Scenes from a Marriage

by: Vickie Tern
vickietern@aol.com

1.

Carl wasn’t really small, maybe only a little below average, but he was thin, gawky even for a teenager. His lean arms and narrow chest and small shoulders refused to bulk up no matter how much "Man-Power Protein Supplement" he drank and no matter how much iron he tried and failed to pump. So when the girls in his high school wanted to practice being girls on some guy they’d ignore him, overlook him. Sometimes even literally -- they’d stand in his path chatting with some acceptably tall, massive guy who happened to be behind him, never noticing that they were blocking his way. Carl would just wait till they moved on, too polite to interrupt the flirting and too unassertive even to say "Excuse me!" He was easily ignored.

No way was he a fit boyfriend for any self-respecting high school girl. But some of them found he could be a friend nevertheless, that he was always a patient and sympathetic listener when they had a problem to talk through and their regular girlfriends weren’t available. They’d get on the phone with him and talk about the hopes and heartaches of their relationships with boys, sometimes for hours. He’d sympathize. After a while they never thought of him as a boy, not the kind of boy who mattered, anyhow. He was sort of more like one of them, one of the gang who hung out together and could often be seen leaning across a table in the cafeteria, foreheads practically touching, ignoring the pizza under their faces and giggling as one or another of them held the rest spellbound with tales of intimacies with one or another boy friend.

Such intimacies were all new and magical to the girls, so whatever any one girl did and how she felt about it had to be shared, turned round and re-examined by everyone. Kiss a boy on a first date? Well, yes, but with his tongue in you? His finger in you? Blow him on a second date if you really like him? Maybe, if he wasn’t too arrogant, if he didn’t take it for granted that’s what you’d do. Or maybe even if he was arrogant, that’s self-confidence really, that’s a good thing in a boy. If he was shy and you wanted to kiss his cock to see what it was like, how big and so on, and wanted him to know, should you suck on his thumb to tell him? When he squirted, should you swallow it? Should you try to share it with him? If he’d accept it from your mouth into his, you could get him to do other things too, one of the girls had heard. But none of them were quite sure what things, not just yet. Carl never ventured an opinion on sex, since he was neither a representative boy nor a makeshift girl. What could he say? He’d listen, always feeling a little left out yet always feeling privileged to be there at all. He’d sit there while they talked make-up and clothes and girls’ magazines and pop stars and local scandals, and boys, boys, boys. It was way better than sitting nowhere. And as long as he listened and nodded, he belonged! One girl even invited him to her pajama party, and he would have gone, too, except that her mother heard and vetoed it despite protests that it wasn’t fair, that Carl wasn’t really a boy, no one thought of him that way! They liked having him around. He was comfortable. He was a safe harbor where they could let down their sails when they returned from cruising uncharted waters with real boys.

So though he wasn’t exactly a boy, being a boy made him better than one more girl in some ways. They’d try out new looks and flirty repartee on him to get his reaction. They’d ask him if this weird mix and match outfit or that retro eye liner was too much, what would he think if he were a guy? Or if this new short hairdo was more flattering than their old smooth long hair. In time they learned to respect his opinion. He’d listen to what they were really saying, not just the frivolous-sounding surfaces but the tangles of anxiety and hopeful pride underneath. And he had instinctive good taste, so he always gave good advice. They loved him for it. One girl told him he was so sweet and so understanding of girls he really deserved a boyfriend of his own! Then when he blushed, they teased him. He was so dear!

The other guys thought he probably did have a boyfriend of his own. To them he was that weird kid who hangs out with girls, probably a fag or a queer, whatever. Especially after an incident when the girls all got tipsy on a little wine and trooped down to the Nail Factory for manicures, and another girl from their school saw them and reported that he’d gotten one too. No matter that it was only clear matte polish. There he was, surrounded by girls, sitting where only girls sit, his hand gracefully extended to the operator while she buffed and painted his fingertips. That tied it. No boy wanted to be seen with him after that. Not even the boys who were discovering that they were indeed themselves fags, queers. A few times Carl tried to get a girl interested in him as himself, as a boyfriend, not as a friend who was a boy. But it was always no go. He wasn’t their type, not for that kind of thing. So he got used to it, to not being their type. What he had going with them was still a lot better than nothing. He was grateful for it. More than grateful, if the truth be known. Because Carl loved girls, being with girls, being surrounded by them, being accepted by them on any terms! They were so incredibly attractive! He was charmed by their smooth skins and graceful movements, the soft round shapes of their faces and bodies, the way their hair bounced when they tossed their heads, their baby doll chins and their huge eyes. The way they held up their hands in class with their wrists bent way back, and talked with their wrists way forward. The way they stretched their lips smooth to apply their "Charm-Kist" candy flavored lipsticks and then later their serious Revlon and Estee Lauder shades. The way their new brassieres lifted and thrust out their new soft mounds and stretched their sweaters. The way they shook their shoulders provocatively to make a point, their mounds waving in emphatic agreement, unanswerable. The way they now and then produced naughty remarks or foul language unexpectedly, starting from way back inside themselves and then suddenly blurting the words, then giggling at their own daring, their unhallowed venture into male prerogative. Girls were wonderful! He just wasn’t their type, that’s all. Not for a boyfriend. Real girlfriends being unattainable, Carl secretly settled for facsimiles. All through high school and into college he maintained an imaginary sex life much like that of other boys’ -- he lusted after the ripe women pictured in "Playboy" and the brazen ones in magazines depicting anatomical details, like "Screw." Recreating those babes in his imagination, he’d ask them what they’d like and he’d advise them what he’d like, while his hand pumped his own member. It wasn’t too bad. He’d attempt conversations with them and they’d reply eagerly, until eventually one of them would leap up onto him and wrap her legs around his waist and lean back in ecstasy while he lunged his always-ready-to-hand cock repeatedly into her vitals. The sex was always good when he himself played all the parts, when he did for them what girls do so he could do to them what boys do. He got good at it. "Oh, Carl, you’re so wonderful!" they’d tell him afterward. He’d tell himself, that is. Then at last, marvelously, when Carl was a Junior in college a real romance with a real girl blossomed, sex and all! With a girl who did think he was wonderful! He was still known to be a nice guy, a good friend a girl could talk to about nearly anything, and he’d become a whole sorority’s acquired mascot -- they’d even wander the house in their bras and panties when he was around, paying no more attention to him than to each other or to some pet dog. One of the sisters was a lovely girl named Carol -- they joked about their similar sounding names when they first met. She was also thin like Carl, like Carl she had dark hair trimmed below her ears, and she was also a Management major. They were in lots of the same classes, and sometimes loaned each other their notes. Other sorority sisters joked that they were almost twin sisters, and Carl felt pleased because he admired her. Usually, though, Carol looked right through him, thinking about other things. Carol liked big, hard-bodied men. Football guys, tennis players, bodybuilders piqued her interest, but not men with Carl’s build. The previous year she’d fallen hard for a basketball player, a well-known cocksman who’d condescended to use her as his readily-available cunt. She’d doted on that man the whole time, but when Fall classes resumed he’d stood her up, told her off, told her he preferred a different doormat. Still weeping, hoping hopelessly against hope, she’d called Carl, could they meet somewhere and just talk?

They did, and Carl gave her tough advice and welcome consolation. They ended up in the Student Union Snack Salon with their heads close, talking about all sorts of things, ignoring the pizza under their noses. Carol looked into his eyes, and was startled to realize that he was a nice looking boy in his own right, really a man, not just a local nerd who hung out with girls because he wasn’t much of a guy. He cared about her problem, he was genuinely concerned for her, she could tell! That was so sweet of him! On impulse she hinted that she might be willing to go to an upcoming campus cookout with him as her date, and he asked her. They did, and they enjoyed it, a lot, and when he timorously kissed her good night she asked if he’d want to accompany her to next Saturday’s sorority dance. Then the third time they went out it wasn’t to attend some event with all their friends, it was to go off by themselves, to drive to a road house some distance away and dance together and just talk. They definitely wanted to see much more of each other.

They did. Carol came to respect and admire Carl, and Carl was ecstatic, wildly elated. She was beautiful, she had the most delicate mannerisms, she was smart, so her opinions mattered, and she liked him! She cared! About him! He would never forget that moment when they were walking back from class through the winter’s first snowfall, both of them well bundled up, and she’d put her face up to his and held it there until he finally realized why and dared to kiss it. And she’d kissed him back! With feeling! It was ... bliss!

They fell in love. Carl was still more skin than muscle, but he had enough of a build by then so when he proposed going steady and she agreed and they finally undressed completely to make love, she was as happy to run her hands over his lean, hard shoulders as he was to caress her perky, soft, generous breasts. That first time was so beautiful, considerate, and affectionate, so very tender! Different, Carol found, not at all like sex with other guys! She showed him a position she liked and guided him into her, and he ebbed and flowed and rose and fell over her and in her until at last she gasped and hugged him, and he came inside her, he came into this wonderful girl Carol, into a real girl, for the first time anywhere ever! It was utterly sublime! How could anyone contain such joy?

Thereafter he was altogether hers. She became everything to him.

His precious darling, the love of his life, his reason for being. Her body and her face were more provocative than his most erotically saturated magazine dream girl’s. Her cute decisiveness of manner entranced him, her absolute certainty about all sorts of things reduced his own considered beliefs to rubble. Whenever they disagreed, he’d always concede before an argument could develop. It was a miracle that she loved him, and he knew it, that she cared for him, and he knew that too. He’d let nothing ever put those things at risk. Nothing!

Carl never stopped thinking of Carol’s body as a holiest of holies. He was never happier than after a date when she’d open her dorm room to him and shrug off her bra and panties and lie down primly crosswise on her bed, feet on the floor and legs ajar, waiting for him to lift her skirt and unveil her quim and sink to his knees between hers and devoutly lick and kiss her delicate pink labia until they swelled up thick with pulsing blood. Then to part the folds of flesh protecting her clitoris with his tongue, and lick and lap that little nubbin until she groaned and rolled around, her thighs by now wrapped tight around his head, her ankles locked behind him. Then she owned him utterly! Only when she came down from her orgasm and released him could he feel that he’d earned the right to rise from the floor and mount her and enter her and then rock gently against her until they released their erotic tensions together, she for a second time, maybe a third, he finally at last. As she saw it, he never crammed into her soon enough once the gifted face he buried in her pussy had brought her off. For Carol, lovely as it was, cuntlapping was only a warm-up for the main event. She was eager to feel Carl stuffed into her, slipping and sliding himself into her, slamming into her. She wanted to feel again what she’d felt with that last boy friend, that basketball player who’d jilted her. She’d fucked that guy even on their first date, because she knew he was all coiled muscle, and she wanted to feel it flexing and tensing inside her. It’d been great -- she could scarcely walk the next day, but she’d nevertheless spent the whole time smiling. Then for months she’d never worn panties when she was near him -- she never wanted him to feel inhibited! She was Miss Available to him at all times, and he used her at whim. She loved his hard fucking! That was why she’d had such a hard time giving him up.

Carl was different -- respectful, considerate, reverent even. Once he dawdled so long licking and sucking her cunt, and she got so worked up, so impatient, that she impulsively grabbed his hair and hauled him up bodily from between her legs and onto her body. She wanted cock! He barely had time to unzip and pull out his dick before she thrust her groin at him, already spasming. He’d slid his thing into her while it was still sticking awkwardly out of his fly, no time allowed for him to unbuckle and drop his pants. Those pants were soaked when they finished, drenched, and the whole crotch area was stiff and crusty the next day when it dried and he had to leap into them to rush to class! He learned from that, and thereafter he stripped bare even before kneeling to kiss her mound hello and then devote himself to her slit. Bare-assed was better. He was her naked lover always on his knees in her presence. She enjoyed that.

But once his lower parts were naked she’d side-track him mischievously for her own entertainment, sometimes even before he could go down on her. Sitting there on her bed, she’d tell him to rise and stand before her, which he did! Then she’d look up at him slyly and take him into her mouth and begin to suck on him. In time she invented a game in which she forced him to cum in her mouth by embracing his backside so firmly he couldn’t pull out. Then she held his cum puddled under her tongue when they separated, and then when she had his complete attention she’d obviously, lasciviously, almost mockingly swallow him down, never taking her eyes off him. Two points for her. "None for you," she’d say, her tongue still coated. If he could kiss her first and share it, only one point for her, and one for him. Cock-sucking him deprived her of her fuck until he could recover, but it was fun to tease him that way. Anybody could fuck!

