TG Techie: Chapter 7: Staring

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Staring

I woke to find my hands pressed in between my thighs. That should have been uncomfortable and wasn’t. It was comforting. I rolled over to go back to sleep and found that everything was wrong with my body.

Not that. That was still wrong, but I had woken up with some of the knowledge permeating my brain.

What was wrong was my breasts. One was half-in, half-out of it’s bra cup in one direction. The other was half-in, half-out at an opposing trajectory. One shoulder strap was on, the other was pinning my arm at my side.

I found my way sitting, and tried to get out of the damn thing without damaging it. I flung it across the room again and collapsed on my covers. Well,* you masturbated last night. Might do it again.* Scared too. Felt too good. I was not going to get into this girl thing. I tried to go back to sleep and found myself reliving last night in my head. What must a tongue feel like on that spot? Probably not as good as a blowjob.

Probably.

But I hadn’t eaten since last night, and breakfast called to me. Time to go downstairs and face my mom while not thinking about the taste of my own pussy on my lips.

Bra back on, I tried to decide how dressed I wanted to get dressed, and went into the kitchen in pajama pants and a new shirt.

Mom was in the kitchen reading the paper. The sunlight streamed through the windows, I would guess it was after one. I was allowed to sleep in. Teenagers are supposed to do that.

“How was your night?” Mom asked. There was an empty cup of coffee next to her elbow. I needed some of that.

“Good,” Transcendent? Illuminating? “Is the coffee cold?”

“Mm-hmm. You’ll need the microwave.”

“Yech.” I set about making some fresh.

“Rinse the pot then.”

“I know mom.” She was reading the paper. She couldn’t possibly have seen that I was about to turn on the coffee maker with three lines of cold coffee still in the pot. I added one more scoop than was recommended, made toast and then came to sit next to her at the table. I pulled the comics too me and started the process of folding them right so that I could read them in order. Mom always folded one page behind the other when she read. It was an age old process.

The paper didn’t carry Dilbert. I was glad. I read over every strip, no matter how unfunny it is, I can’t help myself. Yes, especially Garfield, a strip carried in 2,500 papers that has never featured a single joke. Unless you count that dog-cum-drinking one.

And I do.

Mom got up to rinse out her coffee cup at the same moment my toast popped. She brought it to me with bonus prize orange juice. I set about slathering the blackened crust with butter while I finished “Blondie,” and wished to hell I could stop reading that strip. Man is lazy and eats sandwiches late at night. Those three words cover 90% of America, and this guy still can’t write a joke that anyone relates to.

There. I hope you enjoyed this small commentary on the state of newspaper cartoons in America.

If you’re not reading from America, let me add that Fred Basset and Andy Capp are garbage.

I munched toast and orange juice and tried to decide what I was going to do with the rest of my day. I had got out of bed, so there had to be a rest of my day, even if the plan was to sleep through it.

“Please don’t sleep through the rest of the day,” my mom asked me, as she set coffee next to me.

“What else should I do? My life is ruined.”

“It works better if you put your hand like this,” mom put the back of her wrist to her forehead and cast her head back. “Watch. I have errands to run! And I need my son’s help.”

Something about that hurt, and it wasn’t my pride. “I’m your daughter now.”

“Are you? You made rules.”

I made a pphhhhhhhhhp noise, then got to something that had been bothering me, “I woke up and my boobs were everywhere. How do you keep them in your bra while you sleep?”

She laid her hand on my wrist, “You take it off before you go to sleep.”

Face flushed, I laid my head in my hands.

“I was wondering why you were wearing it under your pajamas. They’re not the most comfortable things, you can take them off when decency allows.”

I put down my coffee mug, “I need to go do something.”

(⦿L⦿)

Upstairs I took off my shirt and stood in front of my mirror with just bra and pants. Dressed? Not today. I tried to undo the bra from the back, and got one hook undone. With the bra like that, I couldn’t get the second one and had to turn it around again.

Then I put my pajama shirt on and went back downstairs.

