The Hormones Made Me Mateo’s Woman

I met him on one of those apps where nobody uses their real name. I had just turned nineteen, and my name was Adrián, though today that name sounds to me like a disguise I wore for far too long. We started out talking about nonsense, music, games we played until dawn, and then we moved into a more private chat. His name was Mateo. He studied engineering and worked part-time. He was two years older than me and had a way of speaking that made me feel small, in the best possible way.

We talked for months before either of us said the word “partner.” And when he finally said it, he did so with a condition that he made very clear from the start.

—I don’t date men —he wrote—. I date pretty women.

Anyone else would have been offended. Not me. I had never thought of myself as important, or interesting, or anything worth looking at twice. So I didn’t read that sentence as rejection, but as a path. I promised him that, whatever happened, I would be his woman. I took it as a goal, as an ideal to reach. At nineteen, almost everyone I knew already knew what they wanted to become. I only knew I wanted to be by Mateo’s side, and that to do that I would have to stop being who I was.

That same month I started training on my own. I ate clean, ran in the mornings before the rest of my house woke up, did exercises for my legs, my butt, for everything I imagined would one day be soft and feminine. I was already slim to begin with, so it wasn’t too hard. The hard part wasn’t the body. The hard part was hiding it.

***

My family was deeply homophobic. I say that without resentment, almost with resignation. They were capable of sitting at a table with liars, with uncles who cheated on their wives, with neighbors they despised, and smiling at them. But the mere idea that their son might be different made them cruel. That’s why, when Mateo gave me my first box of estrogen, I had to go pick up the package by myself at a shipping office far from home, looking over my shoulder as if I were carrying something stolen.

I wasn’t carrying anything stolen. I was carrying my future in a bag.

That night I locked myself in the bathroom, read every leaflet three times, and sat on the edge of the bathtub with the first dose in my hand. I thought about Mateo. I thought about his voice. And I took the first step into something that would never be undone.

I decided to start living for him. I went to a university I didn’t care about, studied a degree I hadn’t chosen out of desire, had no close friends or plans of my own. The only thing I truly wanted was hundreds of kilometers away, speaking to me every night through the screen. So I gave him what I had: my time, my body, my patience.

Mateo kept sending me the doses, following the advice of a doctor he consulted himself, so that everything would be safe. After a few months I could already feel the changes. Softer skin. A different smell. A new sensitivity that ran through my whole body with just a brush of T-shirt fabric.

I had read that one of the most common effects was a loss of desire. For me it was exactly the opposite. I was horny all the time. I couldn’t stop touching myself, even as my body changed, even as everything became smaller and softer. Mateo drove me to the edge with words alone, without touching me, over the phone, and I melted listening to him. He sent me dirty messages, told me to imagine myself with a wet cunt even though I didn’t have one yet, to touch myself slowly, not to come without his permission. I obeyed with my hand down my pants, panting softly so no one would hear me, feeling pleasure rise from my belly to my throat. Every time he said “good girl” my whole body burned. Every time he told me to open myself with my fingers, to put in two, then three, to find that hard, sensitive spot, I trembled until I was out of breath. Sometimes, when I was alone at night, I put my fingers in my ass and then went down on myself, imagining it was him owning me like that, his cock in command and me a mess of spit, sweat, and need.

***

One of those nights we were trading videos. He sent me one of a model with exaggerated curves, a woman with an impossible body named Bianca Sol. He wrote that he loved her, that that was his favorite body type. I kept staring at the screen longer than I should have.

I need to be that. I need to have a body like that.

I didn’t tell him right away. I thought about it for two weeks, turning it over in bed, looking at myself in the mirror and imagining. When I finally told him, he didn’t laugh at me. We talked seriously, like two people planning a life together. We reached a conclusion: if after two years of hormones my body responded well, we would take the step toward surgery. Toward curves. Toward the woman he imagined.

Not everything was easy. By six months the changes were impossible to hide and my house turned into a silent battlefield. Cutting looks. Passing comments. A coldness heavier than any shout. By the time I was twenty, I understood I had already endured enough.

