Empathy

by Vickie Tern

 

I couldn't deny it, not the way she was describing things. "Yes," I said. "I have wondered." I actually hadn't, until now. But the way she'd put it in my head, I did now.

She sat back. "All in all, very good, honey! I think we're ready to move even further. Don't change out of that pretty outfit for the rest of the day, that blouse and skirt, nor the panties, but remember to change the tampon every so often. I'm sure of it now, you do have the right instincts. So here's another task for next week. I think you need more bras in different attractive styles. Buy some when you buy your panties. The make and size you're wearing seems fine, Bali I think that one is. Then each weekend you won't need to imagine it, you'll know how I feel wearing bras, how my breasts need to be supported, enclosed, uplifted, shaped, how any girl feels, or any woman wearing a bra. How your own breasts need to feel. The clothes I've given you are yours now—they'll help put you in the right frame of mind for future assignments. When we have time I'll help you fill out your wardrobe."

"What do you mean, Miss Darla?" I asked, though I was afraid I knew.

"It's like this. This week you'll feel like a woman having her monthlies, and every evening and weekend from now on you'll feel the way women feel when they wear their proper clothes, different kinds, and make-up. From now on. You'll become utterly woman-identified, until it's second nature. You'll get used to how all these things feel, and you'll know yourself how women feel who've worn these things all their lives."

I was about to protest that it was her feelings, Darla's, I should be discovering for myself, not all women's. It wasn't appropriate for a man to wear tampons and skirts and make-up. I was wary, though, because every one of my previous protests had ended with her demands redoubled.

"Of course thus far you've been learning how women feel about men only in your imagination," she said as if it were an afterthought. "Not coping with the real thing as women actually do. Thus far."

Yes, she sensed my protest and had just issued a warning. If I utter the faintest objection to anything, not only clothes but cocks will be added to the list of feminine experiences I need to try on for size. Then I'd really need to decide if saving my marriage is worth it. I clamped my mouth shut.

As Darla rose from the dinner table to help me clear the dishes, I stared at the way she was dressed. The process had begun. Since I needed to wear different outfits, I needed to know how other women wear theirs. How they compose them. I tried to imagine myself wearing her various multi-layered blouses, vests, and denim skirts, her power suits and dickeys, all those that might fit. Would I need to learn how she matches colors and fabrics to fit the occasion? Why women are always calling each other up to ask, 'What do you plan to wear?' Their dress codes were complicated and subtle.

In my mind I arrived home from work, went upstairs, changed my tampon or napkin, and chose an outfit. Then I put on my makeup for the evening, all before starting dinner. Darla seemed to sense that was happening. She smiled encouragement.

"It'll fun, choosing your own outfits and playing with your make-up until you've achieved a look that's uniquely you," she said. "Every girl does. You'll see."

As we loaded the dishwasher together, Darla began to offer me some helpful advice, girl to girl.

"Nickie, now that you're exploring your own femininity, a few hints to help you do it right. Remember that first of all, whenever you're in a skirt or dress of any length in public, you must always sit with your knees together. Ankles may be crossed if you're being prim and formal, but you can splay them anywhere as long as your knees are still touching—that looks really cute, even daring. It doesn't matter when you're here alone, but if you keep your knees together even when you're here alone, you'll never forget."

Me? Wearing a skirt 'in public'? I decided Darla was just riffing, enjoying the idea that I'm a young girl she's advising in the proprieties of womanhood, since it had never occurred to the young girl's mother that she had a daughter, not a son.

"Also, any girl learns early on to open her eyes wide when she looks at a boy. That's why eye make-up matters so much. Wide open eyes raise the brows to a high feminine arch, very fetching. They also give a girl a doll face that tells a boy she's innocent, naive, and may even admire him. Eye make-up confirms and exaggerates that supposed innocence. Boys fall all over girls with wide eyes."

I certainly had. Darla always wears eye make-up that makes her eyes seem larger, I was thinking. And she'd always opened her eyes wide at me when speaking to me, right from when we first met. That's why I'd always thought she was innocent, until a few weeks ago. But I was the innocent!

"I'll remember that," I said. "Thank you."

"And as important, honey, as I've already told you, get accustomed to seeing yourself in the mirror. That way you'll learn to feel confident no matter who's looking at you. Then you can go anywhere without embarrassment. All women do."

Be seen by others? Go anywhere? I felt alarmed again, but realized that she meant only what it would feel like to pretend that I'm out and being seen by others. In my imagination.

I was feeling very edgy nevertheless. Things were moving too fast.

Yet, Darla was now much less antagonistic, or wary, or whatever her problem had been. That evening, when we paused at her bedroom door, she turned and pulled my head down and kissed me on the lips. An actual good night kiss! "We're wearing the same shade of lipstick, sweetie!" she murmured. "That practically makes us sisters."

Only sisters? I thought. Well what did I expect? That her lipstick would make me her husband again? I guess I had thought so. In fact I still did.

"Good Night, dear," she said fondly as she closed her door.

 

Fourth Week—Monday

The next morning was Monday, promising to be filled with a sense of novelty. I was feeling upbeat and energetic. On my way to work I stopped at the chain drugstore near my office and bought some tampons (Tampax, Super) and sanitary napkins (Kotex, Overnight) for my period, at the same time selecting a bottle of tinted face lotion (a beige that matched the back of my hand), a lipstick (rose, not too lively), and a black mascara and eyebrow pencil. A sales girl saw me staring at the wall of different brands of different cosmetics and asked whether I needed blusher too in a similar rose shade. I blushed and nodded yes.

"Does she have enough of the right shades of eyeshadow?" she asked me, maybe to relieve my embarrassment. "We're having a sale this week, two for one."

I didn't know, but that sounded like a good deal. So after determining that Darla was blonde, like me, her skin a faint beige like mine, with brown eyes like mine, we selected two compacts with eyeshadow and a little pad to spread it, three shades in each. I'd had no idea that so much calculation went into the preparation of a woman's face. I'd never wondered and scarcely noticed how women's eyelids were darkened and colored with different tomnes right up to their brows. I told the sales girl some of this while thanking her for her help.

"Oh, we all keep all sorts of cosmetics on our dressing tables, and get used to reaching for the right shades for whatever the occasion and whatever we're wearing. It gets to be second nature. You just know what's called for, after a while. You'll see."

She smiled at me and was gone before I could wonder if she thought I was buying all of these items for myself. As I was, but I'd almost persuaded myself they were all for Darla, and had almost believed it myself. It was too late to feel embarrassed.

But now I wondered, can it also become second nature for a man to decorate himself like a woman? Won't he find after a while that that's what he feels he is? Is that how this is supposed to help me understand Darla better? By becoming Darla? Well, not Darla exactly, but a lot more like her? Like Nick as Darla?

The cashier didn't seem to care that the items I was purchasing couldn't possibly be for me, and asked only if I had any reduced price coupons for the tampons. One more thing to report to Darla, that now I'd have to be watchful for such coupons, as I knew many women were. But why would I need more tampons than the week's supply I'd bought? Was I getting too far into this thing?

I then prowled down the street to find a lingerie store with a few satiny or silky panties to wear with my sanitary gear. Hi-leg, I hoped, I loved the long leg line that style gave Darla. They had to be substantial enough to keep my napkins tucked where they belong and my turgid cock in line, but they also had to be delicate and pretty enough to put me in mind of how women feel about these things. Finding them in the third store I looked into was a triumph! They had exactly the panties I wanted, with teeny touches of lace trim and a little spandex to hold everything tight in place. I loved them!

Then, marvelous, the same store was offering Bali bras on a special "Buy Two Get One Free" sale! Who could resist that? I found a "Flower Bali," a "Satin Tracings," and a "Lace Desire" Bali in my size, all underwires like the one I'd worn, one in deep plum and the others beige and white. And felt a twinge of exultation! I began to understand why women love to shop. Given the enormous range of items stores carry for them, and the limited choices each woman allows herself to achieve her "look," to find something just right and on sale is like finding buried treasure.

The sales clerk asked me if I wanted the panties and bras gift wrapped, and I told her "No, thank you" without thinking. Then I wondered if I should have said "Yes" to turn off the implication that they were for me. Did she think they were? Finally I decided 'No' was the right answer—I was buying these items for myself, as most women do. "No" felt right. More honest. Nothing here to be ashamed of.

"I'm sure you'll enjoy wearing these," the saleswoman told me as she folded the bras and panties into tissue paper and tucked them into a pink shopping bag printed with the name of the store, "Intimates." Then she looked up embarrassed to see me looking even more embarrassed, and I realized she'd been trained to say that to her customers and had said it without thinking, nothing personal. So I smiled at her as I left, pleased by her reassurance. "I'm sure I will," I told her, as if I were joking.

I felt conspicuous, carrying that shopping bag down the street and up to my office, but I had prepared an explanation if anyone should ask me for one. No one did. "My wife asked me to get these," I told Michelle too quickly as I passed her desk, when she noticed the bag and raised her eyebrows. "I'm sure she did," was all she replied. She sounded sincere.

It was a nice feeling. I was a little apprehensive, fearful, when I slipped into a stall in the men's room to change into a pair of new panties and then insert a tampon, my very own for the very first time. I was simulating a period! I felt a private communion with half the human race not previously contacted, though I knew when I inserted that first tampon that I'd better buy KY Jelly before I attempt the next, and I knew almost as quickly that I should have bought more modest sizes to match the size of my maidenly anus. My virgin cunt. But the panties felt wonderful pressing against my partially engorged prick. When I tucked a sanitary pad in its crotch it looked almost as though I had almost no male genitals at all, just a woman's smooth mound.

Then all week long, each time I changed my menstrual tampons and napkins, I felt that same peculiar affinity with all the other women in our office. Like them I was sharing their monthly discomfort and privilege. I felt myself secretly one of their sisterhood. It seemed improper that I was using the men's room to perform such a feminine ritual.

I felt something of the same thing each evening at home when I put on my bra, a blouse, and a skirt, maybe slipped a dress over my head, and then tried to figure out how to use my eye make-up. I rarely got it right or even acceptable at first, and I began studying how each woman I met did herself up, Michelle and others at the office, Darla at home, even women I passed casually on the street. I bought a copy of "Cosmopolitan" and "Today's Woman" and rather ashamed of it, sneaked them into my study at home and looked closely at the ads each evening instead of at my tax notices—the second evening I know Darla saw both magazines open on my desk, but she said nothing. Each day I picked up more tips. And my lipstick got so it needed no more than a few swipes, just as Darla'd said. Late in the week I bit the bullet and plucked my eyebrows a little. If a girl doesn't look neat, she's probably a slut.

Michelle began to sense something different about me. She behaved more informal, even friendly, whenever I called her into my office to take dictation or to instruct her about a report that was due. She'd listen almost as if it were a social call and we'd gotten together to gossip. And when we'd done what we needed to do, she'd pause and disclose a personal item of news—she was worried about her niece, who had fallen in with the wrong high school crowd, or—as she informed me delightedly—that Associate she'd been chatting up had in fact asked her out. She wanted to know what I thought of him, and seemed pleased when, looking for something to say, I said he was "cute."

"I think so too, he's a darling!" she told me with a wide open smile of appreciation. "But you can't have him, he's mine!" I took that as a tribute to the cordiality of our relationship, nothing more.

I was a little disturbed though when later I buzzed her and asked her to come in to pick up a draft deposition that needed typing, and she replied, "Of course honey, I'll be glad to, just leave it on my desk next time you pass by." As if I were asking her for a favor. A favor, woman to woman. It all seemed very friendly, but somehow not businesslike.

Thursday was the last day of my "period." I used only pads, no tampons, and on Friday a "Lite-Day Liner" to be on the safe side. But Thursday afternoon as I walked down the hall and past Michelle's desk she looked up and commented brightly, "You know, Nick, there's been something different about your walk this week. You've been sort of springy, with a sexy wiggle, like a fashion model walking down the runway. The way girls sometimes walk during the first few days of their ... are you all right, Nick?" She looked concerned.

"I'm fine," I replied.

"You're sure, honey? Because if you're uncomfortable, I have ...."

"I'm fine, Michelle, but thanks for your concern."

"Don't mention it, I know how it is," she replied.

I made a mental note that next month when I move around I should try to be less aware of the wadding between my legs and up my ass. Pretend it's not there. Then I caught myself. Next month? Was this exercise with Darla going to last that long? Longer?

