When I got to the apartment I spent a useful minute or so praising my past self for remembering to throw the horrible stretchy underwear I’d made such a mess of in James’ washing machine before I left for work. The dry cycle hadn’t been done all that long by the time I skipped happily over to the machine and extracted the sordid little knickers, and I had a moment akin to vertigo as I realised it had been only a bit more than three hours since I’d woken up in my boss’ bed after spending the night dreaming about him.

It wasn’t even midday yet. I could remember whole weeks that had passed in a flash; suddenly my life was happening in bizarre, technicolour detail.

God, the place was a tip. I navigated the (small) mess I’d left behind that morning and the (far larger) mess James seemed to live in all the time, and made it through the bedroom without stepping on anything gross. There was crusty underwear scattered about the place like landmines. Very glamorous! I slung on the bra, bum pads and knickers, inserted the fake boobs — cold! — and put on the heels from last night, to practice. I considered putting on the wig and/or practicing makeup, but decided I’d probably end up doing irreparable harm to the wig and/or my face if I got anything wrong, so I retired to the couch to fiddle with my phone and wait for Ben.

Five minutes’ later, still waiting, and filled with a need to be doing something instead of just sitting around, I started on the washing-up. It turned out James got an awful lot of takeout meals for one, which I thought was kind of sad; and he left the evidence glued to various plates and bowls, which was disgraceful. I managed to deal with most of the more recent detritus and left everything else to soak in soapy water. I could have sworn some of this stuff was more than a week old! I found an untouched roll of trash bags on top of the microwave, unrolled one, and set about demolishing the mountain of old takeout boxes in the corner and exhuming the teabag graveyard by the sink, then marched around the rest of the apartment, looking for trash to add to my grim little collection.

In his bedroom, after scooping up a couple of empty tubes of moisturising lotion — there was an array of them on his bedside table, for some reason — I saw myself in his mirror again, and laughed: I was in heels and underwear, carrying a trash bag, scurrying around my boss’ flat like I was his bloody maid! I grinned at myself and mock-curtseyed in the bedroom mirror, like I’m sure no maid in history ever has, then dropped the bag and retrieved the bathrobe I’d borrowed earlier. If there was one thing I didn’t need, it was snarky commentary, whether from my own hindbrain or from Ben.

Where was Ben?

I took the trash bag back out into the main room and dumped it by the front door, then returned to the bedroom to fix the mess of sheets I’d left behind that morning and rescue the alarm clock I’d apparently knocked onto the floor at some point. I was rounding up dirty underwear to fill the washing machine when I heard a key turn in the lock and rushed back out to the main room, almost falling over on the heels I’d almost forgotten I was wearing.

Ben looked remarkably together, considering I was pretty sure he’d been out later than we had last night, although he hadn’t shaved. I thought the stubble coming in around his carefully-trimmed beard kind of suited him.

“Alex!” he said, sounding happy to see me.

“Ben!” I replied, trying to echo the sentiment. But then I saw the luggage he manhandled through the front door — bigger than the one he’d left here! — and a percentage of my goodwill evaporated. “More torture devices?”

“Hm? Oh, this is all mostly for the weekend; I had to do a roundup since I probably won’t have another chance before tomorrow. No torture devices at all, I promise.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “But there is something James and I talked about…” he added.

“What is it?”

He looked pained. “I’m not sure if you’re going to like it,” he said. “It’s sort of good and bad. From your perspective, I mean.”

“Just tell me,” I said impatiently.

~

Hair extensions. I couldn’t believe I was doing this.

Ben had offered me the choice of extensions or of glueing that bloody wig to my head for the whole weekend. It hadn’t taken me long to make up my mind — the wig cap had been extremely uncomfortable when I’d woken up with it on this morning and I didn’t want to imagine how hot and sweaty and gross my scalp would get after several days, and extensions eliminated the possibility that my wig could come unstuck in public and expose me — but, all the same, the step into the hairdressers Ben had shuttled me to wasn’t a step I’d imagined taking even after I started my dubious new career as a dress-up doll for my boss. Hair extensions were a step beyond, ‘Just slap on this skirt and smile at people,’ which, yes, was a huge simplification of what we were planning to do with me this coming weekend, but when I needled the idea from every angle I could think of, I came up with several solid, practical reasons why it was a good idea and mere emotional reasons why it wasn’t.

