I stared in disbelief at the email I had open on my computer. I was screwed. And that meant the whole company was screwed.

“Mr Brewer,” the email read, “we are sorry to inform you that several of our girls have been caught ill, and thus we are unable to provide you with three staffers as contracted for the upcoming Consumer Electronics Expo. Only one, Emily Swan, is currently available. Please confirm that you still require her services. We will, of course, be invoicing for only a single staffer. We would also remind you that our girls require regular breaks and thus suggest that if you do decide to go ahead with our contract you find her at least one other girl as backup. Regards, Frank Hammond.”

“Fuck,” I said to myself, re-reading it to make absolutely sure it said what I thought it said. Only one girl for CEE. And almost no chance of acquiring anyone else at this point: CEE was days away, and I’d found Hammond’s firm only the day before after several days’ panicked ringing around every pro modelling agency I could find. Hammond’s had been the sweet spot: the better firms we couldn’t afford, and the cheaper ones had been booked up for weeks.

I’d have to tell James.

James McCain was an old family friend. He’d offered me a job with his startup when no-one else would take a chance on a kid fresh out of school with no experience and thoroughly average grades. He was older than me, twenty-three to my nineteen, and in addition to having every physical attribute I wished for but didn’t have — he was tall and well-built; I was short and scrawny, and felt even more so every time I was in his presence — he was an engineering genius.

I hated to let him down like this.

Fortunately, the walk to his office was short enough that I didn’t have much time to worry. McCain Applied Computing had so few employees it didn’t make sense to lease a large amount of office space, especially because most of the other people we had worked remotely. Even I, who would probably have been considered James’ assistant if the company was formal enough to have real job titles, could have worked from home if I wanted to; most of what I did when I wasn’t organising the company was coding on one or other of James’ projects. But home was a tiny, lonely apartment. Even if the office was often only James and I and the occasional bike courier, at least there was another face to look at.

His office door was open, as usual. I knocked anyway.

“Alex?” he called from inside. “Is that you?”

I poked my head around the door. James was at his desk, frowning at something on one of the monitors in front of him. I felt the usual stab of jealousy in my gut when I looked at him: he was handsome, tall, and the shape of his chest was just about visible through his t-shirt. I controlled the self-conscious reflex to put a hand on my own chest — flat, skinny, unmuscled — and focused instead on making it to one of his chairs without fainting. I was really quite worried at this point.

“What’s up?” he said. “You look— well, you look terrified, frankly.”

I found my voice. “I just heard from Frank Hammond.” His right eyebrow crinkled, the way it did when he was about to ask a question, so I preempted him: “Of Hammond’s, the booth babe agency.” None of the modelling agencies liked it when you called the girls ‘booth babes’, and I’m sure the girls in question felt the same, but a habit is a habit. “They’ve had some girls out sick, and reading between the lines it’s impacted more clients than just us. They can only offer us one girl for CEE.”

James was quiet for a moment.

“James?” I said, when he didn’t say anything.

“I’m thinking,” he said. He didn’t sound angry or worried, which confused me. Booth babes were vitally important at trade shows for smaller companies — especially startups like ours — because a large stage and signage was expensive, and acquiring the floor space in which to put it all was even more so, but hiring a handful of girls and getting some eye-catching dresses made in the company colours with logos on the chest was comparatively cheap, and about as good when it came to attracting attention. Maybe in the future, when more of the attendees were women, it would be different, but people have been saying that for decades and it hasn’t come true yet. As James’ dad, who made his insufferable presence known every so often when he wanted to remind James who had given him the loan to start the company in the first place, had said, “Technology is a sexist business, and the way to sell in a sexist business ist with sex!”

The expectant pause afterwards where we were supposed to laugh was the worst part.

This week’s Consumer Electronics Expo was probably make-or-break for MCAC. We had a revolutionary product — a software solution to the hardware problem of putting a good-quality selfie camera behind a phone display, without resorting to punching unsightly holes through the screen — but the window we had to sell it in was unpredictable. All we knew was, if we couldn’t at least make a start on getting some contracts at CEE then by the time the next trade show rolled around, someone else might have solved the same problem. We had other solutions to other problems in the works — James, like I said, is a genius — but nothing ready to show.

