Josie was not the ordinary twenty-something office worker despite appearing to be one.
For work, she wore boring black leggings, a black top and a hoodie.

With her short hair, she could easily pass as a young man, an effeminate man, but a man. Her almost total lack of breasts helped with that illusion. It was only the style of her hair, the small pearl drop earrings, and a small amount of makeup that told the world she was not just an effeminate male.

On evenings and weekends, things were very different. She only wore skirts and dresses. From micro to maxi, but never black. What made her stand out was her vast selection of wigs. All colours, styles and lengths. Her friends could never guess which one it would be when they invariably waited for her to arrive at least 15 minutes late for a night out.

None of them ever guessed that she was transgender. She’d transitioned before she came to town. She’d even had breast implants, but one had leaked after less than a month, and it had made her very, very ill, and then she had them removed, and ever since, she had relied on false ones for her evening and weekend trips. She was trying to save up enough money for another set, but as usual, money was tight. Working in an accounts department did not pay that much above a living wage, but it was better than nothing. She’d always been good with figures, and this seemed the ideal job for her until something better came along, but it beat the garment factory sweatshop that she’d worked in right after leaving home.

On this eventful evening, she was wearing a bright pink wig that came down to the middle of her back. Matt Black lips and pink-tipped false lashes were topped off with a pair of pink contact lenses. Her blue dress left very little to the imagination. It was clear to everyone that she was wearing very tiny knickers and only a strapless bra. Only her long, matching blue coat hid her privates from view, so thin was the material of the dress. She’d kept the coat on once she realised that her dress needed a lining to preserve her modesty.

Weekends were her time to express herself. Her three close friends just enjoyed being with this crazy chick who didn’t drink and could, therefore, be relied upon to drive them home safely.

The ‘gang’ had been to an open mic night at a pub in a nearby town. It had been a great evening, which was topped off by one of the four, Chloe, getting up on stage and failing miserably to get the audience laughing with her attempt at ‘standup’. Still, she had taken the boos in good spirits and had ended the session on stage with a bow. That had brought a few cheers from the audience.

When the evening was coming to an end, Josie went out to the car park, intending to get the car warmed up before their journey home. As she approached the car, some voices from behind her called out.

“Well… look at what we have here. The little tranny from the office.”

Josie stopped dead in her tracks before turning to face her accusers. She recognised one of them, Greg Thompson. He’d worked at the same company as her before being fired for lewd behaviour towards a woman customer about a month before.

Greg was with three of his mates. They’d been in the other bar of the pub, getting noisily drunk. Josie had seen this booze-fuelled bravado before, and it didn’t end well.

“What are we going to do with this fake woman?” shouted Greg.

“Give him a good kicking where it hurts!” suggested one of them.
“Don’t be silly. If he is a proper tranny that will have been cut off!” said another.

“Kick him in the kidneys. Without them, he can’t pee!” said another.

That threat made Josie scared.

“Nah. Just set fire to that stupid wig with him still wearing it,” said the fourth.

“Who’s got a lighter?” asked Greg.

“I have,” said one of them.

“Let’s do it,” said Greg, grinning from ear to ear.

Josie would have legged it if she thought that she stood a chance of escaping them, but that would just make them even more determined to hurt her badly. Besides, they were blocking her access to the pub. Any flight would mean going into the darkness, and she had no idea what lay outside the reach of the lights that lit the car park.

The four of them started to walk towards her. There was a definite menace in their body language. The copious amounts of booze that they'd consumed were giving them a lot of 'Dutch courage’.

Josie was hoping that someone would emerge from the pub, but it appeared that she was out of luck.

The threat of danger had sent her senses into overdrive. Suddenly, she caught a whiff of aftershave. Then a voice from behind her said quietly,

“Don’t look around. Stay where you are, Josie. Concentrate on them. Let me deal with them.”

Josie tensed and regretted not being allowed to take Judo lessons when she was a child.

