Addicted to Womanhood 1

by Zoe Brown

I pulled my lips away from her shoulder, raising an eyebrow back at her. “You don’t HAVE to tell me,” I assured her, but she waved the sentiment away.

  “No, no, it’s fine, it’s fucking fine.” She mustered up a meagre smile for me, then pushed her hands up into her hair and vented with a heavy sigh, before she began to fill me in on the parts that she’d excluded from her life story Friday night.

  “Alright, so… once I’d turned myself into a girl, it was easy for Theo to convince me to keep doing it, especially since he was so willing to offer himself up for my… uh, new erotic appetites whenever I transformed. We kept my new gender identity and our new relationship super-secret, of course, which meant that for the first couple of weeks I only changed from ‘Giuliano’ to ‘Julia’ whenever we were alone inside my apartment, and the only thing we ever really did was make out, fuck, eat dinner together, and then lie there in my bed, curled up in one another’s arms and talking. But after a couple of weeks of enjoying being Theo’s ‘kept girl,’ I started yearning for the chance to get out of my apartment and experience being a girl outside, out in the world, among people. I wanted to experience more than just sex as a woman, I wanted to experience life as a woman. I wanted to make new friends with other women, I wanted to interact with other people as a woman, I wanted to buy some clothes as a woman, and eat out as a woman, and go to the movies as a woman, and just… live!”

  “We couldn’t sneak me out in our own neighborhood as a girl, though, of course. Even despite my radical transformation, there were still hints of the old me in my face, and enough people in the neighborhood remembered what my mother looked like as a young woman to have been able to peg girl-me, Julia, as related to her if we gave them the opportunity. Plus, everyone knew that Theo and male-me, Giuliano, had been joined at the hip since first grade, so if ‘Giuliano’ suddenly disappeared and Theo started spending all his time with some new ‘Julia’ girl – or whatever name I could think of to use, it wouldn’t matter – people would eventually wonder if Julia was just Giuliano on a gender-bending pill, and then we’d both be fucked. I might even wind up dead. So it was important that we keep up our normal lives in the community, working at the garage together, side by side in separate pits, as guys, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with one another in our identities as ‘best bros’ now that we’d been spending so much time fucking one another as boyfriend and girlfriend instead, showing up at the neighborhood races together and competing against one another – as guys – hitting on girls together – as guys – and all the rest of the normal shit we did, but whenever we had time to slip away together for a weekend or a day, we’d rev out of the Mission district in Theo’s Camaro, and I’d be transforming in the passenger seat by the time we popped onto one of the Bay bridges. Then we’d run off together somewhere, to Sonoma, or Oakland, or even down to San Jose, and we’d fuck and we’d make out and we’d eat out and he’d take me shopping, and we’d hang out at the races, and I’d make new female friends along the track while cheering my man on from the side.

  I even started getting back into racing myself a little bit. As a guy, even. As a girl, it was too risky for me to race one of my cars anywhere in the Bay Area – news of any hot girl who looked vaguely like she might be related to me and who was wheeling one of my cars into a race would get back to the neighborhood crew eventually, and then I knew Mihály would come after me, and Theo – but as ‘Giuliano’ I started getting back into the races again myself. Not for the machismo or the competition, but because it started to feel a bit like a sexy masquerade – like there I was, whipping the pants off of all these ultra-macho manly studs while pretending to be a guy, only to pop a Werewoman the moment I collected my prize money and to dash away before I started popping tits out of my chest and exchanging my dick for a pussy between my legs so that I could shimmy into a tight skirt and a pushup bra, cheer on my boyfriend from the sidelines during his race, and jump on his hard cock once he was done.”

  I blew out a shaky, excited breath, shivering slightly with my own arousal at that incredibly stimulating mental image. Jade grinned up at me as she felt my body quiver, too, knowing first hand just how horny she must be making me. I chose to ignore her look for the moment, though, and focus on the big unanswered question from her story. “So, what happened between you and Theo, in the end? I mean… you don’t seem to be anyone’s girlfriend at the moment…”

  Jade sighed, lowering her head and frowning again. “Well, that, um… that I fucked up pretty badly.”

