“Do you remember your first real kiss? No, not that timid peck of the cheek but the first real one that lasted and lasted and lasted what seemed ages?

Yes, that one. You know the one that left both of you breathless?”

I stopped typing and smiled at what I’d just written. Then I looked out of the window and the person that I’d shared that real first kiss was there right before my eyes. Ok, she was on her knees planting some Begonias and whatnot but there she was. I felt so lucky to have her in my life after all these years.

I was working on Chapter 10 of my Autobiography that was currently titled, ‘Young Love and Beyond’.

Florence (never ever call her ‘Flo’) had been part of my life for nearly three decades. Perhaps using the word 'part' was a bit of a stretch but I had let myself use it because we'd been at school together. Well, I say at school together but… While that was true, she was at the centre of the 'IT' Crowd while I was trying to be as invisible as possible to everyone especially the 'IT' Crowd and their hangers-on. This was strictly for self-preservation purposes you understand. I was the small kid with stupid glasses that were seemingly always held together with sticky tape if I was lucky.

I hereby confess that Florence had been the subject of my teenage dreams. In those dreams, I became the dashing and suave knight on the Black Horse that rescued her from her evil suitors who were just after her money. Did I say that she came from a wealthy family? Well, she did. Her father was rich, no, make that filthy rich. Florence was brought to school each day in a flashy car. If the weather was good, it was usually some convertible Ferrari or Aston Martin. Her long blonde hair and fantastic looks made her the envy of pretty well anyone and everyone at school. Even when it was chucking it down with rain the sight of a Bentley Mulsanne pulling up outside School made her get noticed. She had pleaded with her father to send her to Public School and to let her have a normal education. He’d only relented after she’d run away for the third time from three very expensive schools. Their loss was our gain.

All I could do was watch from afar and dream about fairy tales and being that night rescuing her from the clutches of an evil suitor. Isn’t that what many fairy tales are about?

Now I look out of my study window and see her in our garden and the fairy tale is complete only that I wasn’t the ‘knight coming to the rescue’ that I’d dreamed about so many times as a child but we were together and living happily.

I stopped daydreaming and turned back to my computer.

“Life after school had been both good and bad to me. I had eschewed the normal path to university and instead taken a different direction. After leaving school aged 16, I began working for a Bookie. Not one of the myriads of shops that litter the towns and cities but at the racecourses or as the Yanks call it ‘On Track Betting’. My boss, ‘Stan the Man Jones’ was a hard but fair employer. At first, my job was to look at the horses when they arrived at the course before racing started and to see what they looked like. Were they calm or jittery? Were they sweating from the trip or calm and collected? All that sort of thing. ‘Stan the Man’ used it to set his odds for the punters. Sometimes the odds we were offering were better than the other bookies and sometimes they were worse but overall, we came out on top. Stan shared a bit of his profits with me. After kitting myself out for going to places like Royal Ascot and Goodwood, I began to save my money. He ran one bookshop in West London and I rented the small flat above it. It was perfect for me in that it was cheap and not too damp.

After three years with Stan, I moved on and became a used car salesman. One of the more well-heeled punters at Goodwood, had taken a bit of a shine to me during the rare times, I stood in for Stan when he answered a call of nature. He offered me a job selling cars but not run of the mill boxes on wheels, but Lambo's, Ferrari's and the like. I soon proved that I was very, very good at it and that in turn, made me lots of money in commission most of which I saved. I soon had enough money to move from Ealing Common to what is now called ‘Staines upon Thames’.

I stuck at the job for a while. Just seven years after leaving school, I had enough money to buy my own house outright. This was the one that we lived in today. Some might call it a 'picture perfect' cottage but it was home to me from that day on. The rest of the money I'd saved was invested. Working at selling cars to the rich gave me a lot of information about deals and other opportunities. I used that information to make some bets on certain stocks to either go up or to go down. Most of the time I made a decent profit and no one suspected the unassuming car salesman who looked like he wouldn't say 'boo to a goose' of being such a whizz at reading the stock market.

Ten years into my grand plan, I just gave it all up and cashed in my investments and then quit my job, and literally dropped out of sight. I'd not been that visible in the first place unlike most of the ‘Flash Harry’s’ that I worked alongside at the races and even at the car dealers.

Being financially secure allowed me to become the person I'd always wanted to be. Years before, when I'd had that teenage crush on Florence, it wasn't because I wanted to date her, but in truth, I wanted to be her. I'd known for years that I was different and should have been a girl. Most people assumed that I was gay, which was the perfect cover until it was time for me to become the real me.

