Anything for Chocolate - A Prequel

For the third day in a row, there was a gift left on the door mat, waiting to ruin my day in an increasingly fantastical manner. I stared down at the little wooden box, tempted to smash it under my foot, squashing the contents and rendering the inevitable note within unreadable.

The moment passed, however, and with a sense of weary resignation I picked it up and carried it through to the kitchen and sat at the table opposite my wife. She said nothing, merely smiled at me, a smile as brittle as ice that did nothing to disguise her contempt for me. The spell that bound her to me commanded only her body and soul, not her heart.

But I could see she was curious. I opened the box, showing her the beautifully decorated chocolate within, dark and unquestionably expensive - and, I knew from experience, quite delicious. A card too, with a note, that I read aloud:

To the Lady of the House, who wrings such tears of sorrow from my lonely heart, deny me no more your icy gaze but pierce me to a peace.

I studied her expression. She seemed genuinely perplexed, and yet I needed to be sure. "Who is it?" I demanded. "Who is sending you these gifts?"

"I don't know, dear," she said, her voice calm despite her effort to express her true rage. "There were others?"

I glared at her for daring to ask, but with a shrug of pretended indifference, I plucked the two other notes from my suit pocket, uncomfortably aware of how ill-fitting it seemed now. I read the first:

To the Lady of the House, who once I glimpsed, though once was all it took to set my compass, seclude thyself no longer! Come out into the sun and let all who love you adore you.

She blinked, astonished, and I snorted my disgust at the sentiment. "That's as much poetry as the shit I did this morning." I read out the second:

To the Lady of the House, who fills my dreams with beauty incomparable! This sequestration is a cruel affront to a world that longs to love you.

"Pathetic. And whoever it is will have to make do with glimpses of you. You are not to leave this house - is that clear?"

"Yes, Master," she said obediently, even as tears rolled down her cheeks.

I popped the chocolate into my mouth and made a show of enjoying it and swallowing it. On a normal day I would also have bent her over the table and taken her roughly from behind, but I had lost my taste for false pleasure. Her tears satisfied me far more than her empty cries of ecstasy ever could.

"I love you," I said, and sneered at her automatic response. A minute later I was out of the house and on my way to work, the exquisite taste of chocolate lingering in my mouth.

*

Ever since that first note, my emotions had been in turmoil. The thought that there was someone out there lusting after my wife and daring to send romantic notes and gifts for her to my house... it infuriated me! For two days I had been simmering with rage, barely containing it at work. I'd lost my appetite as well, and could hardly bring myself to eat or drink anything. I could feel myself literally wasting away.

I'd lost my appetite for sex also, and that was something that had never bothered me before. Rare was the day that I didn't fuck my wife at least once, and often I would take advantage of Tracy at work or Emily or Suzanne at the club, or indeed both. But these notes and chocolates had me all messed up and I hadn't had an erection once. I was beginning to wonder if it still worked, and whether I should see a doctor.

And now there was a third note! The fucker was persistent, I'd give them that, but the stress was wrecking my concentration. I spent my morning wading through spreadsheets, struggling to make sense of them despite my distraction. This was work I was good at. Making money from money. It was how I'd been able to buy a decent house in London, a sweet car and - critically - how I'd been able to buy the spell that had made a Stepford of my wife.

But it felt increasingly pointless. Meaningless money. It was all such a grand waste of time and effort, when the only thing that really mattered was the one thing I couldn't have.

Isabelle's heart.

This was the failure that burdened me, and now more than ever. I had seen something so hopeful in her eyes when I read those anonymous notes. It had been years since I last saw anything other than hate.

It was all her own fault for not loving me. That had been the great betrayal. She had said she loved me, had marched down the aisle to me and said, "I do!" She had been the one point of light in my life, the one positive thing.

And how long had that lasted? Three days? "I'm sorry, Bill," she'd said. We'd been eating breakfast in that restaurant with its breathtaking view across the sand and waves, and I'd been planning out our future life with the enthusiasm of the reborn, and she had brought it all crashing down. "I'm a lesbian."

The fuck?

Perhaps I should have let her go there and then - cut my losses, so to speak - but without her I had nothing. If only I could make her stay with me, I reasoned, sooner or later she would love me the way she should.

