Most of all men included in tf stories. Original pictures are gathered from the net. If I use a picture of yours in a way you disaprove, please message me and I'll delete it. When it's not a reblog, the manipulation, caption or stories are made by me. I don't post manipulation here as often as I used to, since the change of policies, but you can find my work here : https://www.patreon.com/enolt I also reblog pictures that I like, of course, sometimes stories from others and mostly men I find gorgeous and whom I'd love to be involved in a tf caption or story. I'm not an english native speaker, so I apologize for the mistakes I may make. Let's enjoy some manly beauty ;)
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:
Months passed after the abrupt departure of star reporter Nick Collins. In his absence, his junior reporter Mitch took up the investigative mantle. He was keen to avoid the same mistakes as Nick, believing his colleague to have been disappeared by the police who claimed he was alive and well. Mitch hadn’t been able to contact him, all his calls and texts were left unanswered and no-one seemed to have heard from him; but nor did they seem to care. Instead, Mitch decided he would focus his efforts on the mysterious company that Nick’s notes mentioned in connection with the local police precinct.
He only had the name New You Industries as a starting point, but like Nick’s efforts, nothing of substance could be found on any such company. However, Nick’s notes mentioned a delivery from the business was due at the precinct garage at the time of his disappearance. Working backward, Mitch managed to obtain a handful of images of the delivery vehicle on various security and traffic cameras and determined it must have originated from a small, isolated manufacturing facility on the city fringes.
Mitch concocted an elaborate plan for infiltrating the facility without raising suspicion, so he was disappointed to find that the building was abandoned by the time he arrived. Dispirited, he stepped through the empty, echoing warehouse. Vats, bottles, and production lines sat empty and disused. Alongside the chemical equipment sat torn pages. Pictures of runes and strange languages colored the paper. The facility seemed to be as interested in the occult as it was in material sciences.
Mitch moved through multiple abandoned desks, rifling through the shelves and drawers in the hope of finding something - anything - that might explain what the facility did and what had happened to Nick. Then he saw it - a set of vials containing colored fluids sitting amongst empty flasks, trays, and boxes. “Chameleon Colors… For testing purposes,” Mitch whispered, reciting the handwritten label affixed to the plastic stand. Some of the vials themselves seemed to have labels just as meaningless and obscure, while others didn’t have any label at all. He picked out one of the vials, holding the tube close to his face and watching as the thick, fluorescent orange liquid within slowly churned. Letting his curiosity get the better of him, Mitch unscrewed the cap. As soon as the lid was removed a thin tendril shot out from the container and attached to his clothing. He dropped the vial in shock, smashing it on the floor and releasing the entirety of the cup-sized contents. He attempted to spring out of the seat and flee, only to be pushed down by the rubbery arm.
The substance gripped and pulled at his clothing, not only tearing and shredding it but seemingly annihilating it just by touch. Once his waist was free of clothing the entire small orange bundle on the floor flung itself around his waist and seemingly glued him to the chair. “Get off, get off!” he growled, tugging at the rubbery substance to no avail as it spread and closed around his ass and cock, taking the shape of a pair of shiny, semi-solid briefs. Again and again, Mitch tried to pull himself away while the material pushed gently at his ass and tightened around his cock. Soon his grunts of struggle became more and more like moans. His cock hardened, pressed against his leg tightly by the cool, latex-like material. The substance rippled and writhed around his member, pleasuring it and turning the journalist into a moaning, sexual mess.
Mitch was powerless as he squirmed and tugged at the material. It was then that he felt a tingling rising from underneath the shiny, orange goo. It spread up his stomach, and with it, short dark hairs began to sprout. “Ah… ah… what t-the hell?!” he moaned, watching on as his smooth stomach grew a dark, thick treasure trail. A contraction and a flash of intense pleasure frazzled the journalist for a moment, forcing him to hunch forward. His stomach pulsed again and again as abdominal muscles were encouraged to grow and strengthen thicker with each heartbeat.
“This… ah… this isn’t real… i-it can’t b-b- augh!” Mitch squealed as he fired cum into the liquid underwear. But the sensations didn’t stop. Instead, seemingly encouraged by the result, a narrow tendril wormed its way from his waist and coiled around his chest. Like his abs, his flat, non-existent pecs throbbed with power and began to swell. Not only that, but the same dark, dense hairs blossomed forth from the base of his neck and between the enlarging pecs. Mitch let out a shout as he came again, unable to resist.
