Henry’s room is on the third floor of the latrine/tower/castle. The stairs are at the back of the house and climb in a spiral up, up, up, six stories total. The steps creak and groan, their old wood dark and polished, as John and I lug the suitcases upstairs. The walls are smooth gray stone, brass sconces light the spiraled steps, and small slit windows glow with a dash of moonlight.
The further we climb, the older the house feels. The thick stone walls muffle sounds, and I can imagine centuries of Joules climbing these stairs, brushing their hands along the cool stone as they climb. There’s the smell of wood polish and damp stone and a hint of woodsmoke and tea. It’s a familiar smell even though I’ve never known it until today, and it makes me feel as if I’ve just finished hugging someone I love.
John leads me down a short hallway with faded oriental rugs laid over wide, uneven wooden floorboards. At the end of the hall light spills across the floor from the open door of a bedroom. I can hear Henry’s mom.
“—always was tidy. Even as a boy he’d trail after us, picking up our messes. The boys would knock down blocks and then Henry would stack them. Charles, bless him, would leave his racing journals lying about and three-year-old Henry would sort them by issue date. I never had to get on him about tidying his room. Not that he minds a mess. He once told me he likes a mess because it’s homely and—”
“Sounds like Mum’s singing your praises,” John says, eyeing me over his shoulder. He drops the suitcase in front of the bedroom and the plastic wheels clatter on the wood floor.
Henry’s mom cuts off at the noise. “Oh, here they are!”
I step up to the door of the bedroom and try to pretend like I’ve seen it before. I set the suitcase down at the entry and send Henry a reassuring smile. He’s standing in the middle of the large room looking a bit overwhelmed.
Honestly, I feel the same. Henry’s childhood room is the stuff of dreams. It’s a large, expansive space. The ceilings are high, with plaster and dark wooden beams, and the wall opposite the door has a large, built-in stone window seat with a tall leaded glass window. The panes are separated by thin strips of silver metal, and the glass has that centuries-old wavy appearance that makes the world outside look like a soft dream painted in pastels. In the center of the window are panes of colored glass, red and green and yellow-gold, in the shape of a knight’s shield. The entire window is framed by rich burgundy velvet curtains. I have the sudden urge to lounge on that window seat for hours, curled up with a book, a cup of tea, and a corgi.
In fact, I think Henry has done just that thing many, many times over.
The rest of the room is neat, tidy, just like Henry’s apartment and his office. Except it’s better, because the antique furniture is dark wood polished to a high sheen, with brass hardware that glints in the light. His bed is as neat as a pin, the sheets tucked in at the corners and the white duvet fluffed. There’s a row of old library bookshelves, perfectly organized, and a wooden desk with a computer. The computer makes me smile because it looks so incongruent next to—honest to God—the highly polished suit of armor.
I try not to gape. Henry wouldn’t gape. Not if this is his bedroom.
“Well, we’ll be off then. Good night, Serena. Good night, Henry.”
Eugenia hurries to me, wraps me in her arms, and presses a soft, motherly kiss to my cheek. Then her eyes twinkle as she reaches up and wipes her lipstick away. At her thumb rubbing roughly over my jaw, she shakes her head and says, “Shave in the morning, Henry. And perhaps Serena has makeup for that black eye? And—”
“Mum,” John interrupts, “I’ve a button loose on my trousers. I don’t want to pop tomorrow. Can you—?”
Eugenia hones in on the emergency of John’s pants falling down during the wedding because of a loose button. She grabs his arm, and without another word to Henry or me, she tugs him down the hall, peppering him with wedding-day reminders and questions that she answers for him. While they hurry down the hall John shoots me a final look over his shoulder. I don’t have any trouble deciphering it even if I’m not actually his brother. It says, “Be careful. Don’t be doubly a fool.”
Then they’re gone and I’m left alone with Henry.
I close the door. The heavy wood swings shut, scraping over the floor, and closes with a quiet sigh.
