Chapter 3: Forbidden Experiment
The slammed door didn’t just shake the walls; it severed something. Mark sat on the floor, the sharp edge of a fallen textbook digging into his thigh, listening to the empty roar the sound left behind. His heart was a frantic animal in a cage of soft tissue. The sick thrill of what he’d just done curdled instantly, leaving a cold, metallic shame in the back of his throat.
He’d meant to shock Ben, to punish him for the quarantine, to force him to see the grotesque reality. He hadn’t meant for his own body to react, for that slow grind against Ben’s lap to feel like anything other than a weapon. But it had. There had been a flicker of something—a warmth, a shocking, alien jolt of sensation that was utterly disconnected from the anger in his head. That disconnect was more terrifying than Ben’s shove.
He got up, his movements clumsy. The apartment was tomb-silent. He picked up his discarded hoodie but didn’t put it on. He walked to his room and closed the door softly this time, leaning his forehead against the cool wood.
The silence stretched. An hour. Then two. He heard nothing from the living room, no returning footsteps. Ben was gone, probably driving nowhere fast. Mark stared at the posters on his wall—action shots of himself, mid-tackle, face contorted in effort. The guy in those pictures was a ghost. A storybook character. That jawline, those shoulders, that flat, hard plane of a chest—they were fiction now.
He needed to move. The stagnant air in his room was suffocating. He pulled on the hoodie and a pair of loose track pants, tying the drawstring tight. He ventured out, a trespasser in his own home.
The first thing he did was go to the fridge. Old habit. He opened it, reached for a protein shake from the six-pack on the bottom shelf. His hand closed around the cool plastic. He shook it, popped the cap, and raised it to his lips.
The first swallow was a disaster. The thick, chalky vanilla flavor, something he’d consumed daily for years, now coated his tongue and hit his stomach with a cloying, greasy weight. It was too sweet, too heavy. His body rebelled. He coughed, nearly choking, and slammed the shake down on the counter. A white dribble escaped his lip. He wiped it with the back of his hand, disgusted.
His body didn’t want fuel. It wanted… he didn’t know what it wanted. Something else. The realization was a quiet, profound loss. Another anchor gone.
He paced. The living room felt like a crime scene. He could still see the imprint on the couch where Ben had been sitting, still feel the phantom echo of his own weight settling onto his friend’s lap. He stopped in front of the lopsided bathroom mirror, the one from the first chapter. He’d been avoiding it.
He made himself look.
The person in the mirror was a stranger wearing his desperation. The hoodie swallowed his frame, but it couldn’t hide the soft, full curve of his lips, the absurdly long eyelashes, the delicate line of his jaw. His blonde hair, messy from the hoodie, fell around his face in a way that looked intentionally tousled. He looked like a girl who’d just woken up in her boyfriend’s clothes.
A hot, helpless anger bubbled up. He grabbed the hem of the hoodie and yanked it off, throwing it into the bathtub. He stared at his reflection in just the thin t-shirt. The posters in his room were a lie. This was the truth. This exaggerated, cartoonish femininity. He poked at his own chest, hard, hoping for pain, for some proof of its unreality. It just yielded softly, a fleshy confirmation.
“What are you?” he whispered to the reflection.
The reflection offered no answers. Just wide, blue, confused eyes in a face that didn’t belong to him.
He heard a key in the lock.
He froze, a deer in headlights, half-dressed in the open bathroom doorway. Ben walked in. He didn’t look at Mark. He looked exhausted, his shoulders slumped. He carried a paper bag from the grocery store. He went straight to the kitchen and started unpacking it with methodical, quiet movements: bread, peanut butter, a six-pack of a different, cheaper beer.
Mark stood there, exposed, waiting for the explosion, the continuation of the fight.
It didn’t come. Ben’s silence was worse. It was a wall.
“Ben,” Mark said, his voice small.
Ben paused, a jar of jelly in his hand. He still didn’t look up. “What.”
“I’m… that was fucked up. What I did.”
Ben let out a long, slow breath. He placed the jelly on the counter with precise care. “Yeah. It was.”
“I just… I felt like you were putting me in a box. Telling me to disappear.”
