Transformation Story: For Real - Part 1

This story has some similarities to 'In the Story' in that people's lives are transformed as a result of what is written in fiction.  In this case it is not simply Katherine but her friends who are also affected.

For Real

By Tang.

Part 1

Katherine slumped down in the armchair and looked around the room quite proudly.  She had moved into her new flat at the weekend and, in the evenings after work, had gone around unpacking each room one-by-one.  Then she had started shifting the furniture about until she felt satisfied.  Now everything was in place and plugged in.  She had even stocked up on groceries so that this weekend she could stay in the flat and revel in not having to wait for one of her housemates to finish in the bathroom or find that someone had drunk her last slurp of milk.  She was pleased that her hard work to get the promotion and the income to rent a place on her own had now paid off.  Quickly her mind spiralled through thoughts of having friends round, laying on dinners and then the thought of bringing a man back here; here to her own flat.  Katherine grinned at that dream.  Work had been dominant for the past few years since she had moved to London, but now she was in a better position and with the money to go with it, it would be good to revive her social life beyond the occasional drink after work with colleagues.

Reflecting on the dating website she had heard a woman of her age raving about while she was travelling to work on the underground the other morning, Katherine went over to her laptop and fired it up.  It had taken a couple of days and lengthy phonecalls to get the wireless provision actually working, but she was glad that it was now all resolved.  Soon the computer was coming to life, but rather than her usual homepage, something different appeared on the screen and Katherine was frustrated to think her computer had caught a virus.  She sought a way, at least, to close down the page that was showing.  As she tried, Katherine was stunned at what she saw on the website.  Of course, it was not her habit to spend time checking out the online details of escorts for hire.  However, this went further because the woman on show was clearly her friend Emma, though now she was Lady Ember - dominatrix.  In these images Emma’s distinctive red hair was bound into a plait rising high from her head and reaching to her waist.  She was dressed in the classic style: a leather corset, spiked collar and long opera gloves, plus matching boots that reached to her thigh; had platforms and long sharp heels.  Everything was in dark red leather.  As Katherine scrolled through the images she saw Lady Ember dominating a string of men, clearly relishing her job.

Katherine finally clicked the website closed.  She waited but it did not reappear.  She pressed to switch on the virus scanner to root out whatever had got on to her machine.  As she watched its bar progress and the names of files flashing up, she felt uneasy.  She recalled what she had seen on the website.  Could it have been real?  Was it a joke, something malicious or did Emma actually have this secret life?  Had she somehow engineered this so that Katherine would find out without her having to speak about it?  A whole host of ideas ran through Katherine’s mind.  Then her worries deepened as she remembered the story she had written some months earlier.  She recalled passing time sitting in a hotel room when she had travelled to see a supplier in northern England.  Being in a dull, functional town and becoming bored of what was on television, plus the erratic nature of the wireless connection, she had begun to write a story on the hotel stationery.  She remembered the frisson she had got as she had begun to add sexual elements.  She had been intrigued by an interview with a dominatrix in a newspaper she had picked up on the train and those aspects had come into the story.  Had it been intentional that she had given the dominatrix in her story the name Emma?  Perhaps it had been something a little naughty: to cast the most timid of her friends into such a overtly sexual role.  Maybe she had struggled with little inspiration around her to think up a name for the woman she had portrayed as being steadily drawn into being a dominatrix.

Perhaps she was making a mistake.  Maybe it was simply her imagination or her tiredness that was making her think this woman was Emma.  She pulled out her phone and scrolled through her list of numbers.  Alongside the number she recognised as being her Emma’s she found ‘Ember’.  Now Katherine felt concern.  How was this the case?  It seemed that the woman she thought of Emma was indeed a friend of hers, but somehow, rather than working in a health food shop, she was in fact a dominatrix.  All the evidence Katherine could see seemed to confirm that that was the truth.  Had she been mistaken all along?  Was the image she had of Emma with homemade sweaters and long skirts, a calm vegetarian, entirely wrong?  Had she simply imagined that for a story?  It was all pretty confusing.  It did not seem impossible.  Katherine had known Emma since university, why should they have not stayed in contact even if she had gone into the sex industry?

