As she finished the last bite of her meal, Beth sighed long and deep, in a decidedly less-than-masculine manner that contrasted oddly with her very masculine body. Shane smiled; he was delighted to see her so pleased by the meal he'd prepared for her. He had wooed many a woman with his cooking skills; he could be a bit of a romantic klutz at times, but his kitchen was his secret weapon.
"That was perfect," Beth said, dabbing her stubbly face daintily with a napkin. "Where did you learn to cook like that?"
"My uncle," Shane said. "He owns an Italian restaurant... he taught me everything I know."
"Well, let him know I'm grateful," Beth said. Then, looking shyly down at her plate, she said, "You'll, uh... you'll have to cook this for me again sometime."
"I'd love to," Shane said, reaching across the table and squeezing Beth's hand. Beth's had was big, rough, and masculine, but Shane found to his surprise that he liked the feeling of her hand in his. It was strange... finding himself feeling this way about someone who looked like a man. Shane had never been attracted to men. But every time he looked at Beth, every time he touched her, every time he heard her deep bass voice, every time he saw her make one of her quirky little gestures that looked so strange coming from a man, Shane felt something stir deep inside of him. And he knew that Beth felt the same way... he saw it in her eyes, heard it in her voice, even though she had told him that she had never had any interest in women, and Shane... well, Shane looked every bit like an attractive woman right now.
Shane and Beth had spent a wonderful day together. Since they had gotten things straightened out after jumping into bed together several hours earlier, gender-swapped and mid-coitus, they had opened up more and more to each other. It had been... the most wonderful day of Shane's life. It should have sucked; Shane had been turned into a woman, something he still wasn't entirely happy about. But Beth had helped him through it, taught him all about being a woman. And Shane, in turn, had given Beth some tips about living as a man. They were both beginning to feel surprisingly comfortable in their new skins... though, of course, they hadn't been out in public yet. They hadn't even left the apartment of the man Beth had become. They hadn't needed to, hadn't even wanted to; Shane was far too delighted with Beth's company to feel any desire to leave the apartment, and vice versa. They'd watched the news together. They'd called their families to check up on them. They'd taken a break from the events of the day and watched a copy of Casablanca that they'd found in the apartment; it was Shane's favorite movie, and apparently it was Beth's as well. They both loved the classics. And they had talked... they had talked and talked and talked. God, the conversations. Shane had never found it so easy to open up to someone he had just met. All the barriers he normally kept up had simply melted away...
And minute by minute, Shane found that he was falling in love with Beth... or something like love, anyway. Something he was sure would develop into love in time. It was amazing... it was like their respective genders didn't even matter. It didn't matter that Beth looked like a man, didn't matter that Shane looked like a woman. It didn't matter what either of them really looked like under the illusion of their new bodies. It didn't matter what anyone else would think about their strange, gender-crossed relationship. None of it mattered. Shane simply adored Beth, loved the person she was, completely. And she him. And that was all that mattered.
"Well," Beth said after a quiet, peaceful moment, "we'd better clean up. This isn't really my apartment, after all. We should make sure everything's tidy in case..." She stopped and frowned.
"What?" Shane asked. "What's wrong?"
"I don't want to go back, Shane," she said, biting her lip. "I don't really want to be a guy, but I don't want to go back to my old life... not if..." She closed her eyes.
"Hey," Shane said, walking around the table and pulling Beth to her feet and into a hug. "Hey... even if we do, nothing has to change. We'll find each other."
"Yeah," she said. Then, with a smile, she said, "It'll be so weird doing this in our real bodies. I mean, it shouldn't be, but..." She laughed. "It's so weird to think about doing this with you as a guy and me as a girl. Isn't that weird?"
"Very weird," Shane said, chuckling. With a squeeze of her hand, he added, "Let's get to work."
They gathered up the dishes they'd laid out, and the ingredients and the cooking implements, and began to clean them up. Shane began to run water over a plate and scrub it clean, but then Beth took it away from him, saying, "Let me do that. You woulddn't want to get those pretty fingers dirty, would you?"
"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" Shane said, grinning up at her. He splashed a little water at her, and she giggled... and again, it was much too feminine a gesture for her body.
"Seriously, though," she said, "you should take off your jewelry. You don't want to tarnish it, or lose it." She took Shane's hands in hers and unhooked his bracelets, then began to slide his rings gently off over his painted fingernails. After a moment, though, she stopped and looked at his hands in hers silently. Then, lifting his hand, she kissed it gently. She held his hand close to her face for a moment, then whispered, "This is so wild..."
"Yeah," Shane said, quietly. "Yeah, it is..."
They stood together for a long moment. Then they turned and silently turned back to their work.
After a few minutes, as she was putting away the spices Shane had used to seasoon his pasta sauce, she picked up a bottle of basil and turned to Shane. "Okay," she said, "now I know the people we've jumped into must have been going out for a while."
"Why's that?" Shane asked.
"'Cause I've seen the guy in the mirror," she said, lifting up the basil. "And I've seen the garbage in his fridge. And he's so not the kind of guy who would buy basil on his own."
Shane laughed.
"You know," she said, "I just realized... we don't even know our names. I mean, our new names."