The four potential assailants came closer. When they were less than ten metres away from Josie, the voice said, this time loudly.

“That’s far enough, Greg. If you come closer, then it will be you needing medical treatment.”

“Yeah!” shouted Greg.
“You and whose army?”

“Me and mine.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Josie saw three very well-built men and one much slighter man step out of the shadows and into the lights. Josie recognised them as being Rugby players from the local club. The company that she worked for was one of their sponsors. The team had visited her company at the start of the season in the hope of getting a few more people to come along to watch their matches.

Suddenly, the bravado of Greg and his mates went up in smoke. All four of them turned around and almost ran towards his tatty Ford Transit.

Josie breathed again before turning to face the four men.

“Thank you for that.”

“Don’t mention it, Josie. Those four losers are short of about half a brain. They could not see us because of the stupid amount of beer that they poured down their throat tonight,” said the smallest of the men.

“I’m just going to give the cops a tip-off about a drunk driver in a very unroadworthy transit. Hopefully, they have a patrol in the area.”

Josie’s face said that she was worried. The man held up his hand and made the call.

When he was done, he approached Josie.
“That’s done. I’m Charles Crowley, by the way. My friends call me Charlie.”

Once again, Josie had to remind herself to breathe again.

“This is Steve and Trev Henshaw, our prop forwards, and the hulk over there is Josh Miller, the No. 8 forward.”

“Thanks for doing that.”

“It is our pleasure, Josie. Are you here with someone?”

“I’m here with three friends. I came out to warm up the car. They should be out in a minute.”

Charlie didn’t wait.
“Trev, can you go inside and find her friends?”

“Sure thing, Charlie.”
Josie was surprised that there was no argument.

“Let me walk you to your car,” said Charlie.

“Thank you again.”

“As I said, it was no problem. Those jerks have all had more than a few encounters with us when they have downed a load of strong cider. Unsurprisingly, they have never come out on top.”

Josie walked with Charlie to her car. It wasn’t much to speak of, but it was all hers.

“This is mine, thanks again to you and your friends for their help.”
“As I said, it was nothing. Those jerks deserve to be taken down. If only they played Rugby. The twins would love nothing more than to come up against them in the scrum. They are bullies. Always have been. I should know, as I was a target for people like them at school.”

Josie got in the car and started the engine just as her friends arrived.

“Thanks again, and goodnight,” said Josie.

Charlie smiled at her before walking away.

During the drive home, the subject was ‘Josie was talking to a man!’. She just had to bite her lip as her friends chided her about this almost unique happening.

“You do know who that was, don’t you?” asked Cheryl from the back seat.

“He told me that his name was Charlie Crowley.”

“Yeah, and is also known as ‘the future Lord Crowley”. His family is loaded and owns at least half of the equity in our employer."

Josie felt herself go red in the face.

Mika, who was sitting next to Josie, said,
“Can’t you see that you are embarrassing the poor girl? She had no idea who he was.”

“And he has the choice of pretty well any woman in the country,” said Dawn from the back seat.

Josie was getting a bit fed up with the conversation, so she pulled up into the driveway of a large house and turned to her passengers.

“Shut it, all of you. He and his mates saved me from Greg effing Thompson and his cronies. That is the beginning, middle and end of it. As you say, if he is not married, engaged or involved with a bit of hot totty from the Polo Club, I’m about the last person someone like him would ever be seen dead with in public.”
After a deep breath, she added,
“Or you can walk home from here!”

The three passengers wisely shut up, but given the looks that they shared, it was clear that they were all certain that Josie fancied Charlie.

As far as Josie was concerned, from that moment onwards, Charles Crowley was very much ‘the forbidden fruit’. Even being seen with him in public could result in her desire for anonymity to disappear in a flash.

Their gossip machine went into overdrive the following Monday, right after a large bouquet arrived at the office for Josie. The card read,
“From Charlie and friends.”

