Office Retreat - Epilogue

If there was a rulebook for what the fuck to do after swapping bodies with your coworker for a weekend, neither of us had a copy.

That next Monday, Jess and I returned to our offices as if nothing had happened, sliding back into the old banter, the meetings, the deadlines.

It was as if none of it had happened—as if the universe demanded our mutual amnesia.

We never talked about it, not in any real way, not while we crammed side by side at the coffee machine or drafted mutual apology emails to HR. The swap became this unmentionable event that hovered between us, decaying but never gone.

On Friday nights, the junior analysts would invite everyone to happy hour. I’d always go, and so would Jess, but we never arrived together or sat side by side. Instead, we’d observe each other across the bar’s sticky veneer.

Three months passed. My internship was over, and I moved back home with my parents. I would think about that week in Jessica's body from time to time, occasionally jerking off to the memory.

In fact, years passed by without ever hearing from her again. I lived in a city now, with my own routines, my own fragile sense of self.

I never saw Jessica at industry conferences, never ran into her at the one exposed-brick wine bar we’d both pretended to like.

Though, through algorithmic accident or fate, she’d occasionally appear on my feeds. Our only contact was the silent applause of likes, the acknowledgment of shared past through emoji.

I didn’t expect the message, not after so many years of nothing. She pinged me on a humid weekday in June. Not a hey or a hi, not a meme or a forward: just a link, and then, “Remember this?” I recognized the lake, the swan-shaped paddle boat, our faces blurred and sunstruck.

She asked if I wanted to catch up. I hesitated, and then said yes.

She looked almost the same as I remembered—maybe more tired around the eyes, but every bit as precise, like she’d been laminated before stepping out in public. We met at a bar in Midtown. She wore the same perfume she had that entire week; it hit me like a slap.

We traded work horror stories, old coworker gossip, the polite preliminaries of adults mapping the shape of estrangement.

Finally, she said, “You ever think about it? That trip?”

“All the time,” I admitted.

She nodded, lips tight, “Sometimes I see a photo of myself from back then—I mean, of the body—and I remember it as being both me and not-me. It’s weird.”

She mentioned the old branch we’d worked for had shut down. She described packing up her things in a cardboard box, feeling like a cliché, and stumbling across a certain artifact in her desk.

Then she said, so matter-of-factly that I almost missed it, “I ended up with the swap device.”

I blinked, “You kept it?”

“I figured HR would just lose it, or worse, someone would try to bury it. So I took it home. I look at it sometimes, just to remind myself it wasn’t a dream.”

“Have you ever used it again?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“No one to swap with. Not really. Never felt the urge, until—” She stopped herself.

“Until tonight?” I said, and the words hung between us, trembling.

She raised her glass, not quite smiling, “Maybe.”

Then: “Do you want to see it?”

I didn’t answer, not right away—I wanted her to say it.

“Because,” she continued, “I was thinking about what we could do with it. Like, for real this time. Not just as a dare.”

The table felt suddenly very small. My mouth was dry.

She leaned in closer, her face catching the reflective blue of the bar’s TV screens, “It’s not like anyone would know. You and me. One more time.”

I finished my drink and said, “Let’s do it.”

She laughed—not the polite version, but something genuine, complicated. “You always were easy to convince.”

I called in sick the following day: sore throat, low-grade fever, nothing fatal but probably contagious. I clicked send, shut the lid on my work laptop, and spent half the day pacing, stewing in a nervous energy that felt more like adolescence than adulthood.

The train ride across the river was a liminal experience. I sat with my hands folded and stared out the window at the city’s skyline, replaying our conversation from the night before with a growing sense of unreality. The swap device. Her closet. “For real this time.”

The closer I got, the more I remembered the sensation of her body.

The houses all had the same general shape: two-storied, beige or grey, with a single stunted tree and a porch lit by an energy-saving bulb. I felt like a trespasser just standing there, clutching my messenger bag and peering up at what I assumed was Jessica's castle.

She answered the door before I could knock. The sight of her caught me off guard: no makeup, hair hastily pinned, bare feet curling into the welcome mat. She wore a faded college sweatshirt and yoga pants. She smiled at me the way you would at a lost pet or a distant cousin: genuine, but cautious.

She said her husband was at work, her child at school. It was just us, suspended in the daylight, the world reduced to her curated domesticity and the aftertaste of our old secret.

Jessica poured us two glasses of tap water and asked if I'd like a snack. I declined. My mind kept drifting to the fact that we were alone here, that any moment a car might pull into the driveway and disrupt whatever was about to happen.

She excused herself, vanishing down the hallway. I listened to the faint sounds of rummaging—the slide of a closet door, the muffled clatter of boxes.

Then she returned with the old device. Its plastic surface was scuffed, the logo near the toggle switch worn nearly illegible by years of handling.

We stood there, grown adults, a little unsteady, about to cross the one line that had ever truly bound us.

She held out her hand, and I took it.

"Just like before," she said.

There was a silent count—three, two, one—and she flipped the switch.

There was a flash—a moment of fracture, blinding and familiar.

And then, I was her.