Turn 2 of 17

The giggle slips out again, nervous and involuntary. Covering his mouth, Dylan realises something about his lips and jaw feels off. Checking the mirror in the hallway his stubble has gone. In fact all his bodyhair has. As Dylan watches his skin smooths and tans, also gaining the scent of a floral lotion/perfume

The giggle slips out again before you can stop it — nervous this time, breathy, and it vibrates against your palm where you've clamped your hand over your mouth. It doesn't feel like yours. That's the part that scares you. It comes from somewhere up near the top of your throat, a sound with no weight behind it, and you can feel the next one gathering already, waiting for a reason.

And something else is wrong. Your lips feel strange under your fingers — fuller than they should be, softer, and your jaw, when your tongue runs anxiously along it, is smooth. Not shaved-smooth. Smooth like it has never grown anything at all. Your stomach drops, and you turn from Mia without a word, crossing the hallway to the mirror by the coat hooks, because you need to see it and you need to see it now.

The streetlight through the blinds gives you just enough. Your face looks like your face — mostly — but the stubble you walked in with is gone, every trace of it, your skin even and clean-shaven in a way you haven't been since you were nineteen. You drag your hand up under your shirt, pawing at your chest, your forearms, and there's nothing. No coarse hair on your arms, none on your chest, none anywhere your fingers can reach. Your skin is moving under your touch, almost imperceptibly, smoothing itself, and a warm flush spreads up your neck like sunburn from the inside.

In the mirror you watch it happen. The pale skin of your face and throat deepens, warming tone by tone into a soft golden tan, the kind that takes weeks on a beach and never looks this even. You lean closer, and your own reflection leans back with fuller lips and bright, smooth cheeks, and it takes you a second too long to accept that it's you. Then the smell hits you: something floral, sweet, rising off your own skin — coconut and vanilla and something like gardenia, the unmistakable scent of expensive lotion, as if your body has decided to perfume itself without being asked.

"That's the tan you liked," Mia says from the hallway behind you. She hasn't followed you to the mirror. She doesn't need to. Her voice is even, patient, almost gentle.

"That's the smell. I remember you coming home with it on your collar. You never even tried to hide it, Dylan."

You grip the edge of the coat shelf, staring at the smooth, tanned stranger wearing your bones, and your hand is trembling — but your lips, in the mirror, keep twitching upward, another giggle pressing at the back of your newly softened throat.