Constant 3: Chapter 5-1

This one definitely falls into the "nearly complete" collection, with an emphasis on "nearly". Though currently working on 5-4, I feel there'll be a need to return and tweak this earlier scene significantly once I've completed chapter 5. This chapter--and scene--have proven surprisingly challenging to write (as mentioned previously) and though I think they've come a long way, they're not quite there yet. It's relatively short at just over 4,000 words but hopefully adequately sets up Julia's story and her final vengeance.

Of course, the biggest problem--and one not easily fixed!--is that the basic premise of the first five chapters of Book 3, the funeral conceit, is really straining at the seams here. I originally imagined (and planned!) it as a short sequence of vignettes filling in the gaps of David's live as Cindy after returning from the Clinic. Instead, it's grown to over 100k+ words in length, which is a huge demand on the reader. Conceptually, I like the idea of the funeral and how it plays out, dipping in and out of events over the first three months of Cindy's life. But in practicality, I suspect it's a bit of a disaster. Any thoughts, readers?

In any case, this is the final chapter of this story arc, bringing the funeral to a conclusion and exiting Julia from the story. Of course, with Julia's exit comes Tom's entrance, which will form the next story arc leading to the ultimate end of the story.

In any case, enjoy! And feel free to comment or let me know what you think.

One: Chiaroscuro

It’s late now, well past midnight and so very dark outside. A moonless night, starless too, and even the distant lights of the city are obscured behind a hazy fog that settled as we talked. She sits on the sofa, legs curled up beneath her. I stand. The small table behind us is littered with the cold remains of dinner and several empty bottles of wine.

            “I didn’t know,” Julia says, looking stricken. Her face is flushed with the night’s drinking, but also with guilt, shock—I don’t know, exactly. I’m drunk, too, and my head hurts with the recollection of past events.

            “Well, you didn’t ask.” Up until now, I’ve been walking back and forth across the narrow space of my little home. I stop and sit next to her and take her hand in mine. She flinches but allows my touch. “But then, those last few days were pretty fucked up.”

            “You went up to that guy’s hotel room? And—”
            “Yes.” She’d listened intently to the story of my bar pickup, eyes growing wide with the details, cheeks reddening even further despite her boozy blush. At first, she’d smiled with restrained glee.

            “And he—”

            “Yes.”

            But by the end, her eyes shimmered and she grimaced as I told her how I lay there on my back as this man swore at me and was rough with me. He fed me his cock and pawed at my tits and finally fucked me on my back as I lay squirming beneath his bulk. I didn’t tell her the whole story, of course. I left out the part where I nearly murdered the man I mistook for my stalker.

            Instead, in the version I told her, after the man was done, I silently pulled on my dress and slipped back into my heels and left his room and returned to the bar and left him there on the bed. I told her how my groin ached as I waited for the elevator, and my legs trembled, and I avoided looking at myself in the many mirror I passed. How, in fixing my makeup in the man’s hotel bathroom, I felt the man’s load slip free and dribble down my leg and I nearly collapsed for the shame of it.

            “I’m so sorry, Cindy, I am, I really hoped—”

            “What? That’d I’d enjoy it?”

            Julia shrugs, grimaces. “Maybe? Yes. Why not?”

            “A seedy hotel bar pickup?”

            “It didn’t have to be seedy,” she says, but clearly doesn’t believe it herself. Julia shakes her head. “No wonder you were so out of it when you came back to the table.”

            I stare at her, hard. “What the fuck were you thinking, Jules?”

            “I hadn’t planned it,” she says, sounding defensive but her eyes are guilty. “Honestly.”

            I don’t believe her. My silence tells her so.

            “Listen, I didn’t know Tom was going to be there, okay?” She sounds both defensive and consolatory. “That hotel bar really was the best place to run a field test. The contract with the shopping centre—and I could collect some data—and yes, I knew there was a conference on—increase the likelihood that you’d meet a guy….”

            Poor Liam. Well, no; not ‘poor’ anything, the asshole was a fucking dirtbag. Still: guy thought it was his lucky night. Instead, he woke up bound and gagged in his hotel room, trapped until the cleaners founds him in the morning. Tied to that chair all night. I wonder if he pissed himself. Nothing stolen, so nothing for the cops to care about, and no injury beyond what might be expected from some overly energetic kinky play. He’s married, the bastard, a cheating piece of shit pulling a fine piece of ass that night—me—sticking his cock where it didn’t belong—in me—and I still reeled from that night’s experience.

