Lucy’s phone chirped with a snippet of “International Smile.” Scarlett texting. Lucy paused in her typing and clicked her phone on.

“HEY GURL, DOWN @ THRILL ;)” She wrote.

“Ugh.” Lucy huffed. “Doesn’t that girl ever spend a night in?”

She didn’t, but Lucy loved her to bits anyway. After college, Scarlett already had a job lined up in publishing, and offered to go halves with Lucy on a studio apartment until they both got on their feet. She’d gotten a promotion to assistant editor and the wooing, wining and dining of a bunch of middle-aged agents, while Lucy Lee with her English degree and minor in Spanish had strung together a series of temp jobs. She’d just finished up the latest today and waited to hear back from the temp agency.

Which is why she was sitting in Starbucks at eight at night, writing.

Her phone chirped again. This time it was Florence + The Machine’s “Kiss With A Fist.” Jerome. Lucy made a face and checked.

“1500 words tonite. :)” He wrote, followed by: “How about you?”

“Ugh!” Lucy slammed her thumb on DO NOT DISTURB and shoved the offending device back in her jacket.

She’d met Jerome at the bottling gig, bragging about how much he was making at his other job. Curiosity piqued, Lucy had finally cornered him and got the details: Jerome wrote porn on Amazon, filthy kinky porn that left Lucy shocked and aroused. Mind control, gender switching, orgies, turning women into sex objects...and she’d been even more shocked by how godawful his prose was. And he made how much off this?!

Her own career had started out proving she could do better than Jerome, both in quality and in income. She wasn’t making enough to drop temping yet, but as long as she kept pounding it out, it was only a matter of time.

Which is what made it so frustrating that Jerome was already 300 words ahead of her. He was wrapping up Part 9 of his Bimbo Copy Machine saga, and Lucy was frankly mystified: how many different ways could you write a woman using the office copier and then getting fucked silly over it? Lucy meanwhile was trying to craft a unique bimbo tale, the harrowing (yet arousing) psychological tale of Candace Wong, the Barstuck’s barista who becomes more sex-obsessed and less intelligent with each new coffee special on order. She’d worktitled it Barstuck’s Bimbo Special, and would bundle it with her other finely-crafted masterpieces, American Bar Girl, Barbi Bimbeau: Editor, Roommate, Bimbo, Thrift Shop Bimbo and Bimbofied and Blacked, which admittedly she’d co-authored with Jerome.

If she was going to catch up, she’d have to seriously buckle down and work. She sipped her green tea latte and pounded at the keys.

“I like my women like I like my tea,” said Shawn, the tall, well-cut, smoldering-eyed fireman, “hot, high-class and imported directly from southern China.”

Candace wanted to smack the entitled prick, but she couldn’t help herself, a silly, empty-headed giggle and a blush emerged from her lips...

Lucy sat back, screwing her cute-but-not-pretty features into a disgusted mien. How could her lips blush? Ugh. But editing was for the second draft. For now, she had to just keep going.

“I like my women like I like my tea.” Said a voice behind her; a man, of course, with a smooth, husky burr. Despite herself, Lucy turned around, amused at the serendipity.

Mel Chang, one of the regular baristas, let out her fake head-laugh.

“Oh yeah? How’s that?”

“Hot.” The man was tall and tan and had that physique Lucy could only ever describe as a swimmer’s build. “High class. And imported directly from southern China.”

Lucy’s jaw dropped, and not just because Mel didn’t smack the smug off the customer’s face. She’d never heard that version of “I like my women” before in her life; she’d spent the fifteen minutes before Scarlett’s and Jerome’s texts deep in thought as to what a troglodyte like Shawn would say to her half-bimbofied Candace Wong. And this troglodyte had come up with it on the spot?

That was a freaky coincidence, at the very least.

But instead of, say, bending poor Mel over the counter while spouting coffee-based double entendres, the guy just moved to the other side of the baked goods, and took his coffee from Alicia of the permanent bitchface.

Lucy gaped a little longer, then shook it off. Freaky coincidence, but just that...coincidence. No time for shock now. She had to show up fucking Jerome.

Candace had to take her big, brown, bovine eyes off Shawn and start working on his drink. Oh no! How do you make an Americano again? Candace wasn’t sure, and put her finger to her puffy red lip. Like, when had her nails grown so long and red and sexy? Finally, her liquid brain bubbled up an idea: she’d ask Brian, the Mr. Universe bodybuilding champ who managed her neighborhood Barstuck’s!

She minced toward the Drive-Thru station, where Brian’s big beefy muscles meant she couldn’t even see out the window. So hot! But he wasn’t serving a customer, he was writing a new blackboard. At the top, it said “SPECIALS.”

“Like,” she asked in a breathy voice, “what’s the new special?”

“Hot pink bubblegum latte,” Brian’s voice was super deep and rumbled right down her soaked panties, “it’s sweet, and silly, and pink, and blown up full of air. Just like you, Candi.”