Katherine wondered if she had been working too hard.  Travelling up and down the country on business and now seeing to all of the arrangements for moving into this flat had probably worn her out.  Perhaps she needed to get away from spending too much time on her computer and get some fresh air.  Quickly Katherine pulled on her trainers and her duffel coat.  She decided to head to the local district shops and become familiar with the area.  She had already seen that there was a café down there that looked decent.  She told herself she should head down there and chill out; read the newspapers or simply watch the world go by.

Outside, Katherine felt many of her concerns subside.  She walked casually along the residential street, past blocks of flats pretty much like her own interspersed with larger houses.  She gazed at all around her, somewhat enjoying the area’s mundane nature.  Whenever her thoughts strayed back to the website and how it connected with her stories she chased the ideas away.  She would search for her stories once back in her flat; she was sure she could turn them up.  As she saw some bins still left out from the day before, Katherine now worried that maybe she had been too late.  Yesterday had been the recycling collection day.  She remembered throwing out lots of odds and ends; by accident had her various stories have gone out bundled up with that stuff?  Were they already being turned into pulp to make new paper?  She had no idea how the process worked.  They might simply be sitting in some recycling plant perhaps many miles away.  In either case they would be lost to her.  As she thought about she was sure she could recall the details and, in large part, reproduce them.  This time she could put them on her computer for safe-keeping.  Katherine stopped herself: was there any point?  The stories had been written simply to pass the time; to douse some of the frustration she felt when in anonymous hotels away from home.  Was it not in fact a little sad to write out her fantasies like a girl?

Katherine was brought back from her thoughts by the throaty roar of a large motorbike drawing up in a car park across the road.  She could not remember seeing this place before, but then again, there had not been anything to attract her attention to it.  Now, however, she saw a group of bikers standing around large machines.  There were probably approaching twenty assembled there and she imagined they were gathering here before heading out of London, perhaps down to the coast.  She had no idea whether these were Hells Angels or weekend wannabes.  The leather, the long beards and the size of these men made her feel afraid no matter what their intentions.  Moving between them were women, a mixture of ages from their early twenties to late forties.  They fitted in perfectly: their denim, leathers and logos matching those of the men she guessed they were partnered with.  The latest arrivals were a couple.  The man stepped down from his long gleaming machine and pulled off his helmet.  He was tall and looked well built, rather than running to a beer belly as was the case with many of his comrades.  He had long dark hair but it was clean and tidy and his beard was trimmed.  There was something about him that to Katherine suggested a nobility - this was a ‘knight of the road’.  Katherine was interested to see what kind of woman he might have attracted.  Long flame red hair was already apparent before she removed her helmet.  She wore skin-tight leather trousers laced up both sides and a proper leather biker jacket not one of these fashion replicas; the club’s insignia emblazoned across the back.  Studs glistened at her left shoulder and elbow.  As she unzipped it Katherine saw it simply sat over a leather waistcoat.  Intricate floral tattoos emerged from beneath it.  As the biker woman swept back her hair, a row of rings were apparent up her ear, a stud, glinting at her nose.  As the woman turned, however, almost as if glancing over to where Katherine stood transfixed, the woman looked to be Lucy, another of her old friends.

Katherine felt as if the pavement was spinning beneath her.  She found it difficult to process what she was witnessing and worried for her sanity.  Steadying herself against a lamp-post, Katherine found she could not look away.  Katherine felt she had to make sure that what she had seen was not a mistake.  The young woman was now deep in a kiss with her man, riding his leather-coated thigh thrust between her legs.  Then they broke.  The woman swept back her long hair from her face once more, in the way that was characteristic of Lucy.  It was not evidence enough, but added to the weight of what Katherine believed was seeing.  She continued as the bikers chatted.  The woman that looked like Lucy; who she was increasingly sure was Lucy, clung to her man as if she really needed to be with him.  Slowly Katherine recalled how this story had come about.  It had been when Lucy, not renowned for anything stylish beyond a new business suit, had coloured her hair.  Not to the bright red she now wore, but something bolder than usual.  Had she not also admired a gleaming motorbike parked outside the restaurant they had visited with Natasha and Rebecca?  From such small references Katherine had created a story, one, which it seemed, however impossible it might be, she had now truly thrown her friend into.

