Head Roulette: Prisoner's Dilemma: Nor Hell a Fury Like a Woman Scorned

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Nor Hell a Fury like a Woman Scorned

(Note to readers: This is the third story in the Prisoner's Dilemma setting. The first story, Curiosity Killed the Cat, and the second story, Separate the Men From the Boys, both contain background information which may be useful.)

Lockman University had been in turmoil since Professor Ripley had invented the biomass reorganizer four years before. The astonishing new creation hadn’t simply thrown communities of physicists and doctors and engineers around the world into chaos, nor had it merely made Lockman an irresistible Mecca for those seeking instant cosmetic alterations. It was that the student body itself, those closest in proximity to the ongoing experiments, was among the most frequent participants in Ripley’s tests.

Professor Ripley offered five hundred dollars for each participant in his psychological and bioalteration experiment. After all, the machine had to be tested. It had to be perfected. Its effects had to be rigorously investigated upon a variety of recipients. He offered a respectable and tempting sum, and all a subject had to risk was his gender.

The test was part game theory, part psychological assessment, and part gender-role study. Two subjects were put into separate and isolated booths, and each booth was equipped with a button. Each subject was given the following choice: do you, or do you not, press the button before you?

If both subjects failed to press his button, both subjects genders’ would be reversed, for a short duration: six months only. The reversal would be mild, barely noticeable, and almost androgynous. If both subjects pressed their buttons, their genders would each be reversed more strongly, and for four times as long: twenty-four months.

In the event that one subject betrayed his companion, pressing his button when his companion did not, the betrayer was rewarded with a super-enhanced physique in his own gender, to last only one quarter the shortest time: six weeks. His betrayed partner would find his gender reversed most strongly indeed, and for four times longer than the longest time: ninety-six months. Thirty-two seasons. Eight years.

Naturally, the subjects were then invited to participate in other psychological and physiological tests, to verify the progress of the alterations. These paid a much more modest sum of fifty dollars, and most considered it only an afterthought. Five hundred dollars for the opportunity to test your luck. Five hundred dollars to test your faith in whatever partner you chose for the experiment. Could you trust him? Could he trust you?

Could you find a partner willing to take the risk at all?

Many students at Lockman University could and did participate in the experiment. The perplexity and confusion resulted when dozens of young men and women went around the campus completely — temporarily — disguised as young women and men.

The next sorority sister’s housing application was gingerly removed from the manila folder and placed in the center of the table. One of the three young women looked at it. The other two watched her, to see how she would react.

“Oh, hell to the no,” said Lindsey Wallace emphatically. “No, no. Absolutely not.” For further emphasis, she smacked the table with the flat of her hand, making their wine glasses jump.

Andrea Newton and Roberta Graves exchanged a look of sympathetic bemusement, and returned to their contemplation of Lindsey. She was the elder sorority sister by one year, a junior at Lockman, and was pretty in an unconventional way. Lindsey’s face was heart-shaped, which accentuated her large brown Latina eyes; her lustrous black hair was easily her best feature. She would never be considered beautiful in a fashion-model sense, having all the wrong proportions: too much in the hips, too little in the shoulders, not enough of a bust worth the effort of showing it off. Right now, folded into a kitchen chair and wearing pink sweat pants with a chocolate brown tank top, she had the lean, long-limbed appearance of a gazelle. Her demeanor bore none of the placidity of a herbivore: the black ponytail tossed restlessly at her shoulders, and her brown eyes flashed fire between the face on the hated photograph and the faces of her sorority sisters.

“The next applicant,” Andrea Newton carried on calmly, reading from the form before her. “is—”

“I know who it is,” Lindsey said, stabbing a finger at the photo of the girl. Freckles, winning smile, chestnut hair, huge breasts, tight sweater. There was no mistaking her.

“—is Brandy Booth,” Andrea read, raising her voice a little to be heard. “She joined Delta Sigma Tau in June of last year—”

“Right after she stole my boyfriend,” Lindsey growled.

“—and she wants to spend her junior year in the sorority house, starting September 2007,” Andrea said.

“Not with me, she’s not,” said Lindsay. “God only knows why we let her in the sorority in the first place. She’s not even a woman, she’s one of Ripley’s creations.”

“We all voted for her,” Roberta explained quietly, “last June.”

“Yes,” Lindsay admitted testily, “but I didn’t know it was her then, did I? I just knew it was Brandon. I didn’t realize that she was the slut that Jack was seeing until I saw them together at the Comstock Street Tavern, did I?” She wiped at her eyes, feeling the sting of tears. “She didn’t even work for that figure, Ripley just gave it to her, and just like that, she took Jack away from me.”

“Linz,” Roberta said in a gentle voice. “You don’t even like Jack. He’s an asshole.”

Lindsay sniffed and wiped her eyes again. “That’s true. It still hurts. You know.”

The other girls did know. They had each been through a similar breakup, each in her own way. Andrea Newton had spent a wonderful summer vacation in the loving arms of a sparkling, vivacious girl named Gina. It had been her first serious fling with a woman, her first experiment in bisexuality, and it had been a short, glorious high followed by a terrible, soul-scarring crash. Andrea had sat in her Honda for seven hours with the doors locked, crying, calling friends and crying, calling her sister and crying, calling Gina’s number and getting only voice mail. She had come out of that relationship swearing never to date another woman again; from then on, she would stick to men. That pledge had lasted only three men and six months, but she emerged wiser and more resilient. Now, the elfin blond sat at the kitchen table and watched Lindsey, biting her lip in concern.

Roberta had never dated a man until college, but she had quickly learned of heartbreak during her freshman year. Her lack of experience, her willingness to experiment, and her innocent good looks had led her into the arms of a college senior seven years older than she. Foolishly, she had considered herself wise enough in the ways of men to keep a cool distance between them. She had disregarded Andrea’s warnings that Aaron was up to no good. From the very first, she found herself unable to stop thinking of him, wondering what he might be doing, asking herself if he might thinking of her. His face, his hands, his voice all kept entering her mind unbidden throughout every hour of the day. Roberta found herself noticing the prices of Aaron’s favorite beer at the grocery store, or fixating on songs she had heard in Aaron’s company by bands she didn’t even like. She fell deeply, helplessly in love, while Andrea stood by in deepest sorrow. Aaron was the first and only man Roberta had slept with. Three nights, three times — and that was all. Aaron had got what he wanted, and for weeks Roberta grieved. Everything reminded her of him, every detail about his life and interests that she had unconsciously filed away now leapt out at her. It was impossible to escape his absence, and the hole in her heart ached like the wound of a dagger.

Andrea was there for her, with her soulful blue eyes and her quiet reassurances. Never once did she say I told you so. But never did Andrea attempt to comfort her physically, because she knew Roberta found it awkward. Andrea was bisexual, Roberta was very straight. Even now, Andrea wished she could give the sobbing Lindsey Wallace a hug and a kiss, and lie in bed with her sorority sister and stroke her hair and hold her and comfort her until the tears stopped, but she refrained from offering. Lindsey would not reject Andrea’s overtures, but Roberta was her dear friend and she would not understand.

“Linz, Brandy’s a good . . . girl,” Roberta said quietly. “She really is. She didn’t ask for Jack to turn her into Boob Goddess.”

Despite Lindsay’s tears, her breath hitched into a laugh. “No. She didn’t.”

“And she’s a sorority sister,” Andrea put in. “She’s got every right to apply for residence, same as anybody.”

“I suppose.” Lindsey covered her nose and mouth with her two hands, pressed palms together. “You’re right. You’re right. She’s not the one I should be mad at.”

“Jack broke up with you before they even went to see Ripley,” Roberta pointed out.

It was more or less true, Lindsey had to admit. Her boyfriend, Jack Munn, had informed her of his intention to visit Professor Ripley’s biotechnical research department with his roommate Brandon. She had expressed a desire that they do it together, instead. Jack, being Jack, had interpreted that as a constraint upon his freedom, or some damn bullheaded rebellious line of shit like that, and had put his foot down. No, he would not go with Lindsey, he said; he had already decided to go with Brandon, case closed. It was yet another example of Jack’s need to assert his manly independence and reject any suggestion Lindsey had of doing things as a couple. As usual, Lindsey declared that she wasn’t going to see Jack any further until he decided to become a mature adult, ready to contribute to an adult relationship. Stop being a rebel child, she had told him — as she had told him many times before. Stop resisting me. I’m not your mother, I’m your lover.

Their fights had always before lasted a period of days, after which Jack came back to her, admitting some crumb of fault, promising to be more compliant and attentive. Lindsey always thought she had seen progress in his behavior, incremental to be sure, but visible.

This time, Jack never came back. It was serious.

This time, Jack had Brandy to bed with, whenever he pleased.

A poor young man’s brain and experiences, Brandon’s likes and dislikes and habits and education, shoehorned into the body of a curvaceous brunette, given birthing hips and a double-D bustline, and condemned to be Brandy for eight years. She was Jack’s roommate, she enjoyed baseball, she played video games, she watched action movies, she drank beer from the bottle. She had a woman’s physique and desires and a man’s attitude toward casual sex. For Jack, it was the ultimate no-commitment relationship, paired with the ultimate lay. For Brandy—

For the first time, Lindsey felt a pang of sympathy for the poor girl. Andrea and Roberta were absolutely right. She hadn’t asked for any of this. She hadn’t made Jack: his rebellious, independent streak was a known quantity well before Brandy even came into existence.

Lindsey looked down at the photograph again: Brandy’s winning, slightly surprised smile; her sparkling gray eyes; her full lips, her massive chest enclosed in shaker-knit wool, her luxurious chestnut hair, expertly styled. Had she done that herself? No, she must have gone to a salon. A salon. Poor Brandon.

There was still a tiny nugget of resentment in her heart, a little bitter pill she was unable to let go. For the past nine months, Brandy had been sleeping with Lindsey’s ex-boyfriend Jack. Jack had rejected her, for . . . for this artificial creature. Brandy wasn’t a woman, she was a fantasy created by Professor Ripley’s biomorphic reorganizer. Brandy was an experiment, a psychology test that had assassinated Lindsey’s feeble love life.