She loved the feel and flavor of cum, and there was no reason he shouldn’t too, she reasoned. So, lovingly, she elaborated the game to give him a chance to share it another way. She let him fool her into thinking he was a long way yet from peaking, supposedly. She’d ease her grip on him so he could withdraw from her mouth just in time to spurt all over her face. That made two points for him. Then he could take his well-deserved victory lap, kissing and licking her face clean of his cum, all of it. She’d insist -- to the victor go the spoils. He did it even though it felt odd, licking up his own cum with its peculiar salty flavor and its sticky feel. But just as he’d kiss her when her mouth was full of him even though he knew she’d transfer it to his mouth, he did it because she wanted him to do it. And because it provided a wonderful excuse for him to lick her face, her eyelids, the hollows under her cheeks, the pulse point throbbing in front of her ear, all the places he loved. It was heaven for him to sink his face into the curve of her neck and kiss and lick her over and over. He’d go breathless doing that! What was licking a little cum, given that joy? She thought that his passionate devotion to her face was to the taste and feel of sperm, that he loved it as much as she did but was too embarrassed to say so. One of those things men couldn’t ever confess, she supposed. So to please him she often let him win. And always, after they’d made love and her pussy was still oozing and she was lolling back half-asleep, she’d tuck his head under the covers for a farewell kiss on her lower lips, then hold him there, giving him plenty of opportunity to suck his own precious nectar out of her. That felt so good!

She wanted it, so despite his initial distaste he did it. He’d read that only girls liked cum, girls and gay guys, and he was neither. But after a while he didn’t mind, he could do it easily, though he never came to love it the way she did. Especially after they fucked and it was mingled with her own sweet juices. He loved those.

After their first few gentle fucks a determinedly lecherous look crossed Carol’s face. One night in her dorm she told him abruptly to lie on his back. As he wondered why she mounted him, crouched, leaned back on her thighs, and sank down onto his prick until it was deep inside her. Then rose and thrust and writhed, his prick glistening, her pussy never tighter nor more swollen, her moans never louder than when she climaxed lunging on top of him, altogether in control of her own movements and sensations as well as his.

That was only the first of many times she fucked him instead of the other way around. When on top she was always rougher, more abandoned, wilder. That was how she found she could give herself the hard fucking she craved, the kind that basketball player had always given her. Carl wasn’t capable. He was always gentle, easing sweetly in and out of her, trying to prolong her pleasure. She appreciated that, even loved him for it, but there were limits!

This was one way she could have it both ways. She made Carl happy by becoming his special girl, and when Carl was happy Carol was very happy. Carol had previously dated only hunky studs, thinking that was what a girl should do. Carl was no hunk, but he was everything else she’d ever wanted, or close enough. He was kind, sensitive, caring, responsible, a loving partner, considerate, always respectful of her wishes, and dedicated to a future they could share equally. And they complemented each other. Where he was tactful, indirect whether praising or finding fault, she was forthright. Where he was quick, improvisational, maybe careless, inclined to go on impulse, she was methodical, exact. When he hesitated, she was decisive. They studied for exams together, and paced and tested each other, and increasingly admired each other’s minds. They became absolutely convinced that they were made for each other, and they were each awestruck that they’d found each other. They married soon after graduating near the top of their class.

She kept her own last name of course. Carl wondered how people would be able to tell they were married, not just living together, if they didn’t have the same name. He offered to take her last name.

"But then they could still think we’re brother and sister, couldn’t they?" Carol told him. "Don’t worry. They’ll know what we are by the way we behave. And how we behave is what counts, isn’t it?" Carl thought commitment counted for something. That they were each others’.

"Oh, you sweet dear! We both know what our commitments are! We’ll always be each other’s, regardless of how things look! So who cares what others think?"

Carl couldn’t find an answer to that. He kissed her lips, and then she spread her legs and he kissed those lips too.

2.

Five years later nothing had changed. They took jobs with the same multinational, though in different divisions, in a city far enough away from parents and relatives to assure that they’d have each other’s undivided attention most of the year. They were each promoted several times. The company found she had persuasive management skills, and soon had her participating in all sorts of meetings. So she commuted daily to their headquarters downtown. Carl mostly telecommuted. His work-group were a bunch of mavericks who tossed him their toughest problems, and Carl soon found he could fax or e-mail back his solutions from home. Why not? It was a good arrangement. Carl would straighten up around the house and more often than not fix dinner for the two of them, since his working hours varied enormously from week to week. He loved doing things for her, and she was delighted that he wanted to. Their lives remained dedicated to each other, each one sensitive to the other’s slightest shifts of mood. They purchased a house with their two salaries and savings and a small inheritance and a mortgage, one large enough to give each of them a separate study or computer room, and a spare as well, a guest room that could be a kid’s room when they decided they wanted one. When she could, which wasn’t too often, she’d choose to work at home too, just to be close to him. Her boss didn’t mind, the work always got done. Though sometimes it made for an amusing moment when someone from Carol’s department called and asked for "Carol" and Carl mis-heard and took the call. Or Carol took Carl’s calls. Sometimes when they’d both come down with colds their voices were indistinguishable, extending the confusion further. It amused them that when someone asked for what sounded like "Curl" they had to ask "Which one?" In time that provided their pet name for each other. Carl didn’t mind being her "little Curl," thouugh it sounded strange to their friends, who wondered what their private lives might be like.

Their attitudes toward sex differed considerably. She was altogether unabashed. She’d slept with other boys before Carl, and of course for a whole year she’d been that basketball player’s designated cunt, doing whatever he asked. She’d even put out for two of his team-mates once when their girls were out of town and they were all celebrating a victory, and he’d asked her to oblige them. So she was unashamed to tell Carl how she wanted him to pleasure her.

Carl on the other hand had previously fucked only phantom magazine girls. He was still embarrassed by his intimate desires, barely able to imagine some of them much less disclose them to Carol. Even to Carol. Especially to Carol. She realized this soon enough, and tried to overcome his modesty by telling him that no desires are ever shameful, no matter how extravagant. A man and a woman should feel free to do anything they want with each other, if they both consent.

He agreed, but it didn’t help. He remained essentially shy, and she learned that she had to coax or tease his secrets out of him, sometimes just guess at them. Yet he had a remarkable sensitivity to her needs. She never dreamt that it came from years of imagining what imaginary girls wanted so he could give it to them.

Not that it mattered. They were keen to sense and satisfy each other’s desires, so by guess and feel they got it right mostly. Or often enough. She told him soon after they moved into their new house how she wanted her breasts suckled as well as her pussy preliminary to their lovemaking, and how she wanted him to use his hands and fingers down below while his mouth was busy. Carl was too ashamed to tell her his equivalents. Certainly not how for years he’d whacked off pretending that his fist was a Playgirl of the Month who wanted to fuck him and his cock was the Playboy who was fucking her because hers was the only pussy available. He was too inhibited to tell her even simple physical things. Once, for example, Carol accidentally kissed one of Carl’s nipples and he stiffened so suddenly that she stopped. She thought it had hurt or violated him in some way, so she didn’t try again for a year, and then only accidentally. She then learned she’d guessed wrong, that in fact Carl had loved the jolt of ecstasy he’d felt, but just couldn’t bring himself to say so. When finally she knew, his nipples became as important to both of them as hers were. She wondered what else might be important to him, but he’d never say. So all in all their sex was more considerate than passionate, more affectionate than frenzied. It was fine, make no mistake, plenty good enough. Yet after a few years, now and then when they were in close embrace and Carl’s penis was moving gently inside her, Carol’s attention would drift. Perhaps to a dress she should have bought when she saw it at Talmadge’s, or to the decorations on a cake she meant to order for his birthday. Or to problems at the office. Whatever, when that happened she’d be a long time reaching an orgasm. Carl in his turn routinely did employee cost-benefit calculations or baseball averages in his head while he was humping her, to defer premature ejaculation until that moment when he could feel her grip tighten on his neck and she’d whisper "Oh! Oh!" and then moan aloud, and finally he felt free to let go and spend himself. Her satisfaction came first, so she should too. So the sex was OK, not always great. But when Carol was on top -- more often than not after the first few years -- she’d always give herself the rough ride she loved. Her whispers then became gasps, even screams that amazed her sweet little Curl as he lunged up beneath her, poking himself into her pussy’s maelstrom. And as with most long-term couples, their imaginations filled out what they couldn’t provide each other. Carol supplemented her sex life and her fantasies with romantic novels, bodice rippers with strong-minded, take-charge heroines and wounded, gleaming heroes with mysterious pasts and exotic desires. Carl knew and assumed correctly that this was a liberated female thing, no threat or discredit to himself implied. He was half-right. Carol wondered now and then if Carl had any exotic desires. But Carl bare-assed on his knees leaning into her crotch to lick her cunt was never one of those heroes of her imagination. Real men don’t do that. Rather, he was then her little Curl, her sweet, darling lover. When she looked down and saw him there she’d lift her legs onto his shoulders and squeeze his head between her thighs in sheer joy that he was hers. Then she’d lie back to enjoy him the way she’d once enjoyed her girlfriend Fiona when Fiona needed desperately to know for sure whether or not she was really and truly a lesbian, and Carol had helped her find out. Carol had languished on her back at her ease, allowing Fiona to find fulfillment by bringing Carol wave after wave of pleasure. Carl felt so much like Fiona when his tongue was rippling in her clit that the two sometimes seemed indistinguishable. She liked imagining he was Fiona, sometimes, or that Fiona with her impudent little boobs and dark, sly eyes had all the while been Carl.

Even when Carl was on top and fucking away, and she was twisting under him, even then Carol remade him in her imagination into someone else. Oone of her former boyfriends, maybe, one more hunk of solid flesh once again rutting and jamming it into her. She maintained a stable of these men in her mind, and she rotated them. Of course Carl was slight, so the illusion never lasted. But when Carol was on top she could close her eyes and then she could easily recall in her mind and her pussy the extra thrust her bodybuilders had crammed into her, the heft of their huge muscled meat writhing under her as she rose and fell on their monumental cocks. She could even imagine that Carl’s cock was her basketball player’s, tense, twisting to plumb her guts as she rose to explode in one orgasm after another. Of course Carl never suspected that he wasn’t the primary inspiration of her passion, that he only provided occasions for someone else to fuck her in fantasy. That the harder she fucked him, the more decisively she was cuckolding him. Nor did she feel any need to tell him. If her past memories still excited her, where was the harm? Her beloved hubby was her true beloved, and always the beneficiary. Carl was also untrue to Carol, in his imagination. He augmented his sex life now and then as before, the way he’d done it when still in his teens. He’d masturbate in private while some pneumatically stacked girl grinned her approval and urged him on from the centerfold of some magazine. Girls like that always craved him. They were eager to feel his tongue or his cock inside them. They told him so, and they told him it was heaven! Carol never knew. As with her fantasies, Carl never thought to tell her his. He never thought they were a threat or discredit to her. Certainly it wasn’t infidelity, just something a little extra, different. Harmless.

Sometimes Carol wondered what he was imagining when he was licking or fucking her. She once asked him, and so she’d know how devoted he was to her pleasure, he replied, "I’m always trying to feel what you feel when I do things, so I’ll know what feels good for you!" That was a little strange. Carl wants to feel what women feel when they’re being licked and fucked? But she shrugged. Best not ask him that again. He might ask what she’d been imagining when they made love, and what would she tell him then? Things were fine just as they were.

