Addicted to Womanhood 1

by Zoe Brown

  —when there was a sudden, unexpected knock on my door.

  “Mr. Rhodes?” my weekdays Executive Assistant for the past four years, Brendan Chang, a young man in his mid-late twenties who came to the firm from one of Stanford’s more recent business MA commencement seasons, opened one of the double doors to my office and stuck his head inside. A dark red tie dangled below a face that was rather a bit rounder and more aesthetically-pleasing than that of the mostly thin, reedy nerds or flat-faced former-jocks that we usually got in the financial services field. Plenty of the female staff members of my company, I had become aware, considered the young man’s generous bottom lip and thick, well-groomed eyebrows especially attractive, and kept making passes at him. For myself, I appreciated the young man’s ready and able intellect, and his willingness to put in unusually-long hours for a demanding and exacting boss without complaint. I didn’t yet have the faith in his instincts that I did in those of my second, ‘weekends’ E.A. Miranda Howell, but Miranda had been working for me for the better part of a decade by now. In fact, she was going to be due for a promotion fairly soon. But Brendan showed promise. I was beginning to rely on him to handle tasks that I would normally have entrusted to only Miranda or myself in the past. He had a pretty good head on his shoulders, and could work fairly independently of my oversight, which was crucial for me when it came to E.A.s. Usually, when he stuck his head in through my doors, he had something important to discuss, something that needed to be brought to my attention, and so I didn’t much mind the interruption, no matter what I was doing. But today, his timing was grating. I smothered a growl of frustration and a grimace, curling my palm tightly closed around the baggie of pink pills and blanking the screen on my phone. I didn’t turn around in my chair. “Yes, Brendan?”

  “Sorry to bother you, sir. Lorraine in accounting brought in a cake for you, for your birthday, today. It’s been in the break room all day and people have eaten most of it, but she’s been standing guard over one last corner piece for you.” The younger man stepped into my office, crossed the space between my door and my desk, and set something down on the desktop surface behind my chair. “I… get the impression that today isn’t something you’re big on celebrating, sir, but I just wanted to bring you ‘your’ slice, so that Lorraine would be able to go home with a smile on her face.”

  My frustration faded. See, Brendan was pretty good guy. “Yeah, that was a good idea. Thanks for that.” I rotated my chair a few degrees to one side so that I could glance at the young man out of the side of my eye. “Do me a favor and send Lorraine a thank you card, from me, alright?”

  “No problem,” Brendan nodded his head and then turned about and slipped out of the room again, closing the door shut once more behind him.

  When then door was shut again, I opened my closed hand once more and gazed longingly at the baggie of pills clutched inside. I felt the stirrings of desire inside of me again, but not the impetus to follow through on them. Instead of impetus, I felt a sudden burning return of the shame. Out there, outside my private office, out among my employees, people were celebrating my birthday without me. What right did I have to hole up, alone, in my office, sulking over the emptiness of my affairs, longing for sexual thrills that were… taboo, at the least? Illicit and kinky and possibly perverted, at worst?

  Slipping the bag back inside the inner jacket pocket of my coat, I decided not to pursue those desires, for yet another night at least. Instead of starting up the Vitae app and looking up a Werewoman for potential hook up, this evening, I’d call up some friends in the city, invite them out for a late-night drink down at some bar, somewhere outside of the Marina district, something that might take my mind off of the pills in my coat, a certain hot, sexy bartender who worked down at Eden’s Lounge, the strange, taboo thrills and desires that I felt whenever I looked at the pills or thought of her, and gender-bending all together.

  Timestamp: Wednesday, Eighth of August, 2018. Fifty-one days ago.

  To my credit: I gave it a good shot. It just didn’t work out the way that I’d wanted it to.

