Chapter 1: The Last Drink and the First Curse
The whiskey was cheap, which was fitting. The bar was cheap, the music was cheap, and the whole night felt like a discount version of something that was never that great to begin with. The neon sign outside flickered, bleeding a sickly amber light across the sticky vinyl of my booth. Every time it sputtered, the shadows jumped like something was alive in the corner.
I was on my third drink, trying to dissolve the memory of a day spent in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, when the scent of patchouli cut through the stale beer smell.
I didn’t need to look up. I knew.
“Aaron. You look like you’re marinating in self-pity. It’s a good color on you.”
Valerie slid into the booth opposite me. Two years hadn’t softened her. If anything, she seemed sharper. Her dark hair was shorter, her eyes brighter and more assessing. She wore a simple black dress that probably cost more than my couch.
“Valerie.” I took another sip. The whiskey burned, but it was a familiar burn. “Stalking isn’t a hobby. It’s a sign.”
She smiled, but it didn’t touch her eyes. “This dive was our place, remember? Or did you forget that too, along with everything else?”
“I remember.” My voice was flat. I remembered the fights, the silences, the final, crushing certainty that we were making each other miserable. “I remember it’s over.”
“Is it?” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the sticky table. Her fingertips tapped a slow, arrhythmic pattern on the wood. “You just get to decide it’s over? You just walk away, clean? That’s not how stories work, Aaron.”
A cold trickle, unrelated to the ice in my glass, slid down my spine. There was a tone in her voice I didn’t recognize—a singsong certainty that felt dangerous.
“What do you want, Val? An apology? Fine. I’m sorry it ended badly. I’m sorry we were toxic. Are we done?”
“An apology.” She laughed, a short, dry sound. “No. An apology is a whisper. I want you to understand a scream.”
Her tapping fingers stilled. For a second, nothing happened. The jukebox crooned the same blues line about lost love and rain. Then I saw it. A faint glow, like the last ember in a dead fire, pulsed under the skin of her fingertips. It was a trick of the light. It had to be.
But the air around our table grew thick and warm, smelling suddenly of ozone and hot stone.
“Val, what are you—”
“You never listened,” she said, her voice dropping to a conversational murmur that was somehow worse than shouting. “You never saw what was right in front of you. You loved the idea of me. The cool, collected girlfriend. You never wondered how I always knew what you were thinking. Why your bosses always liked me. Why the plants in our apartment never died.”
The ember-glow under her skin brightened to a sullen red. The ice in my whiskey glass cracked, a single, sharp report.
Panic, pure and electric, shot through me. I tried to stand up, to push out of the booth. My body refused. It was like being packed in wet cement. I could only stare as she reached across the table, her glowing fingers aiming not for my face, but for the center of my chest.
“Let’s try a different perspective.”
Her fingers made contact. There was no shock, no blast of light. Just a deep, internal wrenching, as if a hook had been set behind my sternum and yanked.
A heat bloomed inside me, terrible and intimate. It wasn’t burning; it was changing. I felt a violent, liquid rush under my skin, a rearrangement of my very substance. My bones didn’t break, they sighed, softening and reforming with a series of sickening, muffled pops. My shoulders pulled in, my hips flared with a sensation like tendons stretching on a rack. A wave of nausea washed over me, followed by a piercing ache in my scalp as my hair began to crawl, growing, spilling over my own shrinking shoulders.
I tried to yell. The sound that came out was a choked gasp, higher in pitch.
My clothes felt wrong. They were strangling me, then billowing, then melting. I watched the wool of my jacket bleed and reform into supple black leather. My jeans dissolved into the same material, tightening, shaping themselves to legs that were no longer mine. A weight settled on my chest, a foreign, frightening pressure. I sagged forward, my new hair—a curtain of auburn—falling around a face I couldn’t comprehend.
The constriction around my torso resolved into the stiff boning of a corset. The cool slide of stockings slithered up my thighs. My feet, now smaller, were crammed into a pair of towering heels that had not existed seconds before.
The pressure, the cement feeling, vanished. I collapsed against the booth, breathing in short, shallow pants. The corset wouldn’t allow for anything deeper. My own breath sounded strange in my ears. Softer.
Valerie was watching me, her head tilted, a clinical curiosity in her gaze. The glow in her fingers had faded. She looked satisfied.
