The shower took about ten minutes longer than it would have, and thirty minutes longer than his normal showering routine, because he broke down halfway through and huddled in the floor of the shower, unable to look at Dakota’s body or touch it, turning the temperature and pressure up as high as he could stand it as though it would wash off this soft feminine shell and leave the real him.

Over the next few days, Kevin had to endure an endless barrage of teasing and questions from Bryce about what it was like turning into a woman. His hope that the situation would be quickly resolved rapidly evaporated, and he resigned himself to following Dakota’s self-care regimen. He started the next morning with her exercise routine (five different stretches followed by twenty minutes of cardio), which made him uncomfortably aware of Dakota’s body, but wasn’t too unbearable. Then a shower, following her detailed instructions to ensure that her hair stayed glossy and untangled, her skin smooth, and her vagina yeast-free. That took about ten minutes longer than it would have, and thirty minutes longer than his normal showering routine, because he broke down halfway through and huddled in the floor of the shower, unable to look at Dakota’s body or touch it, turning the temperature and pressure up as high as he could stand it as though it would wash off this soft feminine shell and leave the real him. But the real him was divided, and half of him was thousands of miles away, across a continent and an ocean.

After he was dried off and dressed in a T-shirt and sweats, he fixed breakfast and ate, taking a women’s health multivitamin and three herbal supplements. He couldn’t follow her diet exactly with no yogurt or fruit on hand, but he did his best.

He kept in touch with Amy, the woman in his body, who was working with an interpreter to help Ayesha, the person in Bryce’s body, take care of it. The British authorities had gotten them a hotel room together along with the other stranded people from Heathrow and other regional teleport stations and private teleport booths around the London area, and assigned Ayesha an NHS doctor for the duration of the crisis, though so far she hadn’t had any problems that would require a doctor visit. If the crisis lasted more than two weeks, though, she’d need some prescription refills.

Elise and Bryce kept him updated on their situations, as well. Elise’s boss had sent her a laptop via cargo-teleport, which was still working, and she had a priority flight back to the U.S. scheduled on one of the first intercontinental flights since the cost of teleportation had dropped to a level that could compete with airlines. She was working with other engineers to figure out what had gone wrong with the teleport network. The family of Benedita, the woman whose body she was occupying, had loaned her a few days’ worth of clothes and given her a place to stay for the first night until the Brazilian government arranged hotel rooms for her and the other stranded people in smaller cities.

After spending one night in a hotel in Xinyi, Bryce and a handful of other stranded travelers had been sent by train to a new hotel on the outskirts of Guangzhou, where the government was putting up all the foreigners in that region of China who’d ended up in the wrong bodies. Apparently the hotel was still under construction, though the wing they were staying in was pretty much finished, which was why the government could get so many hotel rooms in one place on zero notice. Bryce had found a lot of other travelers who spoke English, whether natively or at least pretty well, and several of them had formed a sort of tour group to explore the city while they were stuck there. He complained to Kevin about how his forty-nine-year-old knees ached when he walked up slopes and stairs, but he seemed to be having a pretty good vacation nonetheless.

Kevin was freaking out about Dakota’s body less often now, but he wasn’t anywhere near used to it and didn’t think he ever would be. The mountain scenery was beautiful, and he enjoyed short walks in the clearing around the house and along the lakeshore, but Dakota had warned him that there were bears, cougars and wolves in the area, so he’d decided to stick pretty close.

Eight days after the mass body shuffle, not long after Elise had flown back to Atlanta and joined the other engineers working on the problem, InstaThere announced that they had found the cause of the problem and fixed it, and opened up the teleport network again. They said they should have a solution to return people to their proper bodies again within a few more days. Mere minutes after the announcement, a chime sounded, and a few moments later, a tall blond man in a tailored suit stepped out of the teleport vestibule.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m Dakota. You told me you didn’t know how to operate a teleport booth, so...”

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “Can you program it for me? I’d like to meet up with my wife and son — I sent them messages after I heard the announcement, but I haven’t heard back yet. My wife is at InstaThere’s main R&D lab in Atlanta, Georgia, and my son is in Guangzhou, China. I sent him a message suggesting we meet up at InstaThere in Atlanta.”

“Well, that makes it simpler,” Dakota said. “I’m sure InstaThere has public teleport booths in their lobby. We just need to look up the target code. Do they have more than one facility in Atlanta...?”

