Chapter One - Liverpool Girl

30 seconds before the transition, I woke up from a full bladder. It took me a couple of seconds to get my bearings, as I was not at home but at a place I hadn’t been for almost a year. It wasn’t until I noticed who the sleeping form in my arms was.

This was the sixth year in a row I had decided to spend my summer vacation visiting my aunt in Liverpool. No, it was the fifth time I had decided that. The first time, I was sixteen and my parents had made those plans for me. They thought I needed a change of scenery, something to get me out of the teenage angst I had fallen into.

They had been right. Not so much about the scenery but about the people I hung out with. I had never been the most outgoing girl, and so at home, I always hung out with the same group of people I had known for years. In Liverpool, I knew nobody, so I hung out with nobody. Three days into my stay there, my aunt noticed me not doing anything and she intervened.

As luck would have it, just one storey lower in the apartment building, there lived another girl my age. Livia. She was in her punk phase and, quite the opposite of me, very outgoing. And she was just as happy to carry me along everywhere she went. It took me a while to warm up to her, but once I ignored the wild parties she found, there was a spark between us.

At first, we thought we just had gotten to become good friends. Then we added “with benefits” to that. Neither of us had had any interest in girls before, in fact, we had plenty of “boy talk” and even upped each other in what we expected in a husband. But then one thing led to another, and with no former warning, we reduced our virginity to the “penetrated by a penis” type.

The rest of the summer went on the same. Parties and other entertainment Livia decided on, then some mutual masturbation (as we thought of it at the time, but it was full-on sex) at bedtime. Neither her parents nor my aunt had any issues with us sleeping over. We were both girls, and the difference was literally less than 3 metres. Vertically.

The following year’s summer was much the same. Livia was in a goth phase and had given up her virginity entirely in the meantime. She also had calmed down considerably, and we spent many evenings doing stuff with just the two of us. Yet, we still didn’t see us as a couple or even dating.

That didn’t change the next year, even though I had joined the non-virgin club with a full membership, too. That year, we talked about how useless boys were in bed for the first time.

Maybe I had left my comfort zone because it was important for me to confirm that Livia and I had something special. And that’s why I had prepared for this year’s summer well in advance.

Yet that didn’t matter when I arrived yesterday evening. I no longer stayed with my aunt—that had been an all too transparent pretence for a long time—now that Livia’s parents had retired to Spain full time and she had taken over the apartment. Which meant that we were inside each other’s clothes before the door had fully swung closed. At least Livia was in mine; she hadn’t bothered to put anything on but some sexy lace panties.

Our lovemaking had been intense, fuelled by nearly eleven months of penned-up desire. That, together with the long trip, meant I had fallen asleep around ten in the evening. My last visit to a ladies’ room had been at six, when I had gotten something to eat at the train station—I knew I wouldn’t get a chance to eat supper at Livia’s. So, was it any wonder I woke up at 5 am ready to explode?

🙚⚜🙘

I carefully tried to untangle myself from Livia without waking her but failed miserably. She opened her eyes a bit and mumbled, “What’s up?”

“Need to pee. Go back to sleep,” I whispered. She perked up, halfway between sleeping and waking, and mumbled something about me staying. “Only if you want your bed to turn into a lake…” I joked.

She closed her eyes again and said in a slurry voice, “Then give it to me, and I’ll drink it all.” Ok, she clearly was dream-talking now. I knew she found pee-drinking one of the most disgusting things imaginable. We had talked about that in length when discussing our porn preferences over the years. Once, I had tried to argue for it but couldn’t keep it up for more than a couple of sentences. It wasn’t something that appealed to me either. Sure, I could imagine it might feel nice to be on the giving side, but there are two sides to this coin and the other one…nasty indeed.

I extradited myself fully and stood up, wincing from the pain of my overfull bladder. Then, the world turned haywire.

Time seemed to stop for a second, then crawl by at a snail’s pace. My movements felt like I was encased in rapidly hardening concrete while my mind was racing. I still was looking at Livia, and what I saw made my heart racing. Her body fell apart, the flesh turning into goo. Something oozed out of her nose that looked like liquid brain matter. Then I felt something warm run down my leg. I turned my view as fast as possible downwards and saw my own body melting, no longer containing my bladder’s content. I tried to cry out, but my mouth wouldn’t open…because my chin was falling off.

Then, as fast as it started, it was over, and I found myself kneeling over a fully intact Livia. The pressure in my bladder was gone, replaced by the feeling of her tongue licking me clean. “Yummy,” she murmured. “See, I could do it!” she added as she let herself sink back.

Something felt off. No. Everything felt off. Not just the time jump or Livia’s absurd behaviour. My body felt wrong. The bed sheet under my shins felt wrong. The air on my skin felt wrong. The light coming through the window felt wrong.

