The door hit the wall when it opened and the man in the frame was bigger than I expected. Taller, heavier, the jaw from the photos but thicker in person. He was wearing a suit and his tie was loosened and he was holding a carry-on in one hand and a gun in the other.
The gun was small. Black. Pointed at me.
I'd seen this face before. Versions of it. Different houses, different hallways, different men who came home and found their suspicions confirmed by a stranger standing in the wrong room. Most of them yelled. Some of them swung. One of them cried, which was worse. None of them had a gun.
"David, wait-"
Laura was sitting up. Naked, the sheet tangled around her waist, one arm reaching for him and the other reaching for the robe on the chair. She was saying his name and I was standing there in jeans and an inside-out shirt and no shoes and the carry-on hit the floor.
His hand was steady. That was the part that got me. Still. Aimed. David had decided. David had probably decided somewhere over Colorado when whatever told him to check the flight status told him everything else too, and he'd spent the whole drive from the airport settling into it.
He shot me in the chest.
Left side. High. The sound was louder than I expected and smaller at the same time, a flat crack that bounced off the bedroom walls. I went backward into the nightstand. The photos scattered. The lamp fell. I was looking at David and then I was looking at the ceiling and the ceiling fan was still spinning, brass blades ticking around, and Laura was screaming and I couldn't figure out why I was on my back until I tried to breathe and my left lung wouldn't take air.
I put my hand on my chest. My shirt was wet. The blood was warm and it was spreading fast, soaking through the inside-out fabric and into the carpet that wasn't mine, in the bedroom that wasn't mine, next to the bed I'd fucked his wife in.
He shot me again. Stomach. Lower.
That one was heat first and then a deep wrongness, like a fist closing on something inside me that wasn't supposed to be touched. My legs stopped working. I slid down the nightstand and ended up on the floor with my back against the wooden drawer and one of the framed photos face-up next to my hand. David and Laura at a beach. He was smiling. She was leaning into him.
Laura was screaming words I couldn't make out anymore. The sound was going somewhere. Getting farther away, like she was backing down a hallway I couldn't see.
I looked up. Ceiling fan. Click. Click. Click. Brass and fake wood, spinning on the lowest setting, catalog special. The fan I'd stared at after sex. The fan I was staring at now with blood in my mouth. Copper taste. My hands weren't doing what I told them to do. I pressed them against my stomach where the second shot was leaking through my fingers and the pressure hurt but the hurt was far away, like it belonged to someone in the next room.
I should have left at nine.
That was my actual thought. Lying on the floor of a dead man's bedroom with two holes in me, and I was doing math. I'd said ten, she'd said eleven, I'd said I liked margins, and now I was bleeding out on carpet that probably cost more than my rent. The margins hadn't been wide enough. I'd known they weren't wide enough and I stayed anyway because she made good sounds and I liked her back when it arched.
This was a stupid way to die.
The ceiling fan blurred. Or my eyes did. Same result. The blades went from distinct to soft to a brown smear going in circles. Laura was still making noise. Crying or screaming or talking to David. I couldn't tell. The sounds were running together and the drain was closing.
I never even liked this ceiling fan.
The brown smear got brighter, then dimmer, then it was just light, and then there was no fan and no ceiling and no Laura and no David and no blood and no carpet and no sound at all, just a long smooth nothing that didn't hurt, and I thought: huh, and then I didn't think anything.
Light.
Wrong light. The light in Laura's bedroom had been warm, yellow, a bedside lamp with a shade. This was daylight. Morning sun coming through curtains I didn't recognize, hitting a wall I'd never seen, in a room that wasn't the one I'd just died in.
I was lying on a bed. A single bed, narrow, sheets that had been washed a hundred times. I was on my back and the ceiling above me was white with popcorn texture. No fan.
My chest didn't hurt.
I brought my hand up. Looked at it. It was wrong. Smaller than mine. The fingers were thinner, the knuckles less pronounced, the forearm narrower. A teenager's hand. I turned it over. No calluses. No scar across the knuckle from the time I'd punched a bathroom mirror in a bar in my twenties. Smooth skin. Young skin.
"What the fuck."
My voice cracked on "fuck." Cracked like I was fourteen, like the word had to climb over a speed bump in my throat to get out. I sat up and the room swung and I grabbed the edge of the mattress and looked around.
