Just Think it Through

by Vickie Tern

 

Susan almost smirked. "Oh, Carrie," she exclaimed. "What a question! For convenience! Women douche! So you can keep yourself clean and sweet smelling down below! For yourself and your men both! You must try it, if you never have. Straddle it with the little nozzle under your opening, turn on the warm water, and let it circulate for a few minutes. It feels soooo delicious! My husband used our bidet to freshen himself every time he got home from a heavy date, even when he had only one opening, not two like other women. I suspect because a man's sperm left inside his body overnight freaked him out. He sometimes acted as if he were afraid he'd become pregnant."

She looked at me steadily again, to be sure I was paying attention. "If you're a woman you want sex. If you want sex you fuck. When you fuck, men leave sperm in you. That's how it is. So all of the better houses in this neighborhood have bidets. Not all of their maid's rooms, of course. I have no idea why Emily wants one there. Would it be because that's your room, and that since you're now a woman, she expects that sooner or later you'll need a bidet?"

I didn't answer. After that, our talk was strictly about contractors, painters, and repairs. When I left, Susan placed a palm flat on my cheek and gazed into my eyes as if about to say something serious and sincere. "Welcome to the neighborhood, Carrie. And to womanhood from the inside out. We all love it! You'll feel very good about all this, trust me! And not just because those hormone implants contain a mild tranquilizer, the same stuff I put in your tea to hold down any natural anxiety you might feel about all these changes. I must say, I envy Emily. She's so lucky to have a husband who actually wants to be a woman and doesn't need to be drugged or tricked or hypnotized into it, like mine."

"It isn't that I want to be a woman, Susan," I said mildly. I was in fact feeling very placid. That tea? The implants? It didn't seem to matter. "But I do want to know what it's like. I've always wanted to know. I'm glad Emily wants that for me too. It's lovely."

"Yes," she said, her other hand now also pressed against my cheek. "It certainly is. There's nothing quite like it. When you're enough like the rest of us you'll never want anything else, I'm sure. And you soon will be, now that your body's shaping up as well as your mind. Sooner than you think."

I was still wondering how that could be true when she leaned forward and kissed me on the lips, softly, woman to woman. Then clung there just long enough to raise a question whether she'd urged those hormones on me for Emily's sake or her own. No, she hadn't urged them, she'd only stated facts as she saw them. She'd given me fair warning, after all, with that story of feminizing a reluctant husband. She'd told me she prefers women lovers and that if none are conveniently available she doesn't hesitate to make them out of whatever material's around. She'd only stated facts and then left it to me to draw the conclusions. And I'd be living just next door. Emily too.

"I'm sure Emily's already shown you how lovely it is when women make love to women," she breathed at me. "Do remember. Bye now!"

Well, whatever her motives, the hormones were for Emily's sake and mine, and I was happy that now they were working their wiles inside me. I loved the idea that I'd soon feel physically like a woman all the time. Or nearly. My lips pursed as I kissed Susan back, just a peck. Only then did she break off, smile at me, and remove her hands from my cheeks.

When I phoned Emily that evening and told her that Susan had put me on hormones so my appearance wouldn't create suspicion that I was a man, she sounded skeptical.

"Just look at yourself!" she said. "Who'd ever mistake you for a man?"

"Susan said there were telltale signs other women would pick up on." I mentioned some. The balding hair, the absence of breasts.

"I see," Emily said. Then after a considerable silence, "So you mean to grow breasts now too."

"Large enough to maintain my disguise. With breasts, no one would ever imagine that ....

"What disguise? Why do you think you aren't already more than halfway toward the real thing? Maggie thinks you are. And remember, you always do have a choice. If you think my career's at risk, you can abandon this whole Carrie thing now and settle in with me as my husband."

This time I was silent. Then said, "Emily, we have a deal. I get to live as a woman for a while. You proposed it yourself."

More silence on her part. "All right honey," she said at long last. "That's true. For your sake and by my suggestion you're living as a woman, and for my sake by your own choice you're now changing your body into a woman's. Is that about it?"

"Yes."

"Well, girlfriend, I suppose I should feel appreciative. But you're telling me that when all this is done I'll still be married to a man who wears a bra because he needs one. Was that also part of our deal?"

"Not exactly," I had to admit. "But ...."

"You'll think about that, won't you?"

"Yes."

"Good. Then we'll both be thinking about it. What else has happened?"

I told her the various things Susan had arranged before I'd arrived and what I'd arranged since, how everything would be ready by the time the furniture arrived. She was pleased. "Do you like your room?" she asked. "The bed's temporary of course. You'll be using the really comfortable one from our spare room once the movers bring it to you."

I was a bit startled. "That's my room? We won't be sharing the master bedroom? I .... Why not?"

"Honey, how can we? That room's for sharing with the man in my life. For Cary. You're my sister-in-law. I can't sleep with my sister-in law! We'll have cleaning help coming in every few days, and caterers, guests, we'll be entertaining people all the time. Everyone would know! We each need our own rooms. And you'll need your own closets for your clothes so they don't get mixed up with mine. You can visit me in the big bedroom now and then, girlfriend. I love the way we make love as women. But you'll always return to your own room again afterward."

"I see." I did, too. There was nothing more I could say. This arrangement was getting more and more costly. But I'd made my bed and now I had to lie in it, apparently. Alone.

"Have they installed your bidet yet, baby?"

"Tomorrow, I hear."

"You'll enjoy using it. Susan tells me her husband loved his."

"Emily, I certainly don't intend to ...."

"To do all the things women do? Women use bidets all the time, in France and in all the other European countries that have them. And in the best hotels and homes everywhere. So of course you'll use yours. I bet you'll love it! You are living as a women now, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Then you'll use it the way all women use such things if they have them! And you'll enjoy it, that's what it's for. It's my special gift to the new you, for your use as long as we're living with each other. Nighty night now!" And she hung up.

Emily's move was delayed an additional week, what with training her replacements and dealing with an unexpected branch office crisis, though the furniture arrived on schedule. So it was two weeks before she appeared at the airport and kissed me discreetly, woman to woman. She immediately saw a difference in my appearance. "Your face is softer, honey," she said. "I've always thought of you as feminine. But now you're actually pretty. Cute. Girly, if you know what I mean." She didn't sound altogether pleased.

I couldn't deal with it in a public space, so I didn't reply, but once in the car and driving back toward our house, her house, I said it again as definitively as I could. "Your friend Susan thought I should go on hormones to improve my appearance, in case someone read me and it reflected badly on you. She thought it likely someone would. So that's what I've done. You told me to follow her advice."

She looked cheerily at me, eyebrows raised—whether skeptically or innocently I couldn't tell. "Yes, you've told me that. And that's why you're looking so pretty. And that's why you're growing titties. For me. To protect my reputation."

"Yes." It was true, as far as it went. She knew that. We both knew it. Though we both knew it went much further.

She was silent for a moment. Then, "And how's the house? I'm sorry I wasn't here when the moving van arrived. You've had to bear the whole burden, the arranging of the furniture and all that, and I didn't mean for that to happen. I do appreciate it. Are you satisfied with everything?"

"Pretty much," I replied. "I think you'll like the decor—I kept it soft and unassertive, but with confident colors and draperies and so on. Just right for a house owned by a woman corporate executive who knows her own mind."

"Oh, I do, and I appreciate it that you know it too."

"You mean that I know your mind, or that I know you have your own mind?"

"Is there a difference? Any problems with the contractors? Are you enjoying your new room?"

"No problems, they've all done their work. I'm still sleeping in the maid's room, if that's what you mean, the one with the new bidet installed. Should I be enjoying it? I was wondering whether you'd reconsider ...."

"Maid's room? Oh, you mean that back bedroom, the one with its own bathroom and rear stairs to the kitchen? Yes, that's the one I intended for you. I do hope you like it! It's not as large as the bedrooms off the main hallway near my bedroom, but I need to keep those for occasional overnight guests. The maid's room as you call it lets you come and go at will without disturbing anybody. You can stay out all hours, even bring someone back to share your bed if you wish, all without my knowing. I thought you'd appreciate the privacy no matter who's staying with us. A place of your own where you can lay out all your girly cosmetics and things, and a private bathroom where you can sit undisturbed on the pot when you're peeing, dreaming your girlish dreams. Oh, I've meant to tell you, honey, you're welcome to stay in this house as my guest for as long as you wish. Until Cary returns. Do think of the maid's room as all yours."

And that was that. No compromise. Perfectly logical. No one should ever be able to imagine we slept together, so we wouldn't. And her ironic allusions to my supposedly girly sexual desires told me clearly that there was nothing further to say. That I'd made my decisions, and however unwillingly, she'd accepted them.

"Have you used the bidet yet?"

"The bidet? No," I said brusquely. But she knew immediately that I was lying.

"Tickles, doesn't it? Have you inserted that special nozzle and given yourself a proper douche? Cleaned out your insides?"

"No!"

"Oh? You've been here two weeks, and you aren't dating yet? You haven't been propositioned and gotten laid? Not yet? A girl like you? Or is it that you're trying to get pregnant, you and whoever he is, so you want to leave his stuff inside you for as long as possible?"

"Emily, is it going to be like this?" Now I was pulling into the curved driveway leading through the gate to the house.

"Honey, understand me," she replied gently, regretfully, as I pulled the car up to the front entrance. "I'm doing what I must. I want to recover the man I married. You're doing what pleases you. You want to indulge yourself, fine, we agreed you could. But if you must know, yes, I do appreciate that while you're being the woman you choose to be, you're also concerned for my reputation. I'm grateful to you for that. So in return, here's a warning. You'll will soon find there's much more to being a woman than wearing tasteful clothes and looking pretty—that silk blouse does look marvelous on you by the way, peach is certainly your color. You'll soon find that girls who look as pretty as you do and are as unattached as you are incur all sorts of social obligations. You'll see. You may not welcome them, but you can't avoid them. Of course if things get too stressful you can always bring Cary back. If your body in any way resembles Cary's by then. We'll see. You don't seem to be in much of a hurry."

She looked at me meaningfully, then turned to get out of the car. If anyone had been watching, they'd have seen a young woman leave the car and walk purposively to the front door, then turn and wait while a second young woman followed carrying her luggage. They'd probably conclude that the mistress of the house had at last arrived, followed by a subordinate of some sort, an employee, a helpful guest, maybe a servant.

I suppose I was.

Yet despite all I was in no hurry to abandon being Carrie. A few weeks later we'd established our domestic routines. Emily went off to work each day, and I lingered longer in my nightie and wrapper to finish the morning papers and a second cup of coffee, then to dress decently to do some work in my study or to shop for the house. A cleaning woman came in for a few hours each morning to make the beds and straighten things up, deal with the kitchen, and do the more menial cleanup tasks. I tried to talk with her a few times, and found she was well-suited to her work but not much more. Even so, she was one of the restraints on our relationship. "Your bed must be slept in every night," Emily told me seriously. "Not just mussed, actually slept in. Or she'll tell the Ferguson's housekeeper that there's something odd going on here—they happen to be friends. And then the word will spread."

That meant I could never spend the entire night with Emily. If I went to bed with her, I'd have to leave and go to my own room as soon as we were finished making love woman style, the only way she'd let me. Otherwise there was a risk I'd fall asleep and remain with her until morning. By the second week, Emily would put the book she'd been reading or the folder of papers she'd been working on onto the coffee table in the living room and stand up, and then more often than not she'd say "I'm going to bed. I'll see you in the morning." And that would cancel any hint of an invitation for me to join her there. By the third week I waited to be invited, assuming correctly that otherwise she didn't want me. And I was right. Most nights she didn't.

Once or twice she did come into my room in the middle of the night and say, "I do so miss your brother, Carrie. Hug me for just a moment, will you?" I did. She felt warm against me, her skin faintly moist and always scented, and my cock rose every time. But after only a moment of clasping her she'd say "Thank you, honey, I needed that," in a low voice, and return to her own bed, leaving me feeling especially abandoned, alone. And sad that she was too. She knew that, of course. She wanted me to feel that way, hoping to speed Cary's return.

As anticipated, we entertained at home often, a few times each week, giving small catered cocktail or dinner parties in connection with Emily's work, or perhaps returning the favor when others invited us both out. I learned to make neutral social conversation of the sort Cary's sister might make. As Cary's sister, I was known to be a writer of children's books I actually had written under a pseudonym. I learned to deal graciously with courtly compliments from men and with serious probing of my tastes in men from their wives, preliminaries no doubt to personal invitations to meet single males. After a while I learned how to turn these gambits aside deftly. And Emily helped me deal tactfully with men who became too insistent when they spoke to me, whether they were married or not. In the circles we'd entered, Emily was right, no one assumed that married people were off limits. Many weren't. I kept an eye on Emily, but saw nothing amiss.

The two of us often had dinner by ourselves at different upscale restaurants frequented by Emily's work associates and our slowly enlarging circles of friends, in order to see for ourselves which served the better cuisines but also to be seen dining respectably as two women keeping each other company. "I need to establish that I'm with you when I'm not otherwise accountable," Emily explained. "People talk if I'm not seen often with you—they begin to wonder where I am, with whom, and gossip does proliferate. If runors spread that I'm with a competitor or a supplier it can affect the company's stock prices. That I'm not with a competitor or supplier also affects stock prices!"

