Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

 

A Place Of Her Own

(c) Vickie Tern


F/m, M/M etc, femdom

This story depicts sexual activity of various sorts among consenting if sometimes also credulous and deceived adults. If you are not a consenting adult don't read it, no matter how credulous or deceived. It's not for you. Not yet.

i.

I left on a Sunday and came back the following Sunday. A full week, the longest we'd ever been apart, and the longest time I'd ever spent being a girl, looking and behaving and feeling feminine all the time. I was still enjoying the afterglow as I pulled into our garage and leaving my luggage in the trunk, entered the house directly through the garage.

I had to remain invisible to the neighbors. It was still daylight, and I didn't want any of them to notice that my lovely upswept curls had survived last night's Farewell Ball. This morning they'd looked so sweet I didn't have the heart to comb them out, and I knew I'd be meeting no one who knew me, so I'd relented and flown back with them just as they were. Some other passengers on the plane had stared at me puzzled or amused or interested and then turned their attention elsewhere. A middle-aged woman had glowered as if I were somehow a threat to middle-aged women everywhere. But the flight attendant told me she wished her boyfriend had my courage, that before going into public places he always combed out the cute hairdos she sometimes styled for him, that mine looked darling. My heart melted! For the rest of the trip I couldn't smile at her gratefully enough whenever she handed me the airline's little packets of pretzels!

Tricia was nowhere to be seen. A few years ago that would've seemed ominous, my beloved wife not coming forward to greet me when I came home from a long trip like this one. But not now. I preferred now. Now I went to cross dressers' conventions routinely, and that's how I wanted her to regard them. Like ordinary business trips, the kind we each need to take now and then, separations just long enough to renew our appreciation of each other. Long enough for us both to feel grateful that whatever the occasional stresses between us, we do still live together and share our lives. That we're married.

Everything in the kitchen looked the same. The stove and the counters were spotless -- either the cleaning lady had just visited or else Tricia had eaten out a lot, probably near her office, working the late hours she always worked when I wasn't expected home. I didn't doubt that at this moment she was sequestered in our study or maybe even the room beyond the study, thinking through strategies and prepping court cases for the coming week as she did every weekend. I almost shouted out "Honey, I'm home!" to make sure she knew, then caught myself and grinned. How domesticated can you get?

Of course she knew! She'd certainly heard the garage door grind and growl when I came in. That sound reverberated well past our study despite the walls lined with books and filing cabinets and the other bric a brac of our professional lives. Even into the closed room beyond where I dressed and worked and kept my personal stuff and led my fantasy life.

Tricia had stopped calling it "your girly room" and now called it "our" girly room or else just "the reading room." I'd done it in pink and cream chiffon, with delicate hangings and pastel sketches and plump pillows on the overstuffed divan, with a French Provincial bureau to hold my things and a huge mirrored Vanity Table holding my other things. It was where I went to be a woman. She'd resented it as an indulgence at first, but now she liked it -- it had a distinct feminine feel where she could recover herself, she said, when she'd had to be especially brutal on behalf of a client. She no longer minded that I now spent most of my time there, dressed in frilly lingerie and peignoir, or a chic skirt and jacket, or sometimes only an old house dress. That's where I'd work on some commissioned project, or browse some transgender web site, or study my makeup in the mirror. Or fix my hairdo while thinking my way through some client's problems.

Eventually she felt so comfortable in that room that she preferred it to any other in the house. We'd sit there together after dinner and do our different things like girlfriends, not like the snug married couple we were. If anyone looked in, and no one ever would, all they'd see there would be two women comfortable with each other, the tall one prim at her keyboard, more often than not dressed elaborately as if about to go out (though she never did), the short one dressed casually in tight jeans and a T-shirt, sprawled across the floor while scribbling notes in the margins of legal papers. I always looked like the proper lady of the house, and Trish more often than not like my cute younger sister pretending to do her homework.

Of course Tricia did dress appropriately at work or when attending the social gatherings that were part of her work. Then she wore the expensive black dresses or power suits or beaded cocktail gowns she needed to maintain her position in the firm. I envied her that wardrobe, though I owned one or two dresses as elaborate and high-styled, because she could wear hers whenever she chose and I got to wear mine only when I was out-of-town at gender meetings.

But Trish didn't really care about clothes. Immediately on arriving home she'd hop into skimpy shorts or sweat pants, leap onto the treadmill and stairmaster we kept in the room designated eventually for our baby, sweat off her day's furies and frustrations, pop into the shower, and then emerge smelling of soap, glowing, wearing no makeup at all, her soft, ripe curves barely contained by her jeans and T-shirts. Then she'd peer into my feminine "reading room," kiss me, ask how my day had gone, discuss dinner plans, and if she felt a little horny sit in my lap and begin to unbutton my blouse.

Originally we'd both worked in town for the same large law firm, Trish doing litigation and me as an industrial specialist for patent and trademark strategies. Now as a private consultant I did the same thing at home, sending it out by phone, fax, or computer. I was an engineer at heart, not a lawyer, but I retained many of her firm's clients as my own and I found I could pick and choose among others. I was plenty busy. The firm moved heaven and earth to try to keep me, offering me double my salary, a key to the executive washroom, whatever it took. I had the technical skills needed to solve their clients' problems, and the human skills to persuade them to do it my way. Finally my wife told them to give it up, they'd never get me back by offering me money and privilege, she'd try to find some other way some day. Money and privilege didn't matter at all to me. What I wore mattered.

Like many engineers I hated to wear corporate suits and ties, and at home I could dress as I pleased. What pleased me, ironically, was an even more demanding feminine dress code -- heels, skirts, my hair set just elaborately enough to show care, my make-up impeccable, tasteful jewelry, all of it. That's how I did my job, as my own woman in an office of my own devising.

Then when Trish came home, most of the time I didn't feel like changing into pants and scrubbing my face for a trip to some restaurant. So mostly I cooked for the two of us. It was relaxing after a day of solving other people's intricate problems, and I liked doing traditional womanly things anyhow. More often than not, when Trish came down from her shower I'd already changed for the evening into something pretty and romantic for her, and sometimes I'd already set out the first course of an elaborate candlelight dinner for two. With wines for each course. I did love her, and I wanted her to love me as much. All of me.

My devotion apparently had some effect -- she'd been uneasy about my transvestism at first, but as she accepted more of her own femininity she'd begun to accept mine, even to enjoy it. She'd begun to sit at my make-up table, face still fresh-scrubbed and rosy from exercise, and ask my advice about this or that eye liner or lipstick, subjects formerly beneath her notice. She'd never previously used make-up creatively or with flair, only to maintain propriety when dating in College or when attending formal evenings with clients arranged by her firm. Lawyers don't, she'd told me. Her kind didn't, anyhow. She kept what few cosmetics she needed in an upstairs medicine cabinet, and kept a mascara and lipstick in her purse, and that was it. Nothing more. She'd stroke them onto her face after breakfast as an afterthought before heading out the door.

She didn't really need more. Her skin was clear and her eyes were huge and dark. To me she always looked gorgeous. But during the past few years fashion had decreed that more is better, and even styles for women lawyers had changed. Maybe because the country's feminism was maturing, women who'd felt they had to look masculine to assert themselves now felt they had to look feminine to assert themselves. Or, maybe it was that Trish was now a partner in her law firm and thought that as the only woman on the executive board she should look it, go all the way. I'd told her long ago that a confident woman dressed in high style and perfectly made up always had enormous intimidating power over men, an advantage in a litigator. She'd listened attentively and nodded, willing to test the notion. Which she then did, first on me and then on opposing counsel. It always worked. Her poised beauty reduced them to silence, and a flirtatious wiggle of her hips could then discompose them utterly.

Maybe that was why she began to take the same care I did with her daily make-up. One morning after botching the blending of several shades of eye shadow she'd delighted me by asking for help. After that I helped her daily, and eventually I became the one who made up her face each morning, sometimes evenings too when she had late meetings to attend or clients to see. I loved enhancing her appearance as if it were my own. She began to tease me about such effeminate concerns, of course, once she'd gotten over her anxieties about them. In fact it was around then that she began to call me "Mr. Amy" as if I were some swish hairdresser, and she began to tell envious friends about this wonderful personal beautician she'd discovered, no, she'd never reveal who or where it was "she" worked. Soon I became simply "Amy," and she couldn't praise Amy highly enough.

"Amy" was now what she called me casually whenever we were alone with each other, even when there was nothing especially feminine under discussion. I was never "Andy" to her any more. Even when we made love. "Oh, Amy, that was just wonderful!" she'd tell me with her last hug before turning over to go to sleep. She seemed to like my being a sort of girl when we made love. Oral sex was as enjoyable to her as genital sex, and when I became "Amy" to her she pressed my head down gently between her legs more and more often. I loved it all!

In fact in recent months she'd begun in small ways to encourage my being "Amy." It never seemed to affect my performance in bed, her earliest fear when I began to dress up daily like a girl. Rather the reverse. She noticed that when I was dressed I was always gentler and more considerate, that "Amy" was more affectionate than Andy during foreplay and afterplay, more willing to serve as her lesbian lover. When I commented this she was amused, and said only "Oh? Now you're a lesbian too? You mean that cute little thing down there is a dildo? I should poke one into you some time!"

As Amy I didn't feel compelled to penetrate her with my cute little thing, and some days when she was apparently sore down there from her cycle she felt grateful. Sometimes she would enter a trance as I licked her, and would grip my face to her crotch through two or three orgasms, stroking the back of my head and wriggling her tender slit and clit further into my mouth and tongue. "Lick me deeper, Amy!" she'd mutter gutturally in her ecstasy. And I often did, marveling at her pussy flavors as it became more and more wet and aroused, especially when it began to spasm juices into my mouth. When she was finally ready to sleep she'd gratefully kiss the tip of my nose, tasting herself there. "My sweet cumsucking Amy," she'd say. "Tell me how you love eating me." I surely did! Then sometimes I'd suckle her breasts daintily while she drifted, dozed, and made little contented sounds.

I'd have become her hairdresser too if I'd known how. I'd have loved doing some new things with it. It was long and blonde and thick, and each day she'd swirl it high into a French Twist and then leave it that way for everything, business, formal dinners, even for the stairmaster. My hair was dark and straight and not even shoulder length, so there was less I could do with it. I'd play with curlers and a blow dryer now and then, but my need to look male when I went out anywhere precluded a commitment to anything other than a boyish bob with bangs I could brush off my forehead. I'd have loved to get a body perm and proper styling, and have my hair layered into large waves to frame my face. But no. We were in agreement that the real woman among us should look as gorgeous as nature and art allows whenever she leaves the house, and that the other woman should never leave the house at all. Not dressed or done up as a woman!

So during the past half-year or so Trish had came to look increasingly gorgeous, and her morale and mine rose accordingly. As she took greater pride in her appearance she developed an odd respect for my skill at making us both look pretty where originally she'd been indifferent and sometimes scornful. She became less inclined to worry or resent that I doted on all things feminine.

I adored her.

Two or three years ago when I first told her I meant to attend a three-day crossdresser's convention in another State so I could live like a woman full time, Trish had been dismayed, anxious, deeply disturbed. It was as if I were going off with another woman. I suppose in a way I was. I explained to her that I wanted to learn more about my peculiar compulsion to look like a member of her sex, why it felt so satisfying and relentless. To try to understand why her otherwise reasonable Andy felt such joy when he was being Amy. Conference organizers always scheduled doctors and psychologists to discuss the latest theories of gender divergence, to reassure us that there were hundreds of thousands of us created by nature or nurture or both, all self-identified by the same instinctual processes despite all sorts of denials. We listened, now and then adjusting our skirts. There were always cosmetologists there too, to show us how even the craggiest male faces could be softened into illusory prettiness.

After a few such meetings I'd pretty much learned everything these experts had to teach me. But I kept going to them, just to do it! To wake up each morning deciding which accessories went best with whatever I meant to wear to which occasion that day. To look as pretty as I could, all day every day. To smile gently at other women like me and at real women too, and always receive a smile in return. To chat with other women. To shop and stroll the streets of whatever the host city, blending into the female half of the population, where everyone who saw me could think that's what I was and where I belonged. At such times I could even believe it myself, blissfully.

These days she merely nodded when I informed her I was going, then returned to her work. She knew that now and then I had to be seen by others. Most of the year I dressed only for my mirror and my own delight. But now and then I needed to feel ratified in the eyes of others, confirmed in my femininity by their vision of me. I spent as much time as I could in my special feminine room feeling dainty, pretty, and affectionate in ways men never dare. I loved the feel of nylon and silk on my thighs, and I appreciated my own good taste when choosing the textures, colors, designs, and styles of the ensembles I wore. I loved seeing a flash of bright red on my fingertips, and glimpses of myself reflected in the mirror as no way masculine, rather distinctly ladylike, even coquettish, desirable. I felt sweetly serene at such moments. I felt nice. A girl should always feel nice. Being called "Ma'am" by some sales clerk felt very nice indeed!

But that was possible only when I was out of town. At home we both feared discovery. Dressing up had felt terrifyingly dangerous if also delightful ever since my early adolescence. From the moment I came aware that they were different, I'd helplessly envied girls their grace, their delicacy, their charm, their freedom to be gentle yet enthusiastic, their breasts and figures and faces, the displays of decoration they allowed their faces, bodies, and clothes. Their ...femininity. I still remember that day in high school when with my heart pounding and my hands shaking I'd tried on a bra I'd found while sneaking through a girls' locker room. The sensations were so powerful I was overwhelmed, and nearly fainted. I stole the bra and during the next few years I wore it out.

Then when I confessed this to a girlfriend at College she promptly dressed me up completely as a girl for a Halloween Dance. I was terrified but enraptured, beside myself. Unaccountably I felt an incredible joy, as if I had just been liberated. I thought I was so very beautiful! In fact she made me into so convincing a girl that no one believed I was wearing a costume. By the time the evening ended she'd persuaded herself as well, explained to everyone that my secret desire was to become the girl I seemed to be, and had gone off with a basketball player whose manhood was up front and unquestionable.

I never forgot that humiliation, and neither did anyone else. I became a figure of jest. Only after I'd graduated and met Trish did any woman take my manhood seriously. Even I doubted it for a time, because that Halloween night addicted me. I found I adored the feel of lingerie and the taste of lipstick. I acted out my girlhood in secret whenever I could, always fearful and mortified, desperately afraid of discovery, yet at the same time blissful. Yet no matter how often I dressed I was always apprehensive, ashamed of the smirking, of the fingers pointed at any man who could sink so low as to wish to look like a woman. Any unmanned man!

When Trish and I became engaged I confessed my vice to her. She was troubled at first, and demanded to see me dressed. She saw then that I was not grotesque but passable, and that I wasn't camping or mocking womanliness but admiring it. And she saw how important it was to me. "I suppose your dressing like a woman is a form of flattery," she said. She reluctantly allowed that I could indeed cross-dress whenever I wished, since it was so strong a compulsion, but only at home. Never ever outside! She repeated that, her voice tense and deliberate! I saw no problem. Terror kept me closeted.

Which was one reason why my first attendance at a gender convention troubled her. It also troubled me. It was in a faraway city, but even so I was ashamed to expose my guilty secret to others. Even though that was what I was there for, I barely forced myself through my hotel room door the first morning, dressed and made up. I walked timorously down the corridor, acutely aware of my skirt and heels, shoulders very still and clutching my purse, then into an elevator with other hotel guests, and finally into a hospitality room to meet other attendees. I was wearing my favorite denim skirt and a pretty matching embroidered vest that morning, and knew I looked nice and was dressed appropriately. I saw immediately that I made a more persuasive woman than many of the other conferees, and began to feel more comfortable. We all shared the same humiliating urge, but to my delight we all accepted each other as normal! After a few days among others of my kind I returned home more at ease with my desire than I had ever before felt in my whole life. Being transgendered now seemed a gift! I finally accepted myself as normal!

Trish was troubled by my "girly sleepover" as she called it, for additional reasons. She'd been extremely uneasy when I left, and when she met me at the door on my return it was with a distinct hostile edginess. She asked me abruptly whether I felt different.

I understood what she was really asking. She didn't know how far I meant to go. She feared that while I was away I'd be seduced by perverts, or that I'd go gay. She worried that I might not be a mere transvestite but was an out-and-out transsexual in process of self-discovery, that I'd now want to alter my body from my skin on out. That I'd already swallowed handfuls of female hormones, or gotten my skin pumped plump with them. That I'd already set a date for surgeons to turn my penis inside out to line a functioning vagina, and to empty my scrotum for reshaping as vaginal labia. To make me a woman ready to receive men in fact as well as in appearance.

She'd read about these things. She knew that hundreds, thousands of former men became New Women every year. Though she knew that many or most remain heterosexual, or "lesbians," she knew that many change in their desires. That Nature doesn't always get things right, that the medical profession fixes Nature's more obvious blunders sometimes better than they know how, that feminized husbands will sometimes divorce their wives and take husbands of their own. In her fear she'd half reconciled herself to my returning quite queer.

I replied immediately that in most respects I was no different. There had been no changes in my bodily sex, male, nor in my gender identity, somewhat feminine but still at times masculine, nor in my sexual desires, I still found only women attractive, one in particular, her. I was still the same man who'd departed a few days earlier. But I now understood more about how women feel. I was no longer ashamed to want to act or look like a woman. I was a man who felt free to enjoy his femininity

Trish heard me out impassively that first time. Then she'd nodded. "You're still a man you say?" she'd asked. "You call yourself a man? The way you've been dressing up all this time? You could've fooled me!"

Then she'd smiled, and her smile converted that truculent near-insult into a gracious concession, into acceptance of me as a passable girl. It was really a compliment! If I seemed less of a man it was because I seemed more of a woman! I liked that!

I'd smiled back, tearfully grateful for small favors, any at all, and then we kissed as we always did, as man and wife. Later in bed with her I was more passionate than ever. In the morning when I awoke I found her looking down at me seriously and affectionately. Her eyes were tearful. When I asked why she just shook her head and smiled reassuringly. "Some things are different now," she'd said. "Some day I may tell you. As a woman you might understand!"

Thereafter, each time I came back from a gender meeting she'd be much more sprightly and playful. She'd ask, "Well, has my boy friend come home? Or are you only my girl friend this time? Both? Can we gossip together yet about the different guys we're sleeping with?" I loved hearing her put it that way, because it meant she accepted and enjoyed teasing both aspects of me! I couldn't help but embrace and kiss her! It was wonderful! At such moments I felt complete!

So during the half-dozen years we'd been married Trish went from reluctant acceptance to relaxed approval of my transgenderism. Gradually she absorbed the truth that I felt, looked, and acted more at ease in a dress, that I was more fun to be with when I wore panties and a bra. That women's clothes felt somehow right to me. She finally understood that I was much the better person for these occasional excursions elsewhere. I'd come back from the last few, she reluctantly admitted, nicer in every way, more attentive, sweeter, and otherwise unchanged.

Moreover, my out-of-town transvestism in hotels a thousand miles away eased her own fear somewhat that my compulsion might at any moment disgrace me before the neighbors, our friends, her business associates, everyone with whom we maintained our image as a solidly respectable professional couple. This was a serious matter. We lived in a small community with standards enforced by shame and gossip. Deviance of any kind signified an unsound mind, unreliability. An unmowed lawn could injure your credit rating at the bank. Sexual or gender deviance was unthinkable!

And Trish wasn't a fool. She'd noticed that sometimes I felt I had to break out and play the odds against discovery. That after dark sometimes I'd drive out in a dress to mail a letter. That sometimes I'd risk all by carrying a bin of recycleables out to the curb dressed as if I were merely the woman of the house carrying out one more household chore. That once I'd tried to persuade myself I could attend a company function wearing her flowery "Nuit d'Amour" as if it were an after shave. "Any woman would know what scent you're wearing, and some men! The same with that beige lipstick you've got on!" she'd told me firmly.

But she knew that my suppressed self had to assert itself. That I felt pride that I am what I am, and wasn't ashamed of it any more, or anyhow not very ashamed. She knew that the feminine part of me wasn't some unacceptable exhibitionist, drag queen, or net-stocking slut, but a quiet, tasteful, decent woman, in most respects unremarkable. That expressing that woman somehow comforted me. That I was half-persuaded that I was what I claimed to be.

So she accepted that I went to out of town conventions a few times a year "to play with the other girls." She loved me. She didn't begrudge me my departures, and she welcomed my returns.

Still, she feared that if I felt less ashamed after each gender meeting, perhaps I'd be all the more shameless after I got back home. There was always a danger in her mind that the woman seen flouncing into the supermarket next week might be recognized suddenly as that consulting engineer who lives on the next block, the one married to the lawyer woman, poor soul to be married to such a sick pervert. She knew and feared that our family respectability hung on a single accidentally unwiped dab of my lipstick, or on too narrowly arching a plucked eyebrow, or on a single noticeable swish of my hips. And if respectability went, her professional reputation and her clients' confidence in her would soon follow.

This time I'd been away a full week, so I had to assume Trish had been worrying about these risks for a full week. My first job was to reassure her. When I opened our study door I saw her computer was on, there was some legal file on the screen, but the room was empty. So I crossed through to the far door and opened that one, delighted to be returning to my very own fragrantly scented, richly feminine inner sanctum. I'd flown home wearing an oversized zip jacket and dungarees, my bra and breast forms and pantyhose no way hinted. But here I could be myself. Off came my jacket. This was my real home!

ii.

As I'd expected, Trish was in a satin slipper chair reading a brief of some sort. Wearing jeans as usual, her legs tucked up tight under her butt in one of her favored Yoga positions. I saw at once she wore no bra at all under her plain white T-shirt, that her nipples were poking out noticeably from the bulging dark circles at the center of her breasts. She unfolded herself and stood up at her first sight of me.

"Honey! Oh, darling! I heard you coming in, and I've been waiting! How is my girl today? Did she enjoy herself? I see you're still wearing that hairdo you'd planned for the Farewell Ball. You must have looked darling last night! You wore it all the way back on the plane too? Oh, sweetheart, that was brave! Each time you come back less and less afraid to be yourself! Of course an upswept hairdo isn't what I'd choose for you, but it's really very pretty!"

For the first time, no welcoming inquiry about her "boyfriend" returning? For a week I'd been among people who were honored to call each other 'girls.' Some were actual girls by birth, and some by playful desire, but some by lifelong confusion and doubt, ordeal and sacrifice, determination, psychiatric concurrence, hormones, legal changes of identity, surgical knives, and slow, painful recovery. So it didn't seem at all odd that Trish didn't mention my male aspect. Not then. It did seem strange that she complimented me for wearing a dramatically feminine hairdo in public all the way home, that she didn't feel threatened by my exposing myself that way, but I chose to ignore that too. It was satisfying enough that she'd been thinking about the sort of hairdo she'd prefer me to wear.

She lifted her face for me to kiss her, as I certainly did, and she sighed most satisfactorily when I ran a fingertip lightly over one of her protruding nipples.

"No bra?" I inquired?

"That's right." And that was all. Her tone told me it wasn't a topic she cared to discuss at the moment. "Honey, sit down. We have to talk. Two things happened this week you should know about."

"Oh?"

"Oh?" She mocked me lightly. "Yes, oh! The first is small but large. It seems someone saw you last week, someone driving by saw a tall woman open the front door and take in the morning newspaper. Hair long, a lot like your husband's, she told me, but better styled, and wearing a housecoat. She finally decided the person was a visiting relative, a sister maybe, since she seemed so much at home. Now, I'm not saying that your secret is in any danger. But you know that sooner or later it's going to become known. This is a fussy and gossipy neighborhood. Sooner or later someone will call on the police to inquire if everything's all right. And if you're home and I'm not, that can have consequences."

Fair warning. Sobering news too. "I know that, Trish. Who was it?"

"I'd rather not say. It would make you too self-conscious. It's someone we both know fairly well. The topic may not come up again. I told this person your sister had stopped by. That answer seemed sufficient. Maybe not next time though. We need to do something about it."

"I guess," I said. I couldn't think what. I couldn't pull every blind and drapery in the house and live in the dark all day! That would seem suspicious in itself. But what else was there to do about it?

"And I've figured out what to do! You'll love it! That's the second thing."

"What's that?"

Trish would sometimes hug me gently like a girlfriend when I was being Amy, even give me an affectionate peck on the cheek to show she was especially pleased with me -- with Amy, really. But only Andy awakened her most ardent, passionate feelings. I was Andy now for the trip home, so despite my hairdo and the bra and pantyhose I had on she replied by opening her arms wide and falling backward onto the soft divan and pulling me down on top of her. Again, a nipple naked under her thin T-shirt material brushed my arm, but this time she moaned aloud.

