The Uber driver hadn’t been willing to take his car down the drive to the farmhouse, and hadn’t been that interested in sticking around while Rebecca verified the address was right, either. So it was that the last five hundred yards or so to her destination had to be covered on foot, with a wheeled suitcase that on the rutted old country drive, grass growing in between the tyre tracks, was more of a problem than a benefit.

Mostly, though, Rebecca couldn’t get over the fact she’d been able to get here by an Uber; they were less than twenty minutes from the train station she’d spent all day reaching, but the high hedges around the drive - and the sheer number of small copses of trees at what almost seemed like strategic points - made it feel like they were far from civilisation.

They weren’t - hell, there was what had looked like the central spokes of a village just a mile or so back - but it certainly felt far more remote than she would have expected. Wales, she decided, got rural fast when it wanted to, and was serious about what ‘rural’ meant when it did.

She was about 99% sure they were in the right place, in that way where 99% meant ‘would have been 100% sure if the consequences of being wrong weren’t so upsetting’ but also where any hesitation in the door being answered would probably see the percentages drop fast.

Not for the first time, she wondered what on earth had possessed Stephanie, of all people, to abandon city nightlife for a place in the country. She hadn’t seen her since, well, the whole global pandemic thing, but that was only so long ago; how much could her old friend really have changed?

The farmhouse was big enough, she conceded now she was close to it, to play host to a whole family, not that Stephanie had one of those yet. There was a boyfriend, Rebecca knew, who sometimes appeared briefly on her friend’s social media with what looked like an affectionately tolerant smile, but she couldn’t even give his name with any certainty.

Standing in front of the heavy old wooden door, she took her hand from her wheeled suitcase long enough to grasp the big brass doorknocker, lift it, and let it fall.

The noise it made wasn’t just loud; it was also surprisingly sharp and satisfying. But Rebecca’s attention wasn’t on that so much as the greasy feeling on her palm; looking at it, she didn’t see the murky stain she’d feared, didn’t in fact see anything but perhaps a little extra sheen on hr skin.

Her attention was divided, though, hearing the clat-a-clat-a-clat of heels on stone flooring, and she’d barely had time to wipe her palm on the thigh of her jeans when the front door swung open.

“Becky!” Stephanie squealed, flinging her bare arms extravagantly around her friend. She pulled Rebecca in close, unintentionally (Rebecca was sure) jerking her off balance, and her lips met her friends’ in almost no time.

Stephanie slipped her tongue past the parted lips of Rebecca’s mouth, exploring, teasing, inviting, flirting. She tasted faintly of peppermint and chemicals. Mouthwash, perhaps?

It might have been the shock of the contact or the loss of balance or the surprise at the whole thing, but the kiss lasted for twenty seconds before Rebecca collected her thoughts enough to stop kissing back and another ten seconds before she could gently push Stephanie back enough to break the contact.

“Stephanie! What—”

Her voice cut off abruptly as her friend’s hands slid down to her butt, squeezing her buttocks playfully. As Rebecca gaped in astonishment, Stephanie leaned back in, kissed her lips briefly and tugged her friend inside the farmhouse, smiling perkily all the time.

The door had been shut before Rebecca could get her bearings. She heard the click of a key in the latch and then Stephanie was back in her field of vision, still smiling cheerfully. “Long time no see, sweetheart,” she said. “How’ve you been?”

"Never mind that right now,” Rebecca said. “I - what the hell?”

“What do you mean? Oh, the kiss!” Stephanie’s eyes opened wide. “I’m sorry, I just wasn’t thinking. I was so happy to see you again and I guess I just didn’t think about the fact you might not feel the same way.” She flushed. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Rebecca said, more on reflex than anything else, but after a moment of thinking about it, she felt like it was fine.

She had been surprised more than outraged, she thought, and the kiss had lingered long enough - she’d let it linger long enough - that surely she’d been enjoying it? “I’m just not especially used to kissing friends like that.” Which was a good enough explanation, she felt, to cover her reaction.

Stephanie shrugged. “I’m bisexual nowadays,” she said cheerfully. “Coffee?” She took hold of Rebecca’s suitcase and started wheeling it over the uneven flagstones of the farmhouse floor in a way that suggested total knowledge of where every unbalancing factor was, something backed up by the way the click of her heels against the stone never broke its cadence.

“I’d love a coffee,” Rebecca answered, almost on autopilot, as she started following her friend through the sprawling house. She was replaying the other woman’s comment in her head, turning it over. “And hey, I’m flattered you’ve decided you can come out to me.”

In truth it stung a little to learn her friend had never trusted her with something so important, but Rebecca had enough self-knowledge to understand that it must have frustrated her friend even more not to be able to talk about these things.