I needed to talk to James about it all, though. This whole process — new hair and clothes instead of borrowed stuff — was starting to become more like a top-to-bottom makeover than anything temporary. I worried, hopefully uncharitably, that he planned on persuading me to do this all over again whenever we had something new to sell, for as long as we could get away with it, which was probably a good couple more years, given the slow pace of my masculine development. Knowing that I was almost definitely just being paranoid, I started marshalling arguments in my head as I sat in the salon chair that would keep me out of dresses in the future. It was good to be prepared; recent experience had shown me that if I just walked back into the office without a properly-rehearsed litany against crossdressing (“I will face my dress. I will not permit it to pass over me. I will throw it in the trash and run away to watch sport with people who sweat a lot.”) he’d turn those awful rich-boy puppy-dog eyes on me and I’d find it hard to say no.

The whole process was due to take about two-and-a-half hours, which information nearly had me out of the salon and down the street, if only because I’d still be in the chair when the girl from the agency arrived. James had talked me down over the phone, insisting he’d be well able to make a start on talking her through everything she needed to know, and that it was more important I be both as comfortable and as discovery-proof as I could be for the trade show; extensions, especially this sort, beat even a glued-on wig on both fronts, which lined up annoyingly well with my own conclusions. I still didn’t like the idea of James talking the girl — I’d forgotten her name, and didn’t much feel like looking it up at this point — through what she needed to know about our product and our goals for it, although I couldn’t really point to why. I imagined them both running off, marketing materials unstudied, and adding her clothes to James’ ex-girlfriend drawer at some undetermined point in the future.

They’d colour-matched my hair, after praising how thick and wavy it was — easier to hide the tips of the extensions in — and two of the salon staff, a guy called Warren with short, dark hair, delicate fingers and very pale skin, and a woman, Selina, worked me over while Ben made some phone calls. We weren’t going to have time to go shopping, so Ben was describing our needs (and my measurements, which James had given him; I had a red-hot flash in my spine, thinking of what it had taken to get them) to a personal shopper he knew. The list of clothing requirements was rather more extensive than I would have suggested, or even preferred, but at this point it was clear that I was now little more than the ball in a Rube Goldberg machine, bouncing from apartment to hair salon to personal shopper to office in attempt to get me ready as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Whatever; I could yell at people later when we were in less of a rush, and at least I didn’t have to be actively involved in this part. And I had to admit, having both hairdressers working over my hair was relaxing. I’d been alarmed when Selina told me the extensions were ‘heat-bonded’, but I hadn’t been burned yet; they were clearly as skilled in their own field as Ben and James were in the field of making my simple life incredibly complicated and embarrassing.

I took the opportunity to catch up on some sleep.

~

I didn’t dream this time, thank God. I was woken up by Selina lecturing Ben on how to style keratin extensions. I realised she was talking about me at the exact moment I remembered why I was here, and had one of the unpleasant rapid bootups that had become a feature of my life lately.

The hairdressers did amazing work. My hair, which before had tickled the middle of my ear at its longest point, now hung down almost to my nipples, and the highlights, which started in earnest somewhere around my cheeks, were a nice touch. It wasn’t styled, particularly, but I assumed they didn’t have the time, or that there was a waiting period before you could play with the new hair too much.

“Ah, she’s awake!” Warren said.

That pronoun again. It was weird that I was getting used to it. It was weirder still that I had no idea if the salon staff knew who I was — I’d come in with my usual hair, of course, but wearing a full face of makeup and the maxi dress that Ben had taken an instant visceral dislike to — but I’d decided before I fell asleep that it probably didn’t matter, because these people in particular were unlikely to care, one way or another. It was that sort of salon in that sort of neighbourhood; I was likely not even the most unusual person they’d see today. The thought was comforting: it was nice to feel both relatively ordinary and relatively unterrified.

The dress was less comforting. I looked down at it, remembering how hard it had been to put it on again, after the dream.

“What do you think?” Warren asked.

I smiled at him. “It looks fantastic,” I said, because it did. I was ambivalent about it all being on top of my head, sure, but it was undeniably good-looking work. “How do I remove them, when I’m I’m done with them?”

He looked disappointed. “You want to get rid of them already?”

“They’re only for the weekend,” I said. “A modelling job.”

