We were back in the restaurant, but we were alone, our dark little booth at the centre of a pool of light that encompassed the entire universe in a few square metres. I was wearing the dark blue maxi dress again — I didn’t remember putting it back on — and James was wearing a suit I’d seen him wear a few times when he had to impress important people: charcoal jacket and trousers, a shirt that was nearly-but-not-quite white, and a maroon tie that complemented his deep brown eyes.

There was no food on the table, just some wine, and he already had his glass raised. He was looking at me, smiling, and I felt myself smile back, felt it in the warmth of my cheeks and the softness of my belly. He reached across the table with his spare hand and I gratefully took it in mine, encircling his wrist with my fingers.

“Are you having a good night?” he asked me.

I didn’t answer right away. Maintaining our eye contact I drained my glass. I felt the alcohol spread through my body, suffusing my limbs, and I stretched out under the table. My ankle grazed his, like it had in the car, and I lazily kicked off my heel, wanting to feel my skin against his. I gently touched my toes against his leg, under the material of his trousers, and slowly let my foot run the length of his shin, enjoying the sensation of his leg hair tickling my toes.

“I am,” I said.

My empty wine glass was gone, but it was okay because his was, too. I leaned forward on the table, close enough that he could reach out and touch my face if he wanted to. He made me wait a few seconds — he was grinning, teasing me; I wanted to reach forward and grab him, to make him touch me — before his hand finally caressed my cheek.

And then James’ fingers were in my hair, my real hair, not that awful wig, and he ran them through the length of it, from the top of my head down past my shoulders. He played with the strands of hair that danced around the tops of my breasts, his fingers stroking my chest, and for a moment I closed my eyes, releasing the hand I held in mine in an instant of complete contentment.

I felt a tension at my neck, and I realised he’d cupped my head in his hand and was guiding me forward, towards him. I let myself be led. He leaned forward, and the last thing he said before he kissed me was, “Hello, beautiful.”

I kissed him back.

His hand lowered from my neck to the small of my back, drawing me closer, and I arched my back to meet him, standing on tip-toes, so we could keep kissing as we stood. He leaned down and the disparity between our heights was so great that he nearly dipped me. Had he always been so much taller than me? The table and the restaurant were gone, might never have existed; it was just us in the pool of light, kissing, holding each other, falling as if in slow-motion into his bed.

As we fell I peeled his jacket from his shoulders, undid his tie, and started to unbutton his shirt. He waited until I was done and then lifted my dress over my head and discarded it. He shrugged off his shirt, I opened his belt, he unclasped my bra and let it fall away. He was underneath me now, haloed in silk sheets, kicking away his trousers and gently sliding my underwear down my legs. As he looked up at me his hand returned to the small of my back and he pulled me down with him.

We kissed again, a starfish of limbs, and he briefly caressed my face before his other hand traced its path from my back, across my buttocks, around my hip, and into my crotch. I bit his lip as his fingers entered me and I woke.

~

The first thing I was aware of, before I even opened my eyes, was James’ smell. The whole bed smelled like him — I wondered sourly how often he changed his sheets — and while it was far from unpleasant, it was a little overwhelming. Still, I was warm and comfortable, lying on my side, curled up under the covers, my right arm tucked under a voluminous pillow.

I could stay here a while, I decided. I felt dried out, almost dessicated, with that faint afterglow of pain that means you got lucky and burned off most of your hangover while you were still asleep. I’d have to get up and deal with that sooner or later, and have a piss especially, but there was no immediate need to move.

My left wrist twitched, and felt a little sore. I recalibrated my senses a little and stretched the fingers of my left hand. They wetly tickled the insides of my thighs.

It took a few more seconds for me to finish fully spooling up to something approaching full consciousness.

Slowly, carefully, trying not to wipe it against the sheets, I extricated my left hand from between my legs and inspected it. It was definitely damp, but it didn’t smell like I’d wet myself; in fact, it smelled like…

I don’t think I’ve ever got out of bed faster in my life. I flung the covers away, heard them take out something electronic-sounding on the other bedside table, but didn’t see what it was because I couldn’t take my eyes off my wet fingers. Standing naked — except not; I was still wearing that nightie, those horrible knickers, the stupid bum pads, that slightly too-tight bra and that awful wig — I reached down slowly with my clean right hand and felt my crotch.

Inside my underwear, my cock was still pinned tight against me. It felt like it had tried to get hard but couldn’t, but that hadn’t apparently stopped it from ejaculating and (probably) ruining Ben’s awful fucking knickers.

