Author's note: This story contains a demonic man wearing women's apparel to complete a fantasy for a woman.
Chapter 1 - Another Dead End Job
I never thought that at forty-five that I would be where I am today. What is even worse, is that I do not at all mean that in a good way. As I sit on a stool in a consignment store reading a trashy romance novel that I borrow from my local library, more than hour since the last customer came in, I was wondering where exactly my life started to go so wrong.
I had a great start. I had parents that cared about me, and raised me right. I grew up in the suburbs of central Québec. If you've ever passed a medium sized city situated along Autoroute-forty and the Saint Lawrence River, then you've passed most of my life.
My parents raised me right, for the eighties and nineties. I did alright in school, but was never particularly athletic, academically gifted or even all that wealthy. Every teacher always had the same comment whenever my parents would dutifully attend parent-teacher night in our Francophone suburb: "Véronique is a pleasure to have in the class and she is a great listener". I was destined for a life of mediocrity and middle-class anonymity in suburban Québec.
Both my sisters, Elise and Delphine, were different. I loved them, and still do. We keep in touch nearly every day via text message or one of the million social media applications that we all have today. However, whereas I was never academically or athletically gifted, both of them were superstars in our home town.
Elise lives about three hours to the East of me in Gatineau, where she works as a management accountant at a high-priced consultancy in Ottawa. She realized she was a lesbian as she studied for her MBA, and after she added another three letters to her name and already impressive CV, she settled down into a condo with a lawyer named Marianne. I was her maid of honour at their wedding nearly ten years ago.
Delphine, on the other hand, was around the same level as I was academically, but she more than compensated on the athletic front. In the nineties when she was attending Cégep - our local version of college - she was already a swimming superstar, and was competing for the Québec provincial team at the Canadian Games and les Jeux de la Francophonie, in addition to cycling competitively. She settled down in Lévis with a guy named Luc, right across from the capital of Québec and had five children, all of whom are teenagers now and following in her footsteps. She coaches swimming and works as a marketer for a major manufacturer of bicycles. I was maid of honour at her wedding too.
I am jealous of my sisters. I am envious of their lifestyles, and they know it. They love me. I love them. Hell, my in-laws Marianne and Luc love me too. And therein lies the problem. I, do not really love myself, and my job and husband do not really love me either. Not in the same way. Not in the way I need.
I was an alright looking girl growing up. I was never gifted, and I tended to blend into the background of everything, especially when compared to my two sisters. My long red hair and freckles gave me a homely look, and the fact that I always seemed to carry around a few extra kilograms on my thighs and waist meant that the lean swimmer and the math superstar always had a row of dates.
That led me to Antoine. His dad and him both worked at the local mechanic in town, which meant that he was always around cars. It also meant that he could drive, and when we were sixteen, that meant a lot more than the fact that he had virtually no ambition and even less desire to treat a woman correctly. He had access to a car, cheap alcohol and all that those vices bring with them. We started dating in the last year of high school, and we have been together since.
I was the maid of honour at both my sister's weddings. They met their partners long after I met Antoine. They were happy in their marriages. Meanwhile, I had been living with my boyfriend for more than twenty-five years in the same house that his parents let him have next door to the old mechanic's shop in our city. While the old shop has been redeveloped into a small condo tower, our place has remained basically the same. Just like everything else.
Antoine encouraged me to never go to college or university. At the time, it was because we wanted to save money and put some aside to have a family. The family never materialized, and neither did my education. Then came the accident.
Just before I turned thirty, nearly fifteen years ago, Antoine was in an accident. He was working at his dad's mechanic shop when one of the jacks holding up a car broke. One of the mechanics had been drinking on the job. The car came tumbling down onto Antoine's father, killing him. The employee who had been drunk was sent to prison for seven years, and Antoine got a massive payout from the corporate chain that used to own the shop.
It should have set us up for a better life. Unfortunately, things in my life always have a way of reverting back to the mean - a very basic, silly and unforgiving one.