“I suspect that feels better,” Mom said, from the table. She’d finished the paper and was knitting with her new cup of coffee.

I sat down and felt everything on my chest shift around. Do I feel comfortable talking about it with her? Barely. But I had questions to ask, and she was safe. “It’s better, but everything is so floppy. How do you deal with that?”

“You just do. What do you want to do today?”

“I just want to sit and read for a bit, while you go to work.”

“I’ve canceled with all my clients for this week, you get my undivided attention. I mentioned that we have errands to run.”

“I can’t go anywhere like this.”

She sat back and put her knitting on the table. “Well, you can’t stay home for the rest of your life. And if you’re going to stay here, we need to take care of logistics.”

I gave a deep, teenage, sigh, “You love logistics.”

“Do you want your allowance, or not?”

“Oh right. Yes I would like some money please.”

“Well then you have to wear something you can go to the bank in.” She picked up her knitting again. “Why don’t you get dressed, and then we’ll go out.”

Upstairs I opened my closet to find some new pants. I hung my clothes in the closet now, instead of putting them in drawers. Actually I mostly stored my clothes on the floor. That was unlikely to have changed with my gender.

What did change with my gender was the way it hurt when I opened the door and knocked it straight into my right boob. Damn that hurts. I have a new set of dimensions now. More depth to my body.

These pants. Getting them on was a pain. I had to scoot them up over my hips. They were boot cut, but they still clung to everything above my calves. That shirt I was in. Shoes. Smack my left boob going out the door. Why can’t I go through a door anymore?

Mom grabbed her keys, and I slumped after her to the car.

(⦿L⦿)

“How much do you think you’ll spend in a month?” Mom was taking me to her credit union where I had once got a children’s account. You know the kind. Where they give you a folder to store quarters in, and you feel like you’re special, and you can save money now, and you grow up and realize you can’t.

Target last night I was out in the night time. In a place where everyone was concentrating on shopping. As we stood in line at the bank, I was aware that everyone was looking around at the other customers. Making judgments. I put my head down, tried to hide inside myself. Avoided anyone’s eyes.

I hung close to my mother, and wanted to reach out and take her hand, like a little boy. Wanted her to chase off all the eyes looking at me. When she felt me near she rubbed my back and I felt a bit better. “As far as their all concerned, you’re just a teenage girl, here with your mother,” she kept her voice low.

“I can’t handle this,” I whispered to her.

“I think you can. We’re up next.”

Mom told the teller we needed an appointment to set up a joint account, and we got directed to a little waiting section, and were told to wait in it. Because that was what it was for. I sat and crossed my legs and found a magazine.

My mom sat down and pulled out her knitting. Then she looked at me for a moment and seemed like she wanted to say something, and didn’t. Instead she knit, until she looked up like she was going to say something else. And didn’t. And then set her knitting aside. “Aisling, you’ve seen how a woman crosses her legs.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know why?

“I never thought about it.” The way I was doing it now was uncomfortable, for some reason.

“If you were wearing a skirt, you’d be showing everyone your panties right now.”

“Well I’m not wearing a skirt, mom.” Rule no.2 hangs on tight.

“Just something to keep in mind, dearheart.” She went back to knitting.

I picked up the magazine again, then waited. When I was sure she wasn’t paying attention to me, I put one knee on top of the other. I could feel the balls of my femurs line up when I did it. It was much more comfortable this way. I switched back to ankle on knee in an act of defiance, realized that sucked, and put them back.

My mom had a tiny smile on her face as she continued to knit. I wiggled my ‘on top’ foot from the knee, and then stuck my tongue out at her.

Around this time a man in a nice blazer and tie and carefully messy hair came up and offered his hand to mom, and then to me, “Hi, Aisling. Hi Ailene. My name is Cameron, why don’t you come on back to my office?”

Inside a bank office, with its bank desk, and giant bank window, and bank computer, and bank pens, and bank pamphlets, Cameron sat down and leaned back, and stared at me. “So I understand you want to open a joint account with us today.”