At least there was a bright side.

I sat down heavily on the bed, regarding myself in the mirror: the hair; the tits; the nightgown. What had felt kind of glamorous at times last night, once I’d (mostly) got over my fear of discovery, just looked stupid in the cold light of the morning. What was I doing?

I groaned as I realised I was committed to another four days of this shit.

Which made me think about the Consumer Electronics Expo. Which made me think about the dresses they’d probably already started work on, and which I’d have to wear. Which made me think about the measurements I’m made James take, working over my as-far-as-I-was-concerned nearly naked body from a distance of inches.

Which made me think about the dream.

What the fuck was I doing?

~

Ben, you horrible man, why the fuck didn’t you tell me you glued the wig on? I didn’t know how to get it off without breaking it so I’m still wearing the damn thing and I have to go to work!!!

I threw my phone down on James’ bed and glared at it. I wasn’t normally a three-exclamation-point guy, but it’d been that kind of morning. My vague hope that it had been loosened by a night’s sleep, spent tossing and turning, writhing and — don’t think about it! — doing other things, had been in vain; the wig was still firmly attached to my forehead. If we didn’t need it for the trade show I would already have hacked off the stupid lacy front bit with James’ toenail clippers (which were on his bedside table, for some reason).

I couldn’t stop thinking about the dream. Rather, I couldn’t stop not thinking about the dream. It had to be because it’d been a long time since my last girlfriend, because I’d spent the last year in close quarters with mostly only James, because spending half a day dressed as a woman had messed with my head. The way he’d leaned up from his sofa and kissed me, before I went to bed, had to have planted something in my subconscious that then played out in my dreams.

It had been a nice way to wake up, for sure, but only because it was nice to feel desirable after such a long time single. Even if his kiss and his compliment had been fake — in his half-awake state last night, James had clearly thought I was one of his many exes, or perhaps some girl he had a crush on — they had obviously been real enough for my lonely brain to latch onto and percolate on overnight.

James didn’t want me, and I didn’t want him. I just wanted to be wanted.

My phone buzzed. Ben had replied to my text.

It’s water-based glue, idiot! Soap and water is all you need. Just get your fingers or a paper towel all soapy and rub gently under the lace under the fringe until it comes off. Didn’t you find the instructions in the case?

Me: Oh. I didn’t see them.

Ben: I only used a little bit of glue. A hot shower with the shower cap on should have done it if it wasn’t ready to just pull off at the end of the night. Didn’t you find the shower cap I left in the bathroom?

I sighed at my own stupidity, and replied, Didn’t see that, either.

Ben: OH COME ON

Me: It’s my first time crossdressing! I can’t be expected to know this stuff!

Ben: It’s 2019. And you work in tech. You didn’t think to Google it?

Me: No. I was really tired and still kind of drunk when we got back in.

Ben: …YOU WENT OUT TOGETHER??????

I needed to develop better habits when it came to information other people definitely didn’t need to know.

Me: Please forget I said that.

Ben’s reply was practically instant: Never.

Me: Hey, and where the fuck are my CLOTHES?

Ben: Sorry. James asked me to take them. Immersion therapy kind of thing. I’ll bring them when I swing by the office later.

Me: What am I supposed to wear to work? I have nothing else here.

Ben: You’re telling me THAT was your best outfit? Girl, I feel REALLY bad for you now.

I was about to start work on the snarkiest and most unpleasant response I could generate without the assistance of coffee, but my phone buzzed again, and when I read Ben’s text I almost dropped it.

WAIT DO YOU MEAN YOU STAYED THE NIGHT AT HIS PLACE??????????

I resolved to find out where James’ rich family kept their inevitable nuclear bunker and go live in it for a few years until all this blew over.

~

I looked weird in the wig without the bra, the nightie and the knickers. My legs and crotch were still smooth — I wondered how long a full wax lasted, and decided to Google it later — and so was my face, because I was, as mentioned, never a champion beard-grower. Naked but for the wig, I looked like I belonged in one of those Calvin Klein ads next to all the other androgynes. For the hell of it, I posed like a model for exactly three seconds before I felt stupid and turned away from the mirror.

I threw on one of James’ robes and left the bedroom, hoping he was still asleep. He tended to take alcohol pretty hard, so going by past form I could expect to have the place more or less to myself for at least another hour. I tip-toed over to the sofa and found him still snoozing under the blanket I’d covered him in the night before, and almost smiled at how peaceful he looked, before I remembered he’d stolen my clothes and dressed me as a woman and kissed me and had therefore committed a terrible crime against my subconscious. Apparently unsatisfied with just the dream, my subconscious started spinning up again as I looked down at him.