Not everyone in their neighborhood enjoyed as idyllic a relationship. Some had children of course, and that distracted them into a different kind of sharing, their erotic feelings kept on hold most of the time. And floating across back yards and gardens in summer one could hear shouted quarrels and tearful reconciliations and slammed doors, the usual ambient sounds of suburban life. And over coffee in certain kitchens or wine in some living rooms, provocative tales about recently revealed mis-spent husbands and mis-laid wives were commonplace. Carl couldn’t have cared less, but Carol always enjoyed knowing what others were up to. Across the street and a few houses down lived Carol’s good friend Madeline, a divorced woman ten years older and far more experienced in the ways of the world, a source to Carol of all sorts of practical if sometimes also cynical wisdom. They met the day Carl and Carol moved in with their single carload of wedding presents, a young couple who knew nothing and needed everything. Maddy’d introduced herself then and there in her crisp, self-assured way, appraised them, then advised them where in their new locale the best values and services were to be found. She’d been right, then as always since, and now five years later Carol trusted her judgment absolutely. In her turn, Maddy watched the couple’s comings and goings with affectionate amazement, unable to believe that the course of true love could ever run that smooth. She sometimes invited them over and sometimes she was invited over, and she and Carol went shopping together sometimes, and after a while there were few secrets between them.

"You never quarrel?" Maddy would ask Carol incredulously. "In your whole marriage there’s no defensive male ego trying to dominate a frail female ego? Nor vice versa? No negotiated truces, no power exchanges, no private understandings, no getting even for supposed or actual injuries? No scenes? No top and bottom play, improvised or deliberate?"

Carol had no idea what Maddy was talking about. So Maddy explained about "power exchanges," giving over all control over your life as a gift to the other person to use any way she chooses, or he chooses if you’re foolish enough to grant power like that to a man. And she explained all about tops and bottoms, "most people are one or the other, though some swing both ways, and some mistake themselves." And summing it up, "scenes" or set occasions when couples could role-play in ways radically different from their usual roles, could be other people altogether sometimes. For fun. Sometimes with other couples. Sometimes your own partner not knowing a scene was under way. Carol was shocked if also intrigued by the implied artifice, the insincerity of it. She told Maddy that she and Carl had no need for such things. They were loving, equal partners who respected each other, and that was all. She trusted Carl’s judgment in all things -- even about her hair and her clothes and her make-up -- his good taste dated back to the days when he hung out with girls as if he were practically one of them, and they welcomed him among them because he was undemanding and his advice was so valuable.

When Maddy first heard about this part of Carl’s life she merely raised her eyebrows, but afterward she remembered to ask Carol all about it, and by and by she’d heard it all. It did explain why Carol didn’t feel oppressed by Carl, the way all wives did by their husbands sooner or later. They were pals, almost girlfriends in some ways. Usually they agreed about everything. But when they didn’t, Carol told Maddy, Carl always deferred to her judgment. That’s why they had no need for scenes or games. Except, Carol thought to herself, for the face-cum-licking game I invented so Carl can taste himself and enjoy himself the way I do. He’s so shy about asking, I suppose it’s that macho thing, guys aren’t supposed to want to eat cum, not even their own. And except for my former boyfriends, those guys who take over when Carl’s down there doing his best and it isn’t quite good enough. Carol thought further. And except for me being the heroines of all my novels. Those were scenes, sort of. She mentioned these things to Maddy, thinking nothing of them.

Maddy marveled, mainly at Carol’s innocence. But she said nothing. Carol in turn marveled at Maddy’s often racy accounts of the scenarios she and her ex-husband Ray had evolved during their marriage, the many enactments Maddy had designed to gratify her need to control a man absolutely. That’s what her mother had done with her father, an ineffectual wimp who’d never even noticed, and that’s what Maddy wanted in her life too. Early on, when he still loved and trusted her, Ray had been willing to submit to Maddy’s needs in inconsequential ways. She ran a tight ship at work -- she was a chief hospital administrator -- and an even tighter ship at home. Ray had gone along with her at home even when her demands seemed arbitrary. Houses are women’s territories, he believed, places where women rule the roost. So when at home, he did whatever he was asked to do. Mostly. For a while. As she raised the ante he went along, Maddy told Carol with great satisfaction. She once told him to use the back door and leave his shoes there Japanese style whenever he came into the house, to make it habitual even when his shoes weren’t muddy. So he did, never noticing that she chose not to herself. "That denied him the front door. Grand entrances were for me, not him. He used the delivery entrance, like any servant," she told Carol. "Wasn’t that clever of me?"

Carol thought so, thinking meanwhile that she could never do that to Carl. They were equals.

"But better, it left me wearing the shoes in the family while Ray was padding around silently in his stocking feet. I made sure that the shoes I wore around the house were always high heels, real feminine fuck-me pumps and open-toed slings that clattered on our tile floors, so he’d could appreciate that women’s shoes and those who wear them are privileged, special, that high heels are a badge of authority. So when he heard me approaching the sound would put him in the right frame of mind. I told him he’d have to suck up to that authority if he wanted any favors from me. Then one evening he did want a favor, I forget what, and he found out I meant it! That’s what I made him do. It was an open toed pair, and he slobbered all over them, my toes were soaked when he finished and stood up again, hoping that I approved! I sure did, I loved it! Later I told him that hereafter my ass would be another badge of authority. Told him he’d have to kiss my ass if he wanted to ask me for something."

"And did he?" Carol asked. She knew Carl would without hesitating if she ever asked him. But she’d never asked.

"Yes, of course! After a few days he realized I meant it, and when he really needed my help with something, that’s what he did! Very gallantly, very ceremoniously, he made a game of it so he wouldn’t feel put down. But he did it! After that, no problem, he’d show respect for my asshole’s authority right off whenever he wanted anything, even the time of day. Toward the end he spent a lot of time on his knees, my Ray, sucking on my toes or smooching my rear. Especially when he wanted to watch some football game or go play poker with his friends, that’s when I’d insist he earn the right. Sometimes when he asked, I’d make him do me instead of those things, make that sacrifice for me. He once spent a whole Super Bowl licking my toes and kissing my ass with his back to the television, listening and wondering what was happening." Carol asked if he’d ever kissed her -- you know, her pussy -- to show his love for her, the way Carl always ... then she stopped short, realizing that some things between her and Carl were private. But Maddy heard, and anyhow by their fifth year together there was nothing Maddy hadn’t figured out for herself.

"He didn’t like to kiss my slit," Maddy replied unhesitatingly. "So I made him do it as a punishment sometimes. Even stick his tongue into it during my period, too, that was a special punishment. If he’d liked it I’d have let him do the same thing now and then as a reward. That’s how we were. That’s how I wanted it."

Carol could only shake her head disbelievingly. Maddy had lots more to tell her. There was the time she’d made Ray jump through hoops, literally. Made him bark like a dog as he jumped through hula hoops and landed on all fours while she cracked a whip. Carol thought that was silly, but Maddy only shrugged. "I wanted to. Husbands are supposed to take care of their wives’ needs. I needed for him to do anything I asked him to do. Was jumping through hoops too much to ask?"

Eventually, yes. Apparently so. It got too extreme, Maddy told Carol with some satisfaction. One day she informed Ray that she needed to humiliate him in public in some as yet unspecified way that would permanently injure his reputation, make him appear ridiculous in everyone’s eyes. Would he do that for her? Knights of old did that for their Lady loves in olden days, she said. To test a lover’s sincerity, a Lady might require her Knight at Arms to show cowardice during some joust, for example, to sacrifice his personal honor and endure public scorn for her sake. If he’d do that for her, then there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him. Ray told her he didn’t think he should do that, he was a stockbroker after all, not a Knight or a clown, in his line of work reputation mattered. Maddy’d then insisted, and Ray’d again refused. She then made it an ultimatum, it was something she had to have him do and that was that. When he turned her down yet again, firmly, categorically, finally, she decided that their marriage was over, it had reached a dead end, it was time for her to back out of it. But she said nothing.

Instead she looked around her office for an eligible young man, someone she could train to accept and maybe even enjoy humiliation, and finally she found a young medical technician named Scott. She worked with him quietly for months until he was willing to obey her no matter what. He didn’t know it, but she was preparing him for the payoff her husband had denied her.

Finally he was ready. Despite a near-paralyzing anxiety Scott went to dinner with her in the most prominent restaurant in town wearing a decollete dress, a salon makeover, a cute hairdo, and stiletto heels. He’d gotten his ears pierced, and she made sure everyone noticed by lending him her own long diamond pendants, Ray’s gift to her on their fifth anniversary. Even the Maitre d’ complimented him while showing them to their table. He really was beautiful, Maddy had to admit. And she kept telling him that too, to bolster his confidence.

Scott was terrified the whole time even so, almost unable to speak, so she’d had to keep making soothing noises at him as if to some high-strung stallion, or maybe a skittish mare, all the while waiting for the unveiling, for phase two. Phase two was, she’d arranged for a woman he knew from his lab to join them for dessert, not mentioning why. Office gossip had it that this woman had her eye on Scott and had mildly flirted with him, and that Scott felt the same way toward her. Now she’d see that Scott was not the man she thought him. That would be the humiliation part for Scott, knowing that a girl who’d admired him would henceforth think him effeminate, a wimp, an effete, swishy, ridiculous sissy. She wished for a fleeting moment that it was Ray and not Scott who was sitting opposite her picking at his food nervously with slender, manicured fingertips, looking absolutely gorgeous, knowing nothing about the time bomb she’d planted and knew was already ticking. Especially now that Ray had refused to cooperate, now that in her mind their marriage was over. In the end it all worked out better than she’d hoped! Just as Scott’s workmate spotted and recognized him, unable to comprehend what she saw, one of Scott’s neighbors also recognized him and came over to ask what gives! One of the regulars at Scott’s Tennis Club. They sat down simultaneously and put their question to him bluntly.

Scott gathered up all his courage and tried to speak, to explain, but he couldn’t find any explanation at first. Maddy hushed him and sent him to look for their waiter, then while he was gone she told them both that Scott was really a woman in his heart, that he’d always felt that way, that he cherished his femininity, and that he’d been asking Maddy’s advice about becoming a woman permanently. When Scott returned to the table, his manhood in their eyes was compromised beyond recovery. The two questioned him about his feminine feelings and listened to his uncomprehending, incoherent answers, grins growing on their faces and occasionally widening to smirks. Scott tried to correct their misimpression, no he wasn’t a transsexual, this was a one-time thing. But Maddy kept interrupting to ask him to describe his lingerie or what he’d had done to him in the salon earlier that day, how he’d felt fussing over his borrowed jewelry earlier when he was getting dressed to go out. Trained always to answer Maddy’s questions before volunteering anything on his own, Scott used up the time available for explanations. So the couple left the table without touching their coffee, confirmed in their conviction that what Maddy had told them was true and eager to spread their new gossip, the news that even in his own eyes Scott was no man and never had been, that he was a pussy who envied women with pussies and wanted one of his own. Scott watched them go with his face immobile, realizing that his reputation was disappearing with them. What they thought would be what everyone thought of him from now on.

As they disappeared into the restaurant’s cloak room the whole dining room heard them suddenly burst out laughing, guffawing uncontrollably. The manager had to go out to caution them. Scott realized that this was his future, he was now locked into it. He skimmed over his limited choices. One was to change jobs, leave town. Another was to live as if he actually were the shameful sissy he seemed, his supposed secret transvestism exposed. A third was to deny it, to tell the truth. But that would only add cowardice and mendacity to the list of his sins -- he’d been seen, he’d told them all about his perm and his pierced ears, there was no denying it. Was he more ashamed to confess his submissiveness, that Maddy had pussywhipped him?

"I don’t know what to do," he said near tears as he told Maddy how he saw his predicament. Maddy didn’t feel concerned -- she’d accomplished what she’d wanted to do with a man, regretting only that it wasn’t her husband who was now feeling thoroughly humiliated. But she suggested yet another alternative. Scott could pre-emptively seize the initiative and show real courage by embracing the womanhood everyone would soon assume he’d wanted all his life anyhow. He could pretend to be a transsexual woman and proud of it, and present himself that way to everyone. He could in fact become a woman. That way he’d earn back everyone’s respect, even their admiration. It seemed extreme, but Maddy knew it was possible.

He asked Maddy what to do. Maddy didn’t know, it was his decision, but did he really have a choice? Was respect easier to endure than mockery? She’d help him become a woman if that was what he wanted. She leaned forward, and gazing intently into his eyes, she told him that even if his reputation weren’t now ruined, he still be much better off trying to be a woman. She’d never thought he was much of a man, neither physically nor temperamentally, but look what a gorgeous woman people think he is even right now! That was where his talents lay. Maybe also his advantages.

