We had the contents of Ben’s case spread out on James’ bed. All I’ll say about most of it is, if I didn’t know he was a drag queen before, the dresses he owned would have convinced me pretty quickly. Almost none of it was suitable for a quiet night out; very little of it was even suitable for a loud night in. And James and I both agreed there was absolutely no way I could wear the electric blue dress to a restaurant; I looked like a colour-inverted traffic cone. Ben’s collection contained an overabundance of extremely bright fabrics; in retrospect it wasn’t surprising he was able to find a close match for MCAC’s company colour, as subtlety didn’t seem to be one of his considerations when choosing clothes for himself.

I looked up from the kaleidoscope on top of the duvet and caught another glimpse of myself in James’ full-length mirror. A glimpse that turned into a gawk. Just when I thought I was getting used to all the new experiences this afternoon was bringing — speaking in this voice, wearing these clothes, being all shoved into unfamiliar and not entirely comfortable underwear — there’d be something that bowled me over again. When we were sitting down on the sofa together, warmly drunk, thighs touching, that something had been the view of my bare, shaven legs poking out of a dress that didn’t reach my knees, contrasted against the ordinary dark trousers James had on. The feeling of the fabric of his trousers brushing against my calves had been almost electric.

This time, that something was me, the whole of me, reflected in the mirror, looking for all the world like a normal woman, albeit one with questionable taste in clothes. It was the first time I’d really looked at myself since I put the dress on. I watched myself breathe, mesmerised.

I think James said something, but I missed it. I was too bewitched by this apparition in the mirror, this beautiful woman who, I was suddenly perversely afraid, might vanish if I closed my eyes.

“You know what’s weird?” I said, aware as I did so that I sounded slightly dazed. “I’ve never looked my age before. I’ve always looked younger than I am.”

James said something else that I didn’t catch. I ran a finger along my cheekbone and down my jawline, frowning. Even with the assistance of the horrible-smelling brown goop Ben had covered me in, my jaw still had a little of that strangely smooth feeling you found on men’s faces after they’d had a close shave. I’d have to remember not to let anyone who wasn’t in on the secret touch my face.

James’ hands closed over my bare shoulders. I jumped, and would have turned around except he was holding me in place. I turned my head instead and almost headbutted him, he was so close.

“Alex?” he said kindly. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I said. Head voice, head voice, head voice, I recited to myself. I’d almost cracked on that first word.

“We don’t have to go out if you don’t want to.” His voice was gentle.

I sternly interrogated myself, trying to push aside the alcohol that was still warming me from the inside out.

What did I want? I wanted our software to find a buyer, to get either a single big contract or a bunch of little guys who could help get our name out there. I wanted our company to succeed. I wanted to be successful myself, and I wanted James to be proud of me. Even with the contributions I’d made to the codebases of various projects, I’d never felt quite like I belonged among the engineering staff at MCAC: they all, James included, had qualifications, degrees, experience; I was a deadbeat kid hired straight out of school by a family friend, and it was just lucky that I turned out to have a knack for coding. Whenever one of the engineers worked with us remotely, and on the very occasional visits they paid to the office, there was a part of me that felt like a fraud. Maybe that’s why I threw myself into the organisational stuff so much; I was better at talking to people than most of our skeleton staff, which felt more like something I deserved to be good at.

What did I have to do to get what I wanted? Well, right now what the company needed to succeed was to draw attention to ourselves, and at a crowded trade show, if you couldn’t afford or didn’t have time to set up a large, impressive stand, that meant hiring pretty girls to wear eye-catching colours and demonstrate the value of your product to interested people. And since the number of girls available to help us out on that front had just collapsed to one…

It looked like, to get what I wanted, I had to be a booth babe. A trade show model. It was something I was, seemingly, inexplicably, suited for, in a way no-one else we could get our hands on at such short notice was. In the mirror, I confirmed again that I looked good enough to fool myself.

The only question was, was I good enough to fool everyone else?

“Let’s go out,” I said. “Let’s go to dinner.” I patted one of his hands, and shrugged to prompt him to remove them from my shoulders. He did. “We need to know if I can handle this around other people, and we need to know if other people see an ordinary woman when they look at me. If it’s a negative in either column then we need to come up with a new idea, so the sooner we know, the better.”

James nodded. “Okay,” he said, and then grinned. “Should we come up with a safe word?”

I frowned. “A safe word?”

“Pomegranate,” he decided. “If you get too uncomfortable and need to get somewhere safe, just say ‘pomegranate’.”

I laughed. “We’ll be out in public. If I say ‘pomegranate’ and then we both leave without a word, that’s going to look pretty weird. If I need to come home, I’ll just say so.”

~

In the Uber, I realised I was sobering up: the nice warm feeling had dissipated and now my belly was filled with ice cubes. Worse, I needed a piss and the suspension on the rideshare car was terrible.

