Constant: Book 5, Chapter 5 (Draft)

Here you go, the first draft of Book 5, Chapter 5. This is very much a draft in progress - I expect it to expand by a couple thousand more words before its done, and individual bits are still sort of floating around without having quite settled in their properl place. Finding the right organic flow to the dialogue, interspersed with relevant flashbacks, is proving challenging - a fun challenge, but difficult to get right. Also, the 'voice' of the chapter is a bit weird - this is end of book 4 David reflecting on events happening at the start of book 4, and those are two very different Davids. I haven't quite got that voice right yet, though it's nearly there, I hope.

In any case, enjoy! The full final daft should be available next week.

Five: The Subject at Its Heart

Back in the changing room, Dmytro removed the cuffs. He helped with the gag, passing me a cloth to catch the final mouthful of spit. I wiped my mouth, rolled the tension out of my shoulders. “Thanks.”

            “I believe this went well,” he said.

            Settling in at one of the mirrors, I started wiping my face clean. Makeup first, because I didn’t mind the clothes. Or rather, I didn’t mind them with Dmytro around. In that long, dark room, I felt vulnerable and exposed. Especially in those crippling shoes—although sitting now, I didn’t mind them so much, so long as I kept my knees together and legs tilted to one side. But Darius’s eye left me feeling—dirty, somehow, and I looked forward to a scalding hot shower tonight. But around this old friend I hadn’t seen in twenty years, it was fine, as though the distance of time melted away and it was just the two of us, messing about in Shangri-La as we once did, long ago, casually shooting the shit over a couple beers.

            The first of the cotton pads came away stained bronze with makeup, and Dmytro watched in intense silence.

            “So.” I pointed my chin towards where the drinks were kept. “How about another one of those beers?”
            He nodded, returned with two open bottles held by the neck between thick fingers. I took the bottle, smiled gratefully, drank half of it in one go. A stool groaned beneath his weight. Dmytro watched as I resumed removing my makeup. Another cotton disk heavy with cleanser and makeup joined the pile, and another. Another swig, and with a start he took his first. We clinked bottles, set them down next to each other. A faint halo of lipstick ringed the top of my bottle.

            “Luke?” he said. Shyly, I thought.

            I paused, cotton wipe flat against my cheek, and caught his eyes in the mirror. There was an eager attentiveness to his gaze. I stopped, faced him so our knees nearly touched. “Not Luke, Dim. Not anymore. He died, a long time ago.”

            He considered this for a moment, and nodded, slowly as though gradually accepting this truth. “David?”

            “Maybe?” The earlier realization now sat uneasily. Confronted with the instance of my death multiplied across a dozen screens, it had been easy to accept the obvious. But now it felt cavalier to dismiss the past twenty years. David wasn’t done yet; he had work to do. Yet I still needed Cindy, perhaps more than ever. Truth was, I needed both, needed to be both David and Cindy, if I were to complete my work for Darius. “Or you can call me Cindy. Your call.” I shrugged. “In a way, neither’s real.”

            “If neither’s real, then who are you?”

            “Fucked if I know, Dim. Fucked if I know.”

            He pondered that as I finished cleaning my face. “You do not look like a David,” he said, and frowned. “Cindy, then.” His frown intensified. “Yet you do not sound like a Cindy.”
            “Tell me about it.” I reached down, unbuckled the shoes and kicked them aside. I groaned with relief, curled my toes, stretched out my calves, rolled the ankles and felt newfound appreciation for a stripper’s agility. I never wanted to wear another pair of shoes like that again. “Fuck.” Then I turned my back to Dmytro, jerking a thumb to indicate the corset. “You mind?”

            He untucked the laces, untied, loosened them and I sighed with relief. It’s not like it was all that bad, nothing like the one I’d worn back at the Clinic. There was almost something reassuring in the corset’s steady grip. But—yeah; it still felt good when my friend peeled it away and carefully placed it to one side. I took a deep breath and gingerly poked at the bruises beneath. The skin remained tender, but the pain had faded.

            Standing, I shimmied out of the tiny skirt and felt around the crotch for the electrostatic strip sealing the bodysuit. I thumbed the catch, and a faint tingle ran through the mesh fabric, and the whole thing loosened. He watched me struggle out of that delicate second skin, tits popping free, until I stood naked but for the skimpiest pair of lace panties.

            “Which name do you prefer?”

            I shrugged, passing him the bundle of discarded clothing. “You choose.”

            A smile tugged at the corner of his lips. “Then I choose Cindy.”

            “Yeah, I thought you might.” Padding across the room, I retrieved my original clothes, jeans, hoodie and sneakers from a shelf. But when I turned back, I saw Dmytro staring intently at the garments in his hands. He licked his lips. A little spot of pink colored his cheeks. It was fascinating to watch. Then, he looked up and saw me watching him, and the blush spread. He quickly put the bundled skirt and bodysuit aside and couldn’t meet my eyes.