Confused, half-persuaded, Scott went into the Ladies’ to fix his make-up, and there he made his decision. Maddy knew it the moment she saw him emerge chatting earnestly with a woman he’d found there, telling her who’d done his hair and why this way, and how he was thinking of changing it. When he sat down again he told Maddy he’d decided to go with the flow, look and sound and act and live like a woman in every particular as best as he could from then on. As a man his dignity was lost was beyond recovery, but by trying to become what he now seemed he could recover it and deflect ridicule. And even apart from that, the idea had some appeal. There were advantages, weren’t there? Being a woman wasn’t too bad, was it? Lots of women enjoyed it, didn’t they? Would she help him? Maddy was so pleased to hear this that she rewarded Scott by bringing him straight home, walking him in his cocktail dress and high heels past her husband as he looked up at them from the TV, clattering straight upstairs with him, kissing him full on the lips in the hallway as her astounded husband watched from below, then loudly fucking him to exhaustion all night long in their bedroom with the door locked, teaching him to shriek in as high-pitched a voice as hers. "You’ll love it, feeling penetrated," she whispered to him as she fondled his now inappropriate penis. "Just as men will love you when you’re rid of this thing!"

Ray packed and was gone the next morning. It was another week before he learned that what he had witnessed was not his wife in a depraved lesbian encounter but only an ordinary infidelity, his wife with another man. But by then it was too late for the information to do him any good. By then he’d signed separation papers giving Maddy two-thirds of everything in return for her never telling what had happened, for keeping her lesbian perversities secret so he could in turn preserve his reputation for probity with his clients.

Thus Maddy escaped from her marriage a wealthy woman, and that was a little extra she hadn’t even planned on. She kept working because she liked hospital administration, arranging other people’s lives, and she had no regrets. She maintained a list of men available to her for certain purposes, she told Carol, but she had no special interest in any one of them. "As long as they come when I call, and there’s a waiting list, I’m content."

3.

Though Carol was a relative innocent, she was more amused than shocked by this long tale. In part she was amused because Maddy took such obvious pleasure in telling it in all of its satisfying details, and Maddy was her friend. But in part because she understood both Maddy and Scott. There were girls in her sorority who’d played similar control games with their men, mindfucking them into dom/sub relationships for fun and then ruining their campus reputations before moving on to someone else. She’d been shocked at first, but they were no worse than men who scored with countless women and boasted about it, naming names. Lots of men enjoyed their submission, she knew, though none would ever confess it unless their girlfriends instructed them to tell all. Carol asked where Scott was now, and Maddy told her out west in Colorado, active in her husband’s business and in various charities, the mother of two darling adopted daughters she adored and was teaching to become proper young ladies. She was perfectly respectable, apparently happy, fully in charge of her own affairs including a few her husband knew nothing about. "Becoming a woman finally made a man of him!" she said, grinning. They exchanged Christmas cards, and Maddy sent her "Scotty" a birthday card on each anniversary of her sex reassignment surgery. Had he remained a man, he’d have remained a mediocre lab technician, never very competent, probably let go after some disastrous mistake. He was much better off.

"Wouldn’t you enjoy dominating Carl, Carol?" Maddy asked her friend. "Men do love to serve women, you know. It gives them their chief reason to exist. I think it’s in their genes, Nature’s plan. It has something to do with mate selection, caring for the young, things like that. That’s why once we know the score, we fuck hunky guys we could never live with but then we diddle nice guys into marrying us and supporting us and helping us raise our babies. Now and then a hunky guy’s baby too, though our nice hubbys never suspect it, and that’s how the hunky genes survive along with the wimp genes. The next generation’s girls need their hunky lovers and great fucks too, before they settle down. Even after!"

"Maybe," Carol had replied vaguely. "Maybe I’d enjoy getting the better of Carl now and then." She knew that these days she had to be on top of Carl and fucking him, not vice versa, to feel the way that basketball player had once made her feel. But she’d never want to humiliate Carl, she’d told Maddy. She couldn’t possibly two-time him! They were equal partners in everything, and absolutely faithful. Besides, it wasn’t necessary. He’d already do anything for her, she was sure of it.

"Even that?" Maddy asked. "Even what Scott did for me?"

"Maybe even that," Carol had replied.

The idea wasn’t that far-fetched, She let her mind dwell on it. It was rather exciting! She knew she sometimes re-imagined her gentle Carl as Fiona, his sweet face bent between her thighs to lick her loins, wearing impeccable make-up freshly applied at the beauty salon. Fiona had once dressed for a date and with her face made up perfectly had paused for a session between Carol’s legs. She’d finished up a delicious, grinning, cum-drippy mess, but soooo happy! And a sorority pledge Carol had hazed once had licked her, smeared mascara and lipstick all over her thighs -- it had taken an extra cuntlapping session to clean it up, to make things as neat down there again as Carol liked them. Could Carl ever be those girls?

"But maybe not," was Maddy’s response. "You never know." Afterward Carol was careful not to tell Carl the circumstances of Maddy’s divorce. He was still such an innocent! With his slight build and his whole adolescence spent as one of the girls, or nearly, gender shifting made him uneasy whenever it entered anyone’s conversation. He was always a little uncertain about his masculinity, and who could blame him? At a dinner party once, Maddy’d begun to describe the kinds of men who attended the gender-change clinic at her hospital, and Carol had asked her with her eyes to let it pass. Maddy’d glanced at Carl, who looked edgy but studiously indifferent, immediately understood, and dropped it.

Yet Carol did let the notion drift in and out of her mind sometimes. She wondered how her little Curl might look done up now and then as little girl. Cute, she decided. He’d told her about the time he’d gone with the girls to get his nails done, and she wondered if he’d gone with them for other things too sometimes, and was too ashamed to tell her. Had he ever actually gone out with them dressed and made up like one of them? Of course he must have, if only on a dare! The idea pleased her. Her little Curlie!

After that, whenever she read her romantic novels she loved to imagine that their strong, sensible heroines with her own face would turn now and then to confide in devoted girlfriends who looked like Carl, girls with Carl’s face with just a little lipstick added. And her actual husband Carl, kneeling between her legs and nibbling her pink clit and tonguing her to her first orgasm of the evening, more and more often became her own darling girlfriend kneeling in front of her, hair beautifully cut, face softly feminine, sweetly preparing her for a date with one of her former muscular boy friends, one of those hunky guys who would soon mount her and plunge a massive cock directly into her pussy, then fuck her senseless while she nearly broke her back twisting under him in ecstasy. Elaborating, she saw Carl as her girlfriend husband waving goodbye to her as she left the house to meet her date, for the evening, pleased to be participating in some small preliminary way, wishing her well. Her girlfriend who then went upstairs to get ready for his own date. He always looked so cute when he was done! Her sweetheart!

It was only a fantasy, harmless enough. Mainly, she liked things just the way they were. Then came a crisis.

Soon after their fifth wedding anniversary Carl came down with a mean flu that developed into a vicious pneumonia. He’d turned blue and could barely breathe when the ambulance arrived. For a while it was touch and go whether the doctors could save him -- he was hospitalized for weeks. Then they wanted to watch him closely during his recovery, so when he came home his doctor ordained more bed rest and convalescence. He wasn’t to think about work, he had to save his energy.

His boss awarded him the longest indefinite leave the company’s insurance allowed, months and months, encouraging him to take it easy for as long as he needed, to build back his strength so he could take charge of a massive project looming on next year’s horizon. Carl was so weak he could only nod gratefully. For the first time in his life, no one expected him to do anything. Carol was frantic the whole time Carl was in the hospital, especially when he was in intensive care and it wasn’t certain he’d pull through. Maddy was her constant support, her lifeline to sanity. She didn’t think she could live without Carl, the fearful phantasm of losing him was unendurable. She imagined all sorts of disasters, then all sorts of alternative disasters. Maddy reassured her as best she could.

When Carl finally came home he was a shadow of himself, as gaunt and spindly as ever in his teens. He knew it, and against all reason he began worrying about losing Carol to someone more substantial. Once again he was convinced he was unfit to be any girl’s special boyfriend, her love, especially a girl as marvelous as Carol. He had nightmares in which Carol called him up to ask if her plaid skirt would go with the tweed jacket she meant to wear on a weekend jaunt to a resort hotel with the guy she just met. And other nightmares in which she told him she couldn’t live as his wife any more. She needed a real man, though he was welcome to stay and live with her as her dear friend, nothing else assumed. He’d wake up terrified, looking fearfully at Carol as she slept peaceably beside him. What might she be dreaming of?

When he confessed these bad dreams to her, Carol put all her own romantic imaginings on hold. Little did he know that his fears were in fact her fantasies, harmless enough, but still ..... She knew why he felt so insecure -- once again he was an unacceptable adolescent in his own eyes. She reassured him repeatedly with hugs and kisses, he was her only love and she would love him forever no matter how thin he got! No matter what! No help, all that happened was that Carl immediately began imagining other whats. So she scolded him and put him to bed and demanded that he stay there. She came home from work early each day to feed him nourishing broths and easily digestible foods. Each day Carl clung to her and wept for joy that she’d returned to him yet again, he’d been so afraid she wouldn’t. Each night they hugged each other, they wrapped themselves in each other as they went to sleep. She knew he needed the comfort. But hugging was all they did, because the doctor had told Carl to avoid all vigorous exercise. Carol was taking no chances -- she worried that even the gentlest sexual excitement might bring on a relapse.

Week after week went by, until Carl finally felt fit, still thin but ready to begin exercising again, certainly ready for sex. But no. Carol insisted that he do nothing for the full time the doctors had mandated, many weeks more. His morning boners returned full force. Carol noticed of course -- they pressed deep into her belly or into the crack of her ass each morning. But she refused to act on them until his convalescence officially ended. To make it easier for him she deprived him of the sight of her naked body, suspecting correctly that after his long sexual deprivation -- now six weeks, or was it eight, ten? -- the excitement would only further deplete strength he needed for his complete recovery. Carl wandered aimlessly around the house, idle and increasingly horny. Carol’s work downtown meanwhile doubled -- she was obligated to attend meetings daily, and had to put in full days sometimes into the evening hours. She kissed Carl each morning before she went off to work, and as always cautioned him to do nothing she wouldn’t do or couldn’t approve.

Bored, Carl settled into his study to check out his accumulated magazines. There were his Sports Illustrateds. All those large, vigorous, superbly fit men performing strenuous activities -- it especially depressed him to view them now. He picked up the swimsuit issue instead.

That was different! Image after image of thin-waisted, ripely round girls, gorgeous, page after page of them, women whose bodies earned and deserved careers and celebrity and the reverent, lustful gaze of millions! All by not eating and then by displaying how various shapes of cloth could wrap their carefully exaggerated curves. All by showing how they could spill out of those pieces of cloth in every direction and yet preserve their modesty! God they were beautiful! These girls are all for show, he thought, not for blow. I bet I weigh less than they do -- they’re all so plump where it matters, so ripe that they can all pretend they aren’t and then fall way forward whenever they bend over. And it’s all there, almost all of them exposed, their tits, their swelling buttocks! All for show, and unashamed to show themselves, praises be, he thought. He took his cock in hand. It swelled up. Less visible than tits was that consecrated slit between their legs. Carol’s pink pussy lips rose into his mind’s eye, that open crease between her thighs, dew-lapped, dewy moist, waiting to be kissed.

Re recalled how her moisture clung to his lips as if her pussy was kissing him back. This year’s swimsuits seemed to feature and celebrate pussies even while covering them up. There were no tugged pleats or teeny skirts stretched across hips to mask its presence. Instead, leg openings were cut high, and on model after model, color-splashed nylon and spandex stretched tight to the waist in unimpeded vee shapes fanning out from the place where their thighs met to their bellies, leaving their hip bones exposed, even the hairless sides of their mounds.

The bikini swimsuits covered even less than that, or tried to but hid nothing. Women have nothing to hide, Carl meditated. They all curve up from that sacred place between their legs to their belly buttons in one small hard hairy hillock and then one gently curved, soft hill, everything there fully visible. Because with or without cloth covering their mounds, there’s nothing there! There’s nothing visible in a girl’s crotch. Nothing! Between their legs, Carl thought, that’s where they keep that damp dark honeyed place with its deep hole. That’s what’s hidden. That’s Victoria’s real secret.

