Headlights Girl

by Catherine Linda Michel

part 8

 

I remember hearing that phrase, EXTREME HOLLY, ON!, but I don’t remember much of what happened after that until we got back to the house.

Eric has since told me that I calmed right down and acted like the real deal, pleased as punch about my experience at the salon. We got in the car and drove back to the house, accompanied by Nancy! Eric says that we talked about everything and nothing on the way back to the house and I was as charming a Holly as had ever been. I guess that the Jimmy part of me that was so angry, got temporarily buried by the extremely feminine Holly personality. At least that’s what Eric says probably happened.

We entered the house and Eric got drinks for us all, while Nancy and I got settled in the living room. He brought us our drinks and we all sat down. Then he said,

EXTREME HOLLY, OFF"! And I remembered everything!

I just sat there for a second. I already knew that there was nothing I could do to Eric, at least physically. He was too much stronger than I and there was no point in even trying. I picked up my drink and glared at him and Nancy, though.

I took a sip, set the glass down and finally found it in me to speak.

"Eric, you son of a bitch! How could you set me up like that? I thought you were my friend and mentor in all this and you embarrassed me in front of all those people! Now they all KNOW that I’m really a guy under this damned suit! How COULD you? I’m going into the bathroom and I’m getting out of this damned suit right now! You can take your deal and SHOVE it! I don’t care about your plans and dreams! You can be Holy until you DIE for all I care!" And I started to cry!

Eric waited until I ran down a bit and then he began to speak.

"Look, Holly. I know you’re upset as all hell right now, and I don’t blame you. I was trying to be funny and, at the same time, to let you know that we were in a ‘safe’ environment. After everything went so well today, I thought you would be a receptive mood and take things the way they were meant. I had NO intention of embarrassing you at all, I want to make THAT abundantly clear. I have nothing to gain if you back out of this deal, and everything to lose. As much as I loved being Holly, I DO have things to do, a life to catch up on, and I can’t do that unless I have someone to take my place. I’m sorry if you took things the wrong way. I thought you were more ready than you obviously are. It’s MY fault for assuming things. I promise you, it will never happen again."

Nancy got up from where she was sitting and came over to me. She sat down next to me and before I could get up, she hugged me.

"Please Holly, reconsider? I’ve known Eric for three years and he isn’t a bad person at all. I know he never intended to hurt your feelings or embarrass you at all. Everyone at that salon today was an employee of the HEADLIGHTS GIRL conglomerate, and we all knew BEFORE you ever came in that you were the new Holly. We knew that you’re a guy under all that and we don’t CARE about that! Hell girl, MOST of us are really guys! I am!"

Well, I damn near dropped my drink! Nancy was a guy? Most of those ‘women’ at the salon were guys? Now, I knew that SOME of the employees at the club were guys, but I DIDN’T know that MOST of them were! At least I didn’t remember Eric telling me that. Okay. NOW I had to think.

Was I really mad at Eric and Nancy? Was it because I was embarrassed by them? WAS I embarrassed by them or was I embarrassed by my OWN feelings and doubts? Okay, I DID have my doubts, my fears of being ‘discovered’ masquerading as a beautiful woman. Hell, who wouldn’t? Even though I knew that I was completely indetectable as male while I wore the suit, I was STILL afraid that someone would tumble to my secret and make me look like a complete fool or worse, some kind of pervert!

Plus, there was something inside me that was telling me that what I was doing was wrong. I didn’t know what it was back then, but I know, now. It was that thing that gets practically beaten into every man from the time he’s old enough to understand human speech. "You’re a MAN, and you have to ACT like a man! Trying to act like a woman is weak and soft and WRONG! Men are good, women are BAD! If you ARE a man, and you try to pretend to BE a woman, you’re a FAG, a PERVERT, a QUEER! And the way we deal with "those" kinds of people is, we beat them up, we embarrass them, we expose them for what they are and then kill them, if necessary!

Oh, honey, I know! I know those things are wrong, TERRIBLY wrong, but THAT’S what was haunting me, then. See, I didn’t know about Transsexuals or Transvestites or any of that stuff, then. I only had ever heard about fags and queers and perverts. Oh sure, I’d watched, in horrified terror, the cartoon "Queens" that paraded up and down the stage on the Jerry Springer show, but I DIDN’T know that THEY were not the usual TS or TV. They were the lunatic fringe of those kinds of people, or they were actors PAID to act the way they did on that show.

So you can understand, I hope, the state my mind was in back then. I’ve learned a lot in these last two years or so, and I know now that what I was thinking back then, was wrong. Looking back, I think THAT’S the reason I reacted so badly to Eric’s attempted joke. That’s why I was so frightened and ready to ditch that suit and all it meant.

