Tom could not stop thinking about his brief experience as a middle-aged daddy that one fateful night he played Body Swap Roulette with his friends. He often returned to his online profile and looked at the man who had messaged him - the man he briefly became for one glorious evening.
The photograph waited beneath the username: a rugged man in his mid-forties, dark hair escaping beneath a baseball cap, salt-and-pepper beard, chest hair spreading across a broad, solid torso.
Brian - the name was not listed in the app, but instead it was seared into his mind from the experience - an indelible part of his own consciousness - and a side-effect of playing the game he had not anticipated. Brian was the body Tom had worn for one impossible night during the roulette.
He had hated changing back. For weeks afterward, Tom kept remembering the weight of Brian’s arms, the scrape of his beard, the confident way he felt when he hooked-up with a younger man in Brian's body - his new dick thicker, his urges keen, sharp, with a hint of closeted desperation. Even the softness around his waist had felt substantial rather than imperfect. He had occupied space without apologizing for it.
What Tom had not expected to miss were the other things Brian had left in his mind. A woman laughing somewhere behind him. Two children arguing over a television remote. A suburban kitchen glowing at dawn. The pressure of a wedding ring that had never actually appeared on his finger and never truthfully belonged there to begin with. They were not memories exactly. More like emotional bruises left behind by a life he had touched.
At nine thirty on a Friday night, Tom sat alone at his kitchen table wearing the same red polo he had worn during the first game. He stared at Brian’s photograph until the screen dimmed. He had debated revisiting Brian’s body for weeks - but it was against the rules of the game he had agreed to with his friends. Too risky to do alone. Too much a chance of losing yourself in the shuffle.
Tom couldn’t stand it anymore - he needed to feel Brian again. Needed to feel his weight. Wanted to rub a hand through his scruff. Wanted to see his pouty eyes looking back at him in the mirror. Wanted to feel the weight of his dick in his hand. Most of all - Tom wanted to better understand Brian. So against the rules and his better judgement, Tom waited for Brian’s name to appear with a green dot then he restored his profile and pinged Brian. As soon as Brian responded Tom knew he sealed the deal.
The change began in his hands. His fingers thickened against the phone. Dark hair rose over his knuckles and forearms. The sleeves of the polo tightened as his biceps grew heavier, less sculpted than Don’s gym-built arms but more naturally powerful. His shoulders widened. A warm pressure filled his chest, followed by the familiar prickling spread of hair beneath the fabric.
Tom stood too quickly. The kitchen tilted as several inches of youth seemed to settle downward into weight. His waist thickened. His stomach pressed against the polo, not huge, but unmistakably middle-aged. His thighs filled his khakis. His belt dug in.
Then his face began to pull. He gripped the counter while his jaw broadened and his cheeks roughened. Brown and gray whiskers pushed across his skin, forming the same dense beard he had admired the first time. His hairline shifted. Fine creases gathered beside his eyes.
When the transformation released him, Tom looked into the dark reflection of the kitchen window. Brian looked back.
“God, I’m so fucking hot.” Tom whispered, hearing the older man’s voice come from his throat.
A second voice answered inside him. Not words. Wanting. The thought of a quiet bar off the interstate. A corner booth. Whiskey ordered without checking the price. The certainty that Brian went there when he needed an hour no one in his family could account for. Tom knew where to find him.
⸻
Brian was alone when Tom entered the bar.
He sat beneath a muted television, wearing a navy button-down with the sleeves rolled neatly to his elbows. A pale mark circled the finger where he had removed his wedding band. Tom felt the sight of it before he understood it: guilt, relief, and an old practiced sadness.
Brian looked up. His glass stopped halfway to his mouth. For several seconds neither man moved. Then Brian lowered the drink and said, “What the fuck!?”
Tom slid into the opposite side of the booth. Up close, the resemblance was exact. The same brown eyes. The same gray threaded through the beard. The same vertical line appearing between their brows.
Brian stared as though he had found a crack in reality and was trying to decide whether looking directly into it would make things worse.
Tom offered a nervous wide smile.
Brian’s expression changed with it. “You have my teeth.”
“I have more than that” he said gesturing downward with a stupid grin.
Brian glanced toward the bartender, then leaned across the table. “Who are you?”
“My name is Tom.”
“That doesn’t answer fucking anything.”
“No. It’s just the easiest part.”
Tom explained the body swap roulette as plainly as he could. Four friends. Four profiles. One night in borrowed bodies. He did not mention every detail, especially how much he had enjoyed Brian’s shape, or that he had fucked another man with Brian’s dick, but Brian seemed to understand it anyway.
“You chose to do this again,” Brian said.
“Yes.”
“Why me?”
Tom looked down at his thick, hairy hands. “Because look at yourself! Because I missed having all of this” he said as he moved one hand across his scruff and the other down to his pants.
Brian gave a humorless laugh. “You missed being a married man with a mortgage and two teenagers?”
“I missed feeling like you.”
“You don’t know what that feels like.”
Tom met his eyes. “Your daughter pretends she hates the old songs you play in the car, but you caught her singing one in the kitchen last Tuesday.”
Brian went still.
“Your son only calls you ‘Dad’ when he wants something. The rest of the time it’s ‘Brian’ because he knows it annoys you.”
“Stop.”
“You keep your wedding ring in the coin pocket of your jeans when you come here. You tell yourself removing it is more honest than wearing it.”
Brian’s face drained of color. Tom felt fear flare through both of them.
“I didn’t go looking for those things,” Tom said quietly. “They came with you.”
Brian’s hand closed around his glass. “What else?”
“That you’ve stood outside three gay bars and never gone in.”
The silence between them changed. The television crowd cheered soundlessly overhead.
Brian looked toward the window. “You need to leave.”
Tom started to rise then Brian caught his wrist.
The contact startled them both. Brian’s fingers encircled a wrist identical to his own. He turned it over and felt the palm of Tom’s hand. Rough. With hair encroaching from the wrist and across the knuckles.
“Wait,” he said.
Tom sat again. Brian studied him with a concentration that felt almost intimate. His gaze traveled over Tom’s face, then lowered to the open collar of the red polo, where dark chest hair showed above the top button.
“I don’t wear red,” Brian said.
“I do,” Tom replied.
“It looks better on me than I expected.”
Tom smiled. “You’re welcome.”
Brian’s mouth twitched despite himself, and his forehead creased as he looked Tom over. “It’s so surreal seeing my body from the outside. Do I really carry myself like that?” His eyes moved over the familiar breadth of Tom’s shoulders, the thickness through his waist, the gray threaded unevenly through the beard. “I never realized how dark the skin around my eyes had become, or how tired I look. Back in college I ran track and played soccer. I was lean enough that I could eat whatever I wanted and still see every muscle in my stomach. Even after I got married, I kept it up for a while. Morning runs, weekend leagues, lifting in the garage.” He gave a small, embarrassed shrug. “Then work got busier. The kids came. There was always something more important than going for a run, and eventually I stopped pretending I’d start again on Monday. Now my knees ache, my stomach hangs over my belt when I sit, and half the hair on my body is turning gray.” He studied Tom’s borrowed face with open disbelief. “How could you find me attractive like this?”
Tom glanced down at the body he was wearing, not critically but almost fondly. He spread one of Brian’s broad hands over the slightly soft weight at his middle, then looked back up. “Because none of that looks like failure to me.” Brian’s expression tightened, but Tom continued. “You look lived-in. Solid. Like you’ve spent years becoming someone instead of trying to stay twenty-five forever. I like the gray in your beard. I like the lines around your eyes. I like that your body is strong without looking like you built it for strangers to admire.” He flexed Brian’s fingers once, watching the tendons move beneath the hair on the back of the hand. “And I’ve always been attracted to older men. Not just because they’re older, but because they usually seem more comfortable taking up space.”
Brian let out a quiet laugh. “Comfortable? You’ve been inside my head. You know better than that.”
“I know you don’t feel comfortable,” Tom said. “That’s different from how you look.” He leaned forward slightly. “When I became you, I felt heavier, but I also felt grounded. I didn’t feel like I had to prove I belonged in the room. People looked at me and assumed I knew what I was doing. And when I looked in the mirror…” Tom paused, almost shy now. “I liked what I saw. The chest hair, the beard, the thicker waist, your hairy dick…all of it. I didn’t see some washed-up version of who you used to be. I saw a handsome man in his forties who has no idea how much of him is still worth wanting.”
Brian’s eyes dropped to the table. “You make it sound better than it is.”
“Maybe you’ve been describing yourself badly for so long that hearing the truth sounds exaggerated.”
That small surrender loosened something. Brian asked questions. Some were practical—how long the change lasted, whether Tom could control it, whether anyone else knew. Others were harder.
“Do you feel what I’m feeling right now?”
“Pieces of it.”
“What pieces?”
Tom considered lying. “You’re frightened.”
“Obviously.”
“You’re angry that I know you.”
Brian nodded once.
“And you want to kiss me.”
Brian’s eyes snapped to his.
Tom leaned back. “That part is fairly loud.”
For a moment Brian appeared offended. Then he glanced at Tom’s mouth. “It would be like kissing myself,” he said.
“Not exactly…” Tom replied.
“But you look exactly like me!”
“Maybe but I’m still mostly another man.”
Brian rubbed a thumb along the condensation on his half empty glass. “Technically.”
Tom laughed. “Technically?”
“If you are me—”
“I’m not.”
“—or close enough to me, then it’s not exactly cheating.”
“You took off your wedding ring before I arrived. You were ready to cheat…”
Brian looked down at his bare finger and Tom felt the shame move through him like a cold draft. It belonged to Brian, but it hurt in Tom’s chest.
“I’m not here to judge you,” Tom said.
“That makes one of us.”
