Chapter 6 I WANT MY BODY BACK!

ETHAN.

No matter how many times they sedated me, I woke up in her body.

Every single time.

I had a plaster on my forehead now covering where I'd put it through the mirror trying to shock myself back into reality. Three attempts. Three injections. Three times waking up still wrong, still her, still trapped inside something I wanted no part of.

My knee wouldn't stop bouncing.

I caught it. Held it still. It started again ten seconds later, heel slamming the floor in a rhythm that matched nothing except the panic running laps inside my chest.

A laugh scraped out of me. "Curses aren't real." I dragged both hands through hair that stopped too soon, her hair, the wrong length, the wrong texture, and felt my stomach drop all over again. I didn't believe in this. I didn't believe in any of it. Hexes, spells, some cosmic switchboard operator deciding today was the day Ethan Cole got evicted from his own body. Absolute nonsense.

Except.

I was still here.

I shoved off the bed. Three steps one way. Three steps back. My teeth found the edge of a fingernail before I realized I was chewing it to nothing.

Then it clicked.

One thing couldn't change. No matter what mirrors showed, no matter what doctors said, biology never lied.

I pulled down the skirt and the underwear beneath it in one motion and shoved the curtain aside.

"See." My voice came out triumphant, half-laughing already. "I told all of you that I wasn't..."

The laughter died.

I looked down only to see a mound of dark curls with lips.

My penis was gone too.

Absolutely gone! Not even a trace of it.

The floor tilted under me.

No. No.

My hands flew to my chest and I felt something soft. Big. Heavy. Warm.

I had boobs.

The lurch in my stomach was so violent I tasted the back of my throat.

This was real.

This was actually, genuinely, catastrophically real.

"Fuck..."

Doctors appeared from everywhere at once. Nurses. One elderly woman in a wheelchair took one look at the situation, turned her chair around, and wheeled herself in the opposite direction. A man in a hospital gown stared until his wife grabbed his face and physically redirected it.

"Pervert," someone muttered. About me. At me.

I grabbed the nearest doctor by his lab coat with both fists. "I don't know how much she paid you," I said, shaking him, "but fix this. Put me back in my body. Right now."

His Adam's apple worked. His eyes tracked sideways. I followed them and saw the nurse approaching from the left with a syringe, clear liquid catching the fluorescent light.

I knew that syringe. We'd been introduced thrice already.

"The fall caused head trauma." A tall blonde nurse stepped forward, both hands raised, voice running smooth. "Disorientation this severe isn't unusual. You're safe here. We're trying to help you."

"I'm Ethan Cole," I cried out.

The room went still for exactly one second.

Then someone exhaled. A pregnant nurse leaned toward her colleague and stage-whispered, "She's saying his name again."

The doctor I was holding straightened his glasses. "You're Casey Bell," he said. "Ethan Cole is in the VIP ward upstairs, in critical condition, with his family." He covered my hands with his. "Right now, the best thing you can do for yourself, and for him, is calm down and think about how you're going to apologize to the people whose son you nearly killed."

"She nearly killed me."

My eyes scanned the crowd, shifting from one face to another, but all I could see was confusion, fatigue and blankness. Not a single pair of eyes showed any sign of recognition. It was clear that no matter what I said, it fell on deaf ears.

I shoved the doctor sideways into the nurse with the syringe and ran.

I had just taken a step when the skirt suddenly tried to trip me up, fabric wrapping around my legs mid-stride. I caught myself against the wall, pulled the waistband up as far as it would go over a stomach that wouldn't cooperate, and kept moving. Her thighs rubbed together with each step, the friction stinging, and her shoes pinched at angles my feet weren't designed for.

"Security!"

I didn't look back.

The elevator was already compromised. I spotted the uniforms converging on it from down the corridor, so I slammed my shoulder against the stairwell door and began climbing. The railing felt cold under my hand. The air had a different scent here, a mix of bleach and stale air, with each landing looking just like the last.

By the time I reached the second floor, her body was fighting against itself.

My lungs were struggling to catch the air they desperately needed. My heartbeat had risen to a level it shouldn't have reached. Sweat pooled in unfamiliar places, and my legs trembled in a way that felt structural rather than simply fatigued.

"Casey." I slapped the railing, and the sound bounced up the stairwell. "How do you live like this?"

No one responded, of course.

For her height, it was so unhealthy the weight she carried that I couldn't even get to the fourth floor without feeling like my heart was shutting down.

"I must," I panted, "get to my body." I let out a long exhale.

I had to get to the fourth floor, to my room. The one this hospital had been putting my family in for nineteen years, same view of the courtyard, same climate-controlled air that didn't smell like bleach, same distance from the nurses' station that gave you just enough privacy to feel human.

When I heard the pounding footsteps from below, I managed to continue dragging myself up.

They were definitely not giving up.

I kept climbing because I had no other option.

Thankfully, I made it.

I stood outside the stairwell door for three long seconds with my hands on my knees, just breathing, just existing, waiting for the dark edges creeping into my vision to recede.

Then I pushed through into the corridor.

The VIP wing had a different atmosphere. The sound changed, carpeted floors muffling echoes, and harsh overhead lights were replaced by softer ones. Expensive flowers adorned the reception desk. Someone had left a hockey bag leaning against the wall outside my room. I recognized a pair of skates, Dmitri's, with a worn toe cap and a taped left ankle.

The guys had come.

That realization hit me hard in a way I wasn't ready for, so I quickly pushed it aside; there was no room for it now.

I reached for the door handle.

Through the glass panel, I caught sight of my body.

Wires connected to a machine that breathed in steady, indifferent cycles. My chest rose and fell because a machine commanded it. My hands hung loosely at my sides, the same hands I'd had since I was seventeen, my right thumb bearing a scar from ice at twelve and a callus on my palm from countless hours of grip tape.

Just lying there.

I opened the door.