I’d managed to recalibrate James from his automatic assumption that ‘going out to dinner’ meant a posh restaurant and not, for example, a Pizza Express, and as soon as he got the message it was like a light bulb turned on over his head. He dug in some drawers and found a few casual items that an old girlfriend had left behind, unsuitable for a reservation at Le Fucke Maison or whatever the hell (languages are not my strong point; adding an unnecessary extra e to unsuspecting English words apparently is) but probably fine for a pasta meal for two at a classier-than-McDonald’s-but-don’t-go-nuts chain restaurant.

Naturally, his ex-girlfriend hadn’t left behind any trousers for me to wear.

So there I was in the Uber in a dark blue maxi dress (like I said, I’m not a fashion expert, but I’m together enough to read the labels inside dresses) with a nice subtle pattern on it, and the same heels (which didn’t 100% work with the dress, but I was fine with that), worrying about how I was going to take a piss without giving the game away. I had visions of walking into the women’s loos at Pizza Express and being suddenly laid bare in the harsh lighting: stubble visible, head somehow the wrong shape, hairline probably also suspicious as hell. I pictured myself held down by restaurant staff while a panicked customer called the police.

At least this dress covered my shoulders, and when I looked down I couldn’t see my knees any more.

“You kids having a nice night out, yeah?” the driver said, shaking me out of my thoughts and distracting me from my anxious bladder.

I looked over at James, who seemed lost in his own world, staring out of the window at the rain, which had started up again shortly after we got in the car. We were headed to another part of the city, on the theory that if it all went tits-up (pun not intended) then at least we weren’t anywhere near our apartments or the office, and could safely never show our faces there again. Assuming we got out alive.

I tried using my psychic powers to jolt James out of his introspection and make him respond to the driver, but unfortunately I was no more psychic than I had been at age twelve when I’d gotten a little overexcited after an X-Men movie marathon. Obviously it was up to me.

I swallowed to lubricate my throat — I wasn’t going to be able to start with an aah like I had been when I was practicing in James’ apartment, and the thought of fucking it up had turned my mouth into the Sahara — and said, simply, “Yes.”

It came out okay! Not my best work, sure — it sounded more like I had when I first started working on it, eight hundred million years ago this afternoon — but good enough. I followed up with a smile, hoping the man would be satisfied.

“A date?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, suddenly horrified at the idea that he might try his luck with me if he thought I was available. “First date,” I clarified. I didn’t want to have to pull off a girlfriend-and-boyfriend-in-love act with James seemingly mentally absent and me, from a combination of nerves, heels and alcohol, having to work hard at standing in one place without falling down.

“You two have a good time, yeah?” the driver said, returning his attention to the road.

I sighed in relief and nudged James with my foot.

No response. Damn. When we got to the restaurant was he just going to keep sitting there? Would I have to lamp him with my shoe to wake him up? I hooked my ankle around his foot — there, again, was the interesting sensation of his trouser on my bare leg — and yanked on him as subtly as I could. As if waking from a dream, James came alive. He blinked at me.

I tried to indicate, using a complex system of eyebrow waggles, that he should pay some fucking attention. He frowned, then seemed to realise what I was on about, and mouthed, Sorry.

I should think so, too. He wasn’t the one in the dress.

It wasn’t long after that we finally got to the restaurant. The driver parked up over the road and told us we were lovely passengers. I whipped my phone out of the handbag slung over my shoulder (another gift from the ex-girlfriend, and I could see why she left it behind: it was kind of battered and the side pockets flapped loose inside the main compartment) and ostentatiously gave him a five-star review. He hadn’t tried to hit on me, nor had he beaten the crap out of me for being a man in a dress; he hit all my gold standards for good service.

I got out of the car and then had to dive for the shelter of an overhanging shopfront. It was still raining! And James’ inconsiderate ex hadn’t left any jackets for me to borrow, and we were both too distracted to have picked up an umbrella. I stood under the veranda, my arms crossed over my body for warmth, and wondered how I was going to make it across the road to Pizza Express without the rain plastering my dress to my body.

James announced his arrival next to me with a, “Fuck,” which I thought was on point. At least he had a couple of layers on, and a jacket. I looked up at him — even in heels, he was still taller than me — to ask what he thought, but he was already taking his jacket off. He gestured for me to turn around, and when I did, he put it over my shoulders.

It was huge. With the arms of the coat loose and the whole of me contained inside it, I felt like a teenage girl in one of those coming-of-age movies who’d just been given her boyfriend’s letterman jacket. James completed the picture by putting an arm around me and leaning over slightly, his head shielding mine from some of the rain, and I, deciding I could set aside some time to be embarrassed about this later, hugged him tightly.

As one, we crossed the street.

