Kid stirred a tiny bit, but even when Lucy lightly shook the woman and patter her cheek, did not wake. She still looked extremely pale, which was saying something, because she’d started out very pale. At least, to Lucy’s eyes, John was a pale white guy, mostly using the indoor facilities at the gym. Alan was also pale and apparently straight up unable to tan, though he freckled in a hilariously cute kind of way.

Aaron had always been an avid hiker and biker and kept a healthy looking tan, about as dark as Lucy’s skin was when she wasn’t spending time in the sun. She was pretty mixed, a half Mexican father and a half Filipino mom, mixed with a whole smattering of western European. Both had been third generation in the USA and more ‘American’ than otherwise. Hell, her lolo didn’t even speak Tagalog like her great-grandparents had, apparently. Neither had her dad spoken any Spanish, though she knew plenty well how to curse in it from her cousins.

It was a little embarrassing too, she’d even taken Spanish for her language requirements in school and half of her family spoke at least some… yet Alan was there acting as the translator through German, that he’d learned for kicks after doing his language requirement in Spanish. Spanish he had also forgotten, which saved her a little bit of face. Not much.

Huh, she was thinking of herself as a her again… even though she’d asked everyone to call her ‘he/him’. Did it bother Lucy that he had a penis now? Sure. The only penis he’d ever thought he would need was the one on John. Just thinking that was a bit embarrassing and made her-him look sideways at Aaron to see if it was noticed, before Lucy realized that of course, Aaron already knew about her and John.

Well… plus it’s not like Aaron could read her damnit, his mind. Ugh, why bother? She would either get used to being a guy in her head or she would figure out some other way to deal with the identity issues. This sort of stuff had never been her area of Law, she’d focused mostly on Torts, a lucrative if often nasty area of practice. At least in her cases people might sometimes have been injured, but they weren’t killed or maimed or assaulted.

Not usually. Actually… there was a lot of overlap in civil disputes, though she didn’t have to deal with the criminal portion. That was another counsel, even if it was in the same office and they shared a lot of the work when the client was dealing with both criminal and civil cases.

You know what else she didn’t have to deal with now? Bras. Periods. Wandering hands at bars and parties. Pregnancy! Oh man, John would probably have flipped his shit at her if he’d known that she didn’t actually want to give birth to kids! Adopt? Sure, maybe. She’d been an only child and her parents had divorced when she was little. Bouncing back and forth between cities was rough but… they’d been loving parents and actually worked a lot of things out together.

Could she be a good mom? Probably. Maybe. She’d have a hard time being a good lawyer and a good mom, but some people did it. If she was honest with herself, she was scared. Scared of failing any children, putting career above them, raising strangers. Her parent’s thought of her as a stranger and frankly, to them she was.

John, Alan and Aaron, they were the closest thing to true family in her heart right now. She did want to call her momma up and cry over the difficult situation, talk about how much better it felt not to have boobs and wear a bra, bitch about testicles being weirdly awkward to walk with if the under-shorts supporting everything weren’t pulled up properly.

She was definitely still getting used to that. She’d caught righty between her thighs when things were hanging a bit loose and… yeah, if that minor incident was an indicator, she didn’t want to get truly nailed in the business. Remembering the white faces of men remembering trauma on the others when it had been brought up made her shudder a little.

John came padding back into the small clearing and said there was a crossable area about a mile ahead. That was good, the rain was light, but it was probably going to get heavier. She’d seen a flash flood once from a storm that wasn’t even within a dozen miles of where she’d been hiking once and she did not want to be caught in that while crossing.

They also didn’t want to be caught trapped between the river and weird herculean elves of doom. Her pants still smelled from wetting herself during that event. They hadn’t had a chance to wash and the mostly dry smelly clothing was better than soggy cold wet ones. Fear outweighed gross.

Hands down.

As they started out again, she found her eyes drifting over to land on an increasingly familiar sight. Namely a very shapely ass inside some fairly well fitting grey sweats, topped by a mostly bare back glistening with drops of sweat and rain, covered only by the side and shoulder straps of a white sports-bra. Would that bra get see-through with enough rain…

What the hell was she even thinking? Sure, she’d ‘experimented’ a little back in high-school, she’d gone to an all-girl’s Catholic school like any good little Mexican/Filipino kid who’s parents were throwing money rather than time at parenting. There hadn’t been much chance left for her to hang out with boys or even meet them in the first place and without anyone to even flirt with… some of them got a bit stressed and pent up.

