Alexander Grant, Man Among Men

If your Uber ride to work was interesting, your subway ride back home was fascinating. You opted to simply dump the box of whatever had been lying around your cubicle in a dumpster, saving only the scrap of paper with the temp girl's number. You can get another Far Side day calendar. What you want to do now is test out how this whole dominance display reprisal thing works. Gotta figure out what the parameters on this shit are before you accidentally bump into some guy and he turns into an Olsen Twin.

Simple, unintentional contact seems fine, which is a goddamn relief. You spent a moment working through the throngs of people going about their day and, while your fellow man seems more inclined to give you your space than they did a few short days ago, more than a few times you happened to brush against another man and not a single one expelled masculinity out of their pores as a result.

More active contact also gets a green light; you gave the old man panhandling with his scruffy dog outside of your former work building the usual dollar, and when you give him the customary low five he too remains unchanged. That seems to pretty neatly cover innocent physical interactions. Let's see about the less innocent stuff.

You don't really have all that much interest in seeing if you can actively **** it on someone yourself. Like, bumping someone out of the way as you make your way down the sidewalk is already a dick move, but when it also means you might be shrinking their cock it literally becomes a dick move. So you suppose you have to just wait and see if anyone is going to pull some sort of macho microaggression nonsense.

Hopefully you can be patient, because this being the modern, civilized world, you could spend nearly five minutes waiting for that to happen.

You actually manage to make it all the way onto the subway home before finding a worthy test subject. The train isn't too crowded, but every seat is currently taken. With the exception of the bench that should be able to fit three grown people, but is instead filled by one guy in a huge jacket plopped directly in the center, his legs and arms spread out so widely that he manages to take up the entire thing by himself.

Okay, that's fucking obnoxious. Let's see what can be done about that.

Start things off easy. No reason not to give someone a chance to make right. You pick your way over to the lounging man, who taps away at his phone and utterly ignores your entirely obvious approach. "Excuse me. Is this seat taken?" He snorts in response, not bothering to look up but finding the elasticity to stretch his legs out a little wider. Alright then. "Guess that's a 'no'."

The man finally looks up when you turn around and lower yourself onto the bench, eyes wide with anger as he tries to lock his leg in place and keep you from sitting down. His sneer stiffens into an expression of shock when he gets a look at you, however, his suddenly boneless leg **** back as you calmly sink into the seat and raise an eyebrow at him. The man makes a little noise in the back of his throat as he takes one wildly optimistic swing at holding your gaze, then quickly slides all the way over to the other side of the bench.

It was over in an instant, but you didn't miss the feeling of an **** crumbling against your impregnable resistance, nor the burst of heat and potential begins releasing from the man in great puffs of shimmering vapor that only you seem to be able to see.

Huh. It smells sort of like lemons.

By the time the subway reaches the next stop and the man bolts from his seat to make his escape, he's all but vanished into his already oversized jacket and his increasingly pretty face is graced with a mouth that is dangerously close to what scientists call 'dick-sucking lips.' You rise from the bench, moving over to take hold of a stanchion and allow some more needy passenger to have the seat now that your experiment is over.

So it seems like your masculinity-destroying powers only come into play when someone is actively trying to take a run at you. You can't help recalling your visions of all those other men who sampled Fay's otherworldly pleasures and failed to make the grade, their manhood sucked away as payment for not measuring up. This must be a similar effect. For better or worse, you are apparently the ultimate avatar of Maleness, and anyone who wants to take a shot at your throne had best be ready for consequences when they miss.

This is the sort of thing you have to think about now. It's absolutely insane how much your life has changed since Friday. You shouldn't be worrying about any of this right now; any rational human would be freaking out over their sudden unemployment. But while you might not exactly be a rational human anymore, you do have the benefit of having some irrational solutions to your problems.

Because while most people's worries would be very well founded, most people don't also have a sexy magical trump card waiting for them at home.

"Look at what I got! Isn't this cool?!"

