Rob peered owlishly across the bar. "Are they ours?"

I risked a look. Two girls in their early twenties on the other side of
the room, one short, the other tall, both holding bottles of something
brightly coloured. They saw me looking and giggled. This was the
downside of going out on a Tuesday night: the chance you'd bump into one
of your students out on the lash. Rob and I were already done for the
week and celebrating accordingly and now we had the rest of the week
clear and half-term to follow. Although perhaps our students weren't
holding to their side of the bargain and throwing themselves into their
coursework quite as deeply as we'd hoped.

"Don't stare!" I hissed.

Rob turned back to me with a smirk. "The lanky one's definitely yours. I
know the short one, she's in my new module, I can't even remember what I
called it."

A wave from across the bar, and the tall one, Angelica, she was called,
or something posh like that, she'd been in my Gothic Novel lectures last
year, lifted her glass to me in a mock salute. I managed a polite smile
back. The shorter one was still giggling.

"We should go and say hello," said Rob.

"We really shouldn't. It's inappropriate."

"They're in their final year! They'll be getting jobs soon and
everything."

"I know," I said, "but still."

"Ugh," said Rob, but he didn't disagree. "You know why I become a
lecturer?"

"For the honeys."

"It was for the honeys," he agreed, "at first. I just didn't realise
every year they'd stay the same age while I got older."

Which was maybe laying it on a bit thick. We were only in our thirties.
Mid-thirties. Okay, forty was definitely coming into view, although
neither of us wanted to admit it. Which meant the two attractive
students on the other side of the bar were nearly... fifteen years or so
years younger than us. Christ.

"I saw Katie last night," I said, trying to keep it casual.

"Oh mate," said Rob, instantly forgetting everything else we'd been
talking about.

That was the thing about Rob. From the outside it was probably hard to
see why we were friends. Rob was big, six foot five, and broad as well,
making my five-foot eleven look bookish and scrawny. He was a sports
science lecturer, which we all knew was basically an over-educated PE
teacher. I taught English, which Rob regarded as a complete waste of
time, after all, he already spoke English. And yet somehow, we'd become
proper mates, sharing a crappy flat together while we did our best to
save up enough to one day get places of our own. My own attempt had
fallen apart somewhat of late, as my girlfriend of six months had,
without any warning at all, dumped me just a few weeks ago and done her
best to avoid me since - impressive since we worked at the same
university, albeit in different departments. Rob had a string of
girlfriends but seemed to grow bored with them the second things got too
cosy. Yet despite that, and a brow that made him look, with the best
will in the world, a bit of a caveman, he was thoughtful and kind and
didn't mind me whinging on about Katie leaving me when anyone else would
have told me to get over it weeks ago.

"You want to talk about it?"

I shook my head and turned my attention back to the students, now deep
in conversation with each other. Francesca, that was her name. She'd
always seemed pretty smart, top grades all the way. If I was twenty
years old and a student again, she'd have been just my type. Long black
hair with a blunt fringe above big dark eyes that made her look like
that sitcom actress whose name I could never remember, legs crossed
revealing long thighs under a short tartan skirt that hinted at punk
without trying too hard. She wore one of those fluffy jumpers that was
baggy yet clinging at the same time, hanging off one shoulder to reveal
a black spaghetti strap.

"Mine looks more fun," murmured Rob. "Plays hockey. Good sprinter. I
think she's called Banshari? Something like that."

Banshari did look fun. Short and curvy, dark-skinned, crammed into a
dress that threatened to give way any moment. She had long curly hair
that spilled down her shoulders with a bright pink streak over one eye.
She was leaning over Francesca, talking right into her ear and whatever
the two of them were discussing, it was apparently intense.

"Anyway," I said firmly, "we have to keep a distance from the students
outside the campus, socially at least. Apart from anything else, it's
just not cool."

Rob sighed. "I suppose. Hey, how long has this been a gay bar, by the
way?"

I blinked at him and looked around. I'd been here a month ago, and it
hadn't been a gay bar them. Although.... thinking about it, they had
been playing a lot of Abba. And there were at least three drag queens
down the far end of the bar. And now I looked more carefully, those
three stocky short-haired guys sitting round a table were actually
women.

"Oh yeah," I said. "Well, I wasn't really into finding female company
anyway."