I had to dress elegantly for these excursions out, and loved it. My shopping expeditions and my wardrobe expanded accordingly, and I found a hairdresser nearby who understood Prissy's cut and kept my hairdo looking adorable. Wherever we went, we always looked like two charming ladies on an outing, and men constantly approached us hoping to detect signs that we were interested. I quickly learned from Emily how to be gracious but give no such signs.

"I can understand why single women seek the company of gay men when they go out," she commented at one point. "It warns off all the men who think she's taken. I must find out who in my division of the firm is eligible." She paused, then said with a sly smile, "Maybe you'd like me to fix you up with one of them?" I didn't choose to reply.

We spent considerable time together, though very little of it in bed. One advantage was that Emily now noticed everything I wore and always commented on it. Often that itself became a major topic of discussion—how well it looked on me, where I'd found it, how something similar might look on her, how I'd advise her to accessorize a similar outfit for evening wear. I loved talk like that. We gossiped and giggled together about the people we knew, their oddities and admirable traits, and soon we really were girlfriends in the true sense of that word. My heart was filled with gratitude that at last she'd permitted me this kind of special female intimacy after our five lean years when nothing feminine was ever noticed or acknowledged.

The Country Club that came with the job became our social center. That was where I spent many afternoons when Emily was absorbed in the company's headquarters building downtown. I took golf lessons and flirted with the Pro—he seemed to expect it, though he always kept a seemly psychological distance even when wrapping his arms around me to demonstrate a stroke That was fun. Then again, I'd always played a fair game of tennis, so I signed into a tennis tournament. I loved flashing my tanned legs in short skirts, and I learned any number of cute ways to twist my hips, turn my torso, and pose, even while playing, always careful to leave no one in doubt about my sex and gender. I saw several men pause to watch me play while on their way to other engagements, and I knew it wasn't merely my backhand returns or my killer serves they were admiring. I began to feel like a belle of the ball! It was intoxicating!

I joined a bridge club and soon came to feel comfortable with the wives and professional women who played with us. Susan sometimes took a hand on Thursdays, the universal doctors' day off. Apart from a meaningful "You're looking marvelous, Carrie, I don't know how you do it!" each time she saw me, reminding that she knew just how her hormones were doing it, she gave nothing away. My flair for fashion triumphed. I began to get more invitations to accompany other women shopping than I could accept, and I learned more gossip—who was sleeping with who, who was determined not to—than anyone else in the club. So women began calling me to check up on this or that story they'd just heard, and then while they were at it to invite both Emily and me out. I found I was popular, and in effect I became Emily's social secretary.

This had advantages for Emily, since at the level where she worked, social networking provides all sorts of opportunities to influence corporate decisions. So her career prospered. I knew this and knew she knew it. There were days when she'd look at me with one eyebrow raised, asking me silently though quite clearly whether I was yet ready to quit, to become at last a full-fledged man. I'd smile back at her and shake my head without even a pretense of regret. I was sure she couldn't really mean it. Not yet.

I was in girl heaven. There was no way I was ready to quit. '

One morning at breakfast Emily said, "I hear you're having lunch with Mavis and Reese today. Is that so?"

"Yes," I said, wondering why she was raising the subject at all. I often lunched with someone or other. Mavis was one of my tennis partners, the wife of a research supervisor in Emily's firm, and Reese was a newlywed who often implored me to help her decide what clothes to wear—I had an eye for the proper yet sexy clothing we both liked and she loved. "Then after lunch we're supposed to go to a baby shower for one of the secretaries of one of the other women's husbands, I have no idea who, but I've bought a layette to donate to the cause."

"I'm sure it will be the most fashionable layette imaginable, just arrived from Paris, from what I hear about you. Everyone talks about your feel for fashion."

"It's this year's latest thing in layettes, yes, just arrived in town from Walmart's. As for fashion, I read women's magazines—I love to, really, you know that—so I know many things about nouvelle au courant qui vive haut couture that other women don't bother to know. Until they need to know them, and then they ask me."

"'Other women'? You're officially a woman now? Cary won't be returning?"

"I mean, most women," I corrected myself shame-facedly. Emily was the one woman I never wanted to deceive, even though now and then I did deceive myself. These days a whole afternoon might go by before it occurred to me that I was not like my companions, not a real woman. Because I seemed no way different from any of the other women I was playing bridge or tennis with. And I loved the feeling. "But why ask about my lunch arrangements, Emily? They're harmless, they never lead to infidelities or anything. You know that!"

"Of course I know that, honey. We both know that if you ever took up with another woman it would end our marriage. You yourself are the only 'other' woman I can possibly cope with. So I trust you. But I'm also aware that your sexual desires are much more like a woman's than a man's these days, maybe because of those hormones Susan gave you, maybe because your penis has stopped demanding attention. I notice that when we make love these days as women do, you're ever so much more considerate, so much less concerned with your own pleasures."

"Thank you," I said. I took what she was saying as a compliment.

"And of course you spend all your time with women who think you're a woman, most of them also married. So I don't imagine any of them proposition you too often." She smiled indulgently.

"Then why do you ask?"

"Because that's the very issue that's come up. Remember, I told you that a single woman raises certain social expectations? Certain speculations? Lots of gossip? Well, it's becoming common gossip that my sister-in-law, that lovely, charming woman, currently unmarried, may not be at all interested in men. She doesn't date, and she only gossips about other women's dates. So people have begun to wonder if you're a lesbian. Susan is sometimes mentioned as a possible partner, because her sexual preferences are well-known, but I happen to know that Susan's busy with another woman these days, so I tell them all that it simply isn't true. I also tell them how deeply you loved your first husband until he ran off, and how hurt you felt afterward, how long it's taken for you to recover from the pain, and so on."

"It isn't anyone's business," I said indignantly, though recognizing the irrelevance of that remark even as I spoke.

"People do continue to talk, and we do live together, so now I'm being mentioned as your most likely lesbian partner. And that makes for mean talk. Such as, maybe Carrie's husband ran off because he found out she's a dyke? Maybe Emily's is staying away for the same reason? Maybe for all our shows of affability neither of us is really interested in men?"

"It's true, for me, God knows! And I hope it's true for you! But good heavens, why ...!"

"Carrie, don't protest nonsense. I'm in a highly visible position. I manage vast sums of money. Everything I do must appear to be proper and straightforward. You know that. But two runaway husbands and two lesbians hooked up and coupling under everyone's noses are just too fascinating for the local gossips to overlook. It's all so deliciously perverse. And that kind of reputation can injure my effectiveness with some of the very strait-laced people I work with. The financial community tends to be very ingrown and sedate. I can't afford to become the subject of scandalous gossip."

"I understand that, honey." I did, too.

"Well, I've heard that today at this luncheon of yours Mavis intends to test your sexuality. And that people are making bets on the outcome."

"What?! Test my sexuality? How?"

"With the best of intentions, your friends have decided you need a man in your life. They've picked out an attractive date for you for this Saturday, a really smooth seducer named Orin whom I suspect they've all already slept with, so they trust his promise to tell them how hot a number you turn out to be in bed.

"A date?!" My God! "How do I get out of this?"

"I've already arranged how. You'll tell them you'd be delighted to meet this Orin, you've missed having one-on-one relationships with men, the excitement of seeing how the evening will end up. But it happens that you're booked for Saturday. You've arranged to double-date with me. You'll explain that a man I work with has taken pity on me, my husband being so far away, and has asked me out for dinner and dancing, just for the companionship, nothing more. Tell them that I agreed on the condition that you join us as a kind of chaperone, a guarantor of my virtue. That he thought that an excellent idea, so he's gotten you a date too, a friend of his. Tell them that you're all excited, that it'll be your first outing with a man in a long time, that you're looking forward to it."

"Emily, is any of this true? You can't be serious!"

I'd been living for weeks and weeks surrounded by women and imagining that I was one of them. I'd flirted with the golf pro, and flashed ny legs and wriggled my ass at passing men. But only for fun, and only at a distance. That was what I wanted! No involvements, just pretending. Now Emily was getting me involved with a man close up? I'll need to make charming small talk with him? Deal with his romantic expectations as they emerge? Actually dance with him? Worse, watch while Emily does the same thing with her man? Accompany my own wife on a date with someone else? I couldn't believe it!

"You can't be serious!" I repeated.

"Yes, it's true. And I certainly am serious." She waited for the logic, the necessity of the arrangements she'd made to persuade me. They didn't, I was too shocked. "I'm quite serious. Think this through. We're double-dating this Saturday. We have to. There's no other way."

"You intend to go out with another man while your husband's away? And you actually want your husband to join you?"

"I certainly do. Oh, sweetie, don't be so fretful! To begin with, you aren't my husband, you're my husband's sister, remember? But you'll be there the whole time to see that nothing happens, that's why you're there! And this date is our cover, don't you see? It establishes that I'm faithful to my husband but I do miss being with men, and you do too. So it can't be that you and I are ... lovers."

We once were, I thought morosely. But now it sounds so perverse!

"That's all this is, a companionable evening out with a man I work with every day and know well. Tom Framingham, a very nice guy, you've heard me mention him, our V.P. for Marketing, his wife died in a traffic accident a few years ago. Don't you see? If we double-date, especially if you begin dating, then everyone will know that we're straight after all! And it gets you off the hook for the date they're fixing up for you with this 'Orin.'. I did tell you that being a woman is more than flirting with the golf pro—he's gay by the way, maybe you didn't know that—and more than playing tennis and shopping and going to baby showers with women until you're half persuaded you're one of them. It's also dealing with people's assumptions and expectations. It's also pairing up, eventually it's sending and receiving mating signals and performing mating rituals, if I may use a word you've forgotten, Carrie!"

"You've fixed me up with a man so you can date another man and yet retain respectability?"

Her voice took on an angry edge. "You haven't caught on yet, have you? Yes, you're exactly right! Tom is quite handsome, and he's eligible. And personable, I'll enjoy his company. The fact is, I miss my husband. I miss spending time with him, being with him, dancing in his arms. I'm lonely for male companionship. That was what I was hoping for from you when we married, remember? And now Tom's offering me just that. No more than that. Just companionship, dancing and chatting, maybe a little flirting. Quite harmless, probably. Probably nothing for you to worry about at all. I'll enjoy it, but mainly this is to quell gossip and as I've said, to get you off the hook! Or would you rather be danced and romanced and then fucked by Orin? You do lack his hole of choice, remember!"

She almost glared at me, but instead looked away. "You can come with me and clear your name and keep mine decent, or you can go with the guy Mavis and Reese have cooked up for you, and when he gets his hands into your pants get yourself exposed as a fraud. Get both of us exposed as frauds! Or of course you can come out and tell the truth, tell all your friends that you do indeed prefer sex with women. That so far as Orin's concerned, no thanks, you have me!"

She saw now that I was listening closely, my jealousy finally overwhelmed by the circumstances, by our predicament. So she continued more quietly. "But if you claim you prefer women, two things will happen. First, it'll bring out some of the closeted women of your circle. They'll emerge from the woodwork to try to seduce you, and how you can cope with that and yet keep me as your wife I can't imagine. Second, to re-establish myself as absolutely straight and proper, perfectly normal despite the fact that I live with a self-declared lesbian, with you, I'll have to begin an affair with some man, most likely Tom. Just to clear my good name." She looked at me severely now. "Not that I'd mind, Carrie!" She spoke the name with a hard edge.

I had no choice. I was defeated by all of these options. "I'll go on this double date with you, Emily honey. Of course." It was inevitable. I reconciled myself to the fact. Then curiosity stirred me to move on. "But, ahh, tell me, Emily, what's my guy like? Where do you think they mean to take us? What are you planning to wear?"

Emily immediately broke into a huge grin. "Oh, honey, what wonderfully girly questions! Maybe you really are more a girl than a boy. Well, I think you'll like him. He's an old college roommate of Tom's, in town for a month or so for policy discussions—he's scheduled to head one of the company's regional offices somewhere. His name's Charles—Tom calls him Chazz. He's good-looking and gentle and witty and understanding and sweet-tempered, I hear. Tom thinks he'll be just right for you. Also, they're taking us to the Hunt Ball, so we dress formal. I don't know yet if I have a gown that's just right—I'll be asking your advice."

She paused, then looked both amused and serious at once. "Carrie honey, it hasn't occurred to you yet I'm sure, but you'd better think about how to get Chazz interested enough in you to ask you out again. Because the grace period is over. Once it's known that you've resumed dating, you're going to be beseiged by all sorts of offers, some set up by well-meaning lady friends, some from the horny guys who always surround us eligible chicks. Ideally, you'll want to entice Chazz into becoming your steady while he's here. So expect to do some of that girly flirting you've been practicing, but at close range this time. Serious flirting, the kind that ends up with a man's arms wrapped tight around your neck and shoulders and his tongue inside your mouth. All girls know how to make men that insistent—you may as well learn how too, since you do claim to want to know everything we know about how to be women."

