Third Person Ch. 05

That first night, I was so emotionally drained that I just let myself be held between my husband's bodies. When I awoke the next morning, both were sleeping. I wondered which one contained the essence, the spirit, identity, whatever you called it, of the person I had married. Which one dreamed my husband's dreams? I shook them both and Amanda opened her eyes. She looked up at me and smiled, then touched Phillip and he became active as well.

I laid between them; their hands were clasped on the pillow behind my head. They caressed me, or he caressed me with a man's hand and a woman's. I tried to tell myself this was in fact the case, but it was still so fantastic to me. I couldn't help thinking that it was my husband and another woman, when it was only just my husband. One soul in possession of two bodies. I was aroused and afraid at the same time. I recalled the first time Phillip and I had made love, in his little off-campus apartment. How fumbling and awkward and wonderful that night had been. This feeling was much the same. It was new. It was like the first time again. We had so much to learn. I had thought we'd learned it all, but now we had to learn it all over again with her. I didn't want to move. I wanted to be paralyzed. I didn't want to touch them, I wanted them to touch me. I didn't want to speak, either, and I didn't want them to speak. By "them" I meant my husband. Both of him. Phillip and Amanda.

The Phillip-body rolled over on his back and the Amanda-body crawled over me to get to him. Phillip had one of his bulging, painful-looking morning erections and Amanda took it into her mouth. I gasped out loud. I tried to tell myself that this was just an auto-fellatric trick, not another woman sucking my husband's penis. Phillip and I had watched each other masturbate, many times, and that was all this was. Still, there was an undeniable flush of outrage which only heightened the breathless feeling in my throat. She was making him harder. Making himself harder. Making himself ready for me.

Then she was at me, licking and sucking me down there. Getting me wet and ready for him, or for herself (pronouns fail me) and then Phillip slid into me. I cried out and stretched my arms across the bed, cruciform. Phillip languidly rolled his hips, gliding in and out with the motions of the lazy slow morning love which was so familiar, but so different now because Amanda's hand was down there, too, guiding him in and getting wet with my juices, and then idly stroking my clitoris. Everything was doubled.

Phillip made love to me for a long time. I dreamed through most of it and could not say how long, then they traded. Amanda rolled on top, sliding her knee between my thighs as mine raised up between hers. She was sopping wet and feverishly hot, as was I. She leaned into me, her leg bearing down against my pelvis, and commenced a gentle rocking motion which brought her against me, and then me against her, over and over again. Then Amanda rearranged our limbs so our legs scissored and our vaginas kissed, with dripping labial lips and clenching muscles and rough wet hair and our hard little clitorises tracing crazy figure eights all over each other. Her heavy breasts dangled over mine and her sweat rained down upon me.

Then they traded again and it was Phillip inside me for a long while. Then again, Amanda. Who can say how many times? His questing knotted penis, her prehensile musk-flower vagina, his thick calloused hand with its hard smooth metallic wedding band, her fluttering mouth with its infantile hunger. Morning became afternoon and they were still at me, in turn. My husband seemed to have better concentration when he was in possession of only one body at a time, so when one was above me, the other lay at my side like a discarded corpse. I vacillated between acute awareness and blissful senselessness; reaching not occasional peaks of orgasm but a constant plateau of ecstacy. It ended hours later when Phillip ejaculated into me like the voluminous bloom of a flowering tree. Amanda drank deep from my well and we three shared a communion kiss dripping with Phillip's plentiful seed.

Thus began our second honeymoon, the strangest and sweetest time of my entire life.

*

Amanda and I were sitting in the living room after breakfast one morning a few days later. We were watching some morning news show on television, but weren't really comprehending what was happening in the rest of the world. We snuggled comfortably together, our bellies filled with omelets, our libidos satiated by the morning's lovemaking. Phillip was in the bedroom, his body unoccupied, a corpse resting on our marriage bed. Every morning, when my husband awoke he had a choice of which body he would wear that day, and for two days now he had chosen Amanda. I wondered if he preferred the woman's body because that was the one he had been born into.

Amanda twisted on the couch, rested her head on my lap. She looked up at me and smiled. "Which one do you like better?" she asked.

It was scary sometimes, how she could sense what I was thinking. Maybe it was just normal couple telepathy, but it did seem to be more pronounced when she was wearing Amanda's skin. Was my husband more empathetic as a female? Were there psychological differences from one body to the other? So many questions still.

"Which what?" I said, stalling.

"Which body," she said.

"They're different," I hedged.

"Of course they're different," Amanda smiled.

"Which one do you prefer?" I asked.

Amanda stretched out and yawned. "Depends," she said. "On what mood I'm in. Sometimes I want to be a man and sometimes I want to be a woman. I can't imagine not being able to go back and forth."

"You might be the only person in the entire world who can."

Amanda's eyes sparkled. "I wish you could. If you could just go inside Phillip for a while you'd see . . ."

