Lipstick Lesson

All characters are consenting adults: Juliet is 34, Margot is 41. Contains consensual crossdressing and feminization, gentle femdom, a makeup lesson, high heels, a collar, teasing, safewords and check-ins, and aftercare.

The little gold tube sat on the kitchen table between our plates all through dinner, and Margot didn't mention it once.

It was a lipstick. I knew that much. Slim, heavy, the kind of case that clicks shut with a sound like a promise. It had been there when I came home from work, standing upright beside the salt cellar like a guest who'd arrived early, and every time I looked at it Margot asked me something perfectly ordinary. How was the commute. Had I called my brother back. Did I want more rice.

I wanted more rice. I wanted, much more, to know what was in that tube.

She waited until I'd cleared the plates. Then she folded her hands on the table, looked at me over her reading glasses, and said, "You put makeup on the maybe list."

My face went warm. "I did."

"Under 'start small.'"

"I remember."

"I've been thinking about what small looks like." She nudged the lipstick an inch toward me with one finger. "I think small looks like this. Tonight, if you'd like. You at my vanity. Me teaching you. Foundation, a little color, mascara, and this." Another inch. "And heels, because I bought you heels, and I want to see you stand up in them with your mouth painted."

I couldn't speak. I was thirty-four years old, a grown man with a mortgage and a pension plan and a perfectly respectable career, and a woman of forty-one had just reduced me to silence with a tube of lipstick.

"I'm going to ask the boring questions," Margot said gently, "because I always ask the boring questions. Do you want to?"

"Yes."

"Anything you don't want? Anything that's changed since the list?"

I thought about it properly, the way she'd taught me. "No photos."

"No photos," she agreed. "Not ever, unless you ask. What else?"

"Nothing else. I want—" I made myself look at her. "I want all of it."

"Then the words are the same as always. Green, you're happy. Yellow, I slow down and we talk. Lilac, everything stops and I hold you." She stood and came around the table, and tipped my chin up with the tube of lipstick, cool metal against my jaw. "And I'll ask. Often."

"I know you will."

"Go and shower," said Margot. "Then come to the bedroom in your robe. I'll lay everything out."

She had turned the vanity into an operating theater.

That was my first thought when I walked in, damp and barefoot, my heart going like a hummingbird. Every brush she owned was laid out on a white towel in a neat row, graduated by size. Little pots and compacts, opened and arranged. A bottle of foundation she'd matched to my skin, apparently, by stealing a look at my wrist while I was asleep. The lipstick, standing on its own at the end like the final instrument.

And on the floor beside the stool: a pair of shoes.

They were black patent leather, pointed, with a slender heel that was not small. Not stilettos. But not small. A delicate strap across the ankle with a tiny gold buckle.

"Margot," I said faintly.

"Three inches," she said, from the armchair. She was in the black silk blouse, the one that always made me feel like I'd been summoned. "You can practice. Sit down, Juliet."

That name. Every time she used it in that voice, something in me settled into place, like a key in a lock.

I sat. She came and stood behind me, and we looked at each other in the mirror, the way we always did at the beginning. Her hands rested on my shoulders. She slid the robe off them slowly, let it pool at my waist, and in the mirror I watched her eyes travel over my bare shoulders and collarbones like she was planning something.

"Color?"

"Green."

"Then close your eyes."

I had never understood, before that night, how intimate it is to have someone paint your face.

It's not like being kissed. It's slower than that, and more attentive. She tipped my head back against her stomach and smoothed foundation over my skin with her fingertips, and then a soft brush, in long patient strokes from the center of my face outward. Across my forehead. Down the bridge of my nose. Along my jaw, where the brush paused, and circled, and moved on. I could hear her breathing. I could feel the warmth of her body through the silk at the back of my neck.

"You have good skin," she murmured. "I've always been jealous of it. Hold still."

A different brush, fluffier, at the tops of my cheeks. "Blush," she said, "though I don't know why I'm bothering. You're doing most of the work yourself."

