Circle of Friends Part 2

 Part 2

We got radios. Fortunately, we all lived within range of each other. Every morning we'd get up early for a group conference, then split off twice to share an update on the previous day. If you weren't up on time, you missed out on your clues for the day, and so did the person you were supposed to brief.

Weekends were a little strange at first, as a guy in a girl’s body, getting dressed or more specifically deciding what to wear, and what goes with what, takes time, so a few calls along the way were required. I must confess though that the first weekend, I was Tiff, and had several hours alone, I was put on a private fashion show as I tried on most of the wardrobe, just to see how it felt to be wearing tight clothes or long dress, and lets not even mention various undergarments. I even tried walking in her high heeled shoes and knee length boots, well practice makes perfect, as they say.

All of us got awfully familiar with being in both kinds of bodies over the next few weeks. None of us were willing to experiment with each other just yet, but we all had fingers. It made the girl bodies look less foreign, especially when I was wearing one, but it didn't make them less interesting. It made the guy bodies more interesting when I was in a girl body, and that made for interesting fantasies.

Maybe it was that 'been-there-worn-that' familiarity, but it got to where we could sense where each other was, and sometimes what the others were doing. It was like a web was growing, a web with all of us at the same time out on the edges and in the center, and it made the six of us closer than ever. By now we were hanging out together all the time, enough so that other people were starting to try to guess who the couples were within the group.

We actually gave some thought to pairing off so people would have their curiosity satisfied and they'd go stare at somebody else. The rotation worked against it, though; there'd be no way for us to make the pairing look real, not with six people playing the parts on different days, and that'd focus even more attention on us.

That didn't mean we didn't spend more and more time thinking about each other, though. What was weird to me was how, more and more, my fantasies went along with the body I happened to be wearing. On a day when I was Tiff, I might fantasize about any of the three guys in our group, my own body included. When I was one of the guys, the girls were on my mind a lot.

It started to affect how we'd act towards each other. We'd be together as a group, and out of nowhere the thought of being naked and intimate with one of the others would bubble up, and everyone would pick up on it and suddenly be in the mood too. Suddenly we'd have three girls hugging themselves and three guys dealing with the tree that sprouted in their front yard. All of us got equally familiar with, not only feeling the effects, but watching the other side experience them.

It got to where we'd think nothing of being naked and aroused in front of each other, because, of course, we'd not only seen it all, we'd worn it all and felt it all.

We even starting teasing each other. The mood would flash around, and then we'd have the guys showing off their erections, especially those who started out as girls, and those of us who happened to be girls at the time would respond by flashing our stiff nipples. Then we'd hang out like that for a while before putting everything back on so we wouldn't get caught.

Finally school let out for the year and then we at least didn't have to pretend to people our own age; instead, we had to pretend in front of parents who didn't know what we were going through and couldn't have understood if they had. I guess every teenager feels the same way, but in our case we had real reasons for that attitude.

We went on a lot of hiking trips and beach runs that summer, and hung out in the town's parks a good deal every day, at least until mosquito time. Our folks thought it was smart of us to avoid vegging out in front of the TV, but we were more concerned with not having to put on an act in front of them. It gave us a lot more time to learn all the little details about each other's lives, so we wouldn't be caught unprepared when they came up.

On those hot summer evenings, if we had someplace where we could get some privacy, we'd end up with everybody topless, sharing the sweat. We all got real good at getting all the tank tops and bikini tops back on real quick if somebody showed up. It was funny sometimes, when someone would reach for a familiar top and have it pulled out of their hands by the person who really needed it, and only then realize that they didn't need it that night because they were a guy.

Towards the middle of the summer, we got back from one of those all-day beach runs and hung out for a while at Tiff's place, because her folks were out a lot. That happened to be who I was at the time. I went upstairs, pulled off my bathing suit, showered, and then walked into the den wearing a short tee shirt and nothing else, just to see how long it took everybody to notice, and how they'd react.

They reacted, all right. Right then the sexual energy that had been building between us let out. I had the other guys-in-girl-bodies pulling off my shirt and kissing my boobs, and then the guys were doing it too, so the other girls took off everything and got some attention too. The guys got attention as well, there was a lot of fondling going around, all of it playful but all of it seriously affectionate too.

That party went until late, and a few of us fell asleep waiting for the right movie to be on. When we woke up, those of us who'd dozed off were switched all around again while those who stayed up all night hadn’t; I went home in Steph's body.

After that, the change didn't just rotate us, it mixed us up every night. At least we had some kind of 'override' on the constant switching, though, now that we knew about it. If you needed to be in a particular body, you could do that if you could get some time alone with the person who was wearing it, long enough to take a nap together.

With all the switching around, relations with our natural families had to suffer. Steph's family was Catholic, and Mike's were fundy Christians, and the rest of us had laidback parents, but the position of each of us in the family was getting to be just a role, something we memorized to go with the form. With six roles to be played, that's all they could be. That distinction distanced us from our other family members even when we were in our own bodies. Mike had it the worst.

Mike had long since discarded his parents' beliefs, of course. He had to. As intelligent as he was, the glaring logical holes in their doctrine gave a nursery-rhyme taint to it all, especially once he started seeing it through others' eyes. It would have been like believing in the Tooth Fairy even after you caught your parents in the act of swapping the tooth under your pillow for money. What he was going through just didn't match their dogma at all: knowing your place and being happy in it meant exactly nothing when that place kept moving.

That didn't give him anything to try to replace it with, though, just an emptiness he hadn't expected of life, and it left him lonely and dispirited, forced out of belonging to something that was warm and well-meaning. Now he was beyond them in a way he hadn't asked for, and he was hurting for it, especially so one day when he was sitting alone in his own body and feeling cut off from everything that was supposed to go with it.

The rest of us had to notice, of course. I waved to Lynne and Dave and we all gathered around him, sitting close and hugging him. I told him, "You've got a family right here. You know we're going to have to all be one big family. There's just no way any of us can cope otherwise."

There was agreement from the other four, of course. I had crystalized something that we'd been feeling lately: that no one outside our group of six could possibly understand what we were going through, and we would have to build our own family based on that. Now we had a reason to work on that too: replacing some of what Mike had lost.

Contiunes in Part 3