“Just massage the keratin bonds with olive oil,” Selina said, “and wait twenty minutes. You should be able to just pull them out.”

“Seems like a waste,” Warren said.

“Yes, yes, it’s a tragedy,” Ben said, breaking up our little gathering. “Alex, we have to go!”

I stood up, remembering to pick up the horrible little handbag. “Thank you so much, both of you,” I said. “Ben, did we pay already?”

“Yes, we’ve done terrible violence to the company credit card, let’s go!”

I let Ben bustle me out of the salon. When we got out onto the street the wind picked up my hair and blew it out around my head like I was in a shampoo commercial. I watched it for a moment in the salon window, fascinated. Perhaps it would be waste to get rid of it straight after the expo; they’d gone to such lengths.

~

In the Uber back to James’ I noticed that some sneaky bastard had put acrylic nails on me while I napped in the salon (I had a vague memory of briefly waking up to someone buffing at my fingers, but had dismissed it as a hairdressing-induced fever dream). They weren’t huge talons or anything, just rounded little things perhaps a quarter-centimetre longer than my real nails and painted a colour that looked translucent but wasn’t, and I suppose they did cover up my slightly ragged real ones — the perils of a nervous biting habit. The driver told me I looked nice, though, and she was so friendly that I almost forgot about the nails while we chatted. I gave her a five-star review, which was tricky because I had to use my phone screen with the flat of my finger instead of the tip.

~

Ben tried to hide the logo on the carrier bags that had been left in the hall outside James’ apartment door, but he wasn’t a particularly wide person and I have the advanced pattern-recognition skills of the professional coder and problem solver: it wasn’t hard to infer the missing letters between HAR and OLS.

“Your personal shopper friend works at Harvey Nichols?” I yelled, doing that high-pitched screech again. I’d be attracting dogs soon; I decided to set them on Ben if and when they arrived. “Do you know how expensive they are?”

“Of course I know,” he said, dropping the carrier bags by the sofa and starting to extract clothes from them. There were more than I expected. “I’m surprised you know.”

I didn’t know, personally, not precisely, but Harvey Nicks was up there with Harrod’s in the don’t-even-think-about-it category for me, a Primark guy who stepped up as far as Next if I needed to get really posh. Money aside, I’d never particularly seen the point of buying nice clothes, anyway.

“Look,” Ben continued, turning to glare at me with his hands on his hips, “we really don’t have much time, so if you’re going to freak out, can you please do so while doing something useful?”

“Define useful,” I said, feeling stubborn.

Ben reached into one of his cases and pulled out a small plastic bottle with a pump attached and threw it at me; it turned out to be adhesive. “Heads up!” he said, and I looked up to find another bottle flying toward me at head height. I caught it awkwardly: it was isopropyl alcohol. I shrugged at him, glue in one hand, alcohol in the other, and he sighed at me.

“Take your tits out,” he said, belabouring every word, like he was talking a child through their fiftieth failed attempt at tying their shoelaces, “clean your chest and the back of the tits with the alcohol, then spray glue on the tits and reattach them when the glue is dry.”

“This is tit glue,” I said, keeping my voice neutral. Of course it was. “Is it permanent?”

“What?” he said as he returned to sorting through the clothes. “You think I carry industrial-strength superglue in my drag kit? I just thought it would be nice if, say, you had to bend down to pick something up and one of your tits didn’t fall out of your bra.”

I had visions of chasing an errant breast out of the apartment like it was a cat who’d stolen my dinner, and laughed. Some of the tension left the room, and I took off my dress and bra and set to work following his instructions.

“Just reassure me I’m not a perv for doing this,” I said a short while later, holding a tit to my chest and waiting for the glue to set.

He pointed at his own chest. “I’ve done it,” he said, pretending to be offended. “Am I a perv?” At least, I think he was pretending.

“No, not at all,” I said hurriedly, waving the hand that didn’t have a tit in it. “But you’re, you know, gay.”

“And you’re n—” he started, but interrupted himself and changed tack. “Drag queens do this, trans women who haven’t got their pills yet do this, B-list Hollywood stars making a play for Best Supporting Actor do this; even cis women sometimes do this if they’ve had a mastectomy.”

I frowned, and switched tit, since the first one seemed like it was pretty firmly attached. “What’s a ‘cis’ woman?”