Then she grinned, a little maliciously. "It should be interesting, seeing how you respond when he leans forward to give you—say—a standard, minimal goodnight kiss. Or something much more passionate, if he thinks you're attractive. As I'm sure he will, because sweetheart, you are attractive! And now at last you're going to have to deal with it!"

I tried not to imagine how I could possibly give a man a goodnight kiss. Even a chaste one. But there was something else on my mind, also disturbing. "Do you expect to kiss this ...Tom ... ahh, passionately when he brings you home?"

She shrugged. "We're already friends, so it isn't necessary. But it'll probably happen. I expect it'll be nice. Interesting, too—I've never kissed a man while my husband was watching. I wonder how much tongue I should give him. Or accept from him. Do you think if he pushes it into my mouth I should suck on it?"

I had nothing to say.

"So honey, not to spoil your fun, but don't you think it's getting on toward time for Cary to come home and rescue both of us from this upcoming ordeal? Save us from our own erotic desires? Before Saturday?" Now her grin was genuine. She was loving this moment.

No, I thought. I won't yield. This date may not be too bad. I can survive it. I do want a few more weeks of this. I mean, this last shopping spree with my two bridge partners, we all bought such lovely things! I haven't had a chance to wear any of them anywhere yet!

"Not yet," I told Emily. I was simply enjoying myself too much. I wanted more. "I'll deal with this date first. If I get into trouble, that's when I'll give Cary further thought."

"It's your choice, Carrie. Whatever happens will be what you chose. You can end this whenever it's no longer your choice."

"I understand that," I said. She seemed to be warning me about something. That she found dating another man exciting? That my evening with Chazz might well lead me where I don't want to go?

Emily was silent for a moment. Then she suddenly laughed. "This is your very first date, isn't it, sweetheart? Your very first ever, and our first since coming to Albuquerque. We'll have such a good time primping together and advising each other how to look beautiful for our men. Isn't that the kind of companionability you've always wanted for us? Maybe we can even giggle together about them afterward. As girls do. Depending on how we feel about them."

I was silent.

"Good, then nothing further needs to be said! I'll phone Tom and tell him we're a foursome. You can tell your girlfriends that as far as Orin's concerned, thanks but no thanks. For now."

She was correct. For now. Being a woman was getting more difficult. I tried to look on the bright side. To bring back Cary was the easiest solution, but the least desireable. The double date Emily'd set up at least offered a way we could both maintain appearances and stay out of trouble, and it allowed me to extend my life as a woman just a little longer. It protected me from my girlfriends' eagerness to get me laid, and protected us both from exposure as frauds. Even though it meant that at the very least that we'd both have to watch each other being kissed by other men. Would we be able to giggle with each other afterward about something like that? I wanted to believe it.

All five of us women were sitting around at the Club after lunch picking away with five forks at the single slice of chocolate cake we'd all decided to share for dessert. I told them about my upcoming double date, and they all squealed with delight.

"I'm so jealous of Emily!" Alicia said. "Tom Framingham's such a gorgeous hunk, and altogether eligible! Everyone's been wondering why he hasn't played and plowed the field when he could so easily. Maybe because he and Emily already have a thing going that no one knows about?"

"No, I'd know," I said. And I believed it, too.

Mavis was fascinated. That I'd accepted a date with a man after all closed off one line of speculation about my sexuality, but it opened another one far wider. "This is your first date since your husband left you?" Mavis asked. "That's been years! Carrie, how could you manage to go so long without a man? When Michael's out of town even for two weeks my eye sometimes goes roaming, and sometimes the rest of me too!"

That was an interesting confession. But I just looked at her with a condent smile and said, "For a couple of years I hoped he'd return, then for a couple of years I was afraid he'd return. He was given to violence when upset. There'd have been serious trouble if he found out I'd taken up with someone else. So I swore off all men. I kind of took a vow of chastity, and even went off birth control to help me keep it."

That was a mistake! "Oh, Carrie," Reese said. "You have a date for this Saturday and you aren't on birth control? What if he sweeps you off your feet?"

"I suppose I can carry some condoms, if it should come to that. But I don't expect it will. It's only a first date, after all."

"You have been out of circulation," Mavis said. "A first date these days is to find out if he's good enough in bed to justify a second date."

"Oh, Mavis," Chloris said. "Maybe for you! And maybe Michael's learned not to interfere with your little adventures. But some of us do want to go with a guy long enough to find out his name and if he's married before we fuck him."

"Condoms break," Mavis told me. "And anyhow, good sex should always be sloppy, I like it when our juices get mixed and smeared all over us. And I especially like it when a man knows how to clean up after himself, when he's neat enough to leave me the same way he found me. It shows he's been raised properly from babyhood on, that he hasn't forgotten how to suck and use his tongue. Also, that he appreciates me. Here, Carrie, at least take one of these!"

She dug into her purse and then handed me a teeny, triangular pink pill. Much smaller than the ones Emily still took every day despite the fact that we weren't having 'penetrative' sex any more. I suppose in case Cary should return unexpectedly. "What is it?" I asked dubiously.

"The greatest thing for women's sex since Viagra. K18 is its experimental name—Michael brings them home for me from his research lab. Take one and the contraceptive effect lasts until your next period. No worries. It has extras too—it's relaxing, and I'm told it makes pussies smell like flowers and taste as sweet as candy. You just see if this Chazz of yours doesn't come to love it."

I held it warily between my thumb and forefinger. It was scarcely larger than a grain of rice. It couldn't possibly contain a serious dose of hormones, not compared with the ones Emily took or the implants Susan had given me. Those had already given me a softer face and satin skin, and there were now cone-shaped lumps behind my enlarged nipples, as predicted, but not much else had happened yet. I considered the matter. A pill this small had to be harmless enough. "All right," I said. "But even so, I don't ever grant boys privileges on first dates." I swallowed it with a quick swig of water.

"I've heard of that pill!" Reese said excitedly. "Isn't that the new once-a-month thing the lab's been testing, a wholly new method for achieving contraception? Where, instead of adding estrogen and progesterone and stuff to your blood stream so you can't get pregnant, it stimulates your body to produce those things naturally, in buckets and buckets, then pours them into your blood stream as if you were pregnant and panting like a bitch in heat? Till finally your next period sends out blockers? When that's done you take another, and your body manufactures more gallons of girl stuff, and you're all set again for another month?"

"That's right," Mavis said. "The menstrual cycle seems to cancel the effect, they don't know why—maybe because of something in the uterine lining, maybe an enzyme somewhere else. They're trying to isolate it so they can team up K18 and a blocker, two pills that work in tandem. Then they'll have a complete all-natural birth control system. Michael says without the blocker, if a woman skips a period or starts her menopause, the body just keeps pouring out female hormones until she's got tits and hips like an elephant. Doesn't he just wish!"

"You mean this is like taking a daily contraceptive pill?" I asked. "Only you take it monthly?"

"It's like taking six daily contraceptive pills," Mary suddenly declared. Mary was the quiet member of our group. She'd quit being a research biologist of some kind when her first baby was born, and she didn't mean to return to it until her youngest was in school. "You're get so saturated you pee out excess hormones the way pregnant horses pee Premarin, until something in the menstrual cycle stops the process. Thankfully."

"What if you ...ahh ... what if your periods are irregular?" I asked.

"Then you just keep drowning in more estrogen than any woman needs or wants," Mavis said. "That's why they want to find out exactly what stops the process before they put it on the market. They're pretty sure it's in the menstrual outflow, but nobody wants to drink menses or chew used tampons to find out for sure."

"Should I worry about it, then?" I asked. "I ahhh ... don't ovulate very often."

"Oh, honey," Mavis said fervently. "Then what's to worry? You're the most fortunate woman alive! Overloaded with hormones month after month? You'll look gorgeous! You've seen pregnant women looking all flush and ripe, especially during their second trimesters, when estrogen levels go through the roof. I'm insanely jealous!"

My God, I was thinking. This is getting out of hand. Will my body become even more voluptuous than Emily's? How can I stop the process? Drink Emily's menstrual fluids? She'd think I'm sick! Drink someone else's? She'd divorce me. Wait for this blocker pill? That could be months or years.

I had to tell Emily what I'd done. Three days later, when we were dressing for our double date, I got up the courage.

"The girls at the Club all expect me to get laid tonight," I said.

"Oh?" she replied. "That'll be something. So you're dressing to look especially sexy?" She was looking through her underwear drawer. "You didn't happen to borrow one of my garter belts, did you?"

"So Mavis gave me a little pink pill her husband Michael brings home, so I won't get pregnant."

"You, pregnant? That'd really be something. Not K18 by any chance?"

"Yes. That's what she called it."

"And you actually swallowed it?"

"Yes."

She paused for a moment to look at me. "I was wondering," she said. "I guess they were right, it does work even on male physiology. You've been looking positively radiant the past few days. Ah, here it is!" Triumphantly she pulled out a lace and black satin garter belt and attached it just above her hips.

She was less concerned than I imagined she would be. Not at all concerned in fact. She glanced at me again while unwrapping a new pair of nylon stockings, working them up her legs, then clipping them to her garter belt. "I should have started wearing stockings months ago," she said. "Certainly after my husband took off for parts unknown. Pantyhose may be safer when a man's making his moves, but if you like him they can get in the way!"

"Emily, what should I do about it?" I asked. "I'm already swelling up in front." In just three days, the cones behind my nipples had spread out. "I didn't intend to go this far."

"Oh, yes you did," Emily replied, studying her arrays of lipsticks. "When you let Susan plant those hormones in you, supposedly for my sake, that's when you went too far. And now K18? It figures. You've got more girl juice flowing in you right now than a teen cheerleader. But why not look on the bright side, Carrie? At least now you know you're safe from complications if Chazz dosn't want to use a condom."

"Emily, this isn't funny! I mean, look here!" Unhappily, I unhooked my brassiere, took out my breast forms, and showed her. My nipples were each now well-extruded, and bulges were developing behind them.

She looked. "That's impressive, Carrie. I really should report this to research—they know it does interesting things to male rats, but they've wondered about humans. Of course your implant hormones are contributing, so there's no knowing for sure. It looks like you'll top out a full C, maybe even a D—the women in your family do run large as I recall. But don't worry. Contrary to rumor you won't end up looking like Dolly Parton. Women who supply their own hormones develop according to their own genes, then stop. That's what you'll do too."

"They told me that only menstrual fluid can stop this pill's action."

"Yes, I've heard that. The lab people don't really know. When Cary comes back, if he doesn't like what you've done to his body maybe I'll let him lick my pussy when I'm having a period. If I'm not pregnant by a real man by then. But I won't let you, Carrie. You're a woman now, so all those female hormones are good for you. Just look at you, with that sleek skin and those pink cheeks. We'll just wait and see how shapely you get. Remember, now that you're starting to date men, a knockout figure will be a definite asset. Men love women with big boobs and bubble-shaped bottoms."

"Emily, I don't plan on....!"

"Oh? You have plans? Don't bother, Carrie. The world is already making its own arrangements for you. Go with the flow. Look, the boys will be here in under than two hours, and we haven't even done our hair. Let me show you the gown I mean to wear, and you can help me decide whether it needs a necklace or a choker. Long gowns for both of us, remember—they'll be wearing tuxedos. Maybe even white ties! You can't be too proper for the Hunt Ball."

She actually seemed almost indifferent! Was Tom replacing me in her affections? Already? I had to ask her. Hesitantly, I did.

"Carrie, you're my most intimate friend, and I care about you. I really do. But you're not my husband. You're not the man I love, and you're getting to be less so every day. All by your own choice, need I remind you? You're my girlfriend, and I'm happy for any girlfriend whose figure is improving the way yours is, and now that you've swallowed that pill you have a marvelous figure to look forward to, and there's no reversing the process that I know of. Am I looking forward to spending the evening with Tom? I certainly am. I like being with men. I hope you do too, or the evening won't be any fun for you at all."

She was right. It was a strange evening. Something of an ordeal, though Chazz couldn't have been nicer. Surprisingly, a lot of it was fun, the flirty part especially. But toward the end it was a disaster. I thought so while it was happening, anyhow.

Chazz was as nice a man as I could hope to meet. Blonde curly hair and a cherubic face and a skewed sense of humor, and a sweet, unthreatening temperament, just as Emily'd said. Fortunately he talked and joked almost non stop, so all I had to do was smile appreciatively and say nothing most of the time. I didn't deliberately try to flirt or attract him sexually, but there were times when I'd catch myself insouciantly tossing my head, or looking at him sideways and smiling slightly with what I realized afterward was a 'come hither' look. As the evening went on he seemed more and more entranced by me.

I found quickly that dancing in heels was a matter of planting my feet heel and toe on the floor and then prancing, and I also saw that with heels that high it was impossible not to make provocative moves. My hips weaved as though I couldn't wait to bury his cock in my cunny, no matter what I did to restrain them. He responded to the voluptuous swaying with a delighted smile and a gleaming eye. So I followed up those moves with others that were as prim as possible. He saw that too, and told me that he found my on-again, off-again personality was utterly endearing.