Andrea Newton saw the change in Lindsey’s expression and read her thoughts. “You don’t have any reason to like her,” she said, interrupting the silence. “But admit it, you don’t have any reason to dislike her, either. If you need to be angry at anybody, get angry at Jack.”

Lindsey nodded, and wiped her eyes. They were nearly dry, but she suspected they were now red and puffy. Brandy, looking up from her photograph, was supernaturally perfect.

“You don’t have to decide now,” Robeta suggested. “It’s March. We don’t have to decide until June, and the new sisters don’t move in until September. Why don’t you try to meet her? She can’t be as bad as you say she is. Like I said, she didn’t ask to get turned into . . . that.”

“Boob Goddess,” Lindsey said, breaking again into an uneven crying laugh. “No. You’re right, she’s my sorority sister, and I haven’t even — I’ve gone out of my way not to meet her. I’ve gone out of my way,” she repeated slowly to herself, “not to see Jack. Again. Too many bad feelings.” She took a deep breath. “All right. I’ll think about Brandy. We’ll hold a place for her. She can have the tiny, shitty room on the top floor. All those stairs. And the low ceiling. And no men allowed in there.”

Andrea laughed brightly, her elfin nose wrinkling in delight, and she snorted in an unladylike way. “Definitely no men. She’d be right over me. You think I want to listen to that?”

“Ah,” Lindsey said, relaxing, letting laughter take some of her tension away. The tightness in her chest was going.

Andrea pushed herself up from her chair. “I’ll be right back, I’ve got to — oops, wait. Too much wine. No, I’m okay.” She held on to the back of her chair.

“Too much wine?” Roberta laughed. “Not enough. Bring another bottle up when you come back.”

“Fuck you, get it yourself,” Andrea laughed, weaving in the direction of the downstairs restroom. “If I don’t pee soon, I’m going to start tasting it.”

“I’ll get another bottle,” Lindsey offered, getting up herself. “In fact, I’ll get two. If we’re going to be going over applicants all night, I’m going to need two. Hell, since Ripley started his experiments, I can’t tell which one of them are men and which ones are women.”

Elsewhere on Greek Row, as Brandy Booth’s application was being discussed, Brandy herself was visiting friends at the fraternity house of Delta Eta Rho. In September, the fraternity had instructed its four newest brothers to report to Professor Ripley’s biotechnical research department in Building 34. The fraternity was in need of money, said chapter president Paul Hanna, and every brother must contribute. Your method of contribution, he told them, has already been chosen. A week later, the research department had sent the boys four checks for five hundred dollars each, only by that point, they were four girls.

Casey Wilcox and Dennis Usher had been given the medium sentence. Since Dennis had panicked at the last minute and desperately pushed his button, believing it was his only hope to remaining male, Casey had become female. And because Casey, in his turn, had suspected Dennis might do something of the sort, he had elected to do the only thing within his power to minimize his punishment. Both Casey and Dennis were given the striking bodies of attractive young women, for two years.

Dennis had begged Professor Ripley to allow him to return to normal, and had almost cried, there in the laboratory, when he was told that the two-year duration must be allowed to wear off without further interference. Casey and Dennis — Cassie and Denise — had gone home, awkwardly, with their fraternity sisters, wearing their oversized clothing and ill-fitting shoes. Two years in female forms.

The other girls of Delta Eta Rho were Adrienne and Trisha, formerly Adrian Easley and Patrick Owen. They had adhered to the pre-agreed plan and left their buttons alone, and each had been sentenced to the lightest, mildest gender reversal possible. With any luck, they would be able to pass off their altered genders unnoticed. Six months? That was nothing.

It was not to be that easy. Paul Hanna had conspired with Jack Munn to discover a way to generate even more riches for the fraternity. With a camera, a dedicated server, and a few props, the girls of Delta Eta Rho could become the stars in a new series of pornography shoots. Lockman University was already famous around the world for its miracle technology. What wouldn’t people pay for a first-hand glimpse into the kind of results it could produce?

Cassie, Denise, Adrienne, and Trisha became famous, especially around campus. Cassie for her blue eyes, long blond hair, exquisite breasts, and shyness; Adrienne for her stem-slender body, her serious eyes and her endearing spectacles; Trisha for her short, masculine buzz cut, African features, muscular limbs, and regal gaze; and Denise for her sultry Mediterranean looks and her willingness to do anything for the camera.

Each fraternity brother had to contribute five hundred dollars toward the remodeling of Delta Eta Rho. By their participation in Ripley’s experiment, the four freshman girls made that instantly. With their bodies, a camera, and a computer connection, they made that sum weekly. Six months flew past, and the money rolled in.

“Here you go, Patrick,” said Jeremy Cranbrook, Delta’s treasurer, as he counted out cash from an envelope. He had caught Patrick in the second-floor hallway between the bedrooms and the common bathroom. “This is the last of your back pay for the photo shoot we did in February. Sorry we didn’t get it to you sooner, but you know. Moving the server was a bit expensive.”

Patrick’s teeth showed up white against his dark skin. “I told you guys the University would notice if you ran a porn site on campus. Not a good idea, bud.”

“It sure is funny, seeing you male again,” Jeremy said with a trace of guilt. “I was getting used to seeing you the other way. You sure it’s worn off?”

“Oh yeah. Damn sure,” Patrick said with a throaty laugh. His voice had shifted back down, ever so slightly, to its previous register. Throughout these past six months, his change had never been that obvious on the outside, not to others. He knew, of course — to himself, he was unmistakably female. Small-breasted, to be sure, and less muscular, and lacking certain male equipment, but female. “First thing I did when I changed back, I went and checked out some of my porn shoots. Bud, I was smoking hot.”

“You look the same to me,” Jeremy said, puzzled.

“I know,” Patrick smirked.

Jeremy chuckled. “I gotta say, I never expected this to take off the way it has. We’re going to profit more from this site than I’d imagined. I thought Jack’s idea was pretty crazy, to tell the truth.”

Patrick’s smile faded. “Don’t get me wrong, bud. It is crazy. Forcing four guys to become women, to become porn stars, just to raise a little cash? It’s not right. Jack should’ve done it himself.”

“He tried.”

“So he says. I can’t think of anybody who’d want to be Jack’s partner in that booth. You saw what had happened to Brandy.”

In June of the previous year, Brandon Booth and Jack Munn had gone into Ripley’s laboratory with the agreed intention of leaving their buttons alone and walking away with a fistful of bills each. Brandon had kept his promise. Jack hadn’t.

“I guess you’re right.”

“Damn right I am,” Patrick said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got to go put this money to some good use. There’s black girls lined up to go on a date with me, and I ain’t been on a date in six months.”

“Six months?” Jeremy asked blankly. “Why not?”

Patrick rolled his eyes. “Come on, bud, why you think? I’ve been a girl for six months. You think I was going to go on a date like that?”

“Sure, why not,” said the Delta treasurer, scratching his scalp in confusion. “Hell, Denise goes on dates all the time. She fucks guys on camera. What’s the big deal?”

Patrick, formerly Trisha, just shook his head. “If you haven’t done it yourself, then I couldn’t even begin to tell you. It’s just different. Walking around without your cock, knowing guys are trying to get in your pants. It doesn’t feel safe.”

“I wondered why you never did any hardcore for the website,” Jeremy said, nodding with understanding. “I mean, it paid really well.”

The young black man’s eyes narrowed as he scrutinized that sentence for any possible threat. Was Jeremy suggesting that Patrick wasn’t wealthy? No, it appeared to be an entirely innocent comment. With a grunt, he said, “Yeah, it paid well. But I did do one of the hardcore once, though, you remember?”

“You did? Oh yeah — you had the strap-on. You and Denise. I remember that one. It’s one of our more popular hardcore pictorials, you know. It’s still getting two hundred hits a day. How was that, by the way?”

Patrick laughed, and hooked his thumbs into his belt. “Wearing that, you mean? Nah, didn’t do much for me. I’m glad I have the real thing back.”

The treasurer shared in the laughter. “Say, do you ever regret that you never tried it? I mean, tried . . . it.”

Between them, the question hung in the air. Patrick poked at his lower lip with his tongue before answering slowly. “No,” he said, “no, not really. No, I don’t regret it.”

“Well, if you ever want to try again—” Jeremy began.

“Hell no, bud, not with you.”

“No, not that,” the hawk-faced young man said, almost blushing. “No, I meant, if you ever want to try again, there’s good money in it.”

Jeremy grunted again. “Don’t bet on it.”

The treasurer departed with his envelop for the upper floor, where Denise’s room had been placed. It was the only room on the top floor, usually reserved for the chapter president, but it also had a private bathroom, the most windows, and the best light for shooting, and since it was more easily locked against intruders, it had been given up to the only remaining long-term Delta girl who still lived on-site. Cassie, fortunately for her, lived in the private dorms, and Adrian had always lived in his own rented apartment in town, both before becoming Adrienne and after returning to normal. The arrangements made the men of Delta feel as if they were contributing to her first line of defense, and made Denise feel secure. Any man coming into the frat would have to get through the Delta men to get to her. In truth, the arrangement was as much to protect the girls from the men within the fraternity as from intruder coming from outside it.

Until two weeks ago that had been Trish’s room too. The two girls had stayed together there, and every night for six months, Trish had faithfully locked the door. Now that every part of his male anatomy was back in place after the reversion, Patrick had moved his things down to the second floor.

He pushed open his new bedroom door and stowed his wad of crisp bills into a rolltop desk. It had a lock, which any Delta for the past twenty years could have opened with a flathead screwdriver. Nobody ever put anything truly valuable in it, which made it a perfect hiding place. Patrick didn’t intend to leave the money there long, anyway.

Just as he was lying down on his bed, allowing his body to relax, he heard the downstairs door slam and a familiar clack of high heels. Technically, a woman was supposed to be present in the fraternity only if accompanied by a responsible Delta brother, but Brandy Booth was not technically a woman — not that any Delta brother would bar the door to a pair of breasts like hers.

Patrick made his way downstairs to visit her. It was getting late, and he took the creaky stairs gingerly.

She was wearing a ridiculously tight summer dress in floral print, offering up about an acre of cleavage, and trying to remove her gray woolen jacket in a demure manner. Patrick smiled at her attempt, noticing the way her arms became caught in the sleeves, forcing Brandy to twist her torso to and fro, gently shaking her breasts, as she tried to free her hands. He appreciated the motion of her flesh in ways that were brand new to him, all over again. It was good to be a man.

