Zoomed
A Short Story
By Maryanne Peters

Tom had just started to say something – something to spare Dan further embarrassment – but Nathan cut him off.

“No Tom, I think that we value insights of all kinds,” Nathan said, quite firmly. Everybody understood, and some tried not to laugh.

Everybody except Dan, that is. The words went right over his pretty head, as things sometimes did when he was dressed as Danielle. Perhaps that is why he completely missed the little blue light, or perhaps it was because he had stuck a post-it note right over the top of it reading: “Zoom meeting 10 am”.

The very best thing about lockdown was that Danielle was fulltime. He was her from the moment that he got out of bed. He would shave his legs an have a quick shower before taking out his soft curlers and brushing his hair.

The strange thing was that almost everybody in his team noticed that lockdown had affected their boss in a special way, and now some of them wondered whether it was because he was dressed in women’s clothing. Somehow the gruff edge had disappeared. Perhaps everybody just thought – ‘this whole Covid thing affects people in different ways’. Now they all seemed to be staring at just how much it had affected their boss.

Tom’s intention was to save Dan from embarrassment but having been stopped he started to wonder if Nathan might be right, even if for the wrong reasons. Would he not be so much more embarrassed if he had said what he was going to say - “Hey Boss, your camera is on, and we can all see you dressed as a woman.”

Instead, the whole team remained silent while Dan outlined the allocation of new tasks for the day, and for the coming weeks until the termination of lockdown. Dan knew that the office was split on a return to work, for very different reasons.

Nathan for instance did not like being observed, because he spent little time on the company’s business. He might be called lazy, but the truth was that he was effective lazy – smart enough to work out the easy way. He liked working from home.

Dan’s father had said – “Watch the smart lazy guy. He will know the time effective way to get things done.” That was Nathan. Dan had him worked out, and considered him useful. He was a bad example at the office. Dan liked Nathan working from home too.

Tom was conscientious but took ages. Julia was effective but easily distracted and prone be diverted by other things. Gus was ideal – quick and tidy, with just the right level of detail – but after Dan’s job.

“Don’t be afraid of competent people who work for you,” his father had told him. “The person with the ability to build a good team is always valued higher than a backstabber.”

Dan always listened to his what his father had advised. He was good at his job but would never be as good as his father. The truth was that he was more like his mother, in so many ways.

He had her features, as he could see in the small image of himself on the screen, and the curls suited him as it did her. The small screen! He moved quickly to kill it. How long had it been on?

“Are you trying to turn your screen on Boss? Your camera hasn’t been working,” lied Nathan. It was something that might spare Dan embarrassment, but Nathan really just wanted to see whether his transvestite boss might repeat the mistake in the morning. Lockdown was scheduled to end and the chance to see Dan cross-dressed again was curiously fascinating.

The fact is that Nathan was gay. It was not something that he advertised. Nobody at the office knew. Why should they? He did not present as gay. He liked his partners to take the submissive role, although he enjoyed sucking or tugging cock. He had never thought about his boss in a sexual way before, but now he did. He had an image of Dan with his curls on the pillow and his painted lips in an open-mouthed gasp as he plunged into his sweet butthole while stroking his cock. It was an image that was becoming hard to bury.

Julia was gay too. She was the only woman in the team and had to deal with all the masculine bullshit every day while she shared an office with these guys. But then she had seen that she was not alone. If she ignored the deeper timbre of the voice coming out of her mouth, this was just the kind of woman she would go for. She was strong but she was pretty, and she had a feminine way about her. Julia disliked dykes. And she could not help but think about the prospect of having a girlfriend with a cock.

What might Dan (would she be Dani?} look like naked? Would she be soft and smooth? Would she have breasts? God, let her have breasts. Julia loved breasts. She liked them dangling then pressing up against her as her girl worked the strap-on. But “her girl” was not with her, and she was alone. She craved sex.

She had always wondered how a real cock might feel. It was just that she disliked men, and she always had. But Dani? That might be different.