"Trish honey, you are so hot! What's come over you?"

"Well, Andy, at the moment it's you!" She grinned, and as if my full weight weren't already pressing her whole body into the soft pillows of the divan, she wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist and squeezed hard. Was her crotch already damp? Wet? Then of all things, while we were wrapped in each other she continued to talk to me, my face not six inches above hers. It must have taken tremendous concentration, the kind she'd bring to addressing a jury.

"Andy, what would you think about Amy getting herself a place of her own to live in?"

"What?"

"Amy. Your girlhood. A place of her own. She spends all day bottled up in here, you know that. She doesn't dare show her pretty face, and it really is pretty, and she spends a lot of effort making sure of it. You have to carry her a thousand miles away by air before you dare let her loose in public. And then only for a few days here or a week there, only a few times each year. Like just now. Isn't that so?"

She knew it was, but waited for me to nod. Then continued, "That's no way for any girl to live. It's ironic, too, because I know that all you want for Amy is the same normal life any woman lives. Yet she doesn't dare. Not for a moment. Not here. Not in this town. And when she's bottled up here, you're bottled up here!"

All true. I nodded again. A knot was beginning to form in my stomach. Fright? Exhilaration? Tricia was up to something! Something beautiful? By itself it was a wonderful idea! To set Amy free somewhere to live her own life out in the open? To live the way she'd lived all this past week, venturing into malls and onto downtown streets and into restaurants, lunching with friends, chatting with strangers, and attracting no attention at all except as one more woman? On her own, all by herself? Could she? Of course! But would she then accept the modest limits we always placed on her? Could either of us restrain a liberated Amy? What would she be like on her own? Ooohh! I felt like leaping up and flying! What a glorious notion!

"Andy sweetheart, I know you're no longer terrified of exposure, and maybe you're even beyond feeling shame if Amy should ever become known to our friends and associates here. I've worried that soon you'll feel impelled to come out at least to our friends, to be Amy to everyone who already knows Andy. Even though you know it wouldn't be pleasant, in many ways. That it would be an embarrassment we could never live down. Well, maybe you could, but it would effectively end my career here. Not one of my clients would feel he could trust the wife of a drag queen weirdo to close a simple mortgage for him, much less handle his complex business litigation. Or hers. The powerful men and women I deal with maintain tight control over their domestic arrangements, and expect others to do the same."

This was sobering. "Probably true," was all I said. I was dying to kiss the delicate curves of her mouth, but this was not the moment.

"So day after tomorrow Amy and I will go looking for a place for her to live. Andy's not invited. Strictly speaking, I want to take her to look at a condominium apartment the firm has just taken over in Madison in lieu of a debt. If she likes it, she can buy it easily, no problem at all, I've figured out exactly how. Madison's about ninety minutes from here by car, close enough for easy visiting but just far enough away so there's no one there who knows us. In Madison Amy can be herself!"

My scalp was tingling! My eyebrows were raised high in astonishment, I could feel them, and my eyes were wide open in shock! In panic! In wild surmise! In joy! Inside me, Amy was shouting "Oh, yes! Oh, yes!" so loud I could scarcely think!

Tricia saw that I saw all of the possibilities all at once, and added only, "Then Amy can be her own woman. Completely. We'd get her a complete legal identity, driver's license, credit cards, everything a woman needs. She'd own the property in her own name. Everything she keeps here could go there and remain there and remain hers. Her clothes, her jewelry, even a car we'd buy her if we didn't transfer your ownership. She could come and go as she chooses, get a job or take over your consulting and do what you do, open a bank account, entertain her own friends, do whatever she likes. You'd be her guest when you stayed with her, instead of the way things are here, with Amy your prisoner who doesn't dare ever let herself be seen."

I swallowed. My head seemed to be exploding. Tricia had found a gateway to heaven and was persuading me to walk through it!

"She could live a normal life, Andy." Tricia concluded. "As herself. No more compromises."

Then she kissed me on the nose. "You'll need to discuss it with her. But not tonight. I think I want to make love now, but with Andy, not Amy. Tell her tomorrow that the offer's open, and ask her how she feels about it, and we'll see what she thinks. But now I need to know if there's any boy left at all in my girlfriend. I've missed you, lover! Weren't you feeling just a little bit horny for me?"

For the next few hours I proved I felt terribly horny! Powerfully, lyrically, sublimely! Though it was partly as Amy! I felt so suffused with joy, so richly endowed, so tenderly grateful to my darling, my marvelous wife! And I was still wearing my bra, more Amy in my Trish's arms than she seemed to notice. I could feel myself on the edge of a delightful liberation, and my heart wouldn't stop singing! My cock rose up and pulsed with each thought of Trish's proposal, a prospective free-form feminine way of life! It hardened, and even after Trish had softly sucked me and I'd cum in her mouth, then had pushed deep into her silky wet folds and cum again in her pussy, even then it didn't soften!

"I've never seen anything like this thing of yours" Tricia said in awe toward the end of a second hour of rock hard performance. "It just won't wilt! Here, let's try it this way. Exceptional behavior deserves exceptional rewards."

And she turned over onto her stomach, humped her beautiful bottom high into the air, wiped my erect prick in the fluids oozing from her vagina, spread them slick over my whole cock with one hand, then guided me into her anus. For the first time in our married life! My first time ever with anyone! I slipped in effortlessly! Trish felt hot and incredibly snug, and after only a few thrusts and withdrawals I spurted into her guts helplessly yet a third time! Throbbing my heart out into her! I couldn't help it!

"I thought we should both know what it would be like if Amy should ever want to let a man enter her," Trish said, turning to look at me with an impish smile when I'd stopped pulsing and just lay there humped onto her buttocks, spent. "Since that's all she can do with a man right now. That and suck cock. It feels very nice to me, honey. Amy will love it, I bet, if she ever finds anyone as sweet as you to do it with. I wish we'd done this years ago!"

I'd softened a bit after that last wrenching orgasm. But when Trish spoke those words, astonishingly my cock turned solid yet again!

"The idea of a hot cock spurting cum deep into Amy's pussy turns you on, does it, sweetheart? Then I really do wish we'd done this before!"

I ignored her, but for yet another hour, well into nightfall, I rocked back and forth inside my wife's rump, my prick well-lubricated in my own cum, sliding in and out of her rectum while my fingers dandled her dripping clit, her swollen nipples, and occasionally her engorged pussy. We did other things I can't remember. She came and came, orgasmic wave after wave passing through her until finally she shuddered and whispered hoarsely to me, "Enough now, Andy baby. Please! I have work tomorrow! I need to sleep!"

Right there in my perfumed, pastel boudoir, on that overstuffed divan of my dreams, we slept. We both slept. I remained inside her. In the morning when I awoke I found my softened member was still gripped by her sphincter, and as it hardened I pushed and pulled it in and out of her ass yet again. She awoke smiling and snugged her bottom into me yet again. It felt so very, very sweet! Not even fully erect, I came yet again inside her, as she came too in a kind of full bodied, relaxed shudder.

"Amy really is ready and eager to live her own life, isn't she," Trish said, turning her head sideways on the pillow with the smile of a cat who has just eaten a whole cageful of canaries. "I bet even now she isn't letting you alone! Are you going to tell me that's only Andy fucking my rear end? I think we both know how Amy feels now. Tell Amy the world is hers if she wants it, Andy. Ask her if she'd rather hide out here or live like a lady in her own apartment. Seeing whatever kinds of lovers she prefers. I think her answer's obvious."

My cock finally popped out of Trish's rear and lay there, slick and shiny and spent. She smiled and reached for it. "I'll blow this lovely thing of yours sky high if you can make it hard yet again, honey," she said. She squeezed and kneaded and pulled on it repeatedly with her whole hand. I couldn't.

"I have only one question, sweetheart," I said. I couldn't remember undressing Tricia or undoing any of my own clothes, yet the two of us were now lying tangled together utterly naked, legs tossed across each other's legs. My bra -- Amy's bra -- was on the floor still half-inside my half-buttoned shirt. Can I have taken both off together over my head? My hosiery was in ruins. "Just one question. Then you can tell Amy yourself what you're proposing for us. If you're going to drive her to Madison to look at an apartment, you two will need to talk. You've never wanted to talk to her before, you know."

"You're right, Andy," Tricia said soberly. "What's your question?"

"What about me, Trish? I'm here too, you know. While Amy is making a life for herself in Madison, what about us? Do we live separately? Divorce? Is that what you have in mind? Where do I live?"

"Oh, honey!" My Tricia's voice was so instantly concerned! "No, no, no, no! I don't want you to leave me. Not ever! It's just that, well, darling, I know now that I have to share you. I've been sharing you for years without admitting it to myself. Just this past week I've been utterly without you while you were being Amy, isn't that so? And without complaint, because apart from Amy you're an altogether satisfactory husband. Maybe a little bit because of Amy. Maybe a lot! You've suggested that sometimes, haven't you? And last night I know I was sleeping with Amy, partly, wasn't I. She was so excited inside you that she wouldn't let you quit. I had to help her take off her bra so I could suck on her nipples! That made her ecstatic, practically delirious! She made the most marvelous mewing sounds, and she held my mouth to her breasts as if I were a baby! I don't know where you were at all just then, Andy, but Amy was just wonderful!"

"Well, dearest, life is compromise. I'm giving you up to Amy on a kind of trial basis. Amy won't live here any more. You'll stay with her and be her whenever you wish for as long as you wish, if she'll have you. You'll always be welcome here whenever you want to be you. You and Amy will have to work it out between you! Maybe weekdays with Amy and the weekends here? Or vice versa? Or a week each month at one place and then the other? If you should ever decide to become all Amy, she'll be welcome to visit here any time. I'm sure we can be really good friends!"

Then she added, matter of factly, "There are some legal implications to giving Amy the right to be altogether herself, to own her own property and so forth. But they don't include divorce, honey. You'll see. Nothing so radical! It's much simpler!"

I didn't want to ask her, but I had to. "Trish, if you're now reconciled to 'sharing' me as you call it with another woman, namely myself, is it because you feel I should share you too? With someone else?" I swallowed and closed my eyes and plunged ahead. "Is there someone else?" Having said it, I opened my eyes again and tried to read her face.

She looked at me with the strangest expression, seemed about to say something, then stopped herself. "Honey," she said instead. "We're married. Marriage is founded on trust. Do you have to ask that question? You said you had only one question, and I've already answered it I think. And now another one? Such a huge one?"

"No, I don't have to ask it." I noticed that she wasn't answering it, and now I was certain I didn't want her to answer it.

"You might have asked me that years ago when you first took Amy into our lives. But you didn't. Why not?"

It had never occurred to me to ask her such a question, that was why not. "Because as you say, we're married," was what I replied. I was no more sure what that answer meant than when she said it. "We trust each other."

"Yes. When we marry, we have ideas about each other that we make up out of our own needs, hoping they'll be met. We may be deceived. But through love we find ways to satisfy each other's needs anyhow. I'm happy to suggest a way for you to satisfy your need to live as Amy, sweetheart. I'm willing to share you with that other woman you live as. That may answer your question, or it may not."

Then she was silent. I'd decided not to ask her anything more, when suddenly she volunteered more. "You should know this, sweetheart. When you went to that first crossdresser's meeting a few years ago, I felt hurt and angry and a little betrayed. You remember? Well, I was having lunch with Carol one afternoon while you were away, and she sensed that something was wrong. I broke down and told her everything. All about you!" She paused and assessed my reaction. Carol was another partner in her firm, her best friend, recently divorced and frequently out on the town with different men each time, as far as I could tell. I liked her, she was sensible. In turn she's always seemed somehow amused by me, appreciative yet gently teasing. Could this be why?

"You told Carol that I like to dress up as a woman."

"Yes." She was watching my face closely.

"And she said?"

"Carol just commented that a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do, and she told me not to worry about it. 'It can be very nice, sleeping with a girl,' she said. 'Have you done it with Andy when he's a girl?'

"I told her 'No.' I'd always felt uneasy about sex with Amy before then, remember?"

"'Come over tonight, and I'll show you what it's like,' she said. And that night I did, and she did."

I didn't understand, and it showed in my face.

"We slept together," Tricia repeated. "We made love. Me and Carol! Your wife and Carol! It was wonderful! Divine! Hello?"

I came down from my uncomprehending shock and tried to recover. "That one time," I managed to blurt out.

"No, not just that one time," Trish said, her voice taking on a touch of patience and maybe also pity. "Ever since then, not too often, only whenever we were both in the mood." She saw I was still baffled. "A few times each month. Maybe a little more often. You see, Andy, Carol's bi-sexual. I am too, a little, which may be why living in a romantic way with a man named Amy has never really troubled me. And that's why I can share you with another woman now, with Amy. Because you've been sharing me with another woman too, now and then. All right?"

It wasn't but it was. I composed my face to signify consent of sorts.

"There's another reason why this is a good time to liberate Amy, Andy. Apart from issues of respectability, or Amy's ultimate happiness." She took a deep breath and looked at me, weighing her words. "Andy, for the next few months, maybe as long as a year, we won't be spending much time together anyhow. It's work. I've been promoted. I'm about to become incredibly busy. I have some vast new responsibilities."

She went into a declamatory mode, as if she'd already given this speech several times already. Probably she had. "My firm has just landed a very big client. Magnum Enterprises. The Fortune Five Hundred corporation. They have all kinds of legal problems far beyond the routines their legal staff can manage! Most of my partners in various specialties will be hard at work straightening out Magnum's affairs. I've been asked to coordinate all of the processes, to keep everyone in step with policy decisions and at the same time to keep the client happy. I guess you could say that I'm the Magnum account executive. Their new general counsel. I'm in charge."

"We'll be taking on three new Associates to help me, and during the next months, what with getting on top of the job and getting he right legal actions under way, I won't even have time to breathe. I'll be working late, mostly. I won't be home for your delicious dinners, not most evenings, nor on weekends either. Or were they Amy's dinners? I'll be out of town at the Magnum plant or at their corporate headquarters for weeks at a time. So we'd rarely see each other anyhow. We'd have to put our marriage on hold anyhow, even if there were no Amy."

She took a deep breath, then said it, in a grand act of selfless renunciation. "Honey, I'll be neglecting you utterly for months and months! But it will be some consolation for me to know that you're not miserable without me. That you're with Amy, and being Amy, and that Amy is enjoying herself! She always does enjoy herself, doesn't she?"

I suppose so. I was getting so addled by these references to me and Amy as if we were two different people yet the same person that I couldn't think straight. And I was still floating in a glorious euphoria! An opportunity to live as Amy full time, not just in the house, not just for a week, but whenever I wished for as long as I wished! With my wife's blessing! At her urging! To make an alternative life for myself as Amy! Trish couldn't have been more generous! And she knew it!

"I know I'm taking a terrible chance," she said. "I know that you may disappear altogether into Amy. I'm lending you to her, and you may never come back to me. You may become altogether Amy, once she's herself. I've always been afraid of that. Ever since we were first married. Well, I've had to tell myself over and over, if that happens, it happens. If that happens, then we'll see what we'll see."

She took my face between her hands and tilted it up to her face, and seriously kissed me on one eyelid. I closed my eyes, and she kissed my other eyelid. When I opened them again I saw her looking at me so seriously, so sweetly! "If that happens, sweetheart," she said slowly, "you won't be here any more to worry about it. So don't worry about it. Then there'll be just us girls." And she kissed me sweetly, softly, on my lips. And I kissed her back, softly. I felt so lucky to have a marvelous wife like this! And to have Amy too! To be Amy! My eyes teared and my face began to break up with joy!

"I need to get back to work now, honey," she said gently. "Why don't you pack everything of Amy's except what she'll need to wear tomorrow. A high-powered business suit I should think, and heels, and a few pieces of her better jewelry. That Bergdorf tweed ought to do well. Tomorrow Amy enters the real world. She'll need to charm and impress court clerks and bankers so they'll fall all over themselves to accommodate us. Though I'll do the talking, and I have no doubt about the outcome. I'll attend to the paperwork for you, and tomorrow I'll drive you and Amy to Madison to check out this condo apartment. Then if it's all right I'll leave you two there. I hear it's furnished, complete, exactly the way the previous owner left it. If all goes well, I'll fly back here on my own tomorrow night and leave you and Amy the car. And leave you to be Amy as long as you wish."

The thought of our separation for an unknown time suddenly seized her, and she turned and wrapped herself around me. Clutching me tightly, she said, "Oh honey, do come back and visit often. You'll always be welcome. I'll miss you, even though I'll know you're in the best of hands." She grinned maliciously. "Your own!"

Miraculously, my cock began to grow again. Mine, not Amy's, and not the hybrid who had kept us groping each other all last night. I entered Tricia again, this time in her wet velvet pussy, and I pressed my cum and semen splattered belly against hers, and we worked our hips slowly into a rotating liquid rhythm. This time, as we made love we looked steadily into each other's eyes, reading and rereading there each other's love and caring and concern. Not until we both came, not violently this time but as a beautifully completed embrace, did either of us close our eyes. And then we closed them blissfully. We each knew we loved each other, never more completely than just then.

iii.

I must have been more jet lagged than I realized, because I fell asleep again. The telephone woke me.

"Honey? You're finally up? You looked so dear sleeping! I've missed that all week, but I guess I'd better get used to missing it for a while more. I realized after I left that I may not have been clear about how you dress tomorrow. Remember that you'll leave here as Andy, but you'll arrive in Madison as Amy. That's who you are here, and that's who you'll be there, and no one else. So leave out a set of clothes for each of you. I've arranged a stop half-way where you can change over and pretty yourself up. When we get to Madison my plan is, first stop at the County Clerk's office and the Courthouse to register some papers and signatures, I'm setting them up now, and the Motor Vehicle people, I have papers for short cutting any problems there, so Amy can have her own driver's license, then the Bank, and finally the real estate people to show us the condo. They tell me here that there's no question, that the apartment's a steal, that your sister will love it! Did I mention that Amy is your sister? Unmarried, same last name, it saves fuss. It's amusing to think that if Andy ever decides to have sex with her, it would be incest in a way. There's all the more reason for Amy to forget about Andy and just do her own thing. Then, my darling, when the apartment's yours, I'll take myself to the airport and leave you to begin your adventure. This is really so exciting!"

"O yes, we're having some people over tonight to give Andy a kind of going away party. A few friends, neighbors, and associates. So be sure you're Andy at least this one last time. Take down that darling hairdo one more time. All right? I'll tell you why later. I think you'll be pleased. It'll make things a lot easier for both of us afterward."

She was in her efficient lawyer mode, obviously. Making plans, being persuasive and yet matter of fact. I trusted her. I wasn't fully awake. "OK!" I replied.

"Good!" was all she said, and hung up.

All through the rest of the day I packed up Amy's things except her outfit for her official debut in Madison. And a purse to get her through the day. Her essentials were still packed and in the car, a week's worth of selected conference dresses and party gowns. Most of her wardrobe went neatly into cartons I'd saved from our move to this house, and then into the car. As I emptied my boudoir bureau drawers of their lovely little hoards of accumulated panties and teddies and slips and pantyhose and waist cinchers and so on, it was exciting to realize for the first time that these were no longer optional gear. They were my wardrobe. I was cutting off alternatives. Andy's clothes would remain here.

I made a few discoveries. Some of my sexiest lace panties had found their way into Trish's bureau drawers. Probably courtesy of our part-time cleaning help. Some dresses and blouses and skirts were so unforgivably unfashionable I could never wear them again, not in public, so even though they were relatively unworn they went into a box marked for the Salvation Army. I came upon my younger self, or Amy's, in the form of a stretchy black satin micro-mini, one of several dresses I'd bought when I liked imagining myself a slut seduced into unspeakably obscene practices in private dance clubs. I reluctantly added that to the Salvation Army box, then took it back, to remind myself that the onetime aspiring sexy whore of my fantasy life was now actually about to become a respectable woman full time. My eyes brimmed and my heart nearly stopped with joy as I realized that. That Trish was not only allowing me to do this, she'd in fact proposed it! I was humbled and speechless.

As I packed Amy's cosmetics, I wondered what Tricia had been using all week in my absence. Had she finally acquired her own, now that she was lawyering like a lady in full regalia. And if so, as her personal beautician I was curious, what shades had she chosen for herself? So I went to the bathroom off our master bedroom to see what was there. Nothing new in the medicine chest. The bed hadn't been touched last night of course, and it was still rumpled from her previous nights when I hadn't been there to tidy it up. I pulled it together, and found a pair of lace panties wrinkled into the bed sheets. Split crotch panties, really down and deliciously dirty! Were they mine? Had Trish missed me so much during my week away she'd taken to wearing even my most daring undies in my absence. Or had she taken them to bed to remind herself that this too was part of me. Were they more evidence that she now accepted Amy for what she was, and me for what I am, after years of reluctance, then indifference, then mere toleration, and only now loving support?

No, wait! I'd already packed the only pair of split crotch panties I owned, acquired originally to wear with my slut outfit. Were these Carol's? Did Tricia humble herself to lick Carol's lower regions while Carol never even troubled to undress herself? Or were they Tricia's, to provide Carol's tongue access to her own dear little clit?

Or someone else's tongue? I decided not to think about it! It could drive you mad!

I finally found Trish's own make-up neatly arrayed across the entire top of her bureau, tastefully chosen shades of all sorts, pale beiges and roses for daytime and dark mauves and wines for evening, different shades of eye shadow for different tones and colors of outfits. Only this past week she had equipped herself for all sorts of occasions, I thought. No wonder she felt she could manage without her espoused beautician. There was even a little cloth zip case sitting there, a travelling kit of color-coordinated bare essentials, mascara, eye-liner, shadow, lipstick, blush, and foundation. Inside one of the zipper pockets was a handwritten note that read, "Love, Greg."

I knew no Greg. They were this season's colors, browns and umbres, brand new cosmetics, never touched. Some rejected gift one of Trish's women friends had handed down to Trish now that she was using make-up? A gift from a boyfriend some secretary had decided to side-slip as a gift to her boss? Again I decided not to think about it right now.

Finally everything was packed and out of the house and loaded into and onto our car, five bags and a dozen boxes of women's things for Amy, my computer and a box of manuals and disks for my work. Anything overlooked I could get on my next visit.

My next "visit"! An odd word. This was my home, the place I returned to from wherever and called home. But when I next returned it would be as a visitor. As Amy? Obviously, I hadn't packed to be anyone else! But if I live in Madison full time as Amy, how can I ever return here? How can I dare let myself be seen in this neighborhood as Amy, coming and going? Sooner or later someone would wonder and suspect!

I put the question to Tricia the moment she got home.

"Sweetheart, that's why we're having your farewell party tonight. Andy has been called away to consult on the construction of a massive Saudi pipeline and refinery employing thousands of workers from around the world. He'll be gone for many months, and I'm happy for him but also distraught. Fortunately, I'll be almost as busy and exhausted as Andy, organizing my new client's affairs. That much is true. Now and then Andy's sister Amy will look in on me to see if I'm all right. She's a lovely woman, a little younger than Andy and a little priggish, but a dear. Maybe she'll even stay with me for a few days now and then, Andy?"

What a clever woman!

"That's a wonderful cover story, Trish. But won't Andy be visiting you here now and then too?"

"Now and then." She looked at me seriously. "I'd thought he would often, originally, but now I don't think so. Not too often, honey, or things could get awkward. Among other things your cover will begin to collapse. And Amy should have complete freedom for once, unencumbered by Andy. Of course Amy will always be welcome here!"

"She'll want to visit you often, darling!" I told her. Why did I feel this was a kind of farewell? "You're giving up so much so I can indulge myself as Amy! I owe you so much! Tell me anything you want in return and it's yours!" I kissed her and held her close.

She buried her face in my shoulder, then looked up into my face. Some mischievous thought had crossed her mind, obviously, and left its shadow in her expression. But all she said was, "I want you the way I want you, that's what I want, darling. I'm getting that. Right now I want you happy! I'll tell you when I want something else!" We just stood embracing.

And my beautiful wife couldn't have been more affectionate all evening. Trish had indeed arranged for many friends and acquaintances to drop by to wish me God Speed, and I thanked them. Some joked about my future as an enormously wealthy Sheik or a Pasha, and took note that the Koran allowed me three more wives. I told them that when I could I'd invite them over to eat lambs eyeballs and other delicacies, and then asked them earnestly to look after Tricia. They all agreed. A few of Trish's law partners and their wives showed up too, people I didn't know. They assured me I was fortunate in my marriage, and that I shouldn't worry at all about Trish, she was superb at looking after herself and her clients both. The usual. We all felt grateful to my sister, who would look in on Trish now and then and urge her to take care of herself and not work so hard.

