Changing Room Epiphany
Copyright© 2026 by PostScriptor
Chapter 1
Not TOO long ago (for me within the past year or two) author Penda wrote a story called “Changing Room”. I asked for his permission to take the story onward, and he graciously gave permission.
Penda’s writing is fine, but his topics are sometimes of a ‘Femdom” nature, with evil Fem characters who push and abuse men until their partner goes literally crazy. His stories get lower scores than they otherwise might, because of his subject matter.
To help the reader (who doesn’t bother to read Penda’s original story) understand, I’m adding a brief summary:
Ollie and Ella have been married for a while (not specified) and while she could be described as a ‘gym rat’, Ollie went to the gym because she more-or-less demanded that he do so. For her, the gym was joy. For him, it was torture. But Ollie was madly in love with her and thought that she was a beauty above his level. She is a blithe spirit.
An added stress in their marriage results from Ella getting a promotion to managing director for a division of a consulting firm, so she is now making more money than Ollie.
Ollie lives in daily fear that she will leave him.
The pair return from a vacation in the Beleric islands and return to the gym only to find, to Ollie’s chagrin, that the ‘changing room’ is now unisex with people using showers and lockers naked. Ollie is unhappy about it; his posture isn’t great and he is a bit clumsy. Ella, on the other hand, rejoices in the exhibitionist air of the place. Additionally, she is soon spotted by a trainer/owner of the gym who is attracted to her, and she is highly attracted to him as well.
The inevitable happens and soon she leaves Ollie for the trainer, Marc.
And THAT is where my PostScript begins!
~~&~~
She had left. It was finally broken. He was finally broken. Completely. There was no more pretense; she wasn’t coming back. She was with Marc, so there was no reason to anticipate the sound of her key in the door.
Ollie sat there in the flat, now empty of her presence, dark, except light that crept in through the windows that faced the street where the streetlamps shone once it was late enough for the sensors to turn them on. He had already been put through what was essentially a form of torture by his wife, so he was no more depressed than he had been for almost the past six months. But he began thinking--more objectively than he had for years--about himself and Ella and their relationship.
When they had met at Uni, so many years ago now, he had been an English major with an emphasis in creative writing, a degree he was constantly being told was useless, (‘do you know what an English major says to his customers? Do you want fries with that burger?) but with a math minor, just in case. Ella was majoring in an equally useless degree, philosophy, and they met in one of his writing classes. He was taking it for pleasure; she was taking it because she needed the English composition credits to graduate.
Somehow, by this time he couldn’t even remember the details of how or who initiated it, he suspected that she had. They started talking and became friendly. After that the typical romance: coffee, lunch dates, dinner dates, and finally becoming intimate and after graduation, marriage.
Ollie had always been amazed that he somehow ended up with Ella, which might have been part of the problem. Reflecting, he realized that Ella had probably always been the instigator, the leader, the pusher, and he was the follower. She was the ‘dominant’ in their partnership.
It wasn’t as if Ollie was ugly, if fact most people thought of him as good looking. Not a model, but not an ogre either. He was of normal height and slender without being skinny. He had added some weight over the years, but it was just enough to fill him out.
His biggest problem was that he was rather introverted. He was quiet and shy, although highly intelligent. He was VERY well read, back then and even today.
He chuckled to himself as he thought about his personality. According to articles he had run across recently, these days psychologists had broadened the ‘symptoms’ of autism to the point, that had he been a young man today he might have found himself diagnosed as autistic, but ‘highly performing’ on the autistic scale.
Looking in retrospect, he wondered if Ella had unconsciously recognized that with his personality, he would be a mild man, never asserting himself over her. He had always considered it one of their strengths that they were ‘a team’, making decisions together, consulting each other, making compromises rather than confrontation.