I stare at Henry—looking a bit rumpled in my floral dress and a bit dazed from the day—and say, “Henry Joule, you have some explaining to do.”
I’m wearing Henry’s pajamas—basically cotton boxers and nothing else. When I protested the lack of clothing, he swore that a T-shirt would make me so hot at night it’d be flames-of-hell unbearable. Considering I was completely naked when I woke up as Henry, I’m inclined to believe him.
Henry is in a pair of my sleep shorts and a pink tank top that says, “Schrödinger’s Cat: Wanted Dead or Alive.” Henry snorted when he saw it, a little hiccup of a laugh, and I grinned back.
Now we’re in the great expanse of his four-poster bed, the fluffy down comforter an ocean of feathery comfort below us. We float like two icebergs at opposite poles on the sea of his mattress. He has his knees tucked up, chin resting on them, as he leans against the wooden headboard. I’m perched on the other side of the bed with as much space between us as possible, my Arctic to his Antarctica.
Being in a bed with Henry—well, it’s a vivid reminder of the last time we were in a bed together.
Even thinking about that bed, imagining the way Henry reverently ran his hands over my breasts and kissed behind my earlobe and whispered delicious proposals for what we might do to follow up that thing he did with his tongue . . . Well. Let’s just say, my boxers are getting tight and blood is flowing, and jeez, do men always have this problem, or is it just me? It’s just me, isn’t it?
I clear my throat, shift on the bed, discreetly adjust my boxers, and drop a pillow in my lap. There. That’s not obvious. Not at all.
“So, questions,” I say.
“Right,” Henry says, wrapping his arms around his knees and peering at me through the dim light of the nightstand lamp. “Questions. Proceed.”
I’ve dropped my horrible British accent, and Henry has dropped his stellar American accent.
“These are not in order of importance,” I say, wanting it known up front.
Henry nods, and I continue.
“Okay. Here goes. Who is Lorna? Why did she stroke my thigh and then strip for me, and why does she think we’re getting married? Two, what the heck is a stag do, and why did I get tackled because of it? Three, do you have a plane in your back yard? Four, are you seriously leaving ATLAS, or was John mistaken? Five, do you have memories of mine and cravings that are mine, because I have memories of yours, and I crave all sorts of things like tea and roast and those lemon cookies even though I don’t like any of those things. And I constantly want to tidy up. And why would you leave ATLAS? Why? Are you out of your mind? Also, why is there a suit of armor in your bedroom?” I fold my hands in my lap, set them on my pillow, and add as an afterthought, “Finally, why do you get hard every time you look at or think of titties?”
As I progressed through my list Henry straightened and sat up, his eyes growing wider and wider, until finally, at my last question he lets out a choking laugh.
“Excuse me?” he says, another laugh bursting forth.
I scowl at him. “I’m not joking. It’s an evolutionary flaw. Every time I get a flash of tit, whoopsie, there it goes again. Erect! You have this memory of stroking a breast and kissing it, and every time, it hits me like a lead pipe over the head, and bam—rock-hard! What the heck is wrong with you? Who can function like that?”
I look over at Henry, faltering in my tirade, because his face has gone a bit pale and his eyes are dark pools full of something that looks almost like pain.
“Sorry . . .” I say, holding up my hand. “I didn’t mean to suggest—”
“I don’t get hard every time I see breasts,” he says, sitting so straight he looks prim and proper again. His British accent is crisp as he scowls at me. “I believe that is unique to you. I function quite well in life. In fact, I don’t think I’ve gone ‘bam—rock-hard’ since I was fifteen. To be fair, as a teenager, lying on my back in the grass staring at a cumulus cloud could made me hard in seconds.”
I think about this then ask, “Did the cloud happen to look like a pair of breasts?”
Henry loses his disapproving air and flashes a grin my way. “Perhaps.”
I lean back into the pillows, moving a bit closer toward the middle of the bed. I’m tired of perching on the edge. As I move, the duvet sends up the scent I always associate with Henry, cedar and starlight.
