Life with Brian by Rebecca A. (MM nc drugs tg)

Brian and I had been best friends for as long as I could remember, although I wondered why from time to time. Sometimes he drove me nuts. He sometimes behaved really oafishly - or just insensitively - and he could be opinionated, too. Not that he didn’t have good reason to be. He was always one of the smartest kids I knew, and he was captain of the football team when we were at high school.

Brian was one of those good-looking golden boys for whom life always naturally came easy, smiling his way through difficult situations with a flash of his blue eyes and an easy laugh. Whenever we fell out he always won me over again with some quick-witted remarks and a look that seemed to say “What! You don’t like me? How can you resist?”

I never figured out why he was friends with me, unless it was just an accident of geography since we lived next door to one another when we were kids. I was the opposite of everything Brian surrounded himself with.

While Brian’s family was relatively well-off my Mom and I were always struggling. I was only average at school, and while I wasn’t one of the geeks I wasn’t very popular either. I was too short and small to be any good at sport, and not muscular or handsome enough to get girls easily. The girls I did go out with were more attracted by the proximity to Brian, I think.

For whatever reason, Brian and I remained friends throughout school. After we graduated he went off to California to do pre-med at college in Los Angeles, and I stayed in the same hokey little burg we’d grown up in, working myself into a brain-dead state in a job in an insurance company. I didn’t have the grades for a scholarship to college, and my Mom couldn’t afford to help me out with money since Dad had skipped out on us when I was three. There was the community college, but I would have to move closer in to the city to attend, or commute four hours a day on the bus.

Only three months after I got the job the company went through a round of ‘downsizing’, and after three more months I still hadn’t found a new job. I got a phone call around then from Brian, wondering how I was and what I was up to. I told him I wasn’t up to much, and he told me I should come out to the coast and stay at his place - he was sure there were more jobs in California, and he had plenty of room.

After talking it over with Mom we agreed that at worst I’d get to see the ocean (I never had before) and I couldn’t do much worse than the jobs I’d recently been getting rejections for. Mom and my Grandma gave me farewell hugs and a couple of hundred dollars, and I caught a bus for the bright lights.

Brian met me at the bus station, and sped me home to his little apartment in his beat up Rabbit convertible. He was wrong about having plenty of room, I realised as soon as we walked in. Apart from the apartment being tiny it was full of an enormous amount of clutter. Where had he acquired all this stuff in such a short time? I said as much and he told me all the furniture had come with his previous girlfriend, Ashleigh, who had dropped out a few months earlier and decided to leave for Nepal on some weird spiritual enlightenment thing.

Brian told me she was coming back but he didn’t know when. He looked kind of dejected when he talked about that so I didn’t press him on it. I did think at the time that Ashleigh’s sense of interior decorating needed adjustment, but the awfulness of the striped couch was matched by Brian’s evident total inability to clean so I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

We agreed I’d have to sleep on the couch for the time being. Brian proposed that as soon as I got a job we could move to a bigger apartment and share the expense, which sounded fine with me. In the meantime he would cover all the bills and rent from the money his parents gave him.

Within a few days it was just like old times. Despite our occasional ups and downs I was always more relaxed in Brian’s presence than with anyone else, and he seemed glad to have someone to distract him from Ashleigh’s absence. Pretty soon he began to devote more time to his studies, so I tried not to disturb him and devoted my time to searching for work.

In a few weeks I had begun to realise that in Los Angeles a high-school diploma didn’t qualify me for much more than a car wash attendant. I found that out when I got a job washing cars. It didn’t last, though. One of the guys I was working with, Bob, had an argument with a customer a few weeks after I started, and it developed into a fight.

I was kind of shocked, and I just stood there while they hit one another. When the customer filed a complaint with the police he claimed that there were two guys fighting with him - I don’t know why unless he was embarrassed at Bob humiliating him - and my boss decided to fire both of us to shut the customer and the police up.

Brian thought the whole incident was hilarious, since he knew I’d never been in a fight with anyone my whole life except the time Nicky Davis hit me in third grade, which didn’t count because I was winded so it wasn’t a fight, it was a single punch.

Needless to say I was less than amused. I had no more savings at all. I couldn’t even afford to get my hair cut. As it got longer I took to tying it back most days, and I always put it in a ponytail when I went for a job. Brian tried his best to cheer me up, and made sure the refrigerator was well-stocked and we never wanted for anything at home, but I was dispirited with my lack of success with jobs and the difficulty of getting one without references. I started to sleep late, and mope around the house all day because I had no money to go out. One day I became aware that I really didn’t like myself that much anymore.

After about two months of this I was at a low ebb, and one night over pizza which he had paid for I was unburdening myself on Brian yet again when suddenly he told me to cut it out, he’d had enough of my whining. I was shocked, and upset, but I knew he was right - I had been complaining a lot lately. He told me if I really wanted something to do I could start by cleaning the apartment up a little, he didn’t know how I could be at home all day but the place looked worse than ever. I started to say that he was the source of most of the mess but caught myself and held it in. I owed Brian an awful lot.

Later he seemed to realise that he’d hurt my feelings with his outburst, and to make it up to me he treated me to a movie. It was typical Brian, to act as though nothing had happened and be his usual charming witty self as we drove through the warm night with the top down. By the end of the evening I’d forgotten all about our argument.

In the morning I made sure I cleaned the kitchen, bathroom and living room thoroughly while Brian was at college. I left his bedroom alone, I figured that was his business.