Worrying that if she gazed any longer, she might attract unwanted attention, Katherine pressed on.  Her mind ran down scores of explanations for what she was seeing some apparently rational and others pure fantasy.  None provided her with a satisfactory answer.  She tried to reassure herself that however impossible it appeared, at least these stories had simply put her friends into exciting sexual encounters rather than danger.  She wondered if they knew who they had been before.  Did Lucy know that she had been an advertising executive rather than a biker chick?  Or were their lives so completely altered that they had no recall of what they had been just some minutes earlier?  Katherine had never believed in magic or alien intervention, but now, given what she was witnessing, all of these things appeared credible.

As she wandered along trying to keep herself from drowning in her thoughts, Katherine’s attention was drawn aside by the repeated images in the window of the electrical store.  As was common all the flat screens were tuned to the same channel.  Katherine did not recognise it, but it seemed to be one of those satellite ones that ran news pretty much focused on celebrity gossip.  Apprehensively, Katherine recalled the story she had cast Natasha into.  One evening in a bar she had got off with a player from the local low-league football team.  Katherine and the rest of them had joked that she would soon be a glamourous trophy wife.  Reflecting on such a development, Katherine had felt a frisson at envisaging her friend the civil servant transformed into tabloid frontpage fodder.  Now, she knew that fantasy had come for real.  The caption told her this was now Tasha Pascoe as she stepped from a luxury sports car dressed in glistening tailored black latex dress; a fur wrap slung over her shoulders.  She minced on shoes lashed to her ankles with high platforms and impossible heels. Her hair was blonded and the jewellery on her fingers and swinging from her ears was encrusted with diamonds.  Moments later, Kyle Pascoe, one of the Premier League’s top scorers, slipped his arm through that of his wife and led her into some glamorous social event.  The camera then cut to them standing together being interviewed.  If the truth adhered to Katherine’s story, she knew that, sometime soon, the pair of them, unable to satiate their lust, would be doing it ‘doggy style’ in one of the upstairs rooms.  The state of Tasha’s nipples pressing against the latex that held them, suggested it something that was not far off.

Katherine turned away as the picture switched to showing others at the same event.  Now the evidence of what she had caused was piling up, she began to wonder if there was anything she could do to reverse this.  It seemed certain now that the stories she had written were becoming true.  She had no idea where they were but she began to envisage that they had gone with the recycling and as they were pulped something had been unleashed from them.  Could she write other stories and have them similarly recycled?  Would it work another time or was this the only chance?  She told herself it was worth a try.  Should she head back home and get to work right now?  The recycling collection would not be for another thirteen days and so she guessed she had time.  It meant that her friends would be trapped in these lives for that time.  However, she had little idea what else to try.  For the moment she decided to stick to her original plan and head to the café.  Maybe a chamomile tea would be a better option than a coffee.

Katherine almost stumbled and as she regained her footing, realised that she suddenly felt very different.  She imagined that the concerns about Natasha, Lucy and Emma had left her distracted.  Once again she wondered if this was some kind of impossibly realistic dream and she it would spiral off into the truly, rather than simply marginally, fantastical.  After all it might just be a huge coincidence that the three women had ended up the way they had in her stories.  However, she realised she would find it somehow reassuring if now she suddenly saw giraffes in a London street.

As Katherine took another step, however, she saw that the dream, the magic, whatever it was, continued.  As she looked down she saw the reason for her misstep.  She was wearing black suede ankle boots with a high wedge heel.  Her legs were encased in black wet-look leggings.  She recognised the outfit: the tight long-sleeved teeshirt and that cropped biker-style leather jacket.  She lifted her hand to her head and felt out the side-shave haircut and knew her hair would be black.  She knew too that she would be calling herself Katriona; even in her real life Katherine Howard just led to far too many repeated comments.

This was the next story Katherine could remember writing.  This one that had given her a frisson as it contained elements of a woman she had seen in London that she had conflated into a version of herself.  Of course, she would never have had the courage to dress this way, but that otherness, the almost forbidden nature of how the woman appeared had been what had excited her.  The fact that there was nothing stopping her looking like this somehow had made the tingle, the delightful angst, that much sweeter.  Then, as she stepped through the door into the wine bar and caught sight of Caitlin, she remembered the other ‘forbidden’ aspect of her story – her female lover.