A very red-faced Josie took the flowers and went back to her desk. The office gossip machine went into overdrive with speculation as to who ‘Charlie and friends’ were. Josie put on an air of ‘I don’t know who this Charlie is,’ but if someone wants some flowers, please, help yourself.

The first part of her excuse might have been a lie, but the second wasn’t because she didn’t possess a vase that could hold anything larger than a bunch of spring daffodils.

After two days, the gossip mill quietened down, and Josie hoped that it would be the end of it. No such luck.

On Thursday, she returned home from work to find a letter waiting for her. She knew by the envelope that it wasn't a bill or a summons… someone had once cloned the number plate of her car and was using it like a daemon at the other end of the country. Only the diligence of a young PC who checked the national ANPR records and found that her car was clocked on the A40 in Oxfordshire at the same time that the cloned car was racing through some red lights in Newcastle did the notices of intended prosecution stop.

The paper that the envelope was made from was thick and very expensive. The letter inside was on equally heavy paper and handwritten. There was also an embossed card. It was an invitation to a garden party in 10 days. The letter was from Charlie’s mother.

Josie read the letter twice. After the first reading, she knew that if she accepted the invitation, her desire to be anonymous in life would be at an end or at least in this part of the world. She had been there, done that with relationships in the past. They had always ended in disaster or heartache for her. There was nothing for it but to write a letter declining the invitation. A second reading allowed her to start to formulate a response.

She laboured long into the night, trying to compose a letter that declined the invitation in a polite and non-insulting way. It was nearly midnight when she finally came up with the right set of words. The letter was left on the kitchen table to be posted on her way to work in the morning.

Morning came, and one look at her bedside clock resulted in panic setting in. She was late… no, make that very late for work.

It wasn’t until a breathless Josie sat on the bus that would take her into the city in time for work that she remembered the letter. She’d had to run for the last bus of the morning that enabled her to get to work before the business day started. The letter was still on the kitchen table, where it would remain until the evening.

The first thing that Josie did when she got home that night was to pick up the letter and go back out and post it. A day of reflection had made her even more determined not to accept the invitation.

Josie put the invitation and everything to do with Charlie into deep freeze storage in her mind. More mundane things like getting her car through the MOT test and taxed, and then somehow finding the money for the insurance. Sitting at her kitchen table, she went through her finances for the third time. The facts were pretty stark. Outgoings for the next three months would far exceed the income. She was left with two choices. Pay for everything to do with her car on her one credit card or draw down from her breast implant funds. Being a conscientious sort of person, she hated using the card unless she could pay it all off at the end of the month. Buying a new exhaust system and two new tyres for the car would just about max out the card, and then she’d have to pay silly amounts of interest until it was paid off. No, she said to herself. The implants would have to wait… again.

Josie cried off going out with her friends the following weekend. Her excuse of not having the money was real enough. As it was not quite the end of the month when they'd all get paid, they accepted her reason for crying off. She spent the weekend at home making a new dress for the forthcoming company end-of-financial-year dance. This one would be fully lined, as she was determined not to make the same mistake with this one as with the blue one that she'd worn when she'd had the encounter with Greg and his friends. The skills that she’d learned after she’d left home and worked in a garment factory were, once again, saving money that she didn’t have.

She was so engrossed with her work that she failed to hear a knock on her front door. It was only when the caller rang the bell again that she noticed two things. The first was that she had a caller, and the second was that it was almost dark, and she'd been at it all day without a break.

With a sigh, she went and answered the door, all the time wondering who it could be to come calling at this time on a Sunday evening.

She opened the door and found Charles Crowley standing there holding a huge bunch of flowers.

“Charles? What are you doing here?”

“Er? Looking for you. Why else would I be here?”

“You had better come in. People will start talking if I have a strange man on my doorstep.”

She stepped aside and let him into her home. After a brief look around outside, she closed the door behind him.

“I’m sorry, the place is a bit of a mess. I was making some alterations to a dress, and I lost track of the time.”

