I hovered by the door, waiting for a cue.
Dad was half-undressed already, standing in front of the bureau mirror, peeling off his work shirt, untucking and wrestling off his belt. Not much left as a visual secret between us: I’d seen my father in boxers before, most of my childhood in fact, but never from this vantage.
He looked over, smiled, and in the mirror I watched my own new face try to smile back.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
“Thanks,” I chirped.
As I brushed Mom’s teeth, I felt my ribcage expand and contract, my new breasts rising and falling with every tight, shallow breath.
“Long day?” he murmured from the bed.
“Yeah,” I said, voice so high it was almost a squeak.
The shower. I remembered the self-conscious hunger with which I’d pawed at the body in the steamed glass, the new, soft heaviness of breasts in my cupped hands, the unspeakable heat when my fingers slipped, almost by accident, between my legs.
I’d imagined what it would feel like to be touched by someone else.
But when I shut my eyes and pressed a finger inside, my mind conjured not my mother’s lovers, not the neighbors or the tennis instructor or any of her whispered confessions to friends—it conjured my father. My own dad, tender and oblivious and totally, stupidly in love. The idea had made me sick, but also: I’d finished.
I’d finished, alone, in the shower, and the memory of it was still in my head when I got out, still humming in my nerves when he came home that night, still there every time he called me “hon,” every time he looked at me and saw someone he wanted, not someone he’d raised.
If anything, the sheer impossibility and wrongness of the whole fucked-up scenario made my pulse skitter harder. There was a gravity to it, a recklessness that wanted to see how deep the trap could snap and if I could survive inside it. The more my brain screamed stop, the more my muscles went slack, welcoming the slow inevitability of Dad’s hands at the hem of my tank top.
I wanted to vomit and to laugh at the same time. Instead, I nodded, and with that nod, let myself slip fully into the fiction, the grotesque roleplay of being her, being Mary. Of being someone who wanted this.
I recounted Mom’s innocent glances at me throughout the day, oblivious to the fact that I’d climaxed in her body that morning, put my hands all over her breasts and her vagina. That I’d been secretly, shamefully fantasizing about this.
I imagined what it would be like if I could just shed the last layers of guilt, if I could stop policing my every impulse, if I could just let the new body have what it clearly wanted.
I told myself: This is you. This is your body now, your skin and hair, your teeth that are not quite straight and the mole at the corner of your jaw. The memory of being someone else is a paper mask, drifting away on a breeze. There was never a boy here. There was never anyone but Mary.
If I tried hard enough, I could almost pretend that I had access to her memories, even if I didn’t. In my head, in that moment, I reconstructed scenes with myself in her seat, with her pulse in my neck and her breath in my lungs.
I reimagined every family photo, every vacation snapshot, every grainy cell-phone video, but now with myself at the center, the new matriarch in the soft-focus glare.
I crawled under the blanket. Dad lay beside me.
I hesitated, pulse in my ears, then rolled onto my side to face him.
The grotesqueness of the taboo was overwhelming, intoxicating. My mind flickered back to the imagined scene I had conjured up in the shower that morning.
The thought had appalled me, but the thought had driven me to orgasm. And now, lying beside him in the hush of marital sheets, the answer was so close I could detect the warmth of it, the pulse, the animal proximity of what was possible.
I let my hand travel up to his chest.
He responded to my touch instantly, as though he’d just been waiting for the sign. His arm slung around my new waist, and he pulled me towards him with a greedy, one-motion pull, lodging the warmth of our bellies together. The borrowed breasts pressed up against the animal flatness of his chest, the stubble on his cheek rough as a rasp against my own. He kissed, and this time I kissed back, letting the teeth knock, the tongues probe.
He slipped a hand under the tank top, knuckles abraded from some long-forgotten handyman project, and I thought about how those same hands had once fumbled to teach me how to tie a necktie, how to change a tire, how to hold a spoon steady when I was five and didn’t want to eat. Now they were circling the nipple, and my body—my mother’s body—shivered and arched and gave a little, pained gasp, which was apparently exactly right, because Dad made a low, grateful sound and pulled me closer, our hips aligning, the whole logic of the world reduced to friction and breath and the wet, unfinished sounds of a marriage.
I thought, in a wild sidelong way, about Mom sleeping (or not sleeping) just down the hallway, in my old bed, her body now shaped like mine—skinny, angular, boyish, unmoored. What would she do, if she knew I was here, letting this happen?
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