I have a secret. Sometimes I like to be someone else.
All anyone knows is the mask you wear. In public I am smart and capable, I am a successful college student with a bright future and a good physique. I have women falling all over me, men wanting to be my friend, and no one knows what I really crave.
I like to be her. I like to slip into my second skin and embody my feminine side from head to toe. When I wear the suit that I created no one knows that inside I’m someone else.
When I am her, I finally feel like the real me.
That was the plan for tonight, but what I never anticipated was my roommate coming in when I’m halfway through changing into her. He caught me and saw my truth. My secret is out now and I’ve got no choice but to tell him everything.
My roommate is a good man, he’s supportive and understanding. He’s strong and comforting and when he puts his hand on my skin it’s meant as nothing more than a reassurance. But it is the first spark in a fire that is only too familiar to me.
I want him. I want him to want me. I want him to see me and crave me just like I crave him and I want him to be the first to savor every last inch of my body.
I want him to take me and make me the woman I always knew that I could be.
Excerpt
“Do you want to see it?” I asked him, “Do you want to see what she looks like?”
He nodded and I stood, instructing him, “Turn around.”
Brad turned, facing the wall and facing away from me. I waited a beat with my fingers playing with the belt on my robe before I flicked it open and slid the whole thing off my shoulders.
Working quickly I slid my hands down and shuffled the arms up and over mine. I pulled the fabric tighter, feeling it start to constrict around me and work its special brand of magic. Shifting and shimmying I got it on me, my whole upper body changed and then my neck and my head finally as I pulled the hood tight overtop of me.
For an instant it was constricting, adjusting the last few steps as it hugged me tight and settled in. The sensation was almost oppressive, holding me and wrapping me up in an artificial way that almost choked off my breath until I finally broke through the surface of it and the surface of her was my body and her skin was an extension of my own.
In the moment after it was on me, after I became her in full, I felt it. That little sensation that always lived with me and always remained. The certainty in my heart that I was where I was supposed to be.
Each time I took those first steps in her skin it was like coming home, stepping back into a house that I’d been waiting to live in all my life.
I smiled, for an instant just reveling in the sensation of being in her body and being fully naked at the same time. Brad was so close to me, close enough that I could reach out and touch him if I wanted to. There was literally only a gap of air between us, that and his chivalry that kept him from peeking a look. To have him look at me, to have a man see all of me, that would be a step farther than I’d ever taken Helen before.
For two months I’d explored what it was to be her but I was in no rush to greedily drink down every drop. There was a part of me that held back. I accepted conversation from men at the bars but I bought my own drinks for a while. Then I took their drinks and their smiles and their attentions but I kept it there.
I never went further. I never went home with a man. I never had the touch of a man, of anyone else, on my bare skin but my own. I had never been kissed or caressed, never been witnessed by any eyes but mine.
And in the instant where Brad was so close to me I entertained the possibility, the fantasy building in me until I doubted my own ability to bear any more of it. I wanted him and I wanted him to want me and dammit I could almost have it.
But that wouldn’t be right. It would feel right with him, but he had to ask for it as well.
I reached down and grasped the robe around my feet. I pulled it up and over my shoulders, tugging it tight and secure with the belt and making sure that I was covered before I called out his name and watched as he turned.
“Well?” I asked, eager with anticipation, “What do you think?”