Sweet Romance16 min read
Don't Touch My Body
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I woke up and the world had rearranged itself around a stranger’s chest.
"Who are you?" a low, controlled voice asked from beside the couch.
"I'm... Alexandra," I answered, voice foreign and steady in a way mine rarely is in the morning. I blinked at my hands—broad, veined, callused in a way I’d never seen on myself. "And you are?"
"Cairo Ford," he said.
"Cairo..." I tried the name on my tongue. "Sounds familiar."
"You don't remember me?" His brow creased.
"I—" I laughed, which sounded deep and baffled. "Oh! You're the one who borrowed twenty bucks from me in middle school and never paid it back."
He went still. "That's what you remember?" His voice went sharp. "Is that all?"
"It was a long time ago."
"Did you just—go to the bathroom?" he asked suddenly.
"Of course I did," I said, heat rising. "Do you want me to wet your couch?"
"Cairo," he said, softer. "Are you still...a woman?" His tone changed, like someone discovering a mistake on a contract.
"I am a woman," I said. "And I was in the bathroom for twenty minutes studying the toilet as if it held secrets."
He scoffed. "You studied a toilet?"
"Yes! And I succeeded, thank you very much."
He made a noise like he was offended. "Don't touch—"
I looked at my chest, which suddenly felt intrusive and alien. "I wasn't touching anything I shouldn't," I said. Then, because the truth rose like a bad hiccup, I added, "But now I really need to pee again."
He froze. The air between us turned thin.
1
Cairo had my face; I had his body.
I sat on the couch and faced a man who wore my features like a coat.
"Who are you?" I asked again.
"Cairo Ford," he said, like it settled everything.
"You look..." I searched. "You look like you've been ironing your face."
He blinked. "You don't know who I am?"
"Well—you're a bit familiar." I tried to smile. "You owe me twenty dollars from middle school."
Silence stretched. He ground his teeth, muttering. "Is that literally the only thing you remember?"
"It left an impression," I said. "It was formative."
He dug his fingers into his forehead. "Besides that, don't you remember anything else?"
I shrugged. "It's been a while."
"Did you just pee?" he asked again, incredulous.
"If not, would you prefer I wet your pants?"
He stared. "Are you embarrassed?"
"I was embarrassed in the bathroom for so long that I wrote a short thesis on the acoustics."
"Cairo," he said, softer, almost pleading. "Do you feel shame?"
"Of course I do," I snapped. "I was ashamed, very ashamed. It took a lot of research and patience."
He swallowed. "You research the bathroom. You nod. You—"
I watched him act out my expression in a way that quickly settled into irritation. I felt the urge to be useful.
"Let's be practical," I said. "We need to pretend to be each other. You can't go around shouting that you're me on the street."
He glowered. "And you can't go to my workplace and announce you are Alexandra Rodriguez."
"Exactly." I smirked. "So, morning small chat: Cairo Ford—height, weight, job, bank password."
"I—" He flinched. "Stop."
2
We traded small inventories.
"Designer," he finally said. "Fashion design director."
"A designer? Like clothes?" I gaped. "No wonder the apartment smells like cologne I can only afford in dreams."
"It's not cologne," he said. "It's part of the job."
"Okay," I said. "Important fact: vows to not ruin your workday. Also—no oversharing of passwords."
He made a list, uncomfortable and precise. "Cairo Ford, thirty, height 6'1", weight—"
"Stop," I said. "Give me something useful."
He blinked like a man not used to being ordered. "Salary, accounts—"
"Nope." I wagged a finger. "Give me your routine. Give me the look."
He sighed and told me what to say, what to do, what tone to use. He told me to be aloof. He told me to work like swimming in clear water: calm on the surface, strong underneath.
"Why are you so precise?" I asked.
"Because of the details," he said. "Because one misplaced word here and I lose credibility."
"Okay, Mr. Credibility." I rolled my shoulders, delighting in the unfamiliar breadth of them. "Lead the way, boss."
3
I went with him to his studio—my body wearing his suit, which felt like a borrowed armor. Everywhere hummed with a fashionable kind of seriousness: racks of garments, a scattered sea of sketches, assistants moving with bedazzling efficiency.
I wandered the set and let my eyes rest—on the fabric textures, on the model’s jawlines, then on the handsome male model whose hand I reached to in pure reflex. "Cute hand," I said, cheeky, as if I were the sort who could just reach out.