“You don’t have to do anything.”
Brian looked at the duplicate sitting across from him. “That’s the problem. I do.”
⸻
Brian followed Tom home in his own car. He had texted his wife from the parking lot, saying an early unexpected Saturday client meeting made it easier to stay near the office for the night.
At Tom’s house, Brian wandered through the rooms slowly while Tom got the two men a drink. There was nothing remarkable about Tom’s house. A mismatched couch. Framed photographs. Shoes kicked beneath a table. A picture of Tom with Phil, Don, and Ralph at Pride, all four men sunburned and grinning.
Brian picked it up. “You just leave this out?”
“It’s my house.”
“Someone could see it.”
“Who? And why would I care if they did?”
Brian had no answer.
Tom came closer. Their shoulders nearly touched. “There aren’t any hidden compartments in my life,” he said.
Brian returned the frame to the shelf with unusual care. “That must be nice.”
Tom felt the ache beneath the words because some of it still lived inside him. He touched Brian’s cheek. Brian did not pull away. Their first kiss was hesitant, almost absurdly cautious for two men wearing the same face. Then Brian gripped the back of Tom’s neck and kissed him again with a hunger that belonged entirely to himself.
Later, in the bedroom, Brian paused beside the bed. “You said you might change back.”
“While I’m asleep.”
“What will you look like?”
“Twenty-five. Brown hair. Clean-shaven.”
“Handsome?”
“Devastatingly.”
Brian rolled his eyes, but his nervousness remained.
Tom took his hand. “You pinged my profile on Scruff. Do you remember? I’m assuming that meant you were into me. You can still leave.”
Brian looked from their joined hands to Tom’s face - his own face. “I spent forty-six years leaving, tonight I’m going to stay” he said. “Besides. When else will a get a chance to fuck myself?” Then he planted a kiss deeply onto Tom’s mouth.
“So you think you’re the top tonight?” Tom replied smirking at the opportunity that presented itself.
“I have been my entire life” Tom scoffed in between kissing Tom.
“We’ll see” Tom said with a grin while he slowly began to unbutton Brian’s shirt - sliding it over his shoulders and exposing Brian’s chest. He ran his hands through the older man’s chest hair - pulling himself closer as they kissed.
Brian then reached over to Tom’s red polo and reciprocated by lifting it over his head and rubbing Tom’s chest. He then reached a hand down to Tom’s cock and grabbed it through his khakis before unbuckling the belt and lowering the zipper - letting the duplicate of Brian’s thick uncut cock flop out of Tom’s pants.
“Sorry,” Tom smirked. “No underwear.”
Brian looked down to the fully erect version of his dick staring at him on another man's body. He lowered to his knees - hungry for the intimacy he had long desired but never acted on. He smiled up at Tom.
Tom placed a hand on Brian’s head guiding the man onto his cock. Brian took the head into his mouth and placed a hand along the shaft. He slowly moved his hand up and down the base while sucking lightly on the head.
“Whoa,” Tom said. “Are you sure you haven’t done this before?”
Brian grinned and pulled his mouth off Tom’s dick while still pumping the shaft. “It’s my dick. You think I don’t know what it likes?”
“That’s fair…” Tom replied. “But I don’t recall giving you permission to stop.” He then grabbed Brian’s head with both hands and thrust his borrowed dick deep into Brian’s mouth.
What followed was not gentle. It was tender in flashes and anxious in others, charged by the knowledge of their shared body between them. Tom leaned into the fantasy with a kind of defiant intensity, letting Brian see and experience what he wanted, letting himself feel the strange power of being desired through another man’s outline.
Before long Tom had Brian naked on his back on the the bed taking a turning sucking his cock. He then spread Brian's cheeks and began to eat his asshole - the rough short beard scratching Brian and causing him to giggle.
“You think that’s funny?” Tom growled with the older man’s voice. Beginning to lose himself in the blur of desire. “Let’s see how you feel when I fuck you with your own dick, daddy.”
Brian stopped laughing and began to protest “Ohh, I don’t know about ….” but it was too late. Tom stood up, pulled Brian to the edge of the bed, lined up the tip of his older dick and began to push it into Brian’s tight virgin asshole.
“Uhhhh” was all Brian could get out before Tom pushed fully into his ass. Brian squeezed his eyes shut as the pain from penetration shook through his body.
After a few hard thrusts, Brian started to gently moan as Tom settled into a more steady rhythm. Tom pushed Brian further onto the bed and climbed on - leaning forward into missionary position so he could watch Brian’s face - but more importantly so that Brian could see as clear as day that he was being fucked by himself.
“Open your eyes” Tom commanded. “Do you like this? Do you like the feeling of getting fucked by your own big hairy dick?” Tom whispered.
Brian let out a soft moan as he scanned the man above him from bottom to top - his thick bush, his soft but still muscled midsection, his hairy chest, before settling into his own brown eyes. “Yes, sir” was all he could get out between the surge of pain and pleasure overwhelming his body.
“Good” Tom smirked. “Because I like fucking you with your own daddy cock. I like looking down on you beneath me, powerless, as I take your asshole’s virginity. I like you looking up at me and seeing yourself. And most of all, I like the idea of cumming so deep inside you you’ll carry it home with you tomorrow morning.”
Tom’s pace gradually quickened as Brian reached a hand down to his own dick and started jerking off. Just as Tom reached climax and shot his load deep into the mirror image of the ass he wore, Brian followed suit - spewing rope after rope of cum on his hairy chest.
The two men collapsed into a pile of sweat and testosterone. Brian’s sticky cum resting between their torsos. They stayed like that for several minutes listening as their breathing gradually slowed.
Tom pushed up into his hands and looked Brian in the eyes. “I told you we’d see if you were a top.” The two men then shared a brief laugh and kiss before settling into position to sleep - Brian getting to be the little spoon for the first time in his life.
As Brian drifted to sleep with Tom’s arms wrapped around him he felt overwhelmed with a feeling of fullness - both the fullness of having been filled by another man - cum still leaking out of his asshole - and the fullness of finally acting on a desire he had kept deep inside himself for 30 years. Where he would go from here remained to be seen...
⸻
Tom woke sometime in the night without opening his eyes. Brian’s borrowed body was dissolving. His beard receded into his skin. His jaw narrowed. The weight around his middle softened, then vanished. His chest contracted beneath Brian’s sleeping arm, the dense hair thinning to the lighter growth of his own body.
The strangest part was the silence inside him. Brian’s emotions loosened their hold. The family kitchen faded. The remembered pressure of a ring disappeared. Tom was left with sympathy rather than possession, knowledge without instinct. He became himself again and slipped back into sleep.
Later, morning light filled the room. Brian woke first. Tom surfaced to the sharp movement of the mattress and found Brian sitting upright, staring down at him.
The older man had pulled the sheet across his waist. Panic hardened his face.
Recognition arrived slowly. “Tom?”
“Still me.”
Brian stared at his real face. Tom suddenly felt very young beneath the inspection. Without Brian’s beard and bulk, he had lost the authority that had carried him through the previous night.
“You’re different,” Brian said.
“I warned you.”
“I know.”
“You can go if you want.”
Brian glanced toward the bedroom door, but he did not move.
Tom sat up, keeping a careful distance between them. “The man you came home with isn’t here anymore - not totally anyway.”
Brian looked down at his hands. “Last night, I told myself it wasn’t really another man.”
Tom waited.
“That was the excuse,” Brian said. “Not the reason.”
“What was the reason?”
Brian raised his eyes to Tom’s. “You looked at me like you already knew everything ugly about me and hadn’t decided to leave.”
“I didn’t think it was ugly.”
“You were wearing my face. That made it easier to believe you.”
Tom swallowed. “And now?”
Brian reached toward him, hesitated, then placed his palm against Tom’s smooth cheek.
“Now I have to believe you.”
He kissed Tom again. This kiss was quieter than the ones they had shared the night before. There was no mirror in it. No technical loophole. Brian touched a younger man with a different face and knew exactly what he was doing.
Afterward, still naked, except for a cap Tom had playfully put on his head before he left the bedroom because it “made him look like a baseball daddy,” Brian made coffee in the kitchen. Tom looked through his closet for a more comfortable shirt than the button-up Brian came in that might fit the larger man. Having failed, he gathered Brian's clothes from the night before.
When Tom entered the kitchen with Brian’s clothes he found Brian playfully flexing for him in the morning sunlight.
“Be honest,” Brian said. “In the light of day, without my face on you, do I still look good?”
Tom let his gaze linger. “Brian, I liked your body enough to borrow it twice. That should answer the question.”
The two men shared a laugh as Brian reached for his pants and his button up that Tom brought him.
Later at the kitchen counter while they were drinking their coffee, Brian folded a dish towel into a precise square.
“You always do that,” Tom said.
Brian looked down. “Do what?”
“Make yourself useful when you’re uncomfortable.”
“Did you learn that from becoming me?”
“Yes.”
“I’m beginning to resent how much you know.”
“You liked it last night," Tom replied with a wink.
“You were more respectful when you had my face.”
“I don’t think anything we did last night would be classified as respectful! But I also had your repression. It slowed the real me down. I was giving it like 50 percent.”
Brian laughed before he could stop himself. Then his phone buzzed on the counter and the laughter disappeared. Tom watched him read the message in silence.
“I need to go home,” Brian said.
“I know.”
At the front door, Brian hesitated. “Can you become me again?”
“Probably.”
“Can I see you again?”
Tom looked at the older man he had wanted so badly to inhabit. “Yes,” he said. “But I don’t want that to be the only version of me you’ll come here for.”
Brian’s gaze moved over Tom’s real face. “It isn’t. I mean, it won't be.”
