Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience. =My Ex-Wife`s Gurlfriendby kimmie holland and meeah menoux {When I saw her email} address in my mailbox that Monday morning, I knew immediately that she must have heard. We worked in the same industry, after all, and we knew many of the same people. In the four years since we'd broken up, we hadn't seen or spoken to each other, not even once. She was angry and disappointed; and I was hurt and confused. Our short but turbulent marriage produced nothing but bad feelings. I'd loved her desperately; she was, in fact, the love of my life. Why did our marriage fail? Why hadn't she loved me? Why couldn't I satisfy her? What went wrong? These were questions that I felt I could better answer now. Maybe she did, too. There'd been a time when I would have given anything to see an email from Wendy in my mailbox; now I wasn't so sure I even wanted to open it. I tapped my painted forefinger on the "delete" key several times before curiosity got the better of me and a flood of warm feelings came over me. I took my finger away from the "delete" key and tapped it on the "open-mail" button instead. Her message was short and to the point, rather matter-of-fact, just as I always remembered her emails to be, just slightly more friendly than businesslike, but not by much. She said that she hoped I was well, that she'd heard I'd gone through some personal changes, and that she was very happy for me. Now that some time had passed, she thought it might be nice to get together for lunch, if the idea appealed to me. In any event, she wrote, she wished me nothing but happiness in the future. I read through her message several times with tears in my eyes. When they started running down my cheeks, I had to get up to close my office door and then I sat back down in front of my computer to have a good cry. For an hour afterwards I debated whether to answer her email at all, or to answer in the same breezy tone as hers, thanking her for her note, wishing her well too, and letting the issue of lunch go significantly unanswered. Of course, the debate was a mere formality. The point was moot. All along I knew very well what I would do. I wrote her back to thank her for her thoughtful email, to tell her how surprised and how glad I was to hear from her, how I returned her best wishes...and to set a date for lunch the following week. {When she stepped out of the cab} she might have been stepping directly out of my most idealized memory of how she looked the last time I saw her five years ago. Even after all this time and all the changes I'd been through, I felt my heart give the same familiar stutter and flutter it always did whenever I set eyes on her. She was pretty, no one could deny that; but to me, Wendy was more than just pretty, more than just beautiful. Even where she departed from the conventional standards of beauty (which wasn`t often), especially when she departed from them, she was without question the most desirable woman I'd ever known. She was, if one existed, the only woman who could conceivably made a "man" of me. Our relationship had never been equal; Wendy never had anything like the same attraction towards me. I was always left with the distinct impression that she considered me only "good enough," and only barely good enough, at that. As a consequence, she always had the upper hand and she wielded it mercilessly. Seeing her again, I was painfully reminded how I'd begged her to stay, even after she made it clear she no longer loved me, even when she told me point- blank that she loved someone else. I'd hoped that hopeless attraction had changed with everything else that had changed about me, but from the moment I spotted her stepping out of that taxi I realized some things would never change. God, it wasn't only possible; it was true: I was still smitten with her! I admit that my feelings took me completely by surprised. Ambushed, I panicked. As much as she looked the same, I knew that I looked nothing like I did the last time she saw me. Standing outside the restaurant, I watched as she started across the street. She hadn't spotted me yet and the mad desperate desire to flee came over me. I could still dash off up the street in the opposite direction before she recognized me. But I didn't have forever. She would be expecting a woman to be waiting outside the restaurant. I was the only "woman" standing there. Seeing me, she would put two and two together quickly enough. I had to go--and I had to go now. But my sandals might just as well have been cemented to the pavement. I couldn't seem to budge. {"Michael?"} she asked, still not quite certain, using the name she'd known me by. A name I hadn't used in almost three years. I wonder if she noticed me wincing uncomfortably. Maybe she did. For she quickly corrected herself with that little Mona Lisa smile of hers. "I mean, Meeah..." It was too late to run, to chicken out, to deny it. She clearly "read" me by now. Her large, dark, limpid eyes fixed me, breathless, at her mercy. "Holy smokes, it is you!" "Hi Wendy," I said, sheepishly. "It's really nice to see you again." "Wow, I don't think I'd ever have recognized you if you hadn't told me about the red beret. It's suits you, by the way. Just adorable." I blushed, as if to match it. "Thank you..." Wendy leaned forward and gave me a quick, glancing buss on the cheek. Like she would one of her girlfriends. Did I expect it to be any other way? "Come on, let's go inside. I only have an hour for lunch and I'm famished. I haven't had a thing all day." {"So what can I get for you girls?"