Rob looked at me. "Speak for yourself. I'm heading off to Flaherty's."

Flaherty's was a sports bar. It hadn't occurred to me you could pick up
women in a sports bar, but if anyone could, it was Rob. He clinked his
empty beer bottle against mine. "You staying here?"

I glanced over at the two girls, aware that they'd been glancing at me.
Something about them was making me feel uneasy now, a knowingness I
didn't like in Francesca's constant glances in my direction.

"No," I said. "I'm heading home."

"I'll try and be quiet if I come in late," said Rob, and smirked. "Well,
not too quiet."

I sighed.

WEDNESDAY MORNING

The first thing I noticed when I woke up was the scent. A half-familiar
perfume. A delicate fragrance, not floral, more... smoky. Of course, it
was something Katie had worn once. I'd liked it and complimented her on
it, but she'd never worn it again, which had been a shame. It did bring
back a fond memory, the two of us lying in a four-poster bed in Italy
(she'd been to a conference there, and I'd flown out to meet her at the
last minute), me looking at her, still asleep, dappled in sunlight. We
hadn't been able to work out how to close the shutters, so had left them
wide open. It had been a warm night.

The thought of her lying asleep, looking content and relaxed, the thin
sheet clinging to her body was a fond memory and I felt a warm ache down
below. Somehow, it was a different feeling to the blunter sensations
normally brought about by thinking of Katie naked, but not unpleasant,
and I was content to lie still for a while. I didn't like to get too
hands-on first thing in the morning anyway - you never knew when Rob
might burst into the room, excited to tell me of his previous night's
exploits.

I don't know how long I lay there before I realised I shouldn't be
smelling that scent right now. Also, I had someone's hair across my
face.

I froze, frantically running through the events of the previous night.
I'd finished my beer, headed straight home, gone pretty much to sleep,
only to wake an hour or so later when I heard Rob's key in the lock. No
giggling, no low murmuring, so I'd assumed he'd come home alone. Except
somehow, someone who smelled great and had long hair was now in bed with
me. Maybe Rob had brought someone home, she'd got up in the night to use
the bathroom and accidentally got back into the wrong bed. Well, this
was going to be embarrassing.

Hardly daring to breathe, I opened my eyes, which was when I realised
the situation was worse than I'd originally imagined. Far worse.

First, I either had the weirdest hangover ever, or I'd been drugged or
something, because just that slightest movement set off the weirdest
reaction like I was floating, then I was frantically shaking all my
limbs, which should by rights have sent me flying out of the bed and
waking up the person next to me, but nothing was moving at all. Then
very slowly and faintly I could feel my fingers twitching and my toes
wriggling, but it all felt somehow indefinably wrong, like I was trying
to put on a suit that didn't fit.

Furthermore, the colours of everything were off, everything looking too
yellow, then too green, then finally a weird purplish shade which slowly
wore off, although things weren't much better when I could finally see
normally. Because the window which should have been right next to the
bed was instead down the end of it, and the early morning light, which
should have been kept in check by the thick blackout blind I'd bought
specially was instead streaming through exactly the sort of white linen
affair I'd gone out of my way to avoid. And the interior of the room
slowly being revealed by the morning light, all Indonesian wooden
furniture and tall metal lamps and silk scarves hung from walls was
somewhere I'd never seen before in my life. Which meant that rather than
some strange woman getting drunk and climbing into her bed, I'd been the
one who'd somehow gone to the wrong house and climbed into hers, and man
was that worse.

I don't think I've ever breathed so lightly in my life. I was barely
moving a muscle. At least that bizarre sensation of having to reassert
control over every part of my body individually had passed, although I
couldn't exactly say I felt right. I could sense every thread of the
duvet over me, for one thing, as though my skin had suddenly become ten
times more sensitive. I could still feel the hair across my face, smell
that scent in the air. In fact, oddly enough, I could suddenly smell
lots of things. My sense of smell had been going down the pan for the
last ten years, but now it was like all the shutters had been thrown
open. I could smell the alien washing powder from the sheets, the very
faint odour of cigarette smoke, when I hadn't smoked since my teens, and
something else, a sort of bodily smell, slightly musky - not unpleasant,
but not mine.