But she didn’t want to enter the target code and send him to Atlanta right away. “You’ll need a few days’ worth of my clothes,” she said, “and toiletries and so on.” Kevin would have been perfectly fine making do with some of the hiking clothes and sleepwear she stored at the cabin, but she was horrified at the thought of him going out in public wearing that. “No, you need decent things for different occasions,” she said. “At the very least, several work outfits and something more casual for after work or if you leave home on the weekend. And makeup.”

“I’m not comfortable in your body and don’t want to wear anything too feminine,” he said uneasily. “Definitely not makeup.”

“Tough,” she said. “I’m a public figure and I don’t want you going around in my body, wearing my face with no makeup, getting photographed wearing hiking clothes or whatever baggy androgynous stuff you decide to try hiding my figure in. Those photos will stick around on the Internet forever. You don’t want that woman who wound up in your body wearing dresses or makeup and risking pictures getting back to your friends, do you? Think about it.”

Kevin reluctantly agreed, so they ended up teleporting together to Dakota’s house in Toronto, where Dakota dragged him up to her bedroom and went through her drawers and closet, picking out outfits and instructing him in the fine points of their use. It was over an hour later when she teleported him to InstaThere Labs in Atlanta.

Kevin walked out as soon as the door slid open and went to the reception desk. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Kevin Eldridge. My wife, Elise Eldridge, is an engineer here, and she’s supposed to have told you to expect me...?”

The receptionist didn’t bat an eye at the mismatch of Kevin’s name and body — apparently she’d met some other sex-swapped victims of InstaThere’s screwup. “Just a moment,” she said, and made a phone call.

While the receptionist was trying to reach Elise, Kevin felt a hand on his arm and turned around, startled. “Bryce!” he exclaimed. There was the middle-aged Chinese man his son had sent him a selfie of, grinning ridiculously.

“Looking good, Dad,” Bryce said. “Have you been whiling away your time in the mountains watching makeup tutorials?”

Kevin blushed, feeling gross. Bryce was just good-naturedly teasing, like he usually did, and it felt wrong to resent it, but he didn’t like it. “No, Dakota insisted on showing me how before she’d teleport me here. She hadn’t bothered telling me about her makeup regimen while I was stuck in that cabin, but once I was going out in public, she didn’t want me to wind up getting photographed and messing up her ‘image.’”

“And I guess that explains the clothes, too.”

“Yeah, I’ve been wearing her hiking clothes and pajamas until now.” Kevin was wearing, at Dakota’s insistence, an outfit similar to the one she’d been out shopping in just before Kevin landed in her body: a low-cut blouse, black with dark blue patterns of lines and circles, and those new women’s pants, Kevin couldn’t remember what the style was called, that were tight in the waist and continued tight down one leg while getting extremely loose on the other.

Bryce grinned even wider. “Fortunately, Mr. Chu hasn’t been such a pain in the ass. Come on, let’s go see Mom.”

“Don’t we have to wait for...?”

“No, Mom sent me out here with an extra visitor’s badge for you,” he said, and fished it out of his pocket and handed it to Kevin. “Come on!”

Kevin turned to the receptionist, who’d hung up and was smiling at them. “I see your son’s already found you,” she said. “Go on.”

So Kevin clipped on the badge and followed Bryce down one of the halls branching from the lobby. A few minutes later, Bryce knocked on a door and Dr. Landon Karga answered the door. He was Elise’s boss, whom Kevin had met at a couple of office Christmas parties, a white man a little older than Kevin — that is, the age of his real body. “Hey,” Bryce said. “I’m Elise Eldridge’s son, I was here a few minutes ago, and my dad just arrived,” gesturing at Kevin, who smiled nervously.

“Come on in,” Karga said. “Elise said she was going to show you around a little and then take a late lunch break with you.” He led them into the lab and Kevin barely had time to take in all the equipment, including over a dozen partially dismantled teleport booths of different sizes, before Elise, now a dark-skinned woman not much older than Dakota, was hurrying toward them.

“Kevin!” she exclaimed. “I’m so glad to see you,” and she hugged him. After a moment of hesitation, he hugged back, trying to ignore the awkwardness of feeling Dakota’s breasts pressed against Benedita’s. Would Dakota or Benedita object to this? Certainly they’d have a right to protest if he and Elise went much farther, but hugging was probably all right.

“It’s good to see you too,” he said, backing up a couple of steps after they let go of the hug. “I’ll be glad when you and your colleagues get us back in the right bodies, though.”