A teenager's bedroom. Backpack on the floor, red, leaning against the wall. A desk with a PC on it, the case open, guts half-pulled out, clearly broken or mid-repair. A telescope by the window, angled down and across at what had to be the neighbor's house. The wallpaper was faded. There was a sofa against one wall with a plate of cookies on the table next to it. Real cookies. Sugar cookies, from the look of them, sitting there like someone had left them and forgotten.
I knew this room.
I knew this room because I'd clicked through it on my laptop between hookups, one hand on the mouse and the other holding a beer, mashing the skip button through dialogue I didn't care about to get to the parts where women took their clothes off. The broken PC was the one you needed to upgrade for the Intelligence stat. The telescope was for watching the neighbor undress. The backpack was your inventory. The cookies were the first item pickup in the game, sitting right there on the first screen when you started a new save.
I was in Summertime Saga.
I sat on the edge of the bed in a body that wasn't mine and said "fuck" again and it cracked again and I stopped trying to say anything. I looked at my arms. Thin. No muscle definition. An eighteen-year-old's arms that had never seen the inside of a gym. I pulled up the shirt I was wearing, some generic t-shirt, and my stomach was flat and soft, teenager-soft, none of the definition I'd spent years building.
I stood up. The legs worked. The knees felt weird, lower than where I was used to them being. Shorter. I was shorter than I used to be. I walked to the window and the sun was warm on my face and outside was a quiet suburban street with green lawns and a mailbox and a house next door and everything looked like a cartoon someone had made real. Clean lines. Bright colors. A sky so blue it looked rendered.
I was dead. I'd been shot twice in a bedroom and I'd bled out on a stranger's carpet and now I was standing in a video game character's bedroom in a body that belonged to a kid who was supposed to be grieving his dead dad. Frank. The dad's name was Frank. He'd been murdered. There were Russians involved, and a mayor, and a warehouse. I'd skipped most of that story because I didn't care.
The girls, though. Those I remembered. Debbie, Jenny, Diane, Tammy, Roxxy, Mia, Eve. The routes. The scenes. The stat checks I'd failed and reloaded and failed again until I looked up a walkthrough. Every romanceable woman in this town, and I'd played every route because of course I had, and now I was standing in the protagonist's body looking at the protagonist's street through the protagonist's window.
I walked across the room. The cookies were still on the sofa table. I picked one up and bit into it. Sugar cookie. Butter and sugar. No stat screen popped up. No notification. No floating text. Just a cookie.
I chewed. Swallowed. Okay.
From downstairs, a woman's voice. Warm, gentle, the voice of someone who'd been up for a while already and had the kitchen going.
"Sweetie? Are you awake? Breakfast is ready."
Debbie.
I knew that voice because I'd clicked through it for hours, skipping the dialogue to get to the bathrobe scene, the shower scene, the kitchen scene where she bends over the counter. I knew what she looked like. I knew what she sounded like when she came. I'd played her route three times because her scenes were good and she was the first girl most players went for.
She was downstairs, in a bathrobe, making breakfast for a foster son who didn't exist anymore. Her partner Frank was dead. The funeral was yesterday. She'd been crying all day and now she was cooking because that's what she did when she didn't know what to do, and downstairs was a real kitchen with real food and a real woman in a real bathrobe and none of it was sprites on a screen anymore.
I opened the bedroom door. The hallway smelled like coffee and eggs and soap, faintly floral. There was another door across the hall. Jenny's. Closed. I went to the stairs and went down.
She was in the kitchen. The bathrobe. That bathrobe. Pink, knee-length, tied at the waist, and the front was loose enough that when she turned around the curve of her chest and the edge of her cleavage were right there and she was real. Breathing, grieving, making eggs in a pan with a spatula in one hand. Her eyes were puffy. Red around the rims. She'd been up early or hadn't slept. Brown hair pulled back, grey eyes, full figure, prettier in person than she'd ever been on a screen.
She smiled. Tired. Held together.
"Good morning, sweetie."
My throat tightened and my voice cracked on the first syllable like this body was doing it on purpose and I said:
"Good morning."
She turned back to the eggs. The bathrobe shifted when she moved. I stood at the bottom of the stairs in a dead kid's body in a video game kitchen and the coffee smelled incredible and the woman in front of me had no idea that two minutes ago I'd been bleeding to death on a bedroom floor in a different universe.
Worse things have happened.
Actually, no. Worse things have not happened.
This was the opposite of worse things.