Chapter 6: The Taste of Forever
I woke to the weight of an arm. A solid, male arm slung over my waist, possessive even in sleep. The heat of a body pressed against my back. Breath, warm and even, stirred the hair at my nape.
For one disorienting second, I was Ben. I was hungover. Marcus had crashed in my bed after a party again. My mouth was dry. My head ached.
Then the rest filtered in.
The scent wasn’t beer and sweat. It was sex. A musky, intimate perfume that clung to the sheets, to my skin, to the air itself. The ache wasn’t in my head. It was deeper, a low, tender throbbing between my legs, a physical memory of being used, of being filled. The body behind me wasn’t just Marcus. It was Marcus after. The man who had fucked me into the mattress while I cried out for a ghost.
I lay perfectly still, cataloging the ruins. The red lace bra was twisted around my ribs, the underwire digging into my sternum. The thong was gone, lost somewhere in the twisted sheets. My skin felt sticky, sensitive. Dried sweat. Other things.
His arm tightened, pulling me infinitesimally closer. A sleepy, contented noise vibrated in his chest against my back.
Revulsion rose, bile-bitter. This was my best friend. And I had… we had…
But beneath the revulsion, underneath the seismic shame, something else stirred. A physical echo. A hunger. Not the hollow ache of last night, which had been a need for something, for completion. This was sharper. More specific. The memory of his taste wasn’t a memory. It was a craving. The feel of him inside me wasn’t a past event. It was a blueprint. My body, this new, traitorous architecture, was humming. It was satisfied, but it was also… priming itself. For more. As if one serving had only confirmed the recipe.
I stared at the grey light seeping around the edges of the blinds. It was early. The world was quiet. In this suspended hour, the lab, the curse, Lena’s cold eyes—they felt like a distant fever dream. This, the weight and the heat and the smell, was the only reality. A reality I had begged for.
I had to move. I had to break this suffocating intimacy before he woke. Before we had to look at each other.
I began to slide out from under his arm, moving with glacial care. His hand flexed against my stomach, but he didn’t wake. I slipped free, the cool air of the room hitting my naked skin, raising goosebumps. I stood on shaky legs, looking down at him.
Marcus slept on his side, face half-buried in the pillow. In sleep, the tension was gone from his jaw. He looked young. Just my friend. A strip of light cut across his shoulder, revealing faint scratch marks. My doing. The evidence was on him, too.
I needed to vomit. I needed to scrub my skin raw.
Instead, my eyes traveled down the length of his body under the thin sheet. The topography of him. The swell of his hip. The line of his thigh.
The hunger twisted, impatient.
I don’t remember deciding. There was no thought. It was a bypass of cognition, a direct line from that humming, waking need to movement. I sank to my knees beside the bed. The cheap, rough carpet bit into my skin. My heart was a frantic bird in a cage of ribs. I reached for the hem of the sheet tangled around his waist.
I pulled it down, just enough.
He was soft, vulnerable in sleep. Familiar. A part of me, the Ben-part, screamed in silent, outraged horror. What are you doing? Stop. Get up. Run.
But my hand was already moving. My fingers, which had built model rockets with him, which had passed him controllers and beers, closed around him. The skin was surprisingly soft. Warm. He stirred, a faint shift in his breathing. A murmur.
I bent my head.
My hair fell around my face, a curtain closing off the world. There was only this. The salt-and-skin scent of him. The growing weight on my tongue. I took him into my mouth, and it wasn’t like anything I could have imagined. It was an act of geography. Of learning a new landscape by blind, intimate touch.
He hardened rapidly, a response as automatic as a knee-jerk. A low, sleep-thickened groan escaped him. His hips twitched upward.
I gagged. The intrusion was sudden, overwhelming. My eyes watered. But I didn’t pull back. The gagging reflex felt like part of it, a harsh submission to the physical fact of him. I relaxed my throat, forcing myself to take him deeper. The sounds I made were muffled, wet, obscene. The taste was bitter, musky, profoundly other. It should have been repellent.
It was a key turning in a lock.
I found a rhythm, guided by his unconscious responses, by the faint, helpless thrusts of his hips. My mind was a white noise of sensation. The stretch of my jaw. The pressure at the back of my throat. The feel of his hands tangling in my hair, not guiding, just holding on, his fingers tightening with each pull of my mouth.
“Bree… fuck…” His voice was shattered glass.
He was awake. He knew. And he wasn’t stopping.
