Closed Doors - part 1 (free version) (Patreon)

Read part 2 here.

The porcelain was cold. His palms were pressed flat against the sink. The chill came through the skin faster than it should, registering close to the bone. The skin was thinner. The cold registered closer to the bone.

He opened his eyes.

The bathroom was the same bathroom. Hexagon tiles, gray January light through the frosted window, the shower glass with the water spots Sarah kept meaning to wipe down. His hands on the sink were not his hands. The knuckles were small and pale. The nails were filed into rounded ovals, a clear polish on each one, chipped on the left index finger. He remembered Sarah picking at that chip last night on the couch. A car commercial played. She’d been frowning at the screen. Now the finger was his.

He tried to make a fist. The tendons moved closer to the surface than they should, visible through the thin skin. The grip was weak.

The silk slipped off his left shoulder.

He hadn’t noticed the robe. The shoulder slid down over his curves and caught on the swell of a breast. The fabric moved across the skin and the skin lit up. He felt the friction travel down through the chest and into somewhere deeper. A spike of heat that stayed.

The central air kicked on. Cold air blew from the ceiling vent across his chest. The nipples tightened. He felt them pull inward before he understood what was happening, a sharp localized drawing that made his breath catch. He crossed his arms over the chest. That was worse. The forearms pressed the breasts together and the sensation doubled and his breath came out shallow. The lungs were smaller than he was used to. He couldn’t get a full pull of air.

He looked down. His bare feet looked tiny against the dark hexagons. The toes were painted a muted pink. He flexed them against the cold tile. The arches were higher, the feet narrower. When he shifted his weight to the right leg, the hip swung out further than he meant it to. His center of gravity had dropped. It sat somewhere in the pelvis now, lower and wider, and standing felt like balancing a weight that hung below where his brain expected it. He grabbed the sink with both hands to keep from stumbling.

The grout near the baseboard was yellowed from a leak three winters ago. They’d talked about fixing it. He stared at the yellow stain and tried to breathe.

He needed to urinate.

The pressure was low in the abdomen, familiar in its urgency but wrong in its location. He walked to the toilet. Three steps. Each one sent the hips swaying in a rhythm he wasn’t directing, the movement coming from somewhere below conscious control. The thighs brushed against each other. The skin there was soft in a way that startled him every time.

He stood over the toilet and reached down out of habit. His hand found nothing. For a second it hung in the air. Then he remembered. He sat down.

The seat was cold. The porcelain was cold. His ass settled into the curve of it and the flesh was fuller than it should be, wider across the seat. He sat there. The coffee Sarah had yesterday stirred in his gut. He tried to relax the right muscles and the signal got lost somewhere between the brain and the anatomy. Nothing happened. He tried again. The warmth went in directions he couldn’t predict, spreading through unfamiliar folds, trickling down the inside of the thigh.

He grabbed a wad of toilet paper and swiped at his leg. The paper came away damp. No familiar contours. Just smooth skin and a cleft he didn’t know. He wiped back toward himself the way he always had and the paper dragged through soft folds and a jolt went up his spine. He yanked his hand away and dropped the paper in the bowl.

He stood up. Flushed. Turned back to the mirror.

The face in the mirror was Sarah’s. The flushed cheeks. The parted lips. The wide eyes. He was looking at his wife’s face and the expression on it was his own panic. He watched the small hands grip the sink edge again. The knuckles went white. The clear polish caught the gray light.

He spread the fingers flat on the porcelain. He pressed down. The skin of the palms was too soft and the hard edge bit into the tissue.

Next to him, Sarah was looking down his boxers.

The boxers were the gray cotton ones with the frayed elastic and the small hole under the crotch. He’d meant to throw them out a month ago. She had the waistband pulled open and was staring into the dark gap.

She shifted her stance. The male body was top-heavy. The shoulders crowded her peripheral vision and the arms hung heavy from the sockets. She let go of the waistband and the elastic snapped back against the flat stomach. His stomach. She pressed a hand flat against the bare chest. The hair there was coarse under her palm. She could feel the heart beating, a steady slow thump under the ribs. The ribs were thick. The sternum was a solid wall of bone. When she breathed, the chest expanded more than she expected, the male lungs pulling deep.

She moved the hand lower. The abdomen was dense. The muscles were there even when relaxed, a firm plate under the skin. She traced the external contours with her fingertips. The physical density of it was alien. The female body she’d lived in for thirty-six years was softer, more yielding. This body was built. Load bearing.

She needed to urinate too. The pressure was different. Sharper. More localized. She turned to the toilet and stood in front of it. She reached down and her fingers closed around the shaft. She froze. The skin was warm and loose. The sensation was immediate and strange.

She aimed and relaxed and the stream came out in a direct arc, hitting the water with a sound that was louder than she was used to. The whole process was efficient. Clinical. None of the spreading warmth or the wiping or the careful geometry. She finished and shook and the motion was foreign but the body seemed to know how to do it without her input. She flushed.

“This is insane,” she said.

It was Luke’s voice. The baritone he used in morning meetings. She felt it start low in the throat, a physical rumble that vibrated the vocal cords. The sound originated behind the sternum. When she spoke as herself the voice lived in the mask of the face, nasal and forward. This voice came from deeper. The cords were thicker. She could feel them vibrate against each other when she pushed the air through.

The word bounced off the shower glass and sounded hollow.