In return, Brian started to try to involve me more in his life outside the apartment. I got to meet more of his friends from college who were mostly nice although we didn’t have a lot in common except for Brian. I could see that a couple of girls in his year were infatuated with him. He still had those good looks and that charm, but it seemed he was still hung up on Ashleigh and didn’t notice all the other attention.

Brian decided we should both be fitter, and we started jogging together in the mornings before he went off to classes. At first I was reluctant, but it did make me feel better and got me out of the apartment. We both started taking vitamins, and tried to eat better foods. In a few weeks I noticed both our moods improved substantially, so I guess good health does have some short term benefits as well as the lasting ones Brian was keen about.

**

Over the next few months my success with jobs was just as limited, and I toyed with the idea of going back home to Mom. But I enjoyed my time with Brian, although I was seeing less and less of him as his study increased. And although I’d so far had only a little exposure to LA it seemed so much more exciting than my home town, and I didn’t think I could stand to go back to somewhere where everyone knew me and I wasn’t anything. In LA I was a failure but at least no-one except Brian knew.

I got to be a very good housekeeper. Brian commented on it one morning about six months after I moved in, and as I looked around I had to admit the place had changed since I first saw it. Apart from some general cleaning I’d also moved some stuff around, washed the curtains and put a cover on the horrible couch to tone it down a bit. While the place didn’t look like it would make Architectural Digest, it looked like my Mom wouldn’t drop dead when she saw it.

Not long after that Brian got a letter from Ashleigh, the first in ages, and it really brought him down into a slump. He became kind of listless and empty, and didn’t want to talk about it, so I tried my best to be supportive and didn’t pry. I made sure he ate well and always had clean clothes and all that kind of stuff so that at least he could focus on his studies. He looked at me kind of funny one night as I was doing the dishes after dinner and said “you know Chris, you make a terrific wife”. I threw the dishcloth at him in mock anger and he gave me his first smile in ages.

Brian’s spirits improved quickly after that, and I figured that he was finally over Ashleigh. She sure had made a big impression on him considering they’d only been together for a few months. Anyway, he devoted himself more to work, but we also did more stuff out like in-line skating and some hiking.

**

About nine months after I moved to LA I started to feel a kind of strange fatigue, but I passed it off as a mild virus and didn’t think much about it. I did notice that I wasn’t able to run quite as well as I had been. I thought maybe I needed to improve my muscle tone a little, and so I signed up for a yoga class that was taught after hours at the civic centre.

Brian agreed to pay for it as a present for my eighteenth birthday, on the understanding that I wasn’t going to go all mystical on him like Ashleigh did and wig out for Nepal or anything. I had to reassure him that it wasn’t that kind of course - it had very little meditation and a lot of muscle work. Even so, I found that I had lost a little of the strength I had, and holding some of the poses was more difficult than I’d imagined it would be.

Most of the others in my yoga class were women, and I struck up a friendship with one woman about ten years older than me. Her name was Barbara and she was married with two kids. She referred to the yoga as her sanity break. She started driving me home after the class finished because it was pretty much on her way. I liked her, she reminded me of a younger version of my Mom, who I was missing.

I started losing weight, even though I thought I was still eating the same amounts. I didn’t notice it at first because we didn’t have a set of scales in the apartment, but I did notice that some of my jeans were looser on me and so were the collars on my shirts. Some of them were getting kind of thin, and I thought maybe they’d stretched. But in the bathroom one morning I noticed that I was definitely thinner than I used to be. I started to worry that I was wasting away.

Finally I got a little work. Barbara told me her husband needed some part time assistance with his business, routine stuff like mail-outs to clients and keeping track of orders and deliveries. It was only a day a week, but he could pay me cash and I could choose the day that was best for me. I was really happy, not just because of the money, which wasn’t going to be much, but because it would be my money and I wouldn’t have to ask Brian for as much each week.

Brian was pleased for me, but reiterated that we were doing fine with the money we had, He said I shouldn’t feel obliged to contribute to the house expenses - the money I earned should be mine. So I went to work for Barbara’s husband, John, who was nice enough but a bit distant.

The first day I started there I got the idea that he didn’t really need me but that Barbara might have talked him into employing me. I tried to impress him anyway, doing the work scrupulously, and dressing as well as I could. I had become very used to having long hair by now, and so I always made sure my hair was tied back, and I was as polite as possible. It didn’t seem to matter, he always regarded me with a kind of surreptitious distrust.

I tried to make sure the house was as clean as ever and that Brian always got a healthy evening meal. I didn’t want my work to interfere with that, because I was conscious of Brian’s generosity in paying for all our living expenses. I even began to clean his room as well as the rest of the apartment.

One day during the course of cleaning I found a few letters and photos which Ashleigh had sent him. I idly flicked through the photos. She sure was gorgeous. I could see why Brian would still be hung up on her. I felt guilty looking at the photos for some reason, so I decided not to pry through the letters and put them back in the drawer I’d found them in.

Brian’s room still had a fair bit of Ashleigh’s stuff in it. That made sense, I guess, since she had promised him she was coming back. I straightened Brian’s things up as much as I could, but I left the drawers with Ashleigh’s underwear and other stuff untouched. I didn’t think Brian wanted his life totally organised.

The apartment looked great, and I saved a little money from the job, so I spent a little on a couple of minor things to brighten the place up. I was gonna buy myself some clothes with the first few paychecks I got, but I figured Brian had been really good to me and so I wanted to spend the money on stuff we could both benefit from.

