by Zoe Brown
I took a glance at the article, a society piece from the late 90s, back when Violetta and myself had first been involved with one another. I recognized the piece. I was still just a moderately-successful nobody at the time, but Violetta had already been a young woman of some notoriety, a European glamour model turned fashion student who was on her way to Italy to study at the feet of some of the masters.
“Actually, she and I took a real stab at making things work, once or twice, back in the 90s and then again a few years ago,” I mused, pushing some of the chocolate around on my plate with my fork.
“Oh?” Jade blinked her long black lashes at me and leaned forward, intrigued, resting her chin on the palm of her hand, her elbow on the top of the table as she waited expectantly for more. “So, what went wrong?”
I didn’t respond right away. Still staring at my plate, I frowned, going back over my memories from those days, happy memories of vacationing together all up and down the Mediterranean coast with one of the liveliest, most enchanting and beautiful and intelligent women that I had ever known, making love on the beaches of Barcelona, debating love, chivalry, history, and romantic poetry on a gondola in Venice, sailing out of Marseille together on a private Yacht, touristing hand-in-hand through the streets of Milan, playing house for a few months in Florence while she studied fashion design at Polimoda…
“Nothing,” I said at length, a few minutes later. “Everything was wonderful. Violetta was everything I could have asked for in a partner: smart, ambitious, sensual, feminine…” I stuck another mouthful of chocolate in my mouth and savored it.
Jade’s eyes blinked expectantly when I didn’t continue. “…buuuuuuut there was something missing? I’m guessing?”
I shrugged, mustering up a smile for her. It was a long time ago, and it no longer hurt, per se, but that particular memory was still not overly pleasant. “Well, that’s what she said. That it felt like I was holding something back from her, something I wouldn’t share with her, or didn’t know how to, like there was something missing for me, and she could feel it.”
Jade winced, but she nodded knowingly, her eyes shut. I gritted my teeth and growled inwardly.
“We stayed close,” I continued, trying to lighten the mood again. “She’s one of my dearest friends, actually. She’s in town these days, setting up her label’s second North American boutique over in the, um, Union Square.” I thought about telling Jade that it had been her call that I had failed to answer, at the bar in Eden’s Lounge on the first night that we met, but decided against it, feeling like that would just lead to another big can of worms and even more questions.
“Ohhhh, fucking yaaaaaassss…” Jade’s eyes got big and round and glazed over at the mention of the new lingerie boutique. “A Dona Bella, here, in San Fran? When are they opening?”
The salivating expression on her face made me laugh, and I seized on her excitement, hoping for a chance to turn the conversation around again. “In October, I believe. I already have tickets to the opening Gala; would you care to be my plus one for the evening?”
“Ohhhh fuck yes, yes, yes, yes, please…” Jade whispered, fiercely, clasping her hands together beside her face. But a moment later, the excited, wistful glow began to fade. “… but um… we probably won’t be going as a… as a couple, will we?” She gestured around us at the intimately-lit, romantic interior of Jardinière. “Not like this.”
I felt that sinking sensation again, and stabbed at what was left of my desert. I knew what she was implying, but I refused to play along. Stop it, goddamnit! I am NOT going to become a gender-bender! I felt myself reflexively fling the thoughts at her, though I managed to keep a hold on my tongue. I didn’t care what sexy, seductive fantasies and desires I might have – they weren’t going to get the better of me the way they had her! A defensive, throttling anger wrapped its way around my throat and my chest, constricting down on me. I gritted my teeth, but forced my tone to remain light and casual. “What makes you say that?”
“Well, where’d my nightie go, today, while I was gone?” Jade deadpanned the question at me, snapping her head up at me and fixing me with a no-nonsense look as she set her fork aside. “The truth, this time.”
The sudden directness of her question made me hesitate, and then her eyes narrowed. “Did you masturbate into it? While I was gone? Did you fantasize about what it would be like to wear one of those yourself?” My face blanched, and she knew she had me. “Did you fantasize about taking Werewoman? Becoming a hot chick, like me?”
