Enrica

 

English man to Italian woman TG MtF Hyde

(SWI) Story with images

This is a sort epilogue to Dr Jekyll and Miss Huang, but stands as a story in its own right.

London 2026

The estate agent had called it a “garden flat,” which Daniel Stevenson supposed was technically accurate if you counted the three square feet of moss-choked paving outside the kitchen window as a garden. What it actually was, he decided as he hauled the last cardboard box down the iron stairs from street level, was a basement. A proper Victorian basement with flagstone floors, walls that wept condensation in summer, and ceilings low enough that he had to duck beneath the doorframes.

Still. Five hundred a month in Cavendish Square. Even for a shoebox dug into London clay, that was practical in this economy.

“Bit damp,” his father had said on the phone. “You'll want a dehumidifier.”

 Daniel dropped the box onto the kitchen counter and straightened his back with a groan. The flat consisted of two rooms plus a bathroom barely large enough to turn around in, and a front room that served as bedroom and living space, and this narrow kitchen that ran the length of the building's rear.  He'd taken the place because of the university. King's College was twenty minutes on the Tube, and his PhD supervisor had made it abundantly clear that she expected him in the archive six days a week. 

 It was while fitting his desk against the kitchen's far wall that he noticed the dodgy irregularity. The flagstones there were newer than elsewhere. Darker, less worn, set with modern cement rather than the crumbling lime mortar visible in the front room. A rectangular patch, as though something had been removed from beneath and the floor hastily repaired.

 He knelt, running his fingers along the cement edge. It was professional work, but not recent, based on the colour. Odd for a flat that was supposedly unaltered. Daniel positioned a chair's rear legs directly on the newer flagstones, and when he sat down to test the chair height, the combined weight produced a hollow noise. Sounded unmistakably of empty space beneath.

He told himself to leave it alone. He had groceries to buy. But the compulsion was already getting on his wick, and within ten minutes he had retrieved the claw hammer from his toolbox and was prying at the cement seam.

 The flagstone came up easier than expected. And within that cavity, wrapped in oilskin that disintegrated at his touch, sat a wooden box the size of a cigar case. Daniel lifted it out. The wood was dense. mahogany, and fitted with a brass clasp that had gone green with rust. There were some symbols on the front, probably Chinese characters. He worked it open with his thumbnail.

 Three glass vials lay nested in velvet, each stoppered with wax and containing a fair bit of reddish liquid. They caught the kitchen's bulb and threw light across the flagstones. Beside them, folded into a tight square, was a slip of brittle paper.

The handwriting was precise.

My final gift to whomever finds this. I was two, and could not ever be one. The formula is perfect. Drink, and become whoever you were always meant to be. Miss. H

  He held one vial up to the light, tilting it so the liquid shifted. “Right,” he said aloud to the empty kitchen. “That's going in the cupboard.” He placed the box on the highest shelf above the cooker, behind a tin of biscuits his mother had sent.

 His phone buzzed against the counter. Jack:

Mate you sorted for tonight? bringing Carling. also Sophie's lot are coming, that girl from my seminar with the legs. her mate too. gonna be quality. The Italian lasses too!

Daniel typed back: Flat's still a bomb site though I'm afraid.

Clean it then! legend. see you 9ish

Ignored as usual, oh well, suppose celebration once a year was worth it. He pocketed the phone, glanced once at the cupboard where the red vials sat in their antique box, and went to find the hoover. By quarter to eight the flat was passable. Jack arrived at ten past nine with a Sainsbury's bag bulging with tinnies and a lanky black guy trailing behind him.

“Danny!” Jack shouldered through the door, radiating the particular energy of a man who'd already had two pints at the local. “Flat's class, mate. Proper mad scientist lair vibes. Love it.” He dumped the bag on the counter and gestured at his companion. “You know Ikedi, yeah? From the reading group?”

Ikedi raised a hand, he had close-cropped hair and looked pretty innocent. He was doing his DPhil on postcolonialist literature and Shakespeare...something like that. “Cheers for having us.”

“Cheers. Help yourself...”

 Jack was already cracking tins and arranging crisps in bowls with the frantic competence of a man expecting female company. “Sophie's bringing people. Said half nine. Her flatmates are Italian, apparently. And there's some lot from the Spanish department she knows from yoga or whatever.” Jack hoped Giulia would be there. She was fit, and he could listen to her accent all day. Well, he'd need to actually get into a conversation first.

 They arrived in clusters between half nine and ten. Sophie Moffat first. Giulia, man, she had massive brown eyes, he'd probably creepily stare at them too long and she'd notice. Her friend Catterina had a bunch of black curls and a silver nose-ring, and a Spanish woman called Inés.

 Daniel found himself pressed against the kitchen doorframe with a tin of Carling, watching the party happen around him. Giulia was extraordinary. He told Jack as much, but he just smirked and walked off. Dark hair swinging, brown shoulders bare above a white strappy top, her laugh. Daniel watched her accept a gin and tonic, watched her tilt her head back as she drank, watched the line of her throat.

 Go and talk to her, Just walk over. Say something. Anything. He didn't move.Catterina drifted past him toward the kitchen. Ask her what she's drinking. Just stop standing here looking like you're attending your own wake. Look at all these continental babes, come on.

Somebody wanted rum and Jack was shouting from the front room that there must be something left, check the cupboards mate, surely there's something.

Daniel reached up to the high shelf above the cooker, fumbling past the biscuit tin his mother had sent. His fingers found the wooden box. In the half-dark, with four beers softening the edges of his judgment, his mind supplied an explanation. Some kind of fancy Chinese drink, given the symbols. Yeah, made sense.

 He worked the brass clasp open, lifted out two of the three vials, and cracked their wax seals with his thumbnail. The smell that rose was sharp and sweet  He poured one vial into a plastic cup already sticky with gin residue, and the second into his own half-finished beer. The red liquid swirled into the pale lager, turning it the color of dark honey. He took a sip. Bitter, he grimaced but swallowed.

 The music had shifted to something slower. Giulia stood near the front room bookshelf, one hand raised to examine the spines of his puny collection, her dark hair falling across one bare shoulder. Daniel crossed toward her, the second cup extended in offering.