“Hm?” Stephanie had come to a halt in front of the huge cast iron oven that dominated even the spacious kitchen of the farmhouse. She looked back over her shoulder, puzzled, before laughing and turning back to the hobs. “Oh! No, when we hung out last I was still straight.”

“…You mean you hadn’t come out yet?”

“Nope.”

“You hadn’t realised yet?”

Pausing in the act of spooning coffee into her moka pot, Stephanie sighed almost theatrically and set everything down. “So… I can see why you’re trying to fit me into that system,” she said. “But, like, I know exactly why I’m bi. And I might not be bi in another month or so anyway. It’s a chemical thing.”

This, Rebecca noted, made no sense. “Like… hormones?” she tried.

“Oh, I don’t know the details,” Stephanie said, waving her hand vaguely.

It was such an intensely Steph thing to do that suddenly everything about her friend that had changed since they last met was thrown into sharp relief; the high heels replacing the Doc Martens, the black jeans (jean shorts, just as often) gone in favour of a short skirt in the same dark green as the vivid lipstick she wore, the tight black tee becoming a loose, light blue blouse whose neckline nonetheless plunged low enough that her gifts were still well displayed.

The fact her short black hair had grown down past her shoulders and was now gathered back in two businesslike braids was almost normal by the standards of everything else.

“I’m not a chemist myself. You know?”

“So who is?”

The smell of coffee was already starting to fill the room. “Dennis.”

“Dennis,” Rebecca said. “The boyfriend?”

“Yup,” Stephanie grinned.

“Your boyfriend… gave you bisexual chemicals?”

“Sort of.” She was pouring the coffee now; no question it smelled better than the instant they’d bonded over hating on campus, all those years ago.

“Sort of?” She hated the whole echoing comments thing, but there was no saner way to ask this question, so she just had put up with it.

“It’s not a side effect, exactly. But it’s not really the goal he was going for,” Stephanie said, then corrected herself. “We were going for.”

“And… what were you going for?” Rebecca wasn’t at all sure what her friend meant in the first place, so it was very possible the answer wouldn’t make sense either.

All the same, she had to at least try.

Stephanie finished pouring out coffee into the mugs. “That’s quite a weird story,” she said, and passed one to her friend. “Sugar’s in the pot with Sugar written on it, hon. Excuse me for a moment, I’ve got to check something—” and with that, Stephanie was out of the room.

Baffled, Rebecca added sugar and took a sip. It was only by clinging to these little, normal things that she felt she had any control over the situation.

That pepperminty-chemical taste filled her mouth again. She sighed inwardly—clearly whatever Stephanie had last drunk before kissing her was the sort of thing that lingered, cutting through anything you drank afterward. Almost as bad as brushing your teeth just before someone passed you a drink, except that it was a little sweeter and a little more pleasant.

It occurred to Rebecca that she hadn’t had much luck with odd chemical substances since arriving, between the strange taste and the unpleasantly greasy palmful of… whatever… when she’d used the doorknocker.

And it was around that point that Rebecca noticed that there’d been none of that strange greasiness to holding the mug; that whatever had coated her palm had gone.

For a moment she just stared at her palm, wondering what had happened. Was it too fanciful to imagine that it had all just been absorbed into her?

She raised her hand to her face and sniffed it. It didn’t smell like grease; it smelled like sugar and chemicals.

The door Stephanie had left through opened again and Stephanie bounced back into the room - there really was no other way to describe it - dropping into the chair on the far side of the big oak kitchen table. “Sorry about that,” she said. “It’s been kind of a busy day. I’m sure you know how that is.”

Rebecca’s jaw had dropped. In one of those infrequent reminders of man’s origins as an instinct-driven animal somewhere in the middle of the pecking order, she’d registered the bouncing, jiggly pride of her friend’s prominent, firm, perky tits before it had sunk in how they were being presented.

While Stephanie had been out of the kitchen she’d shed her blouse and the green skirt, underneath which she sported a just-too-small-for-modesty bikini in a black and white cow print. It didn’t look like it could be comfortable, but Stephanie couldn’t appear more at peace with her situation.

Rebecca couldn’t imagine her friend buying a cow print bikini even as a joke. Wearing one was right out of the question.

Stephanie had been fond of wearing outfits that turned heads, but this - the combination of quite how skimpy the cut was and the pattern just said things about anyone wearing it that she couldn’t imagine Stephanie would ever want said about her.

“Steph, what’s going on?” Rebecca asked pointedly. “Is this outfit supposed to just be what you relax in at home?” She left the follow up question, what the fuck message do you think you’re sending me, unasked, if only to see if Stephanie would answer it willingly.

