The Secret Self

by Christina Shelly

  She walks through the open-plan office that houses Adam’s section, mumbling weak ‘good mornings’ to the virtually all-female staff. She looks at her secretary with a sense of utter despair and asks her if Adam can see the Managing Director before nine a.m. Adam’s secretary, the handsome Angela, looks at Eve as if she is looking at a different person, which – of course – she is.

  The MD agrees to see him for five minutes before the first meeting of the day. But this quickly becomes a twenty minute test of nerve when Eve as Adam announces her/his resignation. Adam tries to lie, to talk of stress and boredom, and then promises a full doctor’s report. The MD is both furious and baffled, totally unconvinced by Adam’s excuse of a nervous breakdown. And then, at the height of the heated discussion, Adam finally finds the courage to tell him the truth.

  ‘It’s not the work that’s causing the stress. It’s me. I don’t want to be me any more. Me is a lie. It’s been a lie since I was sixteen. I want to be the person I’ve always wanted to be. I want to be a woman, the woman I’ve been secretly for many years now.’

  The MD’s face freezes with a mixture of horror, disgust and utter disbelief. He then tells Adam to go back to his office, that they will meet later. That he is clearly unwell. That they can discuss special leave. To give him time to get over whatever it is that is upsetting him so much.

  Adam nods and leaves without another word. He goes back down to his office and is quickly Eve again. She sits behind his desk. She stares into space for nearly an hour. Then she calls his secretary into the office and tells her everything. And, amazingly, she appears totally unsurprised. Indeed, her soft smile never falters once.

  ‘I have to say,’ she says eventually, ‘I’m really not that surprised, Adam. You’ve always been a bit . . . different. Most of the girls think you’re gay.’

  Eve smiles at this very typical response. Then she looks at Angela carefully, even coolly. She is in her mid-fifties, but without doubt an attractive woman. Eve has noticed this before, but has quite deliberately sought to detach Adam’s professional life from anything to do with her desires or the truth of Eve. Before, when she had noticed what Angela wore, her rather prim, but always stylish attire, her impressively well-maintained physique, her obvious beauty, Eve had automatically deleted the inevitably sexual thoughts these observations inspired, a discipline she knew was the only way to survive, given her distinctly split consciousness.

  Today Angela is wearing a knee-length tweed skirt and a matching jacket, beneath which is a high-neck silk blouse with a ruby centrepiece. Her tights are pearl grey and her shoes are three- or four-inch-heeled mules of gleaming black patent leather. Her hair, a slowly greying blonde, is bound in a tight bun by a simple wooden clasp. Her eyes are a light, limpid green and her lips are a thick strawberry. Eve feels her cock struggle with an almost surprised excitement in the restrainer and smiles ironically.

  ‘It’s been a real pleasure working with you, Angie.’

  Her smile widens slightly. ‘Thank you, Adam. I think I can say the same with some conviction.’

  Eve laughs. Then the laugh fades and a darkness fills her slightly stunned gaze. ‘Call me Eve. My name is Eve.’

  Angela nods. ‘OK. Eve.’

  Angela then leaves Eve to her haunted speculations. She sits for a long time finally and fully contemplating what is about to happen. Driven by desire and a terrible need to experience the full reality of Eve, she has finally found the courage and conviction to be the person she has always secretly wanted to be. The person discovered by Aunt Debra. The person she had extracted from the torment of a repressed consciousness. A person that had been developed out of Eve’s profound love for her aunt, a love that has survived the terrible fact of their long-term separation. A person she so desperately wished she could now reveal to Debra in person. This thought inspires a moment of genuine elation. Yes: as soon as she – Eve – is fully and properly changed, she will arrange a visit to America and Aunt Debra. But this elation is short-lived. She – Eve – the secret self made known – will require a passport, and thus – surely – a fully recognised social identity. It isn’t just a matter of physically changing: it is a matter of a complete transformation of identity. And then she begins to realise the true cost of surrendering Adam so completely. Adam wasn’t only a convenient social façade behind which to hide: he was a way into the machinery of modern existence. Without him, she will be both totally exposed and profoundly reliant on whatever infrastructure of identity the Crème de la Crème might decide to provide. This is surely the ultimate submission: the true and complete destruction of a personality. And Eve knows this is what they are demanding of her. To become Eve, she must utterly destroy the safety net that is Adam.

