by Darrell Bain
We talked a while longer about the differences we were both having troubles with, me more so than him. Finally, he held up the half pitcher of Whatnot still left. "Why don't we take the rest of this to bed and watch a movie?"
"Oh chips, all right. Just be nice." My mind was getting fuzzy enough that I thought it was time to be going to the bedroom, and to lay down before I fell.down.
I went into the bathroom first, carrying a nightgown carefully picked for its opaqueness. It wasn't until I undressed and slipped it on that I noticed how well Donna had chosen. The soft velvetin fabric clung to my breasts and thighs in a way that was more provocative than something transparent would have been. Too late. I left it on and came out and gave the bed instructions to make us a back rest while Rez undressed down to his shorts.
We leaned back against the pillowed supports. He already knew some of my favorite programs, so I didn't get asked what I wanted to watch. He turned on The Pet Plague Universe. The old tom that hung around the house and accepted shelter and food on cold nights was almost a duplicate in color of one of the intelligent cats in the story.
"Do you want to interact?" Rez asked.
"Mmm. I think I've had too much to drink to bother. Why not just make it a random program and let's see how it comes out this time?"
"Suits me." He started it going. I still think he cheated. The two chief female protagonists didn't lose any time getting involved with each other, and the male protagonist didn't make an appearance until I had already gotten horny watching the women. I guess the alcohol helped. I hadn't thought to take a Nohang and it was still affecting my judgment.
As the story progressed, it was as interesting and sexually stimulating as ever, if not more so. Once we finished the last of the pitcher and didn't need to reach to the bedside caddies to sip at our drinks, I let Rez pull me over to him. I leaned against his shoulder with my left hand on his bare thigh. His arm was around me again and I didn't try very hard to prevent him from covering my breast with his hand.
I glanced down from the screen and saw an erection had built a tent beneath his shorts. Oh, chips. Now what?
Would he really go jack off? I looked back up at the screen. An action scene new to us was being played out, but I couldn't seem to concentrate on it with Rez's hand molded around my breast, squeezing gently and rhythmically.
"Rez-"
"Hmm? He twisted his upper body toward me. He face held a serious, taunt expression, hovering close to my own. His eyes flickered with warm highlights reflected from the screen. I intended to tell him to stop, but he put his other arm around my waist and lowered his lips to mine before I could say anything. It wasn't the first time we had kissed, but it was the first one that was overtly sexual. I tried to relax into the embrace, thinking I would break it in just a moment, but somehow, I couldn't. I slid my hand around his neck and parted my lips, deciding this would just be a good night kiss and then we could go on to sleep. He deftly parted the fabric of my gown and slid his hand inside. His hand closed over my bare breast and suddenly, I didn't want the kiss to end. It was pleasant and his large male hand roving my breasts didn't seem nearly so threatening anymore; in fact, it wasn't threatening at all.
"Oh, Li, I want you so bad," he whispered against my lips when he finally broke away for a moment. At the same time, the screen shut off with the end of the story. The bedroom lights dimmed.
I didn't know what to say or do. The rum was blurring my thoughts. In a way, I wanted the lovemaking to continue, but in another, I was thinking in a residual homophobic manner, asking myself how I could be doing this with a man. While I was debating with my schizophrenia, he told the bed to make the backrests into pillows again, and as they lowered, his lips descended again. I let it go on. He parted the rest of the gown's touchtabs and ran his hand over the curve of my hip and along my thighs and back to my breasts, bared completely to his touch. I could feel myself beginning to respond, then the sensation would fade as I thought of what was happening.
On the next upswing, while I feeling a surge of desire, I moved my hand down the length of his body without thinking of what we were now, acting as if I were searching a woman's thighs with the intent of parting them. My hand met the bulge beneath his shorts. He reached down and pushed them over his hips, freeing his penis. It sprang up, hard and erect.
Curiosity killed the cat, as the old saying goes. It got the best of me, anyway. I wanted to see if it felt any different than when I handled my own. It did. It was an alien object, the skin stretched to a satiny smoothness almost like the velvetin which had been covering my body. I ran my fingers over it, thinking how odd and different it felt when attached to another person. I curled my fingers around it. The night light was still on and I could see how large it appeared in my hand. I made a sudden decision to go through with the act, even though my desire was ebbing somewhat. I wondered if I was wet enough for him to enter me easily and the thought came immediately that there was a sure cure for that.
I took a deep breath and slid down on the bed, feeling the waves of my hair brushing his belly as it trailed along with me. Chips, it can't be that bad. Billions of people have done it before and all I intended was to lubricate it a little. I raised my head and slid my lips down over his erect penis. I heard him gasp at the initial sensation of it entering my mouth and knew exactly how he felt: like a sudden deliciously damp warmth was enveloping him and exploding into his groin.