~

If you’d raised the topic with me six months ago — hell, if you’d asked me yesterday — I would have said that the idea of going into the women’s toilets in a public place was extremely low on my bucket list, somewhere around ‘get shot’, but by the time we got to the restaurant I was too desperate even to hesitate. I dived for the women’s room as soon as we were inside, side-stepping around a pair of older women who were just leaving and who showered me with friendly smiles (which I took as votes of confidence in my appearance) and hurriedly locked myself inside the closest cubicle. I had to take the stupid bum pads off before I could pull my knickers down and sit — I had enough presence of mind to sit down, thank God — but when I was finally ready to piss, it was everything I’d been dreaming of and more.

When my brain came back online, somewhere around halfway through, I realised I could hear someone peeing in the next cubicle but couldn’t hear my own. Paranoia made me reach down and tuck my dick back a little, just enough that the stream went straight into the bowl. I didn’t want to give my neighbour any reason to be suspicious of me. Just a normal woman having a piss, here. Nothing strange about it. Please leave the bathroom?

Thankfully, cleaning myself up and reupholstering my undercarriage took enough time that the other woman — oops, I mean the woman — was well into washing her hands before I was even fully dressed again. I learned from past mistakes and put the knickers on over the bum pads, so next time I wouldn’t have to get quite so horrifyingly near-naked.

‘Next time’, I realised. Dammit. Today, tomorrow, and the three days of the expo meant I had five days of this farce ahead of me.

I made sure I was presentable and left the cubicle. The bathroom was empty except for me, and I breathed out. It was weird, watching myself in the mirror, the way my artificial chest reacted differently to even just the normal process of breathing. So many little differences.

Critically examining myself, I thought that perhaps Ben’s makeup job — intended both to be eye-catching and to go with a dress that was so blue it hurt my eyes — was a little over the top for the clothes and the environment I found myself in. I rubbed experimentally at my eyelids, trying to reduce the amount of colour there, but didn’t have much luck until I brought a paper towel into play.

Better. I extracted a lipgloss from the hastily-assembled assortment of makeup I’d dumped in my handbag back at the apartment, and swiped it across my lips. All those drinks I’d had back at James’ had taken their toll on the lip colour Ben had applied, and I’d looked a little lopsided, like a pro makeup artist had started work on me but got called away by an emergency while they were halfway down my face.

I took the opportunity the empty bathroom presented and ran through my voice warm-up exercises again, taking care to watch myself in the mirror: I was trying to speed-run getting used to being a woman, after all; I couldn’t very well flinch every time I passed a reflective surface when we got to the expo.

I smiled at myself — the things I was doing! — and exited the loos to find James hovering nervously just outside.

“Weren’t you getting us a table?” I asked, confused but thankfully firmly back in my head voice.

“I was worried,” he said.

Aw. Again. “You’re very sweet,” I said. “I don’t know why you’re so nervous.” I was trying to keep my public statements neutral in case my paranoia was right, and amateur bathroom detectives were following us around, trying to catch us out.

He looked perplexed at that. I controlled the urge to sigh — the risks we were taking were ninety percent on my head and only ten on his, and yet I was the one doing my best to act like I belonged while he was the one glancing around the place, looking like he was scanning the environment for improvised explosives and hidden snipers — and took his hand.

I tried to ignore the way he jumped. It was getting annoying the way he kept bouncing from being normal when we were alone together to being a wreck when we were around other people.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get a nice, quiet table in the back.”

I led him to the small queue of people standing near the entrance. He was shaking a little, so while we waited to be served, I stroked his hand gently with my fingernails.

~

The waitress led us to a booth at the back of the restaurant, dropped some menus on the table and left us to it. I sat, smoothing my skirt out as I did so, having noticed in the car that if I didn’t it rumpled up. When I finished making myself comfortable I looked over at James and noticed that, while he’d managed successfully to sit down, he still looked stiff and scared.

“For fuck’s sake, James!” I hissed. “What is wrong with you?”

He frowned, but at least he relaxed his shoulders. It looked like to took some effort. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought I’d be cool with this, but it’s hard.”

“‘This’?”

“You know: you, like this. I mean, don’t take this the wrong way, Alex…”

When he trailed off I made ‘please continue’ gestures that hopefully also indicated that I wasn’t planning on taking whatever it was the wrong way.

“But you’re gorgeous,” he finished.

I blinked. I’d had that thought myself, of course — I’d been ruminating on the implications all afternoon — but to hear him say it was quite something else. I remembered the way he’d called me pretty, all those hours ago, in his office. Some of the warm feeling from the apartment came back to me, and I couldn’t quite stop myself from smiling.

“Is that it?” I said, and then lowered my voice to a whisper. “You’re not scared people will find out?” I was surprised to note that even whispers sounded different in head voice. Very odd.

He laughed at me. Which I was sort of offended by and relieved by at the same time. “Not a chance,” he said. “I mean, look at you!”

I sighed. “I’ve been looking. It’s weird. So what’s up, then? You think I’m…” I couldn’t say the word. “You think I’m okay-looking, fine. Why’re you being strange?”

