The Exception
This story is a spin-off of Body Swap Roulette
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.”
“Then next time, come here to see me.”
Brian nodded, though the answer frightened him.