“Hey Giulia? I was gonna say, if you're studying sculpture, there's actually a really interesting connection to the anatomic-” She turned, but not toward him. Her eyes went past his shoulder, her face breaking into a grin, and she stepped forward... directly into him, her hip knocking his arm, tonic sloshing over his wrist to reach Mateo, who had appeared in the doorframe behind.

“Mateo! Vieni.” In his own flat, right through him and past him as though he were furniture. Rude. The cup he'd prepared for her remained in his hand, dripping. Jack caught his eye from across the room and pulled a sympathetic wince. He set Giulia's untouched cup on the windowsill and retreated to the kitchen to his usual post, out of the way.

The party thinned by degrees, first the Spanish contingent departing in a bilingual flurry of kisses and promises to meet Tuesday, then Sophie extracting Giulia and Catterina to catch an Uber. Ikedi left quietly, saying something kind and weird about the flat that Daniel could not afterward recall.

By half ten the flat held only Daniel and Jack, who was collecting crushed tins into a bin bag guiltily. He probably spilled half of the fuckers anyway.

“Not bad for a first night, eh?” Jack tied the bag and set it by the door. “Giulia was asking about you, by the way. After you disappeared into the kitchen.”

“She wasn't. You don't need to lie.”

“No no, she was mate.” Jack paused, his broad face trying to fix itself into something serious. “Giulia's like that with everyone. Standoffish,  It's an Italian thing. Doesn't mean anything.” Jack pulled on his denim jacket, patting pockets for keys. “Look, I'm going to nip back to mine for my blanket and charger. We'll watch that new gloomy superhero show you like.”

“You don't have to...”

“Nar, first night in a new place. I'm not having you rattling around alone.” Jack grinned from the doorway. “One hour. Occupy yourself.”

The door closed. The flat settled into silence. Daniel stood at the kitchen sink, running water over his sticky hands, and became aware that something was wrong. It had begun perhaps less than an hour ago, masked by the noise and bodies. A warmth low in his abdomen and genitals that he'd attributed to alcohol. But it was spreading now, climbing his chest, pooling behind his sternum with some kind of pressure that made breathing effortful. His groin throbbed too, but it wasn't arousal.

He gripped the counter's edge and slipped a bit. His reflection stared back from the dark kitchen window. Pale, sweating, his sandy hair plastered to his forehead. His heart was hammering far too fast for a man standing still.

“Christ,” he muttered. “How much did I fucking drink? Feels like my heart is exploding.”

He imagined he heard the faintest sound, like a woman's laughter, pouring out from somewhere within his own ear canals. He pulled his collar forward and looked down. The flesh appeared normal in the dim light, but when he pressed his fingertips against it, the tissue beneath felt wrong. Thicker. Denser. As though something were accumulating beneath the surface.

He crossed to the bathroom and flicked on the light. His reflection stared back from the mirror above the sink. the irises reduced to thin rings, and a sheen of sweat glazed his forehead though the flat was cold. The pressure in his groin intensified. His balls were starting to ache. He gripped the edge of the sink and breathed deliberately through his nose, his knuckles whitening against the porcelain.

The first scream came. It hurt from the marrow, from the fibres of his throat themselves as they unravelled and reknit. His sinews tore as he moved his hands to pull open his shirt. The buttons scattered across the tile floor with a sound like teeth falling.  As Daniel pulled the shirt open, his pupils blew wide open and he made a sound, half sob, half bark of disbelief, and looked up and down himself in the mirror. His pectorals were swelling. Not uniformly,  but concentrating themselves into two distinct masses that pressed outward. His face was flushed and sweating, but below the neck.

God it felt... ugh, the breasts continued to swell, settling with a weight he could feel pulling at muscles that shouldn't exist, stretching skin that had never been asked to accommodate such volume. It was like he could feel the skin splitting microscopically, the dermis thinning and reforming. They were tits. Daniel screamed again. The sound was high and thin. He pressed both palms against his chest as though he might push the swellings back inside, but the flesh merely surged between his fingers, the nipples widening and darkening as the surrounding skin spread over the English pink in seconds, taking on Mediterranean bronze.  The colour spread from the nipples in tingling rings. Aching with a soreness that was almost identical to the tenderness of a deep bruise. The tanned skin stretched taut and glistening with perspiration, blue veins visible beneath the new pigmentation. 

“No no no, bloody no! Get off, get off!”

He staggered backward from the mirror. His spine struck the bathroom door and he slid down it, his legs failing, and sat on the cold tile with his ruined shirt hanging open with the tits out. The weight of them pulled at back muscles that had never been made to bear that load. A tan was creeping down his abdomen from the tits, erasing the scatter of his own darker body hair there, leaving deep umber in its wake. His rib-cage itself seemed to narrow beneath his hands, the bones grinding inward with a sound he felt through every vibration.

In the mirror above, angled down at him now from his position on the floor. Daniel could see his own face. At some point he'd started dripping tears. Then his teeth snapped shut from grinding sensation, deep in the pelvis. He drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them, shaking, his enormous new breasts pressed painfully between thigh and sternum.  His fingertips brushed the underside of the left breast and a shudder ran through him. He made a keening sound. So sensitive... His breath came in shallow gasps. He stood back up and kneaded them as he went to the sink, thumbs dragging up and down across the stiffened peaks, each pass sending thin jolts cascading downward. Then he took the heels of his palms and pushed harder. His hips pressed forward against the sink's cold porcelain. Moaning with thick with a narcotic pleasure that captured his thoughts before they could be realized.

His pleasure was suddenly interrupted again. Daniel screeched outright, both hands slamming against the bathroom walls, fingers scrabbling at the tile as his pelvis creaked, cracked and widened by more fractions. He could feel them separating at joints that should never have yielded, pushing outward with a relentless pressure, stretching the muscle and sinew that clung to them. 

“Fuck, just stop, pleasssseeee...” 