That night I wrote up the story of my five-day menstrual period and all my other experiences as a "woman." Darla was frankly delighted, especially when I took note how I could now slide tampons in and out of myself while scarcely aware of the mucky one being tossed and the fresh one replacing it. That act too had become 'second nature.'

"Maybe next month we'll give you the whole thing," she said with a gleam in her eye. "Laxatives for a day or two beforehand to simulate cramps, then pads drizzled in syrup or something else gucky to give you a feel for the discomfort women actually endure. Maybe put a small balloon filled with red dye into your posterior pussy, so you'll know that at any moment it may give way and you'll overflow and ruin your clothing and embarrass yourself."

I knew she was joking, or I hoped so, but I was not amused. Yet it worked! At that moment I felt quite close to her, moreso than in the whole six years of our marriage.

Fourth Week—Friday:

That Friday I put on the nicest of my new bras as soon as I got home, eager to see how it felt. Just fine, and there once again were my little titties. I dressed myself in a plain white nylon blouse with a single button at the neck in back, and a wide beige skirt, and I did my face and eye make-up, brushing mascara and drawing lines and patting on foundation with a little sponge. Routine by now, or very nearly. I was learning, and for once it didn't look at all bad, I actually resembled a woman! To complete the picture I played with Darla's electric curler for a while until my hair was a tangled mass of curls, a kind of coronet that almost looked feminine. When Darla returned from her meeting, she saw immediately what I'd done and what more I'd attempted. She stared a moment and said, "Well! You really do care, don't you!"

Then she sat down in her easy chair and I sat down at her feet, my legs curled gracefully under my skirt. She looked at me with a big smile. "You've been doing very well, Nick. You're way ahead of the other husbands, so far, though there's another who's a close second. Congratulations. The whole class agreed that you're ready to begin more extensive field trials. Learn-by-doing kinds of assignments. I think the first one's just brilliant. You will too." She looked at me with a private smile. "You'll love it!"

I looked at her, surprised and embarrassed. "The entire class knows what we've been doing? What I've been imagining? Karen and Becky too? And their husbands?"

"Of course Karen and Becky, but of course not their husbands! The various women's husbands are doing their own imagining and empathizing and improvising, and Jason is nowhere near as advanced as you are. And Karen's assisting the Instructor this year—Roger is already optimal, as I hope you will be soon. Your secretary Michelle is one of us, working with several boy friends, did you know that? When I described what you've been doing, she told us something amusing, that each time you came out of the men's room this week after changing your tampon or your sanitary napkin, you'd waddle!"

"No! Michelle!? Michelle knows I've been wearing tampons and panties and pads and ...everything?!" Embarrassed wasn't an adequate word for the way I felt! Horrified was more like it! My own secretary?

"Of course she knows, hon! Everything. But don't worry about it, she likes you. She thinks it's good for you. In fact she wanted me to start you wearing panties the first week, to help ease you away from the strains of that male ego of yours and mellow you out right off. That's what she does with her men, especially with that Associate she dates, because he looks like husband material, she says. But I insisted that you had to come by it your own way in your own good time. Journeys of a thousand miles and so forth. You know. As you've been doing. She thinks you're a lot nicer to work for now that you have some personal experience of women's issues. She suggested that you should wear your new bras and little titties every day, to give your womanliness greater presence. And I must say, I agree. And everyone thinks that since you've come this far in your understanding of women, you deserve an award."

She smiled secretly at some private joke in her head, then said, "So tomorrow morning a woman will masturbate you until you ejaculate, and if not then, immediately afterward you'll write about it."

I looked amazed and baffled, both, I'm sure.

"You'll jerk off, honey. Masturbate. Take hold of that beautiful penis and stroke it and pull on it way into the afternoon if that's what it takes, until you cum. Maybe even cum twice. As often as you wish. You still remember how?"

Finally! Despite myself I felt a surge of hope and gratitude! Gratitude? For being allowed to jerk off? By my own wife? Then it occurred to me—how was that being 'a woman'?

"While you do it, I want you to be sinfully unfaithful to me, at least in your own mind."

I thought I hadn't heard her. "You want me to imagine I'm making love to another women while I'm jerking off?" I asked. Darla had said that? My "Miss" Darla? This was worse than mysterious—this was downright weird.

"Not exactly. I want you to imagine that it's another woman who's jerking you off. Making love to you. I want your hand to seem to belong to that other woman."

My mouth gaped.

"Now that you're in touch with your own feminine feelings, finally, and you take pleasure in them, I want you to extend them. You need practice imagining how women really feel when they do actual sexual things with men. You really have no idea. So, back to basics. The first thing any young girl learns when she begins heavy dating is how to jerk boys off. You've always identified with your own cock, I'm sure, whenever you've masturbated or gotten some girl to do it for you. So now instead I want you to identify with your hand, that girl, and imagine that your cock is someone else's. Imagine you're doing it to another man's cock. That you're your own cock's date, that you're a pretty girl who wants to please that someone else, maybe because she likes him, maybe because she wants to be asked out again, maybe because she likes the feeling of power it gives her, you know all about those things. Maybe even because she feels intimidated by him and has to, she's kind of being raped."

My mouth hung open. I tried to close it, but my jaw just hung there.

"Notice everything there is to notice about giving a guy a handjob. How it feels to touch that funny warm, fleshy tube, smooth and lumpy at the same time, how it feels to slide your fingers along it. To rub that velvety head and feel the veins in the shank, and then to grasp it and squeeze it and hold the squeeze an extra excruciating few seconds. And so forth. A girl always feels privileged when she has a handful of cock and knows she has a man's complete attention, that she's in total charge. And when she manages to bring him off? The high that comes from knowing you've made a man you like into a helpless, willing, spurting fountain?"

She leaned forward encouragingly. "You'll write all about how that feels. You'll do an essay about jerking your guy off and how you feel when you see how he responds. Not about how it feels to get jerked off. In this exercise, you're the woman. Don't fake it. Pay close attention. Make it seem as if it's the first time you've ever given anyone a hand job. It is, in a way. But use your hand's point of view, not your cock's. For that it'll certainly be a first time!"

I didn't know whether to feel gratified or bewildered! At last I was going to get off! This weekend wouldn't be a total bust! But by my own hand? No, by a girl's hand. No, I would be the girl with the hand—someone else was the lucky guy with the cock! But still, it would be my cock!

I was getting dizzy.

"Take your time at it. Go slow, honey, be loving, be good to your man, and pay close attention. Write down your sensations practically stroke by stroke. You can speculate how the cock feels, but remember, this is mainly to make you more aware how your hand feels, to make you into the person whose hand it is. Imagine you're someone like me. Like what I was once, what every woman was. Become one of us, in a way. Dream about it tonight, about your delicate hand caressing that man's cock over and over. The poor thing must be ready to explode—it's been weeks and weeks now, hasn't it? Think how grateful it'll be!"

"Yes. Yes."

"But tonight you're still on your back! The big day's tomorrow."

She started toward her room. "Don't stay up late, honey," she said as she disappeared down the hall. "If you really do get into it, you may need all the stamina you've got. Because I want to put that girl in complete charge of you and your cock, and who knows what other kinds of demands she'll make after that. You may luck out. Her hand may be insatiable!" She smiled a cute smile and paused at her door and looked back at me. "The way I am. I'm sure you've noticed. Or suspected." Then went in and closed it behind her.

Was she telling me about something she'd done or something she was about to do? Assuming, as my own woman's point of view developed, that of course I'd understand?

 

Fourth Week—Saturday

I woke up feeling keen anticipation, and then immediately I felt stupid. What's wrong with me? It's only a simple fist-fuck!

But still...!

I came down to breakfast in my pajamas, and Darla brought me back to reality.

"You aren't dressed and made up decently this morning, Nick," she said a little coldly. "Don't you want to feel really close to the woman who'll be giving you your first orgasm in ... what, a month?"

"I was so excited I forgot," I confessed. "I feel like a kid who's rushed down to see what's under the Christmas tree without first putting on his robe and slippers."

"Well, girlie, go back and put something very nice on, with all the trimmings. You do want to impress this man you intend to jerk off, don't you? Make sure he's in the mood and stays there?"

I did. I threw on a charming blue velour dress with a flare skirt and buttons up the front between my boobs, and made up my face quickly. And borrowed one of Darla's silver chokers.

Darla was in a good mood when I returned. "Fine. Beautiful. Now, look here, there's a rather lovely girl in this mirror—remember that this isn't for you, it's for her. She's you, a girl who's going to give a guy a hand job. Write down everything she feels. When you first touch him, and while you stroke him and he lies back eagerly, and when you first see that penis spurt cum, whether you're happy or disgusted or proud that it was by your hand! Use this mirror to watch your guy's face when he cums, though I grant you what you'll see mainly will be your own girly face watching his. See for yourself how it feels to make him feel that good."

Then as I left the kitchen, she added an afterthought. "As for tasting his cum, that's up to you. Men like it when women want to. I hope for his sake you give it a try. We pretty much agree that it's an acquired taste—some like it, some don't. Sooner or later you'll be trying it, so maybe the sooner the better. Maybe your guy'll ask you to lick his up, and maybe he won't. If you do taste it, be sure to tell me what persuaded you, and whether it tasted the way you imagined it would when you were a young girl who'd only just barely heard about such things, maybe even felt repelled by them."

She looked at me conspiratorially. "But not altogether repelled. We never really are, are we? Curious too!"

As I settled down at my desk, I was not at all happy with the idea that I should taste the stuff, though I had to admit that it made sense in a peculiar way. I was just pulling up my skirt and pulling aside one of the leg openings in my panties to haul out my cock, when Darla came into the room carrying a tray full of small bottles.

"Here, sweetie," she said, setting them down. "You'll appreciate a little help with this one. You don't want to see a man's hand masturbating you, that would be gay sex, which would complicate your feelings, and I want to keep things simple for you. So I want to give you a manicure, to put some long tips and nail polish on your fingers to keep you reminded that it's a girl who's holding and stroking your penis each time you look down at her hand, not some gay guy. A girl beautifully aware of all her sensations while she jerks off her fella. Here, put your fingers in this bowl to soak for a moment—we need to trim your cuticles. I don't know your masturbation techniques, so I guess we'd better do both hands."

A half hour later Darla gathered her bottles and tools and left the room while I was still working her scented softening lotion into the skin of my fingers and palms, at her instruction rubbing it in well past my wrists and as high as my elbows. She'd denuded my arms of hair, and also the backs of my hands, and left me to soften them. It was odd, that hand lotion. It felt creamy and slick as I squirted it into my palms, but as I rubbed, it disappeared into my skin, which then felt moist, silky smooth, sort of plump. My skin took on the faint scent of lilacs. I liked it.

"I've thought about it some more, Nickie," Darla'd said as she left, using my affectionate nickname. "I think you need to feel intensely curious about the taste of cum. That's the stuff that makes babies, after all, and can make you into a mother if you aren't careful, or if you want to be one. It's what makes men worth while despite everything. It's wonderful in its way! A magic potion! Keep all that in mind. You might want to take some into you so you'll know, personally, intimately, that a man's cum is now in a woman's body where it belongs, and it's your body."

Each finger was now tipped by a gleaming, dark red, oval-shaped jewel. As I saw my hands (mine?) reach down again to pull my panties aside (MINE!) I could easily imagine they were a woman's hands, long delicate fingers reaching for that now-iron-hard cock (mine, no, his), her (no, MY) pretty finger tips caressing and toying with that purple cock head (WHOSE?), and—I forced myself to conjure the illusion—that mine (they WERE mine) were the gorgeous red fingernails trailing up and down the veins on his (HIS, yes, that other guy's) straining penis. It felt peculiar, that stiff cock, warm, satiny smooth. I squirted some cool, lilac scented skin cream onto its feverish surface, and then began slowly to work it in with the softened palm of my hand. Then with both palms. The skin felt plump. When I heard myself groan I smiled and said to myself, "No, not yet, lover," and I paused to start typing. I meant to tease myself as long as I could.

I prolonged my cock's pleasure all the way into the afternoon. By near-dinner time my beautifully jeweled fingers had executed a series of elegant, graceful gestures, and repeatedly squeezed and caressed and fondled and cuddled and embraced that magisterial cock. It was such fun, denying him his last rites!