} The dark-haired, strikingly handsome waiter struck a pose by our table, smiling at us each in turn, obviously flirting. His French accent was playfully seductive. I sat there as if struck dumb while Wendy asked for two glasses of sparkling water and a little more time with the menus. "That was cute," she said, when he left for the kitchen. "He thinks we're both female. I guess you must get that all the time now, huh?" "Yes," I managed. "Pretty much." "Well I guess I can see why. If I hadn't known beforehand... No one would ever mistake you for a man, that's for sure." She didn't say it in a mean way, just as a matter of simple fact. I figured I might as well consider it a compliment. "Thanks," I said. She smirked. I wondered if she noticed how much I'd modeled my feminine persona on her? The way I dressed, how I'd styled my hair, even the thirty or so pounds I'd lost to reach 115...well, the fact was that we always did look sort of like the male and female versions of the same person. It was something that a lot of our friends and family had commented upon back in the old days. At the time it had seemed amusing. Now, our resemblance took on a whole new significance--one that I now found embarrassingly obvious sitting directly across from my pretty ex-wife. I'd never simply desired Wendy like any normal man would; instead, all along, what I really wanted was to be her! Now, instead of looking like male and female versions of the same person, we looked more like sisters than anything else. The cute waiter came back with our sparkling water and took our order. We asked for the French onion soup with the house salad. Rather, Wendy did. "We'll never be able to finish it anyway," Wendy said. "The portions here are enormous. You'll see." I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that she didn't remember how we used to come to this restaurant together all the time. I'd let myself hope that it was the reason she picked it for our reunion in the first place. Naturally, knowing Wendy, I should have known better. Still, I have to admit it hurt nonetheless to realize how little trace I'd left on her after our--albeit brief, but to me all-important--life together. Wendy was never exactly the sentimental type. Of the two of us, I was always the emotional one. And to think, I used to wonder why! Now with the mega-doses of female hormones coursing through my system, erasing, day by day, even the last faint traces of whatever masculinity I might have ever had, I was even more emotional than ever. Somehow I managed not to cry. {At first, our conversation} proceeded by fits and starts. I guess that was to be expected. We were divorced, after all, and what's more, we hadn't divorced on the best of terms. She blamed me, I knew, for the disappointing failure of our marriage and she resented me for wasting her time, for deceiving her, for not being the "man" that I had presented (and pretended) myself to be before we wed. It was no use telling her that I didn't consciously lie to her, that I didn't misrepresent myself with any malicious, or even premeditated intent. Yes, it's true that I may have kept certain facets of my personality hidden; that I kept secret a good many of my sexual fantasies. But, I figured, who doesn't? If Wendy had any suspicions about my true proclivities, and I'm certain she must have, I doubt until now that she could have had any idea of just how deep and how far they went. But, then again, I could honestly say, neither did I. Still, here I was, sitting across from her, the "man" she'd taken as a husband, wearing a denim jumper, a capped sleeve women's blouse, and a saucy little red beret. My thin wrists jangled with bracelets every time I reached for my water glass. My ice blue nail polish glinted in the light and, what's more, matched the polish on my toes, which were on display in a pair of Japanese style wooden flip-flops. I was wearing a bra. I had breasts. My bum was filled with my boyfriend's cream; he'd fucked me just that morning. I could feel it leaking out of me; it was squishy in my lace and ribboned panties. I remembered our wedding day. What a beautiful bride Wendy had made! She looked like something out of a fairytale walking down the aisle. I thought that was the point at which we would live happily ever after. How could anyone blame her for feeling cheated? How could anyone blame her for despising me? How could anyone blame her for blaming me for her disillusionment and our divorce, when not even I could? I glanced above Wendy's head to the mirrored wall behind her. Just look at what she married! Suddenly I knew what I'd come to say, what I wanted to tell her at long