It was only a week since we got it working at all. James and I had worked day and night at the office for months, with remote assistance from some of the other coders, and hadn’t even had time to celebrate once we knew we’d cracked it: James threw himself instantly into courting the big manufacturers, and I threw myself into the logistics of finding space at CEE on such short notice, and booth babes to put in that space.

I was quietly proud of our software solution. None of it was my idea, and I mostly just followed James’ lead, but since I’m a self-taught coder and he had an expensive education I’m just glad I was able to keep up.

“Hammond says the girls need regular breaks,” I said, “so just one isn’t enough to cover a booth full-time.”

James nodded. “Can I see the email, please?” he said.

I rooted my phone out of my pocket, unlocked it, and handed it over. He scanned the email quickly.

“Are these all the emails you’ve exchanged with this Hammond guy?” he asked, holding the phone out where we could both see it and scrolling through the message history.

“Yeah,” I confirmed. “The initial contact was just yesterday.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ve got an idea. I’m going to forward myself these messages and reply to Hammond personally. We’re going to use this Emily Swan he’s offering us and I think I know where we can find another. You think two girls will be enough?”

“We only had three booked, anyway. It means one of them will have to man the booth while the other’s taking a break, but it should work, particularly with you and me and some of the engineers around to offer support and talk tech.”

He smiled and gave me back my phone. “Good. Go and finish all the other preparations for Friday, and assume we’ll have two girls. When are the dresses getting here?”

“They haven’t finalised them yet. We’ll have them Friday morning, assuming we pass on measurements tonight.”

“Okay, good,” he said. “Now go organise!” He shooed me out of the door, picking up his phone with his other hand. The last thing I heard from him was, “Ben, hi. I need a big favour…” before I rounded the corner and the rest of his conversation was drowned out by the noise from the street outside.

It was an hour or so later and I was thinking about grabbing some lunch, so I headed to James’ office to ask him if he wanted me to pick something up for him and his visitor. The visitor had arrived trailing what looked like luggage behind him and had introduced himself only as Ben. He offered no surname or any explanation as to why James had called him, and strutted off around the corner to James’ office without even asking for directions. I could practically see the gay surrounding him like a cloud, and I wondered where James knew him from.

I knocked on the closed office door, and James immediately called for me to come in.

“I was just going to get some lunch—” I started, but he interrupted me.

“Alex!” James said. He sounded happy; I assumed Ben had found him a spare booth babe. “This is Ben, my roommate from university. Ben, Alex.”

“Delighted,” Ben said.

“Alex,” James said, sounding a little more serious. “Shut the door and come sit down. I have a proposal for you. A business proposition.”

Confused, but compliant, I did as he asked. I could feel Ben watching me as I did so, and wondered again what his surname was. An uncharitable part of my brain decided it was ‘Dover’ and I resolved to give whatever part of my head thought that was funny a good kick when I had some spare time. I’d been bullied some at school for being gay, even though I wasn’t, and it had left me with a tendency towards defensive homophobia that I despised in myself.

“What kind of proposition?” I asked, when I was good and uncomfortable with the attention they were both paying me. I liked it from James, but having strangers regard me so intensely was unsettling.

An awkward look crossed James’ face. “I had a quick skim through your contacts for booth babes — trade show models, sorry —” he corrected himself with a grin, “and couldn’t find anyone who still had availability. You were very thorough.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling a little warm. I admired James, so compliments from him were always welcome, however readily and often he offered them to me. Then I finally processed the implications behind what he had said, and I frowned. “Does that mean we don’t have a second model, then?”

“That,” James said, “is the question before the court.”

I was confused, and said so.

“Ben here is an exceptional drag queen—”

“Performance artist in the medium of drag,” Ben interrupted, but he shared a smile with James, as if it was an in-joke. I could almost hear the extra e in ‘artist’. And then, once again processing people’s words several seconds after they said them, I realised what James was getting at.

“You want to use a drag queen?” I blurted out, unable to stop myself.