Then at last it was time for a grand climax. Pearly fluid leaked from its royal tip as I stroked it and squeezed it, and then suddenly the cock ejaculated out of control, squirting high up to arch down onto my keyboard. I realized I'd have to clean up after it. So as tactfully as I could I wrapped its head in kleenex for the last few spurts. Then it resembled a pasha in a turban, a little doll I was playing with, sort of cute! No self-respect, these cocks, I thought, no dignity, they'll spurt anywhere, into or onto anything! Even so, I felt indulgent, pleased that it had enjoyed itself. After my long deprivation I felt so inspired that I licked cum from the fingers that had wiped it off the keyboard. Salty, and as slick as the lotion. But stickier. Sort of creamy too. Odd. Not too bad.

Then an hour later we did it again! My fingertips were flying over the keyboard this time to record my own thoughts and sensations as I made that man's cum rise up from his deep groin into his cock and then finally seep, spill, spurt, spray out. I was exultant, experiencing the joy of a woman whose own gorgeous hands have brought off her man twice! When the second cumming exploded through that royal purple cock head, and its first spurt landed on my skirt, I quickly blocked off all the others with my palm. Then, genuinely curious about the taste, and wanting to please my man, and eager to show Darla I was a good girl, a little adventurous, I lapped it all up. All of it.

My report loitered over the flavor of that puddled handful, its salty pungency yet its sweetness, a little like Gatorade but with a slippery feel. I was quite pleased, I confess. I liked it! I took my time working up a third climax, and when it came the tensions as that cock pumped out its pearls were simply glorious. It disappointed me that there was very little fluid left, but a girl can't be choosey.

Darla was delighted. Miss Darla, I mean. By the time I'd printed up and brought her my report it was the cocktail hour. She'd set a plate of thin finger sandwiches on the dinette table for us to nibble on, and as the sounds of the printer announced completion of my day's work, she sat there waiting for me to appear. I proudly placed twenty or thirty pages of single-spaced text in front of her with a lovely flourish of my long, slender hands, then stood there attentively while she read, hands clasped loose wristed across my waist, my pretty nails a kind of decorated belt buckle.

"You don't seem at all to be the same person who wrote that first assignment," she told me, looking as delighted as I felt. "I'm so pleased. This is lovely! It has such sensitivity, and fragility, yet a certain earthy good sense, even wry amusement about what it takes to satisfy a man. You're pleased because he's pleased. I agree with you, honey, men do like us to swallow their semen, God knows why, carelessness or ignorance about where it really belongs I suppose. Can they possibly think it's an act of submission to their male essence? That goop? They really are insecure, aren't they? Yet you've humored your man and tasted his cum now yourself, so you know. Twice, I see! Three, counting those pathetic last squirts. "

Impulsively, without thinking, I said, "Oh, Miss Darla, I'm so glad you asked me to do this!" Then I realized I was still in character, the character I'd invented to go with my pretty hands, and she was a little over the top. I decided I'd better not carry this too far. "Thank you, ma'am," I said in my lower, more subdued voice. "If you're happy, I'm happy."

"You see," she added, hearing from my voice that I'd reverted to my male self. "It isn't necessary for you to think only about yourself to enjoy sex. A girl can enjoy giving pleasure to others, and you can be that girl. You even changed your gender to give pleasure to a man, even while you were the man, that girl's beneficiary!"

"That's true," I said, trying to marvel at the profundity of what she'd just said. I'd done it for Darla. Yet for brief moments I'd done it for the man. That man had been comfortably familiar to me. It was easy for me to identify with him. But now and then he hadn't been me.

"Now, honey, this girl you became when you were enacting her, she needs her own name. I'd like to talk to her woman to woman about all sorts of things. I want her for a friend. You'll continue to keep a respectful distance from me, and call me 'Miss Darla' and so on, but this person you're becoming can be much closer, I think. The more you're her, the sooner you learn to become her, the more comfortable you feel being her, the closer we'll feel with each other. Because as women, we'll understand each other. Think about it—just now you were a girl giving sexual pleasure to my former husband, and I wasn't the least bit jealous of you. I couldn't have tolerated that earlier. If it had been just Nick I still couldn't!"

Oddly, it was sort of true.

"Does she have a name, honey? When you were a girl with beautiful hands who was pulling on a man's penis, who were you?"

I hadn't given it any thought. I was a well-manicured broad who was nice enough to take me in hand, I guess. "Apart from sort of being you stroking me?" I asked, stalling? I wish! It hadn't occurred to me.

She knew, and her face disapproved, so I decided to get on with it. Who was the first girl I ever had a crush on? My first hand job, when I was sure I'd lucked out fabulously, what was her name? I remembered that one Spring evening in April we were in back of the school playing field and she'd reached into my ....

"April," I said. "That's who I am."

"Very pretty. All right, April, let's talk. I may be busy now and then, so I'll appreciate your looking after this man I'm trying to train. He's already subordinated himself to me in the hope that I won't leave him, and that's an excellent beginning. Stay by his side and keep him in his place, and teach him more about sensitivity to women, how we do things, how he should want to do them. Let him play at doing them so he'll see how it can be fun. That's what I'm doing with him. Eventually, I'd love it if he disappeared altogether into his own femininity. If he became you!"

So that's it. She wants to turn me into a woman, and she's part way there, so she's enlisting my own assistance. That's how she means to escape from my patriarchal hegemony and all that? And she's succeeding! Look at me. Do I mind? Is it already too late?

"Nick is rather proud of his progress so far, isn't he, April?"

"Yes," I replied. I was. "He is."

"I am too. April, his next assignment will occupy him all of tonight and maybe all of Sunday, but if he can finish it early enough tomorrow we can let him take the rest of the day off. If you like, take him shopping. Or you can invite someone over, or maybe ask them to invite both of you over to their place."

"Roger's someone I haven't seen for some time," I said. "If I can clear the time I'll give him a call." I was really curious to see how he'd survived last year's ordeal. I could use his experience, ransack him for as many tips as possible for dealing with upcoming assignments.

"No, not Roger," Darla said, looking closely at my face to see if I was being mischievous or merely direct, as if there were something I knew that I shouldn't know. She decided I didn't know, and said only, "Not any more. Karen and Roger only entertain together nowadays, and only invited guests, and only by previous arrangement. He's not the same."

It occurred to me, given my bra and panties, blouse and skirt, neither was I. I could change out of them of course, and wipe off my make-up as I'd learned to do each night. But my nail polish? I looked at my hands. Those fingers had given me such pleasure, but no way would I let them be seen by any of my buddies! Good old Nick, sporting a woman's decorated fingertips? I'd never live it down.

So I asked as if an afterthought, casually, "Miss Darla, my nails. How can I get them back to normal?"

"Why should you want to, April?"

"If I meet with some of the other guys tomorrow, I couldn't exactly explain them away. Also, I have to go to work on Monday."

"I see. Are you ashamed of them, April?" She was playing evasive games with me.

"Darl ... Miss Darla! Of course not!" Not at the moment. With only the two of us present I was proud of them. I was April. But in front of anyone else? I didn't want to confess that April's ways would embarrass Nick if they were known, so I just repeated "Of course not!" as if shocked.

Darla's impassive expression told me she was unpersuaded. But she continued in a level voice, "Well, sweetheart, I'm afraid you're out of luck. There's a liquid you can soak them in if you think bare nails are normal and insist on them, but I'm all out of it. Drug stores don't carry solvent for this kind of nail lacquer, you'll have to buy it at the beauty parlor I go to or else have them remove the tips and the polish both. But you'll get nowhere today without an appointment. It's Saturday afternoon. By now every beauty parlor in town is busy getting women ready for the weekend—they're all booked, with waiting lists. And they're all closed all day tomorrow."

Bummer. "I think I'll just keep going with your assignments, then, not invite anyone," I told Darla, who was still watching me closely.

"All right," she said. "That's commendable, Nick. You can leave April's nails on, tips and all, and wear them to work on Monday. They're long and beautifully manicured, but we can paint them a pale pearly pink, almost a natural shade, so they won't be too conspicuous. The April in you loves how women feel when their hands are beautifully adorned, I'm sure. But if Nicholas would be embarrassed, he can wear gloves, or he can keep those pretty hands in his pockets and make some excuse to leave them there. I think he might even find that exciting, a little wicked, hiding a secret like that but knowing it's there. The same feeling he reported when he wore his panties and tampons all last week. Having a secret self who's a girl. Nick, it's getting to be time for April to make her debut in the outer world, for you to share your body with her or step down. Not yet, but soon."

"I guess," I said.

"On your way home Monday evening you can stop at Lisa's, Lisa's Beauty Salon, where I go, it's on your way, and she'll remove your nails for you. Have Michelle set up an appointment."

Darla paused, and then began choosing her words with great care. "Of course, Nick, when your hands aren't a woman's hands I won't allow you to touch yourself in a...womanly way any more, as you did this afternoon. Not at all. I'd not homophobic, but I can't stand the thought of the man I live with jerking another man off. And you do want to give April's desires every consideration. So if April can't wear her pretty nails all the time, she should have other of the advantages of being a woman. For example, I want you to caress her breasts every night from now on until they become your breasts and her hands. You'll love knowing at first hand how women feel when their nipples are being fondled."

Was Darla tripping out? Kinky? But I had to admit, the idea was kind of exciting! My nipples had always been a little bit sensitive, erogenous. And when poked out a little in their bra and I'd brushed against something, they'd been fabulous. They'd felt directly hard-wired to my groin, and my rear pussy had spasmed each time against its tampon. Here was a whole new kind of sex life Darla was authorizing for me.

"Come here a moment, honey."

I did. Darla reached up and felt my small boobs, uplifted in their bra. "They're soft," she said. "Wouldn't you like a little more there?"

I didn't know how to answer her. "Doesn't every girl?" I said, delaying a real answer.

"Yes, I suppose so," Darla replied thoughtfully. There was a moment's silence.

Then she recovered. "Now when you're at Lisa's on Monday, remember to make an appointment to have your nails put back on again Friday afternoon. It seems wasteful to me, but that's what you'll need to do until Nick can agree to let April out of the closet." She hesitated for a moment. "Maybe at the same time Lisa will attend to other things too. You're moving along so fast, you may be ready. I'll consult with her, and we'll see."

Then she looked earnestly into my face. "Nick, from now on keep April close by and do whatever she urges."

"Why?" I asked. It sounded odd to me. Though I didn't mind keeping an imaginary friend available, letting her solve these challenges Darla kept setting up for me.

"Well," she said. "Let's just say that if we're to resume our marriage, I'm more likely to want to live with the person who wrote today's essay than the man who wrote the first week's. April is nicer than Nick. She already feels like a friend, and Nick never did. Also, I suspect the only sex you'll be getting for some time will be from April, except for servicing me in ways my dildo men can't. So you'll want to know her well. You'll yield to her whenever you have disagreements. She may put you into embarrassing situations now and then, but you'll survive them and she knows best what I want."

Suddenly Darla looked delighted about something!

"Something wrong, Mi....Miss Darla?" I asked

"Nothing at all," she replied, now grinning broadly. Then she said, "Sweetheart, listen closely. As I've said, while you're April I really can't object to your groping your man whenever you wish." Darla paused. "Or him groping you anywhere either, if you want him to. I don't think you should be deprived just because you're that closely associated with a man. So next weekend maybe we'll...." She paused, obviously delighted by her next thought. I waited.

She kept it to herself. Instead, she spoke rapidly, dismissively. "Well, all this week you'll learn from April as much as you can about women. Not just me but the woman in you. See everything through April's eyes. Use your imagination."

Unaccountably, even though I'd just blown my wad three times, when she asked me to be April my prick announced itself again. Somehow my take-charge Darla was turning me on! Or was it my take-charge April? Those pretty fingernails?

I thought about my schedule for the coming week. "I won't have time to talk to April at all during the week, Miss Darla," I said. "There are several cases coming up that need my complete attention. I'll be lucky to clear them by the weekend."

"Can you be sure they'll be cleared then?" She paused. I saw the HMO administrator in her cross her face. "Even better," she muttered to herself. She paused. Then, "Nick, sit down."

Suddenly I came aware that I'd been standing before her all this whole time, ever since I'd brought her my essay on masturbating myself. On April masturbating me. I'd been someone on trial standing at the bar, while she sat comfortably judging me.

I sat.