That knowledge, his complicit, groaning acceptance, fueled something dark and victorious in me. This wasn’t the confused, angry fucking of last night. This was service. This was consumption. I was taking something from him, and he was letting me. He was begging for it.
His breathing grew ragged, frantic. The noises from his chest were pure animal distress. His grip on my hair became painful, anchoring. He tried to say something, my name maybe, but it dissolved into a sharp, choked gasp.
He came with a violence that arched his back off the bed.
It was hot, a bitter flood that filled my mouth, my throat. I swallowed convulsively, once, twice, a reflex as deep as breathing. The act of swallowing felt momentous. A sacrament. A sealing.
I kept my mouth on him until he shuddered and went still, until his grip in my hair loosened, fell away.
I sat back on my heels, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. My lips felt bruised, swollen. My throat ached. The taste of him was a permanent layer on my tongue.
And then it hit.
A wave of dizziness so profound the room tilted. A searing heat bloomed in the core of my belly, right where I’d swallowed, and then radiated outward, like someone had injected molten metal into my veins. It wasn’t pain. It was transformation. A cellular reckoning.
My bones creaked.
I heard it. A faint, internal groaning. My hips, resting on my heels, suddenly flared outward with a sharp, popping sensation. The bones literally shifting, expanding the cradle of my pelvis. A gasp ripped from me, but my voice… my voice was wrong. It emerged lower, richer, a husky contralto that vibrated in my new, wider chest. The change wasn’t temporary. I could feel it settle, a permanent alteration in my vocal cords, in the resonance chamber of my throat.
The dizziness passed, leaving behind a terrifying, crystalline clarity.
I looked down at my own body. My hands, resting on my thighs, looked the same. But the spread of my hips under the skin was new. The curve from waist to thigh was a deeper, more pronounced arc. I brought a hand to my throat, feeling the vibration as I made a small, experimental sound. A hum. It was a stranger’s voice.
I looked up at Marcus.
He was propped on his elbows, staring at me. All sleep was gone, burned away by shock and a dawning, horrified comprehension. His eyes were wide, locked on my face, then darting down to the new, obvious swell of my hips where I knelt. He had heard my voice change. He had seen my body shift.
“What… what was that?” he whispered. His own voice was hoarse.
I tried to speak. The new voice felt unfamiliar, a ill-fitting glove. “I think…” I began, the words emerging with this alien, feminine timber. I cleared my throat, but the register was fixed. “I think I just locked it in.”
The phrase hung in the air. It was Lena’s term. A cold, clinical term for what felt like a soul-death.
“Locked what in?” he demanded, pushing himself fully upright. The sheet pooled in his lap. He looked from me to his own body, as if betrayed by it. “What did you do?”
“What you let me do,” I said, and the new voice made it sound accusatory, darkly sensual.
He flinched. “That’s not… I was half-asleep, I…”
“You came,” I stated flatly. I stood up. My balance was different. My center of gravity had lowered. I took a step, and it was a slightly wider, more deliberate sway. The change was subtle but absolute. “And I swallowed. And then… my body finished the update.” I turned towards the fogged mirror above the desk.
I walked to it, my movements feeling studied, foreign. I wiped a hand across the glass, clearing a swath.
The person who looked back was a stranger.
Ben’s eyes, yes. But the face around them was softer, the jawline less severe. My lips looked fuller, probably swollen from use, but also… different. My shoulders seemed narrower, my neck longer. And my hips… the sleep shirt I’d put on after he’d… after we’d… it hung differently now. It draped from a new framework.
I was Bree.
Not a man pretending, not a cursed intermediary. The transformation was complete. The last vestigial echoes of my old skeletal structure had been overwritten. This was the final form.
A sob welled up in my new throat, a raw, ugly sound. “Oh, God.”
Marcus was beside me then. He had pulled on his shorts. He stood next to me, staring at my reflection, then at me. His face was pale. “Your voice…”
“I know.”
“Your… your hips.”
“I know.”
He reached out a hand, hesitant, as if to touch my side, to confirm the reality of the new curve, but he pulled back before making contact. “Lena said… she said it was a process. That it could be… managed.”
“Lena experiments,” I said, the bitterness perfectly suited to the lower voice. “She doesn’t manage. She observes. And we just gave her a hell of a data point.” I turned from the mirror, unable to look anymore. “The curse needed a… a catalyst. A biological confirmation. You. Me. That.” I gestured limply toward the bed. “It was the final trigger. It’s done. I’m… I’m this. Forever.”
The word ‘forever’ echoed in the silent room.