“Look,” she said softly, nodding toward the misted mirror behind the bar.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to close my eyes and wake up. But some horrifying magnetism drew my gaze upward.
The reflection was a nightmare of wrongness. The face in the mirror was delicate, with high cheekbones and my own eyes—but wider, framed by thick lashes. The mouth was full, painted a smeared, glossy crimson. The leather outfit clung to a slender, curved form that was both alien and undeniably, horrifyingly attached to me. I saw the glint of a dangling earring, the fishnet texture of the stockings.
I raised a shaking hand. The reflection raised a hand with slender fingers, tipped with long red nails. The movement was mine, but the image wasn’t. A whimper escaped the red lips in the mirror.
“What…” My voice was gone. In its place was a stranger’s voice, husky with shock and several notes higher. “What did you do?”
“I opened your eyes,” Valerie said. She sounded almost bored now. “You always reduced people to roles, Aaron. To what they could do for you. The supportive girlfriend. The fun date. You never saw the person. So now, you get to be a role. A very clear one.”
"What role is..." my question was only half uttered before the image in the mirror fully sank in and I watched her--myself--shift ever so slightly into a classic hooker pose.
Valerie’s smile was a thin, satisfied line. “I think you just answered your own question.” She leaned back, surveying me like a finished painting. “You look… fitting.”
My heart was a trapped bird hammering against the stiff cage of my ribs—my new ribs, as the full realization of her words collided with the overtly sexual image in the mirror, and understanding of what she meant dawned on me.
“Change me back.” The words were a desperate, husky rasp from this strange throat. But even as I said them, they had the sound of insincerity. Words spoken in rote. I had just been transformed into a smoking hot chick, I was expected to recoil.
The longer my gaze was captured by the image in the mirror, the less alien it seemed. The more natural it felt.
“See something you like?”
Valerie’s voice was a shard of ice, shattering the mirror’s spell. I jerked my gaze away, a hot flush spreading across my neck and chest—a physical reaction that felt entirely new.
“You’re sick,” I whispered, the stranger’s voice trembling.
“Am I?” She sipped my abandoned whiskey, never breaking eye contact. “You can’t stop looking. Admit it. All that effort you used to put in, all that performance of being a man… it was so exhausting, wasn’t it? This is simpler. This is just being. Look at you. The cheekbones. The line of the throat. You’re prettier than I ever was.”
“Stop it.”
“Why? Does the truth make your new skin itch?” She leaned in again, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial murmur. “Don’t you enjoy it? Just a little? The power of it? The sheer, undeniable pretty of it all? You always appreciated aesthetics. Now you’re one.”
“I don’t,” I insisted, but the words were ash. My denial was a reflex, a ghost of Aaron protesting. Because beneath the terror, a treacherous thread of something else was weaving through me. The leather hugging my form wasn’t just restrictive; it was defining. The weight on my chest was an anchor, holding this new version of me together. The sight in the mirror wasn’t just shocking; it was… compelling.
“I don’t,” I repeated, weaker.
Valerie just smiled, reading the falter in my eyes, the way my shoulders had slumped not in defeat, but in a bewildered sort of accommodation. The fight was leaking out of me, replaced by a staggering, quiet avalanche of understanding. This was real. This was me now.
And the most terrifying part wasn’t the change.
It was the part of me that, already, was starting to agree with her.
"But... but... but I'm a man," I stammered.
"You don't look like any kind of man to me," she taunted. "You look more like a cheap slut to me."
"Is that what you are sweetie? A cheap little slut?" she continued to taunt.
"I'm... I'm... Oh god," I cried. "Yes... yes I am."
"That's a good little girl," she smirked. "Still want me to change you back?"
"Ye... No," I couldn't stop myself from saying.
My mind was in chaos as it filled with new, unfamiliar desires and needs. They unfolded like poisoned flowers, bright and insistent. And suddenly, it was very clear...
"Why," I began, "why would I ever want to change?"
My eyes returned to the mirror, no longer in shock, but in appreciation. I was a walking wet dream, and I loved it! Val no longer seemed like an antagonist, but a competitor, I thought. My perspective changing as drastically as my body had. I was seeing the world through a woman's eyes now, not a man's.
The thought didn’t feel like a thought. It felt like a fact, sinking into the marrow of my new, softer bones. The mirror held no horror now. It held a revelation. A thrilling, terrifying truth.