Very, very, slowly, I reached a hand out from my side of the bed,
probing down to the floor in the hope I'd find my clothes, which I could
maybe grab, sneak ninja-like into a bathroom or something to get
dressed, and run away before anyone knew I'd been there. Instead, my
fingers encountered a thick pile carpet. Then a high-heeled shoe.

Oh boy. This wasn't going to be easy. The only thing that seemed to be
on my side was that whoever the woman I'd woken up next to was, she
still seemed fast asleep. In fact, she hadn't made a sound. In fact, if
I didn't know better, I'd think there wasn't anyone next to me at all.

I didn't dare look. I just lay as still as possible. Some other matters
were nagging at me. They didn't seem as urgent at the possibility that
any second I could wake up some poor woman who'd be entirely justified
in screaming for the police, but they'd still need addressing at some
point. Like, I was pretty sure I'd gone to bed in just my boxers, it
being a warm night at all, but now I seemed to be wearing a t-shirt that
stretched practically down to my knees. And speaking of legs, when I
cautiously moved one hand onto my thigh underneath the t-shirt, it felt
oddly smooth. I moved my hand round to my stomach, and that didn't feel
right either. I'd put on a stone or so in the last year, Rob was always
going on at me about it, and yet the flesh under my hand felt toned and
flat.

And still nothing from whoever else was in the bed. Slowly, still
breathing so softly it was amazing I was getting any oxygen into my
system at all, I moved my hand over to the other side of what seemed to
be an excessively large bed, only to find... nothing. There was no-one
there at all.

At first, I felt a great wave of relief. I might be able to get out of
this bed, then the room, then the house entirely without the police
being called once. But then a small, remorselessly logical part of my
brain quietly said: if there's no-one else in this bed, why have you got
hair across your face?

I took a strand of the hair in my fingers and tugged it. And felt it
being tugged because it was attached to my scalp. And I hadn't long hair
since my goth phase, now a good twenty years behind me.

Okay, I thought, and a new sensation added to the list was that of my
heart pounding in my chest, and that didn't feel right either. There was
a perfectly logical explanation for this. Clearly, I have been in a
coma.

That would explain the hair growth, the weird difficulty that my brain
was having connecting to the rest of me, maybe how I'd lost weight. At
least in some places, I was still struggling to make sense of my
proportions feeling weirdly off here and there. Whatever. I'd been in a
coma for an undefinable amount of time, some nice woman had perhaps
fallen in love with me, or something and brought me home from the
hospital and nursed me and finally I had got better.

From somewhere else in the house, I heard footsteps pattering across
wooden floorboards and a door closing. Was that her? Either way, I
couldn't just lie here all day and the idea that this might not all be
my fault after all, that someone else might be responsible for this gave
me the confidence to sit up in bed, swing my legs out from under the
duvet and stand up.

And not only did that not feel right at all, but the reflection staring
back at me, open-mouthed from the large mirror propped up on an
expensive-looking chest of drawers, was that of Francesca from my
English module and the bar the previous night.

The Francesca who was in the mirror, but also me, made a low strangled
moaning sound, and almost on cue the same sound floated back at me from
whoever was in the other room.

I staggered out onto a large and elegant landing and tried a cautious
"Hello?" wincing as I did so at the sound of Francesca's calm, measured
tones emerging from my throat. Although, I thought getting slightly
giddy now, technically it was her throat as well.

The bathroom door slowly swung open. Standing before me was Francesca's
friend from the bar, Rob's sports student. Banshari, was she called? Her
dark eyes were wide and staring, hair all over the place, pink streak
practically out to one side. She wore a tiny vest over a pair of small
clingy shorts. Not that I could judge what anyone was wearing right now,
seeing I was in an oversized t-shirt with a print of a kitten on it I
hoped was ironic. If I was wearing anything under that it was...
unsubstantial.

"Whoever you are," said Banshari, in a choked, hoarse voice, "you need
to call the police. Or an ambulance, or something." Except she didn't
sound like Banshari. Or at least, maybe she did, I'd never heard her
speak before, but I was willing to bet a considerable amount she didn't
have a Welsh accent.

I stared at her.

"Rob?"

Ten minutes later we were sitting in the kitchen. Which was almost the
size of my and Rob's entire terraced house. One of either Francesca or
Banshari had serious independent wealth. I'd flung a window open for
some fresh air. I wasn't sure it had helped.