So, anyway, Nancy was hugging me and telling me that everything was really okay, but it wasn’t working. I couldn’t get past the part where she had said that SHE was a guy, too, and now she was hugging me? Trying to console me? NO!

 

I jumped up off that chair like it was on fire and RAN into the bedroom, screaming. Eric tried to stop me, but I managed to dodge around him and I slammed that door behind me, locking it. Again, looking back, it’s only a matter of chance that I went to the bedroom and not to the bathroom. If I’d made it to the bathroom, I would’ve drawn the tub full of hot water and soaked myself right out of this suit, and right out of the most fascinating, satisfying and profitable years of my life. As it was, I was locked into the bedroom, screaming and crying. Eric and Nancy tried to get me to come out, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t face them. I couldn’t face myself! I methodically broke every mirror in the bedroom, even the little ones in compacts of makeup. I couldn’t bear to look at myself.

Finally, after I had been freaking out in that bedroom for maybe a half hour, I heard Eric calling to me saying,

"Look, JIMMY! If you don’t come out of there and talk to me, I’m going to have to use that command phrase and make you come out against your will. Now I don’t want to do that, but you’re leaving me no choice. If you still want to call this off after we talk, I’ll understand. I’ll be disappointed, and it’ll mess up my plans for the rest of my life, but I WON’T force you into staying Holly if you really don’t WANT to. We DO have to talk first though, okay? Nancy is going to leave if you want her to, but I really think you need to talk to her too. I’m going to give you five minutes to get yourself together and then I’m going to have to make you come out whether you want to or not, understood?"

Well, I had no choice, did I? Either I came out of my own accord, or Eric was gonna MAKE me come out. Of the two, I figured that of my own free will was the better choice. I took several deep breaths, got myself more or less together, and unlocked and opened the door. There was no one there, and when I ventured down the hall to the living room area, there were Eric and Nancy sitting on the couch. They looked at me and I looked at them. For a second or two, nobody said anything.

Then Nancy got up, slowly. She said,

"JIMMY, I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you and I’m not laughing at you. I would never do that. I know you’re thinking some awful things right now, and I feel like some of that is my fault. I’ll leave if you want me to, but I’d rather stay and try to help you with this. Which do you want me to do?"

She made no move towards me and the look on her face was one of sympathy and sorrow. Eric hadn’t even moved or said anything yet. I stood there and I thought. Well, they SAID they just wanted to talk and the final decision was my choice. Despite what I thought Eric and Nancy had tried to do to me that day, I still thought I could trust Eric to do what he said he’d do, so I went over to the chair opposite the couch and slowly sat down.

Nancy was still looking at me expectantly and I finally found enough of my voice to say to her,

 

"Sit down, Nancy. I’ll agree to listen to what you two have to say, but you need to know that I want to call this whole deal off, right now. I’m sorry if that’ll mess up your life, Eric, but you never told me about these feelings and you never told me about the salon. Maybe if you had told me, I might be seeing this a lot differently, but I’m not right now and I don’t think there’s anything you two can say that’ll change my mind. You’re welcome to try though, so have at it. Oh, one other thing. I don’t want you to refer to me as anything but Jimmy or Jim for this conversation. If I hear ‘Holly’ one time, I’m done, and I don’t give a shit about whether or not is messes up any programming. Understood?"

Eric looked directly at me and said, slowly and clearly,

"Understood Jim, but please don’t fly off the handle again if one of us slips up and calls you H..., sorry. If one of us calls you by that other name. Looking the way you do right now it’s hard for me to remember that you aren’t really her, okay?"

"Okay" I answered.

Nancy sat down, and Eric asked us if we wanted new drinks before we started. Well, I said, "hell YES I want a drink!" and Nancy said she’d have one too. I told Eric to make mine a double or maybe even a triple, as I figured I was going to need it to bolster my nerve. So Eric went to fix the drinks and Nancy and I sat there, opposite one another. I couldn’t look at her directly, but out of the side of my vision I could see her looking at me with a look of concern on her face. She didn’t speak at all until after Eric came back with our drinks.

He sat mine down on the coffee table, within my grasp, and backed up to sit on the couch with Nancy, making no other move in my direction. I leaned over and grabbed the glass and slugged about half of it down all at once. It burned, but it helped clear my mind a bit. I sat back with the glass in my hand and said,

"So talk. I’m listening, but this had better be REALLY good or I am outta here!"

And talk they did. They told me all about Transsexuals and Transvestites, about gays and lesbians, about a lot of things I had never heard of before then. They said that they understood what I might be feeling about those things, and then they asked me to tell THEM about my thoughts. So I did.

I told them about feeling guilty and unmanly doing this. I told them about my fears and doubts and I told them about what I had always been told, grew up believing, about TGs and TVs and TSs and queers and fags. I told them how I felt like a pervert doing this and about being scared of being found out and exposed and embarrassed.

