Chapter 3: The Wardrobe War
The towel hit the floor with a wet slap. Farver stood naked in the middle of the room, the air conditioning raising goosebumps on the golden skin. He needed armor. Something to separate the mind from the machine it was driving.
Jordan’s walk-in closet was a cavern of rich-boy uniforms. Racks of polos, stacks of designer jeans, shelves of pristine athletic shoes still in their boxes. It smelled of cheap cologne and cedar. Farver’s eyes scanned for the soft, the shapeless, the hiding place. At the back, he found a heap of less-curated items. An old, faded university hoodie, gray and worn soft at the cuffs.
Yes. This was the thing. Baggy, anonymous. It would swallow these shoulders, hide this chest. He could vanish inside it.
He pulled it off the hanger. The fabric was comforting in his hands. He started to pull it over his head.
His arms rebelled.
It was a subtle, muscular refusal. The hoodie was halfway on when his biceps tightened, his shoulders locking. The motion felt wrong—confining, smothering. A low, instinctive revulsion bubbled up from his gut. His hands, moving with a will of their own, didn’t tug the hoodie down. They gripped the hem and yanked it back up and off, throwing it to the closet floor in a heap.
A full-body shiver racked him, starting at the base of his skull and humming down his spine. The air felt different on his skin now. Not a threat, but an invitation.
“The fuck was that?” he mumbled, but his voice was already lower, smoother. The cadence was off.
His gaze drifted, dragged against his will to a different shelf. Neon-bright workout shorts, the kind that barely covered anything. A sleeveless compression tank, black. A fitted baseball cap, logo facing forward.
His hands reached for them.
He dressed slowly, watching in the full-length mirror on the closet door. The shorts clung to his quadriceps, the hem riding high. The tank top strained across his pectorals, the armholes gaping to show the hard curves of his lat muscles. He tugged the cap down, shadowing his eyes. The reflection was no longer a stranger hiding. It was a statement, posed and ready for appraisal.
A smirk—wide, easy, and utterly foreign—spread across his face. He shifted his weight, popping one hip, and let a hand run down the taut line of his own abdomen, resting on the jut of his hip bone.
“There we go,” the voice rumbled from his chest, rich with satisfaction. It was Jordan’s tone, Jordan’s arrogance, saturating every word. “Let ‘em see what they’re dealing with.”
He flexed his right arm slowly, watching the bicep swell into a perfect, veined globe. The cap’s shadow turned his eyes into pits of cool blue challenge. The person in the mirror was a predator, casually admiring his own teeth.
A spike of pure terror, sharp and clarifying, stabbed through the fog of the takeover.
No. That’s not me. That’s the wiring. The meat is talking.
He wrenched his gaze away from the mirror, breaking the spell. He stumbled out of the closet, back into the oppressive bedroom. The posters of linebackers seemed to leer at him. He needed a distraction, something to ground Farver Klein in this body.
His eyes landed on Jordan’s sprawling desk. A top-tier gaming laptop, sleek and powerful, sat beside a stack of untouched textbooks. Physics 101. Intro to Sociology. The spines were uncracked. With clumsy, too-strong fingers, he flipped open the laptop. It woke instantly, no password. The desktop was a chaos of football play diagrams, spreadsheet stats, and a folder simply labeled “Vids.”
He ignored it all and opened a browser.
His first instinct was to search. Body swap. Consciousness transfer. Quantum displacement.