And there was this guy I knew... A magician - except a real one. Very expensive, and more than a little bit crazy, but he could make people do things against their will, turn them into slaves - usually for sex. It made you wonder just how many WAGs were really just after the money and not in fact magically controlled sex toys.

Certainly there was nothing I couldn't make Isabelle do, no matter how degrading.

By lunchtime I was just exhausted. I stared at myself miserably in the mirror in the bathroom. I was so tired of being angry all the time. Angry at my father for years of brutality. Angry at my mother for years of uncaring. Angry at Isabelle for not loving me the way she was supposed to. Angry that I was the one who worked every day doing a job that no longer held any appeal whatsoever...

Angry that I had spent a small fortune just recently on my suit and now it didn't fit me at all. Angry that I had to wear a suit at all, so grey and bland and masculine while my wife had a whole wardrobe of clothes and colours to choose from.

I recoiled away from this sudden, alien image of myself. "The fuck?" I whispered. I was a man. I had never questioned that before. Why was I suddenly dressing myself mentally in my wife's clothing?

And yet...

And yet, once the idea was in there, in my head, I couldn't shake it. Even more perversely, for the first time in days I had an erection, throbbing almost painfully within my suit trousers.

Two minutes later I had Tracy with me in the store room. She perched on a table and wrapped her legs about me as I thrust urgently into her. "Thought you'd forgotten about me," she said, laughing.

I kissed her to shut her up. I wanted so badly to come, I didn't want to be distracted, and yet I couldn't help imagining myself in her position, my short skirt lifted to my waist, my high-heeled feet digging into my lover's back... Whimpering as much with frustration as relief, I finished at last, sure that something was seriously wrong with me.

"Are you okay?" Tracy asked as she adjusted her clothing. "You seem... different. Have you lost weight?"

And it was true, I had. Alone again in the bathroom, I studied my appearance carefully. Except it wasn't so much that I had lost weight as that I had grown more slender. Almost feminine, indeed. No wonder my suit no longer fit me. It wasn't the suit - it was me.

After that, I couldn't concentrate at work at all. There was no point even trying. I left the office and went for a walk to try and clear my head. And to buy something that fit me better. I felt too self-conscious in the suit. And my shoes were loose on my feet too.

Half an hour later I swapped my suit for a new pair of jeans and a black T-shirt, and felt a hundred times better. Part of me wished I had the courage to choose a bolder colour, and had to resist the temptation to buy a bright pink shirt - that would have just been gay. I wasn't gay. I was a heterosexual male, damn it, not a cross-dressing pervert.

And I damn well wasn't going to buy myself a pair of high heels, no matter how seductive they were. I'd never realised before just how many shoe shops there were for women, and just how many shoes there were. It was mesmerising. And just looking at them made me hard again, and I wondered just how obvious the bulge in my jeans was.

I bought myself new shoes. Black, men's shoes. Because I was a man. And I hated them, but they fit.

By the time I got home I was angry again. Angry at feeling this way. Angry that I couldn't just give in and dress like a woman. Angry that I had been born a man and would never be as beautiful as my wife. Angry because if I were a woman, and least there would be some hope she could learn to love me one day.

Her eyes widened in astonishment at the sight of me. "Don't say anything," I growled, and stormed off to my bedroom to be alone. I couldn't face her.

I caught up on my e-mails and on all the tedious work I'd missed, and I brought a light snack to my room as I watched television that failed to interest me at all, and I tried eventually to sleep - but despite my exhaustion my mind would not settle. I longed to go back and buy the shoes I'd denied myself, and to discard all social convention and wear in-your-face pink shirts and daringly short skirts that barely concealed sexy fishnet hold-ups. I even wondered whether I could make myself more feminine with make-up...

After tossing and turning for hours, I gave up and went through to my wife's room, taking care not to wake her. There was enough light for me to see as I rummaged through her drawers, and rifled through her shelves and wardrobe. Her taste didn't really suit what I wanted, for I had never allowed her to dress slutty, but I selected a yellow dress and some elegant hold-ups, red lace underwear and the highest stilettos she owned, and took these along with a handful of lipsticks and mascara to my room.

