White Knight
The Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

Jerry and I had known one another since childhood. We went through high school together and worked together after I finished college. I went into finance, but Jerry felt that he was ready to set up his own business. You have to admire him for that.

He had driven vans and trucks for a part-time job for years - even while we were at school. He started doing local deliveries and short haulage on shift, but by the time we were graduating high school he was graduating to long haul. That is where the money is.

Jerry was smart and could see the problems with the companies he was working for. He said it was all about backloading. Coming back empty is not just missing an opportunity for profit, it is a cost. If you have business in at least two places you can double your return. If you are getting in business in 6 or 7 cities you never have to do business without getting a return load. It just needs organization. He was good at that, so he enjoyed it.

Jerry mainly leased the tractor units’ long term and trailers as he needed, but he still needed capital. I helped Jerry with funding to set up online bookings and to get casual space for depots in several major cities. He never looked back. He was never shy of hard work. The business took off.

I was also doing well, but as I was in the city center and he was on the outskirts, close to his depot and out of the traffic we rarely met. Perhaps I should have caught up with him more often, as I firmly believe that old friends are the best friends, but we did stay in touch as our busy lives allowed.

He got married and I was best man at his wedding, even though I barely knew his bride, Sabrina. To me she was wrong. She was bigger than him, but that does not mean she was a very large woman. She was all tits and butt and long blonde hair – almost a caricature of a woman, like a widened Barbie doll. Jerry was small and quiet, and a gentle but diligent person. I half-imagined that she had wrestled him to the ground and forced a marriage proposal out of him. I said something close to that in my wedding speech, as a joke. She was not happy.

She never liked us being as close as we were, so we did not involve her in our arrangements to get together.

I suppose friends are supposed to notice changes, but I never really took much notice. Lots of guys grow their hair long, if they can get away with it. I cannot in my job, but he worked for himself so he could look how he liked. There were other things too. When we caught up, I always said that we should go to an all-you-can-eat place to some more meat on him.

“Sabrina’s food must be shit,” I teased him, but it was clear less than a year after the marriage that things were not happy at home. It sounded like he was doing all the cooking as well and bringing in all the income. Sabrina was as lazy as she looked and he said that she was putting on weight. It seemed to me that she was sucking the life out of my pal, or at least the meat on his bones.

Then out of the blue I got an email, sent to all of Jerry’s friends and what looked like a list of his business contacts, with a video attached. It was from Sabrina and it carried the message: “This is the real Jerry, a fag and a pervert”. It was a nasty message, and I knew that it was a vicious swipe by his wife as I knew they were having marriage troubles.

I thought about not even opening the file – just sending it back and saying something like “Jerry is my friend, so I have deleted the file you attached without opening it”. But I thought: ‘My friend is in trouble, so I had better find out how much of it he is facing’.

When I opened the video, I could see a very attractive woman in a little black dress applying her lipstick at the bathroom mirror, and puckering her lips. Then she turned and looked at the camera in shock as she realized she was being filmed. A voice came from her lips: “No Sabrina, please!” It was Jerry’s voice.

I almost fell off my chair. Strangely I was not shocked to see my friend in drag. What really shook me was just how gorgeous he looked. That long hair was washed and brushed to a sheen and flicked over those slim shoulders, the eyebrows were brushed into an arch over made up eyes, and the lipstick showed a mouth that I had never realized was full and shapely.

This was somebody I had known most of my life and I had no idea he was a cross-dresser. I had no real idea what that even was, but Jerry was married and when we were at school, he had dated girls, so it must just be a fetish. I knew that transvestites are not necessarily gay, so it just a kinky thing. But as I say, he was gorgeous. That was unsettling.

Then I thought: ‘Shit. That bitch has sent this out to ruin him. This is bad’. So, I called Jerry straight away.

“What am I going to do,” he said. He sounded so distraught I found myself imagining that I was talking to the pretty girl in the black dress on the other end of the phone, like a damsel in distress. “I have been too embarrassed even to call you about that confrontation, and now she has emailed it to everybody.”

“Is it really that important?” I asked. “By the way, you look good in drag”.

“I’m in trucking.” That was all he said, as if it was the complete answer. Okay, the trucking business can be tough. Jerry was not big and did not have a swagger or a deep booming voice, but he came across as somebody who could not be easily rolled. How did it look now that his customers knew that he was a closet sissy? And then there were his drivers – being the people they likely were, none of them would feel happy working for a drag queen.

“What does she want?” I asked him, keeping my response equally to the point.

“She wants money,” he said. “To get it, she wants me to let her father and brother into the business. It was blackmail, but now she has fired her shot. Her father has said that he can rescue things if he fronts the business and I just do the admin side.”

“The prick,” I said. “The bitch.”

“I kept it secret from her when we married,” he said. I knew what he was talking about. “She didn’t have to know. You never knew. She saw some stuff on my PC and then she searched for and found my clothing stash. And now … well, I’m fucked.”

Suddenly I was wondering what he had on his PC. And what was in his “clothing stash”. How long had he been doing this? Was he cross-dressing at home when we were at school together? Did he ever go out as a teenage girl? What did he look like? My mind was full of this stuff when what I should have been doing was thinking how to help him.

“If she wants money then after only a year or two of marriage then from what I know she won’t get much if you sell the business,” I suggested.

“This business is my life,” he said. I knew it was.