Brian seemed pleased with the minor changes I made around the place, and I felt good for having done it. Anyway, there were paychecks in the future to take care of clothing and other stuff. The clothes I had were worn, but who cared? John didn’t seem to care how I looked at work. I guess the benefit of running a mail- order business is you never have to see the customers.

A few weeks after I started work I was in the shower when I noticed my nipples were unusually sensitive, painful even. I studied them and noticed that they looked pinker, and a little swollen. There was a little hard lump under each of them. I wondered if I had some kind of infection, and whether it was related to the weight loss. I thought I’d ask Brian, he was still only doing the pre-med course but he was the closest thing to a medical reference I had.

But I was too embarrassed for the next couple of weeks. I almost asked him one night after dinner, but then I felt self-conscious and changed the subject before I got to ask anything. Then after a couple of weeks the pain went away, although my nipples stayed a bit puffy. If anything they were even more swollen.

**

Over the next month I noticed Brian sneaking quick glances at me when he thought I wasn’t looking. I wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but whenever I turned to meet his gaze he looked away.

I found I was needing to sleep more. I still got up early to go jogging with Brian, but I started taking little naps in the afternoons on days I wasn’t working. I thought I might still have been losing weight, so I bought a cheap pair of scales with some of my own money and weighed myself. I was shocked. Since I moved to LA I’d lost almost thirty pounds! I wasn’t a big guy to begin with.

I studied myself closely in the mirror, concerned by my still puffy nipples and the amount of muscle I seemed to have lost from my shoulders and chest. My legs were still in good shape, the jogging seemed to be helping that, and I looked fit. Maybe I was naturally meant to be lower in weight and it was just the exercise?

Later that evening I finally asked Brian what he knew about sudden weight loss. He wanted to know why I was asking, and I mentioned most of the changes that had been taking place. He shrugged, and said it didn’t seem like anything to worry about, but if I wanted to see a Doctor… I knew where that might lead considering the job I had with John didn’t give me health benefits.

I didn’t want to mention what was happening to my chest to Brian.

There were some things guys just didn’t talk about.

**

Over the next two months my weight seemed to stabilise at a little over 100lbs, which was alarming, but then it rose another 10lbs. But there was no doubt about it now, my chest was definitely doing something weird. One Sunday morning, a non-jogging day, I was in bed contemplating the day ahead when I ran my hand over my chest and noticed how extraordinarily good it felt. I stroked my nipples a little and was rewarded with a very intense sensation. That’s when I knew.

I leapt out of my bed on the couch and ran to the bathroom. Tearing off the t-shirt I usually wore to bed I stared at myself in the mirror.

I was turning into a girl.

Oh so slowly, but that was what was happening. I had small but definite breasts with largish dark pink nipples, and the weight I had put on recently seemed all to have gone to my butt. There was an indentation at my waist, and I noticed that my neck and arms looked more slender. The hair on my legs still looked kind of dark, but it seemed as though it was thinning. I had never had much on my arms and none on my chest, so it was hard to tell anything from that.

My penis didn’t look as though it was affected much at all. Although now that I reflected on it I hadn’t had an erection for a long time. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed that before?

I sat on the edge of the bathtub and wondered how and why this was happening. I must have some kind of strange disease or something. I had to find out a way to see a doctor.

Eventually I stood up and looked at myself in the mirror again. I pulled my hair up and studied the way I looked. My face had changed a little I think, though it was hard to tell. It looked thinner overall, but my cheekbones looked bigger and my lips a little fuller. Perhaps I was just imagining it. I’d have to try to find a photo from a while ago to make a comparison. I turned with my back to the mirror and tried to look over my shoulder to see how I looked from behind. I noticed my back looked very much like a girl’s, too.

Strangely, I felt more surprised than upset. I got into the shower and washed my hair. On the spur of the moment I decided to reach for the razor and shaving foam on the vanity and began to shave my legs while I was in the shower. I nicked myself once, but mostly it was surprisingly easy. Then, for good measure, I shaved my armpits too.

I got out of the shower and dried myself off. “And the colored girls go doop, she-doop, doop-doop, she-doop” I sang under my breath. How did the rest of it go? “Plucked her eyebrows on the way, shaved her legs…” Well, I wasn’t quite ready to pluck my eyebrows. But my legs felt great. I idly thought I must have been losing my marbles to shave them, but they looked pretty good as well. No regrets, I decided.

I stayed in the bathroom a while, looking myself over. Eventually I guess I came to my senses. I realised I was gonna have to start covering myself up a little more unless I wanted Brian to notice what was happening to me. I guessed I should also work out a way to get to a doctor pretty soon. Idly I wondered why I wasn’t really upset about all of this.

I got out some surgical bandage from the bathroom cupboard and wound it around my chest in an attempt to flatten out my - well, my breasts, that was what they were now, there was no question about that. When I was reasonably satisfied I wrapped a towel around myself, including my chest this time instead of letting it hang around my waist. I wondered how come Brian hadn’t said anything to me yet.

Surely he must have noticed this before considering I hung around the house in t-shirts most of the time. I stopped worrying about that and got dressed. My legs felt amazing as I pulled my jeans over them, so smooth and, I had to admit, kind of sexy. Then I combed my still damp hair out. It was well and truly down between my shoulder blades by now. I had gotten used to it being so long, in fact I kind of liked it.

**

During the next week I explored a couple of aspects of my body I hadn’t known about before. My nipples were no longer sore, but they felt great when I touched them. I played with them idly one morning, and although I didn’t get an erection I got the most wonderful feelings from them. One morning in the bathroom after our run when Brian had gone off to college I experimented a little to see how much like a girl I was becoming. I tied my hair up and tried to thin my eyebrows out a little.