She introduced me to a law partner named Georgy, pronounced with a hard "G" in the Russian manner, who immediately instructed me to call him Greg. A large, vigorous looking man with a slight accent and his hair slicked back as if he were an Andorran or Graustarkian Prince. He congratulated me on my beautiful and intelligent wife, and told me how fortunate they all felt to be associated with her. I told him I appreciated that he felt that way, and on the spur of the moment, while handing him his second drink and myself my fourth, I asked him if he was the "Greg" who had given her a make-up kit.

He seemed puzzled. "Even diamonds are an unsuitable gift for a wife like yours," he said with old world courtliness. "But last Christmas I did give the firm's secretaries and all the women Associates make-up kits. And all the men tie tacks. Why do you ask?"

I told him I'd seen one on Trish's bureau with a note from "Greg" and had wondered. He was vastly amused! "It was your wife Trish who suggested that I give those make-up kits to all the secretaries, when I asked her what gifts might be suitable. 'Flatter their femininity,' she told me. So I did. With an affectionate note in each. Some of them thought cosmetics were too personal a gift, and returned the kits. Trish's secretary I remember was unimpressed -- she told me that those weren't her colors. But most of the girls were quite pleased." He winked at me. "And some still are, if you know what I mean." I grinned and winked back at him, two men together with manly understanding of each other. What a sleaze! He clapped me once on the back, and then we turned to talk to other guests.

Carol was there of course, in an orange cocktail dress with a skin-tight bodice and a flounced skirt, an available divorcee surrounded by men who felt flattered whenever she responded flirtatiously in some way to some quip they'd just made. "Andy honey!" she called to me as I passed by. She rotated her hips toward me. "I understand we won't be seeing you for a while! Are you excited? All packed and ready?"

"Yes," I said a little tartly. "I suppose you'll look after Trish while I'm gone?"

"Depend on it, dear!" she replied, her eyes gleaming. "I intend to see to her every need personally, and you know what those are. Lots of us here want to do just that. Isn't that reassuring? It'll be especially nice for Trish!"

I glanced at Tricia, across the room chatting animatedly with two partners who were leaning deferentially over her. I had nothing to say. Carol moved in for the kill.

"I'm especially looking forward to meeting this mystery woman, your sister, whenever she visits. Getting to know her intimately. I saw her once I think, standing in your front door in her house coat, taking in the newspaper. A lovely woman I recall."

"My sister?"

"Yes, your sister Amy! I've heard so much about her!" Carol cocked her head back. "I hear she's pretty, and likes being pretty. And that she's into girls, doesn't even give blow jobs, not yet anyhow. That'll change, of course. All girls do try men, you know, sooner or later. Well, don't worry your pretty little head about her, Andy! Enjoy yourself! I think it's just wonderful that you're doing this! You're a credit to your sex!"

And she laughed at her own joke, and disappeared again into a swirl of men eager to impress her.

When the last of the crowd disappeared my heart swelled in my chest in eager anticipation. Now the adventure really would begin! I hugged Trish and she hugged me back, her face snug on my shoulder. Then we went together to our bedroom. When I'd made the bed earlier I'd left that pair of my panties on her pillow, rinsed out and dried of course, so she'd know I'd seen them and that I appreciated it, that she'd wanted to wear a souvenir of me when I wasn't there. When I saw her staring at them I told her as much. "Will you wear them to bed every night?" I asked her. "It would be nice to imagine that you're doing that."

"If you want me to, yes," she replied. "I'll dress sexy for you all the time you're gone, and I'm glad you want me to. Just imagine me that way, when you're feeling lonely, sweety! It may help you through the first few weeks, before Amy gets to know other people -- she's bound to feel somewhat lonely at first. Did you leave me any other sexy things to wear?"

She began to kiss me more passionately at that point, and conversation ceased. Maybe I was imagining another woman, Carol, in Trish's secret places, or maybe other unimaginable things, but I found I was frenzied. I can't tell you who went down on who more frequently that night, or who orgasmed more often, and I have no idea if Amy was watching me amusedly or jealously, or if it was Amy and not me who licked out Trish through her split crotch at my insistence, till she was screaming so loud and so frequently I was afraid she'd wake the neighbors. I lubricated Trish lavishly with cum front and rear, and then pushed my cock into both places more often, apparently, than I later remembered. She told me all this as she shook me awake to begin the extraordinary day ahead.

As I packed my carry-on bag with a few last-minute odds and ends, Trish handed me her now infamous cosmetic kit. "Here, sweetheart. Add this to your collection. Georgy was handing these around last Christmas, and I ended up with an extra nobody wanted. I can't use these colors, they're for brunettes like you, not blondes. You've taught me well, I must say!"

"Thank you," I replied. "But earth tones go with all hair colors." Then as I opened it as if to see what it was, I realized that I'd blown my cover -- how did I know they were earth tones? She didn't seem to notice.

Greg's note was gone, replaced by one that read "Love to my sweetheart as she begins her great adventure, Trish". She was flattering my femininity! My eyes overwhelmed with tears and I swept her into my arms. "This is the most beautiful gift I've ever received!" I told her.

"They aren't that expensive, honey," she said, struggling against my embrace at first, then yielding. "They're excellent cosmetics, but you know, it's a Christmas promotional item!"

"No, you know what I mean," I said.

"Oh!" she said, realizing what I meant. That I was as delighted as any woman alive to receive a gift telling me that I'm beautiful and meant to make me even more beautiful. "Oh, I'm glad you're pleased. I suppose we should both thank Georgy for it. It was his gift originally. I think he used them to seduce office staff."

"Yes, but the gift itself was your idea. He told me."

"Mmmmmm," she said. "I suppose so. Are you ready to leave now, honey? I'll go get the car."

Trish drove. I turned to look back at the house where we'd been so happy, and I realized that I wasn't sorry to leave it. I could return of course, and I would. As Amy. That house had been Amy's prison, and now I was setting her free. I was setting myself free. Sooner than I'd thought, it seems, and in ways I hadn't anticipated. It was ironic that now Amy was free to come and go as she chose, and it was Andy who would need to sneak in and out or else explain why he wasn't at that moment in Saudi Arabia. Even so, as Andy I never felt closer to Tricia than at that moment.

iv.

Halfway to Madison we skirted the suburb of a fair-sized town, Trish pulled off the Interstate and pulled into a strip mall of small local stores -- shoe repair, liquor, a boutique for Wedding Gowns and another for "ElitePetite" women, that sort of thing. She parked in front of a "CurlyGirly's Salon."

"How cute!" I commented, looking up at the sign, wondering what we were doing here. We usually shared the same attitude toward commercial bad taste pretending to be wit. I assumed that somehow I'd be changing clothes and identities at a gas station.

"Hop out, curlygirly," Trish said. "This is where it happens. Say goodbye to your manhood, honey!"

She smiled reassuringly at me, but her voice sounded firm.

"This is where I lose my balls?" I picked up on her statement playfully. I hoped playfully.

"You bet, honey. You might just as well, for all the good they'll do you from now on. Girls don't need balls. Here's where you change your clothes and your looks and your identity. This time all the way, until the new you clicks into place. Bring Amy's outfit with you. Right here and now your boudoir girlfriend passes through her adolescence and young womanhood and replaces you as a fully grown mature woman. As Amy. Don't be put off by the location of this shop -- it's nationally known for its work performing problem makeovers. The women who work here are very good. They're accustomed to men and women who would rather look like women and men. I made a lot of inquiries last week while you were away, and as you'll find out soon I've done some very fancy legal footwork too preparing this condo idea for you too!"

"All before asking me?" I was feeling a little pushed.

"As my gift to you, sweetheart. My farewell gift, in a way. You've helped me look prettier, more feminine, and I've learned to enjoy it. You've been my only husband, and that makes you very special! I had to return the favor before you disappeared, didn't I? Should I have wondered what you'd say when I asked you if you wanted to give Amy an independent life? When I suggested you try this?"

"No, Trish. I still love the idea. So much I still have butterflies in my tummy."

She opened her arms. "Give us a kiss, lover!" I did. Twice. And hugged her, as much for courage as for consolation. Then we went in together.

There were several women there wearing pale green smocks, and several others being worked on. The customers were elderly women getting their thinning hair curled, as everywhere the bread and butter of the salon trade. A large, friendly woman came forward to us, also wearing pale green and holding out a pink smock for me. "You're Tricia, of course. And you're Amy. A new woman! Wonderful! Well, I want this to be as joyous a coming out as you can have. I'm Janie. We'll be seeing each other weekly from now on for your electrolysis and touch ups and so on. I'm sure we'll get on just marvelously! Have you been to a salon like ours before?"

"Yes," I confessed. "At transgender meetings. To have my hair set, and for temporary nails."

"Well, there's nothing temporary about this morning's work, dear. We start with a permanent. Is this the day you finally become a ravishing blonde?"

It had never occurred to me! A really radical change. Wild! I couldn't think. Trish merely said, "She can't. Her clothes and makeup are all keyed to her hair color as it is. Or close to it."

"Well, another time, if you should ever feel bored with yourself. That's one way a girl can always give herself a lift. Change her hair, change her boyfriend. In your case, change her sex! Take off your clothes over there, honey, and put this on, and we'll get started. Do you have a boyfriend yet?"

I glanced at Trish. She was highly amused.

"Not at the moment, Janie," I said in the slightly melodic, teasing voice I used at gender meetings. "I'm still experimenting with girls."

"Well, you'll get over it I suspect," Janie said. "Most women do. You can do more with boys. Or strictly speaking, you can get them to do more for you." She smiled to herself and pulled her shoulders back, her breasts suddenly jutting way forward. "Yes," she said, reminiscing. "The poor dears."

I had a sudden vision of Janie in black leather, looking down with sympathetic contempt on some naked male slave grovelling at her feet while he licked them. She was that kind of woman. I felt glad then that I was a woman too, not a submissive wimp man. I could at least preserve my dignity

Then to Trish she said, "Wives often want a little girl look for their husbands to help keep them in line. Their husbands of course always want to look like debauched sluts. You say though that Amy is a professional woman? Not a slut or a little girl?"

"Not right now, not yet," Trish replied. "She's not a prude, mind you. She's just been set free from her marriage, and she's not averse to playing the field for the time being. With a certain confidence in her look and her walk. Busy, so let's make her nails permanent and chip-proof. Some indelible tinting in her make-up wouldn't be amiss either. So she can wake up in the morning looking fresh, if there's anyone there to see her." She grinned at a stray thought. "Make her face kiss-proof!"

"No girl's face is kiss-proof," Janie replied, also amused. "If it's the right kind of kiss. Nor pussy-proof either. Now just sit down here Amy honey, and we'll see what we've got. Nice, thick hair -- you're lucky!"

Two hours later I'd become what Trish had ordered up. I had breasts glued to my chest and "pussy panties" reshaping my crotch, holding my balls up between my legs and pulling my prick down toward a little pee hole in a slit on the very bottom. I realized that some hapless swain could cop a feel of my crotch now and find both my slit and a clit -- a little rubber nub -- and never be the wiser if he didn't press further. I was wearing a pretty salmon silk blouse with a huge self bow, my Bergdorf tweed suit with a wickedly short skirt only halfway down my thighs. But sensible two inch heels, and a single long gold chain. My ears were pierced, long a secret desire I'd never dared fulfill, and they were filled with bright gold posts I'd wear until they healed. Then I could wear any ear rings at all! I looked smashing! I loved it!

"So now I'm a divorced professional playing the field?" I asked Tricia as I quickly daubed on my own make-up, Janie watching and for the most part approving. She pointed out that my now-pencil-thin arched eyebrows needed tinting as well as combing, and I had to agree. We agreed to disagree about lip liner -- I thought it unnecessary.

"Yes, honey. I was teasing but I meant it. Amy isn't exactly married." Tricia spoke carefully as we got back into the car. "She may have felt she was, but now she's out in this world as her own person. Otherwise why are we doing this? Forget Andy. I already have."

She seemed uncomfortable when she heard herself say this, and then changed the subject. "I love your hair lightened just that much, Amy. And curved instead of curled. I think that was a good decision. And it's a nice cut. Up, it would grace any office. Down, it's quite romantic. Do you remember how to comb it out either way?"

"Yes," I said. "You insisted that Janie show me." I wasn't quite finished though. We were now back on the interstate and back up to speed. "I'd anticipated a short no-frills hairdo, " I said. "Comb it with your fingers. This cut will take work, pinning it up evenings or rolling and combing it out each morning. Why did you want it left long and romantic? For playing the field?" I asked. Secure in Tricia's love, deep in her loving gift to me of the freedom to be Amy, I thought I was teasing her.

"You're a single woman, Amy. Why not? Just look at you! You're gorgeous! Of course for playing the field!" She glanced at me, then back at the road. The mid-morning traffic had picked up and needed her attention. "Chin a little large, but make-up handles that. I'd kill for those cheekbones. Did you diet all this past week while you were away?"

I couldn't tell if she was teasing me back. "Yes," I said seriously. "I had some form-fitting outfits that were a little snug. By the end of the week they slid over me quite nicely. You're saying you think it's all right for me to flash myself at other women?"

Another quick glance at me. "You'll attract certain kinds of women whether you flash at them or not. No, I meant other men," she said. "I know men aren't your thing right now, but every girl tries them on for size sooner or later, and most women stick with them. Even develop favorites. I did." She flicked her eyes at me yet again.

"You mean me," I said.

"No, honey. Not you. I mean Andy. But Andy's gone. When I register some court orders I'm carrying here there won't ever have been a boy named Andy. Only a girl named Amy. You. Born that way."

"Isn't that a little extreme, Trish? I'm not all Amy you know. There's always some Andy down inside me. I still enjoy being Andy. For some things he's essential."

"Of course you enjoy him. We all enjoy our men. But you're now all Amy, sweetie, and if Andy persists and asserts himself we'll have to deal with him by other means. You need a single legal identity in order to own property, have a bank account, pay your taxes, and so forth. You can't be two people. For your consulting, you can still sign yourself 'doing business as' Andy. Women often take male names for business purposes, for obvious reasons. But you'll really need to tell your clients that your associate Amy is as good or better than you and deserves their business. For everything but your consultations you're Amy. It's official. That's what I was doing yesterday. In and out of court, making it official. I could still do it yesterday with Andy's unlimited power of attorney. Remember? We gave those signing instruments to each other soon after we got married? Well, I've now closed out everything of Andy's and Andy is now null and void! Amy is herself, and there is no Andy. Andy is now legally Amy, who has always been a woman.

I was sober. A thought struck me. "Andy is now legally Amy? A man is now legally a woman? Then are we still married, Trish?"

"Of course we are, sweetheart! In my mind we are! I told you that yesterday! But legally? No. Not any longer. When we changed your birth certificate, our marriage simply ceased to exist. I told you we didn't need a divorce, didn't I?"

That was sobering. "I didn't want that," I said.

"Maybe not. But you've got it." Was that a flash of determination in her sympathetic glance at me? "You're better off for it, honey. You don't want to feel bound. You're too young to be married. You have your whole life as a woman ahead of you! Play the field!"

I was solemn for a moment. Then I had to ask. Again. "So when you tell me to play the field, Trish, you really are telling me to enjoy other women?"

We were now approaching Madison, and the traffic took all of her attention. She slowed, and changed lanes, and watched other cars as we moved onto an off ramp.

"Of course, honey. If women are your thing. And men too, when you're ready!"

I didn't know what to say. This wasn't what I'd anticipated, trying out life as Amy. I'd somehow imagined I suppose that everything to do with Andy would be put on hold until my honeymoon as Amy ended, or until Amy became my main me and Andy an occasional state of mind. If that ever happened. Or something. I wasn't sure what I'd expected. A long real-time gender enactment, then back to who I really was, probably. I was confused, so I wasn't sure I heard what she next said.

"You see, Amy, you already know about living the way women live, arranging your hair and shopping the sales, and so forth. And I assume all last week people treated you like a woman and you behaved like one. So that part's not new. What would be new for you is sex as a woman. Making a man feel solicitous and attentive, eager to please you, and then enjoying it as he pleases you. Frankly, Amy, it would relieve my mind, knowing you're out there with other people enjoying yourself. I am. I do. I have. Why shouldn't you?"

"What," I asked her? "You've what?"

Another quick glance at me, this time sympathetic yet pitying, as we pulled up to the Madison County Building and she pulled into a parking slot, parked, turned off the engine, and set the hand brake.

"Played the field, Amy. Slept with other men. Enjoyed them. Lots of them! This is something I'd never tell Andy, of course, it would crush him, the poor dear. But I feel closer to you, Amy. I think you can understand this, woman to woman."

She took a deep breath, turned to look directly at me, and then began. "Ever since Andy's first gender meeting a few years ago, Amy. You remember? I was so sure he was going there to get his balls cut off and come back to me a mincing Drag Queen? I'd been resenting this Amy person ever since I first heard about her. I resented that Andy devoted so much time to her. I resented that Andy claimed to be her. I wanted a man. So while he was away being Amy I confided in Carol, and she provided me some wonderful consolations. I think you know about them. She made me feel alive again, desirable as a woman! And she suggested that I confirm those feelings by looking for a man. I did, and I found one. It was quite satisfactory! Different. I spent that whole weekend with him. The sex with him was very good, and I've never regretted it!"

She smiled to herself in a self-satisfied way, then continued. "Amy, I've seen him a few times since then, and I can say with perfect assurance that he hasn't in the slightest displaced Andy in my affections. You remember when Andy returned from his meeting feeling less ashamed to be Amy? Less ashamed to be a woman? I loved Andy all the more then, because that made me feel less ashamed to be fucking another man. It was as if Andy had told me it was all right. We both of us were doing what we had to do."

She sighed. "Well, honey, then I found other men. I was never promiscuous, but men are all different. Some are rough and some are gentle, and I got to like both the slamming and the caressing. Some have incredibly huge cocks, you'll be amazed how you feel when some are stuffed into you. Others make marvelous moves when they're in you. But all men have huge egos. I had to dominate them from the start. Even then, I doubt I slept with any one man more than a half-dozen times, because men do get ideas. They begin to claim exclusive privileges, and that's when I need to drop them. I might have dropped even you if you'd known about my little adventures and objected to them, but now we'll never know, will we?"

"No," I said. I didn't know what else to say.

"I always finish each day at the office by fucking my stud-of-the-week, it's so relaxing when you work under pressure. Then come home to you and work out and shower, and then maybe play with you a little too. You could always make me feel loved, and when you were licking out the last of whatever my lovers had left in my pussy, it was as if you were enjoying them with me. I'll miss that. I owe you so much!"

"But oh, Amy, I do love attracting and controlling different men! Tricia the temptress, using dramatic make-up to seduce all kinds of men, to bring them groveling to my feet. Some quite literally! You were so helpful, darling, when I wanted to seduce certain clients. It was your make-up that did it as often as not. Now you can do it for your own benefit!" She looked up at me. "Not that I needed to seduce men. There's no shortage of horny partners in my firm, or of Associates eager to please me, looking for an inside track." She smiled at her little pun.

I was depressed and furious, but tried to remember how Amy would listen to these revelations. Probably her curiosity would be tickled. Amy was an innocent. "Was Greg one of your lovers, honey?," I asked.

"Not a lover, Amy. I used him for quick sex, once. He has a continental touch. You know, hand-kissing, and ass-kissing too if you've wondered about him that way. But he can be such a fool. He told me last night that you found his note in that make-up kit, one of those free things Helena Rubenstein or someone hands out now and then. He gave it to me as a thank you gesture after I tried out his cock and found that it lacked sincerity. He's such a gentleman! I never bothered to open it, so I never saw the note. But after he told that stupid story about secretarial gifts and so on, I had to stick with it. At least it was credible."

Again she sighed. "I was going to tell you these things later today, Amy, part of a pep talk to encourage you to do the same thing. Forget your so-called obligations, live completely as Amy, use this chance to discover and enjoy your most profound emotional depths as a woman. With women and with men both. To think that Greg almost blew it last night! What an asshole! I'm now doubly glad I reamed him with a huge dildo that one time I was with him, when I was annoyed that he didn't seem to know the proper uses of a cock and a pussy! I remember he couldn't walk for a week!"

She smiled, then looked concerned. "Amy, I haven't been fair to you. It was only this past week, while you were away at your meeting and I was in bed with a different man every night, that I realized you should be sharing some of the fun I was having. I talked it over with Carol. She doubted that Andy would be willing to swing with me -- he's such a conventional prig. So she suggested that I set Amy free. And now I have. You're a woman now, Amy. Enjoy other women if you will, but at least one man. Force yourself, if you must! I want you to, so I'll feel a little less guilty about my own escapades. See what happens! Men can be so wonderful! So many different kinds of cocks, and there are so many different ways a girl can enjoy them!"

I'd been so happy earlier! Now the pit of my stomach was churning!

Trish put her purse in her lap, ready to get out of the car. "Time to do our paperwork now, Amy. These need filing. And you'll need a driver's license and a bank account in your own name before we can talk to the real estate agent. Just follow my lead and sign your name when and where I tell you. Remember which name, honey!"

I hesitated a moment longer. Then, as I'd done before leaving anywhere or proceeding anywhere all through the previous week, I took a mirror out of my purse and began to touch up my hairdo and my make-up. My hair *was* a pretty color, no longer dark but a rich brown with golden highlights. I pulled down a ringlet in front of each ear. I'm still young, I was thinking. Attractive. Even pretty.

"Trish," I said.

"Yes, honey," she replied. She was attentive, yet as always in delicate situations, relaxed, matter-of-fact.

"All those evenings when I made you up to look beautiful and presentable before you went out to meet clients? Taught you how to look responsible and yet feminine, even provocative? Remember that stretch of time when you joked about how looking provocative had provoked lots of new business?"

"Yes?" She was waiting for my question.

"You weren't really joking then, were you."

"No, honey. I brought in a lot of new business then. And you helped me. You were essential. I'd been careless with my looks, and I'd let myself seem much too distant. Who but you could have told me that a wide-eyed little girl look brings out a protective instinct in men and turns their brains to mush? And who but you could have shown me how to look like a wide-eyed little girl with only a few dabs of eye shadow?"

"Were all of them clients? The men you went out to meet all those evenings after I made up your face?"

"Most of them. Most of them were also clients. But honey, if you're asking whether you were primping me for the men who were making Andy a cuckold, the answer is yes. Yes, Andy was setting himself up! Over and over! He might just as well have been jerking them off and sucking their cocks to make them nice and hard and horny for me, because when he finished with me and they saw me, that's what they were. It's ironic. Andy was my live-in girlfriend in dresses while I was out fucking anything in pants. Including women. Remember, night before last, when you were still wearing your bra and pantyhose, that didn't stop either of us, did it? You yourself taught me that there are certain advantages to the ways women make love! I'm going to miss mussing your hair with my thighs."

"All those times you called me your sweet cumsucker. It wasn't all your cum, was it?"

She looked at me for a moment, then smiled confidentially, wickedly. "Amy, not all. Not even mostly. Some. But your friend Andy is such a dear! He loved eating my men! That's how I know you'll love the real thing when it's squirting directly into your mouth, your lips wrapped around the source!"

"You brought men home when I happened to be out of town? Some you fucked in our own bedroom, in our bed? You wore those crotchless panties on dates with them?"

"Honey, you never 'happened' to be out of town. You deliberately left town to cavort like a pansy girl with other faggots, or at least that's what I thought at first. Then later I realized that you left town simply to enjoy being what you are, a woman. That was OK too, but by then I'd found other compensating pleasures. Yes. I brought many men home. And a few women. Those lacy underpants with the split crotch you found in our bed and thought at first might be yours? I still don't know whose they were, mine, yours, or some other woman's. Maybe even some male bed partner I'd humiliated into them -- there are way more of your kind of person than you'd think, and as I think you now know, I've gotten pretty good at having my way with them! I've fucked many men in the ass through split crotches."

Now she began to sound quite sincere, woman to woman. "Some real men have taught me the pleasures of a stiff dick sliding in my ass," she said. "And I've wanted to give others the same pleasure. I've even turned a few real men into real sissies, starting out by lending them some of your lingerie, then teaching them how to buy their own, then getting them to spread for me while I fuck them. It's such fun, when I run into them afterward at business meetings and can tell from the way their faces turn red that they're still wearing pretty panties and who knows what else, and know that I know! Be sure to feminize some lover as soon as you can, Amy! Nothing else gives a girl quite the same rush!"