She spoke in earnest now. "Nick, I think we're getting somewhere at last. We need to go into high gear. This week I want you to clear your schedule for the whole of next month. Take some vacation time or something. Maybe personal time. it's surely that. A month away from the office won't be the end of the world, you've done it a few times before, and we'll both be better off for it, believe me. Think of the advantages. You'll get to know April very well in that time, how to enjoy her, how to enjoy being her. I'm hopeful that our marriage is salvageable after all, but we need to maintain the momentum. You're now where you need to be to work at it full time, beginning this coming Friday, until we've settled the matter one way or another. A month's time will tell. Can you do that, Nick? Give a whole month to pleasing me by being April full time?"

She looked at me intently, solemnly, and waited.

Could I? I sorted my mind through all the things I'd have to do to clear my schedule for the month, how to delay some things, which other things I could dump on other lawyers in my division. Issue by issue, case by case.

Finally I could say it. "Yes, Miss Darla. I can do it. It'll be difficult, but ... yes. I will. For the sake of our marriage."

Darla was transformed! She stood up and beamed! "Oh, Nick, you do feel the way I do about us after all, don't you! That's lovely! It'll be difficult, I know, but if it's any consolation, remember that April will be growing every day in her ability to help you."

All right. Plainly, Darla wanted me to live as April for a month, so my April alter ego could teach me a decent respect for all females of the species, so we could feel closer to each other, and so on. For Nick to try masquerading as a woman was silly. But being a woman came naturally to April—that's what she was. And there was no way back to what I'd once had with Darla. We had to move forward.

It was just as well. April's essays pleased Darla, and at least while I was being April I didn't need to live perpetually hard up. Pink nails at the office on Monday? Better to risk embarrassment if someone should see them than to cope with a throbbing cock all day and sleep with aching balls all night. If April can provide me with the right things to say to Darla, I was thinking, and if she'll use her gracefully manicured hands to get me off when asked, I can live with her for a month. Hell, I can live as her for a month.

Now that Darla was standing, short as she was, she seemed to tower over me. "All right Nick, back to work. Last week you expected you'd soon be giving your boyfriends blow jobs, didn't you?"

I immediately felt wary. "Did I?" I asked, stalling.

"Didn't he, April?"

I tried to be April. "Maybe sort of, I guess," I answered her. "We talked about how oral sex is one way girls cope with the demands boys make when hand jobs are no longer enough. He did speculate about how lips on lips can feel rubbery, same as lips on a cock. The idea did come up."

Darla got a wicked smile. "Can you do it as April, Nick? Give a man a blow job? Because that's your next assignment."

I stared! Did she mean really? Blow me the way April had jerked me off? I couldn't blow myself, she knew that! She must mean imagine it's April who'll give head!

"Nick could never," she continued. "He's so straight, so strapped in by so many inhibitions, so afraid to seem gay, even to himself. Men get like that. But April doesn't have that problem. So take the rest of today to get used to the idea, honey. Imagine every detail of it. Then see if April is actually willing to do it for you. Seduce her into it, stroke and fondle and caress her breasts, she'll love the attention. She'll adore feeling her breasts luxuriate under Nick's fingertips or even her own—just so she gets to feel femmy, never mind how. I'm going to give her my best nightgown to wear, and she can wear her prettiest bra under it—our nipples do feel so much lovelier when they're extended. Touch your own, April, with April's fingertips."

I did. 'Fondle her nips and she'll follow you anywhere' came to mind.

"Then Sunday April can dictate the story to you of her first blow job. She'll know how girls feel under that kind of pressure, how they feel obliged to use their mouths to avoid spreading their legs so they'll be asked out again. Maybe too because they like it, or because they feel affectionate or dominant, we talked about that too. You need to understand her, Nick, it's a stage in every girl's sexual development, and April can tell you about it. Write a definitive essay or story showing how girls feel when they want to keep their boy friends and their boy friends want blow jobs."

"I guess," I said. I wasn't looking forward to this assignment.

"You don't look happy, Nick," Darla said. "All right, forget April for the moment. Think about it yourself. Think about all those different guys' crotches, and imagine what they're like. Your own doesn't count, you'll be taking another man into your mouth, and anyway, for this exercise you won't have a cock, you'll have a cunt, so it won't be 'another' man. Think about lying alongside different guys, each time with their penises in your mouth. Or guys all lined up and you kneeling down in front of them, leaning between their legs, sucking up the best part of them? Think of all the varieties of shapes and sizes, and all for you, and all the things you can do with them. But this one's your first."

"Miss Darla!" I began. Then realized that by calling her that I'd already given up the fight, and sat quiet again.

"I'll want to know how you imagined it would be, and then I'll ask you, when you've done it, did the reality live up to your expectations? Since you aren't going anywhere tomorrow, plan to spend the whole day sucking cock! Different boys, different men, you're free to choose, you aren't going steady with anyone. Love doing it! Provide details! Describe everything vividly! I want to taste the cum in your mouth just by reading your words, and I want to feel it coating your throat. I want your tummy swollen to bursting with cum, so you can only lie there and groan. You do it, Nick, not April! Or else beg April to be you and do it for you! "

She spoke with such passion! I tried to say something, but all that came out was splutter.

Darla's mild eyes looked at me unwavering. It was as if everything we'd done thus far had been preliminary. She was perfectly sure of herself now. No apologetic angle to her head, no secret smiles or blinking and looking away. Her mouth curved in an encouraging half-smile. She sat down again, and stretched her legs under the table, and tilted her chair way back, and she clasped her hands behind her neck, still gazing steadily at me. Her wrists looked more delicate than ever as they poked out from the sleeves of an oversized shirt of mine she'd claimed as hers long ago. I felt odd, sitting there in my bra and panties and skirt and blouse, as if she were now the man of the family and I was the girl!

Was she joking? I'd imagine it and then I'd describe an actual blow job? No, she'd said it carefully enough, at first in that same small, nursery school voice she always used to ask for things. I'd imagine anticipating it, then I'd imagine the reality.

"Does Nick will take this cock into his mouth, or does April?" I asked cautiously.

"Is there a difference? Should there be? If Nick feels attracted to another boy, shouldn't we know that about him right now? I mean, gay men are almost as much fun to go out with as girlfriends—we all cruise for the same hunks. I can live with a gay man."

Now the big question. "During this ... ah, exercise, will you want me to measure my imaginary cocksucking against a ... a real ...?" I asked in a small voice. I couldn't quite say it.

She didn't move. Nor say anything. She leaned back with that half-smile with her hands clasped behind her neck and just looked at me. Then, "Will you want to?"

I found my voice. "Darla, this is ...!" I realized I was too tense—I'd better regain control fast—I took a deep breath, then another, and then I changed the words and tried to say them more quietly. They still came out exasperated, a little. "Miss Darla, that's it? Tomorrow all day you want me to write out how a girl feels when she gives some guy a blow job?"

"No, that's not what I said." Her eyes never left me. She seemed pleased that once again I'd controlled myself, that my manly pride had cracked and buckled under. "What I said was, you'll write out how it felt the first time YOU wanted to give a boy a blow job and then did it. Was it everything you'd hoped it would be? I want you to describe the entire act in great detail, every last thing you can imagine. Its sights, sounds, smells, tastes, everything. I want you to imagine details you can't even begin to imagine right now. I want you to really get into it. When I read whatever you write down I'll want to believe that it all happened. Use the first person. If you can't be Nick exulting that he's finally come out to himself, queer and here and loving it, then be April. April's comfortable with boys, she was once a boy herself remember. Whether this thing happened recently, since our marriage, or before we met, that can be your decision."

That idea tickled her. "Maybe all these years when I've been dressed in my prettiest and waiting for you to come home to my delicious supper, you've been late because you had to stop first at the Athletic Club, you wanted to sit with the boys and hoist a few cocks into your mouth?"

I was appalled. Silent.

She continued relentlessly. "I'll want to know whether your lips enjoyed sliding up and down on him, how cum feels when it first spurts into your mouth, what it tastes like when it goes into your tummy. Is it true that it feels hot, or only warm? You now know something about the feel of it in your mouth. Use that! Then there's this. Does the man's cum inside you made you feel more affectionate toward him, more loving, more like a real woman who knows that all those sperms are now swimming around inside her looking for their egg?"

Had she gone bonkers? No, she was trying to lead me where I'd never wish to go. April would need to do most of this. I'd given it little enough thought. I'd always been the one getting blown.

"Again, if you find you have to be a guy to do this, you can't do it as a girl, if it's Nick, not April who takes that cock into her mouth, then that's good to know. And if it's Nick, then is he under duress or is he queer? If queer, shouldn't I let him go, give him his divorce, leave him free to find more suitable partners?"

She nodded to herself, not yet ready to let go the subject. "You've already kissed a boy in your imagination. Maybe you felt shy, but from the way you described it, I'd say more than one boy. So what's the big deal? Nick, I've got to say it, it's hard to understand why you men get so frantic when you're asked to put a little piece of another man into your mouths to give him pleasure—you never seem to mind sucking on women, after all. Sucking on a tit is good but sucking on a cock is bad? What about women who suck cocks, then?"

I clamped my mouth tight shut. She knew her logic made no logical sense, and she knew I'd never be persuaded by it. She was just trying to accustom me to the idea. It was working, too. Sucking one body part did seem no more perverse than sucking on any other.

"OK," was all I said, and I looked down. "I get it. Enough. I'll spend all day tomorrow sucking an imaginary cock. And then you really will bring in some real guy for me to measure it against?" I had to ask her again, because she could so easily do it! "So whatever I write sounds authentic?"

She shot forward suddenly, chair straight, leaning toward me on the table, her gaze never wavering. "No, Nick," she said. "You aren't woman enough to deserve a real guy." Then when she saw my shocked expression and real relief in my face, she added slowly, "Not yet."

Then she looked me up and down deliberately, derisively. I'd been put in my place for daring to mock her intentions. "You aren't April until you want to be, and then wake up delighted to find you are," she said. "Right now you're still only a man wearing a bra and panties and skirt." She looked away from me contemptuously, then added, "I tell you what, to test for authenticity, I'll compare whatever you imagine for yourself with my own cocksucking experiences."

That really shocked me!

Darla didn't suck cock! She'd never! Not with me, not even with me! Not even when she was in the throes of passion and couldn't cram enough of me into her! Never in high school, she'd told me that, though lots of high school girls do give head, it was true, how else can they stop boys from pushing stiff cocks into their warm, slippery pussies after hours of making out and fingering and sniffing them. In college she'd told me when we first dated that she was saving her mouth for the man she'd marry. That turned out to be me. Then after our wedding she told me she wanted her mouth to be hers alone, inviolable, fit for kissing but otherwise no part of the deal. I'd gone along with that too—we were starting a life together, and my respecting her most intimate feelings mattered. What I knew about them, anyhow. I was finding out more now.

"I don't understand," I said. "What cocksucking? You've never given head to anyone. Not to me, for sure. How am I different? Why do you expect me to imagine that I'm a cocksucker when what you've given me to understand until right now is that you're not, and the purpose of all this is to help me understand you better?"

I was babbling. She'd gotten to me, and was pleased. "Nick, I was younger than you're imagining yourself when I began dating. I never told you I never sucked cock. Only that I didn't in high school. A girl does different things with different boys. If it's physical, then she does physical things. With a friend of like mind, she talks. And with a likely marriage partner, she's very careful. You and I were serious almost from the beginning. When a girl's setting up for the long haul she's watchful about precedents, about the boy's expectations, about letting them slide out of control. It's true, I've never sucked your cock." She hesitated a moment, then stopped talking.

"You gave some guy head once, and then you wouldn't do it for me, even after we got engaged?" I was feeling hurt and angry. Jealous! Cheated!

She took control, forcefully. "Nick, consider this. If I did suck on a prick before we got married, and I'm not saying I did or I didn't, why do you assume it was only once? And only one prick? And how do you know when? How do you know there haven't been any since we got engaged? Or married? How do you know my first time wasn't last week when I went out nicely dressed and left you watching the TV, and then came back horny with an unused cunt? Or that that wasn't the tenth time?"

My mouth fell open. My painted mouth. My made-up eyes were wide open. The truth is, I didn't know. Not anything.