            It’s been weeks since, but thoughts of that night still rise too often. Cindy’s first time. Christ. That night nearly destroyed me. Oddly, I don’t know if I would have recovered had it not been for the utter shitshow that followed. I guess sometimes you just need something even worse to happen to keep everything in perspective.

            Meanwhile, Julia starts as though she’d nearly drifted asleep. “But then Tom messaged me,” she says, “told me he was in town—at the conference—staying at a different hotel—the Elysian, obviously—but he was there already, in our hotel, wrapping up after a session and debating between the hotel bar or somewhere in bar…  so, I invited him over.” She shrugs, but there’s still an aura of guilt to her, as if she knows what she did was wrong. “It would’ve been weird if I hadn’t invited him.”

            “Weird is fine,” I insist. “That was stupid.”

            “It all just kind of happened, okay? Yes, I knew it was—idiotic, that putting you in the same room as Tom had nothing to do with keeping you safe, that I wanted to see you squirm, wanted to punish you and set up….”

            Julia trails off.

            “Your revenge,” I say.

            There’s guilt in her eyes, but also a flicker of defiance. “You deserved it!” she hisses. Almost instantly she deflates. “But no. I wasn’t thinking about that, not then, not that night. Not beyond the usual, anyway. Believe it or not, that night at Icarus I was happy—genuinely enjoying myself. I wasn’t thinking about revenge, or at least not that.”

            She stared past me, remembering. “It’s why I didn’t notice straight away. That you’d taken off the choker and ditched the vibrator and cut the data stream. Or how oddly you acted after returning from the bar. Totally not yourself. I expected….”

            She trails off, and a slight smile tugs at her lips. “Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect. What I wanted was—” Her hand draws ambiguous circles in the air. “Some kind of meltdown when you first saw Tom, maybe, if I’m being truthful. You know what I mean: full on flustered bimbo giggles, or bright-red dying-inside embarrassment. I wanted to see you… squirm, hot and small wriggling in that sexy little dress, wilting with the humiliation of the reminder of who you’d once been and what you were now: not because there’s any shame in being a girl but because being face-to-face with Tom like that, I expected the David in you to—”

            She cuts off, stands and walks away. Standing by the door leading to the patio, she rests her hand against the glass. It must feel cool beneath her touch. Yesterday’s rain has stopped, as has the wind, and an almost absolute stillness surrounds us, and the darkness outside is nearly unbroken.

            Julia speaks over her shoulder: “How many sluts—" Her wince is caught in the glass of the door. “Girls. Women, did you two dickheads pick up at bars over the years? Hmm? And there you were, platform heels, tight dress, blonde and shiny lips, exactly what Tom likes, right? Big tits on display. He sure stared enough.”

            Her chuckle is a groan as she leans her forehead against the door.  Exhaustion is written into every line of her frame. “I was expecting—something. I don’t know. Fun. But instead—”

            I stand and cross over to her. “Nothing.”

            “Nothing.” She shrugs. “Well. Now I know why.”

            “Do you?” I’m genuinely curious as to what she thinks she knows.

            “What you just told me. You’d just gotten laid? A bar pickup from the other side, a dirty little fuck in some guy’s hotel room.”

            “Isn’t that what you wanted for me? What you ordered me to do?”

            She stares at me for a long, quiet moment before answering.

            “I honestly didn’t think you’d go through with it.”

            “You had a shock collar strapped to my neck,” I say, tilting my head to one side. “And a vibrator stuck up my pussy. There was an AI riding shotgun directing my every move. It hardly felt like I had free choice.”

            “You could have left,” she insists.

            Leaving stopped being an option the moment I bumped into Jeff. I had to confront the man—face the reality of my stalker and if that meant deploying Cindy’s sexuality as a tool to distract my enemy, so be it. Julia doesn’t know I followed the man up to his room to murder him. And she couldn’t possibly imagine how I felt afterwards, when I discovered it had been for nothing.

            Misinterpreting my silence as tacit agreement, she continues. A hint of hope enters her voice, and she’s trying to convince herself as much as trying to convince me. “You didn’t leave,” she says. “You—did as I said—and went back to that guy’s room—and had sex as a girl for the first time, and—”

            Julia hesitates. “You were horny as hell and desperate for relief,” she says. “Did you ever think that maybe you wanted it?”

            I don’t bother to answer.

