphrodite’ product first surfaced back in late 2015. Like most other people, I’d dabbled in using TCEs now and again, though only a handful had ever really held much interest for me: a quick stint with hair-coloring TCEs in 2013 demonstrated to me that I was actually more attractive to women with my ‘silver fox’ locks than I was with black, brown, blonde, or red hair, and aside from the occasional penile-size enhancement (which was fun in the right company) and sexual stamina enhancer, the only TCE that I had any regular familiarity with was GENTECH’s ‘Sons of Mars,’ a male muscle-enhancement-over-time TCE that (when taken before or during exercise) helped me to burn two or even three times as many calories during exercise and convert the released energy three times more efficiently into muscle-building activities. I made use of that product whenever I started feeling a little flabby around the middle.
But when reports of what ‘Aphrodite’ was capable of doing to a man began to surface, I found the results truly phenomenal, and quite frankly, a little frightening both in their implications – for a man as steeped in masculinity as I was, anyway – and because I found those implications to be hot. The idea that a single pill of the formula could strip a man even as virile and masculine as myself of every ounce of his physical manliness, and replace that manliness with the softness, curves, beauty, and womanhood of the sexiest women on the planet for up to eight hours per dose was both deeply troubling… and a little arousing.
Rhodes Multinational Holdings had been among a number of major GENTECH shareholders who had pushed the pharmaceutical company’s leadership to pull and overhaul the pill in the wake of ‘Aphrodite’s’ unintended side effects coming to light, and at the time, that was the extent of both my knowledge of and my interest in the product. I did later come to hear through my corporate sources that some of the scientists at competing firms, who had taken ‘Aphrodite’ apart to see what about it was turning men into women, had ported the original formula to the street for some quick cash, and then wound up pulling down a hefty corporate espionage fine, as well. And through the internet I learned, along with everyone else, that the rumors about the gender-bending pill’s revival in a street form known as Werewoman were true, but I chose not to pay much attention to those stories. I told myself that I had no personal interest in a gender-bending drug, and so there was no reason to learn any more about it. I was a rich, powerful, white man in my late forties (at the time) who was very happy in his gender and sexual identities. I liked befriending and talking and romancing and relaxing and having sex with women; why should I ever want to become one?
✽✽✽
But now here I was, sitting in a Lounge club in the Marina district of San Francisco, carrying a small plastic-baggie’s worth of gender-bending pills in the pocket of my pants. I had just held those pills in my hand a moment earlier. I had just been sold them by the beautiful young woman behind the bar.
Was she--? No way. I glanced up at the lovely vision of womanhood standing in front of me and blinked, the dull attraction that I’d been feeling for her all evening suddenly roaring into full-throated arousal at just the thought that the sexy young woman looking back at me out of those dark, fetching eyes might be on the very same pills she’d just passed me. There was something just… unspeakably hot and sexy about the idea, and I couldn’t help but wonder what it would feel like to sleep with a woman like her. Would it be the same as sleeping with any other woman? Would it be worse? Would it be awkward and stilted and uncomfortable? Or would it be even hotter, knowing that there was a forbidden, taboo dimension to having sex with a Werewoman, a thrill from knowing that the beauty I was sleeping with had wanted to become the goddess of beauty, femininity, and sensual charms that I had in my bed so badly she had taken an illicit, borderline illegal drug to do so?
I didn’t know how to ask, so I just raised my eyebrows at her and opened my mouth. She laughed, and nodded enthusiastically, leaning close and kissing my cheek. “Oh honey, if you only knew how much money I make a night in tips off of these tits and this ass…” she whispered in my ear, giggling. “And the best part? At the end of the night, I get to go home with whichever man or woman I want. No one ever wanted to go home with me when I showed up to this place as grumpy old ‘Giuliano.’ But ‘Jade’ has her pick of company.” She leaned back again and winked at me, turning to refill another customer’s drink. “You want to add some thrill back into your life? You want the best fucking sex you’ve ever had?” She nodded in the direction of my waist, and the concealed baggie hidden away inside my pocket. “That’s the ticket.” She winked at me one more time, then tossed her lovely dark brown mane over her shoulder and went back to work.
Chapter Three
Timestamp: Friday, 28th of September, 2018. Today.
4:48. A fresh surge of excitement and nervous anticipation trembled through me when the thought of Jade came to me, and I had to discreetly flatten the palms and fingers of my hands against the finished surface of the reclaimed oak conference table and bite down on an excited smile in order to hide my eagerness to be gone. I was only partially successful, though, and at my elbow Reza Sassani, Rhodes Multinational’s Chief Communications Officer, pressed his fist to his face to cover a ‘cough’ and then leaned in, dropping his voice while one of his eyebrows popped. “Seem a bit antsy, boss. Hot date tonight?”
Well, apparently the time for subtle questions was over. Something like that, I thought back, though outwardly feigning that I had not heard the query. I briefly imagined – though not remotely actually considered – telling Sassani the reason for my distracted fidgeting, and then smirked at the forbidden little thrill that the idea filled me with, a dangerous impulse that I quickly smothered. At that moment, though, something else grabbed my attention: having left some of her papers out of the stack she’d carried with her to the podium, Markham had turned to the row of padded chairs lining the interior wall of the conference room and signaled for her executive assistant, Amy Cho, to bring up the rest of the pages.
The twenty-three-years-young Miss Cho was an incomparably talented, organized, and efficient executive assistant. She’d come to work for Markham just last month, right out of her Business MA at Berkeley, replacing the older woman’s outgoing EA, who had struggled to keep up with our workplace’s frenzied hyper-productivity (there was no rancor in the parting; Markham and I arranged a tidy separation package for the young man in question and wrote him some glowing recommendation letters. The last we’d heard, he was rocking a pretty prestigious senior EA position at a medium-size financial law firm a few blocks over. We wished him all the best.) Amy had encountered none of the same struggles as the man she’d replaced, though. Indeed, the girl seemed to flourish in our fast-paced, high-intensity work environment, and her quick thinking and o
verall acumen had saved the fumbling Markham several embarrassments in the short time she’d been with us. She was truly an asset to Rhodes Multinational.
And, oh, of course, the fact that she was drop-dead gorgeous and radiantly charismatic did everything to improve the reception she’d received when she’d come to work for the company. Amy Cho was five-and-a-half-feet of one of the most beautiful examples of womankind that had ever walked in through the employee entrance of the offices at Rhodes Multinational. Anyone with a pair of eyes and even a passing inclination towards the female half of the species had perked up and taken notice the moment she breezed in through our doors. And now, as she crossed the room towards the podium, looking stunning today with flowing mahogany hair tumbling past her neck and spilling over her shoulders down her back, it was easy to see why. She was a vision of supple curves and elegant beauty, wearing a tight, dark grey, knee-length pencil skirt today that emphasized her ample hips and pert, perfect bottom, along with a matching dark grey vest over a white buttoned blouse, the top of which was open from her neck to the second button. Her high, firm, full bust was generously expressed by the outfit, and while she strode confidently and gracefully to the podium atop a pair of sleek black four-inch heels, her sinuously long and sleek calves faintly glistened in black stockings. She stopped in front of the table, positioned between the rest of the senior managing executives and her boss at the podium, her round bottom unintendedly pointed in the direction of the senior executives seated behind her at the conference table as she handed Markham the papers the CRO had requested and highlighted the relevant passages for her, and I heard more than one chair squeak around the table as all the men (and at least one of the women) discreetly shifted their eyes, not wanting to be caught looking at her shapely derriere. No one wanted to make the women in the office feel uncomfortable or objectified.
