It has been an eventful day after an eventful night, and it was taking me awhile to make some sense of it all. There was nothing I could do to change my wife, or undo any of what had happened. And there were parts I didn’t want to undo. As I did the morning chores, I realized that I didn’t regret what I’d done with Gino—only that she had forced me. What if it hadn’t been forced? My first thought was, he was almost a stranger. That settled nothing. What if I’d known him better? And if I liked what had happened, didn’t that mean it was just as well she’d forced me? Did it matter how it began? Maybe it mattered only in how I felt about her rather than the act? I stopped and smiled to myself. I was a maid, in uniform, with big boobs and long hair and the lingering taste of Gino’s cock in my mouth, and still I was thinking like a lawyer. No one else could spend so much mental energy thinking about a blow job. Especially one that I didn’t get to finish . . .

It was a little after one in the afternoon when my work was done. I changed into a bikini and went down to the pool. I had served Marilyn and Gino a good lunch, with a chilled bottle of white wine, and I didn’t expect them to want dinner till six at the earliest. I stretched out on a lounger. Our pool was secluded enough to sunbathe in the nude, but Marilyn had made it clear that she liked seeing the tan lines. I didn’t mind, and the lines made my breasts look even bigger. Not that they needed it; they were well on their way to filling a D cup. I’d been watching my weight closely, but even though it held steady, my body continued to shape itself in a female way. I looked down at myself, looking for some sign that I had been born male. I saw a narrow waist and flared hips. The bulge in my crotch was almost nonexistent , even though my bikini bottom was snug. It hadn’t been that snug when I bought it two month’s before . . .

I lay in the sun, remembering how Marilyn had behaved; not only today, but since this had all started. I had always given her the benefit of the doubt, always assuming that when she was difficult, she was just playing out my fantasies, being in character as the difficult, dominating mistress of my stories. That explained a lot. I remember how often she’d told me how the fantasy excited her. No one could have faked the enthusiasm she’d shown in dominating me in the last year and a half. And without her lead I would never have had the nerve to actually live them. I had come to love living this way. But even I had to admit that there was more. She liked playing the part. But it was more than a part for her. She had been needlessly cruel.. Even when she had everything she’d wanted, she was not satisfied. There was always been more demands. And, I realized, there always would be. She would never be content with leaving things alone. A hundred times she had said that if I did this one more thing, it would be enough. I knew now that it would never happen. It was always going to be about what she wanted and not me; and if there was a conflict she would never let me have my way. Sadly, I realized I could never really trust her. And then, the moment I had that thought, another one came right behind.

I knew why the last six months of testosterone shots weren’t changing me back, and why I was becoming even more female. It was all so simple.

Those thoughts were still running through my head as I heard someone behind me. It was Gino, wearing a bathing suit and carrying two bottles of beer. He was walking a little unsteadily. I thought about the bottle of wine I’d brought up with lunch.

I started to get up, but he shook his head and waved for me to sit down. “Want a beer?”

“Thanks.” I felt his eyes on my body and I felt self-conscious. I realized it was the first time he’d had a good look at my body. I wished my swim suit was bigger. I was glad that my hair had grown long enough to cover my cleavage. I smiled and we clinked bottles. “Gino, you’re going to put me out of a job.”

He sat down next to me on the grass, a miserable look on his face.. “Suzee, I have to tell you, right off, I am so sorry about—“

“There’s nothing to be sorry about. I’m the maid..”

“You’re a person.”

He looked ready to cry. I saw, now that the moment of passion had passed,, how ashamed he was. He was a person, too. A person I found myself liking more every minute. I swallowed and tried to get control of my voice.. “Gino, you’re making this too complicated. What a person was in the past doesn’t matter; it’s what they are now. And what happened today was fine with me.”

He barely heard me. He was talking to himself. “I’m still figuring this out. I’m—none of this is me. I just got here . . . I’ve never done anything in front of somebody else. I’ve never forced myself on anybody. I’m not that kind of guy.”

