I stirred and fidgeted in my seat, adjusting the shoulder-belt for what felt like the fiftieth time and trying to position myself so Alex's tail would stop thwapping my knee, without just squishing my entire frame up against the door. We were on opposite sides of the car, but the back seat of Nicole's ancient Civic was not spacious.
It was a little weird even being in the back; it felt kinda like being a kid again. I'd always holed up in the rear, then; Caitlin called shotgun any chance she could, and I usually spent long drives with my nose buried in a book – or, later on, my laptop.° But you get so used to driving yourself places, as a working adult, that you almost forget what it's like to have someone else drive you…
° (A hideous old hand-me-down dating to the fifteen minutes when the Pentium 4 Mobile was a thing; it finally attempted to murder-suicide my lap, melting the power plug. But it ran Morrowind, barely.)
Nicole was driving, naturally; Frank had shotgun since she was tall enough that her ears would've been cramped in the back seat. I didn't have that problem, but being reminded of it wasn't helping with the feel-like-a-kid part; neither was having a territorial dispute over whose side of the car was whose.
To be fair, Alex wasn't trying to intrude on my personal space; she was just leaning up against the door, staring out the window with a melancholy look on her face.° Her legs were drawn up and her tail snaked out the bottom of her jumper to lay across the middle of the seat, twitching restlessly.
° (Except when the odd bird flitted across our her field of vision.)
For some reason I couldn't stop studying her. I'd never paid close attention as a human; there'd been no need, our lives just didn't intersect, and it'd be…weird…for a single man to take an interest in someone else's kid. But I kept taking it in: the way her hair framed her face (not as long as mine, but she clearly hadn't had a haircut in a while,) the twitching of her ears as they reacted to changes in road noise or snatches of conversation between her dad and Nicole, the soft black pads on her little paws…
She leaned further, slumping against the door, head turned up and neck craned at an angle that almost made my own crick to look at – though I probably could've done the same, now. Her legs splayed across the seat, and her paws pressed right into my thigh. I wondered if I should say something, but she was clearly zoned out and it seemed wrong to disturb her.
Then she started kneading.
I recognized the behavior, but didn't know what to make of it. Subconscious repetitive motions usually indicate stress in humans, but she didn't smell stressed; and I thought it was something cats did when they were comfortable and content, but that didn't make a lot of sense to me, either. Was she just being fidgety?
I sat there, feeling her paws work my leg as she stared at nothing in particular, not sure how to respond. Then the car slowed, and Nicole flicked the blinker on. Alex started, drawing herself back up to a sitting position in a fluid, feline motion, but she glanced back in my direction with a look suggesting she was just as confused as I was – and then turned away, not about to admit it.
Nicole parked, and we all piled out of the car. I would've been fine grabbing the bare necessities from Target, but we'd hauled down from the foothills to the Palladium, a sort of outdoor mall thing with delusions of grandeur° in the nearest an-actual-city. She and Alex were both barefoot,°° and they picked their way delicately over the toasty asphalt 'til we reached the sidewalk.
° (And no actual relation to platinum-group metals.)
°° (There'd been experiments with footwear for the newly-digitigrade, but nothing commercial as yet.)
The place was busier than other malls during the pandemic, since there was room enough for people to socially distance naturally (outside of the stores, anyway.) It was strange, being out in public in a group; we weren't the only catgirls roaming the grounds, but here we were, a delegation of the Suddenly Different in a normal setting, among normal people…
So of course my body chose this as the opportune moment for my boob to start itching.
The sensation wasn't any different than usual, but I had a whole new socially-awkward part of myself to scratch,° joy of joys. I tried shifting my shoulder around, hoping to rub against myself enough to kinda-sorta relieve it, but…nope, the spot in question was, inevitably, right in the relevant crevice. Attempts to subtly adjust my hoodie so as to catch it with the zipper also went nowhere.
° (There really is no justice in the fact that we make a taboo of this. None whatsoever.)
I tried to ignore it – and failed miserably. Whether it was due to "new" or more sensitive skin or mere novelty, it drove me mildly crazy, and the social factors only added to my aggravation. Finally, I huffed in annoyance, turned aside as discreetly as I could manage, tugged my hoodie over my chest, and dug my thumb into my shirt underneath it. It wasn't perfect – and a partly-relieved itch is its own frustration – but it was better than nothing.
Frank noticed, but politely ignored it; Nicole couldn't quite keep a twinkle from her eye, but also said nothing. Alex was clearly about to ask, but caught sight of my pinned-back ears and thought better of it. I felt a little embarrassed, but…no, sorry, I was not just gonna grin and bear it.
"Well," Nicole said, nodding towards one of the less boutiquey clothing stores, "s'pose we oughta get started. Kit, Frank, you'll wannya get a fitting done nyand pick up a few brrras, and we'll cover basic warrrdrobe stuff after that."
Entering the Ladies' Underwear Zone was…a little intimidating, I'll admit. As a kid, I'd never really bought that "cooties" were a thing, or worried about said contagion causing Unspecified Defects of Manliness, but my sister was just the right age for us to have spent a fair bit of time there right at the point in my life where I was becoming awkwardly hyper-aware of anything feminine; I'd had no idea how I was supposed to react,° but it was plenty uncomfortable. Even now, I half-expected a staff member to jump out from behind a rack of frilly underthings, charge us with violation of Designated Female Spaces, and haul me off.
