The Neighbour
Having both Evelyn and Sera leave Arc City at the same time had left my life considerably quieter than I had become accustomed to.
Considering that only a few weeks earlier my biggest concern had been whether Professor Abrams would decide to surprise us with another quiz, I probably should have appreciated finally having the opportunity to live like an ordinary university student again. Instead, after everything that had happened since my Awakening, normal life had somehow started to feel uneventful.
My parents apparently disagreed.
That was how I ended up spending most of Saturday afternoon having lunch with them at a restaurant several districts away from our apartment, followed by a walk my mother had insisted was necessary because, according to her, I had spent far too much of the previous week sitting around the house whenever I wasn't attending university.
I didn't bother pointing out that I was an Awakened twenty-year-old whose physical condition was considerably better than either of theirs.
Some arguments weren't worth having.
By the time we finally returned to our apartment building, it was approaching four in the afternoon. I stepped through the entrance behind my parents and waited while Dad called the elevator, already thinking about the assignment sitting unfinished on my laptop.
Apparently, awakening a spatial ability capable of teleporting objects and occasionally throwing me into other people's bodies did not qualify as an acceptable excuse for missing coursework indefinitely.
The elevator arrived a few seconds later.
We stepped inside, but just as Dad reached toward the panel, someone called from behind us.
“Could you hold it, please?”
Dad immediately stopped the doors.
A young woman hurried toward the elevator while pushing a stroller in front of her, although calling what she was doing hurrying might have been slightly generous. Her pace was careful enough that the doors probably would have closed again if my father hadn't kept his hand against the sensor.
I recognised her before she reached us.
Mary Snow lived somewhere a few floors below ours. I couldn't remember exactly when her family had moved into the building, but I had seen her often enough over the years that we usually exchanged greetings whenever we happened to meet.
Before her pregnancy, she had been one of those neighbours whose face I remembered more easily than her name. She was somewhere in her late twenties, with warm brown eyes, long light-brown hair and the kind of naturally pleasant face that made her look approachable even when she wasn't smiling.
I had also been a nineteen-year-old man when she became pregnant, so pretending I had never noticed that she was attractive would have been somewhat dishonest.
Pregnancy had changed the rest of her considerably.
Her face was still almost exactly the same, aside from the exhaustion visible beneath her eyes, and her long hair had been gathered loosely behind her head with a large clip. The rest of her looked different enough that I probably would have needed a second glance if I had only known her casually.
The loose cream-colored shirt she wore couldn't completely hide how dramatically her chest had grown, while her lower stomach still projected noticeably beneath the fabric despite the baby already being several weeks old. At the same time, her exposed forearms looked thinner than I remembered, and there was something slightly fragile about her shoulders that hadn't been there before.
Still, she looked reasonably well put together.
Tired, certainly, but considering she had a newborn, that didn't seem particularly surprising.
“Thank you,” Mary said as she pushed the stroller inside.
“No problem.” Dad finally removed his hand from the sensor.
My mother immediately leaned slightly toward the stroller.
“Oh, is this Liam?”
Mary's tired expression brightened.
“Yes. Six weeks yesterday.”
The baby was almost completely hidden beneath a light blanket, although I could see part of a tiny round face through the opening.
“He's gotten big already,” Mom said.
“He was never particularly small.”
There was something in Mary's tone that made my mother laugh softly.
“I remember.”
Apparently, they had spoken about the baby before.
Mary positioned the stroller beside herself and rested both hands on the handle. A large bag hung from one side, along with what looked like a folded blanket and several other things I couldn't identify.
“Where's Martin?” Mom asked.
Mary's smile weakened slightly.
“Work. He left yesterday morning.”
“Again?”
“He has a client presentation outside the city. He should only be gone for a few days.”
The way she said it made me suspect this wasn't the first time her husband had been away for work since the baby was born.
My mother seemed to reach the same conclusion.
“If you need anything while he's away, you know we're upstairs.”
“Thank you. We're managing.”
Mary answered quickly enough that the words sounded practiced.
I didn't think much of it at the time.
The elevator began rising.
Liam made a quiet noise from inside the stroller, and Mary immediately lowered her gaze toward him. One hand left the handle as she bent forward slightly and adjusted the blanket around his body.
The movement looked awkward.
Not because of the stroller, but because Mary seemed to lower herself almost entirely by bending at the hips rather than tightening her abdomen normally. One hand moved instinctively toward her stomach before she straightened again, and for perhaps half a second her expression tightened.
I probably wouldn't have noticed if the last few weeks hadn't made me much more aware of the way different bodies moved.
