Chapter 3: The Door Opens
Marcus woke up on his own couch, a stiff knot in his neck and the taste of stale panic in his mouth. Dawn was a grey smear against the windows. He’d fallen asleep in Lexi’s clothes, the lace of the bra digging a red line into his ribs, the leggings feeling like a suffocating second skin. The silence of the apartment was total, a vacuum where the hum of his old life used to be.
The phone. The money. It wasn’t a dream. The banking app, when he thumbed it open, still displayed the obscene, impossible number. It felt less like wealth and more like a verdict.
He needed a shower. His own shower. He peeled the clothes off, letting them fall to the bathroom floor in a silken heap. He avoided the mirror until he was under the hot water, steam clouding the glass. The water pressure was a familiar, comforting pound on his… on her shoulders. The sensations were all wrong. The soap gliding over slopes and curves that sent conflicting signals to his brain—cleanliness intertwined with a deep, visceral wrongness. He shampooed long hair that felt like a borrowed cape.
Wrapped in his own old, worn towel—which now barely covered his torso—he faced the foggy mirror. He wiped a clear circle with his hand.
The face that appeared, pink from the steam, water beading on full lips, was a stranger’s. But the eyes. He leaned closer. The shock had receded a little, leaving a hollowed-out exhaustion that looked back at him with a familiarity that was almost worse. That was his fatigue in there. His confusion. Trapped.
He heard a key in the front door lock.
His blood went cold. It was a specific, rhythmic jiggle-click-turn. Only one other person had a key.
The door opened. A voice called out, too loud for the quiet apartment. “Marcus? You ghosting the world, man? Your boss called me, said you no-showed. What’s the….”
David’s footsteps halted in the short hallway. He appeared in the bathroom doorway, holding a brown paper bag that smelled of greasy breakfast sandwiches. He was exactly as Marcus remembered: mid-thirties, kind-faced, going soft around the middle, wearing a rumpled polo shirt from their failed bowling league team.
His eyes traveled from the damp blonde hair, down the towel-clad body, and back to Marcus’s face. His expression cycled through confusion, dawning male appreciation, then immediate, profound embarrassment. He took a quick step back, raising his free hand.
“Shit. Sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought this was… Marcus Hale’s apartment.” He was already turning, his neck flushed red. “Wrong key, wrong door, my bad, just…”
“David.”
The name came out in a voice that wasn’t his. Higher, softer, but strained with a urgency that stopped David dead.
David turned back slowly, his brow furrowed. He stared, really stared this time, past the surface. The appreciation was gone, replaced by a slow, creeping bewilderment. His eyes flicked to the towel, to the pile of wine-red lace on the floor, then back to Marcus’s face—searching the eyes, the set of the jaw beneath the softness.
“What the fuck,” David whispered, not a question.
“It’s me,” Marcus said. His voice broke on the second word.
David didn’t move. The bag of sandwiches hung forgotten at his side. “No.”
“Yeah.”
“Marcus?”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re…” David gestured weakly at all of him. “You’re a…”
“I know what I am.” The words were flat, heavy. “Can you… not just stand there? I need to put on clothes that aren’t… this.” He gestured to the towel.
David blinked, seeming to reboot. “Right. Yeah. Sorry. Again.” He backed into the living room, giving the hallway a wide berth.
Marcus shut the bathroom door and leaned against it, his heart hammering. This was it. The first real test. He dug through his dresser, finding an old pair of gray sweatpants and a loose, faded college t-shirt. They were his, from the before. The sweatpants were loose on the narrow hips but strained over the new rear. The t-shirt, once comfortably baggy, now draped in a way that was undeniably feminine, the fabric pulling across his chest. He looked like a girl in her boyfriend’s clothes. It was a different kind of terrible.
He walked out. David was standing rigidly in the center of the living room, staring at the wall like it contained the secrets of the universe.
“You can sit,” Marcus said.
David turned. He looked at the clothes, and something in his face relaxed a millimeter. It was a piece of Marcus, a relic. He sank onto the old couch, the springs groaning in familiar protest. Marcus took the recliner, the one that used to mold to his stocky frame. Now he perched on the edge, feeling like an imposter in his own favorite seat.
For a full minute, the only sound was the distant groan of city traffic. David finally broke it.
“Okay,” he said, rubbing his palms on his knees. “Start at the start. And don’t leave anything out. Because right now I’m trying to decide if you’re my best friend who’s had the world’s most fucked-up makeover, or if I’m having a stroke.”