I ignored it and slipped back under the cover, ignoring how Livia’s body felt wrong against mine. She turned and hugged me. It felt wrong. “I told you I could do it,” she whispered into my ears. It sounded wrong. “I’ve been practising all year,” she said louder as she pulled back a bit and looked me in the eyes. Her breath smelled of nothing, yet my brain told me it was heavy with the smell of piss. Then she kissed me deeply, and my brain shouted about the taste of piss entering my mouth with her tongue, yet I tasted only her. She tasted like she always had, just slightly not completely right.

Of course, I kissed her back. I had a weird dream-like thing going on in my head; there was no need to worry her. Especially with how proud she was.

We kissed and snuggled for a while longer but quickly fell asleep. My last thought was, “Does she expect me to return the favour?”

🙚⚜🙘

I woke up to daylight and an empty bed. It still felt wrong, but it wasn’t as distractingly “loud” as it had been before. The bedroom door stood open, and I could faintly hear Livia in the kitchen. I thought back to our nightly shenanigans…and froze.

I remembered clearly how I had stood up, gone to the bathroom, peed into the toilet, wiped myself clean using wet wipes—place that gets into contact with a mouth regularly and so on—then went back into bed to find a fast asleep Livia there.

I also remembered watching our bodies dissolve. And I remembered her convincing me to pee into her mouth, her swallowing it all and being proud of it. I even remember coming to on top of her, not knowing what had happened. And none of those four sets of memories felt false.

On second thought, there was a difference. The feeling of wrongness I still was feeling was only present in the last set of memories. Those I had assumed to be what happened before I concentrated on remembering and got those other two.

Now, this presented an interesting conundrum. I now clearly was fully awake—even more awake than I usually was just after waking up—so I couldn’t blame being half asleep or half-dreaming for this. This left me with three options, and I liked neither. This could either be real, and the world was doing bad stuff. I could be going bonkers. Or, and that frightened me, Livia had a relapse, and I somehow got some of her drugs. Licked them up with her pussy juice, or so.

I listened into myself. Was there some euphoria? Something that had in any way one of the emotional or rational effects attributable to drugs? The answer was no. I felt a mixture of calm and concern, relaxed from sleeping well, some afterglow from the sex yesterday and the overwhelming joy of being with my loved one. But would I be able to detect the influence while I was under? Livia always had said she thought she acted normal while high, even while being irrational as fuck.

On the other hand, it had been almost ten hours since I ingested anything. Four if you counted that single kiss. Shouldn’t that be enough for just about anything I got second-hand to get out of my system? Also, Livia’s “Sober for __ days” board was right there next to the bed on the wall. It was a little whiteboard I had gifted her two years ago. On the upper half, there were a couple of revealing pictures of me; the lower held the text I had drawn in permanent marker. “2Y+182” was what Livia had squeezed into the empty space I had left between “for” and “days”. Which meant she had updated it today.

For all her faults, lying was not one of them. She would keep things to herself, but when asked about it, she always was truthful. Like with her addiction. She never told me about it. I had learned about it when her mom called me to tell me she had finished the withdrawal program at the clinic and would be released later that week. I was completely blindsided, not having known Livia had an issue in the first place.

Turned out, she had gone pretty deep down the rabbit hole. All I could do at that moment was lie my ass off as her mom praised me for being such a good girlfriend, even sticking to her while she worked as a street whore to get the money for her addiction. I made the “sober” board that week and sent it to her by express with a note to call me the moment she got home.

She did. And when I asked her, she told me everything. Even stuff her parents didn’t know about. At that point, the last bit of anger and the underlying feeling of betrayal had vanished. She didn’t owe me anything; we only had repeated summer flings. Yet she had treated me to a full partner confession.

And it had made me feel guilty. It got me to remember all the times she had gotten something at parties, some of which I even recognised as her being high but never thinking about the consequences. For me, that had just been how she was at parties, from the first one we ever went to. The year before, I didn’t even question it when she went out to work the streets every couple of days and left me with her parents. Of course, I couldn’t expect her to hang out with me every day all day for four weeks, I had reasoned.

Yet her parents had known. And they assumed I knew, too. They saw how I comforted Livia when she came home and wanted to scrub her skin off in the shower. How I held her lovingly (her mom’s words, not mine), not pressuring her but giving her the support to fall asleep without nightmares. How I was the only reason Livia hadn’t gone hating her pussy—again, Elisa’s words. That woman has no boundaries when it comes to the intimate.

She happily told me on the phone last month how she and her husband also had had an open relationship. Until she became pregnant with Livia, and the panic about who the father had set in. To their credit, they never had it tested. When Livia was born and didn’t have some obvious features that couldn’t have come from her father, they had decided to simply accept her. I don’t know if I could have done that in their place. I think I would have wanted to know. I don’t know if I could have done that in their place. I think I would have wanted to know—not that it would matter for me if all went as planned. My kids wouldn’t be Livia’s, and hers wouldn’t be mine. Thinking about it, I’d rather not know who the fathers were. That would just make it harder to see them as fully ours, wouldn’t it?

