Chapter 12: Pussy and Penis
The bathroom door clicked shut, severing the strange intimacy of the morning. Garrett was alone in the opulent bedroom, the silence amplifying the roar of his own thoughts. He could hear the sharp hiss of the shower turning on, then the muted drum of water against glass.
He sat on the edge of the rumpled bed, his gaze drifting over the cityscape. The immense pleasure was receding, leaving behind a sticky residue of confusion. His body was in that shower. He had just made that body convulse with a pleasure so intense it was bordering on pain. The logic he’d cobbled together in the heat of the moment—“it’s my own dick”—felt flimsy now in the quiet light of day. It wasn’t just the dick. It was Katy. Her reactions, her voice, her presence inside his skin.
But then a different, more primal thought surfaced, insistent and simple. If that was his dick, then this… He looked down at himself, at the gentle swell of breasts under the silk camisole, the curve of hips he could now balance his hands on… this was his, too. His alone to understand.
The shower continued its steady rhythm. An idea, a compulsion, took hold. His fingertips, which moments ago had been tangled in his own hair, now drifted down, tracing the lace edge of the camisole. They slipped beneath the delicate fabric, skating over the smooth, unnaturally firm slope of a breast. The sensation was strange—a distant pressure, like touching something through a thick glove. The silicon implants were inert, unfeeling. He felt a pang of something like pity for Katy, for the calculated perfection that lacked this basic, nerve-rich reality.
His hand moved lower, over the soft plane of his stomach, down to the waistband of the silk shorts. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat echoing the shower’s pulse. This was the frontier. The unknown country.
He hooked his fingers into the elastic and pushed them down his hips. The air felt cool on new skin. He lay back on the pillows, the city a blurred painting behind him. He closed his eyes, preferring the dark, the focus on sensation alone.
The first touch was a shock of sensitivity. So much softer than he could have imagined. A complexity of folds and hidden textures. He explored with a hesitant, clinical curiosity at first, mapping the geography. Then his finger found a spot, a small, firm nub that sent a jolt straight through him, a live wire connected to the base of his spine. He gasped, his back arching slightly off the mattress.
It was nothing like the blunt, centralized pleasure of his own body. This was a diffused electricity, a humming that spread outward, warming his belly, tightening his thighs. He explored the rhythm she had used on him last night, a slow, circular pressure. The sensations built, layer upon layer, a rising tide of warmth. It was less an explosion and more a slow, inexorable drowning. He forgot about the shower, about Katy, about the absurdity of it all. There was only this gathering intensity, a coil winding tighter and tighter deep inside.
He heard the water shut off. The sudden silence was a splash of cold reality. He froze, his hand stilling. He listened to the sounds of movement in the bathroom, the squeak of a glass door, the rustle of a towel. Panic-fired adrenaline cut through the languid pleasure. He withdrew his hand, pulling the shorts up, scrambling to look casually draped across the bed as his heart tried to beat its way out of his chest.
The door opened, releasing a cloud of steam. Katy emerged, a large white towel wrapped around his waist, another scrubbing through his short, damp hair. She looked… comfortable. Proprietary.
“Water pressure in there is insane,” she said, her voice—his voice—relaxed. “You should try it later. Really gets the kinks out.” Her eyes scanned the room and landed on him. She paused, a faint smirk playing on his lips. “You okay? You look… flushed.”
“Fine,” Garrett said, his voice a little too high. “Just… warm.”
She nodded, dropping the hair towel on a chair. “Right. Well, I’m starving. I’m going to go resurrect some coffee and see if I can remember how to scramble eggs without setting off the fire alarm.” She headed for the door, pausing with her hand on the frame. “Take your time. Come down when you’re ready.”
The moment she was gone, Garrett let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He brought his fingers to his nose instinctively, then, driven by a curiosity too powerful to deny, to his lips. The taste was mild, slightly musky, but with a clean, almost sweet undertone. It was uniquely, intimately her. It was uniquely, now, his.
He found her in the sprawling kitchen, a space of stainless steel and dark granite that smelled of freshly ground coffee and sizzling butter. She was maneuvering his tall frame with a new, if slightly clumsy, confidence, cracking eggs one-handed into a bowl.
“You decent?” she asked without turning around.
“Yeah,” Garrett said, sliding onto a stool at the breakfast bar. He watched the muscles in his own back ripple as she whisked the eggs. It was still profoundly disorienting.
“So,” she said, pouring the eggs into a hot pan. They sizzled violently. “Big day. We need a plan. We can’t just hide in this penthouse forever, playing doctor.”
“What did you have in mind?” The casual mention of “playing doctor” sent a fresh wave of heat to his face. He focused on the view of the city, trying to appear nonchalant.
“Damage control,” she said, scraping the eggs with a spatula. “I’ve got a company to run. Or, well, you do. Or… this body does.” She gestured at herself with the spatula. “We need to go into the office. Just for a few hours. Show my face—your face—and make sure nothing is actively on fire.”
Garrett’s stomach tightened. “The office? Katy, I don’t know the first thing about your job. What if someone asks me something?”
“I’ll be right there with you,” she said, dividing the fluffy eggs onto two plates. She grabbed toast from the sleek silver toaster. “I’ll be your assistant for the day. ‘Katy’s’ cousin, Garrett, is in town to… I don’t know, shadow her. Learn the business. It gives us a reason to be attached at the hip. I can feed you lines, tell you who people are.”
She set a plate in front of him. The eggs looked perfect. He stared at them, his appetite gone, replaced by a low thrum of anxiety. Going out there. Pretending. It was one thing in the privacy of her bedroom; it was another entirely in the harsh, fluorescent light of her corporate world.
“What if we can’t switch back?” The question hung in the air between them, the unspoken fear given voice.
Katy stopped, her own fork halfway to her mouth. She met his gaze, and for a moment, the sharp businesswoman was gone, replaced by the same scared young woman he’d seen last night. “Then we’ll figure that out too,” she said, her voice softer. “But we have to start by dealing with the world as it is. We can’t just… disappear.”
He nodded slowly, picking up his fork. She was right. The surreal bubble they’d been living in had to pop sometime. The real world was waiting, and it was time to face it, even if they were wearing each other’s skin.
He pushed the eggs around his plate, the fluffy yellow curds suddenly unappetizing. “So, we’re really doing this? I’m going to march into your high-rise and pretend to know which end of a spreadsheet is up?”
“You’ll be fine,” she said, leaning against the countertop with an ease that was entirely new to his posture. “Just smile, nod, and let me do the talking. I’ve been running that place for two years; I can talk shop in my sleep.” She took a sip of coffee from his favorite mug, her eyes—his eyes—narrowing in thought. “We’ll head over in an hour. I need to find a suit that doesn’t make me look like a kid playing dress-up in his dad’s closet.”
A different worry, mundane and yet utterly bizarre, prickled at the back of Garrett’s mind. He set his fork down with a soft clink. “Speaking of tonight,” he started, his voice hesitant. “I just remembered. Dominique is supposed to be spending the night.”