Luke tried to answer. He opened his mouth and a thin breath came out. He pushed air from the diaphragm, the way he’d done in every meeting for two decades, but the diaphragm was shallower now and the column of air was narrow.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Sarah’s voice. High and soft. He hated hearing it come out of his mouth. The resonance was wrong. The sound sat in the front of the face instead of filling the chest. He could feel it in the sinuses and the palate and nowhere else. He sounded small and airy.

They stared at each other in the mirror.

Luke saw his own face looking back at him from Sarah’s body. The jawline he shaved every morning. The slight crookedness of the nose from a baseball in tenth grade. The dark eyes were panicked. The male hands, his hands, gripped the toilet tank. The knuckles were white. The veins stood out on the forearms. He’d known what the blood pumping through those veins felt like for thirty-eight years. Now he was watching it happen to someone else.

Downstairs something clattered. Metal spoon on ceramic.

“Mom.” Leo’s voice. Nine years old. The yell came up through the floorboards. “Someone is at the door.”

The doorbell chimed. The two-tone chime they’d been meaning to fix since the week they moved in. The second tone buzzed, a short electrical rattle at the end of the note.

“It's Julie. She has a Tupperware.”

A cold wash hit Luke's ribs. But the female body took the adrenaline and did something else with it. The cold became heat. A flush spread through the pelvis. He had no control over it. The nervous system he was piloting didn’t have a manual and it was interpreting the fear as arousal. He pressed his thighs together out of reflex and there was a pulse, a warmth, a dampness he had no category for. His brain was screaming about school drop-offs and the quarterly report on the laptop and the neighbor on the porch with a plastic container. The body wanted friction. The body was flooding with heat and the pulse was getting heavier and the dampness was spreading.

He gripped the sink harder. The small knuckles went whiter. His breathing was shallow and quick. The robe gaped at the front and the cold air hit bare skin again and the nipples tightened again and the arousal spiked harder. Every physical sensation fed the heat. He couldn’t think through it.

Sarah felt the male heart rate spike. The adrenaline hit the bloodstream and the muscles twitched. The testosterone translated the domestic panic into a blunt physical aggression. The arms felt electric. The jaw clenched. The teeth ground together and the pressure ran up into the temples. She wanted to hit something. The urge was chemical. The body was preparing for violence in response to a doorbell and a child’s voice and a neighbor with Tupperware. She forced herself to stay still. The effort was visible in the tendons of the neck.

The footsteps started up the stairs. Heavy. Leo took the carpeted steps two at a time.

Luke looked down at the gown. The pale white. The pale hands on the sink. The arousal was a living thing, hot and wet and demanding. Every nerve was close to the surface and the sound of the footsteps made his skin prickle. He imagined Julie opening the door. He imagined being seen like this, in his wife’s body, in his wife’s nightgown, flushed and trembling and damp between the thighs. The image should have horrified him. The body took the horror and fed it back into the heat.

He let out a shaky breath. It smelled like Sarah’s mint toothpaste.

The doorknob rattled.

Sarah moved. The male body was faster than she expected. The reach was longer. She crossed the bathroom in two steps and her hand, his hand, closed over the knob before it could turn. The grip was strong. The bones of the wrist were thick. She held the door shut and felt Leo try the knob from the other side.

“Mom?”

“It’s locked, buddy.” The baritone came out before she could stop it. “Give us a minute.”

Silence on the other side. Then: “Dad?”

Sarah looked at Luke. Luke looked at Sarah. The mirror held both of them. The female face was flushed. The male face was tight with concentration.

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “One sec.”

The footsteps retreated. Slower going down than coming up.

Luke exhaled. The breath shook. He pressed his forehead against the cold mirror and the glass fogged. The small patch of condensation spread and shrank and spread again. The skin of the forehead was smooth. No lines. He couldn’t feel the familiar ridge of the brow bone. The face against the glass was soft. He stayed there, breathing, the cold glass the only anchor.

“We have to go down there,” he said.

“I know.”

“She’s going to see us.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

The voice was his but the cadence was hers. The way she said we’ll figure it out was the way Sarah had said it for eleven years. Calm. Even when the voice was a baritone and the body was a stranger’s, the rhythm of her was still in there.

Luke pulled his forehead off the mirror. The spot of fog held for a moment and then began to shrink from the edges in. He looked at the small hands on the sink. The chipped polish. The heavy rings. He would have to walk down the stairs. He would have to smile at Julie and take the Tupperware and say something normal about the weather or the school fundraiser. He would have to do it in Sarah’s voice with Sarah’s hips and Sarah’s lungs and the wet heat still pulsing between his legs.

He pressed his thighs together. The pulse answered.

Sarah let go of the doorknob. She rolled the male shoulders. The joints cracked. The sound was loud in the small bathroom. She looked down at herself, at the gray boxers and the bare chest with its coarse hair and the thick wrists and the big hands. She could feel the testosterone still humming in the muscles, the residual aggression with nowhere to go. She flexed the hands. The veins stood out on the forearms.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

She opened the door.

The hallway was empty. The carpet was the same beige carpet. The family photos on the wall were the same photos. Luke at the company picnic. Sarah holding Leo as a baby. The two of them at the Grand Canyon, squinting into the sun.

Sarah walked down the hall in Luke’s body and Luke followed in Sarah’s, the silk robe slipping off the shoulder again. He pulled it back up. The fabric caught on the swell of the breast and the skin lit up and he kept walking.