Emergence, Part Three: Meet the Parents

((That's all for now, folks. No real questions this week, just eager to hear your thoughts if you'd like to chime in!

Love,
Charlotte)) 

Outside the bathroom I found a hallway with a banister, beyond which was an open air space and flight of stairs leading down. To the left the hallway fed several rooms with closed doors. The hardwood floors gleamed.

I’m not sure what I expected to find but it had not been this. 

Not only had I become somebody else, literally some other body, but the place I now found myself was also radically different than my old home. I’d gone from a small modestly furnished apartment in a large urban high-rise to what, some single family residence? If just one or two things could be familiar, I thought to myself bitterly, that’d be really great.

When I stepped out into the hallway I was startled to find a severe looking woman in her mid 40s standing in the doorway of a large bedroom off to the right. One look at her face and I instantly knew this woman was my mother. Yes, she was taller and thinner than I was, and gray peppered her hair, but the resemblance was overpowering.

“I didn’t expect to see you up so early, young lady,” she said, folding her arms. They looked brittle and cold, like the bare branches of a tree in winter.

“Mom…” I answered, having no idea what I should say. 

“You were out very late last night, not that you seem to care much for my wishes these days,” my mother said softly. Her body language may have been frigid but her eyes burned into my skin.

I could somehow recall being out late last night. My mother was correct, but the specifics of the evening eluded me. Like the plot of a novel one has read decades earlier, I couldn’t remember any details, only that I had taken pleasure in disobeying my parents. I kept quiet, knowing that my mother was in the position of power and that saying anything would only make things worse. Finally she spoke again,

“Your father is downstairs making breakfast. We’ll be leaving around 11am for the wedding. I shouldn’t need to remind you that this is Waverly’s day so don’t wear anything too tight or revealing. All eyes should be on your cousin, not you.” Her own eyes fell to my belly, or my shorts, it was hard to tell which from several yards away. 

I automatically ‘sucked in’ my belly, which was a comically useless act. All it did was kind of make my belly rise up and flatten a few inches—at least until the effort to keep it this way was too much, whereupon it fell and fattened, overcorrecting wider by an inch or two before rebounding back to its natural shape.

I mumbled a meek “OK,” and went down the stairs with my mother watching intently the whole time. I tried to will my large breasts from bobbing up and down but they were by this point a force of nature. No matter what I did they radiated my sexuality, something I’d rather keep from broadcasting to the world. I could have crossed my arms but I needed to keep one hand on the railing as my balance was understandably messed up. 

Downstairs I wandered into a large sunny kitchen. 

“Dad?” I asked.

“Out here, Sweetheart,” a man called from out the backdoor. There he was, standing on a rickety chair, hanging up a birdfeeder. My father was tall but slight, with sandy blond hair. He furrowed his brow as he struggled to get the hook to latch. Seed spilled to the ground. When the hanging was accomplished he got down, came over to me and kissed the top of my head. It was such an unexpectedly tender moment after so much confusion and fear that I nearly blushed.

“So what are you having? Pancakes? Eggs? Any special requests from the peanut gallery?” my father asked, brushing by me and into the house. When he said peanut he lightly poked my belly. Now I actually was blushing. I was also starving.

“Pancakes!” I cheered, following him inside. 

“Coming right up,” he said. We did a sort of dance about the kitchen as he pulled items from the fridge and I grabbed a glass and went for some orange juice. I was amazed by how safe I instantly felt around my father. He talked about his birdfeeder and how some squirrel was constantly getting into it. The simple story soon ballooned to epic proportions.

Soon I was eating and my father continued to ramble on and I began to think that perhaps my father wasn’t so comfortable around me after all. Was the wall of sound he created masking something else while I shoved heaping forkfuls of syrup laden breakfast into my mouth? Did I make him uneasy?

“Alright, Meggie, you should probably head on up and get ready. I know how you like to soak,” my father said, pointing at a clock on the microwave that read a 9:45am. 

Meggie. 

So I had a name after all. I mean it was only a matter of time until I got a chance to ferret about my bedroom and figure my name out but still, it was one step closer to solving my identity problem.

I excused myself and walked with some trepidation back upstairs. The door I had seen my mother in was closed. 

To the left of the bathroom was Meggie’s bedroom. It was a riot of crumpled clothes, shoes, stuffed animals, bedding, bags, and just tons of… stuff, a stupefying amount of stuff. So much so that it was hard to walk. I found what I was looking for on her bed, Meggie’s battered all-purpose backpack/purse/bag and with it, her phone. When I discovered that the lock on her bedroom door had been disabled (another troubling sign) I decided to take the phone and bag into Meggie's bathroom and secure myself in there. After all I did have to get ready, too.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t tap the wall with my foot, just in case it decided to dematerialize since I went downstairs for breakfast. Sadly, all was still solid.

