From the experience of the trans people he’d been talking to, at the support group and online, he didn’t think the dysphoria would get much better. Most of the improvement had come in the first few days after he got over the shock of the sudden new body, or in the first few days after he started wearing men’s clothes again.

A couple of days later, Kevin was eating lunch at his desk when he got a call from Amy.

“Hi,” she said. His voice sounded tired. “Just wanted to let you know I’m going home today.”

“That’s great,” Kevin said.

“I’m gonna be going to rehab three times a week,” she continued. Kevin heard indistinguishable words somewhere in the background, and then his own voice saying a little more quietly, “No, Mom, he deserves to know this.” Then, louder again, “Plus there are exercises I have to do every day. Or you’d have to do if you want your body back right now. I don’t blame you if you don’t — Not now, Mom — but I wanted to check, because now that I’m getting out of the hospital, tomorrow is probably the earliest we could swap back if you want.”

“I think I need to know more details,” Kevin said, hating himself for it. “Like how long do the doctors think my body will need rehab before — whoever’s in it — gets full mobility back? And whether there are going to be lasting effects after that?” He wanted to ask her how the accident had happened, too — her family had told him that she’d fallen down the stairs at her apartment building, but not how or why. But he wasn’t sure now was the time.

“We don’t know yet,” Amy said. “It’s going to be a while, though. Months, at least, and they said I might still need a cane or walker even after I’m as recovered as I’m going to get. Assuming I’m still in this body.”

Kevin was silent for a long moment, feeling terrified of the pain and the incredible amount of work whoever wore that body in the next few months would have ahead of them, and nearly as much dread of the dysphoria he knew he’d be experiencing during the same time if he stayed in Amy’s body. Finally, he said, “I need to think about it.”

“Okay,” Amy said. “Talk to you later.” Before she hung up, he heard her mother somewhere in the background raising her voice.

Kevin sat there staring numbly at his phone for a long while before he took another bite of lunch.

* * *

At supper that night, Kevin told Elise and Bryce what Amy had told him.

“You should keep her body until she gets yours fixed up again,” Bryce opined.

“I’m considering it,” Kevin said, “but I’m not sure. It’s not like I’m not suffering right now. Probably nowhere near as bad as she is, but... at some point in the recovery process, she’s probably going to be suffering less physically than I am mentally.”

“Assuming your... discomfort with that body doesn’t get any better than this over time,” Elise pointed out. “It’s better than it was at first, so who knows if it might get even better?”

“We’ll see,” Kevin said. From the experience of the trans people he’d been talking to, at the support group and online, he didn’t think it would. Most of the improvement had come in the first few days after he got over the shock of the sudden new body, or in the first few days after he started wearing men’s clothes again. “If that does get a lot better, and she can’t bring my body back to anywhere near the mobility I had when she landed in it... then maybe I would stay here long term? But if so, I think I’d make some changes. Hormone therapy and a mastectomy, at least.” He’d been looking into the options, but they didn’t look that great, especially in terms of female-to-male genital reconstruction. Better than they were twenty years ago, apparently, but still unsatisfying.

Elise hugged him. They’d been hugging a lot more often since kissing and sex were off the table, and it was all they had. “We’ll support you, whatever you decide,” she said.

* * *

Kevin talked with Amy again later that week, after she’d been to a couple of rehab sessions. It was grueling work, it sounded like, even though the amount of exertion would have been trivial for an uninjured person Kevin’s age. Lifting each leg a handful of times and holding it for as long as she could, which was only a few seconds so far; holding a ball weighing a few pounds in both hands until she couldn’t hold it steady any more. Each session left her exhausted, and she took a long nap as soon as her mom drove her home from the rehab center. When she’d recovered more, she said, they’d have her walk short distances on a track with hand-rails until she was strong enough to walk further with a walker.

He finally asked how it had happened, and she told him she couldn’t remember the accident. “I hit my head when I fell, and the concussion wiped out my memory of the last few minutes before the accident. I don’t remember walking out my apartment door, much less stumbling or tripping or something. The doctors did some tests to see if your brain or heart have something wrong with them that made me pass out for a moment, but they didn’t turn up anything. And I know I wasn’t drinking or doing drugs.”

It seemed likely they’d never find out what had caused the accident and whether Amy was at fault.

* * *

Another six weeks passed, and Kevin became somewhat more reconciled to Amy’s body. She had given him permission to cut and restyle her body’s hair, and wear a binder, which helped. But only somewhat. He didn’t have panic attacks when he saw her face in the mirror nearly as often, but he still felt uncomfortable with his reflection and avoided mirrors when he could. Amy reported more progress in her rehab; she was walking half a mile on good days, though she still needed a walker, and she could lift about 30% of what Kevin used to be able to lift when he was going to the gym regularly a couple of years ago.

Finally, Kevin decided he needed to see for himself. He arranged a day off work, teleported to Los Angeles on a Friday morning, and rented a car, giving it the rehab center address Amy had given him.