Well, not quite hidden -- here and there in the magazine illustrationsthe the top of a girl’s slit formed a visible pucker in the fabric covering it, a wrinkle in that smooth, bright, flowery display of groins and crotches. One ravishing blonde in particular was wearing a shiny charmeuse bikini, and had spread her legs wide and tilted her lower pelvis far forward as if the camera had briefly interrupted her aerobic exercises. All that should be concealed was revealed. Carl could make out her entire slit -- the thin bathing suit material was tucked snug into her crack. Sure enough. As he looked into her eyes she smiled invitingly at him, and told him she’d love to watch him pull himself off. Never a man to disappoint a lady, he screwed up his determination to do so and then did so. She watched with intense curiosity as he climaxed, spurt after spurt caught in a previously prepared kleenex. Then she rewarded him with a dazzling smile and a suggestion that next time he should remove her bikini bottom altogether and come join her. "It’s so hot down here," she complained, pouting, reaching to rub herself.

That image was still with Carl the next morning when he carefully disengaged from Carol and staggered out of bed, his wife still asleep, and still groggy found himself standing naked in front of the full-length mirror on his closet door. For the first time since he’d fallen ill, he looked at himself closely. There he was once again, a strange, scrawny teenager easily ignored by girls in the first flush of the hormones flooding their bodies, all of them looking for excitement with big ripped well-padded guys, eager to explore their new sexuality.

His arms were thin, he had no belly, and his narrow waist supported a rib cage with every rib visible. Hip-bones as prominent as a bathing suit model’s flared out on either side of his groin. I’ve got to put some weight back on, he thought. I’m a scarecrow. No way was he one of those tumescent musclebound hunks girls dream about. He wasn’t even as filled out as the swimsuit models he’d admired only yesterday.

Breasts make a big difference, he considered. Even scrawny women’s chests are well-rounded, they have large melons of ripe flesh growing there, hanging down from there. How do they grow them? What do they feel like? Some models he’d admired yesterday had small breasts thrust out by some secret construction inside the swimsuit, but others had breasts hanging unsupported from their chests inside loose tank tops, their nipples hinted or plainly in evidence as they poked through thin cloth. He made a note to inspect one of Carol’s bathing suits to see how all this shaping and suspending occurred. She had both kinds, he knew that. He always felt uneasy when they took beach vacations and men stared or leered at Carol’s impressive figure, especially when her nipples showed. Still, women did wear that kind of suit in order to be noticed. To feel proud that they were attractive women. It was good for their morale. Their right and privilege. Men do that too I guess. They show how heavy they’re hung by wearing thin Speedos, Carl thought. He stared at his own crotch, down where his flaccid cock hung over his balls. Women had nothing hanging in the juncture of their legs to clutter that hill’s smooth descent into the cunning cleft they keep hidden further down. Nothing at all, he thought idly. I wonder what it’s like to have nothing down there. He remembered some of the girls he’d been friends with, maybe a little overweight, who wore their slacks stretched tight across their generous thighs and pulled taut against their ... nothing. Put their whole blank vee on full display. They rolled their hips as they leaned back in their chairs, proud that they were gifted with ... nothing.

Crotches make the biggest difference, he decided. Oh yes! He hadn’t seen Carol’s for weeks, months, but the girls in all those swim suits reminded him that Carol had one of those things too. One of those nothings. She too had nothing visible. More important, she too kept something deep and devilish hidden further down. He did so want to kiss it, to express his gratitude toward her, his love for her. "Not till you’re all well," she’d told him when he’d last tried.

He suddenly felt an intense desire to see a real woman’s crotch. He considered pulling back the blanket and lifting Carol’s nightie to stare once again at that smooth place of worship. Maybe he could ask her what it’s like having nothing dangling down there? But she was still asleep, and his illness had distressed her, she’d been sleeping fitfully, he didn’t want to risk waking her for such a frivolous reason.

So randomly, experimentally, he pushed his own his cock and balls down and back between his legs, and clamped his thighs closed to hold them there. To see while he was thinking about it, what it looks like in the flesh, this newly appreciated presence of an absence. Then, to enhance the femininity of what he saw, he struck one of those swimsuit girl poses -- knees turned one way, hips the other, shoulders one way, head the other, one hand on a cocked hip, the other hand with fingertips lightly fluffing hair on the back of his head, elbow raised and head held high. He crouched slightly as if preparing to spring at a lover, mouth partly open, eyes half shut as if in an erotic daydream. Wasn’t this the pose, now? From under lazily drooping eyelids, he stared at his reflection in the mirror. Yes, it was very feminine! He felt squeezed down there between his legs, a familiar ball ache beginning where no balls were visible. And his hip bones were too angular, but he waggled them once anyhow, to see them sway. Thin as he was, he was a girl down there now all right. There was nothing visible at all between his legs except that classic, smooth, hairy vee. He even had a mound of sorts.

No resemblance otherwise. Narrow waist, true, but no curves at all, no soft fullness. A chest as flat as a girl’s groin, mocked by dime-sized areolas and nipples. Giving it the old school try, trying to complete the picture, he reached under his pectoral muscles and lifted them up and toward his mirror reflection with his palms, just like that gorgeous babe in the red two-piece who’d seemed to be offering her boobs to anyone who happened to glance at her. Then like her he shot his hip even further sideways. Not persuasive, not really female, but better, a lot like it. He tossed his long hair -- it was below his ears, he’d been overdue for a trim even before he fell ill -- just as the girl in the bikini had tossed hers when the picture was snapped. His hair wasn’t big hair like hers. It just hung down neatly -- Carol insisted that since he wore it a little longer than most men he had to keep it neat. I wonder how girls get their hair to puff way out that way, Carl thought. He studied himself. I see a thin girl with no boobs, he concluded. But that’s better than nothing. Suddenly, her heard an amused voice speaking behind him! "If you mean to get rid of those things you usually have hanging down there, honey, let me know first so I can make other arrangements. And wouldn’t a good bra support you a lot more comfortably than your hands?"

Carol’s voice! Carol awake! She sees me!

Carl spun around shocked, astonished, embarrassed! Sure enough, there she was, lying in bed with her arms comfortably tucked behind her head, resting on her pillow, watching him at her leisure as his naked feminized body crouched there in its girlish pose! "I was...I was just..." he started to say. How long has she been awake and watching me? Did I do anything really stupid? Posed cutesy girly, I guess, that’s the worst of it. I hope. "I saw what you were just, honey," she said. "You still are, just. You look darling! But why are they still hiding? Come out, come out, wherever you are!"

He’d been so surprised he hadn’t changed his posture, just rotated it, swiveled it to look at her, legs still clamped shut, pectorals still gathered up in his hands like small boobs. Now he looked down and saw that he still had his woman’s crotch, presumably a vulva hidden below it, his smooth uncluttered mound disappearing between his legs no doubt to split into labia at the entrance to his pussy, all of this fully on view to his wife, no male genitals anywhere. Abashed, he let go his breasts and hastily stepped sideways. His equipment swung forward again, free. Cock and balls fell back where they belonged, front and center. "Ahh, Carol, I’m sorry. It was ...." No, he’d better not mention that he’d been checking out the girls in the Swimsuit Issue and that his mind had drifted to how attractive they looked, that was all. That he was horny, starved for the sight and feel of female flesh. That he’d jerked off under the appreciative eye of one of those swimsuit girls. That was way too much to say. No telling how she’d take it. "I just wanted to see...."

"Honey, your face is bright red! You’re blushing! What could you have been imagining? There’s nothing to be ashamed of!"

"Well, uh, I don’t want you to get the wrong impression about, uh ...."

"About what?" She was still lying back but now really amused, partly uncomfortable because her darling was embarrassed, yet oddly enough, enjoying his embarrassment. Feeling delighted and superior! Her sweetie was afraid that he’d exposed a shameful desire, that he wanted to look like a girl! To look like me, she thought, what a compliment! And he’d been caught in the act and now felt the way Maddy’s Scott had felt when his desire had been found out. No, Scott’s wasn’t found out, he didn’t have any at first, that came later, that was how he overcame his embarrassment. But who can tell the difference? Maybe my Carl wants to be a girl but he’s too ashamed to say so, and now he’s been found out? The way he’s always ashamed to confess lots of things? Is he a real transsexual? Could this be the root of his shame?

Would confessing it be his liberation?

Carol suddenly realized that after all those years of growing up with girls and thinking girl thoughts with them, of course he’d identify with girls! Maybe that was why he’d hung out with them, so he could imagine he was one of them! Of course! She wondered whether that was what had attracted her to him from the beginning. His instinctive understanding of a girl’s problems, his immediate sympathy, no, empathy, when she described how it felt to be dumped by a man! My curly girly Carl, she mused. Is he "Carla" to himself when he’s imagining he’s a girl, I wonder? Is she Carla, I mean? Does the girl in him need a man?

It was an unaccustomed feeling, being suddenly privy to such a huge secret about her beloved’s hidden inner life! Also unaccustomed was the way she felt so utterly in charge as he stood there embarrassed, stammering and apologetic, as if waiting for orders or waiting to be excused! Maddy had mentioned how good that can feel, being superior, in control, on top, a domme. How partners are never really equal. How satisfying it is to put your partner off balance and watch him do your bidding without even realizing that’s what he’s doing. To watch him perform despite himself. Like Carl right now.

"I was just fooling around," Carl finished lamely. She wanted to make the moment last a bit longer, so as she lay back in queenly repose she stared him disbelievingly, just long enough to see him quail and maybe even begin to plead, still crouched, one hand extended toward her in supplication. Plead what? Who knows, she thought, maybe least of all my sweet baby at this moment. So she broke off her judgmental expression and smiled. Time to take him off the hook, she thought. I don’t know exactly what he was up to just now, but something like his pride must be involved, maybe his self-respect. His manhood too in some way. I’d better let him know it’s OK. Whatever he does or wants to do after what he’s been through is OK with me! I only wish he’d tell me his desires in advance, so he wouldn’t feel humiliated when I discover them accidentally! If he wants to look like a girl, I can help! "Honey, it’s OK! I feel the same way!" she said to him earnestly. "I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be a man, the way you’re wondering about being a woman. How inconvenient it would be to have those things hanging down there, always getting caught in my pants when I sit down, and how convenient it would be to be flat up top, not to have to put up with these heavy globes I’ve always got bobbling up and down on my chest. It’s sweet that you have the same kinds of thoughts now and then about me." "Yes," he said. That wasn’t exactly it, but it was forgiving, what she’d just said, so it was good enough. "I’m sorry!" He was, but he had no idea why.

"Why sorry? You don’t have a bad figure, honey, compared with lots of girls. You’re very trim. No real curves, but lots of girls look angular. Think of it this way -- no flab, no cellulite, no love handles, so no real complaints!" She smiled wickedly and added, "A girl can’t have everything, you know. We all learn to emphasize our good features. You’ve got yours!" Now what did that mean, Carl now wondered. She beamed at him and held out her arms. "I need my good morning kiss, baby. Then I’ve got to get up and get to work!." He did that, gratefully!

Twenty minutes later they’d both showered and were getting dressed. He was inspecting an array of sports shirts hanging in his closet, wear which one for another day at home, when he suddenly heard her call "Carl!" He glanced over. There she was, standing on the other side of their bed wearing only her brassiere and panties, facing him with a wide grin, her palms tucked under her plump breasts and lifting them up, those marvelous globes, offering them to him. She saw me do that and remembered, he thought. He felt embarrassed yet excited. He decided that in response to her gesture’s generous, good-natured mockery he should amuse her with a wolfish howl. He did. It came out more like a whimper, but she was satisfied.

"Now yours," she said, grinning even wider. I don’t want him to feel ashamed of any of his desires, she was thinking. Carl tucked his palms under his chest and lifted up his scrawny pectorals. He said nothing. Will I ever live this thing down? he was thinking.

"Mmmmmm!" Carol said. "Nice, honey!"

Then she finished dressing, and they went down to breakfast together as they’d gone down together every workday morning of their five-year old marriage. So why do I feel in some vague way that something is different now? Carl wondered.

4.

When Carol got home from work she was pleased to find Carl asleep on the couch, the table set and their dinner’s fixings laid out in the kitchen awaiting her arrival for last minute cooking. That sweetie! He looks so peaceful, she thought as she went up to his computer room to look for clues about his behavior this morning. Was he logging onto network porn channels, then fantasying? It occurred to her that it was Spring. Were her young man’s thoughts lightly turning to thoughts of other women, was that what he’d been doing?

