Closed Doors - part 2 (Patreon)

The ceiling fan ticked on every third rotation. Luke counted them without meaning to. The blinds were drawn against the afternoon sun but the bedroom still felt baked through. The AC struggled with the second floor like it always did.

The fitted sheet had a tear near the bottom left corner. A half inch of frayed cotton. The white mattress pad showed through. Luke stared at the tear to avoid looking at his own face on the other side of the bed.

He knelt on the mattress. The springs groaned. Julie was under him, her stomach warm and damp under his palms. The chipped polish on his index finger caught a sliver of orange light from the window. Her breathing was shallow and quick. The fine hairs on her stomach were barely visible. He could feel the pulse beating under her skin.

The morning had been a disaster of small lies. Julie at the door with a casserole dish of leftover lasagna from the block party. Sarah standing behind Luke in his body, saying something about a cold, her voice too deep for the excuse. Julie had looked at them a beat too long. Luke took the dish and said thank you in Sarah’s voice and closed the door.

Then Leo needed to be dropped at school. The car needed gas. The quarterly report was open on the laptop and Luke sat down to look at it and the numbers wouldn’t resolve into meaning because the breasts were heavy on his chest and the silk kept slipping and the arousal from the bathroom had never gone away. It had banked. A low heat waiting for attention.

Julie came back. He wasn’t sure why. Coffee, maybe. Sarah had said something on the porch. He didn’t catch it. The next thing he knew the front door was locked and Julie was in the hallway and Sarah was looking at her with his face wearing an expression he’d never seen on himself.

They needed a buffer. Luke could not look at his own male body and touch it. The idea made his stomach turn. But the tension in the new limbs was unbearable. The female body was strung too tight, every nerve singing. The male body was a coiled spring and Sarah needed somewhere to put the pressure.

So Julie, and somehow she'd agreed.

Luke pressed his palms flat against Julie’s stomach. The contact sent a shock of heat straight down through him. Every touch he made on her skin echoed back into himself. The nerve endings in his fingertips were too close to the surface. He could feel the texture of Julie’s skin like it was being amplified. He slid his hands up her ribs and the motion fed the heat that was already pooling low in his pelvis.

He looked up. Sarah was behind Julie. She had his hands on Julie’s hips. The large knuckles. The callouses from the weight bench in the garage. She was gripping the soft flesh of Julie’s waist and Luke watched his own fingers dig in and felt nothing from them. His brain insisted he should be over there, feeling the dip of Julie’s spine under those palms. But the signals were coming from the wrong place. He was here, in the smaller body, the breasts hanging heavy as he leaned forward.

Julie made a low sound.

Sarah shifted her knees on the mattress. The male body was unwieldy. The pelvis was narrower than she was used to and the weight sat higher. She spread her knees wide to accommodate the anatomy and the springs groaned again. The erection was a heavy, insistent presence. The blood had rushed there ten minutes ago when Julie first pulled her shirt off and it hadn’t gone away. The male arousal was blunt. It didn’t build slowly. It announced itself as a localized hunger that crowded out everything else. Sarah felt it as a physical urgency, a pulling tightness against the skin that demanded resolution. She looked at Julie’s back, the curve of the spine, the shoulder blades moving under the skin, and the male brain translated the image into another pulse of heat.

She gripped the hips tighter and thrust forward.

The angle was wrong. She didn’t know how to balance the weight of the male pelvis yet. The movement was clumsy and the friction was a jagged edge of pleasure she wasn’t prepared for. Julie gasped anyway.

The sound hit Luke in the chest. The female body reacted without him. The warmth between his legs spilled over into a heavy aching throb that demanded friction. He shifted his knees on the sheets and the cotton rubbed against him and he choked on his own breath. His mind kept trying to interject. The quarterly report. The cell in column F had a formula error. He was a father. Leo needed to be picked up from school in three hours.

The body didn’t care.

He leaned his face down into Julie’s neck. Peach shampoo and the sharp tang of sweat. The skin was salty when his lips touched it. Sarah’s lips. Soft and full. He kissed the pulse point under Julie’s jaw and the sensation registered in his own throat. Every touch was doubled. Every point of contact vibrated back into him. He closed his eyes. He stopped trying to force the male brain to pilot the female nerves. He let the wave pull him under.

Sarah watched the female face bury itself in Julie’s shoulder. It was her own face. The flushed cheeks and the parted lips. Her own mouth making sounds she’d never made. The male body drove forward again and the muscle memory took over. The thrusts found a rhythm without her input. The friction was a sharp edge and the pressure built at the base of the spine, a coiling tightness that was nothing like the female orgasm she knew. The female orgasm was diffuse, a whole-body event that took time to build and time to fade. This was a tightening. A single point of pressure that wanted release. The testosterone wanted to drive. It didn’t want to pace or check in. It wanted friction and pressure and the release that was building like a knot being pulled closed.

Julie arched up between them. Her hand found Luke’s hip and gripped. Luke felt the pressure of her fingers and the heat flared. He made a sound he didn’t recognize. High and breathy. Sarah’s voice doing something he’d never heard it do.

His breasts pressed against Julie’s side. The nipples were hard. The friction of skin on skin was almost too much. He pressed closer. The female body had no off switch. Every input fed the fire. Every sound Julie made, every shift of Sarah’s hips, every brush of skin on skin added fuel. The heat was everywhere now. It was in the chest and the stomach and the thighs and the place between the legs that was now the center of everything.

