This is an alternate take on Dawning... Or How I Survived a Plane Crash, Sort Of which is the same up to the kiss. If you have just read that story, you can skip down three or four pages (to “kiss a boy”) and pick up how this version goes.

The darkness never changes, but sometimes it smells different. After 400 years, whether my eyes are open or closed matters because it’s how I communicate. One if by land, two if I see….

I can’t really smell anything anymore; all I have is memories. The scent of early morning rain on the cool desert sand, the odor of sweat on the back of a long-time lover’s hand, the reek of aviation fuel on the ground below the flight path of an airplane bigger than the sky.

Do they still have airplanes? Maybe I’m an airplane. How would I know?

When I was a kid, I had all sorts of ambitions for what I wanted to be when I grew up. I don’t think any of them were root vegetables, but I yam what I yam. Someone blow a whistle…

I asked my robot caretakers if I could be allowed to die. They said, of course, any time you like, as often as you want, a thousand times at least.

They don’t like being called robots, but who gives a damn what they like as long as they let me die….

---

Eventually, the drugs they had me heavily sedated on wore off, and all the hookah-smoking caterpillars and purple, inside-out cows went away. I still couldn’t see, but my memories were clearer.

My family had been heading to Japan for a vacation. I remember looking past my twin sister Chelsea to see Tokyo out the window. There were a lot of buildings, and then a small bay and there was the airport. We came in for the landing... and crashed.

The last I remembered was getting mashed into Chelsea. We both had our seat belts on, but because our side of the plane hit the ground, our seats didn’t stay where they were supposed to be and the seat belts didn’t do any good. Her seat bent one way, mine the other, and we were pressed face-to-face, lips touching like we were kissing. Ew! My sister’s pretty hot, but I never wanted to kiss her!

That memory kept playing over and over in my head. Kissing my sister. Maybe a day after that, I still couldn’t see, but I could hear and smell that I was in a hospital, as I suppose I should be, having survived a plane crash.

---

Several days later they took the bandages off my face. Until that point I had only had small holes for breathing. Hooray! I could see! Sort of. After a moment, my vision cleared, and I could see perfectly. Beyond the doctors, I could see my parents standing there across the room.

To my left, there was another bed in the room where they had similarly just been removing bandages. I expected that was Chelsea. But when I looked over, I saw... me? My face. My attempt at a mustache.

She, he, whoever, was looking at me, too, and looking just as confused as I felt. He spoke first, sounding like Chelsea’s manner of speaking but in my actual voice.

“Kevin, are you in my body?!”

I replied, “I must be, because I see my face over there. So I’m Chelsea now?”

“Yeah.”

---

The doctors were dealing with all of our physical injuries, but said if our minds had gotten scrambled to the point we thought we were each other, there was no way they could fix that. At best, they could send us to a psych. They actually brought one in for us, who concluded that I firmly believe I’m Kevin and my roommate firmly believes she’s Chelsea, even though those are not the bodies we are in. But there still wasn’t anything they could do about it.

We lay in bed for another two weeks before they took off the rest of the casts. A terrible fortnight of looking over and seeing myself in the other bed every day, a hundred times a day, knowing I was going to have to live as Chelsea for the rest of my life. Mom and Dad came to visit once a day, giving short talks meant to comfort us. Gradually, little by little, I got more of the feeling of my body back. Of her body. Whatever. It itched, but it was all under casts and unreachable.

One morning they started removing our casts in stages, first removing the ones on our arms and legs and finally the casts over our torsos. After each removal, they gave the exposed skin a thorough sponge bath, and then took a break before the next cast. I don’t know if those breaks were to give us a rest, or to let the doctors rest.

When they prepared to remove the torso casts, they pulled curtains across between us and over the windows of the hospital room, since we’d be exposed sometimes. I did confirm I had Chelsea’s body once that cast was removed and I could see her breasts. My breasts now, I guess. They covered me with one of those paper hospital gowns before opening the curtains, and Kevin’s body likewise. Up until that point we didn’t have any clothes at all, just casts. For the rest of that day and all of the next we were subjected to lots of tests. They were making sure we had healed properly, and there were a lot of parts that needed healing. But apparently everything was good.