It was just before the final part of that process of becoming the real me, that fate decreed that Florence and I were to meet again. She was a triple ‘B’ person. Blonde, Beautiful and decidedly Brainy, but I had no idea that she'd gone on to become a doctor. That was true until the day when fate decreed that our paths should cross again.

It was all down to a leaking breast implant. I'd gone to my doctor complaining about a pain in my right chest. He'd examined me and sent me off to the hospital for a scan. The results showed that the implant in my right breast was leaking and had to come out right away.

Florence was the surgeon who was going to do the operation, although I had no idea about that until it was over and I was on the road to recovery.

I came around after the operation and heard the sounds of various bits of equipment beeping away gently. My chest felt as if someone with a jackhammer had been working on it for hours. I closed my eyes again in the hope that the pain would go away, which in the short term, it didn't.

Florence, or rather Dr Florence Massey came to see me two days later. As soon as she walked through the door, I knew that it was her. She'd gotten even more beautiful since our days at school.

"Hello there, Barbara. How are we feeling today?" she asked, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we'd met before.

"Feeling a lot better, doctor," I replied, smiling.

“Good.” Then she paused.

"I am sad to say this but, we had to take a lot more than just the leaky implant out."

“Eh?”

"The implant was leaking as we suspected, but we also found a lump. I'm sure that you know what that means?"

I closed my eyes and sank back into the bed, hoping that this was all just a bad dream.

“Thankfully, the lump turned out to be non-malignant. The Biopsy results came back just a few minutes ago. That was the reason why we didn’t put a new implant in during the operation.”

I opened my eyes and tried to smile back at her as I imagined or tried to imagine what life would be like with only one breast.

"We'd like you to fully heal before we discuss the next steps in your recovery. But before then, I need to understand a bit more about your medical history. Our records only go back three years."

"Doc, you might not believe it, but we went to the same school. The same year and everything."

“What? I don’t remember you?”

“That’s not unexpected. I was the little guy at the back with the taped-up glasses who did his best not to get noticed. Whereas…"

She did a doubletake and then smiled.
“Whereas, I was always the centre of attention, the ‘man magnet’ and worse.”
She sighed.
“Thankfully, I understand a lot more about people and how shallow they can be now than I did back then.”

I nodded.

“I think I remember you. Simon or was it Stewart?”

“Stewart,” I replied.

“Well, you have changed a lot since then,” she remarked.

“So, have you,” I replied without thinking.

“Really?” she replied.

"Yes. Back then, I could not have imagined you being a Doctor. I seem to remember that you wanted to be a Model or an Actress?"

She laughed.

“I did, didn’t I… That was just an act. It was what my friends at the time wanted to hear. What did you tell the class what you wanted to be?”

I knew I went red in the face as I remembered that day.
“An Astronaut.”

"I was badly beaten up on my way home from school for saying that. Only 'cool' kids were supposed to dream of doing 'cool' jobs unless you were wanting to play football for Chelsea or be a Supermodel.”

“I remember now. If my memory serves me right, you were away for the rest of the year.”

I nodded.
“For once, I fought back and ended up with a broken leg with some compound fractures that took ages to heal for my troubles. Still, the time away from school allowed me to decide what I wanted to do with my life. Sadly the 'work in progress' has come to a jarring halt."

"I hope that is temporary. Once you have fully recovered, we can talk about sorting your right breast out. Whoever did the implants did a good job but, sometimes they split open. You did right by getting it seen to when you did.”

"Thanks, Doc."

She smiled back at me.

"Doctor Florence, please."

She left me with a smile on her face. That alone, took most of the pain away.

---

That night all those childhood fantasies came back to me. This time they were even more hurtful. She was obviously well out of my league and was probably married to some rich lawyer or doctor. One can dream, can’t you?

I didn't see Doctor Florence for three days. When she returned to pronounce me fit to go home but gave me an appointment to see her in two months to discuss reconstruction surgery. As she said those words, I felt for an instant like a breast cancer survivor.

She noticed my reaction.

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing really. Just the words ‘reconstruction surgery’ made me feel like a breast cancer survivor.”

She looked me in the eye and sat on my bed. Then she took my hand in hers and said calmly
"And you are just that. You had a tumour, but thankfully it wasn't malignant."

Talk about a punch in the solar plexus. Until then, cancer was what other people got, not me.

---

Going home with just one breast was horrible. I kept imagining that everyone was staring at me, but they were just going about their own business. The hospital had supplied me with a foam pad to hopefully provide the illusion of having two instead of just the one.

