Switched Ch. 01

Tawney opened the door wide enough to put her face out. She didn't look welcoming, which was fine. I was being rude.

She said nothing at first, making me squirm. "Bryan. Tell me this isn't a booty call." It wasn't beyond the realm of possibility. She and I had never done anything but we'd flirted pretty hard.

"I hope you won't be insulted if I don't say yes." I made a point of checking her out. I wanted her to know she was easily booty call worthy.

Her body was well worth a close look. She wore a short robe, leaving her legs excitingly bare. Her sharpish face was pretty, but her eyes were the best: inquisitive and intelligent, pale blue with hints of gold. She was one of the few women whose eyes I'd rather look at than their boobs, and she had really good boobs.

She checked me out in return, the poor thing. All she had to look at was a plain old, blonde-haired, blue-eyed rich kid with a nice haircut and a body my personal trainer, nutritionist, and I had been working on for years. I had to work at it, because unlike most men, I was man enough to admit that we were at a disadvantage.

Simply put, I worked out and ate raw, pureed vegetables because women had all the looks and most of the charm. Chase was lucky in that way, maybe, but this was not the time to mention it.

I think I was in shock. Some Variant, Metahuman Freak Whatchacallit had turned my best friend into a woman! I couldn't decide if it was better or worse that Chase had such a banging body! I was almost jealous of the guy. Girl.

I said, "I have a big favor to ask. Can I come in for a minute?"

She let me dangle again, but just for a minute. "Who's that in your car?"

"That's Jessica. She's okay to wait."

She considered that, then let me in.

The garage was cluttered but not truly dirty, and it was big. There were two racks, one occupied by a hulking relic from the Sixties, and a workshop with the usual bright red tool chests.

On the other side was an office, and atop that was her bedroom.

The top of a garage office is, by unspoken accord, a place where it is dark and thick with dust, populated by old tires and roadside promotional materials advertising things like fifty-nine dollar tune-ups. Instead, Tawney had made a little platform home of it with strings of white holiday lights and her great-grandma's furniture set, including a four-poster bed that was set against the wall and draped by an old parachute.

She wasn't taking me up there, and I didn't blame her. We sat in the office among the nineties-era computers and stacks of catalogs.

She was classy enough to exchange pleasantries first, but aware of my friend waiting, so we did the abbreviated version. Her family was fine. Mine was down six points in the polls but otherwise fine.

"Tell me," she demanded. She'd obviously spent our chit-chat period analyzing. I had the sense that her entire attention was on me.

"My friend, Ch-essica. Chessica. Jessica. Sorry, my throat's dry. Have you got anything to drink?"

Tawney stretched from her seat, something I found to be quite the spectacle, in order to jerk open a desk drawer full of bottled water.

She handed one to me. "You don't need it cold, do you?"

"Pfft." I took a sip. "All right. Let me tell you about Jessica. She's had a bad falling out with her folks and she's had to run away. Now, I can't tell you many details because of the personal nature..."

"It's her story to tell. Go on."

"You're beautiful when you get all businesslike."

"This must be serious if you're trying to butter me up like that." She sounded flirty but her body language hadn't come around.

"It is. Her family is powerful, and if they find her... She told me it was okay to tell you this... If they find her, they'll lock her up in the house and she'll probably never get out again."

"Further, she's had a very sheltered life, so she doesn't know stuff like buying bras and putting on makeup."

"What?" Then, "You want me to teach her," she deduced. Tawney didn't seem too enthusiastic about the prospect.

"No way. I'm just trying to illustrate the severity of her situation."

"How old is she?"

"Twenty," I freely admitted.

"Did she do anything illegal?"

"Absolutely not. Well, there was the nature of her escape." I wasn't sure if this would be good or bad, but I wasn't willing to just gloss over.

"Go on."

"She stole the family car and ditched it outside of town. Smashed up another family car so they wouldn't follow."

"What kind of 'powerful' is this family?"

She was so smart! "Political."

"Eww. No offense."

"Trust me, none taken."

"How long you want me to keep her?"