“Trish!” Brandy bubbled, seeing him. “Oh — I mean, Patrick! That’s right, you were due to change back, weren’t you? Help me with my coat, my arm’s stuck. Jeremy called and said he had our back pay. Did you get paid for February?”

Patrick nodded, as he helped extract Brandy’s arms from the jacket. “Just now, yeah. I’m gonna miss having that extra spending money, babe, I’ll tell you.”

Brandy gave him a perky smile. “I’ll bet,” she said, and leaned in for a quick kiss. “There, I got to be the first girl in school to kiss you since you changed back.”

“Too late. Denise already did.”

“Well!” she said, mock-offended. “All right, I can be second. Unless there’s something else I can be first at?”

Patrick chortled at her arch stare and inviting hands-on-hips posture. “You know, Brandy, don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m glad I only got the light treatment. I don’t know if I could do what you’re doing.”

“What? Be a woman?” Brandy waved him off with one little hand. “You’ve been through the machine. You know what it’s like. It just kind of changes your brain around.”

“I know, babe, I know. But you got a double dose.”

“At least,” she said proudly, angling her cleavage for him to see. “And I’m the most popular one on the website, Jeremy says. Five hundred hits a day. This girl can make some money.”

“This girl made quite enough money, thanks.”

“Really? You could’ve made a lot more if you’d done a little hardcore. I bet you might really have liked it,” Brandy suggested. Even for Patrick, who had been through the process himself, it was hard to remember Brandy as a converted man. Her behaviors, her frankness, were all so very masculine, but the body— “Anyway,” she went on, “I know I do. Have sex, get paid. What’s the problem?”

“The problem was Jack Munn. He seemed to think he was the porn star everybody wanted to see.” Patrick lowered his voice, though many of his fraternity brothers were studying attentively or sleeping. “I didn’t agree to do any hardcore, because I didn’t want Jack to have anything to say about it. He kept trying to get some of the guys to go down to Ripley’s lab with him, and get him pumped up into a super-stud body again, but nobody would, because—” He broke off, embarrassed.

“Go on, say it,” Brandy said brightly, unashamed. “They wouldn’t do it. For Jack to get his stud body back, somebody else would have to end up like me.”

Patrick’s dark face was nevertheless flushed. “Yeah. Nobody wanted to do that.”

She touched his forearm and laughed. “Can’t say I blame them. I’ve got seven years of this left, myself. I’ll just be getting used to it, by the time I change back. Maybe in a couple of years, you could join me again. You made a sexy girl.”

Patrick’s voice dropped further. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe once Jack’s graduated.”

The young woman’s eyes became bright and intrigued. “Oooh, you’re thinking about it, aren’t you?” she asked in a buoyant, delighted whisper. “Starting to have regrets? Wondering if you want to have another try?”

It took him a long time to answer. “Yes,” he said, finally. “I do want another try.”

“So go again.”

“It’s not that easy. I don’t want Jack to have another try at me.”

“Get another light reversal. They’ll never know.”

“Of course they’ll know. I’ll have to move back up into Denise’s room, on the top floor.”

Brandy smiled up at him mischievously, and her eyes twinkled. “Then don’t tell them.”

The third weekend in March was the end of Spring Break, when most of Lockman’s students were breezing back into town. Many brought with them care packages from home; many had suitcases and luggage from visits with parents. Some students had spent the time more socially, at the beaches along the coast, or at the bars in the town of Tilmont.

Residents of Tilmont weren’t quite sure what to make of Lockman University. It was a major local employer for the tiny town of only fifteen thousand, and the students generated a certain amount of trade with local merchants. Since the invention of Ripley’s device, Tilmont’s hotels and restaurants had been doing brisk business, but with the kind of unusual patrons that make small-town folk nervous. Tilmont had been a college town for years, serving the trendy varieties of mocha and cappuccino, low-carb vegetarian dishes, and gourmet microbrew ales that college students discovered away from home, as well as the cheap, hearty meals of starch and fat that they could more easily afford. It had three used book stores, two vintage clothing shops, five decent bars, and three dives.

It was at one of the more respectable taverns on Comstock Street that Lindsey Wallace met Brandy Booth, more or less by accident, on a Sunday evening just before the resumption of classes at Lockman.

Lindsey had spent all day driving back to Tilmont from a distant visit with her sister Rose and Rose’s new baby Aiden. Lindsey was weary, both of driving and of babies, especially the expectations of her mother to produce one of her own, once college was finished, and had she met anyone at school yet, and wasn’t it a good thing that Jack was gone, but maybe there was some other boy in her life? The conversation was always the same: Lindsey’s mother wanted more grandchildren. Although Lindsey adored Aiden — the way his little head smelled, his tiny pink fingers and toes, the way he yawned and tried to rub his eyes with his fat little hands — she wasn’t ready. She might never be ready. Babies were something Lindsey could appreciate, to borrow, to hold and to look after while Rose had a well-deserved nap, but she couldn’t actually envision having anything to do with one of her own. She lacked the mothering instinct.

The Comstock Street Tavern seemed like a perfect place to address the gnawing hunger in her stomach after six hours on the road. Lindsey parked her aging Saturn on the street, backing into an angled space by the sidewalk, and went inside. She hadn’t showered, she felt frazzled and punchy, and she was sure after six hours in the car that she smelled foul.

Her bedraggled state of mind made it all the harder to deal with Brandy Booth, sitting at one of the large tables with two of her girlfriends. Perfect Brandy Booth with the exaggerated hourglass figure: ripe, lush, hair teased just so, every eyelash curled.

Brandy recognized her immediately, of course, having met her the previous year before her . . . change. She bounced to her feet, obviously in a way designed to attract the eye to the matching bounce of her bosom, and waved Lindsey over to their table. There was one chair. Did she want to join them?

Of course Lindsey had a choice. She could sit anywhere. It was the day before Spring Break ended. All the students were back on campus. The Comstock was nearly deserted. The old oak bar was polished to a high shine for lack of customers. A bored waitress stood idling near the pull tabs and rolling a cigarette. Even the jukebox had stopped playing requests and had gone into its low-volume selection of uninteresting 70s hits. Only the neon signs continued their merry march, blinking on and off in sequence.

Lindsey put on a smile and sat down with Brandy and her two friends.

“Hi, I haven’t seen you for ages,” Brandy gushed at her. “It’s really great to see you. The last time we met, I think we were here at the Comstock, weren’t we? That must be a year ago, now.”

Oh, God, she was going to be bubbly. “Yes,” Lindsey said, not sounding up to a Brandy-like level of cheer. An image came to her unbidden, a short mental home movie, of the last time she had seen Brandy. It had indeed been at the Comstock. Lindsey pushed away that mental picture and searched for a diplomatic answer. “That was back when I was dating Jack.”

She let the name sink in as a not-so-gentle hint, and to Brandy’s credit, she immediately picked it up. Transformed man or not, Brandy was as perceptive as any woman Lindsey had met.

“Oh, Jack. I’m so sorry, I completely forgot,” Brandy said, and she sounded entirely sincere. “Everything has been so crazy since that day. I want you to know I’m really sorry about Jack breaking up with you, but I didn’t have anything to do with it. He didn’t even tell me until after I got changed. You were the only reason I convinced him to go in the first place.”

Lindsey felt the weariness holding her brain back, and she blinked. “Wait, what?”

“Oh!” Brandy said, and held up one of her manicured hands. “First, I want to introduce you. Lindsey, this is Cassie Wilcox and Denise Usher, they’re two girls from the Delta frat who got changed also. Cassie, Denise, this is Lindsey Wallace, Jack’s ex-girlfriend. You’ll love her, she’s a total sweetheart.”

Despite herself, Lindsey felt her anger being slowly disarmed by Brandy’s charm offensive. “Nice to meet you both,” she told the young women beside her. They bore only a few hallmarks of transformed men; their well-maintained manicures, professional hairstyles, and understated makeup didn’t give them away, but their lack of accessories was a subtle hint. No pierced ears, no rings, no necklaces. Only Brandy appeared to have a purse; Cassie carried a woman’s wallet, and Denise must have an ID stowed on her person somewhere. Five hundred dollars didn’t go very far to filling out a woman’s fashion and makeup needs.

Cassie was a gorgeous blond with wild hair and a shy smile, dressed in a modest maroon turtleneck shirt and gray slacks. She had one hell of a figure, Lindsey noted with some interest — not like Brandy’s, which was simply unreal, but certainly statuesque. She found herself reflecting curiously where she might have seen that pretty, Nordic face before.

The other girl, Denise, was definitely giving Lindsey the eye. Bi, was she? Not everybody who went through Ripley’s machine came out straight on the other side. This one looked definitely interested, with her inviting hazel eyes, sultry smile, and sassy black bob. There were definite possibilities with this one, Lindsey thought to herself. A nice roll in the hay with a girl once in a while could be great fun. This one, too, had a distinctly familiar—

It suddenly struck her that she’d seen both these girls before, on Delta’s website, naked. Denise had been considerably more exposed than merely naked, and had in fact been frolicking with a striking slender black woman with a strap-on. Those images had been quite delicious, Lindsey recalled.

She felt a blush coming on. “Oh my God, you’re the ones on the website, aren’t you?” Lindsey said, covering her mouth with one hand. “I just realized.”

“Oh, you’ve seen it?” Denise asked with a naughty smile. “What did you think?”

“You’re all gorgeous,” Lindsey assured the girls. “I wasn’t really looking for that — okay, I was — I wanted to see what Brandy looked like. Now. Not naked, I mean —”

Brandy laughed delightedly, and the waitress finally appeared to notice the table had sprouted a new customer. She sauntered over and took Lindsey’s order with some half-hearted display of customer service: Cobb salad, extra breadstick, red wine.

“What happened to your website?” Lindsey asked. “It went down for a week.”

At went down for a week, Denise let out a dirty giggle.

“We had to move it. The school didn’t want us running a porn site on their network,” Cassie explained. “We tried to tell them it wasn’t using their bandwidth, but they didn’t care. We set it up at Adrian’s apartment in town, somewhere that the guys at the frat can’t get their hands on it. The girls pooled our money and bought a server, so we can control what goes up and what doesn’t.”