Living inside Evelyn and Sera had given me an unusually intimate point of comparison. Evelyn was physically weaker than me by an almost ridiculous margin, yet there was nothing unhealthy about the way her body worked. Sera was the opposite, strong enough that even after inhabiting her for days, I had never stopped appreciating how much easier ordinary movement became when nearly every part of a body had been properly trained.
Mary simply looked tired.
At least, that was what I assumed.
The elevator passed another floor, and I was about to turn my attention back toward my parents when my spatial sense suddenly twisted.
The change happened so quickly that I barely had time to recognise it. After everything that had happened with Evelyn and Sera, I knew what that strange pull meant, but knowing did me absolutely no good when the sensation had already taken hold before I could react.
My stomach dropped.
Not again.
Then space folded around me.
Blink.
My surroundings returned almost instantly.
The elevator hadn't changed. My parents were still standing in front of me, and the stroller remained exactly where it had been a moment earlier.
The person beside it, however, was now wearing my face.
I remained completely still as the first sensations of my new body began reaching me, and surprisingly, the difference in height wasn't the first thing that caught my attention. Neither was Mary's long hair, despite several loose strands having slipped free from the clip and begun brushing against my shoulders and neck.
It was the weight hanging from my chest.
Evelyn had already given me more than enough experience with large breasts for the sensation itself to be familiar, but Mary's were in an entirely different category. They weren't merely large; they were heavy, dragging forward against whatever bra she wore beneath her shirt and placing a constant pull across my shoulders and upper back.
I instinctively straightened my posture to compensate, only to realize immediately that had been a mistake.
The muscles in my abdomen failed to tighten the way I expected them to. Instead of supporting me, my stomach shifted strangely while a deep ache spread through my lower back and pelvis. My knees weakened along with it, forcing me to reach toward the stroller.
My fingers closed around the handle with far less strength than I expected, and even the weight of the bag hanging from one side pulled unpleasantly against my arm.
“What the hell...”
Mary's voice came out of my mouth, confirming what had happened before I even turned toward my original body.
“Oh no.”
Mary lowered her gaze toward my hands and flexed them experimentally, once and then again, as though trying to convince herself that they really belonged to her now.
Her expression was still filled with shock, yet something else briefly passed across my face before she managed to hide it.
Relief.
I recognised it almost immediately, perhaps because I knew better than anyone how my body normally felt.
My mother looked between the two of us.
“Nathan?”
“Yeah. It's me.”
My answer came out softer than I intended, although there was little point in trying to prove anything beyond that.
Dad slowly exhaled through his nose, accepting the situation with considerably less visible panic than he probably would have a month earlier. Then again, he had only recently learned that his son was apparently capable of randomly exchanging bodies with women, so perhaps another incident no longer qualified as completely unbelievable.
“Again?”
“I didn't exactly schedule it.”
Mary barely seemed to hear us.
She had straightened completely inside my body, not with the cautious movement I had noticed from her only moments earlier, but naturally and without hesitation.
She simply stood upright and remained there, almost as though she were waiting for something to hurt.
Nothing did.
Mary slowly ran her hands over my abdomen before moving one around to my lower back, apparently confirming that the discomfort she had grown accustomed to was really gone. When she finally looked toward me, genuine concern had replaced the relief I had seen a moment earlier.
“Nathan, don't move too quickly.”
Unfortunately, the warning came slightly too late.
My throat had become dry during the swap, and I instinctively cleared it, producing a small cough that should have meant absolutely nothing.
Instead, several things happened almost at once.
A sudden warmth escaped between my legs, making me freeze before I had even properly understood what had happened. At nearly the same moment, the pressure already sitting deep inside my pelvis increased sharply, accompanied by the horrible sensation that something inside me had shifted downward.
Farther downward than anything inside a healthy body had any business moving.
My thighs pressed together instinctively, only making me more conscious of the unusually thick material beneath my clothes and the uncomfortable pressure pushing toward the space between my legs. There was another sensation farther behind it as well, less immediately obvious but equally wrong, as though something there had shifted in a direction it wasn't supposed to.
Whatever expression appeared on my face was enough for Mary to step closer immediately.
“Don't panic.”
“What just happened?”
Her eyes moved briefly toward my parents, and hesitation appeared across my own face.
That was when something considerably more concerning occurred to me.
Whatever had just happened to Mary's body wasn't new to her.
My mother stepped closer.
“Mary?”
“It's fine,” Mary answered before I could say anything. “My recovery has just been a little slower than I expected.”
I looked toward her, but the warning in her eyes was clear enough that I kept my mouth shut. Judging by how quickly she had dismissed what had happened, she clearly had no intention of explaining it in the middle of an elevator.
Before any of us could say more, the elevator chimed as we reached Mary's floor and the doors slid open.
For several seconds, none of us moved.
