Tangled

“I don’t know, Jack,” Molly stuttered, looking back towards her brother who’d turned himself into a ghost using an old spell book they’d found in the attic, “This might be a bad idea.”

“What? Of course we have to try!”

“To possess me? Dude, we've pulled a ton of stupid pranks, but this is something else.”

“Don’t be such a baby, Mols. We agreed.”

Molly looked around her room. Her bed looked like any other Saturday afternoon, the quilt bunched at the foot.

The spellbook sat open on Molly’s vanity desk, the library paste binding crumbling along its spine.

“It doesn’t say anything about... side effects,” Jack shrugged.

“What’s your plan anyway?” Molly folded her arms protectively in front of her chest, over her form-fitting knitted dress, “What are you gonna do once you’re in my body? And how long?”

Jack zipped around her head, invisible, “Just wanna know what it feels like. Just for a couple hours, maybe. Until Mom and Dad come home.”

“So ...what now? I just… sit here ...and you enter my body?” she cringed at the words.

“You promised,” Jack egged her on.

“Fine,” she said after a while, “Just—don’t do anything stupid.”

“Yes. Duh.”

Molly squinched her toes on the hardwood, hugging herself, “Just be quick.”

She waited, arms tight around her ribcage. The hush crackled, charged, until the pale air of her room changed. It thickened, went syrupy and wrong.

Before she could so much as flinch away, Molly felt the temperature drop two whole degrees. The first change came at her feet, a chill pooling around her toes, then climbing. Her ankles tried to lock, but whatever new force now lived in her bones bullied them pliant. Beneath the wool dress, her knees snapped tight together, knocking uncomfortably, the tendons inside each leg singing with borrowed energy.

She blinked, and the world stuttered: the pile of homework on her desk doubled for a moment, then merged, as if a point of view not her own had collided with hers and was trying to figure out which was real. Above her sock line, she watched the skin ripple, pulling tight then loose, as something wormed its way up her calves—Jack, Jack, it had to be Jack—his will stretching into her muscles like invisible silly putty.

She had not prepared for the intimacy of it. Jack didn’t simply wear her like a coat; he settled into the blood vessels, the cartilage, the tender pulpy nerves.

Her gums tingled. Orchestra of pins and needles up her shins. Something inside her head—Jack—slithered behind her eyes, made her eyelids twitch.

Her scalp prickled at the roots, “Is it—are you in?” she whispered.

Jack’s voice was inside her head, but not in a way that made sense. It was like a pressure building against the bone behind her ear.

“Almost. Stop squirming.”

He didn’t knock at the door of her mind, polite or sheepish; he pressed through the threshold, bold and childish, and settled immediately, recklessly, into the most private spaces of her self.

She shivered as he stretched into her, the sensation not just physical but mental, like a second set of fingers rattling through her memories

She felt her tongue press against the roof of her mouth without her permission, teeth biting down gently, as if Jack needed to test each piece for himself. She wanted to gag, but her body was no longer just hers to command.

“Whoa,” he said, but it came out of her mouth.

Molly tried to say “Jack?” but her tongue lolled. She had to fight for the syllables but the vowel slid around her teeth, spilling out as a giggle. His laugh and her mouth.

Her lips curled in a way she never would.

“Holy shit,” she heard herself say, “I’m actually in here. Molly, are you still here?”

She tried to speak, but it came out as a low mumble. He seamed to understand what she was trying to say anyway.

Her hands, no longer hers to command, floated upward, fingers splaying, turning under the light. They flexed and curled and obeyed him, slender and agile, skin taut over unfamiliar bones. He traced the other arm with one hand, pinching the flesh, as if the sensation would be proof of his victory. It was—he was—there, solid and real and surprisingly soft. 

“Mols,” her mouth said in a low, amazed whisper, “Your hands are so… skinny?”

Because I’m a girl, jackass, she tried to say, but even her thoughts felt sticky, like Jack was kneading them apart as soon as they gelled together.

“Look at me,” her mouth trilled, high and delighted, but the phrase was wrong, stripped of all the usual Molly-ness, replaced with Jack’s unmistakable lilt of wonder.

He reached for her hair, gathering a lock between two fingers, held it to the light, and let it slide through her grip with absurd fascination.

“This is insane,” he said, again aloud, loving the resonance and timbre of her voice.