Marcus sank onto the edge of Ben’s—my—bed, his head dropping into his hands. “This can’t be happening.”
“It happened,” I said, sitting down gingerly beside him, the space between us charged with a new, permanent distance. “Last night. And again this morning. You were there.”
He winced. “Don’t.”
“Why not?” A sudden, reckless anger surged in me. This new emotional landscape was as unfamiliar as my hips. “You were there. You felt it. You wanted it. Even if you hate yourself for it. You can’t undo it. I can’t undo this.” I placed my hands on my new hips.
“I didn’t want this!” he exploded, jumping to his feet, pacing the narrow confines of the room. “I wanted my friend back! I wanted Ben! Not… not some… some change locked in by a fucking… a fucking blowjob!” The crudeness was a weapon, aimed at both of us.
The words should have eviscerated me. Instead, they crystallized the truth. “Ben’s gone, Marcus. He’s been gone. You’ve just been fucking his ghost. Or his shell. Now even the shell is gone. This is what’s left. Take it or leave it.”
He stopped pacing, his back to me. His shoulders were rigid. “Lena has to have something. A reversal. Something.”
“This was the reversal,” I said dully. “This was it going backwards. The last step. There’s no going forward from here because this is the destination.”
We stayed like that, trapped in the horrible silence. The smell of sex was fading, replaced by the stale dorm smells of dust and old laundry. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead, a maddening, constant insect.
Finally, he spoke, his voice drained. “What do we do now?”
We. He still said ‘we.’
I looked at my hands, the same hands, yet now attached to a foreign body. “I have to see Lena. I have to tell her the experiment is over. The subject is finalized.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No.” The refusal was instant. “This part is mine. You’ve… contributed enough.” I stood up, the motion still unnerving. “I need to get dressed.”
He didn’t move. He just stood there, a monument to guilt and confusion, blocking the path to my dresser. I had to squeeze past him. My new hip brushed against his thigh. We both stiffened at the contact, a fresh jolt of unwanted awareness.
I pulled open a drawer. Ben’s clothes. Loose jeans, band t-shirts, boxers. None of it would fit. Not anymore. The jeans wouldn’t close over these hips. The shirts would hang wrong. I stood there, frozen before the relics of my own past.
Marcus saw it. The impossibility. He let out a long, exhausted breath. “Bottom drawer. Left side. There’s… some of my ex’s stuff. She left a bag here after she… anyway. It’s just some sweats and things. It might… fit better now.”
The humiliation was a living thing, coiling in my new gut. I had to wear his ex-girlfriend’s discarded clothes because my own were now artifacts from a dead man. I nodded, unable to speak, and moved to the drawer he indicated.
Inside was a small duffel. I pulled out a pair of grey cotton sweatpants and a faded university hoodie. They were soft, worn. They smelled of floral detergent and a faint, ghostly perfume. I put them on, my back to him. The sweatpants fit. They hugged the new width of my hips, cinched at my narrower waist. The hoodie was big, swallowing me. I pulled the hood up, hiding my face in its shadows.
“I’ll be back,” I said, my voice muffled by the fabric.
“Bree.” He said the name. Really said it. Not as a question, not as a curse. A flat acknowledgement.
I paused at the door, not turning around.
“I’m sorry,” he said. It was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it.
Sorry for the sex? For this morning? For the curse? For not stopping me? For not being able to look at me?
It didn’t matter. Sorry was a pebble dropped into the canyon now between us.
I didn’t reply. I opened the door and stepped out into the bright, indifferent hallway, leaving him alone in the room that smelled of us, leaving the last of Ben behind for good. The walk to Lena’s lab was a journey in a new body. Every step was a negotiation. The swing of my hips was automatic, an engineered efficiency. Men glanced at me as I passed in the hall—a quick, instinctive appraisal—and I felt a fresh wave of terror. I was visible now in a way I’d never been. Legibly female.
The door to the lab was unlocked. I pushed it open.
Lena was at her central table, peering into a microscope. She didn’t look up. “I anticipated you’d be here sooner. The biometric monitors in the room went offline at 5:47 AM. A fascinating data blackout. Tell me, was it voluntary, or did the system overload?”
I pushed back the hood. My new voice, when it came, was steady, cold. “It’s finished, Lena.”
She finally looked up. Her eyes scanned me, top to bottom, missing nothing. The new posture, the way the borrowed clothes hung. Her gaze lingered on my hips, my throat. A slow, unnerving smile touched her lips. Not a happy smile. A smile of profound, intellectual gratification.