He buckled again. His knees struck the tile with a crack and he doubled forward, forehead pressed to the cold floor. Then he fell onto his side as his spine arched. Vertebrae compressed and shortened. His diaphragm spasmed too violently for him to breath. He was shrinking, he could feel it, he could see the bloody ceiling retreating upwards. the horrible telescoping sensation of his torso contracting, ribs drawing back even more, the spaces between them narrowing. Each breath became a shallow desperate gasp as his lung capacity diminished. His shoulders drew in, the broad planes of his deltoids softening, dissolving, the muscle fibres unknitting themselves and redistributing into something rounder, smaller, less angular. He was down into the five foot range now. The bathroom seemed cavernous around him. His torn shirt hung from his shoulders like a ripped sail, and his jeans had slid halfway down thighs.

Through the agony, Daniel registered the absurd details with hallucinatory clarity. The dark golden colour continued to migrate around his arms, across his hands, the knuckles shrinking, fingers tapering to something finer and more delicate. He watched his own hands transform against the white tile. The lean climber's muscle he'd spent three years building at the university wall just sucked back into his body. In its place, something softer accumulated, not fat exactly, but feminine tissue, that padded his upper arms, rounded his forearms. made his wrists impossibly slender.  The redistribution reached his thighs, and his buttocks lifted and rounded.

The pain ebbed, just enough that thought became possible again. I'm becoming a woman. Tits, woman. How did this happen? This doesn't happen. Hahaha... doesn't happ-his hands fell to his crotch as it spasmed. His softening cock was drawing upward into the body in lurches, the shaft shortening, the glans shrinking and migrating northward with a wet, slick sensation that sent cascades of nerve-fire through his pelvis. His eyes rolled to the back of his head, as the scrote emptied of its contents, cum splattered on the mirror, on the sink, on the floor. It thinned and darkened and drew together, folding inward upon itself like a slow glistening pleats.

The disgusted sound he made was neither male nor female. 

The clitoris finished, every nerve that had once served six inches of shaft concentrated itself into that single dense pearl of flesh, and buzzed. His vision whited. It throbbed with each heartbeat, exquisitely exposed. Then the outer lips darkening to that same bronze that had claimed his chest, inner lips flushed a deep arterial rose, slick already with a moisture. The vaginal canal opened behind them with a sensation of teasing and slight pulling at first, then he gasped as it felt like a punch and puncturing over and over as muscles started arranging themselves in spiraling layers, smooth and warm and coming alive with a depth that made him nearly bite through his lip, his back arching against the cold tile.  Muscular walls contracting experimentally around nothing. The lips softened, ready to be pushed open by something rigid and hard.

Deeper still. Tubes unfurled as the ovaries bloomed into existence like twin seeds germinating, settling into the cradle of his widened pelvis. Almond-smooth organs that pulsed once, twice, and then began their primitive and ancient chemical broadcast. Hormones flooded his bloodstream and Daniel's entire body softened in response, his skin thinning. the last vestiges of masculine fat distribution melting and reforming. The uterus opened, like a fist of muscle materialising from nothing, bonding itself with ligaments that pulled taut against his spine and drew from him a groan so low it vibrated in his newly-narrowed ribcage.

 He sat back up against the door. The labia flushed dark with blood again, parted slightly, glistening with viscous arousal. Daniel pressed his thighs together involuntarily, the pressure sending a cascade of sensation so intense he bit through his lower lip completely this time, tasting irony blood. He whined childishly, but the pleasure overrode the pain. Fingertips found the lips of his pussy and pulled back, a little swollen with blood heat. The clitoris pulsed beneath the lightest graze and Daniel's mouth fell open in a silent cry, hips bucking upward against the touch.  The entirety of conscious thought had collapsed to a single blazing point between legs where sensation pooled and crested and demanded. The stranger's fingers descended. The clit stood swollen and exquisitely exposed at the apex of the new cleft, and when his fingertip grazed its hood his spine arched, shoulder blades grinding against the doorframe, and a low moan escaped him. He pulled back again. “Wha.. what the fuck am I doing. Oh fuck it... fuck it. I need to cum.”

He pressed harder. Two fingers slid along the slick folds, he was wet, drenched, the lubrication copious and hot against his palm, and found the opening beneath. He circled it, shuddering, then pushed inside. The walls gripped his fingers with muscular heat, contracting rhythmically, and the sensation of being penetrated from within, of feeling his own body close around an intrusion with hungry, clasping pressure, was so foreign, but so bloody good. He let out a high whine. His free hand slammed flat against the tile to anchor himself against the floor.

He worked himself urgently, palm grinding against the swollen nub. Then two fingers curled inside, finding a spot along the anterior wall that made his vision fracture with wet blurriness. The oestrogen hit his brain like a drug mainlined. Every bit of scientific distance he might have marshalled against what was happening was forgotten. 

And then his face began to come apart. The jawbone cracked inward with the sound of a walnut crushed in a fist. Daniel gurgled as his mandible narrowed, sharpened, the skin tightening over cheekbones that were rising, sharpening. His masculine brow ridge softened and retreated. The nose narrowed to a delicate bridge. His lips swelled. upper and lower ballooning with collagen that seemed to generate spontaneously. and the skin of his face finally darkened as olive-gold swept up from tits, to jawline to temples. Pain and pleasure warred as he moaned and shook his head. His forehead smoothing, eye sockets widening, while below, the orgasm built. His hair was growing. He could feel it sliding across his shoulders, thickening and darkening, the sandy brown darkening to glossy black in a night fall visible in his peripheral vision. Strands fell past his ears, past his collarbone. His eyes burned briefly, searingly and when he blinked the tears away, the bathroom light seemed warmer, its spectrum shifted through irises that were no longer blue  but deep umber-brown.

He pressed harder, two fingers finding a circular rhythm that sent cascading shocks through the new plumbing, each stroke drawing thick slickness from the opening below, coating his fingertips in warmth that smelled of something a bit animalistic.

His left hand clawed at the tile. His hips rolled upward into his own touch with an instinct he had never learned. The pleasure was nothing like what he had known before, not the focused pressure at the tip of the cock of male orgasm, but something diffuse, oceanic, spreading in quakes from the point of contact until his entire body hummed with it. His toes curled. His free hand rose to cup one heavy breast, thumb dragging across the hardened nipple, and the sensations above and below reduced to a keening cry that bounced off porcelain.