"Hey!" Cairo's voice snapped, and his hand struck my arm, half-command, half-dash of panic. He yanked me away and guided me to a shadowed corner. Then he pushed me against a wall with a force I didn't expect.
"Listen to me," he hissed into my face. "You are in my body. Behave."
A sweet, flirty voice floated over. "Cairo, darling—"
I looked up and saw her: Sophia Wolff, glamorous and poised like someone who carried her own lighting.
She bowed her head toward "me"—Cairo in my face—and then turned cool when she tiptoed toward the other. Her eyes held a cold curiosity.
"Who is this?" she asked, smiling thinly.
"Friend," he said. My mouth shaped the answer. "A friend of many years."
She smiled to him in a way that made my skin prickle. "Ah, friends. Then I will leave you to it."
She turned away with a staccato of heels. My mind fizzed with awkward protection; I moved to intercept her and be the imposing friend—only to have Cairo yank me back into a makeup room and plop a spare pair of his pants at my feet.
"Change," he said, brisk. "Later, we'll handle your behavior."
"In front of everyone?" I asked, peeling off the unfamiliar pants as he pointed to the door labeled 'wardrobe'. I imagined exchanging clothes in a doorway like a sitcom. "Of course I wouldn't mind...unless you want to stand guard…"
He didn't meet my eye. He had a way of making the space between us fraught and tender at once.
4
In the dressing room, two bodies ended up too close when a shelf tumbled. I reflexively protected him, pressed us together, and realized the oddness of being in a man who still had my tics.
"Are you okay?" I breathed.
He looked at me like something new had been planted—eyes softening. For the first time since this swap, his cheeks colored.
"He's a troublemaker," I muttered, stepping away.
"Who?" he said, oddly uncomfortable.
"Me," I said, and he said nothing.
I learned quickly that pretending to be Cairo was really more about learning the shape of silence. He was precise, judgmental about small things—my beard (which was none), my pants being wrinkled (I hadn't known how to iron muscle), and a thousand little grooming standards I never cared about.
"Come on," he said at one point. "Smile less, fold your arms. More composed."
"Yes, Sir Composed," I mimicked.
At one intense instant, a small commotion started. He turned and, without a word, shielded me when a stack of boxes tipped. We ended up jammed between a pallet and a wall, pressed so close we could have fit into each other’s air.
"Are you hurt?" I whispered.
He seemed flustered. "No." Then, quieter, "Thank you."
It struck me: my body known by someone else and yet cared for, protected. It made something bubble and ache inside me.
5
That evening, Cairo—inside my body—was meek and small, hovering in my living room like someone who had found himself inside a stranger's life. I decided to be a good host.
"Let's get to know each other," I proposed. "We should swap briefs, passwords, the whole adult checklist."
"You want to do what?" He flinched.
"Acting as each other," I said. "We can't keep stumbling into minefields."
He reluctantly gave me dates, facts—lessons about his life that surprised me. When I asked where he had woken the morning of the swap, he admitted the couch.
"Oh," I said. "I slept on the couch too."
"What?" He looked alarmed.
"Nothing," I lied, then the wind pushed open my bedroom door and my shrine of idols stared up at us—posters, plushies, and the whole map of my private shrine.
His face when he saw my bedroom was a comic of disgust and then something like soft fascination. "You have a shrine to pop stars," he said, as if auditing a secret museum.
"I have...issues," I said.
He looked at me with something like pity. "Can you lend me a normal pair of pants?"
We both laughed then, and it felt like truce made out of absurdity.
"Promise?" he asked later, standing in my kitchen in the morning.
"Promise," I said. "We swap back. Soon."
6
The next week blurred into a string of adventures we had to rehearse for.
He went to the elementary school that was my job—he did not want to, but he did, with a face like a man who swallowed a lemon and pretended it was a grape. I went to his studio and pretended to be a director, flanked by assistants who admired me for reasons I didn't understand.
When parents went into the school and found their children taught by my body with Cairo's tone, some teachers whispered. Ms. Katherine Beach—the office's unofficial aunt—watched Cairo in my skin with a look that would have made lesser men blush.
"Are you okay?" she asked him at recess.
"Of course," he said, brisk, moving like a man given instructions by someone else.
I watched him text like he touched glass, not paper; he balanced a hundred small interactions with a skill I envied.