Rob poured me a coffee which I took with shaking hands. The mug seemed
huge until I looked at my newly slender fingers with their expensive-
looking pearly pink finished nails and realised how much smaller my
hands were now.

"They've only got that oatmilk muck," she said. "Disgusting."

Except I couldn't really see the person in front of me as "she" anymore,
not now I knew that was Rob inside, just as he'd finally understood it
really was me walking around in this Francesca-body.

I took a wary sip. It tasted fine.

"Mate," said Rob. "What the fuck?"

What the fuck indeed. I stared at him no idea what to say. Rob took a
sip of his coffee and grimaced. "I think Banshari might be a herbal tea
girl." He placed the mug back on the table, then stared down at himself.
"I don't want to go on about it," he said eventually. "But I never
thought I'd see student tits from this angle."

I swallowed nervously. Even after everything that had just happened, ten
years of seminars and online courses telling me to be respectful and
appropriate were still swirling around in my head.

"Are they in our bodies, then?" continued Rob. "Right now, are they
waking up saying 'Bloody hell I've got a cock!'?"

"I don't know," I said reluctantly, partly because I didn't but mostly
because hearing someone else's voice every time I spoke was seriously
freaking me out. It was still me talking - just as I could hear Rob's
Welsh accent in Banshari's voice, my own slightly flat London-ish accent
were present instead of Francesca's posh, clipped tones - but it was
still a purring, female voice I heard whenever I opened this mouth. And
then a nasty thought occurred to me. "At least I hope that's what
happened."

Rob stared at me. Utterly bizarre, to see the short, curvy South Asian
girl with more visible cleavage than I'd seen in front of me in the last
year and know without a trace of a doubt that inside was my six-foot-
five flatmate who'd once got into a fight with three police officers and
won. They hadn't even arrested him in the end, they'd all hugged and
exchanged phone numbers.

"What you mean you hope that's what happened?"

I hadn't wanted to say anything, but the thought was there now and I had
to share it. "What if go back to our flat, look in the window and it's
is us, just normal us, doing normal us things. Like nothing happened.
What the hell do we do then? I don't know any emergency service set up
to deal with that, do you?"

Rob opened his mouth and closed it again. "Bloody hell." He sighed
heavily, then his gaze slid down me and he coughed. "Erm, mate..."

"What?"

"Your, erm, I mean her... they're like chapel hat pegs."

Oh my god. Quickly I put my hands over my chest, where Francesca's
nipples were visibly protruding through the thin t-shirt fabric. Except
now I could feel them against the palms of my hands. Francesca's hands.
Whatever. The end result was that my chest region, for want of a better
phrase, might not have been as ample as that currently sported by my
flatmate, but I could now accurately state that each one was still a
good handful.

I could feel my face burning. "We should call them."

Rob held up a phone. It was in a bright pink case, with little rabbit
ears. "Already tried. Password locked. Yours is too. Hers, I mean."

He pushed Francesca's phone across the table to me. I vaguely remembered
seeing it in class: a sleek, expensive thing, the case studded with
crystals.

"Okay," I said. "Then I guess we go over there and find out for
ourselves."

Rob boggled at me (a very Rob-like expression) and pointed at himself,
then at me. "Like this?"

"Well, no, obviously not like this," I said.

It wasn't until I started rummaging through Francesca's clothes drawers
(a definite no-no for a lecturer normally, but beggars couldn't be
choosers), that I realised I didn't even know where Francesca's house
was, which meant I didn't know where we were. Without access to her and
Banshari's phones, we couldn't even use Google maps.

Still, what I'd lost in network availability, I'd gained in clothing
options. Francesca had no shortage of clothes - thinking about, it I'd
never seen her in the same outfit twice - but none of them were exactly
what I, a pushing-forty lecturer, would choose to wear on the weirdest
Walk of Shame ever. Eventually I found a pair of jeans I could squeeze
into as long as I held my breath like I'd never held it before, and a
bulky cardigan I could belt around myself to prevent anyone else
noticing the nipple situation. The hair I tied back in a scrunchy I
found in the bathroom and most of the residual makeup I managed to wipe
away with makeup remover and a succession of cotton wool pads. By the
time I was done it was a scrubbed and sober Francesca who stared back at
me from the bathroom mirror.