POV: You laid a trap to use a magic ring to swap bodies with your college-age neighbor. You invite him over to help with a chore - but instead of becoming each other, like you had planned, you literally only swap your “body.” You gain his tight muscle-bound stomach and pecs while he balloons out with your hard beer belly gut and moobs. “Crap,” you think to yourself. How are you going to talk your way out of this one…
Chris had always been able to grow a good beard - he just never let it get very far. The moment his face began to look noticeably different, he would second-guess himself and shave it off. What if it looked ridiculous? What if people thought he was trying too hard? Keeping the same nearly clean-shaven face was easier—even if it sometimes felt a little too safe.
Then he matched on a dating app with Miles, a fit 37 year old man who ran an eccentric Tumblr devoted to handsome, hairy men—among other things. Miles never pressured him to change, but Chris had noticed how enthusiastically he reacted to pictures of thick mustaches and bearded faces. More importantly, Chris wanted to see himself that way too. He wanted to look a little older, bolder, and more masculine when they finally met.
The bottle of Hair Tonic promised rapid, natural-looking facial-hair growth. Chris told himself he would start small - with just a mustache.
When the first dark hairs appeared over his lip, he nearly panicked—but instead of reaching for his razor, he watched the mustache gradually fill in. Each new stage made him look unfamiliar, yet increasingly like the version of himself he had secretly imagined.
At first it was only a faint shadow, enough to make him stare a little too long at his reflection. Then it thickened into a soft dark line. Chris touched it cautiously, surprised by the texture. He dabbed a bit more on his upper lip and the mustache grew fuller, darker, and more defined, spreading into a shape that made his whole face look stronger. After a few minutes it was thick and carefully shaped, bold without being overdone. He kept waiting for the usual doubt to rush in. It never did.
Instead, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, Chris felt a strange little thrill. For once, the change did not feel like something he needed to hide from. It felt like something he had chosen. A deliberate expression of his masculinity.
Chris finished tidying up - preparing for his date with Miles. He picked out his favorite henley, put product in his hair, trimmed his stubble to look just enticing enough. The finishing touch was a bit of mustache wax to curl up the sides ever so slightly. He gave himself a final once over before heading out.
By the time he reached the bar, Chris had a thick, carefully shaped mustache and a nervous smile. Miles was already waiting in a red button-up, his own chevron mustache framing an unmistakably pleased grin on a handsome face.
“Wow,” Miles said, looking him over. “You look incredible.”
Chris laughed softly and touched the edge of his new mustache, still getting used to the feel of it beneath his fingers. “You really think so?”
“I really do,” Miles said. His eyes lingered on Chris’s face in a way that made Chris feel warm all over. “Honestly, you’re kind of unfair.”
That made Chris grin. The nerves that had followed him in began to loosen. They settled into drinks and easy conversation, and every time Miles looked at him, it was with the same open appreciation that had made Chris want to be brave in the first place.
After a while, Chris tilted his head and said, teasing, “So… do I make the blog?”
Miles smirked over the rim of his glass and shook his head. “No,” he said, "I'm sorry you don't."
Chris blinked. “No?”
Miles leaned in just slightly, his expression turning into a playful smirk. “Too good for the blog,” he said. “I think I’m keeping you for myself.”
Chris felt his face heat instantly, but this time he didn’t look away. He just smiled, ran a thumb over the edge of his mustache, and decided the Hair Tonic had been worth every drop.
Twenty-four-year-old Tyler went into the costume shop looking for something to wear to his swim team’s end-of-semester party. The theme was “movie characters,” and he decided that his mustache and swimmer’s physique made him perfect for some kind of Magic Mike costume. Near the back of the shop, Tyler found faded blue plumber’s coveralls with a stitched name patch reading MIKE. He grinned at the word play. A sexy blue-collar version of Magic Mike practically wrote itself.
The coveralls hung loosely from his broad shoulders and narrow waist. Tyler left the front partly unfastened, struck an exaggerated pose in the mirror, and buckled the heavy tool belt around his hips.
Then his stomach pushed against it. His tight swimmer’s body softened and expanded, his belly swelling into a huge, heavy gut that sagged over his waistband.
Gray spread through his hair as his handsome young face broadened and aged toward fifty. His chest remained powerful and hairy, but his waist grew thick and solid. His mustache became fuller while deep lines settled around his eyes.
As the changes slowed his cloudy mind grabbed his items and left the changing room - pausing in front of a vanity. He lifted his belly and stared at the burly plumber in the mirror.
For one fading moment, he remembered a swimming pool, a college campus, and a name that might have been Tyler. Then the memories slipped away.
Mike frowned at himself, wondering why he had wasted so much time posing in front of a mirror. He buttoned his coveralls over his belly, checked the tools on his belt, and headed out to the van. He had three service calls left before dinner and he was starving!
Thomas liked Nate almost immediately, which embarrassed him a little. He was usually more measured. At thirty, Thomas had accumulated enough bad dates to know that immediate chemistry often meant nothing more than two people being good at first impressions - and sometimes good in bed for one night. He knew not to confuse charm with compatibility or intensity with intimacy. He had repeated those lessons to friends often enough that they had become part of his public identity: Thomas, the sensible one. Thomas, the engineer. Thomas, who could turn almost anything—including his own romantic disappointments—into a problem with measurable causes and manageable outcomes.
Then Nate arrived at the restaurant five minutes late, carrying the faint scent of tobacco and rain, and Thomas forgot to be sensible.
Nate was forty-four. His hair was cropped short and touched with gray, particularly around the temples. A heavy brown mustache covered his upper lip, giving his face an old-fashioned severity that softened whenever he smiled. He was broad through the chest, in good shape without looking sculpted, and wore a dark green shirt with the sleeves rolled neatly to the elbows.
Thomas had always had a weakness for older men who looked as though they belonged beside a fireplace with a whiskey glass in one hand and a pipe in the other. Nate looked precisely like that. Exactly what Thomas found appealing.
“You’re even better-looking than your pictures online,” Nate said.
It was not an unusual first-date compliment, but he delivered it without the nervous laughter or exaggerated enthusiasm Thomas was accustomed to. Nate looked directly at him as he said it, his pale blue eyes moving once over Thomas’s face before settling on his.
Thomas smiled. “That’s a dangerous way to start a first date.”
“I'm nothing if not a little dangerous.”
That should have sounded rehearsed. Instead, it worked.
Their date lasted three hours. Nate asked good questions and listened carefully to the answers. He wanted to know what kind of engineering Thomas did, not merely whether he liked his job. He remembered the name of Thomas’s sister after hearing it once. When Thomas mentioned that he had moved twice as a child because of his father’s work, Nate asked which house still appeared in his dreams. No one had ever asked him that.
Thomas told him about the narrow brick house in Ohio, the maple tree beyond his bedroom window, the hollow knocking sound the furnace made at night.
Nate leaned forward, one hand resting beneath his mustache. “What color was your room?”
“Blue.”
“Dark blue?”
“No. Almost gray.”
“And the curtains?”
Thomas laughed. “Why?”
“I’m picturing it.”
There was something flattering about the concentration on Nate’s face. Thomas answered.
After dinner, they walked beneath a row of wet sycamores. Nate produced a narrow leather cigar case from inside his coat.
“Do you mind?”
Thomas shook his head. “Actually, I kind of like it.”
Nate looked pleased. He cut the end of the cigar with deliberate care, turning it between thick fingers before lighting it. The ember briefly illuminated the underside of his mustache. Thomas watched smoke drift around Nate’s face and felt a small, adolescent thrill you only get when in the company of an older man.
“You really do have a type,” Nate said.
Thomas looked away. “Is it that obvious?”
“Only because you’ve been staring at me for most of the evening.”
“You’ve been staring too.”
“Yes,” Nate said. “But I have a better excuse.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m trying to remember everything about you.”
At the time, Thomas thought it was romantic.
⸻
They did not see each other again for almost three weeks. Nate traveled for work, though he remained vague about exactly what the work involved and where he was going. Consulting, he said. Private clients. Short contracts. He sent Thomas a photograph from an airport lounge, his mustache visible above a cup of coffee, and another from a hotel balcony overlooking a city Thomas could not identify.
Most of their courtship happened through messages. Nate did not text constantly. He appeared at deliberate intervals, often just as Thomas was beginning to wonder whether the connection had faded.
What are you wearing to your big presentation tomorrow?
Thomas sent him a photograph in the bathroom mirror: navy suit, pale shirt, no tie.
Nate replied almost instantly.
Blue suits you. Turn sideways. I want to see the fit.
Thomas did, laughing at himself as he took the second photograph.
Perfect - Nate wrote.
Later that afternoon:
Oh, btw did you get the promotion?
Thomas had forgotten telling him about that opportunity.
He sent voice messages while driving home, describing the presentation and imitating his manager’s habit of pausing too long before delivering good news. Nate responded with a voice message of his own, his tone low and amused.
Do that laugh again. The one at the end.
Thomas listened to the request twice before recording another.
Nate remembered everything. Thomas’s coffee order. His gym schedule. The name of the project coordinator he disliked. The brand of shirts that fit his shoulders without billowing around the waist. Thomas mentioned once that his mother called him Tommy only when she was worried, and Nate never forgot it.
Sometimes, Nate repeated Thomas’s own phrases back to him.
Thomas wrote: That’s a future problem whenever he did not want to make a decision. A week later, Nate used it.
Thomas often ended voice messages with Anyway, you get the idea. Soon Nate did too. It felt intimate, like the development of a private dialect.
Once, after Thomas sent a photograph from the gym, Nate replied:
You take very good care of yourself.
Thomas wrote back:
Trying to. Thirty isn’t ancient, but the warranty is definitely expiring.
There was a long pause before Nate answered.