---

Starting with dinner that evening, we got to eat food again. All-you-can-eat rice, veggies with a lot of soybeans, and some meat, piled high. It was supposed to help us as we worked to regenerate lost muscle. They helped us with that first meal in case we were uncoordinated with eating after so long in casts, but I got the hang of feeding Chelsea’s body quickly.

The next morning the therapists came in. We’d been in bed for more than a month, and we needed to learn how to walk again. Before we could even do that, we needed to relearn to move our limbs, and they led us through aerobic exercises in bed, stretching out arms and legs, fingers and toes. The big meals continued.

After several days like that, one morning the doctors came in and unhooked us from the IV and the catheters between our legs. We both got a sponge-down of that area.

My doctor said, in broken but intelligible English, “Your period start. You need tampon.”

He left, and a female nurse came in and showed me what was unmistakably a wrapped tampon before opening it. I’d never even touched one before, but I knew what it was... and where it had to go.

She asked me, “Can you insert it? I can do it if you cannot.”

Ugh! You just insert that thing and push the plunger, right? I bet she didn’t even realize that I was Kevin and not Chelsea, not that anybody else was ever really going to understand that. So I told her, “You do it, please.”

But I watched as she inserted the thing, and it went about like I expected it would. If I was going to be Chelsea the rest of my life, I was going to need to know this.

Chelsea had been over there snickering the whole time, and burst out laughing as soon as the nurse left the room. But that didn’t last long, as the therapists came back in. The reason we got disconnected was for us to try to learn to walk today. They lowered the beds so it was like getting out of a normal bed, and helped us turn, sit up, and stand up. We only took a couple steps that first time, and back to bed, but we practiced the sitting and standing a while.

Pretty soon, we were alone again, and I asked Chelsea, “You just insert that thing like she did?”

Although Chelsea had joked before, now she spoke in a serious tone. “Yeah. You’re going to have to get used to that. You could use pads, but the tampon is more freeing, and you don’t really feel it after it’s in.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right about that. I know it’s there, but...”

“To remove it, you pull on the cord that hangs out, at the same angle it went it.”

I reached down and found the short cord hanging out of Chelsea’s vagina. My vagina. Whatever.

“You never leave it in more than 8 hours, and I’m sure they will be around to change it. In the heavy flow, the second of three days, you may need to change it more often and maybe use the heavy flow tampons. They’re larger. I didn’t see what they gave you, but if it just started I’m sure they gave you a standard one.”

A nurse actually came 6 hours after the first one to change it, and after seeing her remove the old one and insert another, I felt like I could do this the next time. Immediately after that the therapists came back, and this time helped us to walk as far as the restroom within our hospital room. We were after that authorized to walk that far ourselves if we needed to, though we also still had a bedpan to use if we felt like we couldn’t make it.

The nurse continued coming every 6 hours including in the middle of the night to change my tampon, or rather to offer me the chance to do so. After I said I’d do it, she handed it to me, and held open a small bag for me to toss the used one, the wrapper, and the applicator into. The second day, it was every four hours, and after one of them came out dripping, it was indeed heavy flow tampons the rest of that day. The third day it was back to six hours, and when I removed the tampon the fourth morning, I found it completely clean. Fortunately, like Chelsea had said, it only lasted three days. Three days during which we got serious practice walking as therapists came in twice a day to help us.

We were down to normal-sized meals after we started walking, ones I could finish. Then the therapists got us doing longer and longer walks, eventually going far across the hospital, where I no doubt would have been lost had they not been there to guide us back to our rooms.

After the first of these walks longer than two rooms down the hall, I complained about the jiggle of Chelsea’s breasts. My breasts. Whatever. A nurse came with a tight-fitting top to wear under the paper gown, which helped, and was subsequently changed out each time they came to wash down my body. Chelsea explained later that what I was wearing was a sports bra, though it was Japanese and a little different from hers that would be waiting for me whenever we got home.

One of these nights, after the last nurse service we expected until the middle of the night, Chelsea asked me, “Did we unintentionally kiss during the accident?”

“Yeah,” I told her. “I remember that. When I came back down to the real world after some really weird dreams from whatever drugs they had us on, that memory really stuck in my mind.”

“Do you think it caused us to swap?”

“I don’t know why that would happen. Lots of people kiss and they don’t swap bodies.”

“Yeah, but not also with the kind of forces on us during the accident. You want to try it and see if we swap back?”

