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They made the deal that night because of Poe.
“Do you know how much a five-month-old baby eats?” Rey asked with a frown.
“No,” Ben said. He propped his book on his thigh. This seemed less of a question and more the start of a conversation, even though she was tapping furiously at her laptop. “Should I?”
“Poe has no idea how to feed his own child,” Rey said, eyes still on the screen. “I need him to review this brief and instead he’s asking me whether the baby can have some crackers.”
“He can’t just ask the baby’s other parent?”
She glared at him.
“Okay, I know I met them at your holiday party, but I can’t remember their name,” he admitted.
“He could just google it! It’s not that hard,” she said, exasperated. “Even people with a uterus learn stuff that way.”
Ben reached for one of her feet, wedged under his legs to keep her toes warm. Some nights she’d scoot them farther and farther under his ass until she could wiggle her toes close enough to tickle his balls, and they’d both close their laptops and work on each other, ignoring the buzzing of their phones. That night she kept typing as he rubbed the arch.
“What’s up?” he asked. “Are you still stressed about that housing case?”
She sighed and pecked away. “We still have a lot of work to do, and Poe promised he could help, but he doesn’t really have time. Which is fine. He should be spending time with his baby.”
That wasn’t all. She still had that line between her eyes that meant something was on her mind. “But?” he prompted.
Rey met his eyes. “I’m afraid the same thing will happen to us. Now that we’re trying to have a baby. That I’ll end up doing all the work and you won’t know about crackers.”
“We should probably talk about that.” He reached for her other foot.
They were serious but not that serious about trying. They’d giggled through the first few rounds of unprotected sex the way they’d snickered to each other on their honeymoon. “Fuck me like a married man,” she’d whispered every time he lined himself up with her. Lately she’d changed it to “Knock me up like a married man,” her eyes mischievous when she said it and, he noticed, her cunt soaked when he buried himself inside.
They treated it like a running joke, and it made him laugh, but it also made him harder than he wanted to admit. That reminder that she belonged to him and he belonged to her. A little primal desire that would always tickle at the back of his brain while the front part kept track of whether he or Rey had taken the car in for its last service, and was he doing half the laundry or had it slipped to 30 percent.
What was serious, and surprising, was the tangle of feelings it brought up. The tears that welled up in Rey’s eyes when she told him she liked her job too much to stay home with a child, even though he didn’t think he’d asked her to. The choking sensation in his own chest when he tried to explain that he wanted to be there, but he couldn’t, because he’d watched the other partners at his firm fire associates who’d taken paternity leave.
Rey stopped typing. “Probably.” She rolled her shoulders, thinking. “It’s just not a fair deal.”
“That women are doing 65 percent of child care? I read the book, too.”
“Even before that. I have to be pregnant and then deliver a baby and then take care of the kid. It’s a lot of labor, followed by literal labor, which will probably be excruciating because I’m small and you’re big.”
“I can take leave if that’s what you want,” he offered.
“Not from your current job,” she pointed out. “And it shouldn’t be on me to want it.”
“Point taken. Okay, I can find a new job and take leave from that.” They were finding their rhythm now. Suggestion, rejection, counter-suggestion, both of them willing to chip away at the problem until it was whittled down to nothing.
“But what are you going to do when the fetus is leaching calcium out of my bones? When I go back to work and get put on the mommy track?”
“You’re right. It’s not a fair deal.”
“I don’t want to end up feeling grateful that you’re doing the bare minimum. Like Poe’s partner.” She snapped the computer shut.
“Sounds like Poe is at least babysitting once in a while,” he joked.
“It’s not babysitting—”
“I know, I know, I’m kidding. You want to renegotiate? Okay.” He worked his fingers across the tendons in her ankle, thinking. “If you have the baby, you can take a shorter leave and I’ll stay home for a bit.”
“How will that work? I’ll need to take some leave to recover. And breastfeed. Do I even want to breastfeed? What if I can’t?” Rey set the laptop on the coffee table and rubbed her temples.
“Then formula will be fine. Or you can revisit that decision.”
“Why should I be the one revisiting the decision?” she pressed, verging on the answer-demanding Lawyer Voice he liked to overhear on conference calls.
“Because it’s your body.”
“Why should it be my body?” Her eyes met his, warning him not to say something stupid.
He thought about his choice of words. “It doesn’t have to be.”
She propped herself up on her elbows. “Go on.”
“What if we agreed to leave it up to chance?” he asked cautiously. “We’ll try to get pregnant, like we have been, and whoever gets pregnant first will have the baby.”
