and glanced at the dress in her hands.
“Oh.” Something totally weird flashed in his mind when he saw it, and was gone too quickly for him to seize hold of it. “It’s...it’s a dress,” he said.
“Okay, I can see it’s a dress, but for whom?” she asked, turning it around in her hands. “Or maybe I should say, for what, an elephant? This thing is huge.”
“I, uh, I was thinking of the big girls,” he stammered. “You know, the oversized ladies. It’s a niche market that isn’t very well served right now, it seems to me. It’s just something I was playing around with, an experiment, sort of.”
“Well, you’re the designer.” She shrugged and took the dress back to where she had found it at the sewing machine. She could not help being just a little curious about it, though. He had never before mentioned doing dresses for the oversized market. She knew that for his designs he really liked the model-type figure, long and slim, skinny, actually. Even she was too full figured to be the kind of pencil thin fashion model for whom dressed designers generally designed their dresses and who wore them on the runways at the fashion shows. She could not imagine Peter even being interested in designing for big women.
Halloween was only a day or so away, however, and she might have supposed that he had made the dress as a costume for himself, if it were not so obviously too large even for him.
Although they had never discussed it, she knew that he was attracted to women’s clothes—designing them, of course, but she suspected there was more to it than merely that. More than once, she had looked in one of her dresser drawers and saw that he had been surreptitiously handling her under things. Once, a pair of her panties in the laundry hamper had what she would have sworn were semen stains. She had never questioned him about them, but she was certain that he secretly longed to “dress up,” and one time she had realized that he was wearing some of her Chanel Number Five perfume.
The funny thing was, she had not yet come up with any tactful way to let him know that the idea appealed to her too. The Chanel on him that one time had acted as an aphrodisiac on her. Drag in and of itself did not, probably because in her mind she generally associated it with gay men, even though she did know, from reading those advice columns in the papers, that there were lots of men who were entirely heterosexual but who nonetheless liked to cross dress.
It was not that she had anything against gay men either. She had any number of gay friends, including their downstairs neighbor, Lee, and she truly treasured her friendships with them, but those men did not, however, turn her on sexually.
Peter did, and she knew without a doubt that he was not gay. For one thing, he was the best partner in bed that she had ever known. He seemed to know merely by instinct what to do to make a woman happy, and no one could be homosexual who was turned on the way he was by a woman’s body, although she suspected that his actual experience with them was not very vast. She had an idea, in fact, that he might even have been a virgin when they met, though she had not been.
His heterosexuality, however, only made the thought of his dressing up like a woman just that much more of a turn on for her. The idea of picking out dresses for him, of helping him with bras and panties and stockings, even putting on his make up, stirred her sexually. Maybe after breakfast....
Unfortunately, though she had made some subtle comments now and again, she had not yet managed to get her message across to him. She could see that it was a sensitive subject for him, one that embarrassed him, even—probably, it was that suggestion of homosexuality attached to it that bothered him—and she wanted to find a way to bring it up that did not make him uncomfortable. A woman could not just say to her husband—especially to a husband that she could see was shy about the subject—“honey, I would love to see you in a dress.”
Grimalkin, who was invariably miffed whenever she and Peter had sex, came to her and rubbed jealously against her leg. She picked him up and gave him a quick hug. “Cats are supposed to be psychic, aren’t they, Grimmy?” she asked. “Couldn’t you hint to him about dressing up for me?”
Grimalkin sniffed and gave her a searching look, as if there were something he thought she ought to know.
“See what you can do, won’t you?” She kissed his nose and put him on the floor. With a muted meow, he turned his back on her and marched disdainfully away, tail aloft. People, he seemed to say with scorn.
Back in the kitchen, Teri poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the Formica topped table. Peter come from the stove to set a plate of bacon and eggs, cooked exactly the way she liked them, in front of her.
“Dig in,” he said.
“Umm, looks great.” She took a bite and added through a mouthful of wheat toast and eggs, “By the way, you look really cute in that little apron, honey.”
The apron was not one of those “man-in-the-kitchen” jobs either, but definitely a woman’s apron, pink and white and ruffled all over—as close, she supposed, as he had yet gotten to dressing as a woman, and he did indeed look cute to her in it. She chewed her toast and when he turned back to the stove, she looked at his naked derriere and thought seriously about biting into one of his shapely little buns.
“Well, gee, if you say so.” He blushed all over, even his buns turning pink, but she could see that the remark had pleased him. He looked over his shoulder and flashed his especially adorable shy grin—the one that started slowly at his mouth and took a moment to reach his eyes—before he turned back to the skillet and his own eggs.
It was a start, she thought. Today, aprons, tomorrow, fish net stockings. She began to eat her breakfast with the hearty appetite she always displayed after their sexual episodes.
“You know, Bunny,” she said—a nickname generally saved for their most intimate moments—“You are the best little hubby any policewoman could wish for.”
Grimalkin had followed her into the kitchen. He rubbed impatiently against her bare leg, as if he had something on his mind.
* * * *
It was Grimalkin who later led Peter to the outlandish collection crammed into the laundry hamper. The Siamese sat on the floor and meowed repeatedly at the hamper as if trying to tell him something.
“What’s up, buddy?” Peter asked and lifted the lid on the hamper. He gasped at what he discovered there: an enormous length of garish floral patterned drapery, a silver blonde wig, high-heeled shoes covered with sequins, a red purse which, when he hastily opened it, turned out to be stuffed full with make-up—lipsticks, perfumes, rouge, mascara, liner. His head swam as he stared at purse’s contents.
That dream he’d had...he flashed back on that. It had been a dream, hadn’t it? Surely that could not have been real. But if it was not real, if it was only a dream, then how had these things come to be here, in the hamper? And hadn’t he dreamed, too, about filling a purse with make-up? It was all kind of vague, like one of those conversations you only half heard on a bus or in a bar.
“Honey, I’m going to do some laundry before I go,” Teri said from the bedroom. Peter snatched the clothes and the purse from the hamper and threw them behind the shower curtain and pulled the curtain closed. The lid of the hamper dropped with a bang, making Grimalkin jump. He swished his tail angrily and stomped out of the bathroom. Things were going very strangely around here, it seemed like to him.
Teri stepped over the disgruntled cat as she came into the bathroom and picked up the hamper. “Funny,” she said, giving it a shake, “I would have sworn this was