“Uh, I really don’t want to kiss you. No offense, but I’m not ready to kiss a boy, even if he’s my old body. And we wouldn’t have those forces from the accident on us.”

“True.”

“But I’ll do it. It’s worth trying, even if there’s only the slimmest chance of us getting back into the right bodies.”

So we stood together between the beds and kissed each other like we were on a date. It wasn’t bad, actually. I closed my eyes and just pretended I was kissing a girl. It worked because they’d shaved Chelsea that morning. Chelsea didn’t want my mustache and had been having them shave it off when they took care of the rest of her face. My old face. Whatever. I wasn’t going to argue with it because she was the one having to live with it now.

There was a moment of disorientation, and to my surprise I found myself back in my own body again!

“Thank you, thank you, Chelsea, for suggesting that. I was scared to death of having to live the rest of my life in your body.”

“You’re welcome, but I’m pretty happy to be myself again, too.”

I really was grateful to be back in my own body. I’d seriously thought I was going to have to be Chelsea the rest of my life, and had started learning skills like using the bathroom with her equipment and using tampons that I thought I would need for that life. And now all that wasn’t going to be necessary after all.

---

Walking my body around rather than Chelsea’s took less adjustment than I expected. The work we had done already had restored the muscles to the point where they worked, and the additional walking practice they gave us, two more weeks of it, had me quickly walking like normal, and we walked all over the hospital. There was another round of tests that we passed, and they said we were ready to leave the hospital.

Mom and Dad arrived with real clothes for us, pulled the curtains, and helped us get dressed. As he helped me, Dad explained, “Everything in our luggage was destroyed in the crash, and you two actually caught fire and even what you were wearing was destroyed. We bought this so you would have something, but insurance is going to pay for more clothes for you to wear before we go back home.”

Chelsea had a similar conversation with Mom, and pretty soon we both were dressed. The clothes weren’t familiar, but they worked. If Mom and Dad remembered us saying we were body-swapped when they first took off our bandages, they never mentioned it. Mom had brought Chelsea a flowery dress, which I’m sure she thought was fine, but the thought of me walking out of here in her body felt doubly bad if I’d had to do it in that dress. I looked at Chelsea, and she didn’t have quite the same kind of relief on her face that I felt. She just seemed happy to be getting out of here.

The four of us were together as a family again, Mom and Dad towing suitcases. They signed some paperwork and led us out of the hospital, but not by walking out the front door into the sunshine like you might expect. No, we left underground, directly into Tokyo’s subway system. They had monthly passes, and a weekly pass for each of us.

“All on the airline’s dime,” Dad explained. “Insurance after your plane crashes is pretty good, as it turns out. They put us up in a hotel room and we’ve had our expenses covered all summer. But now we’re going to get the family vacation we came here for, though we know you two will still have to take it easy.”

After traveling the city all summer, Mom and Dad were experts at navigating the Tokyo subway. Along the way, Mom explained, “We stayed in a hotel near the hospital while you were there, but now we’re going to the one at Tokyo Disneyland. You remember, Chelsea, the one you chose as your prize for finishing high school with a higher GPA than Kevin.”

They’d staged a contest between us. We were both good students, but whoever got the higher final GPA got to choose where we’d go on our celebratory summer vacation, anywhere in the world. Chelsea won, and she chose Tokyo Disneyland. Our brief conversations in the hospital had all been about how we were feeling and recovering, but our parents on their own arranged the same vacation we came here for, simply in late August rather than late June.

At the hotel we had what they called a “family suite.” Chelsea and I took a look into both kids’ rooms, which looked like they were intended for age 8 or so rather than our 18. There was a little girl room all made up in pink with a big Minnie Mouse on the wall and a boy room in blue with an equally large Mickey. The bedroom for our parents was more tastefully done, with decorations showing Donald Duck’s entire family, and we had a living room with couches and a kitchenette and bathroom.

I wasn’t crazy about it, but Chelsea went into the pink room and jumped onto the bed and rolled around, just loving the experience. But she didn’t get to stay there long.

Mom said, “Come on! We have to go shopping. You can’t wear the clothes you are in all week.”

Fortunately, that didn’t mean shopping within the Disney resort, but just at normal stores. Normal for Tokyo, which meant weird Japanese sizes and some just plain weird clothes. One store had the same shirt and pants set intended for boys in every color of the rainbow, including a neon green one that just looked ridiculous. But Dad helped me, and Mom helped Chelsea find clothes we were comfortable with in some stores that stocked more American-style clothing.