They were both silent for a moment. I looked Ben over. He was attractive, no doubt about it, and probably made for a great drag queen. But with his deep voice and carefully-trimmed beard I thought he would probably make a statement louder than our product.

“Not me, darling,” Ben said, derailing my train of thought. “James here wants to use you.”

My train of thought stood no chance of getting back on the tracks. I don’t know what my face looked like at that moment, but I know my mouth dropped open like I was a dead fish and I’m sure my eyes were doing something entertaining as well.

“Sorry, Alex,” James said, frowning at his friend. “I was trying to broach the subject more delicately.”

“You were dawdling, is what you were doing,” Ben said.

I remained silent.

“Look, the thing is, you’d be doing me — the company — a tremendous favour, and you’d be paid the modelling fee, so this’d be extra, on top of your usual salary. It’s not a bad sum, especially since you don’t have to give any of it to an agent or manager like poor—” he glanced at a monitor for a reminder, “—Emily Swan does.”

I remained silent.

“I’m not asking you this as your boss, Alex,” James said, “or even as your friend. Or maybe I’m asking you this as both?” He shrugged. “The fact is, this trade show is everything to us, as you know, and we need it to go perfectly. And I know from interning that if your startup doesn’t have some way to bring people in, your startup will vanish from view amid all the other startups in your tiny corner of the trade show. And I also know from interning that nothing gets attention like beautiful girls showing off your product. Girls plural, not just one who can only talk to one person at a time, and has to leave the stand empty when she needs a bathroom break.”

I remained silent. James would, later, neither confirm nor deny that steam started coming out of my ears at this point.

“And you’d be more than just some agency worker we hired in for the day!” James said, warming to his pitch. “You know the product better than anyone else except me. And you know what else we’re working on, too. If a potential buyer talks to you, you can sell him on not just the product but the whole company!”

“But—!” I said, and then went silent again for a moment as I tried to put together enough coherent thoughts to form a few sentences. “I don’t understand why you’re asking this. I don’t know why one girl and one drag queen is your solution, I don’t know why you think I’d make a good drag queen, and I don’t know why you think potential customers — who, if they are the sort of people who like booth babes at all —” I emphasised the words derisively, “would relate just as well to a drag queen as they would to a model, no matter how knowledgeable he is!”

I managed, just about, not to shout at my boss, long-time friend, and saviour. And his drag queen pal.

The drag queen pal burst out laughing.

“Hey!” I said, offended.

“I’m sorry,” Ben said, “but you have grasped the exact wrong end of the stick here!”

“I don’t want you to be a drag queen,” James said, quietly, carefully, “I want you to be a real trade show model. A woman.”

“A booth babe,” Ben added.

This was even more ridiculous. “Are you out of your mind?” I said, almost shrieking. “Even if I agreed to do it, how would that even work? I mean, look at me!”

“Honey,” Ben said, “I’ve been looking since you walked in. You could do it.”

“I think he’s right,” James said. “I mean, and I really don’t want to offend you here, so sorry in advance, but you’re quite short, you’re slim, you’re — I’m really sorry about this — actually rather pretty…”

My belly filled up with warm syrup, which was a surprise. “I’m ‘pretty’...?” I echoed in a whisper. The concept was absurd.

“When you don’t cover your face with all that stubble,” James muttered. I suppressed a grimace: ‘stubble’ was giving it airs it didn’t deserve; it was basically bumfluff. I was only nineteen; I had plenty of time to grow a real beard. I kept telling myself.

I covered my face with my hand anyway, suddenly extremely self-conscious.

“I still don’t see how this could work,” I said quietly.

“Look,” James said, “how about we all go to my place where it’s nice and private. Ben can work his magic on you, and if it doesn’t work out, we’ve still got the afternoon to try and come up with another idea.”

“I don’t know…” I said.

James waited in silence until I looked back up at him. When I finally did so, he trapped me with his deep brown eyes. I couldn’t look away.

“Please?” he said softly. “Just give it a try?”

Something took control of my mouth and said, “Okay.”

~

James’ apartment was smaller than I expected. Granted, it was larger than mine, but I’d seen cupboards larger than my apartment. It was nicely fitted out, though, and clearly in another price bracket from the hovel I grudgingly called home.