Ben looked up at the ceiling. “And to think I’m not legally allowed to murder her,” he muttered. I deliberated over which part of the sentiment to be more offended by. “A cis woman is a woman who isn’t trans; a trans woman is a woman who isn’t cis,” he said. My face was clearly doing that stupid thing again, because he continued, “Okay, a cis person is someone who has no desire or need to switch away from their gender assigned at birth.” I opened my mouth to ask a question about that last part; he pre-empted me. “Jesus Christ. Let me make it really simple: if you are a boy—” he was using that child-lecturing tone again, “—and you are happy being a boy, or at least not miserable enough to do anything about it, you are cis. If you are a boy but inside you’re actually a girl, then you’re trans.”

I’d like to say that realisation dawned, but honestly I think I’m just an idiot. I nodded anyway and said, “Okay. I get it.”

“Thank all the heavens. Just remember: I gave you the extremely simplified version; don’t try and explain it to anyone else until you’ve had a chance to do the background reading.” He smiled at me momentarily, and then looked me up and down. “Are you not moisturising your legs?” he exclaimed, borrowing my dog-attracting screech.

“What?” I said, looking down at them, as if that would help. “Am I supposed to?”

“Oh my God,” he said. “You’re a world-class idiot. Do you want to get a rash?”

“Hey,” I protested, affronted, “I’ve only been doing this for a day. Just let me have that one.”

“Fix it,” he ordered. “No. Not with anything you find in his bedroom; it won’t smell right. There’s some in the smaller case.”

I disappeared into the bathroom, correct-smelling moisturiser in one hand, phone in the other, thinking hard. The price tag on this whole escapade kept shooting up. Paying for two decently-expensive hairdressers to put decently-expensive extensions in had been one thing, but Harvey Nichols? I nipped to the Harvey Nicks website on my phone and scrolled through some of their stuff; unless Ben’s personal shopper worked in some unadvertised bargain basement department, Ben was probably laying considerably more than a thousand pounds-worth of clothes out on the sofa out there. I scrolled some more and saw a skirt — a simple loop of black fabric — that cost over four hundred quid, and tripled my estimate of how much the clothes in those carrier bags were worth. I locked my phone in disgust. With that kind of cash to throw around, I probably could have found some agency who could sort us out with a couple of models. Why was James throwing company money around now, at me, and not before, when it came to assigning the modelling budget I had access to for the trade show?

I had too many questions for him. The moisturiser felt nice on my legs, though.

~

Personally, I’d wanted to wear the reassuringly calf-length blue skirt that Ben had arranged as part of an outfit with a sort of shimmery top that looked loose and billowy; I was fed up with wearing form-fitting clothes. Ben, obviously, disagreed.

“That’s casualwear,” he said patiently, but absurdly; casualwear was jeans and a sweatshirt, not anything that still required me to wax my legs. There actually was a pair of jeans in the mix, draped over the chair on the other side of the living room, but Ben had his hand on my back and was guiding me towards the clothes he’d laid out on the sofa.

I was surprised at how relaxed I was, being essentially naked around Ben. It helped that I knew he wasn’t interested in me, but it was the case that I’d never been comfortable naked around anyone before. I’d always carried with me a quiet sense of shame about my scrawny little body; even at home alone I didn’t ever sleep in the nude, and didn’t generally look at myself in the mirror after showering until I had a robe on. Perhaps it was because, as Girl Alex, it was like I was playing a character; it wasn’t really me who was standing around in her underwear.

Ben had switched out the bum pads for a new contraption that was more like a micro-miniskirt in flesh tone. My flesh tone, anyway; it was several shades too light for either James or Ben. He promised me it’d give me the same measurements as the old pads — or close enough, anyway — while being more comfortable and essentially invisible under all but the tightest of dresses. The flat front would even give the stretchy knickers a hand when it came to hiding my junk, and I wouldn’t need to take it off to use the loo, just sort of lift it up my body. A definite upgrade. I almost hugged him until he pointed out I’d need to take the nasty old bum pads with me anyway, in case I wanted to wear trousers, and my charitable feelings mostly disappeared.

He’d made me wash off my makeup and had then hunted across my face for stray facial hairs we’d missed with yesterday’s goop-and-shave session. He’d plucked at me for a few minutes — first at my jaw and then around my eyebrows — and then slathered me in moisturiser and dragged me back into the living room, to the array of incredibly expensive clothes that awaited me.