I also learned that the deal we had with the insurance funding us had limits. We each had about $500 to spend on clothes. That was actually 60,000 Japanese yen, less an amount that they had spent on the clothes we were now wearing. So I couldn’t go crazy with it, but I could easily replace what I’d lost in the crash.

We also each got a large suitcase even a bit larger than what we had packed to come here, to make sure we had enough space for whatever we bought. We packed our other purchases into it for transport back to the hotel. I got a satchel that would work as a school bag with space to carry my laptop, and Chelsea got a large purse, which would be our personal items on the flight home. We both got new wallets, though we didn’t have anything to put into them for now.

We got dinner before coming back to the hotel. Again, we had a limit; it was more than the cost of fast food, but less than room service in the Disney hotel. Mom and Dad had seen a lot of the city while we were stuck in the hospital, and knew some good affordable restaurants.

Because Mom and Chelsea were shopping in a different part of the store from me and Dad, I didn’t actually see most of what she had picked out until we got back to the hotel. We did a modeling show after we got back, each of us going into our bedrooms, changing, and then coming out to model for each other and both our parents. Chelsea called my selections boring. Hers were flamboyant, but in a way that was normal for her.

I finished in my pajamas. Chelsea had something to sleep in, too, but it left her practically naked, just with some solid bits covering the critical areas. She had worn stuff like that at home sometimes, too. I think it was a kind of rebellion for her; Mom and Dad hadn’t let us have sex, saying that wasn’t allowed until we moved out of the house after graduating from high school. And this made me realize that that time was almost upon us.

That evening, we took a look at our purchases and made plans for how we were going to spend the rest of our clothing allowance the next day. We got that done quickly in the morning, and then visited various museums and other attractions. Our third day there, we actually went into Disneyland. Due to having just healed many broken bones, we weren’t allowed on any roller coasters, but we went into many other attractions. Well, they were attractions for Chelsea, anyway. I thought the whole thing was silly, and that Chelsea was silly, too, for wanting this at age 18.

We spent the rest of our time there enjoying all sorts of other things across the city. We also had a stop at the U.S. embassy, where Chelsea and I picked up our replacement passports. I was still able to sign my name, and it still looked like it did before the crash. Mom and Dad already had theirs, and the neighbor they had arranged to pick up our mail had confirmed we had replacement driver’s licenses and debit cards and more waiting for us at home.

After a week of Tokyo, we were all ready to go home, and we boarded a flight which arrived safely.

---

We did not get a lot of time to rest. We’d basically missed the whole summer in the hospital, and we were immediately having to get ready for school. If we had still been in high school, we would have already missed the start of classes. As it was, though, we were going on to college, both of us at Gobelstic U., the alma mater of both our parents and where we apparently would have some extra privileges as children of alumni. We were both taking a standard freshman class lineup, so we didn’t have to pick classes. But we were getting ready to go live away from our parents for the first time.

We had one week to pack. I had a lot of stuff in my room and it was clearly too much to take all of it, so I was sorting out what should come with me and what should stay. It was harder for Chelsea, but just like me, she decided some of her clothes were just too childish to keep wearing now that she was supposed to be an adult, and together we built a pile that we took to a donation center on the next-to-last day before our trip.

Chelsea finally finished packing, and came to visit me on our last night together in the house we grew up in.

“Kevin, sorry about cutting off your mustache.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it. I’m just glad we got back to our own bodies.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“I apologize for feeling up your boobs, though I likewise thought they were going to be mine forever.”

“Same with your dick. You didn’t mess with my pussy?”

“No more than necessary.”

“That’s too bad. You would have enjoyed it. I found it interesting to be able to experience your body for a little while.”

“You want to see if we can keep swapping?”

“Yeah, that was actually why I came over here,” Chelsea said, puckering up for a kiss.

If not for the experience we had had, this was something I wouldn’t even consider. But we were never going to forget living in each others’ bodies for a while in the hospital. I had gotten to know my sister’s body in ways no other man could. I had used the bathroom with her body, and changed her tampon through an entire period. But it was somewhat limited because we were in the hospital, and we had only just started being mobile when we changed back.

