Chapter 1: The Confession and the Request
The lavender scent from her candle was supposed to be calming. It usually was. But right now, it just smelled like guilt. I was sprawled on the couch, one arm behind my head, pretending to be deeply interested in the ceiling. My other hand fidgeted against the rough fabric of the armrest.
Andrea walked in, and I didn’t need to look to know her mood. It was in the click of her heels on the hardwood, a sound too deliberate for a lazy Sunday evening. I felt the couch dip heavily as she planted a knee beside my hip, then swung the other leg over to straddle me. My view of the ceiling was replaced by her face, her long blonde hair framing eyes that were blazing green with something like triumph.
“Hey,” I said, aiming for casual and landing somewhere near strained.
“Don’t ‘hey’ me.” Her voice was low, a thrilled whisper. “I know.”
A cold knot tightened in my gut. “Know what?”
Her smile was all teeth. “I saw you last Thursday. Coming out of the hardware store. Except it wasn’t you. It was some bald guy with a beard and tattoos. But it was your walk. That stupid, confident saunter you do. And it was your eyes.” She leaned closer. “Your blue, blue eyes in someone else’s face.”
My breath stuck in my throat. I’d been that guy—Mike, the contractor—to avoid running into my old boss. It was easier than small talk.
“Andrea…”
“How long, Justin? How long have you been able to do that?”
There was no point. The lie was over. “Since I was a kid,” I mumbled, the admission leaving me hollow. “It’s not… it’s not a big deal. I just… shift. Sometimes.”
“Not a big deal?” She laughed, a sharp, delighted sound. “It’s the biggest deal in the history of everything! My husband is a freaking skinwalker.”
“It’s not like that. It’s just… me. In a different skin.”
She studied my face, her excitement softening into something more intense, more curious. Her fingers traced my jawline. “Show me.”
“What?”
“Show me. Do it right now. Change into someone else.”
I shook my head, the movement stiff against the cushion. “No. It’s private. It’s mine.”
“Please.” The word was a breath. Her hands came up to cradle my face. “I’ve been living with my own secret, you know. Thinking I was so brave for finally admitting, to myself, that I’m… curious. That I find women attractive. And here you are, with this whole universe inside you.” Her thumbs stroked my cheeks. “Share one tiny piece of it with me. Just once.”
The plea undid me. It was the raw honesty in it, the mirrored vulnerability. I’d hidden my truth; she’d hidden hers. We were both keeping worlds locked away.
“Who?” My voice was rough.
Her gaze turned speculative, hungry. “Someone I’d never know. Someone… completely different from you.” A mischievous glint returned. “Someone I might see at my book club. That girl, Sabrina. The new one. Short, curly brown hair. Very… curvy.”
A shock ran through me. “A woman? Andrea, no. I’ve never… I don’t do women.”
“Exactly.” She kissed me, hard and quick. “That’s the point. I want to see you become. I want to know what it feels like for you. Please, Justin. For me.”
The resistance bled out of me. It felt inevitable, like a door swinging open after years of being bolted shut. I closed my eyes, letting the familiar, inner mechanism engage. It wasn’t magic; it was a deep, cellular focusing, a directing of will. I pictured Sabrina from the two times I’d seen her. The specific roundness of her face, the pout of her lips, the short cascade of brown curls.
The first wave was dissolution. My bones didn’t break, but they slid, with a deep, internal grating sensation that was soundless and profound. My skeleton was rearranging itself, a dizzying, nauseating puppetry from the inside out.
Then came the flood of foreign flesh.
My shoulders narrowed, caving in with a soft, aching pressure. My chest tightened, the familiar flat plane pulling inward before erupting outward in a sudden, heavy, embarrassing weight. Two masses of fat and tissue settled on my ribcage, an anchor dragging my center of gravity forward. I felt their separate, jiggling weight with every shallow breath I took, a strange and vulnerable pendulosity.
My hips flared, a sharp, bony expansion that made my spine curve. A new, profound softness spread over my thighs and buttocks, the muscle and fat redistributing in a way that made the couch feel completely different beneath me. The absence between my legs was a yawning, shocking void. The familiar weight and presence was gone, replaced by a confusing, flat landscape of cloth. My whole sense of physical self, the map I’d navigated for thirty-five years, was redrawn in whispers and hollows.
