Maid Joy

"Now that you are dressed properly, come and we will talk."

I had some trouble walking in lower heels than normal, but I manfully (ha) managed to navigate from the changing area to the kitchen again. My head was still spinning from what I saw in the mirror, but I would have to deal with it.

Mistress had me sit. My impulse was to jump up and to serve her, as I had been, but she insisted. I was treated as her lady guest, and I didn't know really how to react. So I put on my best manners and accepted what she wanted to give me.

Tea was first, followed by some dinner. I didn't eat much since my nerves insured I wasn't hungry. During the meal there were occasional noises of disapproval, and when I heard them, I tried to figure out what had caused it. Most often it was me slipping back into my male role and forgetting myself.

Mistress finally broached the subject that had been on my mind, and probably hers as well, when we were relaxing with a final cup of tea. Coming right to the point she said, "You have a lot of problems to overcome."

I nodded my head, not trusting my voice to speak. My chin went down in shame again, but she instructed me to raise my head and look at her. "I'm not trying to keep you in a submissive position, but you are unique to my experience.

"Most often strong men who have very powerful jobs, like CEOs or Army personnel, come to me to be abused for feeling feminine. It is a way for them to release the stresses of being the one in control and to let others take that control for a while. But I fear I erred badly with you."

She fell silent for a few moments while I tried to understand what she meant. I understood the release of power for the powerful, I had felt that same release after a session here, but I don't know how she could have made a mistake.

Her voice had been changing accents for a bit, slowly but steadily going from her normal "British Domme" cadence to something that could have come out of Georgia. That accent threw me back to many days in bars there in Columbus Georgia at Fort Benning.

Oh, those Georgia Peaches were beautiful and sweet. I had been ragingly jealous of them, at the same time I was envious of their clothes and make-up. Conversely I wanted to dominate them, humble them, and make them beg for what ever I wanted to do to them, to make them feel the way I did inside. I also wanted to dominate them, not as a master would, but as a boyfriend and a man would do, to hold them, protect them, caress them with a controlled gentility. I was so confused by the clash of emotions that I ignored the girls and threw myself into training.

She finally broke the silence. "Normally when I get a soldier in here, they want to be little or they want to be made to feel this is shameful. I guess your training does that, makes anything feminine bad and negative. So I give them what they want, humiliations galore," she said, quoting a line in The Princess Bride. "Naturally, I assumed when you showed up, Army Ranger, strong and handsome, wanting to be a girl that you wanted the same. I purposefully did everything I could to make you feel shamed and humiliated, from the makeup to the dresses I had you in."

I was confused, "You mean that hideous makeup job was deliberate?"

She had the good grace to blush a bit. "Yes. It was all part of the 'scene'. No real girl would be caught dead in that kind of make up, it looks tawdry and overall just bad. We really do work hard to make ourselves pretty not like a tramp or clown.." She looked at me again. "I think this makeup scheme suits you more."

She sighed deeply and let it out explosively. "I think we need to start again. Tell me, what do you want from this? Do you just want to be in girl's clothes? Do you want to be a girl? Is there a sexual component to the clothes? What can I do for you?"

I shook my head. I really didn't know.

She began asking me questions and taking notes on a legal pad while I cleared the dishes. I rolled up the sleeves of my blouse and put on an apron to protect the beautiful clothes I was wearing. A pair of rubber gloves finished the outfit. Her questions were ones that I hadn't really thought about.

Did I have the courage to tell her that all my life I had felt like the world was wrong? How could I trust her enough to say how crushed I was when I was pulled away from playing jacks with the girls and forced to the football field? Did I dare confess that when I was alone I would braid daisy chains even though I knew that was a sissy thing to do?

Even worse were the questions about how I got trapped. Why did I choose to get rid of everything in my room because it was cute? What prompted my choice in friends? Why did I want to be accepted? Who did I watch as examples of what a man was?

Above all, why did I join the Army and go out for the Rangers, one of the elite fighting forces of the American Military?

The answer to the last question was the easiest. "When I was about 16 in High School, I had still been having a problem with my perceived lack of masculinity. I would challenge people who made the mistake of questioning it openly or in rumors, and mostly by bluff I managed to get the guys and girls to back down. One day the school had a Career Day. One of the recruiters was talking about careers in the Army and mentioned the Rangers. He said 'If you go into the Ranger Training Program and pass it, you will never have to prove your manhood again.'"

I scrubbed the plate I was working on thoughtfully. "It was like a lightning bolt. I thought, maybe this time I can get past it all. Maybe I can finally bury all the questions about if I'm a man or not."

I remembered that time. The front I put up about being a punk was just that, a front. I think that everyone knew about it and just were too intimidated to question it. But I saw some glances. I saw them move away from me in the locker room where we changed. There was even one incident where a very gay boy made a pass at me. He was terrified and I was really shamed. I did something that I don't think any of the others may have done, I actually talked to him a bit. He had been dared to see if I was really gay too.

I made sure he knew I wasn't, and that I also wasn't going to beat him to a pulp, although I made him promise to say that I got really mad and threw him around a bit. I couldn't bring myself to actually beat him up. He was scared and I was scared, and he couldn't help what he was.

Truth be told, I had always wondered what would have happened if I had taken him up on his offer.

Before I knew it, I was done with the dishes and she was done with her questions. I sat down and waited.

She looked up from her notes and saw me. She smiled and laughed a bit. She pulled out her cell phone and snapped a photo of me quickly before I could protest.