He thought for a moment. “When it’s just us, it’s like it’s normal,” he said. “You’re just Alex, even if you look… like that at the moment. It’s comfortable.” I nodded. We’d always had an easy chemistry; it’s why we worked so well together. “When we’re around other people, it’s like, suddenly it’s real.”

I could relate to that part. “Real how?” I asked, biting my lip a little after.

“You’re a girl — or you’re supposed to be — and I’m a man, and we’re together in a car, or in a restaurant, and that’s… loaded, you know? I don’t know how I should behave around you, I mean, I know what people expect to see, but I don’t want to offend you, or—”

“James,” I interrupted, “please, for the duration of this— this— this whatever it is, I want you to discard any worries you have about offending me.” At this point, I kind of wanted to hurt him for being so dense, but that could wait until the five days had passed and I could drop character and really go to town on him with one of the heavier office keyboards. “The more you treat this — me — like it’s all normal, the less likely I am to have difficulties.”

“Difficulties?” he echoed.

“Yeah, like people kicking the shit out of me, for a start.” I was fixated on people responding to me with violence. Can’t imagine why.

“Alex,” he said, “you have no worries on that front.” He dropped to a whisper. “You look like you’ve always been a girl. You even walk right.”

I tried not to deal with the first part of that sentiment and zeroed in on the second. “I think it’s the heels,” I said. “I couldn’t walk like I normally do even if I wanted to.”

We were silent for a few moments.

“So,” I said, “if that’s all it is…” I trailed off, trying to prompt him into being a bit more verbose. I was starting to miss the unflappable old James who was never lost for words.

He looked pained. “That’s not all,” he said. “I still don’t know how to behave, really. I’m trying to do what comes naturally, but what worries me is what natural behaviour means to me in this situation. It’s like…” He stopped himself, and looked thoughtful. “Half of me wants to just end this right now, but—”

“Are you ready to order?” the lurking waitress said, startling us both. Just our luck to end up at the only Pizza Express where the waitstaff were trained for stealth combat situations. I quickly replayed our conversation in my head, but unless she’d actually been hiding in the next booth and listening in, we were in the clear.

But what about the other half of him? my unhelpful brain insisted on asking the rest of me. The half that doesn’t want to end this right now? What does it want?

I put the thought aside for later and focused on ordering. I picked something from the light menu, figuring I’d better watch my waistline for the next few days. It wasn’t something I really thought about most of the time, so possibly a pasta bowl and salad was overkill (underkill?) for a woman on a diet, but at least I wouldn’t be over-full by the end of the evening. James ordered a huge pizza, obviously — I resolved to steal a couple of pepperoni — and a bottle of white wine for the table.

I asked a question with my eyebrows; he answered it when the waitress returned to her stealth fortress. “I need a drink,” he said. “It seems to have helped you out.”

I smiled. “I think I’ve burned off all the alcohol from earlier,” I said. “I’m running on pure adrenaline now.”

“Then we both need a drink.” He nodded to himself.

“What were you saying before?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” he said, looking confused. I thought about prompting him further, but decided it would sound weird. I didn’t even know why I cared: as long as we could both handle it tonight, we were sorted for the expo; what else was there to worry about?

The waitress returned a few minutes later with the wine, made a show of pouring some out so James could taste it — it’s just as well she didn’t ask me to do so: my palette was so inexperienced I was only willing to go fifty/fifty on being able to identify it as wine — and then left us to get quietly tipsy while we waited for our food.

~

Alcohol, thankfully, seemed to loosen James up. We polished off the first bottle in record time and ordered a second to go with dinner. By halfway through — me with my pile of pasta and leaves, James with his gargantuan pizza — we were both highly relaxed. And, just like back at the apartment, I was beginning to enjoy myself again.

So many things about being in public as a woman were interestingly different. The waitress smiled at me, the way waitresses do, but it was a different kind of smile. The other women in the restaurant were sort of neutral-friendly in a way that was, again, slightly different to what I was used to. When I was idly scanning the room while picking at my salad, a young woman at a nearby table gave me a serious-looking nod; not knowing at all what to do with that, I smiled at her and attempted a serious nod myself. She smiled back, so I don’t think I screwed up.

The men mostly just stared when they thought I wasn’t looking.

I wondered if I’d ever stared like that. I didn’t think so; I hadn’t been much in the habit of noticing people — unlike tonight, when the paranoid part of my brain, even though it had been partially defeated by alcohol and the continuing absence of consequences, still urged me to notice everyone and everything — and the few girls I’d dated had approached me, more or less out of the blue as far as I was concerned. And then, usually, broke it off after a few weeks or months; I was ‘nice’ but also ‘distant’ and, if I’m honest, really not all that sexually confident.

Of course, I might well have been making horny eyes at every woman who passed by me and been too oblivious to notice myself doing it. I resolved to watch out for that in future.