The little fucker.

I rummaged in James’ trunk for special wig-removing soap, or some garden shears, or something, and found nothing of the sort. I also didn’t find any wig-removal instructions, so I got to add to my list of grievances. In the end I settled for a bit of dishwashing soap on a sponge and headed back to the bedroom to get the damn wig off.

It was insultingly easy to remove.

I charged out of the bedroom and into the bathroom, locked the door, and started the shower water heating up while I dealt with my full bladder. I was done before I realised I’d sat on the toilet instead of standing.

~

“Headed to the gym this morning?” the Uber driver asked, jolting me out of my early-morning daze. Even after a good night’s sleep my brain wasn’t at its best before coffee; in its current only-just-not-hungover state, and considering everything else that had happened, I was rather proud that my brain was managing to keep my body’s vital functions going and get me to the car without tripping over my own feet.

I’d stolen the only clean clothes I could find in James’ room that I could get to fit me, which had been jogging bottoms with the drawstring pulled as tight as it could go, and a hoodie. I felt dwarfed in them, and a little silly. His trainers didn’t fit very well, either, but at least I could wear three pairs of (stolen) socks and do the laces up extra tight.

It occurred to me, rather too late to be able to do anything about it, that I might have ended up with the driver from last night given the way my luck was going lately, but a quick check confirmed that this was definitely not the same car and definitely not the same driver; he’d have to have switched a compact hatchback for a huge saloon and also changed race, which aren’t things people tend to do overnight.

I smiled at him in relief, remembered he’d asked a question, opened my mouth to reply, and had a coughing fit. I was so dehydrated. Normally after so much alcohol I would have had a pint of water before bed and another after waking up. I suppose I had a lot on my mind.

“Oops, sorry love,” he said. “Just making conversation. If you’re in a bad way, don’t worry about it.”

My half-awake brain took a moment to register what he’d just called me, and another moment to get my reaction under control. What was going on? I tried to sneak a look at myself in the car window, suddenly afraid that I hadn’t taken the wig off after all, or that it had chased after me and latched back on like a face-hugger from Alien, but the glass was misted up. I surreptitiously reached up and felt around the back of my head, unable to dispel the notion that I might have absent-mindedly reattached the wig somehow, but there was only my usual shaggy mess of hair. I was ordinary, everyday Alex, exactly as ignorable as always, just in some hilariously-oversized gym clothes.

I probably had misheard him. That was all it was. It made no sense for him to gender me that way when I looked like this. Still, I decided, there was no sense risking it by talking and collapsing the wave function, so I smiled at him instead, trying not to look as nervy as I felt, and tapped my neck to indicate that I had a sore throat.

He nodded. “Understood,” he said. “Sorry you’re not feeling well.”

I gave this guy a five-star review as well.

~

The office was blissfully free of James-shaped distractions. I’d tersely informed him via text, from my Uber, that I was headed to the office alone. My guilty conscience got the better of me shortly after I sat down at my desk, so I sent a follow-up text advising him to drink lots of water and take the painkillers I’d left out on the side.

There was still a lot of organisational detritus to deal with before the expo the next day, and meticulously and thoroughly dealing with every little bit of it served pretty well to distract me from the fact that the expo was the next day, and I was less than twenty-four hours away from having to do the model gig for three whole days. I thirstily drained my water bottle and worked out some of my feelings on the poor, defenceless computer keyboard. It was tough, though, and it could handle it: James was a mechanical keyboard nerd and had outfitted every PC in the office with these clacky things that were built like tanks. And on the off-chance that my mood did make it all the way through my keyboard and out the other side I could just swap it out with one from another desk and it’d be six months before anyone noticed, which was long enough even for someone who felt as much like shit as I did to make an escape.

It was only when the phone rang and I answered it with the tortured wail of an early adolescent whose voice had started breaking that I remembered I was supposed to be practicing head voice. I struggled through the call, trying to maintain something close to my normal voice, and was deeply irritated when the caller signed off with, “Thanks, er, mate.”

I slammed the phone back in its cradle, closed my eyes, and went through my warmup exercises. My vowels went okay, and my humming was fine, but when I tried to transition to a real, spoken sentence, the teenage squawking returned. Frustrated, I called up the voice recorder app on my phone and recorded myself, then listened to the recordings Ben and I had made during our practice session. Then I listened to myself from just now again.