My face melted and cooled. My jawline softened, the bone retreating. My lips plumped, stretching into a shape that felt too small, too purse-like for the words in my head. My nose shortened. The strain in my scalp was followed by a bizarre, tickling lightness as my hair retracted and then regrew, a million tiny pinpricks, until a curtain of curls brushed my new, slender neck.
I opened my eyes. The world was the same warm terracotta wall, the same lamp. But it was higher. Andrea was now looking slightly down at me. Her expression was one of utter fascination, her lips parted.
I tried to speak. “It’s…” My voice. It was a higher pitch, melodic but alien, coming from a smaller cavity in my head. The word sounded breathy and strange in my own new ears. I brought a hand—a smaller, finer-boned hand with slim fingers—up to my face. The touch was foreign. The skin felt softer.
Andrea’s gaze traveled over every inch of me, this new silhouette wearing her husband’s pajamas, which now hung absurdly large. “Oh my god,” she whispered. She reached out, hesitantly, and brushed her fingertips over the back of my hand. “Your skin. It’s… smoother.”
She then, boldly, cupped one of my new breasts through the cotton of my shirt. I flinched. The sensation was direct, intense, a jolt of feedback from a body part I had no historical reference for. It wasn’t inherently sexual; it was just startlingly present, a heavy, sensitive mass being handled.
“Incredible,” she breathed. “You’re really her. You’re really in there.”
“It’s… disorienting,” I said, the female voice still a shock. My balance was off. My center was lower, yet the weight on my chest pulled me forward. I felt exposed, but also strangely… contained. The world seemed just a little bit bigger, a little more potentially threatening.
“Swap with me.”
My new, wide eyes blinked. “What?”
“You heard me. You shift into me. Let me be Sabrina for a minute.”
“Andrea, that’s insane. I don’t even know if that’s possible.”
“Try. Please. I need to feel it. I need to know what it’s like to be in that body.” Her green eyes were fierce, alight with a desire that was both scientific and deeply personal. “You got to keep this to yourself for so long. Give me sixty seconds inside it.”
The logic was nonexistent. The risk was monumental. But her hunger was contagious, a vortex pulling me in. I nodded, a movement that sent the unfamiliar hair swaying against my neck. I focused again, this time on her. On Andrea. Her taller frame, her longer limbs, the specific slope of her nose, the fall of her blonde hair.
The reversal was faster, but no less violent. The softening hardness returned, the expansion contracting. The heavy weight on my chest vanished, replaced by the familiar, lighter musculature of my own torso. The void between my legs filled, a solid, grounding return. I was back in my own body, staring up at my own wife’s face.
Except it wasn’t her anymore.
Her expression—my expression—shifted. The awareness behind the eyes changed. Andrea, now looking out from my face, lifted my hands. She turned them over, staring. She flexed the fingers, felt the broader palms, the tougher skin. A slow, astonished smile spread across my lips.
Then she looked down at the body she’d just vacated—the short, curvy form of Sabrina, breathing rapidly on the couch. She reached out with my hand and touched her own former cheek.
“Wow,” she said, my voice full of her wonder. “The strength. It’s so… linear.” She patted my chest with my hand. “And so… light up here.” She laughed, a joyful, unburdened sound in my tenor. “This is amazing!”
She stood up, staggering slightly on my longer legs, getting a feel for the height, the different stride. She looked at “Sabrina”—at me, trapped in this soft, smaller shell—and her grin was wicked. “My turn,” she said, and her hands, my hands, went to the hem of the pajama top.
Panic, cold and sheer, shot through me. “Andrea, wait—”
But she was already pulling the shirt over my head, exposing “Sabrina’s” body to the warm, dim light of the room. The air felt shockingly cool on skin that was not mine. I crossed my arms over the bare breasts, a instinctive, shielding gesture from a borrowed nervous system.
Andrea, in my body, just watched, her head tilted. “Don’t,” she commanded softly, using my voice. “I want to see. I want to see what I’ve been wondering about.”
She knelt on the floor in front of the couch, her eyes—my eyes—roving over the form she’d just inhabited. Her gaze was possessive, rapt. The momentum was no longer mine. It was hers. And it was pulling us both toward a line we had never even seen before.