Eating with long hair probably would have been more of a challenge if I hadn’t spent a good few years at school with hair past my shoulders, so I was used to it. Tuck it behind your ears and/or eat out of the side of your mouth farthest from your part; job done. I hadn’t even intended to grow it out when I was younger, I just hadn’t paid attention to it, and I’d only cut it because I was getting bullied; hair was, to me, something that kept your ears warm.

Until today, I supposed. I realised I’d probably paid more attention to my appearance in the last — I glanced at my phone — seven hours than I had done in the preceding seven years, and felt curiously ashamed of my past self. I resolved to do better after all this was over, and smiled at the idea that spending time as a woman would make me a better man.

“What are you thinking about?” James asked. Apparently he’d noticed that I was staring into the middle distance while making extremely heavy work of a pasta shell.

“Just how different things are,” I said.

“Different how?”

“Best not to answer that here,” I replied, indicating with a sweep of my eyes an entire restaurant who might have opinions we’d prefer to avoid giving them an opportunity to express.

“Wise,” James said. “So, do you think you can do it? The expo, I mean?”

I thought about it. The purpose of coming out to the restaurant had been to test for failure, and so far no-one had screamed or hit me or called the police or given any other indication they had discovered I was not what I appeared to be; I, for my part, had been quite panicked a lot of the time, but I was pretty sure I’d successfully hidden it.

“How do you think I’m doing?” I asked. “Not my appearance; I mean, am I coming across like a normal person, not someone who’s scared out of h— her wits?” The pronoun nearly got me. I’d have to watch out for that.

“Honestly?” James said. “You’re doing great. I wouldn’t know you were having a hard time at all if you hadn’t had a go at me earlier.”

Another moment’s thought, just to be certain I was okay with it all. Or at least, okay enough to deal with it for a few days.

“Then yes. I can do it.” I grinned at him, suddenly feeling confident. “And I will do it.”

James echoed my grin and grabbed my hand, squeezing it. I got the feeling he would have leapt over the table and hugged me if we weren’t in relatively polite company.

“Thank you so much,” he said. “Your modelling fee is going to be insane.”

I liked the sound of that. “We can—” And then a thought that had been slowly travelling around my head asserted itself. “Shit,” I said, as the thought settled unpleasantly on the part of my brain that controlled my mouth.

“You look like you just thought of something nasty,” James said warily.

“We need to get the measurements to the tailoring company tonight, right?” I held up my phone. “It’s nearly eight pm!”

James’ expression crashed into mine. “Fuck,” he said.

“I know, right?”

“You get us an Uber back to my place,” James said, and started looking around for the stealth waitress. “I’ll get the bill.”

~

It was the same Uber driver. As I climbed into his back seat, draped once again in James’ jacket, I wondered how many embarrassing experiences it would take to finally kill me. He smiled and winked at me and I thought, yes, that wink might well have been what took me to the embarrassment LD50 threshold. Goodbye, cruel world, etc.

I couldn’t bring myself to be too bothered about it, though. I’d shot off a quick email to the tailors, who confirmed that work on the dresses wouldn’t start until morning, so any time before then would be fine, and I’d found Emily Swan’s measurements in my email archive, passed on by the agency. So, crisis averted: all I had to do was measure myself and then I could succumb to the pleasant alcoholic glow that was suffusing me from top to toe. In the face of such relief, a mere wink from a man who thought I was another man’s girlfriend couldn’t make much of a dent.

I sank into the seat cushions and felt very content.

“Did you have a good night, then?” the driver said.

James seemed to be over his nerves, and spoke up before I could. “Yes, thanks,” he said. “We had a business proposition to discuss, and it went well.”

“I thought you two were dating?” the driver said.

I winced, and thought quickly. “We are, but we just started, and I work for him,” I said, “so it’s awkward. And has the potential to get a bit legal.” Stuff a kernel of truth into your sack of lies, as they say.

“She’s my secretary,” James said, grinning at me.

My relief that he got the pronoun right — or right for tonight, anyway — was immediately eclipsed by my annoyance. His secretary? The sexist little arse.

“I’m his personal assistant,” I corrected him, and kicked him, out of sight of the driver.

James stuck his tongue out at me. I almost reached over to give him a playful slap before I remembered about the driver, who was watching us in the rear-view with obvious amusement, so I bottled it. When the driver looked away again, I raised a fist and brandished it where only James could see, a dire warning of future terrible punishments.

His answering grin was impossibly wide.

~

I nearly dropped the cloth measuring tape in the toilet.

I’d kicked off the heels when we got to James’ place, and as soon as I’d locked myself in the bathroom I’d shucked off the dress as well, taking great pleasure in hanging it up on the shower rail and then theatrically turning my back on it. It wasn’t that it was a bad dress, or that I even particularly disliked the idea of wearing dresses — after the last few hours, the stunning revelation that they were just tubes of fabric like everything else I’d worn my entire life, except with the holes in different places, had sunk in so gently that I didn’t notice it until I’d gotten naked — it was just that I felt more vulnerable when I wore them around other people. Because of the implications.