Thirty is the perfect age. Old enough to know who you are. Young enough to do something with it.
Then, after another minute:
You have no idea what some men would give to look like you.
Thomas read the message while standing beneath the locker-room lights, his hair still damp from the shower. He felt heat rise beneath the dark hair covering his chest.
You seem to like how you look - Thomas replied.
I know how I look. That’s different.
Thomas assumed he was being modest.
⸻
Their second date was at a small Italian restaurant Nate had chosen because Thomas once mentioned liking quiet intimate places where the tables were spaced far apart.
When Thomas arrived, Nate stood to greet him. His hand settled briefly at Thomas’s waist, firm and warm. “You changed your hair.”
Thomas touched it self-consciously. “Just a trim.”
“Shorter at the sides.”
“You noticed?”
“I notice everything about you.”
Nate smiled after saying it, transforming the words into flirtation. During dinner, he asked Thomas about his apartment.
Not whether he liked the neighborhood or how much he paid—questions Thomas expected—but which floor he lived on, whether the windows faced east or west, whether the building used keys or electronic access.
“Electronic downstairs,” Thomas said. “Regular lock on the apartment.”
“Facial recognition?”
“For the building app? No. Just a code.”
Nate swirled wine in his glass. “And your phone?”
“Face ID.”
“Of course.”
“What does that mean?” Thomas inquired.
Nate looked at him over the rim of the glass. “It would be criminal not to put that face to work.”
Thomas laughed. Later, after joking about taking bad photos, Nate asked to see Thomas’s driver’s-license photograph.
“No one looks good in those,” Thomas said.
“I want proof.”
Thomas took out his wallet and handed over the license. Nate studied it longer than the joke required.
“You were twenty-six here?” Nate asked.
“Twenty-five.”
“Same address?”
“No. That was my old place.”
Nate’s thumb passed lightly over the date of birth, then across the small holographic image.
“You always photograph well, I see” he said with a smile, returning it.
After dinner they went to a cigar bar. Nate chose a leather chair in the darkest corner, cut a cigar, and showed Thomas how to toast the end without setting it fully alight.
Thomas did not really enjoy smoking, but he liked watching Nate do it. There was something ceremonial about the way the older man handled tobacco. Mature. Controlled. Slightly erotic.
“You’d look good with a pipe,” Thomas said.
Nate raised an eyebrow. “Would I?”
“Very distinguished.”
“Older, you mean?” Nate replied.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.” There was no smile on Nate’s face.
Thomas hesitated. “I like that you’re older.”
The severity disappeared. Nate reached across the small table and touched Thomas’s wrist. “I know you do. Someday soon, before you know it, you’ll be my exact age too and maybe you’ll look good with a pipe.”
His fingers remained there while Thomas’s pulse beat against them.
⸻
The third date took place at Thomas’s apartment. He cooked. Nate watched from a stool at the kitchen island, asking questions about every object within reach. The framed photograph of Thomas and his sister at a lake. The ceramic bowl his mother had made. The narrow wooden box where Thomas kept his spare keys.
“Organized,” Nate said.
“I’m an engineer, after all.”
“You always say that like it explains everything.”
“It explains a lot.”
Nate opened the wooden box and looked inside. Thomas glanced over from the stove. “Planning to rob me?”
“Only taking inventory.”
He closed the lid and smiled.
After dinner, Nate wandered through the living room while Thomas cleared the plates. He paused before a shelf of old photographs, lifting them one at a time.
In one, Thomas was twenty-two and standing outside his university dorm, thinner in the face but unmistakably himself.
“You had more hair,” Nate said.
“I have plenty of hair now.”
“I meant on your head” Nate said with a laugh.
Thomas threw a dish towel at him. Nate caught it. “I’m kidding.”
He returned to the photograph.
“You were beautiful.”
“Were?” Thomas retorted.
“You are. But differently.”
Thomas leaned against the bookcase beside him. “You analyze people this much for work?”
“Sometimes.”
“What exactly do you consult about?”
Nate set the photograph down. “Transitions.”
“That clears it up.”
“I help people become who they need to become.”
The answer sounded manufactured, but Nate kissed him before Thomas could ask another question.
Later, in bed, Nate rested his hand against Thomas’s chest. His fingers moved slowly through the dense hair between Thomas’s pecs, tracing the path down his stomach.
“You ever think about shaving this?” Nate asked.
“I did actually. Once in college.”
“And?”
“Hated it.”
“Good.”
Thomas laughed softly. “Strong opinion.”
Nate’s hand stopped. “I wouldn’t change it if I were you.”
Something in his voice made Thomas look at him. Nate was staring at Thomas’s chest, his expression distant and strangely tense. Then he seemed to notice Thomas watching and smiled.
“It suits you,” he said.
Nate’s hand remained against Thomas’s chest, his fingertips moving slowly through the dark hair as if memorizing its texture. For a moment the intensity in his face made Thomas uneasy, but then Nate smiled and leaned in, and the unease dissolved beneath the warmth of his mouth. Thomas drew him closer, attracted all over again to the contrast between them—the roughness of Nate’s mustache, the mature weight of his body, the quiet confidence with which he had guided Thomas back toward the bed. Nate took his time, watching Thomas’s reactions with an attentiveness that felt flattering, almost reverent. Each touch seemed to ask permission, and Thomas answered by pulling him nearer.
It wasn’t long before Nate was fucking Thomas from behind observing how Thomas reacted - the younger man on all fours with his back arched as Nate’s mature dick tickled his prostate.
“Let me see how you move while being fucked” Nate said. “I think I know your body better every time I touch it.”
Thomas turned his head around with a grin, wrapped in the pleasure of being filled by the sexy older man. “You like what you see?”
Nate gave a deep seductive smirk and replied, “One day you’ll understand exactly what I see when I look at you.”
A couple of minutes later, Thomas - overstimulated from penetration, sweat, and the feeling of Nate’s testicles slapping against his ass - replied with soft moans and an “I’m getting close.”
“Turn around I want to see the face you make when you cum” Nate responded.
Thomas turned around, lying on his back while Nate reinserted his dick hard and quick into Thomas. Thomas grimaced then grabbed his own perky uncut dick and began vigorously jerking off while staring deeply at Nate’s handsome older face. Within a few seconds Thomas began to loudly moan as cum splattered on his abs and chest. Nate followed suit by ejaculating deep into Thomas then collapsing on his chest - leaving his dick inside.
Nate looked deeply into Thomas’s eyes and began to lick up Thomas’s cum. “I knew you’d taste sweet. Sometimes I look at you and think you were made for me.”
Thomas blushed at the kinky behavior and comments made by a man he was both enamored with and enchanted by. The attention to detail and the way Nate worshipped him made him feel seen, important, in a way no man had ever made him feel.
Later, the room had gone quiet except for their breathing. Thomas lay against the pillows while Nate rested beside him, one hand still spread over his chest. Thomas assumed the older man was savoring the closeness, but Nate’s gaze kept traveling: across Thomas’s face, down the shape of his shoulders, along the body he had already begun to covet. When Thomas caught him staring again, Nate softened his expression and brushed a kiss beneath his jaw. Thomas smiled, mistaking possession for affection, and closed his eyes while Nate continued studying him in the dark.
In the morning, Thomas found Nate in the bathroom wearing only his undershirt and trousers.
He stood close to the mirror, one hand resting on the sink. For a moment Thomas assumed he was washing his face, but then he realized Nate was not looking at himself. He was holding his phone. On the screen was a photograph Thomas had sent from the gym weeks earlier.
Nate raised his eyes to the mirror and saw Thomas in the doorway.
“You caught me,” he said.
“Doing what?”
“Admiring you.”
He turned the phone around. The photograph showed Thomas shirtless, smiling.
Nate looked from the image to the living man.
“You make being you look very easy.”
Thomas smiled. “I’ve had thirty years of practice.”
“Lucky you.”
Nate slipped the phone onto the counter and kissed him.
⸻
Two more weeks passed before their fourth date.
By then Thomas had grown accustomed to Nate appearing in his days. A morning message. A photograph. A voice note late at night. Sometimes Nate asked questions Thomas found oddly specific.
What did his signature look like when he was rushing? Did his coworkers call him Thomas or Tom? Which side of the bed did he always sleep on? What was the first car he owned? Which knee had he injured playing soccer in college?
Nate remembered the answers better than Thomas did. Once, during a video call, Nate imitated the way Thomas tilted his head when skeptical.
“Do I really do that?” Thomas asked.
“Constantly.”
“Show me again.”
Nate repeated the gesture perfectly. Thomas laughed. Nate repeated the laugh and for one disorienting second, it sounded almost identical.
“You’ve been studying me,” Thomas said.
Nate’s eyes remained fixed on the screen. “Yes.” Then he smiled. “You’re interesting to study.”
The fourth date was the best one. Nate planned everything around small details Thomas had mentioned in passing: dinner at a restaurant with a rooftop greenhouse, a walk through a neighborhood of old brick homes, then drinks at a hotel bar with dark wood walls and brass lamps.
Nate prepared for the night of a lifetime. He wore charcoal trousers and a cream shirt beneath a brown jacket. His mustache had been freshly trimmed. A silver band gleamed on his right hand.
Thomas noticed it while Nate ordered two whiskeys from the bartender. “That’s new” he said while playfully tapping a finger on Nate’s ring.
Nate looked down. The ring was broad and old, made from two metals twisted together—one dark and new looking , one older and pale. “It belonged to someone important.”
Thomas waited. Nate rarely discussed his past. Whenever he did, the stories had soft edges: a former boyfriend without a name, a family he no longer spoke to, a mentor who had taught him to smoke a pipe. Thomas had decided not to press. At forty-four, people were allowed to contain rooms they kept locked.