“Yes,” mom said, “and I’d like to attach a credit card to the account.”

“Okay,” Cameron turned to his computer, while still staring at me, “let’s see what we’ve got here.”

And so we gave him a bunch of information, and he offered us types of bank accounts, and it was all boring, and all the while I got more and more uncomfortable. Am I imagining it? He’s staring at me, right? He looks at mom sometimes, but mostly he’s looking at me.

I tried to be polite because I didn’t know what was going on. Tried to contribute to the conversation because I was basically an adult. Tried to shake off the uncomfortable feeling that was sitting in the back of my head. Maybe I just don’t like him. He is* a bank stooge.* A beholden of a financial corporation. A bourgeois salesman, without the talent to do something creative or meaningful. Just move other people’s money around. No, that’s not it.

He was making me uncomfortable. I knew my feelings, and I knew that. I just didn’t know why. It wasn’t until mom had finished filling out her forms, and he passed those forms to me, that I watched his eyes and realized. He’s not staring at me. He’s staring at my breasts. His eyes took a moment to dip, and make tit contact, and then flashed back to my eyes again.

I picked up a pen from the desk, and hunched over on myself filling out the forms, trying to make myself as small as I could. My hair fell around my face making a little safety curtain, and I focused on filling in the little boxes very carefully.

After I handed him the forms he left to go get something, and I leaned back in my chair. He was, like, mid twenties. I was fourteen. Even if he was a girl, I wouldn’t want anything to do with him. Well you’ve been checked out now. How did that feel? Bad. I felt really bad. I didn’t know why I was so uncomfortable, and I didn’t know why I didn’t want to just punch him. But my first feeling wasn’t self defense. Well it was, but it wasn’t martial self defense. It was the kind of self defense where you just try to make yourself not a target. Where you run away.

As a guy, I’d always wondered why women didn’t just call people out when they were sexualized. Now I knew. For a start, it was too embarrassing to bring up. He was embarrassing my by staring and telling him not to stare would just call attention to the fact that he was staring. And if I did bring it up, I couldn’t prove he’d been doing it. I couldn’t prove that he had been making me feel uncomfortable, because how could I? All he would have to say is ‘Oh, I wasn’t’ and then the whole thing would be worse.

So when he came back, I just refused to meet his eyes. I turned my body away from him as I took the card he offered me.

He handed me a pamphlet with all my account information, and we left the bank. I could feel his eyes on my ass on the way out the door. I could feel them on my breasts as we walked to the door in the lobby. I could feel them on my crotch as we got into the car. I could feel them all over me as I started to cry.

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Comments

urk

That poor girl, what a horrible way to find out what crap the other half of the world puts up with =[
Ok, now I just want to slap that meathead and say hey, I'm up here asshole. =p

Sara

It is

unfortunately, her new reality.

Modesty

People, mainly men, looking at me is one of the reasons that I dressed as and became a full on Muslim. I could hide under a loose fitting dress (Abaya) and cover my head with a scarf (Hijab), so no one could see. Later, I would discover that all that modesty just made some men want you more than if you were buck naked. That's the law of forbidden delights.

These days, at nearly 71, I see that women are assumed to be less able by men and I have been known to milk that for all its worth. :) If I want to go to all that effort, a pretty, modest skirt and a tight top, even now, still garners me attention, none of it unwanted.

Gwen

Other side of the fence

Jamie Lee's picture

Ash may not have done to other girls what the banking officer did to her, when she was he, but if as he he heard what other boys said then she now understands why some girls got upset.

Her mind is still screaming boy even though physically she is totally female. And yet she is going through the same thing girls go through as they start puberty and their bodies change.

Mom has been a peach through the last few days, never getting upset but also guiding by use of a carrot. Her actions are exactly what Ash needs at the moment. Ash is confused, angry, entering a new and strange world. Mom is letting her calm down and come to terms with the change, knowing from experience getting upset will do no good.

Others have feelings too.

Slo getting started

Really enjoying this now that the Bizzaro geometric world has departed.

alissa