Elise frowned, and Kevin felt like Dakota’s heart had dropped into her stomach. “What? The news said you were close to cracking it!”

“The PR department kind of took what Dr. Karga said and ran with it,” she said. “It’s not the first time we’ve had trouble with them promising something that we have to deliver on. We have some ideas, but... well, figuring out how to keep it from happening again is not the same as reproducing it reliably on demand. We could be in these bodies for a while longer.”

Kevin felt dizzy, and looked around absently for something to sit down on. “How much longer?”

“I don’t want to try to estimate... could be weeks, could be months. Probably not years.”

“Huh.” After a long silence, he said, “I guess that’s under NDA, right? I’m not supposed to tell Dakota, or Amy, or anybody?”

“Definitely not. Anyway, let me show you what we’ve figured out so far...”

But Kevin was in a haze of shock and didn’t take in much of what Elise said or showed them. He didn’t start to recover much until they were already on the way to lunch. The building had a food court with several higher-end fast food places, and he had to furrow Dakota’s brow and review the instructions she’d given him about her diet before he could think clearly about what to order.

During lunch, the conversation turned to the people in their original bodies. “I think we should see about getting Ayesha to Bryce’s clinic,” Kevin said.

“I’m not sure we need to,” Elise said. “Yeah, the general standard of health care in Libya may not be great, but she’s from a rich family and can get whatever she needs to take care of Bryce’s body as long as she has it.”

“So she can teleport to Emory just as easily as anywhere else,” Bryce said. “But just because it’s the best clinic in Georgia doesn’t mean it’s the best in the world. She can probably afford one of the even better ones.”

“But the doctors at those clinics won’t know your medical history like Dr. Shaw,” Kevin pointed out. “They can request records from Emory, but reading the records isn’t the same as remembering every illness you’ve ever had.”

“Good point,” Elise said. “So let’s contact her and suggest that she keep Bryce’s appointment with Dr. Shaw on the eighteenth of August if she’s still in his body at that point, and go to him if the body’s health gets worse before then.”

After lunch, Elise went back to work, while Kevin and Bryce rode home in Kevin’s car, which Elise had summoned from their driveway at home when Kevin arrived.

Kevin didn’t have to be back at work, or Bryce back at school, until the next day, so after they unpacked, they relaxed and watched a movie, starting to fix supper when Elise messaged them with her ETA.

After Elise returned home, they ate supper, and talked more about their experiences and Kevin and Bryce’s impending return to work and school. It wasn’t until after supper, when Bryce went to his room, that Kevin and Elise found themselves alone together for the first time in these bodies. Kevin felt the awkwardness and the sexual tension more than ever.

“So,” Elise said, “I didn’t want to ask in front of Bryce, but how are you holding up? Being in a woman’s body can’t be easy for you.”

“It isn’t,” he said. “After eight days, I’ve gotten somewhat inured to bathing this body, and peeing sitting down. But only sort of. Seeing myself in a mirror — or rather, seeing someone else — is still a shock.”

“I can relate to the last part, at least,” Elise said. “If there’s anything you need help with, let me know. Has that body’s period started yet?”

“No,” Kevin said, turning bright red. “Dakota told me it should be due in another week or so. She sent me home with a supply of the brand of tampons she uses.”

“Did she show you how to insert a tampon?”

“...She told me.”

“Okay. Let me know when the time comes and I’ll help if necessary.”

They were quiet for a while before Elise said, “When I talked to Benedita through an interpreter, she asked me not to have sex while I’m borrowing her body —”

“Yeah, Dakota said the same thing,” Kevin said. She had also given him extremely specific instructions about what he was and was not allowed to do in the way of masturbation; he’d tuned it out, not having any intention of doing anything of the kind. Doing anything with her body that confronted him with its femininity was stressful enough; he didn’t want to add more to the minimum necessary bathing, dressing and peeing. He didn’t mention that to Elise.

“And no kissing, either,” Elise continued with a frown. “But she said we could hug. And she didn’t say we couldn’t keep hugging for a long time. Do you want to... just snuggle? I’ve missed you so much.”

“Yeah,” Kevin said with a nervous smile. “That would be nice.”

It was nice, eventually, though they had to shift around a little before they found a comfortable position that didn’t constantly draw Kevin’s attention to Dakota’s breasts or crotch.

I have a spooky new novelette, "A Girl, a House and a Secret", available in epub and pdf formats from itch.io. You can buy it by itself, but you would get more value for your money if you buy it as part of the Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology.

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