Constant in All Other ThingsBook 3: Stuckby

  Fakeminsk ([email protected] ; https:///fakeminsk)

  “Friendship is constant in all other things

  Save in the office and affairs of love:

  Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;

  Let every eye negotiate for itself

  And trust no agent.”

  Much Ado About Nothing

  Previously on Constant in All Other Things:David Saunders, misogynistic corporate executive and womanizer, sees his boss, pharmaceutical magnate Jeremiah Steele, kill the son of a known rival. An assassination attempt leads the woman assigned to protect him, Agent Katherine Smith, to disguise David as a woman. He adopts the identity of Cindy Belmy. They flee to the Asklepios Clinic, a secluded medical facility that promises safety. For several weeks he enjoys the retive safety of the Clinic, until their pursuer, Agent Fosters catches up with him. David reveals his past contains its own violent secrets and the two fight. He kills Fosters but is critically injured.

  He reawakens several weeks ter to discover his disguise is even more complete than before: through a radical procedure, the Clinic have made him convincingly female. To maintain his disguise, he continues in his role as Cindy, beginning his new job as a secretary. All seems retively fine until his disguise is discovered by a vengeful ex-girlfriend, Julia, he wronged in the past. They resume their retionship, based on mutual need and vengeance. She forces him on a date with a colleague, Dan, which he recollects on his return journey to the Clinic. En route, an encounter at a diner turns violent as David expresses his self-disgust at his performance as Cindy. Back at the Clinic, he finds Katherine waiting for him.

  Chapter 01: Who Are You, Mr Saunders?Who are you, Mr Saunders?

  This was the question haunting Katherine as she sat and waited in the dark solitude of the small apartment set aside for David Saunders at the Asklepios Clinic. This was the question at the front of her mind as she heard the subtle click of the door. He stepped into the room and tossed his handbag onto the sofa. He hadn’t noticed her yet.

  She was about to call out when his movement triggered the lighting of the room. Recessed spotlights bathed him in their soft glow. A sudden surge of emotions whirlpooled through her, an exhirating sinking of the gut at the sight of the man. Katherine’s breath caught in her throat. The transformed man was pretty—very pretty, in the peach sundress and wedge heels she’d pced in the car for him, fingernails and earring fshing, long hair tousled from the extended drive.

  She noted with amusement that the man already had one hand down the back of his dress, unhooking his bra. How… womanish, she thought. She gave him the time to slip the bra out the front of his dress and sigh with relief before she called out from her seat in the corner: “Mr Saunders.”

  His eyes were instantly alert.

  “We need to talk.”

  Spots of dried blood stood out like a dark consteltion across the bodice and skirt of the dress. Slender fingers tucked a twist of stray hair back behind one ear, and he stood and stared at her for a long moment. In the other hand he held the bra. He opened his mouth as though about to speak—but stopped, lips slightly parted, brow furrowed. Then he sagged and shook his head.

  “Need a piss,” he grunted, and walked off.

  Katherine waited and contempted the changes in her ward. The past six months had provided a steady stream of evidence of Mr Saunders’ ongoing transformation, but the physical reality was something entirely different. She remembered him as she’s st seen him in the flesh, lying on the bed of the new-to-him apartment arranged for him in one of the cheaper outer districts of the city.

  His new curves veiled in a pale blue nightgown, he’d seemed the very image of a modern Sleeping Beauty. His hair, makeup and nails had been freshly and lovingly done by the staff at the Clinic before transporting him unconscious to his new home. He'd been setup to awaken into his new feminine reality. Even then, however, there’d still been a hint—much more than a hint, really—of the man beneath the surface: not just the sizeable bulge in his sapphire panties, but masculine traces across his body.

  But now? The most obvious were the physical changes, subtle but indelible evidence beyond the illusions of makeup and shapewear indicating the process of feminisation had continued. Subtle, but evident: a further softening, shrinking and rounding of features once hard and sharp, seen in shoulder, chin and hands. Still slender, but now with a definite curve to the hips absent before, an unmanly narrowing of the waist. And there was also a—she hesitated to call it a glow—an undeniable feminine property to his skin and hair, a vibrant sheen that spoke of girlish youth and vigor.

  But most intriguing were the changes in behaviour: the hesitation in his response, an apparent nervousness, the unconscious way he brushed back his hair and held his hands, fingers slightly spyed, at his side before turning away.

  She heard the toilet flush but it was several minutes more before he returned. When he did, his hair was brushed and gleamed, and his lips glinted with a fresh coat of gloss. Smoothing down his dress, he sat opposite her with knees pressed together and to one side, poised at the edge of the sofa. He unbuckled his shoes and where his dress billowed open Katherine saw the swell of his unrestrained chest. His breasts were rger, too.

  Sighing with pleasure, he curled and uncurled his toes, nails glinting pink in the pale light. He gnced up, green eyes glittering through long shes, and she saw there a spark of humour.