Lacey paused again. This was getting a little too similar to the final transformation scene, where newly-illiterate Candi asks one of the endless parade of hot guys that always infest these stories what the special is, and he replies “You.” Then the sex scene where Candi Wong gets “stuffed airtight” while her new pneumatic floating devices bounce back and forth. That bit was definitely going in the short description on Amazon, so she needed to find something else for this transformation...

Another giggle from the counter caught Lucy’s ear. She turned, curious. Alicia, the most likely source, was helping a customer at the drive-through window, while Mel Chang leaned against the counter in conversation with tall, reedy Jacob, the other barista. Mel was in the middle of gesturing with her hands, her long, red nails glinting under the Starbucks-brand mood lighting.

Wait, what? Since when did Mel Chang have long, red nails? She was a barista, for God’s sake, she needed to use those fingers on the job! And was that...? Yes, matching lipstick, cat’s eye makeup, T.Swift as American-born Chinese.

Mel let out another brainless giggle, jokingly slapping Jacob’s shoulder. Jacob, whose whole demeanor radiated total disbelief at his newfound good luck. Lucy turned away as Mel started honest-to-God twirling her hair.

What the hell was going on?

Before she could think about it too long, her eyes flew to the door. Someone had just walked in. And not just any someone. From the inky dark hair that just fluttered at his temples to the striking green eyes to the trim-cut suit accenting his slender, powerful body, it was Mister Tang, the sexy and mysterious owner of Second Lives Thrift Shop. In Thrift Shop Bimbo, he had subtly encouraged the two white alpha bitches (who totally weren’t Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams c. Mean Girls, by the way) toward various suitably-ironic clothing choices that had transformed them into his personal pleasure slaves before striking a blow for the hotness of Asian men everywhere all over their nubile bodies. And now he was apparently stopping into Starbucks for a coffee at 8:18 in the evening.

This...this couldn’t be happening. Lucy started to hyperventilate. Mister Tang wasn’t real, he was a character she’d made up in one of her porn stories! Mel Chang wasn’t a brainless bimbo with lips and nails on fleek, she was a slightly-hypocritical lesbian historical costumer-slash-barista! The brainless bimbo barista with lips and nails on fleek was Candace, from her story!

With horror, Lucy turned back to her battered laptop, her face blanched to the color of a tea-stain. Could she be...? But then, how was Mister Tang here? He wasn’t even in this story! She’d written that one weeks ago! But she...it couldn’t...

Lucy forced herself to put it into words. Putting it into words had always helped her before.

“Is...what I’m writing...coming true?” She whispered. Even to herself, it sounded stupid.

She looked at the flashing cursor, waiting for her, full of promise and horror. If what she was writing was coming true, she realized, she had the power. She could end it!

Lucy’s fingers flew across the keys.

Candace objected: “It’s Candace, not Candi. And just because I like pink doesn’t mean my head or my bust is full of air, you primitive troglodyte!”

Surprised, Brian took a moment to process what the strong young Chinese-American woman had just said to him.

“I’m sorry I offended you,” he said, extending a beefy hand like one man to an equal, “I don’t know what came over me, but it won’t happen again. It was unprofessional. It was so unprofessional that as of right now I am quitting and recommending you for manager in my place.”

Lucy buried her head in her hands. It totally didn’t work in the story, each keystroke felt like swimming against an ever-strengthening current. She’d barely tapped out the last few words. Casting a sidelong glance between her fingers, she saw that reality apparently agreed with her aesthetic assessment. Mel Chang, still twirling her hair with a long, red nail, giggled as she took Mister Tang’s order. His piercing green eyes were no doubt penetrating deep into her soul...even if that was about the depth of a fishbowl now.

She sighed and deleted the last few paragraphs. They clashed too hard with the rest of the narrative voice, and hadn’t helped anyway. Would there be more changes if she wrote to the flow of the story? Lucy watched the cursor blink after Brian’s crude commentary on Candi, and puzzled to herself. Maybe if she made just one small change, something that wouldn’t really hurt or change poor Mel any more than Lucy already had, it would be all right. After all, she needed to know.

Candi (or was she Candace? She forgot.) put another finger to her puffy red lip, her eyes wide and doe-like. It was a posture she was getting used to.

“What do you mean, all blowed up with air?” She breathed. Brian smiled on her, which made her super juicy to see.

“You’ve got quite an impressive chest.” He said. “Especially for an Asian girl.”

Candi looked down at the big fake basketballs on her chest, bouncing up and down to see them jiggle a little. It made her giggle. Giggle and jiggle.

“Oh! My titties!” She clapped her hands together, overjoyed that she’d gotten it right, which just made her overblown chest jiggle more. “Like the special cupcakes in the counter up front!”

Lucy sat back, satisfied. That had flowed a lot easier, for one, and for two, those breast cupcakes would be pretty impossible to miss (for her) or ignore (for anyone else). She got up, and went to the counter. She needed another latte, anyway.

She tried to ignore how much the middle-aged couple at the corner table looked like Samuel and Ling from American Bar Girl. Even so, she couldn’t help but wonder if Mister Tang had sold her that hot pink pleather tube-top.