I intended to just get him wet but I got carried away with new thoughts and sensations. It seemed amazing at what a perfect fit it was, pressing against both my tongue and the roof of my mouth, as though nature had designed the mouth as well as the vagina for intercourse. It felt both soft and rigidly hard, a double sensation both curious and compelling. I moved my lips back up, then slowly down on him again, feeling the bumpy ridge of the crown part my lips wider for a second as they slid past it, then the fullness of it crowding inside. I became so intrigued with the mechanics of the act, I completely forgot what the end result was bound to be, and I didn't even consider that he might not have learned to hold back yet. I felt it jerk in my mouth and heard him cry out at the same time. A sudden surge of warm semen filled the back of my throat, startling me almost silly. His hands were grasping my neck and shoulders, holding me there. More semen flooded into my mouth and I swallowed involuntarily, tasting the saltiness now and feeling it spreading to the inside of my lips and onto my tongue like a film of warm brandy. I started to withdraw, then remembered how often Rita had done this for me. I knew exactly what the sensation was like and how awful it would feel to have it interrupted. I let him continue to come while I sucked and swallowed and listened to him crying out his pleasure. It seemed to go on and on until I wondered if it would ever end, or if I could possibly keep up with him, but finally, it tapered off and I could catch my breath.
I held him in my mouth a few more moments while I swallowed the last of his semen and his cries died down to long, drawn-out moans of relief. I let him go and crawled up beside him. He hugged me to him so tightly, I could hardly breathe. I think it was the alcohol that made me do it that first time, and I didn't stop to think until a little later that I had gone and given him a blowjob before I ever got laid.
That was remedied before the night was over, of course. Having gone that far, I couldn't see any point in not going the rest of the way.
The first time I was sill apprehensive, even though I had tried to relax and enjoy the foreplay. I guess I was concerned with what it was going to feel like having him inside me, and then I became so analytical after it happened, I failed to reach an orgasm. It wasn't unpleasant, though. Somehow, even the disparity in weight wasn't uncomfortable when he was on top of me, even though the unaccustomed size of the body covering me made me feel somewhat like the bottom man in a football pileup.
The second time was everything Donna had said it would be. I was more relaxed and enjoyed the slow beginning thrusts, meeting each one with an upward surge of my hips, using my legs and a
rms locked around him for leverage. When his rhythm increased though, I could no longer match it and simply held on while he pounded into me faster and faster until my whole body was vibrating in tune to the beat of his body drumming between my legs. I heard a shrill screaming noise and realized it was my own voice calling out as waves of incredible pleasure swept through me and carried me to a height I had never dreamed or imagined was possible. I don't even know when it ended. I was in some other land, some other universe, until I gradually became aware of his weight pressing me into the bed and the slickness of sweat between us. I was still locked around him, breasts flattened against his chest with my nipples still partially erect and tingling with a residue of pleasure. I sighed, wondering why on earth I had waited so long.
Rez raised his head from where it had been buried in my neck. He kissed me and said, "I love you, Li. I'll love you forever."
I murmured the same words to him. They sounded fine to me.
Chapter Twenty
If it seems like all of us were obsessed with sex in those days, the impression would be right. All over the world, sex became even more of an abiding interest than it had always been. It was the sex changes, of course, in others no less than our family, and the fact there were so many more young, healthy bodies with hormones surging through them than there had ever been before, mine among them.
I never lost my former male orientation so far as being attracted to women went, and Donna was always happy to oblige. The funny thing is, I didn't develop an urge to experiment with any men other than Rez and Russell (though on a couple of trips by myself, I did spend a night or two with another woman), and Russell wasn't home often enough for me to get to really know him in bed for a long time. It was over a month after my first congress with Rez before we slept together. It was fine, and I enjoyed him, but it was still Rez who was my first love. We became even closer than we had been before the change and he never minded that I often wanted Donna in bed with me, or us. She was just as sweet and compliant as ever, my best friend and my female lover. The only bone of contention between us was that sometimes we had trouble with us each wanting to assume the dominant role.
I still hated to travel, but some stories Mary contracted for me required it. Rez usually went with me. One piece we did was about the fourth worlder reaction to the new Federal Welfare Program. That one didn't sell so well; once things quieted down, the upper class didn't much want to hear about their problems and the fourth worlders had only limited funds to spend on entertainment, so not many of them watched.
Forbes lost the election and the party which had split off from the old Democrats won a plurality, but not enough electoral votes to win. The election was thrown into the house and it took a number of votes before Denton Jones was finally chosen as our new President.
Jones was strong on the space program and it began to advance by leaps and bounds. An Orion was launched, over many, many protests by environmentalists, but they were ignored. Construction of a second Orion was begun, and combined with the small Space Clippers rolling off the assembly lines, a manned presence in space began to seem like a permanent possibility. The government never really made clear the purpose of all the expenditures on the space program, but there were hardly any complaints. The majority opinion, believing the gates came from an advanced alien technology, was firmly entrenched, what with the decline of the Church of the Gates (though they remained a force in politics), and it was believed the space program would allow us to "catch up". It didn't matter how many times scientists tried to explain how far beyond us the gate technology was; the majority of people just wouldn't understand. They were satisfied that we were doing something to compete. The tabwebs helped; they were always coming out with "scientific" explanations of how we were learning to understand the gates and how we would soon meet their creators out in space. It is always amazing when you learn all over again how ignorant the general public is about science, or even how little they know of what "science" really is.