“My uncle gave it to me,” Nate said finally. “Though he wasn’t really my uncle. More like a father, for a while.”
“That sounds complicated. What happened to him?”
“He started over.”
Nate rotated the ring around his finger. “He believed people spent too much of their lives trapped inside themselves. Their fears. Their bodies. The stories everyone else told about them.”
Thomas smiled faintly. “He sounds… cheerful.”
“He said two people could never truly understand one another until they had seen the world through the other person’s eyes.”
Nate slid the ring free. The skin beneath it was pale.“He gave me this when I was younger. Told me I’d know when I met someone capable of understanding.”
He placed the band in Thomas’s palm. It was heavier than expected and warm from Nate’s hand.
“You’re giving it to me?”
“Only for tonight.”
Thomas looked up. For the first time since meeting him, Nate appeared genuinely uncertain. His confidence had dropped away, leaving something naked behind it.
“I want you to wear it,” Nate said.
Nate pushed the ring onto Thomas’s right index finger. It fit snugly, though not uncomfortably.
Nate inhaled. His eyes followed the band as it passed over Thomas’s knuckle and settled against the base of the finger. “There,” he whispered.
Thomas raised his hand. “How do I look?”
Nate looked at the ring. Then at Thomas’s face. “Exactly right.”
⸻
After their final round of drinks they returned to Thomas’s apartment shortly before midnight. Rain tapped lightly against the windows. Nate opened one of the balcony doors and stood beside it smoking a pipe he had brought in a leather case since Thomas said it would suit him.
Thomas watched him from the couch. The older man’s face appeared carved in the low light: gray at the temples, heavy mustache, blue eyes reflecting the ember in the pipe bowl. Thomas thought again that Nate looked like someone from another time.
“You’re staring,” Nate said.
“I’m allowed.”
Nate smiled around the pipe stem. “Come here.”
Thomas joined him beside the open door. Nate rested one hand at the back of his neck and kissed his forehead.
For a moment, neither man spoke. “What are you thinking about?” Thomas asked.
“That I’m going to miss this.”
Thomas leaned back. “Miss what?”
Nate removed the pipe. “This night.”
“We could have another one.”
“Yes,” Nate said. “I suppose we could.”
He turned away and emptied the pipe into a small ceramic dish. Thomas felt suddenly tired. It had arrived as a pleasant heaviness, the consequence of two much alcohol and a long week. He sat on the edge of the couch.
Nate closed the balcony door. “You all right?”
“Just hit a wall.”
“I’ll get you some water.”
Nate went into the kitchen. Thomas heard a cabinet open, then the tap. He looked down at the antique ring. The two metals seemed almost to move against each other in the dim light. Nate returned with a glass. “Drink.”
Thomas took it. The water had a faint bitter taste beneath the lemon slice floating at the surface.
“You put something in this?”
“Just something to help with a hangover.”
“You carry anti-hangover medicine on dates?”
“At forty-four you’ll always travel prepared.”
Thomas laughed, though the sound came out sluggish. By the time he reached the bedroom, the carpet seemed unusually soft beneath his feet. Nate helped him remove his outer shirt and slacks. “You don’t have to baby me,” Thomas said.
“I know, but I’ve made a considerable investment in you and I want to ensure you don’t hurt yourself.”
Nate’s hand rested against Thomas’s chest. His fingers spread across a grey t-shirt, pressing lightly over Thomas’s heartbeat.
“You really are remarkable,” Nate said.
Thomas’s eyes were closing. “That’s a strange thing to say to someone passing out at the end of a date.”
“You’re not passing out. You’re falling asleep. Don't worry, when you wake up you'll feel like a new man.”
Thomas tried to focus on Nate’s face, but the features blurred. The pale eyes. The mustache. The thin gray at the temples.
Nate lifted Thomas’s right hand. The ring seemed to tighten around his finger. “Does this hurt?” Nate asked.
“No.”
His thumb stroked the band. “Good…”
Thomas’s body felt distant now, as though the bed were lowering him slowly into deep water. “Nate?”
“I’m here.”
“What was your uncle’s name?”
Nate smiled. “That’s a future problem.”
Thomas recognized the phrase. He wanted to laugh. Instead, darkness moved quietly across the room and covered him. The last sensation he felt before drifting to sleep was Nate removing his own button up and laying beside him on the bed.
⸻
The ring grew cold. Not cool, but impossibly cold, a small circle of winter clamped around Thomas’s finger.
Nate watched the unconscious man’s face. The sleeping expression was softer than the one Thomas wore in photographs. His mouth rested slightly open. A strand of dark hair had fallen across his forehead. Beneath the collar of his undershirt, dense chest hair curled against his throat.
Nate had imagined this moment so many times that the reality of it seemed strangely subdued. No thunder. No flash of light. Only the cold tightening of the ring and a sensation like his body dropping through the floor.
For an instant he could not breathe. Then he inhaled. The breath came easily. Too easily. The lungs drawing it were younger and deeper than his own had been. Nate opened his eyes. The ceiling looked different. Closer, somehow, though he knew that was impossible.
He raised one hand. Thomas’s hand. Broad palm. Long fingers. A faint white scar across the knuckle from the childhood bicycle accident Nate had heard about on their second date. Dark hair dusted the wrist and forearm. The ring was gone.
Across the bed lay Nate’s old body, unconscious and slack. Nate stared at it as if he were looking into a mirror. The gray hair at the temples. The heavy mustache. The chest that required more effort each year to keep firm. The softening around the waist that Thomas had never seemed to mind but he had grown to resent.
He felt no affection for it. Only relief. Nate sat up. The motion was startlingly fluid. No stiffness in the lower back. No familiar pressure in the neck from an old weightlifting injury. He rolled Thomas’s shoulders once, then again. A laugh escaped him. Thomas’s laugh.
Nate froze. He placed a hand against his throat. “Hello,” he said. The voice was clear, warm and younger than the one he had used for forty-four years.
“Hello,” he repeated, lowering the pitch. He stood. The body rose with effortless balance. Strong legs. Firm stomach. Weight distributed in ways Nate had studied through photographs and clothing but could never tottally imagine.
He pulled off his grey shirt and underwear and crossed the bedroom naked, leaving his old body discarded asleep beneath the sheets. At the bathroom door, he stopped. His heart was racing. Thomas’s heart. Nate stepped inside and switched on the lights. The mirror gave him exactly what he had wanted.
Thomas stared back. For several seconds Nate did nothing. He simply absorbed the face. Thick dark-brown hair, slightly disordered from lying in bed. Strong brows. Clear hazel-brown eyes. Straight nose. Firm jaw darkened with short stubble. Smooth forehead without the permanent horizontal lines Nate had begun noticing in photographs of himself.
He moved closer. Thomas moved closer. Nate touched the glass with two fingers. Then he touched his face.
The skin beneath his eyes was firm. He pulled gently at one lower lid, examining the unlined surface. Turned his head left. Right. Lifted his chin. Pressed his tongue behind his perfect teeth.
He opened his mouth and inspected the even white smile. “Thomas,” he said. The name sounded natural in the stolen voice. He said it again. “My name is Thomas.”
A smile spread across the reflection. It was Nate’s smile at first—small, private and cold. He erased it. Thomas smiled differently. More openly. One corner of the mouth lifted first. His eyebrows softened. His eyes narrowed slightly when the expression was genuine. Nate had catalogued it from dozens of photographs. He tried again. This time Thomas smiled back. “There you are,” Nate whispered.
He ran both hands through the thick hair, pushing it away from the forehead, then allowing it to fall naturally. He tested different parts, remembering how Thomas wore it at work, at the gym, on weekends.
He turned sideways. Thomas’s jaw was even better in profile. Nate traced it from the ear to the chin, feeling the rough stubble beneath his fingertips. He examined the ears, the hairline, the shape of the neck. He lifted each eyebrow separately. Frowned. Looked surprised. Concerned. Amused. He practiced Thomas’s skeptical head tilt. Perfect.
Nate stepped back from the sink. His eyes moved downward to take in the entirety of himself. Thomas’s body was everything he had hoped for and more. Athletic without being exaggerated. Wide shoulders. Defined arms. A flat stomach softened just enough to look natural. Dark hair spread thickly across the chest, densest between the pecs, narrowing into a line down the abdomen.
Nate pressed both palms against his chest. The muscle beneath the hair was warm and firm. He inhaled deeply and watched it rise. Once. Twice. He curled his fingers into the dense hair, then smoothed it back into place with almost ceremonial care.
“Don’t change it,” he murmured, repeating what he had told Thomas weeks earlier. Now it belonged to him.
He lifted one arm, studying the hair beneath it and along the forearm. Flexed the biceps. Rotated the wrist. Spread the fingers. He bent forward and touched his toes. Another laugh escaped him.
On the way down he got a good look at his new dick. He and Thomas had already had sex, but the lights were dim and Thomas a little modest. He stood up and wrapped a hairy young hand around his new dick. Lifting it up to feel its weight. Cupping a hand around his new testicles - noting their sensitivity. He reached a hand around to his asshole and fingered the outside before pushing two fingers in a bit deeper - the sensation making plain to him why Thomas had enjoyed bottoming so much. Why he would enjoy bottoming.
Nate began to rub his new shaft slowly. It responded with the enthusiasm of youth - the head sliding out of the foreskin. Nate continued to slide his foreskin over the head while looking at his new face in the mirror. He practiced his new smile, mimicked the seductive faces he’d seen Thomas make when they fucked, he touched his stubble and ran his hand through his chest hair, tweaking his sensitive nipples.