I felt like a thief in the night, one with a proud erection jutting from his pyjamas, but there was such a joy in wearing these garments, and in carefully applying the brightest pink lipstick and in darkening my lashes, all the while my cock hard and throbbing in delight at the androgynous version of me revealed in the mirror.

Not until I had perfected my make-up did I yield to its demand and bring myself to a climax more painfully intense than any I'd known.

Still dressed as a woman, I crawled into bed, and was soon fast asleep.

*

In the morning I awoke with a raging hard-on, which of course I dealt with swiftly.

I dressed as a man before leaving my room, not prepared to greet the world in stolen women's clothing. My wife was in the kitchen, watching me curiously. I ignored her and opened the front door.

Another little wooden box.

I took it into the kitchen and munched absently on the chocolate as I read the note aloud:

To the Lady of the House, who spreads her wings like a butterfly greeting the dawn, unshutter your house and let fly restraints and emerge in the world reborn.

"At least it rhymes this time," I said, spinning it away dismissively.

I had to go to work. I didn't want to go to work. Indeed, once I reached the office and was confronted with the bleak reality of it, I lacked the will to go inside.

Instead I walked, and walked, and though I tried to resist the impulse I found myself back at the shops, staring at shoes and dresses and underwear and wishing I had the courage to wear them.

And why shouldn't I? Why was it so wrong for me to wear such things? Why should being born a man exclude me from the world of bright fashion and sexy clothing?

If society objected to me wearing it, that was a problem with society.

And I didn't have to actually buy anything, did I? I could just look... and there was so much to look at, so many shops, so many dresses, so many shoes...

A pink T-shirt. I could pull that off. And a bright orange skirt... actually, I didn't look half bad. Matching lipstick and a touch of mascara, and I could easily be mistaken for a woman, though flat-chested.

Indeed, once I swapped my man shoes for some chunky high-heeled sandals, I really started to look the part. The real challenge proved to be swapping my boxers for proper lace underwear - which, if nothing else, helped to flatten out the bulge.

And I didn't feel like a pervert at all. I felt like I was becoming who I was supposed to be.

I was becoming a woman.

With every passing hour it seemed even more so. My voice was changing, my nipples enlarging, and there was even the suggestion of breasts - reason enough to buy a bra for the first time in my life.

Perhaps I should have been alarmed by this transformation, but instead I welcomed it and shopped with ever greater enthusiasm, until I was loaded down with bags.

"Hi, honey," I said tentatively as I stumbled through the door in the evening.

"Hello, dear," she said, and for once she even sounded like she meant it. "You've changed..."

Which was true enough. "Do you like the new me?"

"It's certainly an improvement."

"It is, isn't it!" I really did like my new body. I liked that I no longer felt so angry about everything. "Um, Isabelle,..."

"Yes?"

"I'm so sorry - I've been a really bad husband to you."

She said nothing. Of course not. The spell still constrained her.

I continued, "But I'd really like to be a good wife."

"You could start by setting me free."

I nodded, although the thought she might leave me, as indeed she should given what a bastard I was, was terrifying.

"Okay," I said. "But please give me a chance."

"Yes, dear," she said automatically, and the ice crept back into her eyes.

"Sorry," I whispered. I took the snow globe from the mantelpiece in the lounge and smashed against the tiles, and Isabelle screamed and fainted. I caught her as she fell and laid her on the sofa, and waited anxiously by her side through the long night.

She was still asleep when I checked outside the door at dawn, and found another box. I read the note quietly to myself as I nibbled the dark chocolate.

To the Lady of the House, who's free at last to be captive to another. Live for her and die for her whose will you bound for years.

Isabelle, awake now, took the note from me and read it. "Yes. You are the Lady of the House, and mine now to command. You will call me 'Mistress', and you will answer to the names 'Bimbo' and 'Slut', and you will listen quietly as I fuck whoever I like, whenever I like, however I like. Do you understand, Slut?"

"Yes, Mistress," I said.

"Do you still have a cock?"

"Yes, Mistress."

"Then use it on me, Bimbo - and don't you dare come. You'll be lucky if I ever let you come again..."

"Yes, Mistress," I said. And in truth, I was just happy that she wanted me with her at all.