I was silent. If I'd been betrayed, I'd certainly also been self-betrayed. One more question.

"Trish, this whole plan of yours. Suggesting that I live unencumbered as Amy. That I try to enjoy being only Amy for a while. Is this for my sake? Out of love, to encourage me to fulfill myself? Or is it for your sake? A power trip? Or to get me out of the way so you can bed down more men, since I've been such a disappointment to you.

She thought seriously for a moment. "I always have my reasons," she said by way of prologue, still framing her answer.. Then she spoke slowly. "You aren't a disappointment to me, Amy. My pretty Amy! Not at all. Andy was at first. I've come a long way since I first found that I was married to a transgendered man, not to a whole man. But Amy, you're now living as fully as you can according to your desires. I love you especially for that. More than love, I admire you. I hope whatever else happens that we can become the dearest of friends. On the other hand Andy is still a disappointment to me. I'll admit it. Because he spent so much time and energy compromising his desires, trying to keep them hidden. He's a kind of oppressor of women, in a way, did you ever think of it that way? Of you. All the time he was trying to let you out, he was trying to hide you. I've let you out! And frankly, now that you're out do you think for a moment it's likely you'll ever want to go back in?"

"But that doesn't fully answer your question, does it. Maybe your experience as a woman will answer it for you. Live as Amy for a few months, and then we'll talk again. Maybe by then you'll know how women deal with such questions. We women aren't at all like men! And incidentally, Amy, you were never in the way! You always gave me a kiss and a squeeze of the hand and your heartiest best wishes every time I left the house to meet a man I meant to wrap my legs around! I've always meant to thank you for that."

And she moved closer to me and took my face in both her hands. "Thank you, Amy darling," she said. "I hope you'll cherish as many cocks in your pussy as I have in mine. That's my real gift to you. I'm sure you feel that's a little perverse, and I'm sure you feel shy. Maybe even maidenly. That's why I've made arrangements you'll find out about later on. You'll see!" And her soft lips kissed me so with such impassioned force that we both had to fix our smeared lipsticks afterward. She smiled conspiratorially at me, and I smiled back, I wasn't sure why.

v.

An hour later we emerged from the County Court House and the Madison Trust Bank and the Department of Motor Vehicles and I was officially registered as Amy. Andy was formally certified a clerical error ever since birth. I was now a woman with a woman's photo-ID and a checkbook with flowers printed pale on the paper. And a sizable bank account, because Tricia bought out my share of our house so it could be all hers and the condo apartment could be all mine. "Give it up, baby!" she'd said when I balked at selling her my half of the house. "You can't go home again. You can only visit. You were overjoyed when I proposed this scheme two days ago. Your life there is over. Here is where you live. You'll have your own proper place by the end of today."

She then picked up the estate agent, a woman dressed in a pink "Queen Realty" jacket and a short business skirt like mine, but with long, dangling ear rings. Her name was Bess, she explained heartily, Good Queen Bess! She knew I'd just love the apartment. I smiled. Trish introduced me as Amy, her onetime sister-in-law, explaining that our friendship as women had outlasted her marriage. As was indeed the case, I guess. And we proceeded to the apartment.

I was impressed, as the car pulled into an "Owners Only" slot. It was a tall, solid, respectable-looking building in one of the more established neighborhoods, six stories high, with a well-lit lobby and a polite and attentive uniformed doorman, one of four on the staff we were told. The estate agent never stopped talking. "A single woman can feel perfectly secure here, whether in the neighborhood or in the building itself. Most of our tenants are professionals, mostly couples or singles like yourself, and the Owner's association is active and lively. They schedule many kinds of tournaments and activities, no problem meeting others socially. There are two party rooms or hospitality rooms on the bottom floor, and they're often in use. You'll find an Olympic sized swimming pool on the back patio, where the afternoon sun catches the building's brick walls and keeps things warm. And of course there are saunas and showers and hot tubs and exercise rooms nearby."

She gestured in their direction and then led on when she saw we didn't mean to pause to look at them. "As you see, the elevator shafts are in different quadrants of the building, so there are only two condo apartments off each floor and hallway. Your condo is on the top floor, the sixth, which is the brightest, airiest, and most free of traffic noises. I believe your hallway partner is a woman much like yourself, an unmarried professional, a doctor of some sort with one of the local HMOs I'm told. You may find you have much in common."

The condo apartment itself was a spacious gem, serene and tastefully furnished. High ceilings, a turquoise carpet, decor clean and modern, no hint anywhere of that ugly gray and rose someone somewhere had decreed was art deco and inflicted everywhere. Breuer chairs and couches, a fully equipped wet bar, a large master bedroom and a smaller airy second bedroom that would become my study. A real study this time, because here I needed no feminine enclave. Clearly a woman had lived here before -- the wallpaper had small delicate patterns filigreeing it, and the drapes seemed dainty even though massive. It was altogether charming. A delight. Almost immediately it felt perfect!

"Oh, I'm so happy for you, Amy!" Tricia whispered to me, both of us enchanted by the feel of the place. "It's just lovely!"

I had to agree. Queen Bess produced some ownership papers and I signed them after Trish looked them over, then signed a check to secure the purchase agreement. And thus the apartment was mine. We called down to the doorman and arranged for him to empty and park my car -- it was now Amy's car -- and to bring my things up carefully.

The estate lady went to the fridge behind the bar and pulled out a bottle of Champagne and three glasses. "I was sure you'd want it, especially at such a ridiculous asking price," she said cheerfully. "Congratulations! I wish you much happiness here!" We all three sipped the bubbly white wine to honor her wishes.

Then Tricia spoke, holding up her glass, relieved that this matter was now settled. Settled as easily as her marriage to me, I realized. I resented it. Unfairly? She'd shed me without the bother of a divorce simply by getting a judge to redefine my sex to match my supposed gender. After all those multiple infidelities, it turned out we were two women, therefore never married, and therefore she'd never really been unfaithful to me after all. All the time I'd thought we were married and faithful to each other, she'd been a lively single woman living with her girlfriend Amy and dating different men and playing the field, as was her right and due. Spotless. All this achieved in a single deft stroke I'd never seen coming and never felt.

"My darling sister-in-law! My dear friend! Amy sweetheart! We've been so close for so long now, and we've shared so much, that all I can say is, I hope we'll always feel as close to each other as we are now. That we'll always be dear friends. We'll see each other often I'm sure but I need to say this now. Have a wonderful life! Take advantage of everything life offers. You're now free to explore a whole new neighborhood, a whole new city, a whole new world, all kinds of new people. No need ever to feel enclosed or hidden away, not ever. Enjoy your freedom! I love you! You're from a part of my life I don't want ever to forget!"

There were real tears in her eyes as she raised her glass. And in mine, though I knew that the revelations of earlier today were going to twist inside me for weeks until I managed to settle in my own mind how I felt about them. I had no confidence that Trish meant well now or had meant well for some time now. She'd ditched me. Yet everything she'd done for me seemed to be with the most generous of intentions. I tried to say something in response, but my throat choked up, and in the end I had to set my glass down and rush over to her and hug her. Passionately. Sobbing the whole time. For the last time, perhaps, I thought. My wife! My life! My former wife! The woman I'd loved! Goodbye to all these!

She hadn't expected quite this kind ofdisplay, and just held me, rather overwhelmed.

When I recovered myself I just said to Queen Bess, "I'm sorry. I was saying goodbye. I owe all of this to Trish. To Tricia. Please forgive me!"

The Queen Realtor nodded -- I did seem a bit excessive but she'd seen almost everything before.

It was my turn to say something. I picked up my glass again. "To true friends, and to knowing who they are!"

Trish looked at me for a moment, then lifted her glass, smiled, and drank.

"Well! A party? Can I watch?"

A female voice, mellow and bemused, and also sprightly, coming from the open door! I looked up. There leaning against the door post was a woman of about Trish's age. Tall, thin, with a long neck and short black hair swirling over her ears. A delicate face with a small nose, a large mouth, and an air of effortless authority. She wore a bright yellow satin team jacket of some sort, open over a demure white blouse, and a full gray skirt fell from her waist nearly to her ankles. And "sensible" white shoes with chunky heels.

When she saw she had our attention, she came forward, walking directly toward me. I saw her jacket was imprinted "Madison HMO, Field Hockey Champions, 1996."

"I'm Tracy," she said, holding out her hand. "You must be Amy. I'm so pleased to meet you!"

I took her hand and started to shake it as men do, but she meant for me only to hold it. I'm not sure why, but still holding it I placed my other palm against her shoulder and leaned in lightly to touch both her cheeks with mine. As if we were old friends. She seemed to invite it. It was as if we each felt an instant affinity, even intimacy.

"The doorman told me a likely new owner named Amy would be up here. You look likely. That champagne bottle tells me that you're my new neighbor just across the hall. I won't disturb you now. But do look in later when you get a chance, and we'll have a good long talk and get to know each other. Promise?" I promised. She nodded at Trish and grinned at the Queen Realtor and disappeared into her doorway, across the hall just opposite mine, on the other side of the elevator door.

A random thought crossed my mind -- it's so easy to get to meet women if you're a woman. Maybe Trish hadn't been altogether cruel, setting me free to explore my femininity in a new setting with new people.

"Well honey," Tricia said. "I think we've accomplished everything we intended. Do call to let me know how you've settled in. I'll arrange for your mail to be forwarded. I hate to run" -- she glanced at her watch -- "but I don't want to miss the next plane back if I can help it. Things to do and people to see. Don't bother to come down -- the doorman'll get me a taxi." She was already in the hall pressing the elevator call button, and she looked back at me. "I think you'll find that this will work out even better than you've imagined, Amy," she said. "I'm sure of it. Better for both of us!"

The elevator door slid open and Trish stepped in. Her eyes and mind were already preoccupied with something else, I saw, as she waited for the door to close. It closed, swallowing up my wife and my marriage. I stared at it.

"Well, I think I have everything here I need, Amy," the Queen Realtor said. "If you have any questions please be sure to call me. Enjoy your new life. I'm sure you will." She shook my hand and departed after Trish. When the elevator returned for her she too stepped in and was gone.

My new life had begun.

I hung my suit jacket in the hall closet and then thought better of it, kicked off my heels, and walked in my stockings toward my new bedroom, enjoying the squishy feel of the thick turquoise carpet against the soles of my feet. It *was* a cute jacket, pert and short, and it was the first item of my wardrobe I hung up in my huge bedroom closet. My wardrobe. All women's clothes. I was a woman! I pulled open the top drawer in my bureau. Empty. A perfect size for my bras and panties.

Three hours later I'd moved in and set up my computer. The doorman Alex enlisted his night replacement to bring everything up, and I found that if I made tentative noises and seemed momentarily indecisive, then firmly asked them to do something, and remembered to thank them effusively afterward, they were overwhelmed with eagerness to help out. Men are certainly programmed to do women's bidding, I thought to myself. I certainly was.

Tomorrow, I decided, I'd inform my clients by e-mail that I was under new management. Andy would vouch for his forthcoming unavailability overseas and for Amy's qualifications, and then Amy would come online with a free bonus program tailored for each, designed to make their work easier, in earnest of her abilities. I doubted I'd lose any of them. Meanwhile I had no food in the place. I decided to step across the hall and ask Tracy if there was a decent small restaurant in the neighborhood.

No need for a purse. I glanced at my makeup and fixed my hair, though, as women do. As I do from now on, I realized, until I can sort things out. I prepared to smile as I rang the bell. Women smile openly at each other, I thought. They accept each other. When men smile at them women hesitate to smile back.

Tracy was wearing a brightly flowered housecoat zipped up to her neck, and seemed genuinely pleased to see me.

"Amy! Do come in! All moved in already? Nonsense, I asked you to stop by, remember? Let me get you a drink! What would you like? Vodka? Wine? Soda? I have everything! I love your hair, does someone local do it? No, of course not, not yet."

She turned away to her own wet bar in a corner of the living room. Her place looked bright and warm and comfortable. Easy chairs, two couches, Matisse prints of dancing nudes on the walls. I suddenly realized standing there that it had been a long, difficult day, my third in a row, the best and the worst of my life. I'd been swept into a new world made up of bits and pieces of my old world, and my old one with a solid and loving marriage at its center had turned out to be imaginary. I myself was now inside out, with Amy on the surface and Andy somewhere inside. I was momentarily speechless.

Tracy saw at once. "I know what you need, Amy. Hard and quick. Here!" She handed me a short fat glass filled with ice cubes and an amber fluid. I sniffed. Straight Scotch, very old. She then lifted the glass of white wine she'd been sipping, and I wordlessly lifted my glass to her and smiled wanly. We drank. She gestured me into a chair, and I sat.

"You're very good, honey," she said. "You move with a great deal of grace and assurance for a beginner. But if you don't mind my suggesting it, next time you sit down in a short skirt while holding a glass, try to set the glass down first so you can smooth your skirt with both hands. Or else just perch on the edge of the seat on one haunch, and then hold the glass with both hands to display the charm of your manicure. Like this!"

She stood up, and lowered herself gingerly, catty corner to the cushion, then draped her hands elegantly around her wine glass. One finger rubbed the edge meditatively. She raised an eyebrow at me with a slight smile. Then, "Not like this!" She stood up and then flopped backwards four square, sprawled legs apart. Then smiled at me with real warmth. She'd enjoyed her own performance. I realized she wanted to distract me, to amuse me if she could.

I sighed. Was it that obvious? Was I?

"Tell me about it, neighbor. I was about to order in a pizza, lots of pepperoni, is that OK? Good! And let me refill that glass."

She made her phone call, brought me back my glass brimful, seemed to float in a most delicately ladylike manner down into her chair, and then curled up on it. "Now! I had a difficult day too, but in this apartment there are no pumpkins, only coaches," she said. "So tell me."

"Was I that obvious?" I asked her, worried. "This is my life for the foreseeable. I'd thought this morning it would be just now and then, but I guess not. There's no longer anything for me back home."

She was listening carefully but comfortably. "Sounds serious. No, you're not at all obvious," she said. "Any ten year old girl can tell, of course, but they all have radar. They're so intent to study out how it is with all the variants, being female and feminine and all, that they can tell immediately who's off the scale. No, I read you when I saw you saying goodbye to your...was she really your sister-in-law? That was quite emotional for a sister-in-law!"

"That was my wife," I said. "My former wife, as of this morning. She suggested two days ago that I try being a woman for real, not just recreationally. Buy this place and live as my femme self whenever I wanted. It seemed such a marvelous idea! The happiest imaginable! I was ecstatic! I wanted it. I still do. But this morning when she made me a legal woman she nullified our marriage and moved me out of her life. Before I even noticed, we'd divided our property. And now she's gone. I've been finessed by a smart lawyer. Yet I still think she was doing me a favor."

"She may have been," Tracy commented. "I don't see why not."

"She thinks I should take up with men now. To me that sounds a little spiteful."

"Maybe," Tracy said, abstracted. She was thinking about something else. "But you do have to agree, if you're even the least bit Bi, the idea makes sense. Men have their virtues and advantages. Just doing to them what she did to you can give an enormous boost to a girl's ego."

She suddenly seemed to make up her mind about whatever it was. She leaned forward and talked rapidly and with evident sincerity. "No, dear, don't worry. You'll pass. You already have. That Real Estate lady was certainly persuaded. But I'm a gynecologist, I can always tell. Maybe your mind was born to wear panties, as current theories tell us, but your fanny certainly wasn't. I know how a girl's bones grow and how her adipose tissue covers them as she ripens. Yours doesn't quite, not even in your face. Just a touch of rounding and softening is needed here, but a lot more there! I looked at you and what registered right away was 'Oh, my, there's a severe adolescent hormone deficiency.' Then I looked again and saw the most obvious reason why. Wrong hormones."

I sat there looking gratefully at Tracy. She had no problem with me at all. I took a strong pull at my drink and immediately felt warm. Comfy.

Suddenly Tracy stood up. She looked down keenly at me. "All right! Before you say anything more on your own, enough so I'll have to disqualify myself as your physician, let me ask you a series of questions. Maybe I can help you ease into this next stage of your life. You'll answer with one word only. One! Is that clear?"

"Yes."

She grinned. "That wasn't the first question. This is. You're a woman in the eyes of the law now, is that correct?"

"Yes."

"That simplifies lots of things. And you came here intending to live like a woman full time?"

"Yes."

"Are you a woman? In your mind and feelings and sense of self I mean."

"Partly."

"Partly. Is your preferred sense of self feminine?"

"Yes."

"But sometimes you feel like a man?"

"Yes."

"Mmmmm! Let me explain, Amy. If you were a transgendered man in the process of becoming a woman, I'd have to follow an elaborate set of protocols for this RLT of yours, this real life test. But what I see in front of me now is a woman with a severe hormone deficiency. So it's easy. You're a woman legally, subjectively, and by choice, and you appear to be what you say you are. Do you expect any of this to change soon?"

"No." Trish had made any return to my former status difficult, maybe impossible. I added, "No, now that I'm here I want to try this out!"

"Choose only one of those words, Amy. I think the operative word out of that long monologue is 'No!'" She leaned forward. "Since your femininity is inevitable for the present, you mean to relax and enjoy it? Go the distance?"

"Yes." Whatever she meant by that.

"Might you change your mind later?"

I shrugged. Who knew? Tracy's questions were reawakening some deeply rooted feminine desires. They'd been suppressed by the extraordinary betrayals I'd undergone today, my wife's revelations about her lovers and her bloodless excising of me out of her life. But I did notice that I was now exactly where I'd wanted to be, and I was dressed exactly as I wished. I was even talking to my gynecologist! At that I had to smile.

"You find that funny? Let me put it this way. If you woke up one morning to find your balls missing, how would you feel?"

"Shocked!"

"If you woke up one morning to find boobs hanging from your chest, how would you feel?"

I paused. I'd never been much for distortion of my body, or for taking needless medication. But boobs were the epitome of womanhood and could be the fulfillment of my figure! A vagina was more womanly still, I supposed, but vaginas didn't show! Women's fashions didn't feature them. And I couldn't have one short of castration and a penectomy, which I knew I didn't want. On the other hand, to have real breasts to tuck into my bras!

"Intrigued!" I informed her. I meant it, too. The very idea rejuvenated my sense of the privilege of this moment. I was now a woman with my own apartment and my own life to live. Before bowing out, Trish had given me my lifelong dream!

Tracy looked at me very closely again. Really scrutinized me. Then she said, "Amy, my new neighbor, I diagnose that you suffered a severe hormone deficiency when you were an adolescent girl. Probably because your ovaries never developed the way they do in other women. Even without examining you I imagine your uterus is the same way, underdeveloped. I must warn you that you're at risk of osteoporosis and loss or diminished capacity in your secondary sex characteristics. I'll bet you've been too embarrassed to go out in public wearing a bikini. Isn't that so? I thought so. Well, as a woman, I think you'd be much happier with a closer approximation of woman's figure. I mean with hips, tits, and a fat ass, soft curves over your cheekbones, everything. Isn't that so, Amy?"

"Yes. Yes, I think that's so."

"That's redundant, Amy. But I understand!"

She stood up suddenly and disappeared into a back room for a moment. Then she came back into her living room with a syringe in one hand and some pills in the other. She came over and stood directly in front of me, looking down at me. Her crotch was a few inches in front of my face, covered by her housecoat, but suddenly I became aware of it. I looked up at her. I had a feeling I was about to cross some momentous divide. But I didn't care. After this shattering series of days, I had now found someone who understood me. Tracy understood me. I trusted her. I wanted to put myself in her hands.

"Amy honey, this will help. To live like a woman, and feel like one, you'll need to become more like one in body as well as mind! Don't you agree?"

"Yes."

"I'll get the exact medications you need from my office tomorrow, and I'll want to run some tests. But this will get you started. I suspect you'll feel much better about your new life once we get your estrogen and progesterone levels up where they are in a normal woman. This is estinyl estradiol, and I'll inject it three times weekly, then maybe cut back the dosage a little. Then we'll see how things go. You'll supplement the shots with these pills daily, they're to neutralize the testosterone you're still producing. One is to help you feel comfortable about the changes that'll be occurring in your body. Maybe changes in your mind and desires too. All right so far?"

I nodded. My head whirled a little. The whisky? Things were moving faster than I'd ever dreamed.

"There will be changes, all beneficial, but not immediately. I'm giving you a crash course in adolescence, fairly heavy doses, but it will still take time. Months instead of years in your case. You'll experience nausea at first, I'm afraid, morning sickness. The way all women do when adjusting to pregnancy. But then you'll become rosy-cheeked and rosy-nippled, your skin as ripe and smooth and lovely as a young girl's, the way pregnant women do. I think you'll like it. Remember though, that as your breasts grow your clit will shrink. And those things that hang below it. In a matter of months you'll lose your erections, and in a few more months it'll be irreversible. To be intimate with anyone, it'll have to be the way women are intimate. Can you deal with that?"

I thought about the night before last. That grand night of magnificent lovemaking with Tricia. My ramrod cock swollen with the prospect of femininity invading her ass as a special privilege. But how many men had preceded me there? I'd entered her so easily, but was it because I was so stiff or because she was already so stretched out by so many other men? Better men she preferred to me, who'd gotten there first! She'd used me! As a man I was inadequate, but it had amused her to lead me around by my cock. Enough of that!

"Yes, Tracy. Please. I want to develop a proper figure. Now that I'm a woman, I want to be the best woman I can be. And that includes everything. Nearly."

"You mentioned that you have delusions of masculinity. What woman doesn't now and then? We'll deal with them. We'll make your manhood ashamed to show itself! You think you're a man? On your knees in front of me! Bend over, ass held high! Lower your panties and lift your skirt."

I knelt down in front of her. She stripped paper off a gauze pad and wiped part of my butt with it, and then I barely felt the pinprick of her syringe. She took a long time injecting whatever it was, but finally said "There! Now there's no turning back!" and withdrew the needle. When I raised my head again I saw that she was holding out three tablets in the palm of her hand. I licked them into my mouth and she handed me my scotch. I washed them down with a single swallow. I felt so mellow!

On impulse I leaned forward and kissed her mound through her housecoat, and then looked up to see if she was offended. She was smiling down on me, one hand on her hip.

"There's my girl! That's what you are now, you know. Or soon will be. Here you are on your knees eating out of my hand, grateful to me and now committed to become your true gender. That wasn't so difficult, was it? Let's go into my bedroom and get better acquainted. It happens that I enjoy sex with men or women, and right now you're both. Aren't you?

"Yes. So far."

"Then come along, Amy. Let's see what your wife decided she didn't need. The pizza can wait with the doorman. You can have some for dessert later if you find you're still hungry."

vi.

My life as Amy was a delight. I settled into a routine. I went shopping, I met other couples in the building and played cards with them, and practiced light, harmless flirtations with the husbands when they invited it and enjoyed it. I shifted most of Andy's clients to Amy, and they marveled at how much more efficient Amy could be -- "Andy always seemed to be distracted by something," one of them commented. But the central and utterly absorbing figure in my life was Tracy. A week after we met I'd become her adoring swain, or slave, I couldn't tell the difference.

On weekends we were girlfriends, affectionate and easy, enjoying each other as equals. We were wonderfully compatible. We shared a lightly ironic, faintly mistrustful view of the world, and we endlessly amused each other with quips about things other people regarded with reverence, like fidelity in marriage or the solemnity of sex. On weekends we went shopping, dining, chatting, and laughing together, to movies or concerts or the theater. We had similar opinions about lots of things, and similar ways we disagreed with each other. Gradually we developed genuine respect and affection for each other. We were good company. I'd have called it love, but I knew better.

She corrected me nicely when I got too bumptious or bold or let my voice buzz low, and she registered me in the Condo Community Jazzercize classes to help me stay trim, also in ballet classes to learn graceful and gracious movement. "You'll can catch more men with your neck than any woman ever caught by flashing her tits," she informed me. "Watch!"

I watched as she rotated her head demurely down and around and then boldly up at me, her eyes first innocent, then provocative, and finally smoldering. It was irresistible! Then she had me practice that move in a restaurant on men seated nearby. Invariably they flushed, pleased but embarrassed, grateful that I didn't follow through. I seemed to be more woman than they could handle!

When I commented that I had no need for men, she merely said indulgently "Oh, Amy, use your imagination. At the very least girls collect them to keep score! And remember, pre-teen girls also have no use for boys until their hormones flood their blood streams and cloud their judgment. Like yours right now. Then they can't think or talk about anything else! Give it time!"