  “How so?” I asked her, wrapping an arm around her again and pulling her close, gently stroking the soft, bare flesh of her firm, flat tummy with my fingertips.

  “I got us outed.”

  “Oh, shit…”

  “Yeah.” Jade sighed, and then leaned back against me again. “It was just… September of last year, I think. Theo and I had been ‘dating’ as ‘boyfriend and girlfriend’ for about four months. We were having a blast, although Theo was having some problems with the duality of my life. It was making him really uncomfortable to go from waking up with me – as Julia – in the morning, to working alongside me – as Giuliano – all day, and then coming home together so that I could turn back into Julia for the rest of the night. He moved into my apartment with me, and no one really batted an eye at that – but we had to pretend to just be male roommates to one another, best bros, but no more, and that was starting to chafe his chaps. He kept trying to convince me to move out of the Bay Area with him, relocate together somewhere down the coast a little bit, shack up together some place like Santa Cruz, Malibu, Long Beach, even down to San Diego, across the border to Tijuana, or over to Vegas if I wanted to, somewhere where we could start fresh together as just a guy and his girl, and he promised to get me all the Werewoman I needed so that I would never have to change back into Giuliano again, but…” She frowned, and ran a trembling hand through some of her dark hair, pulling it back behind one ear.

  “But you said no?” I was still a little surprised. Family aside, even more so than Brianna had, Jade – Julia? – seemed to really love her new life as a woman, and it seemed to definitely be the default for her. I would have assumed that she would have jumped at any chance to make her situation permanent, despite what her current circumstances might be.

  “I wasn’t ready,” she explained, defensively. “I’d have lost my family, forever. My mom, my grandmother, three little brothers and a sister who adored me, looked up to me. Even if I could never tell them about who I really was, I wasn’t ready to abandon them just yet. It was different for Theo – his father left home when he was in primary school and his mother died of cancer when he was 28, and he didn’t have anyone else to leave behind. But that was my whole life. I couldn’t be who I really wanted to be around them without risking violence for myself, and they probably wouldn’t have ever accepted me even if I had tried, but that didn’t mean I wanted to leave them behind.”

  “So what happened?”

  Jade sighed, running a hand up through her hair. “I tried something stupid. I had Theo drive my mom and me all the way out of the city and across the Bay to the Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, in the Port of Oakland, one of her favorite spots, for a picnic on her birthday. While Theo entertained my mother, I slipped away to one of the public restrooms and transformed into Julia, and then introduced myself to my mother. I was wearing this really pretty, conservative pink flower dress with purple flower patterns on it, my hair was down, I had strappy sandals on, and my makeup was tastefully subdued. I wanted to emphasize how much like a younger, glamorized version of her I looked, how easily it would be to see me as a daughter she’d never met before. But she only took one look at me after hearing me out before throwing her plate in my face, calling me a bunch of names like ‘pervert,’ ‘cock-sucker,’ ‘faggot,’ and ‘whore’, and storming off to call a cab.”

  “Ohhh, Jade, that’s awful—” I started to say to her, my heart going out to the beauty snuggled up against my chest, but she wrapped her arms
around herself and squeezed, then cut me off.

  “It’s okay, I don’t want to talk about that right now. The important thing is that when she got home, she called up all of her friends and neighbors and told them ‘what I’d done.’ I’d never thought she would do that to me, not after my last run in with transphobic, homophobic thugs had landed me in the hospital, but apparently, she wanted everyone to know that she was finished with me, that I was no longer welcome in her house, and she didn’t care what happened to me anymore. It only took a couple of hours after that before the news got around to Mihály and his brutes, and late that evening while Theo and I were lying in bed together, wrapped up in one another’s arms, Mihály and three of his crew burst in and tore us out of bed, knocking us to the ground and beating the crap out of us.”

