Chapter 2: The Bench Seat Squeeze
The dress was a prison of embroidered linen and suffocating ribbons. Andrea, her hands shaking almost as badly as mine, had wrestled me into it after finding it hanging in my closet next to a collection of soft, vintage-looking band tees and high-waisted jeans that had not existed yesterday. The bodice was boned, cinching my already inhumanly narrow waist to an almost painful degree and hoisting my breasts up into two alarming, rounded shelves that strained against the laced front. Every breath was a conscious effort, the air hitting my lungs in shallow, tight gulps. The skirt was heavy, brushing against legs that were startlingly smooth, a phantom memory of coarse hair replaced by this alien, sensitive silk.
“He can’t know,” Andrea hissed for the tenth time as she fumbled with the laces at my back. Her fingers felt clumsy against the subtle ridge of my spine.“We just have to get through today.Tomorrow, you’ll be you again. This… this will be a weird story.”
A weird story. My reflection in the full-length mirror, a mirror that now had a garland of fairy lights draped around it, showed a parody of a fantasy princess. My face, Jessa’s face, was a perfect oval of delicate features under the faint dusting of freckles that had appeared across my nose. My lips, now a natural, plump pink, were parted in a perpetual look of soft surprise. My hair, thick and smelling of some floral shampoo I’d never bought, fell in waves around my bare shoulders. I looked like a cosplayer. I felt like a ghost haunting a very specific, very popular mannequin.“My feet,” I whispered. My voice was still that stranger’s, melodic and light. “They’re so small.”
The boots Andrea had produced were a size too big, but stuffing the toes with tissue paper was a stopgap. The gravel of my own driveway, when I finally ventured out, was a gauntlet. Each shift of weight sent a sharp bite through the thin sole, and my new, lower center of gravity made me feel top-heavy and unstable. The world was seen from a vantage point about a foot lower than I was used to, and everything felt larger, more imposing.
Marcus’s truck was an old Ford, its red paint faded to the color of dried blood. He was leaning against the driver’s side door, already in his own Ren Faire gear—a billowy white shirt, a leather jerkin, and sturdy boots. He was scrolling on his phone, a smirk on his face, likely at some meme. He looked up as we crunched toward him.The smirk vanished.His phone sagged in his hand. His eyes, a warm brown I’d seen a thousand times over game boards and pizza boxes, widened. They did a quick, involuntary journey from my face, down the exaggerated topography of my bodice, to my waist, and back up.A flush crept up his neck, visible above his shirt collar. He straightened up, running a hand through his messy black hair.“Uh. Hey, Andrea,” he said, his voice a notch higher than usual. His gaze flickered back to me, then darted away, then was pulled back.“Hi. You, uh… you must be Jessa. Andrea’s… friend.”
The sound of that name on his tongue sent a bizarre, electric jolt through me.It wasn’t recognition; it was validation of this fiction. I saw him, really saw him, in a way I never had before. The lean strength in his forearms where his sleeves were rolled up, the line of his jaw under his beard, the easy, slouching posture that now seemed powerfully masculine. A corresponding heat, soft and unwanted, pooled low in my stomach. It felt separate from me, a biological echo emanating from this new, traitorous body.My face grew warm.“Yeah,” Andrea said, her voice too bright, too loud. “Jessa!She’s, um, staying with me.Just moved to the area. Thought the Faire would be a fun introduction!”
“Cool, cool,” Marcus mumbled. He gestured vaguely to the truck. “Ready to go?”
He moved to the passenger side and pulled the creaking door open. The interior smelled of old coffee, vinyl, and him—a clean, spicy deodorant mixed with the earthy scent of his leather jerkin.I saw the problem immediately. It was a bench seat.A worn, cracked red bench seat with no center console. Andrea, with a frantic, apologetic glance at me, scrambled in first, sliding all the way to the driver’s side window.That left the middle.
The space between the seat and the door seemed to shrink. Marcus stood there, holding the door, his expression a mixture of awkwardness and a dazed kind of hope.I had no choice. I gathered the heavy skirt in my hands, a motion that felt instinctively feminine, and awkwardly hoisted myself up. The step was higher than my new body expected, and I lurched forward.Marcus’s hand shot out, catching my elbow. His grip was firm, warm.The contact sent a shockwave up my arm. My skin there was hyper-aware, tingling.