He kept up the pressure on my back, steering me away from all the clothes that looked relatively bearable. “You’re not wearing casualwear to the office!”

“I feel casual,” I protested.

“You’ll feel anything but casual when you get there and find James alone with Emily-the-model,” Ben said, and I twitched a little.

“I told you,” I insisted, because he was still apparently imagining sordid things, “I stayed the night but we weren’t together. He can be alone with Emily if he wants.” I dismissed the tight feeling in the back of my throat.

“I’m sure. All the same, how will you feel if you’re slobbing around and she’s looking like a million dollars?”

“I’ll feel very comfortable,” I said. So convincing!

“Be quiet and put that on,” he said. I obliged, feeling contrite.

That turned out to be a black skirt with gold horizontal bands and a black top with an asymmetrical neckline. I liked that the top covered my arms all the way to the wrists; I didn’t like that the skirt covered only half my thighs. I had to admit they fit well, though; Ben’s posh personal shopper knew what they were doing. He directed me to a pair of black ankle boots with a two-ish-inch heel that fit better and more snugly than any shoes I’d ever owned, and while I was admiring how comfortable they were, Ben turfed all my stuff out of my handbag and into a much smaller and less battered one.

“Now, sit,” he said, pointing at one of the kitchen stools. I did so and he turned on a lamp on the kitchen table. He must have brought it with him because I didn’t remember it from last night. The damn thing shone right in my face, but before I could complain he apologised and taped a bit of greaseproof paper over the front. It softened the light, so that it was no less bright but more diffuse, and it wasn’t blinding me any more. “Your hair will do, so there’s just makeup to go,” he said, and opened his kit. “I’m going to do you up in gold, around the eyes. It’ll go with the skirt and make your eyes look bluer. Is… that okay?”

Wow. Asking for consent! What a novelty. I nodded.

“Good. It’s only a shame we didn’t have time to pierce your ears.”

“You are not piercing my ears,” I said firmly. There were some lines I wasn’t ready to cross. Increasingly few, apparently, but still.

“I’m not piercing your ears,” he promised. “Imagine if they got infected in that dirty conference hall!” He shuddered.

I relaxed. It turned out we had a limit, after all. When all this was over with, the extensions could be taken out, the clothes could be sold or donated, and the bum pads and tucking underwear could be loaded into a trebuchet and launched into the sea. We weren’t piercing my ears.

I closed my eyes and let Ben paint me.

~

We rode to the office in a taxi together. An honest-to-God taxi! The last time I rode in a taxi had been when I was twelve and my parents were getting divorced. Real taxis have kind of had bad associations for me since then, which I tried to put out of my mind so I could concentrate on all the other awful things going on.

In the back seat, knees both together (short skirt) and strangely elevated (higher heels than I was used to), I focused on controlling my breathing, thinking through how I would approach Emily Swan, preparing for my biggest challenge yet. Ben held my hand when he realised I was shaking. It was sweet. It was a shame he wasn’t going to be available for me to lean on or hide behind this afternoon; there were a few more things he needed to round up for tomorrow, he’d said. I shuddered when I imagined what terrible equipment he could acquire with a few hours at his disposal.

When I got out, I think he noticed I was just standing on the pavement, fiddling with the strap of my new handbag, pointedly not going into the building. He must have asked the taxi driver to wait, because he startled me out of my dithering with a firm hand on each of my shoulders, and looked me square in the eye.

“You can do this,” he said.

I looked back at him, unsure. “You really think? I’m—”

“Alex,” he interrupted, wielding my name, which was unusual for him, “you can do this. Remember: you’re capable, you’re beautiful, you’re charming…”

“I am?”

“Yes, yes and yes. You helped design the software you’re showing off tomorrow, you have killer legs and — I promise you — when you and James are in the room together he only has eyes for you.”

My heart twitched. I wanted to protest, to tell Ben that I didn’t care about that, that I wasn’t interested in James that way! But I had a feeling he would continue to not believe me on that front, and anyway, all dressed up as Girl Alex, it was hard to deny that she, at least, was… paying attention to him. Still, the idea that James was interested in me was a non-starter; he knew me, had done for years, and I knew him, and in all the time I’d known him he’d never shown any interest in guys. He was able to be around me, dressed like this, without freaking out, because he was more comfortable around drag queens and crossdressers and the like than the average straight guy, having roomed with a drag queen at uni, and that’s all it was. Ben was misreading a lack of discomfort for interest.

