“I’m ho-ome!” May sang out unnecessarily, swinging into the living room her arms hung with bags. I put down my cellphone, abandoning my research; I’d decided to use the time to learn more about the new me. Steph lay on a blanket beside me on the couch, asleep again (she really must have had a fussy night) with my free hand resting lightly on her back. When he taught me the trick, Carl had said she’d started compulsively rolling onto her stomach to sleep at ten months and refused to sleep any other way. For some reason that light touch always seemed to settle her and keep her settled. May’s eyes softened when she saw us.

  “You know, you’d have made a great grandpa.”

  And dammit, just like that I teared right up. What the hell was up with that?

  “Need help?” I ignored my eye-water to stand and stretch. The last of the post-transformation aches were long gone, and with no joint inflammation now (goodbye, moloxicam prescription), physically I felt fantastic, full of energy I had no idea what to do with.

  “I actually do.” May grinned wickedly. “Put her in the crib and come with me.”

  Gathering up the limp lump and her blanket, I laid her down on her back in the crib, and yup she rolled right over. With a last look I followed May.

  “How are you feeling physically?” she asked over her shoulder as we went up the stairs. “One to ten?”

  “Ten, I think. Getting hungry?”

  “No surprise, you’re growing.” She grimaced. “Our schedule today is really all off.”

  “You missed church,” I realized. I knew they went to The Good Shephard Universalist Church. I’d once asked (carefully) what they believed, and she’d summed it up as “We’re all sinners, and we’re all saved eventually, hallelujah. The first bit’s self-evident, the last bit’s a matter of faith. Be kind to each other, that’s just part of loving everyone, and help each other through this life, your hands are all God’s got.”

  Carl had just nodded to that, and it had worked for me too as a non-churchgoing agnostic.

  “Yep,” she said now, “today has been for practicing instead of preaching.” She stopped on the stairs to look me over and sigh. “I’d hug you, hun, but right here it would be a disaster. Spinning about like the announcement of a random hug was no big deal, she continued on up. We trooped up to the third floor where we turned and went up the hall to find Carl back in the front bedroom removing the last couple of boxes from a wardrobe his moving everything had unblocked. She leaned forward, arms still occupied, to lay a kiss on him. “This looks perfect, sweetheart. Steph’s all yours, David and I are about to engage in extreme girl time.”

  Carl gave me a look of deepest sympathy. “I’ll start dinner, then.” He left with the boxes.

  May dumped the bags on the bed. “Now,” she said when I turned to her eyes narrowed, “you need to shower.” Grabbing one of the bags, she pushed me towards the small ensuite bathroom. “Here’s shampoo and conditioner. In separate bottles, not like silly men do it. Also some shower gel.” Getting me where she wanted me, she ruthlessly yanked my t-shirt over my head, still talking as I automatically covered my new breasts and then snatched my hands away. “Use the shower gel everywhere but down there. For that, use the white bottle, it’s an emollient. Use that first, covering your lady bits before getting under the water, then shampoo, conditioner, and gel—the emollient will act as a barrier to everything else. Afterwards rinse everything off. Everything. Understood?”

  “This is more feminine hygiene stuff, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Start good habits early. You’ll thank me—bacterial infections are no fun at all. And pat yourself dry with your towel, don’t scrub dry. It’s bad for your skin. I’ll bring the rest of the bags up while you’re in here.” With that she stepped out and closed the door.

  With a sigh I opened the bag and lined the bottles up on the shower-bath’s ledge. Starting the shower, I pulled my socks and sweats off, ignoring the mirror. I couldn’t ignore what came next. Picking up the white bottle, I read the instructions (without reading glasses!), which basically said what May had said. And apparently I could apply it at night for dryness? I shuddered and popped the top, squeezing out enough to cover my fingertips. The pearlescent liquid was about the consistency of lotion. Right.

  Not looking down, I put one foot on the side of the tub and reaching down and sliding my fingers over my vulva and between the folds of my labia, shuddered, sucking in a breath. I pushed further back this time than I had with the toilette paper, to what I guessed was my perineum (and that I even knew what that was now was mortifying). At least it seemed beyond the little dip that had to be my—new hole. How do I know when I’ve covered everything enough? It felt like I’d touched everything.

  Deciding with another shudder that had been enough of that, I pulled my hand back and capped the bottle before stepping into the shower.

  Shampoo, conditioner, gel, rinse, I went through the stages. And my breasts were unavoidable. Finally, after a few tentative starts, I cleaned them. And slowed to explore. They weren’t freaking me out quite like everything down below was anymore. Maybe it was moving around all day and feeling them under my t-shirt, always there? Now I finally took a good look at them. They really were firm little mounds, standing out from my chest and topped by poky nipples, a lot firmer than the man-boobs I’d sported before losing all the weight I had. And they were small, even on my smaller chest.

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  May had said they were like hers had been, so maybe Bs? I wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, but I remembered something I’d heard somewhere in my distant past, maybe in a locker room. A for Almost Breasts, B for Barely Breasts, C for . . . I lost the rest. I can live with Barely Breasts. I couldn’t imagine having the big breasts of calendar models and Hollywood sex-symbols, but they felt . . . nice. Sensitive to my touch, and soft, but firmer than fat pockets. They had to be, obviously, to stand up against gravity like they were.