            “Dim?”

            Staring at his feet, he forced the words out. “What does it—” Then he took a deep breath and tried again. “How does it feel?”

            I returned to the seat opposite him, reached out and took his hand in both of mine. His palm was rough, calloused knuckles and gnawed fingernails. My skin was smooth, slender digits, their shaped tips painted a vivid color. Size, too; my dainty hands were dwarfed by his.

            “You’re not asking me about the corset, the clothes, are you?”

            He shook his head.

            “You want to know what it feels like, to be a girl?”

            He hesitated, then nodded. There was a terrible, wistful eagerness in his eyes, and fear, too.

            “Are you,” I began but I wasn’t sure how to phrase the question, because it was ridiculous. This was—Dmytro, this mountain of a man, two meters of muscle and stoic reliability. But the way he watched me change earlier, the way he watched me now—the hope and vulnerability clearly etched in his face—it seemed obvious. And yet impossible. “Dmytro, do you want to be—”

            “More than anything.”

            “Tell me,” I said.

            And he did, though not all in one go. His voice tremored at first but grew in confidence with the telling. Dmytro told his story across multiple visits. I became a regular visitor to The Pit and the Empyrean beneath, and to Darius’s Xanadu that sat at its center. And with each visit, Dmytro told me more of his life and the events that led from fostering with Sakura to working for Darius. And these meetings over the next few months, increasingly they became a great comfort to me as the rest of my life grew increasingly intense. In exchange for his story, I told him mine; with each return, I gifted him the latest of my experiences as Cindy. After my first blowjob, with Jonan, Dmytro was there. The confusion and anxiety of a night with the girls? He listened. And when Julia took her ultimate revenge against me? Dmytro was there for me.

            I owed Dmytro a debt I could never repay.

            His story came to me in fragments. Each visit was another piece of a puzzle from which I gradually assembled the outline of the man—and it took me entirely too long to realized that even if the outline conformed to the shape of a man, the subject at its heart was indeed a woman.

            “I have imagined myself as a woman,” Dmytro told me that first night, “for as long as I can remember though perhaps, I did not accept this about myself when I was young, when Luke was my friend. There was shame. Envy. And fear of being caught. Vestige. You spoke of it earlier, our Shangri-La. I went often, you know. On my own. And looked at the clothes, at the women’s clothes, the underwear, the shoes. I did not know what I was looking for. Yet I went, and I stood. I found the color, the different styles, fascinating—but equally, soothing, perhaps—and I told myself many times that I desired solitude, but what I truly desired was to look at the clothes.

            “And one day—or night, to think of it. I remember it clearly. There was a black sheath dress. Sequins in the pattern of a starburst. In looking at it, I realized that I no longer saw the dress as an object that existed simply outside myself.” Dmytro paused, and sighed. “I apologize. This is difficult to… vocalize, or to explain coherently. But try to understand that suddenly and for the first time, instead of a meter of fabric on a hanger I could—imagine—wearing this dress. With high heels, and pantyhose. I could—feel—the fabric against my skin, the constraint around my chest and legs. A ridiculous idea. I felt sick with the realization of it. And stupid as well, for it was a dress designed for a small and slender woman and could not possibly fit me. Yet still, I took that dress and held it in front. I stepped in front of the mirror. And I shook, with shame and fear and with the desire to wear it.

            “I turned away in disgust, that night and swore to never return. But I did, of course, return, though I never dared to move beyond… imagining. Dreaming, I suppose. Fantasizing. Until one day—”

            Dmytro stopped, then and this was the story Dmytro told me that first night, following the first encounter with Darius. I sat here wearing nothing but a pair of lacy panties, arms crossed beneath my chest, uncomfortably cool but unwilling to interrupt. Dmytro released a sigh that bordered on a groan and fell silent, and it struck me powerful, then, how my nakedness had so little effect on my friend. I saw myself in the mirror and my reflection excited me. But when those deep, brown eyes flicked my way, Dmytro’s face flamed red not with excitement but with embarrassment. “You do not think this shameful?”

            I laughed. Seeing the offense taken, I quickly added, “Dim, honestly, I don’t give a fuck what you wear, or what you wanted to wear.” With a shrug, I took a swig of my beer, grimaced. “Or to put it another way, less than a month ago? I was on a date—with a guy—this dickhead from work called Dan. I wore this real tight number, a little black dress, under-rigging like you wouldn’t believe, garters, stockings, the whole shebang, and my makeup, fuck, dramatic to put it mildly.”

            Dmytro leaned a little closer. “And you weren’t… ashamed?”