I suppose it’s just my luck that I respond like fifteen-year-old Henry. Although, come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t Lorna’s breasts that made me hard—maybe it was the memory that did it. That was what did it just now too, that incredibly erotic memory.
“What is that memory of?” I ask. “The one where you’re kissing—”
“My first time,” Henry says. He wraps his arms around his legs again and glances at me from under his eyelashes.
“Was it good?” Although it must’ve been if the memory makes me hard all these years later.
Henry gets a faraway look on his face as his lips curve into what I can only describe as a dreamy smile, and he nods. “Life-changing.”
There’s a pinch in my chest. I think maybe it’s . . . jealousy?
Or maybe envy. After all, my first time was with Bernie Berger, and it was a quick, awkward fifteen seconds in the kitchen pantry.
I decide to move on from the topic of firsts and ask, “Do you get flashes of memory? Do you have my tastes?”
Henry looks over at me, his eyes unreadable, like he’s still caught in the memory of his first time. Then his expression clears and he nods, scooting closer on the bed. “It startled me at first. I was in . . . I think it’s your backyard. I was looking up at the night sky, it was cool, the scent of pine was strong, and I saw a comet and I felt . . .”
“Happy?”
He glances at me. “No. I felt . . .”
Don’t say it.
“Like I was falling in love.”
He said it.
My stomach drops, but I say, “Anything else?”
He lifts an eyebrow at my curt tone but doesn’t comment. Instead he says, “Sometimes I’m lying on your bed at night, your parents are watching TV in the living room, and you’re reading a quantum mechanics textbook and your vision is blurry, teary, because you’re . . .” He pauses. “Alone, lonely—”
Denial rises fast and strong. “I wasn’t.” I shake my head. “I was never alone. I was never lonely. That’s not true.”
He just looks at me. Doesn’t respond to my denial. He doesn’t have to.
I fall quiet, feeling exposed. Suddenly I hate it that Henry is me, that he can see my past and experience my most private feelings. I hate that I can’t hide or blur the truth because he sees it now too.
I can’t bear to ask him if he’s seen the night we were together. I don’t know what he’d see, what he’d think, if he did.
So instead I move on to something that won’t feel like poking myself in the heart with a red-hot iron.
“What’s a stag do?”
Henry smiles then slips under the covers. “Americans call it a bachelor party. It’s the goal to embarrass the groom. The greater the embarrassment, the more you show your brotherly love.”
“Hmm.” I think about how Henry supposedly sent John to the middle of a lake, drunk and naked in a rowboat without an oar. “I guess you love your brother.”
He nods, looking across the room at the stars wavering in the window. “My family . . . I’m one of the lucky ones. My family is full of wonderful people who love each other very much.” He pauses then glances over at me. “I have to admit, it terrifies me to think I might lose them. If we can’t figure this out and . . . I don’t get to see my niece and nephews growing up or send Niall out in a rowboat before his wedding or be there for my parents when they grow old . . . If forevermore I’m not their son or their brother or their uncle, I’m just . . . cut off. Lost to them. I’m . . . It terrifies me.”
He looks over at me then, and the lamplight is so dim that the shadows catch him and I think he’s in danger of being pulled under from the fear of it all. So I slip under the satin duvet, inch across the cool sheets, and don’t stop until I’m resting against him. Arm to arm. Thigh to thigh.
He’s quiet as the sensation of skin to skin, the breath caught and then let free, the heat of me brushing over the cool of him, flows achingly between us. Then, slowly, he reaches over and rests his hand in mine.
It feels as if an electric current connects, crackles, and then settles into a steady, fluxing rhythm.
“Do you feel that?” I ask.
He nods, looking down at our hands.
“Don’t worry,” I tell him, “we’ll, figure it out. I won’t let you down. I promise.”
He smiles up at me, but it’s not a happy smile. “You can’t promise that.”
“I can. I just did. I won’t let you lose your family.”