I put my lips up against my sister’s, and we let our tongues touch. It wasn’t a casual thing; we had to really get into a serious kiss, but it worked. I felt the same moment of disorientation I felt in the hospital, and when I pulled away from the kiss, I found myself in Chelsea’s body.

“This is insane!” she said with my mouth, in my voice.

“Are we going to have this problem when we start dating other people again?”

“God, I hope not! Though I bet there are some people who would really get off on it.”

“Yeah. Would we be stuck dating only those people?”

“Probably. Let’s swap back for now.”

Chelsea stuck out her lips, well, the lips of my body, and we had another deep kiss that let us get back into our proper bodies.

Before she left the room, Chelsea whispered into my ear, “Come visit me at 11 tonight.”

It wasn’t a surprise what she wanted with an invitaton at that hour. She let me lean over and kiss her in bed, and we swapped bodies. I pulled back the covers and found myself in one of her next-to-nothing sleepwear outfits.

In my voice, Chelsea said, “We have a special opportunity. We haven’t had sex yet, but Mom and Dad encouraged us to masturbate to learn our bodies’ sexual response. We should learn what the other side feels, and maybe be able to do it better when we do start having sex with our dates.”

She walked my body over to her packed belongings and came back with a vibrator, a big long wand that was used outside the body. Though I’d never seen it, I knew she had it because I heard it from my room sometimes. I wasn’t ignorant about how it was used, either. When we turned 18, Mom took the porn blocks off our computers. While we were warned some of the things in porn aren’t realistic, I learned a lot, including how women used this type of vibrator.

I told her I didn’t have any sex toys like that and had just used my hand. Chelsea showed me how her nightwear opened at the bottom with two little hooks. Without actually touching each other, we explained how we best got off, and she handed me the vibrator.

“I feel weird actually doing this in front of you, though,” Chelsea said.

“Go back to my room and do it.”

“Sure. Can you hear the vibrator from your room?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. Turn it off when you’re done, and I’ll come swap us back.”

So that was how I first got to masturbate as a girl. It was a totally different experience, and Chelsea was right to have us take advantage of the opportunity. I tried to focus on how the vibrator best excited her body, but I couldn’t help admiring and feeling up Chelsea’s body a bit.

In the past, I’d certainly noticed her body was hot, but she was my twin sister. We had played together since alphabet blocks. We were occasionally rivals, but usually the closest of friends, ones who’d defend each other from anything. When our parents made us compete for the best GPA, it felt like times when we’d been forced to play on different teams competing with each other. We would have preferred to study together, and instead we were each forced to seek out other study partners.

I had never allowed myself to look at Chelsea as a sex object, even as a fantasy, except as a basis for comparison; if a girl I was dating was hotter than my sister then I was doing well. In the hospital, I hadn’t done it because we only had the bathroom for privacy, and I thought I’d have forever to explore her body. Learning other things I needed to live in that body seemed more important to do first, and then we changed back and I lost the opportunity. Now, I was getting to do this because of the continued body-swapping ability we’d learned we still had, along with Chelsea’s suggestion it was a research opportunity. Did she feel that way about my body, too? Probably.

I went back to focusing on using the vibrator, and brought myself to what seemed to be several orgasms, but they weren’t accompanied by the let-down after coming I had as a guy. I could just keep going through them, so the feeling just got more intense. So I’d already learned something: Make it last longer, and if I am doing it right it will feel better to her.

Several minutes after I heard her go to the bathroom to clean up, I decided I was done and turned off the vibrator, and Chelsea came back over.

“I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did.”

“I did. Thank you.”

Since she had cleaned up my body, she had me clean up hers. I washed down the whole area with soap and water, and washed the vibrator head too. I had had experiences like this with sponge baths in the hospital before we changed back, and tried to be as gentle as they were then; I didn’t want to get Chelsea’s body excited all over again, nor be too rough with it.

When I was all washed and dried, we kissed again in her room to change back, and then I went to my own bed and we slept for real.

In the morning, before we headed to Gobelstic, we talked and agreed we should stay close while we were there, and keep talking. We were basically going to know nobody there; there was only one other student from our high school who was going there, Steve Brandt, infamous locally as a hacker who had found everyone’s final GPA before the official release. He’d spoiled for us one day early that I’d lost the contest to Chelsea. None of our many dates from high school, all of whom had either left us because we didn’t get along or left us because they wanted sex and we both strictly adhered to our parental rule against it, were going to be there.