last. "I'm sorry Wendy," I blurted. "God I'm so so sorry. Please forgive me..." Words failed me after that brief outburst. And now I could no longer hold the tears back. Christ, I thought, now, on top of everything else, I was going to spoil my make-up! I groped around in my pocketbook for my compact. I surely didn't want to look a complete wreck when that cute waiter came back with our lunches! "It's okay Mich--I mean, Meeah. You'll have to forgive me--it's going to take me some time to get used to that. Wendy smiled, warmly this time, and put her hand on the back of my wrist. "Please don't cry. There's nothing to feel bad about anymore. It's true I was very angry with you for a long time, but that's all over, that's all in the past. Let's both put that behind us, along with all the bad memories. Everything has worked out for the best. We both have new lives now--the lives we were both meant to have all along. It took us a while to get it right, but thank god, we did. So let's not waste any more time regretting the past. It happened for a reason--it helped us get to where we are today. So what do you say we let bygones be bygones and start over. What do you say...can we be friends?" I'd managed to stop crying but nearly found myself starting all over again at Wendy's unexpected display of kindness. "Gosh," I sniffed, "I really would like that. Do you mean it?" "Of course I do you silly rabbit. Oh look, here's our lunch!" {"You're engaged,"} I said, three spoonfuls into my savory bowl of French onion soup. I tried to make it sound like a casual question; of course, it was anything but. I'd noticed the ring on her finger when she placed her hand on my wrist. How could I miss it? The stone was practically the size of a ping-pong ball. Wendy held her hand up so we could both admire it and wiggled her pale slender fingers, more precious to me than any diamond. The stone seemed to catch light I didn't even know existed. "It's beautiful," I said, and it was--it must have cost a fortune. I could never have afforded to buy Wendy anything half so beautiful, not even in my wildest dreams. Be honest, I told myself. You have no balls, your dick doesn't work anymore, and it never will; you're totally impotent, emasculated, feminized--and, yes, you're happier this way, happier than you've ever been, and yet, you still feel your heart drop a little when you think of your ex-wife getting re-married. Consciously, you know it's right that things have worked out this way, that she, too, deserves to be happy. After all, you've found a man, why shouldn't she? But still, there's that ache deep inside, that awareness of an empty place that will never be filled, the place only she could fill, and in that place nothing but a sense of irretrievable loss. "Congratulations..." When she tells you the name of the lucky man she's marrying the mix of emotions you feel grows even more impossibly complex. You always suspected she was more than "just friends" with Tim, that their frequent lunches were at least a titillating flirtation, at worst something you didn't want to think about. How many arguments did the two of you have about those lunches, how bitterly did you accuse her and how vehemently and disdainfully did she deny what you suspected? Now you find that the worst of your suspicions were true, that you were right all along. If this were another lifetime, if you were a different person, there could hardly be a better time to say "I knew it" and "I told you so." This would be the time to demand an admission or an apology or, at the very least, an acknowledgment, but you lack the will and the desire for any of that now. Most of all, you lack the justification, too; because, let's face it, looking at the bigger picture, she really was the one who was right all along. On the whole, the bigger lie was yours; hers was merely a contingent technicality. So, instead of recriminations, and though you fear for a moment the words themselves might strangle you, you manage to say them, "That's really great. I'm happy for you, Wendy" and, strangely, even miraculously, in some small way you don't even understand, you might actually mean what you say. "We'd like you to be there for the wedding; you and your boyfriend. Andrew, is that his name?" Be there, at her wedding, only this time to another man. Another man? Ha! This time to a man! At first it seemed like a nutty idea to invite me, but the more I thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make. Suddenly, I began to see how attending Wendy's wedding to Tim might actually be a positive, uplifting, and ultimately healing experience. Perhaps, I began to think, it was just the sort of closure we both needed. {She was looking into my lap}, I noticed, with a bemused expression on her face. We we're finishing our coffee and the check was on the way. I knew what she was going to ask. "Are you functional? I mean, down there...?" I shook my head. "No. Not for quite a while now, actually." The hormones I was taking had long ago shut down the functioning of my testicles so that when Andrew decided to have me castrated, it was little more than a