That Stag Night
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

I wonder if I had not looked as good as I did, whether it might have been different. Perhaps I did not even look that good – what do you think? I had understood that drag was more about roasting women than imitating them, but the makeup artist saw something in me which persuaded her not to go too crazy on the eye makeup as she did for the other guys.

Sure the red wig and the fake breasts barely constrained in the green catsuit were well and truly over the top, but not the makeup. It was a good solid foundations to conceal any beard, and the same to conceal my eyebrows under those she painted on, but the lips were mine, and the dark around my eyes revealed what great blue eyes I have.

The other guys looked like what they were – men in drag out for the might at a cross-dress stag party. The reason was that our pal Kade was getting married to the beautiful Marion, the perfect woman who had once been Marlon. It was a bit of a sick joke I guess, but Kade and his best man Seth, were to be the only guys in the bar we visited dressed as guys – the rest of us were dressed as if to mock his choice of a bride.

But Kade was not mad. He took the joke for what it was. In fact, he said that he was happy that we should “normalize gender variance” in the way we did.

“Some of you guys might realize just how close you might be to uncertainty,” he said. He was looking at me. It was like he knew something, because from the moment that I saw myself in the mirror as her, I found myself wanting to be her. She seemed like another person, but somebody I had made up. While the other guys flapped wrists and swung hips for a bit at the start, after that they were just guys dressed as girls. Somehow it was different for me. Seth noticed.

“I suppose like you guys, I felt a little weird about Kade hooking up with Marion,” he said. “But as I got to know her – and you guys clearly haven’t – I learned that she was truly a woman. She just had a stroke of bad luck to be born in the wrong body. It must be terrible to have to cope with that. Is it?”

“I’m sorry, you have me all wrong,” I protested. “I am not trans. It’s just good makeup.”

But the strange thing is that the voice I used was not my normal voice. It was like I could see that he was interested in me, and I was somehow compelled to answer him in a way that left him hoping that my words were a lie.

It seemed like I could only talk to him in that voice. I would join in the cheers with the other guys in my man voice, but when I spoke to Seth quietly in the corner, it was in her voice.

Things stated to go the way they did at stag parties. There was a hard core who wanted to party until dawn, and a few who had already left, and I was looking for an excuse to duck out. So was Seth.

“I think now is the time,” he whispered. "Actually my apartment is only walking distance from here. Why don’t you come over and we can wait for a cab for you there.”

There was a part of me that knew that if I did that, something was going to happen that might change me and my life forever. The fact that I went with him shows that this part of me had accepted all of this as my new reality.

I never called a cab from his apartment. I stayed overnight, and we spent the better part of the following day in his bed, learning all about my new sexuality, and what was to become my new sex.

And in the afternoon we went shopping for something to wear to the wedding – something delightfully feminine to better suit the person I had become.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2023