  Remembering what I was doing, I finished all the steps and dried off fast (by patting) and wrapped myself in the towel—an awkward act with the pressure it put on my new breasts—still ignoring the mirror. I was handling this, a bit at a time, but I had no confidence I could stand another look at everything altogether.

  Waiting on the bag-covered bed, May looked at my hair and grabbed another towel to dry it some more, then pushed me down to sit on the bed and knelt behind me with a hairbrush.

  “You know,” she said lightly, carefully untangling strands and starting to work with the brush, “When your weight started coming off I teased you about looking like Sam Elliot but I’m glad you don’t have his wild hair. Yours is much straighter, I think it’s finer now, too. Sure he looked just too yummy for words in Roadhouse, but hair like that would not look good on you.” Working from the ends up, she got what I’d left as a wild nest all day into shape. It felt so good and before I knew it I was almost melting.

  “That’s right,” she laughed at me when I made an embarrassing sound. “One of the pleasures of longer hair is having it brushed by someone.” She continued with long, slow strokes as she gathered the ends. “I think it’s an atavistic thing, from the old days when we used to sit around and pick bugs and stuff out of each other’s hair for hygiene. Social grooming, it releases all sorts of feel-good endorphins. It’s shoulder length now, we should decide if you want to keep growing it.”

  “Does Carl brush your hair?” I bit my tongue.

  “He does.” I could hear the smile in her voice. “And how I respond to it is a signal for whether or not I want sex. That’s if I want it—he has his own ways of signaling when he wants it. Throwing me over his shoulder for starters.”

  My face was burning up. “How atavistic.”

  She chuckled. “Like social grooming. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways, it’s in our blood. We want what we want. Speaking of wants, how are your wants? I know you liked women that way, before. How do you feel, looking at yourself now?”

  “Oh my God!”

  “That’s what Carl makes me scream.”

  I didn’t touch that. “I’m not a — I’m not a woman.”

  She stopped brushing and set her hands on my bare shoulders to turn me, studying my flushing face. Letting me go, she picked up the brush again. “Do you mean that you don’t think you have the physical sexual maturity that would have attracted your male gaze before? Because honey, most men would find you sexually attractive now even if most older men would never act on it. I told you, you look a lot like me around eighteen or so. You’re small but you’re a woman, not a child.”

  “No.” I stared straight ahead, ignoring my burning face.

  “Or is it something else? Are you not reacting that way to anything right now? Which wouldn’t surprise me at all, considering.”

  “I don’t know,” I groaned. “In the shower—I felt something when I touched . . . I felt something.”

  “Oh, that’s just touch.” She chuckled again. “A girl can go a long way on touch without adding the least fantasy to it, we’ll need to talk about all that another time. I meant wants, inclinations.”

  “I’m scared to look,” I admitted miserably. “Every time I see close to all of it all at once it scares the shit out of me.”

  “Language.”

  I rolled my eyes. “But if you’re asking if I think I still like women that way . . . I don’t know?” And suddenly I really, really didn’t. I knew that sexual orientation was supposed to be all or mostly innate, part of your brain’s hardwiring, but I felt like a stranger in my own head. How much had my brain changed with my body? Could my sexual orientation have changed too? Or was I gay now?

  Picturing myself, as I was now, in the act of sex made my mind blue-screen. Could I be straight when just contemplating straight sex, imagining having a man put his penis inside me, made me shudder?

  “Well,” May said, putting down the brush, “there’s plenty of time for that and it’s fine either way. I do need to know one thing, though. Don’t take this wrong but you’re sixty years old. Sure you’ve always been single, but how can you be this body-shy, even with everything? You’ve had some experience.”

  “Um.” I swallowed the knot in my throat. “No. I haven’t. I was—I am—a virgin.”

  There was a long silence and I turned to look over my shoulder.

  “How.” She snapped her mouth shut and then hugged me. “I’m not judging, hun, just stunned,” she assured me, pulling back with her hands still on my bare arms. “And confused. You’re not religious. I know you liked women. From what you’ve told us you’ve been financially solvent all your life, and you’re such a good person, so . . . A virgin? Really?”

  I nodded, looking anywhere but at her. “Yeah. I—you remember how I looked before everything.” I touched my chest where not a trace of a scar remained. “A hundred pounds overweight? Clinically obese? I was a pudge even before high school.” I’d been socially awkward, into books and movies and chess club. With what I’d thought had been one exception in college, girls had been exotic creatures who hadn’t noticed me at all. Adulthood really hadn’t gotten any better than that, high school and college had left my sexual self-esteem so low. I also might have been borderline depressed for years, too, which couldn’t have helped.

  “But you must have wanted—”

  “I didn’t want to be that unattractive creep who creeped on women, not ever. Not in school, not later as a boss. Even my—even my masturbation fantasies were polite.”

  “What.”

  “Like, I never fantasized about someone I knew socially or professionally.” That would be imposing, objectification. Wrong.

  Her lips quirked up. “So you never fantasized about me.”

  My faced burned. “No!”

  “I can’t say the same. After you took off the weight and got all long and lean you costarred in some threesome scenes. Especially with that beard, rrraar.”

  I had to have gone even redder because she hugged me again, laughing. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Too much information. But thanks for telling me all that, things make so much more sense, now. And now,” letting me go she swung her legs off the bed, “let’s get you dressed and go down to dinner.”