He deserves his family because he appreciates them, and he loves them unabashedly. I won’t let him lose them.
He squeezes my hand then traces his thumb along mine. “Lorna was my first girlfriend.”
Ah. Lorna.
She must be the first time I keep remembering. I suppose it’s good to put a face to a boob.
“Did you propose to her?” I ask. “Youthful enthusiasm and all that?”
Henry shakes his head and his long hair brushes the naked skin of my chest. I reach up and brush his hair back, tucking it behind his ear.
“I’m only doing this because it’s tickling me,” I tell him.
He takes his free hand and twists his hair, brushing it behind his shoulder. A puff of mint rises— the shampoo I use.
“I did not propose,” he says, “although we did discuss marriage in a vague distant-future sort of way. We dated through uni, then when I turned twenty-two I mentioned marriage in a more concrete way, and then she mentioned having sex with my best friend over my birthday weekend while I was in Switzerland touring CERN with my dad. My dad had surprised me with the birthday tour. Lorna surprised me with the . . .” He shrugs.
“Best friend birthday bonk-fest?”
“Precisely.”
“So why the striptease tonight?”
His thumb stops tracing over my hand. He studies our joined fingers. “My best friend, Harry, they took up together after my birthday. Last year Harry ran off to Barbados with his life coach. Lorna wrote me, told me she was sorry, now she understood how painful it was. I told her it was fine. All in the past. She said she was sorry how we’d left things, that marriage was more appealing now. I thought she was referring to John and Olivia’s wedding. She asked if we could talk at the wedding, and I said yes.”
I shake my head.
Henry peers at me. “What?”
“There was so much subtext to what she was saying it was like quicksand. You were sucked under, and you didn’t even know it.”
He huffs. “I’ll have to talk to her tomorrow—”
“As Serena?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Ah. Right.”
“Yeah.” I think for a moment. “It’ll be okay. We’ll handle it.”
He squeezes my hand again and presses closer, seeking the warmth of me. His toes press against my calves, and they feel like tiny little balls of ice.
That’s one thing I don’t miss. My hands and feet were always cold.
I shift my legs and sandwich Henry’s toes between my calves.
“You’re like a brick warmed by the fire,” Henry says, sighing happily as he wiggles his toes.
“And you’re like an ice cube in a subzero freezer.”
“Funny, isn’t it?” he asks, and I assume he’s talking about how we’re now the opposite of ourselves.
I nod then ask, “Do you think maybe this is just a twenty-four-hour thing, like Freaky Friday? Maybe we’ll wake up in the morning and we’ll have switched back. Magic done. Poof!”
“Maybe,” Henry says, looking up at the line of my jaw and the whiskers there. “I suppose it depends on whether this is magic or science.”
“But isn’t magic just science that we haven’t yet explained?”
He smiles at me, a wry, joking light in his eyes. “You know, I always wanted to be a California girl. There are all these songs written about them and I wondered, what’s it really like?” He shrugs. “Now I know.”
I nudge him with my shoulder. “Likewise. I always said in my next life I want to be a stuffy British man, drink buckets of tea, and have erections every time someone mentions the word ‘boob.’ It was my dream.”
He snorts and then drops his head to my shoulder, resting his cheek against the heat of my hard-planed chest and the beating of my heart.
The bedroom is quiet now. The suit of armor stands at attention in the corner, dully gleaming in the moonlight streaming through the window in gentle waves. The rest of the house is asleep. Not a noise penetrates the thick stone. I’m warm and comfortable, and it feels natural and right to have Henry touching me, resting against me, in my arms.
Maybe it’s because Henry is in my body and my spirit is drawn back to my body. Or maybe it’s something else.
All I know is that with the quiet settled around us like a warm, feathery duvet and Henry’s breath fluttering over my chest and his thumb stroking the back of my hand, I feel more right, more centered, more myself, than I ever have in my entire life.
That thought frightens me, though, so I ask, “Are you really leaving ATLAS?”
