Then I was back in my old body. I pressed my hand to my chest, half-expecting to find breasts, but there was only the flat, sagging terrain I knew too well.
I spent the rest of the night in a state of stunned, aroused melancholy, lying next to my sleeping wife. I thought about Akari—her, me, us, the words became indistinct in my head—and I replayed the sensation of being entered, being wanted, over and over until it became both an itch and a wound.
And I realized it had only made me hungrier. Should I possess her again? Who else could I become?
Why Akari? Why not someone else? What if I could be another woman—her best friend, the shy girl who worked the bakery counter, the lady with the crisp business suit who lived two floors down? What would it feel like to wear their bodies, to breathe and move and be them, to rifle through their private desires and routines?
Then I looked over at my wife, and it clicked. It was almost comical in its simplicity: I could be her. I could quite literally save our marriage …by playing both sides.
What would it feel like to look at myself with the hungry, appraising eyes of a woman considering the merits of her husband? What would it feel like to approach myself, to seduce myself, to see if I could find the charm or the sex appeal that had once been there, back when we were young and stupid and still believed that love could heal anything?
I could do it. I felt a jolt of manic, almost religious certainty: I could orchestrate this marriage like a puppet show, pull the strings from both sides, engineer the intimacy that had so long ago become a matter of duty and routine. I could be both the wife and the husband. I could give her—give myself—everything we had ever needed, all that tenderness and attention and forgiveness that we had forgotten how to offer as ourselves.
I stared at her and began to focus on becoming her. Beaming myself into her body.
I felt the tug, the snap, the sickening lurch as perspective inverted. The world tilted.
My nostrils were filled with the scent of sleep and fabric softener and, faintly, of him—me—my husband, my body, the thing I had left behind.
A wave of vertigo hit, quickly replaced by a soft, almost sexual flush of power. I was inside her, alive with her senses, and every inch of her was mine to explore.
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