“Plus,” Denise said, “now that’s becoming better known, there’s lots of other girls on campus who want to put their stuff up on our site. This could become quite a little side industry for us. At least for the next year and a half, anyway. Then we change back. But we made our five hundred bucks and then some, didn’t we?”

The blond Cassie nodded eagerly. “Paul said — he’s the president — that we each had to chip in five hundred dollars. We cleared that amount the minute we got paid for the experiment. Then the website started to get hits, and we started to rake in money like you wouldn’t believe. The guys said they wanted to get a share of it, that it was their idea, and we said no.”

“Good for you,” Lindsay said, and meant it.

“You mean you said no,” Brandy gushed enthusiastically. “I cannot believe you did that. When you first got to Delta you were so shy!”

“I’ve learned a lot,” Cassie said simply. “I’ve had to become more confident.”

“Taking your clothes off on camera will do that, I bet,” Lindsey agreed.

“You should’ve been there,” Brandy continued with bright eyes. “Cassie said, you said everybody had to pay five hundred dollars, and they said yeah, and Cassie said, well, we’ve already paid our five hundred so all the rest of this profit belongs to us. And Paul and Jeremy tried to say that the website belonged to everybody, and Cassie said, if you want to be on it, you know where Ripley’s lab is. None of them would go down there and get turned into girls. Especially not Jack, and it was his idea.”

“And,” Denise laughed, “since the server belongs to us, we basically control the site. We do all of the photo shoots now on an hourly basis. If they want to see us do another shoot, they have to pay.”

Lindsey shook her head and laughed along with them. “Oh, this sounds like one of Jack’s ideas. He likes being able to stand in the shadows and manipulate other people into doing his bidding. I can imagine the look on his face when you told him you were keeping the money.”

There was a moment during the laughter that Lindsey realized in bewildered horror that she had let her guard down to Brandy, and that she had allowed herself to start liking her. Perhaps it was simply because she was too tired. Brandy was the enemy who had stolen Jack. She took a deep breath, fixed her smile in place, and summoned the image to her mind again, the picture of the last time she had seen her and her ex-boyfriend at the Comstock. There was a girl, completely shit-faced, eyes half-lidded, ruby lips pronouncing slurred protests in between confused giggles. There was the man, his massive bicep wrapped around her waist, forearm propping up her massive breasts, holding her off the ground against his hip as he left the bar. She was obviously too drunk to walk, stand, or even speak, but she continued to try. Red wrap dress, lots of cleavage — too much cleavage, because his locked arm was forcing her breasts to spill upward into the cool night air, barely contained in her brassiere. She reeked of tequila, the man of gin. He was a mountain of a man, all bare shoulders and exquisitely detailed muscles, each gleaming in sharp relief to the neon tavern glow. His left hand was fumbling in his pocket, looking down, so the first face she recognized was that of the girl whom she had just voted into their sorority, and that’s when he looked up and she saw who he was . . .

Lindsey would be surprised if Brandy remembered seeing her that evening; the girl had been pretty far gone. She tried to keep that image before her, of the Boob Goddess filled with tequila and draped over Jack’s arm. It would make it much easier to dislike Brandy if Lindsey continued to remind herself the girl on Jack’s arm should have been her.

A clatter of plates disturbed her thoughts. The waitress had brought out plates for Brandy, Cassie, and Denise. She placed a decent glass of cabernet sauvignon before Lindsey and mumbled something perfunctory about being right back with the salad and breadstick. Lindsey let her smile fall away into an innocent and inquisitive expression, as Cassie and Denise chattered about some guy named Brett. Whoever it was, Lindsey gathered, Denise was fairly attracted to him.

“So wait a minute, Denise,” she said, when there was a pause in the conversation. “You got turned into a girl, and suddenly you like guys? How does that work?”

Denise spoke from behind her napkin to conceal her unfinished bite of food. “It’s Ripley’s machine,” she said, and swallowed. “It completely reverses you. Before I went in, I was totally freaked out about the idea of being a girl. I was a guy, I liked being a guy, I didn’t want to get in that booth. When I came out, I had a completely different brain.”

“Not so fast,” Cassie said with an impish smile. “When you came out, you were pouting. You asked Professor Ripley to undo this goddamn thing right now. That’s what you said.”

Denise conceded the point graciously. “Okay, yeah, I was still scared for a little while. That’s because when you go through that machine, all your points of reference change. I got shorter, and lighter, and I saw differently, smelled things differently — and I worried a lot, right at first, that I was even thinking differently, except since I was thinking differently, I couldn’t tell how differently. It’s like . . .” Denise popped a cucumber from her salad into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully for a moment, while the other girls waited. “It’s like waking up and finding all your furniture has been moved around, but it’s still your house.” She saw she wasn’t getting through, because Lindsey wore a quizzical expression, and in desperation Denise turned to Brandy.

“It’s exactly like that,” the Boob Goddess agreed. “You know when you move things around, you find little dents in the rug where your furniture used to be, and little bits of fluff that were under the couch? And you take a painting down, and you see a white spot on the wall where it used to hang? It’s like that, only inside your head. All those little leftover bits of the old way are still there, sort of but not really. You know you used to sit here and see things this way when you watched TV, only now you don’t. And you can’t go back to the old way, you just know it used to be there.”

Lindsey pursed her lips. “I think I get it,” she said, hesitating. “I guess maybe you have to do it to know for sure, though.”

“You should try it,” Denise suggested. She reached out to touch Lindsey’s right arm, and her warm fingertips lingered there. Oh yes, whatever else that machine did to poor Dennis, it certainly made her bi, Lindsey thought.

“I don’t know,” is what she said to the transformed men before her. “I don’t want to end up . . . something strange.”

Brandy smiled, not taking offense. “It was the last thing on my mind, too. I just wanted to try it. I didn’t intend to get stuck like this for eight years. Jack betrayed me.”

“Betrayed you?” Lindsey felt a twinge of sympathy, and deliberately let the image rise again: girl, completely shit-faced, ruby lips pronouncing slurred protests . . .

“That’s what Ripley calls it, when one person pressed the button, and the other doesn’t. Jack and I agreed not to. That was the idea, anyway.” Brandy took a drink from her water glass, leaving a neat half-moon of red lipstick on the rim.

“You said a minute ago,” Lindsey recalled, “that I was the reason you convinced Jack to try in the first place.”

“I wanted to try being a girl,” Brandy repeated. “You know, walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. I didn’t exactly hope for a marathon in them. Anyway, if Jack hadn’t pushed his button, we both would have ended up girls, only for about six months. And nothing like this,” the bubbly brunette said, indicating her exaggerated curves with a manicured hand. “It would have been subtle.”

“Oh, no,” Lindsey said with well-meaning irony. “Big double Ds are all about subtlety.”

The former Brandon laughed ruefully. “Anyway, I had told Jack that he might like being a girl, because . . . you might like it.”

“Him? I don’t get it — oh, you mean me.” Lindsey stopped to consider that, until she noticed her mouth was hanging open. “Jack, a girl? Huh. I guess that would have been . . . interesting.”

“He said you were bisexual,” Brandy said delicately, “but I didn’t really believe him. Jack does have a tendency to make up a fantasy life when the real one isn’t very interesting.”

Lindsey nodded. “So how did you end up with Jack? How come you’re dating him, if he betrayed you?”

“Dating him?” Brandy’s smile was wide, pleasant, and disarming. “Not really. We just fell into bed together a couple of times until it got to be a habit. I don’t really love him. He’s kind of an ass, to be honest.” Her grin became even wider. “You want him back?”

That came so suddenly that Lindsey had to fall into peals of helpless laughter. She pressed her elbows into her sides and groped for a water glass. “Oh my God,” she said through paroxysms of mirth. “Oh God no, I do not want him back. You can have him.”

“He’s pretty good in bed,” Brandy urged her, as if trying to sell her a particularly noxious breed of horse. “And he doesn’t smell bad when he’s had a shower. Are you sure? We could split him, sometimes. Every other weekend, how’s that?”

“Two out of three,” Lindsey said, wiping away tears from the corners of her eyes. “No. No, really, I do not want him back. I’m surprised you want him at all.”

Brandy blushed, and for the first time Lindsey saw that the poor girl was embarrassed to be associated with Jack. “Remember, when he first came out, he was . . . really studly. He’d been buffed. That’s why he betrayed me, to get that super-manly body.”

“I’ve seen something like it,” Lindsey admitted.

“And of course, Jack says we shouldn’t really be dating, not officially. Just friends with benefits. Let’s have an open relationship, he said,” Brandy explained. “Of course, looking like he did, I didn’t have any objection to hopping onto his dick once in a while. And looking like he did, he didn’t have any trouble finding other girls on his own. But the thing about those buffs,” she said with a sly look and an arched eyebrow, “is they don’t last forever. My body is going to last eight years. His buff only lasted six weeks, and then he was back to normal. Back to the old Jack, going a little bald Jack, bad teeth Jack with the creaky knees.”

“He used to play catcher,” Lindsey said, apropos of nothing. “All through high school.”

“Even back then he was calling the shots for other people, I guess. But I had this body,” Brandy said, gesturing again with perfect scarlet nails. “Suddenly, Jack didn’t want an open relationship any more. He wasn’t Mr Studly, and he couldn’t pull the girls like he could before, while I could still have any guy I wanted. Every time I go out with some other guy, I remind Jack that the open relationship was his idea.” Brandy smirked.

Lindsey sat back in her chair happily, admiring Brandy’s beautiful face and smug smile, and for the first time all day she really felt at her ease. She was still weary, but it was as if a weight had been lifted from her. Brandy hadn’t stolen Jack, because Jack had never been worth stealing. Jack had walked away from the relationship because he’d spotted an opportunity. And now, evidently, that opportunity had vanished. “You know,” Lindsey said, “I’m really glad I stopped by here on the way home. It’s been really wonderful getting to know you, Brandy.”

“We’d met before,” the brunette reminded her.

“I know,” Lindsey said, “but that was ages ago, when you were still a boy. Even then, I have to confess, I thought you were cuter than Jack.”

Brandy thanked her meekly.