She taught me how to giggle at little things. At the self-important ways men walked when they knew we were sizing them up, pushing out their chests and pulling in their bellies, boldly or shyly or flirtatiously rehearsing in their heads some kind of excuse to speak to us before giving it up and moving on. At how eager they were to advise me about the small appliances I'd need in my kitchen if I hoped to please my husband, and their even greater eagerness to please me when I told them I had no husband.

"Women marry sweetly solicitous and submissive males to help them rear children," Tracy explained to me once. "So the other kind has almost been bred out of the species. Or should be, but they aren't. Because the other kind are better for fucking, the untamed ones, the kind that seem dangerous when we first meet them and even moreso when we've got our legs wrapped around them. They're for flings. And if a hunk like that gets a girl pregnant, well, she still has a nice compliant husband around to help her with the diapers and the 2:00 am feedings. Your wife has her career and no plans for children. So she really doesn't need a husband who'd rather be her girlfriend. Can you blame her for going elsewhere to get herself fucked senseless?"

I learned to giggle at my own chivalrous instincts, my trying at first to open doors for her instead of standing and waiting for some nearby man to do it for both of us. Or my trying to put her topcoat on her shoulders instead of simply handing it to her. We'd both giggle at the way my balls went jingle jangle when we danced Jazzercize exercises naked together, or I danced alone for her amusement. Or how they slapped against her perineum whenever we fucked in the missionary position. "What good are they, Amy? Really?" she'd ask. "Don't you want to be as trim and smooth down there as I am?" I actually began to think so. They were part of me, but always in the way, a sentimental affectation I might find dispensable when my breasts replaced them in my affections. And as the weeks went by my nipples began to swell and point, and grow sensitive, then actually to bulge as my chest softened and rounded behind them. I couldn't have been happier! I'd finger them by the hour!

During the weekends we slept together, intimate friends. It was a pure lesbian relationship, as I learned to use my mouth and hands and fingers on her with exquisite sensitivity, and to use my "dildo" as she called it to probe and massage inside her instead of merely poke her. "Use it while you've got it," she told me. "Soon enough you'll need to borrow mine."

And she used hers on me, always gently and with infinite care, patience, and consideration, beginning with a small warmed dildo in my rear so I'd get accustomed to feeling penetrated, to containing and enclosing things, to feeling womanly. I loved the feeling, and gradually she built me up to accepting some shocking monsters she plunged into me. I recalled what Trish had said about feeling so stuffed by a rare man's huge cock she couldn't move...at first, and felt the same way, at first. We kissed and nursed and sucked each other, intimate friends who took pleasure in each others' bodies. But we weren't really lovers.

As I met other people, other women in the building or some of the men I'd pass while walking or jogging, or other women and men in stores where I shopped, I'd tell Tracy about them, and we'd marvel appreciatively at the enormous variety life affords us. Tracy wondered why, whenever a man asked me for a date, I'd turn him down. I'd usually say that I'd just gone through a divorce and it was too soon. And she wondered why I gave the same reply when a woman suggested we have dinner together and maybe do something afterward. Tracy urged me to get back into the stream of life. She warned me that she'd arrange dates for me if I wouldn't arrange my own, and they might not be with my kind of women, or -- she always mentioned it with a gleam in her eye -- my kind of men.

Those were our weekends, when I'd enjoy what I'd always wanted, being a normal woman and behaving like one instinctively, without thinking. They were what I had anticipated when I'd leaped to accept Trish's suggestion that Amy live unashamed as herself.

Our weekdays were altogether different. On weekends I was Amy, a woman. On weekdays I was Andy, a man humiliated into femininity. Tracy enjoyed dominating people, and she was delighted to notice that Andy was a natural submissive. She trained me to subservience, instant eagerness to please. Even that first night when we went into her bedroom, she didn't invite me but ordered me to my knees between her knees while she lolled across the bed with her legs dangling. I forgot my twinge of resentment of Trish as for two hours I licked, sucked, lipped, and tongued Tracy's clit and drank juices that flowed from her slit. All the while she behaved as if I weren't even there, orgasming repeatedly as if she were alone and somehow erupting spontaneously. She lay on her back reading ads in Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair while I plunged my tongue in and out of her, trying to distract her enough to bring her to yet another climax.

Then suddenly she said "All right, love, that'll do, that's very good!" And disengaged her thighs from my head, rose, and phoned downstairs for the pizza held there. When it came she handed me two slices, "your share," and as I considered how to put it between my puffed lips and sore tongue she said gently, "No, Andy. Not yet. First it needs a flavoring only you can splash onto it. Go ahead, do it."

I realized what she meant, but by this time I was ravenous and didn't care. Anyhow, I thought to myself, Trish apparently had been feeding me other men's semen from her pussy for years anyhow and not bothering to tell me. This was more honest. So I masturbated and squirted onto the pizza, then wolfed it down while she smiled approvingly. And that set the pattern for our dining together on weekdays. Any meal I ate in her presence was always flavored by my own cum. Even other times, if she permitted me to cum while I was servicing her, I was expected to lick it up or drink it wherever I found it, to take it back into my body like a good girl, as she said. I soon got accustomed to the taste. I even began to like it.

And that was how it was with almost everything else she asked me to do -- it seemed at first humiliating, but soon became routine, even pleasant. Then she'd raise the stakes.

On weekdays she expected me to greet her lovingly when she came home from work, to wait for her in front of the elevator door naked and on my knees, eyes downcast. She'd glance at me and go on into her apartment as if I weren't there, as if I were something on the hall carpet that hadn't yet been cleaned away. Then if she ordered me to follow her I would. If not I'd go back to my apartment hoping that she'd call me into hers later on. Sometimes she did.

Now and then when the elevator door opened there were two of them, Tracy and one or another woman friend. They'd both ignore me and step past me and go into Tracy's apartment together. Then sometimes I was ordered to follow after, sometimes not. If I followed, I knew I would be spending the evening licking two pussies until one crotch seemed very much like the other, while above me they caressed each others' nipples and kissed each other passionately. I was absolutely forbidden to speak during these sessions, and when I was finally given permission to leave I was forbidden to notice whether her friends stayed on through the night or not. Sometimes they did. I never knew their names.

I once asked Tracy timorously if she sometimes came home with men during the week. She looked at me amused and told me that we both would, sooner or later. From then on whenever the elevator door opened I felt apprehensive.

Once she called me into her apartment I never knew what to expect. She wanted me naked, she explained, so I'd feel helpless and vulnerable, utterly subject to any of her moods, and also incidentally so she could follow my progress as her hormone regimen smoothed my skin and rounded my body. She was amused to detect lumps immediately behind my painfully sensitive nipples when those glands first began to multiply themselves, widening and thrusting out my areola. "Only three weeks in, and you already have the pouty tits of a teeny bopper," she said. "It's a natural talent! Don't worry about the shape of your nipples or their sensitivity, Andy. When your breasts come in those pointy nipples will level into the soft tissue behind them. And their feel when you caress them will drive you wild!" She noticed even before I did that my buttocks were filling in and rounding out, and she took to calling me affectionately "bubble butt."

Our sex on weekdays was a matter of strict subservience. "I like to be in charge, Amy," she explained to me one weekend, when we were speaking together as equals. "I love topping women or men, but especially partial men or women who feel incomplete because they aren't the other. I want to teach the irreducible Andy in you utter submission, subservience and obedience not only to me but to any dominant. To you, Amy, so he'll know for the rest of his life who's in charge, that he's nothing without you, that he must consult and obey and please you in all things. He needs to learn to love obedience to Amy, to crave it, to feel unfulfilled without it. I'd whip him into it, but I'm quite sure he'll never kiss the whip -- he doesn't love pain. Nor even tolerate it. He doesn't even value it enough to offer me his pain as a gift. So it isn't fair to you for me to whip him. But he's easy to train in other ways. And you're both learning how deeply satisfying it can be to please me, aren't you?"

She couldn't humiliate Andy by dressing him as a woman, obviously. So she exhibited him as her submissive sex slave to her women friends. Often she would sit and watch television with her legs apart and her pussy fully exposed, while I knelt before her on my knees with my back to the tube, staring raptly at her slit, studying its every fold and crevice and moist gleam from only a foot away. It was like being in church. One of her friends marveled at my self-restraint. "He wants to dive into you, doesn't he," she'd say. "Your Mr. Tits can barely resist eating Miss Pussy." Tracy told me to meditate on her friend's crotch the same way, and I watched fascinated while she spread her twat wide opened and fingered herself, her juices running onto her fingers. "Don't you wish you had one of these, feebledick?" that one taunted me between gasps. I did begin to wonder what it would be like. When she offered me a finger, I licked the juice off it gratefully.

My reward for such perfect obedience was to be allowed to smooch their slits once, using plenty of tongue. Sometimes I was allowed to dive in and lick them outright. Once I had to watch wistfully while they reclined together on the couch, their video program forgotten, and ate each other out. "Feeling jealous?" Tracy asked me, lifting her face from between the other woman's legs and looking at me with a grin. "If you had one of these you could be here with me!"

Another time a woman wanted to use me as a kind of toilet when she saw how I'd obey anything Tracy ordered. It wasn't easy to obey her at first, and it took several visits before I learned to enjoy it, even to look forward to it. Then she stopped coming altogether. When I asked Tracy why she shrugged. "When I saw your eyes light up the last time you saw her, I knew she had nothing more to teach you. Don't worry. There'll always be other women who'll want to use you that way. No doubt some men too. And when you're Amy, altogether your own woman and accustomed to topping others, and you want to impress your superiority on them utterly, you can order other men to serve you as your toilet. They'll do it. Trust me!"

Often she'd tease and terrify me by talking about sex with men. "You can't commit to a full lesbian relationship with me or anyone else, if you mean to end up lez, until you know what you're missing," she said as she installed a butt plug in my rump and made me promise to wear it all the time, awake or asleep, excepting only when I moved my bowels or opened my anus to her dildo. I wore it thereafter whenever I entered and made love to her, and clamping down on it when I went into an orgasmic spasm made for a whole separate experience, as if I were the one being fucked and my ass was milking a cock. Then she installed wider butt plugs in me, shaped and veined like pricks. Then one glorious evening a fat, long, strap dildo that reached deep into my vitals as she stroked it in and out of me. "Face me, your legs on my shoulders," she'd instructed me. "And look into my face gratefully and lovingly the whole time I'm penetrating you. And whenever I fuck you, I want to see intense gratified desire." I looked tenderly at her, then as sensation began to build I felt deep affection, and she saw that. When she came, I came, and nearly passed out.

I wasn't surprised when a week of so later it one of her friends used that same monster dildo to fuck me doggy style. It felt so wonderful by then that I could only grunt. I was becoming such a fuck slut! I grew so accustomed to "anal orgasms" as Tracy called them that she tried an experiment. While I was humping her she reached around and removed my "little lover" as she called it from my rear end. My face expressed such emptiness and deprivation that she burst out laughing and immediately plunged two fingers into me. I spasmed marvelously on them.

"Oooh, are you ever ready to lose your virginity!" she commented afterward. "I just need to decide who with, and how it can be an especially beautiful moment in your life, one you'll treasure! If you were only Andy I'd send you into the street for a week. But then when you came back you'd think of your mouth and ass as sewer openings, not as a treasured receptacles. I want Amy to remember her first real fuck with affection. I want Amy to know that sex with a man you love can be gloriously romantic, even sublime."

I always cooked dinner for the two of us, five nights each week. Sometimes she ate what I prepared and sometimes she ignored it and I dined alone. "Your pleasure should be in anticipating my pleasure," she explained, "whether or not I accept whatever you're offering me." She was always sternly critical of my slightest lapses. A lumpy Hollandaise aroused fury. Yet once when I spent all day preparing a Roast Duck in Cherries and by chance she allowed me to serve her, her first bite was so satisfying she couldn't repress making ecstatic noises. Then looking directly at me she sat forward on her chair and shifted her weight to spread her legs wide apart. I needed no further instruction. I set down my fork and dove under the table. Then for the rest of the meal while she was mouthing and exclaiming over my sauces, I was licking the sauce on the inside edges of her pussy slit. That was sheer joy.

I realized I was becoming very much the girl Tracy wanted, eager to become even mores.

I went back to CurlyGirly for my weekly appointments, for electrolysis, laser, and wax treatments and touch ups on my makeup and hairdo, and each week came back smoother. One week I decided to take my own look into my own hands and get a tight perm and a no-care curly cap of hair instead of the curved-down-the-neck straight hair Trish had thought best for me. I usually pinned it up, but it was always a bother to remove the pins so they wouldn't scratch Tracy's or her friends' thighs whenever I burrowed between them. Janie wouldn't do it. "Believe me, dear, you need to fuss a little," she said. "It's a bother, looking pretty. But men love long hair. And I know your wife wants you looking romantic, swoony."

"I'm not married any more," I told Janie. "And I don't date men."

"Well, we'll see," Janie said non-commitally. "For a divorced professional woman you're making excellent progress, honey."

One morning a few months later I was feeling sweetly tranquil, sitting with my feet up on the couch in my living room, wearing only panties with a matching bra to support the cute new little tits that were coming along so nicely, wondering when they'd feel less sensitive, working out a flow-chart problem for a chemical plant, when the phone rang. I reached for it and absently said "Hello?" in my breathy flute voice, Amy's.

"Amy? Trish. You remember, Trish, don't you honey? Your ex? It's been a while! You sound so genuine! How *are* you, lover?"

At that moment I wasn't sure. My hand shook a little. "I'm fine Trish. Couldn't be better. Wouldn't know how. How are you?" End the conversation, I told myself. I don't want to share me with her. Not after what she's done.

"Oh, I'm terribly busy, it's worse than I'd anticipated, but it's also so exciting! So many new things to get on top of. This new client's work is more demanding than any of us had expected. Apart from all the involved partners I now have a huge crew working with me full time, and two more Associates signing on soon. They put in seventy to ninety hour weeks, travel often, and complain all the time. But the jobs do get done. The wives with no children got together once to protest to me how they felt deprived of male company, as they put it. So I got together with them one night at a hotel retreat to point our how they could organize sleepovers as if they were still teenagers, and then they wouldn't at all mind their husbands' absences, and wouldn't feel at all deprived. They did just that. I mixed a couple of pros into the social events that weekend, males and females, and they made themselves attractive. Now some of them don't care who they're sleeping with, another wife, their husband, or someone else's. Wives no longer feel deprived -- problem solved. I love it, that I'm so good at what I do!"

"That's nice." There was a pause. I didn't want to be reminded how easily she played tunes on other people. Then I asked her "Do you still use my boudoir as a reading room?" Stupid! Almost like asking her "What are you wearing now?" An invitation to reminisce about intimacies! Practically an invitation to phone sex!

"O yes, honey, whenever I'm home. Always on weekends. I'm in it now! It's so peaceful. So very feminine. It reminds me of your gentleness and daintiness, so many things missing from my life these days. I never take men here. Well, maybe to the living room for a drink and then the bedroom for a quickie, but that's about it. I miss you."

"Tricia, you dumped me!"

"Now that's not fair. I offered you what you wanted and you accepted it! You just hadn't thought it all through! Isn't that so? Just answer me this, are you better off now than you were six months ago? Are you happier?"

I was. I was no longer a divided self, a standard visible male and also a secret shamed crossdresser. I was now a whole person, or rather two new people really, a capable and companionable professional woman on weekends, and an eager submissive slave during the week. I loved being both. They captured for me the pride and submissiveness of my former male self, and yet also the sociability of my femme personality, my desire to please and nurture. I did what I wanted to do out in the open. Men smiled at me often, and women all the time. The world felt like my family. I had Tracy to try to please, and my own delight when I succeeded. It was nothing like before, trying to live like a male, competent and always challenged, and yet trying to be sweet and loving and womanly too.

But I didn't answer her. Why give her the satisfaction?

"Poor baby, you know you are. Look, honey, I have some open time this coming Saturday. Shall we meet at the house, say around three? Just drive on in, I'll be expecting you. If I'm not there when you get there, do you still have a key? Of course you do. Honey, I'm dying to see you. Plan to stay an hour at least, longer if possible. I have something on in the evening, so not much more than that, but it'll be wonderful to see you! Bye."

And that was that! The dial tone. No time to ask her what for!

Tracy wasn't concerned when I told her that one of our usual Saturday afternoons together would have to be postponed. "That's all right, Amy baby. I have someone I need to see, new arrangements to make. But this isn't the weekend yet, and my pussy's feeling lonely. Why don't you make her feel better? First your mouth, and then you can enter her if you can still get it up. This time when you spasm be sure to squeeze your butt plug extra hard. Enjoy feeling your asshole spasm as if it were your penis."

I did. The sweet joy I felt in my rear when I orgasmed was now stronger than anything I ever felt in my cock. I loved clamping down on that firm, smooth, soft, jelly-filled yet stiff butt plug. My lover! I wiggled my tush in anticipation! It always felt as though my ass was fucking my own cock, and that both were scumming at once!

The route from Madison to "CurlyGirly" was thoroughly familiar to me by now, but the next leg to my former home felt strange. I decided from sheer orneriness to dress down, to travel in Trish's favorite unisex costume, jeans and a T-Shirt. And on a wicked impulse, to wear no bra. Then when I checked myself in the mirror as I was pleased to see I didn't look at all unisex -- my breasts were still pointy and were obviously rounding out, and my jeans now felt a little undersized.

On impulse, though it made no sense, I decided I wanted to look really pretty when Trish saw me. So she'd be sorry she'd let me go? To make her jealous? To try to attract her back? I had no idea! I realized with a certain awe that my feelings were shifting -- I wanted to look attractive to my former lover, and attractive no longer meant manly, it meant womanly. The hormones were changing my brain?

So I stopped at Janie's to get my hair done and my make-up and nails redone, and I was very pleased with the result. As I pulled into our driveway -- hers now -- I realized that all any neighbors would see now was a casually dressed well-groomed woman getting out of her car. Anyone who'd attended my going away party would assume I was my sister. That part of Trish's plan had certainly worked. Our respectability was secure.

Trish met me at the door, also wearing jeans, and gave me a quick kiss. Then as she led the way back to my former inner sanctum, she commented, "You know honey, that's the first time in a long time I've seen you relaxed enough about your gender to wear a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. You're getting enough femininity in at your new location? You no longer need to dress to kill all the time? Yet the rest of you looks gorgeous enough!" She smiled at me. "You know, you're turning out to be a rather lovely girl. I'd hoped so."

I realized what she was saying. "You're right. I guess I don't need to go all femmy whenever I can, any more. Because now that's what I am." Then I decided to rub it in, and said, "But I'm always a girl now, hon. These are still women's jeans. See?" I pushed my tush out at her and wiggled it ever so slightly to call attention to the label -- they were Toni Tylers, and it showed the Toni Tyler logo, a cute high-kicking girl burnt into a leather label.

"So they are!" she said, a trace of wonder in her voice. I turned to look at her. She was studying my rump, a little bemused. "But it isn't the label that makes a girl's jeans girls' jeans, honey, it's the cut. Narrow in the waist and big in the butt, with a tight swoop under the half-moons to set off any melons a girl may have managed to grow." She looked up at me. "You fill them out nicely. Those buns are very fetching indeed, lover! What man could resist burying his cock in there! Weren't you a little slimmer down there a few months ago? No, I see that if anything your waist is narrower than it had been."

She grinned suddenly! "You devil!" she said. "You're going all the way, aren't you! You really are! Hips and breasts! Those are real breasts! They jiggle. And did your nipples always poke out that way? You *love* your new life, don't you! You can't get enough of it! You really are changing your body! Well, Amy, that's just wonderful! I've really got to tell you as a kind of big sister, though, that you shouldn't try to wear T-shirts without a bra any more! It's indecent! Oh, I'm so happy this is working out so well!"

She came close to me and almost woman to woman, kissed me on the mouth softly, her full lips pressing on mine. Then rather shockingly she lifted a hand and felt me up! "Yes," she said almost somnolently, "there's no question about these." She pulled away, her face obviously pleased and a little mischievous. "Amy, just between us girls. Have you had your first period yet? Are you a lady yet?"

I was embarrassed and decided I might have gone too far with my dressed down, unisex presentation. Or not far enough. "I've been getting a little rounder lately, yes," I said. "It's nice. More appropriate for the way I live these days."

"I suppose it is, love," she said. "Your face is softer too. It's kind of sweet looking now." She flashed me a delightful smile. Then dismissed the whole topic, frowned, burrowed down into her lawyer personality, and began to deliver what I recognized was a preconsidered speech!

"Honey, I'm delighted that you've adjusted to your new life so quickly. It does look as though I was right, that you've always been more of a transsexual than a transvestite, that you really are a woman in a man's body. And now you're fixing that!"

"No, Tricia," I said. She shouldn't feel too self-congratulatory. "I've always felt that I was a man who enjoyed being a woman, and I'm enjoying it now more than ever. I prefer being a woman. So I'm fixing my body to give the man in me extra satisfaction!"

"The man in you? Aren't you cruel! Andy's still in there somewhere? He must feel so humiliated! So ashamed of his ineffectual manhood! Can he still get it up? But you don't care, do you? Any more than I cared when I sent you on your way a little faster than you'd intended? Because I knew and now we both know that your greatest satisfactions are not in being Andy?"

I couldn't reply. Trish was the lawyer. I'd never yet won an argument with her.

"I'm glad that you're quite presentable. Your consulting going well too? Good! You know I'm sure that my rather abrupt treatment of your feelings a few months ago was for your own good. I had to liberate you from your marriage. And I did, didn't I? You can't possibly be carrying a grudge against me now, can you?"

She was beginning to steer me out of my former playroom, her sitting room, and through the study and down the hall toward the front door. Giving me the executive's bum's rush.

"No Trish. I guess not."

"And you're sorry you resented me all these months?"

I wouldn't grant her that. "I'm sorry you betrayed me all those years," I said. "So my resentment was inevitable. You know that!"

"Yes. But I'm glad we're friends again. Now I have something to ask you. Just this one question and I'll let you go." Her tone turned professional, inquiring. "I haven't told you before, but this manufacturer client of mine Magnum happens to have a major plant in Madison. Maybe you knew? That's where Magnum's R&D is conducted for new product lines. Now, my law firm needs an outside representative there we can call on from time to time, someone with precisely your skills. Able to talk to engineers or financial people and show them easier ways to do things. Someone pleasant to talk to. Persuasive too, if it comes to that."

She paused. I knew that whatever she said next was still part of her pitch. "I can't get over it! You're so much nicer since you stopped being that horse's ass Andy. That coward! He hid out from his clients and did their work by e-mail and FAX so he could do drag all day without being seen. Remember? But there's no need for you to do that, honey. You're entitled. And you can be impressive in person -- I've seen it. You've got every qualification we need, or will have I'm sure by the time we'll want to call on your services. So do you think you'll be willing?"

Suddenly and unexpectedly, as if on impulse, Trish placed each of her hands on each of my bosoms. My pointy tits. And began gently lifting and kneading them. Slowly, so I could feel their weight in her hands. I hadn't realized they'd grown that much. Her thumbs went back and forth over my nipples and my knees grew weak. I'd not noticed they'd gotten so deliciously erogenous -- I'd been thinking of them as sensitive, hurting. But now they were me. I let out a moan.

"Yes," she said reflectively. "Your breasts are coming on so well, Amy. You're just the girl for this job!" She looked up into my eyes and continued to stroke my nipples. "We'll pay you a retainer starting right now, and when you begin we'll provide you an enormous budget for clothes and entertainment, because the consultations will be informal, mostly. Disguised as sociability. You'll smooth things over, straighten things out, unruffle feathers, show people what they should have done in the first place. That's the work! A lovely lady like you who's also a clever engineer is what we need for this, exactly the right person for the job. Just think about it, baby. You don't have to give me an answer now. I'll call you in another month or so. Meanwhile the retainer is yours, whatever you eventually decide. It'll show up in your bank account every week."

I moaned again. She absolutely beamed! "I'll take that as a 'yes'! You're as sweet as ever, Amy. So helpless when the right buttons get pushed. Andy was always a tit person, and he still is even though now he's on the other side of such a lovely pair! I'm so glad that we trust each other again, sweetheart."

She led me out the front door and then stepped back into the house. Then it was as if a switch were being thrown somewhere. "Honey, it's been very nice seeing you. I'm delighted you could visit. Do come again any time. My regards to anyone we both know. We'll stay in touch." And the door closed.