Finally, Ben turned. His eyes were red-rimmed and hollow. They flicked over Mark, standing there in his t-shirt, and then away, fixing on a point over his shoulder. “You are in a box, Mark. We both are. You built it when you signed their papers. I’m just trying to figure out how to live next to it without setting the whole damn thing on fire.” He rubbed his face. “What you did… that wasn’t you trying to get out of the box. That was you trying to drag me into it with you.”
The accuracy of it was a sucker punch. Mark had no retort.
Ben went back to putting away groceries. “I got you some stuff. Different stuff.”
Mark looked at the counter. Next to the bread were rice cakes, a tub of Greek yogurt, fruit. Diet food. Girl food.
The gesture was so pragmatic, so utterly devoid of warmth, that it hurt more than a punch. Ben wasn’t being kind; he was managing a problem. Curating the environment for the new, difficult pet.
“I don’t want that,” Mark said, but it sounded petulant, childish.
“Your stomach rejected the shake. I heard you coughing.” Ben’s voice was flat. “The docs probably gave you a metabolic sheet or something. Your body’s different. It’s going to want different things. Less mass, more…” he gestured vaguely, “…maintenance. Just eat it. One less thing to freak out about.”
He was right. Again. Mark hated it.
“I’m not dropping out,” Mark said, seizing on the one piece of his old life he could still fight for. “I can’t do a whole year online. I’ll fail. I’ll lose my scholarship for next year.”
Ben finally leaned against the counter, crossing his arms. It was a defensive posture. “So what’s your brilliant plan, Hammer? Stroll into Sociology 101 like this?” He finally met Mark’s eyes, a challenge in his tired gaze. “You think people won’t notice? You think anyone from the team, from your classes, is going to look at you and see Mark Hamilton? They’re going to see a new girl. A hot one. They’re gonna stare. They’re gonna talk. They’re gonna ask for your number. And what are you going to do? Talk about rugby plays in that voice?”
The scenario unfolded in Mark’s mind, vivid and humiliating. He saw the confused glances, the whispers. He saw guys like Derek, his own teammates, looking at him with that lazy, appraising stare Ben had flashed the first night. The idea of trying to explain, of seeing that confusion turn to disbelief, then to mockery or worse—it made his skin crawl.
“I could… wear a hat. Glasses. Like you said.”
“And then what?” Ben pushed off the counter, a flicker of his old, frustrated energy returning. “You going to the library? The gym? You think you can just blend? Look at you.” The words weren’t cruel, just brutally factual. “Blending isn’t an option. You’re a spotlight. The only way to not get seen is to not be there.”
The truth of it settled in the room, heavy and inescapable. Mark was trapped. Not just in a new body, but in the apartment. A prisoner of his own solution.
“There has to be something,” Mark whispered, more to himself than to Ben.
Ben was silent for a long moment. He studied Mark, his gaze analytical now, calculating. It was the look he got when he was working on a complex physics problem. “Maybe there is,” he said slowly. “But you’re not going to like it.”
“What?”
“You need a cover. A real one. Not just a story people tell, but a person people see.” Ben walked over to the couch and sat down, gesturing for Mark to follow. It was a business meeting. Mark sat on the far end, pulling his knees up to his chest. “You can’t be Mark Hamilton. But you could be someone else. A cousin. A friend from back home. Someone staying here for the semester.”
Mark stared at him. “What, like an alias? That’s insane.”
“More insane than the rest of this?” Ben countered. “We say my cousin, Mia or whatever, is crashing here while she sorts out transferring. You keep to yourself, you take a couple of online classes, you avoid the team and anyone who knew Mark. You have a reason to be here. A reason to look… like that.”
“Mia?” Mark repeated, the name tasting foreign.
“It’s a name. Pick another one. The point is, you’d be a separate person. It gives you a little breathing room. You can go outside, get air, without it being ‘Mark Hamilton in a dress.’ It’s just Mia, a girl who lives here.”
It was a staggering concept. To not just hide, but to actively pretend to be someone new. To construct a fiction from the ground up. The sheer mental effort of it felt overwhelming.
“And you?” Mark asked. “You’d just… introduce your ‘cousin’? Vouch for her?”
Ben’s jaw tightened. “Yeah. I would. Because the alternative is you going stir-crazy in this apartment and doing more stupid, toxic shit like last night. And because…” He looked away, out the grimy window. “Because he’s still in there somewhere. My friend. And I guess I don’t want to watch him drown.”
The admission hung between them, fragile. It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t acceptance. It was a life preserver tossed into ugly, churning water.
