Chapter 12: The Walk of Shame (But Make It Fashion)
The city air tasted like wet cigarettes and ozone. Ethan’s lungs burned, a raw scrape with every gulping breath. He skidded around a corner, shoulder slamming into a brick wall, the impact jarring his teeth. He didn’t stop.Home. His apartment was six blocks away. A normal place with a normal door and a lock that worked on normal physics. He could almost feel his crappy couch, the remote, the sweet, boring oblivion of streaming something predictable.
His legs pumped, a rhythm hammered out by pure fear. He kept glancing down, a nervous tic. The gray sweatpants Jonah had thrown at him—a gesture of normalcy in that neon-lit nightmare of an apartment—felt different. Lighter. They seemed to drink the shadows from the alleyways he passed.
Under the next busted streetlight, he looked again.
The fabric wasn’t just dark. It was thin. He could see the pale outline of his own knee pushing against it as he ran. The calf was taut, the material clinging like a second skin. It wasn’t cotton anymore. It had the faint, cruel sheen of nylon.
“No, no, no, not now,” he whimpered, the words lost in the rush of his own pulse in his ears.
He ducked into a narrower street, a shortcut he used when running late for his opening shift. The ambient glow from a peeling thrift shop sign—a flickering, sputtering ‘SALE’—bathed him in a strobe of sickly pink. He froze, panting, and looked down fully.
The sweatpants were gone. In their place were sheer black tights, the kind with a deliberate opacity that hinted at the shape beneath. They ended mid-thigh, held up by nothing he could see or feel. Below them, his own bare knees and shins looked absurdly vulnerable.
A choked sound escaped him, half-laugh, half-sob.This was insane. This was a prank, a nightmare, a bad latte-induced hallucination.
He tugged at the waistband of the tights. It didn’t budge. It wasn’t sewn to anything; it just… ended, a firm line against his skin that felt as permanent as a scar. The pearl buttons on the corset Jonah’s stupid prophecy had manifested clicked softly under his frantic fingers. He hadn’t taken it off. He’d been too busy running from the forced kiss, from the entire reality-splintering situation.
The hoodie, also Jonah’s, hung open. The night air was cool on his chest, which felt oddly constricted. He looked down the front of the corset. His breathing hitched.
It wasn’t just cinching his waist. The silhouette was different. Softer. The angles of his own body had been quietly rewritten while he wasn’t looking.
“What the fuck,” he whispered to the empty street. His voice sounded thinner.Higher.
A delivery van rattled by at the end of the alley, its headlights sweeping across him for one paralyzing second. He instinctively hunched, pulling the hoodie closed. The fabric felt rough and reassuringly masculine against his knuckles. A tiny anchor.
He had to get off the street.
Forgetting the run, he shuffled forward, his gait awkward. The tights whispered against each other with every step, a constant, maddening reminder. The sound was soft, intimate, utterly out of place here among the dumpsters and graffiti.
His building came into view, a squat brick rectangle with a flickering porch light.Sanctuary. He fumbled for his keys in the hoodie pocket, his hands shaking. The metal felt cold, real. He jammed the key into the outer door lock.
It didn’t turn.
He tried again, twisting hard. Nothing. He looked at the key, then at the lock. It was his key. It was his lock. It just… wouldn’t engage. As if the shape of the key was subtly wrong, or the mechanism inside had changed.
“Come on,” he growled, trying to force it. The key bent slightly in his grip.
Panic, cold and slick, coiled in his gut. He turned and pressed his back against the cool brick, sliding down to sit on the concrete steps. He pulled the hoodie tighter around himself, becoming a small, dark ball in the inadequate light.
Think. He had to think. Jonah had the book. Jonah had started this. Jonah’s apartment was a psychic crime scene littered with energy drinks and bad decisions. He had to go back. There was no other option.
The idea of returning made him feel sick. The memory of his body moving without his consent, arching toward Jonah, his chin tilting up… it wasn’t an attack. It was worse. It was an erasure. Something was rewriting his script, and he was just an actor stumbling through the new, terrible lines.
He hugged his knees. The tights stretched. He felt the corset’s boning press into his ribs. A weird, detached thought floated up: This is actually happening. This is my life now.
His phone, in the hoodie’s other pocket, buzzed.
He flinched. He pulled it out. The screen glared in the dark: JONAH (Weird Prophecy Guy).
He stared at it. The buzzing was an insistent beetle in his hand. He swiped to answer, but didn’t speak. He just held it to his ear.
“Ethan?” Jonah’s voice was tinny, strained. “You there, man?”
Ethan swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Where are you?”
“Outside my place. My key doesn’t work.”
A beat of silence. Jonah let out a long breath. “Yeah. That… might be part of it. The, uh, the sphere of influence. It’s messing with peripheral connections. Locks. Probably your job too. Your bank card.”
Ethan closed his eyes. “My job.” The words were hollow. The little coffee shop, the steamer hissing, the regulars with their complicated orders. It seemed like a memory from someone else’s childhood.
“Look, you gotta come back,” Jonah said. His tone was different. No panic. Just a grim certainty that was somehow more frightening. “I read more. I get it now. The moon’s in the wrong house or some shit, the alignment is… it’s aggressive. It’s not a suggestion, Ethan. It’s a rewrite. And if you’re not near the… the epicenter… it goes haywire. It starts changing whatever it wants to make the story fit.”
“The story,” Ethan repeated, numbness spreading through him.
“The one in the book. The… the maiden’s flight, the transformation under a wandering star, the… the garment of shadows that becomes skin.” Jonah’s voice dropped. “Your sweatpants. Are they…?”
“They’re tights,” Ethan said flatly. “Sheer black tights. And the corset is… it’s doing more than just squeezing.”
Another silence, heavier. “Okay,” Jonah said finally.“Okay. That’s phase two. It’s accelerating because you ran. You’re supposed to be… drawn back. So it’s making it harder for you to be anywhere else.”
“I’m not a character in your stupid book!” Ethan hissed, sudden fury breaking through the shock.
“You are!” Jonah shot back, voice cracking. “That’s the whole fucking problem! I didn’t pick you! The… the resonance or whatever did! And now it’s true. And if we don’t figure out how to break the narrative, it’s just going to keep making it true, piece by piece, until you are the maiden in the tower and I’m the… the fucking wizard or whatever, and we’re both stuck in a story we didn’t want!”
The words hung in the staticky connection. Ethan listened to his own breathing, shallow and tight in his constricted chest. He looked down at his own hand holding the phone. His fingers looked slimmer. The nails seemed… neater.
A deep, unshakeable dread settled in his bones. This wasn’t adventure. This was consumption.
“I’m coming back,” he said, his voice quiet with resignation. “But no fucking kissing.We break this. You hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” Jonah said, the relief palpable. “Now, uh… try not to walk under any more specific lights. And maybe keep the hoodie closed.”
The call ended. Ethan pushed himself to his feet. The movement felt alien, a new center of gravity to negotiate. He pulled the hood up, hiding his face, and turned his back on the door that was no longer his.
He started the long walk back to the neon sanctuary, each step a whisper of nylon against nylon, a sound like secrets being told in the dark. The city around him seemed to watch, its windows like empty eyes, the flickering signs now feeling less like advertisements and more like instructions he was only just beginning to understand.