James ushered me in through the front door first, as if to make sure I couldn’t run away without having to go through him, Ben, and Ben’s enormous suitcase. He sat me down on his sofa and, without asking, poured me a colourful drink from one of the glitzier-looking bottles on his bar. It only didn’t look like a double because it looked like a triple.

“To relax you,” he explained, handing me the glass.

I needed relaxing, so I downed it in a couple of gulps, pre-emptively wincing against the burn and then, when the burn didn’t come, regaining the very stupid look on my face that had served me so well in James’ office. It tasted fruity.

“You were expecting whiskey?” James asked, smiling. I nodded, feeling a little too foolish to speak. “Sorry, I didn’t want to scorch your throat.”

“Thanks,” I said weakly.

Ben clapped his hands. “Enough chatter!” he said. “Enough booze! Let’s get on with this; I’ve got a show to get ready for tonight.”

As he wheeled his suitcase into what turned out to be James’ bathroom I turned to James and tried to ask, with a mixture of silent gestures, if Ben performed drag with his immaculate beard intact. James nodded.

“Get in here!” Ben commanded, his voice echoing in the bathroom.

~

It turns out, getting your legs waxed is horrible.

Ben had insisted I be completely naked, and waved aside my protests by confirming to me in a very matter-of-fact tone of voice that I didn’t possess anything he hadn’t seen and dined on before, and assuring me he wasn’t into twinks anyway.

I think I can be excused keeping my eyes firmly shut for the whole of the waxing process.

He did my legs, and then moved onto my crotch without warning me. The first strip shocked me too much to scream, and while he was preparing the second strip I quickly jammed a flannel between my teeth, so that the only noises I made as he depilated the rest of my junk were some strained whimpering and whatever sound a flannel makes when it’s being destroyed by teeth. It tasted gross.

“You can open your eyes now,” Ben said.

I compromised, and opened one. “Are we done with waxing?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Now we sort out that horrible little teenage beard thing you’ve got going on.”

Before I could get too deeply into worrying about what arcane torture devices he might apply to my oh-so-manly chin fluff, he’d slathered me in paste. It was brown and smelled absolutely disgusting.

“Ugh,” I commented.

“Count yourself lucky,” Ben said. “This stuff will dissolve that blonde fluff on your face without any trouble in just a few minutes. If you had a beard like me or James then we could leave it on for half an hour and all it would do is give you a rash.” He looked annoyed when he said that, like he’d tried it on himself. I looked down at the tube he’d squeezed it out of and noticed it was half empty; obviously he had.

True to his word, when I washed it off a few minutes later it took most of my straggly hair with it. I took a razor to the rest of it. The end result wasn’t particularly any more fresh-faced than I usually looked when I did a close shave, and illustrated why I almost never shaved if I could help it: without the assistance of the much-abused bumfluff on my face, I struggled to look like a nineteen year-old man. I’d stopped shaving when I got fed up with getting carded buying painkillers. It didn’t help.

We were both startled by a light knock on the bathroom door.

“Everything okay in there?” James called.

“Yes!” Ben hissed. “Now go away! You can’t rush perfection!”

“You need anything?”

“No!” Ben and I said at once. The prospect of walking out of the bathroom fully clothed (in a dress) was bad enough; I wasn’t at all ready for him to see me naked and as hairless as the day I was born.

Ben kicked the bathroom door for emphasis. I made a grateful face.

I had to admit, as the sound of retreating footsteps indicated that James’ curiosity had been beaten, that my legs looked better without hair. I’d never really developed that nice, thick coat of body hair that men like James had, that helped them look sculpted and defined; my legs just seemed to grow sad little patches of blonde hair that stuck out at strange angles and accentuated how scrawny they were. And my attempts to build muscle had gone about as poorly as my attempts to grow attractive body hair: I had a set of weights at home that I never used, because I was never at home to use them. The bulk of my exercise was the walk from my apartment to the office and back again, which least seemed to keep me thin, even if it didn’t give me proper muscle tone.

An advantage today, I thought. I shifted position on the stool Ben had perched me on, and my legs rubbed against each other. The feeling was quite strange: it was like they were frictionless. I rubbed them against each other again, and giggled; the alcohol was settling in.

