After the sixth pair of panties that would be too ugly for most women to even wear on laundry day, I asked, “Why did you get these? You have better taste than this!”
“I just needed to work up the courage to buy panties, in public,” he answered. “It was important.”
“You think anyone really looks at what anyone is buying in a Walmart?” I laughed. He wasn’t laughing with me. I suppose it actually wasn’t really a joke, just a statement about the ambivalence of the people at Walmart.
“There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Really!”
“I was in a panic the entire time—I felt like everyone was staring at me,” he said.
“If anyone asked, you could have said it was for your girlfriend. But no one was going to ask, anyway!”
“I tried to say that once at Victoria’s Secret and they kicked me out. I felt like a criminal. They must have just known,” he said.
“Well, their stuff is way over priced and the people who work there are REALLY annoying. They practically kicked ME out of the store for not agreeing to get their credit card after purchasing one damn bra.”
Then he actually laughed.
“Do you want to see what else I got?” he asked.
“Of course!” I answered.
“It’s a secret,” he said.
“I mean, you did put your fist inside me while I was technically on the clock. Your secret is definitely safe with me!”
He pulled out a big shoe box stored underneath his passenger seat. It was a large pair of pointy ankle boots. They sure were a “Secret”—strong enough for a man, but made for a woman.
“Did you try them on?” I asked.
“Not in the store, but yes. I did. And they fit perfectly!” He smiled.
“Is this your first pair of…” I stopped myself midsentence. I was going to say “women’s shoes” but would that be offensive for me to imply these were shoes made for a woman and not a man? And if I said, “Is this your first pair of shoes?” then that would make him sound like a child, or a hobo, who didn’t own any shoes. I was stuck inside of the ocean of a sentence and I wasn’t sure how to move forward and I was too deep to go back.
“Yes, they are my first,” he answered. He knew what I was trying to say. He squeezed his feet into the shoes and put them on. He smiled and held my hand.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Thanks for what? Watching you put on a pair of shoes?”
“Yes, I suppose you’re the first one to see me do this.”
“You’re talking about it like I’m watching you do heroin!” I said. “You need to relax!”
I hated when people told me to relax, and I was almost never relaxed. I felt hypocritical saying the words out loud.
“You can talk to me, Billy. But if you don’t want to talk that’s okay, too. I’m here and I love your shoes, and your panties—well, I like the panties you got from my store, not those other ones!” I kissed him, and he firmly held my hand. He squeezed it tightly.
“So I’m from Boca Raton,” he said.
“Ha! Really? It’s… incredibly fancy there,” I answered.
“I was engaged to a woman I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with. We were high school sweethearts, we dated through our early twenties. We went to college together, then she went on to med school, studying to be a surgeon. I was working with my father. He owned a construction business and he was training me to take it over from him so he could retire early.”
“Okay…”
“Well, I had this strong urge to dress up ever since I was young. To feel the flowy fabrics against my skin. To feel… pretty. I never got to explore it. I thought the urge would go away, but it didn’t. It kept me up at night. Finally, I got myself just one pair of panties and a pair of stockings. I actually drove to a Rite Aid in a different county to get them. I hid them in the crawl space above my fiancée’s and my bedroom that she never went into. I would put them on every Tuesday evening, when she had night class. I walked around the house, I would walk around on my tiptoes and pretend I was wearing high heels. I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I just knew it was something I had to do.” He paused.
“One Tuesday night, I wound up getting a little tipsy while I dressed up. I had accumulated panties, stockings, and a camisole I found at the Good Will. The outfit was a complete disaster but I was enjoying myself. I lost track of time, and my girlfriend came home. I quickly got everything off and shoved it under the bed. Thinking about it now, maybe I just wanted to get caught. I don’t know. But she found them, and she brought them into my work the next day at the construction site, where I was with my father. She stormed right in and looked like she had been crying.”
“Okay,” I said, while he held me closer and teared up a bit as he continued to talk.
“She said, ‘WHOSE ARE THESE?’ She thought I was cheating on her. I thought an honest answer would be a sigh of relief, so I said they were mine. But I sure was wrong. My father punched me in the face and called me a faggot and had security remove me from the site. I haven’t heard from either of them, or even my mother, ever since. They wouldn’t answer my calls, they wouldn’t even let me come get my stuff. So I got a job delivering produce. I stay in my truck and motel rooms and I just keep moving.”
“When did that happen?” I asked.
“About two years ago,” he said. “I was confused by this feeling and I still am. I mean, I’m not gay. I tried that when I first got on the road a few times and it—well it didn’t really work, if you know what I mean. I never masturbated and thought of having sex with men. I’m not ashamed of my cock. I like my cock, but I don’t want to see it when I put my panties on. I’ve tried fitting in with different groups of people in the past two years, and I don’t really fit in anywhere. But I know that this part of me is important and I need to explore it more and I’m just sick of being embarrassed or ashamed.”
I held him. I understood. Maybe not to the exact degree, but I was never quite weird enough for the weirdos and I was never normal enough for the normies. There were bits and pieces of me scattered all over the place and I wasn’t quite sure how they all fit together. My iTunes never knew how to make a proper “genius” mix for me because my two favorite music artists at that moment were Ariana Grande and Depeche Mode. Seriously.
And yeah, the fact that there’s no perfect Pandora station for me doesn’t hold a candle to being punched in the face by your father, but I knew that I always had a hard time being comfortable with just about anyone I had ever met, anyone ever, except… Billy. Whose last name I still didn’t know. That was a minor detail.
“Well, what should we do next?” I asked. “I have a day off, and I am up for anything.”
“How about we start with taking a shower?”
“Right! Where exactly do you shower by the way?” I asked. I looked under the bed as if there might be some kind of miniature, compact, folding bathroom underneath there. It wasn’t completely outlandish to think that. There was, after all, a miniature microwave, a micro miniature fridge that made the usual college mini fridges look giant.
“Get ready, girl, for your first truck-stop shower!” he said. I know my apartment was a mere eight miles away and I fully just did pay for my portion of the water bill, but I felt like Billy and I were existing in some kind of dream bubble; going back to any semblance of my “real” life would make this bubble pop and the dream would end. And I wasn’t ready for it to end.