“Josie, you don’t have to apologise. It is your home, and I turned up unannounced.”

“Thanks for being so understanding. So? Why the visit?”

“We received your letter about the garden party. It was my mother’s idea. All I did was say to her that I helped you out at the pub. She has this idea that her life’s mission is to pair me up with every female of childbearing age that I talk to.”

Josie didn’t know if she should cry or laugh.

“Charles…”

“Charlie, please.”

“Charlie, you just said the impossible. I can’t have children.”

“So?”

“I’m not a genetic female. I was born male and transitioned four years ago.”

“So? I like you because you are you and not some stuck-up wannabe who sees me as a way to riches.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I’d like to take you to dinner next Friday?”

His first words stunned Josie.
“Why? What will your mother say? I can’t be seen to be dating a Lord. Some people want to see me dead.”

“Who? Who would want to do that?”

“My entire family, for starters. Then, the woman whom I was supposed to marry and her family. Have you ever heard of Honour Killings? Well, they exist even in this country and in the twenty-twenties.”

This time, it was Charlie who was a bit shocked.

“I’m not kidding you. My parents are from Afghanistan, close to the Iranian border. Before WW2, it was part of the Persian Empire. After the Russians under Stalin invaded in 1946 and were defeated, Afghanistan, as we know it today, was created. People in the border areas were not happy, and that includes my family.”

“You don’t look like an Arab?”

“We aren’t. Iranians and many Afghans and Iraqis are not Arabs; we are Persians. My family just happened to be on the wrong side of the border when the maps were drawn up after the war and the end of the centuries-old threat of Russia trying to get a corridor to the Indian Ocean. That was what all the troubles in the ‘NorthWest Frontier’, were all about during the time that the British ruled that part of the world. My parents and theirs, before them, had a business that traded with Iran. Mostly agricultural products, but from time to time, a bit of Heroin as icing on the cake. When the Russians invaded in 1980, all that came to an end. My family fled to Iran, but because our sect of Islam was not the same as theirs, we were not granted asylum, so they came here in 1990. I was born in 1999. We went back to Afghanistan in 2004 when it was reasonably safe, and I was promised marriage to a young girl. I was supposed to go to Iran when I was eighteen to marry this girl. I ran away from home and got the help of a charity that deals with arranged marriages. I had to break free of what they had planned for my life.”

“And you got a new identity after that? I know about the process.”

“The downside was that it was a male identity, but my real reason for running away was that I knew that I was supposed to be a woman, so I started my transition. I reacted to some of the hormone blockers and went to the hospital with a very high temperature. They sorted me out, but some stupid charge nurse contacted my parents even though I was legally an adult. I had to go to the Hospital when I reacted to the hormones that I’d been prescribed. That nurse didn’t agree with anyone being LGBT. The last I heard, he had his licence revoked, as I wasn’t the first complaint that had been made against him.”

Josie sighed.
“The result is that my parents know that I’ve transitioned, but so far, they don’t know my identity, as the hospital incident happened before my new female identity was confirmed. My parents had declared me to be a ‘missing person’, so that’s how they found me that time. I don’t want that to happen again, and the moment my image appears on social media with you, they’ll find it and me. That’s why I dress up only at weekends. The wigs that I wear give me something to hide behind. In the week, I remain as quiet and invisible as possible.”

She took a deep breath and said,
“Now, do you know why I turned down your very kind invitation?”

“I do, and I’m sorry that it is like this.”

“Like what?”

Charlie leaned forward and tried to kiss Josie. She backed away.

Didn’t you hear a word that I just said? I’m ‘trouble’ with a capital ‘T’, and you are way out of my league. You could have pretty well any woman you liked to give you an heir. I can’t, so I can’t be seen to get involved with you. The threat from my family is real and one that I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.”

“I did hear every word, and to be honest, I don’t care. I like you… a lot.”

Josie shook her head.
“And when your mother finds out, one call to my boss, and I’m out of a job, and not long after that, I’m homeless.”