I laughed, and she tapped my nose with the end of the brush, and I stopped laughing.

"Eyes open now. Look up at the ceiling. Don't blink."

The mascara was the hardest part. She leaned in very close to do it, close enough that I could smell her perfume, close enough that her breath stirred my lashes, and she told me not to blink in a voice that made me want to do exactly as I was told for the rest of my life. My eyes watered. She dabbed them with a tissue, tutting softly. She did the other eye. When she leaned back, she was smiling.

"Look."

I looked. The face in the mirror was still mine, and it wasn't. My skin was smooth and even and faintly rosy. My eyes looked larger, darker, startled by their own lashes. Someone softer was looking back at me. Someone who had been taken care of.

"Oh," I said.

"Not finished." Margot picked up the lipstick.

She uncapped it with that heavy little click and twisted it up. It was red. Not a pink, not a nude, not anything shy. Red, deep and true, the exact red she wore herself.

"I thought about starting you on something gentle," she said. "Then I thought, no. If I'm going to mark you, I'm going to mark you properly. Color, darling?"

My mouth had gone dry. "Green."

"Part your lips. Just slightly."

She held my chin between her thumb and two fingers and painted my mouth.

It was the slowest thing she'd done all evening. The upper lip first, the little bow at the center, then out toward the corners, the lipstick dragging, waxy and cool, across skin that suddenly felt like the most sensitive skin I owned. Then the lower lip, in one long, deliberate stroke that made me close my eyes again whether she'd told me to or not. She blotted it with a tissue. She painted it again.

"Press your lips together. Like this." She showed me. I copied her. "Good."

When I opened my eyes, there was a woman's mouth in the mirror. Red and full and faintly parted, like it was waiting for something.

Margot leaned down beside my ear. "Now," she said softly, "say thank you."

"Thank you, Mistress."

"Mm. You'll say it again in a minute. Up you get. Shoes."

She knelt to buckle them, the way she had knelt to dress me the very first time. It still made something in my chest go tight: Margot, kneeling, and still so clearly the one in charge. She guided my foot into the first shoe, fastened the little gold buckle at my ankle, and smoothed her palm up the back of my calf as she rose. Then the second. Then she stood and held out both her hands.

"Up."

I stood.

The floor was suddenly further away and much less trustworthy. My weight went somewhere new — forward, onto the balls of my feet — and my hips did something they had never done before in an effort to keep me upright. I grabbed her forearms. She held me steady and laughed, low and delighted, and didn't let go.

"Oh, look at you. Like a tipsy flamingo."

"Don't," I begged, scarlet. "Don't say flamingo."

"A very elegant flamingo," Margot amended, entirely unrepentant. "Small steps. Heel first, then toe. Don't look at your feet, look at me. Walk to me."

She stepped backward, still holding my hands. I followed. One step, two, the heels clicking on the floorboards, my ankles wobbling. Four steps. Six. She let go of one hand. Then the other. I stood there on my own in three inches of patent leather, my robe sliding off one shoulder, my mouth painted red, and she looked at me the way you'd look at something you'd made with your own hands and were very, very pleased with.

"Turn around," she said. "Slowly. Let me see."

I turned. It was easier than I expected; the shoes wanted me to move slowly. When I came back round to face her, the robe had slipped further, and she was close enough to touch.

"Color?"

"Green," I said, and it came out breathless.

"Good." She reached out and drew the robe's belt free, one slow pull, and let the whole thing fall to the floor. Underneath, I was wearing the satin she'd laid out on the bed for me after my shower: pale pink, lace-trimmed, the garter belt and the sheer stockings that I'd fastened with fingers that only shook a little. She took her time looking. She circled me once, her heels and mine clicking together on the floor, and her fingertips trailed along the lace at my hip as she passed, so lightly I felt it everywhere.

When she came back in front of me, she was holding the collar.

I hadn't seen her pick it up. Soft pink leather, the little silver ring at the front. She held it up between us, a question.

I tipped my head back to give her my throat.