Mark didn’t know what to say. The anger was gone, leaving a deep, weary emptiness. He just nodded, once.
“Okay,” Ben said, standing up. “First step. We need to go shopping.”
Mark balked. “Shopping? For what?”
Ben gave him a look that was pure, exhausted ‘Brains.’ “For Mia. Look at you. You’re wearing my old track pants and a shirt that’s straining at the seams. No cousin of mine dresses like a homeless person. You need clothes that fit. That look… normal. For her.”
The idea of going out into the world, into a store, under that fluorescent lighting, with all those mirrors and people—it was sheer terror. “I can’t.”
“You have to. Unless you want to live in that hoodie for a year.” Ben’s tone brooked no argument. It was the voice of logistical
Ben drove them to a sprawling, generic mall on the outskirts of town, a place they’d only ever gone to for replacement cleats or fast food. The fluorescent light inside was a brutal, shaming glare. Mark kept his head down, the hood of Ben’s spare jacket pulled up, but he felt like a lit fuse in a fireworks factory. Every shuffle of his new sneakers on the polished floor echoed.
Every reflective surface was a trap. He saw glimpses—a slash of blonde hair, the dramatic sweep of a hip under jeans, a stranger moving in sync with him. His own walk had changed, a subtle, unconscious shift in his center of gravity. He tried to force his old, lumbering stride and nearly tripped.
“Just pick a store,” Ben muttered, walking a careful two feet ahead, a reluctant bodyguard. “Anywhere that isn’t sporting goods.”
They drifted into a department store, a sea of overwhelming smells—perfume, fabric, cleaning chemicals. The women’s section stretched out like a foreign country. Racks of soft, intricate things in colors that had no names in Mark’s old vocabulary. He stopped at the edge, paralyzed.
“Go on,” Ben said, not looking at him, examining a hideously patterned tie on a nearby rack.
“I don’t know how,” Mark hissed, his voice lost under the store’s muzak.
“Figure it out. You’re the girl.” Ben’s words were toneless. A statement of fact.
A saleswoman with a kind, middle-aged face swooped in. “Can I help you two find something?” Her gaze bounced from Ben’s tense, handsome face to Mark’s hood-shrouded one.
Ben jumped. “No. She’s fine. Thanks.” It was too quick, too sharp.
The woman’s smile tightened, her eyes lingering on Mark with a hint of concern. She moved away. Ben shoved his hands in his pockets, his shoulders up near his ears. “See? You’re drawing attention just standing here. Pick some fucking jeans and let’s go.”
Mark grabbed the first things his hands touched—a pair of dark jeans, a simple gray v-neck t-shirt, a soft-looking flannel button-down. He fled to the dressing rooms, a numbered door his only sanctuary.
The stall was a closet of truth. He peeled off the track pants and stared at his legs in the full-length mirror. They were long, toned, but undeniably feminine, tapering to slender ankles. He shoved the new jeans on. They slid over his hips with a soft whisssh, hugging every contour, the denim strangely soft. They fit perfectly. He’d never worn jeans that fit like this; his old ones were always loose, baggy.
He pulled on the gray t-shirt. It was simple cotton, but the way it draped over his chest, cinched at his narrow waist, was a revelation. It wasn’t tight, but it announced. He left the flannel unbuttoned over it. The reflection showed someone put-together. Casual. Cute.
The word cute echoed in his head, unbidden. He didn’t feel cute. He felt like an imposter wearing a very convincing, very soft uniform.
He looked… normal. For her. For Mia.
A sudden, reckless wave of something—defiance, curiosity, despair—washed over him. He needed to see the whole picture. He needed Ben to see it. He needed to know if the cover would hold.
He took a breath, unlocked the dressing room door, and stepped out into the communal corridor.
Ben was leaning against a wall opposite, staring at his phone. He glanced up.
He stopped breathing.
His phone hand slowly lowered to his side. His eyes, wide and unguarded for a shattered second, traveled the length of Mark and back up. There was no mockery, no anger, no logistical analysis. It was pure, stunned visual processing. His mouth opened slightly, then closed. A faint, painful flush crept up his neck.
He looked, for that single, silent beat, exactly like a guy seeing a very attractive girl for the first time.