I was totally confused. She turned the phone so I could see it. "I think this whole macho Army Soldier thing is just another disguise for you. When you are relaxed, see how you look?" I looked at the picture.

There I was, a nice looking face, beautiful red hair, hands folded in my lap sitting straight up, feet tucked primly beneath the chair with my ankles crossed. I didn't see anything wrong with that.

"That's not how a man sits. This is how a lady sits. I find it interesting that your instinctive behavior when you aren't trying to be Rick Ranger is that you sit like a lady. Did you learn that from your mother?"

I had to admit that I did. "Despite everything and her attempts to make me the man of the household, she treated me like one of her daughters. Her stated reason was the skills I would learn, cooking, cleaning, laundry and so on, would help me when I moved out and started living on my own. They really have helped me. I can iron better than anyone I know. So I learned things like shopping, how to buy and compose meals. I was even more confused."

I thought back to those times. "I know what is good when I shop and what isn't. I don't buy fruit and produce that is bad or unripe. I love cooking. I really, really like doing things around the household. I don't mind cleaning, and I actually enjoy children. I know how to get stains out of most clothes, and I never made the mistake of putting my Class A's in the washer with my BDUs."

We spent some more time talking, mostly about the challenges my being in drag would present.

She was very direct, "Let's be honest, while you are in the Army, there's not a lot I can do for you. I can let you have weekends here, take some time and be yourself. However, the training you do to stay in shape is the exact opposite of the body shaping you need to look more feminine. You are flooding your body with testosterone, and no matter what you do right now, you aren't going to be delicate. Right now, you are what the Welsh call 'wiry', which is their term for being made up of little but bone, sinew and lean muscle.

"Luckily you aren't too tall. If you were six feet tall, it would be even more difficult for you and what you want. There are some tall girls, but they tend to be looked at like short men are, with a little contempt. At 5 feet 8 inches, you are about perfect for a female's height. Your weight is also right where it should be, namely 150. With some padding we can make you a very nice 34, 22, 30 and I think you would look darling with those measurements. We'd have to put shoulder pads in your blouses so that your wide shoulders looked like padding, but that shouldn't be too hard."

I thought for a bit. Did I want this? It was true I was more relaxed right now than I had been in some time, but did I want to be the object of ridicule again? Was this worth it? Was feeling right and relaxed worth the mental torture?

That was the core question I had to answer.

She reached over and patted my hand. "We don't have to start tonight, another weekend is soon enough. For now, I'm going to say that I think this will help you in the long run and it is something I think you should do.

"I'll clear my schedule for two weekends from now. If you get cold feet in the mean time, let me know. I'll do my best to get everything ready so that it is a pleasurable experience for you, not a trip into a world of torture."

She had me come back into the changing area. In the process of taking me out of my clothes and hanging things up, she talked about what each piece was and how it worked. She taught me the "tuck and pull" technique for hiding my male parts, and she informed me that the panties she would have me in next time would more than cover me up, they would ensure that I didn't have an unsightly bulge where it wasn't wanted.

She took measurements of me again, making sure that they were accurate. Everything from my feet to my hair line, she got written down. I asked her why she was measuring me again, when she had done that the first time I ever came to her. She said that it was because there were deliberate errors in the measurements to embarrass me by having something that was too small or too large.

"If I'm going to have your wardrobe here, then I need to have stuff on hand that will fit you. And before you ask, yes, I intend for this to be a long term relationship and I expect you to be doing this for a while.

"How much time do you have left in your enlistment?"

"This is my second tour, and it will be up in about eight months."

"Well, then this arrangement can last until then."

The cynic I was, I had to ask "And how much is this going to cost me?"

She spent a few minutes thinking. "I was charging you a lot of money for what I was giving you. But I have to warn you that this isn't going to be cheap. I think we can work something out, if you are willing to help occasionally and to pay for the clothes and suchlike that I will be getting for you."

I nodded. I wasn't doing much else with my money. I was sending some money back to my mother to pay her back for everything she did for me while I was growing up, and truthfully to pay her for all the grief I caused her.

While I had some money, I didn’t have a lot. The money I had saved for this haven was fast running out. Her offer to shop for my real clothes and then store them for me was an amazing gift. I knew that my money would be well and carefully spent for appropriate items and that took a lot of worry off my mind.

She finished what she was doing and ordered me back into my uniform. “I think that’s going to be enough for this weekend. Two weekends from now, I expect to see you back here.”

She looked me over for a while as I got my uniform back on and took the makeup off. “I think we need to have a name for you, a good girl name. When you are here, en femme, you will be ‘Sissy’. Not to ridicule you, but to reclaim that word from the negative associations in your mind. It’s a bit juvenile, but I think it will do.”

When she called me that, my stomach turned a bit. But I started thinking about it for a little while, and I could see her point. “Yes, ma’am. Sissy will be fine,” I said, dropping back into the habitual “ma’am” and “sir” that had been drilled into me by the Army.

“Don’t say that like I’m about to cut your head off. I’m suggesting a name, nothing more. I suggest it because it is short for sister, and I think it will suit you. We can always change it later if it is too much for you, but you have all these bad memories of the title sissy, and I want to give you some good memories.”

I sat down and pulled my boots on and bloused them correctly. “Honestly, ma’am, I don’t think there is a good memory I could have of that word. It has been used too long to shame me and make me feel bad. I want to try though.”

She nodded. “That’s all I can ask you to do. Just try for me, Sissy.”