"Until we can make other arrangements. A few days, maybe a week." I was bending the truth here, but we were a little desperate.

"No crimes." She wasn't asking.

"None. Other than what I just disclosed."

She grinned suddenly. "You're so handsome when you talk fancy."

"Stop, I'm a blusher."

She chuckled, then shook it off and got back to business. "Drugs?"

"No."

"Booze?"

"Lightweight," I chuckled. There were so many sordid tales of Chase's attempts at drinking.

"She smell bad?"

What? "Not at all."

Her eyes gleamed as she said, "You sweet on her?"

"Ugh! No. I think I just threw up in my mouth."

"I have to meet her. I haven't said 'yes,' so stop looking at me like that."

I tried not to show my excitement as I fetched 'Jessica' from the car. "Just like we discussed," I told my shapeshifted best pal, and we went in.

Tawney didn't find anything objectionable about her. Perhaps I imagined it, but she might have taken a discreet sniff to make sure her prospective guest didn't smell funny. She did ask, "Why is your family after you?"

Here it was. I watched Jessica clear her throat and swipe the back of her hand across her upper lip. I was realizing there was more directness to a man's gaze, because Jessica looked fierce.

At length she confessed, "I'm an embarrassment to them. It's because of something I can't change. It's really humiliating, though, so I don't want to tell you. I do apologize, but..." She shrugged helplessly.

"Can you at least tell me what kind of thing it is? Did you do something?"

"No. Something was done to me."

Tawney scowled, so we hastened to add that there was no sexual assault. That would have served our purposes well, but it was dishonest and disrespectful to the victims of such a horrible crime.

"A baby?" she ventured. "Wait, don't answer that. Did... you don't have to answer this, either... how much of what happened was your fault?"

"None at all!" said Cha-... Jessica.

"Sorry for all these questions. I just have one more, maybe I should have already asked it and saved us some time. What kind of risk are y'all asking me to take?"

I took this one. "You don't have to challenge my family or hers, so very little. If they ask you about me, tell them. No one will be pissed off, just suspicious. They probably wouldn't do business with you afterward."

"Okay. Another question, sorry." Tawney spread her arms in a dramatic gesture, then dropped them. "Why me? Why not someone else?"

"You seem like a cool person and we get along well, but we don't hang out enough that their investigators would make a connection between us. You don't do online stuff so there's no trail to follow, and your place has enough room to hide someone without much inconvenience to you. I hope."

"I'll be quiet," Jessica put in.

We'd laid it out and now it was up to her.

Big surprise, Tawney let us dangle.

Jessica and I exchanged worried looks. I tried to look more confident, for her benefit.

Tawney nodded sharply. "One week. I can't make promises beyond that."

Jessica and I cheered, and at the last minute I managed to avoid hugging her. This was going to take some getting used to. She had no idea how bouncy she was when she cheered.

*

Jessica

Jessica

After Bryan left, I took a moment to take in my new surroundings.

"I like your Plymouth," I said.

"Thanks!"

"Sixty-six Fury, right?"

"Close, it's a Sixty-five," she replied, but she seemed happy enough with my guess. "Let's show you around, I reckon."

The office where we'd sat at first, below her room, had become a kitchen. There was a toaster oven and a microwave, and the desk drawers had been cleaned out and turned into a funky little distributed pantry. The middle drawer of one was a checkerboard of different-colored Ramen packets.

Upstairs it was just your usual bedroom with only two walls, looking out over an auto garage. I loved the airy feeling of it. With the lights off in the garage, it was a little island in a larger, deeper darkness and it felt so cozy. I envied Tawney that parachute-covered four-poster bed, too.

I helped her shift a couple of pieces of furniture, disgusted at how hard that was for my new body, but now I had my own cozy little corner of the loft. It was sectioned off by an armoire and a clothing rack, with layers of blankets upon which to sleep. Tawney kept apologizing but I insisted I was happy with it, I really was. It was like a sleepover adventure, but I... Ahh, shit, who was I kidding?

I wasn't on an adventure. I was lost.

My eyes prickled with the onset of tears.