“Finally having fun, are we?” Ben said, smiling.

I tried not to blush. “I’ll never do this again,” I replied, looking away, “so I might as well try to enjoy it.” I realised as I said it that I wasn’t lying.

“Good,” Ben said, “because now the fun part begins.”

~

It had never occurred to me before that makeup would have a smell to it. I’d never dated a girl long enough to be around her when she was putting her makeup on, so prior to this I’d only encountered it pre-applied, as it were. Ben was applying foundation, and as I watched him in the mirror I breathed in through my nose and enjoyed the subtle floral scent of the makeup.

He handed me the sponge.

“Um,” I commented.

“Now you try,” he said, indicating the half of my face that didn’t yet have coverage.

“Why?”

“Because if you’re going to be doing this trade show thing—”

“—I’m not.”

“But if you are — and I think you can agree that we should proceed with the best of intentions — then you’re going to need to know how to touch up your makeup, and you don’t have a lot of time to watch YouTube tutorials.”

I sighed. “What do I do?”

He put his fingers over mine and guided the sponge around my jawline. “Like this,” he said. “Gentle strokes…” He let go and nodded at me to continue.

I looked at myself in the mirror. I don’t know why applying makeup myself felt different to having Ben do it, but something inside me was rebelling against the very idea. Like doing it myself made it something I was making an active choice to participate in, not just something my lovable arsehole of a boss-friend and his gay ex-roommate were doing to me.

Clearly, I was being an idiot. After we’d finished removing all traces of hair from my body, Ben had had me put on a bra, which he’d filled out with breast forms that were smaller — and colder! — than I had expected, and while I was getting used to the slowly-warming boobs suddenly attached to my chest he’d had me step into a couple of garments that were more like building foundation than underwear. I had on a pair of knickers made of extraordinarily stretchy fabric which, after a quick pantomimed demonstration from Ben which made my eyes cross, hid my junk completely and left me with a smooth crotch; and on top of those I wore a ridiculous contraption which clung to my butt and upper thighs and looked like someone had welded squishy raw chicken to my undercarriage.

So, I told myself, if I’m sitting here with breasts and no (visible) dick and a bunch of padding around my arse that makes me look like I actually have an arse, then there’s no sense in getting squeamish about applying a little foundation.

No sense at all.

Carefully, looking sideways at Ben to make sure I was doing it correctly, I stroked the sponge across my cheek.

~

James had hammered on the bathroom door again, just as we were nearing the end of our makeup routine but while I was still essentially naked. Ben had told him that if he couldn’t contain himself he should go for a walk and, after some light threats, James had grumpily agreed. Ben and I listened carefully for the front door and his feet on the stairs in the common area before we carried on.

And carry on we did: to the wig cap Ben had added a long, blonde wig, which he placed on my head and then styled. He made me watch what he was doing again, so I could fix my hair while I was at the trade show.

“But I’m not going to the trade show,” I insisted.

“Nevertheless,” he insisted back. I couldn’t argue with that.

After the wig came the dress. I know I haven’t described the dress up until this point, even though it had been hanging on the shower rail the whole time. There was just something too real about it. It was so blue and so short and so a part of this whole exercise that I was becoming more and more dubious about as the alcohol left my system.

It was even more real when I was wearing it.

It was tight, and hugged my fake curves like a second skin. It was short, reaching barely two-thirds of the way down my thighs; less when I sat down. And it was electric blue. I would have preferred a more muted colour, but Ben explained that he’d chosen my makeup to complement the dress, and he’d chosen the dress because it was the closest match he had to the colour of MCAC’s company logo, which was also the colour of the dresses we were going to have at the trade show.

After the dress, the simple black shoes with the low heel were almost anti-climactic.

With James out of the apartment we’d left the bathroom so we could both look at me in more neutral light. James had a full-length mirror in his bedroom and as I walked slightly unsteadily (alcohol; shoes) up to it, I have to admit that I gasped.

I was fucking gorgeous.

And there was no way I could tell there was a, well, a me under that dress, and that was with me having the advantage of knowing for a fact that there was.

