Friday after breakfast and some cataloguing, Elijah worked out an other-directed version of the fat-moving spell. She told Cassie she was ready to cast it at lunch.
“We’re going to have to do this one differently, though,” Elijah said reluctantly. “Because… I’m going to have to touch your breasts. Just for a moment, though! I mean, I have to trace the spell on your belly, and maybe on your thighs if you want, and then touch each breast for a moment to set the target for where the fat is supposed to move.”
“All right,” Cassie said. “We’re both girls here, no problem.” But she was blushing, and that made Elijah realize she probably was, too. She’d dated Monica for years and never touched her breasts, even through clothes, and now she was going to touch Cassie’s when they weren’t dating or anything like it… but as Cassie said, they were both girls. The thought of being both girls made her smile for a moment, but she quickly forced herself into a neutral expression lest Cassie get the wrong idea.
So after lunch, they cleaned up the dishes and moved to the living room, where they sat on the sofa. Cassie took off her shirt and bra.
So that’s what she meant about women’s nipples, Elijah thought, and reminded herself to focus on the spell. Tracing the spell on her belly was nothing new, she’d done that several times now for the hair-removal and complexion spells, but touching her tiny breast buds at the end of each casting made her feel weird. She started to second-guess herself, thinking she shouldn’t be doing this, but after she’d grown one of Cassie’s breasts to what looked like a reasonably full size, she couldn’t exactly stop there, so she had to do the other one and get it over with. Cassie didn’t have as much spare fat to work with as Elijah did, but she was pretty happy with the results nonetheless.
“I’m going to need new bras,” Cassie said happily as she tried to put her bra back on, then took it back off again and put on her T-shirt without it. “Can we pad my hips some more too?”
“Yeah, sure… wait, no, you’d have to pull your pants down a little so I could reach your hips, and I’m not sure I’d be comfortable with that.”
“Maybe just an inch? Would that be enough?”
“Maybe. I guess we can try it.”
So they did, and it worked.
“Now I’ll need new panties and pants and skirts, too – so do you. Want to go shopping tomorrow?”
“As long as it’s not in Boone.” Too many people from school or church might recognize her there, and she wasn’t ready to come out to them yet.
“Okay, there’s a few decent-sized towns that are in a couple of hours’ drive. None except Boone are less than an hour away, though. I think the closest are Johnson City, Tennessee and Hickory, North Carolina, but they don’t have as many clothing stores as Asheville, which is a bit further.”
“I know my way around Asheville,” Elijah said. “It’s close to Mars Hill, where I went to undergrad. And we’ve been planning to go there to sell some of the books you don’t want to keep, right?”
“Yeah, it’s got more used bookstores than anywhere else around here,” Cassie replied. “Let’s do that too.”
Elijah fleetingly thought that she might be overwhelmed after a few hours of clothes shopping and need to relax in the comfy atmosphere of a used bookstore.
“Another thing,” Cassie went on. “We need to be measured so we know what size clothes to get. Especially bras. We could get that done tomorrow at the first store we go to and have a professional do it, but if you’d feel more comfortable, we could measure each other this afternoon?”
Elijah hesitated a moment and nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
So Cassie went to get her cloth tape measure and showed Elijah how to take measurements. It felt weird and embarrassing to have Cassie wrap the tape around and under her breasts, but she was pretty sure it would feel a lot worse to have a stranger do it. She noticed a blush on Cassie’s face after she had measured her, and figured she felt the same way.
She was about to say something about it, but the moment passed, and after writing down the measurements, Cassie went back to programming and Elijah went back to cataloguing.
After she went to bed, she spent some time thinking about names. At first she played with feminine names that sounded like the name her parents had given her – Elle, Ellen, Eleanor, Ellie, Eliza, Elizabeth – or variants of her middle name, “Patrick”: Patricia, Pat, Patsy, Patrice, Patience… Then she ventured farther afield, and tried on dozens of traditional, trendy, and fanciful names before drifting off to sleep.
She woke during the night, suddenly remembering that she had seen a book of name etymologies somewhere in the house. But where? It wasn’t in one of the areas she had been actively cataloguing so far. Probably in the living room or or dining room, she thought. She lay in bed, her thoughts drifting from the location of the name book to excitement about the day’s shopping trip and worries about how her family would respond.
Finally, she got up and, casting the light spell on the T-shirt she’d worn the day before, she got dressed and went to the living room, looking for the name book. She had looked over all the living room shelves and started looking through Cassie’s office when she found it; it was a semi-scholarly, semi-popular work on name etymology from the 1960s, with a decent amount of footnotes and a readable style, hardback with no dust jacket. She took it back to bed and lay down to start reading, falling asleep with the book in her hand an hour later.
She brought the name book with her to the breakfast table; the spellbook followed on its own soon after.
“Looks like that’s only going to list older names,” Cassie said when she arrived and Elijah showed it to her. “You probably want to look at a baby names website, if you’re open to considering more recently popular names.”
“Not just that,” Elijah said. “I’m thinking about names of girl characters from stories I’ve read, too. But I’m kind of leaning toward names that start with ‘El-’, like Ellen and Eliza. I sort of feel like my Mom and Dad would be a little more likely to be on board with it if I modify the name they gave me instead of tossing it.”
“That’s possible, but don’t count on it. And don’t saddle yourself with a name you don’t like much to please them. You need to do this for yourself.”
Everything in Elijah’s upbringing rebelled at the idea of doing something for selfish reasons, but she reflected that if she were doing everything she could to please her parents, she’d keep quiet and do nothing about her discovery. And she didn’t think she could stand doing that.
“But… I do like Ellen and Eliza, although I’m not sure I like them as much as Ozma or Kyra or Lissar or Althea or…” She trailed off for a moment, then asked: “How did you pick your new name?”
“Well, my birth name can be either a girl or a boy name, though it’s more common for boys. But I wanted something unambiguously feminine. So I looked at a lot of names, but I decided on ‘Cassandra’ and shortened it to ‘Cassie’ for everyday use. I have to admit my reasoning was a little similar to yours, although I was thinking more along the lines of how it would be less of a change for my friends and family to get used to.” She shrugged. “And I’m not fully committed to it yet; I guess I won’t be until I come out to my family and everyone, and start doing name change paperwork. I still think about other names sometimes.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you excited about our trip today?”
“A lot! But I’m also kind of worried. I don’t know if people are going to look at me and see a woman… what if the people at the stores look at me weird for wanting to try on women’s clothes?”
“Girl, you pass a lot better than I did last time I went to Asheville in girl mode, and I’m pretty sure only a couple of people clocked me. After the work you’ve done on both of us in the last few days, we’ll do fine. Although…” Cassie tapped her chin a few times contemplatively. “Maybe if you move a little fat to your face? Spread it thin so it softens the angles without looking puffy or overweight.”
“Okay, that sounds like a good idea. Do you want me to do it for you, too?”
“Yes, please. And you don’t really need it, after that complexion spell, but if you want, I could do your makeup?”
Elijah felt giddy. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
At first Cassie felt pretty distant, but now that we know what's up, it's nice to see them becoming friends. Also, I really wondered what Cassie's dead name was. I absolutely forgot that we read it every chapter until now....
I'm glad her and Cassie and friends