---

Apparently there were a lot of other incoming students in the same situation as us, either not having a girlfriend or boyfriend or leaving one behind as they entered here. It seemed like everywhere there were guys hitting on girls and girls doing things to be noticed by guys in the very first week, and we were the targets as often as anyone else. Even though we had never had sex, Chelsea and I recognized in much of this activity the signs of those who were primarily looking for sex.

There were people like that in high school, too, and to stick to our parents’ request, we couldn’t even consider going out with them. Not that they were really asking us to, since word of our chastity got around. We were under no such limit now, so we agreed to go on one date each with one of those.

We confirmed those dates were both just as much veiled invitations to have sex as we had thought. We also confirmed that our power was limited to kissing each other, as we did not trade bodies with our dates at any point. We had both gone through with the sex, and I realized that I’d missed something.

“Was that it?” I asked Chelsea when we had a chance to talk afterward.

“I think I get what you mean. It felt really good, but it wasn’t... special.”

“Yes, that’s why Mom and Dad wanted us to wait to have sex. Masturbation is for play, but sex between two people is supposed to be real, in a way. And this wasn’t. We might never even date them again, because they’ve each got dozens of others to go try.”

“That was my virginity!” Chelsea exclaimed.

“Yes. We wasted it stupidly on some random swingers.”

“OK, let’s not be like them. Why does it feel so wrong? What should we have done?”

“The end goal of dating should not be to find sex for the night, but to find a life partner. Or at least, a long-term candidate for a life partner. Once we think we’ve found the right person, then we can have all the sex we want with them. Having lots of one-night stands, like those people are doing, runs counter to that goal. We’d always be comparing any potential partner we’ve had sex with to someone who gave us better sex, but someone we can’t be with because we were only a one-night stand to them.”

Chelsea nodded all through my explanation. Chelsea and I agreed to look for a long-term boyfriend and girlfriend rather than simply sex partners. We’d each found that kind of person repeatedly during high school, but failed to hold onto them, as they also expected sex eventually, where “eventually” was sooner than “after graduation.” Now that won’t be a problem; when we build a relationship to that point, we’ll be ready for sex.

Our one-night escapade actually made things worse for us in this effort, as our names were circulated among the school as being part of the effective swingers’ club that the students we’d observed comprised. By this point, we’d realized there were just a few dozen students out of hundreds we encountered regularly who were involved in it. Also, just as we expected, our dates didn’t show any particular attachment to us, quickly moving on to try others. Fortunately, refusing all of that group for a while undid the damage, and by mid-October, there was a smaller group of students who were widely considered to be swingers, with the intention of “getting laid” (as some of them called it) every weekend, maybe even more than once a weekend.

This made it possible to look for dates among everybody else. And then we were on ground we understood. We simply wiped those few out of the candidate pool, and there were lots of people we could consider. But the same strategies that worked for us in high school helped us find good dates here. We each dated several of these candidates once each, and the ones that went well a second time. Of course, we weren’t having sex with them; that was what set us apart from the swingers. I had my hand, and Chelsea had her toys.

And we continued to swap so we could experience masturbation from the other side. It was tricky, but we found times to swap, when neither of us was busy with school work or dating or whatever, and when both our roommates were out. We developed this whole World War II-based code for talking about it so that even if we were overheard, the secret that we could swap bodies wouldn’t be learned. Operation Overlord, the start of the Allied invasion to retake German-occupied France, was body-swapping. “The coast is clear” meant someone’s roommate was out and expected to be out for a while. And we added other pieces to it over time.

By Christmas, we’d had all our second dates and had each narrowed our list down to two, who we arranged third dates with in January. Finally, I decided to stick with Kayla and Chelsea with Doug as our continuing partners. We arranged to finally have sex with them after our fourth dates on Valentine’s weekend.

It went really well. Kayla’s body didn’t respond in exactly the same way as Chelsea’s had, but my experience in her body helped me better interpret what I saw happening with Kayla. Afterward, Kayla told me she had the best sex of her life and that it was worth the wait. Chelsea reported afterward she’d figured out how to handle Doug’s dick at just the right times to extend the experience so he didn’t come until Chelsea had felt like she got what she wanted out of it, something I had also realized was important and had practiced with Kayla.