A gleam came into her eye. "Yes, Karen told me she called right after I left the house and you took the message. So you felt safe, didn't you, sure that I wasn't out on a date with some man. But how do you know I didn't ask Karen to call so you'd think I was visiting her and never guess that I was in fact on my way somewhere else? With our marriage on hold, I can do anything I want, can't I? We're in a relationship now, not a marriage. We're testing out whether we have a future together. I don't owe you anything. Do I?"

She looked at me intently. This was her HMO administrative manner at its most severe—if a subordinate balks, show how he's between a rock and a hard place. I recognized the tactic, but it worked anyhow. She saw my resentful facial expression turn belly up, and she moved in for the coup de grace. "Shall we cancel this learning experience now? End this relationship? Is that what you want?"

I was intimidated completely. I couldn't utter a word.

"I thought not. So you'll do what you're told! You'll think about how to suck a boy's cock so he'll fall all over himself wanting to ask you out again! You'll think about how you'll dress up to look so attractive that he'd surely want you to take him into your mouth!" A gleam came into her eye. "You'll think about what color lipstick you'll wear to make your mouth more attractive! That rose shade you've got on is pretty, but wouldn't something brighter, more crimson, pull him into your face sooner and bring him off faster? So afterward, when he sees traces of bright red lipstick circling the base of his cock, he'll have especially romantic thoughts about you? Maybe send you flowers? Think right now about what kind of a vase you'll need to put them in, and what kinds of warm thoughts you'll have as you decide where to put them. How you'll explain them to me when I come home from the office. If you can't be April, will you lie to me, or will you confess that you saw this lovely cock and couldn't resist it? You need to be April! If you can't be, then walk out of here and go to the nearest gay bar and suck a dozen dicks and come back and tell me all about it, and maybe I'll take you back as my live-in gay boyfriend. Because I won't want you any other way!"

And still stiff, still angry, she walked out of the room, her hips swishing and her skirt swinging. This was pure raw female power, I felt it in the way she walked away from me, flirtatious and furious at once! I clamped my mouth shut and followed her out with my eyes.

But the fact was, I didn't know any of the answers any more. I resolved to do what I was told, whatever April wanted me to do. I sat there. Then I went back into my study and went to work, imagining oral sex scenes and situations for the first time in my life with greater intensity and in more detail than I could ever have imagined!

Hours later, around midnight, Darla came in looking exactly as earlier, every hair in place, carrying another plate of finger sandwiches. I was still sitting there sketching drafts and making notes, my skirt up and my panties down, staring at April's red-tipped hand wrapped around my cock while trying to imagine it was a mouth. I was wondering how an imaginary girl like me might manage to persuade an imaginary boy to surrender his cock to my mouth. Why should he? Why should he trust that I wouldn't bite?

"Here, doll. I thought you might be hungry," she said, her voice kindly. "I see you do take this assignment seriously. That's good—it's the most transformative task I'll be giving you, except for some of the field exercises of course. But it's late. I think you've done enough for tonight."

"Yes," I said. There wasn't much more I could say to her just yet. I felt way off balance. Did she or didn't she? Would I? Apart from my imagination, I mean.

"You can do a mini-field-exercise now. One I think you'll like."

She told me to fetch a half a glass of warm water from the bathroom. I did. She then told me to place it on the floor, take off my skirt, lower my panties, and crawl over it. I did that too. Then to my amazement she said, "All this is so stressful for you, I understand that. You deserve a reward. Ask April to masturbate you until you cum. But when you cum, be sure to cum under water. Dip your tip deep in the water when you feel yourself about to climax.

I couldn't believe what she was telling me. But April's hand reached gracefully for my cock and began to pull and stroke it as I supported myself over the glass of warm water on the other hand and my knees. Weird, but incredibly pleasant, I felt joy rise up between my legs while my groin was in a doggy position and April's hand was reaching for it between my rear thighs. Darla watched it all. When my climax pushed past a point of no return, April stopped stroking and held me rigid as I humped down and pushed my penis as far under water as I could, and felt the pulsing but saw that the squirting remained invisible. The warm water felt nice. My pleasure, my relief, my elation from that climax was overwhelming.

Darla enjoyed seeing it. "You liked that, didn't you, sweetheart," she observed.

"Yes," I said, still a little breathless.

"It wasn't humiliating that your former wife saw the whole thing?"

"No, ma'am," I replied, though it was, a little, now that she mentioned it.

"Good. Now ask April what you should do with that glass of warm diluted cum."

I didn't need to ask. April spoke for me. I wanted to. "Drink it all down like a good little wanker," she said abruptly.

Of course. It was a lovely preliminary act, a way to get accustomed to the undiluted cum that was still gagging my throat each time my mind tried to swallow it. So April's hand brought the glass to my lips and I quaffed, then swallowed down the watery, glutinous mess. I could hardly tell what it was—warm water with slightly salty mucous?

"You like it, honey?" Darla asked

I nodded. I liked getting off, anyhow. My mouth now had an odd feel.

"Your own sperm swimming in warm water can be a very comforting bed-time drink, Nick. Yummy in your tummy. Nourishing. I'm glad. April will provide a fresh glass for you whenever you ask her."

She then paused, waiting for me to say something. Had it come to this? But finally I said it. "Thank you, Miss Darla. I appreciate it."

"Good," Darla said. "You should. This re-education plan is working out so well for us! I don't want to keep you up, but just a little more talk girl to girl? I've laid out a pretty nightie for April to wear, so you can feel properly amorous when you snuggle up to her and reach for her breasts. Why don't you change into it? Oh yes, be sure that Michelle confirms both your appointments with Lisa. She'll love helping you begin your life as a woman."

"My life? This isn't just for a month?"

Darla smiled enigmatically, as charming as ever. "Even if for only a month, it's your life. You need to think of it as a lifetime, or you won't enter into the right frame of mind—no girl is ever a girl for only a month. Have you decided yet how you'll spend your Monday at the office, in pink nails or gloves or pockets?"

The pink nails were tempting, but my life as April had to be hidden from the office staff. How could I explain her? Though Michelle it seems already knew more about me than I did. She even knew the end-state where Darla was taking me, and I knew now that I didn't. "Gloves," I said. "I have a pair that'll do. These nails are too long to look like a man's anyhow. People would wonder."

"They certainly would," Darla said, reaching for one of her thin sandwiches. "Here, have just a few of these fingerlings. We do need to pay serious attention to April's figure. She's attractive, but she could be moreso. In fact we could both do with a few pounds less in the waist."

I looked at Darla's waistline and shook my head, and she dismissed my judgment yet accepted the compliment with a single pretty, intricate twist of her head, all wordlessly. I should learn to do things like that, I thought, gesture with my neck and head like that, since that's what women do and men would never dare. I tried, but all that came out was a shrug. I then reached out and took up a fingerling sandwich, and admiring the jewel-like brilliance of my fingertips, daintily began eating it. Darla observed all this but said nothing.

We talked a bit about women's voices—Darla wanted me to speak more in keeping with the way I looked and made suggestioons now and then. And we then watched a late late show on the tube together, as in the old days. Darla giggled at it now and then the way she always did, and I confess, I did too sometimes. I could almost imagine there'd been no change in our lives. She reached out to hold hands with me, playing absent-mindedly with my gleaming red-tipped fingers, glancing at them now and then with an almost proprietary air. Except for my nails, and my face, and my skirt and blouse, and my little boobs, it was just like the old days. She gently pressed one of my hands against her soft breast and held it there, then lifted and kissed it before setting it back down in my lap. I was trying. I could feel her genuine affection for me. When we went up to bed together, she turned in the doorway to our bedroom, hers now, and gave me a gentle kiss on the lips. "Go make love to April," she whispered. "Love being April, darling."

I went to bed, and as I drifted away I found that April's hands had already begun to caress my nipples. Or were those my hands on hers. How did Darla know it would feel so excruciatingly delicious? Then April reached down and took hold of my cock again. With very little effort I imagined her leaning over it and sucking it. I imagined me leaning over and sucking hers, or Nick's. I knew how she was enjoying the feel of it in my mouth. I realized that with her help I could write a story about the first boy I ever gave head that would make Darla incredibly proud. Finally I exploded into April's hand, and she fed me the spillover from her palm, little by little, and it went down smoothly. And then I slept well.

Fourth Week—Sunday

When I woke, April gave Nick yet another seductive hand job. At first I just watched, but as I really got into it I joined in with her and pulled gently on it too, that man's lovely cock, as it aroused and went rampant. When it squirted, I delicately licked all of the goo out of the palm of my own hand. Her hand. Yum. Again I liked it. Salty and creamy and slick. Swallowing cum is easy, no problem, what's all the fuss about? I was thinking. I'd remember to include in my essay how a whole mouthful of cum can feel good going down in one swallow, like a whole oyster. I wanted Darla to know I knew.

Darla spent much of that Sunday on the phone, talking from our bedroom, chatting with Becky and other women I didn't know about the course and no doubt also about their achievements with their own husbands. At least I assumed so from the occasional squeals of incredulous laughter that passed through the closed door. I glanced at a Harlequin Romance Darla had left on the sofa. The heroine hated putting her hair up each night and had gotten it cut short and cute. She was now worried that her boyfriend might not like it. My hair was still curled from Friday, but I wondered that same thing, and I didn't even have a boyfriend! Not until I began writing.

I wrote a marvelous story about myself as a young girl, my at-first shy, then gradually skilled, finally bold adventures in the tube trade. It was the story of my imagination's conversion to womanhood. It began as standard male disgust—supposedly the girl's—at the thought even of touching those pimpled things men hang down there. But I found that after a beautiful experience sucking off her first young man, she as me had grown curious and then bold about the other kinds of pleasure other men might find in my mouth. It ended with a full bodied celebration of the devotion one woman can feel toward one special beloved penis, but also a paeon of praise and love for all kinds as they slide in and out of all of a woman's openings and especially of her mouth. My openings. My mouth. In my mind I had became a devout lover, a high priestess of penises.

When Darla finished reading it, she was deeply moved. "Thank you, April, thank you, Nick." She swallowed and then recovered herself. "That was just beautiful," she said to me. "I'm overwhelmed!"

She waited, and gathered her thoughts, then spoke. "It's so tender, yet so passionate. When the boy treated her with such contempt after she'd done so much for him, swallowed him and deep throated him over and over, and yet he broke her heart, I felt so sorry and angry. And then when she got her revenge, when she was engaged to the wealthiest man in town and her first lover was reduced to begging her, pleading with her to let him suck her fiance's cock, just so he could keep his job, and she finally allowed him to suck their dog's, I had to exult! I'm so moved that you've given cocksucking so much thought, its politics as well as its pleasures. I'm so very proud of you! You've come such a long way."

And she kissed me on the cheek. "It's so marvelous that she never gives head twice the same way to the same man. That she loves so many penises yet settles at last for only one. That's so much like life. If only we could all of us find that one, true penis, the one fate created us for."

And she kissed me again, her tongue intruding into my mouth this time. Burying itself there. I was blissful. "I'm going out tonight, baby," she whispered. "I'm not sure for how long. A previous engagement. Don't worry about me, I'll come back, and I know now that you'll be here. Keep April company and enjoy yourselves." And she herself began to caress my breast. On its nipple. I was in raptures, and nearly swooned before she ended it with a quiet "Yes!" spoken to herself.

She did go out that evening for her engagement, or appointment, or date, I didn't know which and had no way to find out. Dressed very well indeed, heels and a flirty skirt and hair up, as if she meant to go dancing. I felt so confused. I was delighted by her praise, but I was uneasy about where she'd gone, and not at all sure what she meant by the last thing she'd said about looking for the one true penis intended for each of us. Did she mean mine? Was she still searching for hers?

Suddenly I felt so alone. Deserted by my wife and by my own former self. I began to weep. April came to console me and I clung to her, wishing with all my heart that I could be as strong as she was, and as beautiful. That I could be her.

"Don't worry, baby," I whispered to myself as she reached to pull yet again on my penis, Nick's penis, and in my overwrought imagination began to suck on it even as I reached to caress her distended nipples and ascend to paradise. "It'll happen. It's happening now." And it was true! I pulled off Nick's prick and finished him off while fondling the nipples on my own breasts. Then again, and then left him alone and fondled myself. My breasts felt fabulous! Bliss, bliss!

