Life Of A Crossdresser With Wife - Part 2

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 After a couple of minutes, Kathleen broke away. "I have to get to work," she said, but I noticed she didn’t look at me as she slid out of the kitchen. A few minutes later she came downstairs in her uniform (white blouse, slim navy skirt, matching navy vest, neutral pantyhose, and sensible 1" black pumps – she wore this outfit, sometimes without the vest, sometimes with a navy blazer, every Tuesday through Saturday). She gave me a peck on the cheek and hustled out the door.

That left me figuring out what to do with the rest of the day. What to do with the rest of my life. Everything had changed, but I didn’t know what it had changed too. Yesterday, I would have run right upstairs after Kathleen’s car had left the driveway and rummaged through my closet for something pretty, or maybe I would have gotten in my car and done some shopping. Somehow, though, neither one of those alternatives seemed like the right thing to do. I wound up spending the day puttering around the house in a daze, not doing anything or accomplishing anything and feeling the time wasting away.

When Kathleen came home she called my name before opening the door (which she’d never done before) and when she saw me dressed in boy clothes, I could have sworn I saw disappointment on her face. She gave me a quick kiss and went upstairs to change into jeans and a turtleneck. We made small talk for a bit while I finished preparing dinner and continued talking about things of no consequence all through my Pasta Putanesca.

It wasn’t until she was clearing the table that I felt Kathleen get serious. Her back was turned to me when she said "Honey, there’s just a couple of things I want to get straight."

I felt my stomach drop. "Here it comes," I thought to myself. To her, I just said, "OK."

"I don’t pretend to know what’s going on, but first, I want to know, no I need to know if you still love me. Do you? Do you still love me and want to make love to me and live with me and hold me and grow old with me?" She still wasn’t looking at me.

I didn’t hesitate for a second. "Yes. I do. To all of it." My mind buzzed with other words, but none of them seemed right.

She turned around and looked at me. Her expression was blank but I could tell her mind wasn’t. She looked at for what seemed like hours but was really only about thirty seconds. "I love you too honey. Still. And I think we can still make this work.

"But there’s one other thing. This is just between us, right?"

I just looked at her, confused, not understanding what she was saying.

"You’re not dressing up with anyone else, or parading around the streets, or hanging around in bars, or anything like that, are you?"

"God no," I splurted. I must have looked so shocked she believed me, which was a good thing because I was telling the truth. I mean unless you counted the several women’s clothing stores where I was known as a regular customer, I hadn’t shared this part of me with anybody.

Kathleen looked relieved and almost relaxed. She still seemed a little tentative, but the tension that had stood between us for the last 24 hours seemed to be fading. We watched a little TV (no pun intended), listened to a little music, had a couple glasses of wine. Just before we headed to bed, she turned to me and asked "Do you have a nightie?"

"Umm, yes."

"Why don’t you put it on tonight. I’ll be upstairs in a bit."

I did just that. Then I turned off the lights and pulled the covers up tight to my neck and waited for her. She came upstairs in about ten minutes, changed into a sleepshirt and sleep panties (panties that had lost their stretch but were fine for sleeping), and crawled into bed beside me. She started caressing my body through my nylon and lace and soon we were making love like we had the second time we’d ever made love.

The first time we were too eager, too hot, too passionate. It was an explosion that left us weak and exhausted and empty. The second time was the next evening and was far more intimate. That time, we played with each other, slowly and lovingly. We explored each other’s and our own bodies with a loving touch that neither of us had ever felt before and by the time the sun came up the next morning, we knew that we’d be spending the rest of our lives together.

This night was almost like that. It was as if we were both new people and though we knew we weren’t, the experiences all felt new and wonderful. The only difference was that we fell asleep a couple hours after midnight (we are in our 30s, after all!). That, and when I woke up, Kathleen was cuddled in a ball on the edge of her side of the bed, as far away from me as she could get. I couldn’t quite figure out what to make of it all.

That morning was Thanksgiving, and we went to her folks for Thanksgiving dinner and had a wonderful time. When we went to bed, I wore a different nightgown and we again made wonderful love together. In the morning, Kathleen made a point of getting dressed and going downstairs ahead of me, which made the task of getting dressed that morning almost momentous. I had permission to wear a wardrobe that I’d kept secret for my entire life but had no idea what reaction wearing something from that side of the closet would bring.