“Girl,” Ben said, “you wear that better’n I do.” I must have flinched a little, because he added, “And that’s something you’ve got to get used to right now, because if you react strange when someone calls you a beautiful woman — and they will — then you’ll give the game away.”

Oh God.

I looked at myself again: I couldn’t get away from the woman in the mirror; she held on to me. I realised a second later I was hugging myself.

“Ben—” I said, and then forgot what I was going to say next because I was still looking at myself as I spoke and the most ridiculous thing about all of this had suddenly, finally occurred to me. “What the fuck, Ben?” I burst out. “I may look the part — and Jesus Christ do I look the part — but the moment I open my mouth, everyone’s going to know!”

Ben took a step forward and put calming hands on my shoulders.

“I know a trick for that,” he said.

“What?” I almost screeched. Screeching like that was starting to become a habit.

“It doesn’t work for me, but your voice is high enough that you can get away with it. Come on, sit with me.”

He patted James’ bed and, after a moment, I shrugged and sat next to him. I was nothing but doubts but I wanted to hear how he could possibly cover up my man’s voice as easily as he covered up my man’s body.

“This is something trans women learn,” he said, “and impressionists, voice actors, and — yes — drag queens sometimes, if they want to.” The expression on his face said that he, personally, did not. “But the difference between men’s and women’s voices isn’t just a matter of pitch. If you think about it, I’m sure you can come up with men with quite high voices and women with quite deep ones. There’s a huge overlap in the middle, and your voice is right inside that overlap.”

“Yes,” I said, acutely aware of my own voice as I did so, “but men with high voices still sound like men. I don’t know why; they just do. Same with women, but the other way around.”

“You might not know why,” Ben said, “but I do. When your voice broke, your Adam’s apple — which I can’t for the life of me actually see on you, but which I assume is in there somewhere — expanded, and that’s why your voice got deeper and, if you’ll pardon the technical term, manlier. But you can still talk out of the small part of your vocal cords, if you know the trick.”

I sighed, still sceptical. “What’s the trick?”

“Put a hand on your chest,” he said, putting a hand on his own chest. “Right here.”

I copied him, feeling the tops of the breast forms under my hand. An unusual sensation.

“Now, say something,” he commanded.

Lost for words, I attempted, “Something.”

“Something longer,” he said, exasperated.

“Um,” I said. A piece of doggerel popped into my brain: “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain.”

Ben laughed. “Interesting choice. You feel your chest vibrate as you said that?” I nodded. “Okay, now what you want to do is say that without your chest vibrating.” Before I could ask the obvious question, he continued, “Say ‘aah’.”

“Aah?”

“No, like you’re at the dentist and he wants to look at your back teeth.”

“Aaaaaaah.”

“Good. Keep going.” I kept going, and he kept talking. “Feel your chest. No vibrations?” I shook my head, which made my aaah sound funny. “Now, without taking a breath, go through the other vowels.”

I did so, waiting for my chest to start vibrating the way it had when I spoke before. It didn’t.

“This is your ‘head voice’. This is what you’re going to talk in. It takes practice, and it’ll sound a little reedy until you’re good at it, but you can practice it and you will get good at it. And don’t worry; it only becomes permanent if you never use your ‘other’ voice. You’ll be able to switch back after the trade show.”

“Switch back?” I said, in my normal voice. Ben slapped me, lightly, on the leg.

“In head voice!” he commanded. “If it helps, try going ‘aah’ again and then turning it into a humming sound without ever leaving your head voice.”

I did as he suggested. It took a couple of goes to get it right. With his encouragement, I kept at it until I could do it every time.

“Now try and say something. Come at it from humming if it helps.”

It did. “Mmmmmswitch back?” I said, managing to stay in head voice.

“Well done. And yes, you shouldn’t switch back for a couple of days; you need to talk like this until the trade show. You need practice, and you need to get used to it!”

“It’s hard,” I said, my voice almost cracking on the second word.

“Then we practice!” Ben said. I glanced at the bedroom door, worried. Ben noticed. “I texted James and made him promise not to come back home until I say it’s okay, so you don’t have to worry about him walking in on us.”

