Chapter 5

It was a relatively quiet evening. After dinner, they washed the dishes, and Shae ran a Disney video she'd rented; it happened to be one Dave hadn't seen, so he and the boys watched it while Shae did a little housework and then came to join them. By the time the movie came to an end the boys were starting to wind down, so Dave had them get ready for bed; Shae told them a story and sang a little lullaby to them, then turned off the light. When Dave checked a few minutes later, they were sound asleep.

"Dead out," he reported to Shae as he sat down on the couch. "They still usually get naps, but didn't today, so it's not surprising."

"Well, good," she smiled. "Dave, I usually don't drink, but sometimes I like a small glass of wine. Would you like some?"

"I think so, if it's no trouble."

"It's no trouble," she smiled. "You should know that by now."

In a minute, she was back, with a small glass of white wine for each of them, sat down on the far end of the couch and swung toward him. "Thanks, Shae," he said after she'd handed him the wine. "You're too kind to me."

"Like I said, no big deal," she smiled. "Dave, I know Eve has talked with you a lot today, but she's not here now. How are you bearing up? I mean, really?"

"I do all right as long as I don't think about it," he said. "But the slightest thing can get me to thinking about it. Like tonight, when I was making dinner, I was thinking that if this hadn't happened, I'd be doing the same thing, but for Julie, not for you. Things spiraled down from there, and I had to forcibly get my mind off it, mostly thinking about high school. You and Eve have had me wondering a lot about that."

"Well, you're making progress. I take it you'd rather talk about something else."

"I can think of lots of things," he said. "Some of them about Eve, of course, but I remember you saying that you attract guys you'd rather not."

"Yeah, I do," she nodded, sipping at her wine, then setting it on the end table. "Dave, I put a lot of guys off, just from being so damn big, you know that."

"You were intimidating in high school, and I know you didn't date a lot, except for Denis."

"Well, I said I didn't want to," she sighed. "I guess I lied a little. I wouldn't have minded more, but I scared a lot of guys, or they didn't want to be seen with a girl so much bigger than them. While it appeared I was dating Denis, you know now that there was something else going on, so it didn't count. With the exception of one special occasion, you were the only guy I ever really dated in high school. Dave, did you ever hear the song, Pick Me, Please?"

"I think so," he nodded. "It was on the charts, what, three or four years ago."

"It reminds me of when we were freshmen and sophomores. I used to go to school dances solo in hopes I could get someone to just dance with me," she said sadly. "But nobody ever picked me out. Not once, Dave. I finally quit going."

"I'm sorry, Shae. I didn't go to dances much. I think I would have danced with you at least a little, though. People kept pushing us at each other, after all."

"Yeah, you probably would have, you're one of the good guys, Dave. Those two times you kissed me goodnight, well, Dave, they were the only ones in high school, except for that one special occasion I mentioned, which was a special favor to a couple out-of-town guys Eve and I knew a little, and more for Eve than me, at that. It was the only date she had in high school, and we had to be real careful about it."

"There was more than that," he snickered. "I remember you and Denis kissing in the lunchroom, several times."

"Strictly an act, so people would think we had a hot romance going on," she smiled. "We really didn't like to kiss like that; we both thought it made us feel like lesbians. This was while Eve was still technically a guy, so it really seemed strange. But I'm wandering away from the point. I did finally get to do some dating in college, all jocks. Well, I hung out with jocks a bit, there were some I liked enough to go to bed with but none enough to get serious with. How do I say this? Eve had her surgery a year to the day after we graduated, and when we were sophomores at Ball State, well, she slept around a bit, trying out the new equipment and validating herself as a woman, so to speak. I guess I was doing the same thing. We finally realized what we were doing, and that pretty well ended our round-heel phase."

"I don't see where the part about attracting the kind of guys you don't want to attract comes in," he said.

"Mostly because I haven't got there yet," she grinned. "Going back to the time when Denis first told us he thought he was a girl -- she hadn't named herself Eve, yet -- after his folks and I figured out he was serious, we realized we had to find out more about this transsexual thing. We didn't have any idea of where to start. Now, you know I have huge feet for a woman, even one my size. So does my mom. Years before, she'd discovered a place over in Chicago where she could get good-looking women's shoes that fit, and she turned me onto it. It's a place called 'Dress to Desire', and I still get shoes there if I happen to be in Chicago. However, big-footed women aren't their main clientele. Want to guess?"

"Haven't a clue."