I sat on the edge of the tub and found what I was looking for in Meggie’s bag—her driver’s license. 

Name: Meghan Myrna Cafferty
Birthday: November 4
Age: 18
Height: 5’4”
Address: Fiona, OH, wherever the hell that was.

I also discovered that today was a Saturday in late May, according to Meghan’s calendar which listed her cousin Waverly’s wedding.

There were so many questions in my mind besides the obvious one of how passing through an invisible hole in the wall could have changed my entire life. These were more specific. Was it simply coincidence that Meghan’s birthday was the exact same day of the year that I passed through the wall back in my former reality? How had I jumped forward in time? How was it already next May? Why had I been zapped halfway across the country? And worst of all, how did I get back to my old life?

I shrugged and realized the answers to these questions would be difficult to obtain if not impossible. 

Resigning myself to the present, I stopped the tub and turned on the water. My father was right, I did want to soak.

In the cabinet I found a bottle of bubble-bath which I poured into the tub. White foam began to form right away.

In the mirror I gave myself a ‘let’s just get this over with’ expression, as I would need to come to grips with the base realities of my body, and that meant dealing with being undressed. I’ll be honest, I was conflicted. A part of me was overwhelmingly uncomfortable with this enterprise. This was the me that refused to submit to this life and continued to view my current situation from a third person perspective. The one who saw an 18 year-old Meghan as a forbidden sexual object.

Another part of me was simply curious. What did I look like naked? Did I look like what I felt like? Sex wasn’t an issue here, at least not directly. This was mostly innocent. I say mostly because when sex did creep back in it was from a wonderfully new point of view. This was the realization that I actually was this person, and this person would have its own needs and desires. And I wondered how or if Meghan’s wants would ever line up with mine.

My gray top slithered up and out popped my bare belly, very pale and surprisingly tight. I pulled the garment up and over my head and the next thing I knew I was looking down at my chest. My bra was too tight and when my fingers undid the front clasp my flesh practically sighed in relief. 

I felt my breasts wobble loosely against the slackened cups before my bra was tossed to the floor. Red striations marked my shoulders. In the mirror I saw my breasts, very full with little sag, their areolas wide but not the darker colored pigment I expected. These were a pale rose color just a hint darker than my cream colored skin. The nubs of my nipples themselves were quite small. I could see where my bra had bitten into the sides of my breasts. 

They were just… so big.

I’d taken my shorts off before and those plummeted easily to the tiles. I stepped out of them daintily with my back turned to the sink. I was nervous about what I might see. Finally, with hands clasped comically over my eyes, I spun around and looked.

I was beautiful in a soft, understated way, even with the pregnant belly or perhaps because of it, it was hard to say, I wondered what Meghan looked like before. Was she ever truly skinny? How much had her breasts and behind grown? I thought pregnancy suited her, or at least this much pregnancy. Who knew what things would be like a few months from now. 

Eventually I abandoned the mirror and eased into the bath. The hot water felt amazing. I sank down to the bottom and the suds eclipsed my entire swollen body. I just lay there for a time taking reprieve from gravity. My hands moved up from my side and rest on my belly. The skin was wet and tight and the widest pat crested out of the water but not up and out of the bubbles. My hands then slid down the slope of my belly toward my breasts and I let my palms cover my chest.

The soft flesh of my breasts felt wonderful. I gently caressed them, pushed them together, heaved them toward my face, all the while they remained hidden, covered in foam. It was all too easy to imagine myself feeling Meghan up. The pleasurable sensation combined with the wrongness of these thoughts aroused me so powerfully and swiftly that my nipples sprang painfully erect into my kneading fingers. A rush of blood between my legs drew my attention elsewhere.

With one hand still massaging my chest, the other rose and fell along the course of my belly before descending down to the patch of hair between my legs. My thigh twitched in anticipation and I picked up my foot, setting it on the back edge of the tub. As my fingers slid lower my free hand fled my chest to grip the side of the bathtub when the impossible happened yet again.

Above the rim of the tub my fingers pushed through the tiles as if they weren’t there. My heart leapt. I forgot about my sexual exploration and sat up, water heaving everywhere. The hole in the wall was no bigger than an apple.

With both hands I wrenched the opening bigger and it reluctantly gave. I tugged and pulled and ripped it open until the invisible portal was big enough for me to pass through. I didn’t care that the hole was now on a different wall. I didn’t wonder if I’d jump to yet another different reality. I had to take my chance.

On my knees in the tub, I pushed off and climbed on through.