His entire body seized, back bowing off the floor, the new walls clenched in rhythmic, clenching spasms that pulsed along in waves of heat so intense they seemed to reach his fingertips, his scalp, the soles of his feet. It lasted impossibly long. Each contraction deeper than the last, pulling pleasure from reservoirs he'd never known existed. When it released him at last, he lay with his chest heaving, black hair fanned beneath him in a dark corona. The bathroom was silent but for his ragged breathing.

Daniel stood. The motion was strange, his centre of gravity had shifted dramatically, hips swaying to compensate for their new width.  He managed it, one hand on the sink edge, and raised his eyes to the mirror. Daniel opened his mouth. The woman in the mirror opened hers.

No sound came out. 

She stared at the mirror, and the mirror stared back, and something behind those dark liquid brown eyes flickered. He could see himself in them, his old self. It began as a sensation of sleepiness. The terror in those magnificent eyes softened, faded, was replaced by something cooler and more appraising. Daniel's panicked breathing slowed. The hands gripping the sink unclenched, and the woman in the mirror tilted her head. She turned her head fractionally to the left, then the right, examining the planes of her cheekbones, the sweep of her jaw, the heavy curtain of black hair that fell in disordered waves past her shoulders. A straight sharp Mediterranean nose. lower lip slightly heavier than the upper in a way that suggested permanent displeasure with lesser creatures. And what rose in her chest was satisfaction... deep, purring, narcissistic satisfaction

She was ruinously beautiful. The thought arrived without distress, because what was wrong with men stabbing each other in the back over her? She turned sideways, examining the dramatic curve of waist to hip in the harsh bathroom light. Full and ripe and golden. The skin was luminous olive-gold, Mediterranean. Just like Giulia.

Giulia. Hmph... the name surfaced unbidden, and with it came not the paralysing longing Daniel had felt three hours earlier, instead she got contempt. That skinny thing with her flat chest and her bony shoulders. Huh, ignore me will you?  Quella stronzetta magra, the Italian arrived before the English, fluid and natural. Roman cadence, like she had been brought up there. Carina, sì, ma ordinaria. Pretty, yes, but ordinary. She was a six at best. A Florentine six, which translated to perhaps a five anywhere that mattered. That was with good lighting and dim angles. She wouldn't command a second glance if they stood side by side. None of them would. They were girls. Ordinary, unremarkable girls. She was a goddess.

She stood naked and perfect and nameless in the harsh bathroom light, waiting for herself to arrive. She shook her head. Come mi chiamo?  Daniel. Daniela? Closer, perhaps, but still wrong. Too close...she ran both hands through her hair, lifting it from her neck, watching how the motion raised her breasts. The gesture felt practiced. Felt right. Her hips cocked against the sink with an unconscious sensuality that Daniel had never possessed in twenty-six years of life. Did he even think about sex at all?

A man's torn shirt hung from her shoulders. She shrugged it off. Those breasts, le mie tette, were magnificent. Heavy and round, with nipples the colour of caramel. She cupped them, lifting their weight, and felt a pleasant shiver cascade down her spine.

More Italian filled her mind in a warm flood, not book learned vocabulary arranged in grammatical structures but living language, idiomatic and instinctive. Devo trovare qualcosa da mettermi. She was cold. She needed to find something to wear. She thought in Italian first and English second, the mother tongue asserting its primacy over what had become, in the space of seconds, a barely functional and secondary language. 

She turned from the mirror... not that one could never tire of such a reflection. The body was filmed in sweat, the black hair clinging to shoulders and breasts in damp ribbons, and between her thighs the evidence of her earlier cumming had left her skin tacky. She needed to be clean.

She turned from the mirror with a languor that belonged to the newly-born and reached for the shower tap, an old brass fixture. The water struck her skin streaming over the new topography of her body in rivulets that followed unfamiliar channels. Down the deep valley between her breasts.

She stood beneath the spray and let it baptise her. Enrica.

Enrica. Where did it come from? A footballer's wife? A model. Huh.. she rolled it silently across her tongue, testing it, and found it perfect. Musical. It suited her. She ran her hands down her own flanks, tracing the hourglass silhouette as though memorising a map she intended to use often.

Men would lose themselves in these curves. She imagined broad shoulders, rough hands, the particular heat of a male body pressed against hers, the weight of one pinning her to sheets, the hardness of a coarse stubbled jaw against her throat. Her stomach tightened with want. Not for any specific face. she could not conjure one right now, but for the concept of masculinity itself. Its solidity. Its uncontrolled hunger. The way men looked at women built like this, slack-jawed, helpless, reduced to nothing but appetite.

But to draw them in even more... she needed... Vestiti bellissimi. Beautiful dresses, silk, cashmere, things that draped and clung. Jewellery at her throat, gleaming and cold. Shoes that cost what Daniel's monthly rent had been. A handbag, no, several, Italian leather, hand-stitched, the kind carried by women who never checked price tags because checking itself was beneath them.  She wanted a flat that didn't smell of spilled lager. This was beneath her too. She shouldn't need to work at all. She wanted men to buy her these things and feel grateful for the privilege. She wanted to be adorned. To walk into a room sheathed in beautiful things and watch every head turn, every conversation falter. She wanted the weight of gold against her collarbones and the sliding of silk against her skin.

 She could make them do anything. Buy anything. Give anything. Men would destroy themselves for this body. She knew it with the certainty of someone who understood leverage. A well-timed glance from beneath those black lashes. A calculated lean forward that offered a look at her tette. Hmmmm...

Enrica turned off the water and stood dripping in the sudden silence, steam curling around her like incense smoke. She couldn't help but try look at herself again. In the fogged mirror, her silhouette was a dark Venus. all curves and promise. She wiped a hand across the glass and met her own gaze: those enormous brown eyes, pupils still wide and lips still rosy with residual arousal.

 She reached for the colourfully stained looking towel hanging on the door and wrapped it around herself with the distaste of a queen handling a peasant's rag. The air of the flat corridor struck her wet skin and raised gooseflesh along her arms, tightened her nipples to dark points, and she relished it with another little moan. Water was still beading on the golden-dark plane of her stomach, her hair hanging in a heavy wet rope between her shoulder blades.

