Chapter 1: The First Touch in a Stolen Body
The first thing Emily registered was the scent of Jake’s shampoo, something woodsy and clean, thick in her nostrils. The second was the weight. A solid, muscular arm was flung across her waist, pinning her to the mattress. Her mattress. In their bedroom.
But the arm was her arm. She knew every freckle on it.
She blinked at the ceiling, the early morning light painting it a soft grey. Her body felt… wrong. Expanded. A deep, residual ache pulsed in muscles she didn’t own. She flexed a hand in front of her face.
A large, square hand with neat knuckles and a thin, pale scar across the forefinger from a long-ago skateboard accident. Jake’s hand.
Her breath hitched, a sharp pull of air.
Slowly, she rolled her head on the pillow. And saw herself sleeping. Or rather, she saw her own body, her vibrant red hair fanned across the pillowcase, her own features softened in sleep. The eyelids fluttered.
They opened.
Her own green eyes, wide and startled, looked back at her. From Jake’s face.
A beat of absolute silence choked the room. The hum of the refrigerator downstairs was suddenly monstrous.
The mouth on her own face—Jake’s mouth now—parted. “Em?” The voice was her voice, but the tone was all wrong, a low, sleep-roughened version of her usual cadence. It came from her own throat.
“Jake?” The voice that left her was his. Deep. Unmistakably his.
Her own face—Jake-in-her-face—blanched. He shot up to a sitting position, the sheets pooling around his—her—waist. He looked down at the hands now attached to him, turning them over as if they were foreign objects. He brought them to his chest, her chest, his fingers pressing against the soft curve of a breast through her thin cotton tank top. He yanked them away like he’d been burned.
“What the hell?” he breathed.
Emily pushed herself up, the movement strangely powerful. She felt the broad stretch of Jake’s shoulders, the easy strength in his core as she sat. She looked down the length of the comforter, past the unfamiliar, masculine landscape of a chest covered in a light dusting of hair, to the long legs tangled in the sheets. Her heart, Jake’s heart, began to hammer a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
A bizarre, uncontrollable bubble of laughter escaped her. It sounded so odd in his baritone.
“This isn’t funny,” Jake said, her voice tight with panic.
“I know it’s not,” Emily said, still grinning. She couldn’t help it. She swung his legs—her legs—out of bed and stood. The floor felt farther away. The room looked different from this height. She took a step, then another, a little wobbly. It was like piloting a rented vehicle, one that was vastly more capable than her own. She rolled Jake’s shoulders, flexed his biceps. A giddy sense of power flooded her. “Oh my god. I can reach the top shelf without the step-stool.”
“Emily, focus.” Jake was staring at her from the bed, her face drawn with an anxiety she herself rarely wore. He started to push the hair—her hair—out of his eyes, a habitual gesture that died halfway as he seemed to realize what he was doing.
He stared at his own hands, now so delicate, before one drifted down to trace the foreign curve of his hip, the dip of a waist that now belonged to him. His other hand rose, trembling, to cup the full weight of her breast, his thumb brushing over the nipple, and a sharp, shocking jolt of sensation—hot and entirely other—shot through his borrowed body. “Fuck,” he breathed, her voice trembling, as his fingers slipped beneath the waistband of the pajama shorts, finding a heat and a softness that made his—her—knees weaken. A low, ragged moan escaped him as he touched the very core of her, a direct line of pleasure blazing a trail he could barely comprehend.
He jerked his hand back, staring at his slick fingers with a look of pure, uncomprehending horror. "Jesus Christ, that's... fuck, that's intense," he gasped, his—her—chest heaving.
From across the room, Emily watched, a knot of heat coiling low in Jake's stomach, a foreign and demanding pulse. "Do it again," she heard herself say, his voice gone rough.
A fractured sound escaped Jake's lips as his hand, moving with a will of its own, slid back down the smooth plane of her stomach. He touches himself, his breaths coming in shallow hitches, his fingers working in a frantic, clumsy rhythm against her own aching flesh, learning the topography of a pleasure that was never meant to be his.