Again, Caitlin had been something a little other, a little forbidden though she had been someone real rather than imagined.  Katherine had had no idea whether Caitlin was a lesbian or not.  However, when they had met at that conference, there had been something about her that Katherine had found strangely engaging.  Yes, she was successful, a little more than Katherine, and she had a confidence and a knowledge that Katherine could not help but admire.  However, in her presence, Katherine had not feel patronised rather that she could work with Caitlin and they could do great things together.  The pair of them had laughed and traded confidences.  Katherine guessed, that if she had been a lesbian, then Caitlin would have been the one she would have aimed for.  Ultimately, those kind of thoughts had come to plague Katherine towards the end of the conference.  Consequently she had gone out of her way not to get Caitlin’s details, even as a potential business contact.  In this case, writing it all out as a ‘how it might have been’ had not only passed a dull evening but had allowed her to exorcise her confused feelings and forget about Caitlin, until now.

Caitlin rose from the leather sofa as Katherine approached and they kissed.  Caitlin’s lips were softer than Katherine could have imagined and immediately she felt aroused by her; thoughts of their sexual encounters flooded into her mind.  Unlike the business suit she had worn at the conference, here Caitlin was in pale olive jodhpur-style leggings and a black teeshirt under a long loose cream-coloured cardigan.  She wore patent mary janes with a thick sole.  Her hair was artfully untidy in a way Katherine loved, but again would never even consider risking herself.

Katherine wondered if she had now sealed herself into this alternate life.  In an instant she had not only turned herself into a stylish lesbian, but one with a partner.  She was relieved that she had not gone too extreme with this story and so ended up in Los Angeles.  She tried to recall all the details, but as far as she remembered, this was set a short time after ‘she’ had started dating Caitlin.  It would be easy enough to break off the relationship and get back to her old life.  It was apparent now that the effect of her stories was not simply on her friends but anyone she mentioned, well, anyone who existed in the real world and she had named and described accordingly.  Anyway, she hoped that was the rule.  She would have to remember to correct Caitlin’s life too.  For a moment she wondered if using her writing she should not set Caitlin up with an ideal partner, as ‘compensation’.  However, Katherine quickly dismissed that thought, as it might simply mess up the life that she already had and any partner in it.  It seemed best to wipe the slate entirely clean and get everyone back to where and what they had been when she had woken this morning.

“Trina, are you alright?  You seem distant.”  Caitlin asked.

Katherine jarred a little as if she had just been dropped back into the room.

“Erm, erh, yes, I’m fine.  Just thinking about some friends.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Erm, have I introduced you to Emma, Lady Ember?”

“Sure, we went to that party at her place.”

“And Lu-Cee?”

“The biker?” 

Katherine nodded.  She guessed it made sense that if she had shifted her friends’ lives then there was nothing in casting herself as Katriona that was going to disrupt that.

“I know she is straight, but I’d be happy …” Caitlin tailed off.

Katherine realised what Caitlin had been about to say.  She laughed in response.  “I am not jealous.  Don’t you think I’ve thought the same?  But I’m with you.”

Katherine bit off the words, realising she was easily slipping into the role she had assigned herself.  That way lay the risk of sinking entirely into it.

“And I’m with you.”  Caitlin said, reaching her hand out and taking Katherine’s.

The sensation of Caitlin’s skin against her own gave her a pleasant shiver.  She realised, however, that this was as far as she had gone in the story, pretty much chaste kisses and hand holding.  She had had little idea what lesbians got up to sexually, which was one reason why she had abandoned it.  Did that mean this ‘reality’ would come to a halt when her writing ran out?  Or were her stories simply the trigger of a new strand of reality?  In many ways she hoped the former, if not least for the sake of Emma, Lucy and Natasha, who would have even less clue than herself about why their lives had been transformed.  If that was the case, she still felt obliged to write something to make sure Caitlin never remembered even this encounter and what presumably had preceded it.  Otherwise, Katherine knew, it might be really embarrassing if they ran into each other again at a conference.