“What makes you think I’m not happy with it?”

He avoided my eyes by squinting into the sun. “Because I’m not that lucky. I was born poor in South Philadelphia and worked like a dog for everything I got. I’m a simple man. All I wanted was a family. I was young and dumb when I got married and I cheated on my wife. I don’t deserve anybody, let alone two.”

“Don’t talk that way. You’re a good man. Successful. And handsome.”

“Nah.”

“Nah, bullshit.,” I said.

He took a pull on his beer and looked at the pool. “I know you say the past is past, but I need to clear the air about some things.” I opened my mouth and he shook his head. “Just let me get this out. First of all, what happened this morning, I was as surprised as you were.”

“She has a talent for getting people off balance.”

“And this is going to sound funny, coming from me, with me living here, but I didn’t want this to work out this way. I would never take a man’s wife away from him. I never cheated on my wife till I met Marilyn. We had a one night stand. I wasn’t proud of that and I told her it wasn’t going to happen again. She said she wanted to leave you. I told her I wasn’t going to be one of those husbands who just go on with a girl on the side.” He drained the beer.

“It didn’t work out that way.”

“She said she was going to leave you. She said she would have a baby with me. I wasn’t ready to move out on my wife then. I was afraid it was over between my wife and me, but she was making another try at detox and I needed to be there for her.” He gave a wry smile. “For all the good it did. But anyway, I said I wouldn’t even consider leaving my wife till her treatment was through, and that was going to be a year. Marilyn said she was going to leave you, anyway. I said there was no linkage. She could do what she wanted but she couldn’t count on me. Maybe it would work out, maybe it wouldn’t.”

“She said she was leaving me?”

He looked puzzled. “Well, sure she did. She wrote that good-bye letter.”

“Letter?”

“Sure” he insisted. “I saw it. I told her she had to be straight with you. She showed it to me that night, before she left the office. She said she was going to go right home and give it to you. I made her write it. I told her, I wasn’t going to have anything to do with her while she was still with you.”

“Oh, God,” I murmured.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve been putting a lot of things together today, Gino. About Marilyn,.”

He wasn’t paying attention, absorbed in completing his own confession. “Like I said, this is something I have to get off my chest, let—“

“That night she took the letter home, when was it?” But I already knew the answer.

“That was another lousy part of it. She did on Valentine’s Day, last year. What a piece of timing. But she wanted to do it and that was when it worked out.”

“She brought home the envelope,” I said. “Just that she didn’t give it to me.”

Now he was listening to me again. “She didn’t--ask for a divorce?”

“Let me guess,” I said. “She told you I was fine with you guys having an affair.”

“Not the next day. I didn’t see her for a few days after that. My wife got picked up for drink driving, and I guess I wasn’t in a hurry to deal with Marilyn. When I saw her she told me that you . . . wanted to have a sex change, that the two of you were getting divorced, and that you’d said that anything she wanted to do with me was fine. She was going to stay with you till you had the surgery but it was over between you as a couple.”

“Oh.” I trusted Gino to tell the truth, and it was the only way the story fit.

“But . . . that’s what happened.,” he insisted.

A long moment passed. The world was just me and Gino and the sunshine and a couple of empty bottles of beer by the pool. For that moment, it wasn’t complicated; things were as simple as two people sitting together in the sun. And in a way, if you looked just at that moment, not the past or the future, it was that simple. A guy with a hairy chest and girl who knew how to fill out a bikini. It didn’t have to be complicated. It didn’t matter how they got there, only that they were there now.

I started to laugh.

It seemed to be the funniest thing that had ever happened. I laughed from the pit of my belly; there was nothing feminine or delicate about it. I was in the grip of waves of laughter that came over me and wouldn’t stop. I laughed till I was out of breath and my eyes were full of tears. I laughed at what I had lost and what I had gained and the sheer irony of it all. Gino looked puzzled. I laughed so long and so hard he seemed to think I was having a fit. He looked at me as I tried to catch my breath, uncertain what to do.