            She’s considering the implications. “After you came back, and saw Tom… could you still feel that other man’s touch?  Did your tits still ache as Tom stared at them, your nipples red and raw?” She turns to face me, back pressed up against the patio door. “Could you still taste this other guy from when he shoved his cock in your mouth? Is that why you didn’t want to talk? And was your pussy sore—did it hurt?”

            “Julia,” I warn.

            She shakes her head. “I can’t even imagine how messed up you must’ve been that night.”

            “Yeah.” I see the man lying still beneath my naked body as I straddle him, feel his wilting cock inside of me. He appears dead, his face pale once the pillow is removed. “You can’t.”

            “You just stood by the side of the table. Swaying a little, with this vacant stare. I followed your eyes to see what you were staring at, and it was your reflection—or maybe the night beyond it—totally transfixed. If I hadn’t pulled you down into the seat, you might’ve stayed there all night.”

            I don’t remember this. Leaving Liam’s hotel room, the long walk down the corridor, waiting at the elevator, the ride down, crossing the busy bar back to Julia’s table, seeing Tom: it’s all a bit of a blur, in which some memories rise clear as day, like apples bobbing in a barrel, and others remain clouded and hidden.

            “I sat you opposite Tom,” Julia continues. “You didn’t resist, stayed silent and withdrawn. He was your best friend, and you hadn’t seen him in nine months, and must’ve had all sorts of questions—but you stayed quiet.”

            “What did you expect?” I arch an eyebrow. “I was—terrified. In shock. I wanted to run away but couldn’t.”

            “Certainly not in those shoes,” Julia says, smiling weakly.

            I don’t return the smile.

            “It wasn’t rational, I admit, it was stupid and selfish but like I said, I was in a great mood and a little drunk and… and to be honest, I just wanted to see your reaction—needed to see you two, side-by-side. Like, how did it feel, comparing yourself to him, now? You two were always so competitive, trying to out-macho each other. It was fucking exhausting. 

            “But then there you two were, and he’s still got that linebacker physique from his college days, a touch of grey in the hair but in a tailored suit and a Rolex at his wrist, you can’t deny he’s still got it, right? He’s a very good-looking man. And those eyes!” She smiles, a little wickedly. “And he’s still in amazing shape, as you know. Abs like a rock.”

            How did feel? Fucking awful, this reminder of how becoming Cindy stripped away a lifetime of gruelling effort, the physicality by which I once defined myself. Not at the time: I was too out of it. But every time I’ve seen Tom since has been another reminder of what I’ve had taken away from me. It sharpens my own desire for vengeance, the palpable anger that sustains me. At the same time, jealousy and frustration and resentment and shame tears at my insides and it makes it hard—so very, very hard—to meet his eyes or talk to him.

            “Meanwhile, there you were in that sexy little dress, so small next to him, soft and curvy. Your long hair shone in the light and so did your makeup. And so yes, I wanted to see you squirm and blush as you confronted how much you’ve changed in comparison to him. You weren’t going to out-man him now, were you?

            I can’t conceal a grimace at her words, the sickening lurch to my stomach at the though of my soft, curvy body set in contrast to his height, bulk and strength, his firmness and masculinity.

            “But sat there, your little smile stayed small and distant, like you were a thousand miles away. You didn’t say anything unless someone spoke to you. Didn’t ask any questions. You drank, though—whatever was put in front of you—but there was something a bit scary about how you did that, even. I kicked you under the table and you didn’t even flinch.

            “It was immensely frustrating. Tom and I had been getting steadily drunker as the night went on, catching up on the past year, but once you got back most of his attention was on you. He spent the night staring at you—or rather, your tits; did you notice? Couldn’t take his eyes of you. Clearly, he liked what he saw.”

            Something she said earlier finally catches up to me.      “Waitasec. You said Tom messaged you? Julia –how long have you been in touch with Tom?”

            “Jesus, really?” She seems genuinely surprised. “You really didn’t know, did you?” Julia reaches for her glass of wine, hesitates, grabs the water instead. “Your best friend, and he never told you?” She shakes her head in mock despair. “Guys, am I right? So terrible at communication. Yes, Cindy. I’ve kept in touch with Tom since the very start.”

            “The start? The start of—” I wave my hand to take in my feminised form. “This?”

            She laughs. “No, you idiot. The start; I’ve kept in touch with him for… Christ, how long has it been, now? These past fourteen years.” She shakes her head. “God, I feel old.”

            And I felt terribly young.

            “But what did you expect? After you—sorry, after David—first dumped me? Tom and I stayed friends after that night.”