Walking into the rehab center and seeing his old body sitting in the waiting room was possibly the worst shock he’d had since finding himself suddenly in Dakota’s body, even though he thought he’d been completely prepared for it. The casts had come off and the bruises had faded, but his old body had lost a lot of weight while Amy was in the hospital, and hadn’t gained all of it back yet. The stress of the accident and recovery had aged it years in a few months. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the hairline might have receded further, and there were definitely more wrinkles and more grey at the temples. But seeing his body from outside, its face animated by someone else’s personality, was a worse shock than seeing how it had changed.

Judging from the expression on his old face, Amy was just as gobsmacked by seeing him walk in in her old body. It was only when someone else tried to come in the door behind him and said, “Excuse me,” to Kevin that he and Amy stopped staring at one another. Kevin walked further into the room and sat down across from Amy.

“So,” Kevin said, somehow more aware of the high pitch of Amy’s voice than he had been since the first couple of days after he got her body. “How are we going to do this?”

“I figured you could just hang out and watch while the physical therapist and I do our usual routine,” Amy said, shrugging slightly and tilting her head in a vaguely feminine way that seemed incongruous on Kevin’s body.

“I kind of wanted to ask the physical therapist some questions, too,” Kevin said. “Seeing as how...” He was about to say we’re probably going to swap back at some point, but trailed off. He wanted his body back, but did he want it in that condition?

“Yeah,” Amy said, “it’s yours, I’m just borrowing it. You deserve to know what shape it’s in and all.”

Just then a lean, fit woman in her forties or early fifties came into the waiting room and said, “Amy, I’m ready for you.”

“Okay,” Amy said, putting Kevin’s arms on the walker parked in front of her and heaving herself up onto his feet. Kevin winced at the expression on his alienated face; in pain, but trying not to show any more of it than necessary. “Alexis, I told you Kevin might be here today — that’s him, in my original body.” She tilted her head toward Kevin, pointing with her chin, as her hands were occupied.

“Pleased to meet you,” said the woman. “I’m Alexis Shen. Come this way, please.”

Kevin followed Amy and Alexis through the door into a middling-size gym; it had a lot of the equipment you would expect from any gym, treadmills and stationary bikes and weight machines, all surrounded by a walking track with three lanes, but also odd things like a short flight of stairs that went nowhere, a set of handrails about four feet apart and fifteen or twenty feet long, and other things whose purpose he could only guess at. Alexis led them over to a set of chairs along the wall and had Amy sit down and start a series of stretches, lifting one leg and then the other several times, then rotating Kevin’s feet at the end of an extended leg, tilting his neck this way and that as far as it would go. Kevin watched the exercises, figuring he’d need to learn how to do them if he decided to switch back before his body was completely recovered. But he also watched his face, seeing Amy’s expressions as she did them. These opening stretches didn’t seem too bad from the lack of evident pain displayed there.

They moved on to the weight machines, and when Amy did the leg extensions and leg presses, he saw that pain on his face again, worse than when she’d made the effort to stand up. Then walking around the track; she didn’t go very fast, not much over a mile an hour, but she went pretty steadily with only a couple of short pauses to rest. “This a lot better than a few weeks ago,” she said. “I couldn’t go even a full lap, and I had to rest three or four times in that short walk.”

After the walk, Alexis let Amy rest for a few minutes and went to do some paperwork. When she returned a few minutes later, she had Amy walk up and down the stairs to nowhere a couple of times. That put the most blatant grimace of pain Kevin had yet seen on his face, and he winced in sympathy again. But when she sat down again afterward, she had an air of satisfaction and accomplishment that reminded Kevin of when Elise told him about solving a problem at work.

Finally, after some work on the stationary bike and some more stretches, she was finished, and they returned to the waiting room.

“Do you want me to help you get your walker into your trunk?” Allison asked.

“I think Kevin can help with that,” Amy said.

“All right. See you Monday.”

“So what did you think?” Amy asked Kevin. She got out her phone and brought up her car’s control app to tell it to drive up to the front door, then gripped her walker, stood up and walked slowly toward the door.

“I’m impressed,” Kevin replied, getting up and walking beside her. “I don’t know how well I could do all that, considering... So you’re doing all that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and some other stuff at home on other days?”

“Yeah, every day I do some stretches and then walk back and forth in the hall at my parents’ house.” She’d moved in with her parents after she was released from the hospital, as she couldn’t handle the stairs at her apartment building.

And if they swapped back, that wouldn’t be much of an issue for him; there were no absolutely essential stairs in Kevin and Elise’s house, only a single small step up from the sidewalk into the front door. He wouldn’t be able to go up into the attic until he recovered more thoroughly — if ever — but Elise and Bryce could handle getting the Christmas decorations out...

“So,” Kevin said, “I have some more things I’d like to talk about, if you don’t mind. Shall we go eat somewhere — the diner across the street, maybe? — or would you feel more comfortable going back to your parents’ house for that? Or just sitting in the waiting room here?”