  I’d gone out that night on my birthday. I rounded up a few of my business and celebrity friends in the city and had enjoyed a pretty luxurious steak dinner, followed by some cards and some… private female entertainment at a somewhat ‘upscale’ seedy strip club afterwards. I’d gone home later that evening with one of the participants in that private entertainment, a very willing and enthusiastic late-twenties-something blonde woman – whose name I simply could not remember the following morning – who kept telling me at the time how hot it made her to know that she was having sex with ‘THE Ashton Rhodes.’ Apparently, she followed my exploits on Instagram, or some other place. And, you know, it hadn’t been bad sex! She was a stripper, after all, and pretty damn lithe and flexible. She made it an enjoyable experience for the both of us, and I definitely lived up to her expectations, leaving her pleasantly purring with an exhaustedly happy smile on her face when I finally slipped out of her bed sometime after 4am in the morning and headed home to my own place for a couple hours of shut eye before work. It was just that… as with every other night out or sexual encounter that I’d had lately, the experience left me feeling more exhausted and drained afterwards than anything else, and even during the highlights of the evening, I had a hard time convincing myself that I was anything other than bored.

  Still… I kept trying. I went out again every night for the rest of that week, and then flew off to Honolulu for the weekend to relax. Hadn’t worked though, and once again I returned to the office on Monday feeling dispirited, drained, and increasingly mindful of the small bag full of pills in my inner jacket pocket, and the recently downloaded Vitae app on my cellphone.

  A maudlin Monday gave way to a trying Tuesday and a wearying Wednesday, but by Wednesday evening I had finally had enough of pushing my desires aside. I found myself sitting alone again, this time in a dark, private booth in the corner of a rundown old speakeasy on the opposite side of the city from the Marina district, sipping some swill and munching on buffalo wings as I stared at the dark screen of my phone, fingered the baggie full of pills that I had transferred into my pants’ pocket earlier in the evening, and tried to convince myself that there was nothing shameful, unmanly, or perverted about wanting to hook-up with someone who was on the Werewoman drug. Someone who had become a beautiful and sexual woman by choice, by desire, not because of genetic accident or quirk of birth or according to societal expectations. After all, I told myself, it wasn’t as if I was planning on taking it myself! That would have been a truly ridiculous notion. Me, the renowned playboy and thrill-seeker, paragon of masculine accomplishment and drive and sexuality, transforming myself into a hot, sexy, high-femme beauty of a sex-hungry young woman?! Absurd!

  I just… chose to ignore the fact that the idea definitely tickled something deep inside my sexual psyche.

  My arousal grew stronger and more insistent the longer that I stared at the blank screen of the phone, the longer I fingered the pills in my pocket, and the longer I fantasized about that bartender, Jade, and the sexy, sultry, taboo double-life she led. Finally, giving into my longings and the excited thrill that shot through me whenever I thought about sleeping with a Werewoman, I powered my phone back on, punched up the Vitae app, and started flying through the ‘New Membership’ questionnaire so that I could get to the good stuff on the next screen.

  Seven minutes of answering nearly the same formulaic boilerplate of questions that practically every other dating or hookup app out there employed later, I snapped a quick head-and-shoulders shot of myself, looking impressively dashing sitting in the cinematically-lit interior of ‘Barracuda’s Bar-N-Grille,’ wearing a dark sports jacket, with my black tie loose around my collar and my shirt open and unbuttoned down to the nape of my neck, and uploaded it, along with a verification shot of my drivers’ license. The last step included processing an eleven dollar and ninety-five cent charge on one of my credit cards, the fee for a one-month’s pr
emium membership access to the app. The app took a moment to process the received documentation, and the payment, and then it dinged, letting me into its interior and unfolding a map that showed the location of online or recently-online (active within the last six hours, according to the app) members within a twenty-five-mile radius of my vicinity.