I liked him. He was good company. During the slow dances he held me close, and had I been a real woman I know I'd have enjoyed being folded cozily in his arms. But as a man in another man's arms I simply felt uneasy. This wasn't what I'd wanted when I elected to become Carrie. Now and then I'd glance at Emily and Tom as they danced. Emily looked altogether comfortable as she swayed into the motion of Tom's body. That made me even more uneasy.

We invited the boys in for one last dring when the dance ended in the early morning hours and they took us home. So there we were, sitting in the living room and sipping and chatting, continuing the different discussions begun on the drive home. Just the four of us. It was quite pleasant. When Chazz got up to go, mentioning piles of work he had yet to get done, Emily reminded me with her eyes that I should accompany him to his car, that I still needed to assure myself of another date with him to stave off my girlfriends' dates. That meant a good night kiss at the very least.

That was when it happened, almost before I was aware of it. And once it began I couldn't stop it.

It had been increasingly obvious even to me that Chazz was attracted to me and wanted to end the evening by impressing his masculinity on me in some strong yet affectionate way. He was attracted by my provocations but respectful of my primness so—as he told me afterward—he was wary about making the first move. Meanwhile I couldn't bring myself to give him even a peck on the cheek, not in front of Emily anyhow. So I decided to give him a more searching kiss once he was safely behind the wheel. That's when I'd bend forward and press my lips to his, and be able to control the event completely, both its intensity and its duration. It seemed like a good idea. But as I leaned in to do the deed one of my high heels slipped on the pavement. I almost lost my balance altogether, but I did managed to grasp his shoulder and then fall forward slowly until my face burrowed into his lap beneath the steering wheel. It was awkward and unexpected as I half-leaned, half-lay there for a moment, trying to recover myself.

"You're wonderful, Carrie!" Chazz cried out. "I never dreamed ... yes, here!"

And then I saw what it was he hadn't dreamed. He assumed from the way I'd fallen into his crotch that I wanted to give not his lips but his prick the goodnight kiss he'd earned by being such a nice guy. When I opened my eyes, there it was, rising high out of his fly and fully erect, all white and pink, its dark tip gleaming in light from the street lamps and the car's bright interior light. I glanced up at him—his eyes were already closed and his head lolled back against the head rest, waiting. It was all between me and that thing of his.

So I took the course of least resistance and kissed the tip lightly. He groaned almost inaudibly, obviously in expectation of more, and otherwise didn't move. I couldn't disappoint him—as Emily'd made clear, I needed to have him call me again. So I kissed that white tower yet again, wishing it could kiss me back so when we both broke off, the whole event would be over by mutual acknowledgement. It couldn't, so I left my lips wrapped around its head ever so lightly and grasped it by its base, intending to push it away as I lifted my head off it. He groaned louder and thrust his hips high up toward my mouth. The whole thick, velvety, meaty head of his cock entered my mouth and stretched my lips wide, and then with one hand he gently pressed my head down so part of the shank slid in too. More of his cock followed until the soft head struck the back of my throat.

My lips were now halfway down the shank, my hand holding the base firmly as if to steady it for sucking. His hand held my head firmly in place as he pulled his cock down and away, then up and into my mouth again. Then again. He was face-fucking me and I was I cock-sucking him. Out, then in. My hand was jerking him off without even moving. My mouth slid and sucked, sucked and slid. Both hand and mouth were his, the helpless servants of his prick's pleasure. His pace increased, and he groaned. I tried not to pay too close attention, but my tongue began to detect a salty savor. Then he lifted himself out of his seat and sighed "Ahhh! ahhh! ahhh! uhhhhh!" and that huge tube in my head shuddered and throbbed, then began to squirt.

What could I do? I pulled way back in shock and his first spurt went on my face, I hoped none of it on my hair. Emergency! All I could think to do quickly was cover that fountain with my lips, seal it in, make sure he spurted safely into my mouth and not all over my face. And then as my mouth filled with his slick, salty excretion, swallow it. Which I did. Spurt after spurt.

Finally the throbbing ceased, and his prick shrank and turned soft, and I found myself with my head in his lap and his whole soft penis filling my mouth, my tongue wrapped around it as I contemplated the enormity of what I had just done. I'd sucked a man's cock until he came. I'd swallowed. I'd done it all, from start to finish. I was now a cocksucker. This was not one of the feminine experiences I had ever fantasized—even the distant idea had seemed repellent. But it had happened anyhow. It was now familiar, something I'd done while being womanly. The taste was still in my mouth and his sperm was now sequestered in my belly.

Finally I was able to recover my footing, lift myself up, and turn toward him, grimacing. He seemed to think I was smiling. He leaned way over and kissed me softly on my sperm-coated lips, apparently not minding the slickness or the taste at all.

"That was so lovely, Carrie," he said breathlessly. "I'm so happy you wanted to do that." And as I stood up, still dazed, he looked at me with a tender grin and said, "I'll call you." And he started his car. I stepped back, and he backed down the driveway.

I could still taste him as I watched his car disappear down the street, then turned back toward the house, hoping that no one had seen us. Emily and Tom were still in the living room chatting animatedly when I came back in. They both looked at me, Tom with a faint, polite grin and Emily with a level stare.

"Have a good time out there, Carrie?" she asked neutrally, almost as if unconcerned with the answer.

"We talked. We had things to say," I replied vaguely.

"We saw. You shouldn't leave the car door open when you're talking—the inside light stays on. Chaz looked almost asleep sitting there with his head way back on the head rest. Blissful. We couldn't see you at all." Now Emily sounded amused. "But from what we did see, you seemed to be searching for something in his lap. For quite a while. Did you drop a contact or lose an earring or something?"

I glanced out the window. No one had drawn the drapes, and the segment of the driveway where Chazz's car had been parked was in full view, not fifteen feet away. The open car door had blocked their view of the event itself, I saw, but neither of them could doubt what had happened.

"We were talking about it," Tom said in a gentle, conciliatory way, trying to ease my evident embarrassment. "And we agreed that Chazz was a lucky man."

"Yes," Emily agreed. "Well, don't wait up on our account, Carrie. We'll be a while yet. I'll see you in the morning." I couldn't tell if she was being considerate because I was now flushed with embarrassment, or if she was being short with me because I had now at last gone too far with my impersonation of womanhood.

"All right," I said in my high pitched voice, trying to sound tired. With that cum coating my vocal cords my voice was higher than ever. I sounded mellow. "Good night, all. It was fun tonight, Tom, thanks for everything."

He nodded graciously, and turned back to whatever he and Emily had been talking about. Half way up the stairs I glanced back at them. They were still on opposite sides of the couch. Emily's head thrown back laughing as if to say "No, I can't believe that," while Tom was grinning and illustrating something with broad hand gestures. As if she'd already forgotten that her husband sucks his dates' cocks.

I turned on the light in my bedroom at the far end of the hall, and checked myself in the mirror over the dresser. No, no cum on my hair. At least I'd been spared that humiliation. Not that it mattered, with the clear view they'd had of us—I'd been caught altogether in flagrante. I sighed, creamed off my make-up, hung up my long dress—recalling how sophisticated and willowy I looked in it—and tossed everything else onto a chair. Then stowed my heels neatly in the closet and slipped into my nightie and put on the satin bedcap Emily had given me so the pillow wouldn't tangle my curls. And crawled into bed. And unhappily, went to sleep listening to the tinkle and rumble of laughter downstairs, occasionally audible.

In the middle of the night some odd sounds woke me. No, not a car door slamming but the sounds of bed springs and a bed frame creaking repeatedly under great strain! I lay there and listened, wide awake.

I could hear Emily's voice from deep in her throat. "NNgggh! NNNGGGH! NGGHHH! Ng! Ng! Ng! MMM! Oh! Ohhh! Ohh! Omigod! Omigod! OmiGod! Ahhhhhh! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh! Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, Tom! Oh, yes, yes! YES! YES!" Emily being pushed over and over into the mattress. I heard grunting. More shrieking. Then no other sounds.

Twenty minutes later my eyes were still wide open as my door opened. "You awake?" Emily asked in a quiet, little girl voice, as if she were trying not to wake me even while waking me.

"Mmmmmmmmmmmmm!" I answered, so I could pretend I was only just barely awake if it became too painful for me to acknowledge that I'd been listening to my wife getting fucked.

"I thought I'd better warn you. Tom is spending the night here. So be sure to dress decent when you come down in the morning."

"He's on the couch downstairs?" I asked as if utterly innocent.

"No, he's in my bedroom. Just don't make trouble. I saw what you did and decided I have a right to do what I'm doing. It's been so long. And now that I'm reminded how wonderful it is, I don't know why I waited so long."

"You had a right?" I repeated, incredulous. Then so she didn't think I was agreeing with her, I added, "You decided?" Then "To do what you're doing?"

"What I'm doing. Wonderful, yes. In a minute I'm going back to him to do it some more."

Terrible circumstances for special pleading, but I tried. I tried to exonerate myself. To stop her? Either way, too late! "But Emily, I couldn't help it. There was nothing I could do about it. I slipped. He already had it out when I ...."

"There are always things a girl can do. And as for me, all this was well-predicted, you've been plentifully forewarned, it's been your decision, and you know how to end it any time. But this isn't the time or place to discuss that. I'm just supposed to be gone a moment—Tom wants more loving and so do I. I'm just letting you know that tomorrow when we all meet at breakfast I expect to see the happy face of a young divorcee who has just found a nice guy who's interested in her, and I also want to see the understanding face of a sister-in-law who's been expecting something like this to happen sooner or later, given my husband's long absence. And no other kind of face. Do you understand?"

"While I look at the face of a wife who's just been well-fucked by another man," I said in a soft whisper, because she'd already re-opened the door to step back into the hallway. "And at the face of that man."

"Yes," she whispered back. "Very well-fucked. Twice so far, and more to come. Tom's very ... affectionate. It feels so ... so very good to have a stiff cock inside me again, filling me, pleasing me, knowing that a man wants me, craves more of me. I hadn't realized how much I missed it. As for looking at Tom's face tomorrow at breakfast, you'll do just that, Carrie. It's a nice face, and it's already kissed me devotedly in more places than I ever imagined he'd want to go near."

I tried not to imagine which places those might be, but failed. I'd also kissed them, delighting in my depravity. And now Tom?

"Here's what you'll think. As my sister-in-law you aren't sure if this is a good or a bad thing for my marriage, but you do know it's become increasingly inevitable. So you're happy for me, a little worried about your brother's marriage, but you know I love him and am eager for his return, so you don't think anything's in serious jeopardy, not yet. This is a wonderful little adventure for me, a whirlwind affair, that's all, and Tom's lucky to be part of it. You'll congratulate him. You'll tell us that tomorrow over the breakfast coffee."

"I will," I said. I intended it to sound like sardonic denial, but it came out sounding like solemn agreement. Even subconsciously I must have realized I had no alternative.

"Now that I've begun having sex as a woman again, Carrie, expect more of this kind of thing. Just as I expect more will happen between you and Chazz—these things never stand still and never go backward. Tom tells me that Chazz is bisexual—did you know that? So he may not mind at all when he discovers that you have only one place down there for him to slide his cock, not two. And he will, sooner than you may imagine he will, especially now that he knows you're willing and eager. Plan for it, and make sure when he knows who you are that he can keep our little secret. If you're at all bothered by any of this, just remember that it all ends when Carey returns and we all settle back into normalcy. That is, if Carey returns before his body's past a point of no return. It's well on its way there now! If you can't live with this, bring Carey back tomorrow, or the day after if he needs time to get here. It's all your decision."

She paused and looked directly at me. "I don't feel I've betrayed him. I've been waiting for so very long for him to return. I've tried not to pressure you to bring him back, but some nights have been so terribly lonely for me. Some nights I've longed to see him. I've missed having him in bed with me so very much. I really have, Carrie. But ...well, now there's no hurry. He can take his time if he wants. Whenever."

And she closed the door.

The next morning I did exactly what she'd requested. I seemed to be grateful to Tom for fucking my wife, and seemed to be delighted when Chazz called to make another date with me, and when on Monday I went to lunch with my seeming girlfriends, I seemed to be ecstatic about the way the whole weekend had gone. I'd made my own choices, and I still loved being a girl. But somehow I was beginning to feel trapped.

A week or so later I found that Emily was no longer interested in the kind of mutually affectionate woman's love we'd previously made together. I was now welcome in her bed for one thing only, and I didn't want that. "You're a cum slut now, honey," she told me gently. "Any time you want to suck Tom's semen out of my cunt before I use the bidet just say so, and I'll be happy to save it and spread my legs for you. I'd like to share him. But I can't allow you any other intimacies with my body. I have a man, thank you. And I no longer need a woman like you. You're second best now. Less than that."

"Oh?" I said resentfully. That last seemed an extraneous dig. "Maybe it really is time for Cary to return from Saudi Arabia, or South Bend, or wherever he's supposed to be, so he can rescue you from a fate worse than death and also rescue me from Chazz?"

"South Carolina last we spoke about it," Emily said. "You should try to remember where you put him or you'll lose him altogether. I suspect you already have. You tell me. Do you think it's time he came back, Carrie? Do you think that strong, manly brother of yours is eager to occupy the smooth, perfumed, curvy body you're preparing for him? He's long overdue. I no longer assume he's coming back. I can't depend on it any longer."

