Top Man

Surely the best man you will ever meet is the guy who finds you injured in the wilderness, unable to walk, and he almost carries you out, and saves your life. That guy is a top man. Tom Peel was just that man.

I was hunting so I was well off the trail. I was in a valley that I knew was good but was not well trodden ground. If Tom had not come by, a man would have died. In a funny way, a man did die.

I had stepped in a hole so deep that it did not just turn an ankle on the leading foot (it did) but it wrenched other knee even worse. I could not move, not even to make a crutch for one leg, if that might work. But after just lying there wondering if this was the end, I heard something in the brush and I called out, and he was there.

He was big -- bigger than me, and I am 6 ft tall and 185 lbs. About the same age or even older, and that is too old to be lying immobilized in the woods. I could not help but notice that his rifle was a Jarret -- a hand-built weapon, far superior to my Ruger.

"Have you got problems Buddy?" he asked, although he could see I had.

"Right ankle left knee", I said. "I can't walk."

The boot and sock were off my right foot. He looked at the injury with some clear knowledge.

"We can bind that," he said. "As for this knee, does this hurt?"

"Fuck yes," I said.

"Medial ligament, I think", he said.

"Is that bad?" I asked. He nodded. "You seem to know a lot."

"I used to play pro football in another time. It's a common enough injury. But it's a season ender. We need to get you down to my camp to have a closer look. It's not too far away. I can help you."

And that is what he did. He took me and my backpack and rifle and he lifted me up and I hopped down the valley with him carrying 95% of my weight the whole way.

"My Name is Tom. Tom Peel," he said.

"I am Jim," I said. "Jim Rankin."

His camp was concealed behind some living brush that he swept aside. I could see why. Beside his small tent he had a fireplace that looked as if it had been used for years, and a tree stump that clearly served as a butcher's block with a bough for hanging carcasses nearby. This was a place he stayed at regularly and had done so for years, by my guess, but it was spartan, as they say

"It is getting too dark to get you down to my truck tonight," he said. "Let me look at your knee. Sit on the stump and take your pants off."

I was in no position to argue, but I would have preferred not to. He could see immediately that my legs were shaved. In fact, I was fully shaved to the waist. It was just good luck that I was not wearing panties. Only when I am hunting or playing sport do I wear men's underwear. I prefer women's clothes, but I lived a man's life, so I needed to choose my moments.

"Nice legs," he said. "And I could have sworn that I smelt some ladylike perfume on you as I helped you here."

It seemed crazy that I would go out smelling like that. It was a mistake. But he was on to me, yet not judging me. He was looking at the swelling on my knee and prepping a compression bandage from some cloth meat bags in his kit. He appeared not to care that I had women's legs, so why try to give an explanation? In any event I didn't have one. He just went on to bind my knee and ankle.

"You are a life saver," I told him, and he was a lot more than that. He knew what he was doing, he was looking after me, whoever of whatever I was did not matter to him.

"Are you up from the city?" he asked. "Have you hunted these woods before?"

"Yes, to both," I said to him. "I have been doing this for years. I feel stupid falling in a hole. My eyes were on a buck. I am guessing you don't make stupid mistakes like me?"

"Everybody makes mistakes," he said. "Nobody is perfect. I am going to make a fire. You keep the weight off."

"What about you?" I said. I had been aching to ask, but for the ache in the knee.

"I am local," he said. "I run the sawmill in Peelville, just over yonder. I have been coming to these woods since I was stump high."

"Tom Peel from Peelville?"

"That's no coincidence," was all he said about that. The fire was coming to life. "I have some smoky pork sachets and I can make us a hot drink too. We'll get some sleep and make an early start. We can see how far you can walk, but then I may need to go down alone and drive my truck up the river to get you."

In the end that is what we had to do. We struggled down to below the waterfall where the river opened up over shingle, and he left me to collect his truck. But that was the day after. Before that happened, I was to spend a night in Tom's tent.

It was already dark when we had something to eat and we talked about hunting, and hunting in these hills and hollers in particular. I must have appeared to be in discomfort because he said: "I have no painkillers, but I do have a flask of corn liquor, if you are interested?"

We drank and then we went into the tent. He needed to help me into my sleeping-bag as I could not bend my knees. His hands touched my smooth legs, intentional or not was hard to determine in the dark. It was like electricity.

"You may find this hard to believe, but the fact that I dress as a woman sometimes does not make me less of a man." I am not even sure why I said those words. It was clear to me that he knew I cross-dressed, and I felt that given all that he had done for me, I owed him that honesty. But why say that I was a man when really, I have always thought that I am not completely that? I guess I thought that we were two hunters in the woods and that I how it should stay. I heard him getting into his bag beside me with replying and settle himself on the soft bed of brush he had put under the plastic floor of the tent.

"I am sure that you would make a very attractive woman," he said in the darkness.

"Sadly, not true. My jaw is too big, and my eyes not big enough."

"I would like to see you in a dress," he said.