You balk as Fay ambushes you the moment you step into your apartment, the girl beaming as she thrusts a brand new smartphone into your face. She pulls you inside then arranges herself under your arm, lifting up on her tiptoes to plant a quick kiss on your chin as she raises her phone and snaps several photos of the posed smooch. She grins widely as she starts flipping through them to select the best one, and you can't help but notice that she's changed out of your button-down and into a tight, trendy-looking tee and a high waisted skirt, neither of which had any chance of coming from your wardrobe. "New clothes, too?"

Fay spins around at that, her skirt twirling as she strikes a sassy pose. "Don't I look great? God, everything is so much better now than it used to be. Phones! Clothes that aren't itchy! The water is drinkable! There is very little horse shit!" Her excitement is impossible to resist, and you can't help returning her smile as when she grabs you by the arm. "There's an Indian place across the street, and I have no idea what that is but I want it so bad."

"That's a crime. Everyone should have naan. We'll go tonight."

The girl grins again at that, rising up on her tiptoes again to plant a soft kiss on your lips this time. "That's a good answer. I like you." She drops back down and hooks your fingers with hers, leading you over to the couch with a lot of extra waggle in her hips. "I got you a bunch of new clothes too, babe. You're going to look hot."

You let her push you down onto the sofa, running your hands up her silky thighs as she straddles your lap. "Wow. I guess there really are a lot of benefits to magic, aren't there."

Fay pauses midway through pulling her shirt over her head, arms cross in front of her and her taut tummy exposed. "What do you mean?"

You wave a hand around. "You know, all the stuff you...conjured? Is that the word for it? The new phone and the clothes and stuff."

The girl gives you a funny look. "Conjured? I didn't do that."

Uh. "Then...where did all this stuff come from?"

"I bought it?"

"With...money you conjured? Or, like, ancient gold or something?"

"Um, no, I used the credit card that was in your closet. Should I...not have done that?"

Your eyes twitch as you mentally subtract at least a thousand dollars or so off of your savings buffer, that very rational freakout you had thus far avoided beginning to creep up on you. "Fay, I lost my job today."

"Oh! Oh, um..."--the girl chews her bottom lips for a moment--"Whoops?"

You run a hand down your face, trying to stay calm and collected as best you can. "This is...not great."

Fay has slid off of your lap by this point, now curling up against your side as she rests her head against your chest and speaks in a quiet voice. "Are you mad at me?"

You look down at the girl pressed up against you, her eyes soft as she frowns at the floor. "...No, I'm not mad at you."

The tension visibly drains away from Fay, and then she abruptly huffs. "It's not fair, though! In the old days they'd have lined up to shower you with gold the instant you passed my test. I'm serious; it would have been too much gold to handle! It would have been a problem. You'd have needed carts."

"I guess that's one way that things aren't better than they used to be?"

Fay considers that for a moment. "The gold probably would have had the plague. Maybe we'll call it a draw." You both laugh at that, her high peals of girlish amusement blending musically with your lower chuckle. At length she trails off, her expression serious again as she slips her arms around your chest and hugs herself even tighter to you. "I'll return all the clothes, and the phone."

You shake your head, draping your own arm around the girl. "Keep the phone. And if you look half as good in those other clothes as you do in these, I want you to keep those, too."

Fay tilts her head to one side. "Really?"

"Yes, really. I'll figure something out. And we're still going out tonight, too."

The smile that spreads across Fay's face is entrancing as she pulls herself up, her pert breasts squishing against your chest as she gives you another sensual kiss. God, her lips are sweet. She moans slightly in your mouth as your tongues meet, whimpering lightly when you snake a powerful arm around her waist. When she finally pulls back, her sun-like eyes are giving off a lazy rose-gold corona. "Wait, what about your new clothes?"

"Well, those we probably have to return." When she pouts, you can't help chuckling. "Fine. You can pick out one outfit for me, and we're returning the rest. Okay?"

"Deal!" The girl pops off of the couch to head into your room, talking herself through the apparently extremely weighty decision of which clothes to pick out for you. So okay, what you'd hoped was a sexy magical trump card is, in fact, more of a sexy magical issue. Fay might be a supernatural being who's power and purpose you in no way understand, but what she is not is a cheap date. As you watch her taut butt wiggling away, you don't doubt for a second that she's worth it.

You're just going to have to make good on your word and figure something the fuck out.