Had it kept them virgins? If they were to believed, not most of them. There were always local boys or friends of your siblings. Most of the girls had a story about how it had happened, who with, where. In some cases at what party and how many it was at once. It had freaked her out a lot, especially when one of her closest friends got knocked up by a creepy thirty year old guy who went to prison for statutory rape.

The girl’s parents didn’t believe in abortion and she had the kid at seventeen. It ruined her life. Plus she’d said the sex had been horrible. After that, Lucy had read some stories online and then crafted a simple and not too exciting lie about losing it to a neighbor down the street from her dad, who she only stayed with on weekends or during school break, two towns over.

Nobody could verify the story and it was super tame compared to the others, plus Lucy had been a pretty private person the whole time, so it bought her space from the peer-pressure.

Oh, but then she’d met John. Frankly, she was a little disappointed to find out that Alan had been interested and never said anything, she’d thought he was pretty damned cute before he packed on all that weight and lost all of his adorable energy and drive he’d had during college. John though had only gotten fitter, smoother. It drove her crazy how much he drove her crazy, but at some point she’d realized he didn’t actually just want to fool around with her.

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By then though, they’d had a lot of bitterness between them. Maybe it was actually just on her end, but each time she thought he was manipulating her to get into her pants and cut things off, he was almost instantly carrying some hot blond around on an arm. All of them white girls, all blonds (not all real blonds), all of them shorter than her and stacked.

Lucy hadn’t been super heavy in the curves. Not that she’d been as slim and athletic as Elean or a supermodel skinny build like Kid, even if Kid was a bit on the short side for a supermodel. Rather, she’d been a fairly unremarkable but still curved shape. If she didn’t keep in good shape, that quickly got lost in the gut and that could hurt her professionally, not to mention that John was always so god. Damned. Fit.

It had sort of been out of fear of him not being interested and later just a habit that she’d stayed in really good shape. They spent a lot of time at the gym together, even if they mostly focused on different things. They did run together, sometimes he hiked with her, though he wore the most ridiculously large hats and long sleeve linen shirts to avoid ‘skin cancer’, not realizing she was always bronzed to a well toasted brown right next to him.

Unobservant, that man. Really it seemed mostly that he didn’t really try to be super observant of her in the way he did with others when he was working or picking up some blond…

She stopped in her tracks for a moment, causing Aaron and John to stop as well and look back at her. Shaking her head and saying she’d just gotten distracted by a thought, they forged on. The shallows were coming into view or rather, hearing. It was going to be time to cross the river very soon.

It was a metaphorical crossing for Lucy though. They were leaving behind the one group of people that they’d encountered, even if the first had been weird and confusing to deal with and the other had tried to kill them. There were people back that way, out across the grass. Ahead was a flight away from people, towards who knew what? Maybe Elean knew, but she’d been trapped, supposedly, in the grassland area.

Much like she and John were now trapped in bodies that hadn’t been theirs. It didn’t seem nearly so major that Aaron was just young and fit and Alan was… young and fit and sporting some rather pet-able looking sandy blond ears with white tufts curling out from the inside.

Kid also had the ears, though her hair was like an incredibly pale gold color, almost white. Elean was still sporting the pastel green and white inner ear fluff like Alan. Heh, compared to John these two girls on the stretchers looked practically like men. John had the body of a freaking knock-out. Would Lucy have chosen to be a few inches shorter with D breasts, a perfectly rounded ass, and that slightly smoothed six-pack of abs?

The real question was, if she could switch with John, would John not be so upset? Would he want to touch her again the way he’d touched her before it had happened? Last night? They’d woken up in the early morning hours, clearly having been unconscious throughout the night. John had been standoffish, not wanting to touch her or be touched.

When she’d pointed out that John was pretty smokin hot and maybe they could ‘teach’ each other about their bodies… he’d been livid! Horrified! He’d nearly burst into tears by the looks of it! What had she said to make him so upset? Weren’t men supposed to be the horn dogs? Certainly, since becoming one she was already finding herself thinking about it more.

Though she did wonder if it would be the same. It couldn’t be quite the same thing, not having someone inside you. Not feeling that heat and the pressure of their body, the control they had and the force they could apply while still somehow, not hurting you. She’d only ever been with John and it had been amazing, whenever they were ‘together’. It was a really big part of why she kept coming back to him.