I remembered reading years ago in one of my Mom’s magazines that you had to do that from underneath the brows rather than on top. I only took a little off, it hardly seemed noticeable. Brian didn’t notice it when he came home.

Next day I went a little bit further. I had been tidying Brian’s room the day before and noticed a box of Ashleigh’s stuff in the bottom of the closet. It was just some old makeup, a couple of lipsticks and some eyeliner and a dried up mascara.

So I tried on the lipstick and the eyeliner. I couldn’t get anything out of the mascara, it seemed like it was all dried up. I didn’t much like the way the lipstick looked, either, I guessed it was the wrong colour for me since Ashleigh had dark hair and mine is blonde. But it was an interesting experiment. I thinned my eyebrows ever so slightly again the next day.

I realised a few weeks later that my body was still changing. We were jogging, and although I’d bound my breasts up I could feel the weight on my chest moving around a little as we ran. Next day I did the bandage up tighter but there was still a bit of discomfort. I noticed after the shower that my breasts seemed to have grown a bit more. They didn’t look much bigger, but they felt kind of heavier. And the nipples were definitely larger. Maybe I should stop playing with them, I thought.

The other thing was that I wasn’t needing to shave quite as much. I had never needed to shave more than twice a week, anyway. The hairs didn’t seem to be getting any thinner (well, maybe a little) but they weren’t growing as fast. One morning I decided to just pluck the ones I could see instead of shaving them.

There were only about twenty or thirty. I had always hated shaving, and not having to made my skin feel a lot better. But I kept shaving my legs. I asked myself why I was doing it, because I thought it was a little bit kinky. But I guess in the context of the way my body was changing it was the least thing I needed to worry about. It did mean that I needed to wear long sweat pants when jogging with Brian, though.

I started to jog a bit less strenuously, and found that if I moved a little differently there was less impact and I could still run comfortably. I was pleased, since I figured a lower impact would help prevent injuries anyway.

I was being more careful about how much of myself I let Brian see. Because I slept in the living room I didn’t have a lot of privacy, but I was always up and dressed before Brian even stirred so there wasn’t that much chance he’d see me naked. Just in case I took to getting dressed in the bathroom so there wasn’t any chance at all of trouble.

My clothes started to be hard to wear. My jeans just didn’t seem to fit right any more, they were way too small around my hips - painfully tight in fact. And way too loose around the waist. I tried belting them in a bit, but that made the size of my waist way too obvious. It made me look too much like a girl, and I was worried Brian was gonna say something if I did that. I still hadn’t saved much money, but I knew I was gonna have to do something about buying some jeans that fit.

I went shopping during the next week, and bought two new pairs of jeans from the Gap. The saleswoman and I spent a lot of time trying to find the right size. The first thing I told her, without thinking, was my old size, and she looked at me kind of weird. Eventually we found some that fit. I wasn’t sure what to think when I noticed they were ‘classic women’s fit’.

Brian complimented me on the new jeans when he saw them on me, and strangely I blushed. I was pleased he liked them. I realised when I tried them on with some of my other stuff, though, that my old clothes were getting too faded and ratty for me to keep wearing them for much longer. And my shirts kind of hung on me, since I’d lost so much weight up around my shoulders.

Since my hips and butt had gotten so much bigger I was having trouble with my old underwear, too. I stole a couple of pairs of panties from Ashleigh’s stuff, and they fit very well. I also found that I was a lot more comfortable in the jeans if I tucked my penis behind me inside the panties. What the heck, I figured, panties and such like were the least of my worries. I wasn’t queer, I was just turning into a girl!

Work was pretty boring, but I was grateful for the money, however small it was. I’d been for three more jobs recently, but now I was having to explain to the interviewers what I’d been doing for the past year or so. ‘Home duties’ didn’t seem to really cut it with them. I couldn’t mention the job with John because that was off the books, and the only other job I’d ever had was those three short months back home.

My future seemed bleak, so I was glad when John offered me an extra day at work, and then an extra half day as well. I did notice he’d started acting a bit different around me, though, which I took as a sign that he actually knew I existed. He was even pretty nice a few times.

Of course whenever Barbara came in she and I had a great time talking and laughing, but I tried not to seem like I was slacking off. We had both stopped the yoga classes together, although I still practised at home every morning after jogging, so it was great that I still got to see her from time to time through work. Apart from Brian she was really the only friend I had in LA.

It had been four more months since I’d first noticed the changes that were happening to me, and the weather was starting to get warmer. My hair was now down to just above my waist. In the supermarket I noticed people started to mistake me for a girl from time to time, especially if I had my hair out.

I also noticed it was getting harder to bind my breasts up. So around the house when Brian was out I stopped bandaging them up. Every afternoon when I wasn’t working I had a little nap, and afterward I’d put the bandage on and get up to prepare dinner. In the mornings, though, I would let them hang free, which felt much more comfortable.

A couple of times I tried on some of the things that were left in Ashleigh’s side of the closet. There wasn’t a lot there, just a few dresses and a couple of blouses and skirts. Mostly they fitted me pretty well. Each time I tried them on I marvelled at the way my body had developed, but I also felt guilty rummaging through her things.

I didn’t do it often.

Out of more curiosity I bought myself a better color lipstick and some cheap mascara one afternoon. I didn’t have anywhere to wear it, but I was trying to figure out more about who I was becoming. It looked much better than Ashleigh’s old colours. I started to think I might even be a little bit good looking.