Eric held up his hand at that point and said, 

‘Wow. Okay, that’s a load of guilt you’ve been carrying around for a lot of years and I now understand why you freaked out today at the salon and back here. First of all, let me address the "being found out and exposed part. You should know by now that there is no WAY for anyone to EVER find out who you really are under that suit, Jim. It makes you absolutely indistinquishable from any real woman in the world with the exception being that you can’t get pregnant in it. Every movement, every mannerism, every possible way for anyone to tell that you’re not a real woman is covered, either by the stuff built into the suit, or by the stuff on the tapes. YOU never tumbled to the fact that I wasn’t a real woman until I TOLD you, and even then you didn’t REALLY believe me until I SHOWED you by taking off the suit, right? Well, if YOU couldn’t tell, what makes you think that anyone else could? The answer is.....they can’t. NO one can. The suits are so perfect that even a DOCTOR can’t tell, Nancy can tell you that and Nancy should know, because she IS or WAS a doctor!"

Well now, THAT was a shocker to me. I looked at Nancy and she nodded in the affirmative. She said,

"Yes, H...I mean Jim. I was a doctor, a long time ago. The pressure of people depending on me every day, to save their lives, to patch up broken and shattered people, got to be too much for me and I had a breakdown. I was at the club one night, trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life when I met one of the ‘girls’. Her name was Nancy. I think she saw that I was at the end of my rope and she invited me to come home with her after her shift was over. Well, to make a long story short, I went, and she explained to me, after a long steamy evening about who and what she really was."

Nancy took a sip from her drink and continued.

"Like you, I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I figured she was just some bimbo trying to run a scam on me, or trap me into something. Well, she was near the end of her contract, her second one, by the way, and she wanted out to resume her old life, so she asked me the same things I’m sure that Eric here, asked you. She gave me the whole story and asked me if I wanted to "take over for her". Well, I figured I’d humor this poor deluded girl and I said ‘Sure, Honey. Whatever you say.’ I even humored her to the point where I gave her an impromptu gynecological exam, right there on her bed. She sure looked real, and GOOD, to me."

"Wait a second here, WAIT a second!" I broke in. YOU were a doctor? I mean a real, "pass the scalpel, suction here, retractor there," kind of doctor?"

"Yes, Jim," she responded. "I was. I had even done some SRS, that’s Sexual Reassignment Surgery to you, on at least four Transsexuals. Jim, in the time I was a doctor, I saw EVERY kind of human misery there is. I saw it every damn day! It just got to be too much for me and I, well, I just lost it. Kind of the way you did today only much worse, in it’s own way. I lost a patient I should have been able to save, because I was so lost in my own misery and pain, and I didn’t pay enough attention to symptoms I had seen a dozen times before. As a result, a young woman with a family died. Some kids had to grow up without a Mom. A husband had to go on with his life without the love of his life, because of my error. So I just quit, that very day. I walked out of the hospital and never returned. I lost touch with all my friends, my family, my life. I drank myself into a stupor and was ready to end it all that night I met Nancy."

She stopped for a minute, sipping from her drink, trembling, seemingly on the verge of tears. Eric looked like HE was ready to cry as well. I just sat there, hardly believing what I was hearing. This thing just got more unbelievable the further I went into it!

Finally Nancy seemed to get some control back and started to speak again.

"SO," she said, "Nancy shed her suit that night after calling in to the club and arranging for the week off. I still didn’t believe a word of what she had told me until that suit started to wrinkle up. Well, I didn’t freak out when that happened, I’m proud to say. Maybe I should have, but I was too drunk and too apathetic to care much about it. I helped her out of the suit as I’m sure you helped Eric, and then I passed out. When I woke up the next morning with the mother of all hangovers, there was this guy in the kitchen, fixing breakfast. I asked him who the hell he was and he said, "Well, last night I was Nancy. Today I’m Brian. Don’t you remember last night, and the bodysuit?" I didn’t, of course, and he went back over that last night with me, and all he said he’d told me. I didn’t believe a word of it, yet somehow, I WANTED to believe it, you know? As wild and crazy as it sounded, if it WAS true, it was maybe a way out for me. An escape from a life I had wanted to end anyway."

By this time, Nancy’s drink was gone, and Eric got up to refresh it for her. I handed him my glass as well, and asked for a refill. In spite of myself, I was fascinated by this story and, as closely as it resembled my own experience, it was still interesting to hear it from another viewpoint. When Eric returned with the fresh drinks, Nancy continued.