She wasn’t worried, he was absolutely faithful to her, he’d never risk his marriage by desiring another woman, she knew that. But that could also be why he was using himself as a substitute for other women! Looking at another "woman’s" crotch and boobs in the mirror! Trying to be a woman and then lust after her! His red face confessed some kind of shameful craving. Hers was the only mons veneris he’d seen since their engagement, she was sure of that. She couldn’t really blame him for wanting to sneak a peek at another, even if only his own facsimile of one. Unless it wasn’t just deprivation but envy? He really did want a crotch of his own like that, but he was ashamed to say so? There lying across his keyboard where he’d abandoned it was the swimsuit Sports Illustrated. It was open to a girl wearing a crimson charmeuse print Bikini, crouching back on her heels in an unlikely position, certainly uncomfortable, supplementing what little lift her Bikini top provided by supporting both of her heavy breasts by the palms of her hands. Carl’s hand gesture under his own tits -- if that’s what they were -- this morning. The girl had twisted her body and was turning her head to confront the camera with a welcoming smile. Carl’s pose. Her vagina crease was fully exposed, as Carl’s would have been if he’d had one and could have opened his legs, though hers was covered by her thin Bikini bottom. Just barely covered, Carol saw. Her pussy hair on either side of it was trimmed and shaved to project smooth nudity. Why is it that men think women who bend like pretzels are sexy? Carol wondered. A mystery. Still, that’s what it may be all about, I bet. My hubby hankers after strange flesh, but he wants to remain true to me, so he wants to be a woman so he can settle for his own flesh. That is so dear, if that’s what it is! Carol felt she should reward him for his ingenuity, for his desire to remain faithful to her at all costs.

But what if it wasn’t an errant lecherous impulse? What if it really was envy? What if he simply wants to be a girl? Should she encourage him? She didn’t know.

She idly turned other pages of the Swimsuit issue. Maillots are out this year, she noticed idly, unless they’re draped like this one. Just as well, mine’s stretched out and unwearable, I won’t replace it. God, look at the postage stamps that girl’s wearing? Pasties? She can’t be sixteen! No girl fully grown and that well-endowed is ever that self-supporting! Are they real? She flipped on, now assessing the different models and their bathing attire woman to woman. These women are really as thin as Carl, she thought, but being women has made them softer, smoother, rounder. A little fatty tissue under the skin goes a long way, especially in the breast and the bum. That’s estrogen doing its thing. Does he really want to look like that? Does he really think he resembles them? If he did, would I love him as much? It would feel strange, but I’m sure I would. It isn’t his manliness I admire, God knows, he’s never really been manly, not his body anyhow. It’s that he’s so gentle, so sweet! So ... feminine, so precious. So lovable.

A peculiar thought suddenly struck her. Can it be that when he’s imagining he’s a girl like these girls, when he’s wishing that he was one of these girls, he has sex with himself? Does he masturbate? Look at these women and imagine he’s one of them and masturbate? That he’s true to me only in his fashion, that he freely takes his pleasure with these girls and with himself? That he feels excited when he’s being one of them? The way I do sometimes when I remember the big guys I used to date? Only he works his fantasy off with his hand, and I work mine off on top of his prick?

She looked about. Sure enough, in his desk-side waste paper basket she saw tufts of kleenex with pale crusts on them. Something like dried phlegm. But he’d had no nose colds nor bronchitis, his breathing was clear -- she’d been watching it closely since his pneumonia and she was sure of it. So this was the residue of some kind of affair he’d been having with one of these swimsuit-clad women. Or all of them, the whole harem. Or with himself, imagining himself to be one of them?

With his figure?

She’d now settled into that thought. She’d never thought of Carl quite that way. As her girlfriend sometimes, yes, but not with a girl’s body, a girl’s breasts, hips, waist, soft curves, everything. He does have the makings, she saw now. He’s practically anorexic! He needs a lot more rounding out, of course, especially up top, but he does look a lot like me in my early teens before my hormones kicked in. When they finally did kick in, Carol mused further. I loved that yellow Jantzen swimsuit I had then, with the push-up bra inserts that made me look bigger than I was! It was when I wore that swimsuit that the boys finally decided to look at me! It’s so hard on a girl to be late-blooming!

She smiled slightly as her imagination clothed a late-blooming Carl in that tight yellow one-piece with its built-in push-up bra. Carl as a bathing beauty attractive to boys! Does he imagine he can look like that? Carol couldn’t decide if he looked ridiculous or cute! Would he want boys to look at him? I better not think about that, she thought. Not right now.

Whatever’s going on here, she concluded, Carl has a secret life and secret yearnings he’s ashamed to tell me. I want him to have whatever he wants. But he’ll never tell me something like this! What to do?

She decided to take the problem to Maddy. Maddy knew a lot about these things, she’d suggest something. Carl was still sleeping. It was still afternoon. Dinner could be ready in ten minutes. There was plenty of time, and she’d noticed that Maddy was home early too, her car already in her driveway. Carol decided to pop by for a talk.

In the end, Maddy certainly did suggest something. Many things. They talked a long while. Maddy filled and re-filled Carol’s wine glass.

First she listened in silence, patiently, as her friend talked it all out. Various explanations offered themselves as Carol described the morning’s event and then her afternoon’s discoveries, and Maddy considered each in turn.

Most obviously, she thought, Carl is bored and looking for novelty. Maybe his illness has started him looking for a new life better suited to some secret self, some girl self maybe. Some girl self dating back to his high school days, maybe? When he was one of the girls yet not one of them? He now wants to close that gap? Carol seemed to think so, but Maddy doubted it. He’s been sick, disoriented, and that may be all it is, just random behavior, she thought. Random sexual behavior, of course, because he’s hard up, he must be randy as a goat by now. At that Maddy had to smile. If Carol insists on total abstinence until Carl’s completely well, what can she expect? Maddy knew that men do strange things when they aren’t allowed sexual release, and can be made to do even stranger things. She often controlled her own men by their pent-up eroticism, their desire to cum at all costs. Carl hasn’t gotten laid for what now, months? Some men would think a phone book was sexually provocative if they’d been through that kind of deprivation. A "Sports Illustrated" bathing beauty issue would blow their minds. Not for nothing do they call that issue "Spurts Illustrated!" Men do fetishize women’s bodies, after all -- clothing, hair, everything that makes a woman distinctively feminine. Why shouldn’t Carl’s mirror provide him with a fetish object ready to hand, his own feminized body? That was the most likely explanation. Not too interesting, she decided, but it has possibilities. It’s something to build on, anyway. Because Carol is my friend, and Carol may not know it, but she’s bored, she wants to liven up her life. Look how she leaps to the notion that Carl wants to be a girl! She’s craving perverse excitement from somewhere! And no wonder! They’re soooo vanilla, that couple!

Well, wherever it may be Carl wants to go, he can be led to wherever Carol wants him to go, I’m sure of that, Maddy said to herself. We’ll just have to find out what Carol wants. She resumed her speculations. Would Carl agree to get involved with men? Is he gay? No, Maddy was thinking as Carol talked, not gay, except maybe with himself when he jerks off. All guys are gay when they have sex with themselves, but they never think of it that way! Like the rest of them he probably tries to hide his homoeroticism from himself by imagining it’s girls who are calling the tune, those girls in their swimsuits. Anyhow, if he were gay he’d know it by now. So would Carol.

Well, is he a crossdresser maybe? A little bit transgendered? Maybe, she thought. It could be. It would be hard for him not to be. With his background, spending all that time with girls all the way through high school? Now and then he’s got to have tried out some of the things girls that age talk about incessantly, at least in secret. Maybe not try boys, but other things, clothes, make-up, cute hair styles. I bet he had his own panties and bras stashed away at one time, maybe he still does. Certainly he knows how girls talk about other girls -- I’ve noticed how his voice always takes on that naughty lilt when some neighborhood wife’s misbehavior is the topic, that’s when he sounds just like one of his high school girl friends dishing the dirt. Does he do other girly things too? I bet he’d try with the right encouragement. Especially now that he’s hard up. Especially now. I know I can arrange that! Should I? Should I help Carol make her life more interesting?

Now that Maddy was focussed, she let her imagination run a little further. What if Carl ended up genuinely transsexual like Scott, a part-time or even full-time woman? Would Carol feel deprived? Maybe not. She once had lots of he-man boy friends and she knows how to get more. Yet she did settle on Carl, and Carl isn’t really a man, he’s too sweet! She might prefer living with a girl who’s a former man, and getting fucked by real men on the side. The best of both worlds! Would Carl make a good former man? He seems to be fixated on pictures of pretty girls with great faces and big boobs. That can carry a man a long way toward becoming a girl like that himself, if he has any inclinations that way.

She tried to imagine Carl with boobs. Scott loved his breasts once he got them -- once he made the commitment he couldn’t wait, he wanted a feminine figure and implants and the bras needed to hold them and the blouses and sweaters to show them off, all of it, right away! He’d been an awkward failure as a man, and he knew it once he realized how self-assured he felt as a woman, how happy, poised, even elegant! In no time there’d been guys swarming all over him.

I remember he wasn’t interested at first, didn’t like men, he was strictly a tits and ass man. Like Carl now probably. But once he got his own tits and ass and girls weren’t interested in him any more, he took up with guys all right. Sex is sex! I remember I had to talk him into his first blow job, but not his second! Men can be so marvelous, I remember I told him, they’re all so different! And while your mouth’s wrapped around that tube, he’s all yours!

Maddy smiled. Yours whether you want to see him again or not. Girls learn soon enough that there is no Mr. Right, take what’s good enough! Scott learned that. Especially when I showed him how a girl can get men to pleasure them. Then there was no stopping him! He couldn’t wait to get a pussy of his own to use on them! Maddy smiled again. Scotty now feels privileged to be a woman. Because unlike other women Scotty can’t ever take her gender or her body for granted the way women do who’re born to them. For Scotty it’s all new and a little daring, maybe even also a little wicked. Could Carl end up like that? Big tits, a pussy where his balls once hung down? Married to a guy who leaps to attend his least whim? Maybe. But not without Carol’s consent, never. It’ll have to be Carol who makes decisions like that for Carl. She’s the boss! I’d better make sure of that starting now! The poor guy doesn’t know that their old equal partnership is over. It’s just as well. I love them both, but they both should’ve learned long ago that it’s more fun to explore the little kinks you find inside yourself. And I really do owe it to Carol to help her, Maddy thought further. She deserves it! She’s been so worried, she’s been through so much lately. Carl too. Whatever’s Carl’s problem, whatever prompted him to stand there with his balls between his legs, he and his wife will soon be very different people. I will guarantee that!

But I’d best go slow. They really have to do it themselves. I’ll help, that’s all. Facilitate. It’ll be hard for me to restrain myself, but I’ll have to try. Maddy grinned. This could be fun! Carol married to a Scotty of her very own!

"So is this something to worry about, do you think?" Carol asked finally. Then sat quiet.

Still flushed with her own thoughts, Maddy replied, "Not at all, honey! You’re lucky! Lots of women would love to have your opportunities!"

Carol looked puzzled.

Too fast, Maddy decided. So she sat quiet a moment too, contemplating where to begin. Then, "Carol, let me ask you just one thing." She refilled Carol’s wine glass yet again. How many was this now? Three? But she’d topped Carol up once or twice too. "Just one thing. When you were just lying there looking at him, and Carl was blushing and stammering, because he’d been hiding this guilty secret from you and now you’d found it out?" She paused. Give Carol plenty of time to remember. To put herself into that mindspace.

"Yes?" Carol prompted her.

It worked, Maddy noted with great satisfaction. Carol’s voice had been small, anxiously concerned as she told her story. Now it sounded confident, firm.

"Did you like how it felt? I mean, sure, you felt sorry for the poor dear, there he was all upset, embarrassed, and so on. But did you feel anything else too? Anything good?"