My relief must have been obvious because he smiled at me.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s just have a normal conversation, and you stay in head voice the whole time. I’ll poke you if you drop out. Ready? What do you do at work?”

Work? I could talk about work until the cows came home. I loved working at MCAC.

~

“Are you ready?” Ben asked.

“Absolutely not,” I whispered.

“Well, you’ve got ten seconds to get ready.”

I swallowed.

After an hour of talking back and forth, Ben pronounced me ‘better enough’. I was getting used to talking in the ‘head voice’. We made a few recordings on my phone so I could hear what I sounded like, and true to Ben’s word, I sounded like a woman. Kind of a tired woman with a relatively deep voice, for sure, but Ben promised me that with practice I would get better at it, sound clearer, and my average pitch would likely also raise. He also said I should use the recording as a reference to help me get back into the swing of things in the morning, and made me promise to use the voice for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

So there we were, standing in James’ living room. I was dressed in a shockingly tight blue dress, heels, and a wig Ben swore was real human hair. I was talking in my head voice. I was sneaking a double of the drink James had poured me earlier to keep myself from running screaming into the night.

I didn’t know what to do with my hands without pockets, so I sort of held one hand in the other in front of my waist.

A key turned in the front door lock.

“Is it too late to run?” I asked quietly, maintaining my head voice.

“If you run, after all the work I just put in,” Ben said, “I’ll chase you down myself.”

And then James was back.

It must have been raining outside, because his hair was slicked back and his coat was drenched. There was a dark look on his face as he closed the door, but it evaporated when he looked at us.

“A— Alex?” he said.

Okay, it’s possible he was just looking at me. I gave him a little wave.

“Holy shit,” he said, and started crossing the floor to where we were standing. He raised his arms as if to hug me, but Ben pushed him away.

“Absolutely not!” Ben said. “You’re soaking wet. Go dry your hair and put on some new clothes.” He grinned. “She’s been waiting hours for you; she can wait another few minutes.”

I blushed hard. Ben had been calling me a woman and a girl repeatedly for the whole hour we’d been talking, but something about the pronoun hit me deep in the chest.

“Of course!” James said. “I’ll be quick,” he promised.

After he closed the bedroom door I almost fainted.

“I’d call that a success,” Ben said.

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“He knows who you are, and if I know men I’d say that the rush of blood to his head just now was only equalled by the rush of blood to his cock.” I opened my mouth to protest, if for no other reason than the crude phrasing — and out of a strange sense of loyalty to James, who I didn’t like to hear described that way — but Ben cut me off. “So no straight man at that trade show is going to think you’re anything but a smoking hot booth babe.”

The alcohol made me giggle. “Hey,” I said, “if you get to be a performance artiste in the medium of drag,” I inserted the e in artist with a grin, “then I get to be a trade show model.”

“So you are going to do it, then?” he asked, suddenly serious.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “You really think my voice will be okay?”

“I think with practice your voice will be okay,” he said. “So don’t stop practicing!”

I re-did my aahs and my hums a few times.

~

James was taking his time. Ben and I were comfortably passing the time chatting and helping ourselves to James’ home bar when Ben’s phone chimed.

“Shit,” he muttered. “Well, I can’t wait here forever; I have a show tonight.”

I was suddenly frozen with panic. “You’re going to leave me here with him? Alone? Like this!” I gestured down at the dress, the shoes, the hip pads, both breasts; everything, really. Suddenly it wasn’t a fun game I was playing with a new friend (who had made very clear that he wasn’t into me no matter what clothes I might or might not have on); suddenly I was going to be alone, dressed up as a girl, with an old friend, in his apartment. I thought back to Ben’s comments about the rush of blood to James’ dick, and blushed. And panicked again. Panic-blushed.

“You’ll be fine!” Ben said.

“How do I even take all this off!” I said, taking a moment to realise I hadn’t dropped my head voice even under duress and being mildly impressed at myself despite everything.

“Just undress and get in the shower,” Ben said, looking at me like I was an idiot.

He was right: I was an idiot. For some reason the transformation he’d guided me through had felt so total that it hadn’t occurred to me that I could just remove the bum pads and the wig and the boobs, and shower off the makeup. My skinny legs would still be shaven but when did I ever show them to anyone, anyway?

