The Au Pair
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

To succeed in anything, you need to be prepared to be ruthless. If you want something, you need to take it without thought for the desires or feelings of others. Think about the consequences perhaps, but what other people expect of you should never come into the equation. It is better to be thought of as brutal than to spend your life worried about the opinion of others. It has always worked for me, although I suppose it led to me being alone. Brutes have few friends.

But family is something different. I am not saying that family can be trusted, but they are necessary. You need to think about succession, and if somebody is going to take over, he might as well be of your blood – that is, my blood. I needed a wife, and the generation above me already had one sorted out for me – Camilla. She was very attractive, and dark, like me – like all of us in my community. She looked like somebody who could be my wife.

It would have been nice to think of her as being a virgin, but this is America, and she was no schoolgirl. She knew a few things, and she knew who I was and what I did. She was ready for all of it in the knowledge that I could give her what she wanted – children and all the money she could ever want. She was smart, and smart women look for men best able to provide for them, with genes for success and the connections to help kids to achieve.

She did disclose that she had a boyfriend, but that he was not somebody she would ever think of marrying, as opposed to dream of marrying. I didn’t like those words, but I understood the point. Like me, she was rational in her choices. She said that she would be breaking it off with him if I was serious. She was looking for a proposal. I said that I was ready, and I just needed to get a ring. Everything about this girl seemed right. My relatives knew me well.

I may have mentioned something about not liking loose ends which was when she asked me to promise that I would not take his life. Of course I made the promise, but it was not enough. She said that she would try not to tie me, but if she ever did, breaking a promise to her was something she could never forgive. I understood, but at the end of the day, I am who I am.

I asked some people to find this boyfriend, and take a video of him. I just needed to know. His name was James. Not Jim or Jimmy, but James. He was a small guy, with a big mop of fair hair and big blue eyes. He was nothing like me. If anything, he was more like Holly, the girl I had a thing about in school. Maybe you can guess the type – blonde, big tits, good legs – a bimbo, I guess. A sex object. Maybe we were interested in the same kind of thing – not like us.

“He looks like a girl, Boss,” somebody said.

It suddenly struck me that if he was a girl, he would not cause me any problems. I didn’t have to kill this guy, I only had to end his life as a man. It was a simple but what some might call an elegant solution. We even had a guy who could do it, a surgeon with a gambling debt, who did this very kind of stuff. It seemed time to call in a favor.

I proposed to Camilla that very evening. She was to cut off all contact with James and busy herself with the wedding plans. Somehow, I seemed to get roped into all that as well. I thought nothing about James except that I was asked by the surgeon if I would agree to another specialist being brought in to fiddle with James’ vocal cords so that he could only talk in higher tones. I said yes because I liked the idea. A man who can only squeak like a girl is no man at all, and that is what I wanted.

The wedding was a special day. I suppose I learned something about myself on that day, as I guess many grooms do. Marriage is an oath before God, and when I looked at Camilla at the altar that day I meant every word I said – that I would love her, just as I loved my mother, and only her, up to that point. As brides do, she looked perfect, so it seemed like an easy oath to keep. There would be no other woman for me – that is what I promised God that day.

We went on our honeymoon, back to the old country. That helps to cement things. You learn about the wider family you have, and it is all bound together by blood, and the joining of bloods by marriage oaths. If those oaths are not honored then how can blood be pure? I was ready to become a family man – maybe not the ideal one, but a man with a family. It would not be long before Camilla was pregnant.

I never even thought about James until well after I got back, and even then, only when I was reminded of what I had ordered done. It was a footnote to a report on a brothel business that I held a controlling stake in. The report was delivered by one of my best captains.

“You remember that guy James, Boss?” he said. “We call her Jemma now, or just Jem. We had to put her somewhere, so we have her down there, just doing support work. Something about her pussy not having healed yet. The girls like her, they are helping her to adjust. But she has dropped the whole James identity and so I figure she needs a new one, if you approve?”

I simply agreed. I liked the name Jemma, and I think that I even suggested Mann as a surname, or Goodbody if she had one. The room laughed, then we got back to work. But I found myself wondering how things had turned out. What did Jemma look like? It was something that I could not get out of my head.

I decided that it was time for me to inspect some businesses that I rarely visited, including that brothel. I went down there and met with the woman in charge. She introduced me to a few whores. They all seemed well presented, but they were all clearly whores. I asked to see Jemma.

“She is not actually working,” the woman said. “She is post-op trans, and still learning about her lady parts. She does the laundry at the moment. She is very popular. I think she has had a tough time of things although she won’t say what. She is trying to stay positive.”

It was clear to me that this woman had no idea that Jemma was a man forced to live like a woman. What is more, she was successfully concealing it from the women around her. Why? Why even stay? I suppose the answer was that from the moment my men had taken James, he had ceased to exist.

Then Jemma appeared. I was shocked. This was a beautiful woman, and no whore. The blonde hair had been straightened and hung down past her shoulders. The big blue eyes stood out through the dark eyeliner, somehow more alluring with the moistness of sadness. The chin was strong, but the lips were plump. Her voice was almost childlike. The whole sense was that she was an innocent in a house of sin.

She had no idea who I was. I had seen her as a man only in the images shown to me, and now it seemed inconceivable that this was the same person. How could it be? With a wave of the hand I had taken away a manhood and left only this beautiful creature – sexless but yet so unbelievably sexy.