“Easy there,” he said, his voice close to my ear.
I murmured a thanks in Jessa’s voice, hating the breathy quality of it, and sank onto the middle of the bench.The worn springs groaned. I was acutely aware of the vast, empty vinyl expanse to my left. Then Marcus climbed in, his body filling that space, and pulled the door shut with a solid thunk.The world compressed. His thigh, solid and denim-clad, pressed against mine from hip to knee along the entire length of the bench. The boned bodice of my dress meant my torso was held rigidly upright, but from the waist down, there was no separation.The heat of him bled through my skirt. My right arm, from shoulder to elbow, was flush against the soft linen of his sleeve. He was trying to hold himself stiff, angled slightly toward his door, but the physics of the old truck’s cabin were against him.Every minor shift of his weight reverberated through me.
Andrea started the engine, a rattling growl that shook the entire frame. She pulled out of the driveway, the truck lurching over the curb.The motion was catastrophic.
My body, with its new, lower center of mass and precarious perch on the slick vinyl, swayed violently to the right.I slammed into Marcus. My hip, my shoulder, the full, shocking softness of my breast pressed against his arm. A small, choked sound escaped my new throat. He flinched, then steadied me, his hand landing on my outer thigh for a brief, searing second before he snatched it back as if burned.
“Sorry,” we both said at once, his voice rough, mine high and flustered.
I tried to brace myself, planting my tiny boots flat on the floor mats, but it was futile.Every turn, every bump in the road sent me sliding into him. The constant, rhythmic brush of his thigh against mine became a torturous friction. The unwanted heat inside me grew, a slow, liquid unspooling that was entirely visceral and horrifyingly pleasurable. I was aware of the soft crush of my breasts with every jolt, the way the boning dug in, the maddening presence of the thong—a feeling I was still unable to ignore. My mind, my Justin-mind, screamed in protest, a silent spectator to this hormonal hijacking.
“So, Jessa,” Marcus said after a few miles of tense, jostling silence, clearly trying to sound normal.“Andrea says you’re into nerdy stuff too. Video games?Books?”
He was looking straight ahead, his profile sharp against the passing window. I could see the rapid pulse in his throat.
“Yeah,” I said, grasping for my own personality like a lifeline.“I’ve been, uh, replaying the Starward Gaze trilogy. The narrative choices in the second game are still unparalleled.” It was my opinion, my passion, coming out in this soft, feminine voice.
He turned his head, and for a second, the awkward tension melted into genuine interest.“No way!The loyalty mechanic with the Quarren fleet? Most people just blast through that.”
“That’s the barbaric way,” I said, and for a fleeting moment, it was just me and Marcus talking shop.Then the truck hit a pothole. My body lifted off the seat for an instant and came down hard, my full weight settling even more intimately against his side.The breath left my lungs in a soft oof. The physical reality rushed back in, drowning the intellectual connection.His scent was in my nose. The hard muscle of his leg was a brand against my softer flesh.He didn’t pull away this time. He seemed to hold his breath.The space between us crackled with a new, dangerous awareness. My own body was responding, the traitorous heat coiling tighter, a direct, humiliating answer to his proximity.
Andrea, from the driver’s seat, was chattering nervously about jousting schedules and turkey legs, a monologue meant to plaster over the palpable, silent thing happening beside her. It was no use.
The rest of the drive was an exquisite torture of conflicting realities: the familiar comfort of a shared passion with my friend’s brother, and the terrifying, magnetic pull of a man’s body on this new, female body I inhabited.My mind was a battleground. Justin was revolted, fascinated, and drowning in sensation. Jessa’s body was just… responding.
When we finally rumbled into the dusty fairground parking lot, I was sweating beneath the linen, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm against the restrictive boning. As the engine died, the sudden stillness was worse. The pressure of his thigh against mine was no longer a temporary jostle; it was a settled, intimate fact.Marcus cleared his throat. He turned to look at me, his brown eyes earnest and confused, clouded with an attraction he didn’t understand. “Well,” he said, his voice softer now, almost intimate in the quiet cab. “Here we are.”
He smiled, a shy, hopeful thing that reached his eyes, and the last of my mental defenses shuddered. The fairgrounds outside were a blur of colorful flags and distant laughter. All I could feel was the line of heat where our bodies met, and the horrifying, eager way my own blood seemed to sing in answer to it.