I relaxed. A little.

“Gotta go!” Ben said, and kissed me gently on the forehead. While I’d been having a moment of self-discovery re my own idiocy, he’d obviously been gathering some things up: he had a couple of plastic bags slung over his shoulder that hadn’t been there moments before. “I’ll leave the trunk,” he added, nodding at the luggage, out of which he had extracted all the torture devices he’d used on me, and which I knew contained more clothes and probably other drag accessories I didn’t want to think about, “in case you need it.”

In case I need it for what?

I didn’t have time to ask, because he was out of the front door in a whirl.

And I was alone. In James’ apartment. In a dress.

And it was getting dark outside.

I needed another drink.

~

I’d knocked back another double of the unlabelled liquor — which I had eventually decided tasted of cherries and was completely delicious — and succumbed to slightly drunken boredom. I hunted around the apartment for my office clothes, looking for my phone; I didn’t find my clothes, which were probably in the bathroom, but I found my phone, wallet and keys on the table by the front door. James was still a no-show.

“You okay?” I called through his bedroom door, managing to stay in head voice.

“Yes,” he replied. I thought I could detect a slight hesitation. I wondered what he was doing in there.

“Ben’s gone to his drag show,” I said, leaning against the door so I didn’t sway on the high heels, “so you need to come out and keep me company.”

“Two minutes,” he called back.

I shrugged and walked back over to the couch. The sound of heels on a wooden floor was a sound I’d always associated with women; it was strange indeed that I was responsible for it this time. I sat down, leaned into the cushions, and experimentally tried crossing my legs. It was uncomfortable to cross them at the thighs — I could feel my cock getting a little crushed inside those stretchy knickers Ben had made me wear, and perversely I felt like the reminder of its presence wasn’t helping with the role I was trying to get into — so I settled for crossing them at the ankles, and relaxed.

I was midway through replying to my third work-related email on my phone when James’ door finally, finally opened.

I looked over. He’d changed into some slightly nicer stuff than he usually wore at the office, although I, a fashion novice at best, struggled to pinpoint what it was about it that was nicer, specifically.

“Hi,” I said, smiling. “What took you so long?”

“I just—” he started, then interrupted himself with, “What happened to your voice?”

I frowned. “You only just noticed? I was yelling at you through your bedroom door.”

He looked nonplussed. “I, uh, didn’t put two and two together,” he admitted. “I mean, Ben said he could do something, but… You sound like a girl! How do you do it?”

“With effort,” I said. “But it’s getting easier. Ben taught me.”

“But you can go back, right?”

Aw. So concerned. “So he promises me,” I said. I could tell he expected me to have dropped into my old voice to prove that I could, so I added, “I’m trying to keep it up. As practice. If I’m going to do the trade show, I need to get really good.”

James, who had been standing in the doorway to his bedroom like an idiot, almost flinched at that.

“You’re really going to do it?” he said, walking over to the sofa. I shuffled over a little so he could sit next to me without being uncomfortably close; he sat uncomfortably close anyway. Thighs touching.

“Maybe,” I said. I’d been thinking about it while I wrote emails on autopilot. “There’s no way we can get someone else at this notice. We were insanely lucky to get the three Hammond girls, and now we’re down to just one, so it’s either her and me, or it’s just her.” I held up a finger. “I’m not saying I’m definitely going to do it. But I’m going to see how this goes for the next couple of hours and if I don’t completely freak out then it’s a solid maybe.” I shook myself slightly. “I need to lay off the alcohol; I won’t be able to get by at the expo tipsy.”

James frowned. “You’re drunk?”

I put my raised finger on his lips, and then wondered why I was touching him so casually. I put my finger away. “Only enough to make my inner voice slightly less screamy,” I said. It was a half-lie: my inner voice was actually having a bit of fun with how self-conscious the normally controlled and together James McCain looked.

“Well, what should we do for the next couple of hours, while you sober up?” James asked.

Push him, my inner voice said. See just how uncomfortable he can get.

“Why don’t we go out to dinner?” I said brightly.