The hospital had also provided me with all sorts of information about surviving breast cancer. I didn’t look at it for almost a week as I kept saying to myself that I didn’t have it or rather had it.

When I did look at it, I felt very ashamed that I had put it off for so long. The mere fact that men do get breast cancer and many do die from it because they like me, assumed that it only applied to women. It didn't and, I was living proof of that.

I was dreading going to the doctor with prostate problems. Since I'd had my gender reassignment surgery, I'd lived totally as a woman. I was legally a woman but, then again, I wasn’t in so many ways inside my body.

Those doubts and the fact that I'd had breast cancer haunted me until I plumped up the courage to seek medical help. The first person I poured out my heart to was next to incompetent. She kept going back to why I started living as a woman and ignored my present problems. I was very mixed up. Was I a woman, or was I not?

Before the ‘my leaky right tit’ as I’d called it, I was sure that I was.

I tried another shrink more out of desperation than anything. This time, she, a Dr Robertson, understood at least some of what I was going through. She told me that her mother had much the same feelings as me after recovering from a double mastectomy and the lack of appropriate help for her was one of the reasons she was sitting there in front of me.

She made me accept that I was suffering from a form of PTSD. She made me look back to the day when I saw my breasts for the first time and how proud I was with them.

“You can be happy again if you get it fixed,” said the Doc.

She put me back on the straight and narrow. Dr Robertson's plain-speaking had done the trick.

I made the appointment to see Dr Massey about getting that 'right tit' fixed. Somehow, I'd started calling the missing one my tit while the other one was my breast. Dr Robertson had said that it was part of my coping strategy and nothing disastrous to worry about.

Dr Florence chuckled when she asked me what I wanted in the way of further surgery.

"I'd like a new right tit, please. Oh, can I have the implant on my left breast replaced at the same time with one containing saline?"
“Then what?” she asked.

“I’ll have two breasts again.”

“Good. But then what? Once it is all done and healed?”

"I don't follow you, Doc?"

She smiled back at me.

“I find that a lot of women who come and sit right where you are right now have some target to aim at after their recovery. One patient of mine is sailing on her own across the Atlantic at this very moment. Two years ago, she’d never sailed anything larger than a dinghy on a lake.”

“Oh… I see what you mean. At the moment, I don’t have anything.”

“Think about it. I’ll ask you again before I operate and again before I discharge you from my care. Knowing that what I am doing has a purpose makes is a big help if you know what I mean? I hate performing surgery simply because of vanity.”

I could tell that she meant it. That pleased me no end. I'd had some work done on my face but had not gone overboard. It was painful enough as it was, and that put me off any further work. Getting my 'right tit' sorted was not, in my opinion, vanity. I wanted to wear clothes that allowed me to show some but not too much cleavage.

---

"They look better than before," I said to Dr Florence as she examined her handiwork. It had been three weeks since the operation. All the swelling and bruising had subsided.

“Is there any discomfort at all?” she asked.

“None.”
Then I added,
“Apart from none of my bra’s fitting properly.”

She grinned.
“We did agree that half a cup smaller was the right thing for you.”

"I know, and I have to take my imaginary hat off to you Doc, you were right. They feel just right."

“That’s good to know. You can get dressed now.”

"Thanks again, Doc, for all your skill. It is much appreciated."

"No more feeling a 'right tit' then?" she asked, turning my joke back on me.

"No, Doc."

Then I asked.

“Am I discharged now?”

"Yes, why?"

“You said that you would ask me ‘what next’ now that I’ve completed my treatment.”

“I did, didn’t I. Well? What is next for you?”

“For starters, I’d like to say thank you properly.”

“How?”

"By giving you a kiss. Something that I longed to do when we were at school but, you were not interested in losers like me back then.”

She just smiled and stepped out from behind her desk.

The kiss was everything that I’d dreamed that it would be. She smelt fantastic as well.

“Would you like to go out on a proper date?” I asked when we broke apart.

“I think I would. There is something about you that makes me want to say yes.”

---

[Almost thirty years later]

“What are you doing?” I asked as her gentle massaging woke me up.

"I'm just making sure that you aren't being a 'right tit'."

It felt nice, very nice indeed.

I kissed her. All the time, she massaged my breasts. Who knew that Dr Florence had a bit of a breast fetish? I did now, and I loved it as I loved her.

Our love for each other was, most certainly, 'sealed with a kiss'.

[The End]