  The sound of the phone ringing shakes her out of these rather gloomy considerations. She picks up the handset and is confronted by the soft, mildly ironic voice of Angela.

  ‘Eve, a Ms Bliss is here to see you.’

  Eve mumbles a nervous instruction to send her in.

  A few seconds later, the door to Adam’s office opens and the stunning, imperious and deeply intimidating Helen enters. Eve stares at her with a sense of absolute defeat and an intense and terrible need. As she stands to acknowledge the entrance, she realises Eve can only ever truly exist through the will of a woman, of a mistress, of a powerful female facilitator; a fact that excites her in a profound and absolute manner, a fact that brings a smile of helpless masochistic pleasure to her girlish face.

  ‘I hear you found the courage to do what was necessary.’

  Her words inspire a look of confusion and a slightly cruel smile crosses Helen’s face.

  ‘Angie told me all about it.’

  It is then that Angela walks in behind Helen, her eyes beholding Eve with a calm, slightly detached look that betrays the same confidence and control Eve has seen in all the women associated with the Crème de la Crème.

  ‘You knew . . . you . . .’

  Eve’s eyes dart angrily and nervously between the two women.

  ‘Let’s just say that Angie has been keeping an eye on you for us.’

  Her mind races as she tries to grasp the meaning of Helen’s words.

  ‘We can talk about all this later,’ Helen says. ‘Now it’s time for you to say goodbye to Adam and this little, meaningless office forever. Get that horrible suit off and put these on.’

  Helen throws a sports bag down at Eve’s feet. Eve looks down at it and then up at Helen.

  ‘Hurry up!’

  Her tone, filled with sharp, brutal power, is an electric sex charge that crashes through Eve’s she-male soul. Instinctively she performs a tiny bob curtsey and Angela bursts out laughing. The smile on Helen’s perfect lips is less cruel, but not mocking.

  ‘This will be so easy,’ she whispers and Angela nods, the older woman’s eyes filled with dark amusement and erotic fascination.

  Eve opens the bag. Inside she finds a white nylon sweater, a pair of black leather court shoes, and a black cotton micro-mini. There is also a pink rubber make-up bag.

  With a sense of relief, Eve removes the shirt, tie and suit. As she undresses before Helen and Angela, her heart pounds and she ponders the disturbing truth of Angela’s association with the Crème de la Crème.

  Eve stands before Helen and Angela in the teddy, tights and panties. She is utterly exposed and deeply aroused. To be so intimately revealed before these two very beautiful women inspires a deep, intensely masochistic sexual pleasure.

  She then slips into the sweater and micro-mini with a grace that has become, over the years, natural. Angela watches all of this with increasingly astonished and excited eyes.

  ‘You’re right,’ she whispers to Helen. ‘He . . . she is absolutely gorgeous. The transformation is amazing.’

  Helen smiles. ‘This is nothing. Wait until she’s all properly padded and wigged. She’s by far the most physically convincing. She’ll make us a fortune.’

  Eventually, Eve is dressed in the soft, se
xy feminine clothes and stands with her hands at her side before the women.

  Helen steps forward and tells Eve to pull the chair out into the middle of the office. She is then ordered to sit on it and Helen carefully applies a surprisingly generous amount of make-up to her face, using a thick pale foundation, blusher, pale-blue eye-shadow and a thick, cherry-red lipstick to produce a look of doll-like glamour.

  Helen steps back and admires her handiwork with a cruel, conspiratorial smile. She then takes two white pearl clip-on earrings from the make-up bag and attaches them to Eve’s small, girlish ears.

  ‘Perfect.’

  Eve looks up at Helen with a sudden panic. ‘But the wig,’ she gasps. ‘Where’s the wig, and the padding?’

  Helen snorts a dismissive contempt. ‘It’s important everyone knows the truth about Adam. You’ll leave this office as Adam feminised. As Adam in the process of changing.’

  Eve’s eyes widen in sudden anger. ‘No, please. Everyone will see! I look ridiculous. This is unnecessary!’