“Ah,” she breathed. She stood, circling me just as she had when I was in the sensor suit. “The skeletal revision is complete. The vocal fold lengthening is apparent. The catalyzing event… it was ingestion, wasn’t it? Following coitus. A post-coital bio-confirmative ritual. The curse required not just mating, but… consumption. Assimilation.” She was talking to herself, piecing it together. “Fascinating. The mythological parallels are profound. It’s not just about procreation. It’s about permanent, physical claim.”
“Stop it,” I said, but the command lacked force.
“Why?” she asked, genuinely curious. “This is what you are now. Understanding the mechanism is the only power you have left.” She stopped in front of me. “How do you feel?”
The question was so vast it was meaningless. Then a specific, physical truth surfaced. “Hungry,” I said. “Starving.”
Her eyes gleamed. “Metabolic recalibration. The body has finished a massive undertaking. It requires fuel to solidify the new form.” She went to a small mini-fridge under a counter and pulled out a plastic container of leftover rice and beans. She handed it to me, along with a fork. “Eat.”
I didn’t want to. But the hunger was a razor in my gut. I took the container, leaned against the grimy counter, and shoveled the cold food into my mouth. I ate like I’d never eaten before, barely tasting it, driven by a imperative that felt cellular.
Lena watched, noting every bite. “The change is stable,” she murmured. “No reversion. The trigger was specific and absolute.” She paused. “And Marcus?”
I swallowed a mouthful of beans. “What about him?”
“His reaction to the finalized form?”
I put the container down, my appetite suddenly gone. “He’s horrified. He’s guilty. He wants his friend back.”
“But he is also viscerally attracted to the finalized form,” she stated. “The conflict will be unsustainable. He will either embrace the new dynamic or fracture completely. I need to observe this.”
A cold fury tightened my new vocal cords. “No. No more. No more experiments. No more observations. It’s done.”
“It is never ‘done,’” Lena corrected softly, moving to her tablet. She pulled up a file. It was a video. Grainy, green. From the smoke detector. She hit play.
On the screen, in the ghostly light, I s
The grainy image showed my own mouth moving, my throat working as I swallowed. “The data may be offline,” Lena whispered, “but the observation was not. You see? It’s never done. The question is what you do next.” She swiped the video away, pulling up a shopping site. “You need clothes that fit this permanent form. Start with practicality.” She selected a simple, black one-piece bathing suit and completed the order. “The pool. The chlorine will cleanse the residue of him, and the water will let you feel the full weight of what you’ve become.”
The package arrived two days later, a flat, discreet parcel left leaning against the lab’s door. Lena handed it to me without a word, her expression one of detached anticipation. Inside, folded with sterile precision, was the swimsuit.
It wasn’t the athletic, sporty cut I might have once chosen as Ben. This was a high-cut one-piece, a sleek sheath of black fabric. The legs were cut impossibly high on the hips, elongating the line of the thigh, and the back was a plunging V that would end just above the cleft of my new anatomy. It was a weapon of display, not recreation.
“Put it on,” Lena said, gesturing to a makeshift screen in the corner of the lab, a stained hospital curtain hung from a pipe. “Then we go.”
‘We’. The word felt heavier than the parcel in my hands. I moved behind the curtain. The air back there was thick with dust and the scent of mold. I peeled off Marcus’s ex-girlfriend’s sweats and the hoodie, letting them puddle on the concrete floor.
My body in the cold lab air was a map of changes. I didn’t need a mirror. I could feel them. The gentle, persistent weight on my chest. The subtle, continuous curve from ribs to waist. The undeniable, solid width of my hips, a skeletal fact I still bumped into doorframes with. I stepped into the black suit, shimmying it up over my thighs.
The fabric was cool and surprisingly compressive, a second skin that hugged every new contour with a slick, unforgiving intimacy. I pulled the straps over my shoulders, adjusting the front. The suit held and presented, pushing my breasts into a soft, defined cleavage I had to look down to see. I ran my hands down my sides, over the slick material, feeling the stark architectural shift where my waist dipped in before flaring out again.
“Come out. Let me see the fit.” Lena’s voice held no prurient interest, only clinical assessment.
I pushed the curtain aside. The fluorescent light buzzed overhead, stark and revealing. Lena’s eyes conducted a slow, thorough scan. She nodded once. “The cut accentuates the primary and secondary sexual characteristics achieved in the transformation. It will generate observable social responses. Useful data. Do you have a cover-up?”