I sounded worse than I had done when I’d first started.

The phone rang again. I let it ring, glaring at it until it stopped; I’d pick up the voicemail some time when I wasn’t freaking out.

James arrived about half an hour later, when I was finally getting back something approaching the voice I’d had when Ben and I had started practicing. Without the relaxing influence of alcohol, it was difficult to retain head voice without cracking; the fantasies I’d entertained — of just re-obtaining the proper voice with a bit of practice and then talking like I used to for the rest of the day — had evaporated, and I was in even more of a bad mood when James sauntered in.

“Good morning!” he said, smiling at me, obnoxiously cheerful.

“It absolutely is not,” I said, glaring at him, and losing my voice on the last word. “Fuck!” I said, and hit the desk with the flat of my hand. I started to massage it; that had hurt.

“Alex, are you okay?” James said, walking over to me, suddenly all concerned.

I couldn’t take it any more. “No, I am fucking not okay, and would you stop fucking asking me that!” His wounded expression just made me want to attack him with a stapler. “I’m scared half to death! I’m going to have to be a fucking booth babe for three whole days, I’m going to have to wear those stupid fucking underpants Ben forced on me for three days, and I’m going to have to talk like this for three days, except right now I can’t even do that part right!” I blinked back the tears I was sure were coming. “I’m fucking useless!”

“Alex—” he started, putting a gentle hand on me. I swatted it away.

“Don’t touch me!” I yelled, without really meaning to.

He raised both hands in the air and stepped back, looking like I’d slapped him. I deflated, feeling like an arsehole, and before he could apologise I stood up and took a step back myself, to establish that even though I was about to walk back most of what I just said, we weren’t going to hug it out or anything.

“Sorry,” I said. “I had a crappy night—” a lie, “—and I am scared, and I’m having trouble getting the voice back. I’m sure you can tell.” I still sounded like a hormonal teenager. “It’s all a bit much, but it’s not your fault. I agreed to this, and there’s so much at stake. Your future; this company’s future; mine. I’m just… it’s a lot.”

“Alex,” he said (he was saying my name a lot, lately), “nothing that’s at stake is as important as you. Your health; your safety.” He took a deep breath. “We can still cancel, or go ahead with just one girl. Now that I say that, it doesn’t even sound that bad of an—”

“No,” I interrupted. “I’ll do it. We need this to work. I need this to work. No half-measures or compromises. I— I’m going to need some space. Personal space, you know?” I swallowed, and hoped what I was going to say next wasn’t too revealing. “I… can’t do the kind of thing we did last night again. I thought it was okay at the time—” I smiled, briefly, unable to help it, “—but it kind of messed with my head, after.”

A sympathetic look shuffled onto James’ face. “Nightmares?”

I looked at the floor and didn’t answer.

“Look, Alex,” he said, taking a hesitant step towards me and then realising what he was doing and stepping back again, “take my office. Go relax in there, get your voice sorted, and chill. I’ll take your desk and deal with anything that’s still left over to do.”

“Are you sure? There’s a lot—”

“I’ll be fine.” He smiled. “You didn’t always work with me, you know, and I had to get things done without you. It was horrible—” the smile turned into a teasing grin that I unwillingly returned, “—but I managed.”

Still, I couldn’t stop myself being a little concerned. The details weren’t really his thing; he was a big picture kind of guy. “You’re really sure?”

“Go!” He made shooing gestures. “Go to my office, practice, play some Solitaire or World of Warcraft or something. I’ve got this. And so have you.”

~

I finally got ‘my’ voice back. Well, ‘Girl Alex’s’ voice, I guess. I’d had very little to think about in James’ office while I was running through my vocal exercises, and futzing about on the internet (a vague memory of something Ben had said about YouTube tutorials had me watching videos on basic makeup technique and, after falling down one of those internet rabbit holes that are so dangerous when you’re bored, some videos by transgender women on voice training, which were actually pretty helpful) wasn’t all that involving. ‘Girl Alex’ had emerged in my head as a semi-separate entity, someone who I had briefly become the previous day, and someone who I would attempt to inhabit again during the expo. It made sense, if I was trying to create this alternate me, this version of me as a woman, that she would be a little pervasive. She’d dream of kissing some guy — the only confirmed-straight man she’d ever met — and respond to it in a way that was natural to her, right? All of this… this afterglow was just her spilling over into the rest of me a little.