  Angela steps forward. ‘You look beautiful, Eve. A perfect representation of the ambiguity at the heart of transvestism. I want the other girls to see you as you really are: gorgeously feminine, yet incomplete.’

  ‘No!’ Eve cries. ‘I won’t do it!’

  Helen laughs and suddenly takes Eve’s face in her hands. ‘Yes you will, Eve. You know you will. You know this is just Adam speaking. His last desperate attempt to protect himself. He knows the moment you step out of that door, Eve will be in complete control. Forever.’

  There is a painful extended silence. Her sex is burning like a molten ember of desire inside the fiendish restrainer. She knows, even as she protests, that the thought of being exposed in this strange half-state excites her in almost exactly the same proportion as it appals and terrifies her. Then, she very slowly nods her agreement as tears of confused defeat and acceptance trickle over her pale-rose cheeks.

  ‘Time to go,’ Helen says.

  She turns to Angela and smiles warmly. ‘We’ll see you at my place later.’

  Angela nods, allows Helen to kiss her on the cheek, then helps Eve to her unsteady feet. ‘Don’t worry, princess. They’ll love you.’

  Angela’s teasing words ring in her ears as she totters to the door in the high-heeled court shoes. Already the ultra-feminine walk of Eve has taken complete control. Yet the collision of the sense of Eve with the deliberate inadequacy of this transformation is jarring and disturbing. As she walks into the open-plan office area, she feels twenty sets of eyes turn on her, all female and all wide with a mixture of shock, malicious amusement and sadistic pleasure. Helen makes a point of addressing her as Adam and asks her to say goodbye to the ‘ladies’ as sweetly as possible. Yet despite this cruelty, and despite the ultra-humiliation she is being subjected to, there is a strange sense of theatre within Eve, a sense of the ultimate occasion. In the heat of her terrible exposure, she finds the same dangerous confidence that informed her first real public display of Eve. She knows she must look odd – a man, even a very pretty man, dressed and made up as a rather sluttish young woman, with no attempt to address issues of hairstyle and figure. But in this deliberate statement of falsification there is a motor for masochistic excitement, and it is this that drives her to perform a deep, dainty curtsey before Adam’s staff, flashing her shapely, black nylon-enveloped thighs and frilled panties with an abandon that is suddenly and deeply arousing. The women’s response is to clap and cheer, and to jeer. They mock Adam: their eyes burn into the spectacle of Adam feminised with a bitterness that is both shocking and – bizarrely – amusing. Eve adjusts her virtually non-existent skirt and follows a wildly amused Helen from the office. As they pass between the tables, she endures more verbal abuse and much slapping of her pretty, hosed and perfectly formed thighs and bottom.

  Then, as if walking from a violent snowstorm into an empty room, they are in the lift, descending through the building, leaving the memory of Adam to fill the exaggerated stories of the disillusioned and embittered for years to come.

  ‘You handled that very well, Eve. I’m very impressed.’

  Eve remains silent.

  ‘You have a particularly appropriate sense of occasion, my pretty sissy petal. That will serve you very well in your new role.’

  They ride the lift to the basement car park. As Eve follows Helen across the large, shadow-infested underground, the sound of their heels crashes across an emptiness which seems to be as much inside Eve as inside the car park.

  Once in the beautiful, expensive Mercedes, Eve cannot resist articulating the feeling coursing through her ambivalent form.

  ‘I thought Eve was created. In the world. That I had finished the work of becoming when I came to you. But I haven’t even started.’

  Helen smiles and nods. ‘You’ve started today.’

  12

  Secret Selves

  They drive back to Eve’s house. She tries to understand what has been happening, but Helen is coolly evasive.

  ‘You know Angie?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes. I’ve known her for quite a while actually.’

  ‘So she was planted. To watch me. Even before Crème de la Crème? But how would you . . . could you know that I would be contacting you?’

  ‘Enough questions for now, Eve. Leave the questions until tonight. Things will become clearer then.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Be quiet or you’ll have to be gagged.’

  She falls silent, aroused by Helen’s domineering tone, but also deeply perplexed and disturbed by the fact that she seems to be the victim of an elaborate plot.