At last the laughing stopped and I took some deep breaths. I looked at Gino. The only thing that wasn’t perfect at that moment was that I could never tell him what was so funny.

I gave him a smile. “Yes, Gino, that’s what happened.”

After the huge changes of that weekend, the summer fell into a routine of its own. I served them breakfast each morning, watched them leave for work, and did the chores during the morning. The house was easy to clean and there were groundskeepers for the yard and a man to service the pool. I had the afternoons to myself for exercising, reading, and resting. I swam every day. My body became fit in a female way; lean, sleek, and curvy.

Once Gino arrived my wife never paid any sexual attention to me again, but I wasn’t alone. After a couple of weeks, Gino began to approach me. He was so polite, so diffident, that the first time he wanted me I had trouble picking up the clues. Probably some of that was me, as well. I had the body of a woman, more or less, without having the intuition of how to deal with the subtleties of a sexual advance. That first time I was thrilled and excited. He was coming to me because he found me attractive. My body, the person I was, made him want to be with me . . . It was a wonderful and very welcome feeling, and the more he came to me, the happier I was.

Nothing is perfect, and even that summer there were two problems between us. One, he didn’t come to me often enough. At first it was only about once a week. I would have preferred a little more often. Twice a day would have been nice. That problem slowly resolved itself as the summer wore on. By the end of the summer he wanted me nearly every day.

The other problem was more difficult, As much as Gino wanted me, as much as he appreciated me, caressed me, played with my nipples and breasts and hair, he could not bring himself to touch me at all below the waist. Although he didn’t insist, he preferred that I keep on my panties or bikini bottom. It was a summer of hand jobs, blow jobs, and sometimes even bringing him off between my breasts, but the part of my body that had been so carefully stretched out went unused. No matter how heated our sessions became, his hand never touched my cock.

I never blamed Gino; it was too much to expect of a straight man and I was thrilled that he found me attractive at all. Even if we didn’t develop a full sex life, I was grateful for what we had.

The reason why the first problem gradually disappeared was obvious to me. People can fool co-workers, friends, bosses, and spouses, but you can never fool a live in maid. She knows about every discarded condom and empty gin bottle. She knows when a bed has been slept in, whether the sexy nightie has been worn, whether the sex toys were used and whether someone left their food untouched. She knows if someone brought work home or not, and what videos they watched. She knows whether the couple comes home together or separately, and how much time they spend apart.

I don’t know whether first they started having problems and Marilyn decided to work late to avoid them, or whether they had problems because she always wanted to work late, but either way, within a few months they were in a downward cycle. Gino worked hard when he needed to, but he didn’t stay at the office for the sake of being there. If a trial wasn’t scheduled he would be home by six, eager for a swim, and, increasingly, sex. Marilyn came home late, never exercised, became pale, and ate junk food. She put on weight. And drank herself to sleep. I knew enough about Gino’s ex wife and her drinking to know how much it pained him to see it. As their relationship deteriorated .she became increasingly jealous, short tempered, and demanding; and Gino became more withdrawn with her. Early on, I overheard conversations about her having his baby, but they stopped after hardly more than a month. Marilyn was cut out for working her way to the top, not for motherhood. Gino never said anything to me, but I know it pained him. He’d left his wife, in part, from a desire to have children, and he was realizing that Marilyn wasn’t going to be the woman to give him that.

I remember a night in late fall, near the end of October. It was a cool evening, and I’d made chicken on the grill. He and I ate on the patio, splitting a bottle of wine, while we waited for her to come home. I cleaned up the kitchen, put her dinner in some aluminum foil, took Gino upstairs to my quarters, and let him come between my breasts. We dozed off together. When we awoke it was nearly ten and she still wasn’t home.

