Chapter 3: Red Light Revelations
The car was too small. That was the first thing Chad thought, his new shoulders pressed against the driver’s side door, his head almost brushing the roof. The second thing was the smell—vanilla air freshener, stale fries from a bag under the seat, and something else, something clean and sweet that was definitely coming from Kylie.
He gripped the gearshift, the plastic groaning under his hand. He had to consciously ease up. Everything felt like it was made of balsa wood now.
The stoplight outside the 24-hour superstore was a blurred red eye through the rain-streaked windshield. It flickered, casting a sickly crimson pulse across the dash, across Kylie’s face as she leaned forward to adjust the AC vent.
The movement did something. The seatbelt cut between her breasts, straining the thin fabric of the stupidly tight t-shirt she’d found at the bottom of her drawer—some old concert merch that now looked like a different garment entirely. The sight was a physical jolt to his system, a low voltage thrum that traveled straight to his gut.
He looked away, fast, focusing on the puddles outside reflecting the convenience store’s neon signs. The air in the car was thick, humid with their shared panic and the weird, charged energy coming off his own skin.
“It’s boiling in here,” Kylie muttered, fiddling with the vent. Her voice, that new, softer instrument, was tight with nerves.
Chad didn’t trust himself to speak. His jaw ached from clenching. His body didn’t feel like his own. It was a engine idling too high, a bowstring pulled taut. Every sense was dialed to eleven. The patter of rain on the roof was percussive. The green light of the fuel gauge was neon-bright. And Kylie… Kylie was a supernova of sensory input in the passenger seat.
The light stayed red. An eternity.
He felt her looking at him. “You okay?” she asked.
A harsh, humorless laugh escaped him. “Define okay.”
“You’re not… feeling anything weird, are you?” Her question was tentative, layered with guilt.
He finally turned his head to look at her. The red light bathed her in a hellish glow. Her new face, all delicate lines and wide, worried eyes, was so utterly foreign. But the fear in them? That was Kyle. That was his friend.
“Weird,” he repeated, the word a gravelly rumble. “Yeah, Kylie. I’m feeling weird.” He swallowed, his throat dry. “I feel like I could rip this steering wheel off and bend it into a pretzel. I feel like my heart is gonna punch through my ribs. Everything is too loud. Everything is too…” His eyes flicked to her, then away, heat flooding his face. “Bright.”
He saw her flinch in his periphery. Good. Let her feel some of this.
The silence stretched, broken only by the swish of the wipers.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, so low he almost didn’t hear it over the rain.
“Sorry doesn’t un-fuck this,” he said, his voice harsh. The anger felt good, cleaner than the other thing coiling in his stomach. “You knew. You saw what it did to you. And you still shoved it in my face.”
“I was scared!” The words burst out of her, sharp and defensive. “I was standing there in a body that wasn’t mine, looking at my best friend who looked at me like I was a ghost, and I had one piece of a puzzle! One! I needed to know if it was just me!”
“So you made me your goddamn lab rat!” he shouted, slamming a fist against the dashboard. The plastic cracked, a spider-web of lines radiating from the impact. They both stared at the damage.
Chad stared at his own fist. The bronze skin, the prominent veins. A monster’s hand.
He took a shuddering breath, trying to leash the fury, the raw power that threatened to spill out of him. But beneath the anger, underneath the electric hum in his veins, there was another current. Darker. More insistent.
His gaze was pulled, against his will, back to her. To the way her lower lip trembled. To the frantic pulse in her throat. To the rise and fall of her chest.
The red light washed over them, holding them in that bloody tableau.
The words came out before he could cage them, low and thick, almost drowned by the rain. “You knew what that powder would do to me.”
Kylie froze, her eyes locked on his.
He couldn’t stop. It was like vomiting truth. “So why the hell…” He turned fully to face her, his new body filling the space between them. The air crackled. “Why the hell do I want to pin you against this dashboard?”
The confession hung in the air, vile and electric.
Kylie’s breath hitched. She didn’t pull away. She just stared, her expression collapsing from shock into a deep, horrified understanding. It wasn’t desire he saw in her eyes. It was recognition of the chemical prison they were both in.
“It’s the powder,” she breathed, her voice barely audible. “It’s not you. It’s… amplifying something. Twisting it.”
“Twisting what?” he growled, disgusted with himself, with the heat in his blood.because bane your still a guy
“Twisting what?” he growled, disgusted with himself, with the heat in his blood.