The thing that made me finally go to a doctor a few months later was that my penis seemed to be shrinking slightly. I hadn’t had an erection in over two years now, since just after I’d moved to LA. That didn’t really worry me, especially since I got so much pleasure out of playing with my breasts. But although a lot of the other changes that had happened to me hadn’t bothered me much I thought I should go and get all this checked out. After all, inside I was still a guy even if my body was beginning to resemble a game show hostess.

I had saved a bit of money, enough for a visit to the doctor. I went late one afternoon. At reception I introduced myself as Chris Neilsen, and didn’t have to wait long before I was called by the doctor, a pretty woman in her mid-thirties who was about my height. In her office we talked for a short while and then she started looking at me a bit strangely. She looked at the notes the receptionist had made, which were basically just my name and address and the fact that I didn’t have insurance, and then she said “So, Chris is short for…?”

As soon as I said Christopher I knew from her expression what the problem was. She had thought I was a girl, too. So that made it easier to tell her what the problem was, since clearly she could see! She had me undress and then she examined me. “You obviously have some kind of hormonal imbalance,” she said. “How long has your body been like this?”

I told her the whole story, about losing all the weight and everything else. She asked me how I felt about the changes and I shrugged. I figured I shouldn’t have been worried but really I was kind of used to things, it had all happened so slowly. And there were some things I liked. I know I was more sensitive in a lot of ways, especially to smells and touch and subtle sounds. I didn’t mind that.

She told me I should buy myself a sports bra if I was going to keep running, at least until she could arrange for a mastectomy. When she said that word I flinched involuntarily, which she noticed. I didn’t want anyone to cut into my breasts! She murmured something like “if that’s what you decide you want” and told me to get dressed.

What did I want? Who knows?

I walked out of her office and down to the bus stop feeling kind of odd. So, she’d told me I had a hormonal imbalance. Like, duh! She couldn’t tell me why without a whole lot of tests. She did tell me that I was otherwise incredibly healthy and fit, which I pretty much knew. Apart from that virus back before I lost weight I hadn’t been sick for years, and since I exercised almost every day I knew my body was in great shape. It was just a strange shape!

As I stood at the bus stop I noticed in the corner of my eye that a guy was looking me over. Then I realised I hadn’t put my bandage back on after I’d left the doctor, and he could see my nipples clearly outlined through my t-shirt. I crossed my arms to try to cover them, which had the paradoxical effect of pushing my bust line higher.

Fortunately the bus came at that moment and I got on. He remained at the stop, so I guess it wasn’t his route. As the bus pulled away I caught his eye again, and surprised myself by giving him a wink and a smile. He grinned back at me, and for some reason I felt really good.

By the time I got home it was getting late. I stopped off at the mini-mart down the street and got some ice- cream for dinner. Yi, the Taiwanese woman who ran the place, gave me an enormous smile when she saw me, and told me how well I was looking. I realised I was still smiling, ever since that guy at the bus stop. We chatted briefly as we always did when I went to the mart for anything, then I hurried back home. I did like how that guy had made me feel. That was pretty weird, wasn’t it?

I walked up the stairs singing softly to myself, swinging the plastic bag with the ice cream in it and thinking about what I was going to cook Brian for dinner. I opened the door and was sailing blithely through the living room when he appeared in the doorway to the kitchen and said “Hi, I’m home early”.

“Hi,” I said cheerfully, before I noticed his eyes go straight to my chest, they flicked straight back up again, and he tried to keep the expression on his face fixed, but I had noticed him looking at my breasts and I blushed. I squeezed past him into the kitchen and put the ice cream into the freezer. I didn’t know what to say as I turned around.

He couldn’t stop looking at my chest, though he was trying hard not to. I folded my arms again.

“Uh, Chris…” he gurgled.

I had my back to the fridge, and I sank down to the floor and put my head my knees. Uh oh. What was he gonna say, now that he knew? Brian wasn’t just my best friend, he was practically my only friend. He walked over to me and bent down to take my hand. I looked up at him and he pulled me to my feet. I was terrified. Was he gonna hit me? What? Instead he hugged me. I could feel his hands on my back, and my breasts flattened against his chest. I realised for the first time just how much bigger than me he was. He probably weighed at least twice what I did and then some.

He pulled back from me and looked me up and down, paying particular attention to my breasts again. I tossed my hair behind me and tried to smile, but I guess I was really looking like I was gonna burst into tears.

“Wow”, Brian said. Then I did burst into tears. He hugged me again, and then he poured us both a large tumbler of Scotch each. I slugged mine down, and he poured me another. “Did you know you’re beautiful?” he suddenly said to me.

Well, that caused some strange reactions in me! I blushed again, and looked away. I was secretly pleased. And then I realised, for the very first time, that I loved Brian. Not the way guys like each other. I actually loved him in a really deep way, and in a physical way, too. I realised that he’d known that things were changing between us for a while, but he had been too kind to say anything to me - until today, when he couldn’t pretend he didn’t know because he couldn’t take his eyes off my tits.

I raised my eyes to meet his again and he tilted my face up to him and bent to kiss me. I just melted into him. He kissed me and touched me and then I felt his hand moving up to my breast and it felt so good! After a little while I kind of lost track of what was happening, because everything he was doing felt wonderful. Then he actually picked me up and carried me into his room.

