Turn 6 of 7

The mental transformation begins in earnest. Jade looks at herself in the mirror and, instead of feeling disgust, starts finding the new body sexy and appealing.

You catch sight of your reflection in the dark window and move toward it without deciding to, drawn by the same compulsion that makes moths seek light. The streetlamp outside silhouettes your new curves through the thin fabric of your borrowed shirt, and you watch yourself approach with a detachment that feels borrowed from somewhere deeper than conscious choice. The woman in the glass waits for you, posed in her platform heels with her weight shifted to one hip, her head tilted at an angle that presents her throat, her collarbone, the swell of her breasts beneath the cotton. You should feel horror. You remember expecting horror. But what rises in your chest as you meet her eyes is something warmer, something that spreads through your transformed body like recognition.

"Like, wow," you hear yourself breathe, and the voice matches the feeling perfectly—the soft exhalation, the rising inflection, the emptiness that somehow contains its own satisfaction. You lift one hand to touch your hair and watch the woman in the glass do the same, her fingers combing through blonde strands with a delicacy you never possessed, her wrist bending to display the slender line of her forearm. The gesture feels like self-care and self-display simultaneously, and you cannot locate the boundary between them anymore. Your lips part slightly as you watch yourself watching, and you notice how full they look in this light, how the gloss catches the dim glow from outside, how your eyes seem larger now, darker, more available to whoever might meet them.

You turn sideways and feel your hips rotate, your shoulders counter, the automatic choreography of a body that knows how to present itself even when the mind has forgotten why. The profile surprises you with its appeal—the dramatic sweep from waist to hip, the curve of your new ass beneath the shirt's hem, the length of your legs in their precarious heels. You place one hand on your waist and feel the indentation there, the dramatic contrast your transformed body offers to any hand that might seek purchase. The thought of hands seeking purchase sends warmth through you, and you giggle at your own reaction, the sound light and empty and genuine.

"Jade looks really good," you whisper to your reflection, and the third person feels correct now, feels like the only grammar that could contain what you are becoming. The woman in the glass smiles back with an expression of pleased vacancy, and you feel your face mirroring her without resistance. You lean closer to the glass and notice your cleavage pressing against the shirt's fabric, the shadowed valley between your breasts, and the sight sends something through you that your simplified vocabulary can only call "tingly." You want to touch yourself. The thought arrives without shame, without the complex negotiations your former self would have required, simply present as appetite.

Behind you, Mia clears her throat, and you turn toward her with a sway of hips that feels like greeting, like offering, like the most natural response to attention your body could devise. You wait for her to speak, your mind quiet now, your thoughts occupied with surfaces—your manicure, your reflection, whether she finds you pretty. The questions that drove you here, the protests and threats and desperate bargains, have receded like tide from a beach you no longer need to visit. Something else occupies the shore now, something simpler and more immediate, and you smile at Mia with your plumped lips and wait to be told what comes next.