They ordered some lunch and sat chatting about things.  Katherine kept struggling to remember that in fact she was not Caitlin’s girlfriend and that she was not even a lesbian, however, pleasurable the speculation might have been one boring evening.  She found that rather than working in project management she was in fact, as Katriona, a graphic artist.  Presumably that was why she went by a different name and that was how she had encountered Caitlin when her company had commissioned Katriona.  Katherine found it very easy being with Caitlin and had to keep reminding herself that however it appeared, whatever the sights and sounds and tastes and feelings she was sensing, none of this was actually ‘real’.  She never would dress this way and, though it might have been pleasant to have lunch with Caitlin, she would never have gone as far as this in terms of their relationship.

“Fancy ‘Nina’s Heavenly Delights’?”  Caitlin asked as the meal came to an end.

Katherine wondered if in fact she had been able to master this dream, hallucination, whatever it was sufficiently that it had not ended up how her original story had, with her and Caitlin in bed doing what Katherine could best imagine lesbian sex involved.  The question Caitlin had just asked, however, dragged her back to that plotline.  The movie was one Katherine had picked up on DVD in a charity shop only to find it had a lesbian sub-plot.  Perhaps, she thought, she should have guessed from the title.  Had she written this into her story for want of any other movie she could think lesbians might like?

“Sure.”

Katherine found herself saying.  She still had no idea yet how much control she had over what happened and whether it was entirely bound by the story.  Katherine was a little self-conscious as she stood and Caitlin slipped a hand around her waist.  However, the frisson she had put into the story of her walking out comfortably close to her lover, now swept over her and as they went to the car, Katherine was aware that part of her was not at all concerned by what was happening and indeed was excited at taking the next step.  Now that added another concern - Katherine wondered if she had been lying to herself and her story writing had simply brought out aspects of her personality that she had buried deeply.

Soon they were at Caitlin’s flat.  Katherine’s arousal had been increasing as they drove here, again in line with what her story had shown.  Now she found it difficult to think of anything other than having sex with this woman.  Her mind was filled with all kinds of ideas about what she wanted to do and she knew the pleasure such things would bring her.  She conceded that, if she had somehow shifted herself into a different life, she could have ended up in a far worse situation than this.  They did not hesitate but headed straight to the bedroom.  Katherine tossed aside her leather jacket and then Caitlin was tugging at her long sleeved top.  Caitlin had shed her cardigan and, now down to her bra herself, Katherine helped Caitlin from her teeshirt.  They both sat on the bed getting out of boots and leggings then discarding underwear.  Katherine found that they were both smooth across their sex and tattooed over their bodies.  This did not look like her and yet it did.  The body was familiar, perhaps a little more trim, but certainly ‘hers’, despite these differences.  Caitlin cast back the duvet and jumped on to the bed, Katherine could not resist following.  They loved diving beneath the cover, it somehow made them both feel closer.  Now they kissed frantically and Katherine found her hand grasping greedily at her lover, really exploring her soft skin and teasing at her nipples as if this was something she often did.  Her story had made her more than a competent lesbian lover.  Dimly she tried to tell herself that this was not real, that she was not a lesbian who dressed and behaved this way; that it was all fiction.  However, the sensations kept telling her that she was a liar and that this was the real her.

Katherine was surprised at how quickly she became so sexually aroused and she took it as one mark on the fiction side; it would never be like this in reality.  Yet, her mind told her it was because she loved this woman and simply being with her had been the start of foreplay in itself.  She rode Caitlin’s thigh and then, shifting, pressed her palm on her smooth mound before dipping her fingers inside.  She recognised that having sex with a partner of the same gender made tracking down the locations they might like stimulated a lot easier.  As the crook of her thumb nudged against Caitlin’s clitoris bringing delighted moans from her, Katherine wondered why so many men found it so difficult to find.  Now Katherine found herself sliding further beneath the cover and pressing her mouth between Caitlin’s smooth thighs.  She would never have considered herself a submissive but there was something about giving herself utterly to the pleasure of her lover that drove her on to lick along the slick lips and suck at the aroused clit.  The orgasm that came squeezed Katherine between Caitlin’s legs but Katherine found she loved the enclosure, her senses filled entirely with the body of her lover – its feel, its aroma, its taste; its very life.  Caitlin dragged Katherine back up and, grinning, slid her fingers up and down Katherine’s aroused pussy before catching her clitoris between two and rubbing it between them.  Her thumb slipping inside Katherine’s sex was enough to tip her over into what she knew was her first orgasm from a woman, but oddly felt like something often shared with her partner.