Henry stills. His breath cuts short, then after a moment he relaxes and says quietly, “The first of October.”
“What! Why? That’s a terrible decision. ATLAS is the center of our universe. It’s everything. I don’t want . . .” I wrinkle my brow. If Henry had told me two days ago that he was leaving ATLAS I would’ve felt relief. But now I don’t want him to go. Ever. Even worse, if we haven’t switched back in a few weeks’ time, it’ll be me that’s leaving. ATLAS is my dream. My one love. It’s what I’ve given up everything for.
“I’m taking a position at FermiLab.”
“FermiLab! Why? No! Are you kidding me? I don’t want to go to Chicago. It’s windy there. I hate wind. There isn’t enough tea in the world to put up with that amount of wind.”
Henry looks up at me, his brow wrinkled in a quizzical expression. “It’s not that windy.”
I beg to differ.
“It’s called the Windy City.” Besides, that’s not the point. “It’s not CERN. It’s not . . . Henry, why? You have an amazing job. You have an amazing life. Why would you go to Chicago? I don’t want you—” I clear my throat. “I don’t want to go to Chicago. My life is in Geneva.”
Henry turns away, pulls his hand free of mine, then shifts his feet free of the warmth of my legs. He leans against the headboard again.
“You’re right,” he says, his voice low and almost regretful. “If we haven’t switched back, you’ll have to decline the job. You can’t go to Chicago. We have to stay together.”
I nod emphatically. Of course we have to stay together. That was the deal, wasn’t it? We stay together until the end.
“Okay,” I say. I look across the room at the suit of armor. “Does it have a name, that armor?”
Henry nods, glancing over at the suit. It’s about the same height as me—Serena—maybe 5’3” or 5’4”. It’s polished silver with gold filigree and a spiked helmet with a visor. It’s almost menacing in a comical way.
“Fitzy Butterbottom.”
“What?” I look over at Henry.
Henry smiles at me, his eyes dancing in the soft light. “That’s his name. Fitzy Butterbottom. I was frightened of him when I was small. Lizzy told me if I named him something silly he wouldn’t be scary anymore.”
“Did it work?”
“No,” he says. “I hid under my covers every night until I was fourteen.”
“Then what happened?” I ask, drawing close to him again.
He gives me a quirky smile. “I discovered breasts and I had something else to occupy me at night.”
I laugh at the joking light in Henry’s eyes.
Then I ask, worried suddenly about the moment when we turn out the light and curl up under the covers, Fitzy Butterbottom keeping watch, “Can we hold each other tonight? In case that’s what we need to switch back. Contact like we had during the storm.”
Henry considers me for a moment, and for some reason my heart drums in my chest, rising up to my throat.
Finally, he nods. “Yes. And then in the morning we’ll wake up and everything will be right as rain.”
“Exactly. Freaky Friday. Our twenty-four hours is almost over.”
Henry clicks the lamp off then and the room floods with the darkness of a stone tower room deep in the English countryside. I slip lower into the bed, the warm sheets gliding over my skin. I’m tall—so tall my feet reach the end of the bed and poke out of the sheets. The bedding whispers and rumples as Henry burrows down under the covers.
Then there’s a sigh. A questioning silence. A held breath.
I lie still and wait, staring up at the dark beams of the ceiling and breathing in the minty scent of shampoo and the woodsy-starlight scent of the night.
Then, with a soft exhale, Henry shifts over the mattress. His hand brushes over the bare skin of my chest—just a whisper, a careful touch. Then he curls into my side, his legs tangle over mine, his chest presses into me, and his head rests in the cradle of my shoulder. His hair is smooth and silky and his weight is a warm blanket.
My breath comes steady and even, and with each rise and fall of my chest Henry rises and falls over me. His lips rest above my heart. I can feel a warm puff of air across my skin with each of his exhales. The feel of him burns into me.
I drop my hands to the bed, bury my fingers in the sheets, and close my eyes, praying that when I wake up I’ll be me again.