Chapter 13: The Test Drive Proposal
The splintered doorway groaned, a low protest from a broken hinge. It framed them all in a jagged portrait: Leo, massive and stunned; Lara, retreating into shadow; Marcus, naked and guilty; and Chad, crawling.
Chad moved with an unsteady, instinctive grace her mind hadn’t learned. Her new hips swayed, a biological metronome, as she crossed the rumpled sheets on all fours. She didn’t look at Marcus. Her wide, wet eyes were fixed on Leo, on the living sculpture of him blocking the light. The terror was still there, a cold undercurrent, but something hotter and more immediate was surging to the surface, flooding the channels of her new nervous system.
She reached him and pressed herself against his leg, her soft cheek against the dense cord of his quadricep. A shudder ran through her. Her fingers, with their neat, unpainted nails, walked up his stomach, tracing the deep, impossible grooves of his abs. She let out a high, breathy moan.
“Oh, my god,” she whispered, her voice a perfect, vapid valley girl sigh layered over a stranger’s panic. “Leo. Baby. Seriously. What is your, like, ab routine? Supersets? Drop sets? The fucking definition.” Her fingers spider-walked lower, toward the waistband of his boxers. “I need to know if it works as good as it looks.”
Leo flinched as if burned. “Chad, stop.” He grabbed her wrist, his hand engulfing it. Her skin was fever-warm.
“Don’t,” Marcus said. The word was flat, final. She moved then, crossing the room. Her own nakedness felt like armor now. She ignored the wrench at her feet. She reached them, and instead of pulling Chad away, she slid an arm around Chad’s trembling shoulders from behind. She pressed her front against Chad’s back, their bodies aligning—two copies of the same cruel blueprint. Sensitive skin met sensitive skin. Marcus felt Chad’s new breasts squash against her own, a bizarre, intimate mirroring. Chad gasped, arching back into the contact, a confused noise escaping her.
Leo was trapped, a monolith between the doorframe and the two identical women. “Marc, what are you doing?” His voice was strained.
Marcus looked up at him, her blue eyes holding a dark, desperate calculation. This was all a broken transaction. Maybe it could be fixed with another. Maybe she could control the curse, instead of it controlling her. She needed to see. She needed to prove she wasn’t just a passive victim.
With her free hand, she hooked her fingers into the elastic of Leo’s boxers and tugged them down. He was already half-hard, a confused physiological response to the chaos. He made a choked sound but didn’t stop her, his own horror rooting him to the spot.
Marcus dipped her head. She kept her eyes on Leo’s face as she pressed a soft, closed-mouth kiss to the head of his cock. It was a gesture devoid of passion, purely experimental. A test of a hypothesis.
She then turned her face, her lips brushing Chad’s ear. “Go ahead, baby,” Marcus murmured, her tone oddly encouraging, a grotesque parody of a wingman. “Try it.”
Chad needed no further permission. The mix of terror, raw sensation, and deep-seated, muscle-memory lust was a cocktail that obliterated higher thought. With a hungry little sound, she leaned forward, her mouth opening.
Leo’s head snapped back against the shattered doorjamb with a dull thud. “Fuck!” It wasn’t a cry of pleasure, but of sheer, overwhelming violation. He stared at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, their faint green pulse seeming to mock him. He could feel Chad’s eager, inexperienced mouth, could feel Marcus’s rigid embrace around her, holding her in place. He could smell Lara’s lavender candle from the hall, clashing with the salt and sweat of the room.
This was wrong. This was a profound, fracturing wrongness. He wasn’t Leo here. He was a tool, a stimulus, a component in some awful ritual he didn’t understand. He brought his hands up, not to push Chad away, but to grip the broken edges of the doorframe on either side of him. The wood bit into his palms. The physical pain was an anchor.
Marcus watched, her chin resting on Chad’s shoulder. She felt Chad’s throat work. She saw the complex play of agony and helpless stimulation on Leo’s face. She was waiting for it—for the ripple, the change, the transfer. Would Leo shrink? Would Chad revert? Would she, Marcus, finally get her old body back in some sick trade?
Nothing happened.
Only the wet, desperate sounds, Leo’s ragged breathing, and the creak of the dying hinge.
The cold clarity in Marcus curdled into a new, more profound horror. This wasn’t a switch. It wasn’t a simple exchange. It was something else, something messier and more permanent. And she had just orchestrated this. She had served her broken friend to her best friend on a platter of her own despair.