So Marcus told him. The Aurora Clinics, the savings, the dream of the Ares template. The waking up in recovery. The other patient—Lexi Morgan—who wanted to be a “baddy” and got Marcus’s male dream body instead. The catastrophic file corruption. Dr. Vasquez. The sterile safe apartment. The money. The hundred million dollars.
He told it in a flat, accountant’s monotone, laying out the facts like columns in a ledger. The only time his voice wavered was when he described looking in the mirror wearing the other Lexi’s lace bra.
David listened without interrupting. His face was a slide show of disbelief, horror, and a stark, painful pity that made Marcus want to crawl out of his skin.
When Marcus finished, the silence returned, thicker this time.
David let out a long, slow breath. “Okay. But you’re still you in there, right?” He tapped his own temple. “The guy who owes me sixty bucks from the March Madness pool. The guy who saved my ass when my car died in the Holland Tunnel. That guy.”
The question was so simple, so devastatingly direct, it shattered the clinical recitation. Marcus felt his throat tighten. He nodded, unable to speak.
David’s tense posture dissolved. He leaned back, a shaky grin spreading across his face. “Cool. So… you got any beer? Because I need a drink for this. Maybe several.”
A sound burst out of Marcus—a choked, wet laugh that was halfway to a sob. “It’s nine in the morning.”
“And you’re a beautiful woman with a million bucks who used to be my buddy. I think the rules are suspended.” David’s grin was genuine now, awkward but anchored in their old, easy friendship. It was a lifeline.
Marcus got up, went to the fridge, and pulled out two long-neglected bottles of IPA. He opened them, the hiss loud in the quiet, and handed one to David. They clinked bottles.
“To glitches,” David said.
“To glitches,” Marcus echoed.
They drank. The beer was hoppy and too warm, but it was real. A real thing from the before.
David wiped his mouth. “So the other guy. The dude in your body. What’s he doing?”
“According to Vasquez? Having a meltdown. Trying to buy eyeliner. Walked out of the clinic.” Marcus took another swallow. “We’re linked. They can’t fix one of us without the other. We’re a matched set of fuck-ups.”
“Christ.” David stared at his bottle. “And the money? It’s really there?”
Marcus handed him the burner phone. David’s eyes bugged. He whistled, low and long. “Holy shit. That’s… that’s ‘never worry again’ money.”
“It’s ‘shut up and disappear’ money,” Marcus corrected. “They’re paying for my silence while they try to unfuck the unfuckable.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“I don’t know.” Marcus looked around his apartment. The dust, the familiar clutter, all of it now part of a diorama. “I can’t stay here. But I don’t know where to go. I can’t be Marcus. And I sure as hell can’t be Lexi.”
David was quiet for a moment, thinking. “You know, when Sarah left, she took the dog. Mr. Bubbles. I fucking loved that ugly pug.” He took a swig. “I spent two weeks in this apartment, on that couch, eating those shitty sandwiches and feeling like the world had ended. You brought me beer then, too. And you didn’t give me some pep talk. You just sat there and watched terrible action movies with me until I remembered how to be a person.”
Marcus remembered. He’d taken three personal days.
“Point is,” David continued, “you don’t have to figure it all out now. You’ve got resources. And you’ve got one asshole friend who still has a key.” He set his bottle down with a decisive thud. “First, we get you some actual clothes. Not… whatever that was on the floor. Not just your old stuff. Clothes that fit this… current situation. That you choose. Then, we get the hell out of this city for a bit. You’ve got a digital fortune. Let’s go somewhere no one knows either version of you. Let the clinic scientists do their thing. Breathe.”
“A road trip,” Marcus said, the concept feeling absurd and incredibly tempting.
“A reconnaissance mission,” David countered, smiling. “In a very nice rental car. Paid for by Aurora’s ‘Oops We Destroyed Your Life’ fund.”
Marcus looked at his friend’s face, seeing no trace of the leer or the awkwardness from the doorway, just steady, stubborn loyalty. It was the first solid thing he’d felt in days.
“Okay,” he said, the word small but decisive.
“Okay,” David nodded. He stood up. “Finish your breakfast beer. I’m gonna go home, have a small existential crisis about this, and then I’ll be back in two hours. We’ll hit a mall. It’ll be horrific. But it’s step one.”
After David left, the apartment felt different. Not like home, but not like a tomb. It felt like a departure lounge.
Marcus walked to the window. Down on the street, people moved with purpose, unaware of the chaos in apartment 4B. He had a friend. He had a stupid, obscene amount of money. And he had a problem that no amount of money could truly solve.
But for the first time, he had a next step. It was small, and it was terrifying. It involved a mall and choosing a new uniform for a life he never wanted.