The expression was gone in a flash, replaced by a hardened mask. He cleared his throat, looked at the floor, then the ceiling. “Yeah. Those’ll work. Get a few like that. Basics.” His voice was gruff, scraped raw.
Mark’s own heart was pounding for a different reason now. That look in Ben’s eyes… it was the final, irrefutable proof. The packaging worked. On everyone. Even on the one person who knew what was underneath.
He bought the clothes, moving through the checkout in a daze, letting Ben handle the money from the shared grocery fund. The walk back through the mall was different. He was painfully aware of the soft brush of the flannel against his arms, the confident sway the jeans seemed to impose on his hips. He caught a college-aged guy’s glance, a quick, appreciative sweep before the guy looked away. It wasn’t threatening. It was automatic. A reflex.
He felt simultaneously powerful and utterly invisible. Mark Hamilton was gone. In his place was a shape that drew eyes and held no history.
They didn’t speak in the car. The silence was a thick, new thing, charged with the memory of that look in the dressing room corridor. Ben gripped the steering wheel like he was trying to strangle it.
Back in the apartment, Mark changed into the new clothes. It felt like putting on armor and a target at the same time. He walked out to the living room where Ben was mechanically making a sandwich.
“So,” Mark said, leaning against the doorframe, the posture feeling strangely natural. “Mia.”
Ben didn’t turn. “Yeah.”
“You’ll introduce me. Vouch for me.”
“That’s the plan.”
A quiet desperation, born from the looming reality of existing in this skin outside these walls, tightened in Mark’s chest. The memory of that guy’s glance in the mall, the saleswoman’s concern, the terrifying prospect of a thousand more such moments, converged. He needed a stronger shield. A better cover.
An idea, horrifying and perfectly logical, clicked into place. It was insane. It was the next, inevitable step.
“How about,” Mark began, his voice deliberately casual, testing the words, “you say I’m your girlfriend? You know, that way nobody hits on me.”
The knife Ben was using to spread mayo slipped, skidding off the bread and scoring a white line on the countertop. He went perfectly still. The only sound was the hum of the fridge.
He slowly turned. His face was a careful blank. “What did you say?”
“Think about it,” Mark pushed on, the idea gaining a desperate momentum. “A cousin is one thing. But a girlfriend? That’s a total zone of safety. Guys see a ring, real or not, they back off. They see a guy, they back off. If I’m just your cousin crashing here, I’m available. I’m a puzzle. If I’m your girlfriend… I’m yours. End of story. No questions. No advances. It’s cleaner.”
Ben stared at him. The blankness cracked, revealing a slow-dawning horror. “You are out of your fucking mind.”
“Am I?” Mark took a step forward. “You saw that guy in the mall. You saw yourself looking at me in the store. This is what it’s going to be like. Every day. Unless I have a big, glaring ‘Do Not Touch’ sign. You’re that sign, Ben.”
“I am not a sign,” Ben whispered, the words venomous. “I am your roommate. Your friend. Or I was.”
“And friends help,” Mark shot back, the anger returning, hot and slick. “This helps. It solves the problem. It makes the story airtight. Who questions a guy’s girlfriend living with him? No one. It’s expected. It’s normal.”
“None of this is normal!” Ben’s control snapped. He threw the knife into the sink with a clatter. “You want me to pretend? To lie to everyone, to all my friends, to my family, and say that—” he jabbed a finger at Mark’s body, “—is my girlfriend? You want me to… to hold your hand? To put my arm around you? After what you did last night?”
The air crackled with the memory—Mark in his lap, the deliberate, grinding movement, the confused heat.
“It wouldn’t be real,” Mark insisted, but his voice faltered.
“It would be a performance!” Ben roared. “A fucked-up, daily performance where I have to act like I want to touch you! Like I’m attracted to… to that! To my best friend!”
The words hung between them, brutal and true. Ben was breathing like he’d just run sprints. His eyes were wild, trapped. “You’re asking me to lie about everything I am. To everyone I know. For a year.”
Mark had no answer. The logistical perfection of the idea curdled in the face of Ben’s raw, human revolt. He was asking for that. He was asking Ben to consume the lie, to live inside it, to become its primary actor.
Ben looked at him, at the new clothes, at the face that was no longer his friend’s. A deep, shuddering defeat settled over his features. He didn’t say no. He didn’t agree. He just turned back to his mutilated sandwich, his shoulders slumping under an impossible weight.