“Stop,” Leo gasped, the word firmer now. He pushed Chad’s head away, gently but with undeniable force. Chad collapsed back against Marcus, whimpering, her lips swollen and wet. She looked dazed, lost in a fog of sensation.
From the hallway, there was a soft, retreating shuffle. Then the faint click of a door closing. Lara.
The sound was like a gunshot in the sudden quiet. It severed the strange, terrible circuit they’d been locked in.
Leo yanked his boxers up, his hands shaking. He looked from Chad’s ruined, wanting face to Marcus’s empty one. The protective fury he’d felt moments ago was gone, replaced by a deep, weary disgust. Not just at them. At himself. For standing there. For letting it happen.
“Get dressed,” he said, his voice hollow. “Both of you. Now.”
He turned and walked out of the wrecked room, leaving the two blonde women holding each other on the floor. He didn’t look back. His feet carried him down the hall, past Lara’s closed door, to the bathroom. He locked the door and stared at the giant, stranger in the mirror. The abs Chad had worshipped. The shoulders that had shattered the door.
He leaned over the sink and vomited, the violence of it shaking his entire, stolen frame.
The acid burn in his throat was a clean pain. Simpler. He spat, flushed, and avoided the mirror entirely. The hollow boom of the flush echoed in the tiny bathroom. Outside the door, the house was a tomb. He could still feel the ghost of Chad’s mouth, the pressure of Marcus’s calculating stare.
He needed to move. He wrenched the door open. The hallway air was cold on his skin.
Back in the bedroom doorway, they hadn’t moved. Marcus was sitting on the floor now, legs splayed, back against the bed. Chad was curled beside her, head in Marcus’s lap, crying softly. They were a pieta of shared ruin. The wrench glinted near Marcus’s foot.
“You don’t get to fall apart,” Marcus said, her voice low. She wasn’t looking at Chad. She was staring at the opposite wall, at a poster of the solar system where Pluto was still a planet. “You don’t get to be the victim. You wanted this. You always wanted this.”
“Wanted what?” Chad blubbered, the words muffled against Marcus’s thigh. “I wanted to be a girl?”
“No, you idiot.” Marcus’s hand came down, not in a caress, but to grip a handful of Chad’s new blonde hair. She tilted Chad’s face up. “You wanted to have this. To consume it. To own it. You looked at women like they were cars. Now you are the car. So how’s the drive?”
Chad’s tear-filled eyes widened. A fresh sob hitched, but something else flickered there—a spark of recognition. Of shame. Marcus saw it. She leaned down, her face inches from Chad’s. “You felt it, didn’t you? Crawling to him. That need. It’s in the wiring now. It’s pathetic.”
“Fuck you,” Chad whispered, but there was no force in it.
“Prove it,” Marcus breathed.
Then she kissed her.
It wasn’t tender. It was a collision, an act of brutal investigation. Marcus’s mouth was demanding, angry. She was testing the boundaries of her own new senses, trying to provoke a reaction from the universe, from Chad, from her own traitorous body. Chad stiffened for a second, then melted into it with a helpless groan, her hands coming up to clutch at Marcus’s bare arms. The kiss was all tongue and teeth and shared, salty tears.
Leo watched from the hall.
He’d meant to walk right past. To go outside, to breathe air that wasn’t thick with their disaster. But the sound—a wet, desperate silence—had hooked him. He stood in the shadowed hall, one hand on the wall for balance.
They were a perfect, fevered mirror. Two identical sets of curves, two pale backs, a tangled weave of blonde hair. The sight was alien. It should have repulsed him. It did repulse him.
A deep, unwanted heat tightened low in his stomach anyway. It was a purely physical betrayal, a visceral response to the raw spectacle of it. His body, this massive stranger he wore, thrummed with an interest his mind screamed against. He felt his breath shorten. His fingers dug into the drywall, leaving faint crescents in the plaster.
Marcus broke the kiss first, panting. She searched Chad’s face, then her own hands, as if checking for cracks. Nothing had changed. No magic reversal. Just two breathless women.
Her gaze lifted and locked onto Leo’s in the doorway. She saw him watching. She saw the conflict stamped on his face, the arousal he couldn’t hide. A slow, awful smile touched her swollen lips. It wasn’t happy. It was victorious.
“See?” Marcus said, her voice ragged. She didn’t let go of Chad. “It’s just flesh. It’s just wires crossed. You feel it too. Even when you hate it.”
Leo had no answer. The truth of it sat in his gut, heavy and sour. He just stared, caught in the current of their shared corruption, his own new flesh a silent accomplice.