POV: At first, you panic. You wake with a weight across your chest that isn’t yours, a scratch of gray beard at your jaw, and the dense, unfamiliar heaviness of a body that seems built out of red hats, red meat, and red football jerseys on Saturdays. Your hands are broader - more calloused. Your legs are thicker. When you sit up, your stomach presses against the waistband of shorts you don’t remember buying. In the mirror, a silver-haired man stares back at you with calm, narrowed eyes and you feel the lingering taste of tobacco in your mouth. You touch the beard. You touch the chest hair curling out of the red Georgia polo. You say your own name, but it comes out in his voice.
Later, the woman on the porch swing calls you “honey,” and for one terrifying second you almost correct her. Then something in you answers before your fear can. A soft warmth rises in your chest at the sight of her bare knees crossed beside yours, her easy smile, the way her hand rests on your thigh like it has belonged there for years. You know her coffee order. You know the sound of her laugh after two glasses of wine. The feeling of your new dick deep inside her.
The first few days, you fight it. You hold the cigar awkwardly. You grimace at the bourbon. You flinch when your new friends slap you on the shoulder and start talking about church barbecues, SEC football, and how the country has been saved by the Republican Party and its dear leader. But the body has its own habits, and the mind inside it has left tracks deep enough for you to follow. You find yourself leaning back on the porch swing after dinner, smoke curling from your lips, nodding along to stories you somehow remember. His politics sit in you like old furniture: uncomfortable at first, then familiar, then disturbingly easy to settle into.
What shocks you most is not that you become him all at once. It’s that you don’t. You remain somewhere inside, watching the edges blur. Your old life becomes less urgent. The city bars, the apps, your boyfriend, the restless hunger for reinvention - they fade like country music from another room. In their place come simpler cravings: the smell of cut grass, a cigar after sunset, your wife’s head against your shoulder before you grab her and lead her to the bedroom, the deep pride of a Saturday Georgia win, the stubborn pleasure of being a man other people think they understand.
By the time summer thickens around the screened porch, you no longer sit there pretending. You ease into the swing with a grunt that feels natural now. You rest one arm around her shoulders. You draw on the cigar, slow and practiced, and watch the green leaves shift beyond the screen. Somewhere far away, the man you used to be would be horrified. But you can barely reach him anymore. You only know the warmth of this body, the certainty of its memories, and the strange peace of wanting exactly what he wanted.