  “Like what you see?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He scowled. “You fucking bitch.” He straightened and the humour was consumed as the spark fred into anger. “You fucking—you had no right!” He shook his head and swept the hair out of his eyes. “No fucking right to do this to me.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “I saved your life.”

  “You stole it,” he snarled.

  “When I found you, Mr Saunders,” she said, “you were dead. Your heart had stopped. Your injuries were . . . they were terrible.” With the words came the memories. Desperate, rasping breath, her own, and pain and fear, scrabbling into the room, slipping, blood – her own, welling between fingers but then on the floor – so much blood – everywhere and the crushing sense of loss and failure.

  “And it was my fault.” She accepted this, now even more than she had accepted it in those initial, frenzied moments in which she scrambled to save his life. The initial attempt to disguise him: not enough. The protection of the Clinic: not enough. She had misjudged Steele’s determination to find him. She had underestimated the skill and resources of his agents. And when she thought back to those days at the Clinic, she could see now that leaving David alone had been her mistake. Blinded by her own arrogance, distracted by emotion and desire, she had failed in her duty. “It nearly cost you your life.” She shook her head, one hand drifting to her side. “It nearly cost me mine as well.”

  Flinty steel scored her voice as she continued. “I will not fail again. You will live, Mr Saunders, no matter the cost.”

  “Cost?” David snorted. “Cost!”

  “Yes, cost,” she answered. “You are not the only one who has suffered and lost,” she continued. “You are not the only one who has paid a price these past six months. Cindy—”

  “David,” he interrupted.

  “We needed time after stabilising you. And we had very little of that most precious commodity. By speaking to him you confirmed your location. He knew with certainty where to find you.

  “It was a miracle you survived one attack,”—and again she wondered, how Mr Saunders? Who are you, Mr Saunders?—“but with arms and legs broken, a punctured lung, shattered ribs and a concussion? You were defenceless. You needed months of bedrest to heal, years of physiotherapy to regain full mobility. And in that time Steele would be searching for you.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “Fuck you,” he added. “You could’ve John Doe’d me in a hospital in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere and left me to recover.” His voice trembled with barely suppressed rage. “There’s no way turning me into a woman was the best possible option. You could’ve of… tried, something, anything else.” His entire body tensed and for a moment he seemed about to unch himself at her, the angry lines of his form an incongruous contrast to the delicate fall of his dress, the lilt of his voice.

  “You could’ve left me to die,” he nearly whispered, and he sagged, suddenly, colpsing back into the sofa. “You didn’t even ask.”

  Katherine cocked an eyebrow. “Ask a dead man for permission to save his life? No, Mr Saunders, I did not ask. Instead, I made the necessary arrangements to ensure your survival.”

  “Survival?” Hefting the generous swell of his breasts with both hands, he presented their fullness to her as though on a ptter. “Look at these thing! You gave me tits – real fucking tits!—and a life to go with them. What, exactly, of David Saunders’ life survived?”

  Katherine pursed her lips. “Mr Saunders. The facility was a small one: fewer than a hundred patients with slow turnover; and nearly as many staff. In gaining access, Steele’s agent hacked the Clinic’s network and bypassed their security systems. We know he accessed sensitive data and transmitted this back to Steele. Your enemy now had patient names, staff names, addresses, medical records.

  “The only detail working in our favour was that he had no reason to link you to the identity of Cindy Belmy.

  “Meanwhile, we could not risk moving you. You had to remain at the Clinic and heal. And by the time you could be moved, Steele could potentially track the movement of everyone coming and going from Asklepios.”

  Pinching at the bridge of her nose, she winced at the memory of the decisions made then, of Jonathon’s offer and the risks involved. Fixing Mr Saunders with an angry look, she continued. “What choice did I have, David? By the time we could move you—the movement of an unlisted male patient would not have gone unnoticed.

  “So I made a choice.” A choice rooted in tragedy: the suicide of a young woman, a rare failure by the Clinic to heal and rehabilitate a patient. Cindy Belmy, already a patient at the Clinic, already a month into her treatment with a digital record reaching even further back, a real world existence with no link to Mr Saunders. A life, tragically cut short – but lost in secrecy—perfect, it turned out, for someone to adopt and continue.

  Mr Saunders gred at her, bright green eyes smouldering with anger and hatred. She was struck by the beauty of the man’s face—the prettiness of his emotion—the way the delicate strap of his sundress slipped down his shoulder as he trembled with anger. “Choice? Your choice?” he hissed. “You took everything from me, K. I had… a life! A life, and a pretty damn good life, too, one I worked my ass off to build. You have any idea how hard—a job, K, I had a fucking job, a high-paying one, I was near the top, you know? The bullshit I put up with to get there! With interns and a free gym and, and… shit. I had my own office, I’d finally scored the corner office! And…”

  Red-faced, he sputtered.

  “And?”