She wasn't altogether wrong. When Cary returned he'd have to be uncompromisingly heterosexual and masculine. In this body, a body that had now sucked cock and was growing tits? Moreover, my craving to look and live like a woman had yet to exhaust itself, drain itself altogether out of my system to meet Emily's requirements. Despite my current relationship with Chazz I wasn't ready for that. I couldn't quit yet. Not yet. I was still exploring womanhood in all its riches, and what wasn't wonderfully new about it was now ... accustomed, familiar. Nice. I was in pretty deep.

Chazz and I were now dating every week or so, "seeing each other" is what the other girls called it whenever they asked me how we were doing, their eyes twinkling with naughty thoughts after practically every weekend, entertained by every innuendo of my evasive replies. I enjoyed his company. I enjoyed how he submitted his enormous male power and decisiveness to my least bidding. It was flattering. I enjoyed teasing him, getting him worked up with a promissory smile or a lilting tone of voice, and then leaning back and enjoying all the benefits as his passion poured onto my face and my increasingly, exquisitely sensitive tits.

Whatever we did during an evening, wherever we went, we always finished up back at the house. I'd let him cop a feel of my blooming boobs with their now-delicious nipples, and then I'd hold his head tenderly as he suckled me, and then I'd give him the good night blow job he'd come to expect. Emily always left us the privacy in the living room so I could do that much, because as we both agreed, who knows what he'd expect from me if we went to his place or rented a motel room. I didn't mind the flavor of his cum any more—it tasted clean, fresh, and salty, like the ocean.

I actually enjoyed licking the residue off his penis and my own lips after he'd jetted his load into my mouth. He couldn't get over it. I joked that it was delicious, he should try it, I'd feed it to him fresh from my mouth while it was still fresh from his cock—good things are more enjoyable when shared. I tried a few times, grasping his head with both hands and trying to kiss him passionately, trying to push some of the cum in my mouth into his mouth with my tongue while he half-resisted, thinking I was only joking. But I was only half-joking. Emily had told me he was bisexual. I wanted him sooner or later to suck on my cock too. But how could he guess that I had one?

Chazz wasn't the only person who took my womanhood at face value—all the other women also accepted me as what I seemed. I regularly played tennis and bridge at the Club, I participated in Hospital League Fundraisers and headed one of the committees, I attended Master Gardener classes with two of my girlfriends, and I was asked to serve on the board of the local Planned Parenthood. Other women—some I scarcely knew—felt free to call me whenever they wanted someone to go shopping with, or do lunch with, or when they had juicy gossip to share. Because they knew that I was almost always available. I worked my own schedule at home, and if anything my writing was in greater demand than ever—I'd developed an extraordinary gift for providing a story with dramatically telling details—I could feel the heartbeat behind the dense fabric of women's feelings, one film producer called it incoherently, though I knew what he meant. I joined the Country Club's planning board for its Spring Frolic and was set to work lining up amateur talent to perform amusing skits—people assumed that because I was a writer of some sort I could write skits and then direct them too, and they weren't wrong. I was well-integrated into the community. I had obligations. People depended on me.

And I loved it all—the dressing up for various occasions, the gossip that spiced them, the opportunities they provided for me to speak authoritatively whenever a woman asked about this neckline or that scarf. I felt myself to be one of them, and I loved being one of them, a woman among women, even though Emily wasn't happy about it. I loved it despite uncertainty how long my relationship with Chazz could last. He wasn't insistent, but the time was inevitably approaching when I would have to open the truth to him about my real sex and my relationship with Emily, maybe also open my ass to him. That no longer seemed unthinkable. But what then? He'd be in town at least another month, and there was talk, Emily reported, of keeping here at headquarters instead of sending him out to head a branch office as intended.

And meanwhile, my body was ripening. Susan's implants eventually depleted themselves and were absorbed, but my body continued to pour out its own estrogen, progestin, and other goodies. One day at the club, when I happened to be wearing tight knit shorts, I saw my backside in a mirror while I was walking away from another mirror, and I saw I had indeed grown a bubble butt. It almost gave me an erection. Almost—that was as far as my cock would go these days.

It was a week day, so Emily was dressing to go downtown to work, and I'd just gotten galleys to proof, so I planned to spend a long, casual, comfortable day at home. No bra, a simple cami and a plain long denim skirt, fuzzy socks, sandals, you know. A little eye make-up of course, always, but not even lipstick. Emily came into my room to ask if I thought her cerise silk sheath was appropriate for the office and yet also for dinner afterward, never mind with whom, and caught me with my arms high overhead about to drop the cami onto my bare chest.

"They're really getting on now, aren't they?" Emily said. "Your shoulders are still thin despite all that tennis and golf. So it's impressive, how plump and heavy and full they look, hanging down in that beautiful curve. A bra is no longer optional equipment for you now, I'm afraid, baby. Support them or they'll sag. Take care of your boobies and your men will take care of you, that's what we used to tell each other in high school. But you already know that, don't you."

I was sort of proud of them, but I didn't think it proper to reveal that I knew what she was talking about. So I just said, "'Getting on'? Why do you say that?"

Emily smiled, her eyebrows raised, surprised I should ask. "Look at them. Your nipples are almost the size of thimbles, and who knows how huge they get when you're chilly or excited. Your areolas have doubled in size, and there's no hiding the soft, pendulous flesh behind them. Not any more! You're fully mature, honey! I found one of your breastforms behind the couch last week, probably it fell there some time ago when you stripped down to let Chazz paw you, and you never even noticed it was missing. You don't bother to wear them any more, do you? Yet your chest looks bigger than ever. I notice that the new bra you rinsed out and left hanging in your bathroom is a full-figure C cup That's what I mean by 'getting on.'"

"They're nice," was all I could say, a little defensively. "I like them."

"What man wouldn't? But are you still a man, Carrie, living as you do inside that voluptuous body of yours? Cary's pretty much gone now, isn't he? Many women would kill for your figure—but you know that, you're in enough fitting rooms with enough of them these days. And it's all you, too, that's the marvel of it. No implants."

I said nothing. Then, "With that guy Chazz all over me, it seemed safer to let them grow. Not that I have any choice any more." It was a lame enough excuse.

Emily flashed me an incredulous glance. "Baby! I've seen you! I've seen those tight sweaters you wear to show them off. I can understand that, a girl's figure is something she should feel proud to put on display. But Carrie, I've been meaning to tell you, now that you're huge you need to display yourself a little more decorously! For goodness' sake at least wear a bolero or an unstructured jacket over them! Maintain a semblance of modesty! Then you can push your chest into everyone's face to your heart's content and the partial covering will only enhance the effect, like a curtain drawn back on either side of a center stage strip show. At least then you won't look quite so brazen. You used to show good taste!"

She was right. I was so delighted with my chest's outcroppings I'd probably gone overboard recently. "I'm sorry," I said. "You're right."

"I won't live with a trollop," she added needlessly, now that she saw I was retreating.

"How about living with another man while your husband's out of town?" I said resentfully. "Whatever happened to respectability? Do you think you and Tom will be moving in with each other soon?" I still resented the fact that they were now regularly intimate.

"Who's asking? Are you speaking for my husband? Has he come back at last?"

Was it time for Cary to come back? To save his marriage, yes. But if he did, I'd be abandoning a lot of commitments and friends. People who respected and admired me. I was living a good life.

So I didn't reply.

"You ask if I'm thinking about living with a man," Emily said, continuing our conversation. "Of course I am. It's been a while. I'd rather it was the man I married, but I make do."

"So it seems," I replied. I sounded tart. Since that first night he'd spent in what ought to have been my bed banging my wife, they'd been a little more discreet. They fucked at his place or else in motels out of town. Her dates with Tom rarely ended before two in the morning, and a few had stretched into the middle of the next day. I'd hear his car pull up, drop her off, and leave. They needed no lingering affectionate farewells, not after the hours they'd just spent plastered to each other. Quick kisses and out of the car.

"Are you bitter, baby? I have offered to share Tom with you. If Chazz can't supply you with enough sperm, you're always welcome to fill your belly with Tom's. You know where I keep it!"

She smiled to herself a little smugly, I thought. As if she was imagining my face between her legs avidly licking Tom's spurtings out of her. It would serve me right! Sure enough, her hips squirmed just a little.

"Carrie," she said suddenly. "Can I ask you a personal question?"

I just stared at her. What could be more personal than the conversation we were already having?

"Did you know when you married me that you were bisexual? It seems to me that's what you are. I've noticed that your face positively glows when you're getting ready to go out with Chazz. Are you that eager to be with him? To suck off that cock of his?"

"Emily, no! I enjoy his company is all! And I'm not bisexual. Transgendered maybe, a little, maybe a lot. But remember that going with Chazz wasn't my idea. It was either Chazz or Orin, the seducer the girls had fixed up for me, remember? And you arranged it! My facial glow when we go out is make-up. I'm using a luminous foundation and blusher nowadays, and the same kind of face powder—you know that, you borrowed them last week! More to the point, I do with Chazz only what I have to do, because that's where our relationship is, and I don't want it going anywhere further, and that's how I keep it where it is. Unlike some of the other men at the Club who are always coming on to me, he doesn't push it. I don't like it, having to give him ... oral sex, but I admit that I've gotten so I don't mind it."

"That's all it's been? Just blow jobs? I thought that surely by now he'd made a real woman of you. You still don't know yet what it's like, do you, how it feels when you clamp a man's body into yours by wrapping your legs around him and holding him tight and deep inside you with your thighs, with the strongest long muscles in your body? Then begin to share with him the joys of teasing and wriggling and thrusting and ... everything else? I thought surely, from the way you cling to him whenever he calls for you, surely it was that you couldn't wait to fuck him. But you're only leading him on? What happens between you, night after night in our living room? Sometimes I catch a glimpse of your head bobbing up and down in his lap, that's you sucking him off only because you have to, not because you want to? Only to keep things the way they are? Not because you love to suck cock and especially his cock?"

I was silent. She had something in mind. She waited. I waited. Finally, I gave in first. "Yes. To keep things where they are. You must know that."

"No, I didn't know that. You've done a lot to persuade me that you want to see what it's like to be a woman, to do everything that women do. Well, women fuck their men as well as suck them. And you don't? What a pity! Because I love fucking Tom. A lot! You only do what you have to do with Chazz because in the main you still prefer girls?"

"Yes. That's true. Why do you ask?"

I'm asking because Susan asked me, and I didn't know what to say."

This was unexpected! "Susan?" I was baffled. "Why? Why should Susan ask? What did you say."

"I told her I didn't know. I haven't needed you for sex lately, not as a woman and certainly not as a man, and you and Chazz have been going at it, and I've been too discreet to inquire what exactly it was you were going at. This is a small community, everyone knows who's paired up with everyone else except maybe their wives or husbands."

"But why did she even ask? Why does she care? What business is it of hers?"

"Why did Susan ask? Oh, of course, you probably don't know. When I first came down here, when I first bought this house and we were getting acquainted and being neighborly, she told me she'd done some gender counselling, and that was when I told her that my husband is a heterosexual transvestite. Well, she told me how she'd already drawn her own husband kicking and screaming into the fulfillment of his own womanhood, so she wondered if there might be more to it in your case too, more than mere transvestism. Maybe you're transgendered? Maybe transsexual? Maybe you're gay but in denial? She told me it was unfair to restrict you. 'Give him his head and see where he goes,' she said. 'Let him do whatever he wants. Let him make all the choices.' So that's what I've done. Now and then I give her the X-rated reports on your progress. She's impressed how quickly you took to cocksucking, and wondered if it was nature or nurture. 'It took a long while to get a cock between my husband's lips,' she said. 'And even longer to get him sucking and swallowing. But from what you say, Chazz's just leaps into Carrie's mouth.'"

I was stunned into silence. "Are you saying that this 'all and then nothing' plan of yours wasn't yours? Nor Maggie's? It wasn't a necessary way for you to stay respectable and yet accommodate to my desires? Instead it was a test of my sexuality?"

"Hardly a test, honey. More an opportunity. Maggie agreed that we owed it to you. That's how we've been helping you decide what you really are."

I still only stared at her.

"At this stage I think you should know this. I've never really expected Cary to return and live full time as a man. How could he? He doesn't have a clue! He's never been a full-time man! Honey, just think about it! From your earliest adolescence you've been enchanted with looking like a girl. Why now would you ever choose to be something you've never been? Especially after weeks or months of living as the kind of person you've always loved envied and loved, at least since you came aware that half of everyone on earth is girls, not boys, and that you're in the wrong half? You only thought you were a transvestite, isn't that true? You didn't know that you'd rather be a woman. You had to find it out for yourself. Susan showed me a simple way how."

I was astonished!

"I agreed to let you make all the choices and stay with them as long as you wish, and I must say I was surprised at how easily you persuaded yourself. First to be a woman full time, then to let Susan start you on female hormones, then to enhance those hormones with K18 so you could be a natural woman for the rest of your life. And what else? With my own eyes I saw you seeking out sex with a man on your very first date, trying to suck his cock the very first moment you were alone with him, right there in our driveway. And the whole time, at each stage, there I've been, asking you, 'Wouldn't you rather be a man?' And there you've been, always replying, 'Not yet.' Could I keep thinking that this was only transvestism?"