It was a wonderful moment. I could feel his come on my chest and the smell of sex was in the air. We were at just the right point of drinking; drunk enough to be completely at ease, but not enough to be stupid or to forget what was happening.

He held me close and stroked my hair. Then he looked out the window; Marilyn’s car still wasn’t back. “This isn’t exactly how I thought my life was going to turn out,” he said.

I almost made a flip comment about how I hadn’t expected what had happened to me, either, but I knew when Gino had something to say.

“I got involved with Marilyn on the rebound,” he said. “I was still trying to work things out with my wife. Marilyn pushed me to get a divorce . . . made promises . . . I think I should have taken more time.”

The estrogen had developed more than my boobs and my butt. I had a pretty good feminine intuition, too. Or at least I had the luxury of time to think about relationships. “She’s been pressing you to marry her.”

“How did you know?”

“Because now she’s single. She filed for a no fault divorce right after you moved it.. It was final a few weeks ago.”

“She said you had divorced some time ago, when you first told her . . . you wanted to change. You—didn’t say anything to me . . .”

“After everything else, the last thing that matters is our marital status.”

“But still, marriage is important . . .” His voice trailed off and he laughed softly. “Sorry, I know I sound like an asshole. I’m divorced and shacked up with a woman and sleeping with another woman and lecturing you about the sanctity of marriage.”

“I know you, Gino. You’re talking about children.”

“She said she doesn’t have the time.”

“Take her at her word. If she had a baby she’d be a lousy mom.”

He turned away from the window. “I have a chance to have a child. I have a niece. She’s . . . . an OK kid, but she—she gets in messes. The family’s been rescuing her for a long time. She’s having a baby in a couple months. I’ve got one of the family lawyers in the firm working on it. Her and the father are willing to let me adopt when the baby’s born.”

“Marilyn isn’t interested. This is going to be a wedge between you, not bring you together.”

“In the beginning, she said . . .”

“But now that it’s time to make a decision, she doesn’t want to.”

He sighed. “My first wife, she had her problems, but she if she could have had kids, she would have.”

““You’re letting me know that you’re moving out.”

He swallowed, and nodded slowly.

“Because there’s no children for you here.”

“I’m forty-two and divorced. The woman I’ve been seeing doesn’t want kids. This my chance. Probably my last chance.”

I turned away so he would not see my face. But I was silent. There was nothing I could say.

“I’m not going to tell her,” he said after a while. I’ll pack my bags and be gone.”

“What about work?”

“It’s a big firm. She can transfer to another division and we won’t even be on the same floor. It’s not ideal but this isn’t going to work.”

“Is there somebody else?”

His chuckle had an edge to it. “After my last two choices, I’m going to take a rest, trust me.”

“Last two?”

He didn’t understand the question. “My ex and Marilyn,” he said, as if it was as obvious to me as to him. Then the light came on. “Oh—I didn’t mean you, Suzee—I’m stupid; I didn’t mean you at all. If things were--different for you . . .”

Now that he’d raised the subject, I realized it was a conversation I didn’t want to have after all. “Where are you going to go?” I asked.

“Like any good Italian boy, back to Momma’s house. Make a fresh start from there. My niece is living there already.”

I kept my voice businesslike. “Go to work tomorrow like always. I’ll pack everything for you. Give me the address and I’ll have a courier bring your bags to her house.”

“Suzee—of everything that’s happened, you’re the only thing I’m going to miss. But I’m going to miss you a lot.”

“You have a big day tomorrow, and she’s going to be mad once she finds out. Go back to your room and get your rest.”

He was surprised by my tone. “Look, I’m sorry that there couldn’t be more for you and—“

“Gino, don’t say it. People are who they are right now. Remember that. Now, get your clothes on and go. No long good-byes.” I have him a hug. at the door.

“Suzee—“ I put my fingers to his lips.

“It’s better this way, Gino. Just go. It’s OK.”

When I was alone I took a deep breath.

It was in play.