7
Days into the swap, I found something that shifted my chest: an old interview of Sophia—who had later called me a "friend" that day—described Cairo in sweet, reverent terms and then dropped one line that turned my stomach.
"He's already engaged," she said with a soft smile. "He has a fiancée."
My phone slipped from my hands. Engaged? Cairo had never mentioned anything. Why had he kept this from me? I sat on his sofa, breathing too fast.
When he returned home that night, he was quiet. "You found something," he said.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked.
He came closer and then looked away. He took a small velvet box from the shelf and opened it in the lamplight. A gleam of diamond winked at me.
"Is that—" I started.
He slid the ring onto my finger and for a long second smiled like someone letting a secret be a secret.
"It's mine," he said. "It fits."
My heart beat a cautious rhythm. I wanted him to tell me his story. He didn't. He said, instead, "You don't owe me anything about my life. You have your own."
But of course I did owe him everything. We were tied by a strange thread that had nothing to do with arrangement and everything to do with intimacy.
"Please," I begged one evening after a long day. "If we're going to wear each other's lives, tell me where you woke up that morning. Tell me everything."
He told me bits—worked late, slept on the couch. But something else tugged at his face when he spoke of family: a fissure he wouldn't speak about.
8
Then the message came from my aunt: "Your father died. The funeral is tomorrow. Do you want to come?"
It read like someone tossing a match into old paper. My stepmother had been a nightmare of my adolescence; my brother a cruel boy who had scarred me. I booked the ticket.
I texted him: I'm going back. He texted back: I'll come too.
He did not explain why. I suppose neither of us could ignore the fact that our lives had knotted together; the swap had given access to things we had never given each other.
On the drive to my hometown, in Cairo's body, I felt a mix of dread and resolve. The town had shrunk but also had something like a memory of my cowering. I went into the funeral home with Cairo in my skin—my stepmother in a black dress, my brother scowling, relatives arranged like chess pieces.
People saw me—Alexandra, but with Cairo's face—and they whispered. His presence made them perk up. My stepmother barked and scolded and the family took their positions.
"Is she here?" she shrieked as I passed. "Is that child coming to pay respects?"
I let her shout. I had a plan, the outrageous kind only someone with nothing to lose could entertain. When people gathered around the casket to murmur, I took a breath, walked to the center, and spoke.
"You know, I thought funerals were for the dead," I said. "But apparently they're also a place for truth."
Heads turned. My stepmother's face hit a kind of porcelain; my brother's mouth froze mid-breath. "Alexandra, what are you saying?"
"I'm saying what everyone here knows and pretends not to," I said, and my voice steadied in Cairo's body in a way my own had never managed. "You called me ungrateful for leaving. You made my life small. You called me names while your son laughed in the warm room and I shivered outside. You forgot what it means to care."
My stepmother erupted. "How dare you—"
I didn't stop. I had rehearsed a different speech in my head, but truth loosening itself felt better. "Remember the winter when the faucet froze? You told me to finish laundry. When I said I hadn't, you threw boiling water at me. I carry those scars. My brother—why do you say you're shocked? You used that knife because you enjoyed power. You made a life where the easiest thing was to blame the child you didn't like."
My stepmother's face went a shade of red I had never seen outside a winter evening. "Lies! All lies!"
"You can call it a lie," I said. "Or face the neighbors."
There were so many people in the hall then—cousins, neighbors, my father’s old acquaintances—all leaning in, whispering into their phones. "Is that Alexandra?" "Is she telling the truth?"
Phones came up like tiny sunrises. Someone started to film. Voices rose. I felt the way against my ribs: a pressure like a heart growing too large for its cage.
My stepmother lunged, hitting the side of the casket with the flat of her hand and shrieking, and the room fell wild. My brother tried to intercept me; I stepped aside with a careful, savage calm and looked at him.
"You always wore your wound like an accessory," I told him through the hush. "But your scars can't hide that you learned cruelty from watching others."
He opened his mouth and everyone craned forward.
"Everyone here has been complicit," I continued. "They saw you call me names. They watched me sleep outside. They let it happen because it's easier to look away. Now you want money, sympathy, performance—and you expect it without shame?"
There were murmurs—anger, disbelief, some pity. Someone said, "She's right."
A woman in the back, a neighbor who I remembered as kind, walked forward and placed a hand on my shoulder.
"This isn't a performance," she said. "I remember watching that girl in the winter and hoping someone would do something. No one did."
