Teri’s dark eyes flashed with eagerness as she undressed. Action on the job never failed to turn her on sexually, and this time was no exception. Her fingers fairly flew over the buttons of her uniform. In a moment her tunic was gone, and her bra after it. She tossed them aside impatiently.
“Street toughs,” Peter said in a puzzled tone, running his fingers through his rumpled hair. “The Moes, did you say they called themselves? You know, it’s funny, but, I had the strangest dream earlier, there were some guys like that in it, too....”
He had awakened only minutes before, sprawled naked across the bed and with the most overwhelming headache he had ever in his life experienced. It felt like all the hangovers of the world rolled into one monstrous one. But, why would he have a hangover? He couldn’t remember drinking anything. In actual fact, he rarely drank more than a single beer or a glass of wine, and never on work nights.
“And here’s the really crazy part, they hadn’t even been in your usual street fight with another gang,” Teri said, shedding holster and gun, “They said it was just one drag queen who had worked them over. Can you imagine, one little drag queen beating the crap out of a gang of tough street punks. Well, not so little, I guess. They said she was enormous. Eight feet tall, if you can believe them, which is probably an exaggeration. I mean, they wouldn’t want to admit they had been worked over by someone normal sized, would they? And she called herself Drag Thing, they said. Isn’t that funny? Usually, you know, they give themselves women’s names, Delora or Angelina, something like that.”
The name seemed to ring a bell in Peter’s mind, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. “Drag Thing? What...what kind of a name is that?” he asked. “It sounds like someone was pulling their legs.”
“Someone pulled one leg, that’s for sure,” she said, “Pulled it right out of a socket. It had to be reset.” She dragged her trousers down and kicked them aside. “It was for real, though, that name I mean, because just a little while later we got a call on a break-in a few blocks away, and someone had cleaned out a shop window, For The Girls, it’s a specialty shop for drag queens—you know, shoes, makeup, the works—and the perp left a sort of I.O.U. written on the glass in lipstick. Signed it Drag Thing.” She rolled down her panties, threw them aside too, and grinned excitedly at him. “Guess what I want to do?”
“Uh, you just got home,” Peter said, his head still pounding from his mysterious hangover. “Aren’t you hungry, honey? Don’t you want to eat something?”
“You bet I do.” She grabbed him by the arm and hurried him toward the bed he’d just gotten up from. For the moment, he forgot his headache. Teri could be very persuasive when she was excited.
* * * *
Later, freshly showered and smelling of Chanel Number Five, Teri sniffed the air and followed the scent of bacon frying. She found Peter in the kitchen at the stove fixing her breakfast. He was still naked except for a frilly little apron he had tied on that left his backside enticingly bare.
“What’s this?” she asked. She held up a large piece of blue-and-white fabric.
Busy flipping slices of bacon, he said, without turning from the stove, “I don’t know; where was it?”
“On your sewing machine.” She came and kissed him on the back of the neck and gave one of his naked buns an affectionate pat. He slipped the spatula under an egg to flip it and glanced at the dress in her hands.
“Oh.” Something totally weird flashed in his mind when he saw it, and was gone too quickly for him to seize hold of it. “It’s...it’s a dress,” he said.
“Okay, I can see it’s a dress, but for whom?” she asked, turning it around in her hands. “Or maybe I should say, for what, an elephant? This thing is huge.”
“I, uh, I was thinking of the big girls,” he stammered. “You know, the oversized ladies. It’s a niche market that isn’t very well served right now, it seems to me. It’s just something I was playing around with, an experiment, sort of.”
“Well, you’re the designer.” She shrugged and took the dress back to where she had found it at the sewing machine. She could not help being just a little curious about it, though. He had never before mentioned doing dresses for the oversized market. She knew that for his designs he really liked the model-type figure, long and slim, skinny, actually. Even she was too full figured to be the kind of pencil thin fashion model for whom dressed designers generally designed their dresses and who wore them on the runways at the fashion shows. She could not imagine Peter even being interested in designing for big women.
Halloween was only a day or so away, however, and she might have supposed that he had made the dress as a costume for himself, if it were not so obviously too large even for him.
Although they had never discussed it, she knew that he was attracted to women’s clothes—designing them, of course, but she suspected there was more to it than merely that. More than once, she had looked in one of her dresser drawers and saw that he had been surreptitiously handling her under things. Once, a pair of her panties in the laundry hamper had what she would have sworn were semen stains. She had never questioned him about them, but she was certain that he secretly longed to “dress up,” and one time she had realized that he was wearing some of her Chanel Number Five perfume.
The funny thing was, she had not yet come up with any tactful way to let him know that the idea appealed to her too. The Chanel on him that one time had acted as an aphrodisiac on her. Drag in and of itself did not, probably because in her mind she generally associated it with gay men, even though she did know, from reading those advice columns in the papers, that there were lots of men who were entirely heterosexual but who nonetheless liked to cross dress.
It was not that she had anything against gay men either. She had any number of gay friends, including their downstairs neighbor, Lee, and she truly treasured her friendships with them, but those men did not, however, turn her on sexually.
Peter did, and she knew without a doubt that he was not gay. For one thing, he was the best partner in bed that she had ever known. He seemed to know merely by instinct what to do to make a woman happy, and no one could be homosexual who was turned on the way he was by a woman’s body, although she suspected that his actual experience with them was not very vast. She had an idea, in fact, that he might even have been a virgin when they met, though she had not been.
His heterosexuality, however, only made the thought of his dressing up like a woman just that much more of a turn on for her. The idea of picking out dresses for him, of helping him with bras and panties and stockings, even putting on his make up, stirred her sexually. Maybe after breakfast....
Unfortunately, though she had made some subtle comments now and again, she had not yet managed to get her message across to him. She could see that it was a sensitive subject for him, one that embarrassed him, even—probably, it was that suggestion of homosexuality attached to it that bothered him—and she wanted to find a way to bring it up that did not make him uncomfortable. A woman could not just say to her husband—especially to a husband that she could see was shy about the subject—“honey, I would love to see you in a dress.”
Grimalkin, who was invariably miffed whenever she and Peter had sex, came to her and rubbed jealously against her leg. She picked him up and gave him a quick hug. “Cats are supposed to be psychic, aren’t they, Grimmy?” she asked. “Couldn’t you hint to him about dressing up for me?”
Grimalkin sniffed and gave her a searching look, as if there were something he thought she ought to know.
“See what you can do, won’t you?” She kissed his nose and put him on the floor. With a muted meow, he turned his back on her and marched disdainfully away, tail aloft. People, he seemed to say with scorn.
Back in the kitchen, Teri poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the Formica topped table. Peter come from the stove to set a plate of bacon and eggs, cooked exactly the way she liked them, in front of