Good Neighbors
By Maryanne Peters
With Thanks to justatawickedtaste on Deviant Art for the images

Kane next door had lost his wife to cancer only two weeks before. Hannah and I went to the funeral. His kids were grown and living in other towns, but they were with him and we left them alone with their grief. But then he was alone, and I knew that he would be suffering. It was just that I had made a ragout for dinner, and it ended up much too big for the two of us, so I decided to transfer some of it to a small casserole and drop it over before Hannah got home from work.

It was warm and I was wearing something light and short, and no bra. Hannah says that it pisses her that my new tits are so firm just as hers are starting to sag, but I figure that while you can get away with going braless, why not do it? But I do love wearing a bra – what crossdressers don’t?

I was still wearing stuffy concealing panties for the walk over to his house. I I would wear nothing down there around the house, but as far as Kane was concerned I was just one half of the lesbian couple next door. I did not want him to see anything poking out and revealing my secret, let alone ruining the line of my dress.

He was grateful and we got to talking. I just felt that a man in the grip of sadness, needs a hug. It was nothing more than that, or at least I didn’t mean it to be.

Hannah must have got home and started looking for me. The ragout was still on the stove to keep warm and the back door was open, and the gate through to Kane’s house. It seems crazy that she should be jealous. After all, she was the one who had a hand making me into the person I had become – somebody that it seemed could only be attractive to her, a lesbian with a cock.

Anyway, the next thing I know she is in Kane’ living room, looking at Kane and me in his kitchen, with Kane’s had still on my hip.

“Maybe before you go any further you should know something about Ashley,” she said, as I spun around and started at her. “Ashley is not my wife, she is my husband! My crossdressing husband!”

I was mortified. I was not simply embarrassed but I was betrayed. I was this way because of her, and be-cause I did not want to be considered a freak. Now I was just that. I am fairly sure that I started to cry. I think it was the hormones that did that. I seem to always find myself crying when watching movies these days, for no real reason. I seem to avoid confrontation too – I have become a coward, maybe? I just ran.

It seemed as if it was just a vice – a little kinkiness that Hannah not only tolerated, but found made me a little more interesting. She said that when she discovered I liked to crossdress it fitted with the fact that she was coming to grips with lesbian tenden-cies. She said that it was as if our was “a match made in heaven”. We had complementary quirks.

In those days I was working and I had my naturally red hair trimmed in a man’s style. It was never short, but it was mascu-line. I had reddish hair on my body and sparse red whiskers, and I was reasonably well muscled without being buff. I don’t think that anybody would have mistaken me for being a woman.

But I lost my job and I was stuck at home. I was able to earn some money from freelance work which I enjoyed, so there seemed to be no great reason for me to rush back to the work-force. Plus I liked domestic chores and cooking. It was my thing.

It was Hannah’s idea that we try living together as two lesbians. It was just something that she wanted to try. She said that all that was needed was for me to restyle my hair, get a facial including beard removal, and get a body wax. There would be nothing permanent. I would still be a man, but I would have to pre-sent publicly as a woman. There was only supposed to be some padding in my bra and a little padding around the butt to get a more feminine shape, and I would need to change wardrobe. Since we were al-most the same size a good number of her clothes would fit me.

I was not keen, but she was. In fact she was very keen. Perhaps her lesbian tendency was stronger than my desire to crossdress, or perhaps my desire was something else entirely.

Anyway, the conversation kept coming around to it so I agreed to the treatments if she arranged for them and paid for them, which she did. I guess that I was quite surprised as to how much like a woman I looked, even when just sitting on the couch with my top off.

The big change for me was the one that she really didn’t see. I only left the house wearing women’s clothes although at that time I favored pants and colorful tops. I used a little makeup but not to much, and my hairstyle remained unchanged as it grew out. I learned how to walk and behave as a woman, and I practiced a female voice until I was being assumed to be fe-male, even over the phone.

The hormones were her idea. It still puzzles me what that was all about. She said that they would ‘soften my appearance’ and improve my skin and hair. Perhaps they did? Certainly I think that my hair became a little lighter – is that hormones at work?

But she must have known that HRT therapy which includes suppressing male hormones, would affect our sex life. It has me wondering if that was not the object of it all along. If I cannot function as a man, then she is free to function as the dominant partner in a lesbian relationship. Is that why she in-sisted on it?

I have to say that I got used to be the new me. My breasts grew and my hair grew, and I grew comfortable in this new skin. Per-haps it was the neutralization of the testosterone that made me less interested in sex than I had been. For women it is relation-ships and intimacy that are more important than orgasms, and I think that applies to lesbians too. Men seem to be focused on the transaction where women believe in fostering the connec-tions between two human beings.

I also became more aware of my body. I had never had a great male body, but it now appeared that I could have a really nice female body. Hannah liked it too, or she said so. Sometimes we would go out wearing outfits that were almost indecent, like the red miniskirt and black lace top that I wore to the lesbian dance, which I liked better than she did.

Hannah said that when we were together like that, it made her feel ‘like a real lesbian’. It was just that I could never let on. I needed to keep my male bits well strapped in and give nothing away. After a while there was not much to conceal. After a while it had ceased to function.

She became the dominant partner in sex all of the time. She wore a strap on and I received a prostate orgasm if I was lucky, and I should be happy with that.

And then she outed me, in front of our neighbor, Kane. I remember that we ate that ragout in silence, but she could see I was upset. I slept in the spare room. She told me to ‘get over it’. She was so cold that she chilled me to the bone.

She left without kissing me goodbye. I decided to busy myself with some work on my PC. It was about mid-morning when there was a knock on the door. It was Kane from next door.

I was not sure if he was there to take another look at me, the husband who looks like a woman. I did. Even as I went to the door I checked myself in the hall mirror.

“I have come over to return that hug,” he said. “I had a feeling that you might be a bit down.”

Have you ever heard of such warmth in another human being? His wife was only two weeks gone and he was thinking of somebody he only vaguely knew, somebody who had been deceiving him and everybody else. I just felt those tears coming back. That damn estrogen! I just fell into his open arms and sobbed.

“I find it hard to believe, but I don’t care if it’s true – I only see you as a woman.”

If I was not a woman before, I became one there in his arms. It was not about sex or anything like that. It was discovering that I needed the kind of love that Hannah could never give me.

I made him some herbal tea and we talked, and although he did not know me before I was a full time woman, everything he said rand true.

“The real problem is that you are a better looking woman than she is … a much better looking woman. She will always be envious of you and jealous of you being with anyone,” he said.

He was right. She wanted me to be as female as possible but not to be beautiful. She hated me wearing that outfit to the club. She said I looked slutty when she wore something much more suggestive. And the scene she made the day before had no other explanation.

“I don’t know how it is with lesbians, but in a man woman relationship we are not competing for atten-tion,” he said.

That sounds nice,” I said. “I think that I would like a relationship like that.”

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2025

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