My stepmother's face crumpled then—first incredulity, then rage, then a rush of denial that made the lips thin. "You—how dare you—"
She looked small and monstrous at once. "Get out!" she screamed.
Instead of cowering, I turned and looked across the room where family and strangers gathered. I held Cairo’s gaze—my friend—then spoke again.
"This man in the photo—my father—didn't have people who loved him well. He left things undone. But he certainly didn't deserve the way you made his daughter disappear into shame. If you want money, you can have the funeral costs. But don't dare pretend you were the loving family."
Phones streamed; the videos traveled outward. People in the hall whispered; some whispered 'shame,' others 'truth,' many simply watched as if watching a broadcast of a storm.
My brother's face went pale, then furious; he lunged at me then, but a hand—Cairo's hand—found my arm, strong and protective.
"Stop," he said quietly. "Let her speak."
My brother's anger turned to sputtering denials; he attempted to smear me, to call me a liar, to twist the story back. But with each accusation, other people in the hall nodded, offered small corroborations: "I saw that scar." "I remember the night she slept at the doorstep." "I heard the shouting."
The camera on someone's phone continued to roll. People murmured into it: "She’s telling what we all know." The footage went out like a ripple. Some attendees watched, mouths open. Others looked ashamed, some angry at being implicated.
My stepmother's composure—the carefully cultivated mask—crumbled under that weight. First shocked, then frantic, she shouted for me to leave. The moment had shifted. People were no longer passive. "She did what?"
"She told the truth," a steady voice said behind me.
I turned. Cairo—my friend who had come in my body—was standing with his chin up. He had taken the center of the room and with a voice like a bell said, "We will not accept this."
"How dare you?" my stepmother screamed, but the sound fell flat against the crowd's attention. A neighbor came forward and said, "Tell the funeral home you don't accept this. We'll help. The girl's story is true."
My brother broke down. He begged. "Please, Alexandra—please, I'm sorry."
The change felt like weather: first a thunderclap of denial, then the slow, wet thaw of exposure. People started to talk, to call out for fairness, to say they'd also seen neglect.
The worst came when the funeral director, who had watched with professional detachment, quietly closed the condolence book and walked to the steps of the stage. "We can continue," he said, "but the story going out is the only truth we have now." He looked at my stepmother with pity.
By the end, she stood alone at the casket, her calls for charity shriveling into a thin voice. My brother leaned against the wall and sobbed with a shame that made him small. Cameras kept flashing.
When I left the funeral hall, people had already begun to call friends, to send the video. Some messages were sympathetic, some scornful; many read like relief—someone had finally said it.
Cairo walked me to the car and put a hand on my shoulder. "You did right," he said.
I could not tell then how much damage or repair would come of it. But I had watched faces change: the calculated masks become cracks and then collapse. I had watched my own small self become large in a room that once swallowed me. It was, in its ugly way, vindication.
9
After the funeral, at a park by a lake where we had once sat as teenagers, we sat in the grass and let the late light wash our faces.
"You found the ring," I said, more softly.
"Yes," Cairo said. "I put it on my finger because it felt right in my own hands."
"You put on a ring that wasn't yours," I said, incredulous.
"I put it on because I wanted to see how it fit," he said. "I wanted to see if commitment in this life would feel different in that skin."
"You're strange," I said.
"So are you." He smiled. "You want to hear a secret?"
"What kind?"
"A stupid one," he said, and then he handed me an old notebook with edges worn like a map. "This was my diary. I wrote about you a lot."
I flipped through pages and stopped at a dated entry, twelve years before. "September 26th," I read aloud.
He closed his eyes. "You almost don't remember that night," he said. "The lake. The stars. You asked me for a ridiculous thing."
"What?"
"You asked me," he read, voice catching, "'If you ever wanted to, would you switch lives with me?' And I said...I would be delighted."
Something warm and fragile unfurled in my chest. "We said that?" I whispered.
"You did," he said. "We were kids. We made flags we didn't expect to see fly."
10
We kept living inside each other's lives for two weeks. I learned how to carry his composure like a practiced actor; he learned to deliver a lesson plan to a room of children who loved snacks and chaos in equal measure.
Sometimes I would find him sitting in my kitchen at night, looking at photos of my childhood like a man reading a catalog of someone else's wounds.
"You have been hurt," he said one night.
"I survived," I said, voiceless.
