“Two pints of Pride, thanks, love,” a thin-haired man in a stained T-shirt said, flashing a smile that revealed a missing tooth.
Liam forced a half smile but remained silent, retrieving a glass from beneath the bar. His feet pinched and throbbed from hours in blocky platform heels, and he felt uncomfortably exposed under the punters' predatory stares. Their eyes stayed locked on his cleavage, prominently displayed by a sparkly black top with a plunging neckline, but only because he’d spent most of his shift behind the bar, which kept his long, nylon-covered legs and mini-skirted backside hidden from view.
Curling his inch-long French tips around the glass, Liam took hold of the beer pump with his free hand and sighed. As he pulled the lever, long blonde hair and oversized hoops fluttered and clinked around his heavily made-up face. The skimpy outfit Hannah and Molly had insisted he wear felt suffocatingly snug, but worse than the physical discomfort was the lingering frustration that he had allowed his body to be altered until he was a stranger in his own skin.
Much larger than he had anticipated, his breasts still caught him off guard. The fleshy mounds jiggled with the slightest movement, and he hated seeing the unfamiliar lumps protruding from his chest. He’d been living with them for over a month now as they swelled with every visit to Mei’s flat. Although the initial pain from the stretching had passed, they were heavy, distracting, and constantly in the way.
The only consolation was that Ronnie "The Razor" Davies hadn’t offed him and his entire family yet. He was alive, as Hannah kept reminding him. As sore as his feet felt after an eight-hour shift, the pain paled in comparison to the thought of being chopped up and fed to Ronnie’s pigs.
That fear had driven him headfirst into the disguise. Before, exposure meant a beating; now, it meant an execution. With his life on the line, Liam had stopped fighting his sister and cousin as they actively erased his existence, replacing him with Tifa Turner, "their bestie," a chavvy girl from the estate with a verifiable history.
This meant that when he wasn’t pulling pints at the Black Horse, he spent almost all of his time with Hannah and Molly. He mirrored their routines, wore what they dictated, and painstakingly mimicked their mannerisms and vocabulary.
He still cringed whenever he thought about Halloween a few weeks back. He had been dragged into central Manchester with no say in what he wore or where they went. Hannah relished the opportunity to go out in just a white leotard, and Molly beamed with pride showing off her customised crimson minidress. Liam, meanwhile, with a blue bow in his hair, was stuck pouting in a pair of garish striped tights and a powder-blue dress.
As the White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts, and Alice in Wonderland, they spent hours strutting up and down Canal Street until Liam couldn’t feel his toes, Molly had emptied her stomach in an alley, and Hannah’s rabbit ears had long since vanished. They drifted between bars, hunting for drink specials to fuel their antics and men to flirt with. When groups of men predictably succumbed to their charm, Hannah and Molly slipped into a practiced, teasing rhythm of seduction that Liam could only stumble through. He forced himself to play along, batting his long lashes and pitching his voice into that vacuous, girlish giggle his new identity required. The night was an exhausting gauntlet of unwanted hands and leering eyes, ending in the regret of making out with a muscular lad dressed as an Oompa Loompa.
But surviving Halloween was just one hurdle. He also had to navigate Sharon.
Ronnie’s wife had slowly wedged herself—and her opinions—into his daily routine, and what Sharon wanted, Sharon got. It started small. A quick message to confirm a bridal fitting. A random skincare recommendation. Before long, she was texting every other day and had even invited him to join her at her regular Pilates classes. Why she had suddenly taken such an intense interest in him was a mystery. He, Hannah, and Molly often tried to figure it out, but ultimately, the why didn’t matter. They all agreed that when it came to the Razor’s wife, it was safest to just smile, agree, and keep her happy.
He entered his first Pilates class far more worried about being seen in skin-tight pink leggings and a matching crop top than about the actual workout. He figured he was in decent shape—how hard could a bit of stretching be?
Five minutes into the warm-up, he discovered how wrong he’d been. He didn’t have the core strength or the flexibility for any of it. By the time they moved to the floor mats, Liam was shaking and sweating as he worked muscles he didn't know existed. Worse was the sheer terror that something a girl shouldn’t have would slip from its tucked position every time the instructor cheerfully told the room to widen their stance.
Seeing the other women in the studio dressed almost exactly like him had at least calmed his nerves. It made him begrudgingly accept that Hannah and Molly were right about Mei’s extreme treatments; without them, he never would have blended in. He’d never admit that out loud, though. He still counted down the days until his body finally reabsorbed the last ounce of silicone from his chest.
The breasts had come to the rescue again at the recent bridal fitting, where he had been forced to try on dozens of different gowns—ranging from massive, heavy tulle skirts to clingy, silk mermaid cuts—just to find what Sharon called ‘the one.’
Humiliated and terrified beyond belief, Liam focused on not hyperventilating as an assistant helped him into the dresses. She tugged yards of thick fabric into place, fastened tiny buttons up his back, and relentlessly adjusted the seams to fit. Since some of the plunging necklines were designed to be worn without a bra, his new chest was exposed on more than one occasion with Sharon watching closely.
They were only in the boutique for two hours, but for Liam, the clock seemed to stop entirely. It became a degrading, endless loop. He would be trussed up in a rigid corset, buried under stiff layers of taffeta, or squeezed into a figure-hugging sheath dress, then guided up onto a pedestal and forced to stand there while they critiqued him using words like elegant and stunning. Then, trying his hardest not to trip over the long skirts in his heels, he would carefully step down to start the whole process all over again.
All in all, the last month had been a living nightmare for a young lad who had no interest whatsoever in playing the role of a chavvy girly-girl. And it was about to get worse.
His mum had found out Gaz was back in town and engaged. She had already dropped by the house unannounced once, forcing Liam to hide upstairs for three agonizing hours. He had been bursting for a wee the entire time, but was too paralyzed by fear to step out of Hannah’s bedroom in case the squeaky upstairs floorboards alerted her to his presence.
He survived that narrow escape, but the debrief with Hannah brought worse news: their mum was insisting on meeting her brother’s new fiancée as soon as possible. The sheer panic of his mother seeing him like this made his blood run cold, piling a massive new layer of dread onto an already suffocating situation.
So, as his shift at the pub finally wound down—an excruciatingly long shift spent tottering around in crippling heels and an outfit so skimpy it left absolutely nothing to the imagination—Liam’s mind was entirely consumed by the impending disaster.
Hannah swore she had a plan to get them through the introduction without the whole house of cards collapsing, but Liam just couldn’t see it working. Even if she was barely involved in his life these days, she was still his mother. No matter how good the disguise was, she would surely recognize her own son.