            Again, I laughed. “God, like you wouldn’t believe.” Then, seeing the look on my friend’s face, I quickly added, “but that had everything to do with the company. Truth to told,” and I also leaned closer, conspiratorially, “I felt pretty damn sexy all night. Hell, earlier that night, with this girl I’m seeing, Julia? Good times, we had fun, like real girly shit, that way girls do before a night out, you know?”

            And it’s true, even if Julia fucking ruined it by forcing me on that date with Dan, a date that ended with me on my knees between his legs, my first failed blowjob. But before, as she strapped me into lingerie, did my makeup, and we worked through a bottle, put on music and danced in her condo, and then stood side by side in the mirror and I saw—felt—the heat of her gaze on me, the naked desire…. it was a miracle my tucking held. I could’ve fucked her right then and there. Instead, she ruined my lipstick with a kiss so deep, she might’ve been trying to take my tonsils hostage, and then she sent me on my way. As humiliating as what followed later that evening might’ve been, it hadn’t been all bad, performing Cindy on a sexy date night out. I hadn’t realized it then, but that night with Julia was important to me. Even in the face of what came later, or perhaps because of it; a glimpse of what could have been. And now, knowing where that night would lead, I don’t know that I’d have skipped it if it meant losing that experience with her. The pleasure of the one was predicated on the pain that followed, and the memory couldn’t be extricated from either moment.

            Meanwhile, Dmytro winced. “I do not know.”

            “I guess not.” I took advantage of the pause in his story to tug on my jeans, slip back into my sports bra. “So, what happened? You said, ‘and one day…’?”

            Dmytro smiled, a great big and open grin. “Another time, friend.”

            I laced up my shoes, pulled on the hoodie. The girl in the mirror made a stark contrast to the one who’d been here minutes before. I was still getting used to the different modes available to me: demure, bold, subdued, girl-next-door or sexy secretary, and more, so much more. Each one a different Cindy, an embodiment of fantasies—many of them my own—brought to life through a selection of underwear, skillful makeup, the right clothes, a shift in attitude. It’s true that I missed my chunky watch and heavy shoes. But I couldn’t deny there was something… fun, in the ridiculous array of choices available to Cindy, and the transgressive thrill felt in embodying some of them.

            Facing the mirror once again, I started to redo my makeup, thinking just a touch of dark lipstick and flick of mascara for the trip home. With my hair back tucked back beneath the baseball cap, you wouldn’t recognize me for the girl who’d fifteen minutes ago had her jiggling titties on display, hobbled by shoes, bound, gagged.

            Dmytro watched, frowned, went to take a drink and thought better of it. “How long?”

            I paused, pencil at my eyebrow.

            “Have you been—like this?”

            “Six months.” I counted in my head. “Nearly seven. It all started back in December, but I didn’t put on my first bra until February, and a month after that I woke up with these puppies.” I poked my boob with the pencil. “Down here, on the other hand,” and I waved the pencil’s tip at my crotch, “that’s new, that’s only been a couple of weeks.”

            “And yet… Cindy?” Dmytro spoke the name as though trying it out, nodded with satisfaction. “Yes, Cindy. Only six months? Surely you started earlier, no?”
            I laughed, turned back to the mirror, lightly drew in my brow. “Fuck no, Dim.

            “You never desired this?”
            “No.”

            My friend looked at me impassively. “You present very convincingly.”

            “I presented kicking your ass convincingly enough earlier,” I said.

            Dmytro acceded the point with a little nod, a little smile. “Yet this you do with equal skill, this performance of femininity.”

            “Well, the constant threat of death has been a compelling teacher.”

            A lengthy pause, and then a repeat of the previous question: “How does it feel?”

            My first instinct was something glib and facetious, a joke to cover up my own discomfort. But the look in Dmytro’s face made clear an expectation of something more—a desperate reaching for meaning in my lived experience to explain something in their own.

            And so, I quashed the next thing that came to mind: it fucking sucks, I nearly said, but didn’t, because even then I knew it wasn’t true, or at least not entirely so. In fact, each visit the question would return, and each time I had a different response. I fucking hate it, after my first blow job. Goddamn fucking amazing, after the first time Julia fucked an orgasm out of me. Fun, after a day out with the girls, and intimate. Frustrating as fuck, after another day of being ignored at work. Uncomfortable, as Julia tightened her grip on Cindy’s image, the clothes she wore. Sexy. Objectified. Unexpectedly happy. Compelling and erotic. Deeply humiliating. Warmly comforting.

            Confusing as hell.

            In acknowledging my own mixed feelings, I saw in Dmytro that desperate yearning to make sense of their own confusion and conflicted sense of self. It’s with no little shame that I admit it took me too long and far too many visits to finally see my old friend as they wished to be seen.