            That roiling in my belly redoubled. No, Tom never mentioned Julia, no once over the years we’ve been friends. It never occurred to me to ask how he dealt with her, after I left that night. I purposefully avoided thinking about it, I guess.

            “I never hated him,” Julia continues. “You know, not like I hated you, even though he shared responsibility for what happened that night. He did fuck me, after all, while you fed me your cock.  But in a way, that made it easier. He couldn’t see, right? The tears, I mean. All he saw was my ass, my back—and your stupid grinning face, the whole time.

            “But you—well, now you know what it’s like to have a cock in you when you don’t want it, don’t you? I can’t tell you how satisfying it’s been. Seeing that look in your eyes. The same look I gave you all those years ago.”

            This is what she says, but her tone, the twist to her lip belies her words. She doesn’t sound satisfied. Rather, she looks ill, like she’s swallowed something rancid, and is desperate to eject the poison from her stomach.

            “The tears,” she says, “the desperation, the silent plea to stop. Sound familiar?” Her lips twist and her features contort, as though trying to summon a smile or cruel laugh that just won’t rise.

            I nod.

            “You saw,” she spits. “And you kept at it anyways. Remember?”

            I nod again.

            “Tom didn’t make it happen. You did. He didn’t pressure me into doing it. You did. And then you dumped me. He didn’t.”

            I consider reaching out to her, but my hand is like stone, my arm leaden.

            The guilt fades behind rising anger. “He stayed with me, you know, after that night. You disappeared. Texted me—fucking texted me—dumped me and left him to pick up the pieces. Did you know that? That he stayed by my side and took care of me until I could get myself home.”

            “He stayed,” she says. Her voice turns distant, and she turns slightly to stare out the window into the pitch blackness of the long night. Her hands rests on her knees, knuckles whitening as she clenches and unclenches. “Tom cleaned up the mess you left behind. And even then, I wasn’t stupid enough to think he was being particularly altruistic. After all, he wanted to fuck me, too, all the way back to that first night, the night I first met you. He asked me out, I was going to give him what he wanted, you know, before you showed.”

            I take this in, sigh and say, “I’m glad he stayed.”

            We lapse back into a sullen silence. Like heavy shadows, the events of the past months seethe about us, dance and mock us from the corners of the room. My head aches and my throat’s dry from too much drink, and Julia must be feeling even worse.

            “This sucks,” she says. Julia turns to me with a sardonic grin. “Your funeral sucks.”

            I frown. “You suck.”

            “How mature.”

            I pick up one of the bottles of wine and hold it up to the light. Pale light shines through thick glass. There’s nothing left. What does out little celebration look like from the outside? There can’t be too many lights on in the building at this time of night. Our singular little rectangle of yellow light beckoning from a dark monolith against a night sky—and the shadow play of our passage, silhouettes acting out the recriminations of fourteen years—who could possibly imagine the quality and quantity of our pain and suffering and loss and cruelty contained within that single pane of light?

            I stare at her levelly. “It was a colossally stupid thing to do, Julia.”

            She opens her mouth to answer, winces and looks away. “I know.”

            That I was a disguised, wanted man already in the company of an ex-girlfriend was bad enough. At least there’d been fourteen years between us meeting and that seemed to have deflected unwanted attention. There’s no reason for my pursuers to expect me to find sanctuary with a short-term girlfriend from over a decade ago. But a wanted man in the company of both an ex-girlfriend and his best friend? Jesus Christ, Tom was there, that night I caught Steele with a gun in his hand. Julia might just as well have run a banner up a flagpole saying, ‘David Saunders Here’.

            She reaches for the bottle and sets it to one side. “I’m tired,” she says. “I feel sick, and I’m tired.” Julia holds both my hands between both of hers. Then, she smooths down my hair, pushing it back over my shoulder so that it falls in a gentle golden wave. I mirror her, drawing my nails across her brow to tuck a stray bang behind her ear, and follow the line of her jaw to gently caress the nape of her neck. Her hair is short now and doesn’t reach her shoulders. She sighs. I miss her long hair, but she looks sexy like this, too.

            We face each other, sat on my cheap sofa, mustard-yellow fake leather; it sticks to bare skin in hot weather. It feels as though we’re trapped in some old Dutch painting, chiaroscuro framing of two women: one young, the other older; long blonde hair and short black bob, and such intensely serious expressions.

            “Let’s finish this,” Julia says, and she takes a deep breath to speak.