Expanding its reach, the orange, latex coil twisted around Mitch’s narrow shoulders and frail arms. Mitch hollered as his arms were forced to grow, muscles twitched under the skin, bloating and swelling in beautiful striations. His shoulders widened and thickened, taking on the same lean, muscular proportions as the rest of him. His underarms, while already graced with hair, thickened with additional darker follicles. A ripe musk wafted from them, almost intoxicating. Mitch found himself gently pushing his nose against his sweaty underarm and inhaling deeply, groaning as he shot another load. Part of him was shocked that he was enjoying the odor, but the other part of him just wanted to embrace it. Meanwhile, his forearms sprouted now familiar hair and puffed up with bulk. Just a sliver of the substance crawled onto the backs of his hands, but this was more than enough. His fingers sizzled with growth, stretching longer and longer, thickening simultaneously. The backs of his hands pushed broader along with his palms, dusting themselves with hair as they grew. Mitch couldn’t believe how strong and agile these hands felt. “This is… ah… s-so… hot…” he groaned, coming again. He couldn’t keep track of how many orgasms he’d endured, but the orange material seemed to just absorb the mess.
Seemingly satisfied with its work, the tendrils receded from his arms and then separated from the underwear, crawling up the back of Mitch’s neck as a separate entity, forming into a baseball cap around his head. “Please… please…” Mitch begged and moaned, but even he didn’t quite know whether it was for more or for it to stop. Further down meanwhile, additional orange tendrils curled around his thighs and calves. He gripped the armrests and leaned forward feeling muscles begin to surge to life in his thighs. They stretched and ballooned while thick hair spread out from underneath the orange undergarment, taking over his legs. Mitch let out a soft moan of approval feeling the hair and muscle growing against the side of his rock-hard cock.
At the same time, Mitch’s hair pulled into his scalp underneath the cap, turning jet black while taking on a shorter buzz cut. His calves pulsated and bulged as they too expanded and grew, his ankles clicking as they thickened and strengthened. He was relishing the experience now. He could feel new, dense stubble pressing against his armpit as he took another whiff. A stupid smile flicked across his face as its structure shifted. He could feel his jaw widening and sharpening, his cheekbones lifting, his nose and ears broadening. Thicker, darker, and shapelier eyebrows took place over eyes that were now brown instead of blue.
The cap on Mitch’s head hardened and took on a more traditionally fabric texture, all signs of its liquid origin extinguished. Downstairs, however, the job was not complete. The tendrils wrapped around his larger, hairier legs moved further, twisting around the soles and tops of his feet. He threw his head back and moaned feeling his toes and soles stretch along the cold, concrete floor while hairs erupted along the tops. Like they had done before, the tendrils separated the main body and spread out evenly around his swelling feet, forming a pair of bright orange size thirteen trainers and socks. Mitch growled in satisfaction at the feeling of his long toes pushing snugly into the massive boats.
The hat and footwear were now nothing more than traditional textiles. But the original segment coating his waist persisted, still rippling against and pleasuring his cock but now speeding up and increasing in force. Mitch couldn’t muster words, only breaths and gasps as he felt his cock stretch larger, little by little with every pulse of the substance. He could see it plainly through the tightly wrapped material, pressed against his leg, edging longer and thickening up. It pushed and pulls on his balls, triggering their growth and further production of hormones and cum. Mitch bucked and thrust uncontrollably, feeling his ass packing on extra cushioning and mass. Then, like a switch had been flipped, the changes ended. The masculinized journalist lurched over and came repeatedly as the last of the incredible orange substance turned into plain old fabric.
Mitch let out a nervous laugh. He was in a state of shock, though at the same time in awe of the looks, strength, and hair and he’d gained. His phone buzzed on the empty desk to his side, a message from Nick.
“Did you find what you were looking for? ;)”
The sound of a car engine starting whirred outside. Mitch leaped off the chair, not caring that he was dressed only in a bright orange cap, underwear, and shoes. He stood half-naked in the evening twilight watching as a parked police vehicle pulled out from next to his car and sped down the road. "Nick?“
With nothing more to do but leave, he packed the other vials into his car and left the abandoned factory. As he drove down the highway he caught a glimpse of his new face in the rear-view and smirked in approval. Part of him still couldn’t believe that that was his face in the mirror, his hands on the wheel, his legs on the seat. He wondered what he would do now. He couldn’t go back to the newspaper, this was a secret he couldn’t share. But then his mind turned to the various, colored liquids sitting on the backseat. Perhaps this was a secret he could share with a few people…
Clark sat down in his living room sofa doom scrolling his way through after a full day. Really just the same routine as anyone else would when they go down the rabbit hole — it’s doom scrolling through Instagram Reels, Youtube Shorts, and even Tiktok
Every time though he’d come across ads from Amazon, some random bogus website, and finally one of those game ads where you can actually play it right then and there. “Damn it, not this again” he said after getting stuck on one game ad that froze his screen, unable to continue scrolling unless he completed the task.