"Need a shower?" Tawney gestured to the stall sitting a few feet from my new nest, facing it. "I'm sorry it's not more private, but it's just us girls, right?"

"Yeah. Just us girls." Was this going to be my life? Was I dead, and this was someone else? This was more than a transformation, it felt like I had been reincarnated.

I was dead. Chase was dead. Now Jessica had taken his place.

Tawney frowned at my expression. "What's wrong?" Then she slapped her forehead. "Wait, you don't have to tell me. In fact, let's make that a rule. I won't pry into your life, and you don't have to tell me anything unless it's, like, unsafe if you don't."

"Thanks," I sniffed. Tears were incoming. "Might as well do this in the shower, huh?"

She gave me a sympathetic look. She was being so nice, and I could tell that wasn't really her style.

With my hand hovering over a stack of towels I looked a question at her, and she said, "Hey, you don't have to keep asking me. Me casa es su casa. Just put the tools back when you're done with them, and put your dirty clothes in the dang hamper." She smiled encouragingly, "Laundry day is Wednesday."

I thanked her again and she drifted off, not ignoring me but not standing in front of me while I disrobed. Not that she gave a damn. Too bad I did.

This was it.

I nonchalantly pulled off the t-shirt I was wearing, then the sweat pants, hoping she couldn't see how fast my heart was beating. This was normal. Normal people did this, and that's what we were. Just normal people, who weren't weird about same-sex nakedness.

I made myself, my naked self, move at a slow, measured pace. To the shower. No one freaked out, which didn't seem right.

In the shower, I was alone with my new body. For awhile I just stared at my hands like I was stoned, unable to believe that I was in control of these delicate, graceful-looking instruments.

How had I been transformed like this? I knew this kind of stuff was possible with Variants. Practically anything was. There was that guy in Florida, fighting those big shark-men, and then there was that talk show host who could shrink. If she, with her brain the size of a snow pea, could do funny opening monologues in a different diorama every day, then I could be changed into this.

You'd think I'd be obsessed with the boobs, but to be honest I couldn't handle thinking about them. They were damned impressive, too: not too large, but quite generous, and firm. Here were the kind of breasts I always wanted to see on a woman, and they were mine.

The nipples were so sensitive it was dumb. Even the water running over them made my whole body break out in the hot-and-cold shivers. Was every woman like this, or was I special? For that matter, had those Freaks made me...

If they could make me a woman, could they make me a woman with nymphomania? Or a bomb in her stomach? Or the plague? Or built-in telepathy? Were the Freaks even now watching me try to soap myself up without skin-to-skin contact?

No sense in worrying about that now. If they could make chicks to order, they probably weren't looking to someone like me for eye candy.

And eye candy I was. I had a narrow waist and tight, flaring hips, and a cute little mole above my bellybutton. I was distractingly fuckable, no two ways about it. If I was my usual self, and with a woman such as this, I wouldn't be able to keep my hands off of her. Now that I was a woman such as this, I was making sure to keep a washcloth between my hand and my body.

I supposed I was going to have to start shaving my legs. And my armpits. The Freaks were kind enough to provide me with a well-groomed girl-body, at least. Hell, they'd painted my nails and my pubes were trimmed.

The idea that they were thinking about my pubic hair was disturbing. Had this been their idea all along, or part of a larger plan? Were they going to abduct me after they shifted me and take me away, maybe send Father a video every few weeks of me being...

I wasn't much over a hundred pounds. I'd just now had trouble moving a piece of furniture, with help, and it had been on sliders. Yesterday I'd have been able to pick the fucking thing up. I was weak in this form, and very desirable, and now there was a nonzero chance I would be raped.

Giving into fear and grief just for a moment seemed wiser than bottling it up. The shower hopefully covered the sounds I was making. It wasn't that I wanted to hide from my new roommate, I just didn't want to burden her. Unless she was secretly a Variant, there was nothing she could do to help me anyway.

I was shocked to hear her voice, just outside the shower stall. "You need clothes, don't you?" she asked.

Gratitude caused a few more tears to fall. "Yeah. The ones I was wearing are Bryan's."