Her lips stretched into a wide “O” of surprise, and then pursed, then bared her teeth again, as Jack seemed to marvel at the sensation of muscle, skin, and bone working in concert.

But curiosity was an unruly beast, and Jack’s attention drifted downward, to the contours of her borrowed form, the way the dress hugged her body.

He knew he shouldn’t. That Molly could see and feel everything. That he would probably regret touching her. 

His heart—her heart—pounded a sick, exciting rhythm, and with each beat the urge to explore the body grew. He pressed one cold palm to her throat, feeling the pulse, then let it slide down, over the hollow between her clavicles, onto the rise of her chest.

He let his hand fall, at first with feigned innocence, tracing the path from her collarbone, down to the fabric of her dress, where it clung to the upper curve of her chest. He stopped just above the swell, fingers splayed, uncertain whether to go further, but unable to stop thinking about it.

“Jack…” Molly’s voice manifested in Jack’s head, “I know what you’re thinking. Don’t even—”

He splayed the fingers wide over her sternum, then slid it, inexorable, to the gentle hill of breast underneath the wool. The foreign weight and presence of it stunned him. And her. It was equal parts mortifying, hilarious, and miraculous, all at the same time.

“Molly? Can you see what’s happening?”

“Yes, you asshole.” The words barely made it through her lips — their lips.

“Why aren’t you stopping?” she demanded. Or tried to. The syllables came out smeared: “Whyarr… you,” and then her own voice cut itself off. Jack’s laughter fizzed behind her teeth.

She screamed at him internally, but only a thin gasp escaped her lips, “Stop it! God, Jack, what’s wrong with you?”

“Molly?” Jack’s cheeks flushed, and he dropped his hands, embarrassed.

She tried to rally control, to force her hands down or to twist her torso or even to dig her heels into the floor, but Jack’s momentum pressed forward, irrepressible and weirdly gentle.

Jack waited for a moment, then shrugged to himself.

The left hand, her left hand, hesitated for a full, mortified second. The fingers hovered over her chest like a criminal’s, shaking with some blend of anticipation and shame, before they closed in again—palming the right breast softly

But, before long, her left hand slid up to cup the right breast again, weighing it like an exotic fruit, thumb tracing a gentle, astonished circle along the edge. Molly’s entire torso shrank away from the touch, horror and something else knotting in her stomach, but her body just kept exploring, guided purely by Jack's curiosity.

It was gross, and worse, it felt... interesting.

Molly tried to clamp down on the sensation, to build a mental wall between herself and her body, but she couldn't escape the nerves feeding back into her brain.

He rolled the breast in his hand, thumb circling the nipple through the wool dress, and an electric shiver bolted through her. She wanted to gag at the intimacy of it.

For a heartbeat, Molly thought he was done. Then Jack’s gaze dropped, drawn by gravitational pull, to the hem of her dress where it clung to her thighs. She felt the gaze as a heat, a prickle on her skin, before Jack reached down—tentatively at first, like even he wasn’t sure what would happen—and pinched the fabric between finger and thumb, pulling it up a half inch, then letting it fall again. He repeated it, a nervous tick, the way a child might test the surface tension of water before plunging a hand inside.

The hands hesitated at the elastic waistband, then with a slow, deliberate movement, wormed inside, the fingertips slick with sweat. There was a pause, a shared intake of breath—Jack’s and Molly’s—and then the fingers slid deeper, rooting around inside the privacy of her underwear, the sensation at once clinical and deeply, humiliatingly intimate.

Her mouth made a wet, guttural bark, as he slipped his fingers deep into her folds.

“Oh, fuck,” Molly’s voice splattered the words, and for a moment, the control wavered, the possession stuttering as if both occupants of the body had tried to seize the wheel at once.

The fingers scissored, searching for what, Jack wasn’t sure, but the feeling only got sharper, more complicated, and Molly’s toes curled against the floorboards, drawing her knees together in a useless protest. The internal sensation was so enormous, so exquisitely unfamiliar, that she felt herself being flooded, overwritten by the wild data of her own nerves. Jack’s presence in her head expanded, greedy now, as if the only way to truly understand the mystery of girlhood was to leave no private chamber unentered.

The two of them were tangled beyond hope now, locked in the humiliating intimacy of shared sensation, and Jack wasn’t slowing down. If anything, he was only just beginning.