Lindsey finished her wine, and leaned forward in her chair again to place it back on the table. “So,” she said. “What’s it like?”

“Going through the machine?”

“Being a man,” Lindsey said. “You remember, right?”

Brandy sighed. “A little. I wish I could explain it. I guess it’s something you just have to do for yourself.”

“I don’t know if I’m that curious. A little curious, but not eight years curious.”

“Then,” Brandy said, and fixed Lindsey with a very direct look. Her gray eyes were penetrating, her chestnut hair perfect, and her lips moist and glossy red. “Then, in that case, perhaps you should ask yourself exactly how curious you are.”

Twice during the week after classes resumed, Patrick Owen stopped by the biotechnical research building. He hadn’t allowed himself to consciously schedule an appointment with Ripley and his machine. He hadn’t told any of his friends or fraternity brothers he was contemplating another turn in it. The idea merely lurked in the back of his mind like an unwanted guest, dissipating like smoke when Patrick was occupied with classes and studies and dates, and returning from the shadows when his brain was quiet again. You could just try it, the idea whispered. It’s only six months, if you get the light treatment. Your friends will never notice.

Twice during the week, Patrick had left Building 34 in his own body. There hadn’t been any singles in the third-floor commons; everyone had reported there in pairs. Once in a while he ran into a lone man or woman, evidently waiting for friends, but those were often previous subjects of Ripley’s. I’d love to go again, they’d say sadly, but not until this body wears off.

Did they know anybody who was looking to try the experiment? Patrick always wanted to ask them, but hadn’t worked up the nerve.

His post-restoration celebrity lasted a few weeks, and in that time he picked up a few dates. One girl, Tammy, had heard about Patrick’s six-month sentence and was full of questions. Another date, Shawna, was glad to see him restored to his male self and didn’t even want to discuss his previous experience as a woman. Didn’t he know that she thought it was weird? Honestly, Shawna thought he intended to stay like that, and what kind of way was that for a man to behave? Only Connie had never mentioned it at all, thankfully, but even that date had been unsatisfactory; Patrick found himself being privately critical of her mismatched necklace and earrings, and her poor mascara lines.

What’s wrong with me? he asked himself. All I did was spend six months in a woman’s body. It’s not like I asked, either.

What was wrong, of course, was that his horizons had expanded. His world was suddenly larger, and his experiences broader, than most other people who had never bothered to try it. Shawna’s rejection of the experience, even the idea of the experience, was discouraging. Tammy’s eagerness, her inquisitive probing without active follow-through, seemed hollow. Had she truly wanted to learn, she could have gone herself. And Connie, sadly, had just seemed so very limited. How could she identify with Patrick, as he could with her, unless she had been through a similar sentence?

On any other occasion, Patrick avoided the Biotech building. He had no classes there, and no earthly reason to enter that building. Even when it was the shortest route between Pre-Calculus and Organic Chemistry Lab, he went around. He was perpetually concerned that the boys — or the girls — of Delta Eta Rho would catch him there.

Who, me? Here in the Biotech building? No, I wasn’t headed for the third floor, I was just meeting someone. I was just on the way to class. I just stopped by for no reason. It looked like rain.

Patrick was not the kind of man to make excuses; when he was challenged he tended to become defensive, to be prepared to fight. Just being near Building 34 made his spine stiffen and made him see ghosts in his peripheral vision. It made him twitchy.

On the Friday after spring break, Patrick found himself walking the familiar sidewalks in the direction of Biotech and Ripley. It was eight in the evening. Most of the lecture halls and labs were locked by this time, except for a few toward the Student Center where night classes were taught by the Vocational Learning instructors. The library, too, would be closing. If anybody asked him, Patrick would say he was simply out for a stroll. That, of course, was why he wore his bulky blue ski jacket. It wasn’t to hide his transformed body. The very idea! He hadn’t any particular business here. Why, everything was—

The biotechnical research center still had its lights on. The third-floor commons, visible between the angled white girders and along the length of the glass wall, gave off a yellow aura. Was anybody moving about? It was hard to tell, through the tinted glass.

If anybody asked, I’m just checking to see why the lights were on.

He passed through the automatic doors and ascended the steps. These too were white girders, between which were stretched concrete slab steps. His footsteps sent metallic echoes bouncing off the girders and throughout the first floor. Dimly, above, a voice could be heard in low, urgent discussion.

Patrick climbed the last steps to the third floor and looked into the deserted commons. Only three figures were here: Ripley stood near the information desk, clipboard in hand, holding a quiet discussion with a female student. His assistant sat by, alternating his gaze between his PSP handheld game and the clock on the wall. Clearly it was time to go; equally clear, this girl didn’t want to leave without satisfaction.

Professor Ripley’s gaze fell upon Patrick from across the room, and glanced dismissively away again, but the girl had noticed the brief look and turned. She pointed, and her words echoed across the commons. “There, there’s somebody coming now. I’ll ask him.”

Without waiting for an answer, she strode away from the neat little professor and his pressed white lab coat. The girl’s pace was brisk. After a few paces she broke into a run.

She was pretty, Patrick could see. Perhaps not a supermodel — not with those hips. The young woman was a Latina with a heart-shaped face, dark hair, and a ponytail which bounced behind her as she jogged his way.

“Hey,” she called to him across the carpet as she approached. “Are you here for the experiment? Prisoner’s Dilemma? Ripley won’t let me go without a partner.”

Patrick was momentarily taken aback, unable to formulate words either in acceptance or in defense. Of all the things he had expected upon arriving at the commons, a direct proposal wasn’t among them.

“Come on,” the young woman said. “It’s after hours and you’re up here. Do you want to go? I want to try this thing out, I’ve heard so much about it.”

“It’s pretty fun,” Patrick said, finding his voice. He put on a show of confidence. “I tried it for six months. Ended up as a pretty good-looking woman, babe, I gotta tell you.”

“So that was you,” the woman said, with a sudden smile. “I thought you looked familiar. When you were a woman, did you do some photos for Delta house?”

He smiled. This question had long since ceased to embarrass him. “Yes, that’s me. It’s the hair, right? I kept the haircut.”

“So you’ve been through it before, you know. Look, I’m not going to do anything weird to you in there. I know somebody who got burned like that once, and, well — let’s just say I’m not happy with the guy who did it. My name’s Lindsey,” the girl said, offering a hand.

Patrick took it firmly. “I’m Patrick. I know a guy, too. Some guy in our frat did that to somebody, walked out of the booth with a buffed-up stud body, sent the other guy home as a chick.”

“In your frat,” Lindsey said, and smacked her forehead. “You wouldn’t be talking about Jack Munn?”

Patrick nodded. “Yeah. That’s him. Now he’s sleeping with the girl — guy — he did it to. Brandy. You know her, too?”

“We’ve met. Look, like I said, I’m not interested in getting stuck in a man’s body for years. I just want to try it out. I’ve been asking around . . . I don’t need to explain it to you. All I want is the six-month deal. What do you say, do you want to partner up with me for that?”

“Yeah,” Patrick said slowly. “Yeah, babe, I can do that. Nobody touches nothing, we both walk out with six months.”

Lindsey nodded. “It’s a deal.”

Professor Ripley was not so happy with them as they crossed the commons carpet toward the information desk. “Mixed-gender couples,” he said sternly, “are not among the demographics in the current study. All the accumulated data points are for heterogeneous couples only. Boys with boys, girls with girls.”

“Then maybe you need to branch out into a new study,” Lindsey suggested. “There’s lots of couples who would want to try this.”

“Of course there are,” said Ripley. “I am already well aware of several such couples who have advanced this argument. However, this psychological experiment was not designed for couples to . . . play? Amuse themselves? Frolic? It was designed — fool around, that’s the phrase, not designed for couples to fool around. Our funding is not meant to contribute to weekends of debauchery. You should certainly be aware of this yourself, Mr . . .”

“Owen,” Patrick supplied.

“Yes, Mr Owen, because you have already been through the process once before.”

“And don’t you think that is a data point worth studying?” Patrick asked curiously. “I mean, here I am, back for more. Don’t you suppose that when some guy gets up the nerve to come back and try again, that maybe you guys should be interested in that little tidbit?”

Professor Ripley opened his mouth, and shut it again. He was an unextraordinary man with little silver spectacles and iron-gray hair that looked as if had been parted with a ruler, but his eyes were windows into a steel-trap mind. “A fair point,” Ripley said. “If you would care to return with another partner—”

“If it’s the funding you’re worried about,” Lindsey offered immediately, heading off that objection, “I don’t really need it. And—” she looked at Patrick with pleading in her liquid brown eyes.

“Yeah, you can skip the five hundred bucks this time,” Patrick offered generously.

Professor Ripley paused again, calculating. The biomatter reorganizer was his baby. It was his life’s work. It had to be tested. And yet the protocols of the testing must be adhered to. The paperwork must be signed, the waivers must be obtained. “I will consult Dr Kessler,” Ripley concluded reluctantly. “Together we will refer the matter of the funds to our oversight committee. It may well come to pass that the sponsorship board approves release of the funds and extends the study into mixed-gender couples. In any case, we will follow all necessary procedures this once and consider tonight’s result an extraneous data point. Mr Knowles?”

The student assistant looked up from his game of Zelda. “Yo.”

Professor Ripley adjusted his glasses. “Get them admitted before you go. I’ll be in the lab.”

Patrick and Lindsey didn’t have long to wait while the student at the desk entered their demographics into the database.

“I really appreciate this,” Lindsey told Patrick. “I’m serious. I’m not going to touch that button at all if you won’t.”

“Neither will I,” Patrick said. “I want the light version for sure. I don’t exactly want Jack finding out I’m a girl again.”

“I can understand that. Of course, I told the girls in the sorority house that I was coming tonight. I just couldn’t find anybody willing to come with me.”

Patrick gave her a squint. “How come you want to try being a man?”

“Because of Brandy, I guess. And because of Jack. I just have to try it. Anything,” Lindsey said with a rueful shake of her head, “anything is better than having my mother call me every two weeks and ask if I’ve found a husband yet.”

The student assistant called over from his station, already engrossed in his PSP. “Okay, you guys, go on back. It’s down the hall and to the left, then take the second door. Follow the yellow stripe on the floor.”

They left the commons together and followed the hall deeper into Building 34. Patrick noticed that Lindsey was close on his right side, looking around at the darkened halls. Most of the lab equipment in the rear corridors had been shut down, and most of the laboratories themselves had been locked. Only the commons, it appeared, had remained lit. Even as they departed for the lab, they could hear the sounds of Knowles gathering his coat and books from the desk and tramping down the steps.

“Nervous?” he asked.

“A bit. You’ve done this before, I haven’t.”

“You’ll be fine,” Patrick assured her. “You’ll be surprised how easy it is.”

They entered the lab.

“My God,” Lindsey said, staring at the neatly divided stacks and shelves. “It’s like something out of Star Wars.”

“Preferably not,” said Professor Ripley distractedly from his position at the keyboard. “For one thing, the science in Star Wars is much less supportable than in, for instance, Battlestar Galactica. In particular, Newtonian space flight. And everything in Star Wars was dirty, of course.” He sniffed.

Patrick and Lindsey exchanged a look, and Patrick essayed a small shrug: meh, what can you do?

Nevertheless, the lab was crowded with identical supply tables, each piled with computers, coiled with cables, and adorned with monitors. The yellow tape on the floor led directly to a cordon of yellow tape that surrounded two gray plastic booths on the left-hand wall. Tape of other colors subdivided the room further, barricading one experiment against the encroachment of another. Massive trunks of bundled cables snaked behind the tables toward the power outlets.

“If you would care to step into the booths,” Professor Ripley said, indicating the gray cabinets to their left. “One of you in each.”

Patrick held out a gracious hand, allowing Lindsey to go first, but she hesitated. “Does it matter which one?”

“They are identical, so it shouldn’t matter which you choose,” Ripley said, and added cryptically, “Although this is a psychology experiment.”

“Great,” she muttered, and entered the left-hand booth.

“The left. Interesting,” Ripley said in a mild voice.

“What?” Lindsey asked, turning around in the booth and looking out with alarm. “What? What’s interesting?”

“For every five people that choose right, nine people choose left. Most fascinating.”

She put her hands on her hips, made an annoyed face, and sat down. Patrick waved to her and sat in the other booth.

“If you have no questions, permit me seal the doors and we will proceed,” the professor began.

“Wait. Wait, yes, I have question,” Lindsey said. Her nervousness was beginning get the better of her, and she struggled to find the question. “Will it — will it hurt?”

“Interestingly,” Professor Ripley said, “the sensation of the passage of time during matter reorganization is highly individual. I haven’t yet collected enough data to fully rationalize it. Some subjects report a very intense series of sensations during the actual matter redistribution, while many others — a majority so far — report almost no sensation at all. There is an exit questionnaire and several follow-up visits during which we administer additional interviews, but let me not get ahead of myself. After all, in ten minutes you are sure to have an entirely new battery of questions for me.”

Lindsey waited carefully during the ten-minute countdown, wondering anxiously whether she would feel pain during the . . . what had Ripley called it? . . . the reorganization of her body. She wondered if Patrick was as nervous as she was. She wondered what Andrea and Robeta would say to discover her brand-new anatomically correct toy.

But she never wondered if Patrick could be trusted. It never occurred to her at all.

When Lindsey emerged from the isolation booth, he felt a strange sense of focus. Somehow everything seemed to be directly before him, right in the center of his vision, with nothing on the periphery to distract him. The sounds of the lab were placed precisely, just so, in the stereo spectrum. Even the laboratory itself seemed sharper and better defined, more solid. The tables were more compact, the walls were straighter.

He hadn’t gained much in height, perhaps not even an inch — his pink sweat pants were still ankle-length, and his dark blue Lockman U hooded sweater came down snugly to his wrists. The only problem with his attire were his shoes; his pink trainers were uncomfortably narrow on his feet.

Lindsey stretched his arms while Professor Ripley unsealed the other isolation booth. He could feel his shoulders were stronger, had better range of motion. His hands made powerful fists. This was the light change? he asked himself. Oh my God, can you imagine the full-on reversal?

“How do you feel, bud?” a voice asked from behind him. Lindsey turned to see Trisha exit her own booth, gingerly stepping down onto the laboratory floor. Trisha was just as he remembered her from the Delta Girls website: lean, sleek, and slender, with an imperious look and a catlike grace. Her attire had also adapted but little from the conversion to her frame: her bepocketed khaki slacks seemed marginally looser, perhaps; her black tee had become slightly more baggy. Once she put on her heavy coat again, she would be indistinguishable, almost exactly, but not quite, like the Patrick he had just met. To the trained eye, there were suggestions that Trisha’s body was markedly female. There, in particular, her body had just the right kind of curves that—

Lindsey felt his loins stir sleepily, tingling with the rush of blood. Oh, wow, he thought. God, I almost forgot about having one of those.

“Cat got your tongue?” Trish asked, giving him a bemused look. “You’re the first girl I’ve met who’s done the experiment first-hand. You gotta tell me how you like it.”

He tried to formulate an answer, and felt the sentence lining up in his brain. Words in this body were harder to marshal, they required more care. Speech was not nearly as fluid or automatic as they had been a moment ago. “I don’t know,” Lindsey said in wonder. “Everything’s so different. I feel . . . really present. It’s hard to describe.”

“I know, bud,” Trish said. “Tell me about it.”

Professor Ripley had retrieved a clipboard containing exit interview forms, and handed one to each subject. “Please fill out this simple questionnaire within the next forty-eight hours, and drop it back by here when it’s convenient. I’m usually in the lab from nine in the morning until dark. And speaking of which, it’s past that now. Good evening to you both.”

Outside the student library there was a garden of rubberized white metal benches, abstract art in hammered bronze, and juniper bushes. Three flagpoles clanged in the night, devoid of their banners. Bats scoured the skies for insects.

Trish and Lindsey sat on one of the white benches together. Lindsey was having a difficult time finding a way to sit that didn’t crush his new male member. Only one or two memorably bad attempts was enough to convince him that the queasy, gut-twisting feeling was definitely to be avoided. Trish sat beside him, with her slender arm around his shoulders.

“I’m the man now,” Lindsey whispered. “I ought to have my arm around you.”

“I have to keep up appearances,” Trish murmured back. “I don’t want any of my boys finding out I’ve been to see Ripley again. Something might happen.”

“Don’t you want something to happen? Wasn’t that why you came?”

“Yeah, bud, you got it,” Trish said quietly. “In my own way, in my own time. The first time, I didn’t have that. Everybody knew I was a girl, so everybody in the frat thought he was gonna be the one. No, sir.”

They sat together in silence, listening to the sound of frogs and crickets singing in the bushes. A cold night breeze rustled the junipers and made the lanyards on the flagpoles clatter.

Trish nudged Lindsey. “What did you want to have happen?”

He allowed himself some time to put the sentence together in his head so it sounded right. There was something very . . . private about the way men thought, Lindsey reflected, that allowed them — us — to say things just the way we wanted. And Trish had been there before, too, and she knew how important it was to allow a man — I’m a man! — time to mull things over. “I guess,” Lindsey said, “I was really trying to figure out why Jack dumped me. How he could be such a . . . an asshole sometimes. I want to know if it’s something I did, or something all guys do, or just . . . Jack.”

“My money’s on it being just Jack,” Trish said. “I’ve seen him from two perspectives now, and let me tell you, bud, I’ve never met a guy like him.”

“Bud?” Lindsey asked. “You called me bud.”

“Yeah. What? I call all guys bud.”

Lindsey gave a grunt of satisfaction. “An hour ago you were calling me babe.”

“I call girls babe,” Trish said, and admitted, “I’m terrible with names.”

They said in silence for a few moments, listening to the night. From somewhere near the dorms came the sounds of competing stereo systems, muddled lyrics and bass tones carried on the breeze. Lindsey put his hand on Trish’s thigh. “Hey, do you suppose your boys will all be asleep by now? You think you can get in without anybody noticing you?”

“I dunno. It’s Friday night. They might all be out at the bar. Anyway, I have this big coat. I’ll sneak in the front door, I don’t think they’ll notice. The guys probably won’t,” Trish amended. “Denise . . . I figure Denise will notice. If she doesn’t, I’ll tell her, and ask her to keep it a secret. For one thing, somebody’s got to know, just in case anything happens. Denise will have my back. We used to be roommates for the last six months, in the bedroom on the top floor.”

“Yeah, they might all be out,” Lindsey said. It was strange to think with a man’s brain, hard to concentrate on thoughts he was thinking and at the same time listening to the chatter coming from Trish. He was sure he hadn’t heard half of it, but he had to choose between hearing her, or having a space in his head to think in. How odd.

“What do you think about that?” Trish was asking him. Think about what? Had he missed something? “You wanted to get the hang of being a man, right? I’ve got clothes you can borrow. Or no, you said you were going to tell the girls at the sorority.”

“I’ll tell them, yeah,” Lindsey nodded. “Hey, I have an idea. Maybe we should go out tonight and hit the Comstock. We’ll split up. I’ll go get some of the girls at Delta Sigma Tau, if there’s any around, and you get some of your . . . uh, girls, and boys. We’ll make an evening of it.”

Trish just looked amused. “I just said that. Didn’t you hear me?”

Lindsey laughed, in sheepish wonderment. “My God,” he said. “I didn’t hear that at all. How cool is that?”

“You really are a guy,” Trish said, squeezing his shoulder.

“Patrick!” squealed Denise, upon seeing Trish enter the Delta Eta Rho chapter house. She bounded down the stairs in a thunder, her breasts bobbling in her tight scoop-neck shirt, and threw her arms around Trish’s neck. Denise gave her several enthusiastic kisses, on the lips and on the cheek, and squeezed her lush torso against the shapeless disguise of Trish’s ski jacket. “You sexy man, you. Come back to ravish me, are you?”

“You know it, baby,” Trish said, reaching around for Denise’s ass. Denise had come down the stairs bare-legged, wearing only a pair of boys’ boxers below. Trisha tried her best to make her voice sound the same as it had before. It was impossible to tell if there were any of the other Deltas at home, or awake, but Trish felt very fortunate that the mild transformation hadn’t — at least in her case — been accompanied by a dramatic shift in the timbre of her voice. If any of her frat brothers were listening, they might not suspect a thing. “Come to papa, babe, because Patrick is in the house.”