On James’ part, anyway. My feelings on the matter, it was finally becoming clear to me, were complex.

I closed my eyes and nodded, trying to focus solely on being Alex Brewer, knowledgeable coder, good organiser, and McCain Applied Computing employee of the month fourteen months running; but, like, the girl version.

I opened my eyes again and smiled at Ben. “Thanks,” I said.

“Just remember: stay in character!” he said, grinning back at me.

Before he could get back in the taxi I stepped forward and hugged him, being careful not to crumple the new clothes or smudge my makeup. “Thank you, really,” I said. “I’m sorry if sometimes I’ve been kind of a…”

“Bitch?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re welcome. Now go be amazing!” He pushed against me, trying to disengage from the hug, but he wasn’t exactly James and I wasn’t overpowered so easily. Before I let him go I nipped in and kissed him on the cheek.

It felt like something Girl Alex would do.

~

I ran into James in the lobby, fighting with the coffee vending machine. He was obviously trying to play the good host for Emily Swan — I gave my inner Girl Alex a warning look for the way she sulked about that — and he’d obviously run out of those stupid little pods for the office Tassimo. I had another hit of mild vertigo as I realised it had been less than four hours since I’d seen him at the office this morning. Time was running fast and yet treacle-slow at the same time, and I couldn’t get used to it; in some ways it was more jarring than the dresses.

He had his phone out and it looked like it was open on Twitter. Probably he was Tweeting something like, I can’t even make coffee without Alex to do it for me, I’m so terrible at life.

I’d forgotten that James, the bastard, was dressed so casually today. He was wearing dark, nondescript jeans and a grey t-shirt that I knew for a fact cost £6 because I’d been in the office when he’d come back from lunch clutching two three-packs of t-shirts from Marks and Spencer. I’d made fun of him for shopping at the supermarket for aspirational grannies. Still, he looked comfortable; I, meanwhile, was wearing a grand’s-worth of Harvey Nicks swag and had to remember to keep my knees together when I sat down.

Maybe being irritated with him was the way to deal with Girl Alex’s incipient crush? Perfect. All he had to do was keeping being fucking annoying and, lucky me, if James hadn’t been been able to make it in business he could have been an obliviously aggravating bastard on an internationally competitive level. I bet there were grants for it, and I bet you got them almost by accident, by being in the right place at the right time, just to make the whole exercise even more annoying for everyone around you.

He kicked the vending machine, and I decided to intervene before he hurt himself.

“You forgot to select cup size again, didn’t you?” I said.

James turned around, took one look at me and dropped his phone. I was grateful the lobby was carpeted around the vending machines, or I’m sure he would have guilted me about his smashed phone screen for the difficult couple of hours he’d have to put up with it for before a new one arrived from wherever rich people just effortlessly get stuff from.

He opened his mouth to say something, but seemed briefly to forget how to speak. He looked me up and down, a muscle in his jaw tensing as he did so.

“What?” I said. I didn’t think I looked weird, but I gave myself a quick once-over just to be certain: I hadn’t broken my ankle in the boots, my skirt hadn’t ridden up, my bag wasn’t spilling its contents onto the floor and neither of my tits had made a break for the horizon. I didn’t know what had him so rattled, so I decided to tease him. “Never seen a pretty woman before?”

“Al— Alex?” he said eventually.

“Yep, and still so good they named me twice,” I replied, grinning. I stepped forward, retrieved his phone and placed it in his limp hand. I actually had to close his fingers around it so it didn’t fall right back out. “I thought you said you could cope without me,” I added, “but here you are, defeated by the vending machine. Again.”

“Oh,” he said. “Um, yeah.”

Rolling my eyes, I nudged him aside with my hip and cleared the half-finished order off the vending machine. “How does she take her coffee?” I asked. I had no idea where all my sudden confidence was coming from, and why it had replaced the nerves I’d been so consumed with in the taxi, but I wanted to bottle it so I could have some whenever I liked.

“Uh,” he remarked, and then finally seemed to get himself together. “Black, no sugar.”

