James woke up slowly, coming back to conciousness in stages, slipping into and out of a series of ever more realistic dreams. He went from a steely eyed gunslinger all in black, facing down his enemy at high noon, to a man comically clad in a woman's dress from pioneer days, fleeing a war party of half-naked braves.
His race across the plains ended in a single wide trailer at the end of a dirt road. James hiked up the hem of his dress and leapt the front steps three at a time, but screeched to a stop in the open doorway. Otis was there. James felt his face flush red with embarassment. Why was he wearing a dress? Otis turned and smiled at him.
Suddenly, James didn't feel very much like a him anymore. To his dismay he looked down and discovered his body filled out the simple checkered dress much, much too well. The large breasts tenting out the bustline of the dress were all too familiar to James by now. It seemed that even in his dreams he couldn't escape the killer curves of Jill's swimsuit model body for long.
Otis was walking toward her and James simultaneously felt both revulsion and delight at the animal response of her new form. Her nipples were hardening under his intent gaze and she felt a familiar loosening in the pit of her stomach. "How's my boy today?" Otis asked and then smiled.
Something inside James quailed with fear. He knows! How could he know? No one in their right mind would ever believe a magic necklace turned me into a woman, into Jill.
Otis wasn't looking at her. He wasn't even looking at her breasts, which was unusual all by itself. He was looking lower. He tenderly reached out one strong hand, auto grease still under the fingernails, and touched her.
He touched her belly. James looked down and gasped, took one step back in amazement and terror.
She was pregnant. Her belly was growing before her eyes, a rising roundness underneath her worn dress that quickly eclipsed her swollen breasts as the most prominent feature of her altered anatomy.
James could only take so much. She blacked out.
When she came to again, James was unsure if what occurred was real or not. It certainly seemed plausible. Perhaps it was some surfaced memory from her drug induced blackout. She was kneeling at the feet of a man, not Otis this time, but a man she knew even better and yet, in some ways, not at all.
The man was James, which had once meant it was her, but she was Jill now - - or almost completely so. He didn't want to be, but James was just so tired of it all. How long could she realistically expect to maintain her masculine identity while condemned to life imprisonment in a woman's body? And a beautiful woman at that!
James was naked. The man that she had once been was fully clothed in black. He was dangling the necklace in the air above her, the symbol on the medallion creating an irregular flash of light.
James inclined further, bringing her lips to the dusty boots of the masterful stranger her old self had become. She was begging, as if showing weakness would induce this fierce eyed other James to give back what was lost.
Light falling across her face awkened James fully. It briefly occurred to her to wonder if the waking world was actual reality or only the most realistic dream of all.
Yawning, she rolled over and stretched her arms, realized she was no longer bound by tethers to the headboard. Free! She was free!
But her joy was shortlived. James quickly discovered there was a collar fastened and locked close about her slender neck. A silver chain connected it to something rather like the trotline Otis kept his dog on in what seemed another world, back home in Alabama.
James didn't even notice that she thought of Alabama as back home. She was too outraged by what had been done to her while drugged and unconscious. Collared like an animal, a pet. Even more demeaning, she was no longer shackled to the bed because there was no longer a bed. She was curled up naked atop a pile of blankets without even the luxury of a pillow.
Her new sleeping arrangement was identical to that of Rikki, the new James's leather clad slave. Did that mean the stranger in her stolen skin, Jill or whoever and whatever Jill had become, had the same fate in store for her?
James bit her lower lip, knowing and not caring that it was one of many Jill-isms she had accquired. How was she going to get out of this?