When Darla got home around midnight I was still awake and in the living room, my body exhausted from repeated orgasms, all the cum I could catch or scoop into my palms swallowed down, my blouse open and my bra unfastened and my fingers working my small nipples. Though she looked tired and slightly flushed, even so, she looked me up and down speculatively, clearly wondering whether or not to lean back in her easy chair and open her legs to my face yet again. "No, I'll leave you with your own taste in your mouth this time," she said aloud to me. "I'll just shower."

She did. Then in the morning when I brought in her early breakfast she was surprised and grateful, and threw back the bedcovers and invited me to graze on her as she ate, to suck up her juices and swallow them down and mingle them with my own. I did. She tasted only of the soap from her shower the night before and of her own sweet self. I loved it. My dear, my own pussy.

Fifth Week—Monday:

As I dressed for work this last week before taking my month-long vacation, my long nails proved troublesome, and since it was still early I returned to Darla's room to ask for help fastening my bra and buttoning my shirt.

"You intend to wear a bra full time this week?" she asked me. "Even to the office?"

I'd realized only then that I'd gotten so accustomed to wearing bras that I wasn't aware I was dressing for the office with one. It seemed so natural. And felt so nice. Women wear bras for their boobs. I have little ones. Why not? Anyhow, now that she'd seen it I couldn't back away.

"You're wonderful!" was all she said, and she hooked it for me and buttoned my shirt over it..

When I came down to gather my briefcase and leave, Darla stared at my chest. A shadow of lace was visible where my breasts poked out against the shirt fabric. I looked down and saw, and regretted my oversight. The previous week and especially the last three days had made wearing it feel so normal, so comfortable, that I'd slid it over my arms and begun to hook it to my chest, then asked for her help, all without thinking. Yet I recalled my last night's sessions with April. As April. Having breasts with nipples poking out had just felt so good! I told Darla this.

She paused and smiled. "You enjoy your breasts that much? I'm so pleased for you, honey," she said. "More and more, I find I'm living with my lovely girlfriend April, not poor sweet ineffectual Nick. For now, you can button your jacket and no one will know. In your own office unbutton everything if you wish. I know Michelle won't be the least surprised to see how well you're coming along."

Then on impulse, as if on impulse, she said, "Since you enjoy your nipples so very much, let me help you!" She dipped quickly into a top drawer of her bureau and came up with a pill bottle. "Here," she said. "Emma gave me these to give you in case you asked for something. They'll do very well for now. Take two now and two this evening, and we'll see what else Emma can recommend as things develop."

"They'll do?" I asked, staring suspiciously at them. "Do what? And who's Emma?"

"Help your nipples poke out just a little bit more, and give you a lot more erogenous sensitivity. Help them feel better, more delightful. Emma's our HMO's resident endocrinologist. When I told her how happy you are with your new little breasts, she recommended these to help you feel even happier."

"I don't know," I said, turning the bottle over in my hand, as if the pills inside would look different from the other side.

"Just ask yourself, 'What would April do?' You're April, what do you want? She loves those breasts, and she's ecstatic about the way she feels when they're caressed. Baby, you're about to spend a while month as April! And you've already had your first period, for goodness sake, you've gone through the unpleasant part already. How can you deny yourself the good part?"

I guessed I couldn't. Darla brought me a glass of water and watched closely as I swallowed the first two pills. "Mmmmmmmmmmm," she said. "Now say goodbye to Nick."

"What?" I said, a little startled.

"I said, 'Goodbye, Nick!'" she called back to me. And she was gone, one hand high and waving to me by rotating it at the wrist, out the door toward her car.

It was time I went too. She was right about my suit jacket—buttoned, the bra and my small breasts couldn't be seen. I found an old pair of driving gloves I could wear to the office to hide my pretty red fingernails, and then went off to work myself.

People noticed the gloves but I can't say anyone cared. In fact I found during a negotiation that by thrusting my hands into my jacket pockets I could look twice as stubborn and get twice as large a settlement for my client (a large part of it for my firm, and a large bonus for me), though my pockets did sag afterward. Michelle made some cryptic comment about people who hide their talents under a bushel, but her smile was so friendly that I decided not to pursue what she meant. Instead, as Darla had suggested, I asked her to call Lisa's Beauty Salon for me to make an appointment for late this afternoon "to do my nails," and another for my total makeover on Friday. That quieted her down some.

I then began the arduous task of clearing and transferring my work load for the "personal time" I'd decided to take—a full month. Everyone was cooperative—I'd been putting in long hours under stress for months, they didn't know why I hadn't cracked sooner, and they hoped I'd come back a new man. That seemed uncertain. I didn't know myself where this was going. "I'll come back different, anyhow," was all I could promise. That much was clear. I hoped that by then at least my marriage would be revalidated.

I needed to talk with someone about this whole spouse consciousness-raising venture. A lunch with Jason was overdue—he certainly wouldn't be surprised by my manicure. So I called him again, and told him about my nails right off, how I couldn't show them to anyone because they were manicured, not today, anyhow.

He wasn't impressed. "Only your hands?" he asked, this time in a little girl's voice with a faint lisp. "And only just this past weekend? Oh, Nickie, some day you must tell me all about how you got away with it, you really must! Becky's been so much more demanding. Right now I'm on leave from the office, and I'm not sure where I am, your call was forwarded to my home and then to me here. I live here now, and its very nice. I have a playroom, and Becky visits me almost every day."

"You aren't working any more?"

"I'm on paid sick leave. It's funny. A week ago I went to the office to clear my desk, dressed just like this, the way Becky wants me to look, and my partners practically pushed me onto the freight elevator and out of the building. Maybe it was the hair ribbon that freaked them. But I don't care, I think it's pretty!"

He said he thought we could meet for coffee tomorrow afternoon "if you promise not to laugh." But an hour later someone who called herself Jason's nanny called Michelle to say that Jason wasn't able to leave the house or have visitors, and all her appointments had been canceled for the foreseeable. A shame, but she was on medical leave after all. No, she could not be reached.

Except maybe through Becky, I muttered to myself as Michelle relayed the message. Obviously Jason's only advice to me would have been "go along with it, ride it out, hope for the best," as he was doing. Go the distance and see where you end up was my policy now too. There are compensations, and if you don't like it you can always back out and away and then quit. Maybe. A shame if you must, I thought, for the moment aware of the lovely way my bra was hugging me and meanwhile snuggling each of my little breasts in a separate embrace. My hands—still April's under the gloves—crept up to tease my erect nipples. Were they a little more extended since I'd taken those pills this morning? No, that wasn't possible. But they did feel good!

On my way home that evening I stopped at Lisa's Salon to have them remove my long nails. It was my first visit, and I felt uneasy walking into the place, all pink and mirrors with large photo murals on the walls of well-coiffed, confident women, and more of them on the pastel covers of magazines stacked here and there in the waiting room. And of course all sorts of actual women lined up there, working and being worked over. When I identified myself, the receptionist told me my wife had left detailed instructions.

"You're to leave all of Friday afternoon free, April," she said to me without batting an eye. "It'll take quite a few hours to do everything properly. Your appointment's for one o'clock, and you may not be finished before six."

Apparently Darla had referred to me by my girl name. Here, I was April. My face turned crimson, and it was still crimson when Bette, the manicurist, walked me through the roomful of women and sat me down at a table between two other women also being manicured at their tables.

"Take off your jacket and those gloves, honey, and roll up your sleeves," Bette said cheerily. Now there was nothing for it. I did. I saw with the one glance I allowed myself that my bra was fully visible through the thin white shirt fabric. The two other women glanced at it, then at my bright-red nails, then at me, and then averted their eyes, though high eyebrows and a slight smile persisted on one woman's face. They tried politely not to listen, and failed.

"It's just as well you're losing these, honey," Bette said as she set my fingers soaking. "Darla means well, but she's no expert. This Friday I'll give you a full set, inch-long and much stronger, and shaped properly. Even I won't be able to get them off. You'll feel fabulous every time you look at them. All my customers love them."

I tried to smile my agreement, but not much emerged. I wished I'd come to this place completely done up to look like a woman, hiding myself in that disguise so I wouldn't so obviously look like a freak, like a strange male sissy. Like what I was. The two women alongside weren't missing a word.

Bette grinned slyly and kept going. "What I give you'll be much more attractive than these, April. Oooh, your wife has such wonderful plans for you -- when we fix your lips to match, the way she wants them, every guy who sees you will cream in his jeans. 'Gorgeous' won't begin to describe how you'll end up."

I turned an even brighter shade of red, and I barely heard her saying something about how lucky I was, because given the shape of my face I have my choice of a half-dozen hair styles, all easy care and cute, really attractive. What was Darla telling people? Did she actually want me to look attractive? To men? So I could imagine myself that kind of woman? "I'd rather not attract men," I said in an almost inaudible but acceptable feminine voice.

"Oh, don't be ashamed," Bette said reassuringly. "Every woman's hairdresser is her confidante. I have transsexual gay men as regular customers, or anyhow they used to be men, you could never tell now. And some transsexual women. The stories they tell about people hitting on them? You'll soon be in on things even your wife doesn't know. But you're my first full-time transvestite. There!"

My hands were finally free of nail tips and lacquer and now looked a little bare. It crossed my mind I should have jerked off one more time before beginning the week's enforced abstinence. Too late now. Would Darla let me fondle my breasts, such as they were? Yes, my hands weren't April's any more, but my breasts certainly were, maybe more than ever, and Nick loved to caress them. And I wanted him to.

"Cheer up, honey," the woman to my left said. "It takes a while, learning how to handle men. But you've got the basics, good bones, good looks, and a good salon, and you'll find that in the end it's worth it!"

"Marcia!" the woman to my right replied to her. "Shame on you! Justifying your own immoral little adventures? 'In the end it's worth it'?"

"Well," Marcia replied, "The adventure is what makes it worth it. What are you planning to tell Harry about where you and Brett are going tonight?"

When I got home Darla was in the living room going through a hair-style selection book. "Darla," I said with no preliminaries, "Everyone at your salon seems to know about me."

She didn't seem to hear.

"Miss Darla, I mean."

She glanced up, then looked at me. "Know what about you?"

Her eyes were cool, steady.

"About April, I mean," I was beginning to sound petulant, even to myself. "About our sex life, I mean."

"There isn't anything to know, honey. There isn't any sex life."

"I mean about my...ahhh... about April... my hands were.... Do you think that's right?"

She seemed baffled. "They're your hands, they needed attention, they do manicures, so there's nothing to be ashamed of. I also told them what they'll need to know this Friday to make sure you finish as beautiful as I want you to be. That's for our mutual benefit. They're your salon now too, April. Get used to it."

Then she set her magazine down into her lap and turned to face me directly.

"Nick, I've been thinking today. I want things to happen even more quickly. I don't want to live with Nick's inadequacies any more. Beginning now and for the next month I want you to feel that you're April and nobody else, full time. This week April is the only person I want to see when you're here in this house, except when you're going out the door to your office or returning from there. Not Nick. Beginning now I don't want to hear that condescending growl of his ever again—speak to me in a higher voice, please, a little less domineering, more plaintive and ladylike, more congenial. More sweetly melodic. I want to see and hear only my dear friend April."

I was a little troubled, though the prospect of becoming or remaining her 'dear friend' was attractive. "You want me to be like Jason?" My voice was strained and high, and it came out almost pleading.

Her eyes barely flickered. "That's not bad," she said, apparently referring to my voice. Then, "You've spoken to Jason? No, I don't think you'll need two months for your conversion, like Jason, not for what I want for you. This one month should do it—you're mostly there now! Becky thinks the operative procedures on Jason's weenie, as she calls it, needs two months because that's how long it'll take to heal. He probably has no idea what she's planning. If they've begun I doubt he knows anything at all right now. Last year it took five months for Roger to get presentable enough to come work for us. But he had much more extensive surgery than Jason's. You wouldn't know him now."

Time for things to heal? On Jason? What could that be for? Nose jobs and breast enlargements I understood, transpeople do those things, but his weenie? What were these women doing to him?

"Jason doesn't know anything? What do you mean?"

"He's pretty much out of it. Hypno-therapy and drugs. Becky gave up trying to make him act more girlish, he has no talent for it, and decided instead to take him all the way back to infancy so he can begin again as a girl, so he'll never know he wasn't. There are places that do that."

I decided I didn't want to know any more about it. Becky'd always had a peculiar streak, almost sadistic, though Jason had somehow never seemed to notice it. He'd always seemed a bit odd himself. Now he was certainly moreso. And what about Roger? Was anything left of that good old sonofabitch? I didn't dare ask. Plainly though. it would not do to make Darla angry with me.

