Chapter 3: A Bitter Taste of Truth
The accusation hung in the air, sharp as the smell of stale coffee and takeout. I’d said it—You wished for this—and watched my own face blanch with a guilt I’d never worn.It was like shouting at a distorted, panicked mirror.
“I didn’t think it would work!” the figure in my body shot back, my voice strained an octave higher with Sabrina’s panic. He—she—backed further into the hallway wall, a clumsy motion that sent my shoulder thudding against the drywall. She wasn’t used to the weight, the bulk, the different pivot points.
Andrea moved, a quick step that placed her between us.Her hand came down on my forearm, the touch firm. Her fingers felt long, strong. I was struck by how small my wrist was beneath them, the bones like a bird’s. “Enough,” she said, her tone leaving no room for argument.It was her teacher voice, the one that sliced through teenage chaos.“Both of you. Kitchen. Now.”
She guided us, her hand still on me, a steadying pressure I desperately needed.Every step was a negotiation.My hips, these new, wider hinges, wanted to sway. The yoga pants whispered against my thighs with a soft, proprietary sound. The thong, that infinitesimal strip of fabric, was a persistent, maddening awareness, a line of ownership drawn in a place I had never, in thirty-six years, had to consciously feel. It rode up, a subtle, constant wedge.She pulled out chairs at our round oak kitchen table. The chair scraped loudly.“Sit.”
I sank into mine, the posture unfamiliar. My back felt straighter without my usual belly in the way, but a new, lower curve in my spine pressed the base of my skull into an alignment that felt both elegant and unnatural. Across the table, Sabrina-in-Justin lowered himself into the other chair with a heavy, graceless plop. He—I’m thinking ‘he’ for the body, ‘she’ for the mind, God, this is impossible—stared at his hands, my hands, as they rested on the worn wood. His fingers, my thick, blunt fingers, found my wedding band and began to turn it, round and round.The gold looked tight on the digit.
Andrea remained standing, leaning against the counter, her arms crossed.The sunset light caught the red in her hair, turning it to fire. She was looking at us, really looking, her gaze flicking between my face—Sabrina’s face—and the face of her husband that now housed her friend. Her expression was a mask of intense, analytical concentration.“Okay,” she breathed out.“Start from the beginning. Justin-in-Sabrina.What do you remember last?As you.”
I tried to swallow. My throat felt smaller, tighter. My tongue moved in a mouth that was fundamentally different—the roof higher, the space more cramped, my lips fuller and constantly touching.“I was on the couch. You asked me about cleaning the gutters.I felt… a pop.In my head. Not painful, just a pressure release.Then everything went black. I woke up…” I trailed off, the memory of silk sheets and crushing weight surging back. The cool air of the room raised goosebumps on my arms—Sabrina’s arms, so thin I could see the delicate tracery of blue veins beneath the skin.“I woke up in Sabrina’s bed. With a man on top of me.He was… finishing.”
Andrea’s eyes closed for a second. A muscle ticked in her jaw.“Ben,” she stated flatly.
“You know him?” My voice shot up, embarrassingly shrill.“Sabrina mentioned a trainer from her app. Go on.”
“He got up. He said, ‘See you around, Sabrina.’ He left.” The words were ash in my new, feminine mouth.“I was… sticky.With his… I cleaned up. I put on these clothes and ran over here.” I gestured down at myself, a helpless motion that made the loose fabric of my shirt slide across my chest. The brush of cotton against my nipples was a shock, a direct line of sensation that made me flinch. They were permanently hard, sensitive pebbles against the soft cup of the bra I wasn’t wearing. Every shift, every breath, made them graze the fabric. I crossed my arms over them, a defensive hunch.“And you?” Andrea turned her gaze to Sabrina-in-Justin.
He had stopped fidgeting with the ring. He was staring at Andrea, at the curve of her neck, the line of her collarbone visible above her shirt. His gaze—my gaze—held a naked, raw fascination that made my gut clench with a possessive fury. That was my look, my love, and it was coming from my face, but it wasn’t me.
“I was bored,” the words came out in my baritone, but the cadence was all wrong, looser, more languid.“I’d just… finished with Ben. It was fine, but it was nothing.It’s always nothing. I looked at my stupid, perfect room and my stupid, perfect life and I just… wished.Out loud. I said, ‘God, I wish I could just be someone else for a day.A man.Someone invisible. Someone no one looks at twice.’” He shifted in the chair, my body making it creak. “Then I felt dizzy.That pop you mentioned. Next thing I know, I’m on the floor in Justin’s hallway, everything hurts, everything is heavy, and I can’t see.” He reached up and tapped the frames of my glasses.“These things are terrible. How do you live like this? Everything is blurry at the edges.”