"It wasn't like that, exactly," I said weakly. "Any of it."

"We've also noticed, Susan and I, how enthusiastically you're a member of all the women's things you're involved with. Can you wonder why she wondered if you're actually bisexual as well as transgendered? Only a few days ago she asked me about it again. When you still thought you were a man, did you really prefer women as sex partners, did I know that for certain? What could I say? I told her yes, for five years we'd both enjoyed each other's bodies a lot, and you hadn't ever gone sneaking off to gay bars when I didn't know, because I knew that you always preferred flouncing around in a skirt and halter top in front of your own mirror. It does now appear that you appreciated my body more than I did yours because you envied me mine and I didn't envy you yours at all. Isn't that true? Didn't you want a figure as slim as mine from the moment we were first engaged? Didn't you starve yourself to maintain that lovely feminine waist of yours and regain those delicate shoulders, and so on? So that when you went on hormones, they gave you curves you knew would look just stunning? They do, you know."

Where to begin? "Emily, you asked me to thin down and stay that way! That was your request!"

"Carrie, you didn't have to, you wanted to! I didn't ask you to do it, I merely told you how to enhance your figure, that's all! I was wondering at the time how far this thing of yours went, what you'd be willing to give up to get what, that's all. And it's turned out that for you, to live in a woman's body is even more desireable than wearing lipstick. Look at you—you eagerly grew boobs the very moment Susan suggested it. Supposedly for me! And since we've been here you've pretended you were a woman whenever we've made love, not a man at all. As if I ever wanted any of this!

"Emily! I've always wanted to make love to you like a man! It was you who wouldn't let me once we arrived here! And now that you have Tom, it's you who won't even allow me into your bed!

"That's true. I've been trying to goad you into acting like a man, I don't deny it! Trying to bring Cary back. Haven't I? Well, it didn't work. If you were a man, if you did desire me, you'd never have accepted any of these restrictions. You'd have come here to Albuquerque with me looking like a man, and taken me and fucked me like a man, and I'd have loved it. And you'd never have touched a cock that wasn't your own, much less sucked on it. And you'd never have allowed Tom anywhere near me! Isn't that so?"

I just looked at her. I couldn't deny that part of it. Men are manly. She was telling me I'd never been a man. Maybe that explained everything?

"Susan doesn't think you ever really desired me. That we were ever really lovers, just the two of us, not without a real man also in bed with us doing the real work of a man at least with me, and maybe reaming you too. I told her, 'Oh yes, Carrie was once quite a passionate lover. But not since she's been a woman.' And that's also true!"

I was appalled, but I couldn't deal with these recastings of the reasons for things. Had Emily forgotten that she'd herself denied me 'penetrative' sex when I still wanted it, while I was still capable of it? Her real reason may have been to goad me into penetrating her as Cary, not Carrie, and thereby to end my career as Carrie. But it was nevertheless her decision, not mine. My decision had been only to go along with what she wanted, to make the best of the bargains available to me. That was also why I sucked Chazz off the first time, to make the best of what remained in fact a misunderstanding, an accident. Why was Emily reading our recent history in such a distorted way? "Why does Susan care about my sexuality?" I asked her, a little bitterly. "Why does she want to think I'm gay, or bisexual?"

"Oh, Carrie, you can't figure that one out? A smart girl like you?"

"She's lesbian. I know that much. She's scouting me?"

"Close. She's preparing you for something, that's certainly true. But don't flatter yourself, not for herself. You're attractive, and you'll do in the absence of better, she says, but she thinks you're still really a man pretending to be a woman, so you're better off being gay. That's why she likes knowing what it is you do with Chazz. Because if you're gay and should then decide to go the distance and become a complete woman, which is always possible—I'd say it's already happened except for the operation itself—then you'll end up a perfectly normal heterosexual woman. You'll have no problem transferring your affections to men. And besides, if you're gay you're no longer competition."

She paused. Then almost reluctantly, she added, "You still don't see it, honey? Susan's got another girlfriend at the moment. She's had one for some time. That's why she asked. She likes to scout the competition."

I suddenly realized what Emily was saying. I just stared at her, silent, shocked, attempting to absorb this revelation. Emily and Susan? Getting it on together? I was a double-cuckold? Emily was bisexual? Also bisexual, like me? Supposedly me? Not only another man but also another woman were sharing my wife, the way the partial man and partial woman in me had once shared her, but now had no part of her?

Emily nodded as she saw understanding dawn across my face. Then smiled, proud yet also embarrassed. "I've done it before, baby, I've told you that, and you certainly must know that by now. I find women attractive too. Tom isn't my only sexual partner these days. That's why I no longer mind it, the way your feminine self has overwhelmed your masculine self. In fact, now I'm truly grateful to you for giving way to this ... tendency of yours. I no longer want Cary to come back. He has no place to come home to any more. Not in your body—just look at you, is that a man's body? And not in my heart—he's shown repeatedly that he cares more for his own pleasures than my needs. Tom is a better lover than Cary ever was as a man because he's all man, and Susan's a better lover than Carrie because she's all woman. As one person who's less than a man and not quite a woman, you just don't measure up."

She saw the expression on my face, and took both my hands in hers. "Please, honey, don't feel too sad. You're still very dear to me, and I still care for you. I mentioned to Susan that I felt a little sad because you and I have shared so many things for so many years now, and my sex life is now so splendid, and yours is so merely ... as you describe it, dutiful. So she's arranging for things to improve for you even as we speak. She wants me to be happy, and that means she wants to see to it that you're happy too."

As she left for work, Emily smiled affectionately at me. "I'll be having dinner with Tom this evening, and then we'll want to be with each other for a while, probably at his place, but even so I expect to be home early. We both have full days tomorrow. I understand you have a dinner date too tonight, with Chazz, so you won't be home for dinner either. But don't stay out too late. Have a lovely time, sweetheart!"

That night, when we were seated on the couch in the living room and I was reaching for his zipper to administer his usual good night blow job, Chazz seized me by the shoulders and began to kiss me. He was so ardent I couldn't hold him back and couldn't break off either. What manliness remained in me was in tatters after Emily's conversation, and I did feel somewhat like a woman, so I tried responding to him as if I were one. Then he began kissing me passionately, his tongue plunging in and out of my mouth as if it were a vagina and his tongue a prick, as if he were hoping to tempt me to let him put his prick in my pussy, and his hands began moving across me everywhere. I allowed it because women do—we like feeling desired. I now knew more intimately than ever how it felt to be a woman with a man, especially with a man in a turmoil to have his way.

"All right," I told Chazz finally, breathlessly. I didn't want to sound too coy, so what I then said was, "Yes! I want you! But I'm not on the pill so you'll have to settle for second best." He stared at me and nodded slowly. So I raced for the KY in the downstairs powder room, removed my thong, checked that my gaff was in place, lubricated myself thoroughly, took a deep breath, hiked up my skirt, and knelt on the couch with my forearms folded and braced on the couch's back, my face on my arms. My ass was at exactly the right height for him to approach me and fuck me from a standing position.

Nothing happened.

So I looked back at him over my shoulder and smiled, and said, "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, honey." I had no idea he'd find that John Wayne speech such an irresistibly enticing invitation, but he let out a little yelp and came at me, took me by the hips, then slammed his cock all the way into me in one deep thrust.

Oh, my God, the pain? I screamed, and he took it to mean joyous abandonment, desire finally fulfilled, and immediately tried to oblige by pumping vigorously in and out and in and out and in and out. I cried out some more! Then either the pain subsided or I became accustomed because by the time he finally pushed it in, held it, then throbbed warm goop from inside him to inside me, I was beginning to feel a peculiar yearning down there, a wishful craving, the beginnings of a full-bodied desire for more, more fucking, that was wholly new to me. Had I in fact turned gay? As he pulled himself out I couldn't withhold a moan of disappointment. I turned and kissed him. He looked so pleased! He took my head in both his hands and kissed me back. Tenderly.

"Now you do me," he said quietly. "My ass is yours!"

"I can't," I replied. "I don't get hard any more." Then I realized what I'd just said. What I'd confessed. "You know?" I asked, wide-eyed?

"I've always known. Tom told me about you before our first date by way of persuading me to double-date with you—he knows I don't usually date women. But I've respected your right to privacy, so I haven't let on that I know—I figured you'd tell me in your own good time. Then just yesterday Susan called to say it was past time. Emily got on the line too, and they both urged me to end the suspense and make a woman of you. 'This very night!' they said. 'Make him glad he's who he is,' they said. 'Since he wants live like a woman, make him one! And then make her glad of it!'"

My asshole still felt full, leaking, distended, and it burned. But I didn't care. I just held onto Chazz for a while longer. Then slowly, tenderly, he bent down and took my soft penis into his mouth and tongued it until it glowed for joy and my body stiffened. Then he swallowed the clear fluid that had leaked out of it.

He left soon after—I hugged him close as he stood at the door, to show him how grateful I was for everything. My asshole really was burning! I hadn't myself realized how stretched it had been while he was fucking me. It had hurt, but at my express desire and enticement, after all. I went straight upstairs to the hall closet, found a package of Emily's tampons on a top shelf, and inserted one. This time of necessity, the same way I'd inserted tampons into me for fun on weekends when I'd simulated having periods. Chaz's cum served as a perfect lubricant—it slipped right in as if it belonged there.

"So now you're no longer a virgin, Carrie?" came Emily's voice.

I looked up startled! I'd been so intent on my quest for tampons I hadn't even noticed that Emily had been home the whole time, her door open to the hallway and her bed light on. She'd been lying in bed reading. Had she heard everything that had taken place downstairs? Of course! That was why she'd come home so early! To see if Chazz would do what she and Susan had asked him to do! To hear me cry out as he did it, as my sense of self began a new chapter!

She watched me with her book still propped on her stomach. "Was it that bad?" she asked, not unkindly. She even sounded sympathetic. "I heard. I just wanted to tell you, honey, it's never easy the first time for any of us."

A remark clearly directed to me woman to woman! Men are never easy to cope with, she was saying, but we don't have much choice, do we?

"Is there anything I can do to help?" she added.

"Yes," I said to her in a small voice as I limped awkwardly into her room and toward her bed. Her bed for months now. Tom's too, once, anyhow. Not mine. "My asshole HURTS! I HURT! Please? Hug me?"

"Oh, darling!" she said. Obviously her heart went out to me at once. Not to her husband but to her girlfriend! She immediately tossed her book on the floor and turned and embraced me and hugged me hard and close. I lay next to her and she covered me over, and as I felt her arms squeeze and grip me tight, I began to weep. "You poor dear," she said. "You poor, poor dear. My little man knows he's no longer a man now, only a girl, doesn't he? Well don't you worry, you won't ever ever have to do that again, don't you worry about that at all. There's only one first time. It won't ever happen again."

"No," I said. "That isn't it. That's not why I'm crying." I managed to sob that much out.

"Oh, sweetheart, why then, because it still hurts?"

"No, not that either. Oh, Emily," I finally managed to blurt out past my tightened throat. "Oh, Emily! It was awful when he began!"

"I could tell. I heard."

"But then I began to like it! I really LIKED it! Not because it was Chazz, though he's a lovely man. And not because he's a man! It was the feeling! I liked the way he felt, moving in and out of me. I like how he occupied me. How it all felt! Like I wanted more!"

And I broke down altogether and sobbed, wailed, crying in half-despair "Oh, God! Oh God! I wanted more!" Emily's arms still enclosed me. What would become of me now? What now?

She embraced me tightly again. "I know," she said over and over. "I know, baby, I know. That's how we are. Now you know too." She could sympathize with me and also exult with me, both of us together, one woman to another.

And that was how we spent the night. In each other's arms for the first time in months. Not as lovers but as the dearest of friends.

In the morning I wriggled out from her embrace while she slept on, went to my bathroom, and removed the tampon—there was a faint trace of blood on it, nothing serious. I then used the bidet to douche myself thoroughly. Then again. And much felt better.

A month later Chazz was fucking me whenever he saw me—on our couch, in the car, against the door of his office when I went to pick him up one afternoon, over a tree stump in the woods later that afternoon, in stalls in the men's and the women's rooms at the downtown Museum of Art and at the Country Club, in motels we passed on our way to somewhere else. Everywhere. I'd see him and he'd see me and within five minutes we were clamped together and thrusting at each other. We couldn't either of us get enough!

I looked forward to it every time. Grasping my lovely tits in both his lovely hands—each was now a full handful—he'd ream me from the rear as I bent over, or he'd ream me face to face with my legs on his shoulders. Now that I knew he knew and had even sucked me off, I'd let him mount me face to face. Not earlier, because that would have exposed my penis and balls to him, and anyhow it seemed too intimate. But now he'd done unto me what I'd many times done unto him, and I felt we were lovers. He was a hunk, but also a decent guy. I wondered now and then if I was in love with him. We'd fuck, and much of the time I'd leak my own climax into a condom or a sanitary napkin worn carefully over the front of my pubes. It was good. I felt deep affection toward the man who so earnestly offered me so much pleasure. He was sweet. He fucked devotedly. So did I.