Tom had opened his mouth to speak up for his boss because he believed in doing the right thing, just as he believed in doing things right. He had always thought that Dan was a good boss, just perhaps not as demanding as he might expect. Tom knew that despite all of his efforts not to, he would make mistakes. Dan was generally supportive. He had be reprimanded on a couple of occasions.

But now he had a new image of the man he worked for, and that image was not of a man at all. The image was now of the woman he had seen on the monitor – big, beautiful, feminine, powerful. That was who he wanted in charge. He felt like making a deliberate mistake. She would take it offline of course. She would not do it in a zoom meeting. It would be a one on one zoom. If she would keep her monitor on and be in her underwear, then he would promise to be in the same state.

She would be angry. He had been inadequate. That was his failing.

“Please Mistress, not that!” Tom groped for a kleenex.

By then the meeting was over, and everybody had indulged themselves in the aftermath. Dan was left wondering – had anybody seen him … or rather, her. His initial reaction had been to be mortified by the prospect, but now as he looked in the mirror, he smiled.

“Somebody like you deserves to be seen,” he said to the gorgeous reflection. The woman in the mirror flicked her head and the curls bounced.

Then there was the look of dread as she realized that all of this would need to go. He would need to take those clippers and a size 4 comb and shear off these curls. He would need to grow hair on his shaved arms and give the hair on his face time to recover and sprout from the empty follicles. He would need to tape down those tiny breasts he had nurtured and wait for a body without hormones to reabsorb that tissue into maleness.

A tear ran down her pretty cheek.

There was a knock on the door. Who could be delivering something? This was lockdown so nobody he knew called, and if it was a delivery man she could come to the door. What had been ordered? There was only one way to find out.

Gus was standing there. Gus – ambitious, driven and perhaps a little impetuous. There was no surprise on his face as he looked at the face of his boss, full made up, framed in glossy curls and above a body in a peignoir robe over exquisite lingerie.

“How do you feel about office romances?” asked Gus. There was not a trace of a smirk or a smile. The look was one of deep concern.

“You shouldn’t be here,” said Dan. He poked his head out and looked right and left for neighbors. “You had better get inside before anybody sees you.”

Gus stepped in. “I mean it,” he said. “Tell me that you can approve of an office romance, because I have fallen in love today.”

“Julia is gay,” said Dan. He knew that Gus was not. The office understanding about Gus was that there had been plenty of women, just no relationships.

“What is your name?” said Gus. “I mean, dressed like this … looking like this … who are you?”

Dan thought for a moment in some confusion and then he just shrugged, or his shoulders just fell. He said – “I am Danielle”. Not – “I call myself Danielle sometimes” or “I like to think of myself as Danielle when I am dressed like this”. It was just - “I am Danielle”. It was like a huge steel collar had fallen from her neck; a collar that had both choked her and weighed her down. The words had come out in her voice, hardly even a practiced voice, but as if the dropped collar had freed that too.

“Danielle, I have fallen in love with you,” said Gus.

“You don’t know me”. Danielle was still puzzled and disbelieving, and Gus could see that.

“I feel that I do. When I saw you for the first time this morning, it all seemed to make sense. My feelings about you made no sense until today. I knew there was something in you that drew me to you when that seemed simply perverted. Now I know what it was. You are a woman.”

“Well, not completely,” Dani was blushing and she felt it. She looked down shyly, and then looked up to see Gus’s eyes burning a hole into her.

“I am going to kiss you,” said Gus.

The idea seemed so ridiculous, and yet Dani felt an inner voice crying – “Yes, please, please kiss me”.

Gus did not need to hear the words. He was upon her, his tongue reaching for hers, his hand cupping one of her perfect little breasts through the thin silk.

She may have said the words - “My bedroom is over here”, or maybe he found it by instinct. You would know? Who would care? There can be no obstacle to a passion like that.

Dan’s father had always said - “Office romances are a no-no, and I mean never”.

But what would his father know. That was in days before the virtual office; in the days before the zoom meeting.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2021

Erin’s Seed: A crossdresser answers a zoom call without realizing the video is on and then has three people from his company interested in him - one a gay guy, one a kinky lesbian and one a straight guy who is just unbearably intrigued.