I could feel the warmth between my thighs spreading slowly into whatever thick pad or underwear Mary was wearing, but even that had become secondary to the pressure sitting frighteningly low in my pelvis.
My arms were already beginning to ache from leaning against the stroller.
I had been inside Mary's body for less than a minute, yet simply remaining upright had become uncomfortable enough that I was already relying on something beside me to take part of my weight.
Mary noticed.
“I'll take Liam.”
She reached for the stroller, and her hands closed around the handle with the casual ease I remembered possessing only moments earlier. I released my grip, and the difference between our bodies became humiliatingly obvious as soon as the weight transferred completely to her.
What had already begun straining my arms barely seemed to register in hers.
Mary pushed Liam out of the elevator without any visible effort before stopping in the hallway and turning back toward me.
“Can you walk?”
I stared at my own face.
Under normal circumstances, being asked something like that probably would have annoyed me, but at that moment I genuinely wasn't certain enough to take offense.
“I think so.”
“Slowly.”
I took one careful step, followed by another.
My legs worked well enough to carry me forward, yet compared with every body I had inhabited before, they felt strangely hollow. There was barely any strength in my thighs, my lower abdomen provided almost none of the support I instinctively expected from it, and each step seemed to push more pressure downward into my already uncomfortable pelvis.
Still, if I moved carefully enough, I could walk without making the problem obvious.
By the time I stepped out of the elevator, I briefly placed one hand against the wall to steady myself before forcing myself upright again.
Mom glanced toward me.
“You all right?”
“Yeah. Just getting used to it.”
Mary answered before my mother could look too closely.
“He just needs a moment to get used to the differences.”
The explanation sounded ordinary enough that Mom only nodded, although I caught her looking at me once more before turning toward Liam.
Apparently, Mary had become rather good at making all of this sound much less serious than it felt from inside her body.
She glanced toward the door of her apartment farther down the corridor.
“We should go inside.”
I couldn't disagree.
There were already several questions I wanted answered, most of them involving some variation of what exactly happened to your body?
Unfortunately, the strange downward pressure between my legs was rapidly becoming the one demanding an answer first.
Mary led us toward her apartment while I followed at a much slower pace, concentrating mostly on keeping my steps normal enough that Mom wouldn't start asking more questions. Thankfully, the distance wasn't far.
Mary stopped in front of the door and unlocked it using my hand before pushing Liam's stroller inside.
I followed her through the entrance, with my parents coming in behind me.
The apartment looked about as ordinary as I would have expected from a young couple with a newborn, although the number of baby-related things scattered around made it obvious that Liam had taken over a considerable portion of their lives during the last six weeks. A folded blanket rested across one end of the couch, several bottles stood beside the kitchen sink, and what looked like part of a breast pump had been left drying nearby.
I barely had time to take in anything else before Mom's phone began ringing.
Dad's followed almost immediately.
They exchanged a glance, and considering both of them worked at the same hospital, that was enough to tell me the calls probably weren't bringing good news.
Mom answered first.
“Yes?”
Her expression changed within seconds.
Dad was already listening to whoever had called him, his brows tightening as the conversation continued.
“A Level Seven?” Mom asked.
That immediately caught my attention.
She turned slightly away while the person on the other end continued speaking, but I could still hear enough to understand the important parts. A Gate had appeared in one of Arc City's crowded commercial districts, and the first reports indicated enough casualties that several nearby hospitals had begun recalling additional staff.
Dad ended his call first.
“They're bringing everyone available in.”
Mom lowered her phone a moment later.
“They want me there too.”
Neither of them moved toward the door immediately.
Instead, Mom looked at me.
I knew that expression well enough.
“Mom, go.”
“Nathan—”
“I'm fine. Mary is here, and it's not exactly the first time I've been stuck in someone else's body.”
Technically, that was true.
It was also becoming increasingly obvious that Mary's body was nothing like the others I had inhabited, but I had no intention of explaining the damp warmth still trapped between my legs or the uncomfortable pressure sitting far too low inside my pelvis while my parents were standing a few metres away.
Mary seemed to understand why I wanted them gone before the conversation went any further.
“You should go,” she said. “Nathan won't be alone, and I know my own body well enough to explain anything he needs.”
Mom still hesitated, although the urgency of the calls had clearly left her with little room to argue.
Dad looked between the two of us before finally nodding.
“We'll probably be there until tonight. Call us immediately if anything serious happens.”
“Of course.”
At the time, I genuinely believed that would be enough.
Author’s Note
Thanks for reading the preview of The Neighbour.
If you want to keep going, the full side story is already available on Amazon here:
[Amazon]
I may also serialize the full story on Scribble Hub later, once the current Awakening serialization is finished, but I can’t promise that yet.
Either way, the main story continues as usual.