He took a deep breath, the air filling lungs that were the wrong size. He could do the next thing. He could buy a pair of jeans that fit. He could get in a car and drive.
Everything after that was a question mark, a blur. But the immediate future had a shape. It was enough to lean on. For now.
For now.
The word hung in the quiet, a fragile placeholder. He turned from the window, his bare feet cold on the hardwood. The pile of wine-red lace on the bathroom floor taunted him from the hallway. He should bundle it up, throw it away. Erase it.
The front door crashed open again.
David stood in the frame, breathing hard like he’d run back up the stairs. His earlier calm had vanished, replaced by a wired, frantic energy. His eyes were wide, fixed on Marcus.
“Forget the mall,” David blurted, striding inside. He didn’t sit down. He paced a tight, agitated circle in the middle of the room. “Forget new clothes. I was halfway home and my brain finally caught up. This is insane. This is solve it insane.”
Marcus stared, the towel from his earlier shower still damp in his hands. “Solve what?”
“The other you! The guy!” David stopped, pointing a finger at him. “The Adonis crying over eyeliner. You said they don’t know where he is. He’s out there, lost in your dream body. We find him. We talk to him. Man to… whatever. Person to person.”
“David, what are you talking about? Vasquez said—”
“Vasquez works for the people who screwed you! They want you quiet and paid off. But that guy? He’s the key. He’s the other half of this.” David ran a hand through his hair, his expression shifting into something more familiar—the reckless grin he got before a bad idea. “Look, we sit here, you hide, they ‘research.’ Maybe in a year they call. Maybe never. That’s their plan. But if we find him? Right now? We get answers. We get leverage. Maybe we even get a fucking clue how to fix this.”
Marcus felt a jolt, equal parts hope and terror. The idea was ludicrous. “How? We have no idea where he went. He could be anywhere.”
“He’s a six-foot-two muscle god having a public breakdown in the body he never wanted.” David’s grin turned sharp. “He’ll stand out. And we’ve got a hundred million reasons to look. Think, Marcus. Who better to find a confused guy in a new body than his best friend?” He stepped closer, his voice dropping. “OK I MEAN WE BOTH MOVED HERE TO LA WITH NO MONEY AND BRO YOU’VE SLEPT WITH TONS OF BADDIES I ALWAYS ADMIRED YOU. FOR YOUR GUTS. THIS IS NO DIFFERENT. LET ME GET CHANGED LET’S GO FIND ME OR HER OR WHATEVER.”
The old callback landed like a physical touch. LA. Their first shitty apartment, the grinding audacity of starting over with nothing. David was right. That version of Marcus—the one who took chances, who navigated worlds—was still in there, buried under the shock and the lace.
Marcus looked down at his hands, the slender fingers clenching. The fear was a cold stone in his gut. But beneath it, something else stirred—a defiant, angry curiosity. He saw the other man’s panicked eyes in his memory. A shared catastrophe.
“Vasquez said he was last at a pharmacy,” Marcus said, his voice quiet.
David’s smile was all teeth. “Now you’re talking. I’ve got a guy who owes me a favor at dispatch. We can start with 24-hour places near the clinic.” He was already moving toward the door. “I’ll be back in ten. Wear something you can move in. We’re going hunting.”
David was gone, the door clicking shut behind him with a finality that echoed in the quiet apartment. The plan was insane. It felt like trying to put out a wildfire with a teacup. But the alternative—waiting in this room for a call that might never come—was suddenly impossible. Action, any action, was oxygen.
Marcus went to his bedroom and yanked open his old duffel bag, the one he used for weekend trips. He stared at the contents he’d blindly thrown in: his own jeans, a few graphic tees, a worn hoodie. The uniform of a ghost. David’s words bounced in his skull. He’ll stand out. So would Marcus, but for all the wrong reasons. He needed to control the narrative, to weaponize this jarring new form. The memory of the guy in the van, that leer, was a toxic splash in his gut. But it was data.
He shoved his own clothes to the side. His fingers touched different fabric—softer, thinner. The clothes from the sterile apartment, the ones meant for Lexi Morgan. He pulled them out.
There were the skin-tight leggings. A silky camisole. And folded beneath, the items from the boutique bag he’d ignored. The daisy dukes, absurdly short and frayed at the hem. A black tube top made of stretchy ribbed material. A plaid shirt, soft and well-worn, probably meant to be worn unbuttoned over the whole ensemble.
He held up the shorts. They were tiny.
“No,” he said to the empty room. This was a costume for a person who didn’t exist.