“Sure,” Amy said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to eat at this Thai place over near my old apartment. My parents don’t really like spicy food and I haven’t had a chance to eat anything very interesting since I moved in with them. And it’s a quiet place where we can talk without the loud music too many restaurants play.”

“That sounds tasty to me,” Kevin said.

They reached her car, which was sitting in the circular driveway in front of the rehab center. Amy unlocked the doors and trunk, then got in the front seat and let Kevin fold up her walker and put it in the trunk. Kevin came back over to the car door and said, “Can you text me the address for the restaurant?”

“Just hop in,” she said. “We can come back here for your rental car, or you can just send it back to the rental place and I’ll have my car give you a ride to the airport after I go home.”

“Okay,” Kevin said, and got in the other front seat, the one that used to be the driver’s seat when Kevin was young.

Once they were underway, Kevin worked up the nerve to say, “I wanted to ask you... how much is it bothering you, being in a male body?”

Amy didn’t answer for a few seconds. “A lot,” she said. “Less now that I’ve got other things to worry about, but back before the accident, it was pretty bad. What about you?”

“It’s not good,” he said. “For me it got a little better after I bought some male clothes for Dakota’s body and started wearing them, but the... gender dysphoria didn’t go away. Early on, it was worst when I had to go to the bathroom, but now the worst moments are when I’m out in public and some stranger calls me ‘Miss’ or ‘Ma’am’. Or some guy holds a door open for me... things like that.”

“The worst part for me was how one of my friends reacted,” Amy said after a few moments. “She’s not... comfortable being around men, socially. I haven’t been to see her, haven’t even talked on the phone with her after that one time. Just texts, and they’re fewer and farther between every week.”

Kevin wondered briefly why, and firmly instructed himself not to ask. Amy went on:

“But yeah, just the sheer physical weirdness of it is pretty bad. I guess it’s gotten a little better over time, but only relative to how horrific it was at first, when the shock and surprise were compounded with the basic wrongness of it.”

They continued talking about their experiences as they reached the restaurant and got seated, then paused for a bit to study the menus and order. When the conversation resumed, it drifted from gender dysphoria to other aspects of their lives, and then back to his body’s injuries.

“I think when I’m a little stronger, I’ll be able to put the walker in my trunk myself, and then get from the trunk to the front seat by leaning against the side of the car as I go. And go back to work around that time. My company told me they’d have a job for me, if not necessarily the one I had before. So I could start looking for another apartment, someplace on the ground floor.”

“Or a building with an elevator?” Kevin suggested.

“What about if there’s a power outage or a fire?” she countered, and he nodded sheepishly.

Kevin thought about what he would do in that situation. If they swapped back pretty soon... well, he could get Elise or Bryce to put the walker in the trunk before he left for work in the morning. And maybe he could get one of his co-workers to meet him at his car and get the walker out of the trunk for him? And the other way around in the evening...? It could be a problem on days when Elise had to work late and Bryce had an after-school activity or wanted to go over to a friend’s house after school, though. So that might not be feasible just yet.

The exercises he’d seen Amy doing today looked painful and difficult, and he wasn’t excited about undertaking that regime, but seeing his body from the outside for the last couple of hours had made him miss it all the more. He wondered if Amy was feeling the same way, and considered asking her, but for some reason didn’t feel comfortable doing so, despite how intimate some of their other talk had been.

After lunch, they returned to the car and Kevin put Amy’s walker in the trunk. After Kevin got in, Amy told the car to head to her parents’ house.

“So,” she said when they were getting close, “how soon do you think you’d be willing to switch back?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, looking out the window and not meeting his eyes. “I miss my body a lot, but I think I’d better wait until you’re recovered enough that I won’t miss any work by taking my body back.”

“That could be a while,” she said. When he turned back toward her, she had his eyes fixed on hers. “This body’s going to need rehab three times a week for several more months.”

“I might be able to work around that,” Kevin said. “Work later in the evenings on the days when I go to rehab, or work extra on the weekends to make up for those hours. But I need to be able to get to work and back on my own.”

“I hate to say anything that might make you delay switching back, but I feel like I have to point out that I’m generally pretty tired after rehab. Today’s better than most, but as soon as we get back to my parents’ house, I’m going to crash and not get out of bed until supper. A late supper.”

“Oh,” Kevin said, disconcerted. “Well, then.” He had noticed she was moving slower on the way from the car into the restaurant than she had been at rehab, but he’d attributed that to the difference between exercise, walking at the fastest pace she could sustain for twenty minutes, and normal walking.

They reached her house, and Kevin got the walker out of the trunk for her. She used her phone to instruct her car to take Kevin to the airport as he got back in the car.

“Talk to you in a few days,” she said. “Let me know what you decide.”

“I will. Goodbye.”

My fantasy romance/courtroom drama, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better and more promptly than Amazon.)

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collection here: