Constant: Book 5, Chapter Sixteen (Patreon)

The redraft of the final chapter of Book 5. Quite a few changes, especially towards the end. As always, feedback, criticism and comments welcome!

***

Sixteen: The Man at the Keyhole

There was a driver waiting at the car.

            “Jan,” she said, inclining her head. She was a stocky woman with a deep, serious voice, wearing a fitted suit, with short-cropped lavender hair and a solid, stern face offset by a quick smile and light touch of purple lipstick, peach eyeshadow, long dangling earrings in her right ear, gold studs in the left. Late twenties or early thirties, with a kind and patient smile. Also, a knowing twinkle in her eyes, an appreciative glance that lingered just a little too long, and I guessed she’d driven other fans of Sin-DI home, late after a show. She held the door open as I slid my ass into the rear seat and followed with my legs, knees together.

            “Where to, Miss?” she asked. The car pulled away from the arena. It was past midnight and beyond the lights of the venue it felt very dark. The sidewalks were empty, though a few late-night bars glowed warmly.

            Already, the surreal aura of Cynthia’s world was beginning to fade. “Please, call me Cindy,” I said.

            “Where to, Miss Cindy?”

            I laughed and told her my address.

            She raised a single, finely sculpted eyebrow. “What’s a nice girl like you doing living in a dump like that?”

            “You know it?”

            She eyed me speculatively in the rearview mirror. “It’s a shithole but there’s a few excellent dives down that way that cater to my kind of people.” With a light touch at the wheel, she zipped between two cars, accelerated past a massive transport, and glided onto the highway. “Got a lot of friends living down that way. A few of them a few blocks from your address.”

            “Rent’s cheap,” I said.

            “Yeah, there’s that. You know Bill’s?”

            “The diner?” I’d been a few times. It wasn’t really Cindy’s vibe, especially on workday evenings. My final visit, one late night after work, I sat there in my tight little pencil skirt and ivory, translucent blouse, exhausted and felt the hot, angry eyes of male patrons ranking me, judging me against their own internal scoreboard, and I weathered first their whispered inuendo, and then open suggestions, until finally the ignominy of a pat to the ass that lingerie far too long, followed by a sharp pinch that brought tears of frustration to my eyes, compelled me to leave. I knew that if I ever went back, a patron or three were eating countertop. Which was a pity, because the food was great. “Seedy little joint full of dickheads, smells of aniseed? Does a great burger?”

            “That’s the place.”

            “They’re closed down, right?”

            “Nah,” she said. “Just shut for a few months. Surprise health inspection. They found decapitated mice in the basement.” She laughed. “Kinda makes you wonder why the food tasted so good, doesn’t it?”

            I groaned.

            A moment of silence, in which she smoothly navigated across three lanes and onto an off ramp. Then, her eyes on me in the rearview mirror.

            “You look like her, you know.”

            A less glamourous Skin-DI, a pale reflection trapped in the windowpane against the darkness outside, nodded uncertainly. Despite her fresh makeup and glittering clothes, the girl I saw looked very tired. She chewed on her lower lip for a moment, touched her hair. “You think?”

            “Like a stage double. Or a sister.”

            “The pretty one, I hope,” I said.

            “I couldn’t possibly comment,” she said. “She’s my boss.”

            Then some tricky traffic ahead demanded her full attention. Leaning into the seat, the day’s exhaustion settled deep into my bones. Cynthia’s words rolled around in my head, dreamlike. You look like her. Who I am. What the fuck is happiness? That kid had dreams. From there to here. Woman with a man inside. Watching. Male fantasy. Points on the same spectrum. Tie me up! What price. That first morning. Devil on my back. Sin-DI. Cynthia. Harry. Sexy bitches. Old bastard. The memory of a young boy alone in a tiny room reaching out for attention and for love.

            White and red lights blurred, fragmented and melted in the window. Something stirred inside of me and wrapped itself around my heart.

            I reached for my phone, put it down.

            Instead, I tapped the embedded screen in the seat in front of me. It lit up, set to breaking news on a loop. Volume set to zero, reporters gesturing, vivid headlines. Mars Mission a Success. Captain Jake Herald, first man on Mars. Closeup of a heavy footprint in dirt. The next great step for mankind. Drone footage of a lander, a planted flag, slow-moving figures in bulky suits against an alien landscape.

            Then more scrolling headlines, recapping earlier news. Luck salvages Mei Zheng’s reckless gamble. Images followed: bright aerobraking flares against the dark of space; the ship’s hull glowed red, hazy horizon skewing crazily in the background. The precise moment the crew touched down. Men in a dark control room and expensive suits cheering, shaking bottles, and those bottles then popping, fizzing, spraying white cream across boardrooms, control rooms, everything in sight, a celebration of Man’s ingenuity and determination.

            I turned it off.

            Soon, we left the major roads for local roads that grew increasingly familiar. Jan drove confidently. The noise and lights of the district enveloped us. Lurid neon and the bustle of late night bled across the road, the sidewalk, even at this time of night, spilling out of cheap diners, small dingy bars, underground clubs, the life of my district heard dimly through the windowpane.

            “Almost home, Miss Cindy.” Jan smiled. “Five minutes.”

            I hugged myself and stared out the window. “What time is it?”

            “Nearly two.”

            We stopped at a light and just outside the car, a couple were making out in an alcove, a man and a young woman, his hand high up under her skirt, she with one leg hitched around his waist.

            “Jan?”

            “Yes, Miss?”

            “Am I your kind of people?”

            She laughed. “I think maybe you are.”

            “You know those dives you told me about?”

            “Yeah?”

            “Take me to one,” I said.

***

And later as we lay in bed with arms and legs intertwined she traveled her fingers up my belly and played with my tits and I stroked her limp cock and thought how there’s a first time for everything, walking downstairs past faded posters of old gigs into the dark of an underground bar where after beers and slow dancing I felt a bulge under my flat palm and her wry, hesitant smile and now I played fingernails through tight coils of pubic hair and she dozed and through the open window cool night air and distant sounds of a city slumbering and then I dozed as well, untroubled by nightmares yet twisting and looping thoughts repeated again and again until dawn drove me to slip from between the sheets and head to the kitchen where I rinsed my mouth and made breakfast and brought it back to bed and Jan blinked blearily and she said God you’re a sight for sore eyes, and she said you’ll make a great wife someday and I blushed and felt unexpectedly warm hearing those words.

            Then she dressed and I said thank you for last night and she said you are, you know, and I asked, what and she stroked my head like you would a pet and said, the pretty one, the prettier sister and I said stop and she laughed and gave me a little smack on the bottom and that also made me feel warm and then she had to go and I felt an uncomfortable hollowness at being alone and then she was gone, I was on my own.

            And unable to avoid it anymore I sat down and stared out across the grey city steaming with morning winter cold and faced those final questions Sin-DI asked me and wondered, who are you? and I also wondered, what do you want? And the second question seemed the easier one, but it wasn’t, and in fact the two questions were really one question because how could I know what I want without knowing who I was?

            I was a man. Or rather, I wanted to be a man again. I imagined myself flat-chested, short-haired, with strong arms and a cock, like Jan, but why did I even have to imagine this when it should be easy to just remember and yet summoning that hanging presence between my legs felt like a dream that fades on waking, even as I yearned for everything the memory of manhood implied, the ability to move with ease through a world designed entirely to my needs, and to exist in space outside the demands of others.

            To be a consumer of fantasy rather than the fantasy itself; the man at the keyhole watching, not watched. And I wanted—to fuck—

            Standing then and shaking my head I returned to the bedroom and stripped the sheets stained by last night and picked up the toys we used and wiped and washed then down and left them standing to dry in a row by the sink and then tidied up after breakfast and this kept my mind busy, and when those tasks were done I looked across my little apartment and thought that it really needed a good clean, wasn’t it a good thing Jan came in the night and hadn’t seen just how dirty I’d let the place get, with condensation streaking the windows and black mold rising in the corners during those weeks chasing Quinn but also the weeks that followed, spending as little time alone as possible here and Jesus it showed, it stank, so embarrassing, and so I slipped into a pair of jogging pants and an old t-shirt, put my messy hair in a rough ponytail, and grabbing a bucket and some rags started to wash and wipe and scrub and was reminded of hands-and-knees work at Julia’s only there I’d been a tightly corseted maid and how fucked up was that, when you think of it, not just that she’d wanted to do that but that I went along with it, but then it’d also been fun and kinky as hell, and next thing I knew the sun was high in the sky and the room sparkled and I threw the windows open and I smiled, contented but the moment I sat down, I thought of Jan, her smooth skin and how differently her cock felt, smaller, softer, and also wetter, the slow constant weeping of her arousal, short sharp gasps as I went down on her and how her strong hands held my head so tightly as I lapped and sucked and it took a long time for her to come, though she kept urging me to keep going, yeah, you little minx, just like that, like that, and then she spurted in my mouth, thin and watery, the taste so different, a little sweeter maybe, and was mine like that now?

            Holding my hands over my tummy, pressing down hard on the discomfort I felt there, I moved to the bedroom and saw it was also a mess, so I dug out some clean bedding and made the bed and put away all my clothes for once, including the new ones Cynthia gave me, though finding room for everything was hard, there was too much to fit into one small closet and one medium sized dresser and the impossibility of organizing everything neatly gnawed at me, I hated the fact that I couldn’t just hang my dresses and skirts and tops neatly, or have them arrayed in drawers, easy to find, some items were buried away and I knew if I couldn’t see them, I wouldn’t wear them, but I also couldn’t bear the thought of selling them or giving them to charity, like this dress, it was the one I wore that night out with Chad, the memory of that night blossomed warmly in my chest but when would I ever wear it again?

            Then I tidied my little vanity with its clusters of bottled fantasies and femininity in tubes and vials, and in doing so found a lipstick I couldn’t remember buying or borrowing and sat at the vanity and held the tube up to the light, rolling it across my fingers and then I remembered, it came from Dan’s bathroom, and I never did figure out why he had a lipstick in his cabinet but the memories of that night washed over me, and I had to sit on my little stool for a minute until the feelings subsided.

            Then I vacuumed and grabbed a spray and wiped down the mirror and saw myself in it and wondered, do I really look like her, actually? because it was impossible to imagine Sin-DI in jogging pants and a baggy t-shirt with her hair in a messy ponytail scrubbing at a mirror, not without making it sexy somehow, I saw her as she was yesterday and I tried to mimic her pout, and blew a cute little kiss and saw my braless tits and her tits were bigger than mine, anyway, it didn’t seem fair, her with that life and me with mine alone in this little apartment, I bet I could’ve done it too given the choice, can you imagine, what a story that would’ve been, instead of hiding in Cindy’s little life, out there on stage instead, hidden in plain sight, and all those gorgeous clothes to wear, and what am I going to wear tomorrow, so I went to the closet and picked out an outfit for work, and then planned out the whole week, and thought how much easier it was when Julia made these choices for me, though also so embarrassing, but wasn’t it fun? at times and wasn’t the sex good? and I missed her terribly, chest suddenly tight and aching, and immediately hated myself for missing her and anger and sadness rose in equal measure as I stood trembling at the closet door, imagining an impossible future, one in which she and I put aside all the terrible things and somehow escaped to our own little place, just the two of us, a life within which the question of who I was and what I wanted both had their answer in her.

            And my phone pinged throughout all this and I avoided checking it and felt guilty for doing so, but I just couldn’t deal right now, I needed to be alone, but desperately didn’t want to be alone, and didn’t know if Emma was okay and it wasn’t fair to keep Mel and Willow waiting, they deserved an update on how the night went, and what if it was somebody else, or work calling, maybe even Mr. Connor and it was always Cindy, wasn’t it, people like her and miss her or want her but never David, nobody misses him not even Julia, who hates him, or Jeremiah Steele, who wants him dead and maybe even I didn’t miss him anymore, what had he ever been other than a placeholder between a long-dead boy and this girl in the mirror?