He opened his eyes. Sarah was looking at him over Julie’s shoulder. His own dark eyes. The face was his but the expression wasn’t. It was Sarah in there. He could see her behind the unfamiliar features. The set of the jaw was hers. The way the brow furrowed. She was in there, piloting his body, learning its weight and its hunger.

She was in there. Piloting his body, learning its weight. He was in here. Locked in each other’s nervous systems.

He reached across Julie’s body and put his hand over Sarah’s hand. His small pale hand over his own large knuckled one. Sarah looked down at the contact. Her thrusts slowed. The heat in the male eyes flickered.

Luke moved his hand back to Julie’s ribs. The skin was slick with sweat now. The room smelled like sex and peaches and the faint must of the old carpet. The blinds glowed white. The fitted sheet was bunched under Julie’s back and the tear had widened. The white mattress pad showed through.

Sarah’s pace quickened. The male body was reaching its limit. The pressure was a live thing at the base of the spine. She tried to slow down but the body overrode her. The hips drove forward on their own. The tightening became unbearable. It was all pressure and heat and the single sharp point of focus that was nothing like the slow wave she knew. The male orgasm was a gathering. A funnel. Everything narrowed to one place and then it broke.

She cried out. The sound was Luke’s baritone but the shape of it was hers. The release was a blunt force that emptied her out. Pulse after pulse, each one a surprise. She knelt there, breathing hard, the male lungs pulling in massive volumes of air, and watched the female face she used to wear press kisses into Julie’s shoulder.

Luke felt the male body go still behind Julie. The tension in the room shifted. Julie was still moving, still chasing something, and Luke’s body was still singing. The female body didn’t have a single point of release. It needed to be coaxed. It needed attention. The heat hadn’t gone anywhere.

Julie’s hand moved from his hip. It slid up his thigh. The touch was electric. The skin of the inner thigh was impossibly sensitive. Her fingers traced upward and Luke’s breath stopped. The heat that had been a low banked fire for hours now roared up. It was everywhere. It didn’t tighten. It expanded. It spread outward from the core until it filled every limb.

Julie’s fingers found him. The touch was light at first, exploratory. The folds were swollen and slick. Every nerve was at the surface. Luke couldn’t think. There was only the touch and the heat and the building pressure that was nothing like the male orgasm he’d known his whole life. The male orgasm was a sneeze. A convulsion. This was a wave that started deep in the pelvis and rolled outward. It built and built and his breath came in short gasps and his hips moved without him and the wave kept rising.

When it broke, it broke everywhere.

His back arched off the mattress. The sound that came out of Sarah’s throat was raw and sustained. The wave rolled through him in pulses, each one a contraction that started in the core and radiated outward. His thighs shook. His stomach tightened. The breasts on his chest felt heavy and the nipples were hard and every pulse seemed to connect to every other part of him. The female orgasm was a whole-body event. It didn’t end. It subsided in smaller waves that kept coming, each one a surprise. He gripped Julie’s hip and the small fingers dug in and pressed into her skin and the wave kept rolling.

Then it was quiet.

The ceiling fan clicked. The blinds glowed white. Julie’s breathing was slowing. Sarah was still kneeling behind her, the male body spent and heavy.

Luke rolled onto his back. The sheet was damp under him. The ceiling was the same ceiling he’d looked at for four years. The same light fixture with the dead bulb they kept forgetting to replace. He looked at his hands. Her hands. The chipped polish. The fingers that had just been inside Julie. The body that had just broken open in a way his male body never had.

The sensation stayed with him. A humming in the limbs. A looseness in the pelvis. The female body after orgasm was different. The male body went slack and empty. The female body stayed receptive. The nerves were still close to the surface. The air from the ceiling fan brushed across his damp skin and he felt it everywhere.

Sarah lay down next to him. The mattress dipped under the male weight. She was breathing through her mouth. The broad chest rose and fell. She stared at the ceiling too.

The male body after release was hollow. The tension was gone and what was left was a heavy stillness. She felt the difference in her own former body, the way the female frame beside her still hummed with residual energy. The male body was done. It had spent itself and now it wanted sleep. The female body was still awake, still receptive, still processing the waves that kept coming in smaller and smaller increments.

“We have to pick up Leo,” she said. The baritone was hoarse.

“I know.” Sarah’s voice. Still strange.

“In an hour.”

“I know.”

The ceiling fan clicked. Luke closed his eyes. The female body was loose and heavy. The heat was quiet now, banked to embers. He didn’t know how long it would last. He didn’t know if they would switch back. He didn’t know anything except that in an hour he would have to put on Sarah’s jeans and Sarah’s shoes and drive Sarah’s car to the elementary school and smile at the crossing guard and pick up his son.

He became aware of the dampness between his legs. The slickness that hadn’t been there this morning. The female body after sex was wet in a way the male body never was. The fluids were different. The smell was different. Faint and slightly sour and organic.

Julie stirred between them. She said something Luke didn’t catch. Her hand found his hip and rested there. The touch was light. The female body registered it immediately, a small spark in the embers. He didn’t move away.

Sarah sat up. The male abdomen contracted, the muscles visible under the skin. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and the feet, his feet, hit the floor with a solid thump. She sat there for a moment, forearms on her knees, the broad back curved.

“I need a shower,” she said.

Luke watched his own body stand up and walk toward the bathroom. The gait was wrong. Sarah still hadn’t figured out the male hips. She walked like she was carrying something heavy on her shoulders. The bathroom door closed. The water came on.

He lay there next to Julie. His body hummed. He put his hand on his stomach. The skin was soft. He closed his eyes and waited for the hour to pass.