  “Jesus Christ—” I protested again, but Jade still wouldn’t let me speak. She poked me around the middle and looked up at me with an intensity and cold ferocity that I hadn’t seen in her before, and shook her head firmly. “They beat Theo within an inch of his life first. He tried to fight back, and I tried to help him, but two of the bastards were holding me down and Theo was never much of a fighter. I screamed and I cried and I wailed, feeling helpless and hating it, but not able to do any more than squirm, half-naked, in the arms of guys who were much bigger and stronger than me, and they all made me watch as they slowly and methodically beat Theo unconscious. Then they dropped me on top of him, on the floor beside our bed, letting me wrap my arms around him and weep over his shattered face and cradle him in my arms as they started pulling their pants off, catcalling me and threatening me with sexual taunts and jabs as they psyched themselves up to first rape and then murder me. But… they fucked up.”

  I was breathless. I felt numb. Cold. This was horrifying. “How?” I asked her, hoarsely, just holding her against my chest for all the comfort it could provide.

  “They didn’t realize that I had seen that day coming. That I’d been scared of it, terrified about it, and waiting for it for months. That I had this sick, horrible feeling every day of my life that sooner or later it would all come crashing down around me. And they didn’t know that I’d prepared for it.”

  “When Mihály reached out for me, I pulled a hand out from behind me, out from underneath the bed, and I came up with a giant, jagged hunter’s knife. I… didn’t hesitate. I screamed and I launched myself forward onto that big, Hungarian bastard and buried the blade deep inside the first bit of exposed skin I could find. I knew they were going to kill me, but I was determined not to die without a fight. And by… pure, fucking, dumb luck… I got the bastard.” Jade glanced up at me, and then jabbed two fingers of her free hand into the soft, vulnerable skin at the base of her neck.

  “Blood started spurting everywhere. I must have cut an artery, or something, because I was just fucking covered in it. Mihály was dead before he hit the carpet, and I was crouched on top of him, screaming and crying and covered in his blood, a knife buried six inches deep inside his throat. Mihály’s brutes froze the moment the big bastard went down, and then they panicked, seeing the crazy-eyed girl, covered in blood, with a knife in her hands, snarling up at them, and they booked it out of the apartment, right into the waiting arms of the cops one of our neighbors must have called when they first heard me screaming. No one knew that the girl living in 4C with her boyfriend was gender-bending, they just heard a girl screaming in agony and fear, and did what normal people do when that happens. They called the cops, and the cops came. The cops stopped Mihály’s brutes before they could get away, and then came upstairs, saw the front door of our apartment all smashed in, and found me crouched on top of my broken and unconscious boyfriend, weeping and afraid, covered in the blood of my would-be-rapist-and-killer, who was lying dead, with his pants off and his cock out, on the floor beside me.”

  “Holy shit,” was I could think of to say. “What happened after that?”

  “Well,” Jade sighed and took another breath, shaking her head and clearing the lingering memories away, “I can definitely attest that ‘pretty-privilege’ is a thing, because by all rights they should have taken me down to the station for questioning, but there I was, a drop-dead, knock-out-gorgeous beauty queen, holding and crying over the man in my arms, while the weapon I’d used to defend myself from the half-naked man with his cock out was lying on the ground several feet away from me. It didn’t take the officers long to suss out that the girl in question – me – was a gender-bending-girl, given the massive amounts of Werewoman that we had stashed in the apartment, but that mattered a lot less right then than figuring out who’d broken into our apartment, and why, why they’d beaten my boyfriend to a bloody pulp, and why they’d tried to rape and murder me. No charges were ever filed against me, and the office-in-charge on the scene actually apologized to me for not getting there sooner. Having boobs and being pretty really came in handy that day.”

  “And Theo?” I asked, sensing that this a somewhat sensitive subject, “did he recover?”

  Jade frowned. She nodded, and shrugged, but it was with a sad look on her face. “Yeah, but … also, no.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. What happened to him?”