Right around the time of the accident, Québec had also legalized sports gambling.
That presented a problem.
In secular Québec where we abandoned religion, most people filled that space with education, self-fulfillment, athletics and the advancement of new ideas. Our education system led the country in mathematics. However, in our household, my husband filled it with gambling on hockey - a sport I came to resent and hate - and cheap beer.
It made him angry a lot, because he lost a lot. It made him frequently drunk. It also made him yell at me infrequently - but enough that I had spent many nights sleeping on the one good couch we had. He had never hit me, but he called me every name he could possibly think of - usually names revolving around my body size. He would apologize the day after, but it never stopped it from happening again. My sisters called him abusive. I never fought them on it.
It also meant that Antoine had difficulty holding down a job, and given that we both did not possess a lot of education in a province that was rapidly becoming a hotbed of high tech and renewable energy production, it left us with fewer and fewer options.
That pressure put a lot of strain on our relationship. We both knew there was no love in our household. We rarely had sex. I invited my sisters over at least once a month, and we talked or texted nearly every day, but getting together with the whole family was a rare affair. Christmas or Easter with my sisters - in their lovingly decorated and manicured condo or their suburban household filled with kids - always made Antoine and I feel inadequate. It made me feel like the ugly duckling, even if I knew that my sisters were still my best friends.
All I could do was keep my head down, and keep working towards something that I knew would never happen. I hoped Antoine would one day marry me, even if it was just because I wanted to have a day about me for once. I hoped that I could one day learn to speak and read and write like my sisters. Maybe go to Cégep or university like them... maybe.
So, here I was, at forty-five, working at a consignment store where the rich ladies in the city dropped off older dresses from Chanel and Simon's and all the other fashionable labels from Montréal or Québec or Ottawa that I never got to buy. Instead, I sold their used garments to other people looking to scoop up a deal.
The store paid me a commission for each garment that I sold, which is the reason I stayed. It allowed me to get an income that was reasonably higher than minimum wage while also not doing a whole lot. The fact that the store was located in the downtown right on the river was a major benefit as well, as there was always reliable bus service, and there were nice cafés lining the old section of the town where buildings from the colonial period of New France contrasted with newer glass and steel condos.
The one problem was the closing shift. I usually worked from the opening of the store until five, but had asked to take over the night shift for the entire spring and summer. It was playoff season, and that meant that Antoine would be betting (and drinking) a lot. I also knew that our hockey team was... not the best. That meant that it would be better to be at work when the game started than it would be at home. Hopefully, he would be passed out before I got home, and I could avoid talking about our anemic savings or our failing household.
Even though the closing shift saw a lot fewer customers than the day shift, especially as time drifted towards nine o'clock, the quiet was nice. It also gave me plenty of time to read trashy romance novels from the library.
I loved getting lost in my own little world of romance. I loved reading books where fancy Scandinavian, French or Russian businessmen (or athletes, or lawyers, or princes) find their happily ever after with a woman. I always imagined it was me in the stories. Especially as I started to up the spiciness level of what I was reading, and got a lot more into men who might share their love with another men (or two), or get into cross dressing with each other, or even crossing swords. I really liked the idea of men genderbending.
When I was alone, I let my mind roam about all the things I would never have. However, the heroines in the stories were always skinny blondes ready to have babies, not chubby forty-five-year-old French-Canadian redheads who work in dead-end jobs.
Especially ones whose partners didn't care about whether they lived or died.
I looked at the clock on the wall, and saw that it was nearly eight-thirty. Only thirty more minutes until I could close up. I turned back to my paperback, and got engrossed in a scene where a brash and eager younger guy is romancing the protagonist, toying with the idea of the two of them doing the horizontal tango. It was particularly well written, and tugged on all the right strings of my heart. I found myself whispering out loud, in a fit of both jealousy and envy:
"Damn, I'd sell my soul to meet a guy like that."