She handed me a thin, grey zip-up sweatshirt from a pile of discarded laundry. It was long, falling to mid-thigh. I zipped it, the fabric hanging open over the deep plunge of the suit’s front. I felt simultaneously exposed and hidden, a secret wrapped in a grey shroud.
The walk to the university aquatic center was a study in peripheral vision. The sweatshirt hid the worst of it, but the high-cut legs meant that with every step, a slash of black-clad thigh appeared through the jacket’s opening. My new gait, that unfamiliar hip-sway, felt amplified, performative. I kept my eyes on the cracked pavement, on the autumn leaves gathering in soggy piles.
Lena walked beside me, a silent chaperone. “Note the difference in proprioception,” she said, as if commenting on the weather. “The shifted center of gravity. Your stride has shortened by approximately four centimeters to maintain balance. Efficient.”
I didn’t answer. The smell of chlorine hit us first, a sharp, chemical blanket that overwhelmed the decaying-leaf scent of campus. The sound came next: the hollow, echoing roar of vast indoor space, the shriek of whistles, the slap of water, the muffled shouts of swimmers. My stomach tightened. As Ben, I’d loved the pool. The weightlessness. The silence beneath the surface. It had been a place of thought.
Now, it felt like a stage.
We pushed through the heavy doors into the humid, roaring warmth. The air was a wet slap. The pool was Olympic-sized, lanes divided by bobbing ropes. At one end, the swim team drilled with militaristic precision. At the other, in the shallow end, recreational swimmers splashed and laughed.
Lena found a bleacher seat high up in the echoing stands. She sat, placing her bag beside her, and took out her tablet. She didn’t look at me. “Proceed.”
It was a dismissal.An instruction. I stood there, rooted, my hand on the zipper of the sweatshirt. The act of removing it felt more vulnerable than being naked in Marcus’s bed. There, it had been dark, desperate, a private madness. Here, under the blazing industrial lights, with dozens of strangers, it was a publication.
I took a breath that didn’t fill my new, seemingly-smaller lungs. I unzipped the jacket.
The sound was lost in the cavernous noise. I shrugged it off, letting it fall onto the bleacher next to Lena. The cold, chlorinated air hit the exposed skin of my shoulders, my back, my thighs. I felt a hundred eyes that weren’t there. I kept my gaze fixed on the shimmering turquoise water at the deep end’s edge, a twenty-meter walk away.
I made the walk. The concrete was cool and slick under my bare feet. I focused on the feeling of it, a tactile anchor. I was aware of my body moving through the space, a foreign object in a familiar environment. I saw a lifeguard’s gaze slide over me, pause, and then snap forward with professional neutrality. A guy hauling himself out of the lane next to me did a double-take, water streaming from his hair, his eyes widening before he clumsily looked away.
I reached the edge. The water looked infinitely deep, a blue-green oblivion. I sat, dipping my legs in. The shock of coolness was a relief. I pushed off, sinking into the embrace of the pool.
The weightlessness was different.
As Ben, I had felt suspended, neutrally buoyant. Now, my body had new points of mass and drag. My hips wanted to sink. My chest wanted to float. I had to relearn balance in an instant, a subtle scissoring of my legs to keep my torso level. I treaded water, feeling the suit strain across my back with each movement, the high-cut legs allowing a freer kick.
I swam. Not with the team’s powerful crawl, but with a slow, deliberate breaststroke. It felt like the right stroke for this body, rhythmic and wide. Each pull through the water made my back muscles flex in new ways. Each kick emphasized the rotation in my hips, a pendulum swing that was now inherent, not forced.
I reached the far wall, touched it, and pushed off again.
Underwater, the world muted to a bubbled, blue roar. This was what I’d come for. The silence. But even here, my body betrayed me. The flow of water over my skin was a constant, tactile reminder of my new surface area, of curves that caught the current. I surfaced for air, the sound crashing back in.
I swam laps, losing count, losing time. The chlorine stung my eyes, but it felt like a purge. The physical residue of Marcus, of the sweat and sex and guilt, seemed to lift from my pores, replaced by the sterile, public scent of the pool. The water supported me, but it also revealed me. There was no hiding the shape of me in this black fabric. It was all there, outlined in streaming water and artificial light.
After what felt like an hour, my muscles began to ache with a new, deep fatigue. I hauled myself out at the shallow end, the water shedding from me in heavy sheets. I stood on the deck, dripping, breathing hard. I was acutely aware of myself as a physical entity: the water beading on my skin, the suit clinging like a glossy, blac