formality. What I still had hanging between my legs was now completely useless... a fleshy--and, to me, unsightly--blemish not much different than a wart. I'd been glad to see my testicles go and I would be equally glad to see the silly flap of flesh that remained go as well, but Andrew enjoyed playing with it, at least for the time being; so, for the time being, it stayed. The surgery that would turn me fully into a woman and provide Andrew with an additional opening in which to fuck me was still somewhere in my future. But it was there, clearly, on my horizon, and it was getting closer every day. In fact, after today, I suspected that I'd taken several giant steps toward my ultimate fate. Even sitting as close as I now sat to my beautiful ex-wife, I felt nothing below my pierced bellybutton. If the desire were there, it survived only in my mind, only in theory. There was no chance, even if, by some miracle, she'd wanted it, that I could ever again make love to Wendy. She smiled. "I didn't think so. I told Tim as much, but I'm glad to hear you confirm it. He'll be okay with us being friends then, I think. He may want to see for himself...I know that's a lot to ask of you and may be a little embarrassing, but it might not even be necessary. I think one look at what you're like now and he'll laugh at the very notion that I could ever have anything to do with you sexually ever again." It was a bitter thing to hear, of course, even if it were true, even if I'd come to the same conclusion, but I knew Wendy wasn't being unkind. She was just stating the fact of the matter. The more painful irony was that while Wendy fully understood and was eager to placate Tim's suspicion regarding her relationship to me, she'd had no regard for my feelings about her relationship with Tim while we were married. "It's different, Meeah," Wendy said, as if reading my mind. "Tim is a man, a real man. You're probably just finding out how men can be about things like that." She grinned. "Come to think of it, I guess you're just finding out how they can be about a lot of things!" {Something so potentially humiliating}, how could I ever have agreed to such terms? That is probably what you're asking. I guess partly I hoped it would never actually come to having Wendy's new husband check for himself to see that I was no longer a man, to confirm with his own eyes the pitiful remains of my "manhood," the mark of my emasculation...I was wrong, of course, it did come to that, but that's a story for another time. What really drove me to accept her terms, however, wasn't just the hope that I could avoid the more unpleasant of their ramifications, but the rewards of her friendship. Yes, I wanted more than anything to be Wendy's friend, her special gurlfriend, if you will. If I'd failed as her husband, I was certain I could at least succeed as her gurlfriend. I'd found a place in her life, after all! Why, you may be asking now, was it so important to me to have a place in her life at all, not to mention such a marginal place at that? I suppose it makes no sense unless you can understand that I still loved her...unless you can understand that if you've ever loved anyone at all, really loved them, there's no such thing as "still" loving that person: you will always love them, no matter what, no matter how, until the last breath escapes your body. No, it's true. We would never have sex again, certainly not as man and woman, but not as "lesbians" either. A kiss on the cheek, a warm hug--there would be never be anything much more than that, nothing erotic, in any x-rated sense of that term. Still, if it is a man who is now reading these words, and I assume that it probably is, I can assure you that there is so much more to "love" than what goes on between one's legs. I love Wendy, that wasn't the mistake I made in convincing her to marry me. The mistake I made was in confusing my love with the mistake I made in assuming that I was a man. It was a mistake compounded by an error and multiplied to infinity. I had to lose what was between my legs before I could understand that, before I could correct and undo all that I had done wrong. I imagined Wendy and I being really good friends, maybe even best friends, someday. I imagined us chatting on the phone for hours, going shopping, getting our manicure/pedicure done together. I imagined us having lunch just as we were doing now. I pictured the men in our lives eventually becoming friends and us all going out together, double-dating, if you will, visiting each other's houses, perhaps one day even taking a vacation together. It was a beautiful dream; surely, I figured, one that was worth risking whatever potential embarrassment it might cost to make it come true. I'd endured much worse, for far less. And it did come true! That was the best part of all. I did become my ex-wife's best gurlfriend. But, that too, is a story for another time... [For more stuff by us--pictures, art, video, real-life experiences, please visit our blog at: http://thefreakbox.blogspot.com/ and our novellas at: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fStoreID=336055&fMode=edit]