I was standing on the front steps in my jeans and T shirt and gorgeously set hair, my purse somehow under my arm, my breast tips radiating a rich afterglow. I realized that Trish had always intended this to be a business meeting, and I'd signed on to her scheme. Magnum had a plant and did their R&D in Madison? Trish had been coming and going there all this time? She might have looked me up at any time and had deliberately ignored me? Once again I'd been had!

vii.

I told Tracy about all of this the next day, Sunday, while we sat in a little tea shop after seeing a movie together. How I was worried that Trish had enticed me into another trap. She'd used my transvestism to clear her decks of her marriage when she wanted to invest her time and energy and desires elsewhere in other ways. To dump me out of her life and somehow leave me feeling grateful to her. Now she seems ready to use me to unload business problems she can't manage by herself.

Tracy's first reaction was amusement.

"So your Trish is into tits too, huh? Well, the way yours are coming in, when she handed you off to me she missed out on a really beautiful pair I'll bet, big time."

Then she looked thoughtful. "She asked you to consult for her law firm? To me that sounds promising. It would get you out meeting more people in more kinds of circumstances. One of the pleasures of being a woman is that you can be many things to many people in different circumstances. And dress differently for each! There's still too much of the imprisoned Amy in you. She's right that you don't need to be bottled up any more. You can open an office now and be seen by anyone. Why don't you? Who'd imagine that you're not entitled to your panties and dresses? And you know, she's right about wearing a bra. That's already settled. You'll wear one daily now for the rest of your life. Look at you! And more titty is still on the way!"

"She tends to take charge with me," I said. "I'm sure I'd lose a certain amount of independence."

"No, Amy, let's not forget, I'm in charge of you. I'm the one who's making you the way you are. And I'll always allow you as much independence as you wish." She grinned complacently. "You just won't wish for any."

"No," I agreed. "Serving you is the center of my life. You're where my manhood and my womanhood converge, somehow." I don't think I'd ever spoken more sincerely to anyone!

Tracy sensed this and was impressed. "Then let me complete you, sweetheart. For the next week, submit yourself to me altogether. Trust me no matter how difficult. We've been going slow, but I think now we can work together intensively for a breakthrough. Promise me you'll do everything I ask of you this week with the same devotion you've always shown me. No hesitation. Total obedience. No matter how outrageous, or unexpected, or shocking. Promise?"

"I promise, Tracy. I really do."

"Then next week we can change our relationship if you wish. But you won't wish. I've seen it before. I know. By the end of the week you'll be yourself, completed, beyond your wife's ability to change you further."

Hidden away in our little booth, Tracy reached across the table and began to knead and finger my breasts, just as Tricia had done, feeling me up and hefting them. "You know she's right," Tracy said thoughtfully. "They're coming along nicely!"

I melted into a pool of ecstasy. "Oh, Tracy honey!" I moaned. It sounded more like a whine.

The next afternoon I was filing a client's project back to him by e-mail, brilliantly solved if I do say so, and at the same time teasing him for attempting to get me to disclose my phone number or address, when the phone rang.

"Amy, this is Tracy. Tonight be downstairs by the doorman's desk at 5:30 sharp. You will be altogether submissive all evening, but don't let it show at any time in your posture, manner, or voice. Wear that black beaded cocktail dress and be made up for the evening. Hair up, high style. You're having dinner out and then going dancing."

Well, this was a novelty! A companionable evening with Tracy during the week! I was there with a minute to spare and just sitting down carefully -- my dress was figure-hugging, now that I had a figure, and tight -- when Tracy arrived in the lobby dressed as she usually was weekdays, in an ankle-length skirt and her Field Hockey Champions yellow jacket.

"He's in the car outside," she said to me. "Do everything he wants you to do, gladly. When you get back, stop by to tell me how it went." And she was in the elevator and gone!

I went outside, and found a maroon Lincoln parked at the curb with a rather tall, thin, willowy man leaning against it. A touch of gray at his temples, but blonde wavy hair, in many ways still boyish. From the way he moved to open the door and hand me into the passenger seat, in many ways girlish? There was a lingering grace in the way he closed the door and walked around to ease himself into the driver's side, swinging his both legs into the car knees together, as if he were wearing a tight skirt. I waited for him to introduce himself. He glanced at me to be sure I was comfortable, a thin, arched eyebrow raised in inquiry, and then satisfied, drove off toward downtown. A plucked eyebrow? His hands on the steering wheel had manicured fingernails, rounded at the tip and gleaming with a clear gloss nail polish. No pierced ears, but his hair seemed to have been permed and just set, every hair beautifully in place.

Don't speak unless spoken to, I told myself. The submissive's creed. And then when you reply, keep your eyes cast down.

He pulled up in front of a workman's bar down the street from a construction project. A very mean part of town. A drunk wrapped in creased and oily rags lay on the sidewalk against a building, and as I watched he raised himself on an elbow and retched. Three teenagers sauntered past smirking arrogantly -- one, I noticed, held a length of steel pipe he slapped methodically against his palm as if to keep it functioning until it could find a better target. The bar itself seemed to be jammed with going-home customers delaying their trip home. Two men in overalls rolled out together, waved at each other, and weaved away.

"If you don't mind, Amy," he said. No question, there was a lilt to his voice of the kind gay men cultivate, perhaps to identify themselves to each other. "There's a cigarette machine at the far end of the bar in there." He handed me some coins. "Be a dear and go in there and buy me a pack. Any brand."

I got out of the car, feeling fearful. This was no place for a woman like me, dressed the way I was dressed. As soon as I entered all conversation ceased and two dozen rough-hewn men stared at me silently, then resumed more subdued conversations, while a dozen more tough men pondered what to do about my unexpected appearance in their midst, watching me through narrowed eyes. I had been a woman in public long enough now to spot instantly the three young men who were primed to make aggressive passes at anyone in skirts. They were already off the mark and heading for me. I moved quickly, keeping my eyes fixed steadfastly on the cigarette machine, and got there before they got to me. I inserted the coins and a package of Winstons slid into the trough. I picked it up, noticing that my red-jewel-like fingertips were a mockery here, where every man's hands were gnarled and stained, his fingernails bitten, cut, and filthy. I realized suddenly that I was a woman who had only one thing I could give them to save them the trouble of taking it, and that was my sole protection and advantage. They would reach for it. But I knew I was a man under my silky black pantyhose. My male genitals here were my death warrant, if anyone here found out I had them. Blow jobs if I need to, to survive, I thought to myself. I can manage blow jobs, somehow. But whatever else, I told myself, no one comes near my crotch or the hem of my dress. I turned daintily to leave the way I'd come in.

"Hi, can I help you?" One of the young men had arrived and was smiling personably at me, at ease with himself and blocking my way. The other two were still en route, not yet positioned as secondary blockers. I had perhaps two seconds to act, or else I'd be caught up in a scenario that could easily end with my cock-teasing, broken male body draped on a fence down the street at that construction site.

"No thank you, but it's kind of you to ask!" I said. Then feinted to the left, rolled my hips further left, darted sidestepping to the right, and slipped straight ahead. It worked. As when I'd played basketball many years earlier. Not attempting to dribble the Winstons, I trotted on my high heels back out the door, and as it swung shut I heard a roar of male laughter and someone saying "Boy, the Lakers could've used her this past year!"

I got back into the car quickly, hoping that my strangely androgynous date had anticipated the need for a fast getaway. He had. With a faint whisper, the Lincoln shot down the street and around a corner.

I handed him his cigarettes. He glanced at them, then tossed them out the window.

"Amy honey," he said. He sounded apologetic, but he kept taking his eyes off the road to look into mine. He really seemed sincere. A decent man after all? "My wife told me to do that to you first thing, without a word spoken. So you'd know that if you don't do everything I tell you, there is where you'll finish the evening."

I decided to play square with him. "That's a likely rape for a woman and a death sentence for a transvestite." I commented. "I've been told to do everything you want me to do gladly, and I will, because I'll want to do what I've been told. But not under threat. Never under threat. Your wife was not fully informed about me. Did she tell you to do anything else to me tonight?"

"She told me everything I'm to do to you tonight. That's the kind of relationship we have."

"I don't understand."

"I obey my wife. I do whatever she wants me to do. Incidentally, you were in no real danger just now. They look like rough trade but they're really decent working class people, law-abiding and self-policing, and tolerant of all sorts of queers and oddities. She made me run the gamut there early in my training, when she was making me into a queer, and I was terrified. I thought I'd be beaten senseless. But all they did was pat my bottom a few times, and tease me about fudge packing, and buy me a few drinks. They were very friendly. You belong to my wife's dear friend Tracy, I know, so I know she wouldn't take any chances with your safety. And she's planned a long evening for us. She and Tracy seem to think we were made for each other."

"How so?"

"You're a man being made over into a woman by another woman, isn't that so? Right now a 'she-male'? Partly a woman?"

"Yes. Partly in my body. Mostly in my mind."

"Well, I'm a heterosexual being made gay by my wife, also not yet a finished product. That is, for months now the only physical affection and the only sex I've had has with other men. I've learned to appreciate my partners, and I did fall in love with one for a short time I think, a sweet man. It broke my heart when it turned out he was only toying with me. But in my mind, mostly I still prefer women."

"Why would your wife do that to you?"

"I had an affair with my secretary. She found out and got really vindictive. At first she said she was going to fix me while I was helpless, asleep, and then divorce me. That wasn't a generalized threat -- she meant to change my sexual habits for good, castrate me and pickle my cock in a jar. Well, she consulted her gynecologist about it -- Tracy, they've become good friends since then -- and Tracy suggested she do something more lingering and drawn out, so she could enjoy it longer. That she turn me gay instead. Allow me only homosexual encounters, in fact require I get off only with men. So I'll get to like it. Well, divorce would ruin me financially -- I've borrowed heavily to get a business launched -- so I've been going along with her. I have no choice." He shook his head, clearing some random memory. "Was your becoming a woman your wife's idea?"

I didn't know how to answer that one. "Yes and no. It was my idea for now and then, but now I live in my wife's reality, and she made my femininity pretty much irreversible. I accept that. I even like it."

"You're good at it. You're very pretty, Amy. I can't help but think that you're a girl when I look at you!"

That was my first compliment ever from a boy! My heart turned over. "Thank you!" was all I said. I know he saw I looked pleased, and I wanted him to know. "Thank you...ahhh...you've forgotten to tell me your name!"

"No, I didn't forget. It's just that I'm embarrassed by it. It's Sally."

"Sally?"

"Yes. My wife's name. She's Sally and I'm hers, so I'm Sally too. Like wearing a house label, in a way. She had my name changed legally. It saves complications. Women don't take me seriously when I tell them, but gay men do."

"Well, thank you, Sally. You're very sweet." I looked at him more closely. He also looked like a decent man, intelligent, capable, and more refined than effete. Though he was struggling to get accustomed to gay mannerisms.

He pulled in at one of the best restaurants in Madison. This arranged date was going very well! As we waited at the bar for our table, I found I was smiling and nodding continuously, and shaking my head flirtatiously, and looking sidelong at him, all in the oddest girlish way. I even hoped my hair was orderly, though I knew it was, and kept patting it with both hands. Which, I notice, thrust my breasts forward as if I was offering them to him. Maybe I was?

"I thought people are born gay or hetero, maybe bi, and that's that! Why does your wife think you'll change?"

"She doesn't. She hopes I won't. Tracy suggested hypnotic tapes to help me admire male bodies more, but my wife likes my doing it out of obedience to her. She likes to think gay sex is repellent to me, but I find it's better than no sex at all."

"Is it?"

Sally looked down and said in a low voice, "I did fall in love that one time, briefly. It felt oddly perverse, but maybe I really do swing both ways. Or maybe I was just hard up. Mostly, I'm sure, I was lonely. But my wife thinks it's all punishment." He took a deep breath. "I've never told any woman any of this, Amy. Not even the fag hags who are the only kinds of women she'll let me see socially these days." He looked up at me. "I can't help thinking that you're a woman. This is the first date with a beautiful woman I've had since I was married."

Why did my heart warm when he said that? I took his hand and squeezed it gently. "Thank you again," I said. "You're very sweet. You'll turn my head with these compliments."

He forced himself to look into my eyes. "I hope so," he said. Then looked away.

When we were seated and had ordered another round, there came an awkward pause. I remembered the advice always given to teenaged girls, "Get him talking about himself." So I said, in as gentle a voice as I could make audible, "Sally honey, what do you do?"

"Management consultant. I help people set up businesses. Or if business is good, I help them enlarge."

He lapsed into silence. Obviously the topic bored him. So I tried another tack. "Tell me about your first gay experience. If it wasn't too awful."

"It wasn't much of anything. My wife sent me to a gay bar and told me not to come home until I'd been laid. I had the sense to pick up a tube of K-Y, and sort of anesthetized my body in my mind, and went. I almost don't remember it. When I got home, she insisted on inspecting, on seeing the cum actually dribble out of my ass. It did, the man had used me several times. And that really turned her on!"

"Oh?"

"Yes, the next night she sent me back for more. To offer to suck off all comers. And swallow their cum. I was lucky it was an off night. Probably not more than two dozen men lined up in front of my mouth. The first few felt and tasted terrible, and made me feel so ... cheap! But by the time I was servicing the last of them that night I was an expert, and rather proud of it. I didn't even have to think about it any more. The third night was for sixty-nining, so I'd get pleasure from getting my own cock sucked by another man. And I did. And the fourth was for me to fuck someone else, but no one volunteered, so I had to pay to get into a guy's ass. A bony ass it was, too, but I did get off, and that felt great!"

"So now I'm educated, a seasoned and experienced gay man, she figured, and she arranged a graduation ceremony for me for the fifth night. A gang bang. A "cum enema" she called it. Well, you probably know that after the first cock has opened up your ass, the rest are easy."

"No, I didn't know that," I said modestly, trying to butter a small piece of bread with fetching delicacy. "Though I know it's true about dildoes. My wife sent me off into femininity by letting me screw her butt as a farewell gift, and Tracy has been training my pussy -- as she calls it -- to enjoy itself, but I've never been with a man."

Sally looked surprised, concerned, and pleased, all at once. Just the reaction I'd hoped to see!

"It's easy," he repeated. "The first time, the man needs to be gentle and understanding, as with any virgin. Then the next time he enters, the asshole is already slick, lubricated with cum, and the muscles are loose. That's when both parties can relax and enjoy it. Some guys' cocks are long enough to press against the prostate from the inside so you can actually get off. Two guys actually did get me off. It felt wonderful. Like a woman coming, Sally my wife told me afterward. All at once, all through your whole body, inside you. That was when I realized I could like getting laid. Taking male lovers. I prefer fucking another man or giving him head, but I can enjoy being someone's punk. Not that I'll let Sally know that, of course."

"I've never given head. I've never done any of these things," I said shyly, and a little timorously. "Not with a real live person. Not with a real man."

"You're a dear!" Sally told me. This time he took both of my hands in his. "I don't care what my wife told me, or what Tracy expects. I won't make you do anything you don't want to do! So you can rest easy on that score."

Then I shocked myself! "No, you don't understand, Sally," I said. "I want to do all of those things. With you. I really do. Now!"

He looked at me with such longing in his eyes. "Really, pretty lady? You're sure? You'd be the first woman I've slept with in ... so long!"

That cinched it. "I'm sure! With you!" I said. I leaned over the table and kissed him on the lips. Gently. They felt warm and soft.

Four minutes later Sally had settled the bill and we were in each others' arms in his car. His big, beautiful Lincoln. He pushed his tongue deep into my mouth, and I tongued and licked it while feeling his arms embrace me. "My place," I said, my arms folded tightly around his neck. I didn't want to let go! "Hurry!"

He looked down on me. "Honey, I can't drive while you're wrapped around me," he said, smiling slightly.

We clinched again as soon as the elevator door closed, and we were both naked before we reached my bed. I was so grateful for my real breasts -- Sally immediately concentrated his attention on them, and I went into ecstasies. I had never before been suckled by anyone, and this darling man's mouth overwhelmed me. I clutched his head to them in bliss. I felt so ashamed of my penis and testicles down there when I should have been able to offer him his choice of holes. I tried to cover them at first, but then realized that he was now accustomed to seeing equipment like mine on his lovers. In fact he told me later that he had never noticed them at all.

On the other hand, he was mesmerized by my estrogen-padded rump. He told me I had the most darling buttocks he had ever seen, not lean like a man's but ripe, rounded as basketballs and smooth as pillows. Then something unexpected occurred. I was standing there naked while he held my buttocks and I held his, feeling his hard cock press against my groin. I decided that this was the cock that would make me a cock sucker. I would drink whatever joy juice I could seduce from him and count myself blessed. Then, while he was still slick and wet from my mouth he would enter me. He would travel the path of that huge dildo Tracy and her friends had pushed into my guts, and he would anoint my insides with his semen. It seemed heavenly!

"I want to suck your cock, darling," I said to him, not as a demeaned man but as a woman rejoicing in her lover. He whispered back, hoarsely, "Yes, but first let me kiss that glorious ass!"

I nodded, and he dropped to his knees and clasped me by the thighs, and buried his face in my melons. I could feel his tongue begin to lick the opening of my crack, and I wanted to feel him deeper down. But as he burrowed his face into my ass a primal impulse took possession of me. I stood casually on one leg, put a hand on my hip, and looked down over his crouched shoulders with hooded eyes. Then in a hoarse voice I commanded "Deeper, honey. Bury your nose in my ass and push your tongue into me!"

What an idea! But he did it! I cocked my hips slightly back to open my bungle to his mouth, and he spread my cheeks wide, and he plunged in! I felt his tongue tickling the outer edges of my pussy as I stood there aloof, dominating. I accepted his worship! Just as Tracy had accepted mine that first night, when she had injected me and started me irreversibly down this lovely path, and I had gratefully kissed her mound in return. What had happened to me? Months of hormones had given me more than breasts and buttocks and smoother skin. It had awarded me a woman's power over men. Some men, anyhow.

When I could feel my entire rear soaked in his saliva, so his cock could slide into me with no friction, I told him. "Now suck my cock."

I knew he would. I wanted to learn from his technique, now that the moment had come for my own mouth to wrap itself around his. He pulled back his head, and I turned my torso indolently, and he plunged his mouth over my dick and began to pull on it with his lips. He was wet and warm and it felt good. Even better than good, it began to feel a certain yearning that intensified -- I could feel my sap rising from the roots. Higher, and I felt a deep pulsing down in my groin, and it too rose in crescendo. Then wave after wave of rapture washed over me, and finally I felt deep satisfaction, even serenity.

Sally swallowed once and removed his mouth. I was as small as ever. "Didn't I get hard?" I asked. "Didn't you taste my cum?"

"No, you didn't get hard, and yes, one drip came out. I've seen it before. Those girl juices they've been giving you have just about dried up your boy juices, honey. You really are becoming a woman! Just look at you!"

"I suppose," I said. I was a little worried. Would I never get an erection again? I looked down and I saw a little tumescence. Like a clit's. But my orgasm had felt marvelous even so! A woman's! It had washed though my whole body. I was a woman.

"Let me suck your cock, lover," I said. "Lie down on the bed." I was unwilling just yet to give up my superior status as a woman by kneeling in front of him. So I lay down next to him, then wrapped my legs around his head. He resumed licking my anus. I took his cock into my mouth, and tongued it, and licked it, and finally drank it in like a straw and sucked on it. When the soft rubbery head bumped the back of my throat I changed my angle slightly and tried to swallow it down. It passed into my throat on the second try. Almost at once it swelled and he came, rich white gouts of semen filling my stomach and, as I pulled back, my mouth. The taste was creamy, salty sweet. A little like Gatorade. No wonder all those hunks like that stuff, I thought as I swallowed it down.

I turned and still licking my lips, smiled at him. He was in a post-orgasmic euphoria, and smiled back. "Was I all right?" I asked in a little girl voice, as if seeking reassurance? I knew I'd been great.

"You were great!" Sally replied. "Just wait a bit and there'll be more!"

I looked at him and there were tears in his eyes. "Why, honey?" I asked him gently, wiping them away gently with my red manicured fingertips.

"Because you remind me what it was once like, making love to a woman. I've missed it! You're so perfect! So smooth and soft! And so caring!"

I got the warmest, most loving feeling imaginable in my belly, spreading out from where I knew his sweet semen was soaking into me where I'd swallowed it down. Without a word I got up and went into the kitchen and opened a chilled bottle of wine and a can of truffled pate, and spread them on crackers and carried them on a plate with two wine glasses back into my bedroom.

"Dinner," I announced. And when he'd sat up and taken his glass in hand I raised mine and said, "To caring for each other!" And we kissed, so sweetly! Then we sipped, never ceasing to stare into each other's eyes. Then when our glasses were empty he set the plate of pate aside and said "C'mere, sweetheart!" I melted into him. He rolled on top of me and gently placed my thighs on his shoulders and poked at my hole. His warm rod slid into me. "Oh!" I squeaked. Because as soon as I felt that long thick mass filling me up, the old, familiar sweet yearning suffused me, and then the building and crashing of waves of feeling came upon me and poured all through me again, and I could feel my ass pulsing on his hard cock, clenching and hugging it repeatedly from all sides at once, my beautifully rounded buttocks writhing into him. I kissed his face passionately. I had come again, and he'd barely begun to fuck me!

Twenty minutes later I came yet again as he spent his cum into my guts. It was the most marvelous lovemaking of my life. I had my legs wrapped around his waist the whole time this time, and wouldn't let him pull out of me. We hugged each other and fell asleep. Then at first light I woke to feel him stroking inside me yet again, and again we made passionate, beautiful love. Finally he whispered "I'll call!" and slipped out of bed, dressed and left. I wanted to tell him "I'll wait for your call," but I still felt too dreamy to move. He was the man I'd been waiting for. And a man! I smiled to feel his cum oozing out of me into the sheets. I squeezed it lovingly with my sphincter, and fell asleep again. Only when I woke at mid-morning to begin my day's work did I realize that I didn't know his last name or his phone number. I wasn't the first girl adrift in a morning-after haze of delight to find myself lacking that crucial information!

That evening when Tracy came home from the clinic I was waiting for her kneeling, nude, as always on weekdays. As she stepped out of the elevator she paused and looked at me. "Amy, throw on a housecoat or something, and come in, and let's talk." Then after a moment she added. "You don't need to greet me that way any more. That's for keeping men in their place. From what Mistress Sally told me her Sally told her, there's no man left in you to put down. You're more and more getting the figure of a woman. And last night, apparently, you became a woman in your own mind. I don't just mean that you got laid! I mean really a woman, with all the power and capacity for affection that word implies. You dominated him, and you felt tenderly helpless with him! You'll still do what I ask the rest of this week, as we've agreed. But now I'll honor you as one of my kind, not one of their kind. Come in and tell me all about it."

And I did. I still felt so wonderful! I spoke of how considerate he'd been, and how heavenly I had felt all day because his cum was still inside me in two different places. I asked Tracy "Will I ever see him again?"

"You're in love, aren't you," she replied.

I didn't answer. I thought so, but if so, that was for Sally to hear first of all.

"I thought so," Tracy replied to my silence. "The answer is, yes, you will see him, probably. I've already spoken to Sally's wife about it. She drives a hard bargain." Tracy smiled. "But no harder a bargain than the other women in your life. And all for your own good, anyhow."

I didn't understand, but since Tracy already knew that, I didn't bother to say so.

"Keep in mind the way you feel now, honey. You'll need to remember it. Because the next few days will be nowhere near as romantic. The next few days will help you discover other aspects of your femininity, and if they aren't there to explore you'll just have to pretend they are. You need hard practical knowledge of male desire and how to satisfy it, and you'll also need to remove any last inhibitions on your own sexual appetites. I mean to try to locate the slut in you and set her free. If there's an Amy who'd just as soon whore as do engineering consulting, that's who I need to find."

"Sally's only known me as a virgin. I've never been with other men. Would he want me after I've been a whore?" I wanted to be obedient, but I was worried.

"He knows that one of his tasks last night was to relieve you of your virginity so you could... extend your experience with others. If you two want to get together again afterward, well, that's between you two. But don't worry. Remember that a confident woman can usually lead a man to a correct view of things. By his prick if no other way."

"All right."

"We'll begin slow, this very evening, and by Friday you'll be up to speed. Amy, I think you'll be thrilled when you see where you end up! Now, what did you prepare for us for this evening's dinner?

viii.

We were sitting over coffee and talking about our sexual fantasies, how both sexes want monogamy for their partners but promiscuity for themselves, so neither is ever satisfied, and how jealousy is one part fear, one part desire, and one part envy, topics like that, girl talk, when Tracy was buzzed from downstairs. "Of course, come right up!" I heard her say from the hall phone.