But the other guy—the Adonis with Marcus’s panic—he had chosen this. He’d wanted to be a “baddy.” This was the aesthetic he’d paid for, dreamed of. It was a beacon, a specific frequency. To find a lost signal, you had to broadcast on its wavelength.
A cold, pragmatic logic settled over him, the same focus he used to untangle a corrupted spreadsheet. This was a variable. An asset. He stripped off his sweatpants and t-shirt.
The daisy dukes were a battle. He had to lie on the bed, suck in his stomach, and wiggle them up over his hips. They fastened with a struggle, sitting low and tight, the denim hugging every curve of his rear with an aggressive intimacy. The tube top was next, a stretchy band he wrestled into place. It compressed his chest, lifting and shaping it into a dramatic cleavage he felt rather than saw.
Finally, he shrugged on the plaid shirt, leaving it hanging open.
He forced himself to walk to the full-length mirror on the back of his closet door.
The reflection was a punch to the throat.
It wasn’t him. It was a concept. A poster on the wall of a college dorm. The shorts bit into his thighs. The tube top made his torso look even smaller, his hips wider. The open shirt framed it all like a casual afterthought. The blonde hair, still damp, tumbled around shoulders that seemed too delicate to hold up the world.
A hot flush crawled up his neck. Shame, acute and sweating. He looked like he was trying so hard, a parody of sexy someone had scribbled in the margins of a men’s magazine.
Then, the other feeling. The unwanted, objective assessment. The lines were clean. The proportions were… undeniable. The body was a Ferrari wrapped in cheap denim. It was engineered for a specific kind of attention. He felt a traitorous, distant hum of attraction again, a biological response to a stimulus that was, technically, himself. It was nauseating.
The front door opened and banged shut. David’s footsteps hurried down the hall. “Marcus, you ready to—whoa.”
David stopped in the doorway. His mouth opened, then closed. His eyes did a quick, involuntary sweep from head to toe and snapped back to Marcus’s face. He looked like he’d been slapped.
Marcus watched him process. Saw the friend trying to see past the surface, and the man reacting to the surface. It was all there, warring in his expression.
“You, uh… you changed,” David finally managed, his voice strangely strained.
“It’s the clothes from the clinic. The ones she picked,” Marcus said, his own voice flat. “You said we need to find him. This is what he was looking for. This is the bait.”
David nodded slowly, still not quite meeting his eyes. “Right. Yeah. Makes sense. It’s just… a lot.”
Marcus turned back to the mirror, gripping the sides of the door frame. He leaned in, studying the stranger’s face, the body draped in a signal he was now broadcasting. A grim, dark laugh escaped him.
“OK bro,” he said, the casual words feeling like gravel in his mouth. “This will definitely find him.” He caught David’s widened eyes in the reflection. “He was horny when he first saw me. Or her. I don’t know.” He let go of the door frame, his hands falling to his sides. “It’s fucked.”
The crude, honest summary hung in the air. It cut through the awkwardness. David’s posture slumped, and he barked a single, sharp laugh of his own. “Yeah. It is profoundly, astronomically fucked.” He shook his head, as if clearing it. “But it’s a plan. My guy at dispatch came through. There’s a 24-hour pharmacy on Grand and Twelfth. A clerk called in a disturbance last night—a huge guy, crying, asking for waterproof mascara. Freaked everyone out. That’s six blocks from the clinic.”
It was a thread. A single, frayed thread.
“Let’s go,” Marcus said. He didn’t look in the mirror again. He grabbed the small burner phone and his keys, the metal familiar in his unfamiliar hand.
They stepped out into the hallway. The flickering bulb cast long shadows. Marcus was hyper-aware of every sensation: the cool air on his bare legs, the restrictive bite of the shorts, the way his center of gravity had shifted forward. Walking felt like a performance.
Down on the street, the city noise swallowed them. He felt eyes immediately. A construction worker on a smoke break did a double-take. A woman passing by gave him a swift, judging glance. He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, on David’s back, his mind retreating into a cold, focused space.
This was reconnaissance. This was leveraging assets. The hundred million dollars was a silent, abstract power. This body, in these clothes, was a tangible, brutal one.
David glanced back at him, his face a mask of conflicted determination. “You good?”
“No,” Marcus answered truthfully. “But keep walking.”
They turned the corner onto a busier avenue, a river of traffic and people. Marcus felt utterly exposed, a raw nerve in a denim costume. Every glance was a probe. He was no longer a person trying to hide. He was a flare in the night, burning brightly with a message meant for one desperately lost man.
He just had to hope the right one saw it.