"See what?"

"What it's like. For me. Why I can't choose just one. God, Heather, if you could just feel what it's like to have a penis."

I laughed at that, uncomfortably.

"It's kind of cool," she said. "Having this thing attached to you. It's part of your body, but it's separate, too. I can't even explain it. It's like . . . being inside out."

"Inside out?"

"Yeah. Everything that's on the inside for a woman is on the outside for a man. And making love to you with a penis, being inside you. There's nothing like it. And coming inside you . . ."

Amanda was writhing against her clothes, toying idly with one erect nipple through the cotton fabric of her t-shirt.

"I wish you could fuck me with Phillip's cock," she whispered breathlessly.

"You can do that to yourself," I looked away from her.

"Not the same," she was actually playing with herself now, reaching her hand inside her sweatpants. "I wish you could come inside me."

"Jesus," I said. "I don't believe you. We just had sex half an hour ago."

"The Phillip body got off," she said. "The Amanda body is still horny."

"Well, I only have one body, and it has limits," I tried to say this with a laugh, but Amanda winced. She pulled her hand from her pants and wiped it balefully on her leg. We both pretended to watch the television, even though it was a credit card commercial.

"Would you try?" she asked a few minutes later.

"Try what?"

"Try going into Phillip's body."

"That's impossible," I said.

"How do you know?" she said. "I can go back and forth hardly even thinking about it."

"You've been doing it for a long time."

"Right," she said, sitting up. "Maybe it just takes practice."

"I don't know," I said.

"Would you try, though? If I thought of a way that it might work, would you do it?"

"I don't know," I said again.

"For me?" Amanda pressed. "Would you just try, for me?"

It seemed so fantastic, as if she had asked if I would jump out the window and fly. "Sure," I said, attempting to be dismissive.

"You would?" Amanda's eyes gleamed. "Then would you fuck me?"

"Yes," I said, pretending to look up at the TV.

"Say it."

"Come on . . ."

"Please say it."

I sighed. "I'll fuck you, all right?"

"Will you come inside me?"

"Jesus," I laughed. "What has gotten in to you?"

"Will you come inside my cunt?" Her back was arched and she was doing her breathless little girl voice again.

I tickled her belly and kissed her, mainly just so she'd shut up. Amanda grabbed my head and kissed me back with a fevered passion. I pulled away, shaking my head. She smiled up at me.

"I'm sorry," she said. "It just gets me really excited to think of that. Do you mind if I . . ."

"Go ahead."

Her hand slid into her sweat pants again and Amanda stroked herself convulsively, crying out a little. I could both hear and smell how wet she was.

I watched banal human interest stories on television as my husband, laying across my lap in a woman's body, brought herself to orgasm with a fantasy about me screwing her with his man's body.

This is what my life had become.

*

My husband's body, the Phillip body, lay naked beside me on the bed. I touched him. He was perfectly still and the muscles were slack. His skin was cool to the touch, but not cold.

"Is . . . the body dead?" I asked.

"Not dead," Amanda said from behind me. She was standing up, didn't want to touch me or Phillip in case this would interfere with the experiment. "If you watch for a long time, you'll see that he's breathing and his heart is beating. Just really slowly."

I stroked my husband's broad chest, running my fingers through the dense hair, searching for any kind of life. There was nothing that I could feel. It had been more than a week since I had learned of my husband's nature, but I had not yet become used to the bodies when they were unoccupied. They still felt like corpses to me.

"I think 'empty' is a better word," Amanda said. "Like a vacuum. You know how they say? 'Nature abhors a vacuum?' I think that's how you can fill it up. It wants to be filled. Just imagine yourself as air. Air moving to fill an empty space."

That was about the twelfth analogy she had so far provided to explain the process. None of them had made me believe that it could work. This was our third attempt.

"Put your head on his chest," Amanda suggested. I did so, listening for the supposed heartbeat. I could hear nothing.

"Now you're going to feel a sensation something like falling. Only you're falling out of yourself. Your natural inclination is to fight against this, to hold on. But you have to let go. You have to trust that when you fall, you'll land safely."

I laid there for several minutes, feeling a bit foolish. There was no sensation of falling. No sensation of any kind.

"Nothing," I said.

"Try putting your hand on his stomach."

I sighed out loud and did this. Minutes passed and I felt nothing except a slight creepiness at touching what, for all appearances, seemed to be a dead body.

"This isn't working," I said. "We can try again later, if you want."

"Just . . ." Amanda was frustrated, I could tell. She didn't say so, but I knew she thought that I was somehow not trying hard enough. "Try kissing him."

"Kissing him?" The thought of placing my lips against Phillip's, cool and slack, was not very appealing.

"Just try it," Amanda said. "Open-mouthed, like you're giving him artificial respiration."

"Christ, Amanda."

"Please."

I crawled up on the bed until I reached Phillip's face. I leaned into him, pulled his unresisting jaw open, placed my lips on his.