Before long Nate could feel the heat begin to rise in his body as Thomas’s dick stiffened and his testicles pulled up close and tight as a rush of heat passed through his new younger body. He climaxed shooting ropes of thick white cum onto the sink and vanity mirror. “I guess we’re a shooter now, aren’t we Thomas?” He muttered in Thomas’s lighter voice.
Nate straightened his back and studied the reflection again. Thirty. Not pretending to be younger. Not flattering lighting. Not an app smoothing away age. Thirty. Fourteen years returned in a single night.
He thought of every room he would enter in this body. Every man who would look twice. Every opportunity that would no longer feel belated. He imagined Thomas’s coworkers greeting him by name, Thomas’s mother hearing this voice on the phone, Thomas’s friends leaning in for hugs.
All of them would see what the mirror saw. None of them would see Nate. He reached for Thomas’s phone. Facial recognition opened it immediately. The lock symbol disappeared.
Nate stared at the screen, then at the mirror. The world had already accepted him. He opened the photo library. Thousands of images. Thomas at work. Thomas running beside the river. Thomas shirtless at a lake. Thomas with his sister. Thomas laughing beside a birthday cake, head tilted back.
Nate selected the photograph from the university dorm, the one he had studied during their third date.
He held the phone beside the mirror. The younger Thomas had been leaner, almost boyish. The current face was better. More complete.
Nate swiped forward. He found a recent selfie and mimicked it: chin slightly down, mouth relaxed, eyes warm but confident. He adjusted. Again. Again. The third attempt was exact.
Next came the voice messages. Thomas’s cadence. The slight upward inflection at the end of a teasing question. The relaxed rhythm when talking about work. The laugh that began in the throat and ended breathlessly.
Nate played one. Then repeated it. “Anyway, you get the idea.” Too slow. Again. “Anyway, you get the idea.” Better.
He replayed another message. “That’s a future problem.” Nate watched his stolen mouth form the stolen phrase. “That’s a future problem.” Perfect.
He left the bathroom and dressed with equal care. Dark boxer briefs from the second drawer. Gray trousers. White undershirt. The navy shirt Thomas wore when he wanted to look polished without appearing formal.
Nate buttoned it, then stopped. He opened the top two buttons again, exposing a deliberate triangle of chest hair. Thomas often wore it that way. Nate remembered watching him adjust the collar on their first date. He copied the gesture in the closet mirror.
Then he tried Thomas’s posture: shoulders relaxed, weight resting slightly more on the right leg, one hand casually in a pocket.
The handsome engineer in the mirror looked friendly, outgoing and entirely at ease with himself.
Then Nate practiced a mild expression of concern.
“What if Nate contacts anyone?” he asked the reflection.
A crease appeared between Thomas’s brows. “He’s been acting strangely. I think he may be having some kind of breakdown.”
Too clinical. Too prepared. Nate relaxed Thomas’s shoulders and softened the stolen face. He imagined his old body arriving at Thomas’s office, wild-eyed and desperate, insisting that the handsome man standing before them was an impostor. Telling them about the ring. Demanding that Thomas’s friends believe an impossible story.
“Nate became fixated on me,” he tried. “I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten until last night.”
Better, but not enough. He let uncertainty enter Thomas’s hazel eyes, followed by reluctant fear.
“He thinks he’s me,” Nate whispered. “I know how crazy that sounds, but that’s what he keeps saying. He knows things about my life because I trusted him. Now he’s using them to convince people.”
The reflection looked frightened rather than defensive. Sympathetic. Believable. Nate held the expression for several seconds, memorizing it. Then he smiled.
He packed methodically - knowing he would need to vanish for a few days until the real Thomas cleared out of the apartment and the dust settled. He took everything that could be tied to his new identity. Thomas’s wallet. Driver’s license. Credit cards. Work identification. Passport from the locked desk drawer. Social Security card from the small fireproof box in the closet. Birth certificate. Laptop. Backup phone. Keys - so when Thomas left he couldn’t return. The folder containing tax documents and employment records. Thomas’s life fit neatly into two bags.
Before leaving, Nate returned to the bedroom. His old body remained unconscious on the bed. The mustached face looked older from this height. Smaller. Less formidable.
Thomas had desired that face. The thought almost made Nate laugh. He leaned over and removed the silver ring from his old body’s clenched hand. Nate slipped it into his pocket. He studied his former self one last time. The chest hair. The broad shoulders. The graying hair and thick mustache Thomas had found so mature, so masculine, so dangerous. Discarded packaging.
Before he turned away Nate leaned into his old face and whispered into his ear “Don’t worry, Thomas, no one will notice the difference.”
With that Nate walked into the bathroom and placed a folded note beneath the bathroom mirror. Then he left the apartment carrying everything that proved he was Thomas.
⸻
Pain returned first. A dull pressure behind the eyes. A bitter coating on the tongue. A heavy pulse beating inside the skull.
Thomas opened his eyes. The room was too bright. He closed them again and tried to remember how much he had drunk. Wine at the restaurant. Whiskey at the bar. Something at home maybe?
Water. Nate had given him water. Thomas shifted beneath the sheets. His body felt wrong. Not painful exactly. Misaligned.
His legs seemed heavier. His stomach rested against the mattress in an unfamiliar way. There was stiffness in his lower back and a faint ache in one knee.
He lifted a hand to his face. Hair brushed his fingertips. Not stubble. A mustache. Thomas opened his eyes fully in a state of panic.
The hand before him was broader and rougher than his own. Pale hairs crossed the knuckles. A small dark spot marked the back near the thumb. He stared at it without comprehension.
“Nate are you here?” The voice that emerged was deep. Older. Nate’s voice. Thomas jerked upright.
The sudden motion made the room tilt violently. He gripped the mattress and waited for it to settle.
“Nate!?” The same voice answered him from his own throat.
He touched his face again. Heavy mustache. Deeper lines beside the mouth. Short hair at the temples.
Thomas threw back the sheets.
A broad, mature chest greeted him, covered in dark hair flecked faintly with gray. The stomach beneath it was solid but heavier than his own. His hands moved over the unfamiliar torso in frantic disbelief.
“No.” Thomas stumbled from the bed. “Nate!”
Empty apartment. The living room had been disturbed so subtly that he did not understand at first. The laptop was gone from the desk. The charging cable remained, curled uselessly beside an empty space.
His phone was not on the kitchen counter. His wallet was gone. The wooden box stood open. No spare keys.
Thomas pulled at drawers with shaking hands. Documents missing. Passport missing. Work badge missing. The fireproof box open and empty. Every object that connected his name to his life had vanished.
He rushed back toward the bedroom, catching one shoulder against the doorway because the body was wider than he expected.
The bathroom light was still on. Thomas entered. He looked up. Nate stared back at him from the mirror.
Pale blue eyes widened beneath a lined forehead. Short gray-brown hair stood unevenly from sleep. The heavy mustache shifted as Thomas’s mouth fell open.
The face he had admired across candlelit tables. The face he had watched behind curling pipe smoke. The face he had believed was dangerous only in the ways he wanted.
Thomas raised one hand. Nate raised his. The reflection touched its mustache, then its cheeks, then the creases beside its eyes. Thomas tried to find himself somewhere inside it. There was nothing.
A folded piece of paper rested beneath the mirror. He opened it. Four lines had been written in his own familiar handwriting:
POV: You lean toward the mirror, but the face waiting for you is too perfect to feel real. The brown hair, the mustache, the younger skin, the broad chest beneath it—none of it belongs to you but is exactly what you deserve. Your fingers trace the stranger’s chin while the reflection imitates you with sickening precision. For one brief moment, awe wins. Then you realize how easily this body could swallow your old life whole - and how quickly you could happily forget everything about who you were.
You try to remember the weight of your former face, the pull of age around your eyes, the shape of your own hands. The details are already beginning to blur. Somewhere, the man who wore this body is trapped inside yours, clawing at your beard and your years. You should feel guilty. Instead, you straighten your back and look again into your new eyes before reaching a younger hand down into your jeans and giving your young dick a little squeeze. This was definitely an upgrade.
POV: You brace yourself against a crappy-looking bathroom counter as the mirror delivers its verdict. The bald scalp, the gray beard, the heavy stomach, the mottled skin and deep lines are not a disguise. Your hand sinks into the beard, searching for the sharp jaw you remember, but there is only another man’s saggy flesh beneath your fingers. Your new body feels older from the inside—slower, heavier, already closing in around you.
Panic gives way to something colder when you understand what has been taken. Someone is walking around wearing your face, testing your strength, deciding whether or not to give any of it back - but why would they? The eyes in the mirror are still yours, but they look smaller now, buried beneath someone else’s history. You stare until even they stop feeling familiar - with not a trace of who you were remaining.
By the time the fourth phone's Scruff profile was activated, none of the four friends sitting at the dining room table were laughing quite as naturally as before.
(Pictured Left to Right: Phil, Don, Ralph & Tom)
Tom’s house had always been their safest gathering place. It sat at the quiet end of a suburban street, comfortably furnished but still half-decorated, as though Tom had moved in months ago and had never committed to where everything belonged. The dining room opened directly into the living room, where a warm floor lamp cast amber light across the couch, the darkened windows, and the crowded wooden table.
There were cards, poker chips, bowls of pretzels and tortilla chips, four beers, and four phones displaying newly created Scruff profiles.
They all knew the rules. One current photograph. No filters. No false ages. No changing the location radius. Each player would transform into the first man that messaged them. Not just his face. Everything.
Age, height, weight, dick, voice, posture, health, mannerisms. Even personality would begin to bleed across, along with fragments of memory from the stranger’s life. The player’s own mind would remain underneath it all, but the longer the night went on, the harder it might become to tell where one man ended and the other began.
They were not allowed to answer the messages. The strangers would never know what had happened.