She had just crossed the living room threshold when the front door rattled and swung inward. Her towel slipped. Who was this? Ah... yes... Jack Bennett appeared in the doorframe. He was slightly flushed from drink. He wore a wool coat open over a grey t-shirt. She started cataloguing the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of his forearms where he'd pushed his sleeves up, the way his jaw squared beneath three days of stubble. He was taller than she remembered. Broader. His body had a robustness to it that sent a low pulse of heat into her belly.

Bello, she thought. Jack's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. His eyes travelled downward from her face, over her breasts, heavy and gleaming with water, over the narrow cinch of her waist and the dark triangle between her thighs, and then jerked back up to her face with a violence that suggested physical pain.

“Fucking Christ.” He stepped backward into the door, which banged against the wall. “I'm sorry, I-who-”

Interessante, she thought. Più bello di quanto pensassi.

 ”Piacere.” She leaned one shoulder against the doorframe between hallway and living room, making no move to cover herself. The posture thrust one hip outward, elongated the line of her torso. She watched his eyes fight not to drop again. “You are Jack, sì? Daniel's friend.”

Her voice surprised her, the vowels round and open in a way that was unmistakably Italian. The accent sat thick on her English. Her old accent was gone.

 “Yeah... yes.... where's Dan?” Jack was staring fixedly at a point six inches above her head. His throat worked. “And, sorry, who are you?”

“Enrica.” She let the name roll from her tongue. “I left behind at the party earlier. Daniel, he leave maybe-” She waved one hand vaguely, the gesture pulling her breast upward in a way she knew he could see peripherally. “-one hour ago? He say something about his friend need help. He say I can stay.”

“He left you here? In his flat? Alone?” Jack's voice cracked slightly on the last word. He still hadn't stepped fully inside. His keys jangled in his hand like a rosary.

“Is a problem?” She tilted her head, let her wet hair slide forward over one shoulder. One dark strand caught on her nipple and clung there. She did not brush it away. “He was very nice to me. Very... gentile. Sweet. He is very shy your friend.” She smiled, watching him and biting a lip. “You are sweet also, I think. No?”

Jack swallowed audibly. “Could you, please pick up that towel, or..”

“I am comfortable.” She straightened from the doorframe and took one step toward him, barefoot, unhurried, the slaps of her sole against the floorboards obscenely intimate in the silence. “Unless I make you... uncomfortable?”

His spine went rigid against the doorframe. He said nothing. “Stay. Is boring alone.” She smiled with a slow parting of those full lips. “You can look at me, Jack. I don't mind.” She closed the little distance between them in three unhurried steps, then she placed one palm flat against his chest, feeling the hammering of his heart through the cotton, and tilted her face up to his.

“Vieni,” she said. Not a question. Her fingers found his collar and twisted the fabric into her fist, drawing him forward as she stepped backward toward the hallway. His coat fell from his shoulders and crumpled on the floor behind them. “Non parlare. Don't talk.”  she murmured against his jaw. “Come,” Her lips grazed the stubble there, coarse, sending sparks down through her throat and into her belly. She pulled gently at the collar while stepping backward, drawing him after her like a dog on a lead. His mouth hung open as he stared. But his feet were moving, following her pull as though magnetized. His eyes had surrendered the battle and roamed freely now across her wet bronze skin, her breasts swaying with each backward step, the dark thatch between her thighs. She could see the bulge straining at his jeans and the sight of it made her smirk.

She drew him through into Daniel's narrow room, the unmade single bed, books stacked on the floor and released his collar, only to grip the hem of his t-shirt and drag it upward. He raised his arms. His chest was broader than she'd expected, dusted with dark hair, the muscles of his stomach defined without being sculpted. She pressed her mouth to his sternum and tasted salty sweat.

“Cazzo,” she breathed against his skin. Her hands found his belt, worked it open. His cock sprang free, thick, dark, already rigid. She wrapped her fingers around the shaft and felt the heat of it pulse against her palm. She gave it a little slap and made hot eye contact for a few seconds. 

 “Christ,” he breathed. “You look... you look a bit like this girl. Giulia. She was here earli-”

Her fingers tightened with a squeeze of authority. “Non dire il suo nome,” she said, her voice flat and cold. Don't say her name. “I am nothing like her. Niente.”  He looked her up and down and nodded as if in agreement. You see my body. You know this. She took a step backward and stood in front of him for one deliberate moment, letting him look and understand what is being given to him. 

 Then she pulled him onto the bed and he went willingly, covering her body with his weight, and the sensation of that heaviness pressing her into the mattress was exquisite. 

“Dentro. Inside. Now.”

She spread her thighs wide and felt him settle between them, his cock sliding through the wetness gathered there, catching against her entrance. She arched her spine and dug her nails into his shoulder blades. She rolled her hips and gasped prettily for his benefit. Jack's hands clamped her hips, fingers digging near the flesh of her arse, and she could feel him fighting not to thrust upward.

“Più forte,” she breathed, increasing her pace. “Scopami, Jack, più forte.”

He obeyed. He pushed into her and she cried out. The stretch was extraordinary, her new walls gripped him with muscular power. His forehead pressed to her collarbone, his breath ragged against her breast, and she locked her ankles behind his back and urged him deeper.

“così, così”

The orgasm built and her thighs began to shake. When it crescendoed, it seized her entire body, her back bowed off the mattress, her pussy walls clenching in rhythmic spasms around him, her voice tearing loose in a stream of meaningless Italian. “Dio, sì, cazzo, non fermarti.”

He lasted perhaps thirty seconds longer. His rhythm stuttered, his grip on her hip tightened to bruising, and then he drove deep and held there, filling her up. a groan torn from his chest that vibrated against her throat. She felt every throb of him inside her, felt the warmth splattering and leaking down to her inner lips, and a second smaller climax rippled through her walls in response.

They lay tangled in the narrow bed, his weight half-crushing her, both of them slicked with sweat. She ran her fingers through his damp hair and stared at the ceiling with dark, satisfied eyes.

“Bravo,” she murmured. “Bravo, Jack.”