I then proceeded to discover, as I bent into impossible shapes while balancing against the side of the bath, squinting at the tailor’s web app on my phone screen and almost falling over, that I wasn’t actually able to get these measurements myself. Which meant I needed James’ help.

Even with the bum pads and the alarmingly tight knickers covering up all my traditionally naked parts — and a couple of extra naked parts I’d borrowed from Ben, farther up my body from the rest of them — I still felt naked, and I very much did not want to be naked in front of James.

I threw the dress back on and unlocked the bathroom door. James was at his kitchen table, working at his laptop, but it didn’t look like his heart was in it. He looked sleepy. I joined him, pulling out a stool from the other end of the kitchen table and sitting cross-legged on it.

“All done?” he said, looking up from his work.

“Not yet,” I said hesitantly. “I, um, need to ask you for a favour.”

He smiled. “Considering what you’re doing for me — for our company — I’ll grant you any favour you like,” he said.

I blushed so hard I could feel it in my feet. “I need you to measure me,” I whispered. “I can’t do it on my own.”

He looked at me for a moment, a serious expression on his face. He seemed to be thinking, because after a moment he nodded to himself, as if one side of him had just won an argument against the other side.

“Okay,” he said.

I silently pushed my unlocked phone across the kitchen table. I found I couldn’t look at his eyes, so I watched his chin as he looked over the tailor’s web app. It guided you through the process from start to end, and also handily showed a woman’s silhouette with all the required measurements marked in white.

Some of them were in very delicate areas. I’m pretty sure I watched him realise this.

“Do you mind if I rifle through your ex’s stuff again?” I asked. “This dress is long enough that it’ll get in the way of some of the…” I trailed off. Some of the dot dot dot indeed.

He nodded, still frowning at my phone, so I escaped to his bedroom and quietly died for a few minutes.

Once I was done I found a nightie in the back of a drawer with his ex’s other abandoned stuff. It was a little bit cute and, when I tried it on, a little bit tight; quite a lot tighter than the maxi dress I’d borrowed, so either this woman was mis-sold on one item or another, or the drawer contained the leavings of more than one ex.

“How many girlfriends has he had…?” I muttered irritably to myself as I examined my reflection. It was tight, but not uncomfortably so, short enough that the thigh and leg measurements ought not to be a problem, and made of thin enough material that it probably wouldn’t affect any of the others. The bottom of the bum pads stuck out slightly, which made me extra-grateful I’d approved knee-length dresses for the girls at the expo.

It felt extremely strange, walking out of my boss’ bedroom in just a nightie, and I could tell he had the exact same revelation as soon as he saw me because his eyes widened. I stood in the middle of the living room, facing him, and said, “I’m ready.”

He took a few seconds to get moving, so I raised my arms into what seemed like a handy ‘measure me’ position. T-pose to assert dominance.

“You’ll tell me if I make you uncomfortable at any point, yeah?” he said.

I laughed. “If that’s the criterion, back away now,” I said. “But yeah, if I need a break, I’ll say.”

He dragged a stool over from the kitchen and placed the laptop carefully on top. He took another step towards me and unrolled the cloth tape with an apologetic look on his face.

“Start from the top?” he asked, and I nodded.

He held the tape up over my head and kept unrolling it until it hit the ground. He put a toe on the end to hold it steady and pulled it taut against my head. Then his hand was on my back, smoothing the tape out. His fingers ran up my spine from my coccyx to my neck, and I fought against the impulse to shiver.

“One-seventy centimetres,” he whispered, and reached over to his computer to enter it.

“I don’t need to know every number,” I said, struggling to maintain both head voice and composure. He was so warm. I’d never been as aware of anyone’s presence as I was at that moment.

He smiled, and placed a finger on my throat. He wrapped the tape around my neck, capturing his finger inside it, and pulled it tight enough for me to notice but not tight enough to hurt me. I was grateful. My arm, length and width in two places, and my shoulder span were all uneventful measurements to get, but then he circled back in front of me.

“I need to go around your chest,” he explained. “Around your—” and he just pointed at my breasts.

I resumed my T-pose, and nodded. It’s not as if the boobs were actually attached to me, after all.

He held the end of the tape against one of my nipples — well, the fake nipple on the end of the fake breast — and, unable to help himself, pushed gently against it. His eyes widened again.

“It feels so real,” he said.

“Have a lot of experience in that area, do you?” I said, sounding slightly more annoyed than I intended.

He smiled apologetically. “Some. Do you mind if I—?”

I had no idea what he was asking, so I just nodded. He reached up with his other hand and cupped my breast in his palm, weighing it like it was a newborn baby.

“Weird,” he said.

“You think it’s weird?” I said, feeling a little faint. I could feel his hand against my chest, my real chest, and the way he was taking the weight of the breast was having an interesting effect on my actual nipple, buried somewhere under there.

“No,” he said, “I mean, it’s weird that it’s not weird.” He shook his head, and repeated, “It feels so real.”