Footwear was a trickier option: heels were right out for obvious
reasons, and at first I thought I'd have to wear a pair of bejewelled
flip flops, until I finally found a pair of Ugg boots under the bed. Not
my normal choice, but with a pair of big Nordic-patterned socks, they
were better than nothing.

The last problem was pockets. The jeans had them but for decorative
rather than practical purposes. And then I remembered: bags. There was a
black over the shoulder affair in the front room. I tipped its contents
out onto the coffee table: some tissues, a pack of paracetamol, a couple
of tampons - and Francesca's student union card. The girl in the photo
was poised, wearing a lot more eyeliner and had probably had her hair
done no more than one hour previously. I crammed the tissues, the
tablets and the card back in the back then, after a moment's hesitation,
the tampons as well. Best to play it safe.

Still no sign of my flatmate. I stared up the stairs. "Rob, are you
okay?"

"I'm fine."

Even from here, I could hear he was talking through gritted teeth.

"What's the matter?"

All I could hear was muttered swearing until he emerged. "Don't say a
bloody word."

"Jesus Christ, Rob!"

The figure standing at the top of the stairs couldn't have been further
removed from my usual mental image of my housemate if it had had three
heads, each of which was bright green. It wore striped leggings, which
may originally have been intended for yoga, a white top with the word
"Juicy" emblazoned across the front and neon green platform trainers,
the whole wrapped up in a puffa coat that reached down to the floor. I
didn't know whether the vision in front of me was about to start a dance
class or sell a whole load of drugs.

"That look's why you took so long, is it?"

He clumped down the stairs towards me, holding the bannister for balance
the whole way.

"I took so long," he growled, his annoyance taking Banshari's voice
about two octaves lower than its natural register, "because I had to
find a bra because of these enormous bloody tits."

"Right," I said soothingly. "Sorry."

"It's fine," he said, only Banshari's normal voice had reasserted itself
and it came out as a squeak. "Argh, what the fuck? Anyway, get you with
your bloody handbag."

Ignoring this, I instead dangled a set of keys from my finger. "Look at
this! Francesca's got a car!"

"Yes!" said Rob, punching the air. I tried not to notice how much every
movement made his chest area wobble, even with, apparently, a bra, but
we both knew it had happened. "Ahem," he continued. "Just pleased not to
be walking, that's all."

Except neither of us knew what Francesca's car looked like and once we'd
tried pressing the button walking up and down the road we'd already
started getting looks from the neighbours, so in the end we had to start
walking.

Once we'd got our bearings, Francesca and Banshari's house turned out to
be in the nicer end of town, about five minutes from restaurants and
clothes shops and a nice little bookshop slash coffee shop I used to go
to with Katie all the time. Our house, as in my and Rob's crappy rented
semi-detached, was twenty minutes away, near a minicab office and a
kebab house. Honestly, it suited us fine.

That walk became the longest twenty minutes of my life. I had to spend
the first five with a supportive hand in the middle of Rob's back
because he was wobbling all over the place in his platform trainers,
although eventually he seemed to get the hang of it, slapping my hand
away as he tottered off under his own steam.

"Got it!" he said firmly. "Adapt and overcome, that's my motto."

For my part, I was starting to regret not taking the time to get myself
some support. Francesca wasn't as generously endowed as Banshari, but it
turned out any amount of boob was enough to make walking above one mile
an hour a distinctly unusual experience. Apart from anything else,
Francesca's nipples were consistently more, let's say "reactive" than my
own, and the sensation of them constantly rubbing against the t-shirt
material was an entirely new one. It wasn't entirely unpleasant, but at
the same time I'd quite like it to stop please.

Also, I'd never worn jeans this tight before. They didn't look that
close-fitting from outside - I'd checked out my reflection in the first
shop window I'd passed, convinced something had split and I was showing
Francesca's pants to the world - but they felt like nothing I'd ever
worn before. Again, Francesca may not have had the curves of Banshari -
Rob moved in front of me to let a lady walking a dog get past at one
point and I couldn't help notice a distinct wiggle had appeared in his
walk - but there was definitely more behind me than I was used to,
whereas round the front the jeans fit so snugly to my crotch I could
even feel the button fly pressing up against me closer than I'd ever
felt trousers press before.