She buckled it on. Two fingers underneath to check. Then she leaned in, and I thought she was going to kiss me, and instead she pressed her mouth, very deliberately, just above the collar, to the side of my neck — and when she drew back, I could see in the mirror over her shoulder a perfect red print of her lips on my skin.

"There," she breathed. "Now we match."

She kissed me properly then.

It was slow at first, careful, the way she does everything. Her hand at the nape of my neck, her mouth on mine, and I could taste the lipstick — waxy, faintly sweet — and feel it smearing between us, and I didn't care. She deepened the kiss. My hands came up to her waist and she let them, for a moment, before she caught both my wrists and drew them gently down and behind my back, and held them there in one hand, firm and certain, while she kissed me until I was dizzy. The heels made me exactly the right height for it. I suspect she'd known that when she bought them.

When she pulled back, her lipstick was smudged and so was mine, and she was smiling.

"You're a mess," she said fondly. "My beautiful mess."

"Your fault," I said, and then, remembering myself, "Mistress."

"Entirely my fault. I take full responsibility." She let go of my wrists and touched my lower lip with the pad of her thumb, tracing the edge where the red had blurred. "Do you know what I want, Juliet?"

I shook my head. I wasn't sure I could form words.

"I want you to walk to the bed. In those shoes. Without falling over. And then I want you to kneel up on it and wait for me while I take off this blouse, very slowly, so you can watch." Her thumb pressed, just slightly, against my mouth. "And then I'm going to find out how much of this lipstick I can get onto the rest of you. Color?"

"Green," I whispered. "Green. Please."

"Then go."

I went. Heel, then toe. I did not fall over. I knelt on the edge of the bed in pink satin and stockings and three-inch heels, a collar at my throat and her kiss printed on my neck, and I watched her unbutton the black silk blouse one button at a time, the lamp throwing gold across her skin, her eyes on mine the whole while.

She came to me. She put her hand flat on my chest over my racing heart and pushed, gently, until I lay back. Her mouth found my throat, beside the first mark, and left a second. Then my collarbone. Then lower, along the lace edge of the satin, and I lost count of them after that.

What we did next is ours. But I'll tell you I was a long time finding my way back to words, and that when I did, the first one was green.

She took the makeup off me afterwards, the way she always takes care of the after.

I sat on the closed lid of the toilet in my softest T-shirt, the heels kicked off on the bathroom tiles, my feet aching in the nicest possible way. Margot sat on the edge of the bath facing me with a pot of cold cream and a stack of cotton pads. She'd brought a glass of water in, and two squares of dark chocolate, and she made me have both before she started.

"Eyes closed."

The cold cream was cool and smelled faintly of roses. She smoothed it over my face with her fingertips, then wiped it away in slow gentle strokes, one cotton pad after another going pink and black and red. She was so careful around my eyes. She did my mouth last, and lingered there.

"Talk to me," she said. "What was good?"

"The mascara," I said, and she laughed. "No, really. When you were so close. When you told me not to blink." I opened my eyes. "And the shoes. I thought I'd hate being bad at them. I didn't. I liked you laughing."

"I wasn't laughing at you."

"I know. That's why I liked it."

She smiled and wiped the last of the red from the corner of my mouth. "And the lipstick?"

I thought about the woman's mouth in the mirror, waiting. "I want to learn to do it myself," I said. "So I can do it for you. Sometime. As a surprise."

Her hands went still for a moment. "I would like that very much," she said quietly.

"Anything that wasn't good?" She always asks; I've started asking myself before she can.

"The flamingo comment," I said solemnly.

"The flamingo comment stays," said Margot. "Anything else?"

"No. Nothing." I leaned forward and rested my forehead against hers. "It was perfect."

She held my face in both her damp, rose-scented hands. Then she reached for one more cotton pad and, very gently, began to wipe the red print of her lips from the side of my neck.

"Leave that one," I said.

She paused. Looked at me. Then she set the pad down, and kissed me once, softly, on the mark she'd made.

"Until morning," she said. "Then it comes off, and we start again."