Chapter 1: Bodies Swapped on the Pool Deck
The sun was a weight on my skin, a thick, golden syrup coating the pool deck. I tipped my beer bottle—a local IPA with citrus notes—and watched Sabrina through my sunglasses. She was stretched out on the lounger next to mine, a magazine forgotten on her stomach, one hand trailing in the water. Her turquoise bikini was practically two scraps of fabric and some string. I felt a familiar, protective pang. She was so young, and the world felt too sharp for her sometimes.
“You’re going to fry,” I said, my voice a low rumble in the heat.
“I’m fine,” she murmured, not opening her eyes. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper. “The sun feels good. Solid.”
I grunted, taking another sip. That’s when it happened.
Not a sound. A flash. A brilliant, silent concussion of white light that didn’t come from outside but from between us. It wasn’t light you saw with your eyes; it was light you felt in your teeth, in the marrow of your bones. My vision sheeted pure white, and a nauseating lurch twisted my gut, like the bottom had fallen out of the world.
Then nothing.
I came back to myself gasping, a high, tight gasp that sounded wrong in my ears. My vision swam, blurred, then cleared.
I was looking up at the underside of the patio umbrella. The perspective was all off. Everything was a foot higher than it should have been. The lounger felt vast beneath me. A profound, immediate sense of wrongness flooded my nervous system. My body felt… small. Compressed. My center of gravity was a fragile, unfamiliar point low in my belly.
I tried to sit up.
A heavy, soft weight shifted and pulled on my chest with a sickening, bouncy inertia. I looked down.
Two perfect, rounded curves swelled from my ribcage, barely contained by turquoise triangles of fabric. My—her—breasts. Sabrina’s breasts. They were attached to me. The feeling was astounding, a constant, tender pressure. The bikini top was tight, the underwire a strange cage against my sternum. I lifted a hand—a small, delicate hand with slender fingers and perfectly manicured pink nails—and brushed a fingertip against the smooth skin of my cleavage. A jolt, electric and strange, shot through me. That was my skin.
“Justin?”
The voice was deep. Masculine. My voice.
My head—a head that felt too light, crowned with a heavy cascade of blonde hair—snapped to the left.
On the other lounger, where Sabrina had been, now lay… me. My own body. Six feet of me, with my short blonde hair, my long beard, wearing my board shorts. The eyes in that familiar face were wide with pure, unadulterated terror. They were Sabrina’s eyes, though. Her expressiveness, trapped in my features.
“Oh, God,” the deep voice—Sabrina’s voice using my vocal cords—gasped. My own hands, big and familiar from this alien vantage point, came up to clutch at my own bearded face. “Justin, what… what did you…”
I opened my mouth. “Sabrina?” The word came out in a higher register, melodic but shaky. It was her voice. I was speaking with her voice. The mechanics felt different—my tongue had less space, my lips felt fuller, the sound resonated in a smaller skull.
“Yes, it’s me! You’re… you’re in me!” she cried, scrambling off the lounger. My body moved with a clumsy, horrified grace, all long limbs and uncoordinated panic. She—he—stared down at my new form. “This is a nightmare.”
I pushed myself up to a sitting position. Every movement was a revelation. The gentle, unavoidable jiggle in my chest. The shift of weight on my narrow hips. When my feet touched the warm concrete, they were tiny. Size five. I’d worn size twelve. The world felt monumentally tall. The lounge chair was a cliff. The ground was too close.
I stood up.
It was the weirdest thing. I was five feet tall. I had to look up at my own body, which was being piloted by my cousin. A dizzying wave of vertigo hit me. My new balance was precarious, focused in my hips. My ass… I could feel it, a distinct, rounded presence behind me, the thin strip of the bikini bottom riding between the cheeks. A thong. I was wearing a thong. The sensation was intrusive, a constant, faint awareness of fabric where no fabric had ever been.
“We have to… we have to fix this,” Sabrina-in-my-body said, her voice trembling. She ran a hand through my hair, a gesture I’d made a thousand times, but it looked frantic now.
Before I could form a coherent thought—before I could even begin to process the alien topography between my legs, a quiet, profound absence where something should be and a different, hidden seam where there was now… something else—the sound of the gate latch clacked.
Footsteps. Confident, heavy footsteps on the deck boards.
Sabrina’s head whipped around. The color drained from my face—her face on my body. “Mark,” she breathed, the name a bass note of dread.
Mark. Her boyfriend. My best friend. The one person who couldn’t see this.
Panic, cold and sharp, stabbed through my new gut. “What do we do?” My voice was a high, tight whisper.
Her eyes—my blue eyes—locked onto mine with a desperate intensity. “You have to be me. Just for now. You have to.”
“I can’t!” The protest was a squeak. The mechanics of speech felt so frail. “Sabrina, look at me! I don’t know how to be you!”
“You have to!” she hissed, taking a step closer. My own tall frame loomed over my new petite one, casting a shadow. “If he suspects, if he thinks something’s wrong with me… Justin, please. For me. Just… talk to him. Get him to leave.”
The footsteps were closer. The sliding glass door from the house rasped open.
“Sabrina? You out here, babe?”
Mark’s voice. Easy, confident, warm.
Sabrina-in-my-body gave me one last, pleading look, then turned, forcing a posture of casual calm into my shoulders. I saw my own back straighten.
And there he was. Mark Mooers filled the doorway, a smile on his face. He was in swim trunks and a loose linen shirt, his powerful frame effortlessly dominating the space. His gaze swept past the tall, bearded version of me—a familiar sight—and landed directly, with a heat I knew all too well as his friend, on me.
On Sabrina’s body.
On me.
His smile widened, a genuine, appreciative thing. “There you are.” His eyes traveled down the length of me, taking in the turquoise bikini, the long blonde hair, every curve I currently inhabited. I felt naked in a way I never had before. It wasn’t just the lack of clothing; it was the scrutiny, the ownership in that look. It was a look I’d seen him give her a hundred times, and I’d never understood the weight of it until now, until I was pinned beneath it.
He started walking toward me, his focus absolute. “God, you look incredible.” He was talking to me. He thought I was her.
I stood there, a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, my new heart hammering against the unfamiliar confines of my ribcage, feeling the late afternoon sun bake my foreign skin, and the world narrowed to the approaching footsteps of the man who loved my cousin, and who now expected me to be her.