"Crossdressing men," she smiled. "You know what I'm talking about, right?"

"Yeah," he grinned. "It does sort of make sense when you stop and think about it."

"I still get shoes from the same sort of places here in the city," she grinned. "Anyway, I got the bright idea that, in a place that did gender bending, somebody might know something about gender reassignment, which we didn't even know enough to call by that term at the time. I was right, and it was there we met our first transsexual, and where we started to get the leads on where to get the information we needed. I say 'we' because I was just as in on the deal as Eve's folks, maybe even a little more in some areas. Well, the guy who runs the place, Carl, he's a tiny little shit, smaller than Eve, even. He's in his sixties now, and doesn't dress much anymore, I'm told, but when he does, she looks gorgeous, and you really can't tell. Anyway, Carl has been studying women all his life; how we move; how we act. I mean, more than a woman does; we just do it; we grow up with it."

"Sounds logical but strange," he smiled. "I noticed that you switch 'he' and 'she' around a lot. I guess a place like that, it wouldn't be surprising."

"Very true, and you get used to it. Well, anyway, Carl is a super-nice guy, very supportive, and was a big help to Eve every step of the way. Now, remember, I just said a woman does things we do just because we grow up with it? Eve had missed out on sixteen years of it and had to play catch-up. I was pretty tomboy at the time, and her mom wasn't much better, so we turned to Carl for help. And, Carl told me I should sit in on these discussions; I was such a tomboy that I didn't act much like a girl. From his viewpoint, he was right. Eve and I wound up going to several seminars, some private sessions, and well, we both picked up some tricks that no teenager should legally be allowed to know. Some of those tricks were just a little bit bent, the kind of thing a man presenting as a woman would do, if you get my drift."

"Not really," he shrugged. "I guess I never thought about it."

"You don't see a crossdresser wandering into a grocery store in jeans and a T-shirt," Shae smiled. "Most shoot for over-the-top glamorous. Mix that in with the kind of exhibitionist I already was, and well, it could get pretty spectacular. Well, anyway, these seminars and the like, there were some weird people there, and I got hit on some, but real strange, even for that place. Carl had put out the word that Eve and I were jailbait, even though I wasn't, but it wasn't that kind of getting hit on. I mean, these people were really strange. Finally, I went to Carl and asked him what the hell was going on. He was kind of disgusted at how naive and clueless I really was, and explained that I was getting hit on by male subs who wanted some female domination."

Dave giggled. "Now that you mention it, I can see how that could happen. You can be, uh, pretty intimidating."

"Don't I know it," she smiled. "Like I said, I had never heard of such a thing, and I thought it was totally weird. Carl had a heart-to-heart with me and basically told me that, as big as I was and the way I looked, I was going to get hit on like that whether I liked it or not, so I'd better get used to it and learn how to handle it." She let out a sigh. "Look, I understand quite a bit about what's going on with gender identity dysphoria, what Denis had; there's no way I could have avoided learning it. But this femdom stuff, I didn't have a clue. And, to be honest, I still don't understand it in my gut."

"Me neither," Dave shook his head. "I mean, I know of people who get off on it, and sometimes it gets pretty damn serious, but understand it? No way!"

"I understand it to the point that it's a kink, or like being gay, like a lot of things," she nodded. "Usually people who have kinks like that can't do much about it, they just have to accommodate it and control it. So Eve tells me, anyway. That's a big chunk of her practice she was deliberately vague about around the boys. A bigger chunk is parents, friends, relatives, wives, of people who have those kinds of kinks, as well as trans people, trying to help them accept it. We usually don't see transsexuals as kinks, there's a different mechanism going on, gender identity dysphoria, but there are some who really are kinks. I mean, even though we hung around some weird people, and Eve still has them for clients, we're both really pretty darn straight. Realistically, the experience I'm telling you about is part of the reason Eve got into that specialty."

"I wondered about that," he smiled. "So this Carl helped you learn about some of this stuff, then?"

"That and a lot more over a period of a few years. Later Carl set us up with a couple very special seminars, brought in a couple dominatrixes, some male subs, and we sat and talked about it, while they did some demonstrations. Then, once we'd talked about it, we did some practical exercises, some on other occasions. Although I don't care for it, I learned how to be a pretty intimidating dominatrix. Mind you, this is while we were still in high school. We didn't even tell Eve's folks about it; they would have absolutely shit, even though there was no sex involved -- these guys never touched me."