Jack's breathing slowed and the combination of drink and fucking pulled him under with the swiftness of chloroform. His mouth was slack and faintly whistling. She watched him sleep for a moment with the dispassionate curiosity. Then she rose from the bed and padded to the bedside table where Daniel's phone lay charging. She knew the passcode without thinking: 1-4-0-2. His mother's birthday. The knowledge arrived flat and factual. She knew what she had to do. She went to the bathroom and put on his dressing gown. Then back in the living room, she opened the camera, flipped it to video, and held it at arm's length and then she pressed record.

 

“Ciao, Daniel.” Her voice was a purr, intimate and conspiratorial, as though she were whispering to a lover through a wall. She smiled, her dark eyes glittering in the phone's cold light. “I know you are in here somewhere, sì? Watching. So I want to introduce myself properly. I am Enrica. Your... come si dice... your daughter, maybe? Your split personality? Flatmate, Whatever you want to call me.” She laughed musically. “I am here now. And I am not going anywhere.” She teased apart the dressing gown.

She tilted the phone downward, panning slowly across her throat, her collarbones, then lower, revealing her breasts in their full glory, heavy and round, the dark nipples still flushed from sex. She cupped one with her free hand, lifting it toward the lens. ”Look at me, Daniel. Look at what you made. Bellissima, no? Your sister. Your other half. Very exotic, very Italian. Be proud.” She kissed the air. 

She spread her legs and brought the camera. Slowly. Deliberately. The lens captured the smooth golden-dark inner thighs, the neat dark triangle, the glistening pink beneath. She opened and closed her knees with theatrical languor.

Her expression shifted to something conspiratorial, girlish.”Tell me, Daniel” her voice changed to a seductive tone “...you want to fuck this? Put your cock in me? Sì? You want to fuck yourself? I think you want. Every man would.” Another laugh, breathier now. “Because I want to fuck you. I am grateful, you understand? You give me life. You drink that little bottle and, poof, here I am. If I could, I would let you have me every night. Like being boyfriend and girlfriend with yourself. English boys love exotic women, tanned skin, the accent, the curves. I know this about you. I know everything about you, tesoro.” She pouted prettily at the lens. “But we are the same person. What a shame. So this is... come si dice... impossible. Tragico. ”

 ”Look at me. Guarda.” She cupped both her breasts, lifted them, let them drop with a heavy bounce. “These are yours sì? Our tits. Perfette. And this-” She turned, glancing over her shoulder, presenting the round swell of her buttocks, the deep curve of her lower back. She slapped one cheek lightly and giggled “-also yours. Lucky boy.”

Her expression shifted then... subtle as a cloud crossing the moon. The playfulness remained in her mouth, but something harder entered her eyes. “I am fine to share this body, Daniel. I am generous. You can have your day and little library hours... but I get the nights. I get the men, the clothes, the fun. This is fair no?” She leaned closer to the camera until her face fills the entire frame, those dark irises vast. “But if you become annoying... if you try to take this away from me...” She switched to Italian, the words dropping a lethal little whisper. “Avremo un problema serio, tesoro mio. Yes. We will have a very serious problem. And you don't want problems with me.” She stared. “I am Enrica. I am your sister now, la tua sorella esotica. I live here.” She tapped her temple. “And I am not leaving. Capito?”

She held the stare for three more heartbeats. Then she smiled again radiantly and stopped the recording. She dropped the phone on the bathmat and stood, stretching with arms overhead, spine curving, every muscle singing with satisfaction. The flat was hers too now. 

Enrica padded barefoot into the living room, stepping over Jack's discarded coat, weaving between the beer cans and crisp packets. She was thinking about money. About how much was in Daniel's account, pathetic, certainly, a PhD stipend barely worth mentioning... and how quickly she could remedy that deficit. A woman who looked like this never needed to pay for anything. And she wanted lots of thing... and she wanted them now.

She had reached the centre of the room when the first cramp seized her. It doubled her forward like a fist driven into her abdomen. A sickening sense of something shifting inside her that should not shift. She gasped and clutched at the arm of the sofa. Between her legs, she felt something hard and hydraulic, like flesh were being inflated from within. As though something buried was pushing outward through insufficient flesh. Her clitoris throbbed once, twice, then grew, the hood stretching taut. Agony lanced up through her pelvis. Her hands clutched her groin, and felt beneath her fingers something that should not have been possible: length where there had been none, hardening cartilage, the terrible familiar shape of a cock.

“No-” The word left her mouth in English. Flat, frightened, stripped of its Italian music. “No, no, no...”

She looked down at her forearms where they gripped the sofa and saw hair sprouting. The skin itself was lightening, draining of its olive warmth, turning the waxy pink of a northern complexion. Her hands were growing, knuckles thickening, fingers lengthening, the elegant tapered nails broadening into blunt masculine grips.

“FERMATI!” she screamed. But her voice cracked mid-word, dropping an octave, the vocal cords thickening in her throat like rope being twisted. The sound that emerged was neither female nor male, it was like some grotesque middle register, a pubescent boy's breaking squeaks.

Her hips were narrowing, that horrible wet crunch she'd heard hours ago now playing in reverse, the pelvis contracting, the generous curve of her thighs flattening, muscle hardening beneath skin that was losing its softness by the second. Her perfect tits were deflating. Sinking back into her chest wall like water being sucked down a drain. She grabbed at them, trying to hold them in place.

“Ugh! Per favore!”

She could feel her brother coming back, his consciousness flooding back into the limbs, his memories regaining their life, his terror replacing her fury. The Italian in her head was dissolving, each word replaced by its English equivalent: specchio becoming mirror, dolore becoming pain, morte becoming death.

She collapsed to the living room floor. Her lengthening, vertebrae and cracking popping like knuckles. The last thing Enrica felt before it all went black was that very last word. Death.

He woke up naked to grey light and a general feeling of confusion. His cheek was pressed against floorboards tacky with something disgusting... lager, he told himself. His knees throbbed. When he lifted his head, two crescents of dried blood marked where he'd been turning his head against broken glass.

Hair was everywhere. Long black strands of it lay scattered across the floor in clumps and ribbons, as though someone had taken shears to somebody. Some clung to his damp skin, others were tangled in his fingers. He sat up slowly and a curtain of them slid from his chest. His own hair sandy hair was matted to his forehead with swear. But these black threads surrounded him like the shed skin

He stood on unsteady legs and noticed with distant alarm that his body felt wrong, not painful exactly, but loose, as though his joints had been disassembled and reassembled with slightly different tolerances. His hips ached. His chest ached. Everything ached. His skin felt too soft, almost downy. He felt his hips and they seemed fractionally off. He pressed his fingers into the flesh above his hipbone and felt a tenderness there, deep in the joint, as though something had been recently forced back into position.