A strange, defiant calm settled over Kylie’s features. It wasn’t the fear from the bathroom, or the panic in the living room. This was something else, a reckless, experimental clarity. Her eyes, dark in the pulsing red light, held his. “Base instinct,” she said, her voice steady now. “Amplified. Testable.”
Her hands went to the hem of the stretched, thin shirt. In one fluid, deliberate motion, she peeled it up and over her head, letting it fall to the car floor. The air conditioning whispered over her skin, and she let her breasts fall free, illuminated by the dashboard’s soft glow and the harsh strobe of the traffic light.
She didn’t cover herself. She held his stunned, tormented gaze. Her own eyes flicked down, noting the obvious, straining bulge in his gray sweatpants. A sad, knowing smile touched her lips.
“See?” she said, her tone almost clinical. “Babe, you’re still a dude in there somewhere. The powder just… turned the volume up to a thousand.” She gestured vaguely at herself. “It’s just a body now. A really confusing one. And you can look. It’s data.”
Chad’s breath came in ragged, shallow pulls. The want was a physical pain, a seismic pull toward her that warred with every shred of his loyalty and humanity. His knuckles, pressed against his thigh, were white. “Put it back on,” he managed, the words strangled.
“Why?” Her challenge was quiet, fierce. “You said you wanted to pin me to the dashboard. This is what that is. This is the ‘weird’ you’re feeling. Now we both know.”
The light outside turned green. Cars behind them began to honk, short, impatient blasts. The sound shattered the charged stillness. Chad jerked his head forward, wrenching his gaze away from her. He threw the car into gear, the tires squealing against the wet pavement as he accelerated into the sprawling, overlit superstore parking lot.
He drove too fast, aiming for the farthest, darkest corner of the lot away from the other cars. He slammed the gearshift into park and killed the engine. The sudden silence was louder than the honking had been.
“Put. It. On.” Each word was a stone dropped into still water.
Kylie watched his profile, the rigid line of his jaw, the corded muscles in his neck. The predatory bulk of him was coiled tight against the driver’s seat, vibrating with restraint. She slowly pulled the shirt back on, the fabric clinging. The act felt more intimate than taking it off had.
“It’s the same for me,” she said softly, staring at her own hands in her lap. “Not… that. But the volume. Everything is more. The fear, the panic, the… curiosity. My own head is a foreign country.”
Chad leaned his forehead against the steering wheel. The cool plastic was a minor relief. “We can’t go in there like this. You’re… and I’m…” He couldn’t find the words.
“We have to,” Kylie said, all pragmatism again. She fumbled for the door handle. “We need clothes that fit. We need to find Marcus. Every second we sit here, this gets more real.”
She pushed the door open, the dome light blinding them both for a second. The humid night air, smelling of rain and asphalt, flooded in. It was a welcome shock.
Chad didn’t move for a long moment. Then he unbuckled his seatbelt with a sharp click that echoed in the quiet car. “Stay close,” he muttered, heaving his new body out of the driver’s seat. “And for god’s sake, try not to… move like that.”
“Like what?” she asked, genuinely perplexed as she stepped out onto the slick asphalt.
He just shook his head, his massive shoulders blocking out the light from a distant lamppost. “Just come on.”
They walked toward the glaring entrance, two strangers in a stolen night, one moving with a new, unconscious grace and the other with the heavy, deliberate gait of a caged animal. The automatic doors slid open with a sterile hiss, welcoming them into the humming, fluorescent brightness.
The automatic doors slid open with a sterile hiss, welcoming them into the humming, fluorescent brightness. The vast, over-lit space was a cathedral of cheap commerce and synthetic scents. It felt absurdly normal. Muzak whispered from tinny speakers, a saccharine counterpoint to the panic thrumming in their veins.
Kylie moved first, beelining for a stacked column of shopping carts. The wheels squealed in protest as she pulled one free. The sound made Chad flinch. “Just grab what fits,” she said, her voice adopting a brisk, logistical tone. “Don’t think about it.”
He followed her, a gargantuan shadow in the aisles. His new stature made the ten-foot ceilings feel low, the wide lanes narrow. He was painfully aware of his every movement, of the way his new bulk seemed to draw glances from the few overnight stockers. A young man restacking toilet paper froze, his eyes widening slightly at the sight of Chad’s anatomy-defying physique.
Chad glared back, a low rumble building in his chest. The stocker quickly looked down.
“Stop,” Kylie hissed, throwing a pack of tube socks into the cart. It was a pointless, stabilizing gesture. “You’re gonna give us a heart attack. He’s just looking because you look like you’re carved from granite. Now come on.”