  Eliminating all the various kinds of potential partners that I was not interested in hooking up with that evening was surprisingly easy. According to what I’d read on numerous websites while searching Google, openly-gender-bending ‘Werewomen’ – women like ‘Jade,’ who were physically women for as long as they were on the Werewoman drug, but who had been born male and would revert back to their male bodies once their taken dosage ran out – liked to use the Vitae app because it already had a long-standing positive relationship with the transgender and gender-non-conforming communities, and had been quick to embrace the new chemically-gender-bent ‘Werewomen’ once they arrived on the scene as well – despite the public censure and quasi-illegality of the drug. There was no official categorization for such women on the app, and couldn’t be as long as the drug was still shrouded in illegality, but the Werewomen themselves, along with the various men and women who were attracted to them, had worked out an informal short-hand that they could use to attract one another via the app: ‘GB’, short for ‘Gender-Bending.’ Female profiles on the App that included the letters ‘GB’ at the beginning or the end of the Profile name, or less commonly in the profile description, were read by the community’s membership as being Werewomen. I wasn’t completely clear on why everyone had decided to go with ‘GB’, for ‘Gender-Bending,’ over ‘WW’ for ‘Werewoman,’ but I assumed that there was some other lingo involved, something significantly less-taboo that ‘GB’ could be worked out to construe, something that provided everyone involved with just a bit of cover in case the legality of their activities was ever called into question. Whatever. That was of no interest to me.

  Once I weeded out the rest of the female (cis and trans) profiles on the app that were not marked with ‘GB’ in any way, there weren’t a whole lot of options to choose from. I had kind of expected that, given the drug’s fairly questionable legal status, as well as the fact that I was sure plenty of women on the drug – like Jade – preferred to simply ‘pass’ as their female selves, without anyone being wise to their gender-bent status. From what I’d read on the internet, most Werewomen publicly concealed their gender-bending status, although they eventually came out to someone, be it a lover or a friend, about being gender-benders, but Werewomen who were public about their gender-bending activities on dating Apps and the like usually advertised their status as gender-benders in that way because they could not afford the drug’s fairly hefty price-tag on their own: they wanted to be women, and to get laid as women, but they couldn’t shell out several thousand dollars a month for the expensive drugs that made their gender-bending lifestyle possible, so instead, they hooked up with men and women who could provide a single-night’s sixteen-hour double-dosage of womanhood (the standard among the community, or so I’d been led to understand) for them in lieu of (or sometimes, in accompaniment with) the traditional dinner and date before the anticipated hook-up. They probably weren’t always – or maybe even most of the time – able to find someone who was willing to offer them the opportunity to let their feminine side out to play for a night, but they took maximum pleasure in each and every opportunity that they got.

  Two of the seven remaining profiles did not respond to my initial overture. Two more apologized and informed me that they were already occupied for the evening. But when I messaged the fifth GB-marked profile on the map, I finally hit gold: GBNightwalker89 responded to my opening message – SilverFoxG3ntlmn: ‘Evening! Do you have any plans for the night yet?’ – almost instantaneously, and to my delight, she was unoccupied: GBNightwalker89: ‘Hiya, handsome! …Wow, is that really you?? Nope, nothing yet, just got off work! Why, did you have something specific in mind? ’

  Nightwalker’s avatar and her profile pics suggested that in her female state she was a stunningly beautiful woman with bright, vibrant orange-red locks that fell to the middle of her back, delicately formed facial features, full lips, beautiful green eyes, and a sexy, svelte body that was blessed with ripe and ample curves. In all but one of the photos she was nearly naked, wearing bits of lingerie in some but with only some artfully draped sheets and hand/arm placements preventing her full nudity from being exposed in others, and I found myself staring at them in disbelief, staggered and amazed that beauty and femininity such as this could be created out of the rough, masculine canvas of men with only the minor application of some gene-altering chemicals and some nanotech. The cock that was already hard inside my pants grew only stiffer and more aroused as I looked through the pictures. I wanted her. I wanted to know what it was like to be with a woman like her. I wanted to know what it was like, from her perspective, to be a woman like her.

  We made our arrangements without too much dancing around the issue. It was already close to ten pm by the time we started our conversation, and neither of us wanted to waste any time. She asked me what I was looking for, and I told her: SilverFoxG3ntlmn: ‘I’m really turned on tonight and I’d love to have sex with you. I’ll buy us dinner if you’d like some, but I’d prefer to have it delivered to where we are – I don’t fancy either of us wearing clothing any longer than is absolutely necessary this evening.’