People have seen me dressed, but I do not make a habit of parading myself. If I was better looking as a woman, then maybe? But there was something about him talking to me this way that was exciting. I needed to say something, so I did: "I don't hunt with a dress in my pack".

"I have a clean long tank top," he said. "Too big for you, but you can wear it tomorrow. Will you do that?"

"Sure," I said. I owed him my life.

I heard him roll over towards me. He asked: "What do you call yourself when you are dressed as a woman?"

"Gina," I said.

He reached over to take the side zipper on my bag, and I heard the slide run down. His huge rough hand entered the bag and reached down to stroke my smooth thigh. I let it happen. I let him do that.

"Just don't touch my crotch," I said to him. "I am ashamed of what you will find there."

"I know what should be there," he said. "And it's not what I have here." There was something else touching me -- something soft and very hot.

It was an invitation. I knew that. I had never touched another man's penis before that night. I might have dreamed about it, but I never had. But my hand was wrapped around his erection. It was hotter than I would have thought possible -- a fever. He sighed. He loved my touch, and I loved that he did.

"Pull me Baby," he said. "Jack me."

He called me Baby, as if I was a girl. It was all I needed to abandon the maleness in me. I wondered later if I would have rolled over and sucked him if my knee would have allowed it, but my hand was all I could offer. I kept it slow, but it seemed that he was excited beyond restraint. He came.

I had the presence of mind to catch it in my hand when I felt the first pulse of orgasm. I know the male body. He groaned. My cupped hand was full. What was I to do with it? I was not going to spread it across my shirt or my sleeping bag. I licked it off my palm. My first taste of semen.

Despite the pain in my knee, I fell asleep smiling, with the taste of his cum in my mouth.

The tank top was bright orange, to be worn over his clothes as a high visibility garment. It was big even for him, but on me it came down to mid-thigh, and with a belt around it is was a dress.

"That color looks good on you," he said.

He carried my pack strapped to his. He helped me all the way down to below the falls. With my arm around his strong shoulders in my orange "dress" I felt ridiculously weak and feminine, and I felt fantastic. The injuries did not matter to me. I had him. All the feelings were unnatural, but good.

I should explain that I had until I met Tom, lived a heterosexual life, albeit with a hunger to be female in every sense. I lived the life that I was born to, because there seemed no other possible life. Even there, as I sat alone on the riverbank and I heard his truck coming up across the shingle, it seemed that my life would return to what it had always been.

"We can collect your vehicle later," said Tom. "For now we will take you to the local clinic and have your knee and foot looked at, at least."

The 'at least' held the promise of something more, and that is what happened when we arrived in Peelville. As he had suggested, the town was named after his forbear who had built the first timber mill there. A much larger and more modern mill now occupied the site, and Tom was the principal owner and the sole operator of it.

The clinic was attached to the mill which funded it, but it served the town and had two experienced nurses plus room for visiting health professionals.

"I need to get changed out of the dress you kindly loaned me," I said with a smile as we pulled up outside.

"Don't you dare," he said. "We left that guy in the woods. As long as you are in my town, you are Gina. I wouldn't have it any other way."

"Tom, I don't think I am ready for this," I said. "No matter how much I might want it."

"In this town, things are the way I say they are," he said. "This town would be nothing without the mill, and there are plenty of timber towns around these parts with no working mill, so most people think that is down to me. I think they might be right. Anyway, if I say you are a woman in my town -- in particular if I say you're my woman -- then that is what you are."

Was I really his woman? It was all I could think about as the knee and ankle were being treated, and I was being issued with a pair of crutches

After I was free of that, he announced: "I have booked you in at the local beauty shop and I will have the ladies' boutique bring you round their catalogue to choose from. Before I return you to your car, I would like to take you to lunch, Gina".

The nurse drove me down to the beauty shop in Peelville Mainstreet, a collection of shops, one municipal building and a Church -- a slice of small-town-America. I was still wearing Tom's orange singlet, without the belt now, but with a girlish legs and bare feet, I was a woman below while remaining a man above. The ladies inside were about to change that.

"Top has told us what to do," the lady clearly in charge said.

"Top?"

"Tom Peel," she said. "He pays. He pays for a lot around here. Now first, you need to take some of our herbal tea."

I had no idea, but the famous "Peelville Herbal Tea" is a sedative and is used widely in the state as a cure for insomnia. It is the biggest earner in Peelville after the mine, and the factory that makes is also owned by the Parkin family. Anyway, it sure worked on me, as I passed out while they were washing my hair and massaging my scalp.

When I came to, the shampoo girl was holding up in front of me a beautiful floral dress.

"We have chosen for you," she said. "It will go so well with your new hair color."

My what? I thought that there was a mirror behind her but as I craned around, I could see a woman in the salon taking a peek at me. But it was a mirror. And that woman was me.

Was it an auburn wig? If it was, how was I wearing my hair up in such a feminine style? And the makeup job was fantastic. There was no hiding the masculine cut of my jaw, but the eyes were big under the shaped brows and with long lashes attached, and even bigger for the stare I was giving. I reached up to touch my face. It was smooth. Unnaturally smooth. Even with a close shave I usually needed to apply foundation with a trowel.