“I sort of guessed that. Very few people of your age make their own dresses these days.”

“And you are still here? Please, Charles, I’m not worth the trouble.”

With a definite purpose in her stride, she went to her front door and opened it.

“You can take those flowers with you. I don’t have anything to put them in.”

Charlie took the hint and left… with the flowers.

Josie sat down and cried. Once again, she'd pushed someone who wanted to be with her away. She had tried to put her background into the past, but every time someone tried to get close to her, her first reaction was to push them away and then run a mile.

Once she'd recovered enough to look at the time, it was past ten. It was far too late to get something to eat. Just enough time to clear away her dressmaking materials, take a shower and head off to bed.

She hung up the nearly completed dress and sighed. She feared that she’d never get a chance to wear it at the company event. Her rent was due at the end of the week, and there was less than a quarter of it in her bank. If she were to be ‘let go, ’ then in all likelihood, she’d be out on the streets in less than a month. All because of a man.

Josie went to bed thinking that she would probably get fired on Tuesday once Charlie had told his mother, who would arrange for her to lose her job. That was her slightly jaundiced view of how things worked. She’d seen others suffer that fate, and so far, the company that she worked for liked to bring down the axe on Tuesdays.

Josie went to work the following Tuesday morning, and as expected, she was called into her manager's office. Her manager was, in her opinion, a boot-licking, arse-licking, good-for-nothing weakling who did not have an ounce of people management skills in their body. Perfect for running a department!

“Hi John, you wanted to see me?” said Josie, trying her hardest to appear cheerful.

“Yes, Josie, please take a seat.”

She sat down and prepared herself for the worst.

“I have received a rather unusual request. Here, read this and let me know what you think.”

Josie wondered if reading your own notice of dismissal was a thing, but she took the sheet of paper that he was offering to her.

It wasn’t her dismissal notice, but it might as well have been.

The email came from Charles’ mother, Lady Crowley.
“I understand that you have an employee by the name of Josie Hayes. I would like to borrow her for at least a week. Crowley Estates will pay her salary for the period that she is away from the office.

Lady Elenora Crowley”

Josie handed the sheet back to her boss.

“This was forwarded to me by the Managing Director first thing this morning.”

Josie was still in the dark.
“Care to explain?”

“John, I have never met Lady Crowley, nor have I ever been to their estate. I have no idea why she wants me for a week.”

While that was perfectly true, Josie hoped that John didn’t press it further.

“Ok, I have my instructions. Clear your current work and hand everything over to Stella. Then, head out. Don’t forget to clock out.”

His last word signalled to Josie that she would not get paid for any work that she might do this week. Nevertheless, she did as he wanted. The office gossip machine would be running on overdrive with speculation that she had been fired for something.

Josie didn’t respond to any questions from those who worked near her in Accounts. She didn’t have any answers to give. The tone of his words suggested heavily that she would not be welcomed back. He would be only too happy to see the back of her because she had developed a habit of finding serious errors in the work of others in the department. Most people accepted her points gladly, but a few of his cronies had taken exception to her actions. It didn’t matter that her observations would save the company a few hundred thousand pounds; being the junior in the department, she should be seen and not heard.
The last time that she had pointed out an accounting error, her manager had claimed it as his own discovery and took the praise from the CFO. His glares told Josie not to say a word or else…

Josie cleared her desk, saying to her colleagues that she would be back in a week, but from their reaction, they didn’t believe a word. Neither did she. Her boss had made it clear that she was very replaceable.

Josie had to go home and get her car before heading off to the Crowley Estate. One look at the fuel gauge caused her to shake her head. It was nearly empty. Half a tank would have to go on her credit card in the hope that she would get paid at the end of the week.

It was almost lunchtime when Josie arrived at the entrance to the estate. Her stomach was empty. Her last meal was a cheese and onion sandwich, almost a day before.

[to be continued]