I imagined a room in my head for Girl Alex to live when I didn’t need her, firmly shut the door, and continued with my exercises; having regained her voice, I didn’t want to lose it again. I was just pleased I’d managed it without the relaxing influence of alcohol, because Girl Alex seemed to like a drink more than Regular Alex and I really didn’t want to encourage her.

On the instruction of one of the videos, I tried singing in head voice. It wasn’t bad! My voice was getting stronger and clearer as I found the limits of my head voice and stretched them. I’d always liked to sing, and I’d never had much of an issue singing along with the women’s parts, but obviously I’d sounded like a guy when I did it. It was a little easier now, with the practice I’d been getting, to hit those higher notes with clarity, bouncing them off the top of my mouth instead of struggling to raise them out of my throat; it wasn’t that my range was expanding, particularly, but my singing voice had always gone to shit if I went much above middle C unless I flipped into falsetto. Well, not any more! Recording myself and listening back, I wasn’t going to give Adele anything to worry about, but I sounded more androgynous than I used to. If it had been someone else on the recording, you could have told me they were a woman or a man and I would have believed either.

If nothing else, I was going to come out of this a better singer.

While I was having fun singing along with a YouTuber who was performing both the male and female parts of A Whole New World from Aladdin, James happened to walk by the glass door to his office and looked in. I instinctively cringed a little, embarrassed to be caught singing, but he gave me a grin and a thumbs-up and I smiled back at him. I felt like I owed him another apology; he was doing his best to help me and I’d been acting… weird around him. He’d never been anything but kind to me, as long as we’d known each other.

He made swigging motions through the glass, and I nodded. He returned a minute or so later with a bottle of water from the vending machine in the lobby.

“I got the voice back,” I told him, in the voice.

“I heard!” he said, passing the water over. “You sound great!” I opened the bottle and downed half in one go; I was still tremendously thirsty. God, it felt good. “You know,” he added, a little hesitantly, “you look kind of—”

“I know,” I interrupted, grimacing and running a hand through my hair. Even though I’d only worn the wig for a single night, it still felt a minor novelty to have just normal-length hair. I had kind of a floppy fringe and a shaggy cut, but it still looked relatively smart when I brushed it. My hair had a natural wave, so it looked okay despite my neglect, even if it wasn’t fashionable; my last haircut had been shortly after I started at MCAC, one of those generic short-back-and-sides cuts barbers give you when you sit in the chair and shrug, and not really intended to be grown out to the extent I’d let it.

I looked in the semi-reflective surface of one of James’ computer monitors, which had gone into sleep mode; great, I looked like a teenager again. A younger teenager than usual, I mean. “This is why I don’t normally shave,” I said. “I look like I should be doing my GCSEs or something.”

“It’s not that bad,” James protested. “You don’t look like a kid, anyway, not really, you look more like…” He trailed off, so I prompted him with an expansive water bottle gesture. “You don’t look like a kid,” he repeated, sounding firm.

“Thanks,” I said, deciding to take some solace in that.

“Oh, hey,” he said, “I cancelled the extra rooms at the hotel since we have two fewer models now. And I followed up with the tailors; one of us can pick up the dresses on the way out of town in the morning. There’ll be six; three each, one per day, right?” I nodded. He listed the other tasks, major and minor, that he’d taken off my hands that morning, and I confirmed he’d done the right thing for each of them, or close enough to the right thing that I could fix it on the day. I was almost proud.

“So,” he finished, “with all that done, we can both rest up for a bit.”

“You can,” I smirked. “I’ve been resting for the last two hours. Actually,” I remembered, regaining a small sample of my earlier foul mood, “why did you tell Ben to take my clothes last night?”

He looked sheepish. “Oh, sorry,” he said, but he didn’t sound apologetic at all; more like I’d caught him out. “I just thought it’d help to, you know, stay in character.”

I fixed him with a stern glare. “That’s your first and last warning for taking my agency away,” I said.

“I promise not to do anything like that again,” he said, actually managing to seem contrite this time. I nodded, somewhat mollified. “Say,” he added, looking thoughtful, “do you want to grab some lunch together?”

I was hungry. “Sure,” I said, but then realised: “I can’t. I’ve got to keep practicing this voice; if I drop it to go to lunch I might undo some of my hard work today.”

“Well, you actually—”

I held up a finger. “Whatever you’re thinking: no,” I said. He looked like he was about to say something else, but his desk phone started ringing. Keeping my warning finger in place, I hit the speaker button with my elbow.

“McCain Applied Computing,” James said, leaning over the desk and pushing my finger aside. Then he grinned and hooked his finger around mine, holding it in place. “This is James McCain.”