Eventually, Rob fell in step with me. "Bit bloody weird this, innit?"

I looked at him but didn't even know what to say. Apart from anything
else, I hadn't thought to put on deodorant, and the exertion of walking,
not counting the extra stress every time a car with more than two lads
in it beeped at us (three times so far), added to the fact that neither
of us taken a shower before we left meant that the delicate fragrance
I'd first noticed when I'd woken up had been overtaken by the rather
more natural odour. Still, if everything went well, very soon that would
be a problem for the original bodies" owners, not us.

We turned a corner into our street and now were looking at our own
house.

"What now?" I asked, suddenly hesitant. In my mind, we just marched
straight in, laid down the law and got our bodies back, kicking the
temporary owners out onto the pavement to have a good think about what
they'd done. "Feels a bit odd to knock on our own door."

"We do a recce first," said Rob, firmly, put a small hand on the gate
leading down the side of the building, then suddenly he shuddered.

"You alright?"

He nodded, Banshari's loose hair flying around him. "Everything's so
big."

Of course, he was a whole foot and a half shorter now. Francesca was
maybe four or five inches shorter than me, and I felt it in every step,
no longer able to look down on most of the people I passed in the
street. I could barely imagine how Rob must be feeling.

He put a small hand on the bar of a gate he could have stepped over just
twelve hours before and swung it open. A moment later he was staring in
our kitchen window, mouth agape.

"What the bloody hell?"

I joined him and within a second, my jaw, too, had dropped.

I was looking at us. Rob and me "us." Our bodies, at least. My body was
wearing a dressing gown, Rob's just in boxers and an old ruby shirt. It
would have been jarring enough to watch my own body making a cup of tea,
yawning, scratching its hair, all under its own steam, but it wasn't
that. It was that Rob's body had its arm around my body's waist, and
that while I was frozen, staring, my body leaned up to Rob's and planted
a lingering kiss full on its lips, causing Rob's body to turn, put both
hands on my body's arse and start squeezing.

"OI!" yelled Rob, the one standing right next to me, banging on the
glass furiously. "STOP THAT!"

Rob's body and mine sprang apart, instantly, looks of panic and fear on
their faces. But the most telling thing wasn't the obvious guilt - it
was that the dressing gown on my body had sprung open, my body panicking
and clutching at it to keep it closed - exactly the sort of gesture
someone who until recently had actual breasts would have made.

For a long, frozen moment, our two sets of bodies stared at each other
through the kitchen window. Then Rob's body moved towards the back door
and opened it.

"I suppose you'd better come in," it said meekly.

"We just wanted what you had," said Francesca-in-my-body. And now, just
as I could only see a "he" when I looked at Rob, all I could see when I
looked at my own body was the posh girl inside it.

"Please stop holding hands," I said. Reluctantly, they let go, although
the look that passed between them could only be described as
"smouldering." I didn't like it at all.

"You know," said Banshari. "Relationship goals."

Rob shook his head furiously, as if that would be enough to clear it.
"Wait, what? You're a couple?"

Banshari giggled. Actually giggled, which didn't sound right at all
coming from Rob's stubble-covered face.

"No, silly," she said. "At least, we weren't. But we know you are. You
don't have to be shy about it."

I stared at her. "No, we aren't!" I said, although I admit it sounded a
bit feeble.

"Oh, come on," said Francesca. "I know it's a bit different from your
generation, but it's okay with us. You live together, you're
affectionate, you're emotionally very supportive, we've seen you arguing
buying furniture together. It's adorable."

"We're not a couple!" said Rob. He didn't even sound annoyed, just
confused.

"We saw you in the Amalfi last night," said Banshari. "That sealed the
deal."

"You were in there too!" I protested. Banshari shook her head. "It's
different for girls."

"What do you mean 'your generation'" protested Rob. "We're barely older
than you!"

"Rob," I warned. "Focus."

Francesca's face lit up. "Stuff like that!" she said. "It's an obvious
tell."

"Moving on from whether we're a couple or not," said Rob, with
surprising evenness. "Which we still aren't. What did you do? How did
this happen?"

Francesca at least had the grace to look ashamed. "We didn't think it
would actually work," she said.