Emily no longer asked me where I was going when I left the house, no more than I asked her where she'd been when she came home at all hours. We lived together, and consulted about the cleaning and cooking and eating in or out, and we mutually ran errands separately or together, but we lived separate private lives. We became pretty much what we seemed to be, sister and sister-in-law, except that we never confided in each other about intimate matters, what our really personal affairs were or how they were going. Emily never asked me where Cary was, which was just as well, because I had no idea.

One day I noticed that she was getting phone calls from a guy named Brad, messages on the answering machine we shared and calls she took where I could barely hear her voice while she spoke to him.

"Who's Brad?" I asked her casually at breakfast one morning, when she happened to be reading through a sheaf of office memos.

She looked up, a little surprised that I should ask. "Oh, Bradley. Yes. A guy at the office I sometimes spend time with," she replied vaguely. Then she looked directly at me. "Honey, here's good advice, girl to girl. Always have at least two men on your string if you're not ready to commit to any one of them. You apparently don't know yet that a girl should never let a guy think he's the only one for her until she knows positively that he's the only one for her. Tom knows I sometimes see other fellas. So even though he's my main man, he always feels privileged when I manage to find room for him in my busy schedule, and then he always shows me how much he appreciates it. It keeps him on edge and ... well, wonderful. Chazz on the other hand may be taking you for granted."

"Chazz is as much man as I can deal with, Emily!" He was, too. "Do you see much of this Brad?" Here was a whole new complication in my marriage, such as it was!

"Not as much as I'd like." Her tone was dismissive. She had something else on her mind, and returned to perusing her papers. But she saw me staring at her, so she set them aside. "Not yet. Though he's next in line if Tom shouldn't work out. I'm a one-man-at-a-time woman, at least in my affections if not my cunt, you may have noticed that. There was a time when you used to notice things like that, when you were mostly my man and I was mostly your woman."

"Now what does THAT mean?"

But Emily had returned to her stack of memos, and no longer heard me.

Then it happened. Chazz went away on a business trip and came back with the sad news that he'd met someone else, a lovely young man with no desire ever to resemble a woman. So he wouldn't be calling me any more. This was devastating news, or would have been except that at Emily's urging I'd earlier visited a select gay bar and begun dating a lovely young man named Derek who was grateful for whatever favors I allowed him—my company, sometimes my tits or my mouth, and if I was feeling especially celebratory, my ass. He had a superbly proportioned, well-cut cock, and a body to match. But the great favor he bestowed on me was his talent for dancing. He loved it, and took me to all sorts of dances, teaching me all sorts of graceful and funky moves and providing me with all sorts of occasions to wear the different marvelous gowns and dresses and costumes I bought for all of those occasions.

Emily admired or commented on each in turn as I acquired them, in part I suppose because we now felt like sisters, in part because now and then she wanted to borrow one herself. She was still seeing Tom, and Susan too of course, and others. We didn't discuss who. Our circles of friends at the Country Club kept us each aware who had been seen with whom, during the general run of general gossip accompanying our card games and our lunches after tennis matches.

Or we were informed by our hairdressers. Emily saw hers every Saturday morning because she worked and wanted to face Saturday nights looking her best. and I saw mine on Wednesday afternoons because my time was flexible and I saw men on different days. Except for the odd chipped nail my looks were self-tending.

We never passed on gossip about each other, I think because we were each feeling a little ashamed and a little responsible that we each were now involved with others. It was a good life. It seemed as if it could have gone on forever.

But it wasn't a marriage. A year after we'd moved to this new community and set up our new lives, mine as a woman, Emily finally drew the line. We were sitting at dinner at home. I had a new book contract and we'd banked the bonus and ordered pate fois gras and canard aux peches from La Chanteuse, with a Moet et Chandon champagne beforehand, a great Margeaux during, and an old Armagnac afterward. We were neither of us feeling any pain. Nor prepared to move. Which is why it came as such a surprise.

"All right! Carrie, I'm going to put it to you straight! You must realize by now that it's time you became a woman! Quit playing at it and become one!"

"Emily, what are you saying? I haven't been playing! I've been being a woman! You know that! All this time. What do you mean?"

"I mean something very simple. It's been a year. It's legal. It's time for you to strip off what's left of your cock and balls and get yourself a pussy and see for yourself what it's like to be a woman not just as a novelty but for the rest of your life. To make plans that span the rest of your life, including maybe husbands and kids and retirement pensions! It's plain that you aren't ever going to get this crossdressing and play-acting out of your system. Obviously you'd rather be a woman than go back to being a man. That's now obvious even to me, even if not yet to you. It's time for both of us to cut our losses and separate and begin our lives again."

I paused. Then said, "You're seeing someone else seriously, aren't you."

"Yes."

"Any reason for me to ask who?"

"Is there any way it matters to this discussion who? It's a who, and it's serious, that's all that matters."

"Emily it was you who urged me to take up this life. I was content to be a weekend crossdresser."

"Our situation urged it. Required it. You know that. You agreed that there were no alternatives!"

"Yes, I agreed. You said that a woman in your position had to maintain propriety and not be seen to associate with transvestites or queers. I was one of those things, and now I'm both of them, but no one knows that, so propriety has been served? Is that what you're saying?

"There was more. I told you that if Cary didn't return within a year we should reconsider our marriage. It's been a year. Does Cary want to return?"

I sat back and spread out my skirt. "No." I had to say it in all honesty.

"'No.' Are you any closer to quitting than when you began?"

"No. I'm probably further away." I had to confess that too. I liked the life, everything about it. Trying different strategies for making myself pretty, and knowing I've succeeded when both men and women give me more than a passing glance—that appealed to my vanity. The spontaneity of my relationships with other women, their unstressed acceptance of me—I loved that too. The desireability of my new body, and the marvelous sensations when my titties were being caressed, incredible—I'd suck off anyone who was willing to stroke my breasts, anyone at all! And now that my affair with Chazz was over I'd become a regular at an elite gay bar where there were always men interested in pleasuring my body. Sometimes I met them there, and other times I met men the way women usually do. Many never did discover I'd once been a man. But given the variety of my partners, I liked being a woman more than ever.

"You're saying that you don't expect to complete your part of our agreement within the reasonable period of time we've defined as a year. Or ever. Isn't that so? Well, it's over. "

"What? What do you mean, Emily? What's over?" Her words surprised me, but what surprised me more was that I wasn't especially concerned.

"Carrie, I hate to tell you this, but as far as the world's concerned it's been over for some time. Months ago people began wondering why my absentee husband never returns even for short visits, why I never visit him, why I was showing up at so many social events with Tom, or Brad, or other men. Whether he ever really existed. So for respectability's sake I ended our little charade. Without telling you, since you were entitled to the full year and I could always reverse course if I had to, I told top management in strictest confidence that when I dated Tom and others I wasn't flouting the institution of marriage. I told them that my husband wasn't coming back. That he's been living with a woman with two kids in South Carolina, and that when I took on this Vice Presidency he refused to come with me and instead filed for a no-fault divorce. And I responded in kind. The decree becomes final in a few more days, Carrie. I'm about to become a free woman." She looked at me confidentially and added, "You are too!"

"A divorce! Emily! But how ... why did they believe you? Didn't you need to show them legal papers? Is any of this true?"

"Yes, except for the part about Cary's whereabouts. I really have no idea where Cary is now. I stopped wondering long ago."

"But don't we both need to sign for a no-fault divorce?"

"Yes, of course."

"When did I sign? I don't recall signing anything like that!"

"You did. Remember the papers Susan gave you when you first agreed to feminize yourself with massive hormone treatments? When you decided to render Cary homeless, a displaced person? Well, that abrogated our agreement, because it denied Cary a masculine body to use if he ever returned. The first paper you signed was the one giving Susan permission to implant those hormones. Because you signed that paper she handed you the application for a divorce and you signed that too. The day I arrived here I co-signed it and filed it with the court."

She smiled as if shamefaced. "It was a little sneaky, I grant you, but we both know it was justified. I still gave you a year to change yourself back to a semblance of Cary. Instead you went even further toward Carrie, as far as you could. All by your own choice. I put no pressure on you either way, except to remind you that Cary's return would be welcome, at times preferable. Isn't that so?"

It was.

"Well, as your titties ripened and you took up all your women's activities and then began dating Chazz, then fucking him, it became obvious that you were comfortably habituated and that Cary wasn't coming back. I knew then that I'd done the right thing. Now the year has passed and the divorce decree is just about final."

It was appalling! Had I been tricked? I couldn't question the justice of what she'd done, given what I'd done, but still .... something wasn't right.

"Why were you so sure I'd never want to be Cary again?" I asked suddenly. "Just because I wanted to grow tits? They were supposed to be for you, you know! To maintain your credibility. For your protection."

Emily just looked at me, unable to believe I really believed what I'd just said. "Oh, baby!" she said finally. "It wasn't just tits. Just think about it. What you agreed to. It's true that I knew how all this would end even before I put that all or nothing proposal to you. I knew how you'd choose and how it would play out month by month. As it did. After all, how likely was it that you'd tire of playing at womanhood and accept full time manhood for life? For five years I'd watched you live for the weekends, and when the weekends came I'd watch you leap into womanhood like a ballet dancer into the arms of her partner! Came Saturday morning you'd be ecstatic! Carrie, you've never been a full time man. You wouldn't know how! That girl's bathing suit you once wore made you a sissy for life. But you certainly do know how to be a woman! That's what you really are. Isn't that so?"

I had to admit it. A year ago, even while agreeing to Emily's terms I'd privately reserved judgement and looked for all the escape hatches.

"I knew it. Maggie knew it! And when I told her your history, Susan agreed. Only you didn't know it!"

Then her voice modulated, softened. "Look at you! A full-time woman for a full year, and nothing but! Content to be just that. I'll prove it to you. Come here."

I stood and came close to her, unsure what she meant to do. She reached out with both hands and gently, exquisitely began to manipulate my nipples through my blouse. Her fingers worked them so delicately I began to melt. A rush of sheer pleasure came over my whole body.

"See? Would you ever want to do without these?"

"No, never," I gasped.

"Who are you, Cary or Carrie? Who will you want to be tomorrow? And the day after that?"

I remained silent. The answer was obvious enough.

"The only remaining question is, then, when will you accept the obvious and become a complete woman? When will the last vestiges of your supposed manhood join our marriage in the great beyond? Isn't it time to get the rest of your life under way? Don't you want a vagina?"

She reached into my blouse now, then into my bra, and sweetly rolled a nipple between her thumb and forefinger. A deep yearning began to overwhelm me. It felt so excruciatingly lovely!

"Oh! Oh, yes! Yes!" I burst out. I wasn't sure what I was agreeing to. More caressing of my boobs? Sex reassignment surgery?

"I knew it, Carrie." She removed her hand and took my head gently between both of her hands, then kissed me softly on the lips. Lingeringly. "Now you really can be my dearest girlfriend," she murmured. "And nothing but." She kissed me again. "All the legal requirements for your surgery have been satisfied, honey. Counseling, hormone replacement, the real life test, everything. You've even signed the consent forms. It can be done any time."

"I signed those too when I signed for a divorce?"

"Those were the very next papers you signed, yes. Susan phoned me the moment you left the room—she wanted to do it immediately, that afternoon, so your pussy would be a fait accompli and already healing when I appeared on the scene a week or two later. So I could be shocked and sympathetic when I found out, yet seem no way responsible. It would all be an unfortunate 'misunderstanding' compounded by your carelessness when signing those forms, your eagerness to grow tits. Susan's plan was that then, after you healed, we'd introduce you to the advantages. Bring on hunk after hunk to keep your cunt stuffed with cock, flatter your femininity so disgracefully that you'd never want to be Cary again." Emily smiled to herself. "But as it turned out, eventually you did that all by yourself."

"Why didn't Susan do that, castrate me and cut a hole in me and then force feed me cock? She'd already done it to her husband."

"I didn't let her. I thought about it. It would have been fun, watching you get fucked over in a pussy you never wanted, or anyhow never knew you wanted. Especially when I remembered all those times when you violated your agreement with me and went out shopping and to the movies wearing bras and tank tops and culottes and lipstick and so on. Don't think I didn't know just because I kept to my part of our agreement and never mentioned it. I really did think you deserved an instant vagina. For a time I wanted to rub your nose in one. So to speak."

I was silent. She was right. I had broken my word.

"But I decided finally that Susan shouldn't go that far with you. Not just then. You'd have resented it and then never come face to face with your own real desires, never realized that at heart you really do want to be a woman. I wanted Cary to actually ask Susan to cut off his balls as an act of surrender to Carrie. So Carrie's cunt would have her own fully informed consent. I wanted your journey into womanhood to be completely your own doing. As it's been."

"Well, thank you!" was all I could say. I tried to say it ironically, but it didn't come out that way. I didn't know what to think.