            “I don’t know,” I told her.

            Dmytro looked disappointed, and I rested my hand on her arm. “I mean it, Dim. Half the time—more than half, to be honest, I don’t feel anything, really, I’m too busy just… being me. Unless something pulls me out of the moment.”

            But she needed more, and across several visits I tried to explain to her what it’s like, being a man wrapped in foreign flesh, experiencing external sensations through this feminine filter that rub up awkwardly against internal expectations. On the one hand, because everything changed, nothing did: once I survived those first few weeks, my lived experiences became the new normal: long hair, softer skin, boobs—so normalized, I barely even noticed them anymore.

            Until I did. Like, if an underwire poked me in the boob, or I ran up a set of stairs and started jiggling, and suddenly remembered: shit, I’ve got boobs! Though truth be told, it rarely happened anymore, I didn’t notice the physical stuff as much as I once did. It was the external things, manifested through the daily dialogue of constant interactions with the surrounding world, that generally caught me unaware.

            For instance, out with the girls—Dmytro saw them in Darius’s fucking slideshow display back there, so knew who I was talking about—it had only been a few weeks since they’d accepted me into their inner circle. Often, they’d ask or say something that would remind me: I’m not one of them, and suddenly I felt really awkward, like I was wearing borrowed clothes that didn’t quite fit. Last night, for instance. Mel dragged me to the bathroom. No surprise. Everybody knows girls go in pairs. It’s a safety thing. I just hadn’t internalized I was one of those girls, yet and hadn’t offered to join her and suddenly felt an idiot, like a failed friend.

            And then once we were there, she dug around in her purse and swore when she couldn’t find a tampon. She asked me if I had one and why the fuck would I? Eventually, I learned to carry some around, of course. But not then, it hadn’t occurred to me, even if I had a goddamn vagina of my own. But Mel grinned, sort of pissed off, sort of what-can-you-do-about-it, cracked some comment about high school days, trapped in class with a heavy flow and desperately hoping she didn’t leave a stain on the seat—and what the fuck was I supposed to say to that? Commiserate, share the experience? I had nothing, and it was just another reminder that I was a trespasser in lands where I didn’t belong.

            We finished our beers.

            “Cindy,” Dmytro said, and embraced me. “It has been too long.”

            “Yeah, no shit.” I pounded her back, feeling absolutely dwarfed. “It’s been swell.”

            A device at her wrist pinged. “You are sure?” she said. “You will do these things for Darius?”

            I swallowed, unexpectedly nervous, and nodded.

            With a heavy sigh, she stood and left the room, only to return a moment later. “This is for you.” She passed me a sealed box, dark gray plastic hardcase smaller than my phone. “From Darius.”

            Taking a deep breath, I accepted the package. The touch of my finger at the lock unsealed it. It popped open, and inside, sitting securely in foam backing, was a small digital key. I went to pick it up, decided against it. “Is this it?” I asked, even though I knew it had to be.

            Dmytro nodded.

            “Shit.”

            “You can do this, Cindy,” she said. “Just like the old days.

            “Yeah, sure.” I closed and sealed the little box, slipped it into the deep pocket of my hoodie. “That’s what he said.”

            “Just like old days. A job, just up your alley.”

            Bound and gagged at that table, there really hadn’t been that much for me to do but sit there and listen. Darius’s holographic projection circled, knelt opposite me. “You were always her favorite? Dmytro, the muscle. I was the eyes. Sophya, the brains. But you—you were… nothing. A shadow; and then the knife in the dark.”

             I rolled my eyes.

            “A real knack for getting close to a target. Get close to them, earn their trust. Well, Luke,” he said. “Do this for me, prove to me your commitment. Three times is all I ask: three targets. With each, you expand my reach. With my reach extended, my influence expands. So much remains beyond my eyes. But do this for me, get close to these three individuals for me, and I will see further—far enough, to grant you your heart’s desire.” A smile, cold and thin, flickered across the projection “Whatever that may be.”

            I grunted and squirmed in my bondage, glared at the man.

            “Or you leave here and never return. My debt to you, I replay in some other fashion.” He paused, his projection settling in the chair opposite. He crossed his legs, ankle to knee, and swept illusionary dust from his shoulder. “So what do you say, Luke? Will you help me?”

            I nodded.

            “A boy,” Darius said, holographic eyes glittering. “An easy target I should think, for Cindy.” Screens across the room flickered, flipped and cast the image of a young man. He appeared to be barely into his twenties, skinny, lanky hair, the kind of kid who spent far too many hours bathed in the pale glow of computer screens.

            “You can find him at a club called Tartarus,” he said. “He is often there on Friday and Saturday evenings.”

            I studied the image, casting it to memory,

            “His name is Jonas.”