The crack in the rewrite

Opening scene

The empty lecture hall still smells of old coffee and dry-erase markers when the new transfer student finishes the last line of the incantation. “He’ll be yours,” she says with a sharp little smile. “Pretty, obedient, and completely obsessed with you. Just say his name to seal it.”

You speak the name of the basketball player who has spent the last two years making your life miserable. Pink light explodes outward. When your vision clears, you are no longer standing in the lecture hall. You are on your knees in the middle of the university gym, wearing a tiny college cheerleading uniform that is already too tight in all the wrong places. The basketball star stands over you, ball forgotten at his feet, a slow grin spreading across his face as he takes in the changes already visible on your body.

“Well damn,” he says, voice low and amused. “Looks like someone finally got my order right.” Your hips are widening. Your chest is swelling against the cropped top. Soft, empty thoughts are already starting to push out your old anger. The transfer student is nowhere to be seen. The spell is still working — and it has decided you are the perfect raw material.

Turn 1 of 5

Look down at myself and assess how much I've already changed

You drop your gaze. The first thing you see is the uniform — scarlet and gold, the university's colors, stretched across a body that is already wrong. The cropped top sits tight against a chest that wasn't there ten minutes ago, soft swells pushing against the fabric, the neckline cutting low across cleavage that definitely didn't exist when you walked into that lecture hall. Your shoulders are narrower. Your arms are slim, the muscle tone you'd quietly built up over the summer already dissolving into something smoother, softer.

Your hands fly to your hips. They're wider. Not dramatically — not yet — but enough that you can feel the difference when you press your palms against them, a new curve flaring out from a waist that has pulled in. The skirt is brutal: short, pleated, riding high on thighs that are rounding out beneath it. When you shift on your knees, you feel the fabric brush against skin that seems more sensitive than it should be, every nerve singing with the contact. Your legs look shaved. You don't remember shaving them.

Your hair falls past your jaw. It shouldn't — you kept it cropped short, practical, out of the way — but now it's tumbling in long, glossy waves past your shoulders, brushing against your bare collarbone. The color is lighter than your natural dark brown, trending toward honey. You grab a strand and stare at it, and for a second the thought that surfaces isn't panic but *does this look okay*, which is so alien and so casual that it makes your stomach lurch harder than any of the physical changes.

Jax is still standing over you, and you can feel the weight of his attention like heat against your skin. That grin hasn't moved. He shifts the basketball to one hip and folds his arms, looking down at you the way someone looks at a gift they're still deciding whether to unwrap.

"Damn, Eliot," he says, and the name lands wrong — too rough, too familiar, like he's talking to someone he's known intimately for years instead of someone he's spent two years shoving into lockers. "You're gonna look *real* good once you finish filling out. Like, championship-good."

You try to say something sharp. What comes out is a soft, breathy little sound that makes your face burn. Your lips feel fuller. Your thoughts are thick and slow, like trying to run through water, and somewhere underneath the panic you can feel something else — something warm and eager and *pleased* by the way he's looking at you.