The apron was not one of those “man-in-the-kitchen” jobs either, but definitely a woman’s apron, pink and white and ruffled all over—as close, she supposed, as he had yet gotten to dressing as a woman, and he did indeed look cute to her in it. She chewed her toast and when he turned back to the stove, she looked at his naked derriere and thought seriously about biting into one of his shapely little buns.
“Well, gee, if you say so.” He blushed all over, even his buns turning pink, but she could see that the remark had pleased him. He looked over his shoulder and flashed his especially adorable shy grin—the one that started slowly at his mouth and took a moment to reach his eyes—before he turned back to the skillet and his own eggs.
It was a start, she thought. Today, aprons, tomorrow, fish net stockings. She began to eat her breakfast with the hearty appetite she always displayed after their sexual episodes.
“You know, Bunny,” she said—a nickname generally saved for their most intimate moments—“You are the best little hubby any policewoman could wish for.”
Grimalkin had followed her into the kitchen. He rubbed impatiently against her bare leg, as if he had something on his mind.
* * * *
It was Grimalkin who later led Peter to the outlandish collection crammed into the laundry hamper. The Siamese sat on the floor and meowed repeatedly at the hamper as if trying to tell him something.
“What’s up, buddy?” Peter asked and lifted the lid on the hamper. He gasped at what he discovered there: an enormous length of garish floral patterned drapery, a silver blonde wig, high-heeled shoes covered with sequins, a red purse which, when he hastily opened it, turned out to be stuffed full with make-up—lipsticks, perfumes, rouge, mascara, liner. His head swam as he stared at purse’s contents.
That dream he’d had...he flashed back on that. It had been a dream, hadn’t it? Surely that could not have been real. But if it was not real, if it was only a dream, then how had these things come to be here, in the hamper? And hadn’t he dreamed, too, about filling a purse with make-up? It was all kind of vague, like one of those conversations you only half heard on a bus or in a bar.
“Honey, I’m going to do some laundry before I go,” Teri said from the bedroom. Peter snatched the clothes and the purse from the hamper and threw them behind the shower curtain and pulled the curtain closed. The lid of the hamper dropped with a bang, making Grimalkin jump. He swished his tail angrily and stomped out of the bathroom. Things were going very strangely around here, it seemed like to him.
Teri stepped over the disgruntled cat as she came into the bathroom and picked up the hamper. “Funny,” she said, giving it a shake, “I would have sworn this was heavier when I picked it up earlier. Oh, well. Might as well get it done anyway.”
“Leave it, why don’t you. I can do laundry later,” he said.
“Oh, I’ve got plenty of time. You work on your designs.”
She took the hamper with her, paused in the kitchen for the detergent and bleach, and blew him a kiss as she let herself out the door.
When she was gone, Peter frantically snatched the things from behind the shower curtain and looked at them with a mounting sense of panic. What was he going to do with all this? He couldn’t leave it here, that much was certain. Teri would be sure to find it sooner or later.
He went into the bedroom, dragged a big battered backpack off the closet shelf, and carried it hurriedly back to the bathroom, where he stuffed the wig, the fabric, the shoes, and purse into it. As an after thought, he went back to the living room to fetch the dress that Teri had found earlier on the sewing machine.
He had only given it a glance before. Now he held it up to look carefully at it. It was a beautiful fabric, a sea blue silk with a delicate white floral pattern running through it. He remembered the fabric all right. He had gotten it just a week or so ago, but the last he remembered, it had been neatly folded on his fabric shelf in the closet.
How on earth had it found its way to his sewing machine, and practically finished as a dress? Teri was right, too: it was huge, too big even for the women who constituted the “full figure” market, despite what he had told her. It might have been made with a drag sumo wrestler in mind. A particularly large sumo wrestler at that, he amended.
It was all too much for him to comprehend. He went back to the bathroom with the dress and stuffed it into the backpack with the other things and hid the backpack well behind his clothes in the closet. He would have to take it with him to work and try to find someplace there to hide it. Or, maybe he could just toss it all somewhere—say, in a dumpster between here and there. He was pretty sure there was one behind the Safeway store.
What had happened to him? He thought back over the previous night, but his memories were only a blur. He’d had those bizarre dreams, and had awakened with a splitting headache just before Teri got home.
But wait, now that he went back over them, not all of his memories were so fuzzy. He could remember the early part of the night clearly enough. He remembered arriving at work and feeling sleepy, and bored; nothing unusual about that. And he remembered, too, the laboratory, and—it came back to him in a flash, like a picture on a screen—the vial and the syringe he had found on the counter.
The syringe with the vitamins. Yes, that was it. It was after he had accidentally injected himself with that Alley Thing vitamin B12 that everything had gone blank.
He looked at his hands. The puncture wound from the syringe had vanished altogether. Even the marks where the cat had bitten him had healed up completely. There was no trace left of either of them. Whatever was happening to him, it was not the result of an infection, then, at least not from either of those. Actually, he had never known wounds to heal so completely so quickly. Still, he had to assume that the gap in his memory somehow connected to the syringe with the vitamins.
What if...? The thought sent a shiver up and down his spine.... What if that hadn’t been vitamins in the syringe? What if it was...? But here his mind balked. What on earth could it have been if not vitamins?
Alley Thing. He puzzled over the name. What could that mean? As far as that went, what were “alley things?” Rats, of course. And Cats. Homeless people and muggers. How did you put things like that into a syringe? And why?
Muggers. His mind circled back to that thought. Street toughs. Like the ones in his dream. Like the ones Teri had mentioned. The Moes, she called them. Could there be a connection? But what, and how?
One thing he knew for sure: he needed to talk to those women scientists at Wald Med. They were the ones with the answers.
Holy Moley, he thought with mounting dismay. What have I done to myself? Something really weird was happening, that much was obvious.
* * * *
He was just too weird, in her opinion. Gladys Kravitz sniffed and averted her eyes when Lee Appel came into the laundry room. It was not that she exactly disapproved of homosexuals, not really. Live and let live, was her motto. After all, she was a medical professional. She had seen it all in her forty-plus years as a registered nurse. People were just people, she liked to say to the other nurses.
On the other hand, male people of that persuasion did not have to flaunt themselves, did they? And a man dressing as a woman—which Lee tended to do a lot when he was not working—was definitely flaunting himself, in her opinion.
It especially galled her because he was a nurse too. It might have been different if he were, well, a civilian, so to speak. But, a nurse.... She regarded his habit of cross-dressing as a slap at the whole profession and maybe even at all of womanhood as well. If nothing else, it was undignified for a trained medical person.
Worse yet, he didn’t even go to the trouble to try to make himself look like a real woman—not that he would have fooled anybody, but still the attempt might have evidenced