Phil had been the one to discover the game, or at least the instructions for it, buried in an old online TUMBLR called Hairy-Bothered, which was devoted to transformation stories that everyone insisted were fictional. He had brought it up as a joke months ago. Don had dared him to prove it was real. Ralph had spent two weeks researching every version of the ritual he could find, then concluded that it was probably fake. Tom had volunteered his house.
Now, with the profiles active, “fake” no longer felt like the right word.
“Last chance,” Don said.
At thirty, he was the oldest of the group and behaved as if that made him responsible for the others, despite the fact that he was usually the one pushing them toward bad decisions. His thick brown hair was styled into a deliberate wave, and his heavy mustache gave him an old-fashioned athletic confidence he clearly enjoyed. Even seated, he held himself like a man posing for a locker-room photograph—shoulders back, arms apart, gray T-shirt stretched neatly across his chest.
Phil glanced at him. “You were the one who said backing out would be pathetic.”
“I said backing out after uploading the picture would be pathetic.”
“That is where we are now, dummy!” Ralph reminded him.
Ralph, twenty-six, sat across from Don in a black short-sleeved shirt with NAUGHTY printed in large red letters across the chest. His dark hair was carefully styled and his mustache looked almost too precise, as though he had trimmed it immediately before coming over. He was normally the most cautious of them, the one who checked rideshare license plates and made sure everyone had charged phones.
Tom sat at the right end of the table, younger than all of them at twenty-five, wearing a red Lacoste polo and khakis. He was smiling at his phone in a way that made Don narrow his eyes.
“You’re hoping for somebody old,” Ralph said.
Tom shrugged. “Not old. Mature.”
“You have been saying that since you were twenty-one.”
“What can I say? I know what I like” Tom smirked.
Phil shifted in his chair. His blue henley made his fair skin and short blond hair look even lighter beneath the warm lamp. At twenty-seven, he was quiet, agreeable, and so conflict-averse that he sometimes apologized when someone else bumped into him - like any good Canadian immigrant to a sleepy American suburb.
Phil picked up his beer but did not drink. “What if the personality part doesn’t go away in the morning?” he asked.
Ralph looked toward him. “The instructions say everything reverses at sunrise.”
“The instructions were written by someone called Hairy-Bothered. Do we feel like he's a reliable source of information?”
“They were very specific.”
“But that doesn’t make them reliable.”
Don leaned over and tapped the table near Phil’s phone. “You wanted to know whether it was real.”
Phil opened his mouth to answer. His phone buzzed and all four men froze. The sound had been ordinary, almost disappointingly so. A short vibration against the wood. Phil looked at the screen.
A new message sat beneath the profile photograph of a heavyset man in his mid-thirties. He wore a dark cap and a bulky jacket. A massive brown beard covered most of his lower face.
The message contained three words.
How you doing?
Don whistled. “Well, Phil.”
Phil stared at the picture. “He’s large.”
“He’s a hot daddy redneck,” Tom said.
“He looks like he owns several guns...” Ralph added.
“I don’t think I want—”
Phil stopped. His breath caught sharply, and one hand flew to his stomach. The first sensation was pain. It began beneath his ribs and rolled outward, flooding his chest, shoulders, and abdomen. His blue shirt tightened gradually across his torso. The fabric did not change, but the body beneath it did, swelling into unfamiliar proportions.
“Is it happening?” Tom asked.
Phil blushed and nodded quickly. His stomach pushed forward, rounding heavily over the waistband of his jeans. His shoulders broadened, not with the balanced definition of a gym-trained body but with the solid weight of someone naturally large. His arms thickened against the sleeves. Blonde hair darkened at the roots and seemed to retreat beneath the shape of a cap that had not been there before.
Then his face began changing. Phil pressed both palms against his cheeks as his jaw widened beneath them. Light stubble darkened into coarse brown hair. His beard grew quickly, spreading over his chin, down his throat, and outward until his fingers vanished into it.
“Oh my God,” Don said, half laughing and half appalled.
Phil’s eyes widened. “My voice—”
The words came out deeper than before, dragged through a thick Southern accent. He went silent.
Something else had entered him alongside the voice. For one disorienting moment, the dining room disappeared. Phil smelled hot pavement, gasoline, tobacco and stale coffee. He remembered sitting behind the wheel of a truck he had never owned, watching miles of highway disappear beneath him. He remembered arguments conducted loudly and without apology. He remembered a father who believed silence was weakness and a string of roadside bars where no one had ever asked him to lower his voice.
The memories were incomplete, but the emotions attached to them were powerful. Confidence settled over Phil like another layer of muscle and fat. His usual urge was to make himself smaller when people stared. Now he found their attention satisfying.
He leaned back, spreading his legs comfortably beneath the table. His new stomach strained the blue henley. One hand moved through his enormous beard with instinctive familiarity.
“Well,” he said slowly, the Southern drawl now effortless. “Ain’t that something?”
Don stared at him. “Phil?”
Phil looked directly at him. The old Phil would have smiled nervously. This one lifted one eyebrow. “Who's Phil? He your faggy friend?”
Don blinked and Phil’s expression shifted into a broad grin. Then he laughed, a deep, booming sound none of them had ever heard from him before.
“I’m kidding,” he said. “It's me, Phil - mostly...”
Tom handed him a small tabletop mirror. Phil examined himself, turning his head from side to side. The more he looked, the more pleased he became.
“I look strong. Real strong-like.”
“You look like you could throw me through a window,” Ralph said.
Phil’s grin widened. “Maybe don’t test me on that, son.”
The change had taken less than two minutes. When it was over, there was nothing visibly left of the blonde, soft-spoken Canadian except the blue shirt and a faint uncertainty behind the stranger’s eyes.
Phil reached into a pocket and fished out a cigar that had appeared along with his cap. He picked it up naturally.
“I know how to smoke this,” he murmured.
“That’s the memory bleed,” Ralph said.
Phil rolled the cigar between his thick fingers, lit it carefully, and took a deep drag. “Feels more like remembering something I forgot.”
While the men were still dazed by what had just happened to Phil, all of a sudden Don’s phone buzzed. His confident smirk vanished.
The message came from a twenty-two-year-old with dark curly hair, a narrow face, a slim body and almost no visible facial hair.
Don shook his head immediately. “No. Nope. Nuh-uh. I'm not going to be some Twink. I don't want to play any more!”
Tom leaned over. “You can’t refuse after the message arrives.”
“I’m not refusing. I’m stating a fact. I’m out.”
But immediately after the last word slipped out of his mouth he felt his gray shirt begin to loosen across his chest. Don looked down.
The muscles he had spent years building began to soften and recede beneath the fabric. His broad shoulders narrowed. His arms slimmed against the sleeves, veins and body hair fading as his skin became smooth. He gripped both sides of the chair.
“Son of a bitch…”
His mustache thinned with every word until only a faint shadow remained. The strong lines of his face softened. His jaw narrowed, his nose changed shape, and his heavy brown hair curled forward in loose dark waves. Even his posture collapsed inward - more diminutive. More submissive.
Don had always sat as though he owned whatever room he entered. Now his knees drew together beneath the table. His hands looked too large for a moment, then became slim and youthful.
He glanced at Phil and immediately looked away, intimidated by the bear of a man Phil had become.
A rush of foreign memories hit him. A cramped first apartment with mismatched furniture. A phone held beneath restaurant tables while he waited for a daddy to answer. A nervous laugh used to smooth over awkward silences. Nights spent trying on three different shirts because he was afraid the first two made him look too big or too masculine.
The new personality did not erase Don’s confidence all at once. It undermined it from beneath. His anger remained, but the instinct to express it weakened. “I hate this,” he said. His voice was younger, lighter and less commanding.
Phil rested one enormous arm across the back of Don’s chair. “Aww, hey there buddy, you look cute.”
Don recoiled, his face flushing. “Don’t call me cute!” The words lacked their former force.
Phil laughed.
Don crossed his thin arms over his chest, but the gesture only emphasized how small he had become beside Phil.
“I’m twenty-two,” he muttered. “I’m younger than when I graduated.”
Tom smiled. “Some people would consider that lucky.”
“I don’t.”
Don caught his reflection in the black screen of his phone. For several seconds, he looked genuinely wounded. His mustache had always been part of the identity he projected—older, tougher, more established than he felt. Without it, and without the body that supported the image, he seemed exposed.
“I look like some dumb Twink bottom that I would take home and fuck, this is humiliating...” he said quietly.
Phil’s expression softened. “You’re still Don inside there, bud.”
Don looked at him.
Phil paused, as though searching through two personalities for the right thing to say. “At least underneath those cute baby cheeks and scrawny chicken arms.”
But before Don could respond with the appropriate level of vitriol, Ralph’s phone vibrated. Ralph looked down at his phone, blinked once then closed his eyes. “Of course...it’s always older men messaging me on three apps!”
The profile showed a man around 65 with a huge white beard, a bald crown, and a broad, heavy frame. Ralph’s face drained of color. “Come on, man, he's older than my grandfather!”
“Rules,” Don said, sounding almost pleased that someone else’s result was worse.
Ralph pushed himself to his feet. He paused as his balance shifted. His center of gravity settled lower, his stance naturally widening as his body grew broader.
The external changes began in his hands. His skin thickened, veins becoming more prominent beneath weathered flesh. Coarse gray hair spread across his forearms beneath the sleeves of the black NAUGHTY shirt.
His shoulders widened. His chest and stomach filled out into the solid build of a man who had spent decades carrying himself with quiet confidence. The chair groaned when he sat back down, now supporting considerably more weight.
His dark hair retreated rapidly from his forehead and crown. Gray swept through what remained before fading completely to white.