The game was Super Adventures and it had a feature of creating your own superhero avatar so you could do missions in-game. The ad allowed you to customize your own avatar with specific traits and powers.
“Fine I’ll do it, ugh” Clark complained.
The ad for the game was simple enough, it had an avatar in the center and a selection of powers you can give it
On screen he chose the basic superhero powers that he knew Superman had — since he was named Clark after all, he thought why not just input those choices?
“Alright so just flight, super strength, invulnerability, speed, and laser vision” he said as he tapped his way through. After selecting the screen then showed the hero avatar — what caught his eye was it kind of looked like him but as if he were drawn like a comic book hero with an absolute unit of a body, one that would be impossible to attain without steroids he thought.
After that, he was finally able to continue doom scrolling. “Man, I hate these pesky ads” as he continued looking through reels of dog memes and funny accidents.
He started feeling tired so he got up from the sofa and made his way to his kitchen to get something to eat. What he failed to realize was — he wasn’t actually walking
As he “walked” past his living room mirror, he saw a glimpse of himself but what shocked him was his feet weren’t touching the ground at all. He dropped most of what he had been carrying to put away
“Whaaat the fuuu..” he exclaimed as he saw himself floating in mid-air. “This can’t be real…I-I’m just tired that’s all” he said worryingly closing his eyes. As he did, he floated back down to the floor as he felt the wood touch his feet.
“No way that could’ve been real” he said as he remembered he clicked “Flight” as one of the superhero options on that ad earlier
“Okay okay that might’ve just been a hallucination, breathe Clark” he said. But to fully dispel his worries, he thought of trying to lift the sofa to be sure the “Super Strength” didn’t apply.
Boy was he in for a trip.
As he positioned himself beside his sofa to try and lift it, it actually budged as if it were just made of a sheet of paper. What previously took him effort with a friend to even get into his apartment was now above his head with just one hand and with almost zero effort
“Ho—ho-okay this can’t be fucking real” Clark said with the sofa hoisted above him almost touching the ceiling. He then lowered it back down to make sure he doesn’t damage anything. He thought that if he now had that kind of strength, one wrong move would easily destroy anything
And that’s when his clothes practically exploded
With loud rips, his clothes practically exploded and tore off his body — why? — because it was as if massive muscles just piled up onto his frame without warning
His shirt and hoodie couldn’t have expected his entire torso to just suddenly pack on pounds of pure muscle mass — thick pillowy pecs, biceps as big as his head, an impossibly wide shoulders and back, 8-pack abs, and all supported by the most powerful set of legs that were now damaging his floor
“FUCK what the absolute FUCK!” He shouted as the rush of his body expanding that much was surprising as the past two powers
He looked down and decided to tear off the torn up fabric off his body to take a better look
As he got whatever was left of his shirt, hoodie, and joggers off his body (with incredible ease), he finally got to see his body in its newfound glory
First, he really couldn’t see much downwards as his heaving chest was now blocking the view. He instinctively gave them a flex and saw how thick and far they went as they bounced.
Second, he felt up his new arms that were now futher away from each other. He felt up the bicep that he couldn’t even wrap his new massive hand around and felt up every ridge and vein that was now there
Third, he propped up his shoulders and back feeling up the new wingspan. He guessed he would at least be double the previous width he was just a few minutes ago with how his lats were pushing his arms out and his shoulders being capped by bowling balls
Fourth, he finally peered down to look at his legs. This thighs alone were bigger than his previous waistline with all the muscle mass stuffed in there
“Fuck man, this can’t be happening for real can it?” He said as he flexed a bicep in the mirrors direction, catching it ball up as big as his head
As he walked to the window he couldn’t feel the floor again. “Might as well take this out on a test run” Clark said as he flew out of his apartment
As he zipped through the sky, he decided on landing just down on the street of his apartment building to test out his new muscles and strength
People on the sidewalk were shocked to find a man with barely enough clothes just land heroically out of nowhere.