Denise kissed him again on the lips, and drew back with a puzzled expression that lasted only a fleeting instant. “Come on upstairs,” she said, dragging Trish’s hand. “I want to show you something.”

The curvaceous brunette with the perfect Greek face dragged Trish up the stairs to the second story, and left into what had once been Trish’s and Denise’s shared room. It was, at the moment, in elegant disarray; it must be laundry day. Denise shut the door behind them, put her back against it, and held up one finger to her lips.

“Shhh,” Trish said, mirroring the gesture. “Don’t tell anybody.”

“Well, fuck me. You went and got femmed again?” Denise said in a delighted whisper.

“Yeah,” the black woman said with a curt nod. “Yeah, I figured, why should you have all the fun?”

“So,” Denise said, giving Trish’s body a lascivious once-over. “Are we going to get out the strap-on again?”

“You shut up, babe,” Trish said in a quiet, mock-threatening voice. “You better not let any of the guys know that I’m all babed up again. And definitely not Jack, you hear me? I am not giving Jack a piece of ass and that’s final.”

“Ugh, me neither,” Denise said with a shiver. “Not any more, I mean. He’s really not that good in bed.”

“Yes, you told me.”

“So who’d you get changed with? Who was your partner?”

“You’ll never believe.”

“Who?”

Trisha grinned, suddenly amused to realize that this was indeed like old times: two girls sharing the latest secrets and gossip in the sanctity of the girls’ bedroom. “You remember last year, Adrian was telling us about how Jack Munn broke up with a girl so he could hook up with Brandy?”

“Yes, Lindsey,” Denise said, recalling the name instantly, and a moment later her eyes widened. “Lindsey Wallace? Fuck me, she was your partner? Oh, wow! Did she come out really handsome as a guy? I might have to give her a test drive.”

“Give him a test drive,” Trish corrected her. “He’s definitely a guy now. And you’ll get to meet him.”

“When?”

“Tonight. At the Comstock, at ten. Hurry up, get some clothes on. I need Adrian’s number, too — it’s Friday, you think he’s got a date?”

“Adrian, are you kidding? He’s probably studying. I’ll get dressed,” Denise directed her friend, “and you call Cassie and Adrian.”

“You really did it,” Andrea Newton said in frank admiration. “You crazy bastard, you really did it.”

Lindsey had reported back to the girls at Delta Sigma Tau as soon as he could, and had immediately told all the girls that were there. It was secret, he assured them — it was not to be generally known that Lindsey had gotten himself made male, although the secret could not be kept forever. Tomorrow perhaps, or Sunday, after he had had an opportunity to beg or borrow some men’s clothing, would be the proper time to announce his sudden change. Tonight, there was no time; he would simply have to make do with baggy shapeless clothing and a little excess padding. Ripley’s machine hadn’t altered his long walnut-colored locks or even disarrayed his ponytail. He even wore traces of the makeup he had applied a million years ago that morning.

The shoes — the shoes had to go. He would need something better, soon.

Not many of the Sigma Tau girls had been at the chapter house at nine thirty when he arrived home, breathless from running. However, Lindsey admitted, the right girls had been home. Roberta he had expected to see; she hadn’t had a solid date since the unfortunate experience with Aaron. Even on a likely Friday night in March when half the campus would be hitting the town, Roberta would be withdrawn into her room, reading her books. Jane Austen was this month. Privately, Lindsey suspected those old romances were a bit below Roberta’s reading level, but sometimes old favorites died hard. Lindsey hadn’t read Austen since ninth grade.

And if Roberta Graves were home, the odds were very good that Andrea Newton would be, too. They were rarely apart. Once in a great while, Andrea could coax her best friend into more decorative attire, and haul her out to a wild evening of dancing and flirtation. Often, too, Andrea would have to drag Roberta back and put her to bed; Andrea was the experienced drinker that Roberta apparently was not.

Much to Lindsey’s surprise and great delight, sorority sister Brandy Booth was also here, studying rational expressions and negative exponents with some of her fellow Sigma Taus. Say what you would about Brandy’s overly generous fleshy assets, or her exaggerated adopted feminine behavior, she had a terrific mind for mathematics.

Brandy, it turned out, was more than delighted to see Lindsey in male form. So delighted, in fact, that she bounced to her feet the moment she spotted him and leapt into a clutch with him, her legs wrapped around Lindsey’s midsection. He was face to face with Brandy’s perfect features and plump ruby lips, his hands supporting her thighs. Lindsey’s chin was buried in her bosom, putting the scent of her bodily perfume right into his nostrils. His loins began to throb, and then ache. Damn this underwear, he thought. It was never designed for this.

On the heels of that thought, Lindsey thought, At least now I can see what Jack sees in her.

“You look great,” Brandy gushed at him, kissing him with abandon. “I can totally tell you went and had it done. You are so handsome. Jack will be jealous.”

Jack, jealous? Lindsey smiled to himself. It’s not likely. Jack never notices anybody else. But then again, stranger things have happened.

Roberta was watching from the doorway of the kitchen, wrapped in a bathrobe. She had obviously just come from an evening shower, just before bed, but had postponed her nightly ritual to observe the excitement. “So what was all this about getting dressed?” she asked.

“What do you feel about going to hit the Comstock tonight?” Lindsey asked them. As he placed Brandy back on her own two feet, he noticed in the back of his mind how all his sorority sisters fell strangely silent whenever he spoke. The background conversations stopped, the chatter died away, and all the women paid excruciating attention to the words he was saying. It was something about a male presence, he decided. He vaguely remembered being similarly attentive when men spoke . . . before. Now, he was at the center of the silent circle.

“Tonight?” Andrea said brightly. “Let’s do it! Come on, Bobbie, let’s get you dressed again.”

“We’re going right now?” Roberta asked, drifting haltingly toward the stairs.

“Yes, get dressed, we’re going right now,” Lindsey told the girls in a commanding voice, and he was amazed how gratifying it was to see all of them immediately go. Roberta gathered her bathrobe around her waist and went immediately upstairs. Andrea gathered her teacup and saucer and dashed them to the kitchen sink before racing to her own bedroom. Brandy gave him one quick, luscious kiss and departed.

How very odd, Lindsey thought. I could get used to this.

Cassie and Denise were already a big hit with the boys at the tavern by the time the girls of Sigma Tau arrived. Most of them recognized the two converted Delta Girls from their famous website pictorials, and those that didn’t were quickly educated — smartphones emerged from pockets and favorite photos were shared. Trisha, too, was recognized, but in a lesser way; she came to the Comstock dressed in the most flatteringly masculine clothes that she owned, to conceal her feminine curves, and she glowered as imperiously as she could. Her arms were still athletic, her tattoos and jewelry still prominent, and her manner was still imposing. Her mere posture assured all of the men that she had definitely reverted back to manhood after six months, and anybody who wished to debate that point was more than welcome to be introduced to the barroom floor.

It was all about poise and presence, and Trish — male or female — had buckets of it.

No one took any particular notice of Adrian.

Jack Munn was here with some of the Delta officers. They were his cronies, or perhaps he was one of theirs; Jack was thick as thieves with the charismatic layabout Paul Hanna and the burly, bald Jeremy Cranbrook. At the moment they were drinking Killian’s Irish Red and attempting to play 501 at the dartboard, with varying degrees of success. Jack was grandly dispensing his expert darts-champion tips to Paul and Jeremy as they attempted to propel bent-tipped unbalanced bar darts into an electronic scoreboard. At the moment, Jack was winning, because he talked a much better game than either of his friends played it.

When Brandy, Andrea, Roberta and Lindsey arrived fashionably late for their ten o’clock meeting with the girls from Delta, the girls’ first impression of Jack and his mates was that of smoldering jealousy. In between demonstrating his dart prowess, Jack Munn kept throwing hateful glowers across the bar at the Delta girls. Brandy, Andrea and Roberta immediately sensed that Cassie and Denise were attracting far more attention to themselves than Jack was happy with. To them, it was written on his face: He, Jack, was not granted the pleasure of sleeping with these gorgeous ladies, ladies in his very own harem, so why should anyone else get the pleasure of their company? The girls nudged Lindsey and, with their eyes, attracted his attention to the corner dartboard where Jack held court. Lindsey glanced that way, nodded.

His first impression: Jack is holding that dart in his right hand.

“I know those guys,” Roberta was shouting in a loud voice, to be heard over the jukebox. Even when she shouted, Lindsey could barely hear her over the din of packed people and thumping music. She tried gesturing at one of the young men hanging around the Delta girls to make her meaning clear. “That’s Eddie Long and that’s Rick Marx. They’re in Phi Eta Omega. I used to hang out with some of them.”

“Phi, isn’t that right next door to Delta?” Brandy shouted back.

“Yes,” Roberta said, with an exaggerated nod. “I’m going to go say hello.”

Roberta had tried to say something else to them, but had slipped off into the noise of the crowd. Lindsey, Andrea and Brandy tried to elbow their way in the direction of the Delta girls’ table in her wake. Most of the men were so intent upon the famous girls Cassie and Denise, and their glowering bodyguard Trish, that they weren’t prepared to part even for the buxom Brandy. Lindsey could see Roberta across a small gap in the crowd, chatting and smiling with Eddie and Rick, sharing a few jokes, shouting in one another’s ears. There was no way to make out what they were saying, but they were obviously well acquainted.

Brandy turned to Lindsey and Andrea and leaned in close. “Real friendly. You think she’s sleeping with one of those guys?”

Andrea shook her head in a definite negative; Lindsey shrugged. “Who knows?” he yelled back.

The crowd was suddenly jostled sharply to Lindsey’s right, as people were being shoved. Someone fell down, by the look of things; a head had disappeared. Cassie and Denise hadn’t noticed, they were chatting away with their circle of admirers, but through the press of faces one particular set of Slavic features hove into view. Jack Munn had left his darts and his beer behind and had ventured into the crowd.

“Hey, Linz,” Jack shouted amiably. He face was flushed, his eyes too bright; he was obviously the worse for his bout with a pitcher of Killian’s Irish Red, and his attempt to stand straight only ended up with a slight list to starboard, braced by the bodies in the crowd. “Nice to see you around, Linz. Great.”