After we started having sex with our dates, we mostly stopped the body-swap thing. Neither of us wanted to go on a date in the other’s body, or even chance running into our date while in the other’s body. We still did it as a sort of refresher course a couple times a year.

We learned the alsorans in the contest for our affections, Clarissa and David, had seen each other during our last dates with them, which happened to cross paths on the same night, and now the two of them were dating. They felt no ill will toward us, and we were happy they had found each other.

---

We stuck together through college, and our partners stuck with us.

During junior year, that guy Steve Brandt tried to blackmail us, claiming we were having sex with each other, and that he was going to spread the word among our friends at Gobelstic and back home. Though we had our secrets, what he claimed was something we had never done. We had never even masturbated in the same room together. We told our partners first.

“We’ve never even touched each other sexually, though we talked about sex, in part to help each other learn how to do it better,” I said. That was the truth, if you took it as meaning that my body never touched Chelsea’s.

“That must be why you’re so good at it,” Kayla said.

Doug added, “I bet the world would have a lot better lovers if everybody had an opposite-sex platonic friend they were close enough to to be able to talk with them about how they best enjoy sex.”

After we ignored Steve, he repeated his demand and sent a photo of me and Chelsea hugging. He said we were kissing, and since we’d had one of our rare body-swap sessions not too long before his initial demand, it was possible we’d kissed when he got the photo. But it was clear in the photo we weren’t kissing at that moment. It was hard to even tell it was us; I could tell, but I didn’t think others would easily be able to.

Kayla suggested going to the police about it, and the cop they sent out to talk to us brought along a wand that searched for transmissions from electronic eavesdropping devices... and found two bugs, one in the hallway outside my room, and one on my jacket that must have been where he got the picture.

They were able to track down where the devices were sending stuff and trace it back to Steve, and after they got search warrants, they found lots of other incriminating stuff on his computer. He got taken away and eventually jailed, but sent out the picture to a bunch of people who knew us before he got locked up.

In response, I posted this message on Facebook:

Notorious hacker Steve Brandt has been circulating unfounded rumors that I and my twin sister Chelsea have been having sex. This is false. The picture he sent actually does show us hugging, but that’s all it is.

Chelsea and I went through a traumatic experience of both almost dying in a plane crash shortly after high school graduation. In addition, Chelsea was my only friend from high school or before who came to Gobelstic with me. As a result, we’ve stayed close our entire time here, and sometimes, as in the moment when our privacy was invaded to take this photo, we remind each other that no matter what we are going through, it can’t be as bad as what we have already been through.

What’s more, the police found the device Steve used to take this picture, tracked it back to him, and he’s looking at potential jail time for it. He never got punished for hacking into Smith HS’s computer and stealing everybody’s final grades before they were officially released, but he’s getting his payback now.

Chelsea and I posted similar messages on all our social media accounts, but my Facebook post was the most popular. It got thousands of likes, including ones from people I never met. I guess it got circulated. It made the rounds a second time when one of our high-school classmates reposted it with a link to a news article about Steve getting convicted.

After the incident, Kayla suggested double-dating, perhaps so she could see how Chelsea and I behaved with respect to each other, so we did. After they saw nothing wrong with the way Chelsea and I acted toward each other, it drove us and our partners even closer together.

But the leak put an end to Chelsea and I using our special power. We never again swapped bodies, though I never forgot the experience of having done it, and of being perhaps the only man alive with the first-hand knowledge to answer the question, “Do men or women have it better in sex?” Personally, I think women do, but not by enough for me to want to live Chelsea’s life just for the experience.

After graduation we had a double wedding. Getting Steve sent to jail had made us celebrities among our high school class, and literally everybody we knew wanted to come, so we had to rent a big hall. And we had so many wedding gifts we were giving duplicates and triplicates to charity.

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We managed to all get jobs in New York City after that, and when Chelsea pointed out a vacancy in the building she and Doug lived in which was an upgrade from what Kayla and I had, we took it and stayed close. Each of our families had just one daughter, since even with the bigger place there wasn’t all that much room, but with them being in the same building, we raised them more like sisters than the cousins they actually were.

At holidays, we traveled to be with our family, Kayla’s, or Doug’s whenever we could. Our parents never mentioned that little outburst we had after having our faces uncovered after the accident, and we never told anybody else that we swapped bodies, once by accident and more than a dozen times on purpose. That secret went with us to our graves.