Stephanie shrugged. “Why not?” she asked. “It’s what I want to wear, anyway. Why not just slip into something comfortable?” Her smile was definitely taking on a more lascivious air during that sentence.

Rebecca couldn’t believe it. There’d never been even the slightest hint before... “My god,” she breathed, “what’s this Dennis guy done to you?”

“Oh, he messed with my mind,” Stephanie said airily, as if it wasn’t important. She sipped at her coffee. “Rewrote me. He wanted someone more into sex and less into having opinions of her own. I kinda like it. Which is him, too, I think. But I’ve felt this way long enough not to care. I help him with it, now.”

Rebecca didn’t know what to say, and as she so often had she covered for that by taking another sip of coffee, and as she did, Stephanie grinned and winked. “You will too, honey.”

Rebecca jumped in her chair with shock. The coffee mug in her hand spilled; the hot liquid splashing all over her hand. “What?” she asked, putting the mug down distractedly. She started to lick the liquid off her hand... There was that peppermint taste again.

Stephanie just chuckled. “It’s a long, long story, honey,” she said, “but it’s a good story. I mean, it has a happy ending.” She smiled. “Happy endings make you smile.”

It occurred to Rebecca that Stephanie’s lips didn’t have that deep green stain on them anymore. Was that something she’d cleaned when she changed her outfit? Had she just put on a particular lipstick just to greet her?

No, Rebecca thought. She’d put on that lipstick just to kiss her. Her own mouth open, staring at her friend’s bizarre behaviour, she raised her hand to her mouth, touched, her own lips, and heard her friend giggle.

“Are you… doing something to me?”

“Oh, babe, of course not,” Stephanie smiled. “Chemistry’s doing something to you.” She leaned forward onto the table, one of her forearms providing her tits with a shelf, making them even more prominent. Rebecca’s eye kept wandering back to them. She was trying to work out if her friend’s tits had grown, but the more she looked at them the more words like juicy and ripe and pert kept filling her head.

“You like what you can see,” Stephanie said. “I’m glad. It’s not the same dressing sexy when he isn’t here to appreciate it... but you, you appreciate the view anyway, don’t you?” she smiled at her friend.

Rebecca opened her mouth to protest, but Stephanie reached out with her free hand, popped some sort of pill into it and held her nose until she swallowed, grinning playfully all the time.

“S-stop…” Rebecca managed.

“Really?” Stephanie asked, grinning. “Do you want me to stop?”

“Please…” she murmured.

“Please stop? Or please continue?” Stephanie got up and started strolling around the table. This, Rebecca thought, is a woman who’s stripped down into cowprint bikinis to be comfortable, but she’s still wearing heels on uneven stone slabs.

It didn’t make any logical sense, except something in her head was starting to insist it did. “Please…” she said again, and she left it at that, her head spinning, tingling, unsure how to finish it.

Stephanie straddled her, pinning Rebecca into her chair.

“Dennis wanted another girl to play with, babe,” she said. “I got to pick who, so long as they were hot.” She picked up a pair of kitchen scissors and started cutting a slit up the centre of Rebecca’s loose T-shirt. “He made me bisexual so I’d know better...”

She leaned down and once more slid her tongue into Rebecca’s mouth. This time her friend somehow couldn’t find the energy in her to protest. She moaned softly into Stephanie’s mouth.

She felt strangely weak and helpless, but she wasn’t even sure she considered that a bad thing. Not right now.

She was, she realised, smiling into the kiss.

Stephanie finished the cut on the t-shirt, then two more along the shoulders, and then pulled it away and discarded it disdainfully. Her eyes flicked back to meet Rebecca’s, and a spark seemed to pass between them. “Better?” Stephanie asked.

“I don’t understand,” Rebecca offered weakly. “What’s… what’s happening?”

“You’re becoming more like me,” her friend said simply. “Better living through chemistry,” she added, and she laughed.

“Why are you doing this, though?”

“Because Dennis wants it,” Steph offered quietly. “And I want what Dennis wants. It’s a pheromone thing, he told me. Just his presence dopes me up into a docile pet.” She shivered, eyes closed, reliving some memory Rebecca couldn’t understand, and perhaps even without knowing it she was grinding into Rebecca as she did.

Rebecca bit her lip. That grind… it was having more effect than she wanted to admit, especially with her eyes once again drifting back to the luscious, swollen chest of her captor-friend. Which was…

“How did your tits get so big?” she asked, and while mostly she winced at how slow and silly her voice made her sound, some craven traitorous part of her seemed to be responding to that.

“I told you, honey. The bisexuality thing is a side effect of being a docile pet.” Stephanie turned back to the table to find the scissors again, stretching in a way Rebecca’s eyes found positively delightful. “You just haven’t worked out what kind of pet, have you?”