“Hi!” said an unfamiliar woman on the line. “This is Emily Swan, from Hammond’s? I’m supposed to come over this afternoon to go over the promotional details, and I wanted to confirm the address.”

Fuck, we both mouthed at each other.

“Absolutely, Miss Swan,” James said, putting on his friendly phone voice. “I’ll pass you over to Alex Brewer, my assistant. She’ll be running our booth with you over the weekend.” He mouthed, I’m sorry.

I extricated my warning finger from James’ grip and raised a much ruder one. “Hi,” I said, in Girl Alex’s voice, hoping my practice had been as good as I thought it was, “this is Alex Brewer. How are you, Miss Swan?”

“I— I’m fine, I just— I’m sorry, I thought you were a man,” Emily Swan said, opening up the floor of James’ office and dumping us both into hell. James actually physically doubled over and put his head in his hands, and I wondered if he was going to try and kick himself. It didn’t matter if he failed; I decided to kick him later, for both of us.

For a moment I despaired that she’d clocked my voice, and then I realised she must have been forwarded my email conversations with her boss. “Don’t worry about it,” I said, to stall, and quickly unlocked my phone and scrolled through the emails. Thankfully, in every email I identified myself as ‘Alex Brewer’ or just ‘Alex’; the only time anyone used ‘Mr’ was when Frank Hammond had been writing back. I double-checked and, for sure, if someone forwarded you the whole conversation, you’d come away with the impression I was a man — and what an impression; what a man! — but, crucially, I never actually said it. “I’m thinking your boss told you that? Men assume that a lot in this business. If I’m never going to meet them in person it usually goes smoother just to never correct them.”

“I get it,” she said. “Can I confirm your address?” I rattled it off, and she promised to be no more than two hours.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuck,” I said, after she hung up.

“It’s okay,” James said, “it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. Just change into your stuff, and it’ll be a dry run for the weekend.”

“What stuff?” I snapped. “I didn’t bring it with me! And I didn’t instantly become a makeup expert overnight, either. And, even if I did bring it, all of Ben’s clothes are drag queen clothes!”

James hesitated for a second. “Okay,” he said again, and whipped his phone out of his pocket. He dashed off what was probably a text, and then marched over to the small safe that was on the same table as his (modest, work-appropriate) bar. “Ben was going to come over later, anyway,” he said as he fiddled with the safe, “to go through our plans for the expo.” I gave his back a piercing look which he obviously detected because he explained, “He’ll be your makeup artist and general gopher for the whole trip. I decided it’d be better to keep Sophie out of the loop.” Sophie was James’ cousin, and our original makeup artist for the expo. I guess I was glad I wouldn’t have to explain to her what I was doing in a dress; to be honest, in all the excitement, I’d forgotten she’d been involved at all.

James handed me a tiny leather wallet which contained what turned out to be the company credit card. I took it and let my eyebrows ask the question.

“Assuming Ben agrees,” James said, “which he ought to for what we’re paying him, he’ll meet you at my place, do you up, and you can both go buy something office-suitable. You’re going to need something to wear this weekend when you’re not in the booth babe getup, anyway.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d need to be Girl Alex off the clock, but James was right: even if, as I planned, I went straight from the show floor to my hotel room and locked myself in with Netflix and the minibar until the next morning it would be prudent to provide for other eventualities. I’d always thought of myself as a pretty smart guy, but the last day or so had kept coming at me with things I just hadn’t thought about.

“Okay,” I said, sighing and extricating myself from James’ wonderfully comfortable (and expensive) office chair, “I’ll get moving.” What choice did I have?

“A moment,” James said, and fumbled in his pocket. He pulled out his keys, removed one of them from the ring, and handed it to me. “You can keep it,” he insisted. “It’s spare.”

“Oh,” I said.

I was saved from having to say anything more intelligent than that by the phone. James waved me out of the office and picked it up with his other hand.

“Ben!” he said. “We have a slight Alex emergency. Can you meet her at my place? She needs to look ‘office presentable’…”

The barrage of pronouns was all the incentive I needed to escape the room.

~

The Uber driver definitely thought I was a woman, which was actually convenient because I’d forgotten to drop the voice. I didn’t know what else it meant but I decided, for the duration of this mini-crisis, to put all those worries in my pocket to think about later. Talking to him with no wig or makeup on, in jogging clothes, and being seen as a woman anyway just because of the voice was a pretty timely confidence-booster, so I gave him a five-star review.