“Get out,” he said, his voice empty. “Just get out of my sight.”
The silence after the slammed door was a physical weight. Mark stood alone in the middle of the kitchen, the gray shirt suddenly feeling like a costume for a play that had just bombed. He could still see the raw wound of betrayal in Ben’s eyes, fresh and deeper than any from the rugby pitch. He’d miscalculated. He’d tried to weaponize this new body, and it had blown up in his face, severing the last fraying thread between them.
He retreated to his room, the new jeans whispering accusations with every step. He didn’t take them off. He just lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, tracing the familiar water stain with his eyes. The money in his account felt like Monopoly cash. Useless. He was rich and utterly, profoundly trapped.
Hours bled away. The light through the blinds faded from gray to orange to the deep indigo of full night. The apartment remained silent. No clang of pans, no video game sounds, no low murmur of sports commentary. It was a tomb for two living people.
A soft knock came at his door just after ten.
Mark didn’t move. “Yeah?”
The door opened slowly. Ben stood there, backlit by the hallway light, his frame filling the space. He looked shattered. His eyes were red-rimmed, his usually expressive face slack with exhaustion. He held two beers, the condensation beading on the cans.
“Truce,” he said, his voice gravelly. He extended one beer.
Mark pushed himself up on his elbows, wary. He took the can. The aluminum was cold, shockingly real against his palm. Ben leaned against the doorframe, not entering, putting the whole room between them. He took a long pull from his beer.
“I thought about it,” Ben said, staring at a point on the floor near Mark’s discarded sneakers. “The girlfriend thing.” He shook his head, a faint, humorless smirk twisting his lips. “It’s the most insane thing I’ve ever heard. And it’s also the only thing that makes a shred of sense.”
Mark’s breath caught. He didn’t speak.
Ben’s eyes lifted, meeting his. The anger was gone, replaced by a deep, weary resignation. “If you’re just some random girl, there’s questions. Where’s Mark? Why’s she here? If you’re my cousin, it’s weird you’re here all semester. But a girlfriend…” He took another drink. “People get it. They don’t ask. They just accept it. It’s a closed loop.”
“So…”
“So, yeah.” Ben let out a long, slow breath, as if expelling the last of his resistance. “We do it. For a year. We sell it. To everyone. My friends, your professors if we have to, the guys at the gym, the mailman. Everyone.” His gaze was steady now, direct, all business. “But it’s a contract. My rules. Full stop.”
“What rules?” Mark asked, his voice barely a whisper.
“One. No more of that shit from last night. Or in the kitchen today. No testing, no poking, no… performing. We act normal. Or what passes for normal for a couple. And that’s it.”
“Okay.”
“Two. In public, we sell it. Hand-holding, arm around the shoulder, whatever it takes to make it believable. But it’s acting. Nothing more. The second we’re back in this apartment, it’s over. We go back to being… this.” He gestured between them, at the cavernous space.
Mark just nodded, a tight knot forming in his throat.
“Three. You tell me everything the doctors said. The metabolic stuff, the… the physical details. Everything. I need to know what to expect. No surprises.”
“I will.”
Ben finally pushed off the doorframe. He looked at Mark, really looked at him, not as a monster or a spectacle, but as a problem to be solved. A co-conspirator. “We start tomorrow. We go to The Gridiron for lunch. The team will be there after morning weights. We walk in together. You’re Mia. My girlfriend, from out of town, transferring in. That’s the story. Stick to it.”
The Gridiron. Their pub. The sanctum of sticky floors and shouted plays and camaraderie that now felt like a minefield. The thought of walking in there, under those familiar flags, with every eye on him—on her—was paralyzing.
“What if they don’t buy it?” Mark’s voice cracked.
Ben finished his beer, crushing the can in his fist with a sharp, definitive crunch. “They’ll buy it,” he said, his tone leaving no room for doubt. He glanced once more at Mark, a final, assessing look that took in the blonde hair, the fitted shirt, the whole terrifying package. “They’ll buy it because they’ll want to. And because I’ll make them.”
He turned and left, closing the door softly behind him.
Mark listened to his footsteps fade. He looked down at the unopened beer in his hand, then at his reflection in the dark window. Mia. His name was Mia now. Ben’s girlfriend. The fiction was settling over him, a second skin tighter than the first.
He agreed reluctantly.