"Now, I'd appreciate it if you'd go into the kitchen and put together something for dinner. You're in charge there from now on, April, it's your kitchen. That's only appropriate. I work. Oh, that's after you change and make your face presentable as usual." She returned to her magazine.

I work too, this week, I thought but didn't dare say. Darla was in charge. I like cooking anyhow, so I had no problem fixing up a treat for both of us. A glance at the fridge and pantry revealed plenty to work with, I'd shop in next week when there'd be more time. When we went up to bed together I saw Darla to her door as always, and as she went in, I nodded and started to pass on. She suddenly turned and seized me around the neck, and pressed her soft lips against mine while her arms locked my face against hers. I could scarcely breathe.

"There!" she said, breaking off finally. "I didn't want you to go to sleep with the wrong impression. You're marvelous, a real doll for going along with me like this, Nick! I love you for it, though that doesn't change anything. Don't be so worried. This next month will be the best vacation in the world for you! You'll have nothing to do, and you'll let April attend to everything. You'll make yourself scarce, in fact invisible. Just think April!

As I started down the hall toward my own room, she called after me, "Remember, April, your hands are not April's now—they aren't manicured. You do have breasts though, so if you're willing, Nick can explore them for your pleasure. Not his. April does not have a penis, and her hands can't be allowed to touch Nick's while he's not in residence. So forget about letting Nick roam around around there. April's other places are all allowed of course."

This disembodiment was beginning to sound like something more for a philosopher than a lawyer. But I got her point. A woman is a woman. I can't say I hadn't wanted to be one when I was in the Salon being something less than a man, or at least to hide inside one.

"Oh yes," she called out to me. "Remember to take your breast pills tonight and again when you wake up. Tomorrow we'll start you on stronger ones Emma's providing. She says they're fabulous, that in no time you'll grow udders that hang to the ground! She's joking, I think. Nighty-night!

The rest of that week I unloaded my work at the office and did the cooking and serving at home, and I took Emma's new pills morning and evening, and I dressed and made up as a woman as soon as I got home, no problem, because I was already wearing my lingerie. We hadn't made love now—had sex, Darla would say—for a month, over a month. But otherwise life was pretty much the same. Darla chatted about procedural problems at her office, and personnel problems with her staff, and I advised her about tactics and restrictions and legalities, and the personnel problems I left to her—where people were concerned she was way ahead of me. But all of my advice was offered much more tentatively, much less authoritatively than before. A few times she had to ask me to remember to speak in a higher pitch, or to soften my voice, or to ask questions more and declare opinions less, as women tend to do. So I did. On Thursday she allowed me to lie in her bed and suck on her pussy and then her breasts, and she sucked on my breasts.

"Fascinating, April!" she said. "They're swelling up already." And her lips closed over a turgid nipple and I went sweetly ballistic. "I know we're doing the right thing!"

Fifth Week—Friday

Friday morning Darla reminded me to dress down casually in sneakers and jeans and a turtleneck. "So you don't stand out," she said. She meant at the salon, I think, not in my crotch, which was partly swollen again for lack of April's ministry or Darla's sexual favors. She loaned me an oversized denim jeans jacket that just barely fit. When I commented that it buttoned right over left instead of the other way, she told me she knew, and that she wanted anyone at my office who bothered to look to know too—I should begin to get accustomed to appearing as April in public, and this was a teeny first step. "But no one ever notices," she said.

Almost no one. No men, anyhow. At lunch time I cleared away some last paperwork and said my farewells to the staff. "I'll miss you," Michelle told me, giving me a hug and a light kiss on the cheek. "But I'm sure we'll see each other. I love your jacket. Gloria Vanderbilt, isn't it? Her gear is so distinctive, you can always tell."

"I guess I can't," I replied, neither affirming nor denying it. Truth is, I had no idea.

"Any girl can," Michelle replied. "Everyone here noticed. You will in time."

So Darla had exposed me to ... to what? Not ridicule, that hadn't happened. She'd wanted me to hint what was happening without my realizing it? So I'd worn a woman's jeans jacket, and all the women in the office knew. I then realized what I'd learned. Some admired it, and none cared.

Because it was a rare warm October day I decided to leave my car in the office's underground garage and walk the few blocks to Lisa's. The receptionist recognized me at once. "Oh, yes, honey. Here you are. April, makeover, see wife's notations." She took out a folder and called Bette over. "You're first," she said. "This time the full treatment. And Greta. Then pass this folder on to Diana, then to Marcy, would you? Room Six for the whole afternoon." She looked over the pages of paper in my folder, Darla's instructions I assumed. "She isn't kidding, is she?" she said. I didn't know what she meant, but I nodded. Darla rarely kidded.

She looked back up at me. "You know, with all the decisions already made, this will get pretty boring for you, honey. And you won't be able to browse the magazines a lot of the time because there'll be pads on your eyes to protect them from the lasers, and again when we're fixing the pigmentation on your eyelids. A lot of our women like to doze through procedures like these. So if you'd rather, take this with a sip of water, and it'll all go much faster. No problem, it's made from all-natural ingredients."

She handed me a teeny white pill. I took it and washed it down with water from the paper cup she also handed me. Bette then claimed me. "How can pills not be natural?" I asked as she led me to Room Six. "Unless they're supernatural, made by witches." That seemed to me funny. A number of the women we passed grinned at us as I went by. "Do they think that's funny?" I asked Bette. I was getting giddy. That was quite a pill!

"They didn't hear you, April honey," Bette said equably. "But Lisa's talked with lots of us about what's about to happen to you, and some are glad for you, and some are amused. The fact is, we do lots of men here. Drag Queens mostly. But now and then husbands with wives who have their reasons."

She glanced at me, then continued. "You see that woman over there, for instance? We did them both before their divorce, full day makeovers. Poor Marge. She thought that if her husband looked more like her, they'd agree with each other more often, have more in common and less tendency to quarrel. They were trying to save their marriage the way you're trying to save yours. It didn't work. He left her."

I looked where she indicated, and saw a woman in her thirties getting her hair set in what Bette told me was a retro-mod style. I thought the rest of her a little extreme too—too much make-up and way too short a skirt, and I said so. "Marge seems to be trying too hard," I said. "Did she always? Could that be why her husband left her?"

"That's not Marge," Bette said. "Marge is in the Bahamas with her new boyfriend. That's Harvey, her ex, he's getting prettied for a date with his new boyfriend. That's what they have in common these days."

I confess it, after that pill I was feeling no pain. Natural? I sat down in a huge padded barber chair of some kind, and Bette cranked it back, and I'm ashamed to say it but I mellowed out and then conked out.

I woke up dreaming I was a Frankenstein monster strapped to a table with electrodes in my head. It was no dream. A plump woman with a pleasant face was leaning over me, a huge needle thing in her hands, poking ratatat at my face with it, though I couldn't really feel the pricking. Someone else was pulling on my hair.

"Back with us?" the plump woman said. "I'm Greta. Laser zapping made easy—you can doze through the rest of it too if you wish. Diana's almost done with your hair, and then Marcy'll do your make-up, and then you can go. Next week I'll see you again, and then there'll be no more shaving, ever. A face like a baby's behind. Your wife won't know if you're her boyfriend or her girlfriend when you nuzzle her ass, not from the feel of your face. A behind like a baby's behind too, we also waxed your body while you were out." She ratatated some more here and there and then stood back.

"How long...?" I began to say.

"Forever!" Greta said. "That beard is gone! Oh, you mean how long have you been out? Three or four hours maybe. We're nearly done. I've been here the whole time doing your beard and body hair with Alyssa and Rachel and Max, so now there's very little left. The other big job was lightening and streaking and perming, and that's now done too, it'll be lovely, you wait and see. And your nails are perfect. You've been peaceful enough. Want me to release your hands?"

I was still groggy. "Yes, please!" I managed to say. She did something with my wrists.

"There," she said. "All done for now. You'll find Marcy's foundation cream more soothing on your face than any medication, if irritation should develop. But none will the way I work. See you next week, April!"

And as she rolled some huge machine away behind me, a new voice broke in behind me. "Hi, dear, I'm Marcy, last but not least. I'm so glad you're finally awake, because you will want to know what I'm doing, at least to watch me, so you can be just as gorgeous tomorrow morning when you have to fix your face on your own!"

"What?!" I said. "Wait a minute. What's been happening here?"

I held up my hands in a kind of "Stop the world!" gesture, and was stopped almost at once! My eyes fixed on them! It was as if the fingernails Darla had given me last weekend had struck it rich. At the end of each of my fingers were deep crescent ovals, inches long they seemed, gleaming and opalescent, as hard as claws and maybe as thick! .

Marcy saw I was staring, amazed.

"Yes, they are a little long, I'm afraid. More for a lady with a lady's maid than for a working girl. But Darla wanted them unforgettable, and that they are now, aren't they? But don't worry. Your new hairdo will fall into place on its own once it's brushed out, so you won't need to learn how to pick up bobby pins with them—I'm not sure anyone can when they're that long. Handling a lipstick and eyebrow pencil won't be a problem, you just hold them the way you've always held them. And you can always use a small sponge if the ball of your fingers won't quite reach to blend your eye shadow."

"What...!" I was starting to shout! "What have you....?!"

A neatly dressed, middle aged, no-nonsense woman suddenly appeared in front of me and stood there. "Please," she said with iron authority. "You'll disturb the other women here! Darla told me you have a passable voice now, soft and wistful. I'd like to hear it, right now!"

She'd said "Please!" all right, but obviously only as a formality. Her tone conveyed some terrible threat too fearful to name.

"I didn't want ...," I began.

"That's better!" she then added. "Soft and wistful it is, I can see now why Darla speaks so highly of you. What you wanted doesn't matter, dear. Darla wanted, so that's what you've got." Then, "I'm Lisa, the owner of this shop. Now, how may I help you?"

"What have you been doing to me?" I managed to ask.

Lisa picked up that folder and consulted it. "Pretty much everything! Just as your wife ordered it up. And it won't be undone in any hurry, either! She knows quality, and she wanted the best, and the best lasts! The base eye-makeup and the lip-tinting are practically permanent, and the hair color too, of course."

What she said next seemed scarcely believable. I didn't follow it at first. "The best costs, too. Darla moved heaven and earth to get Dr. Barnard here to do you this afternoon—she's always booked months ahead. Yes, the Dr. Barnard. I wanted to velcro breasts onto you as good enough, but Darla insisted on the real thing, 'April loves having her breasts fondled,' she said. 'So I won't allow anyone to deprive her by covering them up.' The result is, what you have is, well, they're not exactly implants. It's that new procedure, your own lipids from your waist injected back into your own natural breast tissue. Not at all traumatic, and only just enough to fill out your bra cups with no room to spare. They heal almost at once, but do be sure to wear your bra for a few days.

"I'VE GOT BOOBS? "

"I should say, honey," Lisa said, staring at my chest. "Unmistakably. You came in wearing a D bra, so you're leaving with D boobs in it. 'Fill 'er up' were what Darla said."

I looked down. There they were, two massive mounds filling my field of vision. I looked up, appalled.

"They do look large, don't they? When she ordered them I asked if she was sure. You know what she replied? 'Yes, I'm sure,' she said. 'I don't anyone to mistake him for a man, the way I did once.'"

"SHE SAID...? DARLA?"

"April, if you can't lower your voice I'll have to ask you to get dressed and leave right now, curlers and all, just as you are! Or call a policeman and require you to leave. You're a lawyer, I understand. So you know what that would mean!"

I lowered my voice to the high, plaintive tone Darla had schooled me in all week. "I'll sue!" I said. It sounded petulant. "You know what that would mean."

"Yes, I do." Lisa said. "That's why I insisted on seeing your wife's Power of Attorney to sign the consent forms before carrying out these procedures." She held up a xerox of that document, and then a rather long list with Darla's large, official signature at the bottom. "My dear, just let Marcy finish your face while Diana combs out your hairdo, and then you can go home and discuss these things with Darla to your heart's content. You aren't the first man we've refashioned here. You're one of the more successful ones, I must say, quite nice looking already. Really pretty, in a way. She'll be pleased. So will you be, in time. But for now, don't try to be the noisiest man we've refashioned. I won't tolerate it!" Lisa looked hard at me, saw I'd been subdued, and disappeared.