She came back in. "We're having a very special visitor. You'll do whatever either of us says," then went to the door to wait for him. The elevator door in the hall rolled back and there was a single short twinge of a doorbell. Tracy threw open the door and was immediately swept up in the arms of a large and powerful stranger. They kissed as if plastered together, then separated, and Tracy, still flustered, led him into the room to meet me.

"Amy," she said. "This is Scott. He's my husband."

"Amy," was all he said, advancing to take my hand into his huge paw. He looked to be the size and solidity of a wall! This was astonishing. Tracy had never mentioned a husband. Many lovers maybe, but one in particular? I knew her to be bisexual with a preference for women, one reason she was interested in my conversion. But a man? A man's man, muscular and keen-eyed? I said nothing, but tried to look pleasant. He could crush me if he knew that I'd been intimate with his wife, I was thinking. But all of her friends know about me. Some of it must have gotten back to him. Besides, is it intimacy if her purpose isn't to feel intimate but to project control and humiliation over someone known to be vulnerable? Maybe he should apologize for her, rather than avenge himself on me. Then I remembered that I was a woman. The thought would never occur to him. I was not his rival.

"Please to meet you," I said in reply. I very nearly curtsied.

"Yes, of course," he continued. Then as if making conversation, "Amy, I hear you've been fucking my wife."

Shocked, I tried to follow his lead. "Now and then, Scott," I said breezily. "But she's been fucking me too, so I guess the score's even."

"Not at all," he said, sitting in a comfortable chair opposite me and leaning back. "You owe me!"

The conversation was getting past me. I gaped.

"She's Bi. I knew that when I married her, so I agreed that now and then she could enjoy being with a woman. I'd enjoy being with the same women myself, but since I was married it didn't seem appropriate. I knew that if I ever wanted to fuck a man, she'd be similarly understanding. But I haven't wanted to. Until maybe now, maybe because you don't look like one."

"Now as I see it, you owe me. You're a man who's a woman, becoming a woman who was once a man. If you fucked her when you were being a woman, you owe me the same roll in the hay. If you fucked her as a man, using a man's cock, as I suspect you did, you owe my cock a turn at you. Either way, honey, you're fucked. So which are you?"

"I'm a woman now," I said. "My cock doesn't work any more." I hoped that argument was somehow relevant. I hoped he wouldn't ask for proof.

"Show me." Nothing emphatic in the way he said it, but he meant it.

I pulled up my dress and lowered my pantyhose and showed him. There was my flaccid, pinky-sized cock and marble-sized balls.

"Why don't do you trade those things in for something that works?"

"I don't know," I said. "I'm sorry!"

"Sorry isn't good enough. What do you think I want you to do?"

"Make you happy!" It was an inspired answer. I was scared to death of this man! But it was the right answer. He leaned back in his chair and waited.

Fifteen minutes later I'd been unfaithful to Sally. Scott's fresh cum was mixed with Sally's in my tummy. Desperate and fearful, when I took him into my mouth I did everything I could think of to please him, whatever I'd done lovingly with Sally and lots more. Finally it had brought him off.

"And?" he said when he'd recovered his breath.

I knew what he meant. He was one of those. His prick had leaned over momentarily, but it was now again erect. I decided that we were quits, that from now on he was in Bonusville. I got off my knees and stood up and straightened my skirt. "And?" I asked him, my hips undulating once, looking directly at him. I was determined that he name it, before I did anything else with him.

"Fuck me, honey."

He'd named it. He'd named me.

"Only if you'll fuck me too, lover boy," I replied.

I turned and backed onto his cock and sat down on it, and we fucked. He moved and I moved, and we reciprocated and repeated ourselves, more and more frenzied and then berserk until finally as these days it always did, my sphincter muscles clamped repeatedly onto his silky soft, iron-hard tube, over and over. I felt my rectum fill up with something slick and syrupy, and a trickle or two of clear drip dribbled from the tip of what had been my penis. That was enough to incite him to do it again, to mix even more of himself with Sally inside my rectum, He resumed thrusting and throbbing until I was altogether out of my mind and he was lunging himself high up into me while I flailed at the end of his pole. He felt twice Sally's length, but I doubted I could tell anyone even my name at that moment. With good reason.

"Ahhhhhhhhhhh!" I said. I was exuberant! Glowing! My whole body knotted into rapturous spasms. He lunged into me and held himself rigid. I felt more slick than ever down there. When I lifted off him I had to stuff my panties between my cheeks to keep my skirt from staining.

"That's very nice," he said with a certain awed gratitude. "Tracy's done all right by you! Why don't you get rid of those things hanging down there and get a place put in instead where a man can enter and feel at home?"

"You're a nice man, Scott. Almost the nicest I've ever sucked and fucked."

"Out of how many, Amy?"

"Two. Counting you." I suddenly realized that for whatever reason, obedience to Tracy, respect for Tracy's husband, fear of him, guilt that I'd fucked his wife, I had just betrayed Sally. Two ways. I'd sucked Scott and fucked him, and enjoyed it both times. The first time from obligation, maybe, but the second time obviously for the pleasure of it. I realized that I'd do it again. With that thought I smiled at Scott and reached for his long wet cock, now lying across his thigh. I wanted to do it yet again!

"No, Amy," he said. "Whatever you have going with Tracy, I call the score even now. If you need a recommendation some time I'll write one for you. I envy you, Tracy, in a way."

Tracy? I'd utterly forgotten! Tracy! Where had she been all this time? I looked up and found the answer at once. Sitting in a chair by the fireplace the whole time, watching. She'd seen me work her husband over twice and not uttered a sound either time!

Now she spoke. "It's always a pleasure watching a sissy man get fucked in the ass by a real man. Scott never could keep it in his pants. Ask any of his more recent wives -- I'm one of the early ones. I've got to congratulate you. Tonight you fucked Scott out of obligation and then for fun and yesterday with Sally it was out of genuine affection. That means you can be sweet and sincere but also that you can be a tramp. One day in love with a nice man who cares about you, and the next day fucking a stranger! That's useful to know about yourself. It means you can indulge yourself any time and not give it a second thought."

I was astonished. She'd told me he was her husband, not her ex. She'd tricked me. But I couldn't evade the point. My mouth and my ass were now impure. I'd been untrue to Sally with the first man to come by after him. Deliciously satisfied by that man moreover. This morning I'd been a woman in love. This evening I was a woman who'd gotten laid and loved it!

"It's important to know who you are, honey," Tracy said. "Why you balled Scott isn't significant here. There are always reasons. The fact is, you betrayed those romantic feelings about Sally you were cherishing all day. You fell in love, and then fucked someone else. Well, sometimes women do. A woman can fuck a hundred men all day, and then come home to her husband or boyfriend and lovingly fix him dinner, knowing he'll never know. And the whole time, he knows he'll never know what she's really done all day! That's our mystery and that's the source of our power over men!"

"When you were a married man, were you ever unfaithful to your ex, to Tricia I mean? For any reason?"

"No," I said. "Never!"

"Yet she was routinely unfaithful to you, and you knew nothing about it. See? Well, tomorrow," Tracy said, opening the door to her flat. "Tomorrow come by around eight, and we'll teach you a lot more about being a woman.

She had a point somewhere, but Scott had fucked my brains out and I couldn't think. I went through it feeling beaten. Scott watched me go, amused. I didn't look back. I went straight to bed and cried myself to sleep. Poor Sally! In the morning I felt a little better. I realized I didn't need to tell Sally anything.

The next day Tracy arrived home late. I waited a few minutes and rang her bell. She came to the door flustered, and when I glanced past her shoulder I saw someone was with her.

"Amy! I'm sorry, I had an awful day at the clinic today and I'm exhausted. Then I ran into Sally here and we began talking, and... but you haven't met Sally yet, have you? Only Sally's husband, the other Sally." She stepped to one side and said "Sally, this is Amy. Amy, Sally."

"How are you?" I said in an ingratiating tone, thinking 'this is my arch-rival.' "I've heard so much about you." She was a well-turned-out woman just beginning to lose what had obviously been a hard bodied figure, softening into a middle aged spread. There was nothing soft in her face, however. Gimlet eyes. Even her hair looked enameled.

"I'll bet you've heard about me!" Sally replied. She made no move to reach for my outstretched hand, so I let it fall. "You're Amy, eh? Not bad looking for a girls man. Better than that faggot bastard deserves."

"Never mind that," Tracy replied sharply. "We've settled that. There'll be no reconsiderations!"

"No, we've agreed," Sally replied equably. "But isn't this the night Amy-boy here was supposed to go out and get his ass fucked silly, get gang-shagged by a hockey team or something? So he won't mind what happens to him tomorrow night?" She said this last in a level, deliberate voice, as if Tracy were reneging on something." I looked at them both, not at all sure what was going on.

"Yes," Tracy said. "Damn! Things got so hectic at the clinic today I forgot to call to make the arrangements. Tonight I need at least three guys in his mouth and his ass all night. Five, preferably. Then when he's had enough, he needs to know there's no such thing. By morning I want getting fucked to become a way of life for him. I want him waving his ass at anything with a dick after tonight, never able to forget how good it felt."

"I can take care of that," Sally told Tracy with an amused glance at me. I was still bewildered. "No problem. Shall I?"

"Please do," Tracy said. "Be my guest!"

Immediately Sally turned toward me. "Amy," she said, "There's a lovely little gay bar south of main street." She took out a pencil and small pad. "Here's the address. The same place I sent my Sally for his education, I'm sure he told you all about it. Dress yourself as attractive as you can and get your little pussy out there. Don't take your own car, and don't take any money, and don't come back until you've got $500 in your purse, all of it earned with your mouth and your ass. If you're good, you'll have it by morning. If you're very good, that is!" She smiled maliciously.

Then to Tracy, "See? No problem. Tonight, any time anyone asks him to open his mouth or lift his legs, he won't feel offended or conscience-stricken. He'll feel grateful, because he needs the money. He'll even be eager to hustle a little something extra for tips. If the cock sucking and the fucking are also fun for him, that'll be the extra. That's why they say 'once a whore, always a whore.' Once a girl's spent a night turning tricks, all men look like tricks to her forever after. She knows without thinking what they want and how to give it to them, and what it should cost them. Our Amy will come home to us thinking like a whore. That's how we want her to think, isn't it?"

"That'll do the job," Tracy said. "Go ahead, Amy. You're losing time and opportunity even as we speak."

"But without a car or money for a taxi, how do I get there?" I didn't like the sound of any of this.

"On your back, dear," Sally said, interrupting Tracy, whose face showed sympathetic concern while Sally's showed none. "There are men with cars all the way between here and there. And there's a doorman downstairs, isn't there? Give him reason to be kind to you. Do we need to explain everything?"

A minute later I was ransacking my closet. My desire to be a proper, respectable, 'nice' woman had betrayed me, I found. I had no provocative clothes, only a range of decent ones, the most exciting intended for formal wear. Finally I found that black satin micro mini I'd rescued from the Salvation Army box when I was packing to come here how long ago? Months? There it was, a leftover reminder of the days when I was a cross-dresser imagining I was a slut. Now I really was a slut.

I slipped into it. With a wide red belt around my now-quite-narrow waist to emphasize my now-quite-well-rounded hips, and with my hair pinned high up and held by a red ribbon, I looked appropriately available, I thought. Crotchless panties -- I remembered how I found out that mine weren't the only ones in Trish's and my lingerie drawers, nor in our bed. Whatever happened tonight, I wouldn't be any more a whore than she'd been. On the spur of the moment I pulled on thigh-high black boots. You never know, I thought. Then as I left my place I remembered to toss into my purse some Kleenex, Kotex pads, and K-Y jelly. The three K's, I thought to myself, never leave home without them. ' While slathering on heavier-than-usual makeup I decided I would not put the make on any of our doormen -- they'd tell each other, and they'd all expect favors from me forever afterward. Instead, when I got downstairs all I did was smile and ask him to call me a taxi. When it came, I leaned through the door, handed him Sally's slip of paper, and said to the driver, "Honey Bun, a blow job or a fuck up the ass to take me there."

The driver glared back at me. "Sorry, lady. I'm a married man," and he handed me back the paper and sped off before I could shout after him, "So what? So was I, once!" I told the doorman the driver had been rude to me, please call another. The next one was also rude, but this time I didn't mind. I was toughening up, the way a whore should. The third taxi driver looked me over when I put the choice to him, my mouth or my ass, and replied "Both!"

"If you're man enough," I said, and hopped in. He was man enough. A half hour later when we pulled up to the bar my anal pussy was well-lubricated and incredibly stretched. No more need for K-Y jelly for sure, I thought. It hadn't been at all demeaning. The driver had been gentle and as he approached his climaxes he'd been vigorous and impassioned as he thrust into me. Even considerate! I'd caught some of his erotic energy and begun to give as good as I was getting. I even orgasmed onto his cock when he was deep in my ass! As I got out I turned to give him a big kiss. "Thank you, sweetheart," I told him. "You felt good and you tasted good. I could eat you for breakfast!"

He grinned back. "No thanks, honey cheeks, I don't usually have fruits eat me for breakfast! You make a great girl! Good luck in there! Maybe some other time!" And he sped off.

When I stepped inside I saw that the bar was large, with a huge dance floor in back surrounded by tables and a deep thumping sound making conversation difficult. The bartender motioned me over immediately.

"Tonight's pretty busy, love," he said. "Our regulars have more than they can handle, and most of them are leather boys anyhow, not at all pretty like you. So you're welcome to stay. But we insist on a flat rate here, $25 any time your John gets off, and $10 for any time he doesn't. Whatever brings him off, or doesn't. It saves argument and holds down price-gouging. The house gets 10% if it's anyone you approached here. Male or female. With some people like you, you can't tell, and it doesn't much matter."

"That's not much," I said, my heart sinking while I calculated how many times $25 went into $550.

He shrugged and turned to serve a customer.

So I went to work. I hustled. I eyeballed men lined up at the bar to find the most likely, concentrated on only the likely ones, and once I learned how to say things to them with an insinuating smile, more often than not I was off to the parking lot with them. There were subtle signals I learned to pick up from the cruisers, and signals to ignore from the mere voyeurs. I got several customers just by weaving by myself on the dance floor, making the most suggestive moves I could imagine and accomplish with my upper body -- my breasts nicely set off by the stretch satin -- then sinuously writhing my pelvis as if there were a real precious pussy inside, with a prick already in it, always meanwhile waggling my bubble-shaped ass. Everyone gawked, and some came over to chat me up, then feel me up, and so forth. I loved it!

It was odd. I really did love it. It wasn't me serving them, but me dominating them, controlling them. I could bring any man to his knees, figuratively speaking, when I went down on my own knees in front of him. His rate of breathing, whining, desiring, concentration, everything was in a single lick of my tongue or pursing of my mouth. And when we went back to their cars and they were pumping in and out of my slick, soaked, distended, grasping asshole, it was heaven. I wore their penises like silk rosettes, badges of honor.

Only the thickest of cocks made me lose control, forget who was in charge. Those few, once inside me, could turn my entire body into quivering, brainless jelly, pure joy. I'd cover those men's faces with kisses afterward. And with the $25 fuck fee they'd often leave me a $10 tip!

At three in the morning the customers were thinning, and I was still nearly $100 short. A man took me in his arms to dance, and while I was calculating who else I might hit on, my eyes roaming the few remaining occupied booths, he asked me, "Are you still short, Amy, or are you doing this now for the fun of it, on your own time?"

I looked up and sure enough, it was Sally! Looking tenderly down at me. With other men's cum streaming down my leg into my high boots, here was the man of my dreams holding me solicitously in his arms. I wanted to kiss him, but other men's cum still coated my lips -- I hadn't bothered to wipe the last few mouthfuls of sperm because I'd found that a thin film of cum was more soothing than saliva for coating my irritated mouth.

He kissed me. Full on the lips.

I burst into tears, and almost collapsed, almost inconsolable. "Oh, Sally! Oh Sally," I sobbed into his shoulder. "I'm so very ashamed! I wanted to be true to you. But now I'm a whore and a slut!"

"No, Amy, no, don't be! It'll be all right! I know what this is for! It'll be all right!"

"I've been with other men!" I wailed. "Lots!"

"No, you've been learning more about how to please me!"

"But it turns out I love it! Not just with you. With other men! Anyone, nearly! I never thought I'd want sex with a man, but here I am doing it with whoever wants me."

"Even so, I'll always be your first. And I still want you."

"You can taste other men's cum on my lips, I'm sure."

"Amy, that's not new to me, remember. I like the taste of other men's cum. The same way you do!"

'Oh, Sally!" I cried with relief that he still cared for me, and I cried for joy that I was dancing in his arms. I hugged him. We finished our dance.

"How much more money do you need?" he asked.

"$100! And the crowd is thinning out by now!

"I'll pay you for two tricks, Amy. I'd love to. I'm good for two cums."

"I can't take money from you, Sally!" I cried. "I love you!"

It was out! I'd said it! I was appalled! What had I done?

Sally was unperturbed. He replied calmly with miraculous words! "And I love you too, Amy. I realized some time ago that the way my wife has reconditioned me, I can find full happiness only with a girl like you. With a boy-girl. I never dreamed she'd be as lovely as you are!"

"But I'm a whore!"

"So am I. Remember?"

I was delirious with delight. We went back to his car and within 15 minutes I'd earned $50 more from him and a $10 tip.

Then he just held me while I plastered myself against him. Finally he said,"Amy, you've got to get back to work. I'll wait for you here. Here's a hint. The booths still have people in them not yet ready to call it a night, dating couples and young marrieds, straights who come slumming to the gay bars for the novelty of it. Mostly. You're clever. I'll bet you can get $50 out of one of those couples with no trouble, if you put your mind to it.

I did just that. I sat down with the first couple nearest the door and smiled at them. They smiled back uncertainly. They assumed I was a woman, but in this place they couldn't be sure. Nor could they know what I wanted.

I settled their second uncertainty immediately. I spoke to the woman. "I'll lick your cunt for $25. Until you cum. While your friend here watches. He might learn a few things about what girls like. No orgasm, you owe me nothing. "

The man spoke up. "Now see here," he began, trying to work himself up to a righteous indignation. "See here young woman!"

With that I knew I was home free. I continued as if uninterrupted, "Then I'll suck your cock for another $25, Mister, while she watches. She'll learn how to do things she's never dreamed of before. How to use her mouth to turn your brains into Jello, for one thing. You'll both live happier ever after."

"We don't do oral sex," the woman said. "It's disgusting!"

"You won't need to do it," I said. "I'll do it. All you need to do is lie back and relax and watch and enjoy. Then when I've done it you'll know more about it, and can ask each other a few questions about what one is willing to give up for the other to take. I'll leave you two alone now to talk things over."

I got up and went over to the bar, just out of earshot, or nearly, but I could hear then discussing my proposition rather intensely: "Just watch! You don't have to DO anything!" and "No, you wouldn't have to touch me there ever again, not ever!" and finally "We could both learn a thing or two from her." They signalled me over.

Sally's wife had been right. A single evening of hustling and the feel of a dozen cocks in my mouth and another dozen in my asshole had changed me. I wasn't so much numb as habituated, impassive. They sat side by side so they could each look down at me while I worked them over, and I knelt confidently under the table. First I did the woman. She was easier to bring off than Trish or Tracy or any of Tracy's friends had been. God, she must have been terribly hard up! She was panting within a few minutes and shrieking within a few more. Then squirming so wildly I could scarcely tongue fuck her into a finale! Half the people left at the bar heard her scream and turned to watch. As she finished and was trying to catch her breath she gasped "I never! I never!" to herself over and over.

When I turned to unzip her husband I saw why she'd never. He was smaller than even me, even after my months and months of hormones. I took the whole of him into my mouth and began to tongue him. He grew. When he was a full four inches I worked only his outer edges so his wife could see how. I sucked the tip and ran my lips down the shaft a few times, then licked the underside while he moaned. When he finally came, I clamped down tight and swallowed noisily, so she'd know what was happening. But I kept most of his cum in my mouth until I could stand up, lean over, kiss her and push some between her lips. Then while she reeled back shocked, I kissed him the same way.

"There!" I said gently. "That's the real sacrament uniting you. It's tasty. See to it that each of you get lots! Use your imaginations! Enjoy each other, dears."

The man paid me, and included a twenty-five dollar tip. Apparently she'd been the one reluctant to give head, not knowing that deprived her too. She looked at me musing, obviously thinking her own thoughts. "I can't thank you enough," he said. "That may have been her first orgasm since we got married."

"Your cock is good for sucking, but not much more," I told him. "Your mouth is your only real asset. Do her well with your mouth, and do her often. Because now that she knows how it feels, if you don't take care of her she'll find other women ready to sweeten her pussy with kisses, and other men ready to fill it up whether or not your mouth is willing to empty it out again." I turned toward her. "That's what my wife warned me!" I told her. "Think about it!" And with that I left them still staring at me astonished, not knowing how to feel.

Sally and I then drove back to my place. He explained quietly that his presence in the bar wasn't coincidental. His wife had sent him there to watch me, to be sure I was fucking customers for the money I needed and not just raiding an ATM machine.

"Then you're required to come upstairs with me right now," I told him. "To keep your eye on me until I actually deliver the money to your wife and Tracy. Isn't that right?"

"Yes," he said. "Amy honey, did their scheme work? Has tonight's whoring made you feel cheap?"

"Yes," I said soberly. "A little. I like to think I'm more than a hired scum bag, but tonight taught me that whatever else I may be, I'm at least a scum bag. And that feeling liberates me. Because it doesn't matter. I'm free to use my body any way I see fit whatever any notions of chastity or fidelity or propriety may tell me to do or not do."

"You aren't cheap in my eyes, Amy," he replied. "You're very precious!"

My heart swelled up when I heard that. But we were both too worn out down to have sex again just yet. We went to sleep in each others' arms, and then when we woke up the next morning we reached for each other. "Hurry," I said. "I've recovered that horny smutty feeling I had last night! I need a good stiff dick crammed into me right now, I really do!"

Sally grinned, then said, "I know just how you feel. I sometimes wake up feeling the same need to wrap myself around some ramrod cock." He watched my reaction, and then added. "Our women did their work on us very well, didn't they. We may both still be men who prefer sex with women, but we both crave men too. Isn't that true?"

"That's certainly true for me!" I hugged him! "I do crave you! I don't mind that you feel the same way, Sally. If you like, I'll use a dildo on you after you bring me off."

"All right," he said. "But if we see more of each other, don't be surprised if now and then I need to go out cruising for a real, stiff, fat, hot, throbbing cock to stuff my guts with. That's how I am now. You can use one too now and then, can't you? I mean beyond what I've got for you?"

I knew I could. "Yes," I replied. "When we want to feel filled up, honey, we'll go out and find some stud and share him! "

"We were made for each other, Amy, you know? We're what our wives wanted us to be. In my case, Sally wanted to punish me for that affair I had, and wanted me to enjoy only men from now on. And now I've found you. In your case, your wife wanted you to enjoy men so you'd want to become a complete woman. So you could enjoy them even more! You do, now, don't you."

"Yes," I said. "Tracy has seen to that!"

"Because as a complete woman you're a more useful resource."

"For Tracy?" I didn't understand what he'd just said.

"No, not for Tracy. For Trish. For your former wife. For her law firm."

I was baffled. It must have shown in my face.

"Amy, remember Trish? The woman who brought you here and left you here? She's been behind this all along, you know. From the moment she took you to Madison and made you a legal woman, and annulled her marriage to you and then handed you over to Tracy. She's been following your progress closely every day, right through last night. By now she's seen pictures of you sucking every one of those cocks and rolling your ass under every one of those Johns. She needs to know you enjoyed being an out-and-out whore. She has plans."

"Trish?" I was speechless.

"Sally told me. Tracy doesn't really own the condo across the hall. Trish's law office loaned it to her to make training you more convenient. When you were finessed out of your house and your marriage into your new life and your new gender, your former wife hired Tracy to guide you through a transition not only to womanhood but to complete slut. So you'd live like a woman all the time and enjoy it, and never look back, and sleep with all kinds of men all the time, and enjoy that, and never look back!"

"Tracy works for Trish?"

"Yes. Let's get some coffee and I'll explain."

When we were settled in the kitchen, Sally took a deep breath and then started in. "Last year it was I guess. You were away on one of your cross dressing excursions, and your wife mentioned to her friend Carol how badly her firm needed to get you back to help her deal with this new client the firm would be taking on soon, Magnum. You'd quit her law firm because you wanted to dress like a woman all day, not just on nights and weekends and now and then at some gender meeting. Carol told her it was easy. The way to bring you back into the firm, obviously, was to make you a woman full time. Then you'd have other uses too."

