All Chapters of THE HUSBAND SWAP (bound to the wrong body): Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

"SOME PEOPLE LEAVE MARKS YOU CAN SEE. OTHERS LEAVE THE KIND THAT SIT QUIETLY INSIDE YOUR CHEST AND REFUSE TO HEAL." MAYA.I was awake before the alarm, which was becoming a pattern I did not enjoy, lying in that specific limbo of not quite asleep and not quite ready to be awake, just existing in the early morning stillness of the room.The other side of the bed was empty.I sat up. The pillow on Kayden's side — Yulian's side, the right side, the side that was not mine — was slightly dented and the duvet was neatly pulled back up, smoothed down with a carefulness that was more Yulian's habit than Kayden's. Which meant Kayden had been awake long enough to absorb that habit from the body he was in.That was either reassuring or unsettling. I had not decided yet.I got up. Pulled on a robe. Went to find out what the morning had produced.The answer was: Vivienne in the kitchen making tea, Kayden sitting at the island with his elbows on the counter and his head in his hands in the postur

“I HATE YOU. I LOVE YOU, I HATE THAT I LOVE YOU…”KAYDEN POVLet me tell you something about wearing your best friend's face.It was weird.Not in the way you would expect weird to feel — not dramatic or loud or the kind of thing that hit you all at once and knocked you sideways. It was quieter than that. It was catching your reflection in the bathroom mirror first thing in the morning and having your brain do that half-second delay where it registered the face before it registered that the face was wrong. It was reaching for something and your hand arriving slightly differently than you expected because the arm was the same length but the muscle memory was not yours. It was laughing and the sound coming out different — Yulian's laugh, lower, more controlled, like even his amusement had manners.Three days in and I still had not fully gotten used to it.I did not think I was going to get used to it.I stood in the elevator on the way down to the parking garage with Maya beside me and

“MAYBE IN ANOTHER LIFE, I WAS THE ONE FOR YOU..”KAYDENHere is the thing about Lisa.Lisa and I had been doing this thing for about eight months that I would describe as turbulent and she would describe as passionate and the honest answer was probably somewhere in the middle but closer to turbulent. We went well for a while and then we went badly and then we went well again and then something would happen — usually something I did, if I was being fair to myself, which I occasionally was — and we would go badly again and the whole cycle would repeat.It was exhausting.It was also, if I was being completely honest, a situation I had been wanting to exit for about three of those eight months but kept not exiting because Lisa was not a bad person and I did not want to hurt her and I kept telling myself I would figure out how to end it cleanly and then not figuring it out.Two days before I came to Yulian's apartment I had finally, actually, genuinely ended it.Cleanly was not entirely t

"COMING BACK FOR WHAT'S MINE."MAYA.My feet moved before my brain caught up with them.One second I was standing at the barrier and the next I was moving toward the gap in the railing where the marshals had already gone through and I was not thinking about circuits or protocols or the fact that there were people everywhere and all of them could see me.I was thinking about Yulian.On the ground. In Kayden's body. Not moving for the two seconds before he started moving and those two seconds had been the longest two seconds of my entire life including the morning I woke up to find two men in each other's bodies standing in my living room.Kayden was right behind me.We reached the track at the same time the marshals reached Yulian and he was already up by then — already on his feet, one hand on the bike, the other pushing his helmet off — and the relief that moved through me when I saw him standing was so large I felt it in my knees.He turned toward us.Kayden's face. My husband's eye

“AND THE MYSTERY DEEPENS” MAYAGregor's street looked different at night.In the daytime it had a kind of worn charm to it — the narrow road, the old trees pushing through the pavement cracks, the corner shop with the hand-painted sign that had probably not been updated since the nineties. The kind of street that existed slightly outside of time and did not seem bothered about it.At night it was just dark.The kind of dark that the city never fully managed in its busier parts — here the streetlights were spaced too far apart and the trees filled in the gaps between them and the whole street had a quiet that felt deliberate. Like it was keeping something in.Kayden parked outside number three.The three of us sat in the car for a moment."His light is on," Yulian said from the back seat.He was right. The front window of Gregor's small house had a warm glow behind the curtain — not bright, not the overhead light, something lower. A lamp. The specific quality of light that meant someo