“What’s shaking, Jack?” Lindsey shouted, putting no pleasure into the greeting. He was dressed in some of his female attire, the skirt and sweater he thought most capable of concealing his new physique. Jack’s roving, drunken eye made an obligatory roundabout over the surface of Lindsey’s body, and he wondered if Jack might not spot anything amiss. Probably not. Jack would be seeing two of everything by this point.

“I just hadda come over here,” Jack said, swaying on his feet, “to make a point. These guys,” he said, gesturing with his bottle, “are over here making time with our women. Delta women. Seems kinda wrong to me.”

“Who cares what you think, Jack?” Lindsey shouted back.

He didn’t hear her. His eyes had been drawn to the sight of Roberta, edging back through the crowd toward Lindsey, Andrea and Brandy. “Lookit you,” he said. “You were pretty all friendly with those guys. Friends of yours? I bet friends. Friends of yours. If they’re gonna be hitting up our women, then maybe me and my guys should be hitting up on their women. Right?”

“Fuck yeah!” said a face near Jack’s. It belonged to a tall young blond man with a blotchy face and bloodshot eyes. The tall blond took a useless swig from his empty mug. “You tellin’ ’em, that’s Jack.”

Lindsey was beginning to feel a tightness across his chest, a growing response to the rising danger. Something was going to happen. His triceps were thrumming, his quadriceps twanged. He found that instead of finding ways to retreat through the crowd, he was looking for ways to step forward and intercede — between Roberta and Jack, between Andrea and Jack. He could do nothing for Brandy; she was right on top of the drunken lout.

The noise of the crowd was beginning to subside as people began to notice the potential for mayhem in their midst. Eddie and Rick pushed their way into the widening circle around Lindsey and the girls, a circle that just barely included the Delta girls’ table on one side, and Jack and his inebriated friends on the other.

“Something wrong, big guy?” Eddie asked in a deep, rumbling voice.

“I don’t think you want to be holding your mug that way,” Rick agreed. “Somebody’s gonna get hurt.” He punctuated the polite threat with an outstretched index finger: you.

Amazingly, Jack was still standing. “I was talking to my girl,” he said defiantly. “Me and all my buddies. That’s my girl,” he added, pointing unsteadily in the direction of Brandy’s breasts. The finger pointed toward Lindsey. “That’s my other girl. Used to be. I dumped her, got me a better one. Bigger tits on her, see ’em?”

Eddie and Rick didn’t see much of a threat to Jack, but this unknown number of friends was worrisome. They were only two. “What were you doing, coming over here and picking on these girls for?” Eddie said. It was no longer necessary to shout. Only the jukebox was playing, and one die-hard pinballer.

“What do you care? You had a couple of girls over there,” Jack said.

“Roberta’s a friend of ours,” said Rick unsteadily. “You best not pick being on her unless you want to go home wearing your ass in a hat.”

Oh God, a drunken brawl, Lindsey thought. How charming.

“Fuck you guys,” Jack said. “No law against coming over and hittin’ on some girls. I’ma take me that one.” He directed a finger in Roberta’s direction, deliberately. His leer was meant to provoke. “What are you gonna do, huh? S’only two of you guys.”

“Dude. Fuck,” said the tall blond guy next to Jack. “You and Brandy. Come the fuck you want her, when you got Brandy?”

“You want Brandy? You can have her,” Jack said, as Roberta ground her teeth together. Jack added in uninspired drunken wit, “Shit, everybody else has.”

This was too much for Lindsey. He could not remain silent. “You call him your boyfriend,” he said, his voice shaking with rage, “and he calls you a slut?”

Brandy’s smile was dangerously brittle. “Oh, Jack and I have an open relationship,” she taunted him. “I sleep with anybody I want, and he sleeps with anybody he can get. And that,” she continued with a nasty little grin, “isn’t much at all.”

Jack’s flushed face was turning purple.

“Wait, hang on,” Eddie said. “He’s not sleeping with those girls over there? Those Delta porn star girls?”

“Of course not,” Lindsey retorted. “They’ve met him.”

“Oh, fuck this noise,” Jack said, starting to froth. “That is e-fucking-nough. Paul, Jeremy? You too, Adrian. Patrick. Get your asses over here. It’s time we put these fuckers on the floor.”

At the call for Delta backup, Lindsey’s eyes leapt from Jack’s red, angry face on his right to Adrian’s wary defensiveness to Trish’s sudden fear on the left. Trish, fight? Jack was calling upon Trisha, thinking to get Patrick’s strong arms and quick fists, and all he was going to do was make Trish a target. Jack’s buddy Paul, the tall Dane with the blotchy face, was beyond drunk and near to the stage of blackout. Jeremy, whoever he might be, was nowhere to be seen. Cassie was trying to put her tiny fist into her mouth. Denise appeared strangely excited. Brandy looked like she could spit venom. As for Rick and Eddie, off to Lindsey’s left, by the time they staggered toward the center of the circle, Jack could easily start swinging and hit any number of Lindsey’s friends. Andrea. Brandy. Trish.

Would Jack hit a girl? Lindsey decided that Jack most certainly would. But not if I hit first.

He stepped out from between Roberta and Andrea just as Jack put up his fists. Lindsey felt his own hands curling automatically into powerful weapons.

“Hey, Jack,” he said in even tones. “It sure was good to see you tonight.”

Jack tried a punch with his right hand — he’s holding the dart in his right hand — and Lindsey brushed it aside like he had known it was coming. Then came the right, one punch straight from this masculine shoulder. It’s probably going to hurt, but don’t think about that right now, he told himself, as time slowed to a crawl. Think about the girl, completely shit-faced, half-closed eyes, giggling helplessly as Jack hauls drunken ass out of the bar, her ruby lips pronouncing slurred protests . . .

That could have been me. It might have been me.

As Lindsey’s fist connected solidly with the side of Jack’s head, as he watched Jack’s eyes roll to the whites and his head nod to the right, as Jack fell stiffly backward as if he had been lowered on a board, Lindsey thought: But not today.

Jack hit the floor of the Comstock like the last falling domino clattering to a halt. The sight of him sprawled out there on the hardwood, Lindsey decided, was the most glorious sight he’d ever seen.

Later, Lindsey and Trish were sitting together in the kitchen at Delta Sigma Tau. Brandy had helped to bandage Lindey’s hand — his middle finger had been cut by one of Jack’s front teeth — and gone to sleep on the sofa. He could hear her regular breathing, and she was even so unladylike as to snore gently.

“So,” Trish murmured to him. She stood behind Jack’s chair, her small breasts pressed against the back of his head, her ebony arms draped across his collarbone. “You’ve made a decision about Brandy, then?”

Lindsey looked over at the sleeping girl, his voice low. He hadn’t moved his head quickly, lest he disturb Trish from her oddly comforting from-behind embrace. “I guess I have. I don’t see any reason to insist that we punish Brandy for what Jack did to her. She can stay here next fall.”

Trish’s tones were approving. “I’m glad.”

“How did you know about that? That Brandy was applying to live here.”

“She’s my friend too. Besides,” Trish added, patting his chest, “we have a few things in common. What Jack did to us, for one.”

Lindsey nodded carefully, and after a moment, he said, “You know, it’s not like I expected.”

“What isn’t?”

“I don’t know. Everything. Being male, meeting Brandy. Somehow I got the idea that Ripley’s machine was responsible for all of this, but it isn’t. I wanted to blame Brandy for me losing Jack, but when you get right down to it, Jack was worth losing.” Lindsey rubbed his aching right hand. The initial punch hadn’t hurt a bit, but now that it was over and his endorphins were being metabolized, those knuckles were barking like dogs. Next time he would punch someone with a head less hard than Jack’s. Everyone in the world, he thought, ought to qualify.

“At least you’re jumping right in and doing it right from the start,” Trish said quietly. “I never did. I tried to resist as long as I could. I’m still not sure I want to go through with it. Guys fighting over girls, it seems so . . . stupid.”

“Denise liked it. I think she was getting turned on by it, actually.”

“That girl gets turned on by everything, bud,” Trish snorted. “Believe me, I know.”

“You would.” Lindsey gave it some thought. “Are you going to go back to doing porn?”

“Maybe. Only if I need the money. I might not have to keep it a secret now. It all depends on Jack. He might be a little wiser about which girls he hits on.”

Lindsey laughed. “Don’t count on it. Jack’s always been Jack.”

The black woman leaned down and gave the top of Lindsey’s head a kiss. “You know what?”

“What?” He took one of her small hands in his big left one, the uninjured hand.

“I was just thinking,” Trish said. “About the way you did things tonight. Jumping in with both feet. That was . . . that was amazing.”

“It felt good, yeah.”

“I bet it did. I would have done it myself, only I seem to be missing some muscles right about now.”

“Sorry about that.” Lindsey kissed Trish’s hand, and let it go. “Anyway, go on.”

“There’s still one thing I never did when I was a girl, the first time,” Trish suggested softly. Her hands, freed, began to rub soothing circles on Lindsey’s muscled chest as she bent lower and lower. Her breath was on the side of his throat, now. “And there’s one thing you gotta do, bud, if you want to conquer all these manly activities on your very first day.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

That’s when Trish reached down just a little farther and showed him what she meant.

3 comments:

AnonymousFebruary 25, 2011 at 2:16 AM
I like the way that you write, and I enjoy your story so far. Sometimes your continuity is a little off, but not distractingly so. A very interesting premise, which has lots of possibilities!
RouletteFebruary 25, 2011 at 8:21 AM
Thank you, I appreciate the feedback. Continuity is easy to repair; should anything leap out at you x don't hesitate to mention it, and I can clarify or adjust it.
Berserkasaurus RexSeptember 24, 2014 at 3:26 PM
This is very late in coming, but I have to say this was a very good read. It isn't often that I read a whole story in one sitting. I'll be checking out the earlier stories in this little series shortly.

TG isn't always my thing, but you have genuinely fleshed out characters, and that's a rare thing. The story itself is just excellent and very fun. Pity I didn't find this years ago. Thanks!

- B-Rex, aka Tabitha Kohls http://degradeddamsels.blogspot.com and http://humbledharlots.blogspot.com/

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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Prisoner's Dilemma: Nor Hell a Fury Like a Woman Scorned

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