Of course, back when they first graduated, with her philosophy degree, Ella had limited job prospects. She ended up spending the first five years of their marriage in retail, albeit working in high-end boutique shops with a base salary and commission as well. Not a lot, but Ella was always proud that her commissions and even year-end bonuses, were a form of recognition and praise. Not huge amounts of money, but enough to provide some ‘mad money’ for special dinners or trips to the seashore.
Ollie reflected on his work. As a ‘freelance’ writer, he didn’t have a job, per se, but from almost the beginning he was doing very well.
It was party luck, but also with some help from one of his professors.
A company that produced those little brochures that one sees in racks at every hotel, promoting the various sites and activities to amuse the visitor, approached his professor for a recommendation. The writer who they had depended on for years had retired and was now living on the Costa Brava in Spain.
His former professor and mentor recommended him, and Ollie got a call the next day. He took some of his work into their office and he was handed the assignment to update their general “Seeing London” brochure. They took the risk with the one brochure and were pleased.
Soon he was updating their other ‘London Sites’ series and adding new ones. “The Tower Bridge”, “The Tower of London”, “Westminster Cathedral”, “The British Museum” — those and more, he’d done the research and written the text for all the newly revised ones. He had even done “Vistas from the London Eye”, which was a small guide that sold for £2, of which he was still getting a small fraction for each booklet sold each quarter. He was always amazed at how many of those sold and what he earned from it.
That was his start, and he was still writing pamphlets as needed for the company all these years later.
But that was not all. His work was noticed by others in town who needed to outsource writing assignments.
While he was not a staff reporter, he would get assignment from various newspapers for some of the ‘soft’ articles. Reviews of movies and plays, reports on the flower and gardening shows, horse races, dog shows and other events as needed.
Eventually, he was also being used by several of the well-known advertising agencies to supplement their in-house writers when they had more work than they could handle. Although he cost them more per contribution, it was still cheaper for them than adding another full-time permanent staff.
More recently, naturally, his work had shifted more towards writing for the internet, not infrequently those articles that were clickbait to get readers to read a short story spread over many pages, surrounded with ads bombarding their senses.
In addition, Ollie was not passive in his pursuit of work. After the years of writing, he knew most of the editors of the newspapers and magazines ( print or online) and he would also approach them with concepts for pieces that he judged might be of interest to them.
All in all, Ollie always had enough paying assignments to keep him busy. They didn’t pay huge amounts individually, but in total they kept him and Ella comfortable, even to the extent that they were able to purchase a flat in London. Indeed, through his contacts with people, he was able to buy a flat in a decent neighborhood, close to London’s center and at a price that was, his estate agent assured him, ‘a steal.’
Oddly, early on, although Ella was earning money at her job, because of her loose spending habits, which Ollie never objected to, and student debt, she was still considered a credit risk, so the flat had been purchased solely in his name. They discussed changing the title deed to both of their names later; they soon forgot and it never happened.
After they had been out of school for a little over five years, Ella decided that she wanted to go back and get an MBA that would allow her to find better paid and more interesting employment. It wasn’t that she didn’t like her retail work, but she wanted to stretch her wings and find something more intellectually challenging.
They knew that her going back to school would put some economic pressure on them; certainly, they would have to be a bit more frugal and some of the little extras they were accustomed to would have to be set aside, but they both agreed that the delayed satisfaction would be worth it in the end.
She applied to one of the more prestigious schools in London and to their great delight, she was accepted. The school was looking for students with a broad liberal arts education, so her undergraduate degree in philosophy was a plus, and they wanted to increase the percentage of women in the program which made their decision even easier.
Two years later, Ollie was in the audience clapping as he watched Ella walk across the stage to receive her diploma. Not only a proud moment for them both, but a significant change in their lives: she already had a job awaiting her.
Her first job was with another retail company, one of the large department stores (the name would be familiar to you) but not in the retail end, instead in finance.
Her next years there in finance were successful and she was making her way up the ladder. Eventually, though, she got one of the positions she considered in her strongest area: corporate strategy.
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.