It was a silly suggestion. It was biologically impossible given the two of their bodies. But he offered it seriously, and that was what counted.
“Okay,” she said. “Even if one outcome is much more likely.”
That was a relief. He used to make her offers that she rejected outright. Ben cringed to think of how, when they first met, he’d asked Rey to contact his assistant about interviewing at his firm instead of asking her to dinner like a normal human who was smitten. He was lucky she’d been patient with him while he got better at understanding what she wanted.
“Do we have a deal?”
“It’s a deal,” she said.
He shook her big toe instead of her hand. She shrieked, her foot jerked out of his grasp, and her heel came down hard on his groin.
He yelped and scrambled to grab her again. “Sweetheart, nobody is getting pregnant if you kick me there. Just talk to me instead of destroying the equipment.”
“Stop tickling, then!” She wedged her feet under his legs again, out of reach of his fingers, and levered herself up to put her chin on his shoulder, looking at him with soft eyes. “I want to keep trying.”
Her breath smelled like the squares of dark chocolate she’d nibbled while she worked, sweet and rich. He could eat her up. “Tonight?” he asked.
“Tomorrow, too. We might have to leave the Halloween party early to time it right.”
“Why even go to the party at all?” he suggested innocently.
“Because I spent hours getting those costumes together and I need to see the looks on Finn and Rose’s faces when they realize how much theirs suck compared to ours.”
“So we’re going to watch them suffer? I can agree to that,” he said, holding out his hand this time. She took it and pulled him into a kiss.
*
“That’s disgusting,” Finn said when they took off their coats at his front door. “I hate you for thinking of this.”
“Just dress up as yourselves if you want to come as the perfect couple,” Rose said, handing them a drink. “No need to bring Ruth and Marty into it.”
Rey turned to Ben. “See?” she said smugly.
It was almost more fun to be at the party than at home. It meant Ben had to be sneaky when he peeled her costume off with his eyes while waiting to refill their cups at the pumpkin spice punch table or slid his hand down from her waist to pinch her ass.
He was always telling her she was perfect—which she wasn’t, objectively, she demurred; nobody was. But somehow he was. The exception that proved the rule.
“Gratitude is just a form of benevolent sexism, man. It doesn’t encourage change. I’ll send you this article about it,” she heard him telling Finn on her way to the kitchen to help herself to more potato chips. She’d read the same piece about why women shouldn’t be grateful to their husbands for helping at home, but hadn’t sent it to him, which meant he’d found it on his own, which made something flare in her belly. Maybe she’d make him repeat his words in a few hours, get him to whisper them to her while he eased his fingers into her.
Finally she texted him from the bathroom that she needed him, badly, and when she emerged he was holding their coats so they could sneak out of the party.
*
They didn’t tear the coats off each other when they got home. The nervous urgency that crackled between them the first time Rey invited Ben back to her apartment had calmed over the years, which meant that she could get through her day without having to play whack-a-thought with Does he like me as much as I like him and What if I say something awkward when we’re having sex and Is it too soon to ask if I can pull his hair.
But the air still felt charged as they took off their costumes, touching shoulders to squeeze past each other in the walk-in closet. When Ben walked past the bathroom door while she was washing her face, Rey caught his eye and smiled shyly instead of watching him go by.
That, apparently, was all it took. He skidded to a stop and came into the bathroom, pressing against her back and reaching for the washcloth.
“Leave this,” he said. “We have something more important to do.”
“Like what?”
“Like each other.”
“Here? Not in the bed?”
“We haven’t done it in the bathroom in a while.” He sought her eyes in the mirror, both of them ignoring the flecks of toothpaste on the glass. “This way you can watch.”
“What am I going to see?” She lifted her ponytail and craned her neck toward him.
He pulled her pajama top off her shoulder. “Something spooky. It’s Halloween. You might see a monster.”
“A monster?”
He growled. “With big teeth,” he said, gnawing on her shoulder, “and a monster cock.”
She laughed and wriggled against him. “Ooh, I can feel that,” she said. “Why don’t you show me?”
*
They were chanting each other’s names, urging each other on, when it happened. Rey thought the white light was the start of her orgasm bursting behind her eyes, but there was a clap like thunder and another flash, and then instead of coming she came to.
Had the ceiling fallen in? It seemed lower. There weren’t any cracks in the drywall, though, and no dust on the tile.
“That was weird,” she said. But her voice came from the wrong place, rumbling instead of rising.