The bedroom door stood open. From within came the sound of snoring. Jack. Jack was in his bed. Why on earth? He felt something tingling his public hair. He dipped his fingers down and found something half-dried and matted there. It smeared across his inner thighs in a film that had gone tacky and cool. He lifted his hand and examined it in the dim light. Semen. Where had- then a memory of a moan ran through his mind. This was... Jack's.

Daniel's gorge rose. He swallowed it down, pressed both palms against his eyes. He saw it. The weight of Jack pressing into him. Into her. The fullness, the heat, the inside clenched and fluttered around Jack's cock as she rode him. The Italian pouring from his mouth.  più forte, più forte, sì, cazzo, sì. And then... Jack's hips stuttering, his cock pulsing, another man's cum swimming towards...

Daniel vomited in the kitchen sink. He hung there for a long time, forearms braced on the counter edge, strings of bile swinging from his lips. His phone. Where was his phone. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and staggered to the bathroom, where it lay face-down on the tiles.

The video was the most recent item in his camera roll. He pressed play with a thumb that would not stop shaking. A woman's face filled the screen, dark eyes enormous beneath heavy lashes, sharp cheekbones, lips curved in a hellish smile. She was beautiful in a way that made him nearly melt to his knees. How could a woman like this exist? Maybe only a few women in all human history looked this perfect. She waved at him with almost mocking fingers.

“Ciao, Daniel.”

He watched the entire recording. The blood drained from his face as he watched. The taunting Italian. The way she cupped her perfect tits for the camera. The way she spread her legs and showed the glistening evidence of what she'd done with Jack between her thighs. And the threat at the end delivered in a whisper, her dark eyes flat. And I am not leaving. Capito?

Daniel sat on the bathroom floor with his knees drawn to his chest, his phone dark in his lap, and tried to think of a single rational response to what the fuck had happened to him, but nothing came. From the bedroom, Jack shifted in his sleep and murmured that name.

“Enrica...”

He dragged his jeans on with hands that would not stop trembling. Did they fit wrong? Too tight across the hips, loose at the waist? No... no. He zipped them and went back in the kitchen with his arms wrapped around his bare chest, staring at the vials when he heard the bedroom door creak open.

Jack's footsteps were heavy and tentative. He was walking like someone who had no idea where the fuck they were. He appeared in the kitchen doorway in his boxer shorts and grey t-shirt, glasses slightly bent, hair standing at daft looking angles. He smelled of stale lager and sweat

“Mate.” He rubbed one eye with the heel of his palm. “Mate, what time is it?”

“Half nine,” Daniel said. He kept his gaze fixed on the kettle. He didn't believe it... he didn't... but he could not look at this man's face and know what she had done with his body. He had been inside him.

“Right.” Jack leaned against the doorframe, arms folded. He smile and paused. He was desperate to confess. “So. Last night. I came back and there was... there was a girl here, Dan.”

“Yeah?” The word came out strangled. Jack exhaled hard through his nose.

 “Fucking stunning, mate. Perfect tits. Like nothing I've ever... she was just standing there in your hallway, completely starkers, said you'd let her stay. Said her name was Enrica.”

Daniel's stomach lurched. He gripped the edge of the counter. “Right.”

“I'm not proud of this, but...” Jack pushed his glasses up and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “We ended up, I mean, she was very... it just happened. In your bed. I'm sorry about that, by the way. Your sheets.” The fridge hummed through a few moments of silence.

“Did you see her leave?” Jack asked. “She wasn't there when I woke up. Couldn't find her stuff anywhere either. No shoes, no bag, nothing, like she just vanished.”

“No.” Daniel shook his head, still staring at the kettle. “I didn't see anything. I crashed on the sofa. Out cold.”

“Weird.” Jack scratched his jaw. “Really fucking odd, actually. Who was she? Where'd you meet her?”

“Friend of someone's friend. I don't really know her.”

Jack nodded slowly, clearly dissatisfied but too hungover to press further. He straightened from the doorframe and stretched. “Right. Well. I'm going to head off, got that seminar prep to finish. But mate.” He pointed a finger. “If you get her number, you give it to me. Seriously. I mean it.”

“I don't fucking know her right?” Daniel snapped.

“Alright, alright. Bloody hell. Someone misses his bed. Tra, I'll catch you later.”

Jack gathered his coat from the hallway floor, patted his pockets for keys and phone, and was gone.

Daniel began with the glass. On hands and knees with a dustpan and a wad of kitchen roll, picking the shards from between the floorboards one by one. The hair he gathered into a plastic bag. There was so much of it. Extensions, perhaps. Some of the party guests had worn extensions... yeah. He knotted the bag and stuffed it into the kitchen bin beneath banana peels and an empty crisp packet.

The broken wine glass. The blood on his knees, he had fallen, clearly. Drunk. The flat-warming party, six or seven drinks deep, and then everyone had gone and he had... what? Blacked out. Fallen on a glass. Simple. These things happened to people who drank too much on empty stomachs.

He mopped the floor with Dettol. He wiped the kitchen counter. He found the cup on the windowsill, red liquid gone tepid, smelling faintly of anise and something vegetal, and poured it down the sink without thinking... watching it spiral away into London's Victorian plumbing.

The woman. Some Italian girl from the party, a friend of Giulia's perhaps, or that other one, Catterina. She had stayed behind after everyone left. She had been drunk, flirtatious, the type who thought it funny to strip naked in a stranger's flat and film herself on his phone. She had found Jack returning and... well. That part required no explanation. Jack would fuck anything beautiful that presented itself.

Daniel stood in the bathroom doorway and examined his reflection. Sandy hair. Blue eyes. Pale skin. He leaned closer. A faint shadow beneath his eyes from poor sleep. He picked up his phone from the bathroom tiles. The cracked screen showed the video thumbnail, a woman's face, dark-eyed, lips parted mid-word. His thumb hovered.