I decided to take the next step: move in with my man.

***

By then Mateo was already finishing his degree and had a stable job that paid well. Running away from home wasn’t nearly as hard as I’d feared. A suitcase, a ticket, a new address. I arrived at his door depressed, exhausted, my body halfway between two lives, and he opened it and held me like he had been waiting for me for years.

Mateo was tall, much taller than me. He had over thirty centimeters on me. He had dark skin, broad shoulders from working out and doing physical work, and a way of looking at me that made me feel, for the first time, truly seen. I was five foot six and beside him I looked made to fit under his arm.

My life became a routine, and I discovered I liked that routine. I got up early to make him breakfast. I stayed home tidying, washing, cooking, and at night, when he came back, I welcomed him. He wasn’t violent or dominant out of cruelty. He was someone I could love and give a large part of myself to, without fear. And that changed everything.

Three months after we moved in together, one afternoon while I was cooking with my back to him, I felt his hand close over my ass. He squeezed hard, sinking his fingers into the already rounded flesh, and made me let out a clumsy, startled moan.

—When did it get so big? —he said, his voice low, almost surprised.

I hadn’t noticed either. In that year and a bit of treatment my body had been rounding out without either of us really clocking it, day by day, until suddenly it was obvious under his palm. That night he stopped calling me by my old name. He gave me a new one.

—From today on, your name is Lía —he whispered in my ear.

Lía. I repeated it softly as he said it against the back of my neck, and something inside me finally clicked into place. He turned me around, pushed me gently against the counter, and kissed my mouth hungrily, sliding his tongue in without asking permission, as if he wanted to taste the new name on my tongue. Then he moved to my neck, my collarbone, the edge of my shoulder, and I was already drenched, rubbing myself against his thigh, wanting him to hitch up my imaginary skirt and fill me however he wanted. He unbuttoned my pants slowly, sliding his hand inside to find me hard still, and he gave a low, satisfied laugh when he noticed how much my arousal had grown just from hearing him say “Lía.”

He carried me to the bed almost in his arms, stripped me with impatient tugs, and left me naked in front of him, trembling, my nipples hard and my cunt already open and slick. He ran his palm over my chest, weighing my tits, and then over my belly before sinking two fingers between my legs. He wasn’t delicate: he spread me open wide, showed me how wet I was, and made me look him in the face while he rubbed me with slow, rough, exact fingers. I writhed, begged for more, begged him not to stop, to fuck me, to make me come.

He pulled down his zipper, freed his hard, heavy cock, and brushed it over my face, over my lips, before pushing it between my thighs. He rubbed the head against my opening, soaking it with my wetness, and when he finally entered me, he did it in one thrust, slow at first because I was tense, then deeper, until he settled fully inside me. I felt the sweet burn of being opened, the weight of his cock filling me, and a shiver ran from my ass to the nape of my neck. He held me by the hips and started fucking me against the counter, hard, with sharp strokes that made my body slam into the wood. Each thrust shook my chest, my still-small tits bounced, and he grabbed them with one hand while with the other he held my waist to get deeper, to open me more.

—That’s it, Lía —he said—. That’s how I like you. My woman. My pretty little slut.

I cried and came around his cock, which I could feel had grown a little more with the hormones, and even so it filled me as if I had been made for nothing else. When he finished, he didn’t pull out right away. He stayed buried inside me, breathing into my ear, and unraveled me with little jerks of his hips until he left me empty and shaking, my back pressed to the counter and drool at the corner of my lips. That night there wasn’t just one round. He turned me over, put me on all fours, and fucked me from behind, opening my ass with two fingers first, then three, until my sphincter gave way and I could feel his cock pushing in there too, claiming me completely. He fucked me hard, without mercy, while I clutched the sheets and moaned his new name and my old one, until my head went blank and my body kept throbbing.