When she looked in the mirror she saw the two of them, him standing behind her, her bent over the sink, right where they’d been. Only she was looking at them through Ben’s eyes. She blinked, and his face blinked back.
What in the fuck. It didn’t happen. It couldn’t happen.
Somehow she was in his body and he—she assumed—was in hers.
“Holy shit,” she said. “Ben?”
“Rey? Are you okay? I think—I think I’m in your body,” he said, in her voice. It sounded a lot higher than it did in her head.
There had to be a logical explanation. “Maybe we got food poisoning,” she said. “Now we both have a fever and we’re hallucinating.”
“All I had at the party was candy.”
“All I had was chips.”
“And neither of us had that much punch.” Ben took a deep breath, and Rey realized she could not only watch her own shoulders lifting and falling against the plane of Ben’s chest, she could feel her body move as the air left her lungs.
Because Ben’s cock was still inside her body. Right where they’d left off. She could feel it twitch as the walls around it shifted.
“Sorry,” she said. “Could you feel that?”
“It’s okay. It’s weird,” he said. “But it’s okay. I’m—my body is probably hot because I was about to come.”
“Oh. Is my heart beating really fast?”
“Yeah. It feels like there’s a second heartbeat between your legs.”
“I was really close, too,” she said. “Did I hit my head on the sink from coming too hard?”
“I don’t see a bruise,” he said, tilting her face back and forth in the mirror. “Besides, how would I have hit my head? On yours?”
“How else could this happen?” she groaned.
“It’s Halloween,” he said. “I told you something spooky might happen. Maybe we’re under a spell.”
“A spell? Really, Ben?” she said. “We should go to bed and sleep it off.”
“Or we could keep going,” he suggested, meeting her eyes in the mirror.
For a second she thought it was one of his worst ideas. Worse than when he’d brought her to his firm’s holiday party for the first time, introduced her to all of his horrible colleagues, listened to how much she despised them personally and professionally on the ride home, and then offered to refer her for an open position there so they could commute together.
Wouldn’t it be weird to use each other’s bodies?
Then again, his suggestions had gotten a lot better over the years. Like when he’d pretended to need her help looking for something in his parents’ basement at Thanksgiving and they’d spent an hour down there making out instead of listening to his parents bicker over whether giblets belonged in gravy. Maybe she should give this a shot.
“We don’t have to,” he said. “I won’t do anything with your body that you don’t want to.”
“That part is okay. I trust you. It’s just—what if we can’t switch back?”
“Then I really will have to get a job you don’t hate. Since you’ll be doing it with my body.”
“No, Ben.” She hesitated. This was so strange. “What if this works? What if you’re stuck in my body and you’re—it’s pregnant?”
He lifted her hands, conciliatory. “We said whoever gets pregnant first.”
“But I didn’t think—I mean, realistically—”
“I didn’t either,” he said. “But we made a deal.”
“We did.”
“Come on.” Her eyes darkened as he said it. “I want to see what it feels like to get fucked by a married man.”
She took a deep breath and went for it. “You got the line wrong. Now I get knocked up.” Ben’s cock—or was it her cock, now?—twitched again.
“I knew you liked saying that,” he said. “Do you like thinking about that?”
“I like thinking how everyone will know I’m yours,” she said. Saying it made her even harder. She shifted, wanting to thrust.
“You can move.” He took hold of the counter, bracing her body like he must have seen her do a hundred times. “It feels good, right?”
She grabbed her own hips, which felt almost dainty now that she was clutching them with Ben’s larger hands, and rocked against them. The friction was overwhelmingly good, and her ass looked, frankly, amazing from this angle.
She wouldn’t think too much about how narcissistic it was to be so turned on by watching her own body, Rey told herself. She’d just think about how powerful she felt, looking down from Ben’s towering height, wielding his sizeable cock.
“It’s good, but fuck, this is weird,” she said. “Am I always this tight? No wonder you like doing this.”
“Probably? Does my cock always feel like it’s about to split you in half?”
“Sorry,” she said, realizing she’d sped up, chasing the friction. “Maybe rub my—your—just rub the clit.” Rey wasn’t sure she was coordinated enough to reach around. Besides, would she even be able to find her clit using Ben’s blunt fingers instead of her own slender ones?
“Where—oh,” he said, finding it on his own. “Oh my god. This feels amazing.” He shut her eyes and let her mouth fall open to whimper.
She groaned at the sight and slowed down even more. Usually when she got close, she let herself loose. What was the point in holding off one orgasm when she could keep going and have two? In Ben’s body, though, she’d have to be more careful.