"Eww," she commiserated.

*

The next morning I awoke to Tawney calling for someone named Jessica, and it took me a minute to realize she was talking about me. I touched my chest and felt the new additions were still there. So it hadn't been the world's shittiest, most emasculating dream ever.

"I'm up," I croaked. Jesus, my voice was even cute when my throat was dry.

"I brought food," she announced, and I realized I was ravenous.

I tore into fast food and delicious, hydrating soda while mumbling grateful phrases with my mouth full. She watched me for a moment, filing away the details.

"Your boyfriend brought you a care package," she said with a teasing smile.

"He is so not my boyfriend."

"Heh. Wait till you see the panties he got you."

I coughed, launching half chewed fries into the table.

"Here." She dragged a shopping bag over.

I rummaged through the clothes and discovered them. They weren't the sexiest pair he could have found. I was grateful for the lack of lace, and although they more or less covered my butt, they were really slim and sexy.

I tore open the package and held one up for inspection, seeing the photos hadn't lied. "This is a statement?"

"If he wasn't interested in you, he'd have gotten you big girl panties. These aren't lingerie-quality, though, so he's trying to say he's interested without being skeevy about it."

"He is definitely not interested."

"If you say so."

I had never tried to scowl at a woman while putting underwear on, but I wasn't half bad at it. Next was jeans, which were stretchy enough that their being too small wasn't a deal-breaker.

"Can't... Breathe..." I gasped, which made her giggle.

I removed the sleep shirt I'd been wearing, marveling at the way she looked at me with mild interest. In the guy world, that would have been grounds for a beating and/or a lifetime of mockery.

"You must work out a lot," she said.

I ignored that, not wanting to tell another lie. "Sweet, he got me a Misfits shirt." I put it on.

"We've got to get you a bra," she remarked, looking at the twin protuberances under the shirt. "What's your size?"

"I have no idea. Maybe we can just tape them down," I suggested.

She didn't laugh. Rather, she looked concerned. "Have you been doing that?"

"You could say that."

"Doesn't it look weird?"

I had no idea if it looked weird. "I'll get a bra."

"Aww. It'll be okay."

Rather than explain the real reason for my sudden glumness, I rooted around in the bag. I discovered a hairbrush and a stick of ladies' deodorant, probably Bryan trying to be funny, along with a fat envelope labeled 'expenses.' Opening it, I saw that it was stuffed with fifty dollar bills.

"He so likes you," Tawney needled.

"Shut up!" I replied, but I couldn't help laughing. She was a teaser, that one.

Still eyeing the cash, she said, "We need to take you shopping."

I extracted the bills and counted them, separated them into two equal stacks, and held one out toward her. "Rent," I said.

"Uhh, no."

I cajoled her, "Come on."

"You haven't been any trouble."

"I'll offer again. I don't want to be a mooch. Well, I'll mooch off Bryan, but not you."

"Bryan who is 'not your boyfriend'," she teased.

"But I want to pay you back."

"Don't waste your time." She flashed a dazzling smile. "Now let's get going!"

We went out, driving the old Toyota she used as a daily driver. It was shockingly fast off the line. With no turbo whine or extra engine parts erupting from the hood, how had she done it?

We got up to speed and the higher engine note told the tale.

"You naughty thing," I drawled. "You changed up the gear ratio in the rear end, didn't you?"

"Yeah!" She gave me an approving look. "You like cars?"

"Oh yeah."

"Thought you had a sheltered life."

"Not sheltered about cars. I've owned five, and not because I wrecked them. Not all of them, at least."

"Not bad. What was your favorite?"

For the rest of the drive, I regaled her the tale of a youthful indiscretion with a Porsche 928S. It wasn't my favorite, but I made more interesting mistakes with it.

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Thanks for reading! I'm always looking for an excuse to write 928S porn, so hit me up. Stay tuned for the continuing adventures, etc. There's sex in this story, I promise!

If you're enjoying Switched, all I ask is that you leave a vote and/or some feedback. Criticism is always welcome if it's constructive. Or if it's funny.

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