"Yes, I certainly did," Carol said seriously after a moment’s thought. "I told you I think. I felt strong. In charge. That moment I felt I could control whatever he might say or feel. Play him like a musical instrument, maybe for as long as a half-an-hour. I bet that long! It was wonderful! I was embarrassed for him, sure, but despite that I teased him, and that felt really good! It was mean of me I know, but I really loved it! I liked watching him crawl just a little, because I felt so superior to him!" "Because you really are what he was only pretending to be? A real woman? You felt superior that way?"

"I guess. Yes, that too. Can you imagine? I was feeling superior because I’m a woman and he isn’t?"

"Yes," Maddy replied dryly. "I can imagine that. I feel that way all the time."

"But also because at that moment he seemed to want something he can’t give himself. And I want him to have it. It’s hard to explain. Because I do love him, so I want to help him. Only I’m not sure that with something like this I should help him!" Of course you aren’t sure, Maddy told herself. Because it would change everything. Your whole world, with all its predictability and stability! But you do feel intrigued by that very possibility, don’t you?

"Of course you should help him!" Maddy said firmly. "But he’s in denial, isn’t he? A direct approach would frighten him, or maybe make him angry. So you’ll have to be tactful. You’ll have to suggest things without stating them, and keep secrets from him. I know, you’ve been honest with him so far, you don’t want to play cat and mouse with him ever even for the mouse’s own good. You want to remain equal partners, tell all, share all, no secrets. But think about this! He’s had this thing all this time, this need to express a certain femininity, maybe even more than that his need to look like a woman, maybe live like one at least part time. Maybe even become a woman, you don’t know that he doesn’t!" Carol looked at Maddy silently, eyes wide open. She knew that she didn’t know.

"And he’s never once mentioned it to you! Maybe not even to himself! Carol, you’ve got to be ... indirect for his own good! Just think of what you’re doing as a different kind of sharing, so you can end up more equal than ever!" Maybe even in your bra sizes, Maddy added to herself. "Are you willing?" Carol was silent a long time. She was no fool. Then, "I want to help him," she said simply. "Whatever it takes." And that was that.

"I think I know how, " Maddy said. "It isn’t that hard to figure. But if I help you help him, will you stick with it? No hesitation, no turning back? Go the distance? Part way could mess you both up!"

She paused. Time for a little incentive. "I guarantee that the whole time you’re helping him, you’ll be feeling the same way you felt lying there watching Carl try to go girly all by himself in front of that mirror. That same feeling. Amused, superior, altogether in control. Knowing that whatever you do is for his own good."

"I’d like that," Carol said. "Knowing that I’m helping him. I’ve just said that!"

Carol already sounded in charge, a bit impatient even. Usually her voice registered apology, a desire not to offend. Not now. "Of course!" Maddy paused again. "You love each other. You’re loving partners, the envy of all our friends. But now you know something Carl doesn’t, what’s missing from his life. What all those girls in high school had and he could only envy. Femininity. Girlishness. Womanliness. Not your femininity, he knows that’s the greatest gift of his life, and that it’s all his. His own femininity is I mean! That’s what he was looking for in that mirror and in that swimsuit magazine. I think you know that. He may not know it, but you do!"

She did. She didn’t blink. Maddy asked again. "I need to ask you directly. Are you willing to go wherever the trail leads to help him realize his deepest needs? His femininity?"

There was a long pause. Carol looked down into her wine glass and swirled what was there. Then looked straight at Maddy and said simply, "If that’s what he needs, yes! I love him!"

5.

I thought so! Maddy felt triumphant. "I know you do, Carol! So that’s what you’ll do! Help him find his own femininity! Help him explore it and enjoy it. Not at cost to his masculinity, necessarily. Additional, maybe. We don’t know. That’ll be for him to decide."

Carol nodded. She could think of it that way. It was more likely though that one would overwhelm the other. Maybe his feminine identity would take charge? What if that happened? She asked Maddy.

"It’d be like guiding your own little girl, teaching her to become a grown woman. If you provide him with opportunities and encouragement, and protect him from the pitfalls, and keep him moving forward, and help him when he seems lost, and stay patient, he’ll provide his own growth. He’ll become all the woman he can be by himself! When he hesitates, that’s when you can encourage him, offer him little opportunities he can’t refuse. You’ll always know what he’ll decide before he does, because you’ll be guiding him. You’ll have arranged everything."

Should I go further? I’ll take a chance, and let’s see how she takes it. If she’s repelled, it’s easy to back off.

"Can you imagine how delighted he’ll feel when he holds up his first pair of his very own bikini panties, admiring the shine and the little lace edge, and tries to figure out which side is the front side? How you’ll feel as you watch and advise him? How you’ll feel when the poor dear first tries to put on lipstick all by himself and has to ask for your help?"

Carol could imagine. Pleased that Carl was pleased, if he was. But she’d also feel unsatisfied. Carl trying to become a woman could be dear. But then what would she do for a man? She kept a poker face.

Maddy saw. No reaction! So Carol won’t really mind playing gender games with her darling little Curl! Even if they’re not games, but determine the way he’ll have to live for the rest of his life! Should I mention that sooner or later she’ll need to reassure him that he’s just fine when he wants to look especially pretty for some guy? Or that now and then she’ll very likely find herself dressing to go out with her boyfriend while he stays home to do his nails? No, I’d better let that be for now.

"You’ll feel the same loving affection you’ve always felt," Maddy assured her. "That’ll only get stronger. You won’t be able to tell him exactly how you’re helping him, not at first, but you’ll know. Think of it as a kind of surprise you’re preparing for your next anniversary, when will it be, in eleven months? You can tell him everything then. By then he’ll have learned to appreciate everything you’ve done and whatever he’s become. By then he’ll love it, I’m sure!" By then maybe he’ll have no choice but to love it, Maddy added to herself. "So, are you committed to this thing, honey?"

"To helping my darling feel good about himself? Of course!" "Then let me propose some things you should do as soon as possible, this evening if possible. The first will tell us both a lot about what we’re dealing with. It’s very simple, very innocuous. All right?"

Carol broke into a broad smile. "Maddy, just listen to you! You sound like some gypsy fortune teller who sees all, knows all, and tells next to nothing! Speak up, out with it!"

This was a new and much more attractive Carol, Maddy was thinking.

Amused by my teasing even as she objects to it! "Here are some magazines to leave around the house." she told Carol, picking them off an end-table and handing them over. "He gets off on "Sports Illustrated" when it’s loaded with half-naked women? Let’s see what he does with "Cosmopolitan," which is always loaded with sexy, independent-minded women constantly swapping gossip and advice about their own sexuality, how to handle men, how to seduce them, how to be beautiful. Let’s see who he identifies with, the women or the men. Just leave these around the house and see where his curiosity leads him. See if one of them ends up on his computer keyboard with even more kleenex in his waste paper basket. Later maybe you can quiz him and see what he’s learned. And build on it, discourage some things, encourage others." Maddy already knew what Carl would do. An issue of Cosmo was her standard entrance exam for submissive men. Ray had glanced at one and marveled at the lengths women will go to turn on their men, and had urged her a few times to try some of those tricks on him. A very disappointing response. Scott had rather startlingly identified with the women dressing to seduce men, not with the men being seduced. He’d thought he was merely being sympathetic, trying to "understand" how they felt about sex and seduction. But in the end he’d become one of them. From what Carol had described, Carl would probably split and redouble himself, think of himself as a man seduced by a woman into becoming a seductive woman. Because that’s now what he would be! Carol would see to it that he played all his parts in his mind in the right order. That he’d get seduced into reading the make-up ads too. All Carol had to do was smile encouragingly, Maddy suspected, and Carl would feminize himself! He’d been a boy among girls for so long! He was so needy! He had to be!

Carol took the two issues of "Cosmo" with one eyebrow raised skeptically, ready to wait and see. She’d report back in a day or two, and Maddy would advise her further then. "Oh yes," Maddy said casually. Now the serious stuff begins. "Another thing. You’ll want to keep him feeling hard up! Sexually eager, but deprived. Keep an eye on the overall kleenex level in his computer room. Let him let loose over Cosmo’s girls, and if you have any expose him to other magazines too with other models selling lingerie or make-up, girly things. See if those women seem to be advising him to change how he looks, to become more like them. Give them a chance to try. Then, only then, confront him about his masturbation. Tell him he must promise to give it up except when you yourself ask him to masturbate. Does that sound outrageous? It is, but chances are he won’t think so -- he’s got to be feeling guilty that he’s doing himself, so he’ll promise you anything. Then when you have control over his sexual release, you’ll find that the hornier he feels, more easily you can guide him where he’s too ashamed to go himself."

Carol nodded. She considered taking notes, but decided she’d just try to remember.

"So deny him sex except as a special reward. He’ll be worried about where you’re leading him I’m sure, further and further into femininity, and he’ll be worried that you’ll think the less of him the more feminine he becomes. So make sex with him a reward for his breakthroughs, a reassurance that he’s better than ever! Not so he ever quite realizes it, just so he notices that his acquiescence in some things you ask for seems to turn you on, and his reluctance turns you off."

"OK," Carol nodded. That makes sense, she was thinking. Carrot or no carrot. Carrot if he lets me liberate him, no carrot if he doesn’t. No sticks at all. I like that.

"Now, this next will be hard, but trust me Carol, it’s necessary. Get accustomed to the idea. When he’s on a plateau and unwilling to rise to the next level, he gets no sex at all. No approval, no affection. Not even an affectionate glance. We’ll want him feeling a little inadequate and deprived. Maybe you can even seem mysteriously annoyed with him at such times, impatient with him for unexplained reasons, so he feels anxious. You’ll find that if he’s been denied sexual release and you’re at odds with him, then when you ask him to do something to carry him to the next level, something he might normally find odd or perverse, he’ll do it eagerly. If only to get back into your good graces." "Poor Carl," Carol said. She stood up and weaved a bit. Time to get home to the dinner her sweet hubby had prepared for her while supposedly she’d been putting in a long day at the office. And her long consultation here.

"There’s more, honey. This you may not like, but again, it’s for his own good. Especially when he’s feeling deprived, when he’s had no sex for a while, you’ll want to go out ‘shopping’ now and then evenings and come back with only vague explanations about where you’ve been. We’ll be talking fairly frequently, so when you come over here, don’t let him know. Just say "out" or "here and there" when he asks. Then he’ll find those moments when you’re altogether pleased with him that much more reassuring as well as rewarding. Keep him on edge, unsure of himself and of you, so he’ll be more than willing to please you when you suggest some further step." "That makes sense," Carol had to agree.

"Even more. When he’s hard up and getting no sex, and you’re going out on unexplained errands, dress provocatively. To turn him on, to keep him juiced and eager and unable to think clearly. Call him "stud" or "sport" or whatever you usually call him to invoke his manliness, and trail your fingers across his genitals in passing now and then. Let him know you’re a highly-sexed woman. But be too busy to do anything further about it with him. A hot and bothered husband is a husband especially ready to do whatever you want. If he’s entertaining jealous suspicions, even more so." Poor Carl, Carol thought again. She giggled out loud. "You are a devil," Carol said with admiration.

"All part of keeping him on his toes, honey. You need to own his sex life absolutely, so it’s no longer his and he’s anxious about it. You need to control all of his pent up desires so his frustration inspires him to greater efforts. That’s why when he’s ramped up, he won’t be allowed to masturbate. If he cheats once, and you can tell, you’ll threaten that his next offense will get his penis locked up inside a chastity tube -- I have one around here somewhere you can show him. It won’t come to that though. He loves you. He’ll want to do whatever pleases you even when he doesn’t understand why."

Carol heard this last solemnly. Poor Carl, she thought yet again. I know he needs me. I’ll just have to be careful I don’t destroy him by seeming not to need him. She nodded slowly. She’d been in charge of their married life for only those ten seconds or so she’d watched her husband cringe in front of a mirror. Now she’d remain in charge for their whole foreseeable future. It felt awesome. It felt good!

"I’d better get home," Carol said. "My car’s home. Carl’ll be wondering where I am, when to put dinner on the table." "His turn tonight? What a prize you married, Carol. I do so envy you. But hold in mind how much more of a prize he’ll be in a year. How very much happier you’ll both be. Not that you aren’t now." "Mmmm!" Carol replied, scarcely listening, starting toward the door.

Now’s the moment, Maddy thought to herself. The two most important things, now that she’s too impatient to discuss them. "One last question, before you go, Carol. How is Carl physically now? I mean, are his blood levels OK? His liver’s functioning normally, and all?"

