Chapter 2 — Priya Exploring
I woke up in his body.
It was a slow, disorienting creep of awareness.
The weight of the sheet was different. The smell of the pillow—his shampoo, faintly piney—was wrong.
The light pressing against my eyelids was the same gold-tinged morning light of the suite, but when I opened my eyes, the perspective was a few crucial inches higher.
The world felt subtly, profoundly off-kilter.
And then I felt the rest of it.
A deep, dull ache in my lower back. A stiffness in my right shoulder. A heavy, warm presence between my legs that was both alien and, after last night, intimately familiar.
I was Sam.
I flexed my hands—his hands—on the rumpled sheet.
They were broad, the knuckles prominent, the fingers thick.
The wedding band on the left hand was mine, but it felt loose.
I brought a hand up to my face—his face.
The stubble rasped against my palm. It was coarse, a five-o’clock shadow that had grown into a rough morning beard overnight.
I ran a fingertip over his lips. My lips. They were thinner than I’d pictured.
The other side of the bed was empty.
I pushed myself up on one elbow, the muscles in his arm bunching with an easy strength I’d never possessed. The suite was quiet. The door to the bathroom was closed. I could hear the faintest sound of water running.
Sam was in there. In me.
The thought sent a shiver through his body. My body.
I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, the motion clumsy with the unfamiliar length and weight of his limbs.
My feet—his feet—hit the cool floor. I stood, and the room tilted for a second as I adjusted to the new center of gravity.
I was taller. The ceiling felt closer. My head felt…
clearer, somehow. Less cluttered. The thoughts that came were linear, singular.
A need for coffee. A mild curiosity about the hotel’s breakfast menu.
A low, persistent hum of arousal that sat in the groin like an idling engine.
That last part was new. Or, it wasn’t new to him. It was just new to me, feeling it from the inside.
I looked down at myself.
His chest was broader than mine, hairier.
A smattering of dark curls across the pectorals, trailing down the stomach.
My stomach. It was flat, softer than I’d imagined.
I ran a hand over it, the skin warm, the muscle beneath yielding.
I followed the trail of hair down, past his navel, to where it thickened around the base of his cock.
It hung there, soft against his thigh. Mine. It looked vulnerable in its stillness. I’d seen it a thousand times, touched it, taken it inside me. But I’d never been it. I reached down, my heart hammering in his chest—a slower, deeper drum than I was used to. I took it in my hand.
The skin was softer than I expected, silken and loose.
The weight was substantial, a dense, living heat.
I gave an experimental tug, and a bolt of sensation, blunt and direct, shot up into the core of me.
It was nothing like my own arousal. Mine was a slow, spreading warmth, a complicated network of nerves lighting up, a need that could be specific or diffuse.
This was a simple, localized signal. A pull. A demand.
I let go, my breath catching in his lungs. The air felt different going in and out—deeper, cooler.
I needed to see.
I walked to the full-length mirror on the closet door, my gait awkward, his hips swinging less than mine would have. I stopped before the glass.
Sam stared back at me.
It was Sam, but it wasn’t. The eyes were mine, wide with a curiosity and a trepidation he never wore.
The mouth was set in a line of concentration he’d never hold.
The body, though… that was all him. I turned slightly, taking in the slope of his shoulders, the way his back tapered to his waist. I saw the man I’d married.
I saw the body I’d shared a bed with for a decade.
And for the first time, I saw it not as an object of affection or, lately, polite duty, but as a vessel.
A machine with its own simple operating system.
The bathroom door opened.
I turned, startled.
She stood there, wrapped in one of the hotel’s white robes. My robe, on my body. Her hair—my hair—was damp, curling at the ends. She’d washed her face. My face. She looked fresh, dewy. And utterly terrified.
We stared at each other across the room, a chasm of plush carpet between us.
“You’re up,” she said. My voice. It sounded higher coming from her, laced with a nervous energy I recognized as my own.
“Yeah,” I said. His voice rumbled out of my throat, a baritone vibration that felt foreign and powerful. “Just… getting my bearings.”
A faint, pained smile touched her lips. My lips. “It’s weird.”
“Understatement.”