  My matter-of-factness seemed to amuse her. GBNightwalker89: ‘Hahaha! Ohmigod, Fuck… Alright!! Normally I’d insist on dinner and dancing or some shit first, but fuck you are Old Spice smoking hot, and I am really horny myself. >.< I can’t wait to get out of this body and into something softer, smaller, and more femme. You have pills and condoms?’

  I felt the small little plastic baggie in my inner jacket pocket again. There had to be at least a dozen or more pills inside of it. Several times more than enough for tonight. SilverFoxG3ntlmn: ‘I do.’

  GBNightwalker89: ‘Kick ass. Wanna get us a pizza, Mr. Old Spice? I like pepperoni. We can go halvsies if you want when I get there. And something to drink? And do you prefer lingerie or latex? Kinks or vanilla?’

  SilverFoxG3ntlmn: ‘Tonight: Vanilla and lingerie. I have an 1811 Chateau d’Yquem that cost me $120k dollars which I haven’t opened yet, and Tony’s Pizza is only a few blocks away from my loft. I’ll stop by for pizza on my way up. Don’t worry, dinner’s on me. Here’s the address… Where are you now? I’ll send a car.’

  Chapter Five

  Both ‘Nightwalker’ and myself agreed not to tell the driver of the car that I’d ordered for her – well, for the male version of her which would be arriving at my loft in a little under an hour – what the occasion was. ‘Nightwalker’ told me to send the driver to pick up a guy in his late twenties who went by the name of ‘Greg,’ but she also told me that she preferred to go by her female name, ‘Brianna,’ once we were alone and the transformation was complete. I had no objections to that. I was feeling a little awkward about the fact that my hook-up for that evening would be arriving at my place with a cock instead of a vagina, but there was a bit of sexiness in the duality, too. Assuming I understood things correctly, ‘Greg’ was going to become ‘Brianna’ in my loft, and – hopefully, at any rate – I’d get to watch. My straining cock was starting to seriously ache by the time I made it the full fifteen blocks across town and took an elevator up to my place, a piping-hot pizza balanced on one hand.

  By the time ‘Greg’-slash-‘Brianna’ arrived, I had the wine out of the chiller and a pair of crystal glasses on the marble-slab island in the kitchen near the front door of my loft. The pizza, still in its box, had been comfortably warming in my oven until just minutes ago; now it was on the marble-slab countertop of the island. My suit jacket was off, and my tie was strung over the back of a chair. The sleeves of my shirt were rolled up to my elbows, and I was standing before the large windows of my corner penthouse, looking out over the city and eagerly anticipa
ting my date’s arrival.

  My loft in the city wasn’t particularly grand or spacious – it was just a sexy, trendy little space with a staggering wrap-around-corner view of the Bay area and downtown – the same one that I’d chosen for my office. There was a large, luxurious California-king-sized bed on the loft directly above my little den, a pair of comfortable couches underneath, space in the kitchen to prepare a meager dinner for two, a few pieces of art and some bookshelves but not a whole lot else. I didn’t really ‘live’ there, honestly – I lived at the office, or out in the world on the weekends when I could get away from things, away from it all. The loft was just where I slept, alone, or with someone else.

  Not that I was planning to get much sleep that night.

  When the knock on my door finally came, I opened it to find a tall, lanky young man of about my height who was, as advertised, in his late twenties, on the verge of heading into his thirties. He had a scuffed-up leather jacket and some worn jeans on over his slender frame, and a baseball cap worn backwards on his head covered up most of his hair, but I could see the bright, rich, orangey-red in what he had under that cap, and that only made me further intrigued. There was some stubble on his face. His clothes were just a bit on the shabby side – clearly ‘Greg’ was not a person who could afford to replace things often – and there was just a bit of cigarette smell hanging in the air around the man that made me imagine him as a nervous smoker, but he had kind, friendly, vulnerable eyes, and when we exchanged our first glance I saw him blush.