I made some remark about her being in the right place to make good money, but she said that she did not want to sell her body. She said that she was happy in her present work and to be surrounded by “other women” – no mention of her change of sex.

The meeting left me uncomfortable, which is not a feeling that I have often. I muttered something about other engagements and then I moved on. But again, the image of her before me just lingered. Now that I had seen her, I could not get her face out of my head.

Then, a few weeks later, Camilla confronted me about James. She said that she had run into an old friend who told her that James had disappeared months ago and never been seen since. She reminded me of my promise that he would not die, and she was very upset. She was pregnant and upset, which is not something a husband likes to see.

“James is not dead,” I said. “I can prove it to you.” But as soon as I said it, I could see that there were going to be problems.

I arranged for the bordello to send Jemima to me, for a sort of interview for a position in the greater organization, but I chose a restaurant as the venue for it, because Camilla would be there and she would never make a scene in a public place.

“James has a new life now, so you may not recognize the person who is coming to see us.” Those were the words that I used to warn her.

I was looking at Jem when she entered – I could hardly do anything else – so I saw her reaction rather than Camilla’s. She simply came towards my table and then saw the person she really knew. She just said “Camilla” in that little squeak another wave of my hand had given her.

“What has he done to you?” I heard Camilla say, and I turned to her just as she turned to me in fury.

“I could not have anybody competing for my love, Honey”, I said. “I did what I did for us, for our marriage. I wasn’t so sure of our relationship back then. Now I am. Perhaps I would never have had this done, or maybe not as much. But Jem here has moved on. She is living with who she is now…”. I turned to Jem. “That’s right, isn’t it Jem? We just need to find you a place.”

It was all tumbling out of me as if I was begging for my life, the way so many had in front of me. I felt weak and pathetic, which I guess men who love their wives will understand.

“She has a place,” said Camilla. “That place is our place. I need somebody at home when the baby comes … what do you call it? An au pair.”

“Whatever. Sure,” I muttered.

“I’m leaving, and I’m taking her home,” said Camilla, standing up and ignoring her ravioli. “Maybe you should stay somewhere else tonight, until I calm down.” But her tone was hushed. Like I said, Camilla would never make a scene in public.

I respected her wish that night, but she was drawing closer to her delivery date, and that drew us closer together as expecting parents. She had Jemma, our new au pair, move into a spare room in our part of the house, rather than one of the guest suites. I was not about to complain.

I always understood that if they had wept about Jem’s lost future as a man, and any other kind of relationship they might have had, they did it during that first night when I was absent. At all times they appeared to be nothing other than firm friends, and I clearly had nothing to fear about that. No, my problem was the way that I felt about Jem herself.

I wondered if guilt had a role to play, but that was not something I had any familiarity with. I always thought that guilt was a weakness. It never made any sense to me, so it cannot have been a factor. It must have been sexual, which is a strong driver, and can be even more powerful in a strong man. It was just that Jem was an extremely attractive woman, and the fact that she had once been a man seemed to make her even more attractive. I doubt whether the fact that I had a role in ordering the emasculation and the feminization even played a part. It was barely a consideration – I just wanted a potential threat neutralized.

Or maybe that was a factor – maybe Jem was my creation and I was fascinated by her, like Leonardo was with his Giaconda, carrying the painting with him everywhere he went. I could watch Jem for hours attending to my children, or just relaxing in a sun lounger by the pool, where my dark glasses could conceal my stare. Her body seemed to get better with every year that went by, and with every child my wife placed in my arms.

Of course I longed to fuck her, but I was true to my wife – she would be the only one, and I feared that if I ever took Jem to my bed, I would betray my oath. There were whores, but for me that is nothing but assisted masturbation. For me adultery requires a relationship, and that was what I dreamt of with Jem.

The way she looked at me sometimes only fed my desire. I think that she understood that there was no real malice in my stripping her of her male self, but I was still responsible. If she hated me then she hid it well. Instead, she looked at me as if I deserved pity for being powerful yet so insecure that I needed to remove somebody who was harmless. Maybe she could see the longing in me, but she ignored it.

Some might say that if she worked for me I could simply fire her and send her away, but that could not happen. Camilla enjoyed her company, the kids loved her, and she was always present as some kind of warning to me.

She was a fixture in our home, and I could do nothing about it. “Au pair”, or “alla pari” in Italian, has the closest translation in English as “on par”, but what it really means is that this person is not a servant, but somebody in the household on the same level as a member of the family. I could no more have sex with her than I could have sex with a sister, if I had one.

So she stayed, like the albatross hanging around my neck, a weight holding me back from my worst instincts. The Au Pair.

The End
2510

© Maryanne Peters 2026

Author’s Note: This story comes from a suggestion sent in by Selena Arturo in January when reviewing a story on FM. These are her words: “Well, can I share an idea? How about a jealous old mafia-lord/politician kidnapping his young wife’s ex-boyfriend and forcibly turning him into a voluptuous mistress? The new woman would be ashamed for what she has been forced to become while simultaneously receiving abuses from his ex-girlfriend. The two women eventually learn to co-exist after the husband brings his mistress home as a maid to help his pregnant wife.” I figured that in normal times (but perhaps not now) this is not the thing a politician would do, so I made it a gangster. Also, being abused did not sound right. I saw different dynamics arising.
Special thanks to Eric for editing this one, and for drawing my attention to the language caution!