Chapter 20

Paul was well enough to leave the hospital a couple of months later. He had become more comfortable with his new body, but he still found it hard to deal with the loss of his manhood.

What he found most difficult to adjust to was the way that other people reacted to him. Men seemed to want to help him, as if he wasn't capable of performing any task. At first he had thought it was because of his injury, but even now that he was well on the way to recovery, he was still treated the same.

Even worse was the way men ogled his body. It was quite a beautiful body, Paul knew. His own reactions to being mentally undressed by every passing man were a little schizophrenic. On the one hand, he was embarrassed and angry, but on the other he treated it as a compliment. On several occasions when he had been dozing in his hospital room he had wondered what it would be like to make love with a man who truly cared for him.

He was going to have to get used to these feelings. Anne had explained that because he had a totally female brain and feelings, his mental state would shift somewhat towards a feminine viewpoint.

Both Anne and Mandy spent as much time as they could with Paul. He could sense a tension between them whenever the three of them were together. Anne spent her days on her laptop trying out various computer models in an attempt to find a way to defeat the virus. Mandy went straight from work at the burger bar to the hospital each day.

He liked Mandy a lot, and part of him wished that they could go back to sharing a run-down apartment. It wouldn't be fair to Anne, though. She really had done a lot for him, and he had finally found out that his transformation wasn't her fault.

Neither Quince nor Simonds had been tracked down, but the rather confused report given by a manager of a motel to the police told Paul that Quince hadn't gotten away with it. The manager had found a briefcase full of money and some vials of a colorless liquid in a room that a horse had broken out of. The police hadn't be able to work out how the horse had been smuggled into the room without anyone noticing.

At the airport, he had said goodbye to Mandy. Both of them had broken down into floods of tears. She had known that she wasn't going to be able to hold onto Paul after the reappearance of Anne, but that didn't make Paul's departure any easier.

Paul felt a little embarrassed by his tears, but for once he was glad he was now female. A similar performance from a man would have been considered very odd by the other passengers.