He stood me beside the bed and undid the button on my jeans and began to pull them down. He looked a little surprised when he saw the panties, but he didn’t say anything. He pulled my t-shirt over my head. He began to undo his own clothing as he bent to kiss my neck, and then my chest. After he had his shirt off he lifted me onto the bed, standing, so that my nipples were at the height of his mouth, and he flicked his tongue over them as he took his own jeans off. I moaned and closed my eyes. Then he lifted me again and lay me down on the bed.

He explored my body with his mouth for a long time, kissing me on my belly and my thighs and my breasts and even on the arches of my feet. I was on fire. I was running my hands over his body and loving the way he felt - his body was so different to my own!

Eventually I came to his cock, and when I felt it I opened my eyes in surprise. It was enormous, at least it was now that it was fully erect. I stroked it a few times and he smiled gently at me and then went back to kissing me again. Then, as though he could bear it no longer, he rolled me over on the bed and tore down my panties, and then I could feel him applying something slick and wet to my anus. I tensed a little, but I didn’t say anything. If this was what he wanted…

He told me again how beautiful he thought I was, and then came into me gently - at least I think he was trying to be gentle. But it felt like agony, he felt way too big for me. I whimpered, and he withdrew. Then he brushed my hair off to one side and kissed my neck until I relaxed, then came in me again, this time forcefully.

He held my shoulders and pumped into me, and the pain gradually gave way to a different feeling, a good feeling. I did love Brian, and I loved it that he liked the things that had happened to me, and it was good to have him inside me like this. After a while, as I was starting to enjoy the sensations, he tensed and shuddered and came into me in an enormous series of spasms. A few moments later he withdrew. I could feel his seed inside me. He lay behind me with my back to him, and cupped my breasts and stroked them some more.

I smiled. I felt great, better than I ever had when I’d had sex with a girl, even though I didn’t come. I snuggled into him as he held me and told me he loved me. I warm glow went through me and we lay there together for a very long time.

It was getting dark by the time we got up from the bed. Brian kissed my neck and told me it was time to go have a shower, so I stood up and turned away from him, worried that my body would look odd from the front, and scurried into the bathroom. I felt his seed running down my leg as I walked. I took a very long time in the shower as I washed my hair. When I came out I wrapped a towel around my body, including my breasts, and smiled shyly at him. He stood up and came over to kiss me.

“Let’s go out,” he said. “Somewhere nice. Why don’t you get dressed up?”

I was about to respond that I had no clothes that would be ‘dressed up’ when it hit me that Brian was thinking of me as a woman, and suggesting that we go out together as a couple. I blushed again. He released me from the embrace and patted me on my butt. Then he went off to have a shower, and I dried my hair. I hardly ever used a dryer on it, which meant it was in good condition for long hair.

After I finished it had a lot more body to it, and it shone. By that time Brian was out of the shower again and had dressed and was in the living room watching television and waiting for me. All my stuff was in the living room, but I realised I didn’t need my stuff, I needed some of the things that Ashleigh had left behind.

I rifled through her drawers and found a very sexy pair of panties I hadn’t seen before. I looked through the few bras that were there, too, but all of them were a little small for me. Ashleigh had been an A-cup, and I was easily approaching a C. It was probably better to do without one.

I took a long black sleeveless linen dress from the closet and put it on. It had a low back with straps that crossed below my shoulder blades, and it gathered my breasts together a little and accentuated my cleavage. I had tried it on before, of course, though I think my breasts had become a little larger since then.

I was glad I’d practiced with makeup before. Even so I was a little nervous, and I had to reapply my eyeliner because I was shaking. I kept thinking of the way Brian had made me feel when we were in bed. Eventually I got the makeup right. I looked at myself in the mirror, and then reached for one of the barrettes in the box of Ashleigh’s stuff and pinned my hair up on my left side. It showed off my neck and breasts better.

The only shoes I could find were a pair of strappy black sandals with a chunky 2” heel. I didn’t have any trouble walking in them but they were a little tight on my feet and I hoped I wouldn’t have too stand up too much in them.

Finally I was ready. I took a deep breath and went into the living room to see Brian. He smiled broadly when he saw me, and then he stood and took both my hands in his. “Chris, you look absolutely beautiful”, he said, looking me deep in the eyes. I knew he meant it, and I relaxed and smiled back.

We went downstairs to the car. I discovered I had to be careful on the stairs in heels. In deference to my hair Brian left the top up although it was a balmy night.

Brian took me to a wonderful little restaurant that was dark and intimate, and we were given a very private table over in a corner, with just a candle lighting it. At first I was very nervous that people in the restaurant would realise I wasn’t exactly a woman, and I was shaking a little as we were led to our table. I couldn’t remember when the last time was that I’d eaten out. The waiter pulled my chair out for me so I could sit down, and I remembered to smooth my dress under me so it didn’t crease too badly.

At first I was afraid to talk over dinner. I thought my voice would give me away. I didn’t have a very deep voice at all, but I knew I would sound like a guy when I spoke. So I let Brian do the ordering, and mostly that night I just listened to Brian talk, and asked him the occasional question to keep him going.

He never had any trouble talking, and that evening he was especially witty and entertaining. I found myself laughing and smiling and overcoming my nervousness easily. As we left the restaurant I took his arm. He seemed to like it, and that made me feel good.

When we got back to the apartment he undressed me slowly, murmuring his approval of my body before he once again laid me on the bed and made love to me. This time I wasn’t as scared when he came into me, and he lasted for longer. Afterward we lay together facing one another, both very happy.