“I am not suggesting you really sell out. I will come up with somebody to buy it - a white knight.” A plan was forming as I spoke. “One of the funds I control already holds some debt on the business, so we can use this turmoil she has created as an excuse to call up the loan and force a sale. That will crystallize a price for the business, and we will keep it low so that you can pay her a cash settlement. The business assets are not owned by the business, so it is mainly goodwill. If we say that her actions have effectively destroyed that the value just needs to be a dollar more than her family are thinking of paying. We can control this. You don’t have to do what she wants. As you said, she has shot her bolt. You must have done something to get her that pissed – if she had kept up the blackmail she would be in the driver’s seat.”

“Are you saying that I should sign my business over to you?” he asked. I had me wondering if maybe I had gone too far? “Because I happily would in order to keep her and her family out of it,” he added.

“Not me – a shell company. As I have said it would just be temporary, but we would back it with cash. We will have a trust document drawn up to protect you and you alone. There would be a call option for you to buy the business back. It is just a common financial device.” Not so common, but something that I could arrange.

“And you would front the company?” he asked.

“If I need to, sure. But maybe you can put this girl thing behind you and step up. It’s a modern world, Bud. People understand that trans stuff now – right?”

“Not my customers,” he said with a look of resignation on his face. “Besides, now it is out there, maybe now is the time to leave the man behind.”

“What man?” I was confused. Was there somebody else involved in this shit-show?

“Me,” he said. “Sabrina was right: This is not the real me. The real me is on that video. You have seen her. Everybody has. It is not the way I would have done it, but it is done now. All my excuses for hiding are now gone, so why hide?”

I said: “I don’t understand”. But I did. It seemed incredible that I had no idea in all the time that we had known one another. I thought I knew him, but clearly, I did not. He was not a transvestite; he was that other thing – a transsexual. A woman stuck in the body of a man.

I found out later that Jerry had only married Sabrina for the fact that she was as I had always thought, just a fantasy of womanhood, and in Jerry’s case, that is what he wanted to be. He didn’t want a wife; he wanted to be one. If that was impossible then her could watch her putting on her bra to cup those breasts, or pulling up her tights over that huge butt, and imagine it was his body. He liked to brush her hair and help her to arrange it for her, and to watch her put on her makeup. It was supposed to cure him of his condition, but he discovered that her presence just increased his longing to have a body like hers … but slimmer, I suppose.

It was only a matter of time before she understood what was going on. To be fair to her, it must have been a shock. But it was clear from the video that her husband had moved from watching to emulating her. Her presence only made his to become a woman so strong that it burst forth.

In less than a year in had become obvious to both of them that this was not a normal relationship. But Jerry said that he could have let it continue, but surely it was something other than money that forced her to post that video.

But now it was done, and it would not win her any support should the property split come before the Court. For that reason, the attorney I found to represent Jerry was able to secure a relatively cheap buy out of Sabrina’s interest in his property, and a quickie divorce.

But Jerry was right, my help was needed to deal with some of his less liberal-minded customers and many of his drivers. To them I was “the guy who bought out the pervert”, but to others I could call myself “Jemima’s (Jem’s) partner”. I meant business partner – the clients and drivers knew that behind the scenes was a guy who liked dressing as a girl who was arranging the loads and the back loads and making sure they were paid. In time, some of them felt able to call her direct, without having to think about what the person on the other end looked like.

Yes, Jerry was now Jem and she was free to live as a woman, and to run all of the logistics of the business just as well as she always had.

What Sabrina had done was horrific and spiteful, but in reality, it was like a dream come true for Jemima, and as it happens, for me too.

I found that the work was far more interesting than the dry world of finance. I was dealing with real people, and we were shifting real goods, rather that working to convince people that there was value in pieces of paper or lines of code. I could still do some market trading in the downtime, so why work fulltime in the rat-race? Why not work with real people – customers that shift the freight that makes our great nation rich, and truckers who brook no nonsense and tell things how they are – these are the heart and soul of this country. Financial products are just a con that we all have to believe in.

And the truth is, that the working environment in finance is rat-eat-rat. I was sick of talking to people who might be smiling but you knew that they wanted your job and your clients. I never really liked champagne, let alone downing it to celebrate a profit to the business that almost inevitably resulted in a loss to somebody out there.

Trucking is a service business where you are all working together to achieve a good business – keeping inventories, tracing movements, meeting committed delivery times, keeping trucks on the road. And the key members of the team were me and Jem. We were always together. Even when I was tearing a strip off some driver, she was always there to support me, now preferring to watch me do those kinds of jobs, saying they were better done by a man.

People who saw us together and heard us described as “partners” were bound to make assumptions.

“No, we’re business partners,” I would say.

Some might reply with a wink to me: “Business is looking good.”

I mean, they were right. I had said that Jerry “looked good in drag” but Jemima was never in drag – she just looked good. There is a woman who takes pride in her appearance, and who became happier each day as the effects of the hormones became more obvious.

Jerry had ceased to be, and the words: “This is my partner Jemima” became easier to say and to extend beyond mere business. Looking at her should make this much easier to understand.

It was just supposed to be temporary. But we enjoyed working together so much that it just seemed to coast along.

And just I case you think that I have taken advantage of a friend’s misfortune to have the business signed over to me, let me tell you that she will be getting her share back the day after tomorrow. That is the day that Jemima and I are getting married.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2026
2680

This story is included in my latest anthology published on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0GHZBN7MM