Carol suddenly remembered that her husband was still convalescent, and looked at Maddy questioningly. "Oh he’s fine now," she said. "Everything tests normal or better than normal now. He’s in perfect health. Except of course that he’s so thin. Emaciated. That he needs to put weight back on as quickly as possible." "Of course. And my last advice deals with that. Two things. One is, you’ll want him to join a health club and work out regularly. That one in the strip mall two blocks down is perfect for our purposes. He can stop there for a session each morning. I’ve sent men there to get them shaped up. They do a beautiful job. Let Carl give them this card when he registers, and they’ll understand what we want. He’ll think it’s for a discount." She scribbled something across the back.

Carol glanced at it and stuffed it into her purse. "’FormFit Figures’? Isn’t their clientele mainly women?" "That’s true of most health clubs, honey. It’s women who worry about their figures, not men. But no, not ‘mainly.’ FormFit is exclusively for women. That’s why at FormFit the trainers will know just how to help Carl, and you won’t need to give that part of it another thought. You’ll see. Now just wait here a moment more, would you, hon?" Now here it comes, she was thinking. This works or it doesn’t!

Maddy abruptly left the room, leaving Carol wondering if she wanted her man to exercise with other women. Daily? Especially when he’s feeling horny and deprived? She mentioned that to Maddy when she returned.

"Not to worry," she said. "I expect him to identify with other women, not desire them. He’ll think of himself as one of them soon enough. With good reason, if he takes these pills. A big one and a little one each day, and within a couple of months he’ll be putting on weight where he never dreamed it was possible for a man to put on weight. Guaranteed."

Maddy, smiling, held up a pale blue plastic compact with a wheel inside holding 28 large pills, then under each one 28 smaller pills. Carol glanced at it and looked intently into her friend’s eyes. Her mind was in a whirl.

"Maddy, these look like birth control pills," Carol said quietly. "Why should he take birth control pills? Do you think there’s a chance he’ll get pregnant?" She was afraid she knew the answer. "These will help him become all the girl he can be, if that’s what he wants to be," Maddy said with a conspiratorial grin, inviting Carol to join her. "Strictly speaking they aren’t for birth control, though they do function that way too. They’re stronger. They’re a full teenage hormone replacement regimen. Concentrated estrogens, progesterones, everything any developing girl could possibly need. They were originally designed for girls with delayed puberty due to underdeveloped ovaries, but nowadays we use them for all sorts of female or transsexual underdevelopment. They flood the system and work all sorts of marvelous magic. I know men who’ve taken them for several years and you’d never know it, to look at them. You’d never know they were once men, I mean. These things work. They overwhelm everything."

Carol saw now that Maddy was serious. Where Maddy thought Carol should take her husband. Where she expected Carl to end up. "I don’t know," Carol said. "He may not want to. I mean, he...." "Carol, I did ask you if this is where you think Carl wants to go even if he doesn’t know it. And I did ask if you were serious about taking him there, even if he doesn’t know where ‘there’ is." It sounded like a rebuke. Carol said nothing.

Maddy relaxed and smiled. "Just take them home for now. Think about it. See where his mind goes when he reads women’s magazines like ‘Cosmo.’ See how he reacts to his new health club. Go slow, satisfy yourself before you move on. Because if this is where Carl wants to go, and it certainly seems so to me, then this is where he should go. Start him on these. If they seem wrong for him you can always discontinue them. You’re in charge."

Maddy knew he wouldn’t want to discontinue them. None of her men had ever quit. The big pills did the serious work, and the little pills assured that the big ones would be taken daily as intended. Teenage girls often forget. So the little ones included a mood drug to assure a feeling of well-being that was missed if not renewed daily. And since teenagers are often troubled, the little ones contained a tranquilizer to induce a lovely serenity of mind, an inclination to go with the flow, a compliant disposition that made everything else so much easier. Girls who took this combination soon discovered sex and how to enjoy it with no regrets. Men who took this combination never regretted it either. Carol was still uncertain. To soak Carl in female hormones was only one more step, true. It could always be retraced, mostly. But it seemed to her to be the most radical step of all. Yet Carl did seem to want what only hormones like these could provide! A memory of him posing there with his smooth crotch, his genitals as out of sight as any woman’s, flashed across her mind’s eye. And of Carl pathetically offering his bunched up chest muscles and loose skin to his mirror image as if they were real breasts, and then as he’d spun around offering them to her. Was that what he wanted? Real breasts? Then he should have them! Could she accept them if he one day offered them to her? Could she suckle them? Carol didn’t know. But she recalled how she’d sometimes feel when Carl was down below on her nibbling her clit, what a lovely girl he could be in her mind’s eye. She felt a warm, tingly glow. If I’m the heroine of my own novels, she thought, then my husband is entitled to be the heroine of his, if that’s what he wants! With breasts and everything else, if that’s what he wants. "If that’s what he wants," Carol said aloud. This could be fun, she added to herself.

"He’ll need guidance," Maddy reminded her. "If that’s where he wants to go, he’ll never get there on his own." She looked directly at her friend. "Really, Carol! Do you want to take charge or don’t you?"

Yes. Carol reached out her hand, and Maddy handed her the blue plastic compact.

"Lot’s more where these came from," Maddy commented. "A lifetime’s supply if need be. We’ll see."

"What should I tell him they’re for? I won’t lie to him. I can’t."

"Tell him the truth, Carol," Maddy said seriously. "Tell him they’re to help him put meat back on his bones. To fill out his figure. Because they’ll certainly do that, put meat in all the right places, and they’ll round out his angularity and smooth out his skin, too. He’ll like that."

Carol looked at the blue compact, and nodded. It was similar to her own pink birth control pill compact. Blue for boys? "You can even tell him they’re also a kind of birth control," Maddy said. "Because they are, for him, in a way. They’ll slow and then stop his sperm production after a few months, and then you’ll be able to discontinue your own birth control. Tell him it’s his turn to take the pills for a while. He’ll think that’s fair." Maddy grinned.

Carol tucked them into her purse.

Now for a clincher? "You should know, though, Carol. They’ll have another effect too. After a while he won’t be getting hard any more -- girls don’t get erections. So you may want to keep taking your own pills after all, if you find you miss the feel of a man inside you. I’ll lend you a suitable man until you can find your own, if it should come to that."

Unthinkable, Carol said to herself. Wasn’t it? Would I? The idea was obscene! Supplement my hubby’s loving with someone else’s? Someone like one of my old boyfriends? Actually live out that fantasy where one of my old boyfriends pushes himself into me after my girly hubby has licked my pussy to prepare me? She remembered how it had once felt to yield up her body to a really big man, to someone really powerful. It had felt good! Really good! She began to feel wet underneath.

"We’ll see," was all Carol said. "Thanks, Maddy. You’ve been an enormous help. I have to get back. I’m sure Carl’s wondering where I am." Almost afraid to hear more, she dashed out of Maddy’s house.

Carl was awake when she got back, and was indeed wondering where she’d gone. He looked up questioningly as she breezed into the house and carelessly tossed her two issues of "Cosmopolitan" down on a hall table.

"Hi, honey," she said. "You were asleep, so I stopped off to visit with Maddy. I’m sorry I’m so late. She’s given me such marvelous ideas for your recovery. I want to tell you everything." Then Carol surprised herself. Unhesitatingly, she added, "But first of all, you know what these pills are for? Take one, and the little one that goes with it, and I’ll tell you!"

She had no idea why she was starting Carl’s hormone regimen without a moment’s hesitation or consultation. To establish who was in charge in her own mind right off? Because she wanted to know that Carl was well-launched, on his way to where he really wanted to go? It felt good!

Carl swallowed the pills, the big and the little. Carol had been in charge of his recovery from the day he first came home from the hospital, all of his pills included. He swallowed whatever she handed him. Except for withholding sex, he had to admit she’d been right about everything.

I guess about this too, he decided. Because soon after taking both new pills he began to feel rather pleased with himself. And with Carol. Comfortable. Better about everything!

"So what ideas did you and Maddy come up with?" Carl began to feel delighted that two women were looking after him! His eyes sparkled.

When it came down to it, Carol found that she could repeat to Carl very little of her conversation with Maddy. She’d need to proceed by indirection. Men were irrationally defensive about their so-called masculinity. If Carl couldn’t acknowledge his gender ambivalence even to himself, mentioning it aloud would only drive him deeper into denial. Yet their future happiness depended on his self-realization, on their mutual acceptance of each other as they were, as they each needed to be. Each one had to feel free to become more of whatever each one already was. Carol knew that Maddy was right, that she enjoyed being in charge, and she liked knowing that she was leading her husband toward his true nature little by little. She still wasn’t sure how she’d deal with it if in the end Carl wanted to go all the way, become a woman in every respect. Could she lick his pussy the way she now sucked his cock? The way he licked hers? Well, never mind that now. Her job now was helping Carl acknowledge, develop, and enjoy his femininity. Handing him Maddy’s "FormFit Figures" card, she told him that beginning tomorrow morning he’d be building himself up and recovering his strength with different exercise sessions at that place just down the road, where Maddy knew people. "They have excellent trainers, she tells me. Be sure you do everything they ask you to do."

Carl agreed. After weeks of inaction he’d enjoy being pushed to his physical limits, he was sure of that.

"And your pills. Take them daily from now on," she told him.

"They’ll help your body shape up and fill out." "They’re like steroids?" he asked, looking the wheel over? "Why only 28 days’ worth? To simulate a menstrual cycle?" He thought he was joking, Carol thought. So go with it! "I suppose so," she said casually. "They’re a lot like birth control hormones I hear. Keep them in your purse the way I do mine." She smiled. Carl didn’t seem to be flapped by her teasing, so she continued. "Or leave them on your dressing table, to remind you first thing each morning when you’re putting on your make-up for the day." Did that kind of talk outrage him?

No, it only amused Carl. "I don’t have a dressing table either," he observed dryly, ignoring the reference to make-up. Poor Carol must have had an exhausting day, he was thinking, her jokes are so heavy-handed. But he appreciated what she was attempting for him. Between weight lifting at that gym and these bodybuilding pills, he might actually achieve the professional athlete look he’d envied all his life. In which case he’d emerge from this illness better off than ever. "Birth control, you say? Does this mean that now you think I’m ... recovered? That we can ...?"

"We’ll see," was all she replied. My, but he picks up quickly on anything having to do with sex! Carol then told him that his FormFit workouts would be his main physical activity daily, no shirking. She still wanted nothing else to deplete his strength or addle his concentration. "We’ll have sex again when it’s beneficial. I’ll decide when!" She spoke emphatically, staring at him. Establish a dominating control immediately. Carl’s disappointment was obvious. He’d much rather make love to Carol than lift weights, given a choice. He said so. "Oh, you dear, how sweet! And what a long face!" Carol replied sympathetically. This was hard for her too, but as Maddy had pointed out, firmness now would save them much grief later. "Cheer up, honey! We can still cuddle, any time. And if you take your pills and do your exercises and everything else you should be doing, I don’t see why you can’t begin again to ... appreciate me with your mouth whenever you feel the need. Or I feel the need. I’ll want that. I’ll be feeling deprived too, remember. But your health comes first, and you need to preserve your vigor. Sex for you will be a special treat now and then maybe until you’re the way we both want you to be, and that’s all it’ll be." I know just what he’s thinking now, Carol added to herself, enjoying her own amusement. Back to the girls in swimsuits. Back to the hand jobs. Well, we’ll see how those Cosmo girls appeal to him, and for what, before I turn that tap off by asking him about all those kleenexes in his waste paper basket.

6.

Carl’s self-fulfillment as Carol and Maddy conceived it came much sooner than either imagined possible, and by a somewhat different route.

After dinner Carl glanced at one of the issues of "Cosmopolitan" Carol had tossed on the hall table, then actually picked it up and carried it back to his chair. The girl on the front cover stared out at him with a challenging expression, her mouth open and her lips glistening, her satin robe fallen open, her ripe breasts visibly suspended in a frivolous lacy black and purple bra that matched the nearly bare panty he could glimpse crossing her crotch, one of many "Adorable Underthings" pictured in the cover story to justify her appearance on the cover. Could any man resist her? "I want you!" sh