His neatly trimmed mustache blossomed into an enormous beard. It poured down his cheeks and over his chest until it formed a thick, brilliantly white curtain. Ralph instinctively combed it with his fingers, surprised by how soft it felt.
Deep lines settled around his eyes—not harsh ones, but the kind earned through decades of laughing - but at this moment his face rested in a grimace.
He blinked. A flood of memories slipped effortlessly into place. He knew exactly how to trim a beard this size without making a mess. He knew which reading glasses lived in the kitchen and which pair stayed in the car. He remembered the passwords to three different dating apps, which profile pictures got the most attention from younger men, and which local coffee shop was best for a first rendezvous.
His phone suddenly felt different in his hand—not unfamiliar, just... organized. He frowned. "Why do I have notifications turned on for everything?"
His thumb moved across the screen before he consciously decided to. Three settings changed. "That's better."
Tom laughed. "You just hacked your own phone."
"I didn't hack anything." Ralph kept scrolling. "This app keeps suggesting men forty miles away." He wrinkled his nose. "Absolutely not."
Phil leaned over. "What are you looking at?"
Ralph angled the phone away on instinct. "My business."
Phil grinned. "You weren't this private five minutes ago."
"In my 65 years I've learned that people online will absolutely waste your time." The words came out so naturally that Ralph stopped talking. "...Did I just say that?"
Don folded his arms. "You sound experienced."
"I am experienced. Well...he is?" The answer escaped before Ralph could think. He froze - lost between his former and current mind. Then, after another moment, he shrugged. "I suppose I am."
His posture shifted almost imperceptibly. Gone was the restless energy of a twenty-six-year-old. He settled comfortably into the chair, crossing one thick leg over the other with practiced ease.
His gaze drifted around the room, assessing everyone. Tom -still unchanged - looked exhausted. Phil desperately needed a haircut and a beard trim. Don's shirt fit poorly across the shoulders. Ralph noticed all of it in an instant.
"What?" Tom asked.
Ralph smiled. "Nothing. You boys just have no idea how you're presenting yourselves. People used to put more effort into such things.”
Phil burst out laughing. "There he is."
"There who is?"
"The old guy."
Ralph reached up, absentmindedly stroking his beard. "It is an exceptional beard."
"It is," Tom admitted.
Ralph caught his reflection in the darkened window. A large man stared back—sixty-five, bald on top, framed by a magnificent white beard. He expected horror. Instead... "Huh." He tilted his head. "I actually pull this off."
Phil stared. "Seriously?"
"What? I'm not saying I'd have picked sixty-five..." He turned his face from side to side. "...but I'm handsome...I mean he's handsome." Ralph rested one hand in his beard, surprisingly at ease. "I still know I'm Ralph," he said quietly. "But I also know who this man is."
Tom looked up. "What's he like?"
Ralph smiled—not sadly, but with unmistakable fondness. "Confident." He glanced at his reflection again." Comfortable in his own skin." A beat passed. "And apparently very picky."
Phil snorted. "That sounds about right."
Ralph laughed. "It really does."
For several minutes, they sat quietly. Then Tom’s phone buzzed. He looked down at the screen.
The man who had messaged him appeared to be in his mid-forties. Dark hair showed gray at the sides beneath a baseball cap. Salt-and-pepper scruff framed a tired but attractive face. His profile offered little information, but the photograph had been taken in a kitchen. A family calendar hung behind him, partially visible on the wall.
Tom smiled.
Don noticed. “You are far too happy.”
“I told you, this could be fun! I got a hot daddy!"
Tom’s red polo tightened first across his shoulders, then relaxed as his body settled into a broader, slightly softer maturity. Fine lines appeared around his eyes. His face lengthened, his jaw grew heavier, and dark stubble spread across his cheeks before turning gray in patches.
His hair darkened from sandy brown, then silver appeared at the temples. Tom held his phone in front of him throughout the change, studying every new line with fascination.
His hands aged around the device. The skin grew rougher, the knuckles more pronounced. Hair thickened along his forearms and beneath the open collar of the red polo.
He inhaled sharply when the memories arrived. A wife asleep upstairs while he stared at his phone in the kitchen, looking at pictures of men. A wedding ring slipped into a drawer before taking photographs. Children calling from another room. Years spent building a life that looked perfect from the outside and felt increasingly divided from within.
Tom’s smile faded as the stranger’s guilt settled into him alongside his attraction. He felt the practiced caution of a man who deleted conversations, cleared notifications, and always listened for footsteps. For the first time, the transformation frightened him.
“Tom?” Don asked.
Tom looked up. His face now belonged entirely to the middle-aged stranger. “He has a family,” Tom said.
Ralph frowned. “You knew that from the picture?”
“I remember them.” He closed his eyes. “A wife. Two kids. He tells himself this app doesn’t count if he never meets anyone in person. He just shares pictures and sexts men while jerking off.”
Don looked uncomfortable. “That’s dark.”
Tom rubbed his salt-and-pepper jaw. The texture fascinated him despite the sadness in his expression.
“He’s lonely,” Tom said. “And terrified. And he’s been both for so long that they feel like the same thing. He’s not sure how much longer he can keep up the façade before it comes crashing down.”
The older personality moved through him more subtly than the others. His posture became relaxed but watchful. His speech slowed. He checked the position of his phone before setting it face down.
Yet when he looked at his reflection in the window, pleasure returned. Tom touched the gray at his temples and smiled. “I still like this face and body…”
Don groaned. “Of course you do, and if I'm being honest from my new body yours is looking pretty good to me as well...but I'll never admit that again so soak it up.”
Tom laughed, now in the warm, slightly rough voice of a suburban father. “Sorry.”
“You don’t sound sorry...”
With all four transformations complete, the four friends - now unrecognizable - sat around the same table like strangers wearing evidence of a friendship no one else could see.
Phil lounged in his blue henley, cigar smoke curling from one hand, his large body relaxed with newfound authority. Don sat beside him in his loose gray shirt, slim and young, visibly annoyed whenever Phil’s arm drifted too close. Ralph occupied the center like an aging patriarch who had been dragged reluctantly from bed after 10pm white beard resting against the red NAUGHTY lettering across his chest. Tom on the right in his red polo, smiling at a touch of his salt and pepper beard or a glimpse of his older hands whenever he thought no one was watching.
They returned to the card game. It was not the same. Phil became competitive and loud. He slapped winning hands onto the table and accused Don of bluffing in a Southern drawl that grew thicker as the night continued and he had more to drink.
Don insisted he was not bluffing, then folded whenever Phil stared at him too long out of sheer intimidation.
Ralph complained about the quality of the beer, the temperature, and the way young gay men today can’t tell Tina Turner from Janet Jackson.
Tom quietly won three rounds in a row - reluctant to draw attention to himself or to the conversation he began with a now younger man on his phone on GRINDR.
By midnight, the new personalities settled more deeply, and fragments of the other lives slipped into their conversation.
Phil described rebuilding an engine, then stopped when he realized he had never done it.
Don mentioned a roommate named Evan and could not remember whether Evan was real or imagined.
Ralph began telling a story about a great niece’s birthday before his voice broke.
Tom reached automatically for a wedding ring that was not on his finger.
At around one in the morning, the game ended without anyone declaring a winner. They remained around the table, surrounded by empty bottles, cards and phones.
As they prepared to depart for their own homes, to give themselves a few hours to "explore" their new situations, Don asked "What happens when we wake up?”
“We go back...in theory.” Ralph said.
“That’s not what I meant.”
No one answered immediately. Phil looked down at his huge hands.
“I think I’m gonna miss this, y'all.”
Don curled his cute twenty-two-year-old nose and gave Phil a tired smile, “I won’t.”
“Maybe we keep some of it," Tom said.
“The memories?” Ralph asked.
“The perspective.”
The next morning Tom woke with his cheek pressed against his pillow - and an unfamiliar young man in the bed next to him. Someone who messaged him thirstily on GRINDR before his friends headed home for the evening.
For several seconds, he did not move. Then he lifted his head and saw his own young hands. His red polo laid on the floor next to the bed. The gray had vanished from his hair. His face felt smooth. "Ugh, this is going to be fun to explain to him."
In the back of his mind Tom also felt a sense of satisfaction. He was able to follow through on an action his middle-aged married counterpart was always too afraid to carry out.
After a couple minutes reflecting on his predicament, Tom reached for his phone and saw a chain of messages from his friends on the experience from last night culminating in a message from Phil:
So ... Same time next month?
Next to the message were 2 thumbs up. Tom smirked and typed:
Eighteen-year-old Ben slipped into the costume shop to escape the rain on a cold Chicago fall morning. Scrawny, freckled, and painfully aware that he still looked younger than most college freshmen, he decided to browse a bit to pass some time - hoping for the rain to let up. He stopped when he found an old Chicago police uniform tucked behind a rack of capes.
It was several sizes too large, but he tried it on anyway. Staring at the baggy sleeves in the mirror, he laughed. “Yeah, real convincing. I look soooo intimidating.”
Then the uniform tightened. Ben shot upward as muscle filled his shoulders and arms. The uniform started to fit better.
His youthful face sharpened and aged beneath his fingertips while reddish peach fuzz spread into a dark mustache on his upper lip.
His hair thinned rapidly until only a narrow fringe remained around the edges. By the time he looked thirty-five, the uniform fit perfectly—and he was smiling.
He leaned into the mirror to admire his new more handsome, rugged looking face. Grasping at the corner or his new mustache and smirking.
Before long the last strands of hair disappeared and his face sagged a bit with age as his body settled into the powerful frame of a man in his mid-forties.
As the rain finally relented, Ben stepped out of the shop a changed man. Nobody would have mistaken him for a kid anymore. His days of homework and youthful anxiety were just a distant memory. It was time to return to his precinct and then hit the beat for the day.