  “Traumatic brain injury,” she explained, softly. “He was in a coma for several weeks. When he finally came to, he didn’t remember me – the Julia version of me – very well anymore. He didn’t remember Alessandra, or me getting beaten half-to-death by Mihály and his thugs, or the months of me angrily stewing and then moping around the neighborhood after Alessandra left, yearning for something that I couldn’t have and sinking further and further into despair. He just… woke up one day and discovered that his best bro had suddenly turned into a hot chick that he had only vague memories of and feelings for, and he couldn’t understand why I’d done it or how I could expect him to be okay with it. Apparently, for all of the months that I’d been undergoing my own journey from male to female, he’d been going through one of his own, as well, from being passively and ignorantly transphobic to understanding and then to fully-supportive and accepting, but after he woke up he was suddenly right back where he’d started again, at square one, but we weren’t bros anymore, we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend anymore, we weren’t anything anymore. He left town a few weeks after getting out of the hospital, and didn’t even leave word.”

  “Oh, god, Jade, I’m so sorry,” I kissed the top of her head again and rocked her against my chest. “That must have been awful.”

  “Yeah, it sucked a lot,” she sighed, heavily, sniffling slightly and wiping one wet eye with a delicate finger. “Sucked, too, that I was no longer welcome in my home, or among my family, at least not as a girl. My mother relented a little bit when she heard about the attack and what I’d been forced to do to defend myself, but she wouldn’t see me again, she told me, unless I came as Giualiano, ‘her son,’ and she wouldn’t let any of the rest of the family see me either. And even though Mihály was dead and his thugs were all awaiting trial on charges of breaking and entering, assault, and attempted rape and murder, the neighborhood was still not a safe place for me after news that I’d gone over to the feminine side of things for Theo slowly leaked out onto the streets. Not long after Theo left town, I moved out of the apartment that I’d shared with him, the one I’d shared with Alessandra briefly, a few months before that, and dumped all my furniture and my dishes and the stuff I didn’t really need at a Goodwill store for some extra cash so that I could buy a used 2008 Chevy Impala – like, oh, how the mighty have fallen, right? I really only kept ‘Julia’s’ and ‘Giuliano’s’ clothes, packed into a few suitcases and travel bags in the back of my new-to-me automobile, my phone, a couple of books, and some toiletries – along with the remainder of my stash of Werewoman. I left racing behind, along with automobile culture and the cars I’d worked on, and started looking for work with the only other half-way marketable skill I possessed other than auto-wrenching: bartending.”

  “Where’d you pick that up?” I asked her, n
uzzling the top of her head softly until she purred against my chest.

  “One of my uncles taught me. He used to tend at Shotwell’s, back in the day, before his street racing got him in trouble and he had to start working out of some dive bars instead. When I got old enough to do legitimate work he’d occasionally bring me along with him and show me how to mix drinks and tend bar like a pro, even paid for me take 35 hours of bartending school when I was twenty-one. I’d had a few short-term gigs behind the counter now and again over the years, mostly when work at the garage was running thin, but nothing serious or long term, so it took me a little while to find work, sleeping in my car to save money and using the Y to catch a shower in the a.m. Eventually, though, I landed the gig at Eden’s Lounge.”

  I interrupted her there. “Were you still gender-bending at the time?”

  “Uh, actually, no,” Jade screwed up her face with an awkward expression. “After the whole thing with Mihály and Theo and my family… I kinda… decided I needed a break from being a woman for a while. I started to think that maybe I’d made a mistake, that maybe I’d wrecked my life by getting obsessed with gender-bending, and that maybe the whole… being-a-girl-thing, no matter how fun and sexy and fulfilling it was, just wasn’t worth what it was costing me. So, when I moved out of the neighborhood and started sleeping in my car, I decided to hang up my identity as ‘Julia’ for a while and focus on trying to get ‘Giuliano’s’ life back up and running again. I got a job at Eden’s Lounge, I started seeing chicks that I met while working at the bar, I went back home to visit my family – as a guy – and I kept Julia’s things and her pills locked in the trunk of my car.”

  I was intrigued. The way that Jade was talking about her attempt to give up gender-bending, not to mention the fact that she was lying in bed with me now, as a young woman, and very decidedly not a man named Giuliano, after a long, delicious weekend full of energetic, enthusiastic sex, led me to believe that she hadn’t exactly succeeded in what she set out to do. Why was that? What had happened to pull her back into skirts, lingerie, and high heels again? “It didn’t work out?” I hazarded a guess.