"Well, as crazy as it sounded to me," Nancy went on. "and as apathetic as I was about my own life, taking over a different life sounded like just the ticket to me. Even if it turned out to be as much of a load of bullshit as I believed it to be, it would still be good for a laugh and I could still commit suicide whenever I wanted to, so I sat and listened to the whole story all over again, only this time I was sober. Brian talked me into trying out the suit and I did. The rest is pretty much history. That was ten years ago. I went from waitress, to dancer, to manager, to head of the salon in that time. I’ve never looked back, until tonight, and I’ve never regretted my decision. I’m Nancy now and forever, and I don’t ever want to change that. I love my life now. I’m much more relaxed and in control of myself. I don’t have life or death decisions to have to make anymore, and if I make a mistake, the worst that can happen is I’ll ruin a hairstyle! Is it different, being a real woman? Well, yes and no. I still have two hands, two arms, two legs, a brain, so in that sense, no it’s no different. It’s more in the way I approach every day life, where the differences lie. I’m not going to go any further into that unless and until you make your decision tonight, and it HAS to be tonight. Eric will need all the time he can get to get back into that suit and get used to it all over again."

As I tried to digest everything I had heard, I glanced over at a clock on the wall. It read 8 o’clock! That meant that we had been back from the salon for over two and a half hours! Eric noticed my look at the clock and, checking his watch, he announced that he was hungry and was going to order out. We decided to go with that and placed our orders by phone, hopefully to be delivered in the next 30 minutes. In the meantime, it seemed like I had a decision to make.

Eric told me that he wanted to say a few more things before I made any decision, so I said, okay, go for it.

 

"Okay, Jim. Here’s the deal. I made you a lot of promises when this all started, and I followed through, so far, on almost all of them. I screwed up today, I’ll admit that, but I really thought you were getting used to the suit and the thought of being Holly for the next three years. I also overestimated your resolve, and I didn’t have any idea that you felt some of the things you have told us about tonight. So here’s the deal, a new deal. If you decide to do this, you decide tonight before we go to bed. Like Nancy said, if you don’t decide to do this, I’m going to need all the time I can get to get used to the suit again AND to change a LOT of plans I had already set in motion. Now. If you DO decide to do this, I’ll make you an alternate deal. The original deal was for three years. If, after ONE year, you decide you can’t handle it anymore, I will come back and finish out your contract. I’ll of course keep any money that Holly makes from that point on, and you get to bow out with whatever you’ve managed to put away. I’ll clear it with Management, but I’m certain they’ll agree to this, especially if Nancy here backs me up on it, but this is all I can or will do, Jim. So you think about it while we wait for our food, and while we eat, and right up until we go to bed tonight. No more talking from me or Nancy about it. We’ve said everything we can think of to say. The ball is in your court now. Serve, or get off the court, it’s as simple as that. I’m not mad at you, Jim. Just a little disappointed in you and lot disappointed about the rest of MY life that I’ll have to change if you don’t do this."

He stood up and walked back to the couch and sat down next to Nancy. I didn’t know what to do or what to say. I’d had a LOT thrown at me in a very short time, and my head was spinning from that, and from the idea of spending a year, or three years, as a woman. Strangely, the booze I’d been pouring down my throat didn’t seem to be having much, if any, effect on me at all. I mentioned this to Eric and he said,

"Don’t you remember? The suit has a direct effect on your health, and that includes normally poisonous substances like alcohol. It, the suit that is, tends to neutralize most poisons, or lessen their effect on you. You could, theoretically, drink all night and not get more than a slight buzz on. An interesting little plus, don’t you agree? Makes it real difficult for some guy or gal to try to get you drunk and take advantage of you.

While I was pondering THAT little tidbit of information, the doorbell went off. Eric answered it and it was our food. He paid the delivery guy and we all sat down at the table in the kitchen to eat.

By the time I had finished, I was feeling considerably better. Hunger makes you cranky sometimes. I had been thinking, all the time we’d been eating. I realized that a lot of my fears had been addressed and satisfied. A lot of my doubts and misinformation had been set right in our conversation that evening. I guess I always knew that I WAS going to do this, regardless of what I had gone through that day. I’d promised that I would, and if my life had taught me anything it was that, once you promised something, you did it, or you came up with a DAMN good reason why you didn’t do it. So, even with my freaking out act, it didn’t alter the fact that I had promised Eric I’d do this. My cover story was all set with my family and my few friends, and it seemed that it had been accepted by them.

 

I got up from the table and went into the living room to sit down for a few more minutes alone before announcing my decision. I knew I still had the time between then and the time we went to bed, but I also knew that Nancy had to go home, and Eric would have to drive her. I also knew that she would want to hear my decision. By the time Eric and Nancy came into the living room, I was pretty much ready.

After they sat down and got comfortable, I cleared my throat and announced my decision.

 

The suspense continues! Stay tuned for part 9! Ain’t I a bitch? Hehehehehe.

  

  

  

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