They had stopped for some reason. Oh, it was because they were going to go down the bank. John helped Aaron carry Elean’s gurney down, careful not to spill the woman out. Her sweatshirt was visibly stained and crusted with a massive amount of blood, but somehow she was breathing almost normally. Next Aaron and John took down Alan. When they came for Kid, Lucy helped John do it while Aaron looked over the ford and considered exactly where they would cross.

John was glaring at her and she realized she’d been staring down at the fairly amble cleavage exposed by the sports-bra.

“…sorry. I didn’t even realize I was doing it.”

“You were staring at my ass almost the whole time we were walking too!” Lucy looked away. She knew what it felt like to be ogled, even if she hadn’t been on the same scale of attractive that John now was.

“I’ll try not to do it, if it bothers you.” John held the angry face for a moment, then switched to an expression of defeat after then carefully set the gurney down near the others. Aaron had walked a hundred feet or so upriver, pacing the ford and continuing to plan the crossing. The rain was thankfully still light, though steady enough they were getting drenched.

The sports-bra was doing a good job of being opaque, though the nipples were plenty apparent…

“Lu! You’re staring at my chest!” John crossed his arms and hugged his chest. He didn’t look… angry. Not exactly. Disappointed. Hurt, maybe.

“My eyes never wandered like this before. I’m not used to having to pay attention to it so much. Plus… uh… you are really hot.”

“I didn’t know you were into girls too.” She shrugged.

“I wasn’t. I don’t think. I mean, I wasn’t not into girls, not entirely, but I mean, I wasn’t going to look for a girlfriend like that. I don’t find myself staring at Elean or Kid like that though. Maybe I’m just into you, specifically?” John looked a little surprised by that, but the hurt expression didn’t leave.

“I don’t like it. It’s not that I don’t want you to want me, you know? But not like this. This isn’t me.” Lucy’s shoulders slumped a little.

“Does that mean… does that mean you don’t want to be with me anymore?” John tensed up and looked genuinely shocked.

“I… I didn’t mean… I don’t know. I love you Lucy, that hasn’t changed, but this is a lot. This is a lot of change. It’s not like I didn’t know what you had going on under the sheets, you know? I had a certain viewpoint of what our… uh… equipment was. I’m a man, I liked being a man, I liked being with a woman, with you specifically. I wanted to be the man to your woman, you know?” Lucy did get it. She’d liked being smaller, being held, feeling the man that John was against her body, which was all woman.

“I understand. I’m not bothered by the change the same way you are, though I’m probably still in shock about it.” She chuckled a little. “Plus, when you get your cycle… I’ll admit to a bit of schadenfreude, in advance.” John got white at the subject. Clearly it hadn’t occurred to him yet.

Abruptly, John stepped closer to Lucy and leaned against her. Not a hug, but contact. Hesitantly, making sure it didn’t make him upset, Lucy wrapped her arms around the strong, female body. John flinched a little, but bit by bit, relaxed into the embrace.

“We can figure this out at whatever pace works for us. We’ve got all of our lives, assuming we keep living, to figure this out, right? Plus now we’re younger, we can think about getting married and having some kids.”

“That’s true. I did always want to have kids with you, Lu.”

“Really! You were the one that suggested I was too old!”

“Well, we had been skirting around the issue of really committing for a decade! Plus after thirty-five the risk of complications goes up dramatically, fertility goes down…” John got really quiet and the gears were spinning in Lucy’s mind as she thought about it. Having kids, but with her not being the one to be pregnant and give birth… would she want to do it then? “Wait, Lucy, how would you have kids… oh, oh no. No.”

“How else would we have kids? They grow in the womb, you know?” John craned around to look up at her, eyes wide and hands on his mouth.

“Oh gods Lucy, I couldn’t. Shit, we can’t ever have…”

“Sex? Well, you’ve got at least ten years until your fertility drops, right?” John practically shrank back into himself, but didn’t break free from her embrace. “Plus, I gotta say, sex as a woman is pretty good when you do it right. Maybe you’ll think it’s worth it…?”

“Hey guys, I’m going to cross alone and confirm the route. Watch me in case something happens.” Aaron shouted at them. They broke them embrace and Lucy dutifully watched as Aaron started wading through the shin deep water, stepping carefully. John squatted and hugged his knees, mumbling about contractions.