Chapter 8: The Morning After
The phone buzzed against the wooden nightstand, a persistent, angry insect. Justin. My name. His number. Calling this body’s phone.
The towel around me felt inadequate, a thin barrier against the chill seeping from my own bones. I stared at the screen until it went to voicemail. A second later, it buzzed again with a text notification. Then another. The screen lit up with rapid, successive pulses of light in the dim guest room.
I left it. Walking was a negotiation. My hips had a new, swinging pivot to them that felt deliberate and obscene after what had just happened. Each step sent a faint, sore ache radiating from my core, a physical memorandum of the violation. The slickness between my thighs was cooling, becoming a sticky, shameful residue. I needed my own clothes. My real clothes.
The pre-dawn light was a dull gray as I slipped out of the guest house and across the dew-wet grass to the main house. My small, bare feet left dark prints on the wooden deck. The key was under the frog-shaped rock, just like always. The familiar metallic scrape of the lock was a comfort, but the sound of the door opening—a sound I’d heard a thousand times—was different. Higher. Softer.
The kitchen smelled of stale coffee and yesterday’s loneliness. And there I was.
Or rather, there he was. My body. Six feet of slumped, bearded masculinity sitting at my own chipped kitchen table, wrapped in my own favorite faded flannel shirt. The shoulders strained at the seams in a way they never did when I wore it. The hands—my hands—were wrapped around a thick ceramic mug. They looked huge. Capable.
He—she—Sabrina looked up.
It was the strangest feeling in the world, looking into your own eyes and seeing a stranger staring back. My blue eyes, in my face, but the expression was all wrong. There was a hardened anger there, a deep-seated confusion that had settled into the lines around the eyes. Lines I knew well, but had never seen flex with such feminine fury.
“Hey,” the voice that came from my mouth said. It was my baritone, but the cadence was off. Sharper. The word was an accusation.
I just stood in the doorway, clutching the towel closed at my chest. The terry cloth bunched under my fingers, rough against my smooth, manicured nails. Pink. I kept noticing the pink.
“You look like hell,” Sabrina said, taking a sip from the mug. My body’s throat worked as it swallowed. “Sit down. Before you fall down.”
I moved to the chair opposite. The simple act of sitting felt perilous. My center of gravity was in a different zip code. I lowered myself carefully, the cool wood of the chair meeting the backs of my tender thighs. The towel threatened to gape open, and I held it fast. My breasts, heavy and loose beneath the fabric, shifted with the motion—a soft, unsettling sway I felt deep in my ribs.
We sat in silence for a long moment. The hum of the refrigerator filled the space. I could see myself in the dark window behind her—a pale, waifish ghost with tangled blonde hair.
“He texted me,” Sabrina finally said, her voice low. She nudged my phone, which was lying on the table next to her, with a thick knuckle. “Mark. ‘Had a great time last night, buddy. Thanks for having me over.’” She looked up, and my own eyes pinned me to the chair. “So he had a great time. With you. In my house. Using my body.”
The words were ice picks.
“It’s not that simple,” I whispered. My voice was a frail, high thing in the quiet kitchen.
“Then un-complicate it for me.” She leaned forward, planting my elbows on my table. The posture was aggressively male, something I never did. “I woke up in this… this cave of a body. Everything smells like beer and sawdust. I had to piss standing up. Do you have any idea how terrifying that is? Aiming this… this hose? And my head is pounding with these… these urges. Strange, gross thoughts. Images. And my best friend is sending me wholesome bro-texts while he’s probably already thinking about round two with the piece of ass he found in my guest house.”
Her words, my voice, were laced with a vitriol that made me flinch.
“He locked the door,” I started, the words tumbling out in a rush. “I tried to stop it. I said no. But he just… he looked at me, and this body… it…” I trailed off, helpless. How could I explain the biological treason? The way the nerves had sung under his touch, the way the muscles had clenched and released on a protocol I didn’t understand?
“It what?” Sabrina prompted, cold.
“It responded,” I said, the admission burning my throat. “It wanted things. It felt things. I came, Sabrina. Twice. While my mind was screaming.”
She stared at me. The anger in my face seemed to calcify into something colder, more brittle. She looked down at the hands—my hands—turning them over as if seeing them for the first time. “So he raped my body,” she stated, with a chilling clarity. “And my body liked it.”
The finality of the sentence hung in the air. There was no arguing with it.
“We need to figure out how to fix this,” I said, echoing her text from days ago, my voice pleading.
“No shit,” she snorted, a harsh, unfeminine sound from my lungs. “But first, we need damage control. You can’t be around him. Ever again.”
“He wants to see me. Again. He texted the guest house phone, too.”
“Of course he does,” she said, standing up. My body uncoiled to its full height, and I had to crane my neck to look up at myself. The perspective was dizzying. She started pacing, my long legs eating up the linoleum in two strides. “He thinks he just hooked up with a vulnerable, grieving teenager. He’s your best friend, and he’s a predator.”
“He’s not—” The old defense, a lifetime of camaraderie, leapt to my lips and died there. The memory of the lock clicking, the hunger in his eyes, the feeling of being lifted like I weighed nothing… “I don’t know what he is anymore.”
“He’s a problem,” Sabrina said, stopping her pacing. She looked at me, a calculated gleam in my own eyes. “We need to get our bodies back. And then we need to make him disappear from our lives. But until we switch back, you are in the world’s most vulnerable position. He’s stronger than you. Everyone is stronger than you now.”
As if to demonstrate, she walked to the counter, picked up a half-full beer bottle I’d left from two nights ago, and easily pried off the cap with my fingers. No opener. She took a long swig, wincing slightly at the taste. “Ugh. How do you drink this? It tastes like bitter bread.”
“It’s an IPA,” I mumbled, the absurdity of discussing craft beer at the end of the world nearly making me laugh hysterically.
She put the bottle down with a thud. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to stay in the main house. I’m staying in the guest house. We tell anyone who asks that ‘Sabrina’ is struggling hard with her grief and needs space. ‘Justin’ is being the protective cousin. That keeps him away from you. It also keeps me from having to pretend to be you for too long out in the world. This body is a liability.”
“What about work? Your friends? My… my life?”
“You call in sick. I’ll figure out the rest from the guest house.” She ran a hand through the short, blonde hair on my head. The gesture was so familiarly mine it hurt. “We research. We try to remember everything about the night this happened. Was there anything weird? A object? A phrase? A storm?”
I thought back. It was all a blur of shock and disorientation. “We were both just… angry. Scared. You were packing to leave. I was trying to get you to stay. We yelled. Then everything went white.”
“Great. So a mutual tantrum swapped our souls. Perfect.” She sighed, a deep, rumbling sound from my chest. “I need a shower. This skin feels like it’s crawling. And you…” She looked me up and down, a clinical disgust in her gaze. “You need to burn that towel. And for God’s sake, put some real clothes on my body. You’re giving me a complex.”
She walked out of the kitchen, my heavy work boots thudding on the floor. I sat alone, listening to the sound of my own footsteps retreat down the hall. The first sliver of actual sunrise cut through the window, painting the messy kitchen in weak gold. It illuminated the laptop, the beer bottles, the normalcy of my former life.
I looked down at the hands in my lap. Small, delicate, with perfect pink nails. They were trembling. I made a fist. There was no power in it. Just a faint, bony ache.
Mark’s text from last night still glowed in my mind. ‘Last night was incredible. Can I see you again?’
The body around me, this exquisite, treacherous shell, gave a tiny, involuntary shiver of remembered pleasure. It was the deepest betrayal of all.