  When they arrive back at the house, Richard and Cherry are waiting. Eve follows Helen into the living room to discover a bizarre and deeply sado-erotic image. Richard, dressed from head to foot in black, is standing over the prone form of Cherry. Poor, lovely Cherry is lying face down on the carpet. She is dressed in semi-opaque white nylon tights, bra and panties – and nothing else. Her arms have been lashed tightly behind her back at wrists and elbows with layers of white nylon cord. Her ankles and knees have been secured in exactly the same manner, and her ankles have in turn been tied tightly by means of another length of cording to her tethered wrists, thus leaving the beautiful she-male in a painful, rigid hog-tie. A thick strip of white duct tape has been stretched over her lips and, judging from her desperately bulging cheeks, is holding in place a particularly fat and testing gag.

  Eve looks down at Cherry’s gorgeous, bound form. The black beauty looks up at her with wide, sex-starved eyes, and Eve realises she is enjoying every second of her intricate, deeply kinky bondage.

  ‘Get Eve ready. We need to be at the club by two p.m.’

  Richard nods, acknowledging Helen’s terse order.

  He turns dark, hard eyes on Eve and she feels a quiver of masochistic pleasure.

  ‘Strip down to your undies,’ he orders, his voice filled with a terrible masculine power that makes her feel deliciously helpless and possessed.

  Helen leaves the room and Eve hears her march upstairs. She begins to undress once more, pondering what this beautiful, powerful woman is planning.

  Eve removes the sweater, skirt and high heels and stands before him, hands at her side, her tightly restrained cock bulging desperately through the teddy and the panties.

  ‘It’s not only your cock that needs to understand the meaning of restraint, my pretty little sissy pet,’ he says, his voice filled with a new authority. ‘Bondage will be a key part of your training as a member of the Crème de la Crème Elect. Put your arms behind your back and cross your wrists.’

  Eve looks at him with a mixture of genuine fear and helpless sexual excitement. Again she looks down at Cherry and the thought she is about to share her fate inspires a dreadful sense of masochistic elation.

  At the foot of the sofa is another black sports bag. From inside, Richard extracts the lengths of cord that are to secure her delicate she-male form. She squirms with a terrible pleasure as h
e winds the first length tightly around her crossed wrists, forcing her shoulders back and pushing her perfectly flat chest forward. He secures the cord with a tight, unyielding knot and then, using a second length of the cording, binds her elbows together in a tight, painful cinch that inspires a gasp of shock.

  ‘Please,’ she pleads, her voice weak, feminine, ‘it’s hurting.’

  Richard laughs and pulls the cinch tighter, then secures it with another fat, inescapable knot.

  Cherry watches Eve’s developing bondage with heavily aroused eyes. Eve hears Cherry’s muffled moans of delight as her bondage progresses and knows she will very soon be joining Cherry on the floor, a thought that fills her with a powerful joy.

  Once her elbows are secured, Richard spends some time enjoying her ambiguous she-male form. She squeals with pleasure as he begins very gently to caress her bottom through the silk panties, teddy and tights. His hand slips between her buttocks and fingers press against her anus. Her squeals become deep moans of fierce pleasure and her wrists strain uselessly against the cording that secures them so very tightly together.

  ‘I’ll be out for about three or four hours. Then I’ll be back to enjoy you, my pretty trannie slut,’ he whispers.

  Eve moans with desperation, begging him to begin his no doubt deeply perverse ravishment much sooner.

  But no: she is to be tightly tied, gagged and left for the rest of the afternoon with the gorgeous Cherry.

  He binds her ankles and legs just below and above her knees. Then he orders her to kneel down. From the sports bag he extracts a pair of black silk panties.

  ‘A little present from Ms March, to remind you of the challenges to come.’

  He carefully rolls up the panties into a ball, so that the gusset area is fully exposed. He orders her to ‘open wide’ and then stuffs the panties deep into her mouth. Eve gasps and gags and immediately tastes the sweet flavour of Ms March’s sex: she is being gagged with her still warm, freshly soiled panties.

  More white duct tape is used to hold the panties firmly in place. Eve’s eyes widen with a fierce masochistic joy as he stretches the thick strip of tape across her dark strawberry lips and then uses the flat of his hand to press the tape tightly in place. She squeals and moans and he laughs. Her eyes plead in bad faith for an impossible release. His response is to lower her on to my stomach and set to work on the hog-tie.