“Keep doing it so you come, too,” she ordered. “I want to feel that cunt clench around me.”
“What about these tits?” He let go of the counter with the other hand to guide both of their palms to one breast. “You want to feel them swell up?”
She cupped it, marveling at the way it fit into Ben’s hand, and brushed the nipple with one of his thumbs. It was one thing to imagine this while he was away on a business trip, that it was his fingers stroking and teasing instead of her own while she panted into her phone on speaker.
It was another to actually touch her own body with someone else’s hands. She’d always liked it for being hers, loved the way it reacted to Ben’s touch. But this—it felt like maybe he had a point when he told her she was perfect.
“Everyone will see them,” she said. “Just like everyone will see that belly growing.”
“All round and full. It’s going to look so good.”
She could picture it. Her breasts getting puffy and tender. Her hips stretching, her whole body softening. Ben’s hands resting on her tight belly. Or keeping her heavy tits from bouncing while he thrust. Or maybe she’d be the one thrusting, if they didn’t switch back.
“I want to be yours,” she said, pushing all the way into the warmth and wetness like she could fuse their bodies together.
“You are mine,” he said. “This cunt belongs to me. And everything that comes out of that cock.”
Even in a different body he was perfect. Her hips stuttered. “Fuck, Ben.”
“Do you need to come, sweetheart?” he asked. “Do you feel like you’re going to burst?”
Of course he could tell she was desperate. He knew both of their bodies. He’d felt the exact thrumming need in his body that was overwhelming her. If she shut that out—thought of anything besides rutting and spilling and filling for a second—she could feel the walls of her cunt bearing down, the slight trembling in her thighs that meant she was close, too.
“Yes,” she grunted. “I want to—to come inside.”
“Come on. You want a baby?”
“Yes, I—”
“You know what to do,” he urged. “Give it to me.”
For the first time she used Ben’s thighs to put some power into her thrusts, working herself deeper, hoping it would take her to the brink.
Ben moaned, and it sounded like the noise she always made when it was so good it was nearly unbearable. Rey moaned, and it sounded like the noise he always made when he was about to lose it.
She thrust, he moaned, she moaned, she thrust, and the loop tightened and tightened until he arched back and cried out. She tried to fuck him through it, like he always did for her, but everything burst out while he was still shaking and bucking into her.
There was no thunderclap, though. Rey slumped against the wall and caught her breath. “We didn’t switch back,” she said.
“We’ll figure it out,” he said. “Maybe I’ll get pregnant first.”
“I doubt that, but we’ll see.” She shifted to pull out.
Ben reached back to hold their hips together. “Don’t,” he said. “Keep it all inside.”
*
He’d never been relieved to be hard when he woke up. But he was the morning after Halloween. As soon as he felt himself throbbing against his own thigh, Ben knew he was back in his own body.
Not that Rey’s body wasn’t incredible. Not that he wasn’t ready to hold up his end of the deal. It just would have been a big change.
Rey stirred next to him. He rolled over to watch her blink the sleep away, seeing his own relief mirrored in her eyes.
“Thank god,” she said, wiggling her toes under the sheets. “Last night was really hot, but I can’t learn to go through life eight feet tall.”
“I don’t know how you do it. It’s like being a miniature person.”
“Look at a statistic once in a while. I am a perfectly average-sized person, Ben. You’re the freakishly large one in this house.”
“I won’t forget it,” he said, propping his chin on his fist. “When you’re—excuse me, when one of us is pregnant. Although statistically it’s more likely to be you.”
She scooted over to nestle onto his chest. “Forget what?”
“That you’re very small and tight, and I’m big. Very big.”
“I’ve been telling you that for years.”
“I know, but I kind of thought it was just when you wanted me to come. It’s different when you’re on the other side of the dick.”
“Wow.” She groaned. “Takeaway of the century right here.”
“I’m serious! I couldn’t imagine fitting in anything else. Let alone pushing a baby out.”
She lifted her head. “Do I smell weakness?”
“I’m willing to reopen negotiations. On whatever.” Except he didn’t feel weak. He felt powerful. Willing. He wished something in their house would catch fire so he could carry her away from the flames and demonstrate.
“I’ll need time to consider my demands,” Rey said.
“I’ll be here when you’re ready,” Ben told her. “In the meantime, I have another idea.”
“What’s that?”
“Trust me,” he said, rolling on top of her. “You’ll like it.”