Marcy reappeared with a rolling cart, and for the next half hour she instructed me in the occult arts of facial make-up. Apparently, with what had been done to me, nothing more was essential. She kept saying, "Of course with what's there now, you won't necessarily need ..." or "but if you really prefer it darker..." or "will make a lovely change from your permanent earth tone..." and she kept finishing every remark with, "gilding the lily, but if you add it like this, you'll look especially lovely." When she was satisfied, she stepped back, then handed me a large leather case. "Here, these are all the cosmetics I've been using, with a little booklet to remind you what I've done. Use them well!"

Then to my astonishment, she leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. "You look soooooo kissable now, April! And none of it comes off! I'm sorry, sweetie, but right now you do remind me of my little sister. The same dazed, pleased look! Bye now. Darla's already taken care of my tip, don't give it another thought."

And she was gone.

All the while Diana was behind me, taking tight-wound rollers out of my hair and brushing it back, and sideways, and fluffing it up. "No problem here now, darling," I heard a man's voice say into my ear as Marcy disappeared, in that peculiar lilt favored by some gay men. "Brush it out any which way from now on, and it'll look quite flattering! But brushed back is best, to offset the sweep from our brow. Now just look at us! Aren't we the belle of the ball?"

I worried that he might be the next one to kiss me, but instead, a hand came round with a mirror on a handle. "Diana?" I asked, bewildered. "Mr. Diana," he replied as I took the mirror and looked into it. "Just ask for me when you next need it reshaped. Though that won't be for some time."

There in the mirror was a rather pretty woman's face, large but unquestionably feminine, with a colorful mouth and deep-shaded eyes under high, arched brows, a curled fringe of light blonde hair hugging her head like a framing halo, softening my features and making them look more fragile, more somehow ... wistful. A gold stud glistened on each ear lobe. I saw myself nowhere. "My God!" I exclaimed. "I'm a woman!"

"My dear, I should hope so!" Mr. Diana said.

What had Darla done to me? My nails were now the least of it. There was no way I could walk around with my whole head thrust into my pockets. And where could I hide my chest? There was no way now for me to begin to pretend I was a man!

And that, of course, was what Darla intended. Those vague evasions last weekend, occasionally even this week, whenever I commented on my appearance or asked why I needed eye shadow in the evening when mascara was quite adequate. Her references to going "all out" during my month's leave. Her little bribe, requiring that I use only April's hand for sexual relief, become April in order to get off. As she'd said, we'd now gone into high gear. I was no longer expected to imagine myself a woman in various situations and then write about them. For the remainder of this "course" she was taking, I was expected to be a woman.

Well, I hadn't given my informed consent, and I was not happy. I felt like a freak. I swung out of the beautician's chair and stood up, and took a step for the first time in hours, and My God! those huge breasts projected way forward under my turtleneck pullover! They were as large as Darla's! Larger, given the fact that my torso was larger than hers! Heavy, I could feel my bra tugging at my shoulders. I lifted them, one in each hand, they felt plump and yielding and warm, and they jiggled. Another step and despite the bra's firm support they jounced!

My God! was all I could think. What am I?

"Just gorgeous, honey!" Mr. Diana reached out to curve and fluff the hair over my right ear with his fingers. "Stunning! Do you like your hair?"

I turned to look at him. A small man, scant fair-hair a little wild, several hoops in each ear, a purple satin blouse or smock, pale complexion, and a worried expression. Obviously he'd meant well. They all did.

"Yes," I said reflexively, not wanting to disappoint him. "I do." And the fact is, I did, or would have if I were a woman. Then I added, while vaguely fluffing the hair over my left ear with my taloned fingers, "It's lovely. Thank you, you're an artist!" Why disappoint him? He'd done well by me. It was Nick who'd failed me, by not walking out on Darla weeks ago. But he'd never been able to, and now he was nowhere visible. April was who I was. I didn't know what else to say.

Mr. Diana absorbed the compliment as if it were merely confirmation of what he already knew. "I've been meaning to ask." he then said, his face animated by curiosity. "Is all this for some artist's ball, or for a D/S slave competition? Or is it the fulfillment of your own lifelong dream?"

"None of those things," I replied, my animus that Darla had done this thing to me again rising. I looked at him and considered telling him that it was to attract and entrap men he'd never ever be able to attract himself. But that would be gratuitous cruelty. So I just said, "I'd rather not say."

"I understand," he said meaningfully, looking earnestly into my eyes. Even though I didn't myself understand—was he on to something I wasn't? "Whatever, enjoy yourself, dear!"

As we spoke I started toward the front of the room, and came suddenly aware that I was now committed to pass through the salon and onto the street as a woman—there was no pretending I was anything else. And to drive home as a woman. And to spend the next month looking like a woman. Being one, that was what Darla wanted. How long? Forever? Unable ever again to fake being a man?

An odd thought, it occurred to me. Had I been faking it?

"Just a word of advice, though?" Mr. Diana added as he accompanied me. "As you walk, take short steps, thighs close together, shoulders way back to show off those tits, and dangle your hands at your waist so everyone can see those scrumptious fingernails. You might want to hold your upper body perfectly still, don't roll it like a football player. That's it! Perfect. Very lady-like."

"Thank you, Diana," I responded regally. "I do appreciate all your help. May I call you Diana, not Mr. Diana?" I was feeling vaguely antagonistic toward his affectation even though he meant well, and I hoped he'd reject the familiarity.

"Of course," he replied. "That's my name. Frank Diana."

My surreptitiously mocking gesture as one involuntary faggot to another faggot full-fledged and certified, disappeared into the air. Who was trying to put him down for being a man with a woman's name. Another man named April, that's who. Who now had better become the woman he seems to be or else face incredible humiliations.

I proceeded carefully through the crowded salon, glancing at women in all stages of processing. Not one noticed me. I realized now why Darla had me dress down in jeans and a high-neck sweater today—they were unisex, male all day, now female, and anyone's doubts about my gender would be overwhelmed by my swollen, jouncing breasts. Whatever I thought I had been, Darla was right. I was no longer a man.

"How do I get home?" I asked the receptionist in a small voice. "Did Darla arrange anything to keep me off the streets?"

"Oh, hi, April! My, don't you look lovely! An angel! No, I suppose Darla meant for you to get home the way you always do. She said nothing to me. Do you have a car?"

I did, back in the garage in my law office building. There was nothing for it, I felt like a freak, but I went out on the sidewalk and cautiously looked around. I seemed to be invisible—people walked by me without a glance. So I walked back to get my car, thighs together, hands at my waist, torso very still, careful not to jounce. A couple of men glanced appreciatively at my chest in passing, but none at my face. Thank God, I looked like a woman to them! I took refuge in that. And it felt strange, but the April in me had to restrain myself from sauntering into the building feeling pleased with herself because she'd accomplished something, though I didn't quite know what.

Then I got into my car and drove it back up to street level. At the exit booth, the kid who usually waves me through held up his hand.

"That's $5.00, lady!"

I decided not to try to fish for the money in the wallet in my jeans. I do need a purse! I thought. It seemed an odd thought. "Ahhh, this is Nick's car, young man," I said in as mellifluous a voice as I could. "I'm sure you recognize it! He told me to drive it home for him. He told me 'Just say 'Hi' to Les when you see him.' Are you Les?"

"That's right, ma'am. You're his sister? You two do look a lot alike. Of course you're a lot prettier!" He was staring straight at my tits. Then he leaned back with a cock-of-the-walk grin, waiting for a reply. He was actually spinning me a line!

"Don't tell him you think so," I said. "He's been waiting weeks for you to call!"

As Les's grin faded, I gunned the engine and left him standing there without waiting for his permission to leave. I had serious things to say to Darla.

And as I pulled into the driveway, there she was coming out the door, leaving for her weekly training session. All the way back I'd rehearsed various outraged comments. That it was insupportable, this affront to my manhood, to my dignity, what she'd told them to do to me! That it wasn't part of our agreement! And so forth.

But Darla cut them all off unspoken. She threw me a radiant smile. "Oh, April! Oh, darling! You are so gorgeous, honey, better than I'd ever dared hope! I love it! I really do! I envy you, you must be feeling glorious! Gotta run now! We'll talk later! Dinner's in the oven! Bye!"

And she got into her own car.

I had to stop her. "Darla, this is serious!" I said.

She leaned out of her window, looking at me. "Oh, one more word, sweetheart? A girl with your figure really ought to wear only oversized sweaters. Otherwise you'll attract all kinds of attention you may not welcome. You probably have already!" She flashed me a sly grin. "But don't change anything yet, please? Not a thing, especially not your face or hair—I want to see all of you up close just as you are! Oh, this is such fun! I have a marvelous new girlfriend!"

"Darla!" I said again. Never mind that 'Miss Darla' servitude she'd insisted on. That was when I still hoped to recover my role as man of the house. Now, what was left, to be the other woman of the house? She'd said it herself. I was her girlfriend. "Darla, we need to talk!"

"That's exactly right!" Her voice was crisp, and she was looking straight at me, and I knew she'd noticed how I'd named her. "Honey, really, I don't have time right now. But while I'm gone, I want you to go straight into the house and sit down in front of a mirror and keep asking yourself one question, 'Who am I?' Darla's husband? No way. Darla's former husband? Yes, but who are you now? That's what matters."

I said nothing.

Her eyes didn't waver. "I'll tell you who you are at this moment. You've got some choices. You can be Nick, once a patronizing man who repressed his insecurities with hollow bravado, but a sweet man, now a resentful male who looks like a woman and owes me a month of trying to act like one, now mourning a lost manhood he hopes some day to recover. He could. Nothing much is irreversible yet, except a beard you never intended to grow and what those pills have done to the size of your nipples, their greater erotic sensitivity. And your breasts. But I don't think April would want Nick to reverse those, would she, and April's who you are also, aren't you? So that Nick will hang on for now and hope for the best, and make up his mind later, just as that Nick always does."

I waited for her to continue. That was me. She wasn't wrong.

"Or you could be Nick the defiant male who feels outraged that I've done everything I told him I intended to do, because he hadn't quite visualized it despite his recently developed imagination. He discovered only a short while ago that it's one thing to imagine you're a woman and another to look in the mirror and see her. That Nick won't be here when I get back. He'll end our relationship right now and move to a one bedroom apartment across town and then try to backtrack, spend a month or two looking like a sexually confused man with tits and permed hair and permanent make-up. Then try to make a life for himself again. With tits—if he loses them, he loses the pleasure his nipples provide. So he'll try to keep them so he can cop a feel now and then, that'll be the only sex life he can get. That means, he lives as a bachelor or if he really lucks out, as a dyke."

She stared inexpressively at me, and turned off the engine and stared at me some more. She had more to say. Finally, "No, I don't think that's you. That's not the man I loved and there's no sign in that man of the woman I still love."

I didn't grasp that, not at first. 'The woman I still love?'

Her expression softened, but she continued. "Third choice. Be April. Be adventurous. Live on the wild side for a month of wonderful exploring of what it can really mean to be a woman. Just a month. And then, when it's a real choice, when the month's up, you can make up your own mind how you want to live the rest of your life, with me or without me, as a woman or as a man. If it's as a man, it's without me. Because the man you were was quite unacceptable. Why? The second Nick is a stubborn bastard unfit to live with anyone. And the first Nick, the sweet, soft, well-meaning and compliant Nick is an impossible wimp, the man who let me do this to him. Yes you've been just that, love. Any man who wants to keep my respect has to be more of a man than that. And now you aren't even that! I don't see any man in you at all!"

I didn't want to hear it. But that didn't stop her.

"But if you choose what you're so well fitted for, honey? To be a woman? My companion, my friend, my dearest love? You've come a long way already, April honey. You already have a woman's exterior, and a pretty one at that. And you've been exploring women's interior lives for the past month, and your ability to live such a life, and your essays prove you can. And you know it! Well, live the life you've been imagining! I know that the woman I want to live with for the rest of my life is in you. I know she's there. Please give her a chance? I'll be back in a few hours. Promise me you'll be here. Please?"

This was not the Darla I'd been subject to during the past month. That one didn't ask for promises, she gave instructions. That one never said 'Please." This Darla is genuinely afraid I'll leave her. Finally, I have a chance to get even! I should hurt her by just going!

Well, I didn't. I waited.

 

(continued)

 

  

  

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