“Like,” Mel breathed, “hi. How can I serve you?”

She wiggled her eyebrows and licked a pink tongue across her bee-stung red lips.

“Uh...” Lucy could not deal with this at full speed. “...I just want another green tea latte. And one of...y’know...um, those.”

She could write the filthiest orgy scenes in Bimboized and Blacked and Barbi Bimbeau, but couldn’t bring herself to say ‘breast’ out loud to the doctor, much less in the middle of Starbucks. Lucy’d often wondered how many other porn authors had the same problem.

“Oh!” Jiggled the new Mel. “You mean the Titty Treats!”

“Um, yeah.” Lucy coughed.

“We have a special! Buy one, get one free.” Mel smiled smugly at how clever the oncoming train of an obvious joke was. “Cuz they come in pairs.”

“O-of course.” Lucy said. Then, knowing what she did about porn bimbos, she quietly said: “Do you need help figuring out the total?”

“OMG,” Mel actually spelled it out loud, “thanks!”

Lucy tallied up her total and handed Mel exact change, to spare the poor girl from math while she was bimbofied. Dear God, it was getting easier to think in those terms. As if any of this were normal.

Alicia didn’t have permanent bitchface anymore. As she handed Lucy her latte and muffins, the sultry smile on her lips distracted Lucy from the finger-stroke on the outside of her hand. Lucy was so shocked she nearly dropped her drink, and scuttled back to her own corner as quick as she could.

Okay, she hyperventilated, okay okay okay okay...

While her brain halted like a laptop without a hard drive, Lucy’s hands mechanically peeled one of the muffins and brought it up to her drawn, tense lips. She looked over the last few lines as if she could bore a hole through her laptop screen as she took a bite. Mmm, cinnamon. Vanilla frosting.

...special muffins...

...Titty Treats...

Lucy’s eyes went wide. In bimbofication stories, ‘special’ comestibles inevitably meant they’d turn you into a big-titted airhead, (subject to ironic fine details from yours truly).

And she’d just bit into one!

As discreetly as she could, Lucy spit out the half-masticated bits of muffin into her old cup. All chewed up and slimy like that, they didn’t look like sexy-making glamour magic, but who knew anymore? That was quite definitely too fucking close.

Her phone chirruped, almost giving Lucy a heart attack. When the thumping in her narrow chest subsided, she clicked off “Kiss With A Fist.”

“2k!!!” Jerome preened. Asshole.

Wait!

Her thumbnail, her trimmed, clean-but-not-done-up thumbnail, raced across her phone screen.

“Jerome, has anything weird been going on around you?”

Behind her, the woman who couldn’t possibly be Ling sidled up to her lover, who definitely wasn’t Samuel.

“Whatcha mean weird?” He replied.

“Like everyone else is...” If nothing was going on where he was, Lucy would never hear the end of it. Maybe she should play it safe. “...on E or something?”

As she watched the “...” pulse on her screen, the definitely-not-Ling plopped her skinny ass on definitely-not-Samuel while the man who couldn’t possibly be Mister Tang watched with approval.

“Damn, Luce...maybe I should write where you are?” She watched the “...” again, eyes glued to her smaller screen. Behind the counter, Alicia and Mel cooed over Joshua, who at least was still reedy and nondescript. “Yeah there’s been some funny stuff over here. Saw a bottle of Doll pink-bubbly rosé behind the counter. Some other stuff.”

“Let’s meet up.” Lucy’s thumbs could not type fast enough.

“Where?”

Lucy tapped out of Messenger to go look a place up, then halted, her thumb hovering over Scarlett’s last message. Barbi Bimbeau...if Mel was changing...

“Let’s meet up at Thrill. 10mins?”

The “...” helpfully distracted her as a leggy blonde cheerleader and a Japanese exchange student tugged each other to the bathrooms to reenact the erotic climax of From Japan With Bimbos, the one with the magic wish-granting dildo.

“See you there.”

Lucy pocketed her phone and slammed down the ancient laptop with force. She whipped through the movements, heart pounding, chill heat rising under her top from fear. For a fleeting moment, she wished she could be one of the bimbos in her stories; it’s not like they had to worry about reality getting pulled out from under them, they didn’t have enough brainpower. Finally, she had everything all packed up and threw her purse over her shoulder. She was almost to the door when...

“Excuse me.” Crooned a voice like a baritone sax.

Lucy felt herself rooted to the spot. Before she could stop herself, she turned around.

Mister Tang was there, his green eyes boring into her. She’d modelled him on Jay Chou and if anything he looked better than the original, but those eyes...she knew better than anyone not to look into his eyes...

“You look like the sort of woman who appreciates fine apparel,” he intoned, “would you like to come to my thrift shop and peruse your options?”

That hadn’t been in Thrift Shop Bimbo...but it was totally in-character for the Mister Tang that Lucy had written. She had to fight the script, swim against the current, no matter how bad it ruined the story.

“You...” She whispered, almost lisping like a cornered little schoolgirl under his green gaze. “...you have something on your shirt.”