Not that that would happen if I just did nothing. And that was the signal to get out of bed and pretend I wasn’t feeling like I was plugged into the Matrix. Huh. Was that a fourth possibility, or did it go under “world doing weird shit for realsies”?

🙚⚜🙘

So I got up and walked into the kitchen. I had to resist the urge to put on something. Not that Livia’s parents would have minded—I had run into them not bothering with putting on something when going to the toilet or a snack at night often enough—but I would have. But now Livia was living here alone.

I found her in the kitchen, eating some cereal, a carton of soy milk standing right on the counter. That soy milk existed for me. Lactose intolerance and a slight slant to my eyes when I squinted the right way were the only things I had inherited from my great-grandmother. Yet it made me feel guilty every time I saw it for the first time at one of my stays. For the last five years, there hadn’t been a single lactose-containing product in the apartment when I came to visit. I wouldn’t have minded; at home, I was used to always checking when taking something from the fridge. My mother mostly managed to make the meals she served me safe, but the rest was my own responsibility.

“Hi Jane,” Livia greeted me with a big smile, “want some? 99% sure it’s cow-free…” She pointed at the milk and wiggled her hand as if still unsure.

“Sure,” I replied and sat down after grabbing a bowl from the shelf. “If it comes out the other end via express train, I’ll let you lick my ass clean,” I joked.

“Yuck, don’t even!” she exclaimed. “I got my lifetime quota filled by that one guy who got diarrhoea while I was licking his arsehole.”

I snickered with my mouth full, a couple of drops of milk escaping my lips. I looked around for a napkin, but the out-of-style-since-the-late-seventies napkin holder on the kitchen bar was empty. A moment later, I didn’t need one anymore as Livia had licked my chin clean, leading into a kiss.

“Love you,” I whispered when she let me breathe again. She stiffened for a moment, then clung even harder to me. Neither of us had ever uttered those words, and I hadn’t been sure how she would react. Seems she liked it, so step one of my evil master plan completed successfully.

“When was that?” I asked.

“April, I think. Could have been May,” she said.

“So, at your new job. Good.”

“Yes. That would have been ugly when I worked solo. But with the agency behind me, the guy was about as tiny as his dick. Paid me a nice wad of hush money in cash. Doubled it when I whined about having to go to a hospital for a checkup…”

“So, an American tourist then?”

“Got it,” she said and fed me a spoonful of my cereal. My hands were busy holding her so she didn’t slip off, as she had moved half off her bar stool to hug me.

I chewed and swallowed. It was the good stuff I never got for myself. I was hard-strapped for money as it was. “If you don’t mind me asking… How weird is it working high-end escort after having worked the streets for so long?” I asked. I still couldn’t work my head around whoring at all, even two years after learning she did it. The idea of letting strangers have sex with me was just so alien to me.

“Exhausting,” she said after a moment. “Not the sex part. That actually is easier. But all the being a fake date for the evening or pretending to be his girlfriend and such. That is real work. And then, keeping up that fake facade about us agency girls only being escorts, not whores and being smitten by the client, so I want to fuck him on my personal time afterwards…I hate acting!”

I grinned, seeing how acting and lying were basically the same thing for different reasons. “But you must have gotten pretty good at it, dropping your day job and all,” I probed.

She nodded. “My boss thinks so, too. I’m now in the second highest price category.”

“1200 pounds for an evening and a night, I know. I checked the website.” Just about every other day. “Please don’t charge me!” I mock begged.

“Nah. Personal favour. I won’t even charge you rent…” She left the sentence hanging, like a question. I stayed quiet, not sure what to say, even after having rehearsed that a hundred times.

“…because apparently you’re not staying with me but in the old master bedroom that I am not renting from my parents? The one they said they wanted to keep to ‘store’ some furniture and stuff? Where they keep a bed to stay when they visit me? Explain.”

There it was. The elephant that was the three big suitcases standing next to the door, holding everything I owned.

I took a big breath and looked her in the eyes. “Livia, I…” Her gaze was full of love, not the sternness I had expected from her words. “I… I quit my job. And I cancelled my flat.”

My heart was hammering like a steam hammer, whatever that was.

“You see… I talked to your parents. They are concerned about you all alone here. And they very pointedly pointed out how weird it is that your girlfriend hasn’t moved in with you ages ago.”

“You’re not my girlfriend,” Livia said quickly, like on instinct. We had said that thousands of times when people had assumed that about us.

“No. I’m not,” I said. “But if you could, for a minute, imagine you’re not holding on to me like an octopus in heat so I could get something from my bags, then go down on one knee: Will you marry me?” There it was. Step ten in my master plan: Skipping the queue like an American at a bus stop. Hitting Livia over the head like that just ruined my life. She would never say—

“Yes. I will.”