She was keeping her voice down, barely above the level of an intense whisper, which I appreciated, but still, my skin prickled with the fear that someone might overhear her, and shame burned at me. I rallied, refusing to concede to the truth of what really happened, clinging to my lie and holding to my story. “I already told you. I threw it away.”
Jade growled faintly, and broke into fluent Spanish for the first time since I’d met her. “Por el amor de Dios, no seas gilipollas!” She tipped her head to the side and reached for my hands with both of hers. “Come on, Ashton, stop bullshitting me and look at me.”
I did as she asked. The dark-chocolate-haired beauty’s eyes sparked with a hint of anger, but also sad and sympathetic as she gazed up at me. “Tell me what you like about me.”
“I’ve already told you,” I muttered, roughly, feeling a sudden surge of irritation but fighting it back. “You’re… bright, warm, cuddly, soft, beautiful, sensual, assertive, elegant, feminine…”
“You’re just describing what kind of woman I am,” Jade interrupted me gently. “And it sounds a lot like the way you described Violetta. The way you describe Brianna. Honestly, it sounds a lot like the way you describe most of the women from your past.”
I tried to laugh that off, positioning for a change of subject. “Are you accusing me of having a type?”
“No, not exactly.” She resisted the repositioning, sighed, and squeezed my hands, her eyes drifting closed for a second. Then she opened them again. “I’m saying… none of what you just said about me has anything to do with who I am as a person. What I like, what I care about, what I’m interested in, what I do with my life, what I think about things… It’s all about how I … express being a woman. You know, ‘gender expression.’ But there are millions of ‘bright, warm, cuddly, soft, beautiful, sensual, assertive, elegant, feminine’ women in the world, Ashton, and you didn’t say anything about me that involved any shared mutual interests, or compatible personality traits, or how good we are together… you just focused on the parts of my personality that say ‘hello, world, I’m a girl and I like it!’”
I mused on that uncomfortably for a moment. I knew, again, what she was getting at, but I didn’t want to admit that she might be on to something. “You’re just so much more of those things than any other woman I’ve ever come across,” I murmured, taking another bite of my desert. “It’s a little bit irresistible.”
“Yeah, but partly that’s because I wasn’t just saddled with them from birth,” Jade explained, gently, laughing softly, “I wasn’t forced to learn how to be a ‘beautiful girl’ so that I could fit in at school, or because my parents expected it of me or because society demands it of people who are born with vaginas,” she lowered her voice to a whisper for the last word. “I chose to be this way. I wanted to be this way. I fought to be this way. I’m ecstatic, all the time, about the fact that I get to be a woman. Especially one as beautiful as this…” She waved down at herself and shook her head in amazement. “It’s like a fucking fairy tale dream come true, but that fairy tale magical feeling is what you’re really attracted to, like a fly to a candlelight. It’s not who I am. It’s what I am. And that’s what I was like when I was in your shoes, too. With Alessandra. Before all of this…” she looked down at her breasts and her body again, “happened to me.”
“I don’t think that you and I will be going on boutique-opening-gala dates together in November, Ashton, because…” She cast a discreet look around the
restaurant to make sure that no one was watching us too closely, then glanced back at me, squeezed her breasts gently through the thin fabric of her dress, slid her hands sensually down her sides, over the narrow curves of her waist and the wide roundness of her hips, and fixed her fierce, intense dark eyes on mine, “…because this is what you really want, isn’t it?”
Chapter Fifteen
The return trip in the Ferrari after dinner was not nearly as cheery and flirtatious as the one that brought us to the restaurant had been. The two of us sat side by side in silence. Jade drove, still enjoying the souped-up foreign automobile, but she said nothing, only shooting me a few discreet little glances now and again, as if she was checking to see whether I was angry with her or not. I wasn’t, but I was having trouble expressing that at that moment. Instead of flirting, or conversing, or communicating effectively in any matter whatsoever with the beautiful young woman who was driving the car, I was sitting cold and stone-like in the passenger seat, staring fixedly out of the window, although my eyes wouldn’t focus on anything. A low broil of anger and defensiveness had thickened my thoughts and was making it impossible for me to sort through my feelings.