"Well, Trish was so delighted with the idea that she ate Carol out nonstop all night, and Carol waddled like a duck for a week I'm told. When the time was ripe Trish proposed it to you, sort of, and you fell for it. Of course you didn't mean to go all the way, but they didn't need a recreational transvestite, they needed you to be a real woman. So they needed a physician to oversee your hormone regimen in confidence, so they brought in Tracy. Tracy was just right -- it turned out that she's also a Dominatrix when she feels like it, an expert at manipulating men so her desires gradually become their desires. She was perfect! You've been well-manipulated ever since, programmed to want to be a woman who enjoys men, and just about ready to consent to a complete sex change. That's what's about to occur. The process is nearly complete."

"The process is 'nearly complete'?" I managed to get out. "Why does Trish want me to go all the way?"

"Understand, Amy, it isn't just that she wants it. She wants you to want it. The beauty of this whole scheme is that nothing is forced on anyone. Everyone wants what they get. Everyone benefits. Everyone's better off."

"Why me? Why should she bother?"

"Her law firm needs a kind of special agent. The Magnum Company has some serious engineering problems that are also legal and personnel problems. The technical people need to be coaxed into cooperation with each other, into supporting the best of several competing ideas. You can recognize which ideas and then make it happen, as an engineer but also as a woman who uses her body to persuade men to do what she says. You could also infiltrate the competition, and see what they're doing. Serve as a kind of company whore as needed and also as a company spy for technical matters, both. Be a kind of industrial Mata Hari."

I was silent, absorbing this. It was diabolical! Because as I thought of it, I realized I just might like doing just that! Steering less-capable engineers straight while luring others into telling me what they're up to and then steering them crooked! And meanwhile getting both of them to satisfy me sexually!

"Now you're no longer self-conscious about sex with strangers. But you need a vagina to use on them along with your ass and your mouth. That's what's scheduled for tonight. You'll see. Tonight you'll lose your balls in an accident, and then there'll be no turning back. They'll ask if they should go on and finish the job, and they're sure you'll say 'Yes!' because even now your balls are useless. Even you tend to think that they're ridiculous. Because even though they're you, they are ridiculous. Because now you're a woman, and women don't have balls."

There was a question I had to ask before we went any further.

"Sally, why are you telling me this? Why don't you just let things happen the way they planned them. You're part of their plan, aren't you? Is your telling me all this right now also part of their plan?"

He was silent. "Amy, what difference does it make? Yes. My wife Sally knows that I'm so utterly honest that I can't plot against anyone or deceive anyone. She knew that when she factored me into this scheme of theirs. But after tonight, when you're a eunuch and they ask if you want to be a woman with a vagina, when they reveal how thoroughly you've been screwed and manipulated for months, you'll never believe me. You'll never trust me. You'd always think I'm part of some further conspiracy."

He hesitated, then went on. "I told them I'd tell you, and they told me to go ahead. They want me to tell you. Deception isn't necessary any more. As they see it, you want what they want anyhow, now."

I believed him. I was convinced that every word Sally was speaking was the truth.

Sally paused, then said, "And now I'm an added incentive for you to go the distance."

I was silent. Then, "You?" I thought a moment. "How are you an added incentive, Sally," I asked.

Sally looked grave, then spoke rapidly, embarrassed, as if the torrent of words would stop if he attended too closely to them. "Amy," he said. "Sally hired me out for just one phase of your conversion, to give you your first girlish crush, so your first fucking and cock sucking would be a deeply romantic experience for you. My wife liked using me that way with a man, and your wife wanted you to have that with me, a beautiful and memorable first fuck. Because she still cares for you. You've been her husband, after all!"

That was news. But it was credible. Trish always felt kindly toward people she meant to use for her own purposes. Her affection for me when I was doing her makeup for her lovers, that was certainly genuine.

"I was supposed to be done with you now. You were supposed to get a "Dear John" from me when I heard you'd had sex with Tracy's former husband, and then when I heard about your exploits as a whore. I was supposed to feel aggrieved. I was supposed to write you 'If you can't remain true to me, if you prefer any common cock to mine, well then...'."

"So?" I sensed something delicious coming. I was eager to hear it, but at the same time I wanted this moment drawn out. Some instinct told me that I would want it to last forever.

"Amy, I couldn't write that note. No one anticipated my falling in love with you. I don't want to deceive you. I love you. I want to marry you!"

"What?!" I replayed that word in my head. That was what Sally had actually said! He wanted to marry me!

"Yes! Marry you! It wouldn't affect your new work for Trish! I know that you'd need to take men to bed now and then to get them in a good mood and talkative about their work, or to reward them for their work, or to help them with their problems at work when like most men they're stuck but won't admit it. That's the work your wife wants you to do. You're uniquely qualified now, aren't you? She must've hinted it to you by now, to prepare you, to line you up for it."

"Yes. When I visited her, she told me there was something coming up. She didn't say what, but she put me on retainer."

"There you are, then, Amy. I like men too, now, so maybe if we were married I could help you with your work sometimes."

I was silent.

Finally I asked "Has your wife agreed to let you marry me?"

"That's what they've been negotiating. As the company's lawyer, your wife wants you to have a vagina and no balls, so there can never be complications if your origins are ever found out. So there'll be nothing for anyone ever to find out. My wife has wanted you to keep your balls, to punish me, so I'd always know that I was sleeping with a man and marrying one too, if it came to that. It remains that you're legally a woman, so we could marry any time, once Sally gives me my freedom."

"Well, Trish and Tracy together managed to persuade my wife that it was more humiliating all around for all of us to see your balls rolling around in a bottle. I'd still be marrying a man, or anyhow a former man, so I'd still be gay, the way my wife wants me. Gay till death doth us part. And you'd be marrying a man, so you'd be a thoroughgoing woman, the kind your wife wants you to be. So what they negotiated was, if I can persuade you to give up your balls, Sally will give me a divorce."

"I told her I wouldn't be part of this deception any more," Sally concluded. "That I'd have to tell you everything. They told me to go ahead. As they see it, that's one sure way to get you to agree to let them operate on you. They told me to tell you everything when they sent me out last night to watch you turning tricks and collecting your money. I almost refused! I don't want to be their tool!"

"But you haven't refused," I said. "Why not?"

"Because I want to marry you, Amy! I don't want any deception ever to come between us."

I managed to recover my wits. I tried to be coy, but I couldn't. My heart was too overflowing with happiness. I did manage to sound grave and chiding. "You haven't asked me properly," I replied.

"Properly?"

"Yes, on your knees in front of me, with both of my hands clasped in yours."

"You darling!" He got on his knees and took my hands in his. He looked so cute!

"Amy, my love, will you marry me?"

"Sally honey," I replied. "Why don't you suck my cock while I think about it."

He did. Experience tells. He was much better at it than I was even at the peak of the previous night's whoring. He brought my little stump of a cock to a tremendous orgasm, and I managed to squirt quite a few drops of clear fluid into his mouth.

Then I did the same thing for him. And finally I told him yes, yes I would marry him, yes. Even if it did cost me my balls. Because he was the one person in the world I really wanted. Now.

ix.

Sally returned to his wife, and I somehow got through the day. Tracy slipped a note under my door telling me to keep the money I'd earned, she believed it was fairly earned, and to dress in garter belt, net stockings, stiletto heels, a lacy bra, and no panties at all for tonight when she got home, then to wear sweats over everything.

"We're going to attend an orgy," she told me as we went down together in the elevator that evening. "Where everyone can do anything to anyone. After last night, the prospect doesn't frighten you, does it?"

"No," I told her. "There's not much I haven't done, and not much that hasn't been done to me."

"That's what I thought. Even so, there are strange people where we're going, and they do things that might freak you out. I don't want to see you upset."

We rode in silence to a large country house. As Tracy rang and we waited to be let in, she suddenly said, "Amy, you'd better take these tranquilizers right now before we go in. They'll make you feel weird, but less weird than you'll feel once we get inside. They'll release you to enjoy yourself, I hope.

I did. And almost immediately felt strange.

My vision wasn't blurred, exactly, but lots of things I saw and felt flowed together. Did I dream some of it? There seemed to be a huge room where men and women were strapped to equipment located here and there, padded saw horses and flying rings and swings, while other men and women whipped them or kissed them or seemed more vigorously occupied -- pumped them -- fucked them? I saw women with cocks in their hands, their own? and huge muscled men with cone-shaped breasts and pussy creases below the mounds of their crotches where there should have been a cock and balls! And Janie fucking a thin young man. Was it Janie? Was she one of the men or the women? Which one? I saw my fiance Sally strapped into a set of stocks, his feet separated wide apart by a spreader bar on the floor and his hands caught by the wrists through holes in a timber about three feet high, his neck held firm between them, bent over with his ass high in the air behind him. Tricia, it *was* Trish, she was standing behind him, holding him by the hips and plunging her enormous rod into his backside while meanwhile a man he'd been sucking off came all over his face. He looked so happy! Then I was Sally, locked in the stocks and reamed and raped in the mouth both ends at once. When I looked again I saw that the man headfucking me wasn't the same one as before, and the cock in my ass was smaller too. I'd passed out? Then it was huge, filling my guts to bursting. I clenched onto it and held on with my ass muscles to keep it from splitting me wide open, and then came on it convulsively, over and over, my little penis dripping from the tip like a faucet. Sally's wife was on the other side of the room, her long black hair waving from side to side in slow ecstasy as she swung an enormous lash through the air. It landed where some woman shrieked. Or was it a man she'd just castrated with it? Trish and Carol stood together next to me holding hands and laughing as two huge men came up and told me to suck their cocks. When one pulled out to spray my face with semen I begged Trish to set me free, my voice squeaky high from all the pricks that had been squeezed down my throat. "Girls suck cock!"she replied. Except that she couldn't have, because her face was buried in Carol's crotch the way mine was in hers. Tracy gave me an injection -- another? More pain -- was I was being fisted this time? Two strange women squeezing my groin while looking me straight in the eyes. Excruciating, unrelenting pain!! Tracy came to my rescue. "Oh dear," she said. "That's done it!" Then she told me, "But look on the bright side. Now you have to become a real woman, sweetheart. Sign here."

I signed and passed out.

When I came altogether to myself I was on a hospital bed of some kind with my feet up in stirrups, in some kind of clinic. Feeling terribly vulnerable. I recalled feeling something down there, but now I felt nothing. I was feeling easy and mellow, the same as when I had my appendix out and they dripped something into me to reduce the anxiety. Tracy was talking to someone.

"I should have resected them that first night, before we started him on injectable hormones. It would have been traumatic for him, but he'd have gotten over it and accepted the inevitable, maybe that much sooner. Then we could have given him lighter hormone dosages and he'd have mellowed out and gotten ladylike sooner. But he was still playing with his femininity then. Not really being feminine. Well, not any more!"

Then Trish's voice! Was it Trish? "Is that them? Those little blebs? That's what all this fuss has been about? Those things? Men!"

Tracy continued, "I'm sure he won't miss them. See? Just as I said, shriveled grapes. They haven't functioned for quite a while."

Trish's voice again. "It's a shame. We protect the poor darling from physical pain so he'll enjoy his transformation and look back on it with fondness, and those two women mangle his balls before we can ask him to give them up on his own. They see a shemale not theirs and decide to clamp him for their own amusement. Not even ask first if he belongs to anyone."

"I have a confession to make," I heard a third voice reply. Sally's wife's voice. "I told them to do it. I'm sorry, but I wasn't at all happy when Sally told us an 'accident' wouldn't be necessary, that Amy now really wanted a vagina! I felt cheated. I want to know Sally is fucking guys up the ass, like a proper queer, not fucking their vaginas! I wanted this girlfriend of his to have balls too, you remember, but you talked me out of them. So I thought, at least losing his jewels should be memorable for him. So I told those ladies we hired to go ahead and do it as originally planned. And that's what they did."

"That's annoying, Sally, " Trish said sternly. "That wasn't what we agreed finally!"

"No, but let's not fight," Tracy's voice said. "I don't think there's any real harm done. He was pretty much out of it anyway by the time they got to him. I guess we should have remembered that Sally was herself a ball buster when we were all still in college. She likes seeing men look anguished. How many testicles did you ruin our Senior year, Sally?"

"As many as there were guys who fucked me, Trace. That was my price. One fuck, one ball, payable on delivery. It was surprising how many agreed that year, five or six, easy! I don't know what they expected. Probably they didn't believe I'd do it. They didn't expect me to flatten their things with a thumbscrew I suppose. But how else? I hate the sight of blood. Of course they were always too ashamed to tell anyone afterward, even when they had to get medical attention. I'll bet even now some of their wives think that's how some men's balls happen to be, one shaped like an egg and one flattened like a pancake."

"Why didn't you squash one of your husband's balls when you caught him with that secretary, Sally? Why'd you decide instead to turn him queer?"

"Oh, Trish, c'mon! We mature! Our judgment ripens! I squashed guys' balls when I was still in college! I was a kid! Turning your own husband into a faggot to punish him for fucking around is much more elegant! And anyway, look what you're doing to Andy here, a perfectly decent, faithful husband whose only fault is that he happens to like wearing women's clothes. Dumping him all the way into femininity and divorcing him because he might accidentally embarrass you among the neighbors or at work, or so you yourself can fuck around more conveniently! And now luring him into sex change surgery so he can troubleshoot corporate personnel problems with a cunt as well as a brain!"

"It wasn't a divorce. And anyhow, his new pussy is for his new boy friend as far as he's concerned. For your husband. Do you really think your Sally's now faggot enough actually to marry him?"

"O yes!" Tracy's voice now. "He does want to! Because as he sees it, Amy is the best of both worlds for him, the kind of woman he's always desired, and the kind of man his wife has trained him to desire. Hold in mind too that Amy is now even more of a faggot than Sally. Because Amy is a man in love with a man who doesn't even remotely resemble a woman. You'd cry for joy to see how sweetly they fucked and sucked each other on their first date and then again last night, not to mention this morning. They make such a lovely couple!"

"I saw the videotapes," Trish's voice replied. "And I'm so happy for him! I love seeing men suck each other's cocks. They look so sweet, like nursing babies!"

Tracy again. "Anyhow, girls, this discussion is just about moot. Dr. Harper's finished now. Just look."

There was a shuffling to the foot of my bed.

"His vulva looks raw, but it'll heal quickly enough. In years ahead many a man will kiss those lips Dr. Harper has just shaped from his testicular pouch, now that the balls they once contained are in that jar over there. And his penis has been reshaped into a very nice vagina with full feeling -- that pretty clit is the stub end. That's very nice work, doctor."

I heard some woman mumble something. Then Tracy continued, "I'll keep him here bandaged for a week or so, so he can heal and realize gradually that he isn't the man he was and is more of a lady than he'd intended. Is he awake yet?"

"I'm awake," I croaked. "I heard you!" I opened my eyes.

There was Trish smiling down on me. "I know, sweetheart. You were supposed to hear us. That's why Dr. Harper didn't use a general anesthetic. We have no secrets from you now! You're one of us! I just wanted to be sure you knew as we begin our new relationship that the accident to your balls did occur after all. A pity. Whether or not an accident is for you to decide."

She leaned over and gave me a soft, lingering kiss. "My dear girl! "Welcome to your new sex, honey! You now have the cutest vagina! It'll be even more darling than Carol's when it heals, and I love Carol's! Men are going to fall all over themselves to get inside you when they see it!"

She was always urging men on me. At least now I knew why. "Is Sally here?"

"No, he's outside in the waiting room. We didn't want him to know that those women really did crush your balls before we brought you here. It would have distressed him."

"Do you feel all right, honey? All things considered, I mean?" That was Tracy leaning over me now."

"I feel fine!"

"That's the tranquilizers talking. But you will be fine. Better than before. Because you'll be one person now in body and mind, not two."

"I want to talk to Sally. My Sally!"

"Of course, honey!" Trish again. "We'll leave you now. You two have so many plans to make! Wedding plans, I hear! It's so exciting! Maybe you'd like to borrow the gown I wore when I married you? But we can talk about things like that another time!"

They left, and Sally came in and kissed me, and then I felt so much better! He sat by me and we talked, until I got tired and fell asleep.

x.

Three months later I was fully healed, and Sal and I lived together in my condo apartment and regularly made love as man and woman. Tracy's apartment was sold to another couple, the wife a treasure of gourmet recipes, sprightly advice, and delicious gossip about everyone else in the building. We became dear friends.

Gradually Sal acted less and less swish -- it was no longer necessary -- while I learned to act more and more feminine. Our passion sustained itself. Now and then one of us brought home a monster cock attached to a hunk of a man, and then we'd both stuff ourselves with him as if he were a Thanksgiving turkey! Or we were. Our love ripened.

When Sal's divorce became final we married each other in a small ceremony. I did wear Trish's gown after all, because I'd wanted to ever since I first saw her in it, the day we were married. That had been a hopeless fantasy, but now it finally came true. Everyone told me I looked lovely! I was so happy! I knew I should have felt grateful to Trish for all she'd done for me, but we deliberately scheduled the wedding for a time when we knew Trish had to be out of town. She'd done more than enough!

I went back to work for Trish's law firm. Sal negotiated a non-exclusive services contract restricted to Trish's Magnum operation, and I kept my own clients in a new consulting firm Sal and I quietly set up. Trish introduced me to a few other people in the firm as my sister, and no one questioned it, not even those who had known Andy. Georgy put the make on me and had to be scraped off several times before a senior partner warned him about sexual harassment and he gave up. Rumors spread around the company and in my former neighborhood that Andy was dead, killed tragically in an industrial accident in Saudi Arabia. Trish and I both wore black ostentatiously for a few weeks, but our dresses were so fashionable and mine so provocative that no one who didn't know could imagine that we were in mourning.

My new work for Trish was what she called troubleshooting, but it was really fucking and sucking trade secrets out of engineers who worked for the Magnum Company's competition, and sometimes persuading Magnum production engineers to cooperate with other engineers who had better ideas. I offered them certain compensating satisfactions.

Whatever she asked, I did. It gave her special gratification, she once told me, knowing that her former husband was now her personal whore on assignment, ready to sleep with anyone on call from her. It gave her a special feeling of power, she said. She loved it. She'd have made me her personal maid and sex slave and not ended our marriage, she told me one day meditatively, and maybe not even tricked me all the way into femininity, if I'd been a more submissive husband to her, more into bondage, more eager to feel humiliated. She was a control freak, and made no apologies about it, now.

But she'd detected no masochistic or self-abasing tendencies in me, and what shame I felt that I wanted to look feminine evaporated when my first cross dressing convention taught me pride. Now, she said, ordering me onto various men's pricks by whatever orifice they chose was enough to satisfy her. She enjoyed calling me in to brief me for my next assignment, informing me for example whether the man I was expected to seduce -- sometimes the woman -- preferred me regal or slutty, aloof or eager, and telling me what she wanted done with them.

Frankly, I enjoyed the work. I liked manipulating various men to my own purposes. I'd describe what I did with these people to Sal when I got home, so he could enjoy it too. And as we planned, little by little our consulting firm signed up the cleverest and most imaginative of the engineers I slept with, one by one enlarging our client pool and our ability to service it. Unnoticed, we became one of the best-regarded new companies in the industry.

Until one day on a late Friday afternoon Trish called me with an odd assignment. "Amy," she said. "It seems that there's a new firm of consulting engineers in town seriously threatening the Magnum corporation's growth curve. It's headed by a husband and wife team I'm told. See if you can get into the man's pants and get their client list from them. Then we can mount an offensive to recover the clients we've lost and pick up some others. It won't be hard, once they know that their new consulting firm doesn't keep client lists confidential."

"I know something about them," I said. "We need to talk. I can stop by your house tomorrow. Around eleven in the morning? Or will you still be here in Madison?"

I knew that she spent weekends in the house we'd formerly shared. This would be my first visit to my former neighborhood since that Saturday months earlier when Trish had felt up my breasts and first proposed this job to me, and then expedited my journey into full womanhood.

I stopped at CurlyGirly en route to consult with Janie. "I need to be read as a man in a dress," I told her. "I want to blow my cover to anyone. At a glance. Can you help me?"

"These days it isn't easy with you, honey," she replied. "With all those hormones doing their things, you have all the right curves for a woman, and none of the crags. But that tight blouse with big boobs helps. We'll make them even bigger. The satin mini and net stockings are perfect. Put a tear or two into the stockings though. And you'll need stiletto heels, 'fuck me' pumps of the kind no woman wears any more. Dressed like that on an ordinary street, no one will think you're real! Never mind your hairdo -- we'll cover it with a Drag Queen wig bigger than a beach ball. No earrings or eye makeup, but use too much lipstick. That ought to do it. Can you recall how you used to walk? Slouching, lots of shoulder?"

"No," I said. "But I'll fake up something."

It amused Janie to put make-up on me emphasizing a broad face and square jaw. The result was as persuasively masculine as my first face had been feminine after my first CurlyGirly visit. I hugged her in gratitude. "Just lovely!" I said.

"No, not at all lovely," she replied, amused. "Remember to lower your voice."

Arriving in my old neighborhood, I went straight to the local supermarket. "How are you, Mrs. Svenson," I said to the first person I recognized. "You remember me? Andy? Tricia's husband? I went to Saudi Arabia? I'm back now."

She looked at me peculiarly. "You've changed," she said.

"Yes, I'm a girl now. I was away from my wife for so long that I decided one day while masturbating that I should become my wife. So that's what I did! Now I don't miss her any more when I'm away."

"Humph!" she said. "Does your wife know about this? Have you told her? Tricia?"

"Oh, yes! She encourages me! She loved it when I grew these!"

"She does? She did? Humph!" Mrs. Svenson replied, hurrying to get away.

A few more chance meetings in the mall, and a few neighbors where I rang doorbells asking to borrow back tools they'd borrowed from me, and Andy's reputation and Trish's respectability in the neighborhood were permanently ruined. It would get back to Trish's superiors by Monday I was sure, and the Magnum company's board would know almost immediately afterward that their General Counsel plays perverted sex games in public with her husband. As Trish had forecast long before, she would be on another assignment by Tuesday. Something much more modest than overseeing Magnum affairs.

When I arrived at my former home, Trish looked at me closely.

"You look like a man in drag," she said abruptly.

"I still am, in some ways," I replied.

"Well, that's no longer my concern. Just be sure you dress properly on the job, and don't loiter in the neighborhood when you leave here." She then repeated her instructions to me: seduce the husband and get their client list, and she gave me their office address. One of her people had suborned one of our secretaries to get additional information about Sal and me. I made a mental note to fire her.

"I know this company, Trish. In fact I'm already into the husband's pants," I said. "He's very affectionate, but he's very honest with his wife. He keeps nothing secret from her."

Trish looked surprised. "He does? Then he's a fool. Does he tell her about you? What you two do together?"

"He doesn't have to. She already knows about me!"

A slow grin spread across Trish's face. "You minx!" she said. "You're balling both of them together, aren't you?"

"If I fuck him, his wife gets fucked too, Trish. That's the deal. That's how it is!"

"People never cease to amaze me," Trish said. "They swing? Can we blackmail them into giving up their client list?"

"It wouldn't work," I said. "I've thought about it. There's nothing they do they're ashamed of."

"How about sleeping with a transvestite? You could dress carelessly, the way you are now, and spread the word. Take a few pictures for evidence. Threaten to post them on the company bulletin board."

"That might work. I'm trying a threat very much like that on someone else right now. Spreading the word through the neighborhood. We'll see if it destroys any reputations." Then I asked as if it were an afterthought, "Do you expect to be fucked this weekend, Trish?"

"That's none of your business any more, Amy."

"No. But I bet you will be. I'll call you Tuesday."

I drove directly home and changed into a more appropriate dress and made my face decent, then told Sal what I'd been asked to do, and what I'd done.

"You're wicked!" he said. "What if I did that to you! Dressed up in women's clothes and pranced about the neighborhood ruining our reputation as a respectable married couple! Even if only your reputation in this building!"

"What if you did, Sally?" I said in a playful, lilting tone of voice. I felt an unaccustomed thrill stir deep inside me. He had a small, thin face. With the right makeup my Sal would look gorgeous! Would my wedding gown fit him?

"What if you did, honey?" I asked, watching his face closely. "Would you find it exciting?"

FIN

(c) 1999 by Vickie Tern. May be copied to free archives.