"My skin? My hair?" I was just babbling in disbelief.

"Just how I wanted it." I recognized the voice. Somehow it was exactly what I wanted to hear. I turned the other way and there he stood, washed, shaved and dressed smartly in a blue shirt and tan pants.

"You look beautiful," he said. I must have blushed. "Your face has been waxed and your hair has been extended. It is not a wig that you can take off. Forgive me, but that is what I wanted."

"Do you always get what you want?" I said. It could have been an accusation, but somehow it came out very differently. It was almost said in admiration.

"Around here I do," he said. "But what you do from here is up to you. I have come to take you to dinner as it is too late for lunch. You have some special underwear to put on, that dress -- if you like it; and these shoes -- if you can walk un them." He held up a pair of gorgeous wedge heeled sandals.

As I reached out for them, I saw that my arms had been stripped of hair too. How could I explain that? Hairless arms and plucked eyebrows. Even if the hairdo was cut off, I would still look strange. Not like a woman -- God knows I could never look like that -- but a very strange looking man.

"Are you coming?" Tom said.

I cleared my throat. I wanted to reply, but reply in the voice of a woman. I had no such voice. My voice was deep. I could just croak a whisper: "Yes. Yes please."

He smiled, and said: "I'll wait outside while you get dressed."

The underwear was tight formwear giving me a feminine shape and tucking away my maleness. It could do nothing to conceal my broad shoulders, but the dress had half sleeves and a cut that disguised my make shape further. The dress was bright and screamed confidence. I loved it. The shoes too, but I still needed crutches so could not display them as I would like.

"I have packed you a small bag with some lipstick and mascara." I barely had time or sense to understand her -- it was like a dream.

When outside I needed his arm for support, but it seemed to me that I had spent 24 hours with that arm, and somehow, I belonged there holding it.

The restaurant was an annex to the diner, and we were the only guests. Perhaps he had arranged that. He seated me.

"I will have a beer," he said. "But you should drink champagne." So I did.

I had to ask him why everybody called him "Top".

"Well, maybe it is because that was the rank I had in the army; or maybe it is because I am the big cheese in this this town; but it also happens to be my initials -- Thomas Orville Peel; and it is my preferred position."

"I am pretty sure that I am not up for that," I said with a smile, because I assumed that he was joking with me.

"A woman always has the final say," he said. "And as far as I am concerned, that is what you are. I knew it from the moment I saw those legs of yours. And now that I see you dressed as you are, there can be no doubt."

"You really are doing me a wonderful favor," I said. "I ache to look this good. But I will never look like the woman I would like to look like. You saved my life, and now you give me this, even if only for a day."

"You have looked at yourself too critically for too long," he said. "I have only known you for that day and a night before it. I can't see a man."

He saved me and now he was making me feel as good as I had ever felt. And the whole evening was like that. I might have thought at the beginning that it was at best artfully shovelled bullshit, at worst a cruel joke at my expense. But as our meal wore on it became clear that he believed every word. He really did desire me.

You can say whatever you like about submitting to gay sex for the first time in your life at my age, but I had been preparing my ass as a fantasy for years. It was something I did sometimes when I was dressed as a woman, as if having something inside you down there confirmed that it was more than just clothing. I had never thought that it would happen, but now suddenly I found myself in a position where I could experience a man sexually for the first time.

More importantly, what this man promised with his eyes was not as some animalistic act, but as genuine love-making. Who would turn that down?

His house was a huge mansion between the town and the sawmill; his bedroom bigger than my entire apartment, and his bed almost as big as my living room.

"With the injury to your knee I would not ask you to get down on all fours," he said. "So, it has to be face to face, with you lying down and looking up at me, if you are good with that?"

I looked at him with eyes that seemed suddenly wet. Here was a man who wanted me and wanted to see me. He did not see the ugly male me -- he saw the woman within me and only her.

"Yes," I said. "Yes Please."

He had lubrication, thank God. His horn seemed even larger than the remembered from the night before, and larger than the dildo I had used at home in my efforts to feel more female. I lay back and spread my lovely new hair across the pillow. I think that my lips were quivering, so he kissed them to still them. My first kiss from a man. My first yielding kiss. I realized that I had been waiting for this my whole life.

He seemed to have made my whole body as sensitive as my lips. Plucked clear of hair, softened by the moisturizers used at the salon, and now heated by foreplay, my body could feel like never before. It was as if I felt the head of his penis before it even touched me, let alone enter me. There was no resistance. If anything, my body welcomed him and pulled him inside me.

He ploughed me starting with gentle strokes, building as we both grunted and gasped. It was exquisite.

We came together -- our screams in unison, but his so much deeper than mine. The sound from my lips was me, but somehow less than male. It struck me that it was the sound of a man become woman. A person changed by the man still inside her, filling her with his hot seed.

I opened my eyes and he was looking down at me, begging me to be his, always.

And I am. I am Mrs Peel, the wife of the Top Man in this town. The man I always want on top of me.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2020