"Hold in mind that for the whole past year we've had you by the balls, so to speak, and you never knew it. Yet we never did cut them off. Think about it. Susan had all the signed papers in hand, the permissions, the powers of attorney, the informed consents, everything needed to do the deed. At any moment during the past year you could have awakened to find yourself feeling groggy and in a strange place, then discovered that under those bandages down below, surgery had done what your hormones and habituation couldn't quite manage. It could still happen, honey. We've just had a marvelous dinner to celebrate your book, and two bottles of great wines. You could nod off right now, and then when you awoke, presto, no more shriveled balls and shrunken cock. In their place? A pretty vagina with pink, plump lips pursed and ready to receive any number of cock heads. And I'll bet you find that idea attractive!"

She looked at me and nodded. She was right. I looked back at her and sat very still and said nothing. No provocations!

"I know that now you'd like that. But I want you to agree to it the way you've always agreed to everything else. Sometimes we need just a teeny push. So let me remind you, in another few days you'll no longer be my husband. There isn't a prayer that you'll ever function as a man again, or ever want to function as a man. Each day you've been more and more eager to function as a woman and have whatever's manly function inside you. True or not true?"

"True." I had to admit it.

"Then we understand each other. Just do it. Here's the phone. Call Susan. She's waiting to hear from you. And then let's go to bed."

I sat staring at the phone for quite a while, while Emily watched and said nothing. I was thinking things through. Then I called. Susan congratulated me when she heard that I'd just had my last supper as a male, and told me that I shouldn't eat breakfast.

Then we went to bed. Emily and I performed sixty-nine on each other for the first time in a year. "I must kiss this dear little thing goodbye," Emily said. "It once gave me so much pleasure! And it's still so cute!"

"Yes," I muttered at her, pushing my groin into her face as she pressed hers into mine and I drank up her juices.

The next day I entered Susan's hospital, undressed, put on a hospital gown, and climbed onto a gurney unassisted. Six hours later under swaths of bandages my dear little thing was altogether different. I was a complete woman. I'd arrived. Now there was nowhere further for me to go.

Well, a little further. Three months later I was dilating myself with my thickest stent when Emily appeared at my door and just watched me, silently.

"You know," she said. "I don't know why you need to do that after Larry's real meat spent half the night sliding back and forth in there, dilating you and then lubricating you too."

"Mmmmm," was all I replied. I was rising to my third orgasm of the day. Then when it had peaked and receded, I said, "You can't get too much of a good thing."

"That's true," Emily replied. "I felt that way my first trip here. You were back home in our old house, trying on different girly clothes every day as I knew you would despite our agreement, and timidly showing them to the world. I'd asked Maggie to look out for you, and she told me that the whole time I was away you were making out you were a hot babe. So I indulged myself too. While you were abandoning your manhood and dressing like a full time woman, I stayed over an extra week and fucked Tom and slept with Susan. The whole time, over and over, alternating, in and out of their beds. It was heavenly!"

I was speechless. "What?!" I managed to say again. Then "You were unfaithful to me then? That very first visit? With both Susan and Tom?"

She nodded, amused by my consternation.

I didn't know where to begin. "I ... I thought you didn't fuck Tom until that night when Chazz and I ...."

"Oh, sweetie, that's what I wanted you to think, so after that we could both be more open with each other about our sexual activities. So you'd feel free to keep doing with Chazz what I was doing anyhow with Tom. You did, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"In fact, honey, I fucked Tom almost as soon as I got off the plane here. That very evening. After five years with you, to find myself in the hands of a 100% real man? And then when I settled on purchase of this house and met Susan, a 100% real woman? How could I be satisfied after that with your half-way sexuality? I spent that third week here getting to know them both a lot better. After a week of a real woman's hands on my breasts and a real man's prick in my pussy, I knew that our marriage was over. I told both Tom and Susan about you. They each advised me to cut you loose, to let your transvestism play out all the way on its own the way it has. Susan wanted to force it, as I've told you, but I thought just encouraging it would serve well enough. That you'd find your own way to become a girl and end our marriage. As you have."

I felt cheated, deceived. Yet the high moral ground under my feet kept slipping away. "I can understand about you and Susan," I said. "She's a forceful woman, like you when you choose to be, and you'd had a good time in college, and she'd had some previous experience with her husband. You both saw quickly enough that hormones were all I needed to get me out of the way. But how did Tom get involved?"

"Not intentionally, it just happened. We'd spent the whole first day talking about my responsibilities here, meeting the people I'd be working with, and so on. I was exhausted. So Tom treated me to dinner. And then took me dancing. And you know, one thing leads to another. It was wonderful to dance in the arms of a powerful man, then later that night to feel a powerful man plunge into me. You know, you've slept with Chazz and by now who knows who else? I'd slept only with you for five years, and then only on weekdays, and even then I knew your mind was elsewhere, probably looking forward to your next upcoming weekend with that woman in the mirror. Then again, you've always had an effeminate build, and Tom was an All-State bodybuilder. Oh, yes, it was wonderful, being reminded again what a real man feels like."

"So you've slept with Tom all along?"

"I have indeed. And as you now know, not only with Tom. Honey, it was inevitable. What else could I do? Everyone agreed it was for the best."

"Did you think it was proper? I mean, with your concern for respectabilty and all ...!"

"As for respectability and propriety, I did exaggerate a little. You've seen for yourself that despite all our talk, marital infidelity is as common around here as card playing. Not really disgraceful. And you've seen that gays and lesbians are respectable too these days—no one thinks less of Susan because she prefers women to men. But transgendered men are still considered pitiable freaks. I mean, men who want to look like women? Become women? Ridiculous! I couldn't possibly live with you as you were, a weekday man and weekend woman, and yet be considered a serious member of the community."

She shook her head, agreeing with herself. "So everyone was unanimous, Susan, Maggie, Tom, everyone. You and I should renegotiate your transvestism, but this time I should give you a choice, all or nothing, first all, then nothing. Let you imagine you have a choice. Let you become gay or a woman or whatever you chose. But give up on the status quo."

I listened. This was not exactly what I'd thought had happened, nor exactly why I'd thought it had happened.

"As everyone expected you leaped at it and loved it. And as everyone expected you got habituated—addicted to it is probably more accurate. To the clothes, which were still erotic to you back then, not just stylish the way they are now. To the social roles—who knew how much you'd love becoming a clubwoman, chairing endless committee meetings and attending endless lunches, living a life of cards and golf and tennis? To the sex—Tom suggested that we introduce you to Chazz to see how that part of you would respond, and as you know you fell hard and gobbled him up. Maybe accidentally at first, but afterward? Inertia did the rest—you enjoy playing at femininity, and it's easy to keep doing what's enjoyable. I ended up in bed with a real man and you've ended up a woman in bed with real men of her own. What could be better?"

I considered my situation. I'd just spent half the night getting fucked by someone who felt grateful because I let him, and later today I'd be playing tennis with Mavis in the quarter-finals. And my racy script for the Annual Club Entertainment was already in rehearsal, and I had a killer Givenchy gown in my closet waiting for the opening night. What could be better?

Yet, Emily had one more surprise for me. "Good!" she said. "I'm glad that's settled. Now here's more news, honey. Tom and I are getting married next month and I want you to be my Maid of Honor."

Again, astonishment. My jaw open, silent.

"I want you to give me away to Tom during the ceremony, since I have no father or brother or other man to do it. Only you, or the memory of you. It'd be so very fitting, you standing there in a lovely gown as you hand me to Tom. That's what you did do during the past year, you know, though you were never quite aware of it. As we'd both hoped you would."

I suppose I had. So I agreed.

Susan was into bondage. I found that out after Emily confessed her multiple adulteries, and explained how she'd encouraged me to indulge myself and thereby end our marriage, and then asked me to be her Maid of Honor when she married Tom. Resentful and indignant, the next day I stormed over to Susan's house to have it out with her. I told her that a year earlier she'd not only alienated my wife's affections, she'd colluded to have me castrated.

"Did I?" she'd replied. "I guess so. Quite successfully too, I'd say."

She then made it quite clear that though the signing of my legal papers had indeed been deceitful, it had been at Emily's request and well-intended. And that I'd been a co-conspirator, so eager to develop my own tits and ass that I'd have signed anything and pretty much did. She'd pointed out that everything else done had been at my request, or else done to me by me, including even my castration.

"In fact you agreed twice to be castrated," she said with a triumphant grin. "First with chemicals and then by surgery. Isn't that true?"

It was.

"You're right though. I do love emasculating men! Emily has reminded you I'm sure how we held your balls in our hands for a whole year, as it were, yet did nothing. If you'd made a problem we would have, but you were a perfect doll. I must say though that I especially treasure the moment when I actually did hold your balls in my hand, just for a moment, then tossed them into the trash."

I should have remembered that Susan is not someone to trifle with.

"All right then," she said. Let's see how your vagina is doing today. Fucked anyone yet?"

"Yes," I said. "But carefully. So as not to injure it."

"Well, we can cure you of that fear easily enough."

She then restrained me on her examination table and fumbled with some instruments. I couldn't see because my upraised legs in the stirrups blocked my view. But suddenly I felt what had to be a strap-on dildo plunge into me. She began then to fuck me slowly, telling me between thrusts that I should let myself go, my new pussy was built to withstand heavy abuse. It did. When she fell from me an hour or so later, my orgasms had utterly exhausted me.

A few weeks later I called her about another matter and mentioned the upcoming marriage, wondering if she considered Tom a rival or a partner in her relationship with Emily.

"Oh yes, that," Susan replied. "Her marriage. I knew she'd get around to telling you sooner or later. But there's more to it than that. It's time you knew. You want me to tell you about it?"

"Yes, of course."

"Come over then. You know the way by now. You're due for another physical anyhow."

I went. Susan was waiting. "First things first," she said. "Lie down please." She strapped me into the stirrups for my examination as she had done so often while my vagina was healing. Then as last time she strapped my wrists down too.

"Why?" I asked. I was a little surprised but not overly concerned. It had been a good fucking.

At first she didn't answer. She simply inspected my vagina, then said "Perfect. I can now use my largest dildo on you now. You won't return to earth for days!" Then she reached forward and lifted my breasts, palpated them, then stroked them. "Even more perfect," she breathed. Then she straightened up and began preparing several hypodermics.

"Susan, what's this?" I asked her, a little more concerned. I felt helpless. I had no idea what she was doing. "Why tie my wrists?"

"So you won't squirm when I tell you the news you don't know. Emily's pregnant, by Tom. That's why they're getting married."

This wasn't too surprising. Why should I squirm? "So? That's wonderful! I'm glad for them. But what has that to do with me now?"

"Carrie, just think! You may not be her man any more, but you're still her girl. She's a top executive, far too busy to be taking care of a baby, nursing it and so on. So she came to me for an abortion. Reluctantly, because she did want to keep the baby. Like most career women she wants domesticity too, but she knows she just can't spare the time for it right now! Doesn't want to. May never."

"So?"

"So I had a better idea, and I told it to her, and she loves it! You do have the time. With the injections I'm preparing now and a few follow-ups, in five months time these lovely breasts of yours will engorge and then begin flowing with milk. Delicious mother's milk. All that her baby will need and more, and just when it's most needed! We both agree that you'll make a marvelous wet nurse. And you'll love it too! It'll give you more of the full womanly experience you're always craving. You'll enjoy all the joys of motherhood except the labor pains!"

T thought about this. I do love the sensations when my breasts are suckled, so the idea had some appeal. And it would provide a kind of retribution for Emily's treacheries—her unfaithfulness, and the ways she'd indulged my womanhood until it had ended our marriage. All I'd wanted was to let the woman in me, Carrie, please herself and me by now and then looking pretty. But Emily'd wanted Carrie to take over altogether, as women do. She had. Now it would be Emily who would suffer the pains of childbirth and then walk away, leaving me to enjoy all the subsequent pleasures of nurturing.

That seemed a fair exchange. Even so, I didn't like being used to serve other people's convenience. "Susan," I said. "Suppose I don't want to be a wet nurse!"

She waved a huge hypo in the air and approached my right hip. "Then don't be. You'll find though that when you're lactating you won't be able to beat back all the men who'll want a piece of the action. Men go mad with delight if they can suck breast milk from a woman while they're fucking her, just as you're delighted these days to suck semen from a man's cock while getting fucked. We're all like babies that way. We want it all. Men will want to fill their bellies from you and empty their balls into you all at once, then sleep, and then when they wake up they'll do anything for you because they'll want more. You'd like that, wouldn't you? There are still a few things you haven't yet gotten men to do for you, aren't there?"

I nodded. A few.

"Then hold still. Just think this through, consider the advantages, and then don't squirm while I inject you."

I did. As she requested, I didn't squirm. Not just then. But afterward, my feet still in her stirrups and my vulva fully exposed, when Susan lifted her skirt, lowered her panties, and strapped on her largest dildo, I did squirm. Even more when she forced it into me. As she started to move it in and out I rolled my bubble-shaped bottom round and round, and could do little else. It was pure joy. I'd once imagined I was Carrie, but now I wasn't imagining anything. I was altogether myself.

END

© 2005 by Vickie Tern. May be freely archived in free archives, but please let me know about it, OK?

  

  

  

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