Rebecca flushed. It was strangely exciting to be treated so much as a silly little pet whose compliance could just be assumed, but it was embarrassing, too; and that embarrassment seemed to light a fire within her.

She closed her eyes and tried to shut it all out.

She kept her eyes closed through the first two sounds of the scissors, but opened her eyes again just in time to see Stephanie slice apart her bra between the cups, having already severed the shoulder straps. Steph tossed it away, and now Rebecca was sat under her, topless, while her friend smiled down at her in too-tight cowprint.

“It’s true,” Stephanie said. “I’ve ruined your clothes. But they were far too reserved anyway, honey,” she said. “Clothing should just remind people you’re naked underneath.”

Rebecca tried to protest but even she couldn’t make head nor tail of the noise that gurgled out of her throat. It was incoherent; it seemed, somehow, to have too many consonants, too many syllables, even though it was really all one noise.

Stephanie leaned in close, her lips against her friend’s ear, and whispered, “That’s what you’re for. What we’re for.” The feeling of her friend’s breath across the sensitive skin of her ear set Rebecca squirming.

Steph straightened up, then arched her back, almost proffering the huge, soft, milky tits strapped in place by her cowprint bikini. “Can you feel it yet?” she asked. “You should be practically in heat by now…”

Rebecca whimpered. “What… how…” The word how seemed to stretch in her mouth, drawing itself out longer than it should.

Stephanie giggled and slid a hand down Rebecca’s bare belly, fingernails gently skritching at the skin until they reached her belt and her jeans, sliding down her crotch. Rebecca couldn’t help herself, clenching around the hand like she could anchor it in place to grind on, earning another giggle from the other woman. She let out a low moan that also sustained itself longer than expected.

“Oh, honey, you don’t wanna be riding my hand,” Stephanie told her. “Well, I shouldn’t be your first option anyhow.

“Not when…” She turned back to the table again, stretching back, her trapped hand pressing firmly against Rebecca’s crotch as her captive helplessly humped herself against it, but then Stephanie was turning back, opening her phone’s menu and then turning it around to show Rebecca a close-up photo of a cock.

Rebecca was suddenly still, eyes wide, staring at the photo. She could feel her mouth starting to fill with saliva. She couldn’t believe how much she wanted that cock filling her, couldn’t imagine wanting anything more.

Stephanie was giggling and Rebecca’s head felt like it was fizzing and everything was right with the world.

“These… drugs,” she managed, “are bullshit…”

Stephanie laughed and Rebecca laughed in her turn. “You want that cock?” she asked, waving the phone screen in front of her eyes again, and Rebecca nodded eagerly.

“Fuck, yes,” she promised. Or begged. She wasn’t sure which.

“You willing to share?”

Her eyes crossed for a moment. She wasn’t sure exactly why but somehow that seemed to make things hotter. Rebecca made a sound; it wasn’t a word, not really, but it was still an answer.

"You willing to be led, like the docile pets we are?”

Stephanie’s voice had become a sing-song now. It wasn’t exactly teasing, but it was close, and Rebecca found herself grunting her acknowledgement, too caught up in the drug-fuelled passion she felt to use words, no better than sounds.

“Join me in the herd,” Stephanie purred, and Rebecca’s head, spinning, didn’t even have the capacity to question that phrasing. She let out a long, lingering moan of agreement.

Stephanie almost cackled. “I can’t wait to introduce you to him,” she said. Her hands were up around her shoulders, thumbs slipping under the straps of her cowprint bikini, and in a single smooth motion the straps were down around her waist and those huge, firm, milky tits were free, hanging a little lower perhaps than while supported but standing prouder than Rebecca had expected.

“I just need to get you ready, honey. I need you bigger.” She was smiling as she said it, and Rebecca found herself nodding along as she moaned. Yes, I want to be bigger.

Stephanie pinched a nipple, tugged at it, and Rebecca saw white droplets form. The sound that came out of her was a needy animal lowing. She didn’t hesitate. Couldn’t hesitate. Didn’t think about it. Couldn’t think about it.

She just leaned forward and latched on to the milky nipple of the woman who straddled her, who began to squeeze and stroke her own giant tit, milking herself into the eager throat of her friend, of her herdmate.

Stephanie stroked Rebecca’s hair as the other woman released a long, muffled moo around her nipple.

“Just as soon as you’re milky and fertile, he’ll love you,” Stephanie promised her.

Her ears perked up as she heard the sound of a car in the long driveway. Soon, Dennis would see what she’d done, and Rebecca would see that cock for real for the first time.

And soon, the herd harem would begin to grow, and perhaps Dennis would give Stephanie the bell collar she so wanted…