            I’ve buried the story to come deeper than the night with Liam. We’ve unearthed a lot of memories I’ve suppressed over the past three months: the constant simmering shame of revealing outfits and secretarial duties; stomach-churning submission to pinches, grabs and comments at work; being tarted out and flirting at Noir; that first blowjob kneeling between Jonas’s legs; the realization of how easy it’d become now, to take a man into my mouth; and even the intensely pleasurable humiliation of schoolgirl spanking bent over my boss’s desk.

            Also suppressed, the pleasures of the past months because to admit to myself I’ve enjoyed any of this is to lose myself, an unmanning acceptance that at times, living as Cindy has offered joys I couldn’t have ever otherwise imagined or ever experienced. Female friendships, Emma and Willow and fucking Mel; friendships somehow so different in their tenor and closeness than what I’ve ever known. Dancefloor ecstasies. Flirtatious fun—and confusion—at work and yes—galling as it is to admit—the physical pleasure as well under Julia’s firm hand. Even the clothes and everything that came with them, the social expectation weighing down a pretty twenty-year old girl, the makeup, the shoes, the pressure to maintain appearances and act—nicely—wasn’t so bad, really, once you got used to it, at times, maybe.

            Cindy’s life is not one I’d choose but confronted with the reality of the past nine months, I can’t honestly say it’s all been bad.

            But what comes next nearly undid me. I want to hear her apology and see her beg for forgiveness. I know she won’t. And now that the moment has finally come, I don’t want her to continue. A wholly unexpected reluctance comes over me, sweat beading my brow as she goes to speak. I’m afraid of what she’s about to say and how this must end.

            “How could you do it?” I speak quickly, before she can begin.

            She closes her mouth, frowns. “It’s no worse than what you did to me.”

            “No,” I say. “It is. Much worse. Especially because—you knew. How could you do that to me when you knew how much it hurts?”

            Her eyes glitter and she says nothing.

            “What I did to you, back then? I did it in ignorance. You might not believe me, but I never mean to hurt you. It wasn’t even about you. I was—fucked up. And you suffered. And I’m sorry, Julia. I am—I really am, and if I could go back and somehow change what happened, I would, I really would, I’d change it all.

            “From the very start you’ve wanted an apology from me, for me to not just say I’m sorry but for me to genuinely be sorry. And I am, now, I really am. For what I did to you. I hurt you and I understand that now, but back then you have to believe that I had no idea what my ignorance, my—selfishness, callousness—could do to you.”

            I almost babbling, but if I’m talking, she isn’t and maybe what’s coming doesn’t have to happen, after all. After all, she’s still silent. Her face impassive, lips slightly parted, one beautiful eyebrow sightly arched.

            “But what you did, Julia? You acted in spite, in the full knowledge of what it would do to me. You acted in anger, because you didn’t get the promotion you wanted. You took everything you despise about men and weaponized it and took all your frustration out on me, on this man you’ve made into a caricature of everything you despise about femininity.

            “You wanted to hurt me—him—the thing you made?” My laugh was dry and humourless. “You did. No.” I shook my head. “You didn’t hurt him; you killed him, Julia. You killed David Saunders. He was barely holding on as it was, and you delivered the killing blow.”
            Her silence continues. We still hold each other’s hands, facing each other on the sofa. My pounds in my chest, because nothing I say will divert her from telling her story.

            I take a deep breath. “That night,” I begin. “That final night, when you—”

            Julia cuts me off. She pulls her hand free and lays a single finger against my mouth to silence me. She tilts her head to one side, as though examining me, and sighs.

            Julia says, “You said this was my story.” She shakes her head, as though disappointed. “But all night, you’ve done all the talking. How can it be my story if you tell it?

            “So. If we’re doing this, we’re doing it properly. It’s your turn to shut up, Cindy. And to listen. You say I killed David Saunders? Sure, why not? Then let the accused speak.

            “How does it work in all those murder mysteries? Motive, means and opportunity? I’ve had plenty of opportunity over the past few months, haven’t I? You willingly gave yourself over to me. The weapon?” Her smile is thin and humorless. “Lingerie and heels, makeup and dresses—are these weapons? Maybe. But so were guilt and need, hate and love. Fear, too. I had the full arsenal at my disposal, didn’t I?”

            She pauses.

            When I say, “Motive,” my voice is soft and distant.

            She nods.

            “God, yes,” she says.

            “Go on, then,” I say. “Tell me your story.”