They navigated the maze of aisles, the mission a temporary anchor. Kylie’s focus was terrifying in its efficiency. In the men’s section, she ran her hands over fabric, her brow furrowed. She bypassed the normal racks, heading straight for the performance wear.
“You need stretch,” she muttered, more to herself than to him. She yanked a few plain black and heather gray t-shirts from a shelf, their material thin and silky. She held one up against his chest, her fingers briefly brushing the new, hard plane of his pectoral muscle. They both stiffened at the contact.
“Large?” he asked, his voice still that unfamiliar bass.
“Extra-large. Maybe double,” she said, tossing the shirts into the cart. She grabbed two pairs of simple gray sweatpants, the kind with a drawstring. “These’ll give. Hopefully.”
She didn’t wait for his approval. Her own need was more daunting. She pushed the cart toward the women’s section, her steps slowing as they crossed the threshold. The landscape was foreign: soft pinks, intricate lace, endless racks of confusing sizes.
Chad hung back, a warship docked in a sea of chiffon. He watched her scan the tags, her new fingers flipping through hangers with a speed born of desperation. She grabbed three packs of sports bras, simple black and nude, based only on the size chart printed on the plastic. She wasn't browsing. She was looting under duress.
Leggings were next. She found a multipack of black ones, her hands shaking as she checked the size. A crop top, plain white, followed. She hesitated, then grabbed a simple hoodie, throwing it on top of the pile like a blanket over a secret.
“Okay,” she breathed, turning the cart around. “Checkout. Now.”
The self-checkout line was mercifully empty. Kylie fumbled with Chad’s credit card, her movements jerky. The machine beeped its disapproval twice before she scanned the items correctly. Chad stood sentinel, his back to the security mirror, trying to look casual and failing spectacularly. He looked like a bodyguard for a nervous girl buying a lifetime supply of basics.
The bags were barely in the cart before Kylie was moving again, toward the family restroom sign at the back of the store. It was a single, lockable room. Sanctuary.
She shoved the bags at Chad inside the stark, tiled space. “You change first. I’ll stand guard.”
He didn’t argue. The door locked with a solid thunk. The silence was immediate, broken only by the rustle of plastic and his own ragged breathing. Peeling off the torn, constricting clothes felt like shedding a skin. The new sweatpants were forgiving. The t-shirt, however, clung to every newfound ridge and slope of his torso. He looked at himself in the metal mirror above the sink. A demigod stared back, dressed for a lazy Sunday.
He unlocked the door. Kylie slipped in, her arms full of her own bags. She didn’t look at him. “Turn around,” she said, her voice small.
He faced the door, listening to the frantic sounds behind him: the tear of plastic, the snick of a tag being removed, the sharp intake of breath as fabric met new skin. He stared at the grainy wood of the door, his mind a blank white noise.
“Okay,” she said, a tremor in the word.
He turned.
The transformation was mundane, and therefore, utterly devastating. The cheap black leggings shaped her legs, her hips. The simple white crop top ended just above the waistband, exposing a sliver of pale, smooth stomach. The sports bra provided a modest, defined shape under the fabric. The hoodie was draped over her arm, unused. She stood there, hands slightly away from her sides, as if waiting for a technical inspection.
She had brushed her hair. The dark waves fell around her shoulders, softening the sharp fear in her eyes. She looked like any other young woman, maybe one heading to a gym, or a late-night study session. The ordinary-ness of it stole his breath.
Her eyes searched his face, looking for Kyle’s friend in the stranger’s eyes. She did a little half-turn, then faced him again. A shaky, defiant smile played on her lips, an echo of the girl in the fogged bathroom mirror but stripped of its bravado. This was raw, exposed.
“How do I look, babe?” she asked. The old, familiar endearment, the one they’d thrown around a thousand times, hung in the tiled air between them. It was a test. A plea. A bridge made of cobwebs, thrown across a canyon.
Chad’s throat tightened. The powder-twisted part of him, the animal core, saw only the devastating curve of her waist, the vulnerability in her posture. But deeper, beneath the chemical storm, he saw the friend who had thrown him a thousand passes, who had his back in every stupid fight, who was now standing in a supermarket bathroom looking at him like he was her only tether to a world that had evaporated.
His loyalty, strained and confused, met her courage in the middle.
He let out a long, slow breath, the tension in his shoulders easing a fraction. He nodded once, a short, sharp motion.
“You look…” he started, his voice rough. He searched for a truth that wouldn’t poison them both. “You look like you’re ready to go find Marcus.”