Clark then tried lifting up a parked car on the road. Much to his excitement and wonder, the car weighed nothing more than a feather as he hoisted it above him like the sofa in his living room.
Unbenknownst to him while being distracted by his new powers, everyone got their phones out and was recording the behemoth lifting up a car with one hand.
Unbenknownst to him as well, he was lifting the car so high up because everyone stood only up to his lower pec height. He didn’t manage to check how the ad also affected his height as he towered over everyone on the street
“This is gonna be great” Clark said to himself as he put the car back down and flew off, leaving a crater on the road where he launched himself — “gotta go back and install that game” he said as he flew back to his apartment.
Epilogue
Clark, now alias Goliath, was back in his apartment after a long day fighting crime in the city as he doom scrolled his way through social media again having a bit of difficulty with the size of his phone versus the size of his hands
See, after downloading the game, he made more specific modifications to his superhero avatar — all for the better he thought — now being twice or thrice the size he previously was with just the ad version of the game.
“I guess some ads aren’t all that pesky, heh” he laughed to himself bouncing his now massive pecs.
——————————————-
Credit to the owner of the first photo who’s also on here. Sorry the moment I saw it, I knew I had to make a story out of it.
Enjoy! I had a hard time writing this because the AI gave me photos I couldn’t resist staring at
I've had my fair share of crappy work uniforms. When I worked at the corndog stand at the mall, they made me wear a lame striped shirt with a matching dorky hat. My last job as a server, they made everyone wear a giant sparkly name tag that lit up in bright letters. And the worst of them all was when I had to dress up as the giant dancing rat as a pizza place's mascot to entertain the customers. But unlike all of those, I very much enjoy my new job's uniform. Honestly its the best part of the job.
When I got hired at Alphalete, I didn't think I'd really fit into the culture. The gym was full of heavily muscled bros who looked like they work out for a living. Not only were the customers all jacked, but the employees themselves were an army of Spartan soldiers, looking ready for combat with their chiseled bodies. Honestly, while I was being interviewed, I had to put all my focus on the job ahead to not get distracted by the interviewer's massive set pecs poking from his collared shirt. So much more different than my more slender, untoned body. Compared to them, I was a stick with no muscles that could break with the slightest push. Even though I was sure I bombed it, the next day I got the call and the job was mine.
Going in on my first day, I had no idea what was in store. They told me to wear 'casual clothing' cause a uniform would be provided. When I arrived, a man similar to my physiche was there waiting for me. His messy brown hair and the way it looked like the shirt he was wearing was two sizes too large gave me a breath of relief; not everyone who worked here was some muscled adonis. He greeted me like we had met, but I had never seen his face before. Still, he asked me to follow him to the back, where he would show me my uniform.
"Today, we have you on a probationary period as you get used to the training and services we offer. Your job is to give simple guidance to the folks here, offer spotting, and familiarize yourself with the facilities." As he led me through the area accessible only to employees, I pondered how I would be able to help anyone lifting weights that were probably heavier than me. We finally arrived at a door labeled uniforms, and as I followed him inside, I was shocked to find walls of racks, hang upon them were what looked like naked heavy-set muscled bodies.
I was about to run away in terror when the guy next to me smiled, "No need to fret, they are not real people or anything! These are just the company-issued uniforms." It took me a moment to calm down and hear him out. Apparently, the secret of this gym is that not all the trainers and instructors who work here are strong in the traditional sense. As a motivator for the customers to reach their goals, all the employees wore these high-tech silicone bodysuits built with strength enhancers. That way, the gym can hire anyone regardless of body limitations, and the customers are more motivated to return. As he was saying that, the person demonstrated slipping on the suit and accompanying handsome mask, turning into the buff interviewer I had met before! His shirt now fit his new body, hugging the chest with his pepperoni-nipples poking through the fabric.
He pointed towards someone sitting passively on a chair. From his blank stare at the wall and lack of movement, I concluded that this was another uniform. "Here, this suit has just come in, just like you! Standard issue trainer body. Should allow you to perform all the tasks you need for your first day."
As I stared at the handsome man waiting for me to arrive, the red 'Alphalete' shirt and Under Armour compression pants barely containing the shredded muscles underneath, I couldn't help but smile hungrily. This, for sure, would be the Best Work Uniform I've ever gotten to wear.
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:
germansingergirl
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk
izzy806
2087
yousharknotpass