"No," he insisted. "You did not only survive. You fixed the pieces. You put them in boxes, labeled them, and stacked them. You're not just patched—you are whole in a way I didn't understand."
He looked at me as if from a distance, and I realized something dangerous: in his eyes I looked like someone he wanted to keep.
For my birthday—some secret he had known from a diary—he made me a small cake under stars, with candles that trembled. He gave me a necklace with two stars, one big, one small. "For your constellations," he said.
"How do you know my birthday?" I asked.
"You told me that night," he said simply. "You told me a story you didn't tell anyone."
We laughed until the night swallowed our noise. When he said he would help me fight the past confrontations, I believed him. It felt like a promise without a name.
11
The day we swapped back, I woke with a double start in my own body and felt like a thief caught returning to the scene. I poured coffee, smoothed my sleeves, and felt the quiet relief of being back in my skin.
Then that evening I went to Cairo's apartment to collect the artbook he had forgotten. I found him at the door with another woman laughing, a scene that dropped like cold water.
He smiled when he saw me, warm and wide, and the woman hugged him like someone who knew the line between rehearsal and life.
I turned, fled down the stairs, the light a smear.
I sent a text that night: "I don't want your things. Don't come see me again."
I meant it with every terrified, honest piece of my heart. I didn't want to be the kind of girl who ruined marriages, or tampered with someone else's life. I didn't want to be a weak thing who fell for a man who had a place for someone else.
Then came the knock at the door.
"Open up," he said. "Open the door."
Before I could respond, strong hands caught me and pressed me—gently but firmly—against the entryway. In the dark, his breath on my ear, he said, "Why would you say 'we won't see each other again' after we shared each other's bodies?"
He held me there like a fierce weather.
"I—" My chest pressed into his. "Because I don't want to hurt her. I don't want to be the complication."
"She isn't your fiancée," he said, and I felt the words like an anchor.
"What?" I choked.
"She wasn't engaged to me," he said. "The rumors—Sophia—were a test. I told them we'd rehearse a publicity angle. I didn't realize you'd see it and think it was real."
I stared. "You didn't tell me."
"I didn't think you'd look," he admitted. "I didn't expect you to find out like that."
"I asked you a week ago," I said. "You didn't tell me."
"Because I didn't think I had to," he whispered. "Because I thought you'd be safe. Because I thought I could...control the narrative."
His face was a war map of emotions. "Alexandra," he said, and in the dimness he cupped my cheek. "I like you."
Before I could decide whether the moment was mine or not, he moved closer and kissed me.
"Don't make this about promises," he said softly when he pulled back. "Just be—"
"Say it," I demanded. I needed the truth, not a rehearsal.
"I like you," he said again. "I have liked you for a long time."
12
It turned out, to my shock and bewilderment, that what had been growing during two weeks of inhabiting one another's faces had been something honest and accidental.
"I don't deserve you," I whispered, trembling, the weight of my past, my fear of being the person who broke things sitting heavy in my throat.
He smiled a crooked smile. "You deserve better than stories pinned to you. You deserve someone who sees you."
We didn't promise forever. We didn't sign contracts by the glow of a ring. We simply started again, slowly, with careful words and clumsy care.
13
Months later, when I think back to that strange match of bodies, I'm still stunned by how much we gave each other: a chance at being someone else and, at the end, a chance at being whole.
We keep that black diary in a drawer—a relic of vows whispered under stars. We keep the necklace in a box we both sometimes open to prove the other isn’t a dream.
I learned that being someone else for a while taught me to love the skin I was born in. He learned that loving someone doesn't mean stepping into all their spaces. We both learned that a hand can rescue and that hands often know things words do not.
Sometimes, when I look at him across the table, I remember a cruel little town, a lake, a night when two kids made a ridiculous promise that got tangled into reality. I remember that he handed over a bowl of soup when mine had gone cold. I remember that for two weeks I got to live inside the safety of someone who saw the edges of me and polished them until they shone.
He squeezes my hand and calls me "Alex," the way only he does, a name that suddenly contains too much.
"Do you think," he asks as if there's no smallness left in the world, "that you fell in love with me, or that you fell in love with the way you looked when you were loved?"
I press my lips to his knuckles. "I think I learned how to love myself," I say. "And loving you happened along the way."
We laugh, because our lives had been wrapped in improbable scenes and now we make new ones—quiet ones, angry ones, forgiving ones, ordinary. They are the ones that are ours.
The End
— Thank you for reading —