            Noticing my own stink then and nose wrinkling in disgust I took a long, hot shower, water pounding my skin, air so thick and heavy with steam my reflection in the mirror faded and the walls wept as I held my face up to the spray and stood empty of thought and then slowly started soaping myself only to pause with one hand on my breast, the other over my pussy and remembered when both were appliances, attached and my throat tightened and anger prickled my scalp and I wanted to tear the remaining prosthetic away and see what remains, what’s left of David and was that all there ever was to him? only to then wonder which would I miss more, if either was gone, the cock or the pussy?

            Gorgeous green eyes between my knees, and last night with those toys, oh, and that night with Mel, God I love that bitch, and Julia, fucking Julia, it started with her and if I’m honest, these tits aren’t so bad either, they’re quite fun, actually, when you get down to it, the way Jan’s eyes went wide with appreciation as I slipped out of the dress, and wasn’t Jonas like that, too, the first time and in the right hands, Mmm, the right touch to match a mood, gentle but also rough, through the bra or under it, nipples rolled pinched or pulled, yes, and slick now between the legs, just like that, yesss, sighed into streaming water with cheek pressed to the tiled wall, hair heavy with water, dusty izakaya closet and glossed lips in the dark, yes, and fingers thrusting, God, why am I such a slut, three times in less than a day, like some horny fucking kid but then aren’t I, in a way, young again, a bitch in her prime, hot and ready and then all these fragments of memories of the past year crested and crashed down as I touched myself a final time and I bit my lip so hard it bled, a mournful cry trapped in the shower as I sank to my knees with the hot water on my back and pussy pulsing its echoing pleasure.

            And I tried to feel the reality of what lay beneath my pussy, the twitch of a dormant cock, or a twinge of testicles; and felt nothing.

            Then with the water still pouring down over me I knelt at the bottom of the shower and tried to cry, but the tears wouldn’t come and then feeling ridiculous I stood again and washed properly this time, needing it after last night and my hair was a disaster, real bird’s nest after sleeping on Willow’s efforts and so I got to it, working the shampoo through twice and then conditioner and left it there as I first scrubbed myself down then lathered up and reached for the razor and started with my armpits and then the legs, and how crazy it is that we can send a woman to Mars yet on her return hand her a razor and demand she be pretty and smooth for the cameras, there’s got to be better ways of doing this, read about a pill the other week that suppresses follicle growth but no, because he’s worth it, for women effort counts and intent is everything, not just outcomes but the knowledge deep in your bones that all these hoops we jump through have a purpose far beyond simply looking or feeling our best, pressures far beyond my or any woman’s control and how the hell did this become my life, not fair it’s not fair and anger spiraling from my center, looping thoughts a pall descending over my eyes; and then the sharp sting.

            The thin dark line, blood beading along its length, high up on my thigh where in my inattention I’d cut myself, streaking red rivulets swirling in suds, those iridescent pearls welling up again, and with them dark thoughts, and I held the razor to my skin parallel to the first cut and pressed down to stem these feelings, this at least was within my control and the marks would be gone by tomorrow anyway and—

            I turned off the shower and patted myself dry and rubbed in lotion then shuffled back to the bedroom to get dressed and thought about how often I seemed to cry these days, that David never cried, but as a girl the tears always threaten and why was that?

            Though I never saw them cry, not once, not Persephone or Sakura and reaching back as far as I could remember, my mother, her face only dimly recollected, forehead wrinkled with annoyance, always angry.

            It’s this body, of course, my ID says I’m twenty but like Cynthia, actually younger, flooded with female hormones, and maybe that’s why I cry so often now, I thought, with my hair wrapped up in a towel, as I first rubbed in moisturizer and then sifted through all the lovely stuff Cynthia gave me and with a wry smile put aside the sparkly pink miniskirt, and the cropped t-shirt, and then did some simple makeup, a little concealer to cover up yesterday’s late night, a swipe of lipstick and gloss and mascara, and set my nails to glossy pink, and this was the minimum, really, couldn’t imagine myself stepping into public with anything less, and isn’t that kind of funny, I thought, as I brushed out and dried my hair, and then got dressed, going braless, tugging the top down over my chest, zipping up the skirt at the side, then threaded a pair of dangly earrings and slipped on a few bracelets at my wrist and then I posed in the mirror with one hand on my hip and forced a grin and then that’s when the tears came, actually, for some reason, I don’t know why but seeing myself cute as a fucking button with those slender arms and sleek bare thighs and that thin, angry red line, full lips and bright cheeks, I dunno, but everything Cynthia said came back and my chin wobbled and tears started to dribble down my cheeks.