***

From there a dynamic was born that neither of us ever put into words, but that we both understood. If I cooked well, he fucked me. If I left the house spotless, he fucked me. If I welcomed him the way he liked, at the door, already undressed, he fucked me. And I began to feel alive doing things right. Every chore was a way of asking for it. Every success, a promise paid out.

That’s how the following year passed. He fucked me two, three times a day. I rarely left the house, almost never, and I didn’t miss it. One morning, while he was at work and I was cleaning alone, I stopped in the middle of the hallway with an absurd thought.

I still have a dick, right?

I felt ridiculous for having ignored it for so long. When Mateo and I had sex, I came a lot, but never from touching myself there. I looked down that afternoon and really looked at it for the first time in months. It had shrunk. Barely three inches where there had once been five and a half. Instead of upsetting me, I loved it. I can’t explain how good that smallness made me feel, that silent surrender of my own body. I decided to keep ignoring it, leave it there, unimportant, like a trace of something that was no longer me.

But Mateo didn’t ignore it. Some nights he’d make me kneel between his legs, grab my hair, and shove his cock into my mouth to the back, forcing me to take it in short hard thrusts while he told me that little thing was useful to him less and less, that he didn’t need to see me do anything with it anymore. I sucked, drooled, choked, and even so I felt proud of how little was left. When he came on my tongue, he made me open wide so he could see me swallow every last drop. Then he’d turn me around, bend me over the bed, and fuck me again, harder for having used my mouth on him first. I liked the way he treated me. I liked being useful, being dirty, being taken.

***

When I turned twenty-one we went to a doctor together. Mateo wanted to make sure the hormones weren’t hurting me, that there weren’t any hidden long-term consequences. He was more afraid of that than I was. I had tests, checkups, questions. In the end, the doctor looked over his glasses and said something I remember word for word.

—Your body is very malleable. It adapted to the hormones with unusual ease. You’re one of the few cases where feminization is this deep and this lasting.

For him it was a clinical fact. For me it was a flash of light. It meant my dream could go even further than I had imagined. We left the office hand in hand, and in the car Mateo squeezed my thigh and we decided to extend the treatment for another year.

My routine hardly changed. He had graduated and now worked all day, so I was the housewife who took care of the home, washed, cooked, and waited. Sex became wilder, rougher, more his. We made love at six in the morning before he left, and then I spent the day unable to think about anything else but how he would fuck me when he got back. Sometimes I’d wake with his face between my legs, licking my cunt with fierce patience, sliding two fingers inside me while his other hand held my hip. Other times I’d wake up with him behind me, pushing me against the sink, shoving his cock in deep while he watched my reflection in the mirror and told me I looked beautiful, that I looked made to be opened like that, to be marked by him.

Little by little I understood what I was to him. Not just his partner. I was his reward for working so much. What waited for him at home at the end of each long day. Understanding that, far from hurting me, made me profoundly happy. Don’t get me wrong: he loved me and I loved him. But I had stopped thinking about myself in order to think about him, and in that surrender I found something like peace.

***

By the time I turned twenty-two I had breasts, a generous cup size, a curvy, unmistakably feminine figure. When I crossed the street, men looked at me the way Mateo had looked at that video. That was the point of no return, and I had no interest in going back.

Then came the surgeries. We had talked about them for months: my body would be that of a voluptuous woman, exaggerated, tailored to his desire, inspired by those models he showed me. It was expensive. Very expensive. Mateo paid for almost all of it, and so one night, before the first operation, he held my face in both hands and made one thing very clear to me.

—After the surgeries you’ll be completely mine.

He said it slowly, looking me in the eyes, and I nodded without hesitation. Because I already was. I had been since the first dose I picked up in secret, since the first night he called me Lía, since the day I decided my life would make more sense belonging to him than belonging to me. The surgeries were only going to put on my skin what was already written everywhere else.

That night I fell asleep with his arm around me, feeling my chest rise and fall against his, thinking about the woman who would wake up on the other side of the operating room. The woman he had imagined. The woman I had become, dose by dose, through love and desire, until I no longer belonged to myself but to him.