Possessive Memories - Part 2

I hadn’t touched the pendant since. But, for whatever reason, as I watched Ana share gossip between bites, I started to wonder what it would be like to possess her again now.

I caught myself staring a little too long and tore my eyes away from her, pretending to check my phone. I wasn't eleven years old anymore. I was a grown man.

Ana was mid-sentence, recounting some minor drama involving her husband, Lucas, and their six-year-old twins. I wasn't really listening—I was watching her hands, the way she gestured with long, lacquered fingers. I pictured what it would be like to slip inside her again, to inhabit that body transformed by years and experience.

I felt my throat dry as I watched Ana laugh, sensing that old, electric pull inside me. I needed a break to collect myself. I jerked my hand up in a gesture that interrupted her story—"Excuse me for a sec," I said, and hurried off toward the men's room with a clumsy urgency.

I locked the door behind me and splashed cold water on my cheeks, stared at myself in the mirror. My hands trembled. It had been more than twenty years since I last used the pendant, but I had kept it, stashed away in my nightstand, and today I'd slipped it into my pocket before leaving for lunch. For some reason, I’d thought I might need it.

I fished the pendant out and turned it over in my palm.

What would it be like to do it again? To possess not the adolescent, but the full, grown, confident Ana?

I closed my eyes. I pressed the pendant to my chest, just as I had on the day I first discovered its magic. And then, conjuring her from the next room, I willed myself to cross that line again.

The world blurred. There was a moment of double vision: my own reflection in the bathroom mirror, and then, layered very faintly, the soft-focus shimmer of Ana's world.

I blinked hard. When I opened my eyes again, I was no longer facing the men's room sinks. I was back at our table, looking down at a half-demolished salad. I felt the sharp click of high heels bracing against the rung of the chair, the definite weight of breasts and hips, the sudden, dizzying newness of this body—my sister's body, but mine now, too.

Ana (me, now) was in the middle of chewing a forkful of salmon, a fact I discovered mid-bite. I felt the oily richness of the dressing coat my tongue, the sharp tang of lemon, the salad’s prickly textures.

Then something even stranger happened: my old body—Jason, the original—emerged from the bathroom, striding back toward our table with an oblivious air. I caught a glimpse of myself, the self I'd left behind, and the sight sent an instant jolt of panic through my nerves.

It wasn’t only that I’d never attempted a possession with the host body present before, but it was the uncanny feeling of seeing my own face, my mannerisms. Shadow-me didn’t notice anything amiss.

I needed to get away. I excused myself and paid the bill as fast as I could.

I rose to my feet on impulse, felt the tight stretch of her dress across my hips, the drag of her pantyhose, the unfamiliar click-clack of heels as I took a step away from the table.

I made for the front doors. The air outside was crisp and alive, and as I stepped out under the spring sun, I let the wind whip Ana’s hair around my face, inhaled the newness of her lungs, her scent, her every cell.

I caught myself grinning, an uncontrollable, luminous smile stretched across Ana’s lips.

With Shadow-Jason out there, living his own life and blissfully untroubled, nothing was tethering me; I could remain in Ana’s body for as long as I pleased.

The thought alone sent a pulse of reckless possibility through me. No more holding back. No more boundary between me and her except what I set for myself. I wanted to see how far this could go.

Why did I want this? The question circled and circled, refusing to settle. I’d always been curious, in the abstract sense, about what it would feel like to be a woman, but that curiosity was more the flavor of idle fantasy. I loved my wife, found her plenty attractive, and never once had I actually wanted to swap places with her, or any other woman.

But this was Ana. My sister.

Why did I want to be inside her, literally inside her skin? The answer was half compulsion, half forbidden fruit. I tried to tell myself it was about curiosity, crossing lines just to see if I could, but that wasn’t the whole truth. There was a deeper, uglier need to defile something sacred, to put on the mask of my older, more beautiful sibling, and bend her life to my own design.

I could not explain it, even to myself, except with the blunt admission that the wrongness of it made me want it more. The more taboo it seemed, the more the thought burned in me.

Maybe it was the thrill of getting away with something absolutely depraved. The kind of thing that would ruin a family if it got out—hell, ruin several families.

Maybe it was the exhilaration of knowing I was the only one who could ever know.

The thought of being sexually desired by another man—by Lucas, her tall, gentle husband—should have horrified me. Maybe it did. I’d never entertained a homosexual fantasy in my life; the idea had always made me vaguely uncomfortable, a queasy confusion somewhere between disgust and fear.

But I had a vagina now, didn’t I? What else was it for if not to be filled by a man’s penis? It was stranger to be a gay woman than a straight one.

Would it really be so awful to see what it was like? Wasn’t it even stranger, in some ways, to be a woman who didn’t desire men at all?

It felt logical, even inevitable: if I was inside a woman, I should want what women wanted. Otherwise, what was the point? It would be like buying a sports car and refusing to take it out of the garage.

I’d be sleeping with her husband. I’d be using her body, her voice, her mannerisms, to seduce him, and then I’d be the one getting fucked, not Ana. I’d be the one moaning, writhing, coming apart under his hands. I wondered what those hands would feel like on this new body, how they’d cup these breasts, stroke this skin, explore these hips.

The idea was horrifying, and it was also the hottest thing I’d ever imagined.