            I tried to stem the tears with the heel of my hand. The tears kept coming.

            Shaking slightly, I walked back into the living room and felt the chill of a late December afternoon but didn’t dare turn on the heat because I couldn’t really afford it.

            I hugged myself and felt afraid.

            Next week I had my three month follow up appointment with the Clinic and I knew what they were going to say, some bullshit excuse, but they’d swap out the old pussy for a new one and send my back with an empty promise to check again in three months’ time, the lure of a new life, but this life would stretch out in perpetuity, like brightly colored lights strung out across some great public chamber, each year a flickering bulb, and I saw them glimmer and shine, twenty of them, or forty, and the bulbs at the end flared and went dark, and I couldn’t imagine anything beyond them.

            And I wanted what Emma wanted and what so many women want and that was to feel safe and after Tom hurt me and Quinn hurt me and others hurt me, I no longer felt safe.

            The room was dark now, I stood alone in it.

            And then I walked over to the balcony doors and opened them wide and stepped outside and felt the evening air flow over me, chill against feverishly hot skin. Now the city was lit up and many of those distant lights shone like those in my imagination.

            And I leaned against the balcony wall, a slab of poured concrete six inches deep, cold and dirty and stained by years of rainfall. Gritty beneath my palms. Rough bite against my skin. Leaning further forward and the dizzying distance to both the ground and a sky overcast and grim.

            All those stories reaching above and dropping below, delineated by windows and lights and the silent passage of unknowable shadows.

            With an easy hop, I stood on the narrow balcony wall. Barefoot, balanced precariously at the edge. Toes curling for purchase. With one hand I lightly gripped the adjoining wall.

            A wet wind whirled around me. Pink pleated flutter against my thigh. Whipping blonde halo, a dance of earrings. Chill air against a bare belly. Stray hairs, sticking to gloss.

            I swept those hairs free of my lips with a finger, held the skirt down with my other hand. Standing freely, I wavered. A sudden wind could push me either way.

            Could anyone see me, were they watching?

            Rushing in my ears, and the wind, and how my heart hammered in my chest! I saw stretched out below the sprawl of these suburbs with all their warrens and the glow as if by gaslight of backstreets I’d gotten to know too well and the seething lives of those like me who found themselves trapped on the edges of a center lit up with brittle luminescence.

            Last night I’d gone beneath those streets and danced under colored lights in the arms of a woman I barely knew in a space filled with women who were like me or like her and not at all like Cynthia or Sin-DI. She knew who she was and she was a blazing star on stage embodying a sensuous dream of youth and sparkling femininity.

            Everything I am, she said, you are: but she was wrong, Sin-DI, so fucking wrong because I am so very much more than some glittering ephemeral fantasy, I’m this cramped apartment on the outskirts of your city and I’m the damp basement shared by three other girls and I’m the dirty underbelly of a harborside club where the holographic memory of a man schemes and I’m sitting pretty and poor at a reception desk downtown under the watchful eyes of the office manager, and I’m the seething resentment of every single young woman sat at a desk or standing behind a counter, or at your table, or pushed to one side in yet another boardroom and forced to endure the unwanted stare and touch of some goddamn dickhead with a pot-belly and receding hairline expounding on her fucking ideas reworded through his smirking lips and I’m sexy and I’m young and I want nothing more than to watch the center burn to the ground, collapse in on itself as the dark, roiling periphery consumes it all from without.

            Spreading my arms wide, the city below flowed through me, wild excitement and a sudden, giddy sense of invulnerability.

            I howled into the night; my rage was torn away by the wind.