I waved my arms slightly; they were getting tired. “Could you get the measurement so I can lower my arms?”

“Oh. Sure.”

He let my breast go and wrapped the tape around my torso, pulling it tight. As soon as he took a step backwards to record the result on his laptop I gratefully let my arms drop.

He nudged my wrist. “I still need your arms up a little,” he said. “I need to find the narrowest part of your waist.”

“It’ll be somewhere above the bum pads,” I said. “They give me hips as well.” Before the bum pads I’d been more or less a straight line up and down, like a pencil that was good with people but didn’t get a lot of third dates. He crouched down, which brought his head roughly level with my navel, and wrapped the cloth tape around my waist. He frowned, pinched the fabric of the nightie so it was as tight as it could get, and then pulled on the tape again.

I stood there for what seemed like an hour while he fussed with the tape, apparently having difficulty locating the exact narrowest part of my body. He had a palm flat on my belly, which was extremely distracting and probably had something to do with me losing track of time. When he was finally done I swayed a little, overcompensating for not having his steadying hand on my stomach any more.

“Sorry,” he said. “Should have warned you.”

I smiled, and felt my blush, which had been getting to know parts of my face it’d never visited before, deepen. “Not your fault,” I replied in a near-whisper. “I kind of zoned out.”

When he turned to record whatever number he’d finally come up with on his computer, I put a hand over the warm spot on my belly, but dropped it when he turned around again. I didn’t think he noticed.

Waist-to-neck and waist-to-floor were straightforward and didn’t induce any confusing sensations. I was grateful for the breather.

“You doing okay?” James asked, standing in front of me and stretching a leg. Clearly, crouching down in front of me had been tiring for him, too.

“I think so,” I said. I was getting that dry feeling you sometimes get when you’ve had a lot of wine — and assorted spirits — and the alcohol starts leaving your body. I wanted nothing more than to drink a pint of water and fall asleep in a dark, warm hole somewhere. That we still weren’t done with measuring and then I still had to scrape off all this feminine stuff, shower, and get an Uber home to my personal dark, warm hole before I could sleep was almost depressing.

“You sure?” He looked concerned, and reached out to me, grasping my upper arm in a gentle hand. I closed my other hand over his and smiled.

“I’m sure. Just tired.”

He grinned, and squeezed my arm. “Me too,” he said. “I feel like if I blink for too long right now I might not ever open my eyes again. Long day, huh?”

“Long day,” I agreed. “Now stop stalling and measure around my butt!”

I’d tried to inject some levity, but the truth is that when he crouched down in front of me again it was like someone hit me with defib paddles. He put his hand on my hip, which I could feel even through the pads, and wound the tape around first my hips and then around my bottom.

I think the last time another man touched my bottom was probably when I was born.

“Last two,” he said. Still crouching, he lifted the hem of the nightie just a little and wound the tape around my thigh. When his fingers met under my nightgown, I could feel both his hands together between my thighs. I felt my cock tighten. Trapped as it was inside those horrible knickers, it was an only slightly unpleasant mixture of anticipation and pain.

What exactly am I anticipating here? I asked myself as he leaned away to type the number into the computer.

He put the end of the tape under my foot.

“Step on that, please?” he said. I obliged.

Even after the thigh, I wasn’t prepared for what came next.

James ran the tape slowly up my leg, pressing it against the inside of my calf, then my knee. Slowly he inched it up my thigh, his thumb gliding over my skin all the way up to my crotch. He held the tape there with one hand, and with the other gently raised my foot so he could retrieve the other end. He pulled it taut, leaning in as he did so, his head resting on my hip, his breath warming the top of my thigh, the back of his hand pressing against my crotch.

I swear my dick stiffened. I have no idea if he felt it. I tried to freeze, but it was difficult because hot waves were cresting all over my body and the tides were dragging me down at the knees. I put out my hand to steady myself, aiming for his shoulder but finding his head, which I ended up pressing harder into my hip.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m getting a bit wobbly.”

“S’okay,” James whispered. He released me and wound up the tape, sitting back on his ankles and granting me relief from some of the novel sensations that were battering me. He still had one hand on my thigh, which he gave a reassuring squeeze before he stood up, stepped back, and took his laptop back over to the kitchen table, presumably to enter the last measurement and then email the tailor.

Overwhelmed, I collapsed onto the nearest piece of furniture available, sinking full-length into the sofa cushions. My crotch burned and the fire was still catching all over my body, so I just lay there for a minute, too exhausted, too confused, too fucking hot to pretend to myself or to James that something hadn’t just happened to me.

I didn’t know why I was responding this way. All I knew was that if, when his hand was on my crotch, he’d pulled my underwear aside and touched me more intimately, I would have let him.

James came over. He looked down at me, all six foot of him, a silhouette against the light from the lamp by the television.

“You okay?” he said.

I smiled weakly. “You ask that a lot,” I said.