Yeah, that was all. Some mischievous Italian slut who had wandered into his flat and thought herself terribly clever. Had found him raving on the floor and helped herself to his flat, his phone, his best friend. It was sordid and humiliating but it was explicable. Filmed herself naked on a stranger's phone. Probably pissed on prosecco and laughing about it now with her girlfriends in whatever flat-share she had crawled back to. He pressed delete.

The screen went blank. The bathroom fell silent. Daniel set the phone face-down on the edge of the sink and stood very still, his hands braced on the porcelain, breathing through his nose. Yep, there was nothing wrong with him. Nothing had happened that could not be explained by alcohol and coincidence and a forward Italian stranger with exhibitionist tendencies. He believed this. He chose to believe this. The faint olive undertone beneath the skin of his forearms remained unexamined.

By eleven that night he had managed six hundred words of passable academic prose and consumed four cups of tea.  It came without preamble, a white-hot compression beneath his sternum, as though an invisible fist had closed around his heart and squeezed. He gasped and his hands flew to his chest and he felt it immediately: movement beneath the cotton. Something trying to push outward. His pectoral muscles were softening, distending, rounding themselves into shapes he had only hours ago convinced himself were nothing but a hallucination.

“No” He whispered. He looked down at his forearms braced on the desk edge and watched the colour darkening olive. The whispering began. Inside his skull, behind his eyes, threaded through the folds of his brain. Not words, not quite yet, but the cadence of Italian, the rhythm of a woman's voice murmuring just below the threshold of comprehension. Eccomi. Eccomi. Sono qui. Sussuration.

His spine arched. The pain in his chest intensified, the swelling now unmistakable, two soft but still small mounds pressing against the stretched cotton, nipples hardening and darkening tawny dragging against the fabric. His hips ground against the chair as the bones began their migration outward, the pelvis widening with a series of deep, ugly cracks that he felt rather then heard through his entire body.

In the dark window glass he caught his reflection: a face half his own and half something else, the jaw softening, the lips becoming rosy red, his sandy hair darkening at the roots as though dipped.  His lips forcefully moved of their own accord. She smiled, a smile of pure bitchy narcissistic completeness.

Ciao, Daniel.

 His heart hurled itself at his ribs. They narrowed, compressed, reshaping themselves for smaller lungs and higher breath. Great waves of heat rolled through him, not the gradual warmth of fever but hot flushes, each one leaving his skin darker, smoother, more foreign. He lurched from the desk chair and made for the bathroom, some instinct driving him toward the mirror, toward confirmation or denial.

His foot caught on nothing. The bones of his ankle had shifted mid-stride, the arch reshaping itself, tendons snapping and resetting in the space of a single step, and he went down hard on one knee in the hallway. The impact sent a shock up through his thigh and into his pelvis, where the grinding bone-deep restructuring made him cry out, a sound that began in his own voice and ended in something higher and sweeter,

The bones of his face were moving again. Cheekbones lifting, jaw narrowing, brow smoothing itself flat. His scalp itched ferociously as dark glossy hair unfurled past his shoulder blades, cascading past ears that were reshaping themselves into delicate shells. As if it had been bound up all day and was rushing to express itself. The sandy stubble on his jaw simply ceased to exist, absorbed back into skin.

“Sto-” he gasped, but the word came out wrong. Higher. Rounder. The vowel carrying a music that belonged to someone else. His throat had thinned; his vocal cords were shortening even as he spoke, and the next sound that escaped him was not English at all but a breathless Italian phrase in a moan “Ah, finalmente”

 He tried to crawlback to the hallway. The hallway carpet burned beneath palms that were shrinking, fingers lengthening and tapering, nails pushing outward into elegant ovals. His t-shirt strained across the swelling mass of his chest. His jeans slid down hips that bloomed outward, the elastic waistband again totally inadequate. But his head kept twisting back to the mirror. He couldn't help himself. I just need to look at myself.

Enrica straightened. She rose from her knees with the fluid grace of a dancer, thighs shone that were smooth and magnificently curved. She turned around back to the mirror and tilted her head. She watched the final changes while chewing on her lower lip, the breasts completing their swell beneath the ruined t-shirt, the waist cinching inward, the lips plumping to their full provocative bow. studying those dark Mediterranean eyes. His eyes, blue drowning in brown, the iris flooding with pigment until nothing remained of Daniel's pale gaze.

And then... click.

One by one his thoughts were being translated and replaced. He could feel himself thinning.  One moment Daniel Stevenson was present, terrified, and then next moment he was not. The anxiety drained away.

The self-satisfied laugh that escaped her was the sound of a woman who has won an argument she never doubted she would win. She looked over herself another time. Bronzed skin, dark brown dominant eyes, salacious lips full and parted over white teeth. She cupped her breasts through the grey cotton, heavy, round, exquisitely sensitive, and tilted her head, admiring the line of her own jaw.

“Eccomi,” she whispered to her reflection. You thought deleting that video would make it all go away? Delusional.

She pulled the t-shirt over her head and let it fall. Naked now, she turned slowly before the mirror, running both hands down the hourglass sweep of waist and hip, watching the muscles of her stomach flex beneath skin. Her smile widened. I'm so sexy. So beautiful.

Lasciati andare, the voice murmured from inside his skull. Let go. 

 Daniel's thoughts did not fade. They simply ceased to matter

Daniel's wardrobe yielded slim pickings, a pair of dark skinny jeans that clung acceptably to her hips if she rolled the waist twice, a plain black t-shirt that hung loose enough to pass for deliberate oversizing, and a denim jacket whose sleeves she shoved to her elbows. She examined the result in the bedroom mirror and wrinkled her nose. Tomboyish. Androgynous. She needed a woman's clothes. The face above the collar was still exquisite enough to carry anything, but the fabric offended her on principle.

Time to go shopping...

 

She spent some of the night at a bar playing pool, showing her culo to every man worth showing it to. They weren't rich... but it was a start. By midnight she knew her time was up. But she stood in her new clothes and smirked. She had taken some sexy photos. Something a bit satanic. She wanted to express herself. And she wanted to make sure that Daniel showed them to his friend Jack personally. Time for another video mio fratello.

 

 

 

To be continued?