Same as me. I dialled up a black, no sugar, and handed him the paper cup when it was done. He took it, but continued to stare at me.

Clearly, he still wasn’t as comfortable around crossdressing as he thought he was. He was acting something like he had last night in the restaurant — it’s possible he would need a good run-up like this every time I put on a skirt, which suggested he’d be spending every morning at the expo walking into pillars and looking confused — but for some reason I was finding it funny now.

I poked him, and pointed to the compartment which had just popped open on the other side of the machine. “Lid?” I prompted.

In a daze, he retrieved and applied the plastic lid for Emily’s coffee as I sorted out a cup for me (also black, no sugar) and a cup for James (full cream, two sugars, and a sprinkle of chocolate flakes, because James is a giant baby). I made him carry both his and Emily’s, and redirected him from the stairs he automatically headed for, steering him towards the elevator in the corner.

“It’s only a couple of flights,” he complained. He was the kind of well-off fitness dork who had a gym membership, a private pool membership, and never took the elevator as a point of pride; I was the kind of skint loser whose only exercise was walking to work and back, who stayed thin largely because of forgetting to eat some days; I sort of lose track of stuff if I don’t set reminders. I think I’m so good at organising other people because first I had to learn to organise myself.

I nudged him with my boot, and laughed when he jumped a little.

“These things are at least a two-inch heel,” I said, “and in case you forgot, I’m new at heels. You want me to fall and break my neck?”

“Definitely not.”

“So, what’s she like?” I asked as we waited for the elevator.

“Who?”

“Emily Swan? The model we hired? I assume she’s up there.”

“Oh yeah,” he said, and cleared his throat a little. “She’s pretty smart, actually. I think you’ll like her.”

“Good,” I said. The elevator opened to admit us and I stepped in carefully, extremely aware that I had heels on and very much not wanting to get one stuck in the gap under the elevator doors.

“No, I mean I think you’ll like her,” James said, sounding more like his old self. Damn; he was getting his equilibrium back. “She’s your type.” He nudged me with an elbow.

“You mean, someone who’ll break up with me after three weeks for reasons she can’t explain?” I was getting irritated with him again. “Or someone who’ll cheat on me with some guy she met at a club? Or someone who’ll flirt with you in front of me and treat me like I’m not even there?” My history with women was pretty terrible. Fuck James for reminding me. And fuck James for rattling me like this. I closed my eyes, tried to think myself back into the mindset I’d had a few minutes earlier.

“Sorry,” he said. He didn’t sound sorry. “I just thought you’d like her. You know, she’s smart, pretty, down to earth… You should ask her out. You’ve got to meet someone who won’t dump you sooner or later.”

I opened my eyes to glare at him. “You think I can afford to ask a girl out when I’m like this?” I said. His face fell, like I’d caught him out, but he wouldn’t look at me. “Look at me!”

“What?” he snapped, but he looked at me anyway. His pupils dilated. I think he’d forgotten how I was dressed. I don’t know why; my voice should have been reminder enough, but as soon as we stepped into the elevator he’d snapped back into his old jerkish self, the way he usually acted when we were alone, before I started wearing dresses.

I grabbed his face with my free hand, making sure he didn’t look away. I wasn’t normally so physical, but I was so angry with him. The elevator doors opened again, and I took a sideways step, interposing my leg between the doors so the sensor wouldn’t let them close. I didn’t let go of his face. Fortunately, the office had its own front door around the corner from the elevator, so unless Emily Swan was hanging out in the corridor she wouldn’t see any of this.

“If you’re going to make fun of me, James,” I hissed, “then you’re going to get out of this elevator alone and I’m going to go home, burn all these stupid clothes, and you can wear a dress to the expo yourself!”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything. I promise.”

I let his face go. “Remember how freaked out I was this morning?” He nodded. “None of that has magically gone away. I’m staying on top of it but it’s really, really hard, so the least. You. Could. Do. Is. Help.”

“God, I will, yes,” he said, flustered, looking away.

“Right,” I said, stepping out of the elevator and walking towards the office door.

Behind me, I heard James mutter, “When did you become such a bitch?” The word felt very different in his mouth, in this context, than it had from Ben, and I wanted to turn around and kick him.

I took a deep breath instead, opened the office door, and prepared to meet Emily Swan.