He returned my smile. “I think it a lot,” he replied.

“I’ll survive,” I said. “Too much to drink, too much time trapped in these horrible knickers, and too little sleep, I think.”

He nodded, and walked over to his bar. “Speaking of drink… want something?”

I almost said yes, but I really did need to get out of James’ apartment, go home, and avoid thinking about things until the morning. The idea didn’t appeal, but the alternatives were difficult to contemplate.

“I can’t,” I said. “I have to go shower all this crap off and go home. I need my bed.”

For a moment, just a moment, a strange look might have crossed his face, but it was likely my imagination. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d started seeing pixies in the corner of the room, I was so tired.

He nodded and poured himself something, placing the glass on the coffee table.

“Before you sit down,” I said quickly, “can you help me up? I really need to get on with things.”

“Sure,” he said, and reached out an arm. I grasped it, pulled against it, and together we manoeuvred me into a standing position. I almost fell against him, but he caught me, and for a second we stood together, my arm in his, his other arm around my waist, steadying me.

“Thanks,” I said, gently pushing him away. Again with the flash of an expression I couldn’t read. I felt guilty, and stepped back into him, encircling him with my other arm and giving him a hug. “Really,” I said, “thank you. For doing the measurements. I nearly broke my brain against the bath trying to do them myself.”

He hesitated, and hugged me back. I really, really hoped he hadn’t felt my cock move when he was measuring me, just as I really, really hoped it hadn’t moved at all and it had just been my tired brain playing tricks on me. It can’t have been a particularly pleasant experience for him, being so close to me, dressed as I was, responding as I had been. If he’d even noticed.

I prayed that he hadn’t.

I gave him a grateful squeeze, and then stepped away. “Shower,” I said, pointing my thumb at the bathroom door. He nodded, sat down, and retrieved his drink.

I crossed the room and shut the bathroom door behind me, leaning against it and closing my eyes. I imagined him knocking back glass after glass, trying to forget what I’d just made him do. He’d been so kind about it, as well!

It would be just like him to suffer all that discomfort in silence and then get horribly drunk about it afterwards. I’d have to make sure to call him in the morning, make sure he got into work okay.

I hitched up the nightie, pulled down the knickers, and sat heavily on the toilet. I started looking around the bathroom while I put a thumb up to where the wig met my head, and thus I discovered that Ben had glued the damn thing on at the exact same time I realised the clothes I’d gone to work in that day were nowhere to be seen.

~

Ten minutes later and I was no closer to coming up with a way of getting home I was happy with. I wasn’t convinced I could get the wig off without damaging it or myself, even if I did find a solvent or whatever in Ben’s horrible luggage, so whether I stuck with the dress or borrowed something of James’ I’d be catching an Uber still looking, fundamentally, like I had all afternoon. The thought of being alone in a car with a man, without someone else there who I could pretend was my boyfriend, was not an appealing one.

I dropped the nightgown back over my head and unlocked the bathroom door. I’d have to ask James if I could sleep on his sofa.

When I got back to the living room area, however, James was sound asleep, horizontal on the sofa, exactly as I had been. His glass was mostly empty, but at some point he’d fetched whatever bottle he was working on. It sat, unstoppered, on the coffee table.

I walked over to the sofa and crouched down next to him.

“Hey,” I said quietly. “James?” No response. “I can’t get the wig off, and I can’t go home alone like this. I need to stay the night.” Still no response. Damn.

I couldn’t leave him that way, but there was no way in hell I was going to try to undress him and drag him to bed. I sighed, stood back up, went to his bedroom, and searched around for something approximating a linen closet. Eventually I found where he kept the spare blankets and carried one out to where he was still asleep, snoring lightly. I draped it over him, feet to chest, and folded his free arm over it to keep it in place.

Touching him seemed to wake him, if only a little. His eyes half-opened and he gazed at me, smiling broadly.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I whispered, returning his smile. “I need to stay the night. Is that okay?”

His smile broadened. “O’course,” he said, slurring a little. “Stay as long as you need.”

His eyes closed again. I patted him on the shoulder, and was about to stand up when his hand suddenly grasped mine. Before I could react he’d leaned forward and kissed me wetly on the mouth, his half-open eyes looking directly into mine. Then, just as quickly, he let me go and fell back onto the sofa, eyes closing.

“G’night, beautiful,” he muttered.

I wondered who he thought I was in that moment. Perhaps one of the ex-girlfriends whose clothes I’d been appropriating all evening?

I busied myself tidying up a little, stoppering his bottle and replacing it on the bar, checking his emails to make sure he’d sent the measurements to the tailor and closing down his laptop, turning off the lights and making sure the front door was locked.

I staggered into his bedroom, fatigue biting at every limb, and fell onto his bed. I didn’t even try to remove the bra or the padding, I just pawed at the covers until I’d pulled them over me, and before I could think another coherent thought I’d drifted off, my head deep in James’ pillow, surrounded by his smell.