Finally, however, after several long, uncomfortable minutes together in that thick, angry silence, I managed to half-turn in Jade’s direction. “I’m sorry,” I apologized, gritting my teeth against the uncomfortable, defensive frustration, “I promise, I’m not angry at you. I don’t even know what I’m angry about.”
Jade relaxed a little, smiling at me with an understanding tilt of the head. “It’s alright. I bet I probably do.”
I stifled the urge to fire back with sarcasm. Oh, I bet you do. You just know everything about me, don’t you? I didn’t say it, and I didn’t want to think it at her, but I did feel it. “Oh?” I bit out, gruffly.
“Yeah…” the gorgeous young woman in the elegant maxi-dress beside me laughed, taking my barely-contained frustration in stride, and with a fair bit of humor while she was at it. “You’re feeling defensive because I finally got through to you tonight, didn’t I? I called you out on what you really wanted, and you’ve run out of believable lies to hide behind.”
I growled faintly, shaking my head. “I am not—”
“Oh, shut up, Ashton,” the hot young woman beside me chuckled and shook her head. “Yes! Yes, you are. Or you do, or whatever you were going to pretend doesn’t apply to you. You can’t lie to me about it anymore. You’ve been getting off on fantasies about turning into a hot chick, just like me.” She fixed me with a raised-eyebrow, knowing-look, and my face burned with shame and anger again. “And you know I know now, and it burns ya, but you can’t really deny it any more, because I’ve had plenty of time to pick up on all the little hints you’ve been dropping about it all this time.”
“What little hints?” I snapped back, the defensiveness surging back to the forefront again. Was she implying that I had been acting in some… effeminate, girlish, womanly way recently? That got my dander up. I felt my hands clench, and heard the sound of my clenched teeth grinding together in my mouth. I wasn’t some fucking effeminate—
“Little things you said and did when we were alone together.” Jade gave me a pitying expression and rolled her eyes. “Oh, unknot, sheesh. I’m sure no one else picked up on it. After all, you don’t normally walk around asking cis women how they got into being girls, do you? Or ask to watch them ‘transform’ into women before you fuck them? Or buy them lingerie to wear that you masturbate into afterwards while fantasizing about becoming hot babes just like them? Or pepper them with questions about what life is like for them ‘as women?’”
I frowned and shook my head. She was right about that, I had to reluctantly concede. And… looking back now, I realized that I ought to admonish myself about how unsubtly I’d approached my questioning of Jade over the past couple of weeks. Way to give away the game, asshole.
Jade cocked her head to the side and smiled at me, acknowledging my silent concession. “Well, anyway, before you got all silent and stony faced on me at the restaurant, the last thing that I said to you was that what you really wanted wasn’t me; it was to become a hot, sexy, curvy babe,” she purred at me, teasingly, and fished for my eyes, “like me.”
I felt a surge of embarrassment and defensiveness again. I knew that it wasn’t really Jade’s fault that I kept getting so defensive whenever the idea of me, personally gender-bending came up, but it was hard to reconcile my lifetime-experience of ultra-competitive macho-masculinity with the desire to become a hot, sexy young woman for a while. Plus, there was the possibility that if Jade could call me out this way, someone else might be able to do so, as well. That idea made me more than just a little defensive – it terrified me. If rumors that the CEO of Rhodes Multinational was into some kinky, quasi-legal gender-bending got out, it could destroy the firm, or at least me as a businessman. “Look, I just can’t—” I blurted out, furiously, gesturing wildly and accidentally smacking one of my hands against the passenger side window. “Ow, damnit! Look, it doesn’t matter one goddamn bit if I’m getting off on fantasies about becoming a… uh…” My face flushed, and my voice trembled slightly, but with a surge of defensive anger, I got the word out, “a woman, like you, in my private time. It doesn’t fucking matter! Because it can’t happen. It can never happen. I will never take one of those little pink pills.”