Shane raised his eyebrows. "You're right," he said, a little surprised to realize that. He and Beth had simply been too wrapped up in each other for it to even occur to them to look up the names of the people they'd jumped into. "Let's find out," he said, drying his hands on a towel. "I'll check my purse, and I'm sure you have a wallet around here somewhere."
Beth dug her hands into her pockets. "Nothing in these jeans," she said. "I'll look around."
As she began to look around the kitchen, Shane went directly into the bathroom, where they'd left his purse after Beth had taught him how to put on his makeup. Picking up the purse, he dug past the makeup, past all the other items he'd already looked at, until he found a small red wallet. Opening it up, he found a driver's license. "It looks like my name is Amanda Reynolds," he said. "Age twenty-seven, five-foot-four... I'm not supposed to tell you how much I weigh, right?"
"No you're not, Miss Reynolds," Beth said, suddenly appearing in the door frame and smiling. Lifting up a driver's license of her own, she said, "I'm August Larsen. Kind of a weird name..."
"I don't know," Shane said. "It's kind of distinguished. It's like Augustus Caesar."
"I guess," Beth said. "August Larsen, she said. "August. August." She frowned. "I still think I like your name better, though."
"It's not bad," Shane said. "If I've gotta be a woman, Amanda's not a bad name to have." He placed the driver's license back in the wallet, then dropped the wallet back in his purse. "Well, Mr. Larsen," he said, turning back to Beth and wrapping his arms around her waist, "now that we know our names, what do you want to do next?"
Beth grinned.
Vic grinned.
Striding down the sidewalk and left the alley, and the people in it, and the body of the one man he hated more than anyone in the world, behind him. Sure, he could have killed the cop and those rich business bastards to shut them up, but there wasn't any need; it was faster and easier to just wish for them to let him go. They wouldn't suspect him of Bartlett's murder, and they probably wouldn't even think much about the wishing stone. Vic had no problem with killing people who deserved it, but there was no point in killing people just to kill them. He was no monster.
Vic was satisfied with his work. He'd killed Alec Bartlett, that fucking son of a bitch, and he'd made it good. Damn good. He'd gone to Amy's house that afternoon to check out her life--and more importantly, her body--and he'd spent a few hours in her room trying to think up the best way to off the bastard. He'd thought up all sorts of delightfully twisted and horrible ways he could use the wishing stone to torture and murder Bartlett, and he'd taken endless pleasure in thinking them up. He'd even jacked off to a few of the better ones... in the middle of jacking off to Amy's reflection, of course, which he'd also spend a good deal of time doing.
As fun as it had been to dream up the most brutal and fucked-up way to punish Bartlett, though, every method he'd come up wish had been dissatisfying. Because at the end of everyone, Bartlett had simply... died, which meant his suffering had been over. Vic wanted a way to make Bartlett's punishment last. Vic wasn't sure he believed in an afterlife--if there was an afterlife, he knew that he was personally screwed, of course--but if there was a heaven or a hell, he wanted Bartlett to take his punishment with him wherever he ended up. And besides... using some magic stone to wish Bartlett to death would have been kind of... anticlimactic for him. He'd spent so many years about killing Bartlett... he needed to do it with his own hands. So in the end, he'd decided against magical tortrue in favor of good old emotional torture.
He'd taken his inspiration from the swaps himself. With everyone in the wrong bodies, he'd figured, and with the stone at his hands, Vic could make Bartlett believe he was anyone he wanted to be. So he'd made some wishes to let him find out everything about Bartlett, and with all that knowledge, he'd decided on the perfect way to do Bartlett in. Bartlett's whole identity, his entire sense of self-worth, was wrapped up in being a good cop and, more importantly, a good father. So, Vic had decided, the best way to kill Bartlett was to pretend that he was Bartlett's daughter. What better way for Bartlett to die than at the hands of his own daughter, who he loved more than anything in the world?
Of course, Vic had forgotten to take into account his wish for everyone to believe he was Amy Johnson. It had made it impossible for Vic to convince Bartlett that he was Annabelle, Bartlett's daughter. Some creative wishing had fixed that, though: he had wished for Bartlett to believe that Amy was his adopted daughter. He hadn't actually made himself Bartlett's daughter; he didn't want to have to pretend to mourn his father. In Bartlett's mind, though, he had been murdered by the little girl he'd devoted his whole life to caring for. And the look in Bartlett's eyes when Vic had pulled out the gun, the way he had sniveled and stammered and almost started to cry... it had made it all worth it. All of it. All five years of prison, and all the wishes he'd had to make to get to the point where Bartlett believed it was his daughter who was murdering him.
Of course, he still wasn't sure Bartlett had died in as horrific a manner as he'd deserved. He could always wish Bartlett back to life and murder him again if he wanted to... and again, and again, and again. Now that thought... that one truly made him happy. In fact... perhaps he would have to find a mirror and a place to take off his dress and panties again... he was feeling pretty frisky thinkikng about it.
In any case, with Bartlett out of the way, it was time for Vic to start thinking about the next target on his list. The next person he wanted to kill was the brother of Charlie Larsen, the man he'd killed five years ago. The brother had pressed hard for Vic's execution... it was the brother, even more than Bartlett, who was responsible for Vic being on death row. So now Bartlett was going to turn the tables and make sure the brother wound up dead.
Easy decision who had to die next. There was no other choice than August. Fucking. Larsen.
