Sarah and I climb into her 10year old Prius and drive to the La Encantada mall, far up on Tucson's northwest side. I'm still armored in my sweats and hoodie, though Sarah warns me that after we are done shopping she's taking all my old clothing home with her and will only return items she thinks are appropriate to my new body.
As we are driving up there I get a text from an unknown number, "Hi, I'm Sadie. Dr. Finch gave me your number and thought we might have something important in common. I won't text again unless I hear from you. Just know that everything will be OK! :)" My eyes grow wide at the message and it makes me feel really good to see it. I tell Sarah about it as we drive.
"Dr. Finch is the best. Honestly, she's helped me with a lot more than my annual coochie check!"
"Really? You call your va-jay-jay a coochie?" I ask... mocking her.
"You just called it a va-jay-jay! Why not call it a coochie? It's cute, non-threatening, and not at all sexy." Sarah replies as we turn into the mall entrance and she starts to look for parking.
"Fair enough. You think I should text this Sadie chick back?" I'm not sure, so I'm hoping Sarah will support me.
"Fer sure, Aussie. I can tell you about how to take care of your new stuff, and help you with dating stuff and clothes, but I haven't had the experiences you have, and I'm betting Sadie can help you with that." She says as she slides into a spot.
I quickly dash off a text... "Hi Sadie. I'm Austin. At least I was. Could we meet sometime soon for coffee, maybe down on fourth avenue?"
I'm reaching for the door handle when Sarah stops me. "No.. I'm sorry. You can't keep wearing that hoodie for even another minute Aussie! It's ninety-eight-fucking-degrees out there and you actually look really good without it on. So off with it!" She seems pretty serious.
I look at her... twisting my lips into a knot as I struggle with the notion of being in public and being readily identifiable as a woman. "Ok... but you have got to be close the entire time. I have no idea of how to act as a woman!"
She starts to laugh, "oh, that's right, god-damn, you didn't get to take the class in high school that the rest of us took... 'how to be a woman'! It's really too bad, you'd have learned the secret handshake and everything!" She gestures for me to take off the hoodie.
I fake groan and pull it off. I'm wearing an old Wilco tee-shirt that used to fit me really well, but when I stand up outside the car I can feel that it's a bit tight over my breasts and because of that it shows off a bit of my belly. It also hangs out, away from my belly as my breasts push it away from me. Sarah looks at me in the bright Tucson sun, a smile comes to her lips.
"Damn girl!" she winks, "you got some nice ol' titties!" She takes me by the hand and we walk into the mall, after I slip my old wallet in the back pocket of my sweats, as I'd done a million times as a guy. I've noticed how my boobs giggle when I walk, and to be honest had pretty much gotten used to it, but that was when they were more confined and weighed down by the heavy cloth of my hoodies. Now with only the light tee on I can feel them moving quite a bit. Sarah clearly notices this as well.
"Ok, first stop is Soma Intimates. If we don't strap those babies down we're going to end up needing to use a baseball bat to keep the men off you!" As hard as this is to contemplate for me I agree. The pearl of male awareness awakens inside my mind reminding me of those occasions when I'd pass a woman who wasn't wearing a bra and how my attention was completely captivated by the movement of her breasts.
We walking into the store and Sarah tells the wise looking lady who greets us that I need to be fitted for a bra as my 'weight' has changed a bit recently. I almost laugh out loud at that, thinking that it's completely true. My chest never weighed anything before three weeks ago and now I've got several pounds of boob there. She takes me back into the fitting rooms and pulls out her tape measure, finding my 'band' size to be a 36, and after a bit more assessment declares me to have c-cup breasts. I'm a 36c! Not that it means anything to me.
She's about to go and get a bra for me to try on but pauses, "Will you be wanting any panties today?"
I nod. "Oh, yah... I will."
The assistant pulls the tape across my hips at their widest point. "36 as well." She pauses and looks at my tummy, and I notice that my boxers are peeking up just a bit over the top of my sweats.
"ummm. My apartment got broken into and some perv took all of mine and left me with a bunch of his old boxers!" I lie.
"Fucking perverts!" Sarah chimes in, the assistant laughs, and goes out to find the lingerie for me.
She brings me a white, pretty 'balconette' bra that she says is supportive, pretty, and very comfortable. I nod as though its the bra I've been looking for my entire life while Sarah pushes me into a changing booth, telling the the sales assistant "She has anxiety problems when she's alone, so I'm helping her out."
She draws the curtain behind us and looks at me, "well, you certainly have grown a pair. Off with the shirt dude, let's get you fitted." I pull off my tee shirt and my 'girls' are on display.
I hold up the bra, aligning the ins and outs of it with my body and slide the straps over my shoulder, pulling the cups down over my breasts. I try to reach back to hook the strap and quickly realize that this is so much harder than women make it look. The pearl of my maleness laughs at me mockingly, 'you could barely unhook them when you looked over a girl's shoulder!' I keep fiddling with it for a long while, Sarah looking at me and finding it increasingly difficult to stifle the laughter about ready to burst from her.
"Listen, it's a skill, you'll need to practice and it'll become second nature soon enough. For now, just do it this way." She takes the bra from me, pulls the band around her chest (but over her shirt), with the cups behind her so that she can look down and see the hooks, fastens them, spins the bra around her body, and then slides her breasts into the cups and then her arms into the straps.