“Why not?” Jade served the rejoinder back at me.
“Because I’m a g—”
“—A GUY!?” Jade laughed, long and loud, shooting me a disbelieving look as she mocked my response. “You know that’s how the pill actually works, right? Remember what I looked like when I showed up at your apartment this evening?” She glanced down at herself, and jiggled her chest with another teasing expression, “I’m pretty sure that I didn’t have these at the time.”
I cursed, silently, under my breath. “I’m not like you,” I tried again. “I’m—”
“Ohhhh, I get it,” the dark-haired beauty driving the car rolled her eyes. “You’re a real guy, not a defective one like I was, huh?”
I started to get angry again, and clenched my fists. “I didn’t say that! But I love being a man! I’ve spent my whole life being—”
“—the biggest, baddest, most hardcore and successful guy you could be!” Jade finished my sentence for me, grinning at me. “Yeah, I know! It’s a lot easier to keep people from suspecting that your heart might not really be in it when you go at it a hundred and fifty percent all the time, isn’t it? And it feels really good pulling one over on everyone and being so popular for your cool-hot-guy-shit and your success, so you most of the time you can even forget, yourself. Except sometimes,” she covered my mouth with her small, delicate right hand, keeping me from interrupting her as she took her point one step further, “sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night, and you look back on your past, and you wonder ‘what the fuck am I doing with my life?’ ‘Cause when you’re fucking honest with yourself, none of it feels real to you, does it? It’s all a big fucking sham!” She laughed, then let my mouth go and grabbed the wheel with both hands again.
I swallowed my tongue slightly. A shadow of something like doubt crossed my heart when Jade turned my words around on me. I felt a bit like I’d just been slammed into a metaphorical brick wall. What she’d just said – it rang true. I remembered standing in front of that mirror, in the airport outside of Washington D.C., some six months ago, staring at myself in the reflection, and wondering just what the hell I was doing with my life, and why. I remembered everything feeling pointless, and hollow, and empty, and meaningless. Everything… except…
I thought of the half-empty baggie of little pink pills sitting in a dresser drawer beside my bed back in my apartment. I thought of the sexy, exciting, erotic fantasies that I’d had about them. The way those fantasies had made me feel alive again, after months of morose, empty maudlin. Maybe… could there be some truth to what Jade was suggesting?
“… I don’t think it alwa
ys made me feel so empty,” was all I was finally able to come up with. Quiet, and mumbling. Almost morose. But it couldn’t have, right? I wouldn’t have kept doing it for twenty or thirty years of my life if it had all been one big, giant act, would I?
Jade shot me a sympathetic look, and then she shrugged a little. “Well, who knows? Maybe you’re right about that. Maybe you haven’t been pretending all your life, maybe you’re just hitting some kind of … mid-life-crisis wall, or something, maybe just need a little break. But I gotta tell you, Ashton, my man,” she winked at me, “You don’t seem to care for being a guy much these days, at any rate.”
I frowned again. I couldn’t deny that that was true. Although my brief, and now possibly terminated intimate and sexual relationship with Jade had brought some rejuvenation and some energy back to my daily routine over the past two weeks, I had to admit that I was feeling no less disillusioned by the routine itself. I still couldn’t quite wrap my head around what the point of it all was. Why did I need to be the best guy around, at everything? Why did I feel the need to outcompete all of my friends and rivals in the business field? Why did I feel the need to very publicly throw myself off of so many death-defying, thrill-seeking cliffs? Why did I feel the need to be seen surrounded by and adored by beautiful, sensual, feminine women all the time? Was it all about the thrills? I mean, was there a chance Jade was right? Was I out there to prove something to myself? Was it all so that no one could point a finger at me and question my masculinity? Was it all about some secret desires that I was afraid to admit to, some longings or fantasies that I’d buried deep, deep down inside?