  “And…” He scowled. “I had a home. I was half-way through the goddam mortgage on my condo. And a brand new car. And I had… I had friends. Friends and a favourite bar and—they knew me by name down at the Clocktower.” He jabbed a finger at her. “They knew my name K!”

  For a moment his voice turned pintiff, and he swallowed, and then he was yelling at her once again. “And… shops! I had a thing going with the girl behind the counter at the corner store, her name’s Kay and…” He pounded one fist into his palm. “Girls! Getting id every goddamn weekend, K!”

  Watching and listening to his rant, Katherine noted how performative it was. She watched this man from whom everything had been taken struggling to find anything he truly cared about. The anger was genuine, but hollow: without any real sadness or loss, only outrage remained.

  “And I had fucking muscles!” Slender fingers wrapped around his thin bicep as evidence, and for the first time she noted the tremor of true emotion. “I was… strong. And you—you gave me, what, in return? Tits! Skirts and heels and some shitty little apartment on the edge of town. A job as a, what, a goddamn secretary? And this—somehow—you call this a choice?”

  “Yet here you are, Mr Saunders. Alive.”

  “No.” He jumped to his feet and stalked up and down the narrow space of the lounge. “That’s not good enough! You could’ve found another way.” He stopped and shouted at the ceiling. “Fuck!”

  Resuming his pacing, he continued. “Do you have any idea what it was like, waking up in that apartment on my own? Waking up Cindy, with no idea of how I got there?”

  She shook her head.

  “I nearly went crazy, K! Nearly? I fucking lost it for a week or two. There I was in a body I didn’t recognize with clothes that weren’t mine and pictures of me I couldn’t remember and then I realised—you’d betrayed me.” He stopped and spun and pointed a finger at her. “This was all you. You wanted this—me—you like it, don’t you, watching me prance around in these dresses like some fucking fairy, putting makeup on my face… degrading myself every fucking day, the shame and humiliation.”

  “There is no shame to being female, Mr Saunders, no degradation.”

  “But I’m not female!”

  Katherine stood. In her low heels and him barefooted, she nearly towered over the feminised man. “You say I take pleasure in seeing you like this?” With the back of one hand, she gently stroked his cheek. She thrilled at the smoothness of the skin and at the way he seemed to unconsciously lean into her touch. “Yes,” she said.

  She leaned in and whispered in his ear. “Do you remember, Mr Saunders? You asked me once who Cindy was, and I told you: she is gentle, yes, and dependent? Weaker, at least physically than you were, and reliant on others. And so very soft.” She held his chin, gently, and felt how he trembled under her touch. “And so, yes, David, I do like this, very much so.”

  And her lips found his, in a single, deep kiss, dark and passionate. She tasted his lipstick and felt the suppleness of his lips and wanted to run her fingers through his long hair and slide the other strap down his smooth shoulder and grab him by throat and pull him to her so that they crushed together and she could feel the supple flesh of his chest against hers—Katherine wanted all this and more, much more; but she pulled away.

  He stood there, swaying slightly, one finger held to his lip. “You bitch.”

  “You are alive, David.” She sighed and sank back into the chair. “Six months, yet you remain alive despite the unfettered attention and determined efforts of one of the most powerful men on the pnet to revenge himself against you.

  “Do I take pleasure in seeing you like this? Yes, Mr Saunders, because it worked; because there was no other alternative; and because you are alive.

  “And so, David– Cindy–I do not offer you an apology.”

  He fell back into the sofa opposite, legs spyed as wide as the dress would allow, arms stretched across the back. He stared up at the ceiling. “And so now what?”

  “Now?” Her eyes lingered over the slight frame of the man sat opposite. Katherine smiled. “You are booked in for two weeks. Think of it as a holiday. Arrangements have been made with Cindy’s workpce. Rex. Enjoy the hospitality of the Clinic.”

  “Two weeks? Julia’s not going to like that. But, yeah, sure.” Still staring at the ceiling, he waved one arm to take in the room. “Whatever. But it’s not like this little face-to-face needed to be here, right? What’d you drag me out here for?”

  “Ah. For that, you will have to speak to Jonathon.”

  “He’s here?”

  “Yes.”

  “To undo all of… this?”

  “That,” Katherine answered, “is not my decision.”

  Author's Notes

  Originally, the previous chapter (the end of book two) fed directly into this chapter, but what ended up becoming the "Clinic" arc of the story grew to sufficient length to justify it's own book. It was meant as a short interlude but became much more than that. When I first started writing, the interludes were done in third person, offering a break for the reader from the protagonist's head but also allowing me, the writer, an easy cheat to slip in extra details. Because this story arc grew to the size it did, it introduced a lengthy break from that first person point of view. I know it's breaking one of the so-called core rules of narrative writing, but I think it works here. And as an exercise in trying a different style, it was a break for me. Hopefully, it doesn't prove too jarring for you, the reader.