A stark silence fell, broken only by the hum of the refrigerator.My new body felt too hot, too aware. The waistband of the yoga pants dug into the soft, incredible flatness of Sabrina’s stomach. I felt my own heartbeat in places I shouldn’t—a faint, rhythmic pulse in my neck, my wrists, my inner thighs.I was a symphony of unfamiliar rhythms.
“So an idle wish,” Andrea summarized, her voice dry.“And a concerned thought about gutters. And now you’ve switched.” She pushed off from the counter and started to pace, three steps one way, three steps back. “We have to operate on two assumptions.One, this is real.Two, it can be reversed. To do that, we need to know the mechanism.Was it a cosmic coincidence?A triggered… ability? A curse?” She stopped and looked at Sabrina-in-Justin.“Did you do anything else? Say anything?Touch anything unusual?”
“No.I had champagne. It was the same bottle from book club last week.Nothing special.”
Book club.Andrea and Sabrina. The normalcy of it was a gut punch.
“We need to keep this between us,” Andrea stated, her pacing resuming.“No one else can know.Not a soul. You both have to live each other’s lives, at least publicly, until we figure this out.”
“Live her life?” I exploded, lurching to my feet.The motion sent a devastating tremor through my chest. The weight there swayed, pulled by gravity, a heavy, pendulous movement that left me breathless. “Andrea, you can’t be serious!I have to be her? Go to her yoga classes, answer her texts, what if that guy calls?” The image of Ben, his smirk, his hands, flooded back. A confusing, unwanted heat flickered low in my belly—Sabrina’s body, Sabrina’s chemistry, reacting to the memory of a fit male.It made me want to vomit.
“Do you have a better idea?” Andrea snapped, her patience fraying.“You can’t go to work as Justin. You don’t know his current tickets, his passwords, his projects. And you,” she wheeled on Sabrina-in-Justin, “can’t just disappear. Sabrina has a life, friends, family who check in.If either of you acts out of character, people will notice. They’ll ask questions we cannot answer.”
Sabrina-in-Justin was still looking at her, but now with a dawning, horrified understanding.“My mother calls every Sunday. She expects a recap of my week.” He said it with my voice, but the dread was entirely Sabrina’s.
“Exactly,” Andrea said. “So you,” she pointed at me, “will go back to Sabrina’s house. You will familiarize yourself with her phone, her calendar, her social media.You will be Sabrina.And you,” she turned to the other, “will stay here. You will learn Justin’s routines, his job from home, his habits. You will be Justin.”
“And what about us?” The question fell from my lips, small and wounded.
Andrea’s gaze softened, just for a second. She looked at the man who wore her husband’s face, then at me, the woman who held his consciousness. A terrible, weary sadness washed over her features.“There is no ‘us’ right now,” she said quietly, firmly. “There is only survival and solving this.We are a committee of three. Nothing more.”
She walked to the junk drawer, rummaged, and pulled out two small notepads and pens. She slid one toward each of us.“Start writing.Everything you can think of. Justin, write about your body, your medical details, your common passwords, your train set—everything Sabrina needs to know. Sabrina, you do the same.Biographies for each other. We’ll swap them.”
It was a logical, practical next step.It felt like planning a prison exchange.
I picked up the pen.It felt tiny and insubstantial in my slender fingers. I looked across the table at the person in my body. He was staring at the notepad, his brow—my brow—furrowed in concentration. Then his eyes lifted, not to me, but to Andrea, who had returned to the window, looking out at the darkening street. His gaze traveled over her profile, down her spine, to the shape of her in her jeans. There was a wistfulness there, a lonely hunger.
And in this impossible, alien female body, I felt a jealousy so profound it locked my new, delicate jaw. He was in my skin, sleeping in my bed, looking at my wife with a desire that was not mine. The possessive thought was immediate, instinctual: He doesn’t get to have her.
But then the brutal truth followed, cold and slithering: And I, in this, can never have her again.Not like I was. Not as myself.The thong dug in.My breasts felt achingly heavy. The pen was a stranger in my hand. I put the tip to the paper and began to write the first words of my own obituary.