At first, there was only the revulsion, which I'd anticipated. Then came this overwhelming teetering feeling, almost exactly as Amanda had described it. It was sort of like the feeling of being in a chair that was about to flip over backwards, while you scramble for balance. Only infinitely more pronounced, like the hypothetical chair was on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

I pulled away.

"I felt it," I said.

"Really?" Amanda was excited, and in the moment this made me angry, that she should be so happy when I was terrified.

"It scared the hell out of me."

"Try it again," she prodded. "Only this time, don't fight it."

"Give me a goddamn minute, all right?"

"I know it's scary the first time," Amanda said. "But please, you have to trust me. I really want this. I need you to do this for me. Please, Heather."

I drew a deep breath. I told myself that I was doing this out of love for my husband. But there was a strange excitement fluttering around in my belly. I wanted it, too. I leaned forward and kissed Phillip again.

Again, the deathly vertigo. This time, I surrendered to it, let myself fall. Then came a feeling something like, please forgive an especially crude metaphor, vomiting or diarrhea. An explosive voiding. Only it was me that was being expelled. My identity, my life-force, my soul, whatever you wanted to call it, purged all at once. And it was like one of those magic tricks where a jet of water is propelled across the room to land in a glass without a drop spilled. I filled Phillip's body.

I let out a cry with a voice that was not my own and sprang to Phillip's feet. There was a strange, reeling, shock of dislocation. It was like being turned inside out, upside down and backwards. I looked through Phillip's eyes and saw a radically different world. He had been complaining for years that he needed glasses, but the sudden near-sightedness was only a very small part of the overwhelming shift of perception. All the colors were different, for one thing. What I had believed all my life to be reds and blues and yellows were nothing like what Phillip saw. They were colors I had never seen, never even imagined were possible. And the same thing was happening with all five of my senses, all at once.

Even more disorienting was the dimensions of the body itself. Phillip was taller, heavier, and I felt the new height and weight upon me suddenly. It was, I imagine, like moving instantly from a low-gravity world to one where the pull of the earth was twice as strong. Only there was more to it than that. I raised a strange hand to a strange face and felt rough stubble and calloused fingers, both the hand on my face and the face under my hand utterly alien to me. My breasts were gone and there was itching hair all over my body. And, between my legs, a feeling like my vagina had fallen out and was dangling by a fleshy string. The thing was throbbing and screaming and I wondered how men could stand the constant vibration.

Meat. It was all I could think of. Just a sudden revelation that the human body was nothing but meat. I had traded one pile of meat for another.

I looked down and saw myself on the bed, a corpse, and thought Jesus, is that really what I look like? It was like hearing your voice on tape for the first time, only a million times more pronounced. Seeing yourself through another's eyes was nothing like looking in a mirror. Nothing at all. I barely recognized myself. My body looked horrific through these eyes.

And then Amanda was looking up at me with utter wonder. Amanda looked so strange, too, like I had never seen her before. She was all breasts and curves and flesh. Was this how men saw women? Again, I thought of meat. She was nothing but meat.

"Heather?" She came across to me. "You're really in there. Oh my God, your eyes. I can see you in his eyes."

She tried to touch me and I flinched back. I was staggering in revulsion, and she was trying to touch me?

"Remember what you promised to do?" she said. Sly, kittenish, utterly animal.

I tried to speak but could not make the strange thick throat work. My refusal came out as a grunt.

Amanda got on her knees before me. Her eyes rolled up at me and she smiled as she pulled the meaty dangling part of me into her mouth. The feeling was an electric shock, hot and vibrating and painful, a thousand times too intense. Then wet. How can I describe an ejaculation, something I had never before experienced? It was like peeing, but it burned. I felt a draining sensation from a part of the body I had never before possessed. It was awful. It was like dying, again, as I had when I entered Phillip's body. Only now I was entering her mouth and she was consuming me.

Amanda gulped and licked her lips. She looked up at me coyly. "That didn't take long," she said. "It wasn't what I had in mind, but . . ."

It was too much. I turned Phillip's head and vomited. This elimination was both as abhorrent and as satisfying as the other one I had just performed.

Amanda's expression turned instantly to a mixture of hurt and concern. "Are you OK?"

I worked Phillip's heavy tongue. "Too much," I gasped. "Gotta go back."

With that I fell onto the bed, on top of my own body. I performed the open-mouthed kiss again and for a second nothing happened and I was afraid that I was dead and would have to live in this horrible condition forever. But then the falling sensation, welcome this time, and I was all at once back inside myself with the heavy sack of dead meat that was Phillip laying on top of me, crushing me, stinking of vomit and semen. I pushed him off with a scream.

My own body felt strange and alien, just from the few minutes I had spent in the other. I began to sob. Amanda tried to touch me, to comfort me, but I pushed her away. Several hours passed before I once again felt at home in my own skin.