The first time after I went to bed with Russell, I got up the next morning and called Derek, my brother (or sister now). I apologized for the way I had treated him in the past. She laughed at hearing my throaty soprano voice explaining I understood her better now that I had a woman's body and had been to bed with men myself. She said she would come up for a visit and bring her fiancé soon.
She did, and I found I liked her better as a woman than I ever had as a man. Bert and Edie managed to get leave at the same time, so we had a full house. I didn't mind; all that meant was the four of us who lived there spent the night in the same bed.
***
Three years passed while our family grew ever closer. We were happy, prosperous, and had interesting work to occupy our time. Rez and Donna each got their advanced degrees in psychology and mathematics. I couldn't make heads or tails of Donna's thesis, but Rez's was interesting. It concerned more speculation on the coming steep decline in the birth rate and the psychology behind the male psyche which was causing it. His thesis attempted to prove that the nurturing instinct was grounded much more in the physiology of the body than the mental portion of it, and that males in female bodies simply weren't going to have babies in any great numbers. If he had asked, I would have been honest: as a female, I had no great yearning to get pregnant. The only time the subject came up in a serious discussion between Rez and I, my offer to contribute an egg for a host mother was refused, but he didn't make a fuss about it.
If it sounds like the world was settling down into a peaceful coexistence with the sex gates, it is only because the gates were mentioned less often in the news. They were still as controversial and as unexplainable as ever, and continued to be the proximate cause of wars, rebellions, and social unrest enough to make the last century seem like a child's game of paintball. Nothing new was learned about them. There they sat, in their hundreds of thousands, with no clue as to their purpose or origin. They were certainly changing the world though, if that was what the controlling power intended-if there was a controlling power. Even that couldn't be proved.
The gates did unleash a bonanza of new inventions and innovations, simply by upsetting conventional notions and turning thoughts and speculations into new areas. The new technology generated a slow financial upswing in the markets but left the fourth worlders little better off, or anyone else for that matter. Global warming continued and the ice sheets at both poles were still melting. Much of the added revenue governments gained from increased employment went toward relocating seacoast residents. The North Houston and our local militias began to drill regularly as more and more of Old Houston became uninhabitable and many of the fourth worlders began moving north, but only as far as they had to. I can't say I blamed them much. The Midwest relocation camps were getting a bad reputation. I made sure we had plenty of arms and ammunition on hand and we all got a lot of exercise fireproofing the old house and building and then prettifying revetments around it. I didn't like having so many fourth worlders near Ruston or Russell's lab at the college in North Houston, and I didn't trust the Luddite philosophy of the Gaters among them-and there were plenty of them. The Church Of The Gates appealed more to the uneducated than to the elite.
Occasionally, word would get out about another person becoming a Seconder but they were few and far between, and according to all the data I could gather, they had no more idea of why they could pass repeatedly through a gate than anyone else.
Really, the only thing which marred our happiness those years was the fact that poor Russell was still working on his theory as tenaciously as a bulldog with its teeth locked in the throat of a larger opponent, hanging on but unable to bring him down. The theories his group had come up with had been reviewed again and again and never a flaw found; yet each time an apparatus was constructed to test their ideas, it failed to work. It was driving him to distraction. Almost always, when he came home, he was haggard and took pains not to transfer his irritability onto the rest of us. We took care of him as ably as we could and usually
managed to send him back to the lab refreshed and ready to work even harder.
One afternoon in the spring, almost three and a half years after he had said, "six months, maybe" he returned with a smile on his face and a spring in his step. He greeted us with hugs and kisses, practically oozing confidence.
Rez threw an arm over his shoulder. "If you don't have good news this time, you can't tell it from the way you're acting. Something must have worked right on that last contraption you built."
He grinned. "Nope, it failed again, just like always."
"What's all the joy about, then?" I asked, rubbing my cheek against the three days growth of whiskers he was wearing. He smelled strongly of sweat and burnt coffee.
"Because I know what's been causing the problem now. Next time, it will work, believe me."
"What was it?" Rez asked, his face brightening like a Christmas tree being lit up. His enthusiasm for the project had gradually faded after so many failures and he had finally returned to his own research.
Russell looked around as if a squad of 'porters was in the room with us. "I don't want to say anything else about it right now. I'll tell you once we've rewired everything and tested it again. I just wanted to come home and relay the good news and spend a few days relaxing before starting over again. Who's making the Whatnot? I'm ready for a drink. Or maybe two or three."
Donna let go of him and went to the bar and began stirring up the usual concoction. Russell gazed around happily. "Hey, you girls look great!" he exclaimed.
Even after that long a time, I found myself looking around to see what girls he meant, then laughed to myself. I was wearing shorts and a clingtight sleeveless blouse. I looked down and could see my nipples making little tents where the fabric clung to my breasts, outlining their twin forms so perfectly, the blouse might as well have been painted on. I went over and hugged his neck again, feeling the pleasant little sway and jiggle as I moved. I had gotten almost completely used to having a female body and no longer worried about showing it off; in fact, I had begun to enjoy it. I never had gotten to where I had much use for a bra, though. The damn things felt like a straight jacket on me.