            Then I jumped, straight up. Twirled, a vertiginous moment suspended between extremes. In that moment, I could no more have not jumped than I could have suddenly and magically returned to being David.

            I landed, badly. The concrete balcony wall was slick with cold and rain. I slipped and felt a pop in my ankle. Crying out in pain, arms pinwheeling, I pitched backwards with a cry.

            And then I was falling backwards, away from the balcony.

            Grey skies skewing above, a break in the clouds, midnight sky beyond the city’s glow and now there were a few brights stars, impossibly bright. My stomach lurched, dropped, and I dropped with it.

            Then my body twisted, slammed into the wall and I dangled there, shoulder and arm burning, holding on by a single hand. Without conscious thought, I’d flung out my arm and by some instinct grabbed the balcony’s edge. Blood pounded in my ears and my breath came in ragged gulps.

            Closing my eyes, I took active control of my breathing. In. Out.

            A moment of calm descended as I hung by one hand a dozen stories up.

            Well, that was a fucking stupid thing to do.

            Still. Clearly, I did not want to die.

            I laughed, felt my fingers slip, bit back the laughter.

            This past year happened. And the years before. Cynthia asked me who I was. Like anyone, I was the person shaped by the things I had done and had done to me, the sum total of my lived experiences. There was no turning my back on my past. Maybe Cynthia felt it necessary to pronounce Harry dead. But I could not.

            A child, hated by his mother. The boy who ran away. An angry teen, falling in with a family of delinquents. The young man who fell in love with a woman and then watched that woman die and never left her side, Luke, still trapped in a small room beneath a naked lightbulb.

            David. Twenty years of pretending to be a normal man. Or rather, what he thought a normal man should be. Yeah, and how did that work out? Not once did he ever feel himself the man he ought to be, that what he wanted remained forever outside his reach. Instead, he’d filled the ache of absence in other ways. He wore a suit and went to work, fashionable shoes and an expensive watch. Earned promotions, made money and spent it on shit he tried so hard to believe made him a normal man. Chased distraction and the fleeting joy of giving and receiving pleasure with women. He sought in them an answer that had always laid within himself.

            Which brought him to Cindy and a year that redefined who I am, and so much of it had been good, even in its as most humiliating or shameful times there had been glimmers of joy or pleasure, sensed nestled in Dan’s arms, the comfort of Jonas’s bed, cherished in an embrace by Anna, and even at times Julia horrible obsessiveness that felt, for all its awfulness, like an expression of love and care in the only way she knew, as I taught her, and Tom’s unwitting abuse, Quinn’s rape, those things had happened and would forever remain a part of me and become part of the landscape of my being and I would walk those paths with all their twists and turns for the rest of my life.

            A life worth fighting for.

            A life that would not end until these slender fingers stretched around Jeremiah fucking Steele’s neck and squeezed until his eyes bulged from the socket and I felt the bones crack and pop beneath my grip and the flesh give way as I forced my thumbs deep into his throat and his larynx cracked and he drowned in his own blood and I watched the life leave his eyes.

            And all this rushed through me in a second or an hour, as I dangled ridiculously by one hand a dozen stories up from my balcony wall, and then grinning I reached up with my other hand, grabbed hold, and with a single fluid motion hauled myself up and over the wall and dropped to the balcony floor in a heap.

            I lay on my back with my ankle burning, arm aching, fingers raw and then I was laughing, laughing, laughing until my sides hurt at the ridiculousness of it all.

            Christ, had I always been such a drama queen?

            The wind rose and fell and I listened to the fleeting sounds of conversation that slipped free from open windows and to the shouts from far below, the barking of a dog and then the thin, shrill sound of a baby somewhere, crying out; a window slamming shut; and then silence but for the distant roar of traffic.

            Then, from within the apartment, the sound of my phone.

            I limped inside and locked the balcony door behind me. Whoever the caller was, they knew who would answer. It could be the girls or Darius or Jonas or Julia or Katherine Smith or maybe even Mr. Connor. Implied in every phone call was the identity of the person at both ends of a connection. This person calling me knew who I was, could define me in the moment.

            I could play the part they expected. I just had to answer the call.

            And the phone kept ringing.