° (I'd mostly hung out at the watch section of the nearby jewelry counter. I was no horologist, but clocks were much easier to understand than Sacred Mysteries of The Other Sex.)
Alex shared my unease; she eyed the plethora of brassieres hanging from every vertical surface warily, and scooched in closer to her dad. "D'you rrreally need this…stuff?" she queried.
Frank glanced down at her with a curious expression, then laughed. "Believe mya, kiddo, that's a 'yes.'"
"But…you're nyat tryin' to be all prrretty or anyathing, rrright…?" she said, tail lashing.
Frank made to answer, got a sheepish look on her face, and chuckled softly. "Well, nyat as such, but…"
"It's nyat just for looks," I put in. I wasn't sure why I felt the need; something about Alex's tone suggested it was a fairly loaded question. "It's for support. They get kinda heavy, and they move around a lot." I'd known that in the abstract for years, but I was actually getting to experience it, now…
She glanced up at her dad. "Guess they would," she muttered; Frank gave another awkward laugh.
"Lady athletes wear 'em, too," Nicole nodded. "It's purrfectly nyormal."
Alex didn't seem too convinced, but the conversation broke off at the changing-room counter. "Mya, can we borrow a tape?" Nicole asked the attendant, a chipper, freckled redhead who was maybe just old enough to drink. "These two're in need of a fitting."
The Chipper One's eyes lit up. "Oh, absolutely!" she said, scanning over our group. I realized what was happening and tried to will her over to Frank, but the cosmos was not on my side today. "I can help you, ma'am," she said, latching onto me like a magnet. "And you ladies are free to take the other stall."
"Copy that," Nicole grinned, abandoning me to my fate. That was it, I decided; she was paying for lunch.
"So," the Chipper One bubbled, locking the door behind us, sealing me in, "you're new to this, huh? You turned out so nicely, you know." Her perfume was gentle-ish and not too chemical, but it was as sunny and floral as the rest of her.
"…thanks?" I said, smiling weakly; I was not prepared to deal with an onslaught of ENFJ energy right now, and I couldn't decide if this was preferable to the dreaded Small Talk. "It's, mya, taking some getting used to…"
"Of course," she said, bludgeoning me with a polite, supportive smile. "There's a lot to learn, but I'm sure you'll get the hang of it. Can I have you take your top off? You don't have to, but it, ah, looks a little tight, and I think it might skew the measurements."
I felt awkward about it, but…if I was gonna need one, I should get this done right. I doffed my jacket and pulled the hem of my shirt up…only to have it bunch up under my breasts. With a sigh, I tugged it out enough to lift it over and off, and stood there waiting for whatever humiliation was in store next.
The Chipper One, moving with a confident, cheery professionalism that rankled my soul, closed in and cinched her tape around my torso. "Now, the first measurement you need is the circumference of the ribcage at the base of the breast," she said, "also called the 'underbust.' This corresponds to the band size of the bra, and in your case it looks like that's ## inches."
"Oh," I said, hoping that if I didn't ask questions we might get through this faster. I felt the tip of my tail twitching nervously.
"The second is around the fullest part of the bust." She slackened the tape and looped it 'round the breasts themselves, while I wondered if that wasn't just a coy way of saying at the nipples. "And that's…about ## inches. The cup size is just a shorthand for the difference, which would be around a @ cup° here."
° (No, I don't think you do need to know the exact figure. Let's just say it was in the upper end of "thoroughly average," right at the point where I could feel all self-conscious about it in both directions.)
"Got it, thanks," I said, trying to disentangle myself from her tape. That was it, right? I could go now?
"Now, that's more of a guideline," she continued; this wasn't stopping, was it? "Most women aren't an exact match to the standard sizes, and everyone's breasts are shaped a bit different, so it's good to experiment, really see what feels most comfortable for you. You don't want to go any smaller in band size, but you can go up a band and down a cup if it's too tight, or up a cup if you're getting any spillage…"
I tried to tune her out and focused on getting my shirt back on while she explained that the fit might differ by manufacturer. What good were standards that weren't standard? I got enough of that at work! Cripes, I knew this stuff was complicated, but I hadn't anticipated just how complicated.
"…designs might also fit a bit differently," she was saying, "and it's a good idea to keep a few types on hand for different occasions, depending on your personal style. If you'd like, I could grab a selection for you to try on…?" She stood there expectantly, cornering me with her upbeat, pleasant attitude, like a predator waiting for its quarry to make the next move; meanwhile, I wondered if I even had a "personal style."
"…I, mya, think that's good, thanks," I said uneasily, slipping my hoodie back on in a meaningful kind of way. "Just need something basic, don't wannya keep the others waiting…"
"Of course," she said, smiling brightly enough to disintegrate a vampire. "I won't keep you, but don't hesitate to ask if you have questions. And don't be afraid to explore a bit," she remarked, as I made my escape. "I hope you find something that really suits you, you know?"
I exited the changing room – feeling a strong urge to find a basement somewhere and hole up in it by myself for a week or two – to find Frank browsing the selection with Nicole, looking entirely comfortable and not harried at all; Alex had drifted over to the watch section. I grabbed the most basic thing I could find in the "sister sizes" the Chipper One had indicated; only then did I realize she'd never actually been told I was a former guy.
Well, it was a reasonable inference, I decided; we were probably not her first. I might've been madder, but that'd require me to think about what I wanted her read on me to be…anyway, I'd have to ask Nicole if it was okay to try these on in the store, but I'd worry about that once I had other stuff to check the fit on.