I ended up going right down the middle, sort of. A pair of plain, white, cotton panties. A lacy camisole under a big, blousy poet’s shirt. My regular (i.e., boy’s) jeans. No socks or hose. Penny loafers. I almost trembled when I entered the kitchen, but Kathleen didn’t seem to notice. A peck on the cheek, a cup of coffee and it was as if there was nothing unusual in the world.

That’s how this part of our lives got started and it continued in the same way, more or less. Every once in awhile, I’d go a little further but it all seemed so, logical. Soon, I started wearing panties every day and when the novelty of wearing panties wore off it seemed like my wearing panties was the most natural thing in the world. The first time I wore a skirt in front of Kathleen was on a chilly Saturday morning in early December. I came downstairs wearing a long, almost ankle-length denim skirt under an Irish fisherman’s sweater and she didn’t blink an eye.

A couple of weeks after that, I took what I thought was a big gamble when I wore the same sweater with a knee-length wool plaid skirt, black tights, and chunky shoes. It was the first time I’d worn hosiery or women’s shoes in front of Kathleen and the first time I’d worn a skirt that showed off my legs. Again, I entered the kitchen trembling with something between fear and excitement, and again, Kathleen didn’t seem fazed at all. "You look cute this morning, honey," she grinned as she poured my coffee and that was the last notice she paid to what I was wearing.

As the weeks went by, I brought out Martha’s (my alter egos name) wardrobe more and more but the one article I couldn’t bring myself to wear again was a bra. I didn’t need one. Back when my dressing was a secret, I loved wearing bras and I stuffed them with all kinds of things but now that there wasn’t a secret, there was something about putting on a bra that seemed, I don’t know, decadent. I mean, here I was wearing panties and camisoles almost every day, coming home from work and changing from sportcoat and slacks into a blouse and skirt but a bra just didn’t seem right anymore. I had a half-dozen or so in my dresser and my attention was drawn to them every time I got dressed in the morning but I just couldn’t wear one in front of Kathleen.

Then, one morning, about a week before Christmas, I got dressed in a silk poet’s blouse, denim jumper, and tights and headed downstairs. Kathleen already had the paper open and the coffee ready. As she gave me a section of the paper, she said, "That’s a really cute outfit, Mark honey, but you’d look a little cuter with something up top."

I must have looked confused. "Mark, you really need some kind of tits to make an outfit like that work. Don’t you have a bra?"

"Uh, yeah." I must have blushed a million shades of red. "I just felt a little weird…"

"You’re wearing a jumper and tights, and you’re telling me you’d feel weird wearing a bra?" She smiled. "Don’t be ridiculous." She put on a schoolteacher’s voice. "Go upstairs and get dressed properly young lady!"

Well, I did, but I still felt a little funny and I certainly wasn’t going to put anything in it. When I came back downstairs she smiled. "That’s a little better. Didn’t you ever put something in it to fill it out?"

"Yesss, sometimes," I remembered spending hours getting knee-hi’s with birdseed, water balloons, and baggies filled with water just right to give me the look I wanted. "I don’t have anything like that anymore. It’s kinda ridiculous, I guess." I was lying through my teeth.

Those weeks I’d spend some evenings dressed in women’s clothes, and most of the time on weekend mornings I’d dress. If we were going out, I’d change into boy clothes, with panties and sometimes pantyhose or a camisole underneath. Certainly, I’d never wear anything that anyone would notice. We’d do our errands on Sundays and go to various stores but neither of us would go near a clothing store or clothing department. The closest we came to acknowledging this new phase of our life in public was in a grocery store. The store had their house brand of pantyhose on sale and Kathleen picked up a half dozen pair for herself. Then she turned to me.

"Do you need any?"

I didn’t. Partly because I still had worn any pantyhose in front of Kathleen (so far, just tights and long skirts – I didn’t want her to see unshaven legs under pantyhose) and partly because I didn’t like cheap pantyhose. But, even though I didn’t, I didn’t think I could let this opportunity pass so I tossed a half dozen in the basket too. She didn’t say anything else until we neared the checkout when she grinned at me and said "I wonder if the cashier will notice these are two different sizes?"

Our life was proceeding normally (well, as normally as a gradually de-closeting crossdresser’s life could be). There were occasional moments of weirdness. While watching Monty Python one night, the "Lumberjack Sketch" came on. It used to be one of our favorite bits but that particular night we both sat in awkward silence. I used to do the laundry most of the time and one week I mixed in a couple pairs of my panties with hers. She didn’t notice until one morning she put on a pair and they almost slid off her hips. Kathleen also told me this story of looking in the car’s rearview mirror just before she went to work on Saturday and noticed in a panic that there was a lipstick smear on her cheek. From me. But apart from those incidents, we were very, very careful to go too fast or to get ahead of ourselves.

This all ended on Christmas. I’d gotten Kathleen some lovely presents, the kind I’d gotten throughout our marriage. There was a beautiful stained-glass window hanging, a big, luxurious picture book of English gardens, a big, fluffy sweater, and some odds & ends. She got me two gift certificates. The first was from one of the plus-size stores in the local mall. The second was from a foundation/lingerie shop in the same mall and where the amount should have been were the words "one pair of breast forms." I was speechless.

"I really don’t know what you like, honey, so I got your to gift certificates. I hope you don’t mind," she said as she smiled at me.

I leaped across the couch to give her the biggest kiss I could. I couldn’t believe how much courage it took for her to do this. "Kathy, you couldn’t have given me a present that meant more."

"If you think you could handle it, I’d like to go with you, too. Is that OK?"

"Of course it is. I’d dreamed about this for years, Kathy, for years."

Christmas fell on a Sunday that year and I had the week between Christmas and New Year’s off, so on Monday, we planned on getting my breasts. As I was getting dressed (boy clothes today – khakis and a sport shirt), Kathleen suggested I wear a bra. I was planning on it, but her suggestion was a sweet one. I put on my prettiest bra, which was a 42C and it really didn’t show under my shirt and coat.

We got to the shop and one of the salesladies brought us to a relatively empty part of the store. She showed us the different kinds of breast forms (I didn’t know there were different types) and explained the features and prices. She asked if I had a particular size in mind and after determining that I had a bra with me, sent me off to the most isolated dressing room to try them on. Kathleen didn’t accompany me and I was a little disappointed at that. At any rate, I slipped them into my bra and saw how they all looked and I was electrified. Part of it was pure fear – after all, I was a man in a lingerie shop wearing a bra and trying out breast forms. But besides that fear was the feeling I was experiencing by seeing MY breasts under my shirt and knowing that Kathleen was behind it.

Then I wondered if she really was behind it or whether she was just humoring me. Off and on for the past month, I had agonized over what this really meant to Kathleen and I had moved oh so carefully, following her lead. Buying me breasts seemed like such a bigger step than we had ever taken before and I could not stop thinking about where it was taking us. On the other hand, I just couldn’t explain how wonderful I felt with the weight of my breast forms filling out my bra. It took a while, but I eventually stopped thinking, made my choice, repacked everything, and came out of the dressing room. Kathleen and the saleswoman met me and they took my purchase to the register and did everything that had to be done. I offered to carry the bag but Kathleen made sure that she carried the bag with the shop’s logo when we entered back into the mall.

When we got home, she said "you gonna try ‘em on?" as if it were no big deal. I bounded upstairs with the bag, took out the breasts and slipped them into my bra, and then put on the same jumper, blouse & tights outfit she’d teased me about earlier. Kathleen was absolutely right, this outfit did look so much better now. I discreetly tiptoed downstairs and with a soft "Ta-Dah" did a ballet leap into the living room. Kathleen didn’t say anything, but she smiled warmly and gave me a big hug and kiss. When our breasts touched, I went electric and tingled all over. And I know that mine was only silicon, but just the same…

When we went to spend the other gift certificate, it went about the same way. We went to the mall and I was dressed in my boy jeans and a polo shirt (although I was wearing panties, pantyhose, and a camisole underneath). When we entered the store the saleswomen looked at me a bit quizzically – not because I was a man but because this was the first time they had seen me with anybody. It also could have been a bit confusing for them because Kathleen could have been shopping for herself, as she’s a plus-size herself. I smiled in a way that told them everything was OK and started right towards the skirt rack.

While we were in the store, Kathleen just sort of poked around aimlessly. Occasionally, she’d check the price tags of a T-shirt or a pair of jeans and when I showed her something, she’d comment. We were there for a while but in all that time I didn’t see her really look at anything for herself. I mentioned that a couple of times and she’d reply "I’m not in the mood," so I decided not to press it.

Eventually, after going through almost every rack in the store (I really wasn’t interested in outerwear or sweatpants, so I left them alone) I settled on a couple of outfits that I really loved. I had them rung up and chatted with the saleswomen for a bit. As we left, Kathleen took the bag as we hit the mall.

Over the next several weeks, my wardrobe grew dramatically as I actually started to develop a style. With the ability to spend an increasing amount of time dressed at home, I started to see what kinds of clothes looked good on me and what didn’t. Kathleen helped out here, too. At first, she expressed approval with everything I wore but I suspect that this had more to do with psychological approval than it did anything with a fashion perspective. After a while, though, she’d notice something that looked off and say "I think that this might look better if you…" or "We don’t really do it that way. You should probably…"

It was one of those comments that led to her giving me my first makeup lesson. It was late February and the first spring dresses were in and I fell in love with a long, almost ankle-length yellow floral print. Big bright pink and red flowers were sprayed across the sunny yellow background, the sleeves were gathered into puffs and the shoulders and the neckline was almost a collar style. I loved it and ran right home to try it on. I kept it on (under an apron, of course) as I made dinner, and met Kathleen at the door with a big hug in my new yellow spring dress.

She could tell I was excited but when I stepped back to show it off, all she did was look at me appraisingly and said "That’s very nice, dear. Very nice." Then she went upstairs to change. During dinner, we chatted but I’d catch her looking at me with a funny look every once in a while. As I was clearing the table, she cleared her throat. "Honey," she said.

"Uh oh," I thought to myself. She’s having second thoughts. This is all about to come crashing down on me. "Yes," I replied, as neutrally as possible.

"That is a really pretty dress. I think you look very nice in it, but there’s something off. Turn around and look at me."

I did. She looked at me for a couple of minutes and I was getting more and more scared.

"Have you ever worn makeup, honey?" she asked when she finally broke the silence. My jaw must have dropped but nothing came out. "I mean, I look at you and I see a nice body with big boobs under a beautiful dress, but it still doesn’t look right. I think it’s your face. There’s no makeup."

"I tried a couple of times a long time ago," I answered, "but I wasn’t very good at it. It always came out looking either sloppy or slutty."

"We can fix that, hon," she said brightly. "Change your clothes, we’re going shopping."

After I changed (I hated getting out of that dress) we drove to the local strip mall. In the parking lot on the way to the drugstore she whispered to me "we’ll just get some basic, inexpensive stuff this time. After you learn what to do, you can get something nicer."

We went straight to the makeup aisle and she picked up a whole bunch of stuff. I recognized the lipstick, nail polish, and mascara, but I’m not sure I knew what everything else was. As she was going through the racks she kept looking at my face and a couple of times, when she knew nobody was watching, she’d hold something up to me and frown thoughtfully. When she had everything she needed, she told me to wait in the car.

A couple of minutes later she plopped down in the seat next to me and said, "Let’s go home. I have a couple of things to show you."

When we got home, she told me to get dressed (although I’d been dressing in front of her for nearly three months now, she still hadn’t seen me get dressed) so I got into something simple and told her I was ready. She came upstairs and sat me down on the edge of the bed and proceeded to pull everything out of the drugstore bag and explain to me what it was.

Then, piece by piece, she began working on me. She kept up a running commentary on what she was doing as she rubbed, smeared, dusted, and drew on me. I kept up with her for a while, but after a few minutes, I just began to bask in her attentions. A couple of times she pulled away to look at me, but then she’d start in again and do a couple more things. Finally, she put down the lipliner (the last piece of the puzzle, I guess), picked up a hairbrush, did a couple of passes through my hair, and then stepped away from in front of my face so I could see.

I’ve read enough stories to expect that I should have been dazzled by my reflection. I wasn’t dazzled and I wasn’t shocked by how beautiful I was, but I was amazed by how much difference Kathleen had made in my appearance. It was still me, but it was an enhanced me and I really, really liked what I saw. What I saw looking back at me was a woman. A woman with a funny haircut, but a woman. And in this moment, I understood that everything had changed, again.