Welcome to

The morning light was harsh through the blinds, slicing across the rumpled bed. Claire blinked, her head throbbing with a dull, medicinal ache. Something warm and soft was pressed against her. She looked down.

Amy was nestled in her arms, asleep, her blond hair fanned across the pillow. Except… Claire’s arms were thickly bandaged from wrist to elbow, and the body she held was decidedly male. The firm plane of a chest, the coarse hair on a forearm. Her heart began to hammer against her ribs.

“Amy?” she whispered, her voice a dry rasp. It came out wrong. Deeper. Rougher.

The body in her arms stirred. Blue eyes, so like Will’s, fluttered open. They widened in instant, sheer panic. “Frank? What the hell? Why are you… holding me?” The voice was high, melodic. Amy’s voice. But the tone was all Will—confused, irritable, direct.

Claire—in Frank’s body—pushed herself up on her elbows. Past the tangle of Amy’s blond hair, she saw the closet mirror. The reflection showed Frank’s familiar, lean frame, his own dark hair mussed from sleep, his bandaged arms wrapped around a petite, curvy Amy. But Amy’s face was contorted in a terror that wasn’t hers.

“Will?” Claire breathed, the name feeling foreign in this new throat. “Is that you in there?”

The person in Amy’s body scrambled back, the sheets pooling around a waist that was suddenly, distressingly narrow. “Claire? What did you call me?” He—Will—looked down at himself, at the pronounced swell of his sister’s breasts beneath the thin cotton sleep shirt, and his hands flew to his throat. “That’s my… this is Amy’s voice. What is this?”

“I think… I think I’m you,” Claire said, the reality of it dawning with a sick, dizzying weight. She swung Frank’s legs—her legs—out of bed. The movement was all wrong, the center of gravity shifted, a heavy, unfamiliar weight swinging between her thighs. She ignored it, for now. “The accident. The goodbye. Don’t you remember?”

Will—in Amy—stood up shakily. He looked down at his new body, his hands hovering over the generous curves. “I remember you… you and me, in the car. Crushed. Then nothing. Then waking up here, smothered by my little brother.” He shuddered, a full-body tremor that made the new flesh quiver. “This isn’t right. This is Amy.”

“And this is Frank,” Claire said, staring at Frank’s hands—her hands—as she flexed them. “We’re in our siblings. Our spouses’ siblings.” The sheer, grotesque improbability of it threatened to swallow her. But the throbbing in her bandaged arms was real. The discharge papers on the nightstand were real.

They found them, the crisp hospital printout. Franklin Miller, contusions, lacerations. Amy Miller, contusions, mild concussion. The names were wrong, but the injuries mapped. They had been patched up and sent home, two souls crammed into the wrong, aching containers.

Wordlessly, they moved to the kitchen, the beach house silent except for the distant crash of Pacific waves. The medical instructions said to clean and re-dress the wounds. They worked in a stunned quiet, Claire clumsily winding fresh gauze around Will-Amy’s slender forearm, Will using Amy’s delicate fingers to secure the wrap on Claire-Frank’s broader bicep with a efficiency that was utterly his own.

“We need to shower,” Will said finally, his voice tight. “We’re covered in road grit and… and whatever else.”

Claire nodded. It was practical. A step. They stood in the master bathroom, a spacious tiled room with a large glass-walled shower. The silence grew thick.

“Just… get it over with,” Will muttered, not looking at her. He—in Amy’s body—peeled the sleep shirt over his head, revealing Amy’s full, pale breasts. He froze, his breath catching, his face a mask of profound disorientation. Claire watched, a strange, detached part of her noting how Will’s shock did nothing to diminish the natural, ripe beauty of the form he now wore.

Swallowing hard, Claire turned her attention to Frank’s clothes. The jeans were awkward, the button fly an unfamiliar puzzle for her fingers. She got them open, pushed them down Frank’s hips. The boxer briefs followed. And there it was.

Frank’s penis, soft and nestled in a thatch of dark hair. It was… there. A presence. A weight. She stared at it, this alien appendage that was now, technically, hers. The core of her being, Claire, recoiled. But the body she inhabited didn’t. There was a low, curious hum of sensation, a connection to the thing that was both deeply wrong and undeniably physical.

Will had stripped completely now, standing naked by the sink. He was staring into the mirror, at Amy’s face, with a kind of horrified fascination. His hands skimmed over the dramatic hourglass curve of the hips, the soft swell of the stomach. “God,” he whispered.

“Don’t,” Claire said, her new voice gruff. “Just… don’t think. Clean. That’s all.”

They stepped into the shower together, a bizarre and intimate pantomime of their old married life. The water was hot, a welcome shock. Claire let it sluice over Frank’s broad shoulders, watching as Will soaped Amy’s body with a clinical, hurried desperation. The suds slid over smooth skin, over curves that Will had only ever seen on his sister from a detached, brotherly distance. Now he was mapping them with his own, stolen hands.

Claire’s own washing was more hesitant. The soap slid over Frank’s chest, flat and hard. Down the taut stomach. Her hand, wrapped in plastic to protect the bandages, hesitated again at the groin. She had to clean it. It was just a body part. A piece of biology.

She touched it. Frank’s flaccid penis was soft, vulnerable in her grip. She washed it quickly, the soap slick, her mind screaming the wrongness of it. But as her fingers moved, a jolt went through her—through Frank’s body. A thick, gathering tension. A flood of warmth that had nothing to do with the shower. She gasped, and the thing in her hand began to change, to swell and stiffen, lengthening and thickening in a way that was utterly, overwhelmingly male.

In the mirror of her mind, she was still Claire. But the sensation… the sensation was a deep, insistent pulse, a claiming of blood and flesh that centered entirely on that stretching, hardening shaft. It felt powerful. It felt hungry.

She looked up, water streaming down Frank’s face, and met Will’s eyes. He had seen. He was staring, not at her face, but lower, at the clear, hard evidence of the body’s response. In his own new body, Amy’s body, a sympathetic flush spread across the chest and throat.

“It’s… it’s just the heat,” Claire stammered, the excuse weak even to her own ears.

Will didn’t answer. He was looking down now, at Amy’s body. At the space between her legs. His expression was one of dawning, awful comprehension. “It would… it would stretch,” he said, his voice hollow. “Wouldn’t it? If we… that would stretch this.” He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to. The image was there, brutal and visceral: the thick, hard length of Frank, of the penis Claire now felt twitching in her hand, pushing into the tight, small space that was now his.

The thought should have revolted him. It should have revolted her. But standing there in the steam, with the water beating down on their stolen, aching forms, it didn’t. It hummed between them, a forbidden current. A terrible, logical next step. The body Claire was in throbbed with a need that was entirely about filling a space, about the profound, physical truth of fit and stretch. And the body Will was in, for all his mental horror, seemed to soften in response, a faint, unfamiliar ache blooming low in Amy’s belly.

They finished rinsing in silence, the air crackling with things unsaid. They toweled off, avoiding each other’s eyes, avoiding looking too long at the reflections in the fogged-up glass. They were two people, stranded in the wrong skins, with the ghosts of their spouses between them and a terrifying, tantalizing new physics of flesh beckoning from the shadows of their own home.