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One of the books Lev read about how to ace grad school recommended setting aside Saturday nights for partying, in order to avoid resenting the rigor of the rest of your schedule. He follows the spirit of the advice, if not the letter; no matter how overworked he is, he keeps his Saturday nights sacred.
It takes a long time to shave all his body hair; he has hair on his chest and his stomach and his arms and all over his legs, and a week is enough time for it to grow back into stubble. But moving the razor over his skin is meditative. He likes it. It's a way of marking the difference between being Lev and being Leia.
Having smooth skin is decadent. Every time he marvels at how soft it is, how easy it is to run his hand along it; every time he feels the slide of sheets against his skin. This is the point in the night where he gets hard.
When he gets out of the shower he touches up his toenails; this week they're a light pink. He puts clear nail polish on his fingernails and carefully plucks his eyebrows. No one notices, but he can tell they're there, and it's comforting during the week.
He's not blind. He's seen girls, he's even had a girlfriend, he knows what they dress like: Old Navy shirts and faded denim, clothes that wouldn't really look out of place on a man. But he's not a girl. It's just a fetish. And he wants to be beautiful. He wants to be someone you could look at and desire.
And he's pudgy and broad-shouldered and flat-chested and unalterably square, he has a little bit of a belly and flab under his arms and most repulsive of all a penis, that disgustingly male body part, that he can't even tuck away out of sight because the process of getting dressed turns him on so much. No one would pause in what they're doing to look at him; no one would want him.
But he can at least dress like someone they would want.
So he wears high heels and fishnet stockings held up with suspenders, a frilly lacy tulle skirt and a sheer bra. He puts on the cosmetics even the names of which fill him with longing; foundation and concealer, eyeliner and mascara and three kinds of eyeshadow, lipstick and blush and bronzer.
It's not right. But if he looks in the mirror and squints he can imagine being beautiful.
His hair is shoulder-length now. He jokes about how he never had time to cut it.
He doesn't jerk off right away, even though his stupid penis is still hard and making his panties bulge out. Instead he takes out his books from his secret cache. If he were doing it right, it would be transformation fetish pornography. But he's a failure even as an autogynephile. He has Cognitive Psychology of Memory and Blackwell's Handbook of Perception, Advances in Behavioral Finance and Characterizing Human Psychological Adaptations, books from a dozen graduate seminars he's not brave enough to try to audit.
He reads for an hour or four, until it is time for him to go to bed; then he begins the most pathetic aspect of this whole sorry business. He scrolls through Facebook for pictures of Sasha where he's smiling, happy, at peace with himself and with the world. He imagines being Sasha's girlfriend, imagines Sasha's dick in her pussy and his mouth on hers and his hands in her hair, imagines walking down the street holding hands and a wedding where she's in a white dress and being called a good girl, his beautiful girl. And when he's horny enough that he can bear it he puts his hand on his dick and jerks off in the most efficient manner possible and finishes.
As always, on Saturday nights, it concludes in disgust. The sticky white stuff on his hands is bad enough. Worse, no longer aroused, he's repulsed at how pathetic he is, at his failed imitation of womanhood, at the awkward way he looks in clothing intended for someone more beautiful than him, at the entire concept of jerking off to someone's Facebook feed and of using a real person as a tool to validate his imaginary womanhood, even in his own mind. He strips naked in a businesslike way and scrubs himself red and raw. He hides his books and clothes and makeup, knowing through long experience that throwing them out in disgust now will only lead to embarrassing and expensive purchases on Friday night.
He doesn't cry.
"....Nat is a sadist and Gwen kinks on monsters and hypno and on tying people up and I'm not sure I want to know what all is going on with Legion but there's a whole lot more than just masochism."
"That's... weird. --There have been studies, women who have non-masochism paraphilias basically don't exist, and there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that it's not just social desirability bias, women almost never die from autoerotic asphyxiation, they're almost never arrested for being exhibitionists or child molesters or grinding on people on subways--"
"Well, of the four girls I happen to be close friends with, one is a sadist, and one has a TF kink and a monster kink and a hypno kink and both ends of a bondage kink, and one is into things I don't actually know the names for, and one is a sub but I wouldn't call her particularly masochistic. And I find it very unlikely that I happened to become close friends with the only three girls with paraphilias in my city."
"Clinically, 'masochism' includes being interested in humiliation or degradation or taking orders or being tied up as well. --That's weird. I'm confused."
"It's possible these studies were conducted in the 1980s, or maybe paraphilia is being defined in a way that leaves out for instance omegaverse fic, or maybe researchers find what they expect to find as people studying gender are wont to do, or maybe something weirder is happening. But kinky women definitely exist and not all of them are subs with no kinks except submission."
"It's an extremely common fanfic trope, generally written by girls, where in addition to man and women there are alphas and betas and omegas and omegas go into heat and can get pregnant and alphas have weird dicks and go kind of nuts from pheromones when they're around omegas in heat. It's very loosely based on bad science about wolf packs, I think it comes from the Teen Wolf fandom but don't quote me on that last one."
"...You know, I have ever pretended to be a girl with weird sexual fantasies on the Internet."
"There's a lot of people writing and it would be really weird if they were all pretending."
Lev pulls out a plastic box from under his bed.
There's kind of a lot of clothes: stockings and miniskirts, dresses and knee-high lace-up boots, even a French maid outfit. It would be misleading to say that there were no common themes. The person who purchased this clothing clearly believes that, whenever possible, clothing should be sheer and see-through, or alternately made of leather or PVC, or alternately bright pink, or alternately so tight you can see every part of their body. They clearly desperately want to wear florals and bright colors, and yet have no idea which florals and bright colors look nice and which ones are blinding or something your grandma would wear or look like you made lingerie out of a carpet. There are multiple dresses with holes cut out where the breasts should be. Nevertheless, despite these commonalities and the amount of clothing, it's difficult to imagine how you'd assemble a single non-clashing and aesthetically pleasing outfit.
He has foundation that's the wrong shade for his skin and eyeshadow that looks like it comes from the 1980s and lipstick of a garish color that doesn't really belong on human lips. The nail polish is nice. There are three sets of breast forms, in sizes normal, large, and cartoonish.
Incongruously, there is also a stack of academic books, mostly about psychology.
......some of the dresses he can probably cut up for scrap fabric? He's going to need to get him foundation that suits him but he can probably use the rest of Sasha's makeup, but none of the clothes Sasha owns are likely to fit —
"That's — a lot."
"That makes sense.
.....you can use my lipstick and eye makeup probably but my foundation isn't going to be the right shade for you either, we might have to go to the drugstore."
"The sharing or the going to the drugstore? I can help you hide it if it's the drugstore but I can't buy you foundation without you there or you'll just get something totally the wrong color again —"
"I mean. It's not okay to do things in public if I'd get off on them, other people don't consent to be part of my fetish."
"....okay, but going to the drugstore to buy makeup for yourself isn't other people being part of your fetish."
"There would be a clerk and there might be other people in the store and I shouldn't involve them."
"People don't get turned on by the process of buying sex toys but I get turned on by the idea of doing things I associate with womanhood. Like buying makeup. And even if they do have a fetish for buying sex toys I think sex-toy store clerks opted in for that and the guy at CVS didn't."
".....you could go in with me so I can try out the samples on you and then leave while I buy them and not interact with the clerk while we're there?"