We stood in silence again. The awkwardness was a physical thing in the room. Last night, in the heat and novelty of the swap and the sex, there had been a frantic unity. This morning, in the cold, clarifying light, we were two separate entities again, just housed wrong.
“I was… exploring,” she said, her eyes flicking down my body—his body—then back up to my face. “In the shower. It was… instructive.”
I remembered the running water. “What did you learn?”
She hugged the robe tighter around herself. My body looked small inside it. “That it’s very… direct. The way you feel things. Arousal. It’s like a switch. On or off. No… gradients.”
I nodded, his head moving with a ponderous gravity. “I felt that. Just now.”
Her eyes widened. “Did you…?”
“Just a touch.” I felt a blush creep up his neck. My neck. “For science.”
The pained smile returned. “Right. Science.”
Another silence stretched. The hum between my legs was no longer idle.
It had become a low, insistent thrum. The sight of her—of me—standing there, vulnerable in the robe, was doing something to this body.
It was a purely visual, purely physical trigger.
See attractive mate. React. The simplicity of it was breathtaking, and a little horrifying.
“I’m hungry,” I said, mostly to break the tension.
“Room service?” she suggested.
“Yeah.”
We ordered breakfast. The process was surreal. I used his voice to call, to ask for eggs and bacon and coffee. She sat on the edge of the bed, her hands—my hands—folded in her lap, listening. When I hung up, she said, “You ordered for me. You remembered how I like my eggs.”
“Of course I did,” I said, frowning. His brow furrowed easily.
“You never remember at home.”
The statement hung in the air, accusatory and true.
I didn’t have a response. Because Sam wouldn’t have had one.
He’d have let the comment slide, a tiny pebble of resentment added to the unseen pile.
So I did the same. I just shrugged his shoulders and walked to the window, looking out at the city coming awake.
Breakfast arrived. We ate in near-silence, the clink of cutlery against porcelain loud in the quiet room. I watched her eat. She ate like me. Small, precise bites. A careful dab of the lips with the napkin. She caught me staring.
“What?” she asked.
“You eat like I do.”
“I am you.”
“No,” I said, the word coming out harder than I intended. “You’re not. You’re Sam, in my body. You don’t know why I take small bites. You’re just mimicking.”
She put her fork down. “Why do you take small bites?”
“Because my mother used to yell at me for wolfing my food. It’s a nervous habit.” I hadn’t thought about that in years.
She looked down at her plate, my face troubled. “I didn’t know that.”
“Why would you?” I said, and it wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact. A decade of marriage, and he’d never known the origin of my table manners. The simplicity of his arousal had a counterpart: a simplicity of perception. He saw the what, rarely the why.
After we ate, she took the tray and set it outside in the hall. When she came back in, she didn’t return to her chair. She stood before me, her arms crossed over her chest. My chest.
“We have the suite for the whole retreat,” she said. “The… the instructions said the swap holds for a full forty-eight hours. We don’t revert until tomorrow night, at the exact time we initiated.”
“So we have today. And tomorrow,” I said.
“As each other.”
We looked at each other. The unspoken question hovered: What do we do with it?
Last night had been mutual, a shared dive into the unknown. Today felt different. Separate. We were alone in these foreign skins, carrying the other’s secrets.
“I think,” she said slowly, “we should have some time. Alone. To… explore. Without the other person watching.”
My pulse jumped. The thrum between my legs intensified. “You want to be alone?”
“I think we need to be.” She met my eyes—his eyes. “Don’t you feel it? The… the performance of it? With you here, I’m aware of being watched. Even by you. Especially by you. I can’t just… feel what it’s like to be me. To be you.”
She was right. My presence was a pressure. Her presence was a mirror. I needed to understand this body, this mind, without the audience of my own familiar eyes.
“Okay,” I said, my voice gruff. “You want me to go for a walk? Give you the room?”
She shook her head. My dark hair swayed. “No. I’ll go. I want to… I don’t know. Be in the world like this. See what it’s like.”
A spike of irrational protectiveness shot through me. “Out there? Alone?”
“It’s my body, Priya,” she said, and the use of my name, in my voice, was a jolt. “I know how to handle it. You… you should stay. Get to know…” She gestured at me. At him. “All of this. Without me here to complicate it.”
She was giving me permission. Or she was running. Maybe both.
“Okay,” I said again.