Banshari had got a ritual off the dark web, which was a thing you could
do now, apparently. They'd been talking about it for weeks, seeing me
and Rob, mistaking our friendship, which I guess you could see from the
outside as a sort of bromance, as a deep and lasting romantic
commitment. Both girls had had relationship troubles of late, and the
idea of being in a couple was one that appealed, except they were both
straight. Then when they'd seen us in Amalfi's that night, they'd gone
straight home and fired up the ritual, and to their surprise, let alone
ours, it had worked.

"Banshari used to be really into cosplay," said Francesca. "And I was
into fanfiction, which is how we met, on the forums. And then we
realised we were at the same uni! "

"We used to have long talks into the night," said Banshari. "About how
if we actually fancied each other, we'd make, you know, a perfect
couple."

Rob was just staring at her. I think he'd got lost in the conversation
at the word "cosplay', to be honest.

"We both find gay guys really hot," said Francesca. "Like, really hot.
We even tried online roleplay once where we were these guys from an
anime we both like? That one with the flowers and swords."

She'd lost me at that point.

"Anyway," she continued. "It went really well at first, but after a
while, you know, you have to admit you don't actually have all the sexy
bits you're writing about."

"And by sexy bits," I said grimly, "you mean... penises."

Part of me couldn't believe I'd just said penises to a female student,
although it would surely be a mitigating circumstance that the student
in question had literally just stolen mine, along with the rest of the
body. I wasn't sure how the disciplinary board would deal with that one.

Banshari and Francesca both nodded solemnly. It seemed penises were
something they took very seriously.

"So anyway," said Banshari, "we woke up this morning and honestly, the
last thing we expected was that the ritual thingy had actually worked.
I'd forgotten all about it, to be honest. But then I went into the other
bedroom and Francesca was just waking up and she knew immediately what
had happened, like I mean, immediately."

"Although did think it was a bit weird," admitted Francesca, "that you
had separate beds. Also, no gay porn. I looked everywhere for it. I was
quite disappointed.

But Rob had already moved on. "Wait a moment," he said. "All that
kissing and holding hands... what else have you done?"

Neither girl spoke, both looking at the floor. A gear suddenly turned in
my mind, one that had turned in Rob's a minute ago.

"Jesus Christ," I said. "You've had sex? With my body? And... his body?!"

"Nothing serious!" said Francesca. "We were just... fooling around.
Trying stuff out."

"Well, it ends now," I said firmly. "All of it. Swap us all back. And
we'll... say no more about it."

But the girls just stared at the floor. I say "girls', they were two
full-grown men in their late thirties, but all I could see right now
where two girls barely into their twenties who were starting to realize
they'd made a horrible mistake. Although only in their assumption that
me and Rob were a couple. I could tell from the glances between them and
the way they were constantly trying to find ways for their fingertips to
brush against each other, that the "two straight girls waking up in male
bodies" thing was working very well from their points of view.

"Okay," said Banshari after a while. "The thing is-"

"It lasts for a week," said Francesca.

It was a good job I was already sitting down. On the very kitchen stools
Rob and I had had an argument over in Ikea, one Francesca and Banshari
had seen, apparently, and helped push them towards thinking we were a
couple. Except now my feet barely touched the floor - Rob's were just
dangling in the air, even with the platform trainers. Also, the seat
felt softer than before, which took me a moment to realise was because I
was sitting on it with the arse of a twenty-one-year-old girl.

"What?" I squeaked.

Francesca made an apologetic face. I'd never realise how annoying that
expression was from the outside.

"Fucking hell," said Rob eventually.

"It's fine!" said Banshari. "Well, it's not fine, but it's nearly half
term, so you wouldn't be doing much anyway, would you?"

"Actually, I'd booked a mini-break for me and my ex-girlfriend, to try
and patch things up," I said through gritted teeth.

Rob looked at me, surprised. "You did? What did Katie say about that?"

I couldn't look at him. "Well, I haven't actually told her yet, so...."

"Ah," said Rob, with surprising delicacy.

I looked up to see Francesca looking from Rob to me, then back to Rob
again. "Oh my god," she said, and it was the poshest thing that had
every come out of my mouth. "You're really not a couple, are you?"

"Really not," I said grimly.

"A whole week?" said Rob.