He asked me how I felt about the events of the day, and about looking the way I did. I told him I felt better then than I ever had before in my life. I also said that I was surprised by my reaction to all the changes in my body. I should have been afraid of everything that had happened to me, but instead I seemed to accept the changes quite happily. Maybe I had been meant to be a girl all along.

“I’ve thought that about you for years,” said Brian. “You’ve always fascinated me that way.” Then he told me he’d like it if I kept on being a girl, his girl. I realised there wasn’t anything else I wanted as much. I ran my hands through the thick mat of blond hair on his chest and he told me he loved me, that he’d always loved me. We made love again and then finally went to sleep.

**

Next morning he woke me with a kiss. I saw that it was much later than I usually woke, and that we had both slept through our jogging time. So I hugged him and then jumped up from the bed and pulled on my panties. I borrowed one of his giant t-shirts, and trudged off to the bathroom and then to the kitchen to make breakfast for him. We each took our vitamins with orange juice, and this morning I decided to squeeze it, fresh, from the bag of oranges I had bought a couple of days earlier.

As I finished squeezing the juice Brian came into the kitchen, showered and dressed for college. He patted me on the butt again as I poured his juice, and stroked his fingers up my thigh as he was sitting down. I purred. Then he handed me a credit card, and gave me instructions to use it sparingly but to buy myself some new clothes that day. I was gonna protest but he would have none of it.

As he said, I needed some new clothes anyway. He pulled me into his lap and told me that if I was going to be Christina instead of Christopher I was going to have to pay more attention to the things he said. I pulled a face at that and told him that he’d have to look up feminism in the college library, and we both laughed.

After I kissed him goodbye at the front door I did the breakfast dishes and decided to take him at his word. I called Barbara up and asked her if she was busy, and if she’d mind coming shopping with me for some stuff I needed. I didn’t tell her what had happened between Brian and I, or the kinds of things I needed help shopping for, but she seemed very pleased to get out of the house and said she’d be over to pick me up in an hour or so.

I dressed in jeans and a t-shirt (only this time one of Ashleigh’s), then brushed my hair carefully and pinned it back from my face but without tying it up. I put on just a trace of mascara and some lipstick. Then I spent the rest of the hour watching bad morning television and talking into Brian’s tape recorder, trying to imitate the way the women on TV talked. I found if I talked softly and pronounced words more carefully I sounded much better. I knew I’d need a lot of practice, but I felt more confident.

The buzzer for the door downstairs sounded and I pushed the button to let Barbara come up. As I opened the door to let her in her face registered only mild surprise at the way I looked, though she did a double take when she saw my breasts pushing though the t-shirt. “Well, hello,” she said, smiling. “Haven’t you come out of your shell today.”

I blushed and said hello, trying my best to keep my voice sounding acceptable. I asked her whether she wanted coffee, and she sat at the kitchen table while I made it.

“I wondered when you’d get around to telling everyone,” she said. I looked at her questioningly. She told me that she’d known for ages that something was going on. She’d noticed in yoga classes that my body had been changing dramatically. I protested that I had been careful to bind my breasts when I was doing yoga, but she told me it was my hips and butt more than anything else that had given the game away.

I shrugged. Whatever. At least she was still my friend. She asked me if I wanted to be called anything different, and I said Brian had called me Christina so I guessed Chris was still okay. She raised her eyebrows at that. “How does Brian feel about all this?”

I blushed all the way down to my toes. Barbara had never met Brian, but I’d told her all about him and our friendship over the years. I think she guessed from the way I skittered nervously around the kitchen that he and I had been more than friends since he found out. I told Barbara that he had discovered my secret by accident when he came home early the previous day.

We finished our coffee and drove down to the mall. The first thing we did was head to the lingerie department. I had to try on a few bras before I worked out which ones fit best. I was right, I was a C-cup. I bought a few cheap pairs of panties, too. Then we went to the cosmetics section of one of the anchor stores and got a makeover from a woman at one of the counters.

I only bought some blusher and a powder compact, but she taught me some tricks I didn’t know. The three of us actually had a pretty good time as the consultant showed me how to apply stuff. I tried to keep my voice soft and a little higher, and she seemed not to think there was anything unusual about me. Barbara distracted her from time to time when she thought I was taking too much.

Then I bought a new pair of women’s sneakers to replace the rather awful pair I had on. Barbara told the salesman to throw the old ones in the bin, and demanded that I also buy a pair of high-heeled pumps. I told her I was trying not to spend too much because it was Brian’s credit card, and she raised her eyebrows at that, too. But I gave in and bought them.

Walking back through the mall Barbara diverted me to a small boutique and ruffled through the racks before pulling out a short red silk dress. She told me to go try it on. I hesitated, since I certainly wasn’t going to spend that much of Brian’s money, but she bundled me into the fitting room. When I came out she and the saleswoman exchanged glances and Barbara said immediately “We’ll take it.”

I protested, and she told me she was buying it for me as a gift and that I should shut-up and be thankful. I dutifully thanked her and insisted we leave the mall before I could do more damage to anyone’s bank balance.

But instead of leaving we went and had lunch at a cafe downstairs in the mall. Feeling guilty, I paid for lunch for both of us out of my own money. Then Barbara led me over to a hair salon, and asked if they could squeeze in an appointment that afternoon. I took her aside and said that I liked my hair long and didn’t need it cut, but she insisted that it would look better if the ends were trimmed and that Brian would appreciate it. So in I went. Barbara said she had some shopping she wanted to do by herself, and scurried off.

At the urging of the stylist I agreed to have a couple of inches taken off my hair, so that it would be healthier and more manageable. I was reluctant, but she pointed out that it was almost down to my butt and that it would probably be better to cut it even if only for the sake of my spine. So I agreed. A few hours later I emerged with my hair trimmed and styled and softly curled and subtly lightened from its usual mousy blonde to a lighter more feminine shade. Barbara, laden down with shopping, smiled and told me I looked beautiful and that I was going to make an enormous impression on Brian that night.

We drove home late in the afternoon. I invited Barbara up again to chat while I began to prepare dinner. Then she gave me two small shopping bags, and told me I couldn’t look inside until after she’d gone but that they contained other presents I would need. I tried to be angry at her for spending so much on me, but she told me it was her way of making up for John underpaying me so badly.

That was when I remembered I had to work the next day, and that John would need to know. Barbara said not to worry, he had already figured most of it out and he’d decided he liked me much better as a girl than as a boy. She said it had been a good thing for him to have to deal with how strange and androgynous I had been some days at work, because he had been very narrow minded until he discovered he had a soft-spot for me.

So that was one hurdle out of the way.

We were nattered on about nothing in particular for a while, and then Barbara said to me “How did you bring about this amazing change? Is it a local doctor?” I looked at her blankly, and explained that the changes in my body had just kind of happened, and that when I’d been to a doctor she’d said it was probably just a hormonal imbalance. “Some imbalance,” said Barbara cynically. “You haven’t been taking pills?”

I told Barbara I had an aversion to drugs of almost any kind except wine, and that the only things like that to pass my lips were the vitamins that Brian and I took every morning. Since we both took them - and Brian hadn’t changed - that couldn’t be the cause. Curious, Barbara asked to see them. I took down the bottles from the top of the refrigerator, and she studied them carefully.

She paid particular attention to the ones for calcium and vitamin E, then finally she said softly to me “Honey, I don’t know what they are, but these sure ain’t vitamins.” She showed me the little drug company logos on the tablets, and then held up the vitamin C, which had no markings. “This is a vitamin tablet.”

I had to sit down. How? And why wasn’t Brian changed by them? Finally I realised how dumb I was. Brian was taking them, but he clearly wasn’t swallowing them, or he was just pretending to swallow them.

I looked at Barbara, who shrugged. “Why?” I said softly, and she put her hand on mine.

Then everything became clear. Brian had done this to me. I felt strange. Did this mean I couldn’t trust him? Barbara asked me how I felt about the changes, and I told her I felt good, I felt great. She said that in that case I had nothing to worry about, and I should be grateful to Brian for giving me what made me happy. She seemed kind of unconvinced, though. I thought of what Brian had said the previous night, “I’ve thought that way about you for years.”

Barbara told me she had to leave and get dinner started for John, but that she would stop by at work next day to see how I was. She hugged me and wished me luck, and told me she thought I made a beautiful woman and she was jealous of how pretty I was. By the time she left I was feeling a little better. I unwrapped the shopping and put on the beautiful red dress. I felt better. Then I unwrapped the two other presents Barbara had bought for me. The first was a copy of ‘Everywoman’, which made me smile. The second was a very sexy blue nightgown.

Brian came home at his usual time. As he came through the door I wasn’t sure what to do. He smiled one of his gorgeous smiles and told me how wonderful my hair looked, then swept me up in his arms and kissed me. I must have been a little cold, because he pulled back from me after a moment and asked me what was wrong. I looked across at the table, and he followed my gaze and noticed the ‘vitamins’ spread out there. He looked back at me and I caught a flash of guilt. Barbara was right.

He reached out for me and held my hands in his. Looking deep into my eyes he said “Christina, I love you, I’ve always loved you. I love you more now than ever before. And you are truly beautiful. I didn’t know how to tell you before, although I meant to several times. But I knew you would like this. I knew this was right for you.”

We talked. Brian had gotten the pills from a nurse he knew. From what I could understand he had to pay quite a lot for them. But he knew what he was doing medically. At first he had just given me antiandrogens, which were the things that had made me weak and tired and caused me to lose a lot of my muscles. It wasn’t until later that he’d begun substituting estrogens and progesterones for the other vitamins, and my breasts and hips had started growing so much. He told me he just couldn’t bear to watch me trying to be a guy, since inside he could see a beautiful woman.

Brian said a lot of other stuff, mostly about how he wanted nothing more than to make me happy and to be with me. I learned that Ashleigh had written to him ages ago to say that she had fallen in love with a Dutch guy while hiking and that she was moving somewhere in Asia with him and wasn’t coming back. Brian had been very hurt by that, but that it was the thing that cleared his mind and allowed him to see that the reason he hadn’t been happy with her or other girls was because he really wanted to be happy with me.

I have to admit that all his talking began to overwhelm me. I was trying to be stoney faced and angry with him, but he gradually wore me down. Eventually he even got me to smile a bit. He knew then that I had forgiven him, even if it might take a while for me to tell him so.

He knelt on the floor beside my chair and produced something from his pocket. I hesitantly took the small box, knowing what would be inside (I might be dumb, but I’m not completely idiotic!). It was a small ruby and diamond engagement ring. I looked at him and he returned my gaze. I was speechless for a few moments. I wanted to slip the ring onto my finger, but I knew this was all too good to be true.

“Brian, I can’t. I’m not really a woman.”

“Yet,” he said seriously. “But you can think about that, can’t you?

It can be a long engagement if you want.”

And with that he helped guide the ring onto my finger, then scooped me up and took me to the bedroom. END